‘Consent’ is the dominant hermeneutical resource in sexual ethics. However, some recent research (e.g., by Rees and Ichikawa⁷) has argued that consent is analytically insufficient for capturing what is wrong about sex subject to certain forms of power imbalance. It follows that an important project for the philosophy of sex is understanding the limitations of consent, and what principles might complement it.
In this essay, I extend this project by identifying three cases of sexual injustice that are not only beyond the analytical capacity of consent but actively occluded by consent’s hermeneutical dominance. In other words, the persistence of these injustices—the ‘orgasm gap’ experienced by heterosexual women, child marriages in the United States, and the sexual exploitation of trans women—is at least in part explained by a hermeneutical overreliance on ‘consent’.⁸
[work in progress]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.” 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.” 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 Indeed, I argue that, like ‘human rights’, consent's blind spots are part of why the concept enjoys such a privileged rhetorical position.