Jon Zimmerman's Argument Analysis

“We’re casual about sex and serious about consent. But is it working?”, written by Jon Zimmerman, is published in the In Theory section of the Washington Post on October 13th, 2015. In his article, Zimmerman argues that colleges nowadays go to great length to uphold the “affirmative consent” policy and successfully protect themselves from lawsuits of sexual violence, but a discussion with the students about the emotional intimacy aspect of sex is often missing. Zimmerman accurately assesses the current verbal consent policy and makes good points about why it alone is not enough to make all sex truly consensual, but that one should not feel pressured to give consent if they don’t genuinely want to have sex; however, when he talks about his proposal …show more content…
His teaching career at New York University that involves history and education guarantees that he has spent a considerable amount of time working with the very subjects of the topic – college students. It is safe to assume that Zimmerman has a better view of some of the beliefs, views or lifestyles of today’s students. Moreover, he has written a book on the global history of sex education, and it was published by Princeton University. This means he has done extensive research on how sex is being taught to young minds across eras and countries. In other words, he has seen “the good, the bad and the ugly” of sex education, so when he says that the system that most American colleges are using now is not working, he is speaking from a highly objective perspective – a timeless and global …show more content…
He describes a hypothetical but typical scenario – the kind of scenario in which the mutual agreement of both parties to proceed is not clear, and this prompted us to come up with the verbal consent policy. He then points that regardless of whether the consent is clear or not, he is interested in a different question – between strangers, simply saying something doesn’t necessarily reflect what the person really wants. To extend the tea-analogy in the witty YouTube video we saw in class: perhaps a person only says she wants tea out of courtesy, but in reality, she actually prefers coffee; however, since she said “yes”, she ends up having tea and feels unhappy. The difference here is that sex is a much bigger commitment, one that requires much more emotional investment; therefore, a person is having sex for any reasons other than the intimacy and emotional connection that results from it, is likely not going to express that real reason by simply saying “yes”. This is furthered explained by Zimmerman in the next paragraph: he identifies the logical fallacy in the colleges’ thought process, which goes as follows: colleges assume that certain a population of the school will be having sex with strangers; when they do, they are to give a consent which theoretically proves that one, both parties agree to have sex, and two, both parties believes