Not Enough Sexual Provocation

Oliver Traldi Reviews Rethinking Sex: A Provocation

The Year Zero Review will be hosting occasional reviews of new books and films. Today’s guest post is a review of Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation

By Oliver Traldi

Rethinking Sex: A PROVOCATION

By Christine Emba

Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex is subtitled “A Provocation.” The book’s jacket copy explains that Emba will argue against “today’s consent-only sexual code.” No such code exists, however, and Rethinking Sex, though wholly engaging, well-written, and convincing on many counts, is closer to an expression of the dominant contemporary attitudes toward sex than a challenge to them. It is a provocation, like the casual sex it examines, only to the memory of the long-dead rules it would have violated, while its actual content is quite in line with societal expectations.

According to her publisher, Emba “[r]each[es] back to the wisdom of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Andrea Dworkin”—not exactly two philosophers on a par. These sensibilities prove to be just as ill-matched as some of the more physical unions she describes. What purports to be a radical vision of the good and bad of sex and romance is difficult to distinguish from glossy magazine-style concerns about whether people are having good sex in the fifty-tips-to-please-your-boo sense.

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Emba, an opinion editor and columnist for the Washington Post, describes the changing legal standards around consent: changing understandings of rape, “no means no,” enthusiastic consent. “Nonconsensual sex is always wrong,” she writes. “But the inverse is tricky: Is consensual sex always right?” Is it tricky, though? It’s a commonplace that consent in its legal sense is not the sole moral standard for ethical sex. Infidelity is still frowned upon by most people. Lying to someone in order to persuade them into having sex is another no-no. Even the polyamorous have developed frameworks of “ethical non-monogamy” to govern the byzantine protocols of their complex arrangements.

Later in the book, Emba mentions an Economist poll from 2017 which “found that more than one in ten young American women (and one in four young men) thought that ‘asking [a woman] to go for a drink’ would constitute sexual harassment.” It’s not clear how this finding is proof of a widespread sexual morality that acknowledges only consent as a factor.

Emba expresses the hope that “‘being asked for a drink’ could turn back into ‘being asked for a drink,’ not ‘being asked for a drink with the expectation that it will end in a sexual encounter.’” But it’s hard to know who could effect such a change. We might talk about romance and courtship as governed by “norms” or we might talk about them as parts of a “sexual marketplace,” but either way we are discussing the consequences of myriad small choices of billions of individuals. How the state of affairs Emba criticizes came to be is a worthy subject, but not one about which this book has much to contribute.

For all her talk about reintroducing morality into sexual affairs, Emba stops short of actually making judgments, and she doesn’t seem to realize just how aggressive and expansive contemporary sexual moralizing already is.

She characterizes the “Shitty Media Men” list that circulated in late 2017 as “accounts of physical assault mingled with behavior that wasn’t technically a crime.” But the list combined accusations of assault with behavior that didn’t have anything to do with sex at all—and wasn’t a crime in any sense. Some men were called out for things like yelling in meetings and taking women’s ideas. The truly bad accusations were believed and repeated uncritically, most recently by Emba herself. The whisper network was said to have moral priority over any notion of due process or presumptive innocence. At the same time, normal workplace frustrations seemed to gain new moral urgency through their association with sexual crimes and transgressions. The jurisdiction of sexual morality had expanded to include the non-sexual.

Emba cites Aquinas’s notion “willing the good of the other” as a way of approaching a one-night stand. But the good of the other in sex is simply sexual pleasure. Emba insists that that’s not all she’s after, but she constantly refers back to examples in which women have unenjoyable sex to make her case. And the notion that when a woman’s expectations for sexual pleasure are disappointed, the man has done something not just mechanically wrong, but ethically as well, is not a provocation to the prevailing sexual culture but one of its most tightly held precepts.

In a 2013 First Things article called “Sex in the Meritocracy: Performance anxiety, not hedonism, motivates Yale’s sexual culture,” Helen Andrews wrote that “Yale students treat sex as one more arena in which to excel, an opportunity not just to connect but to impress.” An event called “Sex Week” was “devoted to instruction—how to give the best this, get the most that, and generally become as accomplished at sex as you are at everything else.”

The final chapter of Emba’s has a section titled “What If We Had Less Sex?” But surveys show that this trend is already happening on its own.

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Emba assumes that women have been passive in the establishment of norms of sex and romance, while men have been active. Women are, in the somewhat hackneyed parlance of liberal post-feminism, “denied agency” by most of Emba’s accounts. Most men, however, will tell you that norms of courtship are generally dictated by women. This goes even for some of the contemporary sexual antics that Emba views the most harshly, such as choking

, which she presents as an imposition on women of male dominance and objectification, learned from online pornography. But submission is integral to many women’s fantasies too, as exemplified by films like Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey as well as much of written erotica. (My own experience in the casual scene, for what it’s worth, is of being told repeatedly by women of their enjoyment of increasingly sadomasochistic pornography.) Emba hedges her bets again on questions of morality by using an anecdote in which a woman agreed to something she didn’t want to do. But it’s completely consistent with contemporary sexual morality to say that something has gone wrong when people are doing things they don’t want to.

What Emba seems to wants to say but only circles around is that choking is the wrong sort of thing to want, either to want to do or to want done to you. But her presentation of this eminently reasonable opinion is so elliptical and general—“it is worth it to ask questions about what we want and why,” “it would be good, and is in fact necessary, to ask questions about what we accept”—as to neutralize its provocativeness. Many of her female readers are likely quite invested, as a matter of personal identity, in being sexually adventurous and “kinky,” often in a submissive way.

Emba interviews a woman who says, “You’re gonna hear a lot of man-bashing here. I almost hate men. Not almost. I do.” About which Emba comments, “Post-#MeToo, the declaration that men are trash has gone from goofy in-joke to exhausted lament.” When men say negative things about women, it’s taken as a sign that they’re misogynistic, and hence that women have it rough. When women say negative things about men, the assumption is that they’re right, and hence that women have it rough. Emba writes of “incels” that “they’re not exactly a sympathetic bunch, believing as they do that sex is something they’re owed by women.” But she had just finished describing a set of women who believe that emotional intimacy is something women are owed by men, and who respond to not getting what they want with explicit hatred.

Women of roughly Emba’s age are probably the main market for this book—really, any book these days—but that’s no reason to treat them with kid gloves. Emba portrays such women’s loneliness very sympathetically, declining to speculate about what decisions they might have made that inadvertently helped to create this vast system of romantic dysfunction. Like most books about sex and romance, this one glosses over the most fundamental truth about them: There are some people who can be with almost anybody and some people who can be with almost nobody. A great number of problems arise from this fact in a culture saturated with sexual imagery, which encourages us to delude ourselves about our own value as mates. (For all its problems, Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex acknowledges this uncomfortable fact.)

Regrettably, Emba does not address the growing phenomenon of relationship quit lit: op-eds in prominent papers and magazines about opening up one’s marriage or getting an empowering divorce. These articles are almost always written by women, or feature women who are happy with a committed relationship changing shape or dissolving entirely. In a New York Times article entitled “Marriage Requires Amnesia,” Heather Havrilesky asked last December, “Do I hate my husband?” and answered, “Oh for sure, yes, definitely.” This followed up on September articles “Divorce Stinks, But It Could Be Your Superpower” and “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love,” both essays by women who had initiated divorces. Last December, too, The Atlantic published an article “How I Demolished My Life” by Honor Jones, about her own divorce-initiation. Jones wrote: “By breaking up our family, I’d taken something from my kids that they were never going to get back. Naturally, I thought about this a lot. There was nothing I could give them to make up for it, except, maybe, a way of being in the world: of being open to it, and open in it.” Last month New York Magazine’s section The Cut published an interview of a divorced couple – a man they called Drew, who said, “It hurt. It was like losing a limb. It was like death,” and a woman called Brie, who said, “I am doing well. I am in therapy. I feel calm. . . . In my heart, I have no doubt that I did the right thing.” For every woman who’s desperate to find a partner there seems to be a woman who’s desperate to leave the one they’re with. A 2018 The Cut piece about a married couple trying out Tinder contrasted men’s responses to a married woman dating – “Fabulous. Courageous. That’s amazing. . . . You sound perfect,” with women’s responses to a married man dating – “Go fuck yourself, one wrote. Gross, wrote another.”

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The book is at its best on the coldness which has become a sexual ideal—the notion that one must not “catch feelings,” as though they’re some sort of disease. Emba rightly diagnoses a lot of the strangeness of modern dating culture as having something to do with loneliness—including among men, which Emba takes seriously, to her credit—and by understanding that physical touch, which is essential to but not identical with sex, is a commonly-sought-after salve for that loneliness. Yet Emba still seems to believe that sexual norms are the product of our ideas about sex, rather than a consequence of broader social arrangements and material conditions, and that problems with them are best addressed by trying to convince everyone somehow all at once to change such views.

Emba is correct that there is a deep social confusion about the meaning of sex: it cannot be both a meaningless encounter we sign up for with a swipe and a high-stakes enterprise that contains the potential both for great intimacy and for deep hurt and violation.

Having sex with someone does mean a great deal. But in modern dating culture, we are always looking for someone with whom it might mean even more—the logic of sexual value that so many writers avoid. There is no tension there, only the shortsightedness of an attitude that renders impossible the achievement of its own goal: togetherness, belonging, partnership. If that’s what many people are looking for, and I suspect it is, then Emba is right that even by their own lights they are going about it the wrong way.

Oliver Traldi is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a writing fellow at Heterodox Academy.