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

Do extended families or same-sex couples count?

Yeah, I think I'll have regularly scheduled sex with my sla—wait, what? Thomas Jefferson isn't around in this modern world of dating, sex, and pornography. Besides, the book and the article are largely about sex.

The blog author doesn't actually make it clear if the line

> You are not entitled to sex with anyone, but people can have preferences that are problematic.

is spoken from their perspective or the book author's perspective. It's not a given that they agree with that sentiment. So it might be that the blog author briefly entertained their question of entitlement as a consideration before arriving at the conclusion quoted above, or they still favor it.

I think it's fair to say that for this book dating implies having sex, since it's peak intimacy. The title starts with "The Right to Sex" and the article mentions sex a lot.

> No you aren’t, you are taking a stance against someone being shocked / disgusted at hearing 4 white men say they would never date a Black woman.

Parent isn't taking issue with the blog author being disgusted but rather the question the author raises.

I'll just copy what I said for your second sentence.

The blog author doesn't actually make it clear if the line

> You are not entitled to sex with anyone, but people can have preferences that are problematic.

is spoken from their perspective or the book author's perspective. It's not a given that they agree with that sentiment. So it might be that the blog author briefly entertained their question of entitlement as a consideration before arriving at the conclusion quoted above, or they still favor it.

Parent probably has biases that led them to interpret it how they did, but everyone has biases and parent hasn't replied to me yet, so I'm not sure if they intentionally reading it that way.

You are missing the point: saying that some preferences are problematic while others are not by itself creates an unfair double standard, even if you pay lip-service to the idea of individual right to consent. When a man rejects a woman because she's obese, that's problematic. When a woman rejects a man because he's short, that's not problematic.

I also find it sexist that both examples of racial preferences involve men, when it's well-established that women have stronger racial preferences than men, for example, white women prefer white men over Asian men (the least desirable group of men) by a much larger margin than white men prefer white women over Black women (the least desirable group of women). You could probably do the Grindr experiment on Tinder and find that the white man has an easier matching with women than the Asian man (especially if "Asian" means "Indian man" and not "K-pop idol dreamboat").

It's also strange to focus on men, when women are the pickier gender, especially when it comes to sex but to lesser extent also when it comes to dating. Even the undesirable black woman probably has an easier time hooking up than most white men.

Of course, it all makes sense when you realize that most modern-day feminists are only interested in pointing out the “problematic” behavior of men and how it impacts women, and never the other way around.

Finally, you phrased it as “THE problematic aspects of sexuality in our society” but the crux is that defining WHICH aspects are problematic is itself subjective and political. In Western society feminism dominates the institutions, so we get the result that "men rejecting black women" is problematic and "women rejecting Asian men" is not problematic. Of course, this isn't at all objective.

> The only torturing of definitions is when the author insists that certain people not wanting to have sex with her is problematic.

Considering the article author is named Armand Halbert and is not a she I am pretty sure the biases you are showing are clouding your judgement.

The author doesn't say "not wanting to have sex with me is problematic", they say "not wanting to date someone based on their ethnicity is a political stance and it's problematic if it's the only factor in that decision". Granted the choice of words ("Are they entitled to have this preference") is poor but the whole sentence "Are they entitled to have this preference, when it comes to something as personal as dating and sex?" means "should something as personal as dating and sex be decided based on a political stance? ", the political stance being here "I don't date black people out of principle".

ELI5: it's problematic as a whole, for the community and society, when people decide not to mix, to mingle based on ethnicity.

How you arrive at the conclusion the author is promoting rape is beyond me.

For the posterity, this is the passage from the submission :

> In college, I was with a group of white men and the topic of dating came up. One of them mentioned he wouldn’t date a black woman. To my shock, the rest of the group agreed with him. We say that nobody is entitled to a relationship with someone else, but I was still disgusted. Are they entitled to have this preference, when it comes to something as personal as dating and sex?

The author explores this tension in “The Right to Sex”. You are not entitled to sex with anyone, but people can have preferences that are problematic. To the author, there is a political dimension to what we desire. She cites an example of the Grindr short videos, called “What the Flip?”. In it, a beautiful white and asian man swap profiles. The white man has scores of lovers beckoning to him, the asian man comparatively few, and those he does match with send racist messages. To the author, this video illustrates the contradiction between the principle of consent and the principle of equity:

> > the question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated 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.

And this is the relevant (I think) passage of the author (Amia Srinivasan) of the essay being discussed in submitted blog post:

> In her shrewd essay ‘Men Explain Lolita to Me’, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that ‘you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you,’ just as ‘you don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you.’ Not getting a bite of someone’s sandwich is ‘not a form of oppression, either’, Solnit says. But the analogy complicates as much as it elucidates. Suppose your child came home from primary school and told you that the other children share their sandwiches with each other, but not with her. And suppose further that your child is brown, or fat, or disabled, or doesn’t speak English very well, and that you suspect that this is the reason for her exclusion from the sandwich-sharing. Suddenly it hardly seems sufficient to say that none of the other children is obligated to share with your child, true as that might be.

> Sex is not a sandwich. While your child does not want to be shared with out of pity – just as no one really wants a mercy fuck, and certainly not from a racist or a transphobe – we wouldn’t think it coercive were the teacher to encourage the other students to share with your daughter, or were they to institute an equal sharing policy. But a state that made analogous interventions in the sexual preference and practices of its citizens – that encouraged us to ‘share’ sex equally – would probably be thought grossly authoritarian. (The utopian socialist Charles Fourier proposed a guaranteed ‘sexual minimum’, akin to a guaranteed basic income, for every man and woman, regardless of age or infirmity; only with sexual deprivation eliminated, Fourier thought, could romantic relationships be truly free. This social service would be provided by an ‘amorous nobility’ who, Fourier said, ‘know how to subordinate love to the dictates of honour’.) Of course, it matters just what those interventions would look like: disability activists, for example, have long called for more inclusive sex education in schools, and many would welcome regulation that ensured diversity in advertising and the media. But to think that such measures would be enough to alter our sexual desires, to free them entirely from the grooves of discrimination, is naive. And whereas you can quite reasonably demand that a group of children share their sandwiches inclusively, you just can’t do the same with sex. What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.

I hope you're capable of doing a modicum of your own research. It wouldn't be hard to find a thread and pull on it.

The government/society is already regulating vices. It really is just a question of who gets to decide what is a vice and what is not. Propositions that reference "human or civil rights" are begging the question. What are "human rights"? What are "civil rights"?

I suggest you can't really have a useful understanding of political questions in the abstract. When you look into the history of these policy decisions, there's always something more going on than a purely reasoned universal morality.

Take your example of Prohibition. The Temperance Movement was around for a long time before it formed a political party and started gaining traction. Why? Was there any connection between the massive social upheavals that were changing the society in the U.S. at the turn of the century that might have put wind in the sails of this party? Prohibition was "progressive" politics but does that word "progressive" still mean what it meant then? No. You can't have a Progressive party without some sense of "progressing towards what?". In that case, you were talking about the WASP ruling class that had very long-held ideas about what progress meant, dating back to before the founding of the country by English Dissenters. Of course, the advent of WWI had the normal accompanying propaganda campaign. Prohibition benefited from wider anti-German sentiment (anti-beer) and war-time grain conservation efforts.

But, arguably a bigger reason for Prohibition's policy achievements were widespread anxiety about urbanization and "saloon" culture in the cities, which was widely and accurately associated with immigrants and african americans. In a sense, you can see Prohibition as a last-gasp attempt to control the social forces changing America at that time and restore "law and order". The fact that it gave rise to organized criminal gangs (mostly run by the very people they were trying to restrain) was an unintended consequence. We see a similar thing at work with the War on Drugs.

I would argue, the reason these Prohibition-type campaigns against vice fail is because they treat the symptoms, not the disease. The disease is a culture that is dissipated and lacks moral cohesion. Arguing about "moral universalisms" like libertarianism proposes is just more of the same. All honest morality is particular, just like all rights are particular. There has never been and never will be a universal morality without turning the world into one homogeneous goo. So long as there are different peoples, there will difference conceptions of the good. The sort of pro/con argumentation is a distraction from reality, imho.