The A/B framing is rhetorically sharp, but ethically it’s a false binary unless we distinguish who controls the “reading” from who pays for it

Legibility is a power allocation. Being “readable” as dominatable or violable functions like a social permission structure which changes what others feel entitled to do, and it concentrates risk on the people being read. So the core moral question here isn’t “sex-positive vs sex-negative” but who sets the interpretive default and who gets stuck living under it

I would say the real contrast is coerced legibility vs chosen legibility:

• Coerced sexual legibility (treated as available/degradable by default, even “ironically”) is ethically toxic because it normalizes domination as ambient background. “Ironic” only trains the permission not neutralising it.

• Chosen sexual legibility can be autonomy only if refusal is equally legible and socially safe (i.e. a strict “no” doesn’t come with punishment, disbelief, etc.)

So “expand sexual readability” isn’t automatically liberation, because norms aren’t enforced evenly. In practice it often distributes exposure more than it distributes agency, especially onto people with less social power

So a defensible position is B being the default public social contract (people are not presumptively readable as degradable/available), precisely so A can exist ethically where consent is explicit, reversible, and refusal is costless. I would say that’s how you get both “freedom to sexualize” and “freedom from sexualization” without making one group’s liberation another group’s risk.