And nothing without.

That is the whole entirety of sexual ethics in a simple, logical form. Everything with consent, nothing without. That is it. Whatever it is whatever number of people want to do in the privacy of their own whatever^[1] is perfectly fine as long as everyone is consenting and having a good time however they define it.

Everything else is bullshit, suitable only for those who lack the wit to separate their morality from their disgust reaction. The fact that you find a certain sex act to be disgusting or disturbing – even when an objective case could be made for that – does not actually give you the right to have any opinion whatsoever about whether people should do it or not.

One of the simplest definitions of a certain brand of intolerance as a psychological phenomenon is the inability to live with the fact that something even exists. Even if it is simplicity itself to avoid actual exposure to the thing, the intolerant person is so hounded by the mere thought of it that they feel justified in wanting it destroyed, or at least tightly contained.

So the debate always comes down to something like this :

Don’t like it? Don’t look for it.
Don’t want to see it? Don’t go looking for it.
Don’t want to watch it? Turn the channel.
Don’t like the sound of it? Don’t listen to it.
Don’t like the taste of it? Don’t eat it.

Personally, I loathe olives. But that doesn’t make me want to destroy or restrict them. That would be extremely immature. Intolerance is always a sign of an immature mind which lacks the metacognitive capacity to avoid thinking about something.

It all comes down to metacognition in the end.

Back to the subject at hand. Consent seems like a very simple idea, and most of the time it is. But there are potential grey areas.

Like coercion. For the purposes of fairness, we have to assume that if someone indicates consent through words and action, they are consenting. Maybe they feel coerced into having sex, but unless they make some kind of indication to their partner that they do not want to do this, and the signals are unclear or unreliable enough to allow for misinterpretation, we have to assume consent has been given.

After all, the other participant(s) cannot be expected to read minds. They can only go by what they see.

Relatedly, there is no such thing as “retroactive rape”. Consent is a realtime thing, and cannot be retroactively withdrawn. No matter how someone feels about the sexual encounter afterwards, if they consented at the time, then it was not rape, sexual assault, or whatever you want to call it.

Then we have age-related issues. The phrase “age of consent” has always stuck in my craw a little. I understand why, in order to formulate the highly necessary laws/rules against adult/child sex in this modern and tolerant era, it is necessary to construct a somewhat artificial notion that people below a certain age “cannot consent”.

But it’s clearly untrue, at least in the literal sense of the word. Clearly, a teen or child can consent to things. In fact, they often make it very, very clear what they want to do and what they don’t. They are perfectly capable of the emotion and intention of consent or lack thereof.

What we really mean is that we don’t think they can make certain decisions for themselves. Obviously, children and even teenagers cannot be allowed to make important decisions like sex or voting or driving a car or entering into contracts on their own because they lack the mental faculties to truly understand what it all means, and the younger they are, the less we can make them responsible for their decisions.

I mean, we don’t even let little kids decide when to cross the street, for Christ’s sake.

But in some cases, we let parents make decisions for the child/teen. Sure, no amount of parent consent would be sufficient to allow an eight year old to sign contracts, join the military, or legally drive a car. But virtually all other decisions are made by parents.

Parents can, essentially, consent for the child. In fact, we accept this surrogate consent in all conditions where an individual is considered non compis mentis and thus not capable of consent, whether it’d ebcause they are too young, adult but not possessing an adult IQ, mentally ill, senile, unconscious, or otherwise mentally compromised.

So it’s really a cognitive issue. Without ever giving it a scientifically precise definition, a level of mental acuity and cohesiveness is required for consent to count. Without that, you can get all the seeming consent that you want and it doesn’t matter diddly because the individual is not considered capable of informed consent.

The most curious case of concern for consent is bestiality. Sex with animals disgusts people, especially those in the modern world, largely because most of the exposure a modern city-dwelling human has with animals is via pets and pets arouse our nurturing instincts in much the same way children do. So on a gut level, bestiality is pseudo-pedophilia.

Thus, we have the rather unusual notion that we can justify modern laws against bestiality because of the animal’s inability to give consent. This works both on the emotional and intellectual levels. On the emotional side, it is in line without our thoughts (and instincts) on children, and intellectually, it is in line with the cognitive definition of consent.

The problem is that ask animal’s consent for precious little else. Most of us are carnivores, and it’s hard to imagine that the animal wanted to die. We spay or neuter our pets. We make animals do work for us. We make them follow human rules without asking them beforehand. We can do virtually anything to an animal entirely for our own pleasure, and it’s legal as long as it’s not “cruel”.

Just not sex. Why?

Because it grosses us out, that’s why.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.