Date Finished: June 12th 2022
I decided I would make June a month of short story and essay collections. I didn’t do very well on that front, but this one is proof that I did manage to read one essay collection this month, and I’m counting that as a win. Onward!
The Right to Sex collects seven essays from feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan covering a wide range of hot-button issues including sexual assault and #MeToo, incels, the ethics of student/teacher relationships, prostitution, and pornography.
In the first essay, The Conspiracy Against Men, Srinivasan considers the nature of rape accusations, false and real. False rape accusations have become something of a boogeyman among white men of means, despite the fact the system overwhelmingly condemns black men to serve for false accusations (a legacy of Jim Crow and the false accusation infamously levelled at Emmet Till). It is an inversion of reality that such men fear this when, in truth, women still go disbelieved when it suits the system. Cases like Brett Kavanaugh and Brock Turner show that the wealthy white accused is likely to get off, despite the injunction to ‘believe women’, which acts as a blunt yet necessary tool against a rigged system. On a case by case basis, the evidence may add up to a different conclusion, and all are innocent until proven guilty, but we can look at the situation and observe that the odds are that a woman was assaulted. The racial component is also important. Historically, black men accused of rape against black women during slavery were often acquitted, the logic being that black people were savage and rape couldn’t exist between them; both sexes were hypersexual. This has led to black men, such as Clarence Thomas and R Kelly to evade justice, both by invoking the lynching metaphor without apparent irony when accused by black women of rape. Meanwhile, famous and powerful men have positioned themselves as the real victims of #MeToo. Where many men denied the allegations against them, some—Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, etc—admitted, at least partially, to misconduct, then tried to reposition themselves as having learnt their lessons. In this analysis, men are stupid but not malicious; they didn’t realise they made their victims uncomfortable, but they’ve listened and learnt from this experience, surely they don’t deserve further punishment? In the past women had to put up and shut up, now that they’re speaking out, their aggressors are doing everything they can not to hear, or manufacture excuses as to their behaviour. At the same time, there are more ambiguous events occurring. Srinivasan recalls an encounter on a campus in the US where a young woman was uncomfortable during a sexual encounter, but didn’t feel unsafe or that she couldn’t leave; the man in the encounter was coercive but not forceful and the encounter ended amicably. Nevertheless she felt her discomfort constituted reporting the incident, not in a quest for justice, but some sort of reconciliation of the discomfort. The university, under Title IX banned the male student from campus until after his graduation. The female student said this wasn’t the sort of punishment she wanted. Clearly, justice is wildly inconsistent—this student’s university time was destroyed over an awkward night, whereas Brock Turner was acquitted of a rape he unequivocally committed. But the more interesting takeaway here may be the female student’s logic: she felt able to leave but almost guilty for wanting to do so—an internalised sense of shame at letting a man down after getting him all worked up; a patriarchal legacy, perhaps. Ultimately, however, it’s the bigger fights that matter, and here there is a real lack of contrition. The accused who basically accepted the allegations against them were rarely contrite: John Hockenberry wrote a wild op-ed in which he talked about learning empathy—not for his many victims, but for accused men. Kevin Spacey has set about making a film in which he plays a falsely accused pedophile, seemingly to game internet search results about him. When all is said and done, men are far angrier not that they’re accused, but that saying sorry doesn’t absolve them of their actions.
“In both Britain and the US, the 8 per cent figure was largely the result of police officers’ susceptibility to rape myths; in both countries, police officers were inclined to consider a report false if there hadn’t been a physical struggle, if no weapon had been involved, or if the accuser had had a prior relationship with the accused. In 2014, according to figures published in India, 53 per cent of rape reports in Delhi from the previous year had been false, a statistic giddily seized on by Indian men’s rights activists. But the definition of ‘false’ reports had been extended to cover all those cases that hadn’t reached court, never mind those that didn’t meet the legal standard for rape in India—including marital rape, which 6 per cent of married Indian women report having experienced.”
In the second essay, Srinivasan considers the “porn wars”, the rift in feminism around pornography, with the pro-side arguing for a woman’s right to (good, consensual) sex as part of their freedom, and the anti- side arguing that pornography depicted an explicitly patriarchal form of sex that was demeaning to women, and acted as propaganda that shaped the reality of sex in the world. Srinivasan was doubtful that conversations about porn would rivet her students, but found they were fascinated by the subject and broadly agreed with the anti-porn perspective insofar as almost all of them had been exposed to porn and it was essentially the foundation of their understanding of sex. Countless videos online, completely free to access, now act as formal sex education for boys and, to some extent, girls (research suggests that girls understand the fantasy of porn more than boys who seemingly accept it far less critically as an educational material). Whether porn counts as patriarchal propaganda, Srinivasan argues, is down to whether porn is vested with the authority by society, and perhaps, in the absence of effective sex education in America, it is by proxy. At the same time, young people are far more conscious of and more capable of articulating the potential harms of pornography. Historically, attempts to curb pornography were thwarted as free speech by the Supreme Court, although anti-porn feminists argued that pornography’s insidious effect was more akin to telling a dog to attack someone—the resulting action wasn’t an opinion: “women are inferior”, protected by free speech, as the Supreme Court argued, but an active harm. However, when a ban on violent pornography was passed in Canada, the resulting law was rarely used against large pornographers but almost invariably against small same-sex pornography concerns. Indeed, most bans on porn tend to attack the more “unorthodox” sex acts catering to particular fetishes, whilst leaving the mainstream, rough, male-centric varieties untouched. And especially now, the victims of any ban on pornography aren’t going to be monopoly moguls like Larry Flynt, but individual content creators using sites like OnlyFans to supplement their incomes. A ban on pornography may have been feasible before the digital age, but the internet cannot be contained, and so the argument about porn moves from the legislation sphere to the education sphere, and the state of sex education is bad, particularly in the USA, where only thirty of the fifty states mandate sex ed, and twenty-seven of those states stress abstinence. The male gaze in mainstream pornography is dominant: the male actor is a cipher for the viewer, seen only really through his erect penis, with the woman posing as an object for his pleasure. And yet around 30% of mainstream porn viewers are women. Do they identify with the objectified woman, or might they identify with the male in this scenario? (Srinivasan cites the possibility that rape fantasy porn might provide arousal not because women identify just with the victim but also with the perpetrator; an inversion of the actual event’s power hierarchy). The absence of a female gaze in much pornography is a problem worth addressing, but it does not mean women are incapable of identifying with it or even subverting it via interpretation. But the reality is that monopolistic mainstream porn sites are shapers of sexual desire; their algorithms dictate what so many see bringing sexuality into narrow conformity. While bolder independent studios are centring the pleasure of women and the marginalised, imaginatively creating new narratives of sex, they’re up against a tide. And that imagination is hard to come by in pornworld hegemony. Srinivasan hopes for imagination, for a remaking of the sexual narratives at large, but it’s an enormous task.
“The myopic focus on his son’s well-being – wasn’t Miller’s life also “deeply altered forever’? – is striking. Even more so is the (presumably inadvertent) sexual pun: “20 minutes of action’ – healthy, adolescent fun. Should Brock, Dan Turner seems to want to ask, be punished for that? Then there is the food. Brock no longer loves his steak? You no longer have to hide the pretzels or chips from Brock? This is the way one talks about a golden retriever, not an adult human. But in a sense Dan Turner is talking about an animal, a perfectly bred specimen of wealthy white American boyhood: ‘happy go lucky’, ‘easygoing , sporty, friendly and endowed with a healthy appetite and glistening coat. And, like an animal, Brock is imagined to exist outside the moral order. These red-blooded, white-skinned, all American boys – and the all-American girls who date them and marry them (but are never, ever sexually assaulted by them) good kids, the best kids, our kids.”
The title essay considers the case of Elliot Rodger, the self-described incel who conducted a killing spree because women wouldn’t have sex with him. The incel ideology, a disgusting prison of misogynistic extremism and male debasement as recruitment tool, has been analysed via many angles. Srinivasan considers whether the incels might have a point about desire and how it is shaped. Feminism originally had much to say about patriarchy’s role in shaping desire. Anti-sex feminists argued that sex with men was necessarily giving into patriarchy and that resistance required women to overcome desire, to refuse to marry and have sex, even to become celibate. Pro-woman feminists, as they were known, argued that marriage and sex could be necessary and even desirable, if not perfect, and that the role of feminism was to reshape desire, to free women from the chokehold of the narrow male paradigm of desire. From between these two factions emerged a pro-sex feminism, which now prevails and ultimately says that what individual women want is fine provided it’s consensual: some woman want a buttoned-down marriage and missionary, others want polyamorous fetish exploration, and everything inbetween, but we need not police personal desire. However, this has led to a lack of interrogation as to how these desires are shaped by society; the gay community is more aware of the politics of sexuality—tops, bottoms, Asian twinks, femme and masc, etc., all these labels come with a certain politics, a labelling that creates injustice, that categorises and sorts people by crude sexual metrics. The same is true of straight people, particularly pronounced on dating apps where people state height preferences and proscriptions on who they want, with the unwanted invariably being those from marginalised groups. The trouble is that this analysis soon leads us to the right to sex conversation which at its extreme gives us incels. No one has a right to demand that another person has sex with them. Education, representation and visibility may redress the balance slightly, but, Srinivasan says, we ultimately will have to engage with sex “on its own terms”.
Coda: The Politics of Desire is a reassessment of The Right to Sex essay in the face of various critiques levelled against it after its first publication in 2018. This is a highly varied, fluid essay, impossible really to recount here. Much of it concerns a rehashing of the politics of desire aspect of that essay, the idea that people are categorised. An interesting point is that black women (subordinate) often take black men (dominant) to task for preferring white women, an inversion of the usual power hierarchy, while Asian men (dominant) are the ones criticising Asian women (subordinate) for preferring white men to Asian men—a strange inversion of sexual politics. Incels are also a large part of this piece. These men, who seem to believe that they’re entitled to sex, Srinivasan argues are actually furious that they don’t have access to the higher status that sex confers on them; essentially that their anger is almost logical in an unequal society but that they’re wrong to believe themselves at the bottom of the pile. What is the alternative? Where some, invariably male, commentators have preached going back to traditional modes of monogamy and chastity, or enshrining a literal right to sex in law (a solution which cannot be divided from a logic that sees women’s bodies as a commodity to be traded), Srinivasan argues
On Not Sleeping With Your Students explores the prohibition on relationships between students and faculty in universities. After the Civil Rights Act made discrimination on the basis of sex unlawful, subsequent cases brought new nuances to the law. One high profile case, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, involved a black woman who was fired for taking ‘excessive’ leave. She had been sleeping with her supervisor but had done so out of fear for her job. The court pointed out that consent, when the sex was consensual, had been gained through fear rather than given freely. This logic extended throughout universities in America which began to put in place prohibitions on student/teacher relationships for fear of similarly coercive arrangements. Some universities banned any staff member from having a relationship with any student. However, many balked at such strictures which seemingly implied that students, usually women, were incapable of giving consent in a situation where there was perhaps a conflict of interest, a power differential; could desire not genuinely bloom in this situation regardless? It is, however, a gendered question. The professor is usually male and the student is usually female. And desire can be many things. Especially in a teaching environment, the desire for knowledge, the desire to be like an inspiring teacher, can be conflated with a desire for that person. It would not take much effort by the teacher to twist that conflation of desire to their own advantage if they were unscrupulous. Indeed, some professor-student relationships manifest with a disturbing asymmetry, with the student coming to “serve” the professor. It doesn’t have to happen this way, but the inherent power differential exacerbates the likelihood. While consensual relationships do not constitute sexual harassment there is something intuitively wrong with this picture: a failure by the teacher to uphold the standards of their profession. Their role is to teach, and a deviation from that paradigm by engaging in a relationship with a student is disruptive to the process, particularly if other students/professors know about the relationship. If the student succeeds, she will likely be dismissed as having “slept her way” to her position. A plethora of judgments and opinions will coalesce around the relationship, and their burden will fall on the (almost always) female student. In this sense, oversight of relationships may go somewhere to safeguarding against the exploitation of young female students.
“Many philosophers prefer to see complexity only where it suits them. Philosophy is a discipline dominated by men, including many men who feel – or historically have felt – powerless in the face of women, and who trade on their professional status for sex as a way of getting their just deserts, I remember once reading on an anonymous philosophy blog a comment by a philosopher – I can’t imagine it was a woman – who asked why there should be any difference between a professor asking to have sex with a student and asking to play tennis with her. Why, indeed? ‘When you are a woman and a philosopher’, wrote the French philosopher Michèle Le Douff, ‘it is useful to be a feminist in order to understand what is happening to you’.”
The final essay concerns prostitution. In Cologne, Germany, a drive-thru brothel has been created, an area through which men drive, pick-up their chosen sex worker, and drive into a parking garage. The garage is designed so the driver can’t get out but the passenger can, the sex workers have panic buttons, and social workers are on hand. The image attracted disgust from many feminists—prostitution has always been the perfect symbol of female subjugation. And yet, if we accept that the way society is structured will always result in prostitution, this is surely one of the best ways it can be conducted, with the safety of the workers prioritised. Indeed, legal restrictions on prostitution invariably hamper sex workers—in America where it’s illegal, rape is common; in Nordic nations where selling sex is legal but buying it isn’t, johns want more security, placing the burden of their safety on prostitutes. Some anti-prostitution feminists style themselves as abolitionists, ignoring the fact that prostitution has been illegal in a lot of places for a long time but has always happened regardless. In this sense, prostitution is less likely slavery and more like abortion. And just as if one really wanted to decrease the number of abortions they would invest in sex education, birth control and other measures, so some argue that to end prostitution one must decriminalise it. The essential divide in feminist thought on prostitution is: criminalise it into non-existence vs decriminalise it into non-existence.
“The feminists of the early US women’s liberation movement, like European and Third World feminists, had not, on the whole, looked to the state’s coercive apparatus for a solution to gendered violence. Sceptical of state power, they created and ran their own grassroots rape crisis centres, domestic violence shelters and abortion networks. But by the 1980s, mainstream feminists had fully embraced ‘law and order’ as the way to deal with domestic violence, prostitution, pornography and rape. Why the shift? In part it reflected broader changes in the US in this period: increasing anxiety about violent crime, together with the taking hold of an individualist ideology which implied that crime was a personal failing rather than a social pathology.”
Carceral feminism is a term used to describe the growing tendency of feminism to turn to state power in its crusade for equality. But these state solutions, as in legalisation around prostitution, cause problems too. A carceral feminism necessarily assumes that all women’s oppression is equal, and so where a state solution to women’s problems may legitimately help in the problems of middle class white women, the absence of class and racial analysis means that no solution, or even greater problems, will be the lot of women in poverty and women of colour. Essentially then, feminism has to transcend the limits of the carceral system which, insuperable from capitalism, means that a revolutionary feminism must be a revolutionary politics. This is Srinivasan’s destination: feminism as revolutionary movement; revolutionary socialism as feminism.
The Right to Sex shows Srinivasan to be a fascinating communicator with an admirable facility for translating complex theoretical arguments into lucid debates grounded in reality. Ultimately, she deconstructs rather than proscribes, taking the entire messy edifice of feminist thought and pulling on every thread until they unravel, providing endless food for thought in the process. This does seem to be a relatively introductory volume to feminist philosophy (by which I mean I understood it, so it can’t be too advanced), and I can imagine that it might not offer as much to those familiar with the terrain, but for my purposes it proved just right. That said, it does feel as though Srinivasan is being a little too polite at times; there are moments when she clearly has ideological differences with other referenced thinkers but skirts the disagreement so passively that you could almost miss it. Nevertheless, I would be fascinated to read a full length work from Srinivasan, or further essays on other topics (I’m writing this as Roe v. Wade has been overturned in the USA and would certainly be fascinated to hear her analysis of the situation).
7.5/10
chrisgregorybooks 