The right to sex - Feminism in the twenty-first century

The feminists of Me Too appear, on the whole, to have a great deal of faith in the coercive powers of the state. They protested Brock Turner's comparatively light sentence for sexual assault, celebrated when the judge in Larry Nassar's trial seemed to express the hope that he might be raped in prison, and crowed when the verdict on Harvey Weinstein came in. They champion the move to stricter notions of sexual consent both in the law and on university campuses, and have denounced critics of these developments as rape apologists. It is hard to blame them. For centuries men haven't only assaulted and degraded women, but have used the state's coercive apparatus to enforce their right to do so. Is it not time women got to wield some of that same power -- to express their outrage and to take revenge?

Except that once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will now down. Feminism's embrace of carceralism, like it or not, gives progressive cover to a system whose function is to prevent a political reckoning with material inequality. This is not to say that there are no difficult choices to be made. There are poor women who want to see their abusive partners in prison, just as there are sex workers who long for violent johns to be arrested. Some opponents of carceralism think that no one deserves to be punished, that violence must never be met with more violence. But feminists need not be saints. They must only, I am suggesting, be realists. Perhaps some men deserve to be punished. But feminists must ask what it is they set in motion, and against whom, when they demand more policing and more prisons.

source: From the book 'The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century' by Amia Srinivasan; p170-71; www.boychat.org/messages/1583018.htm; Book from: 2021