Words matter.

As women all over the world came forward to talk about their experiences of sexual violence, old certainties about what constituted normal, acceptable behavior between men and women, between those with power and those without it, began to peel away like dead skin. Half a decade later, it's still happening. It's not just Hollywood, and it's not just Silicon Valley. It's not just in the White House or behind the scenes at Fox News. It's happening in the art world and in mainstream political parties. It's happening in the London radical left, in the US Democratic Party, in the Australian parliament and in the world of international aid. It's happening in academia and in the media and in legal and therapeutic professions. It's been happening for decades. It's still happening. Wandering hands and daily dehumanisation remain a weary assault course not just for women trying to make their mark in entertainment or finance or media or politics, but for the many millions fighting to survive in lower-paid, lower-status jobs. Shortly after the #MeToo movement broke, tens of thousands of domestic workers started speaking out about their experience of abuse. McDonald's workers declared that their bodies were not on the menu. The movement against male domination and sexual coercion appeared, for a brief moment, to bridge divides of race and class. Migrant agricultural labourers spoke out against domestic violence at the same time as Hollywood actors, journalists, politicians and technologists were organising to bring down serial predators in their industries. Defiance, for these women, began the only way workplace defiance ever does: at the point where people decide that the risk of staying silent is greater than the risk of speaking out. When people realise that their struggles aren't unique, that their pain is real and it matters, the sensation is terrifying and liberating at once. There is an exhilaration to realising that you are allowed to trust yourself, that it's not crazy to want another world, or that even if you are crazy, it doesn't mean you're wrong. A great many alleged abusers and their allies responded to these revelations with pleas for more understanding, with insistence that accusers consider the context of these crimes. Well, of course. Context is vital. It is crucial to consider the context in which this all-out uprising against toxic white male entitlement is taking place. The context is a historical moment where it has become obvious that white male entitlement is the greatest collective threat to the survival of the species. That isn't a metaphor. Political consent and sexual consent are not analogous. They are correlative. They feed one another. The search for a more human understanding of power and consent is not simply stage dressing for a bigger fight. It is the big fight. It's all about the grabby old men, and the young men groping for power in their wake, and it always has been. What will happen when women everywhere flick on every light in the house ... and men no longer have any darkness left to hide in?' asks writer Caitlin Johnstone at Medium. 'It is unimaginable. Power structures will be disrupted from the basic family unit all the way up to the highest echelons of influence.' This book deals directly with the implications of this seismic shift - and the threat it poses to traditional systems of power. Modern states are sexist and racist by their very nature, because their power structures are built on the exploitation of people of colour and of white women. Sexual violence and racist oppression are fundamental to how work, money and resources are organised in most modern societies. This is not a new idea. Theorists like Catharine A. MacKinnon have observed how fundamental gendered power is to the formation of the modern state. MacKinnon, however, believed that sexual violence is the source code of that power differential - that the state was constructed to facilitate male sexual violence against women. This book argues otherwise. Sexual violence is not the end goal of white supremacist patriarchy - it's an enforcing mechanism. The real point of maintaining hierarchies of gender and race, the hierarchies that scaffold most modern political systems, is not controlling sex, but controlling work. Our architectures of racist and sexist violence are designed to coerce people of colour and most white women into doing the hard, repetitive, essential labour of sustaining life so that a minority of white, wealthy men don't have to - an arrangement that is, ultimately, to everyone's detriment. Sex is part of this story. My generation inherited a world where Sex was cheap but not free. We inherited a culture of boring, violent, coercive heterosexuality. We grew up being warned that sex was something dangerous, something violent that boys did to girls, something that men needed and women controlled, something that strong men wanted and nice girls didn't let them have too easily. We grew up marinated in a flood of mainstream pornography that rephrased sex as a factory line of bodies battering each other into submission, of ritual violence being done to women and girls, of hammering, nailing, smashing, wrecking, choking, slapping, destroying, a language of sex that was as strait-laced, joyless and competitive as everything else in our lives. Modern society conflates sex and power, creating an environment where the idea of freedom is fetishised in theory and flattened in practice. Where every desire must become the desire to dominate. Where power, violence and authority are eroticised, sex itself becomes authoritarian. Authoritarian tendencies are baked into mainstream political culture. A more specific term for this tendencies are what some people call neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is, quite simply, a way of organising society - from politics to culture and commerce - so that the needs of the market and of private gain take precedence over everything else. It describes a specific form of global capitalism where nothing is more important than what can be sold, and to whom, and for how much. Where human life itself has no inherent value, where every human urge is channelled towards greater productivity and most of us spend most of our time working ourselves to the raw nerves for someone else's profit. More than anything else, neoliberalism is allergic to the idea of human beings living, organising and caring for one another collectively - instead, it imagines a world order where individuals and their families struggle alone in a world of ruthless competition where only the strongest and luckiest survive. This is why neoliberalism eventually becomes authoritarianism. And neoliberalism, like every form of authoritarianism, is not just about controlling what people do; it is about controlling how they think and feel. But eventually, something is bound to snap. Something usually does. Wilhelm Reich was one of the first philosophers to pay attention to the way in which sexual frustration was being whipped up and manipulated by the despots of the 1930s and channelled towards violent imperialist and racist ends. He observed in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that "the suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications ... Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.' The same is true today, from Islamic State to the American far right: the strategic use of sexual frustration and weaponised misogyny in the radicalisation of young men is consistent across ideologies. Sadly, the entitlement that underlies it is not exclusive to fascist movements. The opposite of consent culture is not rape culture - it is authoritarianism. Sexual authoritarianism occurs when straight men can no longer count on women's sexual compliance. Again, this is more than a metaphor. Sexual repression is more than simply an analogy for political oppression. Sexual repression is real, and political oppression is real, and the two are related. Both tend to involve powerful men grabbing whatever they feel entitled to, whatever the cost, and getting away with it - because the laws that ought to hold them accountable were written by and for people just like them. This is the very essence of privilege, a word which literally means ‘private law'. To challenge sexual exploitation is ultimately to challenge male privilege on every level, from the political to the personal. It is to insist on the right of all bodies not just to equality before the law, not just to dignity and agency, but to self-mastery and pleasure and adventure. This book argues that the sexual revolution, and its urgent demands for a reorganisation of care and labour, is a threat to the modern economic order. And it is a challenge to sexual repression. This sexual revolution is a revolution in redefining terms - an exercise in taxonomy. It is about naming and nailing down the contours of a world of violent incoherence. Words matter in sexual politics. In 2018 the actress Alyssa Milano suggested a 'sex strike as a way for women to escalate the #MeToo movement - denying men sex so long as they deny the rest of us basic bodily autonomy. This was the right instinct, but the wrong strategy. A general sex strike is a stupid idea as well as a socially conservative one, given that female sexual desire is a real and active thing that requires extensive social and economic strategy to repress. Priests and politicians have been trying to squash women's sexuality for centuries. However, one specific sex strike - the one that chauvinists are afraid of - is already well underway. A widespread adoption of consent practices is the 'sex strike' that the chauvinists are afraid of. What has been happening, quietly and for quite some time, is women and girls opting out of the old patriarchal bargain whereby we traded our sexuality and the work of our lives for security and protection. Today, fewer women are obliged by economic necessity, social pressure, isolation or fear to enter or stay in relationships they don't want. It's all well and good to say that feminism is about women having choices, but what happens when we start making choices - en masse - that men don't approve of? What happens is a fundamental disturbance in the 'sexual contract', which, according to theorist Carole Pateman, is the very basis of what we think of as democratic freedom. Interrogating the idea of the Hobbesian 'social contract', Pateman explains" that the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment liberation rely on an enforced power differential between men and women-an unspoken sexual contract whereby women owe men a duty of care, attention, sexual access and unpaid domestic labour. If women break the terms of that contract by refusing subservience, they deserve to be punished for it - and in the course of writing this book I spoke to countless women who have been punished for it, who carry wounds that ache in relentless reminder of the cost of non-compliance. In order to heal injustice in the future, it is necessary to name and claim the hurts of the past. This is one of the greatest challenges when it comes to constructing cultures that value human life and building human lives that resist oppression. Most of us would prefer the version of the story where we were in control the whole time, where all the hurt and disappointment we have suffered was our fault, because that way it's easier to own the horrible things that have happened to us and make sense of the way they make us feel. It is terribly human to want to avoid reliving the pain of the past. It can often feel as if denying past atrocities is the only way to fully survive them. But acknowledging harm that has already happened is often what it takes to stop it happening again. We cannot have sexual liberation without freedom from abuse, and we cannot be free from abuse without naming it. A great deal of the work of social change is about giving people permission to tell the truth about their own experiences, to articulate the hurt they have suffered so that others might not have to suffer the same. That's what happened in the 1960s and 1970s when feminists first began to speak about the sexual abuse and domestic violence that were and remain the ugly secrets gnawing at the core of our communities, families and political institutions. It was a brave and dangerous thing to do then, just as it is now. The shame of abuse was supposed to be borne by the survivors, largely women and children, who were expected to stay silent about what had happened to them, shielding their abusers from the consequences of their actions and - more importantly - protecting everyone else from the discomfort of other people's pain. Today, we're moving from a culture that tacitly permits the rape and abuse of women and children but criminalises homosexuality, abortion and birth control, and considers female sexual pleasure to be fundamentally suspect, to one where the important thing isn't who you have sex with, or how often, or with how many, but whether or not everyone wants it. More broadly, sexual revolution imagines a world where people are free to have sex and form relationships and build families in whatever way they choose, so long as they are not hurting or violating anyone else. It imagines a world where the moral schematic is not how much sex is being had, or what kind, but whether it's wanted, whether it's fun for everyone involved. And that schematic or consent doesn't just apply to sex. These ideas are an affront to current orthodoxies of work and love and sex. They are an affront to the assumption that men are owed something by women. To the assumption that women owe men sex, affection, emotional labour and domestic service. These assumptions are disturbed when women, girls and children come together to insist that, in fact, powerful men are not automatically entitled to have access to the bodies of others. And when a woman finally finds herself able to question whether she really owes men anything at all, whether she might be the one that's owed something by the world, that is an act of resistance. I've learned the hard way what happens when I make men uncomfortable. When I refused to make myself small and powerless so that men could feel large and in charge, there were consequences. But there are also consequences for staying clenched and closed, for forgetting your own selfhood. There are consequences for hollowing out your heart. Consequences for putting up with violence and disrespect. The most immediate is that the violence and the disrespect keep happening. To you, and to others. Karah Frank, who finally left a violent and abusive relationship, said in a letter that was presented during the court case against her abuser: In Judith [Lewis] Herman's now-foundational text "Trauma and Recovery", she outlines the process of psychological domination. The final stage in this process is known as total surrender, where the victim becomes utterly complicit in their own abuse? Herman explains the necessity of this 'in the mind of the abuser' using a quote by George Orwell, from 1984: We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. This, in Judith Lewis Herman's estimation, is also how abusers work, the creation of a cowed and complicit loyalty being 'necessary for the justification and continuation of the abuse cycle. The perpetrator insists on total loyalty; mind, body and soul.?25 Complicity can curdle anyone's courage. It is extremely uncomfortable to acknowledge historical violence that has been done in your name. That's one reason why women and girls, gay and trans people, Black and brown and Indigenous people remain bit-part players in the notion of history as it is simply and collectively understood. That matters. It matters because if we don't know our history, we can't learn from it, and those who can't learn from history are doomed to speak in ignorant clichés and to live them, too.