Beyond Enthusiastic Consent: Desire, Asexuality, and the Condition of Ethical Sex

Abstract

Contemporary sexual ethics has come to place desire at its center. To have ethical sex, we are told, you must really want it and enthusiastically consent. In this talk, I de-center desire: it is neither what makes sexual consent valid nor what makes sex ethical. My talk has four parts. First, I show that the model of "enthusiastic consent" does not fit a range of ethical sexual encounters. Second, I draw on asexual theorists, such as Angela Chen, who reconceive what valid consent looks like without sexual desire. Third, I turn to Margot Witte's view that "murky wants" — desires that are unsettled, unclear, ambivalent — can be a source of distinctive personal and relational value rather than defects to be overcome before sex can begin. Finally, I suggest an alternative picture of what goes wrong in certain sexual encounters: the problem is not a consent-giver's internal lack of enthusiasm, per se, but rather their external relations with the consent-receiver or their social context. Enthusiastic consent models have been looking inward when we should be looking outward.