Review: The Right To Sex by Amia Srinivasan

In this collection of essays, University of Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan turns her attention to the thorniest questions in feminism of recent years. She considers sexual violence, porn, incels and whether anyone has a right to sex, sex between students and teachers, and the criminalisation of sex work. In each she goes for the surprising and counterintuitive, with rigorous attention to evidence where it is available, and logic where it is not. She troubles each topic by going back through decades of feminist thought, tracing the pathways of arguments for and against various ideas and ways of dealing with the sexual inequity between women and men.

Her conclusions are by no means clear cut. These are provocations, disturbances, unsettlements to staid ways of thinking. Take, for instance, her consideration of porn. Srinivasan describes how the debate over whether porn could be liberatory or repressive broke the second wave feminist movement in the 1980s. Porn, so a certain way of thinking went, was “a metonym for ‘problematic’ sex … for sex with men”. Other feminists countered that “women’s freedom required a guarantee of women’s right to have sex when, how and … with whom they liked”. Srinivasan takes these two sides and tangles them by considering whether porn is speech or action (even that distinction is relentlessly political, she argues) and the various attempts to regulate it. Porn is here to stay, she concludes, but “I am asking that we do not confuse the necessities of negotiations under oppression with the signs of emancipation”.

Her approach to sexual violence is similar. The evidence is clear: women don’t make up claims of sexual abuse. But Srinivasan troubles the Me Too movement by exploring how the exhortation “believe women” is racialised, with Black men overrepresented in sex crime convictions, and Black women much less likely to be believed. Neither have much to do with the reality of sexual violence, and nor, Srinivasan argues, does a narrow focus on consent and punishment. What she calls “carceral feminism” does not produce justice nor further the abolition of male sexual domination. What does freedom look like, and what is the work required to get there? I was drawn, funnily enough, to what a gay man said who wrote in to Srinivasan about the work required to let his partner be sexy against the norms of patriarchy, “to eroticise what is happening in front of us during sex.” “Is this an act of discipline, or of love?” Srinivasan poses, and for a moment the theory falls away.

These essays can be read on their own but reward a collective reading. Pathways emerge. One is an insistence on what we now call “intersectionality”, or the need to realise the compounding oppressions of class, sexuality and race. On Me Too again Srinivasan writes:

its fundamental problem is the presupposition that any such movement must be grounded in what women have universally in common … for many women, being sexually harassed is not the worst thing about their jobs.

Earlier she writes that “any liberation movement … that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group … have in common will best serve the members of the group who are least oppressed”. Srinivasan’s wants to free women (and men) from patriarchy, but she has no truck with solutions that only benefit cis white women.

To say that these essays complicate is not to say that they aren’t relentlessly clear-sighted. One of the joys of Srinivasan’s writing is her forbidding clarity. On the very first page she effortlessly dismisses a half-decade of trans-exclusionary nonsense on the basis of some “objective material ground”:

We inspect this supposedly natural thing, ‘sex’, only to find that it is already laden with meaning … Sex is, then, a cultural thing posing as a natural one. Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise.

Such writing is like throwing open a window.

Gay rating: 3/5 for discussions of queer relationships.