<<< As for Carole's notion that the "anti-sex left" is only a figment of some outsider's imagination: I invite you to check out a recent article that appeared in Counterpunch by Professor Robert Jensen called "Rape is Normal" (http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen0904.html); it clearly states his complete absorption of the Dworkin-MacKinnon theory of male sexual rapicity/female passivity in order to sell his analysis of pornography and prostitution as a grave threat to women and a tool of "capitalist patriarchy". >>>
I don't agree with MacKinnon and Dworkin, but find pro-sex preaching just as bad.
In the end, MacKinnon and Dworkin are mainly against coercive sexuality - even the Jensen article you just linked to was mainly about rape. Do MacKinnon and Dworkin set the bounds of what is "coercive" over broadly? Yes, in my opinion. But I don't find the assumption that everything sexual is great (as if power relations never enter into sex and sexuality, and as if none of the problems MacKinnon and Dworkin address are real at all) any better. Sometimes the way people have sex is damaging and oppressive; I don't see any reason for leftists who criticize everything else on earth to give sexuality a free pass.
In the end, most sexual repression in the US is puritanism, which is more of a right-wing than a left-wing phenomenon. The right wants people to stop fucking unless they're doin' it without birth control, heterosexually, and in marriage. Dworkin and MacKinnon have nothing against people fucking all the live-long day, so long as they do it non-coercively. This does require a willingness to think critically even about things that we find fun; but it really doesn't have much in common with the anti-sex analysis of the right.
My real problem with MacKinnon and Dworkin is that they're waaaay too obsessed with sex (not unlike you). Sex is not the be-all and end-all; I think sex equality would advance faster and further through equalizing pay, childcare responsibilities, and political representation than it would advance from banning porn. But that's why M. and D. are radical feminists while I'm just a liberal/socialist/3rd wave feminist, I guess.
Barry