The #MeToo movement has made one thing incontrovertibly clear: Contemporary America is confused and conflicted at the deepest level about sex, sexuality, and social norms that should guide men’s and women’s intimate relations. Sometimes these schizophrenic tendencies are on vivid display in the same person.

As the #MeToo movement has spread from the upper echelons of Hollywood to the halls of Congress, what has most struck me is the startling disconnect between the movement’s feverish sensitivity to sexual impropriety, on the one hand, and women’s eager embrace of our nation’s sex-drenched popular culture, on the other.

For example, in 2017—the year #MeToo came to public attention—hip-hop/rap surpassed rock for the first time as the most widely consumed genre of pop music. Americans are now avid consumers of a form of music that demeans and hyper-sexualizes women. Yet far from protesting, Hillary Clinton agreed to appear at the 2018 Grammy awards in a video mocking President Trump that featured raunch-rappers Snoop Dogg and DJ Khaled.

Movies, television shows, and video games routinely depict women as male playthings, and women willingly buy into it. Indeed, the world’s best-selling women’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, coaches them in how to project sexual desirability and availability to men—how to make themselves “hot.” In 2012–13, E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey—written for a female audience—burst onto the publishing scene. Fifty Shades glamorized sadomasochistic abuse of a vulnerable young woman by a powerful man. James earned $95 million by “selling more copies” of her book “faster than any other author in history,” according to Forbes.

The #MeToo movement has made one thing incontrovertibly clear: Contemporary America is confused and conflicted at the deepest level about sex, sexuality, and social norms that should guide men’s and women’s intimate relations. Sometimes these schizophrenic tendencies are on vivid display in the same person.

Model and actress Emily Ratajkowski, for example, made news when she was arrested at the U.S. Senate Building during an anti-Kavanaugh demonstration. “Today I was arrested protesting the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, a man who has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault,” she tweeted. “Men who hurt women can no longer be placed in positions of power.” Yet ­Ratajkowski launched her career by dancing nude in an R&B music video, arousing the male libido that fires the “rape culture” she deplores.

Nowhere is the current confusion more evident than on American college campuses, where administrators tolerate the hook-up culture—in which young people engage in casual sex with no intention of emotional connection—as a matter of course. “Casual sex was happening before in college,” according to Indiana University psychologist Debby Herbenick, “but there wasn’t the sense that it’s what you should be doing. It is now.”

Joanna Coles, former editor of Cosmopolitan, reports in a new book on what has become a way of life for some female students. A friend’s daughter, she says, gave this description of a typical weekend at her liberal arts college: “My friends and I all go out on Friday nights, get drunk and hook up. And on Saturday morning, we go down to the health center together to get Plan B.” Some feminist commentators regret how women’s own behavior is contributing to an apparent epidemic of sexual harassment. “I’ve noticed a weird pattern, in fiction and life, about sexual encounters,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote recently. “Women decide they’re not attracted to a guy they’re nestling with . . . But they go ahead and have sex anyhow.” Why? she asks.

Jessica Bennett, who was appointed the Times’s first “gender editor” in October 2017, thinks she knows. Bennett openly admits that she and her friends often say “yes when we really mean no” to a sexual encounter. They wish to avoid hurting men’s feelings, having to argue, or appearing inexperienced.

Sex today, she explains, often falls into a “gray zone.” By this, she means

that murky gray area of consent; begrudgingly consensual sex, because, you know, you don’t really want to do it but it’s probably easier to just get it over with; lukewarm sex, because you’re kind of ‘meh’ about it; and of course, bad sex, where the ‘bad’ refers not to the perceived pleasure of it, but to the way you feel in the aftermath.

Many women now believe they are supposed to—expected to—have casual sex with men who don’t respect or care for them.

This was not supposed to happen. The sexual revolution promised to lead to more natural and equal relations between men and women. By draining sex of moral content and stripping it of the context of a loving relationship, however, it made the very idea of consent problematic. After all, theologian Angela Franks asks, if an act has no content, how do you know if you want it? “Without a sense of a true good in relationships,” she says, “we don’t know to what we should consent. We are left with an arbitrary act of the will.” As a result, women faced with potential sexual encounters today must contend with what Franks calls “the default of the yes.” While a woman may turn down any given opportunity for sex for idiosyncratic reasons, she can no longer invoke socially supported ways to say no.

A recent Wall Street Journal article likewise confirms that women face pressure to engage in sex even in the most fleeting of encounters. The article—titled “Saying OK to Sex? There’s an App for That”—advises women to “decide what you want in advance,” including “the type of sex” or “whether you want it to be casual or part of a continuing relationship.” Then, it suggests,

If you have a date but don’t want to have sex that night, tell the person beforehand. And give a reason. “I am eager to go out with you tonight but have to get home early.” This will make sure everyone is on the same page.

In other words, a woman who doesn’t want to have sex must not only expect to apologize for but to defend her decision. She can’t even tell a man the truth about why.

Technology (of course) is coming to the rescue of men and women who want to get their consent on record. The Wall Street Journal reports that phone apps, such as the recently introduced uConsent, “allow potential sexual partners to tell each other what level of physical intimacy they are comfortable with and record their eventual agreement so there is no misunderstanding.” The process works this way:

One person types what he or she is requesting into the app . . . [and] the other person . . . then types into his or her phone what he or she will agree to, and a bar code is generated. The two people then hold their phones together and the app captures the bar code and makes sure that what was requested matches what was granted.

The next frontier in twenty-first-­century romance: trying to find the magic moment to pop the cell phone app question.

The #MeToo movement has revealed the treacherous nature of a central tenet of the sexual revolution—that women can enjoy casual sex with men who want their bodies but don’t care about their welfare. The New York Times’s Bennett points out, for example, that men and women have “wildly different understandings of consent.” In one study, 61 percent of men said they rely on nonverbal cues to indicate whether a partner consents, while only 10 percent of women said they actually give consent through body language. And since persuasion is part of the sexual game, many men just take “no” as a reason to try harder, Bennett adds. A 2015 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that at least 40 percent of current or recent college students believe that undressing, getting a condom, or nodding “yes” establishes consent for sexual activity. Conversely, at least 40 percent said those same actions do not.

Bennett also observes that a woman’s decision to consent “isn’t always black and white.” Given the difficulty of knowing what she is consenting to, a woman may well become caught up in the whim of a moment—which is hard to explain to herself or the man involved, and liable to change suddenly.

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