While officials in Indonesia have been busy channelling their inner Turnbull in prosecuting sexual infidelity, The University of Technology Sydney has pursued the opposite goal. Its administration wants to make sure that its students are instructed in explicit sexual material whether they consent to it or not.

The irony underlying this latest leftist scheme, is that under the guise of highlighting the importance of “consent” when one has sex, people are being exposed to sexual activity without consent. What’s more, UTS is not alone in pursuing this type of approach. Sydney University has adopted a similar strategy. But according to the UTS website:

I don’t know of anyone—not currently in prison—who thinks that sexual assault, let alone rape, is ever acceptable. But do we really need for something like this to be made compulsory? It’s socially progressive programs like this that border on the puritanical. Actually, that’s being unfair to the Puritans. For at least they never forced everyone in society to take a quiz before they could get their exam results.

Faculty and students that have already taken part in the training say that part of it involves viewing a house with 10 bedrooms. The online viewer—or should that be ‘voyeur’? — then has to click on each bedroom and either hear / read explicit details of the sexual activity in each bedroom. Unsurprisingly, seven of the ten examples involve same-sex couples. And all this time I thought the actual figure for homosexuality was the mythical 10 per cent.

One concerned academic—who is also a Christian—showed their 18-year-old daughter, who after watching a part of the presentation said:

This is misrepresenting young people as if we all take drugs, get drunk and go around having sex…

There was a time—not so long ago—when society was governed by shared values and social mores regarding sexuality. In particular, if you weren’t married then there was supposed to be no consent, at least, not culturally. This venerable tradition protected women in particular from being abused or taken advantage of. As C.S. Lewis wrote just before his death in 1963 for The Saturday Evening Post:

A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women. Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous than men; it is a biological necessity. Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore always be more often the victims than the culprits. Also, domestic happiness is more necessary to them than to us. And the quality by which they most easily hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after they have come to maturity, but this does not happen to those qualities of personality —women don’t really care two cents about our looks—by which we hold women. Thus, in the ruthless war of promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage. They play for higher stakes and are also more likely to lose. I have no sympathy with moralists who frown at the increasing crudity of female provocativeness. These signs of desperate competition fill me with pity.

But now it seems that in this age of anything goes—especially with the historically novel advent of gay marriage—the implementation of consent has become as authoritarian as the radical gender theory that UTS also seeks to impose on it’s students.

Mark Powell is the Associate Pastor of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, Strathfield.

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