Affirmative consent in Victorian times

This evening I was reflecting on the concept of affirmative consent and on how much energy is being spent these days on devising mechanisms whereby partners can signal their affirmative consent to a sexual liaison. I found it interesting to learn that there are even suggestions that sex education classes include instruction on how partners may obtain affirmative consent from each other.

Suddenly, the following proposal for a foolproof 3-step mechanism for obtaining affirmative consent sprang into my mind:

1. the young man seeks the hand of the young woman from her father (this step is perhaps optional);
2. if the father approves, the young man proposes to the young woman;
3. if the young woman accepts, the young man and young woman engage in a public ceremony, presided over and sanctioned by a respected member of the community, whereby they officially signal to the general public that they consent to engage in exclusive sexual relations with each other.

Oh wait! Silly me! This mechanism for obtaining affirmative consent is called "marriage" and it's just how things used to work in the old days before we all became sexually enlightened and liberated.

The only reason why we need to devise mechanisms for signaling affirmative consent and to teach them in sex education classes is because we have discarded the traditional mechanisms that used to work so well.

Perhaps those Victorians weren't so benighted after all.

UPDATE:

Heather Mac Donald has assessed the situation correctly. In a recent interview in WSJ with Jillian Jay Melchior, Mac Donald discussed the topic of affirmative consent:

She similarly thinks conservatives miss the point when they focus on the due-process infirmities of campus sexual-misconduct tribunals. She doesn’t believe there’s a campus “rape epidemic,” only a lot of messy, regrettable and mutually degrading hookups. “To say the solution to all of this is simply more lawyering up is ridiculous because this is really, fundamentally, about sexual norms.”

Society once assumed “no” was women’s default response to sexual propositions. “That put power in the hands of females,” Ms. Mac Donald says. “You didn’t have to bargain every time you didn’t want to have sex. The male had to bargain you into yes. But you could say no, and you didn’t have to exhaust yourself.” Sexual liberationists claimed men and women were alike, and chivalry and feminine modesty were oppressive. “Now, the default for premarital sex is yes,” Ms. Mac Donald says. “That gives enormous power to the male libido” at the expense of women.

The #MeToo movement is one reflection of this reality, but so is the growing realization that consensual sex isn’t always healthy sex. To get back to the “no” default, students are “inviting adults back into the bedroom to write rules that read like a mortgage contract,” Ms. Mac Donald says. Young women, meanwhile, are learning “to redefine their experience as a result of the patriarchy, whereas, in fact, it’s a result of sexual liberation.” [emphasis added]

Burke recognized the same destructive forces at work in the French Revolution as have been at work in our sexual revolution:

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion ... When antient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.

The traditional prohibitions against casual, pre-marital, promiscuous sex -- prohibitions that constituted the decent drapery of life, furnished from the wardrobe of the moral imagination -- were exploded by the sexual revolution as so much ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. But, once these prohibitions had been eliminated and a new age of "sexual liberation and enlightenment" had dawned, men and women found that they no longer had any moral compass to guide them and women were left exposed, naked and shivering and without defense, in the face of the enormous power of the male libido. Unsurprisingly -- almost necessarily -- what has ensued are the messy, regrettable and mutually degrading hookups that are the defining characteristic of life on our campuses today. To remedy this situation, we now have calls for the new rules of affirmative consent to be re-introduced, which conceptualize sex not as a romantic and erotic act, but as a business contract. But, these contractual rules would never have been needed if the traditional prohibitions and the practice of such cultural norms as modesty, chivalry, and shame had not been jettisoned.