Feminist philosophy: A yes is not enough

For a long time, as a woman you had two options: either you became a wife or a whore. However, according to the philosopher Silvia Federici, that didn’t make much of a difference, after all, in both cases you were exchanging sex for financial security. Historically, female sexuality was never autonomous, so there was no need for an idea of ​​consent. Sex was primarily a service.

It marked a fundamental change when, in the course of the sexual revolution in the 1970s, terms such as “sexual consent” appeared for the first time, implying a decisive act: sex requires consent.

For a while, the term seemed established in feminist discourse as the ultimate formula for equal sex. “Consent is sexy” was read embroidered in left-wing bars, and then at some point the public youth network “Funk” made suggestions on Instagram about how to creatively ask for consent before sex. How nice, you thought, because of course you would have liked to have learned all this much earlier.

But then the doubt: Does the concept of consent really have the emancipatory potential that it claims to have? Do we just have to learn to ask for consensus and women’s sexuality is finally liberated? It’s not that simple, counters the French philosopher Manon Garcia, who teaches as a junior professor at the Free University of Berlin.

In her book “The Conversation of the Genders. A Philosophy of Consent,” she asks not only what consent actually is, but also what use the term is. She calls this an ameliorative analysis; specifically, she asks: Is consent an effective instrument for fulfilling the feminist concern of equal love and sexual relationships? According to Garcia, it all depends on how we use them.

For a long time, we used sexual consent to distinguish between sex and rape. So far, so ambiguous, because “MeToo” made it clear that in practice it is of course much more complicated. What exactly does it mean to consent to sex? Do I just not refuse, or do I actively decide to do something? And the other way around, doesn’t it make a difference whether I just don’t feel like it or I’m radically against it? What if someone falsely suggests romantic intentions and you sleep with them on that condition? Is the consent given under false conditions and therefore invalid? And is it consent if the job potentially depends on it?

Interpersonal details don’t make it any easier. Just imagine the following situation: A woman doesn’t want to have sex, but her husband does. She knows that otherwise he will be in a bad mood and that the house blessing will go wrong afterwards. So she sleeps with him. She formally gave her consent. Morally, we would still assess the situation as wrong. In reality, the concept quickly becomes exhausted.

But not only is consent difficult to grasp in practice, the term is also far from clear legally and philosophically, Manon Garcia explains this over several chapters. She clearly illustrates that there is often a big difference between what is legally permissible and what is morally right and considers: If morality is no less important than law, then it does not make more sense to define what morally good sex is in a positive way rather than in a negative way define what “not rape” is?

This would mean, and with this suggestion the book concludes, assessing the legitimacy of a sexual act based on its circumstances and details. Garcia suggests understanding sex as an “erotic conversation” in which equality rather than domination is eroticized. Consensus is then not passive acceptance, but an active decision-making process. Because then, and only when the sexual autonomy of everyone involved can be preserved at all times, when sex is liberated from domination, the concept of sexual consent is productive for the feminist cause, according to Garcia.

Of course, the fact that sex is political is not a new insight. But the book shows how we can have better sex. And at the same time encourages people to think about (female) autonomy.

The urgency of the questions that Manon Garcia deals with in her book was once again demonstrated by a report last Thursday: The conviction of the American film producer Harvey Weinstein in the US state of New York to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault was overturned due to procedural errors . Although Weinstein was sentenced to a further 16 years in prison in a subsequent trial in Los Angeles in 2022, the New York court’s decision is still a bitter blow for the #MeToo movement, which was largely triggered by his case.

Manon Garcia: The Conversation of the Genders. A philosophy of consent. Translated from French by Andrea Hemminger. Suhrkamp, ​​332 pages, hardcover, €30.