I was shocked by Janet Albrechtsen’s opinion piece in yesterday’s Australian, because I never would have pegged her as a Sex and the City fan. But she begins by quoting a scene in which conservative, prim Charlotte says loudly in a crowded restaurant: “Don’t you ever just wanna be really pounded hard, you know?”

Albrechtsen goes on to praise Sex and the City’s “refreshing” depiction of “a group of sassy 30-something women comfortable with their sexual desires”, before saying that The Sydney Morning Herald’s Richard Ackland probably never watched it, because in writing about the recently dropped rape charges against French banker Dominique Strauss-Kahn, he wouldn’t suggest that only non-consensual sex would leave women with vaginal bruising.

“Surely we should have learned by now not to prescribe the choices women make about how they conduct their sexual lives, whether these choices are totally white-bread or rough and rollicking or somewhere in between,” wrote Albrechtsen.

Take that, Richard! Janet is truly a feminist warrior to champion rough sex while completely blurring the issue of consent and discrediting physical injury as evidence of rape! And if you think it’s not an especially feminist move to cite reactionary nutjob-for-hire Bettina Arndt, well your feminism clearly isn’t as advanced as Janet’s!

Now I’m going to look like a total prude when I point out the preposterousness of Albrechtsen’s assertion that “the past sexual proclivities of women have long stopped being relevant in rape prosecutions”. That is just utterly untrue!

Think of the way women who allege sexual assault by prominent sportsmen are predictably and viciously smeared as sluts. Perhaps re-read Ackland’s article about how the adversarial legal system is ill-equipped to determine the credibility of its plaintiffs. Or you might have noticed a protest movement against victim-blaming called Slutwalk.

One of Australia’s key public awareness campaigns is that violence against women is never acceptable. But if I were to argue that Australia Says No is prudish and retrograde because some women identify as masochists and derive sexual pleasure from being humiliated and tortured, I wouldn’t be, in Albrechtsen’s words, “challenging the cultural fault lines about sex”. I’d be deliberately and vexatiously ignoring them.

That’s what Albrechtsen is doing. Since both our legal system and public opinion are more sympathetic to victims of aggravated rape by strangers, physical evidence of rape is often one of the most decisive factors in prosecution. Albrechtsen, however, would like to offer defendants the get-out-of-jail card of arguing that the plaintiff’s injuries came from a decidedly feminist taste for rough sex.

It’s astoundingly misguided for Albrechtsen to use a rape case — and Arndt’s ramblings about how women must submit to their menfolk’s libidos — as the springboard for an argument about freedom of sexual expression. Truly consensual rough sex is role-playing, and it can only occur within a framework of trust and mutual respect.

Both partners understand that it’s only enjoyable when it doesn’t transgress agreed-upon boundaries, whether physical or emotional, and they use safewords and other signals to withdraw consent as soon as they’re uncomfortable or out of control. Rape victims and people trapped in abusive relationships don’t have that luxury.

The fantasy of releasing one’s deepest, most primal desires is just that — a fantasy. That’s the sense in which Charlotte – Sex and the City’s most buttoned-up character — talks about pounding, headboard-knocking sex. For her, it’s much more daring to speak her desires in public than to act on them in private.

But it’s our responsibility to govern our desires. The social contract we call “civilisation” requires humans not to act freely, but to control their behaviour out of respect for other people … and to do so gladly, rather than grudgingly.

It is not “stubborn puritanism”, nor any sanctimonious feminazism, which makes me find Albrechtsen’s article troubling. It’s the way she insists that women’s sexual self-expression has only positive and progressive consequences, when there is such a towering mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Albrechtsen refuses to acknowledge that the legal system reinforces, rather than compensates for, the power imbalance between female rape plaintiffs and male defendants. What Albrechtsen might call “empowerment” a rape jury might — and often does — see as someone who’s “asking for it”. And that’s pretty rough.