The allegations coming out of Cornell are horrifying. What ultimately happened in that fraternity house, who committed crimes, and whether prosecutors can prove those crimes beyond a reasonable doubt are questions for investigators, courts and juries. But there is another question raised by this story that has been bothering me, and it exists apart from criminal law: What are we teaching young people about sex, morality and their responsibility to one another?
For years, much of our culture has increasingly reduced sexual morality to a single word: consent. If two adults consent, we're told, that's essentially the end of the discussion. Don't judge. Don't impose your values. What consenting adults do is their own business.
Legally, consent is indispensable. Morally, I think that standard is woefully inadequate.
Yes “consenting adults” establishes an essential boundary, but it doesn't teach you what you ought to do. It tells a young man not to violate someone's autonomy. It doesn't necessarily teach him courage, restraint, responsibility, empathy, or that he sometimes ought to say, I'm not participating in this, and I'm going to make sure this person is okay.
There are plenty of things human beings are legally free to do that aren't necessarily good for them or good for the people around them. Sex shouldn't somehow be exempt from that basic truth. Consent can tell us whether someone's autonomy has been violated. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether we're treating another human being with dignity, whether we're exploiting someone's vulnerability, whether we're degrading ourselves or somebody else, or whether we're behaving like the kind of person we ought to be.
I wish we were better at teaching that to young people.
The Internet has given an entire generation access to sexual imagery and behavior that previous generations would barely have imagined. Pornography increasingly presents sex as performance: more partners, more extreme acts, more humiliation, more aggression. And somewhere along the way we've developed an attitude that essentially says: If everybody says yes, who are you to judge?
I think we should judge—not other people's worth, but our own behavior.
Just because you can live as though life were a porno doesn't mean you should.
Sex can be intimate, loving and profoundly human. It can also be degrading, selfish and damaging. Pretending the second possibility disappears whenever someone says "yes" doesn't strike me as enlightened. It strikes me as abandoning young people to navigate extraordinarily powerful human experiences with almost no moral compass beyond the criminal code.
Consent is a necessary legal safeguard but an inadequate moral compass. If young people are taught additional virtues—sexual restraint, dignity, responsibility for other people's welfare, and an unwillingness to use another person merely for gratification—then someone receiving a message inviting him to join an intoxicated stranger for group sex doesn't think merely, “Is she consenting? Great, I'm clear.” He thinks, “This is degrading and dangerous; I'm not participating, and I should probably make sure she's okay.”
And I think we should expect something more from young men in particular.
I would like young men to be taught that masculinity includes restraint. That strength carries responsibility. That encountering a vulnerable woman isn't an opportunity. That sometimes being a good man means being the guy who says, "No. This isn't right." Sometimes it means walking away. Sometimes it means checking whether someone is okay. And sometimes it means being willing to look foolish in front of your friends because you're more concerned about another human being than about fitting in.
Imagine receiving a message inviting you to come have sex with a woman you've never met who is already in a room with other men and where drugs and alcohol are involved. I don't want a young man's only thought to be: "Is she consenting?"
I want another voice in his head.
Would I want my sister in that room? My daughter? My mother? Would I want a group of strangers treating someone I love this way? And if I walked into that room and saw someone I loved intoxicated, surrounded by strangers and being treated as an object for their gratification, would my instinct be to join in—or to make sure she was safe?
That doesn't mean women aren't autonomous adults. Of course they are. Women are responsible for their choices just as men are responsible for theirs. Nor does believing that something is immoral give anyone the right to physically control another competent adult.
It means something much simpler: another person's willingness to participate doesn't relieve me of my responsibility to decide whether I should participate.
And perhaps that's the lesson we've neglected.
There is a world of difference between saying that a consensual sexual act should not be illegal and saying that therefore there is nothing morally wrong with it. A free society necessarily allows adults to make choices that other people consider foolish, unhealthy or degrading. Freedom requires that. But freedom also includes our ability to develop standards for ourselves that are higher than "I wasn't breaking the law."
This becomes even more important when sex is mixed with alcohol, drugs, strangers and group dynamics. I wouldn't say anymore that such circumstances inevitably lead to abuse. That's obviously too sweeping. But they can all too often create situations in which inhibitions disappear, judgment deteriorates, people egg one another on, boundaries become harder to communicate, and behavior escalates far beyond where it began.
That's precisely why moral guardrails matter before things get that far.
If your only guardrail is consent, you're already perilously close to the edge. You're waiting for someone to become too intoxicated to consent, or for somebody to say no, or for an aggressive act to cross some legal boundary. A stronger moral framework can stop you miles earlier.
Maybe I shouldn't be doing this at all.
Maybe this person deserves better from me.
Maybe I should care about what happens to her after tonight.
Maybe instead of asking what I can get away with, I should ask what a good man would do.
And this is one place where I think faith can matter enormously. I don't mean that everyone needs to belong to a particular church or subscribe to one denomination's teachings. I mean something more fundamental: the belief that there is a moral order greater than ourselves—that right and wrong aren't determined solely by what we desire, what other people will permit, or what the law allows. A belief in God or a higher power can give us another question to ask before we act: Even if I can do this, should I?
Faith can also change the way we see the person standing in front of us. If we believe human beings possess an inherent dignity that isn't bestowed by popularity, sexuality, beauty or even their own choices, then another person becomes more than an opportunity for our gratification. She is a human being of immeasurable worth. And suddenly there are many more signals guiding our conscience than simply whether we heard the word "yes": compassion, dignity, restraint, love, responsibility, humility and the quiet voice telling us that something simply isn't right.
That doesn't require perfection, and it certainly doesn't mean religious people always behave morally. Human beings have demonstrated otherwise for thousands of years. But faith can provide a compass outside ourselves. It reminds us that freedom isn't merely the ability to do whatever we're permitted to do; it also includes the wisdom and strength to choose not to do something we know diminishes another person—or ourselves.
None of that determines what happened at Cornell. Allegations have to be proven, and every accused person deserves the presumption of innocence in a criminal proceeding. But whatever eventually happens in that case, I hope the broader conversation doesn't end with determining precisely who consented to what.
We should be capable of asking a bigger question.
What kind of men and women are we trying to raise?
I want young people to understand consent completely and unequivocally. But I also want them to understand dignity, restraint, responsibility, compassion and love. I want young men especially to recognize that there is something honorable about protecting rather than exploiting, about exercising restraint rather than indulging every appetite, and about caring for the person in front of you even when nobody is legally requiring you to.
Consent matters enormously.
But it should be the beginning of our moral conversation about sex—not the end of it.
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