The Feminist and the Sex Offender

This book was difficult to read. It challenged a lot of the anger within me. I would recommend this book to anyone who is pro-abolition but struggles with the coming to terms with the fact that that includes rethinking how we deal with sex offenders. I was disappointed by the last section... it was the one I was most looking forward to and I felt let down by it. It seemed rushed, for starters, but it also reproduces the dichotomy between sex positivity and sex negativity- which causes a lot of problems. I would have liked to see more nuance in the final section, especially the section on consent. I think it's very important to think beyond consent when thinking about sexual ethics. Thinking beyond consent means a lot of things- confronting the ambiguous nature of most of our relationships is one, but another is thinking about harm without automatically thinking about punishment. This is what I expected a discussion of abolition feminism to do, but instead I received a half hearted paragraph explaining how BDSM is a good example of “playing with consent” by “saying no and not meaning it.” This simply lacks critical examination and reproduces the neoliberal assumptions worth critiquing in consent in the first place.