The feminist future of straight sex: Consent culture

Sex in the future is going to get a lot more queer-looking for straight people, as the normalization of consent culture gradually creates safer spaces for women to openly express our sexuality, and this progress will resemble current shifts in the queer sex community.

From the three legs of contemporary online writings, historical and ongoing trends, and my own experience, I'm going to defend this view of a possible future of human sexuality through the lens of feminism.

The feminist antidote to patriarchy

Why feminism? Why not say, “plain old garden variety equality”? Because we can’t get there from here without feminism. Under patriarchy, pursuit of equality and sexual justice requires a feminist antidote. Similarly, if we lived under a matriarchy, then pursuit of equality and sexual justice would require a “masculist” antidote. But we don’t, so here we are: needing feminism to dismantle patriarchy, instead of using female supremacy to pointlessly invert the power dynamics of patriarchy and create a matriarchy. This echoes Audre Lorde’s idea that The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House: the methodology of oppression cannot dismantle systems of oppression, it can only change who is doing the oppressing.

One basic goal of almost every form of feminism (except for the hardline separatists) is the deliberate inclusion of women into the power structures of society that otherwise exclude and marginalize us. This inclusion into practices of power, where it was previously lacking, is what constitutes equality. Taking those principles into the bedroom is what creates sexual justice.

Rush Limbaugh, of all people, nailed it right on the head when he described consent culture. Forgive the lengthy quotation, but the sheer depth of insight is frankly stunning:

“You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.” (source)

This is an amazing quote, because anyone left of center would recognize it as obviously correct, but be absolutely perplexed as to why he sees it as a bad thing. And here, in a nutshell, is the key to the right’s view of sexual morality: God. What matters is not what any individual person wants or doesn’t want; what matters is what God wants.

What (some people say) God wants

The Christian Nationalist blog Biblical Gender Roles has an entire article with the wretchedly rapey title, It Is Not A Woman's Consent That Matters, It Is God’s. It gets even worse from there, but this quote encapsulates it all:

“Sexual Consent Ideology says ‘You get the final say over what happens with your body’ but God says your body belongs to him and in marriage he has given your body to your spouse for their sexual use.”

Note well, dear reader, that this site was chosen for being emblematic, not for being authoritative. They're not setting out a brand-new dogma; they’re just saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to what religious conservatives already believe.

On the right’s view, God permits/requires certain sex acts (marital procreative sex, female submission), and God forbids other sex acts (masturbation, gay sex, threesomes, abuse of children, abuse of animals). This is why the right is so lightning-quick to pull out slippery-slope arguments to pedophilia and bestiality when they're arguing about queer rights. If you’re doing one or two things forbidden by God, then why not do everything forbidden by God? A little taste of disobedience might only make you thirst for more.

Of course, anyone left of center knows that children and animals can't meaningfully consent to sex in the same way that adults can. Plus, like most folks, I don't even want to do those things with children or animals. Although I will admit to appreciating the lithe silhouette of the occasional thiccamore (it really puts the “bough” in “bough chicka wow”).

The current far-right backlash notwithstanding, sexual consent ideology is frankly winning the culture war. We see this in how the right’s view has dominated until very recently in history, but that is speaking on the timescale of centuries and millennia. In more recent periods, the changes in our mentality around consent have been dramatic. These changes have been brewing since the start of the first wave of feminism, from even before the suffragette movement. They’ve carried on through the sexual liberation movement of the sixties. We’re still living through the downstream effects today.

In future columns, I'll discuss these historical trends in more detail, such as how the second wave of feminism gave rise to political lesbians who have grown into the modern-day TERFs behind movement transphobia. For now, I will simply remark on the general and enduring historical trends of over a century and a half, and still going strong. Sex culture generally is taking on a more feminist bent, and consent culture in particular is a concrete example. Simply bringing consent to the table, and including women in discussions of it, constitutes a feminist antidote to the patriarchal authoritarian refrain of “Thy Will Be Done.” It takes time to work out, it doesn't happen overnight, but that's why it's important to look at the future of where sex is going, not just where we've been and where we are.

Robot lawyer sex

One form this cultural shift takes is described in The Pervocracy’s excellent post, Rescripting Sex. Our current sex scripts are lacking, because we are still doing the early cultural production work of scripting sex based on consent rather than on God Says So, and comparing something decades old to something millennia old is bound to be a little one-sided sometimes. To illustrate this, Biblical Gender Roles quotes Daphne Merkin (username checks out) in the New York Times:

“Asking for oral consent before proceeding with a sexual advance seems both innately clumsy and retrograde, like going back to the childhood game of ‘Mother, May I?’ We are witnessing the re-moralization of sex, not via the Judeo-Christian ethos but via a legalistic, corporate consensus.” (source)

This could be translated as, “Eww, you ruined it by talking!” Cliff Jerrison addresses this fear of “legalistic, corporate consensus” after an example script of "Robot Lawyers Consenting To One (1) Act Of Intercourse":

“No question, that’s dull and awkward and probably would work excellently as Vagina Repellent in an emergency vagina⁠-attack situation… But the problem with it is not that it's too sex-positive. The problem is that it's not sex-positive enough… People seem to imagine that talking about sex means talking in the dorkiest possible way, and I don't know why.” (source)

We can negotiate consent out loud, and still make it sexy. To see what that looks like, we will next look at contemporary lesbian sex culture, because lesbians have been doing this for a long time and we’re getting better at it. The fact that we’re “leading the charge” means that whoever follows, at least initially, is going to replicate the principles and mores that lesbians have established.