Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon concludes a thoughtful, nuanced review of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti with a wonderfully positive point (emphasis mine.)

What’s really great about this book is that it’s so readable, and so it’s a perfect book to hand off to someone who wants to know more about feminist thinking about the rape culture, but who is easily spooked by radical feminists who’ve been thoroughly demonized, like Andrea Dworkin. You can’t condemn this book as being “anti-sex” when it’s anti-rape, which is a common tactic for rape apologists. In reality, as this book demonstrates beautifully, our rape-coddling culture is the one that’s anti-sex. Radically reinventing sex so that it’s a collaboration instead of a conquest isn’t bad for sex. You don’t really know how good it can be until you’ve had it in circumstances where everyone involved feels safe and free.

Read the quote in context here.

Maybe it’s just because I’m an old ex-hippie, who started discovering sex about the same time women in my parent’s church started discovering what was then un-ironically called “women’s liberation” but however many missteps or stumbles I’ve taken since then I’ve always had that basic intuition, and Amanda’s sentence sums it up.

“You don’t really know how good it can be until you’ve had it in circumstances where everyone involved feels safe and free.”

That nicely summarizes why a male sex blogger might be so enthusiastic about feminism.