The sexual revolution and second-wave feminism were supposed to empower women in society—and in the bedroom. So why are so many millennial women miserable when it comes to their dating and sex lives? Even after the #MeToo movement enshrined “enthusiastic consent” as the baseline requirement for sexual encounters, women (and men) continue to have sex they don’t really want and don’t enjoy.
This week, we talk to Christine Emba, herself a millennial woman, who has surveyed this bleak landscape and think we need to build a new sexual ethic based on empathy and “seeking the good of the other.” Christine is a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. We ask her why consent is not enough to guarantee ethical sex, how young Catholics can have conversations around these fraught issues and what values a healthier sexual culture would uphold.
No Signs of the Times or faith-sharing this week—but that doesn’t mean there was not a lot of Catholic news! Check out some of the great work being done by our America colleagues in the links below.
Links from the show:
- Rethinking Sex: A Provocation
- Bishops have frank conversations with lay theologians about Pope Francis, U.S. Church and Vatican II in semi-off-the-record meeting
- What it means to be a woman — from a Catholic perspective
- Roundtable: Indigenous abuse survivors on truth, reconciliation and the need for a papal apology
- Former Jesuit superior of Ukraine: ‘Putin is destroying the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.’
- Join Jesuitical in Italy!
- Wondrium special offer
What’s on tap?
Coffee