[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection ... This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill ... These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it ... This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term ... Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one ... Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.
Srinivasan is clear about the need to do something about our desires but not about what, exactly, we should do ... Srinivasan’s essential counsel—to embrace ambivalence—might seem unlikely to cause offense. But it did. The disgruntled responses to the publication of 'Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?' are the subject of a subsequent essay in Srinivasan’s book, 'Coda: The Politics of Desire.' Reading these two pieces together is like chasing a glass of rosé with a shot of fire. In 'The Right to Sex,' Srinivasan is temperate and scholarly, treading lightly as she builds her argument. In 'Coda,' she is writing with the clarity of anger ... For each of her points...she can find a counterpoint. This must be what it means to 'dwell in ambivalence.' Clearly, it’s not a comfortable place to be. But why should it be comfortable? ... Srinivasan is after liberation.
Srinivasan covers a lot of ground: pornography, sex work, Title IX, #MeToo, the racial politics of desirability, the incel movement, student-teacher relationships, carceral feminism ... If the collection has any through line, it is dissatisfaction ... This all might sound dizzying, even overwhelming, but Srinivasan lays out the stakes of these questions with an urgency that forces you to stay with her, to live in the difficulty of the politically inconvenient ... Some readers of The Right to Sex [might] feel unsated, hungry for clearer choices about how to live a feminist life. Well, that is the point ... Each individual essay in this collection is complex, requiring an exegesis beyond what the scope of a single book review can handle, but certain moments stand out to me as impossible not to highlight ... I felt that Srinivasan was careful to disentangle ideas from action, and laid out some startling information about the unequal policing of pornography and sex work ... On any given page, Srinivasan will leave you feeling convinced she has found a way out, only to pull the rug out from under you; whenever she says 'but,' one wants to duck. Though far from exasperation, I felt relieved—even hopeful—that someone is asking the hard questions in public without asking for anything as absurd as a single answer.
Srinivasan’s true subject is the need for nuance and generosity in contemporary discourse on sex. She demonstrates the value of clear thinking by testing it on a range of topics. You don’t need to agree with her on everything to admire her even-handedness, her commitment ... Stylistically I was reminded of What White People Can Do Next author Emma Dabiri’s wit: Srinivasan shares Dabiri’s gliding rigour and sharp edges ... Srinivasan has a wide audience and can’t address everyone at once ... Inevitably, though, Srinavasan is more exacting at some points than others ... in a work that does not meaningfully incorporate disabled perspectives, I think it is better not to mention us at all than to do so tokenistically ... I also found the treatment of LGBT+ activism woven a little too neatly into a general narrative of feminist achievement ... She takes her opponents at their strongest, she braves ambiguity, and she holds up contradictory evidence to see if her argument still works ... I’ve thoroughly audited why anyone should skip The Right to Sex, and I couldn’t think of any reasons. Srinavasan’s work is too interesting to be perfect. It’s superb.
The title...has a triumphant ring ... Some of her suggestions are more promising than others ... However one goes about it, urging others to change their desires risks accusations of moralizing. Srinivasan’s willingness to take this and other risks is admirable, an enactment of her insistence that feminist politics are necessarily uncomfortable.
This book has clarity in abundance, but it also asks us to bear with complexity when it is required. Srinivasan refuses quick solutions ... Although the book makes a strong intervention in the field of feminist philosophy, it does not moralise. Indeed, one of its chief strengths is to show how moral philosophical reflection takes place in the midst of ordinary situations: in the classroom, on social media, in both public and intimate spheres. Imbued with the breath of fresher air, The Right to Sex demonstrates how moral reflection can be distinguished from moralising, why we must learn to pause, collect many perspectives on a topic, turn them over, and resist the lure of panicked and premature judgement ... but I missed a more sustained discussion of the rights of LGBTQI people, and women, to find sex where and how they want without discrimination and fear. That said, I appreciated her slow demolition of bad popular arguments ... Srinivasan offers a capacious and careful consideration of arguments about censoring pornography ... The Right to Sex examines different and conflicting versions of freedom through a wide range of cultural examples, and it does this extremely well: freedom as masculine entitlement, as white supremacist power, market freedoms, including the freedom to accumulate, and to treat sex as both commodity and property. Srinivasan further develops a Marxist-feminist critical reflection on how capitalism and patriarchy continue to inform some of our most basic debates on sexual ethics and policy.
Writing from an unmistakably feminist perspective, Srinivasan reiterates a number of arguments that have become axiomatic in some feminist circles: Teachers should not sleep with their students; sex work is work; and there is no feminism that is not intersectional. Yet more than many contemporary feminist thinkers, she draws on the work of second-wave feminists, including those with whom she disagrees ... Srinivasan doesn’t always offer firm answers to the questions she poses in the book—about whether to consume porn, or how to prevent violence against women—other than to emphasize the inadequacy of carceral solutions ... The Right to Sex is an exciting example of new thinking in feminist political theory as well as a work of feminist intellectual history—a project of recovery and preservation, like so many feminist projects before it ... Srinivasan’s vision of education is lovely, though, I would argue, somewhat idealized. As someone who has taught my fair share of undergraduates, I’ve found the relationship between teacher and student to be far more transactional than therapeutic. It also raises a question about the sites of feminist inquiry and who has access to them ... As Srinivasan demonstrates, we won’t think differently about sex and desire until a true sexual revolution has taken place. But we won’t get there by imagination and education alone. If we want to behave differently in the bedroom, we might start by behaving differently in the streets.
For Srinivasan, the notion that people who are fat or transgender or simply don’t fit the white and blond mould are sexually undesirable is a matter for political contestation and moral analysis ... It is a compelling argument ... The book effectively highlights how sexual desire – who we are and are not attracted to – is political and affected by the prevalent injustices in society and relevant to their elimination ... Titillating chapter titles such as 'On Not Sleeping With Your Students' seem unnecessarily performative. But perhaps that’s a reflection of where academic feminism is right now. In the end, Srinivasan accomplishes what she sets out to do: deliver a treatise both ambivalent and discomfiting, one which reveals the inadequacies in what we had imagined to be solutions.
The Right to Sex...engages with some of the most complex hot-button cultural issues to emerge around sex and consent in the 21st century. With intelligence and clarity, Srinivasan unpacks the moral and philosophical underpinnings of such topics as false rape accusations, pornography and teacher-student relationships, making her book an invaluable companion for readers interested in nuanced analysis rather than hasty clickbait ... Srinivasan moves her argument in unexpected directions to ask ever larger and harder philosophical questions ... Srinivasan provides a helpful survey of the history of feminist responses to pornography ... With articulate precision, Srinivasan’s timely book offers readers a lucid and compelling guide to thinking philosophically about sex and power.
The thing she comes for is a truer feminist project, one which retrofits second-wave thought for the intersectional era and reminds a movement’s cynical grandchildren of the once-utopian feminist imagination ... In reconsidering the political formation of desire, Srinivasan asks us to reconsider the political solutions as well. Along with feminism’s lazy refusal to interrogate desire, Srinivasan diagnoses its complicity in great harm. But The Right to Sex is a diagnostic book and not, in any great detail, a prescriptive one. We know what the wrong tools are, but which are the right?
The first, third and fifth chapters are diligently researched, expertly synthesized accounts of the events, theories and materials which have formed the primary interests of much of the last decade’s popular feminist writing on sexual power and consent ... Srinivasan’s great strength is to condense and arrange these arguments in ways that make their juxtaposing assumptions evident, to highlight particularly the tensions between calls for the regulation of sex, the punishment of sexual violence and the harmful social consequences of carceral legal systems ... She risks assuming that there is such a thing as sex devoid of power. But even outside the rigid hierarchies of institutional pedagogy, do we not imbue those we desire with a form of power over us? ... Srinivasan compares the misidentification of sexual desire for the teacher to Adrienne Rich’s theory of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’...Srinivasan’s inversion does the opposite, and discredits (mostly straight) sexual desire – because it is the wrong type – as an errant act of transference. Where Rich aims to add to the volume of desire visible in society, Srinivasan tries to detract from it ... Srinivasan’s book...generalises outwards from the university to diagnose morbid symptoms in a culture that is not bound by the para-legal ethical frameworks of the campus ... The methodology on which Srinivasan’s insights are based is often dubious: why should the opinions of a group of Oxford students, self-selectively interested already in feminism, be taken as representative of the mores of the general young adult population?
A succinct and clear writer, Srinivasan defines her terms in helpful and revealing ways ... Another key concept for Srinivasan is intersectional Marxist feminism. She is at her strongest when demystifying it as a framework that attacks the system rather than 'men' as a group. Her most provocative arguments stem from the notion that sexual politics cannot be fully examined without speaking truth on race and class ... Porn is everywhere, but the argument that it has poisoned an entire generation, making it impossible for them to think about sex for themselves, feels too broad and poorly supported ... Some of Srinivasan’s assertions about pornography are rattlingly obtuse ... It’s obvious that Srinivasan is a thinker whose ideas can evolve, as they must.
Srinivasan’s argument is at its most challenging to current feminist orthodoxies when she questions the injunction to 'believe women' who accuse men of sexual assault. False accusations of rape are uncommon, yet in a society that imprisons a disproportionate number of black men for sexual crimes, feminists should be wary of siding with the carceral state ... Srinivasan is fond of the distinction between radical (good) and liberal (bad). But radical politics requires a programme. How do you liberate sex from the distortions of oppression? ... Perhaps this performative gesture towards possibility is necessary to save us all from strangulating pessimism, but the idea that the imagination could choose to make sex good again seems decidedly liberal to me ... As a teacher, Srinivasan needs to believe that making arguments has real-life effects. But I kept wanting an account of why the radical feminists of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s didn’t win.
[An] exhilarating title essay ... The thesis of The Right to Sex is both persuasive and daring, and Srinivasan does not shy away from the difficult tensions that it throws into relief ... Dwelling in this [ambivalent] place for the span of one essay, or even two or three, might have been productively provocative—especially when the place is as astutely imagined and as beautifully described as it is by Srinivasan. But an approach that initially titillates begins to madden when it is extended over the course of an entire collection. Though the book’s version of its title essay carries a new coda, the fresh material represents more of a scattershot response to Srinivasan’s critics than an attempt to resolve the dilemmas fleshed out in the original essay. It paves no paths toward less ambivalent places ... Ultimately, The Right to Sex provides little guidance as to how we should actually respond to the moral quandaries that it so perceptively sketches ... This statement does little to clarify what concrete alternatives to carceral feminism we should seek in the immediate future, given that we live, regrettably, under conditions of grave inequality.
Her nuanced analysis of complex problems feels fresh. Is it utopian, though? Socialism in other societies has not solved oppression, but Srinivasan is right that the status quo is failing many of us.
After all this build-up, you might be expecting something as shocking as Germaine Greer, as analytical as Simone de Beauvoir, as radical as Andrea Dworkin. The Right to Sex does not, sadly, deliver the bang it promises ... too often Srinivasan seems hemmed in by her awareness of what the 'correct' answer should be ... Srinivasan’s proposal of an anti-carceral feminism...hand-waves the practicalities. Sometimes, this aloofness from the real world produces strange omissions ... There is very little sense in her essays of how people get up to sex in the real world, which is a problem for a book about sex ... Srinivasan, for all her dazzle, offers no way out of the universal sex pickle.
The end of the subordination of women is wrapped up with the end of categories that seek to contain and name desire — the categories of gender, sexuality, and race, among others. This is a bold claim, and one of its logical conclusions is that the goal of feminism is the abolition of women as a category. But Srinivasan arrives at this idea over the course of five essays, in which she rigorously deconstructs today’s dizzying array of gender and sexuality discourses ... What Srinivasan implies but leaves unsaid is that the right to respect subtends another right — the right to be loved. And not only as an object of romantic or sexual desire, but as a refutation of the horror and disgust that whiteness and patriarchy instruct us to feel about Black people, fat people, and ourselves ... While The Right to Sex and its coda are the most polemical and expansive in their understanding of feminist politics, Srinivasan’s other essays demand comparable degrees of reflection ... Though her analysis is clear and bracing, the fact that Srinivasan appears to punt the decision is disappointing, all the more profoundly because she achieves such clarity in The Right to Sex ... Srinivasan is a meticulous and rigorous logician, so much so that one is forced to ask if the problem is not with the clarity of her writing but instead with the fact that 'politics,' in signifying such a wide array of structures and processes, signifies very little after all.
A collection that poses more questions than it answers ... In this spirit, and with an alluring style that gives readers the sense of rolling around in thoughts with her, the author readily engages second-wave feminists, many of whom are now viewed as too white and juridical in their thinking. And she critiques the intersectional and sex-positive feminists who dominate today’s discourse ... If there is a philosopher able to think toward a more spiritually plural feminism, it may be Amia Srinivasan, who — this book makes clear — is so curious and inventive. The Right to Sex is a truly stunning debut, sure to provoke, unmoor, and inspire many.
... [a] necessary treatise of the modern age ... six essays on gender and sex of the highest quality - each one a joy to read and informed by the latest ideas ... From the dangers of pornography to interracial dating, she manages to capture in easy- flowing and concise prose the issues of the day ... Her fearlessness in engaging with touchy topics, usually avoided by progressives - including whether all people, no matter their sexuality, have a duty to examine whom they sleep with - makes her voice a real standout in a time of popular reckoning for gender relations not seen since the 1960s and 1970s ... From the outset, it is clear that she does not wish to only preach to the choir and is intent on persuading those who disagree ... follow her arguments to their not always definitive conclusions and it is clear that Srinivasan is not stoking controversy for its own sake ... She engages with conflicting evidence, ambiguities that cannot be easily resolved and then asks how these can be better reconciled and used to shore up ethical beliefs ... Everyone should read it.
One of the best books to contend with the politics of desire ... The essays in Srinivasan’s new book balances historical analysis with a deep sense of how feminist philosophy functions in online and academic discourse, how it travels through whisper networks, and how it uneasily joins and diverges from other anticapitalist struggles. She can levy an acidic 'perhaps' to send shivers down the spine of an argument she is about to perform decisive surgery on ... a fascinating and exciting work that contends with a full spectrum of ideas, even when gaps begin to show. In one essay, Srinivasan quotes a professor that there will 'still be heartbreak in utopia.' This is the kind of nuance and fraught response this book can bring to feminist philosophy.
Srinivasan is one of those philosophers who is, first and foremost, an exceptional prose stylist – an exemplar of what academic writing, specifically, both could and should be. Her writing is unadorned and perfectly-tuned, like listening to someone play the piano incredibly well: at times her sentences resonate with an almost luminous clarity, reducing some horrendously tangled rat-king of philosophical concepts and material concerns to an insight which beams out perfectly in the relations between her paragraphs ... Unlike most analytic philosophy, Srinivasan’s book is angry – icily calm and clear, yes; at times almost terrifyingly restrained; righteously and appropriately angry – but angry, nonetheless ... Srinivasan’s feminism is ultimately utopian – her analysis never seeks to reconcile itself to a world which is anything other than finally, universally free. In this, The Right to Sex is an almost uniquely unedifying book. Its effect is not to leave the reader feeling confident and optimistic and sure of what is to be done, but rather to catch a glimpse of the horrible severity of reality, as Srinivasan sees it. In a way, she writes like Nietzsche (though with a lot less storm and stress): the point here is to undo you; you’re going to have to build yourself back up ... There were points when I felt Srinivasan let herself have things too easy ... If Srinivasan is right about how bad sex is, under presently-existing conditions, then really: who would ever want to have it at all? ... Sex may well be an appropriate site for moral and political critique. But there are times when, let’s face it, none of that can possibly feel like it matters. Real, good sex can only be experienced as a zone of reprieve.
These essays provide a useful introduction to contemporary feminism, its permutations and positions, for those who may, somehow, have missed the debate ... Srinivasan’s great strength is to condense and arrange these arguments in ways that make their juxtaposing assumptions evident, to highlight particularly the tensions between calls for the regulation of sex, the punishment of sexual violence and the harmful social consequences of carceral legal systems ... Sexual authority ought, in this model, to rest with the individual subject, their freedom realised by thinking and imagining outside the set of social practices within which they have been raised. As a conception of freedom, this is high liberalism, offering up in place of social power the utopia of the blank slate, the unquestionable priority of autonomy ... The risks of this manoeuvre are evident in Srinivasan’s book, which generalises outwards from the university to diagnose morbid symptoms in a culture that is not bound by the para-legal ethical frameworks of the campus...The methodology on which Srinivasan’s insights are based is often dubious: why should the opinions of a group of Oxford students, self-selectively interested already in feminism, be taken as representative of the mores of the general young adult population?
Overall, the essays bring many of the foundational tensions of the women’s liberation movement into the political and cultural climate of the 21st century ... While many of these debates will be familiar to some readers, the analytic precision Srinivasan brings to them serves as a reminder that sexual ethics always need to be contextual and nuanced. The imperative for feminism, as these essays eloquently demonstrate, is not to find a safe space in which clear parameters are drawn (with even clearer exclusions), but to dwell on discomfort and ambivalence that come from being genuinely open to inclusivity. It also means acknowledging the deep tensions that have shaped feminism as a political movement ... This is a book that gets you thinking and gives you enough hope to imagine that things might be otherwise.
... sharp and thoughtful ... Srinivasan doesn't back away from uncomfortable moments and offers a reasoned, multifaceted analysis that may change the simplistic ways we sometimes view such issues ... Ideas from other scholars, activists, and journalists are expertly woven into her essays, making for a rich and balanced narrative that is fascinating to read ... This exceptionally well-written collection is among the most insightful works yet about sex in modern culture. It effectively merges academic analysis with lived experience in an accessible read that will interest readers from diverse professional and personal backgrounds.
Approaching each of her topics, Srinivasan orients readers with care, nuance, and intersectionality ... To accompany Srinivasan on her thought-work into unpacking, questioning, considering, contextualizing, and deepening contemporary feminist issues is to be stretched into new shapes that the world needs. Srinivasan’s powerful thinking is matched by her powerful language, often striking like an electric revelation at the core of an issue. This is required reading.
Potent, thought-provoking ruminations on feminism as a political movement capable of eradicating the subordination of women ... This collection contains a staggering amount of research ... Featuring excellent criticism of subjects such as carceral solutions and sex education, this is a vital, compelling collection.
