It is perhaps time for someone to say “totalitarianism”. Dworkin’s view of male supremacism is total: a system, in which the most privileged and emancipated live alongside the most subordinated and degraded. The point is underlined in Right Wing Women, where she writes: “Every woman - no matter what her sexual orientation, personal sexual likes or dislikes, personal history, political ideology - lives inside this system of forced sex. This is true even if she has never personally experienced any sexual coercion, or if she personally likes intercourse as a form of intimacy, or if she as an individual has experiences of intercourse that transcend, in her opinion, the dicta of gender and the institutions of force”. The experience of personal sexual freedom is undoubtedly real, but its reality is that of an exception, an exemption, which remains ineluctibly contoured and circumstanced by the threat of force, by the reality of force in the lives of others.

The underlying moral argument here is identical to that of Ursula le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: even a superlatively peaceful society, if its peace depends on the systematic use of force against even the smallest minority, is by that token a society of violence. This is not the same as saying that any violent act immediately and irrevocably contaminates the entire society in which it occurs: the violence must be systematic, not accidental; directed against one class by another as a function of the organisation of a class system. The understanding of the radical feminists was that the rape and battery of women were not predominantly spontaneous outrages, crimes of passion or manifestations of individual sociopathy, but hate crimes more akin to the lynching of black men or the battery and murder of homosexuals. That is to say, they were seen as crimes directed by one class of persons towards another - with pornography acting as a targeting system, identifying what was to be done to whom, and how. When the radical feminists said “men” and “women”, they meant classes: not biological essences, and not evanescent cultural illusions either. They meant the distinct outcomes of a gender system established and maintained through violence: “the dicta of gender” supported by, and co-ordinating in their turn, “the institutions of force”.

The context in which Dworkin was writing was a little different - not a lot different - to the present situation. In particular, the law at the time did not formally recognise forced sex within marriage as rape; it said, in effect, that the woman’s body was the husband’s property and any sexual use of her by him was therefore lawful by definition, whether she willed it or no. There at least some reform has been won. But in practice, the law has very seldom recognised any kind of forced sex as rape, either then or now, unless the force employed was exorbitant: more than the normal, usual, healthy degree of force. The consent standard as currently upheld means that when a person says yes to force, says yes when pressured or intimidated or desperate, the force is taken to be obviated by the consent, rather than the consent obviated by the force.

“Yes means yes” even when not saying yes would mean being thrown out into the street, or not having the money to pay for medicine for your children, or being called frigid or a prude or a prick-tease and then asked again, not so nicely this time. The acknowledgement that a person might be pressured or intimidated or desperate is held to infantilise them somehow, to remove the sovereign power of their consent to make the force used to obtain it instantly not matter. Our word is our bond; but it takes force, ubiquitous and inexorable force, to make a person give their consent when there is no mutual desire, no mutual respect, no mutual accountability. The consent standard says nothing about such mutuality, nothing about exploitation and inequality. It grants a formal right of refusal but does nothing to empower that choice, to make it viable in the circumstances where it is most needed.

We must ask whether the class analysis of the radical feminists was correct, whether their understanding of the systematic character of rape and battery was true, whether the arrangement of forces in society is now as Dworkin described it, such that the relative sexual freedom of individual women is at best a state of privileged exemption within a context fundamentally structured by coercion. Does the fundamental moral argument, that the coercive sexual use of women in rape and prostitution and pornography makes ours a society of sexual violence even if the experience of the majority of women is one of comparative peace and safety, still hold?