An official in Australia recently made a tentative proposal that an app be developed so that both parties can positively confirm consent before sex is initiated.
The poor man was pilloried for this suggestion. I guess it didn’t help that he was a middle-aged man, and his job related to law enforcement. How could such a fellow claim to understand the nuances of modern life? How could anybody try to reduce our most romantic engagements to a scientific button pushing exercise? Actually, I think the poor fellow is on to something.
While I am at it, I would love for a second, related app to be developed. This one would require positive consent for the possibility of a pregnancy arising.
Imagine the benefits of these two little apps. Women (and men) would be protected from the “he said, she said” ambiguity that comes up in legal cases, and more often stops legal cases or even formal disputes from arising. There would be full equality between the partners in terms of responsibility and accountability, for both sex and pregnancy. Unwanted pregnancies, that have blighted countless female lives since time immemorial, would become a thing of the past.
These potential benefits are so large that surely it is worth trying to address the legitimate issues that would make it difficult to implement these apps. Rather than quoting an issue and immediately dismissing the ideas, we would embrace the dream of the ideas and work back to try to address the issues.
The issues arise in at least four categories. There are technical concerns, privacy issues, ethical or moral or spiritual matters, and concerns about loss of romantic spontaneity and the joy of “the game”. Let us address them each in turn.
Technical issues are critical, but given the rate of medical and IT progress in the last few years they are probably surmountable quite quickly. For the pregnancy consent, the challenge is a medical one. Reliable contraception would need to be the default for both women and men. Both parties would need to actively “turn it off” for pregnancy to become possible, each having to signal agreement for both themselves and their partner. The contraceptive device could be physical or pharmaceutical, whichever can be proved to be 100% reliable. I sense the medical community could quickly come up with this if it had the will. For established couples, they could choose to change their default (only with each other) to “on”, perhaps needing to be positively reconfirmed monthly.
For the sex consent app, the technical issue is more about definition. What is sex? Does it have to involve penetration? Andrew Cuomo is about to lose is job (quite rightly) for far more modest transgressions. But an app is unlikely to work for leering or innuendo or even touching. So the issue of abuse and consent would not entirely go away with an app. It would also not eliminate rape: it would only make it indisputable that it had occurred. This issue would require more thought. Perhaps there can be a series of levels of activity, each requiring additional consent with the app. No doubt that could be other rules for same sex couples, and for young people or couples with a large age difference. This could become very complicated very quickly.
Next there are privacy concerns. The entire sexual history of all of us would be sitting on the Internet. These are obviously dangerous data, open to significant abuse in the wrong hands. Even if the company operating the app platform made promises about deletion or encryption or protection, it would take a while for us to build trust. Hopefully this challenge is surmountable technically.
The third group of concerns are about ethics and morals. Religious lobbies would doubtless reject the ideas out of hand, especially my one about pregnancy. The element of chance is considered by many to be an application of the will of God and something that we humans have no right to tamper with.
Of course the same arguments have been used against abortion, contraception and sex before marriage. Indeed, such people don’t seem to approve very much of sex at all (especially not for women, interestingly). Just like with contraception, it will be argued that the pregnancy app is a license for loose morals, allowing sex without its potential consequence. Then men in many cultures believe they have a right to demand sex whenever they feel like it.
There will be no winning over these constituencies. I can make as many liberal counter arguments as I like, about the grinding poverty caused by unwanted pregnancies, failed marriages or overpopulation, or about the sickness misery caused to victims of sexual abuse, about pervasive sexual inequality, or even the abuse of power by some women who may threaten a partner or even become pregnant deliberately without consent.
Society would need to be ready to accept the apps, and the politics would be fraught in many countries. Debate should be welcomed, for these are fundamental changes and no doubt there would be unintended consequences. But it is surely a good thing that the debates starts as quickly as possible and from a basis of knowledge and real possibilities rather than loose speculation.
The fourth concern is about the positive aspects of sexual ambiguity. Romance, chivalry, spontaneity and uncertainty provide a lot of joy for many people (and a lot of misery for others). It does seem rather heartless to potentially turn all of this off, reducing such joys to the pressing of buttons. My belief is that we would find new normals that continued to offer the same joy, but took away many of the negative consequences. It would be hard to predict how this would evolve, and perhaps some positive aspects of romance might be lost, even permanently.
So be it. The same sorts of arguments were used against bans of smoking or imposition of seatbelts or curtailing other reckless behaviours. Sometimes the benefit to society is so great that new rules or norms simply make sense.
Which brings me back to the potential benefits of these innovations. I would guess that a large majority of women have suffered an unwanted pregnancy or at least weeks of horrific fear contemplating its possibility. Many live with crushing guilt or some societal ostracism due to their sexual history. Our most important tasks on earth, to find the joy of love and to procreate, are too often sources of random outcomes and of misery.
In fifty years time, people will look back on our current society and shake their heads in disbelief about how we handle love, sex and pregnancy. A mature society should find a better way. Let us start solving the technical challenges now, in a way that guards our privacy. Then we can start hacking away at the moral objections and challenge the romantic ones.
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