The Feminist Pursuit of Good Sex

Women’s liberation should not be “about fending off men’s sexuality,” she said, “but being able to embrace your own.”

..  Younger women, also known as “Twitter feminists,”

.. There have always been liberal feminists, from Betty Friedan to Sheryl Sandberg, who wanted a seat at the table rather than to reset the table, who seek equal opportunity within existing power structures.

.. They include older feminists, who endured pats on the bottom to succeed in the workplace and who urged the movement to prioritize things like women’s economic empowerment rather than sexuality, which they considered frivolous and distracting.

.. But there are younger feminists, too, who wish #MeToo would focus on predetermined bad behavior, like rape, rather than rethink tolerated behavior, like sexual pressure, and bristle at suggestions of a connection between the two.

.. These women were absolutely pro-sex, pro-pleasure and pro-freedom.
.. if rape and harassment were political, so was bad sex.
.. In a 1980 essay, the radical feminist Alix Kates Shulman remembered that in those early sessions, “sex was a central and explosive subject to which we continually returned”; feminists “used their sexual discontents to help them understand the power relations between men and women.”
.. Mr. Ansari is alleged to have badgered a woman into going further than she wanted to .. But the instinct that it was an important article was correct.
.. The issue of consensual yet joyless and unsatisfying sex was the same one my mom and her friends were grappling with 50 years ago.
.. “Feminism is a vision of active freedom, of fulfilled desires, or it is nothing.”