SAVE ME, DADDY:

A throughline emerges in all these cases: These are women who made decisions under their own power, but couldn't cope in the aftermath when those choices made them feel terrible. Under other circumstances, this might lead a person to contemplate the gap between her actions, her desired outcome, and the actual result--and to recognize that this kind of miscalculation is normal, human, and an essential part of the trial-and-error process by which we eventually become better judges of what will make us happy. But consent culture increasingly doesn't leave the door open for that kind of nuance. There is no room within the framework for a desired choice to lead to regret, or for a woman to say, "I wanted this in the moment, even if things didn't work out as I'd hoped." Instead, women retroactively strip themselves of their agency: "I didn't consent to feeling bad about this, hence I didn't consent to any of it."

It's not hard to understand why young women are leaning into victimhood in the aftermath of these "gray area" encounters. Societally, and particularly when it comes to sex, we remain far more comfortable with the idea of women as helpless victims than as autonomous human beings who sometimes want things that aren't good for them. Overt slut-shaming has gone out of style, but the stigma surrounding female desire lingers. And there are few things that are worse to feel than ashamed of yourself, and few things harder than owning responsibility for the choices that led you there. Under those circumstances, "Look what you made me do" can be an attractive way out, an opportunity for young women to avoid reckoning with the consequences of their own choices. Faced with the weight of self-blame, or blame from others--deserved or not-- it's all too tempting to dump it all in someone else's lap, or maybe even see him punished for not saving you from yourself. Consider this moment in the first episode of the Radiolab series, in which Prest walks home after hooking up with a former boyfriend--sex which she initially claimed not to want, but then consented to and enjoyed, a fact which leaves her angry and conflicted. Marinating in regret, she considers her decision, wondering, "Is that on me?"--only to reject the patently obvious answer: Yes, it's on you.

The easier path is a retreat from autonomy and into pre-ordained powerlessness, where "I didn't say 'no'" becomes "I couldn't," and the thousand-year weight of the patriarchy pins you in place but also shields you from responsibility. Passivity can feel like safety. But that safety comes at a cost, one that women ought to consider before they go all in on this fragile, passive brand of femininity: To admit your desires is to make yourself vulnerable, and to pursue what you want is to risk not getting it (or getting but regretting it, and having to revise your future behavior accordingly). But if your goal is to protect women at all costs from feeling bad about their choices--because you don't think they can handle it, and they probably don't know what they want anyway--then we already have a word for that. It's not feminism. It's paternalism. And it denies women a fundamental if unglamorous freedom: to not just make decisions, but to live with and learn from the consequences of their less-than-great ones.

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