AH! My Foolish Heart: A Reply to Alan Soble's 'Antioch's ‘Sexual Offense Policy’: A Philosophical Exploration'

A sexual code occupies an uneasy position at the intersection of the public and private, the communal and intimate, the codifiable and spontaneous, the articulate and ineffable. And sexual conduct is located at the troubling interface of pleasure and offense; passion and power; freedom and submission; desire as an individual drive and desire as the epiphany of mutuality-the desiring of the other’s desire. How do we regulate sexual conduct? How can any code legislate sexual desire or successfully thwart abusive sexuality? Here the wise say that only fools do tread. Since Antioch announced its Sexual Offense Policy, Antioch has, in the eyes of the media and some retro (and not so retro) feminists and academics, worn a dunce cap. Is it well-deserved? After a clear, and seemingly sympathetic, discussion of the code that includes much of the motivation for the policy, Alan Sable weighs in with the wise. On three grounds: pleasure, body talk, and consent? Upon first learning of the Sexual Oflmse Policy, my romantic heart declared this was a silly, foolish code-though my feminist mind urged a more cautious judgment. To have to verbally consent to each level (and just what is a level anyway?) of sexual intimacy? each time? even with a partner with whom one had been intimate many times before? Many of us lose the capacity of articulate speech at these moments. Are we to be deprived of our hearts’ desire since, unlike Molly Bloom, we don’t utter an ecstatic “Yes! yes! yes!’’ at the appropriate moment? Xeadhg the harrowing accounts of date rapes recounted by Robin Warshaw? I kept wondering if a code such as Antioch’s would help in any of these cases. And if it would not, what was the point? Being on sabbatical, I was unable to canvas my classes for the student point of view. Fortunately, I had some private college-aged informants, my twenty-year-old son, his girlfriend (whom I questioned separately), and their friends. I also queried colleagues who had discussed the code with their students. There seemed to be a rather interesting response that came up again and again: “The code is silly, but I wouldn’t mind it being there. It would be a way of opening up discussion on these issues.” Only one young man I spoke to said it would encourage him to only have sex with himself-he always