Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Soulless Sex... and Consent

I'm not sure what I think of the overall argument here yet, but the author makes a number of important distinctions on the way to this deeply insightful passage:

But what we see on college campuses, I believe, is not so much "rape culture" as hookup culture. Hookup culture confuses everyone, because all the normal cues, such as love, commitment, and mutual trust and knowledge, are gone. Empty seduction is the norm. Hence the state of mind of the two people involved becomes unknown, one to the other. They behave like rutting animals, setting aside the higher human functions and all that mankind has added to sexuality that raises it above the animal level, and then they are shocked, shocked to find that consent, the one distinctively human trait they want to retain, is only ambiguously present, if present at all.

"Soulless, sordid, drunken sex with a drunken stranger is not rape" by Lydia McGrew