Feminist author argues against 'affirmative consent'

Article here. Well this does her in among the sisterhood. Excerpt:

'And now we get to the single thing that has most distressed me, as a feminist and a lawyer, about the affirmative consent bandwagon.  The norm itself sounds great.  I myself would never want to have sex with an unconsenting person, and I don’t want you do so either.  I also don’t ever want to have sex that I haven’t consented to, and I hope that never happens to you either.   But using legal procedure to decide these cases is about far more than just the desirability of the norm.  It’s also about the desirability of putting the weight of the state and of punishment behind that norm.  We have to want to put the norm into legal proceedings in the real world.

As I will argue here, affirmative consent requirements—in part because of their origin in a carceral project that is overcommitted to social control through punishment in a way that seems to me to be social-conservative, not emancipatory—will do a lot more than distribute bargaining power to women operating in contexts of male domination and male privilege.  They will foster a new, randomly applied moral order that will often be intensely repressive and sex-negative.   They will enable people who enthusiastically participated in sex to deny it later and punish their partners.  They will function as protective legislation that encourages weakness among those they protect.  They will install traditional social norms of male responsibility and female helplessness.  All of these will be the costs we pay for the benefits affirmative consent requirements deliver.  This essay asks feminists to engage in a robust debate about whether all of this what they want, and if it is not, whether it is worth it to get the upsides of the reform.'