Abstract
Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex is a collection of essays about the ethics of sex and politics in the contemporary world animated by the hope of a different world where “fuckability” is of central importance. This book further draws on the traditional and older feminist ideology that was mostly unafraid to think of sex as a sociopolitical phenomenon because it was considered something fully within the bounds of social criticism. Basically, this book comprises a story of Srinivasan's Black friend who, despite being popular and beautiful, could not attract the attention of her male fellows when it came to dating in her mostly White private school. Srinivasan tells the readers that it is the “hot blonde sluts” and east Asian women who are “supremely fuckable” in respective societies. By “fuckability,” Srinivasan is not referring to the sexual availability of these bodies but rather to their ability to “confer status to those who have sex with them.” In her theory, there is no “fuckability” in its general sense, as in pre-political, pre-social desirability; one's own sexual politics construct it.
For Srinivasan, cultural conflicts provide a sense of security. The fierce culture and gender wars of recent years allow people to discern a queered, you do you, sex-positive mixture of feminism from an unmixed infusion of harsh, no-porn feminism that assures more lamps on gloomy roads in 2021 when it comes to (Anglophone, Euro-American) feminism. Through this book, Srinivasan highlights that we know who our friends are, whom we want to read, and whom we want to follow once we choose a side. However, like all clashes, cultural conflicts begin when people stop thinking. The comfortable positions that this particular dispute has produced conceal a deeper and more significant fault line that continues to obstruct feminism's progress. This is the fault line that feminists create when they fight for either freedom or critique, neglecting the important Black and developing-world's feminist lesson that all demands for freedom must be accompanied with critique. Therefore, in her ground-breaking debut, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Srinivasan attempts to bridge this gap.
Srinivasan delves into the politics and ethics of incel (an online community of young men who view themselves as unable to attract women sexually) culture, porn, sex in educational settings, and sexual harassment in a series of six gratifyingly written pieces on desire and feminism. She spins the culture battle in her hands, demonstrating how the idea that desire is basic and essential has become the bedrock of today's sexual ethics. The author demonstrates the limitations of popular feminist freedom arguments by asking why, if the want is essential, it generally fits so well with ableist, racist, sexist, transphobic, and casteist axes of power. She notes the inconsistency of “freedom,” which leads to unfreedom: she writes, “If all desire must be insulated from political critique, then so must the desires that exclude and marginalize Trans women” (p. 89). On the other hand, Srinivasan believes that criticism is meaningless without liberty: “I was not imagining a desire regulated by the demands of justice, but a desire set free from the binds of injustice” (p. 96). She emphasizes the horrible fact that: “we have never yet been free” (p. 122).
The Right to Sex encapsulates Srinivasan's ideas that are based on her examination of the worrying confluence of justifications for sexual and market liberty. She sees parallels between contractual ethics of consent and the neoliberal principle that people exist as atomized entities whose behaviour is fundamentally rational simply because they are “free”: “A practice which is consensual can also be systemically damaging,” she writes (p. 147). Srinivasan's comprehensive reflection on interlocking axes of oppression is motivated by the queer and anti-racist argument that nonwhite, non-heterosexual, nonce (sexual offending) males also have a right to sex. She cautions us against doing so. “Presuppose a false dichotomy between oppressors and oppressed, as if being oppressed along one dimension exonerates us from the possibility we might oppress anyone else” (p. 101).
Srinivasan describes the main example of Elliot Rodger's massacre in 2014 of six women and men in Isla Vista near the University of California, Santa Barbara, as one in which Rodger's frustrated and pathological sense of entitlement to have sex with a White, blonde sorority woman resulted in his misogynist terrorism. His racial and male privilege led him to conduct mass murder partly—and ironically—because of his belief in his “unfuckability” as a mixed-race man. “Feminist commentary on Rodger and the incel phenomenon more broadly has said much about male sexual entitlement, objectification, and violence. But so far, it has said little about desire: men's desire, women's desire, and the ideological shaping of both,” Srinivasan writes (p. 76). Srinivasan focuses on Anglophone discussions and Euro-American instances, but she purposefully searches out case studies that unsettle simple categories of oppression, reenacting what Black and developing-world feminists have done for decades in confounding feminist arguments. To say that feminism would be better served if Srinivasan didn't complicate things would be to undermine feminism's own accomplishments by putting desire outside the grasp of sociopolitical analysis.
This book has a shadow text that also explores the importance of education and pedagogy in the twenty-first century. This shadow text opens up a new world of pleasure and fascination for Srinivasan's reader. Srinivasan, for example, observes that children often use porn to learn about sex rather than to watch it: “Porn is not pedagogy, yet it often functions as if it were” (p. 44). She uses this finding to reframe the age-old debate over criminalizing pornography by questioning whether sex education should be left to the business in the first place. What would a more effective sex education look like? Similarly, in her essay, she says: “On Not Sleeping with Your Students,” Srinivasan breaks through the endless disputes between professors and students over consent to uncover the psychodrama at the heart of the relationship: women and girls are socialized to want their instructors, while men and boys are socialized to want to be their teachers: “Is it too sterile, too boring to suggest that instead of sleeping with his student, this professor should have been—teaching her?” (p. 128).
Srinivasan's brilliance is in her ability to cut through the clutter of historical and contemporary discussions of sexuality, desire, and freedom to pose new questions. She accomplishes this by drawing on a wealth of historical knowledge to demonstrate where our ideological ideas come from and where they could lead. She also explores hundreds of studies and cases highlighting the weird paradoxes in today's sexual politics (in Australia, for example, unless you’re Aboriginal and live in the Northern Territory, you can watch porn openly). Srinivasan writes in various registers, and the book is equally rewarding for those who are well-versed in feminist theory and history and those who are new to the subject. Above all, it emphasizes, through historian David Roediger, that a radical movement must not just speak truth to power but also act on that true power and “speak frankly to itself.”
