When Did Consent Became Our Only Moral Standard?

How we abandoned courtship, normalised promiscuity and forgot that sex was sacred.

The moment we placed the ‘I’ at the centre of the universe, morality ceased to be something we were obliged to obey and became something we were entitled to invent. Russell Brand is both a perpetrator and a casualty of this revolution.

We have grown up in a culture which has taught us that, in matters of sexual intimacy, consent is both necessary and sufficient. Provided two people agree to whatever sexual activity they have in mind, there is nothing more to be said about it. And in arriving at this extraordinary position, we have quietly dispensed with an understanding of sex which governed Western civilisation for centuries: that sexual intimacy is sacred, that it belongs within marriage, and that it is not merely something we do with our bodies, but something which touches the very essence of who we are, with consequences that reach far beyond the body and into the depths of the soul.

I have been thinking about this recently, having returned to some of the films and television programmes I watched in the 1980s and 1990s. I remembered them as rather innocent, even milquetoast, especially compared with the entertainment available today. The rom-coms and the sitcoms belonged to a more wholesome age? But watching them again, I was struck by how much of what we now take for granted was already being carefully established in the popular imagination. We were being taught a new understanding of relationships and sex, which came wrapped in humour, romance and attractive characters, such that we barely noticed.

Take Sleepless in Seattle, the 1993 romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In one scene, Sam, a widower, explains to his eight-year-old son why he is dating a woman whom he has no immediate intention of marrying. “This is what single people do”, he tells his son. “They try other people on to see how they fit”. He speaks of people with the casual indifference of a man trying on clothes, as though they were objects to be picked up, tried out and discarded when they no longer suited him. And perhaps that is precisely what people had become in the popular imagination. The old moral order had been turned on its head. Where once we understood that things were to be used and people were to be loved, we had begun to love things and use people. We try on shoes, coats, dresses, and if we like them, we buy them. If we don’t, we put them back on the rail. And here, in this apparently innocent romantic comedy, a father is explaining to his young son that this is how adult relationships work. People are to be tried on. The other person is presented as a consumer choice, to be tested for suitability rather than approached as someone whose dignity demands more.

Or consider the film 10 Things I Hate About You, the 1999 teenage romantic comedy based loosely on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. There are sexual references throughout, jokes about virginity and erections, and a scene in which a penis is drawn on a teenage boy’s face. These things are played for laughs. But what does a young teenager, who may never have entertained such thoughts, make of them? What happens when something which ought to be approached with modesty is made into a joke? We tend to think of corruption as something dramatic, something which announces itself with a great flourish of wickedness. More often it happens quietly. A joke here, an innuendo there, a suggestion that everyone is doing something, that only the hopelessly naive or socially inadequate would object to. Eventually the young person ceases to be shocked, and then ceases to wonder whether there was ever anything to be shocked about.

This is how a culture is formed. Not simply by the laws it passes (though that is another story), but by the stories it tells. Lord Byron understood the power of an origin story. In his 1821 drama Cain: A Mystery, he takes the familiar biblical account and turns its moral universe upside down. Lucifer is no longer the deceiver who leads mankind into rebellion against God, but a sympathetic champion of reason, freedom and enlightenment, while God Himself is cast as a cosmic tyrant demanding obedience. The characters remain recognisable, but their moral identities have been reversed. Evil is made attractive while rebellion becomes a virtue. And this is the extraordinary power of storytelling. A story need not persuade us openly that good is evil and evil is good. It need only teach us to admire the one and recoil from the other. Isn’t this what we see coming out of that cesspit called Hollywood (and the BBC, Channel 4 and other equally disgusting filth producers)?

90’s sitcom Friends was not a programme about the destruction of sexual morality. None of us would have been allowed to watch it if it was billed that way. It was a programme about six attractive, amusing young adults living in New York, and navigating life together. That was precisely its power. Promiscuity was not presented as a moral revolution. It was simply life. And in the life of a young adult, you hook up…often…or else you are a weirdo who has only ever slept with 6 people before the age of 30! The audience laughed, sympathised, identified, but most of all…..absorbed.

And here we are, thirty years later, in a society where it is considered perfectly normal for people to meet in a nightclub, or through an app on their phones, and to have sex before they know anything about one another.

How did this become normal? More importantly, why do we think it is acceptable?

Consider what courtship meant to previous generations. In the 1940s and 1950s, and certainly before, there was a widely understood distinction between courting someone and having sexual relations with them. Courtship was a period of discernment, during which a man and woman came to know one another with marriage as the intended destination. There were conventions governing behaviour, expectations about modesty, and often the involvement of families and communities. A young man might call at a girl’s home, meet her parents, take her to a dance or the cinema, accompany her to church, write letters, and gradually establish whether they were suited to marriage.

Of course, people sinned. The past was not populated exclusively by saints, but there is an enormous difference between a society in which people fail to live up to a moral standard and one in which the standard itself has been abandoned. In the former, the sinner knows that he has fallen short of something good. In the latter, he is encouraged to believe that there is nothing to fall short of.

We have not merely relaxed the rules of courtship. We have abolished the very idea that sexual intimacy should be governed by anything other than mutual agreement.

And so we arrive at the extraordinary sexual landscape of the twenty-first century, where young men and women are encouraged to regard their bodies as instruments of pleasure, where almost every imaginable sexual practice is available through pornography, and where sexual encounters with strangers are treated as an ordinary part of adult life. A woman may meet a man in a nightclub, return to his home, and consent to a series of increasingly intimate acts, all too shocking to describe here, but see the Russell Brand case for details. Neither knows anything about the other’s character. They have not promised fidelity to one another, yet we are expected to regard this as an entirely unremarkable encounter between two consenting adults - it’s all ok, because she said ‘Yes’.

The only moral boundary our culture seems capable of recognising is the moment at which one person says no. That is simply insanity when the person saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ has been de-formed so badly by the culture around them.

Every single imaginable sexual act is regarded as morally acceptable until the moment consent is withdrawn, at which point we suddenly rediscover the language of moral outrage, violation and human dignity. But why only then? It is a curious moral logic, not unlike the one by which we can disregard the humanity of a child throughout the nine months he spends in his mother's womb, only to insist upon his dignity and rights the moment he emerges from it. In both cases, we have drawn an arbitrary line and declared that everything on one side of it is a matter of personal choice, while everything on the other is a matter of profound moral consequence. We appear quite indifferent to the degradation to which two people might willingly subject themselves, yet the moment one withdraws consent, we are suddenly capable of recognising that the human body is not merely an object to be used. But surely its dignity existed before the refusal, just as the child's humanity existed before his birth?

The Russell Brand case brings this contradiction into particularly sharp focus. Why is the absence of consent the only aspect of such encounters which provokes moral scrutiny? Why are we not equally troubled by the degradation of intimacy itself?

There was a time when Catholics understood that what people watched, read and listened to mattered, because these things helped form their imaginations and their consciences.

In the early 1930s, American Catholics became increasingly alarmed by the sexual content and moral attitudes being promoted in Hollywood films. The American bishops responded by establishing what became known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, formally organised in 1934 and later known as the National Legion of Decency. Its purpose was straightforward: to oppose films which promoted obscenity, sexual immorality and the corruption of public morals.

Millions of American Catholics pledged to avoid films which offended Christian morality. The Legion developed a classification system, rating films according to their moral suitability. Films judged acceptable received an A classification, those considered objectionable in part received a B, while films classified C were condemned. A condemned rating could have serious commercial consequences for the studios, not least because Catholics represented an enormous proportion of the cinema-going public. At its height, the Legion claimed the support of more than eleven million Americans, and Hollywood took notice.

The Legion’s pressure helped bring about the rigorous enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the Hays Code, which had been adopted in 1930 but initially enforced rather loosely. Under the leadership of the Catholic Joseph Breen, the Production Code Administration began exercising much stricter control over what could be shown on screen. Scripts were altered, dialogue rewritten, costumes changed and scenes removed. Adultery could not be presented as something desirable or admirable. Sexual relations outside marriage were not to be treated as casually as they are today. Filmmakers were expected to exercise restraint, not merely in what they showed, but in the moral impressions their stories conveyed.

The beginning of the end came with Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film The Pawnbroker, a Holocaust drama which included scenes of female nudity during a flashback to a Nazi concentration camp. The film’s serious subject matter provided the perfect opportunity to challenge the moral restrictions which had governed Hollywood for decades. An exception was granted to the Production Code’s prohibition on nudity, on the grounds of artistic merit, establishing a precedent which would prove increasingly difficult to contain. If nudity could be justified in the service of a serious artistic purpose, who was to decide where that purpose began and ended? The principle had been breached, and with it the authority of those who had insisted that some things ought never to be shown.

The Church of the 30’s understood that entertainment was capable of shaping the desires, expectations and behaviour of an entire population, and it was prepared to act upon that understanding. This confidence has been lost, and we are much the poorer for it.

Having dismantled the whole, we are left trying to regulate the fragments. We teach young people about consent, contraception, boundaries, sexual health and personal choice, and fail to tell them what sex actually means, and what it is for. It is into this world that Russell Brand exploded.

We are inclined to laugh at the courtship rituals of our grandparents. The chaperones, the dances, the young man arriving at the front door in a jacket and tie, the nervous introduction to the girl’s father, the expectation that a man should declare his intentions. How quaint it all seems.

But perhaps we should ask ourselves who has the greater claim to wisdom. The generation which believed that a man ought to marry a young woman before being granted the privilege of intimacy with her, or the generation which thinks it perfectly acceptable to have sex with a stranger? The generation which regarded chastity as a virtue, or the generation which regards virginity as an embarrassment?

We have not become more sophisticated about sex. We have become less capable of understanding its significance.

The Catholic Legion of Decency understood that a civilisation does not lose its moral bearings overnight. It loses them through a thousand small concessions, through what it permits, what it celebrates, what it laughs at and what it eventually ceases to notice. Its members believed that the moral imagination of a people was worth defending, and that the stories told on the cinema screen could either strengthen or undermine the virtues upon which family life depended.

We may no longer have a Legion of Decency. But perhaps we need to recover something of its conviction, beginning in our own homes, with what we watch, what we laugh at, what we allow our children to absorb, and what we are prepared to call good or bad.

A society which has reduced the morality of sexual intimacy to the single question of consent has not discovered a higher understanding of human dignity, it has forgotten what man is for.

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