Sex

Three powers rather than one act, and the definition sorts them by what they do to membranes. The exosocial power bonds and heals, creating strong euphoric and empathic bonds and eventually a shared animus, which is connection in the framework's ordinary sense. The endosocial power unites or divides, creating a membrane with the two people either joined inside it or separated by it, so the same act can enclose a pair or wall one off from the other. The endogroup power controls and subdues, sublating one self to another inside an endogroup membrane. All three are available in the same act, which is why Marsh treats the category as needing separation rather than evaluation. Her insistence on that separation is the practical point. Sexualized violence and sexualized sublation ought to be considered separately from sexualized connection because they appear to be fundamentally different interactions, and it is far more important to know which is occurring than to know anything else about the act. The parallel with her treatment of paedosadism is exact, since an interaction requiring a victim is not sex, and the category error is what allows coercion to be discussed in the vocabulary of desire. What the three powers supply is a way of asking the right question, which is not whether an act occurred but what it did to the membranes of the people in it.

Sexology and public health treat sex primarily through consent, health and function, with consent doing most of the normative work in contemporary frameworks. Feminist theory has a long argument about whether sexuality under unequal conditions can be separated from power, with Catharine MacKinnon holding that it cannot and others insisting on the distinction. Attachment and bonding research documents oxytocin and pair bonding effects that parallel Marsh's exosocial power. Her three-way split cuts across the consent framing rather than replacing it, since it asks what an interaction does to the people in it rather than whether it was agreed to, which can classify a consented act as sublation.