An essay published by The Daily Wire is drawing fresh attention to a long-running cultural fight over how parents should talk to young boys about sex, consent, and respect for women. The piece, written by Elizabeth Grace Matthew for the outlet’s lifestyle vertical, argues that everyday lessons on bodily autonomy and affirmative consent — the sorts of messages that have become common on parenting social media — are not only ineffective at preventing sexual assault but may actually be making things worse.
Matthew opens with the recent case of a female Cornell University student who, she writes, had sex with multiple partners and later alleged she had been raped. According to Matthew, it “remains unclear at this time” whether a sexual assault, as legally defined, occurred. What is clear to her, she writes, is that “a whole lot of people — and most concerningly, many mothers of sons — have utterly inane and patently wrong ideas about how little boys become predatory men and about how to prevent that outcome.”
The Instagram Consent Tutorial
The essay takes direct aim at a genre of parenting content that has flourished on social media: short videos and posts instructing parents on how to teach young children, often as young as seven, about consent. Matthew catalogs examples she says she has encountered on Instagram — reels advising parents to make sure a son stops wrestling the moment a friend says “stop,” even if the friend is laughing and wrestling back; to let a child decline a hug from a grandparent; to stop teasing a sibling when she asks. The stated goal, she notes, is to dismantle what the videos describe as patriarchy and to keep boys from growing up to become rapists.
That logic, Matthew argues, only holds if you accept that murky “he said, she said” cases — like the Cornell episode, where a woman initially consents to intimacy and later feels used or degraded — are rooted in a patriarchal disregard for women’s consent. She calls that premise wrong.
“It is precisely the miring of sex in the language of consent rather than of morality that creates these ‘he said, she said’ dramas,” she writes. In her view, using a girl for sex is an entirely separate matter from teasing a sister, wrestling a friend, or enduring a grandparent’s hug — and conflating them, she contends, trains boys to see a false connection between ordinary childhood interactions and sexual predation.
Consent as the Only Arbiter
The essay identifies a specific philosophical target: the idea that consent is the sole measure of whether an act is right or wrong. Matthew characterizes the mothers posting such content as well-meaning people operating from the premise that “as long as everyone is doing what (s)he wants to do, no kind of physical contact between two people can ever be wrong.” In that framework, she writes, the moment someone dislikes a form of contact, that contact becomes “definitionally predatory.” She labels this a “utopic tyranny of individual preference,” in which feelings reign supreme and consent becomes the only arbiter of morality.
Against that, she asserts that whether a child wants a hug from Grandpa does not determine whether the hug is moral — “Grandpa’s hug probably is safe whether you like it or not” — and that context, grounded in standards rather than feelings, is what actually matters. Defaulting to feelings, she warns, inculcates a kind of fragility that flattens human interaction and, paradoxically, gives would-be predators a vocabulary of litigious standards to hide behind.
The essay also reaches back into feminist history. Matthew cites mid-19th-century first-wave feminists who fought for suffrage and against domestic violence, noting that one of their aims was to extend to women without social standing — factory workers, house servants — the same sexual deference that wealthy daughters received by virtue of influential fathers or husbands. She argues that second-wave feminism, in an “unholy” alliance with the sexual revolution, went the other direction: rather than extending sexual morality to all women, it reduced relations between the sexes to a “quagmire.”
Her portrait of the current moment is one of contradiction. Boys, she writes, are raised in a world where an off-color joke can be labeled bigotry or predation if a woman says she feels uncomfortable, while group sex involving one woman and multiple men can be deemed “perfectly fun, moral, and normal” if the woman agrees. That tension, she suggests, is why cases like the one at Cornell confound so many people.
Morality, Not Consent
Matthew’s central prescription is blunt: “Our sons do not need lessons in consent, but in morality.” Just as a hug from Grandpa is fine whether or not a child likes it, she writes, group sex is not fine regardless of whether participants claim to like it.
She defines positive masculinity as men recognizing their superior physical strength and using it to protect women and children. “Women’s safety and rights fundamentally depend upon the consent of men, while the reverse is not true,” she writes — an asymmetry she says cannot be ignored if the ideal of protective manhood is to be revived. She calls on readers to restore social standards around sex, proposing as one example the norm that sex without the public, monogamous commitment of at least boyfriend-and-girlfriend status is “always and indiscriminately wrong, for men and women alike.” Absent such standards, she argues, society will keep raising men who hesitate to intervene against predators because they are unsure whether they should.
The essay closes with a direct address to parents: don’t teach sons to respect women’s “bodily autonomy” and “affirmative consent” in a bid to fight patriarchy; teach them to respect women as fellow children of God who need and deserve protection from immoral men — “in a long-overdue effort to produce a patriarchy worth having.”
The piece is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s culture and lifestyle section, and is written by a contributor who, per the outlet, writes about books, education, and culture on Substack.
The arguments in the essay are likely to land very differently depending on the reader. For critics of the consent-education approach, the piece articulates a case they say is rarely made in mainstream parenting discourse. For advocates of consent-based sex education, the essay’s framing — that lessons on autonomy and boundaries are “dangerous” for boys — will read as a rejection of the very tools many parents and educators credit with reducing sexual violence. That the essay stakes its position on a disputed case, one the author herself describes as unresolved, is likely to intensify rather than settle the disagreement.
What the piece does make plain is that the debate over how boys are raised is no longer confined to parenting blogs. It is now a front in the broader political argument over gender, family, and what society owes to the vulnerable — and neither side shows any sign of conceding the terms.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-dangerous-lesson-we-keep-teaching-young-boys