section_path: Sexuality/Affirming female sexual autonomy
section_name: Affirming female sexual autonomy
paragraph_text: Affirming female sexual autonomy
  
  For feminists, a woman's right to control her own sexuality is a key issue and one that is heavily contested between different branches of feminism. Radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon argue that women have very little control over their own bodies, with female sexuality being largely controlled and defined by men in patriarchal societies. Radical feminists argue that sexual violence committed by men is often rooted in ideologies of male sexual entitlement and that these systems grant women very few legitimate options to refuse sexual advances. Some radical feminists have argued that women should not engage in heterosexual sex, and choose lesbianism as a lifestyle and political choice, a view that has fallen out of favor, as sexuality is seen as largely biologically influenced rather than a choice one can make for political reasons.
  
  Some radical feminists argue that all cultures are, in one way or another, dominated by ideologies that deny women's right to sexual expression, because men under a patriarchy define sex on their own terms. This entitlement can take different forms, depending on the culture. In some conservative and religious cultures marriage is regarded as an institution which requires a wife to be sexually available at all times, virtually without limit; thus, forcing or coercing sex on a wife is not considered a crime or even an abusive behaviour.
  
  In 1968, radical feminist Anne Koedt argued in her essay The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm that women's biology and the clitoral orgasm had not been properly analyzed and popularized, because men "have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina" and not the clitoral area.
  
  Other branches of feminism such as individualist feminism consider themselves sex-positive, and see women's expression of their own sexuality as a right. In this view, what is or is not "degrading" is subjective, and each person has a right to decide for themselves what sexual acts they find degrading and if they want to participate in them or not. Individualist feminist, Wendy McElroy wrote in her book, XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography, "let's examine the idea that pornography is degrading to women. Degrading is a subjective term. Personally, I find detergent commercials in which women become orgasmic over soapsuds to be tremendously degrading to women. I find movies in which prostitutes are treated like ignorant drug addicts to be slander against women. Every woman has the right—the need!—to define degradation for herself."
  
  According to this view, part of sexual autonomy is the right to define one's boundaries, desires and limits around their sexuality rather than accept a narrative in which all women are victims of men during a sex act.