"... out of this predicament, but feminism, Srinivasan* believes, bears some blame for getting us into it in the first place. Female desire isn’t seen as an appropriate subject for feminist critique. Sex positivity rules the day: whatever a woman claims she wants is, by definition, a good thing, an expression of female agency, so long as it takes place within the bounds of consent. 'Sex is no longer morally problematic or unproblematic,' Srinivasan writes. 'It is instead merely wanted or unwanted.'... Sex is a useful thing to have on your side, but, Srinivasan believes, it comes at a cost. 'The important thing now, it is broadly thought, is to take women at their word,' she writes. 'If a woman says she enjoys working in porn, or being paid to have sex with men, or engaging in rape fantasies, or wearing stilettos—and even that she doesn’t just enjoy these things but finds them emancipatory, part of her feminist praxis—then we are required, many feminists think, to trust her.' She herself doesn’t seem to think so—her tone here is laced with skepticism, even sarcasm—but she stops short of saying that directly."
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* Srinivasan is Amia Srinivasan, an Oxford philosophy professor whose book of essays is called
"The Right to Sex."
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