2026/07/01 by Ellie Anderson
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Philosophical Ethics and Theory #Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies #Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre
paper · doi:10.1215/00318108-12455393
Eight years after the eruption of the #MeToo movement into public discourse, relations between men and women appear to be in a bad way. Manosphere influencers and incel forums have driven extreme misogyny into the mainstream. Straight women have found inspiration in the 4B movement emerging out of South Korea, which swears off partnership with men. Pundits have decried the ‘male loneliness crisis’. The widespread return to conservative values evident in tradwife content and Christian nationalism reveals the depth of the problem. What began with a discussion about the pervasiveness of men’s sexual violation of women has blossomed into full-on heteropessimism.One might be excused for thinking that the conversation that #MeToo started has ended—not because it achieved its aims but because it was foreclosed, whether by the unrelenting violence of its enemies, sheer exhaustion, or the devolution of public discourse in the United States. Yet Manon Garcia’s The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex suggests that this conversation is far from over. In a sense, it might not even have begun, for a genuine public discourse about sexual ethics should both propose a positive vision for what makes sex good and foster the conditions for achieving it. This involves a robust understanding of why sex is so often bad, in being shaped by unjust social norms. It is a matter, then, of an education in “the art of erotic conversation” (204).Garcia’s book was first published in French in 2021 as La conversation des sexes: Philosophie du consentement, where it received a wide readership and public acclaim. As Garcia notes, the long French tradition of the art of love involves celebrating a largely amoral approach to seduction, seeing sex as beyond the ethical realm altogether (39). It is common in France to think of discussions of sexual ethics, including around consent, as a product of the influence of American puritanism. In this context, Garcia serves in La conversation des sexes as a kind of ambassador for a feminist ethics of sex, which has predominantly flourished up until now in Anglo-American cultural settings. The attention her book has received in France attests to the success of this project, and the book is now being translated into numerous other languages. Garcia has also been a key intellectual voice in France in the recent high-profile case of the sexual assault of Gisèle Pelicot.In an American context, the book provides the most comprehensive, lucid synthesis of feminist critiques of sexual consent in a single volume to date. While feminist philosophers are likely to be familiar with many of these critiques, the breadth of Garcia’s citations and the engaging character of her prose render the book extremely useful as a compendium of them in all their variety. She deftly explains and ties together not only a wide range of scholarship within feminist theory but also legal theories of consent, approaches from BDSM, and more. In contrast with perhaps its closest cousin in recent feminist philosophy, Amia Srinavasan’s (2021) The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, which is thin on engagement with contemporary positions in feminist philosophy, The Joy of Consent is steeped in the rich debates and nuances of this subfield. Feminist philosophers will find this book highly rewarding as a result, and those unfamiliar with these decades-long debates will find that the book is an excellent introduction. Garcia, a French scholar who has also lived and worked in the United States, translated the book from French herself, and the result is highly successful.First and foremost, The Joy of Consent is a critique of the liberal view of consent, originating in the work of John Stuart Mill. While the liberal view may be helpful for distinguishing rightful from wrongful sex, Garcia contends that it is not up to the task of distinguishing good from bad sex (38). Garcia explains how the mainstream view of consent is rooted in liberalism, and that the recent public calls for more robust consent norms on college campuses and beyond—including affirmative, enthusiastic, and ongoing consent—are therefore insufficient. Indeed, while consent has become more and more popular in public discourse around sexual ethics in recent years, feminist philosophers have questioned its fittingness as a norm guiding sexual ethics. For Garcia, we need to move beyond liberal consent toward a view of consent as conversation. On the way, she finds a surprising ally in Kant (38).The liberal view is essentially individualistic, Garcia points out. It treats social relations, including sex, as encounters between individuals who are each pursuing their own vision of the good life by the means that they wish, barring infringing on the rights of others (46). Within Mill’s liberal framework, consent is “the criterion for the legitimacy of actions implicating multiple individuals, defeasible only by harm” (51). If permission is given, then the sex should escape state intervention (50–51). The deeply rooted social norms that may undergird sexual encounters are outside the purview of the liberal view of consent. Consent is a formal criterion for the permissibility of sex—but whether the sex is good is a different question (52).Like Mill, Kant views consent as enabling the expression of individual autonomy (37). However, the Kantian picture of consent places ethics at its center. Garcia draws on the Kantian idea that the consent of one’s sexual partner is inseparable from treating them as an end, rather than as a means (201). “The fundamental question,” she writes, “is not how to ensure that everyone takes only pleasure from sex but rather that each of us has only sexual experiences that are wanted and valued” (194). Recognizing others as subjects of desire and pleasure “is at the heart of a Kantian vision of good sex,” which she advocates (196). This, then, enables us to understand what makes sex good.Garcia states that the book aims to foster an understanding of good sex. She means ‘good’ in the double sense of (a) not being impaired by unjust social norms, such as female submission, and (b) fostering a good life (186). However, the book is most successful as an extended account of the problems with taking consent to be the guiding norm for sexual ethics. The positive account of good sex, while promising, is sketched out only in the final chapter of the book and is largely proposed rather than argued for. I’d like to turn now to this view of consent as conversation.The solution to the problems of gender injustice in matters of sex, Garcia suggests, is to “talk to each other” (187). Rather than conclude that sexual consent is a dead end, Garcia advocates rethinking consent as erotic conversation (187). On this view, consent is relational, shared between all parties. It is not something we have but something we do—in fact, we do sex, and reframing sex as a conversation highlights its character as activity (191). “In a conversation,” she writes, “we progressively lose track of the authorship of ideas, as the conversation becomes something generative that steers participants in unforeseen directions” (204). This counters the mainstream view that consent is a sort of permission giving, with an asymmetry between the giver and receiver of consent. It also emphasizes that consent is ongoing and requires respect for one’s partner(s).The advantages of this approach over the liberal view are clear. But consent as conversation also has advantages over other related proposals for rethinking sexual consent in recent feminist philosophy. Garcia points out that her view is less agonistic than Quill Kukla’s (2018) argument for conceiving of consent as negotiation. And, while Linda Martín Alcoff (2017) has helpfully proposed rethinking sexual subjectivity, Garcia’s account better highlights the relationality of sexual ethics. Additionally, conversations, like sexual encounters, are temporally delimited situations that end, whereas subjectivity is a general and pervasive feature of experience. Finally, one advantage of the conversation model is that it is applicable in both private and public contexts: Garcia shows that consensual sexual encounters are conversations of a sort, but so too should our educational model around sex be conversational. We must be able to speak openly about the features of good and bad sex, including the unjust social norms that shape sex. Only in doing so will we build the skills needed to improve our erotic conversations.At the same time, Garcia’s analysis of the unjust social norms that shape sex give reason to wonder whether the solution can really be as simple as talking to each other. What might talking to each other, or having an erotic conversation, look like between men and women socialized under patriarchy? Extensive research on patterns of communication between women and men reveals that men are generally dismissive of women’s invitations for conversations about challenging interpersonal issues, in part due to a lack of education in speaking about their emotions (see Anderson 2023). Gendered oppression is more recalcitrant within intimate relationships than in other domains of life in purportedly egalitarian societies (Gunarsson 2014: 99). One way that this appears is in the widespread expectation that women interpret both their own feelings and those of male partners, taking on un undue burden of what I have called hermeneutic labor (Anderson 2023). Given this, it is likely that erotic conversations, even when explicitly welcomed by sexual partners, would most often involve further exploitation of women.This is the opposite of what Garcia desires: she suggests that the asymmetry of labor should actually go the other way in order to push against patriarchal expectations. That is, the person with more power in the encounter, who is most often the man in heterosex, should be the one to establish the erotic conversation (188). But it seems impossible for that goal to be achieved without a profound transformation of the conditions that drive this gendered imbalance to begin with (see Gavey 2005: 223–24). It is unclear that further skill building in erotic conversation would achieve it. This is not to say that Garcia is wrong but rather to highlight the challenges we face under current sociosexual conditions. The discursive register of conversation, even understood broadly, may not be radical enough.Granted, Garcia recognizes that there is a chicken-and-egg problem at work. “How can we have good sex if good sex requires an art of erotic conversation that we do not already possess?” she asks. However, she states that this is precisely “where consent could be emancipatory” (204). By practicing erotic conversation, we get better at it over time. Although sex under current conditions is unlikely to happen between equals, the care of the more powerful sexual partner can to some extent provide a corrective and enable a conversation between “near-equals” (205). “My hope,” she writes, “is that the more people practice erotic conversation with partners, the more comfortable they will become at talking about sex, during sex and outside of it” (204). Although that is likely true, I have to wonder who will be doing most of the teaching, and who most of the learning.