Manon Garcia and the new Sexual Revolution
Manon Garcia (Berlin) visited Amsterdam for an event at SPUI25 on her new (2023) book, The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex. Her commentators were Petra Van Brabandt; Lillian Cicerchia; Mari Mikkola. You can find more details, including the recording of the event here.
A few years ago, I read her earlier (2020) We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives with admiration. But while I give it a passing mention back at D&I (recall here), I did not engage with it. This was a missed opportunity because it is a very clear and thought provoking book.
The significance of The Joy of Consent is that it tackles the legacy of the sexual revolution of the 1960s/70s. Without wishing to turn back the clock to a more repressed or paternalist age, she wishes to make its benefits accrue more fairly and to help undo rape culture, in which “sexual violence is constantly minimized and hidden and thus rendered socially acceptable.” (p. 7) Throughout her book, Garcia argues persuasively that our intuitions about the nature of consent facilitate bad thinking (and bad law) about sex and rape. The book is also the product of the sexual revolution because it nearly completely disassociates sexual activity from sexual reproduction and birth control.
The Joy of Consent identifies two notions of consent that are present in contemporary culture (as manifested by the law and philosophical discussions) : first a Millian notion which, when certain conditions are met and others are not harmed, provides permission “whereby consenting means giving up exclusive right to use of one’s property. When I consent to have sex with someone, I give up my right not to have that person touch me sexually and therefore I allow them to me in that way,” (p. 46; emphasis in Garcia.) Crucially, she extracts from Mill the idea that “for consent to be valid, it must be free, voluntary, and undeceived” (p. 49) and not harm others. And, second, the Kantian one that “consent manifests the autonomy of the will of the consenting party.” (p. 52)
Garcia goes on to argue that there is a tendency to treat the Millian notion of consent as a “sufficient condition for sext to be permissible, and a necessary, but not sufficient condition to be good.” (p. 52) While there is a tendency to treat the Kantian notion as a sufficient condition for sex to be good.” (p. 52) Much of the excitement of the book is to undo one’s confidence in both of these claims, and explain the role of suitably revised understanding of consent in “a new, egalitarian sexual ethic.” (p. 84)
Before I get to that it’s best to divorce both the Millian and Kantian notions of consent from the writings of Mill and Kant, and treat them as ideal types to help us think about sexual consent in various contexts. The treatment of Mill, especially, is a bit odd. This may be the first feminist work that omits mention of the authorship of Harriet Taylor when discussing On Liberty (and does not draw on The subjection of women nor The Enfranchisement of Women.) And let’s also leave aside the fact that On Liberty as also doesn’t really discuss the nature of consent (and certainly does not make consent a ‘criterion for justice’ (p 48)).
My key critical point here is that Garcia treats Mill (and liberalism more generally) as a kind of hyper-individualist: “social life is understood solely as a series of relations between individuals, and therefore consent is essentially a phenomenon that happens between two individuals, without consideration for the social structures that may inspire individuals to make the choices they do.” (47) In reality ‘society’ is one of the most used terms of On Liberty, and it is itself treated as a kind of agent throughout with responsibilities of creating the full agency of its members (e.g., “If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame for the consequences.”) That is, for the Millian we cannot bootstrap ourselves into becoming self-determining agents, but our agency is embedded in and constituted by a much wider social context. And, this wider social context, is shaped, as Mill explicitly notes in the Introduction, by hierarchies that generate conditions of domination/subordination, in which (recall) the ruling ideologies will tend to favor the self-interest of the ruling classes.
I mention all of this not to defend Mill’s version of liberalism (regular readers know my ambivalence about him), but because in a sense Garcia is much more Millian than she recognizes. In a classic paper (1977) “Mill and the Subjection of Women,” Julia Annas diagnosed how Mill and Taylor vacillate between a radical and reformist critique of patriarchy in The subjection of women. In chapter 4, especially, Mill and Taylor seem to argue that (now quoting Annas) “What is required is a radical change in the whole framework of society's attitudes to the relations between the sexes.” (p. 181)
Garcia, too, exhibits such a vacillation. Most of the work — which draws inter alia creatively on Foucault, Fabre-Magnan, and a careful study of BDSM practices — seems to lay the ground-work for the overthrow of patriarchy because the book systematically shows the way it damages the relations between the sexes. In particular, it shows how much of our sexual interactions involve cases that can be considered consensual yet unwanted. (pp. 182-3)
When, Garcia, in chapter 7 turns to her own positive program she writes the following:
The goal of this moral and political study of sex is to know how to have good sex, in the double sense of sex that is not impaired by unjust social norms—such as the norm of female submission, which prevents women from asserting what they want and like—and sex that fosters a good life. Consent cannot automatically provide us good sex in either sense, and, when understood on conventional terms, it actually reinforces unjust social norms. But a different, contextually sensitive approach to consent can accomplish what mainstream ideas of consent fail to. (p. 186)
Her own alternative is rooted in the idea that “in sex, consent is created by the partners through the ongoing exchange of agreement with one another.” (p. 187) And because such agreement cannot be symmetrical in a world of inequalities, this “means that the more powerful party in the dynamic…is the one with primary responsibility for building consent.” (p. 188) That is consent is seen as a joint effort, continuous, and conversational. (p. 188) This is so because part of the conversation is “consenting subjects” talking “about their consent.”
At the SPUI25 event, Garcia’s respondents expressed some reservations about this position. But before I add my own, I wish to acknowledge that “egalitarian sexual conversation” is a clear, far-reaching break with existing social norms. For, earlier, in passing, Garcia had noted that “People routinely have sex without talking before, or during, about what they want, and many people have sex while intoxicated.” (174) Garcia, thus, is committed to the thought that much more sober (and conversational) sex is much better sex than the status quo (see also the conclusion, p. 219).
Even if we stipulate that egalitarian sexual conversation is possible under patriarchy (Mikkola seems to deny this), it does not by itself undo patriarchy. In fact, one may well wonder whether the practice of sexual “reciprocal generosity” makes patriarchy more bearable for those under it, and thereby entrench patriarchy more fully.
For, part of Garcia’s argument (borrowed from Beauvoir) is that under the status quo men are deprived of being “fulfilled sexually by proposing to them a self-centered, inauthentic conception of their own eroticism.” (p. 198) Egalitarian sexual conversation is supposed to turn all our erotic lives from a mostly sub-par equilibrium to a win-win situation.* Unlike many feminist arguments that appeal to men’s interests this has the air of plausibility. This is plausibly so not because sex becomes an expression of our relational autonomy (if it does), but rather because it is rooted in the idea that such sex is a skilled activity of mutual pleasure giving (pp. 204-205; p. 213).
But a (sexually) satisfied public need not be a revolutionary force for further change (cf. with the sex strike in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata). Garcia’s closing paragraph recognizes that even a suitably reformed notion of “sexual consent” is “easily co-opted by patriarchy.” (p. 219) In fact, it is not entirely clear (as Van Brabandt noted) how this project furthers solidarity among the victims of patriarchy.
To put this in Garcia’s own terms. The main insight of We Are Not Born Submissive is that women become partially complicit in their own subordination from the start and help sustain it in various ways. For, the risk with Garcia’s current ethical project is not that it fails, but rather that if it succeeds the “sexual revolution” it would unleash would only be a very partial social liberation in virtue of making subordination literally more satisfying to all. Presumably, then, The Joy of Consent is a stepping stone to a much larger project of reform, or revolution.
*It would be unfair to say that the book is only focused on heteronormative sexuality. But contemporary gay culture (as distinct from the evolution of BDSM practices) is barely touched upon.