This Is How You Lose the Sex Wars

Welcome to the newsletter! This one's a doozy. Before we get there, though, here are the book announcements:

Be Not Afraid #2, the second issue of my horror comic series with Lisandro Estherren, comes out on July 17. You can preview of it here and read some really great reviews of the first issue.

My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out October 14. You can pre-order that anywhere you get books. The best way to support your local bookshop is to use Bookshop.org.

Will you still want to pre-order it after you've read this newsletter? Only time will tell! Now, on to the main event.

There are, as I’ve said before, a lot of unnerving things about writing a book about the relationship between trans rights and feminism in the year 2025. One of the most unnerving is the obligation to have a take about the Sex Wars. 

The Sex Wars, for those unfamiliar, were one of the longest and ugliest intra-feminist conflicts. Staged throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, they more or less put paid to the second wave of feminism, and drove a permanent wedge between the groups we call “feminist” and the groups we call “queer.”

The Sex Wars started as a fissure between two different wings of lesbian feminism. Traditional lesbian-feminism (also known for the purposes of this debate as “anti-porn feminism,” or sometimes “radical feminism,” though they didn’t comprise the entire radfem movement even at the time) focused on ending sexual violence, and was responsible for many of the advances in survivor justice we now take for granted. The concept of “sexual harassment,” and the ability to prosecute it as a form of workplace discrimination, comes to us from the work of Catherine MacKinnon. Take Back the Night, the first large-scale anti-rape protest in the US, began as an anti-pornography protest with an address by Andrea Dworkin. 

However, the anti-porn feminists also aimed to police consensual sex, particularly sex between women. They protested butch-femme dynamics and BDSM, believing that the only truly lesbian sex was toy-free, kink-free, penetration-free lovemaking between two equally androgynous partners. They worked to ban and criminalize sex work and pornography. Finally, though not all radical feminists were TERFs, and not all transphobic feminists were radfems — many early radical groups, like Cell 16 and Olivia Records, were trans-inclusive; the trashing of trans athlete Renee Richards involved mainstream liberal feminists like Gloria Steinem — TERFs were over-represented in the anti-porn camp, and eventually managed to make their position movement orthodoxy. 

The other half of the lesbian-feminist community — the part consisting of butches, femmes, sex workers, leather dykes, and trans people who were increasingly unwelcome in radical feminist spaces — split off to embrace a brand of sexual militancy and anti-respectability politics which would (eventually) go by the name “sex-positive feminism.” (See also: "sex-radical feminism," see also: "queer.") This is the moment that created Patrick Califia’s Macho Sluts and the feminist porn mag On Our Backs; it’s the moment of lesbian BDSM clubs like Chain Reaction in the UK and Lesbian Sex Mafia in the US; it’s the wellspring of much sex-worker activism, like the fight to unionize the Lusty Lady strip club in San Francisco. The names you’ve heard from this movement — Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Dorothy Allison, Tristan Taormino, Susie Bright — did, and still do, a lot to construct our understanding of what it means to be queer.

Most contemporary queers and/or feminists carry around a blurry Xeroxed copy-of-a-copy of this conflict, somewhere in their heads. They know, roughly, whose side they’re on (usually the sex-positive one). But that doesn’t prepare you for the ugliness of the history itself, in which screaming matches bled into physical fights and death threats with appalling regularity, and everyone, everyone, everyone fought dirty. To this day, inheritors of the conflict regard any attempt to understand or recuperate the Other Side of the Sex Wars with knee-jerk rage and revulsion. Generations later, everyone involved still sees this as a simple black-and-white conflict in which their side was pure and righteous and misunderstood, and the other side was in bed with (a) Ronald Reagan, (b) child molesters, or (c) Satan himself. 

The truth, though, is that every side was compromised. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s anti-pornography ordinances created a model for later Republican porn bans, by framing anti-porn legislation as a means of “protecting” women —  this legacy continues on to the present day, in the Republican-led effort to ban queer and trans content as de facto “pornographic.” Dworkin was alarmingly chummy with certain right-wing figures by the end of her life, and some TERFs, like Janice Raymond, actually went on to work with Reagan, just as groups like WoLF work with the American right wing today. This, understandably, is enough to discredit them completely in many people’s minds. 

However, the sex-positive feminists also made drastically bad alliances in an attempt to shore up power. Several leaders and prominent figures within the movement — Patrick Califia, Gayle Rubin, and Samuel R. Delany, among others — were vocal supporters and/or members of NAMBLA, the nation’s largest and most shameless pedophile-rights organization. These feminists openly argued that child sex abuse materials should be legal, and that to restrict them was an attack on both pornography and freedom. They also argued for abolishing the age of consent as a necessary part of “sex-positivity.” Rubin and Califia have since recanted — though only partially; in 2000, Califia wrote that he still supports NAMBLA’s right to march in Pride — but bringing this up at all is incredibly sensitive, in part because of how it's been weaponized by the right to paint all queer people as pedophiles or at least pedophile sympathizers. All I can say is that I don’t think we, as queers, have any obligation to be silent when our elders or movement leaders hurt people. I’ve already been a Catholic once, and I’m not doing that shit again. 

At any rate: The sex-positive camp thought the anti-porn feminists were closet Republicans, and they were sometimes right; the anti-porn feminists thought the sex-positives were rape apologists, and they were sometimes right; both sides were being unfair and selectively spinning facts to fit a narrative, but that was only possible because they kept giving each other ammunition. 

So it was a relief that, by the mid-2000s, the Sex Wars seemed to be over. Radfems had decisively lost the fight, and were seen as relics. Sex-positive feminism, which was queer and radical in its first incarnations, had been commodified by capitalism and — in the process — substantially straightened out, becoming the province of Sex and the City bus tours and Tupperware-style sex toy parties for straight women. It became increasingly common to hear young feminists complain about “compulsory sex-positivity” and the pressure to be sexually game for straight men, and they had a point: By the 2010s, the face of sex-positive feminism was not Susie Bright, it was Hugo Schwyzer. The party was over.

The third-wave feminism I came up with — which stretched from the ‘90s through the blog era of the ‘00s and early ‘10s — developed what seemed like a workable way to reconcile the two positions: All sex was good sex, as long as everybody consented. It was a deceptively tricky bit of theory, duct-taping two radically opposed corners of the movement together, but it held for a long time. “Sex good, rape bad” was easy to explain, and to abide by, and it left room for everyone to be as queer or kinky (or vanilla, or straight) as they wanted as long as no-one got hurt. 

But third-wave feminism, too, got co-opted by capital, and somewhere around 2016, that wave broke. So, in the past ten years, the Sex Wars have picked up steam once again. #MeToo created a newfound appreciation for Catherine MacKinnon’s work against sexual harassment, and Dworkin — as one of the few second-wave feminists to criticize Israel and Bill Clinton — came to be almost trendy. It probably helped that neither woman was actually trans-exclusive (those who were are clearly beyond recuperation) but queer and trans people nonetheless reacted against the resurgence of a radical feminism that had been harmful to their communities, and ‘80s-style punk transgression and free-speech absolutism became increasingly popular in that camp. 

As the old battle lines are redrawn, we have fallen back into what I think is a supremely unproductive binary: “Feminists” on one side, protesting sexual violence, and “queers,” on the other, protesting sexual shame and censorship.

Most people care about both things. Most people are affected by both things. Most queer people are feminists, of one kind or another; this binary, like most binaries, fails to accurately describe reality. But if you want to talk about the places where feminism and queer theory cohere, or fail to, the Sex Wars are one of the most important conflicts. When the book comes out, I expect people will want to know my position — or just assign me one, based on what they think a person like me typically believes — and, while my actual position is that the Sex Wars were a fucking headache, and that you’d have to be a fool to weigh in on them, the conversation is likely to happen with or without me. So, like a fool, I am weighing in.

The most emotionally charged front of the Sex Wars — policing queer relationships in order to impose one’s own idea of “acceptable,” “feminist” sex — is actually the easiest to resolve, mostly because no-one in their right mind still agrees with the anti-porn feminist position. 

Debates over strap-ons and leather jackets might sound stupid to us now — mostly because they are stupid; deeply so — but they caused massive psychic damage. In her book Skin, Dorothy Allison tells a story about  receiving a call from a woman who was trembling with shame, insisting that there was something wrong with her, that she was “sick.”  

The problem — Allison figured out, after patient questioning — was that the woman liked to have something inside her when she masturbated. Vaginal penetration, according to the lesbian-feminist dogma of the time, was a relic of patriarchal false consciousness; no woman enjoyed it, and no lesbian would willingly do it. This woman had read all the right books, hung out in all the right circles, had all the right politics, but she still experienced sensation in that part of her body, and she thought that made her a bad person. 

No-one should have to live with that kind of self-hatred. Queer people are already being shamed en masse by the dominant culture; we should not be inflicting it on each other. 

The feminist critique of things like BDSM or butch-femme coupledom rested on the idea that they were innately “patriarchal,” that they imported “heterosexual” power dynamics into the queer community. But it doesn’t make sense to apply a heterosexual power analysis to relationships that are not heterosexual. Similarly, comparing domestic violence to BDSM, just because both of them involve power dynamics, doesn’t work. The power inequality in heteronormative relationships is institutional, naturalized, normalized — people do it because it’s “the way things have always been done” — whereas BDSM entails consciously choosing roles which aren’t necessarily linked to gender. Trying to understand a butch-femme relationship or a queer BDSM scene in terms of heterosexuality is like looking at a grapefruit and saying that it’s a very unsatisfactory puppy. You’ve got to learn to see fruit as fruit. 

There are still debates about what constitutes “real” queer sex, and they are still ugly — the idea that trans lesbians and gay men are straight people “appropriating” queerness is one I’ve heard a lot, as a trans guy with a husband — but legislating what feminists are “allowed” to do in bed, down to the precise acts and body parts involved, has come to seem like a relic of a less enlightened era. I hope it is. 

The lesbian-feminist critiques of porn and sex work are harder to dismiss, even if you believe — as I do — that their proposed remedies were harmful. So, with the acknowledgment that I am drawing myself ever deeper into the abyss from which no-one returns un-ratio’d, that’s where I’m heading next. 

I am uncomfortable talking about about my own sexuality. I worry about offending people or transgressing their boundaries or grossing them out; I am now the age of every middle-aged guy who hit on me at a bar when I was in my twenties, and I recall staring at them with utter revulsion and wondering why they didn’t realize that bad dick had an expiration date. Furthermore, if any online stranger does express interest in my sex life, they’re typically some kind of chaser, or they’re looking to sexualize me in order to take me down a peg.

So let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that I am not the hottest man you have ever seen in your life, and that concocting an explicit mental image of my sex life is not what you want to be doing right in front of your salad. 

However: Though hormones work differently for everybody, and no one experience is definitive, I’m one of many trans guys whose sex drive changed after starting testosterone. It was already pretty high, but in the first year or two after transition it felt scarily enormous, almost bigger than I was. The question of when I would get laid felt like life and death. Balancing the demands of living in society with that constant, unpredictable, and overwhelming demand for sex was maddening, like trying to do your taxes when you haven’t eaten in a week. All it takes is for one person to walk past your window with a bag of French fries, and everything falls apart. 

This settled down eventually. Puberty always does. But it was a lot for me to handle, and I was a married adult with fully developed frontal lobe. It forced me to realize that testosterone-based puberty must be really scary for the kids who go through it, especially when their society provides no context for those feelings, except to say that they’re shameful and bad and you shouldn’t talk about them. 

Another change that happened for me — and that happens to lots of people — after starting T: My sex drive became a lot more visual. Previously, figuring out that I was attracted to someone was a matter of getting into the right mindset, feeling things out over the course of a conversation. Now, it really did work to just look at someone.

Now: Given this experience, I do not find it at all strange that there’s a market for pictures and videos of naked people, or that young cis men might be especially prone to look at those pictures, sometimes before they're ready or able to have sex with other people. That just seems like human biology at work. 

What I don’t understand is why so many of those mainstream porn narratives are dominated by violent hatred, contempt and disgust toward women, why sex is framed as a means of injuring or humiliating those women, or why the idea that a woman is being tricked or forced or coerced into sex is so routinely presented to us as a good, fun, sexy thing. I’ve observed this both in the porn I’ve seen and in the porn I’ve made — I worked my way through college as a phone sex operator, and the ability to be verbally abusive and horrible and misogynistic to a woman without consequences was a major part of the draw for the men who called. 

That aspect of porn, it seems to me, is only explicable as a political phenomenon — as indoctrination into patriarchy. Talking about the overwhelming Biological Power of the Male Sex Drive is risky, because traditionally, people do this as a way of justifying rape or assault — men’s desire for sex is supposedly so constant and tremendous that they can’t help hurting people. But that does not make sense. The urge to feel good and the urge to make someone else feel bad aren’t the same thing — they’re not even connected. Something is doing the work of connecting them, and porn (along with every other media outlet in patriarchal society) is doing that work much of the time.

In her book The Right to Sex, Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan suggests that younger feminists are more interested in recuperating the anti-porn side of the Sex Wars partly because porn has been more ubiquitous for their generation than it was for Gen-Xers or even older Millennials. “I imagined my students would find the anti-porn position prudish and passe,” she writes, but instead, “they were riveted:"

Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it. 

Significantly, Srinivasan writes, the men in her class were just as likely to agree to these statements as the women, if not more so. The reason was that anti-porn feminism’s most controversial position — that porn is teaching people how to have sex; that you are likely to imitate the acts you see in porn when you have sex, and that porn therefore affects the way you treat your partners — had become an accepted commonplace of day-to-day life: “Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he wanted it, or didn’t want it, in front of a screen,” Srinivasan writes. “And almost every woman in that class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been.” 

In other words: The men in that class acknowledged that they were using porn as their primary means of sex education, and the women in that class had come to understand that much of the bad or unsatisfactory sex they were having came down to some guy using moves he’d only seen in porn. 

Using “pornography” as a general term here is misleading — there are clear differences between written erotica and a privately run OnlyFans and the non-consensually posted revenge porn that gets uploaded, with appalling regularity, to sites like PornHub — but if we confine our analysis to the sorts of mainstream porn videos aimed at straight men, and if we acknowledge that this porn is explicitly regarded as a teaching tool by its audience, I would argue that it’s reasonable to worry. 

Mainstream porn is like having someone read you a chapter of Mein Kampf every time you take a drink of water. You still need the water. At best, it sets wildly unhealthy expectations. At worst, it’s a form of brainwashing in which a basic and — for young people — often overwhelmingly powerful drive is being linked to misogynistic ideas about women and sex, so that young men, who’ve never experienced sex in any other context, come to believe the two are inseparable. You don’t want to get off, mainstream porn tells them, you want to hurt some woman. If they see women get hurt every single time they get off, sooner or later, Pavlov’s bell starts ringing.

Again: This is not about policing BDSM or dividing specific sexual kinks into “feminist” and “non-feminist” categories. BDSM can be freely chosen, and involves consciously thinking through one’s role and the power (or powerlessness) it entails. This is about heteronormativity: Teaching guys that male domination of women is the only way that sex does ever, can ever, should ever, will ever happen. 

Misogyny, in porn, also functions as a deflection of shame. A psychologist once emailed me, after I wrote about rape revenge movies, to say something that’s commonplace in the trauma field — nearly every act of violence, he told me, is an attempt to project one’s own shame outward into the body of another person. Rape victims often fantasize about bloody revenge on their attackers because it would be a way of putting the shame from the attack back where it belongs — moving it off themselves and onto their rapists. But rape, though it is undeniably a crime of power and politicized male domination, is also a way of weaponizing shame — making your own sexual shame into the victim’s problem by using sex to humiliate her. Again, this does not mean that rapists are victims: They’re rapists. They make victims. But if you do not view sex as dirty and degrading, it would not occur to you to use it as a means of causing harm. 

Porn does some of the same maneuvering. It’s not that you are dirty and gross and shameful for watching pornography — it’s the women, because they had the temerity to be attractive. They must be punished, made dirty, so that you can retain a sense of yourself as a good and un-dirty person. But, again, if young guys are using this as sex education, and they are learning that sex always means demeaning or punishing a woman, that isn't giving them the tools they need to communicate with their partners. And all of it tends to reinforce the concept of sex as essentially dirty, which is the problem. You cannot tell someone that sex – one of the basic human drives – is dirty and bad and wrong and an immoral act on par with violence, and then act surprised when they use sex as a means of inflicting violence. That's just how this works.

So the core of the radical feminist critique — that straight men are socialized to view sex, not as a source of pleasure, but as a ritual affirmation of male dominance over women; that porn provides much, though not all, of this indoctrination — actually does make sense to me. It also seems spectacularly unlikely to be resolved through banning porn, or criminalizing sex work, and in fact, those solutions make the problem much worse. 

I’ll start with the criminalization of sex work, which functions as a means to create a disposable class of women (and young people, and queer people, and people of color, and immigrants, and) who can be subjected to misogynist violence, raped, hurt, and/or killed without consequences for their attackers. 

Plenty of sex work activists have written about this — the analysis I’m drawing from most directly is Molly Smith and Juno Mac’s Revolting Prostitutes — but all of them agree that the violence sex workers face is drastically exacerbated by criminalization. Victims who are criminalized cannot seek legal recourse without potentially being jailed. The cops are the ones inflicting the sexual and physical violence a lot of the time — criminalizing sex work gives them leverage in those encounters. Decriminalization removes that leverage and allows sex workers to access basic workplace protections through labor laws. It doesn’t completely end violence against sex workers, but it has significantly reduced it in every place it’s been tried, which is why it’s recommended by Amnesty International.

By giving sex workers access to workplace protection, decriminalization would seem to answer radical feminists’ stated objections to porn and sex work — that they are exploitative and dangerous — but in practice, most opponents of porn also ardently oppose decriminalization, for reasons they can’t quite articulate. Those reasons are perfectly transparent to everyone else, though: Lots of workplaces are exploitative and dangerous. If people get emotionally worked-up over sex work in ways that they don’t over, say, Amazon factories, it’s not because porn is more dangerous — it’s because we find something particularly shameful about sex. 

Here we enter the question of porn bans. Aside from the fact that they’re largely spearheaded by conservatives and used to push queer content off the Internet, they also seem very unlikely to actually resolve misogyny. If young men are trained to offload their sexual shame onto women by brutalizing them, adding more shame and stigma cannot possibly help anyone. And, if the problem is that these young men are turning to porn for sex education because they cannot find it elsewhere, or that they’re only learning one heavily limited and patriarchal version of what “sex” is, stigmatizing the open expression of sexuality makes that problem worse. It's not just porn bans that are the problem here: The rise in young men getting their primary sex education from Internet porn is directly correlated with the second Bush administration slashing sex-education programs and promoting "abstinence-only education" in the 2000s. As we have learned over and over, in the past twenty years, refusing to teach teenagers about sex will not stop them from having sex, but it will make the sex they are having worse and more dangerous.

In order to get better or healthier information about sex, young men need to get information about sex, period. Queer people have long been experts at providing free and comprehensive sex education to each other, and it was sex-positive feminists, specifically, who did the educating — distributing condoms in the AIDS epidemic, opening stores like Babeland, which ran open classes on queer sex in addition to selling equipment, or forming projects like the Lesbian & Gay Switchboard, where you could call up an anonymous queer and ask her about employment discrimination or get tips on how to fuck your girlfriend. 

Straight people need that kind of information. Straight men might particularly need it. Srinivasan writes that her male students are unlikely to watch ethically made or feminist porn — it’s more expensive and harder to find than the free, scummy stuff on streaming sites — but I am not so pessimistic. Before FOSTA-SESTA, and the ensuing crackdown on sexual content, sites like Tumblr actually did a very good job of providing hubs of free, progressive sex education. Even if men are shy about seeking it out — it is, after all, one of the rules of manhood that you’re not supposed to admit it when you don’t know something — they are already seeking some kind of education when they look up the porn. Making better sex education available does not guarantee they’ll use it, but it is better than throwing them into the deep end of the Internet and letting them figure shit out. 

It does not make sense to draw a bright line between “anti-porn” and “sex-positive,” between “queer” and “feminist,” between rape and shame; most anti-porn critiques can be addressed through pro-porn measures, and most feminist problems have queer solutions. Sexual violence and sexual shame are not separate issues; the one is a reflection of the other, and they must both be addressed if we are to heal. 

What’s my position on the Sex Wars? My position is that it’s been forty fucking years since the Sex Wars, and that viewing anything as complex as human sexuality through the lens of a polarized and polarizing conflict is bound to fail us. Sexual desire is so deeply individual that “sex good, rape bad” is probably as close as we’ll ever get to a one-size-fits all prescription. We don’t need prescriptive rules, though. We need information and the ability to make our own choices freely. We need the freedom to want what we want, and the safety to pursue it without being brutalized. There are no "sides" to that, and no conflict; freedom and safety are just two names for the same desire.