Smart Writer...Bad Premises...Lacks Courage...

Christine Emba’s, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation is a mixed bag of cultural analysis, personal recollection, and simple investigative journalism that comes very close to being a great book but ends in ambiguity and intellectual cowardice.

On the plus side, Emba is a very bright young woman who writes well and can produce an engaging narrative over long stretches. She rightfully points out that many young college-educated women engage in “bad sex” caused by flawed premises about human nature. While she gets closer to the truth as the book progresses, Emba does not want to consider that her religious upbringing may have been far closer to revealing a truth about proper sexual relations than the hookup culture that she encountered in college.

Her conclusions are simple, and I will briefly deal with them one at a time.

First, she concludes that consent is critical and necessary in any sexual encounter. There is no opposition to that point. Of course, she does not define what adequate and valid consent means. When discussing the issue, Emba talks about an intimacy ethic and claims that the hookup culture needs to produce' good' interactions for both sides. But she is unclear when dealing with what the word ‘good’ means. I do not blame Emba for this because one could write volumes of texts on both the nature and the adequacy of consent and her position about an act being ‘good’ for both parties.

To some extent, the failure to follow the ethics discussion further down the road was disappointing to me as a reader because it is clear that Emba has sufficient knowledge to give it a try. She brings up both Aquinas and Aristotle in the latter part of the book. When she talks about the ‘ethic’ of hookups and sexual interactions, and one squints hard enough, the reader can see a connection to Aristotle's excellent book, Ethics. But she fails to go that far because she probably realizes that the route leads to a conclusion that cultural critics, book editors, and feminists could never accept.

The investigation into the emotional outcomes of hookups takes us to another one of her conclusions; perhaps fewer and more thoughtful sexual interactions are better. Too much is not optimal. It may cause harm to the individuals who are choosing to engage in activities that provide ‘pleasure without consequences.’ But there are consequences. Frequent meaningless sexual encounters devalue the individual engaging in those encounters and future partners. Emba comes close to the traditional position near the end of the book, which holds that casual sexuality comes with a high price. That price may be telling us a lot more about human nature than Ms. Emba wishes to acknowledge.

For Aristotle, the ‘good life’ and happiness come from learning to be good. Being good is dependent on character. And character is elevated by developing good habits by making good choices. Is it a good idea to choose to have sex by swiping on an app and selecting an image of an individual that one does not know? I would argue no. And by the end of her book, so does Christine Emba.

This conclusion takes us to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of what a relationship should be. You find a person you can love because that person will be your companion through a long lifetime. You build a solid foundation and form a family that produces children. Sexual encounters only occur between you and your companion. Your behaviour sets an example for the children, and they are not confused about how they should behave.

Christine Emba gets close to this vision of how sexuality is supposed to work but refuses to follow her logic down the rabbit hole to the proper conclusion. She does not consider that one can have a richer and more pleasurable sex life within a monogamous relationship than by following the hookup culture that she seems to be turning against. She also embraces false promises and refuses to admit that women have more power in the hookup culture because they are the ones who choose. The willingness of women to play the game and engage in sexual encounters that have few consequences for the men they have selected will ultimately make them miserable.

A high-status male who participates in a lot of casual sex has more choices because he can quit and find a younger woman looking to marry up. That is not true of the bright and intelligent woman who is past her ‘best by’ expiration date. She fights the biological clock and sees her choices reduced over time as desperation builds. Then we have the case of the young man who was not ‘hot’ enough to get selected in the dating apps. He had to be content watching porn and dreaming of better luck later in life. If that young man becomes successful enough to become attractive to young women looking for status, he may be fine as long as the conditioning from watching porn does not change him very much. But the young men who never got the chance to find a young woman at the right age and did not become successful enough to attract one later on in life can quickly become bitter and turn into the abusive and angry type that the feminists expect. The irony is that the failed feminism that encouraged bright young women to act like prostitutes may have helped create some of those men.

I like the writing. I respect the intellect that Emba exhibits. She seems to have a lot more respect for the traditional views than she does for the inferior, abusive, and less pleasurable alternative of modern culture. But she lacks the courage to say it clearly.

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