Is Something Wrong with Romance?
Utopian Feminism and the Limitations of Consent
Amia Srinivasan recently appeared on Conversations with Tyler, and is a self-described “Utopian Feminist” as well as a Marxist. While some of her views are eminently contestable, I found her comments on romantic consent insightful.
Think about all of the times you interact with — I don’t know — a really old friend. Your old high school or college buddy loses a child, and you put your arm around them, and you console them — something we haven’t done a huge amount of under the pandemic. You don’t ask for that consent. You don’t ask for consent to be able to put your arm around your buddy.
The reason is because the nature of your relationship as friends involves a fine attunement to your friend’s desires and needs and wants. You don’t go into that interaction with the friend thinking, “I want something that they might not want.” There isn’t a kind of implicit presupposed mismatch of desires or wants. It’s not a contractual exchange. It’s not a negotiation. You wouldn’t want to put your arm around your friend if that’s not what your friend needed at that moment.
The very fact that we have such an emphasis on consent when it comes to sexual relations, I think, reveals a certain set of background conditions about how we interact sexually, which is to say, there are lots and lots of cases where one party basically wants to have something that the other person doesn’t really want, in some sense, to give, where there is a misalliance. There isn’t that same level of attunement.
I too interpret an overriding emphasis on contracting consent as a sign of deep dysfunction in the broader culture of romance. Setting the bar so low gives license to a lot of sexual behavior divorced from genuine care for the other person. At the same time, the increasingly tortured protocols currently being promoted on college campuses risk pathologizing healthy relationships. They define deviancy up as well as down.
For Srinivasan, improving the background conditions that govern our romantic interactions means substantially modifying or removing societal structures she views as oppressive, from free-market capitalism to the nuclear family. If we can restructure our society to work without these malignant forces, much of the impetus to treat others’ desires as less important than our our own will fade away.
In contrast, I see families and markets not as tools of oppression, but as civilizing institutions—both work within our inherent limitations to make peaceful and productive interactions more likely. Despite ultimately diverging in this important respect, I appreciate her opening discussion on the issue.