Towards a Culture of Care and Consent

Due to the tireless work of scholars, activists, and educators, consent has become the primary criterion for evaluating whether sexual encounters fall short of our ethical norms. This centralization has largely been a policy triumph, allowing the law to cover sexual misconduct such as date rape, marital rape, stealthing, and nonconsensually rough sex. The rise of hybrid concepts (e.g. enthusiastic consent) suggests that consent may not fully cover the range of sexual norms worth exploring. I draw on work in the ethic of care as a supplement to consent in understanding sexual norms. Including a dimension of care advances on previous writing in three ways. First, it helps respond to concerns raised by second wave feminists regarding the impossibility of consent within a society suffused with rape culture. Second, care also provides a vocabulary that allows us to articulate why some sexual interactions leave the participants and the surrounding community with the moral intuition that something wrong has gone on, despite being formally consensual. Finally, including care helps reorient sexual norms towards what we ought to do and away from what we ought to avoid, thereby recentering sexual joy in our normative framework.