Sex and ethics: beyond consent

The sex educator Eli Soler usually begins her talks with the children of the first years of ESO, aged 12 and 13, talking about macaroni.

He tells them: “If when we leave here we go to a restaurant, the normal thing is that each one asks for something.

Some will want hamburgers, others pizza… Isn't it normal to force someone to eat macaroni if ​​they don't want them? "

And from there he goes on to put the famous tea video / meme, the one that explains sexual consent with two puppets, one of whom offers the other a cup of tea.

If he first says that he does love her and then changes his mind, that's fine and you have to respect him.

If the second puppet is unconscious, he will not want tea.

If one day he said he wanted tea, it does not mean that he will want it every day.

More information

• The Judiciary unanimously approves the report that questions the key aspects of the sexual freedom law

• Feminist objections to the current bill on sexual freedoms

In contrast to almost everyone over 20 years, Soler was

not surprised at all the video that circulated in early summer of the

tiktoker

Mallorcan Naim Darrechi, with 26 million followers on its various platforms, bragged in a video with another

influencer,

known as Mostopapi, to trick his sexual partners into having sex without a condom.

The dissemination of the video led the Ministry of Equality to file a complaint against him with the Prosecutor's Office.

"He is a 19-year-old boy who does not have the maturity to know that he is talking about a sexual assault," believes the educator.

"Every day I meet many boys who try the same thing and girls who agree to have sex without a condom or to do sexual practices that they really do not want to do because they have seen it in pornography," explains this psychologist specializing in adolescents who works in the province from Girona.

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The scandal surrounding Darrechi and, earlier, in a much more dramatic way, the case of La Manada de Pamplona and its judicial ramifications revealed that the debate on sexual consent is taking place on three very separate planes, which barely touch . On the one hand, there is the philosophical or conceptual, where it is discussed whether the culture of consent leaves enough space to explore feminine pleasure and pure pleasure. On the other hand, the judicial, which has put the issue of consent at the center of the new law on sexual freedom, pending approval in Congress and the Senate. And far, sometimes far from these theoretical debates, there is a whole world of sexual relations in which few people are still clear that yes is yes and no.“And even less what is explicit consent or enthusiastic consent”, as Xavi Tallón points out, who also gives workshops to young people with the Sexus foundation.

From the outset, on the purely intellectual level, the place where ethics and sex meet returns, as in the seventies, to bring together some of the brightest working minds, trying to discern how the new contract is settling sexual.

One of them is that of the star philosopher Amia Srinivasan, who at 36 is both the youngest person and the first non-white woman to hold the Chichele Chair of Social Theory and Policy at All Souls College, Oxford, the same one previously occupied by Isaiah Berlin.

Srinivasan has written

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

(edited by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of essays that

Another

magazine

he has called "the most polarizing essay of 2021". There he argues that, somehow, the idea of ​​consent is too small to clarify many of the frictions that arise in sex. "In the 1970s, feminists had to fight very hard to make the lack of consent, and not violence, the determining condition of sexual abuse," says the philosopher in the same magazine. “It was a major legal twist, but as a result our conversations about sex monomaniacally focus on consent as if it were the only useful paradigm for thinking about sexual ethics or sexual politics, and #MeToo has underlined this. But sometimes there are objections about sex that is not non-consensual, it is problematic sex for another reason.I believe that women and men can consent to sex when they don't really want it, but they believe that it is expected of them. In those cases, the sex is consensual, but something problematic is also happening ”.

Writer and scholar Katherine Angel, an expert on the history of psychiatry and sexology, also problematizes the usual notion of consent in another book with her dose of controversy,

Good Sex Tomorrow.

(Alpha Decay).

“We tend to think that consent is 'the' place where all the problems of our sexual culture are going to be solved, and this is not the case,” Angel clarifies by email.

“The legal idea of ​​consent has bogged down our ideas about sex and has mesmerized us when we try to understand what it is that makes sex good or bad.

Much consensual sex is painful and unpleasant for women, or it is consensual because inequalities make it difficult for many women to say yes or no, and it is easy to put female pleasure in the background.

Consent does not reflect a reality, which is that men and women come to sex with different expectations and experiences ”.

Demonstration in Madrid against the ruling of the Pamplona Pack, on May 4, 2018.Joaquin Gomez Sastre / NurPhoto via Getty Images

For the writer Shaina Joy Machlus, author of the book

The sexiest word is yes

(Vergara), opposing consent and female desire poses a false dichotomy.

“I believe in that the revolution is irresistible.

Sexual consent is a recipe for mind-blowing sex, period. "

Machlus also recalls that the concept of consent is always “something that is given freely, without pressure, reversible, specific, clear and continuous”.

While in academic literature and in philosophy more or less

mass market

It is discussed whether consent is passed or falls short when it comes to generating good sex for as many people as possible, in the judicial field the debate is different. In the long process of drafting the sexual freedom law, known in the media as the law of yes is yes, which was approved by the Council of Ministers last July and is pending ratification in Congress and the Senate, the reluctance of the General Council The judiciary and the tug of war between ministries focused primarily on one issue, the so-called reversal of the burden of proof. That is to say, for some judges the problem of the law as it was raised in the March 2020 draft was that the aggressor became a presumed guilty and not a presumed innocent.

María Acale, a jurist who has participated in the drafting of the law, believes that with the latest amendments to the letter of the law doubts are over and, above all, the victims are protected: cries in the specific circumstances in which the sexual act takes place, those tears or screams are proof of the lack of consent ”. Acale, who is a professor of Criminal Law at the University of Jerez, defends that the spirit of the law is the one contained in its official name, the protection of sexual freedom "against all kinds of attacks", without ignoring that women are who tend to suffer disproportionately from sexual violence. "It is not about signing a kind of notarial act", as has often been wanted to ridicule, painting the new sexual contract as a literal contract,a multi-page instance to be signed by participants before going to work, as Christian Gray does with Anastasia at the beginning of

Fifty Shades of Grey.

"It is about attending to the inherent spontaneity of consensual sexual relations", clarifies the lawyer.

In terms of comparative law, Spanish law is similar to Swedish law, amended in 2018, which emphasizes that if a sexual assault occurs taking advantage of the fact that the victim is drugged, drunk, subjected to some circumstance or even “taking advantage of a situation of dependency ”(And therefore cannot pronounce the famous“ no ”), it is still considered aggression.

For the feminist lawyer Carla Vall i Duran, the entry into force of the law will mean that the victims no longer have to undergo so much depending on what interrogations in the hearings. "They are always asked what they did not do to preserve their integrity and not what they did." The famous questions that still appear in many court records: if the victim clearly asked for help, if he closed his legs, if there was "merriment and rejoicing" in the environment, as Magistrate Ricardo Gómez wrote in his private opinion in the judgment of The pack. “The most frequent thing in an assault is that the body is blocked. You cannot move, you cannot scream, you cannot run away, or physically respond to aggression. This will allow us not to have to start each process remembering basic premises of victimology ”, believes the lawyer.

In the media debate, encouraged by a school of canallita-style columnism, the introduction of the sexual freedom law was used to regret that, according to some, it was legislated in favor of a modest and prudish type of sex, oblivious to any outburst. That is what PP deputy Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo was trying to convey when, in a debate in the Catalan elections, she asked her opponents on the left: "Do you say yes, yes, yes, all the time until the end?"

“I don't know what kind of relationships Mrs. Álvarez de Toledo has, and I feel bad for her”, responds Vall i Duran, “but we have to think that the Penal Code speaks of violence and not of sex.

Sex is important to humans and I don't think we settle for non-criminal sex.

We want it pleasant.

Not just saying yes, yes, yes, but here, there, this way and this other ”.

Not only if you want the hamburger or the tea, but how you want them, what Eli Soler would say to his students.

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