What we seem to have a hard time recognizing is that while consent works fairly well as the demarcation of the legal from the illegal in the realm of sex—nonconsensual sex is rape, assaultive, and criminal, while consensual sex is none of that—at the same time consent is only a necessary, and clearly not a sufficient condition of good sex, i.e., sex that’s both hedonically and morally good.

This is partly because of the overvaluation, in this consumerist culture, of consent itself as a marker of value, and hence the prime moral determinant of virtually all personal transactions. Consent, after all, demarcates not only rape from legal sex, but also theft from gifts and bargains: nonconsensual takings are thefts, and hence illegal, while consensual transactions—bargains and gifts—are legal. That a commercial or gift exchange is consensual implies that it isn’t theft. But the same reasoning surely doesn’t mean that it is therefore a good, fair, or even mutually beneficial exchange, as the entire consumer movement from the 1950s to the present attests.

Likewise, consent (among other things) demarcates illegal slavery from legal work: if work is consensual, it’s not slavery. But that doesn’t mean the work or labor contract is good: it might be exploitative, dangerous, demeaning, and underpaid. Labor law and labor movements wouldn’t be necessary if consent alone was sufficient to guarantee that our labor contracts are always good.

Sex is parallel in this regard to labor and commerce, but in the sexual realm, our difficulties seeing the harms in the transactions to which we consent seem even more acute. That sex is consensual means only that it’s not rape—it’s not any sort of guarantor that the sex is either morally or hedonically good. Yet, with sex, we only have a vague sense of what the relevant moral constraints might be—beyond the minimal constraint of consent—that might follow from this. We’ve only just begun to put that question on the table. That consensual sex should be welcome by both sides—mutually desired and mutually pleasing, at least in aspiration—might be a good place to start. When women are, eventually, fully included in what my Kantian friend Heidi Li Feldman loves to call “the empire of subjects who are always treated as ends, and never as means,” I believe this will be understood. In fact, when that happens, all of this will likely be too obvious for words. But we’re not there yet.