Snogs of innocence, snogs of experience

Abstract

The current conventional wisdom is that rape is wrong because it is contrary to the interest in bodily autonomy: human beings are entitled to decide the conditions under which they will have sex. That is, it is grounded in an assumption that sexual pleasure is a good thing, and it is wrong to subject a person to sexual contact contrary to that person's intentions. But this assumption has not entirely replaced earlier assumptions, such as that sexual activity is always wrong and can be justified only by the need to reproduce the human race, or assumptions that sexual activity is right and good in the context of a lifelong marital commitment, but not otherwise. Here, I examine a number of subplots, themes and episodes within the series Dollhouse, Firefly, Blake's 7, The 4400, and Dawson's Creek with a view to analyzing the issues of sexual consent and autonomy raised within them.