On March 26, 2026, the Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government (CCCG) hosted opinion columnist and author Christine Emba as part of Students for Child-Oriented Policy’s (SCOP) annual White Ribbon Against Pornography (WRAP) Week. Co-sponsored by SCOP, the lecture—titled “The Emptiness of the Modern Sexual Ethic”—explored why the modern sexual ethic is failing today’s society.
WRAP Week serves as SCOP’s largest annual event, featuring a series of programs aimed at improving Notre Dame’s culture surrounding pornography, including speaker events. Current SCOP president and Tocqueville Fellow Jack Krieger ’28, who organized the event, worked with the CCCG to identify this year’s keynote speaker. He noted that Emba’s work, which directly engages questions of sexual ethics and pornography, made her a natural fit for the themes of WRAP Week.
Emba is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where her work focuses on gender and sexuality, youth culture, and social norms. A graduate of Princeton University, she is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life.
A former evangelical and convert to Catholicism, Emba drew on the inspiration behind her recent book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation (2022), to frame her lecture. She described a recurring pattern in her conversations: a disconnect between what the modern sexual ethic promises and what people actually experience.
Emba characterized this “promise” as one of “freedom, empowerment, [and] fun,” while the lived reality often produces “confusion, sadness, and a vague sense that something was off.” She frequently encountered a similar refrain: “I consented to it, so I guess it’s fine, but it didn’t feel fine.” This, she argued, reveals a fundamental issue—what she termed “the gap between the legal permission and the actual goodness of the encounter.”
To explore this gap, Emba offered a three-part diagnosis of the modern sexual ethic. First, she identified what she called the “dating recession,” noting that roughly half of single adults have given up on dating, particularly among Gen Z. While the modern ethic promised a “golden age of dating,” facilitated by apps and fewer social taboos, many instead report feeling lonely, anxious, and exhausted.
Second, Emba described a broader “spiritual and cultural malaise.” The sexual revolution, she argued, failed to deliver on its promises of freedom and equality, having been “co-opted by both capitalism and American individualism.” In this framework, sex becomes detached from meaning and subject to market logic—encouraging individuals to “maximize your options, minimize your commitment, and optimize for experience.” Reduced to a transactional exchange defined by consent and physical pleasure, sex is stripped of its connection to the whole person.
Within this malaise, Emba emphasized the limitations of the consent paradigm, which has become the dominant moral framework of the modern sexual ethic. Consent, she argued, now functions as the primary ethical threshold, beyond which little moral evaluation occurs. By centering a legal standard rather than a substantive moral vision, this framework reduces sex to a kind of formal contract, obscuring deeper questions about human flourishing and the good.
Finally, Emba addressed the role of pornography in accelerating these distortions. She argued that American society has become inured to the sexualization and objectification of women, and that pornography shapes not only behavior but perception itself. Quoting early feminist critiques, she noted that pornography “doesn't just depict women's subjugation… it’s training its watchers in it.” As she put it, “Images aren't just images. They are, in fact, what make up our world… what we consume becomes part of our psyche,” raising concerns about an industry that profits from shaping desire without regard for human well-being.
After diagnosing these problems, Emba turned to the question of whether a path forward exists. She suggested that reducing sex to mere transaction leads to dissatisfaction, while recognizing its meaning can foster genuine human flourishing.
As an alternative, Emba pointed to the resources of the Christian sexual ethic. Central to this vision is the belief that human beings cannot be commodified. “If people bear God's image,” she explained, “they can't just be objects for our use. They have to be treated as ends in themselves, not means to our pleasure.”
Emba concluded by calling for a renewed engagement with this ethical framework alongside, rather than in place of, consent. In contrast to the secular model, she argued, the Christian ethic upholds human dignity in a way that allows for meaningful critique of pornography, dating app culture, and broader patterns of degradation. It “acknowledges longing, struggle, the difficulty of waiting, the understanding of failure,” while still offering hope.
The lecture was well attended by Notre Dame students and members of SCOP. Reflecting on the event, Krieger noted that he resonated most with Emba’s claim that something is fundamentally amiss in the modern sexual ethic: “It is deeply felt by men and women alike that relationships are not functioning properly, and yet so many are afraid to question the ethic itself, and instead wonder why they don’t seem built for love.” He added, “Yet, they are built for love—we as a culture just don’t often know what love looks like. The definition she provided for love—willing the good of the other—is something that we could do well to remember.”
Krieger also emphasized the importance of bringing difficult cultural conversations to the forefront on campus. “Discussions like these are important at Notre Dame because we, as college students, are enjoying a special period of time, which, if used well, can set us up for the rest of our lives,” he said. “Getting people talking about these problems gets them thinking about solutions, regarding both the broader sexual ethic and the problem of pornography.”
To view the full recording of Emba’s remarks, as well as past event archives, visit our lecture library. To stay up to date with additional CCCG programming, subscribe to our email list.