Something happened at my college in the olden days of the late 2000s which still lives rent-free in my mind. A fraternity developed a game where you won points for sleeping with girls who were on the extremes of attractiveness. Sleeping with an average-looking girl was minimally rewarding, but you would be greatly rewarded if you bagged a 10 or a 1. Of course, these boys eventually found it was much easier to bag a 1, so they began scouting campus parties for the “ugliest” girls they could find, often bringing them back for sex and then recording the girl’s ugliness on whatever system they were using for their scoring. I still don’t know who won. This was the type of game that yielded primarily losers.
As far as I know, the girls consented. They weren’t drugged. No legal cases came out of this, not even a singular rumor of sexual assault. But clearly, what the boys did was wrong. The girls did not know—at least not until later—that they were playing the “ugly chick” in a morally repugnant game. They likely wouldn’t have participated if they knew. You could make the argument that they should have been more discerning about why a much better looking boy wanted to sleep with them, but is the onus not still on the boys for engaging in sexual bullying, the same way the onus would be on a group of girls who had sex with ugly boys for the sole purpose of ridiculing them? (I’m aware some ugly boys wouldn’t care and would simply enjoy the sex because men do not feel as embarrassed about such things—but I maintain it would still be wrong!)
If you were around for the 2000s-era time of liberalism being the “cool” South Park laissez-fiare young person philosophy that would live and let live, smoke a joint and leave gay people alone, then you might recall saying, or hearing, that “what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom is nobody’s business.” And hey, why stop at two, and why limit this to the bedroom? As long as everyone is consenting and not a minor, nobody can judge. And if you do judge, you are kink-shaming, slut-shaming, uptight, and not minding your own business.
I said this plenty of times. I probably said it last week! Liberals were pushing back on theocratic right-wing sentiment that the only acceptable sex to have is within matrimony and for procreation. And, hello, it’s 2026. People will date, and by virtue of dating not always ending in marriage, you’re probably going to sleep with a few people before you get married. Some people are gay. Some people (although I think it’s a very small percentage) are polyamorous. I’m sure plenty of people can have a threesome or an orgy and come out feeling just fine about it. And because we don’t live under the Taliban, it’s not our government’s job to police consensual sexual activity.
Now, while policing and judging this activity should not be the domain of law enforcement, things spun out of control when we decided nobody was allowed to make any moral judgement* unless a law was broken.* This put us in a strange situation when confronted with a sexual act that was consensual but indisputably harmed someone. We created a framework wherein consent alone determined whether something was morally wrong or harmful (I cannot take credit for this observation, I first heard it on ) and if something was harmful, it was either actually non-consensual in some way that might not be apparent to anyone, or it was fine, and the person who was harmed needed to take accountability for their own bad decisions and entitlement. Did you really think someone you slept with owed you anything other than deigning not to rape you? Grow up!
This, my friends, is the combination of affirmative consent culture meeting the secular, therapy-speak idea that you don’t owe anyone anything. As long as everyone consented and there was no problematic power imbalance, you were not (at least in my liberal milieu) allowed to judge sexual behavior that was deceptive, selfish, or hurtful. It was “nobody’s business” if you cheated, knowingly slept with a cheater, used sex as a manipulation tactic, treated a sexual partner poorly, or lied to get sex. If you took issue with this, the rebuttal was the same: *well, it was legal. *This also meant that if sexual behavior was consensual but immoral or obnoxious, there could be a kneejerk instinct to brand it as a form of non-consent, even if it fell nowhere near the legal definition. Exhibit A: Aziz Ansari. Exhibit B:
The problem is that cheating, using sex to manipulate, lying to get sex, or being pushy and obnoxious about sex, *are *immoral acts. But we lost the language to talk about sexual immorality that has nothing to do with consent and is totally legal, especially from a secular point of view. Under the new framework, unless you were assaulted, you should not, and cannot, expect any decency or moral code from anyone you sleep with.
