Consent, Taboo and #MeToo

Last week Sean Westin was acquitted on charges of sexual assault. The embarrassing details of the case were splayed across the pages of the Uinta County Herald. Sean, a body builder who worked as a personal trainer used his position to solicit sexual favors from a client.

At issue in the trial was whether her consent was freely granted. The woman’s traumatic brain injury as a child, her huge disadvantage in physical strength and the threat of monetary loss all combined to raise the question of whether she was capable of free consent.

In another case, a federal judge in Casper awarded Amanda Dykes $221,000 in back pay, ruling that she had no choice but to resign from her job in the Wyoming Military Department. In this case, there was no sexual activity and no consent. Nor was there threatening conduct, verbal abuse, or obscene language.


Rather, her supervisors failed to protect her from the unwanted advances of Don Smith, the director of the Youth Challenge Program at Camp Guernsey. He was apparently dissatisfied with his own marriage and took to email, written notes, and personal visits to Amanda’s work space to attempt an extramarital affair.

U.S. District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl ruled that Smith’s persistent advances after Dykes had rejected them created a hostile work environment. In a stinging letter he rebuked the Wyoming Military Department saying, “[they] should be embarrassed by the multiple failures” of Dykes’ supervisors to address her complaints effectively.

Meanwhile, at Utah State University in Logan, the piano program has been rocked by allegations of sexual discrimination, harassment, and assault. On April 6, 2018 the investigative agency, Snell & Wilmer, released a report of its investigation into abuses alleged on social media in mid-February.

Professor Gary Amano, long-time Director of the USU piano program and world-renowned piano teacher has retired in its wake. To be clear, he is alleged to have discriminated, but not to have harassed or assaulted anyone himself. He remains well-respected piano professional. The question is whether he and other supervisors did enough to address complaints of harassment and assault by others in the department.

USU Press Conference

The perpetrators of the harassment and assault appear to be three former, and one present members of the piano faculty (their names were not released). Over the course of two decades, there were both allegations and admissions of inappropriate sexual relations between students and faculty. The investigators have concluded that these were known to the heads of the program but were not adequately addressed.

Both those engaged in student sexual affairs and those supervisors faulted for lacking supervision and discipline defended themselves by asserting that the sexual contact was consensual.

There’s that word, again. All three cases—and a jillion more—hinge on the question of consent. Inappropriate professor-student relationships, inappropriate extramarital relationships, inappropriate trainer-client relationships are all justified by the nebulous claim of consent.

All three of these cases sicken me.

Let’s be perfectly clear. None of these things should have been done. Women and men were seriously hurt, with lasting effect. They were hurt psychologically, physically and spiritually. Budding careers were derailed, academic progress impeded. People who placed themselves and their children in the care of others were betrayed by institutions and persons who should have been safe and nurturing.

What has gone so wrong with our world that so many people in so many walks of life are being hurt in such terrible ways? What should we be doing to reduce these harms? These are the question with which we should be wrestling.

The answers are not simplistic. We should start with the admission that such evils have always been perpetrated among human beings. But while admitting this, we should also notice that far more people are being hurt today than in previous generations.

These two admissions both agree on one thing. Human sexuality is entirely different than animal sexuality. There is not a single case of long-term psychological or emotional damage caused by disordered sexuality among dogs, cats, or laboratory mice. Nor are there any sexual predators in the animal world. Those are only found among humans acting inhumanely.

Societies that understand the deep, spiritual meaning of human sexuality have worked together to guard and protect one another from abuses that arise when sexuality is downgraded to mere animal instincts. As our own society has abandoned these basic truths, we have seen untold damage to families and to individuals—both men and women, both children and adults.

The first step to recovering sexual sanity is to be clear on this point. In the animal world, desire and consent are all that matters. Not so among humans. For us, there are some things that should never be desired and should never receive consent. These are taboo.

Many of these are still recognized in law. Incest, bestiality and pederasty are among them, so also statutory rape. No amount of consent, by any definition, can make such things right.

Related to these are policies in the work place and in schools that protect people from unwanted advances. School is an extension of the home. It is the place where parental guidance and instruction are carried out on behalf of parents. That is the fundamental reason why every school has policies prohibiting the sexualization of the teacher-student relationship.

This taboo was downplayed and ignored on the USU campus and many people were hurt as a result. Parents who felt betrayed by inappropriate faculty relations with their children were completely in the right. Age has nothing to do with it. The nature of the relationship was at stake.

Part of this taboo involves a power differential. Professors have such enormous power over the future of their students that special care must be taken to protect the student from the abuse of this power. That means questions of sexual consent should not even be possible.

The same goes for monetary pressure and work relationships. That’s why prostitution is not treated as private consent, but as a public harm. If we can’t understand this in the abstract, the current explosion of human trafficking should help us see the light.

Then, there are marriage promises made before a judge. Why should a judge be involved in hearing the promise, “til death us do part,” if he doesn’t care whether or not the promise is kept? Quite apart from whether Mr. Smith was being inappropriately persistent in his amorous pursuit of Ms. Dykes, somebody should have taken him to the woodshed for violating his marriage vows.

One of the problems that we face today is the disintegration of public morals that are meant to safeguard people from sexual abuses that the law is incapable of stopping. These taboos are not mere holdovers from an unenlightened past. They represent the wisdom of generations that were far-and-way more enlightened than ours.

It’s time to stop attacking taboos in favor of the unfettered pursuit of every desire and the absolute freedom to consent to anything at all. It’s time to reconsider how we might protect one another from a view of human sexuality that never rises above the animal instincts.