Book Review: ‘Right To Sex’ By Amia Srinivasan Walks Us Through Difficult And Important Conversations

Whenever we talk about sex, a judgment is pronounced upon us. It is implied that something that should have been strictly personal is out now. Heads are turned. There are always gaps between what we think about sex and how we discuss it. Amia Srinivasan, philosopher and Chichele professor of social and political theory at Oxford University, wants to have these conversations out in the public. In her book Right to Sex, she tries to demonstrate the importance of the word in our lives.

The basis of the book is Srinivasan’s 2018 essay Does anyone have the right to sex in The London Review of Books, which generated a debate that prompted her to write more about the public life of sex. The book includes that essay and covers a lot of ground through its other essays which reflect upon desire, porn, feminism, and much more that we do not talk about often. Srinivasan unravels a plethora of questions on consent, agency, misogyny, incel movement, silence, justice, gender violence, sexual harassment especially in the context of the #MeToo movement, and seeks to unpack the movement and its complexities within the class dynamics.

In one of the interviews when Srinavasan was asked about being misrepresented, she replied, “I wasn’t trying to deliberately leave myself open for misreading. It just never occurred to me to write in a different way. But now I see that writing that wants to fearlessly engage with complexity is always going to be open to misreading. That’s true of so many great feminist texts; texts that open themselves up in those ways that I think continue to pay dividends.”

The book distinguished by spaciousness is full of sharp turns and trapdoors. It provides a powerful analysis of how race, class, and institutional power interact in our society. Srinivasan’s gaze is turned towards the politics and ethics of sex. She wants us to ponder over sex more deeply as a personal experience that exhibits societal connotations. She regards sex not merely a private act rather she says “sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing”.

In the first chapter aptly titled Conspiracy against Men, Srinavasan dismantles misconceptions concerning false rape claims, Title IX, and cancel culture, some of which have become invisible through repetition. In this chapter, she engages with the ethics and politics of #MeToo movement and the discourse around false accusations. What is important for our understanding is the way she talks about the prodigal sons of #MeToo who are outraged by the truth of these accusations. Srinivasan also suggests that movements like these are a bigger worry. She convincingly argues that fear of false accusations in the #MeToo era are a symptom of a wider worry that has little to do with sex. 

Srinivasan engages with the second wave feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and their works against pornography. These feminists demanded ban on pornography and accused men of violence and urged they must be punished for it. She takes question to her students, whom she believes are aware and apprehensive of criminalising porn and sex work, and who it harms ultimately. At the same time, Srinivasan treats sex workers with indistinctness, quoting many of them while also addressing their critics. She considers the rights of sex workers more important than “political symbolism”. However, under the surface things are still bubbling. She believes that anti-prostitution activists think of decriminalisation as a reformist measure “which marginally improves the lives of sex workers while shoring up both patriarchy and the neoliberal commodification of sex”. However, she leaves it to the readers to decide whether this is really true. Talking about the anti-sex view, she says the sex we knew is a patriarchal construct, a true embodiment of gender inequality.  

In the book, Srinivasan does pick in the sense how Black women in America and how Dalit women in India are termed as “unrapable”. One of the things that piques interest is how she equates the poor Black women with low caste Dalit women, and how she defines them sexually “promiscuous”. Indian feminists have been writing about it for a long time. Consider, for example, Nivedita Menon’s work Seeing like a Feminist, which makes a similar argument about rapes in India. Menon writes how the rape of a woman is considered the lowest of sins. In order to avoid those rapes, we must lock women inside the houses. She also talks about how rape is considered a manifestation of a woman’s attitude that includes her attires, her bodily expressions, and her physical occurrence. 

In the last chapter Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism, Srinivasan poses a question about feminists and what should they do if they win the long battle they have been fighting. She says some feminists who have brought changes within power dynamics were privileged. These feminists speaking from a position of power have reproduced the world’s inequalities within their own ranks. And for a fact, women belonging to working class and immigrant women in the global north, and the poor brown and black women in the global south remain relatively disempowered. Regardless of that, some feminists do wield power that cannot be denied. 

Right to Sex, despite being a book by a philosopher, makes a convincing case that theory often returns to the reality of lived experience. The book is a well-crafted, well-researched collection that takes us through difficult yet important conversations. This book is both a challenge and a promise that is set to transform our political conflicts and at the same time tells us about the most valuable caprice, which is what it means to be free. This book will question your sexual desires and will tell you that your desires are not your personal entity but they are political and influenced by society.

This is a must read on feminism, sexual politics, desire, the politics of hashtag movements, and so on. It questions everything, including the intuitive behavior which is not so institutive.