Chapter 2 argued that men (mis)used sexuality to skew the gender playing field and serve their own— not women’s— interests. Their scheme deprived women of sovereignty over their sexuality/childbearing and thereby played a big role in men's overall subjugation of women. Hence, it follows that alongside public policies re women's economic independence, there is an urgent need to advance public policies and programs that, at all social class levels, explicitly promote women's control over their sexualities/reproduction. The two rights are inseparable and mutually reinforcing— the autonomous woman possesses both, and both lie at the core of the New Normal ways of doing relationships/families. An economically independent woman gets hold of the material resources she requires. A sexually independent woman gets hold of the intangible resources she desires.

As challenging as it is for women to gain their economic independence, the struggle to achieve their sexual/reproductive independence is even more daunting. It is not mere happenstance that Old Lights resist progressive changes within the sexual/reproductive sphere with even greater ferocity than changes within the economic sphere. Complicating matters is the mutual interplay between the two spheres: Making it harder for women to be sexually/reproductively independent impinges on their economic independence. But promoting their economic freedom furthers their sexual/reproductive independence. In effect, freedom in one sphere facilitates freedom in the other; limiting freedom in one hinders it in the other— the two freedoms are bound together in a single package.

Curiously enough, women's subjugation was the theme of the post-coital pillow talk between England's King Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth. He surprised her by remarking that the humdrum sex they just had is “not like love, is it?” Henry contrasted their mundane, ho-hum experience with the wild and inflamed encounters he’d enjoyed nightly with a farm “girl when I was a young man.” They’d sneak off in secret and “when I touched her she would shiver, and when I kissed her she would melt […] and cried out in her pleasure. […] I felt her sobs shake her whole body with joy.”