A New Feminism Is Required

The victim-centered approach is not a legal doctrine. It is a theory of human nature. It holds that certain categories of people — women most reliably, because the original wound runs deepest there — cannot be trusted to know what happened to them. Their choices are not choices. Their consent is not consent. Their testimony on their own behalf is, by definition, suspect. The government steps in not as arbiter but as interpreter, and its interpretation is settled before the trial begins: you are a victim, whether you say so or not.

This is how a bureaucratic logic becomes a cultural one. The courtroom gave it teeth, but the idea was already loose in the world long before any case was filed. It moved through institutions — funding streams, training curricula, university programs, therapeutic frameworks — until it became the default frame for thinking about women and sex. The premise stopped sounding like a premise. It became a given.

What this doctrine does to a culture is not subtle. It takes the question of a woman's agency and makes it unanswerable. Not because the question is hard, but because the structure forbids the answer. A woman who says she chose is a woman who doesn't understand her own coercion. A woman who reports harm is a woman who finally broke through her conditioning. There is only one correct answer, and the doctrine guarantees it will always be found. The bar for what constitutes a victim keeps lowering — not because women are getting weaker, but because the system requires them to be.

The logical endpoint is a feminism organized entirely around suffering. Not around what women are capable of, but around what has been done to them. Not around their power, but around their wounds. The government-assisted subsidy for claiming incompetence: renounce your adult choices and you qualify — for protection, for status, for the moral authority that victim identity now confers.

OneTaste was the test case because OneTaste was the direct refutation. A community built explicitly around female agency, female desire, female self-knowledge — in the domain where the doctrine is most invested in helplessness. Women and sex. We went to the belly of the beast of victimhood and said: not only can you know what you want, you must know. You have an obligation to your own volition. If that survives, the whole architecture is in question.

So it did not survive. First they came for the ones who said desire is not the problem, its suppression is. The ones who said a woman's body is not a liability to be managed but an intelligence to be learned. The ones who built, quietly and seriously, a culture of consent — and watched the prosecution take that culture and name it as the evidence of coercion. George Orwell understood why sex is always the first target: it creates a world outside the state's control, and therefore it must be destroyed. The attack begins at the margin not because the margin is the point, but because the margin is where resistance is least organized. Once the doctrine is established there — once consent can be named as coercion and self-knowledge can be named as conditioning — it is available everywhere. The legal perimeter does not stop at sex. It stops wherever belief does.

The cultural damage is not that one community was prosecuted. The cultural damage is the premise that made it possible. A doctrine that says women cannot be trusted to report their own experience, that consent can be evidence of its opposite, that the state is a better interpreter of a woman's inner life than the woman herself — that premise, normalized, ends something. It ends the project of building a feminism worth the name. It replaces self-determination with managed victimhood and calls the replacement protection.

A new feminism is therefore required — one that renders the old obsolete. Not organized around opposition or victimhood or endless cycles of retaliation. Organized around self-realization. From that ground, a woman does not demand freedom. She radiates it.

The connection to religious freedom is not metaphorical. It is structural. Any community organized around a belief system — about how to live, how to relate, what the body is for, what transformation requires — now operates under the same doctrine that prosecuted OneTaste. The VCA does not require physical force. It requires only that someone, later, report that they felt psychologically pressured toward a belief they no longer hold. Every church, every contemplative community, every school of thought that asks its members to change is exposed by that standard. The prosecution of OneTaste was not an outlier. It was a proof of concept.

"Allowing for the book, after all, being a parody, something like 1984 could actually happen. This is the direction the world is going in at the present time. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. The sex instinct will be eradicated. We shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty except loyalty to the Party. But always there will be the intoxication of power. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who's helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don't let it happen. It depends on you."

— George Orwell, on 1984