‘Consent’ is the dominant approach to sexual ethics. This paper, however, argues that frameworks of consent frame sex in a way that facilitates, rather than suppresses, sexual violence and abuse. Three cases of sexual injustice—‘bad sex’ that women have with men, child sexual abuse, and the sexual exploitation of trans women—are examined and used to reveal three supposedly innocuous features of consent—negativity, protectivity, and desirousness—that in fact not only obscure these injustices but partially cause them.
Consent, it is argued, serves a role similar to that of sexual harassment training in the workplace: the reduction of social liability without any confrontation of the underlying mechanisms. It is the minimal solution to soothing the gendered contradictions within sex, a relief valve for the increasing pressure exerted by feminist critique. It is a counterrevolutionary force.
[draft]In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir cautions against “inauthentic flight” in the face of patriarchal domination. “Clearly”, she writes, “no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex.”⁷ Yet, in 1981, in a talk which borrows its title from The Second Sex’s most famous aphorism—“one is not born a woman”—Monique Wittig declared “‘Lesbian’ is… beyond the categories of sex.”⁸ Can Wittig’s proclamation be squared with Beauvoir’s admonition?
In this essay, I argue against incompatibilist interpretations of Beauvoir and Wittig, as exemplified by Butler's ‘Variations on Gender and Sex’. Indeed, I contend that Beauvoir leaves room for the ontological freedom to transcend one’s sex. Yet Beauvoir still provides the resources for a critique of Wittig through her existentialist ethics, and, in particular, her figure of “the passionate man” in The Ethics of Ambiguity. |
[draft]⁸ Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman”, 20.