Many actions can fall under the label of “rape”. Too many, according to Garcia. In fact, there is no clear dividing line between sex and rape; instead, people can be violated in very different ways without being directly raped (170). One reason for such a spectrum-view is that a definition of “rape as sex minus consent” dilutes the concept of rape (178); a problem Garcia identifies with the liberal approach to rape. In fact, consent should similarly be understood as a kind of continuum (180). Instead of clearly delineating between rape and (morally or legally) permissible sex, consent becomes a tool for more fulfilling sex.Footnote ¹ Drawing on insights from BDSM, Garcia develops an account that understands consent as an ongoing, continuous conversation that is shaped by and affects all partners involved (187, 201). Yet, neither is it the case that consent can simply be assumed nor that women and men can ever be on a level playing field in societies marked by gender injustice (138). Therefore, the person with more power (read: the man) has the ethical responsibility to create a conversational context in which the other person(s) can express themselves without fear in order to come as close as possible to the status of equality (205). But let us take a step back and recount some of Garcia’s argumentative line in the book before going into more detail.

Manon Garcia starts her book by taking the reader on a walk from the liberal tradition of consent to a Kantian conception to Foucault and toward an erotic conversation. The liberal tradition of consent, inherited from John Stuart Mill, assumes a formal agreement between two equal and rational subjects. Yet, Garcia intervenes, under unequal gender hierarchies, there are no two equal and rational subjects. Instead, we should focus on a Kantian conception of consent that is grounded in theories of dignity, autonomy, and respect. Garcia then continues to shift our perspective to the way in which power is underlying our social and political reality, arguing that there is no outside to power—think Foucault –, but that we, as social agents, are all embedded in the social structures that shape our understanding of sex and sexual desires. The important point, Garcia argues, is that we cannot know whether our sexual desires are really ours or whether they are a product of patriarchal power relations. Accordingly, full sexual autonomy is an illusion.

Luckily, Garcia does not end on this note but takes the reader further toward an emancipatory sexual politics; a way to think of consent that takes into consideration the way in which gender norms are infused in our sexual activities. She develops a context-dependent approach to consent that shifts depending on the specific sexual situation. Furthermore, such an approach is necessarily relational in character, it implies “to feel with”—Garcia reminds the reader of the Latin etymology of consent “cum sentire”—the other. An understanding of consent that is both context-dependent and relational, Garcia argues, can be lived as an erotic conversation that aims at sexual pleasure together.

The Joy of Consent starts where Garcia’s last book ends: women are not submissive qua their nature, but gender norms of femininity provide incentives for women to submit to men. Obviously, this is bad news for our sex lives: If women are pressured or feel inclined to submit to men, it is much harder for them to reject what men want—including sexual advances. And, if women are socialized into giving—their attention, care, and bodies—to others, it becomes harder even still. This insight is far from new and a long list of feminist scholars have analyzed the burden that patriarchal norms pose for women who want to refuse sex (including those women who might not even know that they want to refuse sex).Footnote ² Also not very new is the general idea that this line of thought means serious trouble for any theory of consent; as Catharine MacKinnon and others have argued, women under patriarchal conditions cannot consent due to the existing power hierarchies between the sexes. Hence, it is also far from clear that women are well positioned epistemically to see and accurately understand their false interests (namely, the interest to submit to and serve men); a lesson ideology critique has taught us long ago.Footnote ³

The turn that The Joy of Consent takes—away from the moral permissibility of consensual sex toward the question of how to have a fulfilling sex life under conditions of patriarchy—is an interesting shift in perspective. Garcia’s theory is not on consent as “moral magic” (to borrow a phrase from Heidi Hurd) but on sexual autonomy. Consent is a specific kind of conversation that lays the framework for morally good sex.Footnote ⁴ This relates to debates on autonomy and agency in general; where the idea is that we misunderstand what it means to be an autonomous agent unless we consider the social environment and the agent’s relations within that environment. While unjust social structures can negatively influence our agency, this should not be taken to mean that oppressed subjects do not have agency; the “agency dilemma” in Serene Khader’s words and a point Garcia takes up in her book (164).

The Joy of Consent recognizes that our (sexual) actions are influenced by our social structures and, thus, by different power hierarchies. A point that has been well articulated by many, including Catharine MacKInnon, Andrea Dworkin, Lois Pineau, Marilyn Frye, and Susan Brownmiller. Garcia takes the insight that our sexual activities happen in a world shaped by unjust gender relations a step further: It is not only the case that the act to consent (or should we say the many acts to consent) is shaped by problematic gender norms and gendered power imbalances but so is our whole sex life, our sexual agency—the way we have sex, enjoy sex, refuse sex, negotiate sex. Here, Garcia is in good company with, for example, Quill Kukla (Reference Kukla2021, Reference Kukla2018) and Caleb Ward (Reference Ward2020). Kukla (Reference Kukla2021) recognizes that full autonomy is unattainable and should therefore be understood as a continuum.Footnote ⁵ Compressed autonomy is the norm rather than the exception; consensual sex should therefore be regarded as a collaboration, the aim of which is to come as close as possible to a state of full and uncompressed autonomy. Consent is an ongoing process in a quest for sexual agency.

However, while this is an important point, the book does not follow through. Garcia sets the stage with these (not entirely new but nevertheless deeply important) insights for a complex analysis of consent and sexual agency, but falls back onto a view of sex as erotic conversation that, if accomplished, should create a context in which we can develop sexual agency together (187); a theory that has been spelled out similarly before and that is not without problems.Footnote ⁶ Being socialized into a sexist ideology that comes with gendered sexual scripts, norms, and ideals and that gives meaning to our sexual acts, implies that many of us do not know their real desires—we might not even know what kind of sex could be possible outside of the ritualized behavior governed by sexual norms. As Kukla (Reference Kukla2018) points out, many of us do not even know how to talk about sexual needs and desires—even with a partner willing and eager to do so. We need to know what we desire sexually and what options we have to have an agency-enhancing conversation. We need to know what good sex—qualitatively good sex!—feels like for us; a question that is hard to answer even under ideal conditions and much harder still under conditions of oppression. Here, an epistemic account that looks at the heteronormative, sexist, patriarchal, but also racist and ableist norms that underlie our sex lives should take center stage—a lesson for which we should turn to other resources than (merely) BDSM; for example, the important insights from crip and queer studies (for example, McRuer Reference McRuer2006; Elman Reference Elman2012; Kafer Reference Kafer2013) or Black and indigenous feminists (for example, Deer Reference Deer2009; Dines Reference Dines1998; Kelly Reference Kelly2010; Smith Reference Smith2010).

Adequately understanding what it means to be socialized into these sexual scripts has to move away from the power dichotomy of heterosexual relations; (sexual) agency looks different for each person depending on their intersectional social positions. In fact, a person’s autonomy or agency is read differently depending on the (assumed) social group membership of that person. Alisa Bierria addresses this problem by drawing a distinction between an action that is merely read by the audience—where how the audience understands the action and how the action is intended are in line with each other—and an action that is authored by the audience—where the audience rewrites the action with a different intent; here, the activity and the social category are inextricably fused, leading to a particular interpretation of the activity within society (Bierria Reference Bierria2020, 16; see also Bierria Reference Bierria2014). Hence, no person just has sex. They have sex as a white woman or a Black woman, a Black man, a disabled man, or a non-binary person; with important repercussions of how a sexual conversation is “read”—or “rewritten”. In other words, differently situated agents have to invest a very different amount of time and energy (and might still fail) to have the kind of conversation Garcia advises us to have.

The Joy of Consent fails to take into account the complexities that intersectionality demands. Instead, it paints a dichotomy between women as, in MacKinnon’s word, “rapable”Footnote ⁷ and men as rapists; a dichotomy that can also be found in Garcia’s We are not born submissive. Unfortunately, this fails to adequately understand sexual agency in a world shaped by intersectional oppression where sexual violence has served the interests of the powerful but is not limited to patriarchal power relations. The lack of complexity is puzzling as Garcia aims to provide an account that takes unjust power hierarchies as a fundamental piece of the puzzle. While the idea of a conversation as an ongoing process makes an important contribution in the right direction, it needs to be fleshed out better taking into account intersectional approaches.