Radical feminist thinkers affiliated with Kristeva's second moment in feminism, such as Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly or Andrea Dworkin, base their cultural criticism on the idea that heterosexual intercourse serves as one of the central sites of women's oppression in patriarchy. Therefore, from this perspective, it is only from within patriarchal conceptualizations of sexuality that feminist interventions can displace this oppression. As Chapter Five demonstrated, attaining agency does not complete the processes of feminist utopian speculation in Russ's fiction. Russ simultaneously explores how women's economic position in patriarchy is linked to their bodies and their sexuality through a complex system of mutual interaction.

Russ's central ‘heterosexual’ protagonists, Alyx in the short story collection The Adventures of Alyx, Jael in The Female Manand Irene in The Two of Them, assert their agency by killing a man, but this act by itself does not make these women subjects of their sexual desire. Alyx, the woman who kills a man she hates without so much as winking, she who never hesitates to act, becomes an instrument of her lover's pleasure in copulation:

The narrative of Alyx's own sexual pleasure buries this pleasure in images of passivity which remove her from her self.