Srinivasan, born in 1984, is the youngest and the first woman to be named the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, a chair formerly occupied by Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor, so maybe it’s not surprising that the issues that engage her most deeply are those of particular interest to the young, especially college students. They just get on with life, as women tend to do. As far as I know, they don’t even set up online forums devoted to raging against their lot. Srinivasan even uses the word “unfuckable,” seemingly unaware that its locus classicus is Amy Schumer’s famous 2015 skit in which a group of middle-aged actresses celebrate Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s “last fuckable day.” Interestingly, women who haven’t had sex in a decade do not go around murdering strangers. You would expect a feminist to have noticed that women over forty, let alone over sixty, are written off by many men their own age (or even older), while plenty of women are interested in older men. Given her interest in incels, it’s odd that Srinivasan doesn’t mention the largest group of losers in the dating and mating game: older women. Indeed, it is only now that many women can survive without marriage that they can seriously ask-and act on-what they do and don’t find sexually appealing. That was what Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story, “Cat Person,” was all about. Their lives are already overdetermined by fear, politeness, self-doubt, and the felt obligation to please others-the feeling, so common among young women, that one owes a man sex if he expects it and that the consequences of denial could be serious, even fatal. They are easier to guilt-trip and/or bully into bed. But who is going to hear this message? Women. Perhaps Srinivasan is right that we should all try to be more open. That’s one reason the “political lesbianism” of the 1970s, in which lesbians pushed straight women to give up men, was not a lasting success. Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas?” Well, sure, and moreover genitals are often attached to different kinds of bodies and even different sounds, smells, or other things that prompt desire beyond our control. On the other hand, she finds the “reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia-what’s more, genitalia from birth-puzzling. On the one hand, she writes that it’s wrong for trans women to try to bully lesbians into sleeping with them. So what does one do about it?Īs she often does in these essays, Srinivasan treads delicately. It isn’t some innate quality that makes Asian women desirable and Asian men not so much, or explains why Black women get fewer matches on dating apps.
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If a woman says she enjoys working in porn, or being paid to have sex with men, or engaging in rape fantasies, or wearing stilettos-and even that she doesn’t just enjoy those things but finds them emancipatory, part of her feminist praxis-then we are required, many feminists think, to trust her.” But, as she points out, women’s desires (as well as men’s) are shaped by social assumptions and prejudices-about race, ethnicity, weight, height, gender presentation, disability, and so on. There’s a tension, she writes, in current feminism, which rails against fatphobia but also forbids interrogating women about their desires: “The important thing now, it is broadly thought, is to take women at their word. From this rather alarming starting point, Srinivasan develops a fascinating challenge to rethink the commonplace view of sexual attraction as fixed and not open to critique. To incels-young, “involuntarily celibate” men who rage against women for not wanting to date them-Rodger is a hero. When Elliot Rodger killed six people in Santa Barbara in 2014, he left behind a 107,000-word manuscript arguing that beautiful blond girls rejected him because he was half-Asian (not because, as Srinivasan notes, he was “a creep”), and therefore those girls deserved to die. Maybe just a little, Amia Srinivasan suggests in the essay collection’s title piece. It’s bold and provocative, even a little shocking: “OK,” it seems to say, “so they’re crazy, misogynistic, and dangerous-but are those incels on to something?” The Right to Sex has to have the cleverest title on the women’s studies shelf since Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
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This article will appear in Dissent’ s Winter 2022 issue, out in January.
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So what does one do about it? Katha Pollitt ▪ January 3, 2022ĭetail from Big Kiss, 2020.
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Desire is shaped by social assumptions and prejudices, Amia Srinivasan argues in The Right to Sex.