Separating sex from love hasn’t made it more fun or less complicated

Concepts such as consent can fall apart during sex with strangers.

By Gracy Olmstead

For days, the story was inescapable. In a Jan. 13 article for the website Babe.net, reporter Katie Way detailed the experiences of “Grace,” a young woman whose date with actor Aziz Ansari went terribly wrong. According to Grace, Ansari kept initiating sex despite her nonverbal cues and distinct reticence. The article launched countless responses, quickly delving into arguments over what counts as assault. Many young women chimed in to say they had experienced similar encounters — experiences that left them feeling wounded and confused, if not traumatized.

Grace’s story comes a month after the New Yorker’s notorious “Cat Person” short story, which depicted an awkward sexual encounter — one that later catapulted into the aggressive, but in the moment, was mostly just unpleasant. It spurred a healthy and valuable debate about bad sexual encounters, ones that transcend the legalities of consent and touch on the deeper dignity and happiness of the human person.

Both “Cat Person” and the Babe article suggest that we may have lost something in today’s casual hookup culture: an ingredient in more old-fashioned sexual encounters that…