article on consent / shame

[archer75]

WALSH: You Feel Violated After Casual Sex Because You Degraded Yourself. Not Because It Was Rape.

I think this is not bad, though he neglects to distinguish this "casual sex" issue from other things that are part of the "metoo" discussion and do not fall under this heading at all. He's fallen into the same trap (some vocal members of) the metoo folks have fallen into.

Thoughts?

 

[ArmyMatt]

I would agree. there is also I think a greater moral distance between casual sex and rape, and the violation one feels afterwards (not from personal experience, but I do have friends who have both been raped and had casual sex). and while he does bring God into the equation, he doesn't get into Who God is, and that is the most important point I think.

 

[PloverWing]

[ I realize that this is not my home forum, and that I am a guest here. I don't think this is an issue on which Orthodox and Anglican Christians disagree, but if it is, let me know and I will be politely quiet. ]

I agree with Walsh that sex is best within marriage, and that marriage provides a very useful public way of saying that these two people are consenting partners, so that within marriage there's much less guesswork about whether one's partner is consenting. I also agree that some people engage in fully consensual casual sex and then regret it later, and that this is not at all the same as sexual harassment or sexual assault.

I'll also note that I have not studied the Aziz Ansari case and thus have no informed opinion about it.

However, I think your observation:

he neglects to distinguish this "casual sex" issue from other things that are part of the "metoo" discussion and do not fall under this heading at all.

is an important one at this particular point in history. For people who do have sex outside of marriage, our culture is finally starting to lay out some moral guidelines. A boss who coerces an employee into sex with the threat of firing is doing something worse than just having premarital sex. I think it's good for our culture to start recognizing that, and I'm uncomfortable that Walsh seems to want to shut down that conversation prematurely.

 

[archer75]

Yeah, the notion that people may feel bad after casual sex because it's beneath their dignity is useful (actually, I think a lot of things that have been normalized are even farther beneath our human dignity than casual sex is...but that's another discussion).

If the recent public discourse that includes the testimonies of (once) young girls who were bamboozled into being violated by the physician that their parents trusted is implicitly sort of included here, that's not good. I'm not totally sure that it is, but you need to be careful.

Still, the basic idea is worth considering.