What women want

Lost Americans understand today that sex without consent is a no-go, both morally and legally. Sex without consent is rape.

But consent should be the floor, not the ceiling, for ethical sexual encounters, suggests Washington Post columnist Christine Emba in Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. “Things don’t have to be criminal to be profoundly bad,” she writes.

Consent is a “baseline norm,” but consent alone doesn’t make sex “ethical, or fair, or equally healthy for both participants,” argues Emba. Indeed, there are “many situations in which a partner might consent to sex—affirmatively, even enthusiastically—but having said sex would still be ethically wrong.”