It’s the start of the day in Oxford. Amia Srinivasan probably woke up quite early for our morning Zoom call, but she doesn’t let on. Her long hair loose and her skin glowing, the Indian-American speaks in a clipped accent, pausing between questions as she frames her responses. It is easy to imagine the 36-year-old in the classroom at Oxford’s All Souls College, where she teaches philosophy and has held the prestigious Chichele Chair for Social and Political Theory (a statutory professorship) since January 2020. Much has been written about her being the first woman, the first person of colour, and the youngest to hold this position, but it is evident Srinivasan shrugs off these labels.
Now, with the launch of her first non-fiction book, The Right to Sex , much is being written about her again. The divisive work — a collection of six essays that attempts to break down the politics of desire, discusses the pitfalls of pornography, and asks questions about whether one has the right to sex in a world where the personal is political — has had armchair philosophers, feminists, the LGBTQI+, and even peers critique her for her brazen take on sex. But she is open to it all. “I like criticism; I think it is an important part of the feminist tradition,” she tells me with a smile.
The book grew out of an essay, Does anyone have the right to sex? (published in the London Review of Books in 2018), and was written over two summers in California, where, as she told The Guardian , she “would get up at 6 am to surf before settling down to work”. It delves into uncomfortable questions: what makes one person eminently more desirable than another, who decides this, what is the relationship between feminism and state power, how does consent work in the #MeToo era. It is also a heavily-loaded gun that challenges what many feminists and philosophers have said so far. Srinivasan addresses some of these in her conversation with The Hindu Weekend.
What does The Right to Sex mean to you?
The notion I’m interested in is this idea rooted in male sexual entitlement — that men have a right to have a certain amount of sex, regardless of whether the women want to. You see this explicitly in play in the so-called incel subculture [involuntary celibates, who claim they are unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one]. These young men talk about themselves as if they are lonely and sexually marginalised, but what they are really upset about is that they are not getting their due, sexually speaking. [As Srinivasan explained in an earlier interview, they aren’t able to attract the sort of women that could confer a high sexual status on them.] This comes out of an ideology of male sexual entitlement.
Feminism has been repurposed today to suit the world we live in.
I think the resurgence of feminism is a good thing, but I do worry about some of the forms that it can take. Globally, there exists a certain kind of mainstream feminism that’s not fundamentally interested in critiquing structures, but in slotting women into pre-existing structures of inequality. So, while the question of how many women are in your boardroom, or how many women are in positions of political leadership matter, it stop us from questioning whether the boardroom is a good democratic structure to begin with. Should we have corporations exercising this much influence over society? Does party politics, as it now exists, really enfranchise people, especially women? I think there can be a tendency to focus on middle-class and wealthy women, and not pay enough attention to those most vulnerable.
How does the politics of desire play out in countries that are deeply patriarchal?
There’s a profound asymmetry in most societies. On the one hand, there’s an implicit understanding, even if people deny it objectively like they do in the UK, that men, in some sense, are entitled to sex. For example, mostly everywhere rape in marriage is not recognised, or has only been recognised very recently. The whole point of the marriage contract is that men get to secure their entitlement to as much sex as they want. The flip side is that women aren’t entitled to sex on their terms. They play out differently in different cultures, but I do think it’s no coincidence that the assertion of male sexual entitlement goes hand in hand with the denial of women’s sexual agency, desire, and pleasure.
Amia Srinivasan
Why is unhindered access to pornography problematic?
I wasn’t really concerned about pornography until I started teaching about the debates that feminists had in the US and the UK, especially in the 70s and 80s. And I found that my students responded very strongly, often siding with those who were very critical of pornography. I think the reason is because they are of a generation who have come of age sexually when online pornography is ubiquitous. This mainstream porn doesn’t help set expectations, tell them the truth about sex, offer alternative views. It’s porn [that is limiting] that trains people to experience pleasure as acts of male domination and female subordination.
Many of the concepts you refer to are quite western. What is the audience you wrote for?
I’m a member of the Indian diaspora [born to Indian parents in Bahrain]. I’ve grown up in the US and the UK and, as a result, most of my orienting points come from a feminist tradition within a kind of Anglophone tradition. I think some of these notions, like male sexual entitlement and rape culture, do travel quite well, but there are also important specificities of culture and history that shape regimes of sexual entitlement in particular countries. I don’t expect the book to make automatic sense, and I don’t aspire to a kind of completeness or global reach. But I do hope it contributes to a conversation.
Published by Bloomsbury, The Right to Sex is ₹699 (hardback), on bloomsbury.com.
