He Asked Permission to Touch, but Not to Ghost

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/style/modern-love-he-asked-permission-to-touch-but-not-to-ghost.html

We had met on Tinder. I was nearly 30 and he was 24, but our age gap somehow seemed a lot larger than five years. Not because he acted especially young. It was more that when it came to sex and foreplay, he acted so differently from guys my age, asking for my consent about nearly everything.

He looked scared. Somewhere in our five-year age gap, a dramatic shift must have taken place in sexual training. I sensed this would be a different kind of hookup than I was used to, but I couldn’t predict how.

I lay down on my bed, and he lay beside me.

“Is this O.K.?” he said.

“I invited a guy from Tinder to my empty apartment on a snow day,” I said. “Let’s just assume you have blanket consent.”

“I’m not comfortable with that.”

Afterward I sat in bed, thinking about the encounter. I knew I had been a little dismissive of all of his asking, but in fact I had liked it as a form of caretaking. I just wasn’t used to being taken care of in that way.

Yet something else about his asking also made me uneasy. It seemed legalistic and self-protective, imported more from the courtroom than from a true sense of caretaking. And each time he asked, it was as if he assumed I lacked the agency to say no on my own — as if he expected me to say no, not believing that a woman would have the desire to keep saying yes.

If I could go back in time, I would have urged him in that moment to really think about why asking for consent even matters. Because the answer, I think, is basic: We want people we’re intimate with to feel good, not bad.

I did not see him soon. I texted him a few times in the days that followed, playfully at first, then more pressing. He ignored me.

At first I couldn’t believe he didn’t answer, and then I was devastated. My roommates didn’t understand why I was so much more hurt than usual.

Because he kissed the soft part of my arm,” I said. “And then he disappeared.”

They looked at me blankly.

“Because he asked for my consent, over and over. So sex felt like a sacred act, and then he disappeared.”

When he asked so many times about my desires, when he checked to be sure he was honoring and respecting me, then sex, however short-lived, became a reciprocal offering. But the moment we pulled on our jeans, that spell of reciprocal honor and respect was broken.

But in the days and weeks after, I was left thinking that our culture’s current approach to consent is too narrow. A culture of consent should be a culture of care for the other person, of seeing and honoring another’s humanity and finding ways to engage in sex while keeping our humanity intact. It should be a culture of making each other feel good, not bad.

I wish we could view consent as something that’s less about caution and more about care for the other person, the entire person, both during an encounter and after, when we’re often at our most vulnerable.

Because I don’t think many of us would say yes to the question “Is it O.K. if I act like I care about you and then disappear?”

Okay so a few things. Emotional risk is always a factor when engaging in sexual activities. It might be the case that it’s better for men to more aggressively pursue sex and not do “boyfriend-ly” things like the way he did.

I also think he did what he did not out of respect, but out of a deep mistrust of her and to save his own ass from an accusation.

Additionally, on the one hand, she seems pissed that he gave her a false sense of intimacy, but on the other hand it seems that is what she is looking for. Ultimately, I’m not sure why she expects random hookups to care about her as a person. And when he treated her as a person, she still felt used.

So maybe casual sex is a oxymoron after all...

Are we supposed to care about strangers the way we care about loved ones? Obviously women aren’t owed emotional intimacy regardless of how many NYT articles are written.

General thoughts on the article.