she said that phrase ordering a guy off tinder she herself paused and was like i don't. i don't know why i said that maybe that's not the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. the parliamentarian: washington, d.c., april 10, 2023. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable tammy duckworth, a senator from the state of illinois, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patty murray,

president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 8:45 a.m., on thursday, most people don't want to have transactional sex.

you know their idea of a good relationship isn't you know two people bartering for this bodily act but actually something that sees them as a full person something that involves empathy and care and being seen for who they are. and something that leaves their humanity and their human dignity intact. and so while i think that we are sort of being trained to see ourselves as members of a sexual marketplace. there's something within a lot of people that is really repelled by and wants to reject that framing. we just have to figure out how to do so you know, i i've one of the things i've thought for so long is this idea that you know true sexual empowerment. you know regardless of what you decide you want to do and you don't want to do true sexual empowerment requires us to become like critical thinkers about sex like we have to engage with that. you know, it doesn't just have to be this wave coming at us, you know, just because someone tries to sell us a sexual marketplace where the idea that sex should be a kind of marketplace doesn't mean that we have to interact with it that way but to be empowered we have to realize that we have choices to make around what's coming at us. and i feel like that's the part where i get stuck in. everyone gets stuck. is that we often don't realize we have any power to critique what's coming at us or to make decisions around it as opposed to just accepting it. and you know, i'm wondering what do you think we can do to get out of this cycle? because it does seem everybody people have these feelings. but we're so afraid to articulate them. yeah, that's a really good question. i mean i can give to i have two thoughts on this.

one, you know i started writing rethinking sex in 2019 and kept writing it through the pandemic and so there was an interesting shift that i saw happen. pre-pandemic people were moving around. they're really busy. they were swiping away dating away. but when the first lockdowns hit, you know, when people finally had to pause sort of stay home alone or not alone and think about what they wanted from their lives from their relationships. a lot of thinking did happen actually people finally had a second to stop and think like is this thing? i'm doing really bringing me closer to the goals that i have. and so a forced pause was helpful. that said i am not advocating for another pandemic or another, you know, sad reason for a forced pause. i i think sorry, i'm just catching my drain of thought here. i think another thing that we

need to do and that i that was actually kind of the impetus for for writing this book too was after the metoo moment. you know. with the media men list with the aziz ansari story cat person etc it did seem like there was a moment where people had. through conversation through these stories that were finally bubbling up into the public eye. stopped and said, oh, yeah, there's this is bad. i'm not enjoying this scene something something is off here. but that almost felt like where the conversation stopped with the recognition that things were bad. i think that the next step in pushing people to actually take a moment and really think aloud is to have the next step. in an open conversation to kind of propose substantive, you know statements or claims about say what sex means what we want from

it. what is ethical what is not ethical etc and do this in public in conversation with each other not just whispered at bars or among our friends. so that these questions can be sort of argued about debated we can correct our assumptions if they're false and in that way move forward to something better. i mean rethinking sex is subtitled provocation, but you know, it's meant to be a provocation tohis kind of conversation actually by making claims about what sex is say that it's that it's meaningful that it could in fact be spiritual about what our experiences with sex might be that we might want to catch feelings. actually, you know that some longings maybe shouldn't be acted upon because they're not good for us. by actually proposing claims that we can talk about and build understandings from there. we can move forward in the discussion.

there are so many thoughts i have and i feel like you just set up the next set of questions. i wanted to ask you about really perfectly but one of the things i was thinking so much about when i was reading your book was i feel like this book is is really offering permission. because often i think we were afraid to you know, talk about these things or assert things that seem to be maybe a little bit countercultural or that that make us feel vulnerable and is that something that you thought about when you were writing this book that that you because you're also offering your your offering your own feelings, but you're some of your own stories stories of others like do you feel like do you want this book to be permission? i do. absolutely. i mean i think in you know, just the introduction to the book. there's a part where i say. you're not crazy right to the reader. you're you're not crazy. the thing you feel is off is off.

it's not crazy to want something better than the sexual culture that we have now. it's not crazy to be asking questions about whether what's going on is is really right for for you or for society at large. and i think by just allowing people to speak up about what they feel to not necessarily feel like they have to abide by a certain vision of what sex positivity looks like or a certain vision of you know, girl boss or leaning feminism that expands the conversation and you know also allows us to change change the culture if we wish i want to ask about sexual ethics which and you know, you brought up earlier in our conversation the idea of the good and like the sexual good and you just brought up sexual ethics again in a second ago, and i wanted to there's a passage in your book. in this chapter called some desires are worse than others

and you know, you're you're talking before this section about how we fear being asked to look closely at our own desires. and so so here's the section you say the consent paradigm gives us a way out of this discomfort or at least makes it easier for us to stick to a position of moral neutrality. and the contemporary era we have settled upon consent as a lowest common denominator that we can all agree on once we see that is established consent functions as an iron curtain a social and political divider that cuts our experiences in half. we use it to separate our intimate lives into those parts that are up for discussion and those that are seen as exempt from critique. but in allowing consent to be that divider, we have arbitrarily and incorrectly set many of our deepest tensions and disagreements behind a veil consent has helpfully give us a

way of dodging difficult questions about morality and autonomy, but they are unhealthy ones to dodge because some things are worse than others or at least should not be mainstreamed and we should be able to say so and you go on about how hard it's is to express our discomfort. and and then you say when we do want to object to a particular act or practice often the best we can do is frame it as not a moral failing but a failure of consent and i want you to say more about that that you know, you like consent is sort of our only way through but we're we still can't seem to talk about ethics or morality in the context of sex. right, i mean i think one thing one of the things that's interesting about the current sexual landscape is that again as as you said at the very beginning we have a fairly

robust sort of legal doctrine about sex we are able to talk about what's allowed and what's not allowed. but again consent and you know, the legal questions leave so much out, you know practices that are consensual can still be damaging, you know? the lack of consent alone is not the only indicator of problematic sex. and then there's the fact that we can consent to things that are still harmful to us, and we don't really have a language to talk about that when we're only talking about consent. i think that we also just don't really have a strong language for for talking about what is good or you know, what is bad in some sense we have in some ways in the modern era sort of pushed the idea of morality or at least a shared morality kind of out of the public square in within the public square in public. you can talk about whether things are legal. you know what they're consented

to whether they're not whether something was actively criminal. but to go deeper and ask you know, what does this say about us? what are our moral standards and frameworks? do we do we share those when we talk about sex? what should they be what i deal should we hold up that's seen as something private and personal something that maybe you can hold for yourself, but you know you can't put on another person. but then that becomes a little bit strange, you know when it comes to sex because that is something that you're doing with another person where ideally you want to be sharing the same standards and then sex in and of itself is such. such a social act in some ways, you know, it's something that we're all doing. it's something that we all talk about, but it also kind of shapes our society up to you know, the creation of another person. it's implicated in so many other factors. so if we can't really make judgments there then we leave a

lot of space open for you know problems to arise that. we can't really address. i keep trying to get try to figure out why why are we so afraid? of talking about sexual ethics and you know even as a baseline our conversation about consent is is an ethical conversation, you know, it's it has to do with relational ethics because any time you're relating to someone else you're engaging in relational ethics whether you want to name it or not and you know and so our conversation about consent have to do with sexual ethics period but we're so afraid to name that and to go there and why do you think we're so afraid of ethics and morality? well, i think there are a couple of reasons and one actually i think is really justified. you know one of the pushbacks that people have against, you know talking about sexual ethics or sort of old school sexual ethics is that they've been

repressive in the past and we we know this right the sexual revolution happened for a reason the feminist movements happened and are happening for a reason. we've seen how sort of topped down hierarchical understanding of what's right and what's wrong in certain moral codes have been used to oppress and you know reject people for centuries, whether it's women whether it was sexual minorities whether it was people of unfavored races or classes. we've seen how moral judgments can be used as you know. not moral as actually just a way to sort of oppress and and hurt other people and we don't want to do that. we very justifiably sort of moved away from that on purpose because we've seen the harm that it can cause but i think that you know, there's still space to talk about morals in the public square. i think what we have to do, you

know to avoid those harms. is talk about them in public and in common making sure that we are inclusive of the views of you know groups that have been marginalized in the past and that we make our assumptions courageable as we learn more about other people who we didn't know as we sort of get more input from other groups who we might be thinking about making decisions for we actually bring that information into play into how we make up our boundaries today. one of the topics that you you bring up here and there throughout the book and you devote a chapter to the is faith and spirituality and relation to this topic and you know you really have this expansive open inclusiveness about how you're approaching faith and relation to sex and i think you know, we often see faith and sex as

competing and you know, you're really opening the door, i think for readers to to contemplate. their own faith commitments whatever they may be in relation to this topic, and i was wondering if you could say more about that choice you made with this book to include faith. yeah, you know writing this book was. it started out as almost an academic question in some ways thinking about the sexual culture post me too and being like what's wrong here. how do we fix it? and then in the course of writing a book about sex and sexual ethics? i becamimplicated myself and you know, i hado think about where did i get my ideas about what is good and not good or what's right and what's wrong and how relatable are those? and you know the way that i think about these questions about a lot of questions is influenced by my faith. i'm i'm catholic christian, but i also wanted to write a book that was you know relevant to

not just christians or not just people of faith, but anybody who wanted to enter this conversation about our sexual culture and how to make it better. so in the book i talk about for instance. what might be a better standard for sex a better sexual ethic and i propose the idea of willing the good of the other and that's aristotle by way of saint thomas aquinas, you know and willing the good of the other implies that you think about the other persons good as much as you would think about your own, you know, you you way care for them. as highly as you way care for yourself. and it also suggests that you have to figure out what the good is right? you actually have to be searching for the good the common good. and i like this ideal, even though it sort of it does spring in some ways from faith and catholic social teaching because it's legible to anyone, you know in some ways the golden rule crosses