Consent Is Not Enough

What makes sexual behavior acceptable? What makes it legal? More importantly, what makes it good? Different cultures have come up with different answers to this question. In ancient Rome, the standard was power. Those in power have sexual access to those who are under their power. To us, this standard is bizarre, but to them our standard would be equally ludicrous. The Bible’s standard is clear—marriage. And not just any marriage, but a biblical marriage where husbands love and sacrifice for their wives and wives respect and submit to their husbands. The culture’s standard, however, is consent. And consent is not enough.

This issue comes to the public’s attention every so often. Recently, social media and the pundit class have been abuzz with accusations that sexual abuse at Cornell college was covered up. I’ll spare you the details, but the main problem with this accusation is that, immediately after the event in question, the woman specifically stated that she consented to everything that happened. She involved herself in drinking, drugs, and some pretty gross behavior but at the end of the day, her initial report filed at the time said that she agreed to it all. In fact, recently leaked screenshots of conversations she had with one of the men involved clearly stated that “non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal”. Now she has come out two years later and claimed that she was indeed raped.

The flurry of attention that followed sounds familiar if you are paying attention. This cultural heartburn has become a trend in our culture. A woman engages in gross immoral behavior; she later feels regret and shame over what happened; and then decides that she was raped or that something wrong happened to her. Some come to her defense, while many respond with rage against the jerk she slept with. This keeps making headlines. The reason for this is because moderns have replaced God’s standard of marriage with a secular standard for consent, and it just isn’t working.

Now, I want to be very clear in what I am claiming and what I am not claiming in this article. I am not claiming that consent is unimportant, or that it doesn’t matter. Rape is a horrific crime and rapists deserve to have the book thrown at them. But simply requiring “consent” as if every sexual interaction is acceptable, if not good, so long as both parties agree to it is a terrible standard.

A Broken Standard

While consent is important from a legal standpoint in defining rape, it is entirely inadequate to define good versus bad sexual behavior. This is because…

Consent Often Cannot Be Proven

The first problem with consent as the standard for ethical and even legal sexual behavior is that consent is almost impossible to prove. “I said no.” “She said yes.” How does one know who is telling the truth and who is lying? The mantra “believe all women” was an easy solution, but that assumes that women never lie, and of course some of them do. That standard pretty much died when the Democratic national candidate, Joe Biden, was accused of sexual assault.

For a while, single young men on the dating scene were (rightly) paranoid about this and so they started having their dates fill out consent forms on an app on their phones. Ironically, even some from a secular culture looked at this and were disgusted that men would be using these apps. Not surprisingly, legal counsel felt that even these apps were not enough because anyone could withdraw consent at any time.

Consent and Alcohol Do Not Work Well Together

Several years ago those concerned with sexual abuse began a campaign to remind everyone that “No means no.” In other words, if someone says they don’t want to do something sexual, you should stop. They soon realized that this didn’t go far enough, as many women were scared to say “No” in the moment and the man could take advantage of a woman and later claim he had done nothing wrong since she hadn’t said “no.” So they updated their language to “Yes means yes.” In other words, you needed to get a verbal affirmation that someone wanted to engage in sexual activities with you before starting. But of course, this didn’t go far enough, either. Soon it became “My sober yes means yes.” You see, drunk people can’t meaningfully consent, or so the logic goes.

Now, I have no problem with that standard, except that it’s ridiculous. Seriously. On what college campus does that have a chance of working? This might come as a surprise to my readership, but I have never been to a college drinking party. My impression of them, however, is that they are the kind of place where students show up to get very drunk and then hook up. Can you imagine a drunk college guy telling a girl who’s into him, “Well, let’s meet up again when we’re sober. I wouldn’t want to take advantage of you.” Should he say that? Of course. Will he say that? Uh, no.

Consent Does Not Make an Action Good

Underneath the dialogue about sexual consent there is an assumption lurking. An assumption that is so weak that once it’s pulled into the light it completely collapses. That assumption is that consent makes an action good. “Two consenting adults” is used as a way of shielding sexual choices, not just from legal consequences, but from societal judgment. But the problem with that is that two people can absolutely consent together to do something widely immoral, even if it is illegal.

Let’s say I have a friend who, for some inexplicable reason, really wants to know what it feels like to pass out. So he asks me to punch him in the head as hard as I can, and I do. He is out cold, and isn’t responding, so I call an ambulance. Let’s say I hit him so hard he gets a major concussion and is in the hospital for a week. Was that good? No, obviously not. But it was consensual! We both agreed to it. But as should be obvious to everyone who thinks about the issue for even a moment, consenting to an action doesn’t alone make it good.

The Nature of Sex Is Pursuit

Several years ago, there was a big controversy over the Christmas hit, “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” I wrote a similar article there on the problems with our culture’s views on consent. Quoting from that article, I argued:

The whole nature of sex is that a man is pursuing a woman. Song of Solomon discreetly rejoices in this very thing: a husband’s romantic, sexual pursuit of his wife. But how do you pursue when you constantly have to ask for permission? How many times can you ask before you’re harassing?

None of this means that a husband has the right to force himself on his wife, or run over her feelings. Nor does it mean that every guy who sleeps with a woman he is not married to does not care at all about her feelings. It does mean that men naturally are the chasers and women enjoy being the one chased. Marriage, when done rightly, gives a safe sandbox for husband and wife to perfect this game with one another. Marriage allows for communication, give and take, and a commitment to the other which allows both parties to safely grow and develop in this wonderful aspect of their relationship. Random hookups with strangers give you none of this. Which is why people (especially women) often walk away from random hookups feeling violated, even if they technically gave consent.

Consent Does Not Remove Guilt or Shame

Finally, sexual sin leads to guilt and shame. God is the one who hardwired the physical universe and the moral universe, and He made it so that those who violate His Word will feel badly about it. I think one of the reasons we have so many cases of women wondering after the fact if they were in fact raped is because they walk away from an awkward and gross encounter and feel, well, gross. In their minds, what they did was morally good, because everyone consented. But they feel like they lost something, or like something wrong was done to them. They’re right. They did lose something important, and something evil was done to them, and by them. Since consent is the only moral judgment they have for “bad sex” they assume they must not have really given consent.

So, to recap, consent is a very broken standard for ethical and moral judgments on sex. Consent is often almost impossible to prove, it does nothing to make an action good, and it is awkwardly juxtaposed to the very nature of sex, which is a pursuit. Throw alcohol into the mix, as almost every frat party does, and you’re toast. You’re going to end up with coeds in ambiguous, murky sexual encounters that they feel badly about, but which should be fine because technically everyone “consented.” As a legal standard for rape, consent is important. As the ultimate standard for moral sexual behavior, it is a miserable failure.

The Only Viable Standard

The Bible textbook I use when teaching juniors and seniors in high school uses a helpful illustration when thinking about how God created the world. They describe creation as being like a spring. When people push against the way God thinks, the created order pushes back. Eventually cultures are going to have a day of reckoning where they realize that God’s standard is the only one that works. The rebellion against the Creator can only go so far until you realize that rebellion is disastrous.

I don’t know if our culture is at that point. It does seem that some of the crazier ideas of transgender ideology are losing ground in the public sphere. Men competing against women was finally the breaking point where normie Americans said enough was enough. I don’t know when or if the culture will have a similar reckoning about consent. The hippies and the revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s proudly marched out their prized replacement of God’s sexual ethic. “Marriage” was replaced with “consent,” and we were told this would result in a sexual utopia. Fifty plus years later, this utopia feels a lot more like a dystopia. Regret, shame, confusion, declining marriage rates, declining birth rates, even declining sexual activity. Satan sold us unlimited free sex if we would only reject the Bible’s prudish rules, so American culture rejected the Bible and, not surprisingly, Satan has given us the exact opposite of what he promised.

God’s standard is good, because God is good. He created us and knows us better than we know ourselves. When He limits sexual activity to marriage, He does so because He knows what truly leads to the good life. “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled.” Sexual activity within marriage is honorable and pure. That’s God’s standard. It’s a wonderful standard, and if followed it will lead to happiness and human flourishing more than any other standard that gets thrown out there. But we knew better, so we switched the standard. Now we are learning that, while consent is definitely good and important, consent is not enough.