This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The testimony of the dozens of men accused of raping Frenchwoman Gisèle Pelicot is almost impossible to comprehend. Her husband Dominique has pleaded guilty to inviting men he found on coco.gg, a since-closed website where users could remain anonymous, to have sex with her after he had rendered her unconscious with Temesta, a prescription sleeping drug.

Most of his co-defendants have denied the charges, some claiming they believed they were participating in a sex game pre-arranged by the Pelicots, others that they thought her husband’s permission was enough.

Ms Pelicot suffered grave physical harm as a result of these supposed sex games: she tested positive for four STDs, and the sleeping pills caused such severe confusion and memory loss that she feared she was developing dementia or a brain tumour. But what if there had been no physical trace? When it comes to women’s bodies and boundaries, there’s a long tradition of men — and medical and legal authorities — thinking that what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

Until recently it was standard for trainee doctors to practise internal exams on oblivious women under general anaesthetic. When women say trans-identifying men should stay out of female spaces, we’re told that the ones who “pass” have been using those spaces unnoticed for years. The claim is implausible — almost no men make convincing women, no matter how hard they try — but the justification is familiar: what we never find out about supposedly does us no harm.

It’s only in the past decade that the legal system has started to take unnoticed intrusions on women’s privacy seriously. Upskirting — photos secretly taken under a person’s clothing — became a criminal offence in the UK only in 2019, two decades after mobile phones with cameras came on the market. France passed a law against upskirting a year earlier, and Mr Pelicot was prosecuted for upskirting in a supermarket in 2020. But the penalty was derisory: a €100 fine.

Revenge porn — sharing intimate photos without consent — has been common since the 1990s, but became illegal in the UK only in 2015. Before that the police and web hosting companies cared solely about copyright violation, which was no use to the woman who was violated, since copyright is held by the person who takes a photo, not by the subject. Women were told that if they wanted to be sure nude pictures of them didn’t become public they shouldn’t pose nude — sound practical advice, certainly, but hardly an appropriate basis for the criminal code.

Now there’s hyper-realistic “deepfake” porn produced with the help of AI. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, is currently suing a father and son over videos hosted on American porn sites made by superimposing her face on another woman’s body. Unable to cite a law banning AI-made porn, she is arguing that the videos constitute defamation.

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When you read an account of women’s devastation on learning that their nudes — real or fake — have been made public, it typically starts with police officers telling her they have been found on a porn website or a man’s computer. The move away from leaving these women in blissful, though potentially temporary, ignorance has been driven by taking consent much more seriously.

A short video most young adults will have been shown in school, made for a police anti-rape campaign, explains consent in terms of cups of tea. Tea is the nectar of the gods — if you want it. But it’s not okay to force a cuppa on someone who said they were parched, or even started drinking it, but then change their mind, and it’s not okay to assume that they want one today because they wanted one yesterday. “Whether it’s tea or sex,” the video concludes, “consent is everything.”

Everything? Really? In the wake of #MeToo, that’s certainly becoming the norm. Universities are rewriting their disciplinary policies to require students to get verbal agreement to every successive step in any intimate situation. Many young people now regard chatting someone up in a bar as harassment because you can’t know they are open to the possibility of a sexual encounter. Seen in this light, the only acceptable place to pick someone up is on a dating site.

That tea video, just a decade old, is now horribly behind the times. An up-to-date version would warn against asking someone if they fancy a cuppa without having good reason to think they might. Rather than regarding the answer as a simple “Yes” or “No”, it would break down the question into a series of choices: tea bags or tea leaves? With or without sugar? Milk or lemon? Cup or mug?

Even as consent is increasingly understood as vital, other protections against bad sexual encounters are being dismantled. Violent, readily accessible porn is reshaping young men’s ideas about what is acceptable and normal. Counsellors at Beira’s Place, the women-only rape crisis centre in Edinburgh funded by J.K. Rowling, say teenagers now think “breath play” — strangulation — is a routine sexual act.

The pornification of sex also influences the spin-off stories written by girls and young women for fan-fiction websites. Stories can be searched for and sorted by tags, making it easy to tell that many of them feature acts that a generation ago would have been seen as extreme — not just strangulation but slapping, verbal degradation, deep-throating and multiple partners.

On such websites, the assumption is that sexual relationships are open by default unless both partners have expressly agreed otherwise. All sexual tastes and acts are framed as “kinks” — whatever brews your tea, so to speak. To regard some sexual tastes as worse than others is to commit the modern sin of “kink-shaming”.

But the result of removing all limits from what is acceptable to ask for in the bedroom is to put more weight on consent than it can bear. In theory, everyone is free to say “No” to what they don’t want; in practice, when the menu of options is so wide and weird, many people won’t find out what they don’t want until too late. If they think their only alternative is abstinence, they may choose to ignore their own preferences and consent to acts they find frightening or degrading.

If consent is your only criterion for what’s right or wrong when it comes to sex, you won’t be able to draw a line that excludes bestiality or necrophilia: people do much worse to animals and dead bodies all the time.

A man who chases fantasies of sex with an unconscious woman doesn’t need to ask himself hard questions

Or, to bring it back to the Pelicots, what if your kink is non-consent? You wouldn’t pour tea down someone’s throat just because they said they wanted a cuppa before nodding off, the tea video points out — “unconscious people don’t want tea”.

Yet even sex with a sleeping person is now supposed to be fine, as long as consent was arranged in advance. A man who chases fantasies of sex with an unconscious woman doesn’t need to ask himself hard questions about what his desire says about him, but merely to find a woman who thinks it’s sexy, too.

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This idea is also being packaged up and presented to young women. Of the nearly 14 million stories on Archive Of Our Own, one of the largest fan-fiction sites, 300,000 are tagged with “consensual non-consent”. “Somnophilia” (sex with someone unconscious) and “free use” (agreeing up front that someone can have sex with you at any time, with no further need for you to consent) are tagged 30,000 and 40,000 times respectively.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that normalising these acts offers predators a plethora of new paths to semi-plausible deniability. If no act is inherently vile, and if men who get turned on by the idea of sex with a comatose woman are not perverts but merely kinky, then how can you condemn a man who says he’s into consensual non-consent and thought the woman was, too?

He can claim he was obliging her by going along with outsourced arrangements, the better to maintain a mutually desired immersive fiction. It’s a modern twist on the oldest excuse of all: she was asking for it.