The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Over the last few decades, interest has grown among academic philosophers in what’s come to be called “public philosophy”: talks and writings aimed at a nonacademic audience. This is a salutary development. Not only do philosophers have much of substance to say about matters of general concern, they have approaches to the considering of difficult questions that can illuminate unfamiliar (and sometimes, unpopular) points of view, sort out alternative positions, and make unexpected connections among familiar opinions. Amia Srinivasan’s book The Right to Sex does all these things and more, setting a new, very high bar for public philosophizing.The book collects six long essays plus a “coda” (Srinivasan’s reflections on first publication of “The Right to Sex”), each centered on some central aspect of contemporary issues pertaining to sex. The writing is lucid and disciplined, but also full of passion. There is a great deal of outrage in these pages, but also strains of deep sympathy. And then there’s what I like the very, very best: arguments instead of polemics.It would be lazy understatement to say that the issues Srinivasan tackles are “complex:” it is her brilliance to be able to wrangle the complexities into fluid narratives that are a pleasure to read (if “pleasure” is an OK word in connection with content that is often saddening or disturbing). But don’t conclude from her sensitive and scrupulous examinations of different points of view that she is a moral relativist. She makes no secret of her own positions; she simply demonstrates that it is possible to understand a position without endorsing it. Modeling such an approach to controversy is, all by itself, a sorely needed contribution to the improvement of what now passes for political discourse in the United States.Each essay has a central focus (although many themes recur throughout the volume). “The Conspiracy against Men” is about false rape allegations: who makes them, how often they occur, who gets sent to prison on their basis—and also, whose complaints of actual sexual assault get dismissed as “false reports.” “The Right to Sex” begins with a discussion of the “incel” (for “involuntarily celibate”) movement and the villain who inspired it, the mass murderer Elliot Rodger, but quickly moves into a general discussion of the normative dimension of desire: the heart may want what the heart wants, but does it have a right to want it? Both topics are elaborated in “Coda: The Politics of Desire.” “On Not Sleeping with Your Students” is an extended argument against the idea that erotic involvement with one’s student is compatible with pedagogical responsibility. “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism” examines the arguments for, and consequences of, relying on state power in matters of sex. The essay has a dual focus: on legalistic strategies to end prostitution and on the incarceration of (mostly) men in cases of rape and domestic violence.The essay “Talking to My Students about Porn” was particularly informative to me, a pro-sex feminist from the “Second Wave,” unsure whether to applaud or decry hookup culture, sexting, and all the other baffling social practices of Kids Today. Srinivasan opens the essay by detailing the paradoxical ways in which college-aged women—her students—seem to have internalized both twentieth-century feminist analyses of masculinist oppression and mainstream pornographic constructions of sexual relations, yielding a weird doublethink about their own sexual relationships, their dissatisfactions, and even their injuries: “How should we understand the relation between this raised state of feminist consciousness … and what appear to be their worsening sexual conditions: increased objectification, intensified body expectations, decreasing pleasure, and shrinking options for sex on their terms?” (49). Srinivasan is (correctly, in my opinion), critical of feminist efforts to legislate against porn. She points out—as liberal feminists like Nadine Strossen (1995) have emphasized—that attempts to ban pornography have not only been ineffective in eliminating violent and degrading pornography but have been harmful to members of sexual minorities. Srinivasan goes beyond ACLU liberalism, however, in acknowledging the harm that “mainstream” pornography does, harm that may not be eliminable by “more speech.” For one thing, she notes the fact that young people are increasingly dependent on pornography for sex “education.”1 Echoing Catharine MacKinnon’s analysis, Srinivasan says that mainstream pornSrinivasan goes beyond going beyond liberalism to look at ways in which pornography can be good. Unlike most feminist philosophical critics of “pornography,” she recognizes both the variety within pornographic material and the variety of viewers and producers of pornography.2 She considers a list of sex acts prohibited by a 2014 British law—stuff like “penetration by any object ‘associated with violence’” and “strangulation”— and comments that many of these acts are “characteristic of femdom porn, in which women subject men to physical pain and psychic shame” (57). Is it possible, Srinivasan asks, echoing pro-sex feminist Ellen Willis, that when women view even mainstream hetero porn, they find power—perhaps even healing—in identifying with “the ones, for once, doing the ordering, demanding, shoving and pounding?” (66). I certainly welcome Srinivasan’s presentation and discussion of such renegade ideas as these. I was disappointed, however, that she did not provide a more complete picture of the variety of the productions and practices of contemporary sex-positive communities, whose members strive to embrace sexual diversity within the context of feminist analysis and positive consent. I would also have welcomed her thoughts on feminist pornography, which centers feminine pleasure.One theme that recurs in almost every discussion is “intersectionality.” The term has become a buzzword among progressive academics and activists (and I say this as a proudly progressive academic and activist). But Srinivasan’s essays embody intersectional analysis: they show us, through specific data and narrative detail, how race, class, gender and other dimensions of social location create sui generis sites of injustice. Consider her discussion of false rape charges in the first essay, “The Conspiracy against Men.” False rape allegations, she reports, do occur; but the victims of such injustices are most often men of color, and the accusers are (most?) often men—police officers and prosecutors, keen on conviction, who suppress exonerating evidence and engineer false “identifications”(4). Readers of this essay will probably already know that false rape charges were very often pretexts for the lynching of Black men (some 150 just between 1892 and 1894, left undetailed, Srinivasan notes, by the National Registry of Exonerations). But are readers also aware of “the use of false rape accusations as a tactic of colonial rule” in India, Australia, South Africa, and Palestine? (I wasn’t.) The complicity of white women in all these racist regimes, together with the fact that it is women of color whose charges of rape are least likely to be believed, means that “the politics of ‘Believe women,’ in its current form, collides with the demands of intersectionality” (17). She continues: “Black women in particular suffer from the stigmatization of black male sexuality to which the injunction ‘Believe women’ too readily gives cover…. When we are too quick to believe a white woman’s accusation against a black man, or a Brahmin woman’s accusation against a Dalit man, it is black and Dalit women who are rendered more vulnerable to sexual violence” (17–18).The malice and violence of such criminally false charges put into context the absurd whining of privileged white men whose sexual “peccadillos”—or those of their privileged sons—have been called out and sanctioned, and the misplaced sympathy for abusers who simply didn’t realize that the “rules have changed.” Srinivasan skewers that idea: “How many men are truly unable to distinguish between wanted and unwanted sex, between welcome and ‘gross’ behavior, between decency and degradation?” (21).Another recurring theme—which receives central treatment both in “The Right to Sex” and “The Politics of Desire”—is the question whether and to what degree we are morally responsible for the content of our sexual and romantic desires. Srinivasan is skeptical of the “naturalization” of erotic preferences—the idea that sexual preference is either innate or determined by factors out of one’s control—and rejects the “liberal” (i.e., not radical) idea that the “sole constraint on ethically okay sex” is consent. But she also acknowledges the real dangers, identified and struggled against by generations of feminists, of “subjecting our sexual preferences to political scrutiny. We want feminism to be able to interrogate the grounds of desire, but without slut shaming, prudery or self-denial: without telling individual women that they don’t really know what they want, or can’t enjoy what they want, within the bounds of consent” (86). Nonetheless, she contends, “it is as ‘banal as it gets’” (citing a phrase from a tweeted comment on “The Right to Sex”) “to observe that what is ugliest about our social realities—racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity—shapes whom we do and do not desire and love, and who does and does not desire and love us” (95).Should one be suspicious of a desire, say, to be with someone of a particular race? Srinivasan writes of the pain of some Black women suffering sexual rejection and self-hatred because of white-racialized standards of feminine beauty, as well as the pain of some East Asian men who are rejected because of white-racialized standards of masculinity. But on the flip side, should an East Asian woman who dates or marries a white man (who is, perhaps, responding to the exoticization of the “Oriental” woman) be criticized? Does she fail in some racial-romantic duty?Srinivasan acknowledges that discussion of what people sexually ought to want can “encourage a discourse of sexual entitlement” (86). Granting that there are sexually marginalized people “paves the way to the thought that [such] people have a right to sex, a right that is being violated by those who refuse to have sex with them” (86). This is, of course, a prominent theme in the misogynistic ravings of “incels,” who draw analogies between the injustice of sending a starving man to prison for stealing bread, and the criminalization of rape by a man “starving” for sex. (And speaking of intersectionality, Srinivasan documents the extent to which incel rage is racist and classist. While characterizing themselves as “too ugly or socially awkward to find love and sex” [115], their fuming is about the unavailability—to them—of hot white women.) Srinivasan relates this sexual rage to the generalized anger of white Trumpists: “In both cases, the anger is ostensibly about inequality, but in reality it is often about the threatened loss of male privilege” [116].)So what’s the solution? Srinivasan insightfully distinguishes between a critique of the production of desire (which must include a clearheaded look at the genuine sufferings of those whom prevailing prejudices have constructed as undesirable) and an endorsement of the view that the possession of individual desire must be disciplined and controlled by a larger community. She has been imagining, she says, not “desire regulated by the demands of justice, but rather a desire set free from the binds of injustice. To liberate sex from the distortions of oppression is not the same as just saying everyone can desire whatever or whomever they want. The first is a radical demand; the second is a liberal one” (96).The final recurrent theme I want to highlight is Srinivasan’s survey of the inadequacy, harmfulness, and injustice of legal and carceral approaches to sexual harms. In “Talking to My Students …,” she explains that “attempts to legislate against porn … invariably harm the women who financially depend on it the most” (60). In “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism,” she surveys a number of abolitionist approaches to prostitution—criminalizing “solicitation”; arresting the johns, but not the prostitutes; outlawing brothels. All these approaches fail both to protect women and to end prostitution, and they create or increase burdens and risks for the prostitutes. (One complaint: Srinivasan leaves unquestioned the liberal ideas that prostitution is inherently degrading and is something women do only out of economic necessity. I wish that she had included the voices of contemporary sex workers who challenge these notions.) Srinivasan sees a parallel in different women’s views about carceral approaches to sexual assault and domestic violence. While many white and privileged women are zealous in demands for the prosecution of harassers and abusers, victims who are poor, or Brown or Black, are reasonably reluctant to activate the power of the police, because of the devastating effects to families and whole communities of the imprisonment of their men.The broader political issue here, as in the debate about the politics of desire, and in older feminist debates about wages for housework, is the debate between reform and revolution, about “which demands set the groundwork for the undoing of a system of domination, and which only secure the grip of that system by relieving its most egregious symptoms” (157). On the international scale, Srinivasan observes, the visions of “socialist and anti-colonial feminists” (167) that place women’s emancipation within a broad movement toward global economic justice have lost out to Western government-backed programs in education, health, and economic “opportunity” aimed mainly at the incorporation of poor women into the neoliberal world order.I hope I have conveyed some of the richness of these essays. The book is brilliant and courageous. It is about feminism, which, as Srinivasan shows, is about everything.