Women must choose between liberty and protection

If women are to be truly equal, we must accept the responsibilities that come with liberation

It used to be those to my left who were most concerned about young women being coerced into sex, but lately I hear this more from women to my right. The worry is similar, that young women are often pressured into having sex that either they don’t really desire at the time or know, in some way, isn’t good for them. But the explanations for why they have this sex are different. Those to my left question whether women can meaningfully consent in situations involving a power imbalance and the more radical claim that sexual choices, “under patriarchy, are rarely free”¹. Those to my right worry about women having sex out of “politeness”, which they see as a downstream consequence of liberal sexual norms coupled with relatively higher female agreeableness. The left-wing concern is that consent is complicated when sexual partners are of different ages, incomes etc. and more broadly that all of women’s sexual choices are complicated by their feelings of responsibility for men’s pleasure and their fears of male violence. The right-wing concern is that in a sexually liberal culture, with few guardrails, and in which women are told sex is empowering, men’s desire for casual sex ends up dominating. 

The argument from the right is in many ways easier to make since they’re consistently anti-promiscuity, especially for women. While the trad feminists focus on how liberal sexual norms endanger women, the right more broadly cites the correlation between number of sexual partners and divorce or the “fact” that men prefer less promiscuous women as points in favor of a more repressive sexual culture. While I generally disagree with the social conservatives, and think that, for the most part, higher rates of casual sex reflect the lower costs that it now presents for women, both in terms of pregnancy risk (given better birth control and abortion access) and in terms of reduced social stigma, the left-wing argument is in many ways more confused. Ever since the sex-positive feminists declared cultural victory in the late 90s, leftists have been impressively successful at destigmatizing all sorts of sexual practices. So long as it’s between consenting adults, it’s all good. Arguments rooted in the concept of false consciousness now feel passé. And given that most on the left believe that women are just as sexual and just as capable as men, they find themselves with scant grounds for critiquing sexual behaviors. Consequently, as Jacob Falkovich observes, “All the ways in which sex can be bad are shoehorned into “lack of consent”.” 

But consent is only the minimum bar that must be met for legal sex. And, as in most areas, our expectations for what counts as ethical sex exceed the legal bar. For most on the religious right, the answer to “what counts as ethical sex” is pretty easy: sex between a man and a woman within a marriage, or some variant on that theme. But for those on the left, this is a more difficult question. Ideally the sex is desired, pleasurable, and psychologically safe for both parties. But plenty of sex that most would see as ethical would fail to meet this bar. The idea of affirmative or enthusiastic consent aims to shift norms such that both parties ensure that sex is actually desired rather something the other party is succumbing to. But raising the bar for consent can’t guarantee that sex will be pleasurable, or that one or both parties won’t regret it, or won’t feel in retrospect that it caused them some sort of psychological damage.

In Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Conspiracy Against Men”² she discusses a case of sexual assault allegations against a university student where:

the alleged victim insisted that [the accused] did not force her to do anything, that he listened when she said no, that she initiated all the sex acts, that she was not afraid of him, that she knew she could’ve stopped and walked out the door, that she gave him multiple indications of wanting to proceed. Nonetheless, something had happened to her that she “felt in [her] bones wasn’t right.” She had been “violated.”

The accused student was found not guilty of assault but because he had sent the accuser a Facebook request after he had been made subject to ““interim restrictions,” including a prohibition on contacting the complainant”, he was “suspended until after his graduation date, permanently banned from living on campus, and required to get counseling”. His education was seriously interrupted, and he later sued the school resulting in the case being settled privately. Srinivasan cites this example both to highlight the way in which he was “presumptively punished, [...], without due process protections” but also as a jumping off point for discussing the ways in which women have internalized the sexual norms that led to this situation in the first place. Considering why the self-proclaimed victim didn’t leave, despite the fact that “she knew she could’ve stopped and walked out the door”, Srinivasan says:

She kept going for the reason that so many girls and women keep going: because women who sexually excite men are supposed to finish the job. It doesn’t matter whether [the accused] himself had this expectation, because it is an expectation already internalized by many women. A woman going on with a sex act she no longer wants to perform, knowing she can get up and walk away but knowing at the same time that this will make her a blue-balling tease, an object of male contempt: there is more going on here than mere ambivalence, unpleasantness and regret. There is also a kind of coercion: not directly by [the accused], perhaps, but by the informal regulatory system of gendered sexual expectations. Sometimes the price for violating these expectations is steep, even fatal.

Srinivasan also points out ways in which affirmative consent laws can lead to unjust outcomes and asks if perhaps “the law is simply the wrong tool for the job?”, suggesting it is our “gendered sexual expectations” that need to change. Figures on both the left and the right are, I think, correct to consider ways in which our cultural norms around sex could change in ways that would reduce this sort of undesirable sex. But this change in norms, behaviors, or expectations, whatever form it takes, must occur among women in addition to men. If women are to be truly equal, we must accept the responsibilities that come with liberation. 

The right-wing push to return to a culture of sexual repression in order to protect women, from my perspective, does more harm than good and fails to acknowledge women’s agency. Efforts from the left, from what I can tell, have over the past decade or so largely succeeded in reducing the acceptability of men coercing women into sex. I think that’s a good thing, and I hope that young women are now less likely to find themselves in uncomfortable sexual scenarios. Men should be shamed for pressuring women to go further than they want to and shouldn’t socially punish women if they break things off before “completion”. But taken too far, this exclusive focus on men’s behavior undermines women’s agency. Yes, men should not pressure women into sex, but women must also be forthright in expressing their desires. When we claim victimhood in response to experiences like the one described above, we are capitulating to the view that women are less capable and in need of protection. We simply cannot have it both ways. We cannot be equal, liberated, and at the same time claim an inability to make our own decisions. This is true regardless of whether we lay the blame on “patriarchy” or on “sex differences”.

During the MeToo era, the Aziz Ansari “exposé” clarified my ideological differences with many mainstream feminists. In some ways similar to the case above, the story involved a woman who by all indications could’ve left the situation at any time but didn’t. While Ansari was accused of much more explicitly coercive behavior, including re-initiating sex after she had explicitly said she felt uncomfortable and “didn’t want to feel forced” he did not sexually assault her nor is there any reason to believe she feared that he would. In my view Ansari’s behavior was clearly unethical. But I also think so-called “Grace” failed herself through her inability to act to protect her own interests. The takeaway here should not just be about how men must “be better” but about how women can be stronger. 

While I accept that women are on average more agreeable, that doesn’t exempt us from internalizing the consequences of our actions. Just as men being subject to more violent impulses doesn’t exempt them from being held accountable when they act on those impulses. If you’re not assertive enough to explicitly say no to someone who wants to have sex with you, or to leave if they persist in trying to engage after you’ve said so, then you should probably avoid casual hookups altogether. A lack of assertiveness at that level is a personal failing, something you’ll have to either work on or work around. Again, I think Ansari’s behavior was unethical and gross and that given he was on his first date with “Grace” he should’ve conformed to more stringent norms of affirmative or enthusiastic consent, which he clearly did not. But both parties failed to live up to what I think should be expected of them. 

Srinivasan’s essay is nuanced, but her claim that the consequences for saying no can be “steep, even fatal”, while technically true, is grossly misleading. There are cases where a woman ought to follow her intuition if it tells her the safest thing she can do is to go along with things. Women are highly responsive to signals of potential male aggression and if you’re receiving those signals, you should probably heed them. But in many cases, it’s not a fear of violence that leads a woman to “go along with things” but a lack of assertiveness or a fear of embarrassment. I expect that while sex differences contribute to these situations these behaviors are also influenced by social expectations. Women need to hear that they are agents, expected to be held responsible for their actions and inactions. While they might look back on a sexual experience and rightfully complain that their partner was too pushy or unethical, if they chose to have sex with him simply to avoid an awkward conversation, then that experience should be seen as a lesson for them as well.

1. Srinivasan, Amia. "The Right to Sex." The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp. 84.

2. Srinivasan, Amia. "The Conspiracy Against Men." The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp. 24-30.