Why Walk the Line? A Reply to Kate Phelan
2026-05-23
Kate Phelan's defense of feminism as a movement exclusively concerned with sex‐based oppression rests on two interlocking moves: a sharp division between women as women and women as members of other oppressed groups, and a “sex‐right” framework that is supposed to entail an abolitionist conclusion about prostitution. This reply argues that both moves fail, and that they fail together. The attempt to isolate sex‐based oppression as a separable object of feminist concern proves unstable once the intersectional constitution of women's oppression is acknowledged: the characteristics that make sex‐based oppression recognizable as such cannot be cleanly separated from class, race, and other axes of domination. The same instability undermines Phelan's sex‐right argument: the inference from the existence of prostitution to the persistence of unconditional male entitlement does not hold once rape has been criminalized and sexual access has been made legally conditional on consent. The line‐drawing to which Phelan attributes such importance is, in the end, both theoretically imprecise and politically unnecessary for the ends she wishes feminism to pursue.