Deanne Carson is a sexuality expert – which sounds like a title you would only ever apply to yourself – and she has pink hair, but that’s not the controversy. She’s in the news because this week she told ABC News in Australia that, in order to establish a “culture of consent” in a household, you should ask your baby for permission before you change its nappy. The language doesn’t have to be complicated: “I’m going to change your nappy now, is that OK?” will do fine. This, said Twitter and assorted moral-majority response units, is truly the endpoint of political correctness gone mad – the giddy limit of liberal bullshit, an abnegation of parental authority amounting to neglect.
I disagree with Carson, too, but not for those reasons. Babies are good at signalling their lack of consent; the only problem is that you never know to what they’re not consenting. It might be the violation of their personal autonomy or it might be the dappled shading of some leaves that reminds them of the lost comfort of the dark womb. But even if you knew to what they weren’t consenting, you would ignore them anyway, so what you’re establishing is not a culture of consent, but a culture of the language of consent, masking a culture of complete dominance. You are gaslighting your baby, in other words.
It’s a classic of authoritarian deceit, immortalised in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: to impart information before its recipient is old enough to understand it, thereby heading off the questions they would ask once they were old enough. In the novel’s case, it’s that they have been bred as an underclass to have their organs harvested, whereas Carson’s idea is about the principles of physical intercourse, but the underpinning manoeuvre is the same: manipulating someone’s ignorance in order to control them and their worldview. It’s actually a bit sinister, but then so much absolutism is.
Maternal love is inherently dicey and knows no consent. It starts with 18 months cuddling someone full-time when you know they can’t say “no” and it takes another couple of decades before you can process the idea that they are not still a part of your body. The least you can do, and also the most liberal thing, is admit it.