I remember the first time a friend told me that she had been choked without her consent during sex. I was in my early 20s, and it hadn’t been the first time for her – she had also been slapped and had her hair pulled, all by men she had met online – but I was shocked and concerned. “It’s as though he was trying to do what he has seen in porn,” she said. As our 20s progressed, my single friends came to feel that a transactional dating environment only exacerbated the problem: the men they met would watch porn, then “order” a woman on Tinder to act out what they had seen. It felt, by all accounts, mechanistic, depressing and disempowering.
I write this in the midst of what is being called a backlash against sex-positive feminism. For more than a decade, millennial women have been looking back at the 90s and early 00s in which we came of age and reflecting on the all-pervasive sexist lad, porn and raunch culture, and the toxicity of the tabloids and women’s magazines. As a result, fourth-wave feminists are ambivalent about pornography and its effects, and this scepticism has coexisted quite peacefully with a desire not to shame women while deconstructing the issues we all face.
