The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

“Feminism cannot indulge the fantasy that interests always converge; that our plans will have no unexpected, undesirable consequences; that politics is a place of comfort.”

“Feminism is not a philosophy, or a theory, or even a point of view. It is a political movement to transform the world beyond recognition. It asks: what would it be to end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women? It answers: we do not know; let us try and see.”

“Sex” in this second sense is also said to be a natural thing, a thing that exists outside politics. Feminism shows that this too is a fiction, and a fiction that serves certain interests. Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing. The roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world.”

“This is the deep contradiction at the heart of the incel phenomenon: incels oppose themselves to a sexual market in which they see themselves as losers, while being wedded to the status hierarchy that structures that market.”

“A famous philosopher once said to me that he objected to feminist critiques of sex because it was only during sex that he felt truly outside politics, that he felt truly free. I asked him what his wife would say to that.”

“Think back, she asks straight women, to the first time you betrayed your best friend for male attention. Was that natural? Inevitable? Or something demanded of you by the infrastructure of male domination, which fears most of all the absence of female desire, and with it the end of men’s presumed access to women’s bodies, labor, minds, hearts?”

“But many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors, overwhelmingly male, intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect.”

“The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement—feminism, anti-racism, the labor movement—that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of color, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.”

“women’s autonomy, even if it spares men a good number of problems, will also deny them many conveniences; assuredly, there are certain ways of living the sexual adventure that will be lost in the world of tomorrow: but this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry, and dreams will be banished from it.”

“But Indians are such civilized people,” he said. I wanted to tell him that there is no civilization under patriarchy.”

“It is absurd to contend that … vice, ecstasy, and passion would become impossible if man and woman were concretely peers; the contradictions opposing flesh to spirit, instant to time, the vertigo of immanence to the appeal of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of oblivion will never disappear;”

“The question, from a feminist perspective, is why sex crimes elicit such selective skepticism. And the answer that feminists should give is that the vast majority of sex crimes are perpetrated by men against women. Sometimes, the injunction to “Believe women” is simply the injunction to form our beliefs in the ordinary way: in accordance with the facts.”

“As Rebecca Solnit put it: “Sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status, and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity.” Incels, Solnit says, “are furious at their own low status, but don’t question the system that allocates status and commodifies us all”

“But these feminists might counter that they are responding to another, equally real choice, which proponents of sex workers’ rights ignore: the choice between making life better for the women who sell sex now, and bringing into existence a world in which sex is no longer bought and sold.”

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined.”

“Kincaid doesn’t want us to see him as a cliché. He also presumably doesn’t want us thinking about—or isn’t himself aware of—the gender dynamics that underpin this cliché. By this I don’t only mean the way that boys and men are socialized to find domination sexy, and girls and women to find subordination sexy; or the way that some male professors blend sexual entitlement with intellectual narcissism, seeing sex with women students as the delayed reward for suffering through an adolescence in which brawn or cool were prized more highly than brains.”

“Indeed, what is remarkable about the sexual revolution—this is why it was so formative for the politics of a generation of radical feminists—is how much was left unchanged. Women who say no still really mean yes, and women who say yes are still sluts. Black and brown men are still rapists, and the rape of black and brown women still doesn’t count. Girls are still asking for it. Boys still must learn to give it.”

“on the contrary, it is when the slavery of half of humanity is abolished and with it the whole hypocritical system it implies that the … human couple will discover its true form.”

“When you are a woman and a philosopher,” wrote the French philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff, “it is useful to be a feminist in order to understand what is happening to you.”

“Specifically, pornography performs the speech act of licensing the subordination of women, and conferring on women an inferior civic status. Like the stampede that follows my shouting “Fire!,” porn’s effects on women are not just, anti-porn feminists think, the expected result, but moreover the whole point of pornography.”

“As Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici pointed out in the 1970s, and Nancy Fraser has argued since, the family as a site of feminine care serves capitalism by giving men emotional and sexual compensation for the coercion of market relations.”

“When the teacher takes the student’s longing for epistemic power and transposes it into a sexual key, allowing himself to be—or worse, making himself—the object of her desire, he has failed her as a teacher.”

“Judges routinely decided that workplace sexual harassment was a “personal” matter, or that it was discrimination not “on the basis of sex” but on the basis of something else, like being the sort of woman who didn’t want to have sex with her boss—a characteristic which, unlike sex, was not protected by anti-discrimination legislation.”

“It is true that women have always lived in a world created by men and governed by men's rules. But it is also true that men have always lived alongside women who have contested these rules.”

“Women sell sex, on the whole, because they need money; to give sex-less men money with which to pay for sex presupposes that there are women who need to sell sex to live.”

“And yet, if the aim is not merely to punish male sexual domination but to end it, feminism must address questions that many feminists would rather avoid: whether a carceral approach that systemically harms poor people and people of color can serve sexual justice; whether the notion of due process—and perhaps too the presumption of innocence—should apply to social media and public accusations; whether punishment produces social change. What does it really take to alter the mind of patriarchy?”

“A vexed question: when is being sexually or romantically marginalized a facet of oppression, and when is it just a matter of bad luck, one of life’s small tragedies? (When I was a first-year undergraduate I had a professor who said, to our grave disappointment, that there would be heartbreak even in the post-capitalist utopia.)”