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One of the problems of sexual relationships - or rather, human relationships with a sexual component - is that our culture has abandoned the idea that human relationshiups should embody a range of diverse virtues and goods, and instead substituted a single uncompromising shibboleth: the relationship must be consensual. And as we have abandoned the idea that relationships should be virtuous and nurturing, that single stipulation has become more and more demanding. At the same time, the quasi-contactual language of consent has further demeaned sexual relationships: sex is reduced to a kind of transaction, in which informed consent is the necessary price of admission and physical pleasure is the pay-off. The whole discourse of consent simply embodies the moral and imaginative poverty of our culture. And while it is certainly hard to imagine that any sexual (or non-sexual) relationship could be mutually nurturing or virtuous without a minimal level of assent (I'm not recommending rape), the whole language of 'consent' vastly overestimates the extent to which the outcome of any interpersonal venture can be recognised in advance. Our 'consent' fixation sets the legal-administrative bar for permissible sex far too high, while setting the moral bar far too low. We should demand much more from sexual relationships than our culture is willing to ask, but we should also focus precisely on the quality of the relationship itself, and not on whether (or how) that relationship manifests itself sexually. |