Putting Consent Back in Its Place

In this talk, I argue that consent has been asked to do too much in contemporary sexual ethics. While consent is legally important and morally significant, I suggest that treating it—especially in the familiar “consent as permission” model—as the central concept for understanding sexual violence and sexual ethics distorts the phenomena it is meant to explain. The talk develops a critique of mainstream analytic approaches to consent by showing how they often miss the social, structural, and phenomenological dimensions emphasized in feminist work on sexual violence. I argue that many sexual wrongs are not best understood simply as failures of permission, but as relations of domination in which inequality, coercive scripts, and disregard for subjectivity are central. I also defend a more positive account of good sex as a form of shared agency, better captured by the idea of ongoing mutual consensus than by one-off authorization. More broadly, the talk suggests that contemporary sexual life is shaped by a conflict between two social meanings of sex: sex as shared agency and sex as dominance.