Welcome to the TIFO Podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. I begin today's episode with a caution.

The subject of my discussion is of an adult nature. And so if you're listening to this episode in the car with your children or anything like that,

please be advised. Let's go back to the fall of 2017 when a phrase began to appear on social media.

Slowly at first, and then with increasing frequency, until before long it had gone viral and saturated

Facebook pages and Twitter profiles across the world.

The phrase was me too.

And it was posted by women who were acknowledging in public that they had suffered sexual

abuse of some kind.

That women were sometimes victims of unwanted advances is not news to

anyone. You can find this ugly reality of the human condition, wherein the strong take advantage

of the weak, where men are not self-governing, but enslaved to their untutored desires.

You can find depictions like that in the mythology of ancient Greece and even in

the narrative histories of the Hebrew Bible. The fact is that it takes an awful lot of civilizing

discipline to free men from their base passions. And that work must be undertaken by the social

orders and religious traditions of every decent society in every generation.

In our generation, the legal concept of consent, whereby two responsible, conscientious, free

people agree to enter into the sexual relationship, consent has become a shorthand way

to describe ethical sex. Consent's a good thing because it recognizes the equal dignity of both

participants in this uniquely intimate human relationship. That consent as a part of our sexual

ethics is good, but is it sufficient? That's the question that my guest takes up today,

and she takes up in her fascinating new book, Rethinking Sex.

Christine Emba is a columnist for the Washington Post. In Rethinking Sex, she takes us on a tour

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