[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Coca-Cola. Thanks very much for joining me for this conversation. Thanks for having me.
So our topic today is consent to sexual activity in non-ideal or unjust circumstances, which are the circumstances pretty much of the world.
That's right. So in other words, you know, how is it possible that people can consent to sex in a world that's so riven with inequality,
with power imbalance, and with limited choice situations?
But before we get to that, I wanted to ask you at the outset, how do you think about consent to sex in the most general terms?
Yeah. Um, thanks for asking that because I've thought about this a lot.
Um, I like thinking of the notion of sensuality as actually prior to the notion of consent.
So for me, consensual sex, as I think about it,
is sex where Everybody who's participating is expressing or communicating that it is their will to participate.
They it is their will to participate. Everybody else involved also understands that they are expressing this respects, that this is their will.
And if anybody were to express that they wanted to stop.
Everybody else would respect that and stop.
So for me, consensually is about the quality of the communication and the freedom of the actual extended act.
And so consent to sex is just agreeing to do that.
Um, I don't actually think that there is always such a thing as, like a moment of consenting to sex.
Sex. Consensual sex can start in various different ways, but sometimes we actually say to one another, okay, let's do this.
And that would be consent. As long as what you're agreeing to is a consensual activity.
So can I ask, does this mean for you this idea of consent, duality? Um, that consent requires enthusiasm, kind of willingness in in that sense?
Yeah. Actually not. I mean, there's a lot of emphasis in, in a lot of circles right now,
including circles that I feel very sympathetic with on the idea of enthusiastic consent and
sometimes even the idea that consent doesn't count as consent unless it's enthusiastic.
And I actually think that leaves a lot of important kinds of genuinely consensual sex out.
So, for example, um, asexual people have pointed out that they often make fully free, wilful decisions to have sex,
not because they're super enthusiastic about it, but for social purposes or as a favour to a partner or whatever it may be.
Um, sex workers have done a very good job of pointing out that nobody goes through their whole workday with total enthusiasm.
And so if you were to teach every class. Woo hoo! Right.
So if you were to require enthusiasm as a condition for consent,
then you would be basically saying that a lot of the time they're having non-consensual sex,
which would be erasing the difference for them between rape and consensual sex.
Right. They don't want to say every time they're doing their job wilfully, they're being raped.
That actually makes invisible the very real problem of rape, of sex workers.
So I think that in a sex work context, enthusiastic consent doesn't make sense as a criterion.
And one last one I want to mention, because it's one I've been thinking about a lot.
Um, I think that being able to act under conditions of sexual ambivalence is actually really important to our agency.
So sometimes, whether it's sex or going on a hike or getting into a boxing ring,
whatever it may be, um, we're really not sure that we want to do something.
It pushes our boundaries.
We're not sure what the experience is going to be, and we want to be able to enable people to make those ambivalent choices and take risks.
And that takes various kinds of work to make sure that they can back out if they need to and they feel safe and so on.
But I think that if you say to people, oh, unless you're just completely into it, then don't do it.
That really limits our agency, right?
It really limits our ability to push our boundaries, which is inherently empowering, and to discover things that we may love.
So the idea is that there's a in the sexual context, maybe in particular, there's a certain value in exploration.
Maybe, you know, I think there's an important one. I mean, yeah, there's slogans out there now that I've seen that say maybe means no.
And I understand that the intent is good, but no, maybe it doesn't mean no, right?
Maybe means maybe. And, you know, think how many how how many fewer.
Is that a sentence? Um, think how few people might have ended up coming out as queer if they were told,
well, if you're not sure, then it's not consensual and don't trust. Right?
Right. That's very interesting. So if we think about, um, autonomy and freedom, I think most of us assume, and surely correctly,
that freedom is a critical condition of giving valid consent to sexual activity.
But you argue that freedom or autonomy, autonomy is always a continuum.
Yes. Um, and that, in fact, partial autonomy, not full autonomy, uh, is enough in order to be able to consent to sexual activity.
So I wondered if you could just say a bit more about that. Yeah.
Um, I think I'm a little bit hesitant to say it's enough, because it depends on the rest of the context,
and that's really the point that I want to stress, right?
So yes, I want to argue that partial autonomy is a minimal condition for ethical consensual sex, but that we don't need full autonomy.
Um, I want to say three things, I guess.
I mean, first of all, I just want to point out that the, um, bar of full autonomy is totally unrealistic, right?
When we think about power imbalances and sex, we tend to think about things like professors having sex with their students,
or employees having sex with their bosses, um, or gender inequalities or racial inequalities.
But if you think about all of the incredibly, um, tight number of and huge number of power imbalances that can exist,
there can be a power imbalance because, um, you and your partner have different numbers of friends or,
you know, you're new to the community and they aren't or they're more extroverted than you are or they're,
you know, somewhat wealthier than you are and so have more economic options, right.
And can pay for more stuff. There's just an indefinite number of ways in which there are power imbalances.
And the idea that we would escape all of those and be these fully free beings.
In no way held down by power imbalances is just not unrealistic.
It's not realistic. Not to mention the fact that, you know, realistically,
it's going to keep being the case that we have sex when we're a little drunk or a little high or really super tired or not at our full capacity.
So I think the idea of full autonomy is just an unrealistic bar.
I think that what we need, at a minimum, is the kind of autonomy that would let us participate in consensual sex in the way that I defined it.
So you have to be capable of expressing your, well, understanding somebody else's expression of, well,
you have to be able to have enough self-reflection and impulse control to decide not to do things.
Um, and you have to be able to respect the other person's communication of their agency and their desire to stop.
Right? So all of that is just way less than being some sort of free autonomous chooser set completely
free from all power imbalances and fully informed and completely clear on what they want.
Right. But the last thing I want to say is whether that's enough really depends on the circumstances, right.
And we can talk more about that.
But for me, it's really important that whether somebody is in a position to have consensual sex depends not just on their internal capacities,
but on what kind of negotiation is going on with their partner, where they are,
what cultural context they're in, what legal context they're in, and so forth.
So I suppose the the challenge that you were confronted, you know, the antagonist to this way of thinking would be somebody who says,
well, no, nothing short of full autonomy, absolute autonomy, whatever that means, is required for robust consent.
Valid consent. There we go. Since we never. Since we never are in conditions of full autonomy.
Um, it's actually the case that there's never this, this, this robust consent going on.
Um, and I take it from your writing that, that you reject that position as, as sort of untenable.
I wonder if you could. Yeah. I mean, the case where this has come up most clearly is in the context of some of the second wave feminists
who claimed that there was no such thing as women consenting to heterosexual sex under patriarchy.
Right. Because men and women are inherently in an unequal and oppressive power relation.
And so there's no way. Um, and then, as you point out, you could just extend that.
And once you acknowledge that we're all in power relations, then it seems like there's no such thing as consensual, right?
And you think this is just not a helpful. I think it's completely unhelpful.
I think it's first of all, it doesn't allow us to distinguish between the actual harm of rape and not right.
We need some way of drawing a line and being able to say, yes, this is ethically acceptable sex and this isn't.
I guess some people might want to say no sex is just not ethically acceptable in this world, but that seems like a very self-defeating position.
We'll die off fast if we think that, right? Um, but I also just don't think it does justice to the fact that sexual pleasure and sexual agency,
um, are a huge part of many, or maybe even most people's lives.
Right? We enjoy sex. We feel empowered when we have sex that we want.
And that is going well. Um, bodily pleasure is just this huge dimension of our well-being.
And to say all of it is off the table because none of it can be consensual just feels to me like it's shutting down an enormously,
um, essential part of human well-being. And you could also, if, you know, if we're going to go that route,
then it's not just sex it's going to be rolled out because it can never be consensual, right?
Like you can't get medical treatment either because you can't consent to that.
Because there's always power relations. You can't do anything. So I mean, I think that really, you know, slippery slope arguments are dangerous.
But I do think that that would just lead us towards you can't do anything because nothing is autonomous.
Sure. I wonder if you think I mean, do you think that there's a kernel of truth in that second wave feminist view?
Only insofar as the thesis is full consent in this context, or considering these contexts,
heterosexual sex against a backdrop of patriarchy is always, at the very least, kind of attenuated or or tainted.
Even if we wouldn't want to go so far as to say it's therefore off the table, because that does sound quite extreme.
I think that's exactly right. And I also think that, um,
an important lesson from that strand of second wave feminism is that we can't ever take heterosexual sex under patriarchy for granted.
Just because somebody says yes does not mean that we have an unproblematic, consensual situation on our hands, right?
Anyone who says yes under those conditions, and particularly any woman who says yes under the conditions of patriarchy and heteronormativity,
is saying yes across a power imbalance, but also having been embedded in a culture that makes saying no to men risky.
Um, embedded in a culture in which men are trained, that it's romantic and praiseworthy,
not to take no for an answer, but to keep pursuing and pushing for a yes.
And so it can be hard to extract yourself from that kind of dynamic.
So there are all kinds of reasons why we need to always be sort of critically aware of the ways in which
the culture and our norms of communication chip away at the consensual of that kind of heterosexual sex.
But that's a good reason to think about how we can scaffold it and make it better.
It's not a reason to say, oh, well, then just don't have that right.
So a primary example of sex with impaired autonomy that you write about in one of your papers involves people who have moderate dementia.
And you describe this as a murky case or a complex case, um, in this context.
And you actually give the example of, of the gist of a real life case of somebody who has sex with their spouse,
who is a person with moderate dementia.
Um, could you maybe take us through how you think about these sorts of people and these kinds of capacity issues?
Yeah. Um, yeah. I'm glad to have a chance to talk about that,
because I think it's a really interesting case that is super difficult and that, um, hasn't gotten enough attention.
Um, we do know that, um, older people, including people with dementia, um, generally want sex.
Their sex drive tends to either stay the same or go up. It rarely goes down.
And we also know that people with dementia who do have sex, um, tend to be less depressed and do better in a whole roster of ways.
So I think we have to be very careful about just sort of saying, oh, well, that's off limits because it does seem to be important to their well-being.
Of course, that's not the same as that sex being consensual. But part of the problem here is that, um, there's no clear cut off.
There's no point at which somebody with dementia simply just goes over some precipice
where they no longer have those minimal autonomy conditions that we were talking about,
where they can no longer express their well, make sure that their well is being understood, interpret the other person's well.
Right. It's a gradual process, but it's also a process that's really uneven and fluctuating.
So people's capacities tend to get better and worse depending on whether they're tired, whether they're stressed,
who they're with, um, but also where they are, how comfortable they are in the situation.
Right. So the whole process is inherently murky.
Um, but I think it's important that we not just presume that the answer to murkiness is to rule out sex for people like that.
Um, because for for two reasons.
One is it seems like it would be a huge hit against their well-being. But also, I mean,
there's something very bizarre about thinking that anyone could decide for somebody else
that they no longer have the bodily self-determination to be sexual beings anymore.
right? Like, unless somebody is clearly, totally and completely incompetent and maybe even a danger to themselves or other people,
we don't get to take away other people's bodily self-determination. So what I think we need to do instead is sort of work with the McKays and think,
how can we scaffold the situation of people with dementia to make a gentle,
consensual sex possible and to do a better job of telling when and where and with whom they are and aren't able to have this kind of.
And you say a number of things about the general attitudes of nursing homes.
Yeah, to this sort of thing. And the antagonism, I suppose, to this, the very idea that, um, that patients would, would, would be sexual agents.
Yeah. For reasons of worry and risk and liability and that sort of thing which you think plus stigma and stigma.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, I think the way that we've set up almost all nursing homes now,
they're basically just like maximally designed to undermine the possibility of consensual sex.
So the staff tend to be against the idea of their, um, the people they're caring for having sex,
and in fact tend to think the idea is just icky and off limits.
Um, we build nursing homes physically in such a way that people who live there tend to not have a lot of privacy,
not have private spaces, not have comfortable, sexy spaces that they can go to.
There tends to not be any kind of established, institutionalised, um,
sexual counselling, sexual advice, um, you know, recourse for potential sexual assault.
None of that is there. So we've basically set up these institutions that, for cultural reasons and physical reasons,
are just antagonistic towards the possibility of consensual sex.
And if sex does happen there, it's probably going to be some sort of furtive,
secretive thing in an uncomfortable space where you might get walked in on and where something goes wrong.
You don't want to tell anybody because you weren't supposed to be having it anyway.
And if you're worried about somebody full agency, that's that's worse.
It's the exact opposite. One thing I think that would be really just wonderful if we could do it.
As far as I know, nobody's doing this is we should make it just standard practice that partners of people with dementia,
or partners of people in long term care facilities, should receive mandatory training on how to think about negotiating sex with their loved ones.
Right. Specific training on what are the signs you should look out for?
To see if the person is in a more competent state of mind today or not, or is manifesting discomfort or hesitation or not, right?
I mean, having sex with somebody with dementia is a different kind of thing and we get no training on it.
And so partners are just supposed to kind of figure it out,
which I think lays open room for all kinds of mishaps and just putting it out in the open and saying,
look, this is the thing you need to learn to do, I think could be enormously empowering and helpful.
So could I ask a little bit further about that, about this idea of of scaffolding, as you say, as you put it, somebody's sexual agency.
So when a person is maybe in this kind of grey area. Yeah.
Um, you think, well, it's possible that they could meet the threshold of consent,
but they may need to be helped in all sorts of ways to meet that threshold.
So you've just given a few examples of how how they may be helped,
which I suppose are to do with their partner's sensitivity to understanding what they're communicating.
You know, what their desires are. That's part of it. What would be the other ways in which we could scaffold someone's agency?
Somebody say, with moderate dementia? Yeah, this notion of of scaffolding of agency is enormously important for me.
It's really central to how I think about all these issues, and I think of scaffolding as consisting of multiple different layers.
And these aren't fully separable. They of course interlock with one another and overlap with one another.
But, you know, one is the one that you just mentioned, which is the kind of scaffolding that we get through communication where we do a,
um, a good job of explicitly negotiating with our partner.
What are your limits? What do you want to do? How are you going to show me when you want to stop?
Right. Just that whole sort of communicative layer.
Um, there's also, I think, a material physical layer.
So, for example, how easy literally physically is it for this person to leave if they need to.
And that might be in the case of somebody with dementia. That might be a mobility issue.
Right. Can this person actually just get up from the bed and leave?
It might be about whether they have anywhere to go.
Right. Think about the woman who gets trapped having sex at a frat house with no way to get home and nowhere else to stay.
Right. Like, physically, it's hard to leave that situation.
Um, so it can be physical.
I also think that there's cultural scaffolding, which are, um, the various norms that do a good job or a bad job of supporting people's sexual agency.
So, for example, um, body shaming norms that tell some people that they're not worthy of sexual attention, I think,
undermine sexual agency because people who have internalised that message often don't feel entitled to stand up for themselves in a sexual situation.
Right. So that's just one out of many, many examples of a cultural norm that can boost or undermine agency.
I also think there's institutional scaffolding. Right. So what are the laws and policies around accountability for sexual assault.
What are the educational? Um, well, you know, how does school education work?
How does sex education work? Um, these are all things at the institutional level that can support agency or undermine agency.
My last one, um, at least for now, is when I think of as community scaffolding.
Um, so, you know, somebody who has a strong community that they can talk to, go to if something goes wrong,
but also not just if something goes wrong, just, um, you know, people to talk to about sex, what's normal, what isn't, what should you put up with?
What should you not put up with friends who you can rely on if you're feeling unsure?
That whole sort of being embedded in a supportive community, rather than a shaming community or no community at all.
Right. I think is another important layer here. So if you think of somebody with moderate dementia,
there's just all the difference in the world between somebody who has a partner who's good at negotiation,
living in a place that makes sex possible and safe for them, right.
In a community where older sexuality is not stigmatised in a country or a jurisdiction
where the laws around sexual assault are pretty good and victim friendly,
that person versus somebody who is just, you know,
dumped in a facility with no privacy and no history of knowing how to negotiate sex and then has something happen and doesn't know what's going on.
Right? I mean, these are just completely different situations,
even if those two people have the same kind of cognitive level, cognitive capacity in some sense.
I mean, obviously, the greatest worry in this context, where we're we're thinking about people with impaired functioning of some kind is
the worry about exploitation of vulnerable people and the possibility of abuse,
which I assume kind of looms very large in the consciousness of people who work in,
in nursing homes and partly maybe explains, um, the general attitudes.
So, I mean, what might you say to somebody who thinks that there's just too much risk here when one person is,
is so vulnerable, um, to abuse, uh, you know, meaning that that really we should just be thinking about consent as.
And sexual activity is off the table, right? Yeah. I mean, I think, I guess I would want to really stress two points.
One is, I think that our entire approach to thinking about sex and sexual agency, interestingly, from sort of both the left and the right,
if I can cartoonishly oversimplify the sides here, right, tends to be organised around the like, making sure that bad sex doesn't happen, right?
So from the right, you have this message of just, you know, sex is bad.
Just say no, right? And from the left, you have this message of, like, men do terrible things to women and women out to be able to say no,
but they're sort of united in their focus on how do we ensure that no is possible?
Right. And I agree. Yeah. I mean, fundamentally negative.
And I agree that that is super important. And I'm not trying to undermine the importance of it.
But neither of those approaches really directs our attention to, um,
the fact that there are huge positives and benefits to having access to sex and sexual pleasure and sexual agency.
Right. Um, and we it's it's not a trivial thing by any means to take away somebody's
bodily self-determination and access to pleasure and access to what might be,
especially in the case of dementia, like absolutely crucial social bonds to another person that are like sort of holding you in yourself and say,
oh, you don't get that anymore because it's too dangerous. Right.
So, I mean, I just I think that like, it's a risk benefit calculation, but people always focus on the risks,
and the risks are real, but we don't have conversations about the benefits.
The other thing I would stress, which I mentioned slightly before, but I really want to hammer the point home,
is I just don't think anybody gets to make that decision for somebody else.
Like the idea of okay, no, sorry. Too dangerous. Sex is off the table for you.
For me, it's that's almost like a category error. Like other people don't get to refuse sex on somebody else's behalf.
Unless, again, unless they are truly, like, completely unable to meet that minimum bar for autonomy.
Right. So I don't want to say can never like.
Or if it's extremely dangerous to you know, even then people get to like do things that'll kill them if they want to.
So by imposing consequences on anybody. Or consequences of a certain type on anybody who would have sex with them,
you're saying that's effectively what we would be doing is making that decision for you?
I think it's taking. Yeah. Now, I mean, I want to be clear. I think there are exceptions.
I think that there are cases where the power imbalance is so great that it's just literally impossible for the less powerful person to consent.
Like when we're dealing with an adult and a small child, for example, or when we're dealing with,
um, a disabled person and their caretaker on whom they're completely dependent.
I think there are some cases where it's like, no, you know, self-determination is nice, but that's not an option in this situation.
And then we do need, like things in place to keep sex from happening laws and other stuff.
But when you're dealing with somebody who has at least the potential for competence and bodily self-determination,
I just don't think it's ever an ethical option for somebody else to say on their behalf.
We're going to make it impossible for you to exercise that self-determination. So far,
we've been speaking about all of these things exclusively in terms of consent and what does or doesn't get a person to the threshold of consent.
But I wonder to what extent some of these issues are about the ethics of sex,
kind of beyond consent, a little bit more generally, kind of past that baseline threshold.
Right? Yeah. So consensual sex. All ethical sex is consensual, but not all consensual sex is ethical, right?
So I mean, there's, um, sex that is, um, consensual but unethical for any number of reasons.
For example, you might be having consensual sex that, um, unacceptably betrays somebody else, right?
Um, or there are very contentious cases. Like, what if the Consensual sexual role playing scene that you're engaged in, which is fully consensual.
Um, is playing off of deeply racist or hateful tropes.
I don't actually want to come down on that one, because there's an interesting debate around that.
But it should should at least make us ethically uncomfortable, right?
Right. At a minimum. Um, yeah. And there's no issue of consent there.
So it's not an issue of consent, right? Um, you know, having, um, consensual sex.
Um, this might be an issue of consent, although an odd one.
Right. Having consensual sex in some very public place in front of other people who don't want to see it.
Like walking into a church and just having sex on the altar or something, um, could be unethical.
I think there are really difficult cases. Like, for example, um, what about consensual sex?
That is intentionally very degrading to one of the people involved.
I think there's a lot of subtleties there.
I think sort of degradation kinks are legitimate kinks, and there's ways of playing with them and making them ethical.
But it's very easy to consent to something that really is against your self-interest, in the sense that it dehumanises you or degrades you.
And the last and probably most common one is like you can legitimately consent
to sex for all kinds of bad reasons when you shouldn't be consenting to sex,
right? So you might consent to sex with somebody just because, like you think it will make you more popular even though you hate it.
Or you might be consenting to sex because you think that, um, you know,
there's this wonderful article out there about how there's a lot of pressure on women who have cancer to have this sort of eat,
pray, love attitude toward sex and enjoy sex to prove that they are life affirming and positive.
So this is a pressure from any particular person. It's kind of it's from the culture. Yeah.
But also sometimes from their doctors buying into these weird cultural tropes like good cancer patients are life affirming and have sex.
That's part of it. Yeah. And that really made a big impression on me.
So, like you might have, you might legitimately consent to sex because you think that, like,
that's the kind of cancer patient you're supposed to be, even though you're finding it painful and gross and uncomfortable.
Yeah. Right. So there's yeah.
So there's all kinds of reasons why consensual sex might be terrible, either ethically terrible or just really unpleasant.
So we already spoke a bit about power differentials, which is something you're interested in and is one of the,
I suppose, context in which autonomy can be impaired. Um,
and you made the point that almost no sexual interaction and maybe almost no relationship is likely to be entirely equally balanced in terms of power.
And this is something that we have to sort of work around, I suppose, when thinking about consent.
But there are other kinds of cases where people may be kind of intentionally playing on a power dimension in a sexual interaction,
or intentionally exploiting a power dimension. I wonder if you think that's a different sort of a scenario that warrants its own analysis.
Yeah, I'm really interested in cases like this, because there's a sort of a version of what consent is supposed to look like,
including in a lot of feminist literature that I'm generally very sympathetic with, which says, look,
if somebody is being submissive or is having control taken away from them, then it's just bad.
It's not consensual and or it's sort of repeating oppressive power dynamics.
And so we should just not do that. Um, again, I think this is unrealistic.
Um, for one thing, it turns out there's a really interesting study that shows that well over half of men and women,
um, the study didn't have a category for non-binary people, so it was just men and women.
But well over half of men and women at least fantasise about being submissive during sex.
It's no surprise that men fantasise about being dominant.
That's less interesting, but I thought it was fascinating that, like most people, regardless of gender, fantasise about being submissive.
So the idea that submitting during sex is just some sort of bad compromise of our autonomy or of sensuality doesn't fit people's actual sexuality.
Right? So the question is, how can we do that essentially, right?
How can we play with power dynamics and give away our control and submit to somebody else and still have that be ethical and agency?
And I think one of the keys is, um, that kind of power differential.
I mean, first of all, it shows something that I was talking about at the beginning,
which is that if that can be consensual, then consent definitely does not mean the traditional autonomous chooser.
Who knows exactly what's going to happen and controls everything, right? Because that's exactly what you're saying.
You don't want to be right.
Um, but I think that in order to make that kind of sex agent, we really need to think about how you enter into it and how you leave it.
So I think that two people can negotiate that kind of power differential, but only if outside of it, they start from relatively equal power.
It's never going to be completely equal for the reasons we said, but relatively equal, right.
So two people who are both empowered enough to negotiate with one another well,
and to not be dependent on one another or afraid of one another can negotiate and say, look, I want to have this dynamic with you.
One thing that's crucial is they have to negotiate how they're going to leave it, right.
This is why people use things like safe words to get out of situations they don't want to be in.
If you're going to give over your agency to somebody else and cede control to them, that's great.
And it can be super sexy. But if it goes too far and you no longer want it, you better have a way of being able to get out, right?
But if you have, for example,
a very traditional gendered heterosexual marriage with a very sort of bossy husband who is the sole income owner and is very controlling and a meek,
submissive wife, I think it's literally impossible for them to negotiate with one another as legitimate free agents that they're going to do,
like an S&M scene or a master slave dynamic, or some sort of really extreme domme sub scene,
because the woman is not actually in a position to really stand up to the what the man is trying to negotiate.
Right. Um, if you've got somebody who has, like, no financial way of leaving, um, who is maybe physically afraid of their partner to some extent,
or even has just been sort of inculcated into thinking that they need to please them and do what they say.
They're not in a position to then say, okay, let's do this more extreme thing where you get to tie me up or beat me up and tell me what to do.
Right. But if you have two people who are relatively equal and really good at negotiating, I think it's totally reasonable for them to say,
this would be super fun to within this sort of limited space with these safe checks on it.
Let one of us just give our will over to the other person.
And notice, by the way, we don't just do this in sex. Right.
Um, a lot of us enjoy, for example, having a coach or a trainer who dons us,
who while we're training, we're just like, just tell me what to do, even if I hate it, you know?
For people who work out. Yeah, right. But you recognise that lots of people enjoy it.
Yeah. Yeah, right. You know, like, you don't want to do those last 20 push ups out of the hundred.
Yeah, but you do want somebody standing over you being like, no, keep going.
You're weak. You don't get to stop yet, right? Like that's something we pay money for.
Um, I enjoy having, um, friends who live in cities that I don't know that very that.
Well, don me when I travel, right? Right. Be like.
No, this is where you're eating dinner. This is where we're walking. This is what you're going to do.
And I like giving myself over to them. Right.
But I have to be able to get out if I want to get out and I, you know, or like, stop with the training session or whatever it may be.
And there has to be like free and equal entering into it.
So I think that ruling out that kind of like radical submission is both unrealistic and would be a loss.
We really enjoy those dynamics, but we need to think about how to get them into get into them essentially.
And I'm very uncomfortable when I see sort of, you know,
bossy dummy men with their submissive women partners who are like, oh, no, this is a consensual dynamic.
I'm like, I'm not so sure about that's what it is. It seems to me there's also an interesting question here.
When we think about, as you said, the prevalence of the submission fantasies or, you know, people are optimising submission,
um, about where that comes from and how authentic that is and, and how that is constructed.
And obviously, you know, the role of cultural norms, patriarchy and pornography, um, you know, eroticism in this.
You know, it seems to me that you, you, you have quite a friendly view towards, um, towards that kind of penchant as if.
Well, that's it seems to be there seems to be something natural about this.
That's if we look at the number of people who are interested in it.
But of course, you know, I suppose a counter-narrative could be.
Well, this has kind of been constructed out of inequality.
So, I mean, on the one hand, I just want to concede immediately that there's no such thing as, like, pure social activities or pure desires.
Like literally every single thing we do, everything we do is constructed and shaped by our culture and so on.
So like in that sense, yes, absolutely. Including the fact that a lot of the stuff that's constructing and shaping our desires is toxic and messed up.
So all of that, granted. I didn't mean to imply that it was just some sort of pure natural, outside of society impulse that we have.
Having said that, a few things that I think are interesting. One is, like I said, it's also over half of men who have this fantasy.
And if anything, one would assume they're getting the opposite message from their culture.
Right? And yet they still fantasise about this too, is if you look at if you watch dogs playing or cats playing,
and here I am, verging on making a claim about naturalness, right?
Mammals like to play with dominance and submission, right?
It's when I see dogs play in the dog park and one of them is, you know, rolling over on its back while the other one goes to town on it and so on.
It's very clear that that's a dominance submission dynamic, and it's also clear that it's consensual.
Now not always. Sometimes things go badly and it turns out it wasn't consensual. And they fight.
But oftentimes you can watch the dogs negotiate that they're going to play negotiate.
Which one of them is going to take the damn role, and which of them is going to take the sub role and then negotiate exit when they're done.
And it's fascinating to watch this. You can see it happen. We used to have a corgi.
Um, may she rest in peace.
Um, who we used to call a power bottom because she always wanted the submissive role, but she was really insistent on negotiating it.
So she would, like walk up to other dogs and be like, I am going to submit to you, and you were gonna take me down right now.
So I think this stuff is like it does have a natural component,
and we don't think that the dogs are like replaying an oppressive dynamic when we watch them do it.
But of course, when we do it, it's infused with toxic patriarchy.
It's not pure the way it is when dogs do it. So I'm not denying your point.
It's just I do think that there's sort of a core there of this is fun, you know, and like similarly with my travel dogs,
I like handing myself over to somebody who knows the city better and who I trust.
It's not because they're sort of implicitly oppressing me. It's just fun.
This has been wonderful. Thank you so much, Coca Cola. Thanks.
I really enjoyed talking.