For feminists like Ellen Willis and Susie Bright, the MacKinnon-Dworkin approach encouraged a sexual conservatism that did not serve women. In a landmark 1981 essay titled “Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?” Willis struck back at the attitudes that, as she put it, “tap into the underside of traditional femininity—the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims.” Bitterness was not the same as an actual solution, and the doom-and-gloom hyper-focus of sex negativity pushed women to “accept a spurious moral
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