Most of us would think that straight men who demand the right to sex are motivated by a patriarchal sense of entitlement. As a reaction against this claim, we may naturally argue that nobody is entitled to sex. But this reaction can buttress sexual preferences that are extremely problematic.

Intersectional feminism is not a progressive advance over the non-intersectional sort. It is, rather, a rearguard attempt to recover from what I think of as original sin—that is, from a profound and consequential error. The original sin was the sin of treating some men as the unmarked case of man, some women as the unmarked case of woman.

Feminism is a complex set of ideologies and theories, but on the most basic level, its goal is to achieve equal social, political, and economic rights for women.

The first wave of feminism, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, focused mainly on women’s voting rights and property rights. Then came the second wave of feminism and the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s, which focused on issues beyond the legal status of women to include sexuality, reproductive rights, gender roles, and patriarchal attitudes and culture.