Still, the resurrection of Dworkin’s work and reputation is in some ways quite strange, because her contemporary admirers tend to reject her central political commitments. Dworkin, who’d turned tricks as a broke, bohemian young woman, wanted to outlaw prostitution and pornography, and in the 1980s she made an alliance with the religious right to push anti-pornography legislation. There is no sympathy for such a bargain in feminist circles today, where it’s mostly taboo to treat sex work as distinct from any other kind of labor.

Yet the renewed interest in Dworkin is a sign that for many women, our libidinous culture feels neither pleasurable nor liberating. “Me and my peers, we believed in this sort of fairy tale, that there was a line of demarcation that was very clear between rape and nonconsensual acts, and consent,” said Fateman. “We knew where the line was, and everything on the side of consent was great, and it was an expression of our freedom. But that’s not the experience of sex that a lot of people are having.”

Moira Donegan, the writer best known for creating an online list of alleged sexual abusers and harassers in media, recently wrote an appreciative reappraisal of Dworkin occasioned by “Last Days at Hot Slit.” “It should not be hard to say that heterosexuality as it is practiced is a raw deal for women and that much pornography eroticizes the contempt of women,” she wrote. “It should not be hard to say any of this. But it has become hard.”

Seen from a certain angle, the #MeToo movement — or at least those offshoots of the movement that question the unequal power dynamics behind seemingly consensual encounters — looks like a way of saying those hard things. Indeed, some of Dworkin’s ideas have been reincarnated in #MeToo, and not just because she also sought to challenge oppression by going public with her own stories of sexual abuse.

Think of the woman who told a reporter, last year, about an encounter with the actor Aziz Ansari that she’d come to understand as sexual assault, though she didn’t describe force or threat. Decades earlier, Dworkin created a political framework for viewing such an experience — one most would probably write off as bad sex — as a violation. In that 1975 lecture, she described “presumptive rape” as one in which “the constraint on the victim’s will is in the circumstance itself; there has been no mutuality of choice and understanding.” Consent, she insisted, had to mean more than just acquiescence.