How Should Feminists Have Sex Now?
When the activist and writer Ellen Willis published “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution” in 1982, the preposition in her title underscored an uncomfortable truth: The sexual revolution had come and (mostly) gone and left women largely unsatisfied. On the one hand, the ’60s and ’70s had ushered in real, tangible gains. Contraception and abortion had been legalized; the stigmas surrounding casual and extramarital sex had lessened. For women, there weren’t as many punishments for daring to have sex as there had been before. Still, the rewards hadn’t entirely materialized, either. Willis is chiefly remembered today for defining the concept of pro-sex feminism, refusing to condemn pornography—as many feminists did—and espousing the radical idea that “sexual love in its most passionate sense is as basic to happiness as food is to life.” But the new “liberated” sexuality, Willis noted in the early ’80s, was “often depressingly shallow, exploitative, and joyless.” True sexual liberation, she argued, would involve “not only the abolition of restrictions, but the positive presence of social and psychological conditions that foster satisfying sexual relations. And from that standpoint, this culture is still deeply repressive.”
Willis published that essay almost exactly 40 years ago, and it’s hard to argue that either the sex or the culture is functioning much better than it was then. Sex has certainly been destigmatized, even and the attention-seeking home-renovation series .) The , though, has imposed unforgiving consequences for many people who become pregnant, and well-intentioned sex positivity seems, on its own, inadequate in addressing a modern epidemic of shallow, exploitative, and joyless sex. In her 2021 book, , the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan how her students, reared in a world of ubiquitous online gangbangs and sexualized violence, are innately drawn to the anti-porn ideologies of the 1970s radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon instead of the ideas championed by Willis and her sex-positive peers.
