NYT Writer Gives Script For Sexting With Consent. Here’s Why The Hookup Culture Has Descended Into Such Absurdity. By Matt Walsh.
A freelance writer for The New York Times named Suzannah Weiss, who, according to her bio, specializes in “feminism, sex, and psychonautics,” recently attempted to instruct the unwashed Twitter masses about the intricacies of consent. …
“Ask consent for all sexual encounters, yes, even sexting. I just came up with this script that you’re all welcome to borrow,” Weiss tweeted. Her script has the would-be sexter saying “I’ve been having some sexual thoughts about you I’d like to share over text if you’d enjoy that.” In the scenario she provides, the lucky sextee gives clear consent by saying “ok” with a blushing smiley face emoji. …
A consent checklist over at Cosmopolitan takes it a step further. Item number three on the list: “Is consent ongoing before, during, and after an encounter, or throughout a relationship?”
After? According to the braintrust at Cosmo, you may become an unwitting rapist if consent for sex is withdrawn after the deed has already been done. …
If I choose freely to do something, despite not really wanting to do it, I have still consented. The begrudging nature of my consent does not erase the fact that it is consent. If I feel guilted into giving five dollars to the kids raising funds for their little league outside the grocery store, I can’t later claim that I was robbed. Begrudging charity is not robbery. Begrudging sex is not rape. …
The big picture:
It is rather ironic that sex in our oversexed age has become laden with rules, stipulations, and fine print. We fled so far and so fast from anything resembling sexual morality that we came full circle and ran into it from the opposite side. This is our culture’s weirdest and most significant innovation: prudish hedonism. We’re like a Frankenstein mixture of Victorian England and the 1960s, as if the Woodstock festival had a lovechild with “Pride and Prejudice.”
It’s not hard to see how it came to this. The hook up culture is not what it was cracked up to be. It is, in fact, fraught with danger — physical danger, emotional danger, psychological danger. When you put yourself into the role of a stranger’s sex toy, the pleasure will be fleeting and it won’t be enough to compensate for the peril. An ever-expanding list of rules is meant to offer protection, but it always fails, and so more and more rules are added. But all of these new rules are only really necessary because we have thrown out the ingredients that make sex truly safe and joyful. Those ingredients, as much as we hate to admit it, are love, devotion, and commitment.
The Suzannah Weisses and Cosmopolitans of the world aren’t giving rules for sex, per se. Rather, they’re giving rules for sex with strangers who don’t give a damn about you. They are trying to spare you from the danger inherent in giving yourself to a person who barely knows your name. But the best way to avoid those dangers is to refrain from doing that altogether. You don’t need to worry as much about all of the lawyerly stipulations if you’re with someone you know, love, and trust.
