Abstract
Reviewed by: F Vera-Gray, Durham University Law School, UK
Moira Carmody’s Sex, Ethics, and Young People. is the book I wish I had 10 years ago when first designing programmes for sexual violence prevention in school. Arguing that sexuality and sexual violence prevention education has focused on the ‘bad’ things that can happen, ignoring or minimizing pleasure and intimacy, Carmody provides an alternative way of conceptualizing primary prevention education in the field of sexual violence. The model, tested in Australia and New Zealand, draws from Foucault’s work on developing ethical subjectivity to develop a ‘sexual ethics framework that values pleasure at the same time as it acknowledges danger’ (p. 5). It is not intended to establish the borders of acceptable or unacceptable desires or practices – giving young people hard and fast rules – rather it is concerned with determining the conditions for ethical exploration, inviting young people to apply this exploration to their sexual decision-making. Situating ethics as a way of being, not a way of doing, Carmody argues that ethical sexual behaviour only becomes possible when we pay attention to ‘the interrelationship among desires, acts, and pleasure, and their impact on others’, rather than a singular focus on one aspect of sexual behaviour alone (p. 111). In this way, it rests on four key elements: care of the self, care of the other, negotiation and reflection. These elements are used to centre the always relational nature of ethical reflection and to offer a route for moving from the ethical decisions of an individual to the development of ethical communities.
The book itself is divided into two parts – the first describing the initial interview research with young people in rural and urban Eastern Australia on their views about sex and sexuality education and the international literature on prevention, and the second on the development of education based on sexual ethics. Carmody has succeeded in writing an easily accessible, personable and practical text, with a focus on the words of interviewees and the mechanics of implementation, in order to reach her desired audience of both academics in the fields of sexuality, gender and violence against women, and practitioners who work with young people. It is for this latter group that the book holds the most exciting potential in providing the grounding for a theory of change for primary prevention programs. It offers an alternative understanding of the causes of sexual violence amongst young people from that of sexual miscommunication, a theory which though having a low evidence base still provides the basis for much violence prevention education (see Burkett and Hamilton (2012) for an interesting discussion). Instead, the sexual ethics model of primary prevention centres on teaching young people the skills for thoughtfulness in their sexual decision-making – the need for which I have seen first-hand.
Before coming into academia, I worked for over a decade in sexual violence prevention with young people, from delivery to lobbying and research. The work was interesting and challenging, but in watching the responses of young people to the messages I found myself delivering, I started to feel uncomfortable with the ways in which our necessary focus on safety was missing discussion of its counterpart: freedom. These two are often lived in tension in women’s lives, and without an explicit recognition of this, our work was working against us. We were slowly, inadvertently, feeding into something positioning young women, and women as a whole, as those whose sexual selves were acted on, rather than as also being sexual agents who acted through their bodies and out into the world. We were missing the opportunity to tease out how both our restrictions and our expressions are lived in relation to, rather than distinct from, each other. There was no space available to talk about or even point to the possibilities of young women masturbating, or the potential pleasure for young women and young men of sex outside of a ‘healthy’ relationship. Even the notion of sexual consent itself was problematic; the best we can hope for is that women agree to sex, to, as Fine (1988) puts it, ‘say yes or no – to a question not necessarily their own’ (p. 34), never that they are the initiator or the desiring agent. Though this may reflect the surface reality in many young people's lives, its reinforcement feeds myths that excuse men's perpetration: for example, men as desiring, women as desired. The underlying message is that women’s bodies are something to be acted on – by young men, or by the young women themselves through beauty practices, diets, adornments and surgery. This is a position that feeds what Young (2005) has described as the inhibited intentionality of female embodiment: a diminishment of our body as capacity. Essentially, our approach was doing nothing to expand the sexual space for action of girls and women (Vera-Gray, 2017). We were acting as unwilling participants in the authorized suppression of a discourse of female sexual desire (Fine, 1988).
This is where Carmody’s work provides such exciting possibilities. She reminds us that educational discourses in violence prevention may have unintended consequences in reinforcing traditional gender and sexuality norms, a warning that work in the Nordic countries has found also applies to race (Honkasalo, 2017). Mirroring my own experience, the empirical basis of the sexual ethics model reveals how young women’s sexual desires and pleasures were missing from their own narratives about their sexual decision-making. That the evaluations of the program show the biggest shift occurs in young women’s ability to articulate their own needs, and young men’s understandings of the needs of the other, demonstrates the value of this approach. The need for such a shift will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has worked with young people around these issues.
What emerges in Carmody’s review of the state of prevention education is a gap between what young people want to know and what is being delivered to them via the school curriculum. To seek the answers to these questions, young people often look to broader cultural products – increasingly pornography – where gender, sexuality and racial norms are reproduced routinely without challenge. The sexual ethics model in contrast offers young people a set of tools to think about how to fill this gap themselves: to ask questions of themselves such as ‘am I doing what I really want to do?’ or ‘how do I know they want to do this?’ It introduces them to concepts such as the Sunlight Test, essentially ‘would I be ok with everyone I respect seeing me do this?’ Most importantly, it does this not through moralizing – presenting the decisions that should be made – but through providing some of the questions that can help young people make and evaluate the decisions themselves; demystifying the process of ethical reflection.
The framework Carmody describes reminded me of Bergoffen’s (1997) work using Simone de Beauvoir to build an erotics of generosity. In fact, the way in which Bergoffen mobilizes Beauvoir’s ethical theorizing of ambiguity leads into the only real point of tension I had with Carmody’s text. Whilst providing a firm critique of the dichotomous structure of sexuality in terms of pleasure or danger that has arranged sexuality and violence prevention education thus far, Carmody still shows a tendency to support the binary in a reworked sense – slipping into the language of ‘sex positivity’ and its obligatory though often unnamed counterpart ‘sex negativity’. This binary still structures and reduces much of the current feminist debates on sex and sexuality. Though on the face of it such labels simply identify positions, I’ve found in my current study on women and pornography that these labels have discursive force, limiting women’s ability to speak of experiences or positions that are more ambiguous than this. These positions reaffirm on an ideological level the separation of women’s sexuality into the oppositions of sexual subject or sexual victim, though on the ground women’s positions are much more conflicted than such a separation allows for (see “Women on Porn”. Available at: www.womenonporn.org).
Carmody recognizes this in the young people she has worked with, noting the ambivalence they see in the real world of consent negotiations. She argues powerfully that ‘(i)f we are to embrace a holistic view of sexuality education, we need to consider the ethical and pleasurable, as well as the unethical and unwanted that manifests in sexual and other forms of gendered violence’ (p. 83). This is where supporting the idea that feminist positions on sexuality can be divided along lines of positivity and negativity prohibits the holistic approach needed and has the unintended consequence of reaffirming the very structure it seeks to destabilize. We need to find a space to move between and within pleasure and danger, safety and desire and victimization and agency. A space where instead of value laden labels such as positive or negative, we are able to begin articulating what Muehlenhard and Peterson (2005) have characterized as a missing discourse of ambivalence. This space may be closer to an erotics entangled in themes of ambiguity and generosity – sitting perhaps more closely with Beauvoir than Foucault – however, it is definitely a space that Carmody’s practical approach supports. In highlighting the complexity and uncertainty of ethical decision making, the framework outlined in this book, and the wealth of research underpinning it, offers an invitation for young people to develop skills of self-reflection. In a world increasingly structured by swiftness and impermanence, this turn to radical thoughtfulness might be just the shift we need.