But what both activists and their critics are missing is that if #MeToo draws on the work of Ms. MacKinnon and Ms. Brownmiller, it’s also rooted firmly in the tradition of the other radical Second Wavers. These women were absolutely pro-sex, pro-pleasure and pro-freedom. “We’ve got to learn to sleep with people because we want them,” one woman said in a consciousness-raising session transcribed by the author of “The Dialectic of Sex,” Shulamith Firestone, in 1968. “Not to prove anything to them, not to make them feel better about their masculinity, not out of weakness or inability to say no, but simply because we want to.”

But they also understood that if rape and harassment were political, so was bad sex. In a 1980 essay, the radical feminist Alix Kates Shulman remembered that in those early sessions, “sex was a central and explosive subject to which we continually returned”; feminists “used their sexual discontents to help them understand the power relations between men and women.”

I was reminded of this history when the website Babe published its Aziz Ansari article in January. The account of the so-called bad date, during which Mr. Ansari is alleged to have badgered a woman into going further than she wanted to, was an example of reckless reporting and was cited by many as #MeToo’s too-far moment. But the instinct that it was an important article was correct. The issue of consensual yet joyless and unsatisfying sex was the same one my mom and her friends were grappling with 50 years ago.

At bottom, #MeToo is not about hashtags or individual firings. It’s a chance to reset the table of sexual politics — not by infantilizing women or declaring a war on flirting or administering litmus tests, but by continuing a decades-long push for true equality in the bedroom, for a world in which women are not intimidated or coerced into sex but are also not stuffed into the role of gatekeepers.

For such a movement, the history of Second Wave pro-sex feminism should serve as both North Star and cautionary tale. Ultimately, the arguments of these women got swallowed up by the more coherent, consistent narrative of sexual conservatism, and later by a largely depoliticized version of pro-sex feminism that presented hot-pink dildos as the key to liberation. One reason this might have happened is that amid these conversations, men were at best ancillary and at worst demonized, an understandable impulse in the 1970s, when the most basic feminist ideas were scary and radical. “A free woman needs a free man,” a woman said in a rare moment of clarity during that same 1968 consciousness-raising session.

But there may be a deeper reason this history has been obscured. In a 1982 essay, my mother admits that a misstep of the early pro-sex feminists was “the failure to put forward a convincing alternative analysis of sexual violence, exploitation and alienation.”