And to state what will perhaps be obvious: no matter how high-minded the philosophical case for Child Liberation, we should be uneasy that there are people who will cheer such a case to the echo for non-philosophical reasons — specifically, those who will find distinctly appealing the idea that a liberated child will be capable of consenting to sex with adults. Nambla ... and the UK’s now-happily-defunct Paedophile Information Exchange ... were very keen on respecting the rights of children to express their sexuality freely.

The particular system of unequal power between men and women, to which porn contributes (or of which it forms a part), is one in which women’s agency and worth is denied in such a way that their protest or refusal (not just to sex or to sexual advance, but especially to these) is effectively defused or nullified in ways that are not always easy to detect, let alone to articulate or to combat, but that have to do with the social status and identity that are accorded to women and, relatedly, with the way in which their attempts at protest and refusal are interpreted.