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.