Saturday, March 21, 2015

Feminists and the Definition of Consent

Feminists tend to have a very limited definition of consent. I've tried to outline a few of their principles.

1) Consent, once given, may always be reversed.

In Christian societies, a wife who consented to marriage was consenting to be permanently sexually available to her husband. This is based on explicit Christian teaching, most notable St. Paul's instructions in 1 Corinthians 7:3-5. If you believe this teaching, marital rape is an oxymoron.

If we believe that a person genuinely owns their body, they can presumably sell their body. However, our legal system is not based on private property, or Christian law. It is based on feminist moral norms.

2) Consent must be free from economic or social pressure

Prostitutes sell temporarily sexual availability for money. If the prostitute owns her body, this is obviously not a violation of private property. But it is a violation of feminist morality, and may be declared rape.

3) Consent cannot be obtained through fraud or other improper means

From the Feminist Perspectives on Rape:
Cases of nonconsensual but unforced sex, on the other hand, include those in which the victim is induced to have sex through fraudulent misrepresentation (for instance, a doctor telling her that sex with him is necessary for her cure), and those in which she is coerced through nonviolent means (for instance, a professor telling her that she must have sex with him to pass the course). The tendency of the law to see such encounters as meaningfully consensual departs strikingly from how consent is understood in other areas; as West observes, “fraud or coercion that vitiates consent in nonsexual contexts constitutes either criminal or tortious activity” (240).

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