THIS is what I was trying to say, dammit

I struggled with the Fatal Attraction paragraphs in my book for so long.

I wish I’d read this first:

In a liberal framework, our freedom to engage in activities assumes that all activities are equal, as long as we have obtained consent when those activities involve others.

But sex is not like other activities.

Sex, unlike anything else we might do with another person, transcends the self while radically reorienting it within a new, shared context with our sexual partner.

Consent assumes that sex will not do this, that sex will leave two people as fully autonomous after sex as they were before. But this is precisely the one thing that sex was designed not to do.

Sex, even if entered into based on a free agreement between two autonomous people, by its very nature dismantles the autonomy upon which the consensual understanding of sex had been based.