As I read Christine Emba’s new book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, I couldn’t help but be reminded of New York Times columnist David Brooks. Emba’s book follows the same formula that appears in much of Brooks’s writing: Start with lots of personal reflection, interviews, and research from sources that politically liberal readers will find palatable, and finish with conclusions that are presented as revelatory but are likely to strike conservative or religious readers not only as rather obvious but also as insufficient.

That’s not to say it’s a bad book. On the contrary, it’s well written and engaging, and it tackles harmful beliefs about sex head-on. Through interviews, personal stories, and profiles, Emba illustrates the emptiness of a sexual ethic premised on radical autonomy, which sees consent as the only determinant of sexual morality and tells women that they should sterilize themselves physically and emotionally in pursuit of an idealized, consequence-free, masculine experience of sex. She also makes clear the destructive consequences of the consumption of ever more disturbing pornographic material, which has mainstreamed violent and degrading sexual practices to the point that many young women feel they can’t say no to submitting to them.

Emba seeks to affirm young, secular readers’ sense that “there is something unmistakably off in the way we’ve been going about sex and dating,” and she calls for “a new ethic” based on “willing someone else’s good.” This sounds very nice — as far as it goes. Even as she gently pushes readers to consider the idea that “some desires are worse than others,” she shies away from making definitive statements about human nature or positing objective standards of morality beyond empathy. As a result, her “new ethic” ends up rather modest: Think about the other person and what they want, and maybe wait and get to know them a bit first.

Much of the ground Emba covers is already well trod. She describes the disillusionment and dissatisfaction wrought by new technologies, such as Tinder, that commodify sex, and the chilling effect of the Me Too movement on romance and dating. She laments the lack of social scripts for dating, whose clear boundaries free men and women to get to know each other in safe ways. This is certainly a real problem. Still, it sounds a lot like the critiques that organizations such as the Love and Fidelity Network have been making about hookup culture for the last two decades.

Emba takes as her opponent the egalitarian, sex-positive brand of feminism exemplified by Mia Hamm and Michael Jordan’s “Anything you can do, I can do better” Gatorade commercial from the late Nineties. She argues forcefully against the ideas that men and women are the same and that it is empowering for women to imitate pornified male fantasies of casual sex. Unfortunately, she doesn’t meaningfully engage with intersectional feminism (save for one paragraph connecting it to our reluctance to impose our morality on others), which has long since trickled down into mainstream discourse about sex and, in particular, gender.

Mia Hamm isn’t making headlines anymore; Lia Thomas is. Today, discourse around sexual politics tends to center on the oppression that women and transgender people face at the hands of privileged cisgender white males. Yet, even though she devotes an entire chapter to the claim that men and women are not the same, Emba relegates the cultural battlefield of transgender ideology to a single footnote. It’s understandable that she wants to stay away from hot-button culture-war issues to avoid alienating her readers. Still, it seems unlikely that a generation of young people trained to detect and call out heteronormativity and transphobia is going to unquestioningly accept that innate biological differences between men and women should be the basis of our sexual ethics when they can’t even admit that these differences should be the basis of sports teams.

On the other end of the spectrum, traditional sexual ethics and their religious foundations also get surprisingly short shrift, appearing mainly through Emba’s personal experiences. She opens the book by sharing that in college and for much of her twenties, she stayed a virgin, inspired by her Evangelical upbringing and her conversion to Catholicism as a young adult. But, she writes, “I didn’t end up waiting until marriage to have sex. I held onto abstinence for a while and then let it go, after emerging from a failed relationship and wrestling with my own faith. I stayed Catholic, but sex went from something longed for and maybe slightly feared to something far more down-to-earth.” Later, in a chapter titled “Sex Is Spiritual,” she writes, “I was raised with the understanding that sex should be saved for marriage, on pain of . . . something. Converting to Catholicism, I came to a more nuanced view. Sex was incredibly meaningful, but having it wasn’t a sin.” I appreciate the attempt to correct Catholicism’s reputation as repressive, but it seems odd to imply that the church doesn’t prohibit sex outside marriage.

Emba does argue that “even the most restrictive Christian prohibitions on sex actually provide a positive vision of what sex can be — not just a mundane biological function conducted by fleshy bags of water and DNA but something beautiful and profound.” But she doesn’t go so far as to endorse those prohibitions. Instead, she coaxes readers to move from zero to one, encouraging them to improve their sex lives by practicing “radical empathy: imagining ourselves in the other’s stead and considering what they might feel about the encounter, not just in the moment but in the days to come.” She concedes that this “new ethic” she’s arguing for might require having less sex. Personally, she shares, “In my most recent relationships, I’ve taken some time before having sex.” Not exactly revolutionary, but certainly better than semi-anonymous Tinder hookups.

Emba writes that her “social milieu is educated, young, forward-thinking; the swinging singles of Helen Gurley Brown’s wildest dreams.” Indeed, this is not a book aimed at religious conservatives or woke nonbinary Gen Zers. It’s a book aimed at high-achieving Millennials in their thirties who have prioritized casual sex and career advancement and are starting to question whether any of that is ever going to make them happy. If someone you know meets that description, by all means, buy them a copy of this book. It could do them a world of good. But if you already embrace a robust sexual ethic, feel free to skip this one.