Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice

by Joseph J. Fischel

When we talk about sex—whether great, good, bad, or unlawful—we often turn to consent as both our erotic and moral savior. We ask questions like, What counts as sexual consent? How do we teach consent to impressionable youth, potential predators, and victims? How can we make consent sexy?
 
What if these are all the wrong questions? What if our preoccupation with consent is hindering a safer and better sexual culture? By foregrounding sex on the social margins (bestial, necrophilic, cannibalistic, and other atypical practices), Screw Consent  shows how a sexual politics focused on consent can often obscure, rather than clarify, what is wrong about wrongful sex.
 
Joseph J. Fischel argues that the consent paradigm, while necessary for effective sexual assault law, diminishes and perverts our ideas about desire, pleasure, and injury. In addition to the criticisms against consent leveled by feminist theorists of earlier generations, Fischel elevates three more: consent is insufficient, inapposite, and riddled with scope contradictions for regulating and imagining sex. Fischel proposes instead that sexual justice turns more productively on concepts of sexual autonomy and access. Clever, witty, and adeptly researched,  Screw Consent  promises to change how we understand consent, sexuality, and law in the United States today.
 

Genres: Nonfiction, Sexuality, Philosophy, Feminism, Politics, BDSM

280 pages, Paperback

Published January 22, 2019

Reviews

[Bop · Rating 4 out of 5]

The negative reviews of this are just baffling tbh. Even if I concede there are parts that are too muddled or things I don’t fully agree with, I see absolutely no genuine engagement with the ideas which are pretty sound and thought provoking. Instead everyones hung up on the fact that a man - A CIS MAN! - dare say anything out of line from the milquetoast feminist mainstream. Even though the book is so obviously feminist.

Anyway, I recommend.

[Cedric · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book tries to be funny, but shouldn't it have tried to be more... accessible? It's seriously just half made up of references that make it more like a salad than a legible book?

Here's an example where you can see these priorities laid bare:

A conceit of this chapter is that if we care about targeting coercive or likely coercive sex, rather than incestuous or otherwise icky sex, then we ought to pay attention to postwar family formations. Not only are our country’s current laws regulating sex and status too sanguineous and biological, but they typically presuppose a nuclear family of two married parents and their genetically related off spring. Our sex laws (and our sex thinking) should account for the growing number of single parent–led, stepparent-co-led, intimate-partner-of-parent-co-led, and other kinds of blended families. Persons superordinated in positions of familial authority are no longer biological fathers alone.
Here, though, is where we run into the race problem, which is more frankly a black problem. For while “today less than half (46%) [of chil-dren] are [. . .] living in a family with two married parents in their fi rst marriage” (Pew Research Center 2015), and while “the number of U.S. adults cohabiting has continued to climb, reaching about 18 million in 2016 [a 29% increase since 2007]” (Stepler 2017), “the majority of white, Hispanic and Asian children are living in two-parent households, while less than half of black children are living in this type of arrangement. [. . .] The living arrangements of black children stand in stark contrast to the other major racial and ethnic groups. The majority—54%—are living with a single parent” (Pew Research Center 2015; emphasis added)...

[it goes on like this and honestly just gets weird and all over the place?]

"...This is the strongest objection to this chapter’s proposals; the (racial-ized) costs might very well capsize the (gendered) benefits. Given the Trump administration’s avowed commitment to “law and order” polic-ing and the renewed drug war waged by Attorney General Jeff Sessions (M. Ford 2017; Nunberg 2016), any call for an expansion of criminal law, let alone an expansion that potentially screens in more black men, may simply be unpalatable and unsupportable. Yet I am inclined to agree with Stephen Schulhofer (2015) that “the danger of unequal enforcement [. . .] cannot be allowed to exert an all-purpose veto over efforts to fi ll gaps in the criminal law” (681).
Let me offer a few additional counterobjections that may ultimately be unconvincing (I am not sure they convince me)."

I can't believe someone thought that all of this ranting was going somewhere... and then it got published?

Please, anyone who gave this 5 stars, share your favorite passage.

[Lara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Have you ever wondered what it would sound like if a white, cis, male really, really wanted to be heard but had nothing to say? This book is for you.


Bloody hell this was an incoherent mess. The "author," a poorly educated, trust fund, imbecile with a bored penis tried to write a book because no one was giving him the time of day. He never expresses any concrete thought other than 'everyone else is wrong,' 'consent is unfair to poor me,' bdsm and football are just the worst, I'm pretty sure, though I admit I don't know anything about football.' Fuck, this was a shit show.

The author quotes his students! Can you imagine anything more sad? How pathetic must you be? To get the book published, it seems he had to have someone else co-write two chapters. Noticeably, those were the only two chapters worth reading.

My favorite sentence might be, "...if you believe there is no there there, there are..." This was somehow published. It is almost hysterical. Oh wait, we also have this gem, "Halley likewise contends warns feminist-led efforts." What a poetic and intelligent writer!

To cut to the point, the author says bdsm is evil, though he doesn't know why, football is the worst, though he doesn't know why, all consent is awful, but he can't offer anything better, and Louis C.K. is "the fantasy" of consent. Yup. That is how stupid this 'author' is.

[Farida · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive and dense but riveting deconstruction of sexual consent that sheds light on the (il)logical and socially mandated paradigms guiding our experiences of good, bad, wrongful, and criminal sex.

[doug · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought this might be a thoughtful analysis of the male experience and what leads to poor ideas of consent, however it turned out to be an angry rant about how the metoo movement has harmed the ability of men to get laid. Would have had about the same impact and reach if they had just posted this as a facebook status, since it was a gigantic waste of time.

[Kari Barclay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes! Best analysis of the #MeToo movement I’ve read. The book is not a dismissal of consent but a desire to put pressure on the concept to see what other goals it might yield. And those goals are glorious. Here’s to building a “democratically hedonic sexual culture!”

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an extremely interesting and provocative book. I have so many thoughts on it but I hope to return to them later.

[MLDunk · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some hilarious reviews for this book on here that are both accurate and exaggerated. I, too, had to squint at some of the sentences in this book and go "huh?" or "for real?" many, many times. I felt like I was reading a citation report rather than an academic text. Christ, I've never seen so many citations in one book. I can't remember if he went more than two sentences without citing someone else. Honestly, I didn't know you could publish something like this with so little of his own thoughts until the very end. And yes, his comments on #MeToo could strike the wrong chord with a lot of people.
HOWEVER, this book synthesizes a lot of information in one go. If you are studying alternative sexualities, the collection of court cases, rulings, and laws can be helpful. And above all, I found the chapter on Cripping Consent especially helpful as a queer scholar. (You can also tell that someone else helped write it because it is more comprehensive than the other chapters). There aren't many resolutions here about what to do, but it builds the case (haha) for legal repercussions of not delving deeper into consent before expanding into how our hyperfocus on one solution for the sexual assault rampant in our society leaves many, many holes.

[spoon · Rating 1 out of 5]

03/28/24 DNF. Got through Intro and Ch 1. Horrendous. When you're writing a book, don't 1) be violently transphobic (calling gender confirming surgery "b*dily inj*ry" is not valid in any form to make any point ever. it is not valid when you straw man the point. it is not a valid point. period. you need to start from different base assumptions. sorry not sorry!) 2) write an entire chapter on B//D//S//M and then admit to not doing said thing or even understanding it in the slightest by quoting another scholar who describes in the most basic of terms why people might be interest in the practice and then writing "this seems to be some of the good stuff of BD*M to which some of its practitioners seek access." Vague city called - they're hiring you for mayor on the grounds of incompetence.

Hot tips on how not to do this: 1) learn what discursive analysis is (could help with deconstructing the whole "bodily injury" category!!) 2) don't be a legal scholar (other things to do in life than decide whether some things should be criminalized!!!)
Bonus tip: Don't be a man with the logic "when I think an act is valid it's valid. when I think it's not valid, it's not valid." That. Is. Not. The. Basis. For. Good. Theory!!!!

[Robert Hudder · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I read his first book on age of consent and then this one. This one seems to make the point better. I know, the first one is slightly more focused on more legal matters. This one is trying to get at something better than consent.

Does it hit the mark? Well, I am not sure that it is trying to go somewhere specific. I guess, my being in Canada, where we have some of the stuff (sexual exploitation) that is being advocated for but we still have some of the fuzziness that encapsulates consent and the wooliness of sex law.

Also, he was looser here. It was nice to see some vernacular. I suppose that philosophy has always been scatological. Here we have the dicks too. It makes for some very memorable arguments especially when trying to take down the dick obsession with laws.

[Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for class.
Despite the completely inaccessible (and unnecessarily so) legal-speak that the book is written in, I think Fischel’s central points are very important. Consent really isn’t sufficient to create sexual justice. We need better sexual practices that don’t just involve the checking of a singular box.
Still, Fischel sometimes betrays his points with absurd examples that really distract from his arguments rather than enforce them. And, again, I do wish that a book with such a meaningful thesis could be more accessible to the general public.

[Risa · Rating 2 out of 5]

A really interesting topic to explore (how we can move beyond consent to better models of good sex) but I definitely disagreed with a lot of the assumptions and logical jumps that the analysis made along the way. But always interesting to learn about a framework for analyzing sex. I especially appreciated the discussion of what makes sex special and if sexual violence is different from other kinds of violence. And also it was funny at times!

[Abhro Sroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book, which answers sex education(in a broader, sex-positive, and inclusive sense) to the problem of sexual assault, through a concept of democratic hedonism. It is a well-written critic of US sexual assault laws, disability and sexuality discourse, and the anti-SexualAssault campaigns/discourses. BTW the book is filled with factual weird sex stories/legal cases.

[benjamin adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

🙄

[Coral Opal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoy Fischel's style and humor and found his considerations and arguments very interesting. A book I would certainly recommend to any interested.

[casey vieira · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredibly illuminating and provocative and wild and So Right

[Isham Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tangled analysis on a timely topic; remembered almost nothing after finishing the book.