Consent is Not Enough: Harvey Weinstein, Sex, and Human Flourishing
by Angela Franks, Public Discourse:
In a breathtakingly rapid turn of events, Harvey Weinstein has gone from being a lionized kingmaker to persona non grata, as woman after woman has come forward with remarkably similar stories of his sexual predations. The common themes are a bathrobe, an erection, and a private room.
The coverage has focused on the sensational details, but we who are following the newsfeed are in danger, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, of having the experience but missing the meaning. The legal concern has been, as it must be, whether the women consented, and Weinstein’s own public statements have zeroed in on this point. While not denying the many liaisons, his spokeswoman Sallie Hofmeister said, “Mr. Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual.” His team then deftly shifts the goalposts on this front, moving from an assertion of consent to the inevitable he-said-she-said battle that they hope this assertion will provoke: “Mr. Weinstein has a different recollection of the events.”
The sheer weight of evidence might steamroll this tactic, but the move itself highlights the problematic nature of the contemporary refuge in consent as the seal of approval for sexual relationships. Consent may be the basic minimum needed for legality, but should we really reduce the good of a relationship to its barebones legal status? Surely we can have a richer understanding of love and relationships than that.
The Default of the Yes
The problem is that, without a sense of a true good in relationships, we don’t know to what we should consent. We are left with an arbitrary act of the will; it is an empty form with no content. The fixation on consent obfuscates larger problems: don’t we have to start to ask what people are consenting to, for the term to have any meaning? And are there cultural conditions necessary for a woman to be able to give consent?
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