Spring 2023 · Vol. 52 No. 1 · pp. 76–78
Book Review
Consent on Campus: A Manifesto
Donna Freitas. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. 231 pages.
Donna Frietas believes in the university. She believes not only in the idea of the university as a place of learning for the common good but also as a place that can strive for a type of utopia. This is why the intended audience for her 2018 book, Consent on Campus: A Manifesto, is “Every single college president in the United States.” She believes that colleges and universities have it in them to create healthier communities that will spill over into the world and drive social change. This belief in the university undergirds her examination of one of the most pernicious cultures currently writhing within institutions of higher learning in North America: the culture of rape.
Freitas uses expert data and first-person stories in her own qualitative research into the underlying conditions that have allowed sexual violence to permeate the North American university experience. But her keen analysis extends beyond campus culture and experience. Freitas also analyzes and critiques contemporary responses by universities to sexual violence on their campuses. She argues that their strategies have little capacity to end sexual violence and merely provide a legal shield for university administrators. What is needed, Freitas implores, is a wholesale rebuilding of the culture that exists around sex. The current culture must be dismantled and a new one that is not afraid to attach meaning, vulnerability, and ethics to sex must be embraced.
The book is divided into three sections. The first offers an overview of the contemporary American landscape that provides the soil in which the weeds of sexual violence, consent education, and alcohol-fueled sexual assault grow. Freitas uncovers a malignant culture surrounding sex among young people at universities, one which current consent education and legislation such as Title IX (an American civil rights law originally designed to prevent discrimination in education and now also used to fight sexual assault) are unable to uproot.
According to Freitas, contemporary consent education relies on the concept of affirmative consent, which means that any party involved in sexual activity must be participating actively, consciously, and voluntarily, if not enthusiastically. During the first week of school, students are taught through seminars, posters, and social media campaigns that spoken consent must be normative. Freitas argues that while it is admirable to emphasize affirmative consent, these seminars, posters, and slogans do little to address the root causes of sexual violence. Rather, they prioritize a simplistic understanding of consent that relies exclusively on verbal {77} communication and ignores the messy business of how desire and consent can be communicated through human bodies.
These policies are inadequate because they assume a high degree of agency, independence, and self-understanding with regard to desire and sexual activity. Freitas argues in the second section of her book that the social scripts young people have inherited about sex limit their ability to meaningfully consent to sex in the simplified way universities are asking them to. The script that students most often absorb is one that details how to “hook up,” that is, have casual, brief, and emotionally detached sexual encounters that have no greater meaning. Hook-up culture reinforces young people’s ambivalence and narcissism by normalizing the objectification of one’s sexual partner. These scripts deeply undermine students’ ability to grant meaningful consent, and they erode any sense of sex as something intimate, empowering, or imbued with ethical significance. They also foster a culture that assumes an “everyone is doing it” attitude, which marginalizes anyone who chooses to abstain from sex. Consent education therefore tacitly encourages students to ask, “What am I allowed or expected to do?” rather than “What do I desire?”
In the book’s final section, Freitas argues that universities need to go beyond a shallow consent education and work to reattach meaning and ethics to sex. To do this universities need to see sex through a social justice and community lens, promote the dignity of all people, and show that the community can be a help in setting ethical standards for sexual activity. She then sets out what she believes is a good starting point for expectations around sexual activity and lays out a playbook for how universities might begin to address the harmful hook-up culture on their campuses. This includes hearing the unique stories of students’ experience of sex on campus, interrupting problematic preconceived notions surrounding sex, and collectively offering new scripts about sex. Freitas argues that the university is uniquely equipped to do this and that it should be done the old-fashioned way—in the classroom. If everyone on campus engages in dismantling rape culture, she argues, the university can build a real culture of consent and live up to its mission of creating responsible citizens of the world.
A myriad of rich insights is packed into this slim book, but the richest may be that developing a contemporary sexual ethic must be a communal project, not an individual one. Because whatever the issues are, they must be solved through a community. The attempt to solve the rape crisis at colleges by teaching students the right words to say at the right time is foolhardy and ineffective. Values and ethics must be taught in community.
Freitas believes in the university. But she boldly asserts that past attempts to address sexual violence within its walls have been nothing more {78} than a band-aid on a festering wound. The university must go beyond its individualistic risk-management strategies and actually concern itself with the ethics of its young people. Christian institutions—whether churches, colleges, or agencies—must also take a clear-eyed look at themselves when addressing sexual violence in their midst. If they do that, they may end up with the same evaluation that Freitas does: real societal change is possible through the tools they already have. The classroom may be an important place to do this work, but one wonders if it is possible to get every faculty member on the same page. Nevertheless, her general point is well-taken—the most important step is being fearless in talking about campus sexual violence where all the world’s other problems are talked about. May we all believe as much as she does.
