> The only torturing of definitions is when the author insists that certain people not wanting to have sex with her is problematic.
Considering the article author is named Armand Halbert and is not a she I am pretty sure the biases you are showing are clouding your judgement.
The author doesn't say "not wanting to have sex with me is problematic", they say "not wanting to date someone based on their ethnicity is a political stance and it's problematic if it's the only factor in that decision". Granted the choice of words ("Are they entitled to have this preference") is poor but the whole sentence "Are they entitled to have this preference, when it comes to something as personal as dating and sex?" means "should something as personal as dating and sex be decided based on a political stance? ", the political stance being here "I don't date black people out of principle".
ELI5: it's problematic as a whole, for the community and society, when people decide not to mix, to mingle based on ethnicity.
How you arrive at the conclusion the author is promoting rape is beyond me.
For the posterity, this is the passage from the submission :
> In college, I was with a group of white men and the topic of dating came up. One of them mentioned he wouldn’t date a black woman. To my shock, the rest of the group agreed with him. We say that nobody is entitled to a relationship with someone else, but I was still disgusted. Are they entitled to have this preference, when it comes to something as personal as dating and sex?
The author explores this tension in “The Right to Sex”. You are not entitled to sex with anyone, but people can have preferences that are problematic. To the author, there is a political dimension to what we desire. She cites an example of the Grindr short videos, called “What the Flip?”. In it, a beautiful white and asian man swap profiles. The white man has scores of lovers beckoning to him, the asian man comparatively few, and those he does match with send racist messages. To the author, this video illustrates the contradiction between the principle of consent and the principle of equity:
> > the question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question.
And this is the relevant (I think) passage of the author (Amia Srinivasan) of the essay being discussed in submitted blog post:
> In her shrewd essay ‘Men Explain Lolita to Me’, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that ‘you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you,’ just as ‘you don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you.’ Not getting a bite of someone’s sandwich is ‘not a form of oppression, either’, Solnit says. But the analogy complicates as much as it elucidates. Suppose your child came home from primary school and told you that the other children share their sandwiches with each other, but not with her. And suppose further that your child is brown, or fat, or disabled, or doesn’t speak English very well, and that you suspect that this is the reason for her exclusion from the sandwich-sharing. Suddenly it hardly seems sufficient to say that none of the other children is obligated to share with your child, true as that might be.
> Sex is not a sandwich. While your child does not want to be shared with out of pity – just as no one really wants a mercy fuck, and certainly not from a racist or a transphobe – we wouldn’t think it coercive were the teacher to encourage the other students to share with your daughter, or were they to institute an equal sharing policy. But a state that made analogous interventions in the sexual preference and practices of its citizens – that encouraged us to ‘share’ sex equally – would probably be thought grossly authoritarian. (The utopian socialist Charles Fourier proposed a guaranteed ‘sexual minimum’, akin to a guaranteed basic income, for every man and woman, regardless of age or infirmity; only with sexual deprivation eliminated, Fourier thought, could romantic relationships be truly free. This social service would be provided by an ‘amorous nobility’ who, Fourier said, ‘know how to subordinate love to the dictates of honour’.) Of course, it matters just what those interventions would look like: disability activists, for example, have long called for more inclusive sex education in schools, and many would welcome regulation that ensured diversity in advertising and the media. But to think that such measures would be enough to alter our sexual desires, to free them entirely from the grooves of discrimination, is naive. And whereas you can quite reasonably demand that a group of children share their sandwiches inclusively, you just can’t do the same with sex. What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.