Amia Srinivasan: evaluation

Transcript context

…But you could envision it as a kind of inviolable Kantian autonomy, doesn’t have to be Lockean ownership. But I think what I’m getting at is, once you buy into enough self-ownership, say, to have that as a first line of defense against slavery or restrictions on what you can do with your body, how do you square that with a certain skepticism about consent models? What stops you from moving from self-ownership to consent? My skepticism about consent models is very specific in nature. Okay, basically, the way I think that sex exists in our society, which is to say, a broadly patriarchal society at the moment — this consent effectively operates as a necessary, though not sufficient, condition on ethically permissible sexual activity. Probably not one with oneself. I don’t think that one really asks and gives consent to sex with oneself, but with other people. A necessary condition but, I think, not sufficient because I think there are cases of ethically problematic sex that are consensual. One example I talk about in the book is professor-student sex. Obviously, sometimes, professor-student sex, like sex between adults in general, can be nonconsensual. But I think there are plenty of cases of professor-student sex which are uncontroversially — or should be uncontroversially — understood to be consensual, but nonetheless are problematic. There’s a deeper feminist critique of the role of consent in sex, which objects to the preconditions that make the ritual of consent-asking and consent-giving necessary in the first place. When you say to someone, “Well, imagine sexual interaction without the ritual of consent-giving and consent-asking,” they just imagine sexual violation. But think about all of the times you interact with — I don’t know — a really old friend. Your old high school or college buddy loses a child, and you put your arm around them, and you console them — something we haven’t done a huge amount of under the pandemic. You don’t ask for that consent. You don’t ask for consent to be able to put your arm around your buddy. The reason is because the nature of your relationship as friends involves a fine attunement to your friend’s desires and needs and wants. You don’t go into that interaction with the friend thinking, “I want something that they might not want.” There isn’t a kind of implicit presupposed mismatch of desires or wants. It’s not a contractual exchange. It’s not a negotiation. You wouldn’t want to put your arm around your friend if that’s not what your friend needed at that moment. The very fact that we have such an emphasis on consent when it comes to sexual relations, I think, reveals a certain set of background conditions about how we interact sexually, which is to say, there are lots and lots of cases where one party basically wants to have something that the other person doesn’t really want, in some sense, to give, where there is a misalliance. There isn’t that same level of attunement. To put it really crudely, lots of people are turned on by the fact that another person, in some sense, doesn’t really want to have that sex, so then the ritual of consent becomes necessary. It’s not the only reason consent matters. The other reason consent might matter — and you see this very clearly in BDSM practices — is that sometimes we just don’t know what the other person wants because sex is really complex, and people can perform in different ways. ght matter — and you see this very clearly in BDSM practices — is that sometimes we just don’t know what the other person wants because sex is really complex, and people can perform in different ways. So sometimes, it’s really important to just ask someone straight up.…

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