In these essays I attempt to dwell, where necessary, in discomfort and ambivalence. These essays do not offer a home. But I hope they do offer, for some, a place of recognition. I have written them to be read together, or by themselves. They are not intended to convince or persuade anyone of anything, though I would not be unhappy if they did. Instead, they represent my attempt to put into words what many women, and some men, already know. This has always been the way of feminism: women working collectively to articulate the unsaid, the formerly unsayable. At its best, feminist theory is grounded in what women think when they are by themselves, what they say to each other on the picket line and on the assembly line and on the street corner and in the bedroom, what they have tried to say to their husbands and fathers and sons and bosses and elected officials a thousand times over. At its best, feminist theory discloses the possibilities for women’s lives that are latent in women’s struggles, drawing those possibilities closer. But, too often, feminist theory prescinds from the particulars of women’s lives, only to tell them, from on high, what their lives really mean. Most women have little use for such pretensions. They have too much work to do.

Defenders of “men’s rights” like to say that “Believe women” violates the presumption of innocence. But this is a category error. The presumption of innocence is a legal principle: it answers to our sense that it is worse, all else being equal, for the law to wrongly punish than to wrongly exonerate. It is for this reason that in most legal systems the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused. “Believe women” is not an injunction to abandon this legal principle, at least in most cases, but a political response to what we suspect will be its uneven application. Under the law, people accused of crimes are presumed innocent, but some—we know— are presumed more innocent than others. Against this prejudicial enforcement of the presumption of innocence, “Believe women” operates as a corrective norm, a gesture of support for those people—women—whom the law tends to treat as if they were lying.

But by presenting what happened at UMass as a case of “ordinary” sex—sex that is merely “ambivalent, undesirable, unpleasant, unsober, or regretted”74—the critics of Title IX make things too easy for themselves. The woman who gave Bonsu a handjob didn’t really want to—or, she wanted to at first, and then she stopped wanting to. She kept going for the reason that so many girls and women keep going: because women who sexually excite men are supposed to finish the job. It doesn’t matter whether Bonsu himself had this expectation, because it is an expectation already internalized by many women. A woman going on with a sex act she no longer wants to perform, knowing she can get up and walk away but knowing at the same time that this will make her a blue-balling tease, an object of male contempt: there is more going on here than mere ambivalence, unpleasantness and regret. There is also a kind of coercion: not directly by Bonsu, perhaps, but by the informal regulatory system of gendered sexual expectations. Sometimes the price for violating these expectations is steep, even fatal. That is why there is a connection between these episodes of “ordinary” sex and the “actual wrongs and harms” of sexual assault. What happened at UMass may well be “ordinary” in the statistical sense—as in what happens every day—but it isn’t “ordinary” in the ethical sense, as in what we should pass over without comment. In that sense it is an extraordinary phenomenon with which we are all too familiar.

I am not saying that feminism has no business asking better of men—indeed, asking them to be better men. But a feminism worth having must find ways of doing so that avoid rote reenactment of the old form of crime and punishment, with its fleeting satisfactions and predictable costs. I am saying that a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better—not just fairer, but more imaginative—than men have been.

To be sure, pornographers, unlike umpires, were never formally invested with the authority to tell the truth about sex. No one elected or appointed the pornographers. If porn is indeed the voice of the “ruling power,” it is not officially so. Whatever authority porn has is granted by those who watch it: by the boys and men who trust porn to tell them “what’s doing.” Some critics of anti-porn feminism say that this sort of de facto authority isn’t enough to hold porn responsible. Just because boys, and presumably some girls, take porn to be an authority on sex, doesn’t mean it really is. Whatever power it has was never sought or formally conferred. But this is to draw a sharp distinction between authority and power that belongs, perhaps, to an earlier time. The internet blurs the distinction between power and authority. Platforms for speech—previously allocated by radio stations, TV shows, newspapers, publishing houses—are now overabundant, infinitely available, and practically free. Without any formal grant of authority, individual speakers can amass great power—“influence,” as we have learned to call it. To what standard, if any, should we hold those who wield such power?

The porn star Stoya performs in what she describes as “gender-binary-heterosexual-oriented pornography for a production company that aims to have as much mass appeal as possible.”41 In a New York Times op-ed, she acknowledged an authority she did not seek out: “I didn’t want the responsibility of shaping young minds. And yet thanks to this country’s nonfunctional sex education system and the ubiquitous access to porn by anyone with an internet connection, I have that responsibility anyway.” “Sometimes,” she went on, “it keeps me awake at night.”42

The invocation of young people in political discourse often serves reactionary ends. Calls to protect their innocence are based on a fantasy of childhood that does not and never did exist—a childhood untouched by the world of adults and adult desires. The appeal to childhood innocence also tends to draw an implausibly sharp distinction between the way things were and the way things are now, skating over the continuities: between the Rolling Stones and Miley Cyrus, between top-shelf magazines and PornHub, between making out in the back row and the dick pic. What’s more, it is arguably the rest of us, and not today’s teenagers and young adults, who are under-equipped to deal with the technological renovation of our social world. By this I don’t just mean that kids are the ones who most easily grasp the semiotic possibilities of TikTok and Instagram. I also mean that they have a sensitivity to the workings of gendered and racialized power that outstrips anything seen before in the political mainstream. It would be a mistake to assume that they are unable to cope with the pornworld just because we believe that we, as children, couldn’t have coped. Like the anti-porn feminists of the second wave, perhaps my students attribute too much power to porn, and have too little faith in their ability to resist it.

Since Willis, the case for pro-sex feminism has been buttressed by feminism’s turn toward intersectionality. Thinking about the ways patriarchal oppression is inflected by race and class has made feminists reluctant to make universal prescriptions, including universal sexual policies. The demand for equal access to the workplace will be more resonant for white, middle-class women who have been expected to stay home than it will be for the black and working-class women who have always been expected to labor alongside men. Similarly, sexual self-objectification may mean one thing for a woman who, by virtue of her whiteness, already conforms to the paradigm of female beauty, but quite another thing for a black or brown woman, or a trans woman. The turn toward intersectionality has also deepened feminist discomfort with thinking in terms of false consciousness: that’s to say, with the idea that women who have sex with and marry men have internalized the patriarchy. The important thing now, it is broadly thought, is to take women at their word. 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. This is not merely an epistemic claim: that a woman’s saying something about her own experience gives us strong, though perhaps not indefeasible, reason to think it true. It is also, or perhaps primarily, an ethical claim: a feminism that trades too freely in notions of self-deception is a feminism that risks dominating the subjects it presumes to liberate.

The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obliged to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question often answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion. It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalization with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, those women who protest against their sexual marginalization typically do so with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies. That said, the radical self-love movements among black, fat, and disabled women do ask us to treat our sexual preferences as less than perfectly fixed. “Black is beautiful” and “Big is beautiful” are not just slogans of empowerment, but proposals for a reevaluation of our values. Lindy West describes studying photographs of fat women and asking herself what it would be to see these bodies—bodies that previously filled her with shame and self-loathing—as objectively beautiful. This, she says, isn’t a theoretical issue, but a perceptual one: a way of looking at certain bodies—one’s own and others’—sidelong, inviting and coaxing a gestalt shift from revulsion to admiration.24 The question posed by radical self-love movements is not whether there is a right to sex (there isn’t), but whether there is a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires.

To take this question seriously requires that we recognize that the very idea of fixed sexual preference is political, not metaphysical. As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred: we are rightly wary of speaking of what people really want, or what some idealized version of them would want. That way, we know, authoritarianism lies. This is true, most of all, in sex, where invocations of real or ideal desires have long been used as a cover for the rape of women and gay men. But the fact is that our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills—not automatically, but not impossibly either. What’s more, sexual desire doesn’t always neatly conform to our own sense of it, as generations of gay men and women can attest. Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

23.  Is there no difference between “telling people to change their desires” and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want? Must the transformation of desire be a disciplinary project (willfully altering our desires in line with our politics)—or can it be an emancipatory one (setting our desires free from politics)?

27.  Is my talk of transforming desire moralizing in a different sense, in that it focuses too much on personal responsibility? Racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity: these are structural problems and—as we have learned to say—they demand structural solutions. That is surely right. It is also surely right that a myopic focus on individual action is characteristic of a bourgeois morality whose ideological function is to distract from the broader systems of injustice in which we participate. (To use Chu’s phrase, individualistic morality can be a shell corporation for systemic injustice.) But to say that a problem is structural does not absolve us from thinking about how we, as individuals, are implicated in it, or what we should do about it.