Modern dating is a minefield. Even in our sexually over-saturated culture, twenty-seven per cent of men under thirty report having no partners since eighteen. Six in ten of that cohort stay “electively single”, preferring self-service rather than risking rejection. Eighty-one per cent say sex is a subordinate concern to career and “intellectual growth”.

How do we reverse this sex recession? Thank the fertility goddess, the feminists who contributed to this situation in the first place have the solution: affirmative consent. In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel suggests “affirmative consent” will establish “some kind of mutuality and equal participation between sexual partners, [and respect for] another person’s sexual decision-making”. This entails participants of sexual acts offering “unambiguous and voluntary agreement at every stage of increased erotic activity”. Angel insists this contractual intrusion is necessary because consent is impossible so long as “individuals do not bear equal relationships of power to one another”. Until equitable power exists in both the boardroom and bedroom, nobody experiences the melding of sexual soul-mates promised by Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying — the “zipless f*ck”, a “platonic ideal” of pleasure free from fumbling and feelings.

Such progressive enthusiasm ignores the fact that married couples self-report more satisfying sex lives. Angel also, ironically, appropriated her book’s title from Michel Foucault: who campaigned for the abolition of age of consent laws in France. So much for “equal relationships of power”.

Simone de Beauvoir — another intellectual whose Progressive legacy has been marred by accusations of grooming — progenated Angel’s position. Beauvoir insisted that sex is wrongly experienced by women as “an interior story and not in relation to the world and to others”. If women were to consider themselves and coitus in this social context of living in an eternal, ephemeral patriarchy, they would understand that heterosexual sex “always constitutes a kind of rape”. There is no such thing as the liberal standard of “what two consenting adults do behind closed doors is none of my business”. Your private conduct is a reflection of your political participation and thereby women’s lack of emancipation. A la Carol Hanisch, your pillow is political.

To become disembodied is Beauvoir’s prescribed act of transcendence

For Beauvoir, female physiology from “puberty to menopause” is “the principal site of a story that takes place in her and does not concern her personally”. If biology robs women of autonomy, then to become disembodied is Beauvoir’s prescribed act of transcendence.

The freedom women achieve is the eternal recurrence of self-actualisation. This is Clare Chambers’ concept of “comprehensive liberalism”: endlessly seekling a hypothetical state of total sexual autonomy. Because autonomy cannot be quantitatively assessed, increasing it requires a ceaseless inquisition against any limitation on freedom. Any involuntary biological constraint or bond of social obligation is treated as an incursion on autonomous personhood. What results is a civilization of Rousseau’s atomised savages, returned to a pseudo-Eden of unfettered digital consumption. Relationships are to be recoiled from like a disease, unless and only for as long as they facilitate your self-expression.

As Abigail Favale pointed out, it is curious that Beauvoir chose to conclude her treatise on feminism with the word “brotherhood”. The contraceptive pill realised her vision of women’s total workforce enrollment by engineering women’s reproductive systems to have equivalent functionality to men’s. The “procreational potential of sex” became “a switch that can be flipped, if desired, but whose default setting is ‘off’”. Sex became recreational, with sex differences levelled by technology. Any emergence of them in public life has since been equated to oppression. Beauvoir’s “new woman” is a man, and she must learn to make love like one.

The sexual revolution pushed by Beauvoir and Angel requires the abnegation of the sexed self. We cannot disentangle our revealed preference for sexual desire from embedded sex differences, however. You cannot out-think oxytocin bonding for your “zipless f*ck”. No wonder many of my generation are sex-starved and dissatisfied.

Consent-based comprehensive liberalism either fails to account for the disparate impacts of economic and social conditions on autonomy, or it aims at their eradication via state intervention. This results in socialism, or selective reticence of the consequences of endorsed policies. Circumstances of coercion are either eradicated or ignored to achieve the second (often conflicting) goal of equality. In the latter case, Louise Perry has highlighted the hypocrisy of “sex positive” feminists proposing legalising euphemised, hypothetically-consensual “sex work” — whilst never experiencing the trafficking, drug-addiction or destitution of women coerced into prostitution. This disparity is produced by having the time, distance and education to articulate a luxury belief, as Rob Henderson would say.

Seeking the former, comprehensive liberalism cannot account for the sixty-one per cent of women who self-report ravishment fantasies, however, without infantilising them with accusations that their preferences are a product of patriarchal false consciousness. For those who buy into consent-based morality, but also desire sexual asymmetries, their failsafe is “kink culture”.

The endless search for autonomy will leave you sterilised

Mary Harrington once told me that “Kink culture functions as a kind of nature reserve for libs who realise that power imbalances are just a fact of reality, and they want to make space for that in their own lives without letting it get too dangerous.” These power dynamics are synonymous with patriarchy when substituted for the phrase “immutable sex differences that I don’t like”. Angel alluded to this, saying that affirmative consent — and the legal penalties resulting from transgressing its pedantic progress — is for guarding against the “probable greater physical power” which man “wields over” woman. Kink is Keats’ negative capability: desperate to rationalise two contradictory desires at the same time. It is the incomplete ring-fencing of dimorphic sexual desires by autonomy-maximising liberalism, whilst the rest of us just get on with the fun stuff.

Perry’s anti-capitalist critique of Ann Summers and BDSM-accessory brands then reverse engineers this observation. Market forces have responded to, rather than created, the clash between the crusade for affirmative consent and desire for asymmetrical power dynamics.

This is by no means to deny that consent is a moral necessity in sexual relations, but it is not the lone moral foundation. To deify it as a means of obscuring gender differences is to ignore the reality of desire. “Kink culture” attempts to square the circle of atomised liberal subjects finding disequilibrated sex-based power dynamics more erotic than Demolition Man’s sanitised “Three Seashells” approach to intimacy. As Harrington says, this paradox has perverse consequences.

The same holds true for politics. Social contract theory presumes it to be in a citizen’s rational self-interest to consent to participation in a society. Rights codified on paper feel meaningless, however, to those whose material conditions do not improve. I doubt the slum girl in Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, aged prematurely by poverty, “miscarriages and drudgery”, was dreaming of suffrage when “poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe”. Abstract ideals, from “social contract theory” to “kink culture”, become alienating when they ignore human nature and material conditions to such an extent as to depart from lived experience.

Political and sexual liberalism is pure cope. The endless search for autonomy will leave you sterilised. Only when sex-embedded power dynamics are embraced as complementary, rather than antagonistic, will sex, and civilisation, be good again.