About a year ago, David Morrow, an employee of Britain’s Public Health Service, was running late for work when he chanced upon the "Kilroy Show" on television. The BBC program was about date rape and, as Morrow put it, "people were shouting and screaming" about what constituted evidence of consent.

That’s when Morrow got the idea for the "consent condom." Morrow’s invention is a condom that has been double wrapped. The outer sleeve reads "yes, I consent to have sex with you" in one of seven languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. The inner sleeve has been treated with chemicals that record fingerprints. As the woman removes the inner sleeve, her finger print is recorded. This, along with tabs indicating the date of the sexual encounter, will serve as proof of her consent to sexual relations.

Morrow says that his invention serves a two-fold purpose: it provides a "quick and easy way of proving consent," and it also encourages condom use. But Morrow’s aspirations don’t end there. A visit to the Consent Condom website reveals an almost missionary zeal regarding sexual relationships between men and women. In language that consciously or unconsciously — I can’t tell which — mimics the rhetoric of Internet zealots, Morrow and his backers talk about creating "a new sexual etiquette for men and women."

What does this "etiquette" look like? It’s one where both parties can be "responsible, open and mature within sexual relations, [while] attempting to avoid misunderstanding." It’s one where women are "empowered" because they encourage men to use condoms. This etiquette, according to Morrow, is needed because "in the area of socio-sexual interaction whether it be flirting, seduction or coercion, there are complex and subtle signals from both parties. This situation is unfortunately prone to misunderstanding."

To put it mildly, not everyone is as enthusiastic about Morrow’s invention as he is. A spokeswoman for Women Against Rape told London’s Evening Standard that the consent condom "sounds like another way to put women at a disadvantage. What on earth makes them think that a man who can coerce a woman to have sex against her will could not coerce her in the same way into opening a box of condoms?" Newsweek called Morrow’s invention the "unsexiest" idea since you found out that your parents did it.

For his part, Morrow is undeterred by his detractors. As he told the Standard, "people may say [consent condoms] are a passion killer but they are a product for our times."

I don’t know about the "passion killer" part, but he’s absolutely right about his invention being a "product for our times," albeit not in the way he means. The consent condom is a product for our times because it represents our thinking about sex taken to its logical conclusion.

In the mid 1960s, the Sexual Revolution jettisoned a sexual morality that had been in place for nearly two millennia. In this morality, young men had no reasonable expectation of sex. While this didn’t prevent all attempts at pressuring women for sex, it certainly reduced the incidence of what Morrow euphemistically calls "misunderstandings." Furthermore, in a culture where women were less sexually active, claims of consent on the woman’s part were accorded less credibility. You may consider this is archaic and sexist thinking. Maybe. What’s certain is that women enjoyed a measure of protection they’re missing today.

The Sexual Revolution replaced this morality, which was the product of Christianity, with an ethic that taught that sex, being a biological or "natural" function, had little to do with morality. Sexual acts were neither right nor wrong and what a person did in the bedroom had little, if any, bearing on what kind of person they were.

But while we denied the rightness and wrongness of sexual acts, we couldn’t deny these acts had consequences, among them, sexually-transmitted diseases and questions of consent. After the sexual revolution, the question became: how do you minimize the fall out from sexual liberation without attacking sexual liberation itself? The first part of that response was to turn, as columnist Charles Krauthammer put it, sexual education from "a form of moral education" to "a branch of hygiene."

Sexual acts were no longer moral or immoral. What mattered was whether they were sanitary or unsanitary. The symbol of this shift in emphasis was, of course, the condom. To paraphrase what Robert De Niro’s character said at the start of "Casino," the condom does for the promiscuous what Las Vegas does for gamblers: it’s a "morality car wash" that "washes away [their] sins." In other words, it lends an air of responsibility to an act that is about self-indulgence.

Even if you assume the condom answered the questions surrounding sexually-transmitted diseases, that still left the question of consent. Concerns about date rape and, more recently, things like gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), a.k.a. the "date rape" drug, have prompted an increasingly legalistic approach to the question of consent, both legislatively and on college campuses. Perhaps the best-known, and certainly the most derided, is Antioch College’s sexual consent policy, which requires that "verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct in any given interaction, regardless of who initiates it ..."

What sets Antioch’s policy apart is its almost comical attempt at precision — it includes a proviso that, for purposes of policy, American Sign Language constitutes "verbal language" — not the assumptions that motivates the policy. Schools all across the country have similar, if less well-known, guidelines. In the age of hooking up, when telling people that chastity is not an option, we expect laws, rules and checklists to substitute for self-restraint and concern for the other person’s well-being.

And that brings us back to the consent condom. Morrow’s idea sounds ridiculous and it may very well fail, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere. Morrow is trying to do the same thing as countless sex educators and other apostles of the Sexual Revolution: make sure that the "no-big-deal" sex people are having is sanitary and consensual. If the double wrapped package makes sex seem, well, unsexy, it’s not Morrow’s fault. It was the sexual revolution that took a great and mysterious gift and turned it into the stuff of hygiene class and notary publics. It is they, not Morrow, and certainly not the advocates of sexual restraint, that have created a world where sex is both pedestrian and a threat to the safety and dignity of women.

The only way out of this predicament is through the sexual morality that prevailed prior to the Sexual Revolution. That may sound unrealistic, but what’s more unrealistic is expecting a generation of young men who have come to see sex as almost an entitlement, and without either emotional or moral consequences, to be deterred by codes or regulations. I hate to generalize, but if nearly 5,000 years of recorded history teaches us anything, it’s that men are inclined toward promiscuity and will take advantage of women. What stops them is a culture and a morality that teaches them to do better than that. We had such a morality and replaced it with one that could be accurately summed up with a little foil packet. That’s foolish in any language.