“Wouldn’t it be more freeing to let [sex] be irrelevant?” wrote Marie Le Conte for the New Statesman a couple of weeks ago. Le Conte was considering heated debate over what role sex should play in modern feminism. No role, she argued. In fact, she suggested that feminists have been too preoccupied with this question for too long and that there should be “a space for a feminism that doesn’t care much about sex”.
While it is a tempting conclusion, the problem is that it is impossible to talk about, or understand, sex without acknowledging the context in which it exists. You cannot separate the act from its meaning, a meaning which is crafted in a world of misogyny and gender-based violence.
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