The Right to Sex

Book Overview

The Right to Sex is a collection of six essays, plus a preface, by Amia Srinivasan — the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, born 1984, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. When it came out in 2021, Bloomsbury got a bestseller it probably hadn’t expected: a book of feminist political theory that read like a series of extended arguments between a careful philosopher and the political moment she happened to be writing into. It was the book that marked, for a lot of readers, a generational shift in anglophone feminism — away from the hot-take / TERF-vs-sex-positive binary, back toward the older radical tradition that was willing to treat sex as a political object without flinching, and without pretending the answers were easy.

The book’s signature move is that it refuses to resolve. Each essay builds up a question — the asymmetric treatment of false rape accusations, what porn teaches a generation raised on it, whether desire has a politics, what professors owe students, what feminists should do with the state’s coercive apparatus when they finally get their hands on it — and then, instead of closing the question with a thesis, it walks you carefully around it until you can see all of its sides. Srinivasan will hold two true-feeling things at the same time: false rape accusations happen and are vanishingly rare and are a moral scandal and are overwhelmingly racialised. No one has a right to sex and who gets to be fuckable is a political fact. Teacher-student sex can be genuinely wanted and still be a failure of teaching. Carceral feminism helped some women and has been disastrous for many more. The book’s intellectual ethic is to keep all of these in view at once without letting any collapse into the others.

The voice is patient, precise, and a little dry. Srinivasan writes in the long sentence and the one-line kill. She has a gift for the deadpan anecdote — the famous philosopher saying sex is the one place he escapes politics (his wife wasn’t at the dinner); Ralph Blasey shaking Ed Kavanaugh’s hand at the Burning Tree Club after Brett’s confirmation — and the numbers she marshals, when she marshals them, are marshalled carefully. She has read everyone: Beauvoir, bell hooks, MacKinnon, Dworkin, Davis, Rich, Federici, the Combahee River Collective, Andrea Long Chu, Wesley Yang, Adolph Reed. She is unafraid to argue with all of them in turn.

This summary is in the “deep” format. Each essay gets its own long walk-through, with generous blockquoted excerpts so that Srinivasan’s own prose carries most of the weight. The connective tissue tracks her arguments and the moves inside them. Nothing here is a substitute for reading the book — Srinivasan’s sentences are too good, and the cumulative effect of the essays only builds when they’re read in order — but this is as close as a summary can get to reading it with someone smart sitting next to you, pointing at the passages that do the most work.

A note on reading order. The six essays are designed to be read in sequence, but they are also independent — you can read any of them alone. “The Conspiracy Against Men” and “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism” bookend the collection politically, and the title essay plus its Coda are the heart. “Talking to My Students About Porn” is the most self-contained. “On Not Sleeping With Your Students” is the most personal.

One more note. Srinivasan is explicit in the Preface: these essays do not offer a home. But I hope they do offer, for some, a place of recognition. That is the right frame for this summary too. She is not building a movement or issuing a verdict. She is putting into careful words what a lot of women, and some men, already know — and then asking what follows if we take that knowledge seriously.

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Preface

Srinivasan opens not with a definition of feminism but with a demotion of the word. Feminism, she says, is not the kind of thing that belongs in a seminar room.

Feminism is not a philosophy, or a theory, or even a point of view. It is a political movement to transform the world beyond recognition. It asks: what would it be to end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women? It answers: we do not know; let us try and see.

That modest closing clause — let us try and see — is the posture of the whole book. She is not here to hand down a system. She is here to think in public, and to think against the idea that thinking alone is enough.

Two senses of “sex”

Before anything else, she separates the word into its two meanings, and shows that both of them are political all the way down.

The first sense is sex-as-class. To be born into a body sorted as female is to be assigned, from the first breath, a social function. Srinivasan is careful here: the “natural” ground is already cultural before anyone steps onto it.

At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned. Some of these bodies are for creating new bodies, for washing and clothing and feeding other bodies (out of love, never duty), for making other bodies feel good and whole and in control, for making other bodies feel free. Sex is, then, a cultural thing posing as a natural one. Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise.

The second sense is sex-as-act. And this one is supposedly the most private thing in the world, a zone outside the reach of politics. Srinivasan refuses the premise.

Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing. The roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world.

The famous philosopher

Into this frame she drops a small, deadly anecdote — the book’s first and sharpest joke.

A famous philosopher once said to me that he objected to feminist critiques of sex because it was only during sex that he felt truly outside politics, that he felt truly free. I asked him what his wife would say to that. (I couldn’t ask her myself; she hadn’t been invited to the dinner.)

The aside in parentheses does all the work. The philosopher believes sex is the one place he escapes power. His wife isn’t at the table. The proof is in the seating chart.

A freer sex to come

Srinivasan is not a pessimist about sex. She is a pessimist about the story the present tells about sex — the simulacrum of freedom, freedom mistaken for ubiquity. The genuine article, she insists, remains something to build. She hands the microphone, here, to Beauvoir, and lets her speak at length.

assuredly, women’s autonomy, even if it spares men a good number of problems, will also deny them many conveniences; assuredly, there are certain ways of living the sexual adventure that will be lost in the world of tomorrow: but this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry, and dreams will be banished from it. Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future … new carnal and affective relations of which we cannot conceive will be born between the sexes … It is absurd to contend that … vice, ecstasy, and passion would become impossible if man and woman were concretely peers; the contradictions opposing flesh to spirit, instant to time, the vertigo of immanence to the appeal of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of oblivion will never disappear; tension, suffering, joy, and the failure and triumph of existence will always be materialized in sexuality … on the contrary, it is when the slavery of half of humanity is abolished and with it the whole hypocritical system it implies that the … human couple will discover its true form.

Then she echoes her opening in miniature: What would it take for sex really to be free? We do not yet know; let us try and see.

The lineage

Srinivasan places her essays inside a tradition that was never squeamish about treating sex as a political object. The names are the names: Simone de Beauvoir, Alexandra Kollontai, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, Adrienne Rich. Their collective provocation, as she frames it, is to push past “consent” as the endpoint of ethical thinking about sex.

They compel us to ask what forces lie behind a woman’s yes; what it reveals about sex that it is something to which consent must be given; how it is that we have come to put so much psychic, cultural and legal weight on a notion of ‘consent’ that cannot support it.

At the same time, she signals what the book will add to the inheritance: a twenty-first-century update. Sex in relation to race, class, disability, nationality, caste. Sex in the age of the internet. And the uneasy question — running under the whole collection — of what it means to enlist the capitalist and carceral state as a tool against the harms of sex.

A global frame

The essays are, she admits, largely Anglophone in their focus: the US, the UK, with attention to India. But she is unwilling to let the Anglophone center stand in for the world. She offers a quick, deliberate tour of feminist energies the English-language press tends to miss: Polish women leading a general uprising against new abortion restrictions, with protests in more than five hundred cities and towns; the Argentine Ni una Menos marches pushing Congress to legalise abortion after five years of mass organising; Sudanese women — among them Alaa Salah, still in her early twenties — leading the revolution that brought down Omar al-Bashir and then pressing the UN Security Council to guarantee women and minorities a place in the transitional government.

This is not throat-clearing. It is the frame. The most alive feminism, right now, is not where the publishing houses are.

Politics is not a home

On some things, she says, the book is firm — sex workers’ rights, the damage done by carceral politics, the pathologies of contemporary sexuality. On others, it is deliberately ambivalent, and she is not going to flatten the ambivalence for the reader’s comfort. She quotes the labour historian David Roediger: a radical movement “speaking frankly to itself” is a “far more important activity than ‘speaking truth to power’.”

Then she turns to Bernice Johnson Reagon, who supplies the Preface with its ethical spine.

Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets … And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home! They’re looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which does not happen in a coalition.

Reagon’s point, Srinivasan writes, is that the fantasy of politics-as-home — politics as “a womb” — is exactly what produces feminism’s worst exclusions. If the room must feel like family, then anyone who complicates the family has to be pushed out the door. A truly inclusive politics is, by definition, uncomfortable.

What the book offers

And so she is upfront about what the book will and won’t do. It will sit in discomfort where the material demands it. It will not try to convert anyone. It will not try to be a home.

These essays do not offer a home. But I hope they do offer, for some, a place of recognition.

The goal, she says, is older and quieter than persuasion: to put into words what many women, and some men, already know. The book bends toward the practical wisdom that gets worked out on picket lines and street corners and in bedrooms and in the hundred conversations women have already had with husbands and fathers and bosses.

At its best, feminist theory is grounded in what women think when they are by themselves, what they say to each other on the picket line and on the assembly line and on the street corner and in the bedroom, what they have tried to say to their husbands and fathers and sons and bosses and elected officials a thousand times over.

And she closes with a warning against the feminist theory that floats above the lives it claims to explain.

But, too often, feminist theory prescinds from the particulars of women’s lives, only to tell them, from on high, what their lives really mean. Most women have little use for such pretensions. They have too much work to do.

Oxford, 2020.

The Adrienne Rich epigraph that opens the book sits under all of this like a keel:

the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth

That is the promise. What follows will be six essays, read together or alone, that refuse the tidy story and go looking for the thing itself.

Essay 1: The Conspiracy Against Men

Srinivasan begins with a ledger, and the ledger is deliberately uneven. “I know two men who were, I am fairly confident, falsely accused of rape.” One was wealthy, accused by a woman on the run who had also stolen credit cards; the charge was a small piece of a larger fraud, the police were reassuring from the start, and nothing came of it. The other was, in her unflinching phrase, “a creep: narcissistic, charming, manipulative and a liar” — a man who used coercive methods that fell short of the legal definition of rape, who made the women he slept with feel they were the ones seducing him, and who, years after the fact, was accused of assault by a woman who had by then understood the pattern. Srinivasan thinks the accusation was probably a legal remedy for something the law doesn’t recognize: being used, manipulated, lied to. He lost his job for unprofessional conduct. He is now re-employed, more careful, more quietly predatory, and “self-styles as a feminist.”

Against this she places the other ledger: “I know many more than two women who have been raped.” Almost none of them went to the police. She tells the story of a college friend who called her after a man, at a group hangout, forced himself inside her on a dorm pool table. She said no, resisted, pushed him off. The call’s purpose wasn’t justice or even outrage — just to register that the thing, which they did not call rape, had happened.

The essay that follows keeps both ledgers open at once. This is its method and its ethic: to hold several true things in view without letting any of them collapse into the others.

The statistics, carefully

Srinivasan grants what ideologues on either side can’t: false rape accusations happen. Then she counts them. The UK Home Office’s 2005 study — “the most detailed ever study of sexual assault reports” — found that about 3 percent of 2,643 rape reports over fifteen years were “probably” or “possibly” false. British police, meanwhile, classified 8 percent as false, largely because officers believed rape myths: that real rape requires a physical struggle, or a weapon, or no prior relationship. The FBI in 1996 reported the same 8 percent, for the same reasons. In India in 2014, men’s rights activists seized on a Delhi figure of 53 percent “false” rape reports — a figure produced by redefining “false” to include every case that didn’t reach court, including the ones that couldn’t, because marital rape isn’t a crime in India, though 6 percent of married Indian women report having experienced it.

Then she runs the Home Office numbers to their conclusion. Of 216 complaints the police judged false, only 39 suspects had been named; 6 arrested; 2 charged; charges dropped in both cases. “So, in the final analysis, bearing in mind that the Home Office counted only a third as many false accusations as the police, just 0.23 per cent of rape reports led to a false arrest, and only 0.07 per cent of rape reports led to a man being falsely charged with rape; none resulted in wrongful conviction.”

Having established the floor, she refuses to stand on it smugly:

I am not saying that false rape accusations are something to shrug at. They are not. An innocent man disbelieved, mistrusted, his reality twisted, his reputation stripped, his life potentially ruined by the manipulation of state power: this is a moral scandal. And, notice, it is a moral scandal that has much in common with the experience of rape victims, who in many cases face a conspiracy of disbelief, especially from police.

That is the Srinivasan move — honoring the wrong even while resizing it. A false accusation is, she writes, “like a plane crash”: objectively rare, culturally enormous. Why? It can’t just be that the victims are men, because “the number of men raped — largely by other men — easily overwhelms the number of men falsely accused of rape.” So maybe it’s that the imagined perpetrators are women.

Who actually falsely accuses men

Here she turns over a stone most readers don’t know is there. “Very often, it is men who falsely accuse other men of raping women.” Between 1989 and 2020 in the United States, 147 men were exonerated for sexual assault on the basis of false accusations or perjury. Fewer than half were deliberately framed by their alleged victims; over half of the cases involved “official misconduct” — police coaching false identifications, charging suspects the victim hadn’t identified, suppressing evidence, inducing false confessions. The scorned-woman archetype does not, on inspection, explain most wrongful convictions. Cops and prosecutors do.

The conspiracy that does exist

“There is no general conspiracy against men. But there is a conspiracy against certain classes of men.” Of those 147 exonerated men, 85 were non-white, 76 of them Black. Black men are 52 percent of those convicted of rape on the basis of false accusations or perjury, despite being 14 percent of the US male population and 27 percent of men convicted of rape. A Black man imprisoned for sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than a white man imprisoned for sexual assault. He is also very likely to be poor.

And the National Registry of Exonerations, which begins in 1989, doesn’t touch the history that matters most. It doesn’t record what Ida B. Wells called “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” It doesn’t include the 150 Black men lynched between 1892 and 1894 for alleged rape or attempted rape of white women — a category that, Wells documented, quietly included consensual interracial affairs. It doesn’t name William Brooks of Galesline, Arkansas, lynched on 23 May 1894 for asking a white woman to marry him, or the “unknown Negro” Wells reports was lynched in West Texas earlier that month for “writing letter to white woman.” It does not mention Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Black boy whom Carolyn Bryant accused, in 1955, of grabbing and propositioning her. In 2007 — fifty-two years later — Bryant admitted she had lied. By then Till had long been abducted, bludgeoned, shot, and dumped by her husband and brother-in-law; they were acquitted of murder and paid $3,000 by Look magazine for the story of how they did it.

From this angle, the modern anxiety comes into focus:

It might seem surprising, then, that false rape accusations are, today, a predominantly wealthy white male preoccupation. But it isn’t surprising — not really. The anxiety about false rape accusations is purportedly about injustice (innocent people being harmed), but actually it is about gender, about innocent men being harmed by malignant women. It is an anxiety, too, about race and class: about the possibility that the law might treat wealthy white men as it routinely treats poor black and brown men.

Well-off white men, she writes, correctly trust the state not to plant drugs on them, not to gun them down and later claim to have seen a weapon, not to harass them for walking where they “don’t belong.” The rape accusation is “a unique instance of middle-class and wealthy white men’s vulnerability to the injustices routinely perpetrated by the carceral state against poor people of colour.” Except, she adds, even in rape the state is on their side. “What matters — in the sense of what is ideologically efficacious — is not the reality, but the misrepresentation.”

Two all-American boys

She illustrates the point with two portraits. The first is Brock Turner — Stanford swimmer, three felony counts of sexual assault against Chanel Miller, six months in county jail (three served) from Judge Aaron Persky. Srinivasan reproduces Dan Turner’s letter to the judge almost in full, because the letter does the argument for her:

Brock’s life has been deeply altered forever by the events of Jan 17th and 18th. He will never be his happy go lucky self with that easygoing personality and welcoming smile … You can see this in his face, the way he walks, his weakened voice, his lack of appetite. Brock always enjoyed certain types of food and is a very good cook himself. I was always excited to buy him a big ribeye steak to grill or to get his favorite snack for him. I had to make sure to hide some of my favorite pretzels or chips because I knew they wouldn’t be around long after Brock walked in from a long swim practice. Now he barely consumes any food and eats only to exist. These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.

Srinivasan’s reading is both withering and strangely tender toward the dog at the center of it:

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) — are good kids, the best kids, our kids.

The second portrait is Brett Kavanaugh. His defense against Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation wasn’t primarily factual; it was sociological. Ford, he said, “did not travel in the same social circles.” He produced a cast — Tobin, Mark, P.J., Squi, Bernie, Matt, Becky, Denise, Lori, Jenny, Pat, Amy, Julie, Kristin, Karen, Suzanne, Maura, Megan, Nicki — Georgetown Prep boys and the girls from Stone Ridge, Holy Child, Visitation, Immaculata, Holy Cross, spending the summer of 1982 at the beach, lifting weights, going to church on Sundays. Sixty-five women signed a letter. “Friends for a lifetime,” Kavanaugh called them, “built on a foundation of talking through school and life starting at age 14.”

The yearbook detail is the giveaway. Kavanaugh and his friends styled themselves “Renate Alumnius [sic],” a sneer at Renate Schroeder, one of the sixty-five lifetime friends who had, in good faith, signed the letter attesting to his having “always treated women with decency and respect.” Kavanaugh said the phrase was “clumsily intended to show affection” and “not related to sex.” Schroeder, learning of it after the fact, said it was “horrible, hurtful and simply untrue.” “I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things,” she told the Times. “I pray their daughters are never treated this way.”

And then the coda, which does more work than any argument:

After Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Christine Blasey Ford’s father, Ralph, gave a warm handshake to Ed Kavanaugh, Brett Kavanaugh’s father, at the Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, where they both play golf. ‘I’m glad Brett was confirmed,’ Ralph Blasey apparently said, one Republican dad to another.

Srinivasan doesn’t editorialize. She just lets the handshake rest there. “We can’t imagine a black or brown Kavanaugh without inverting America’s racial and economic rules."

"Believe women” is not what critics think it is

The injunction “Believe women” has been taken, by its detractors, as an assault on the presumption of innocence. Srinivasan says this is a category error, twice over.

First, the presumption of innocence is a legal principle about how the state should go about punishing people — a procedural rule that stacks the deck in favor of the accused because it is worse for the law to wrongly punish than to wrongly exonerate. “Believe women,” by contrast, is a “corrective norm” — a political response to the fact that the presumption of innocence, under real conditions, is unevenly enforced. “Under the law, people accused of crimes are presumed innocent, but some — we know — are presumed more innocent than others.”

Second, even inside the law, the presumption of innocence governs verdicts, not beliefs. It tells you how guilt must be established in a courtroom; it does not tell you what to think about your ex-boss. “Harvey Weinstein had a right to the presumption of innocence when he stood trial. But for those of us not serving on his jury, there was no duty to presume him innocent or to ‘suspend judgement’ before the verdict was in.” Rational belief is proportionate to evidence — and the evidence against Weinstein, “including the compelling, consistent and detailed accounts of more than a hundred women,” plus the statistical base rate that powerful men abuse power, was overwhelming well before the jury returned. Had he been acquitted, she asks, should we have concluded his accusers were lying? The selective skepticism feminists meet when men are accused of sex crimes is the tell: “you likewise cannot know the same about, say, Bernie Madoff.”

Where “Believe women” breaks

And yet. Srinivasan refuses to let the corrective norm off the hook.

‘Believe women’ is a blunt tool. It carries with it the implicit injunction ‘Don’t believe him’. But this zero-sum logic — she’s telling the truth, he’s lying — presumes that nothing but sex difference is at work in the assessment of rape allegations.

She cites Colgate University, where during the 2013-14 academic year 4.2 percent of students were Black and 50 percent of accusations of sexual violation were against Black students. “Does ‘Believe women’ serve justice at Colgate?”

The question has a history. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) theorized the rape of white women by Black men as an Oedipal urge to destroy the white father and take what is his. Angela Davis, in Women, Race & Class (1981), replied that whether innocently or consciously Firestone had “facilitated the resurrection of the timeworn myth of the Black rapist.” And the myth never travels alone:

The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous. For once the notion is accepted that Black men harbor irresistible and animal-like sexual urges, the entire race is invested with bestiality.

Rape, empire, caste

Srinivasan pauses for a hinge story. In December 2012, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Jyoti Singh was gang-raped and tortured on a Delhi bus by six men, including the driver. The assailants penetrated her with a rusty iron rod. She died thirteen days later. Soon after the attack, a friend’s father said to Srinivasan at dinner, “But Indians are such civilised people.” She wanted to tell him “that there is no civilisation under patriarchy.”

Non-Indian commentators read Singh’s murder as a symptom of India’s failed culture — its repression, its illiteracy, its conservatism. Libby Purves wrote that “murderous, hyena-like male contempt [for women] is a norm” in India. Srinivasan lets the symmetry reveal itself in two questions: “Why is it that when white men rape they are violating a norm, but when brown men rape they are conforming to one? A second question: if Indian men are hyenas, what does that make Indian women?”

The second question opens onto a longer history: the colonial logic that made certain women unrapeable because they were presumed promiscuous. In Cape Colony in 1850, a judge commuted a rapist’s death sentence after learning the victim was “Bastard coloured.” In 1859 in Mississippi, a court overturned the conviction of an enslaved man who had raped a girl under ten because “intercourse” between slaves “is promiscuous.” In 1918 the Florida Supreme Court ruled that white women should be presumed chaste but the rule should not apply to “another race that is largely immoral.” A Georgetown Law study found that Americans of all races see Black girls as more sexually knowing and less in need of protection than white girls of the same age. In 2008, a juror in R. Kelly’s first child pornography trial explained his acquittal vote: “I just didn’t believe them, the women … The way they dress, the way they act — I didn’t like them.”

Shatema Threadcraft’s work sits at the center of this passage. Threadcraft argues that the focus, in Black American politics, on the “spectacular” Black male corpse — lynched, shot by police — obscures the more routine forms of state violence visited on Black women: police harassment, sexual assault, forced separation from their children, disbelief when reporting domestic violence. The susceptibility of Black women to intimate-partner violence is itself an effect of state power; higher unemployment among Black men accounts for the higher rates at which Black women are killed by their partners. Threadcraft’s question lands hard: “What will motivate people to rally around the bodies of our black female dead?”

And then Srinivasan draws the two strands — Black men as rapists, Black women as unrapeable — into their single knot:

There is a disturbing genius at work in the white mythology about black sexuality. By portraying black men as rapists and black women as unrapeable — two sides, as Angela Davis says, of the coin of black hypersexuality — the white mythos produces a tension between black men’s quest to exonerate themselves and black women’s need to speak out against sexual violence, including the violence perpetrated against them by black men. The result is the doubled sexual subordination of black women.

Black women who name Black male violence are accused of reinforcing racist stereotypes and of calling on a racist state for protection. At the same time, some Black men internalize the sexually-precocious-Black-girl stereotype and read its subjects as asking for abuse. R. Kelly’s team in 2018, responding to decades of allegations, spoke of “this attempted public lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture.” They did not address the fact that almost all his accusers were Black.

The lynching metaphor recurs. In February 2019, two Black women — Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson — made credible accusations against Justin Fairfax, the Black lieutenant governor of Virginia, who was poised to become governor. On the State Senate floor, Fairfax compared himself to the historical victims of lynching. “Fairfax did not note the irony of comparing black women to a white lynch mob,” Srinivasan observes, drily. “Neither did Clarence Thomas, for that matter, when he accused Anita Hill in 1991 of triggering a ‘high-tech lynching’. The very logic that made the lynching of black men possible — the logic of black hypersexuality — is repurposed, at the level of metaphor, to falsely indict black women as the true oppressors.”

Some rapes count more than others

Back to India. Jyoti Singh’s rape prompted grief and anger across the country but not a reckoning with rape as such. Marital rape is still a legal contradiction in terms in India. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act, descended from a 1942 British colonial law meant to suppress the freedom struggle, still grants the Indian military impunity to rape women in “disturbed areas” including Assam and Kashmir. In 2004, Thangjam Manorama, a young woman from Manipur, was abducted, raped, and murdered by the 17th Assam Rifles. Twelve middle-aged women protested outside Kangla Fort by stripping off their clothes and chanting: “Rape us, kill us! Rape us, kill us!”

Jyoti Singh was high-caste, urban, educated. That was the sociology of her post-mortem elevation as “India’s daughter.” In 2016 the body of Jisha, a twenty-nine-year-old Dalit law student, was found disembowelled, slashed more than thirty times, in Kerala. The same year, Delta Meghwal, a seventeen-year-old Dalit woman, was found dead in a water tank at her school in Rajasthan the day after she told her parents a teacher had raped her. Neither death produced a “grieving nation.” In September 2020, a nineteen-year-old Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh died after reporting a gang-rape by four upper-caste neighbours. The police, denying the report, burned her body in the middle of the night over her family’s protests.

Punita Devi, the wife of one of the men executed for Jyoti Singh’s rape and murder, asked: “Where will I live? What will my child eat?” She maintained her husband’s innocence until the day he was hanged. Srinivasan is careful here. Maybe she was in denial. Maybe she was alert to the susceptibility of poor men to false allegations. Either way, “she saw one thing clearly. The law of rape — not the law as it is explicitly codified in statutes, but the unspoken law that governs the way rape is actually treated — does not care about women like her. Had Devi’s husband raped not Jyoti Singh but his own wife, or a low-caste woman, he would very likely be alive today.”

“Why are the politicians not thinking about me?” Devi asked. “I am a woman too.”

Intersectionality, done right

Srinivasan stops to define a term that has been worn smooth. “Intersectionality” — Crenshaw’s coinage, anticipated by Claudia Jones, Frances M. Beal, the Combahee River Collective, Selma James, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez, Cherríe Moraga — is often flattened into a reminder that oppression has many axes. Srinivasan insists on the sharper version:

The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement — feminism, antiracism, the labour movement — that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of colour, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.

A feminism that only addresses “pure” patriarchy serves rich white or high-caste women. An anti-racism that only addresses “pure” racism serves rich men of colour. Both produce assimilationist politics, aimed at letting the best-off members of the oppressed group climb into the seats of rich white men. The point of intersectionality is not inclusion; it is to refuse this bargain.

Under this frame, “Believe women” is not false, but partial. It is a remedy for women’s default disbelief — and in that frame Ida B. Wells is still its patron, because Wells “patiently documented the lynchings of black men on trumped-up claims of raping white women” and also “recorded the many rapes of black women that inspired no lynch mobs.” Wells recorded the case of Maggie Reese, an eight-year-old girl raped by a white man in Nashville: “The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black.”

The prodigal sons

Srinivasan turns last to a genre peculiar to the #MeToo era: the essay by the outed man. What’s strange about these essays, she points out, is that most of them don’t deny the allegations. Weinstein, Allen, R. Kelly, Franco, Keillor, Travolta held the line; but Louis C.K., Jian Ghomeshi, John Hockenberry, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose conceded the bad behavior and then, “like a child growing weary of a timeout,” demanded to be let back in to play.

One month after the Times reported C.K.’s habit of masturbating in front of women without their consent, Matt Damon said, “I imagine that the price that he’s paid at this point is so beyond anything.” A year later, C.K. got a standing ovation walking on stage at the Comedy Cellar; soon after, in another set, he mocked Asian men (“women [with] really big clits”), a “Jewish fag,” and “a trans retarded boy.” Sensing discomfort, he said: “Fuck it, what are you going to take away, my birthday? My life is over, I don’t give a shit.” His shows continue to sell out within hours. Charlie Rose’s lawyer called his conduct “routine workplace interactions and banter.” John Hockenberry, in Harper’s, under the title “Exile,” wrote:

Being a misguided romantic, or being born at the wrong time, or taking the wrong cues from the sexual revolution of the Sixties, or having a disability that leaves one impotent at the age of nineteen — none of this is a justification for offensive behavior toward women. But is a life sentence of unemployment without possibility of furlough, the suffering of my children, and financial ruin an appropriate consequence?

Kevin Spacey, after an initial apology to Anthony Rapp, posted a video — “Let Me Be Frank” — in which he addressed his viewers in the persona of Frank Underwood: “I know what you want … You want me back.” Twelve million views. 280,000 likes.

These men do not deny the truth of the allegations against them, nor even the harm they caused. What they deny is that they deserve to be punished.

Michelle Goldberg, in a Times op-ed, confessed sympathy for “the slightly less powerful, less overtly predatory schmoes whose gross behavior was tacitly accepted by those around them until, suddenly, it wasn’t.” “I can only imagine how disorienting it must be,” she wrote, “to have the rules change on you so fast.” Srinivasan takes the idea seriously enough to argue with it. Some feminists — Catharine MacKinnon, famously — have made a version of the same claim: that patriarchy so totalizes male perception that men cannot tell the difference between flirtation and harassment, sex and rape. She cites the 1976 British case of John Cogan, acquitted of raping his friend Michael Leak’s wife because he “genuinely believed” she had consented, even though she sobbed and tried to turn away under him.

Then Srinivasan asks the question the softer version of this defense evades: how many men really can’t tell? Did Cogan truly fail to notice her sobs? Did Louis C.K. truly not realize the women were unhappy — and if so, why, “when he asked another woman if he could masturbate in front of her and she refused, did he flush red and feel compelled to explain to her that he ‘had issues’?” Her answer is plainer and sharper than the patriarchy-made-me-do-it reading:

It is true that women have always lived in a world created by men and governed by men’s rules. But it is also true that men have always lived alongside women who have contested these rules … The rules that have really changed, and are still changing, do not so much concern what is right or wrong in sex: women have been telling men the truth about that, one way or another, for a very long time. The rules that have really changed for men like Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, John Hockenberry and many others like them is that they can no longer be confident that when they ignore the shouts and silences of the women they demean, no consequences will follow.

What consequences?

Having argued that men have long known, she turns to the harder question: what should be done with them?

She is not naive about the appeal of punishment. She quotes Jenna Wortham on the Shitty Media Men list leaking in 2017:

During the initial hours after the list’s publication, when it still felt secret, for women only, I moved through the world differently. The energy in the air felt charged … A friend compared the feeling to the final scenes of V for Vendetta. She liked seeing women as digital vigilantes, knowing that men were scared. I did, too.

But she will not pretend that social-media shaming is mere speech. In a world where people are fired for public outrage rather than actions, “these things cannot be regarded as mere speech.” She pushes the analogy the feminists who defend digital vigilantism won’t: for decades, pornographers defended themselves by saying words don’t cause harm. “Should feminists, of all people, subscribe to the notion that words do no harm, or that the harm they cause is of no ethical or political consequence? Should feminists, of all people, deny that powerless voices joined together can enact great power?” At the same time, she is careful not to overstate how much accountability even the online pile-on produces. Of the seventeen men on the Shitty Media Men list, only a handful faced any professional sanction. None are in hiding. One apparently has standing lunch dates with Woody Allen, during which they discuss their mutual victimization. Weinstein got twenty-three years — but only after a Pulitzer-winning investigation, a viral movement, more than a hundred accusers, six on the stand — and even then convicted on just two counts.

And yet, if the aim is not merely to punish male sexual domination but to end it, feminism must address questions that many feminists would rather avoid: whether a carceral approach that systemically harms poor people and people of colour can serve sexual justice; whether the notion of due process — and perhaps too the presumption of innocence — should apply to social media and public accusations; whether punishment produces social change. What does it really take to alter the mind of patriarchy?

The UMass case

The essay’s last long example is designed to make this question uncomfortable on purpose. In 2014, Kwadwo Bonsu, a Black junior at UMass Amherst, was accused of sexual assault by a fellow student after a Halloween party. Srinivasan reproduces the woman’s own statement at length. The two of them had been smoking weed and kissing; she straddled him, told him she didn’t want to have sex, and he said, “We don’t have to have sex.” She initiated giving him a blow job; she felt something on her tongue, stopped, told him she was uncomfortable and wanted to leave; he said, in a tone she describes as playful, “I think I should get the next two minutes to convince you otherwise”; she laughed it off, they kissed more, and she left. “As my RA training kicked in,” she wrote, “I realized I’d been sexually assaulted.” She added a key admission — “UMass Student Culture dictates that when women become sexually involved with men they owe it to them to follow through” — and then filed a complaint.

The police investigated and declined to press charges. UMass imposed interim restrictions that amounted, practically, to exile: he couldn’t enter most dorms, most dining halls, or the student union. Suffering stress-induced pneumonia and a mental breakdown, Bonsu moved home to Maryland. The hearing was held without him. He was found not guilty of assault but guilty of a Facebook friend request; he was suspended past his graduation date, banned from campus housing, and required to attend counselling. He sued and settled.

Srinivasan refuses both easy readings. The Title IX critics — Janet Halley, Laura Kipnis, Jeannie Suk Gersen — treat this as the “sex bureaucracy” punishing “ordinary” sex. But Srinivasan argues the Title IX critics let themselves off too lightly. The woman kept going with a sex act she no longer wanted “because women who sexually excite men are supposed to finish the job.” That expectation wasn’t necessarily Bonsu’s; it was the expectation she carried into the room. “There is also a kind of coercion: not directly by Bonsu, perhaps, but by the informal regulatory system of gendered sexual expectations.” The episode is “ordinary” in the statistical sense — it happens every day — but not ordinary in the ethical sense. “In that sense it is an extraordinary phenomenon with which we are all too familiar.”

Which is why she asks the question she asks:

But whom would it help to call sex of this sort, as many feminists would call it, ‘rape’?

Under California’s 2014 SB 967 — the “Yes Means Yes” affirmative consent law — lack of protest isn’t consent, silence isn’t consent, and consent must be ongoing and revocable. Ezra Klein, backing the law in Vox, wrote that “everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter … Ugly problems don’t always have pretty solutions.” Srinivasan asks what problem, exactly, is solved. If the problem is men proceeding without an explicit yes, affirmative consent is a plausible (ugly) answer. “But if the problem is something deeper, to do with the psychosocial structures that make men want to have sex with women who don’t really want it, or make them feel that it’s their job to overcome a woman’s resistance, and that make women feel they must have sex with men when they don’t want to, it’s far less clear what a law like SB 967 achieves.” MacKinnon’s objection stands: affirmative consent only shifts the goalposts. “Whereas previously men had to stop when women said no, now they just have to get women to say yes.”

And then the race question, one last time. Had UMass adopted an affirmative consent standard, Bonsu — a Black man accused by a white woman — would likely have been found guilty, probably expelled, possibly, in a state like New Jersey or Oklahoma or Wisconsin, imprisoned. Note that even his accuser told the university his punishment should be “as moderate as possible given the shades of grey this incident is colored with.” But suppose she had wanted him in prison; suppose prison would have made her feel safe. “Is this a cost feminists should be willing to bear?”

I am not saying that feminism has no business asking better of men — indeed, asking them to be better men. But a feminism worth having must find ways of doing so that avoid rote re-enactment of the old form of crime and punishment, with its fleeting satisfactions and predictable costs. I am saying that a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better — not just fairer, but more imaginative — than men have been.

The final image

The essay closes where it began — with men — but with the temperature lowered all the way. Hockenberry, in that Harper’s piece, “wholeheartedly endorse[s] the higher cause of gender equality” in one sentence and, across many more, bemoans the end of “traditional romance,” compares #MeToo to the Reign of Terror, wonders whether Andrea Dworkin would have been his friend (“Would she embrace me as her penis-less paraplegic male buddy?”), and identifies with Lolita — the fictional twelve-year-old rape victim. The words “damage” and “harm” do not appear in his essay. “Pain,” “painful,” and “painfully” appear six times, each one about him or his children. Jian Ghomeshi, in the New York Review of Books, reported a “crash course in empathy” that was in fact empathy for other men like him.

Goldberg again: “I feel sorry for a lot of these men, but I don’t think they feel sorry for women, or think about women’s experience much at all.” And then Srinivasan’s closing sentence, doing with one line what a long essay has been assembling:

These disgraced but loved, ruined but rich, never to be employed again until they are employed again, prodigal sons of #MeToo: they and their defenders are not, for all their protestations of innocence and accusations of lynching, outraged by the falsity of women’s accusations. They are outraged by the truth of those accusations. They are outraged, most of all, that saying sorry doesn’t make it all better: that women expect them, together with the world that brought them to power, to change. But why should they? Don’t you know who the fuck they are?

Essay 2: Talking to My Students About Porn

Did porn kill feminism?

Srinivasan opens with a provocation that is also a potted history. The US women’s liberation movement “exploded with such joyous fury and seriousness of purpose in the late 1960s, yet within the space of a generation had become a fractured and worn thing.” The porn question — is it a tool of patriarchy or a counter to sexual repression? A technique of subordination or an exercise of free speech? — was the question that fractured it. Not the only one, but the one that did the damage. A whole movement’s trajectory bent around the question of what to do about pictures of women being fucked.

She lands first on a specific evening: April 1982, the Barnard Sex Conference in New York, theme “women’s sexual pleasure, choice and autonomy.” Carole Vance’s concept paper, “Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” called for recognising sex as “simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency.” Eight hundred feminists attended workshops like “Pornography and the construction of a female subject” and “The forbidden: eroticism and taboo.” The conference organisers had prepared a punk zine, Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, as “a coming out party for feminists who [had] been appalled by the intellectual dishonesty and dreariness of the anti-pornography movement.”

It did not go well. A week out, anti-porn feminists began calling Barnard’s administrators to complain that the conference had been planned by “sexual perverts.” The college president, Ellen Futter, let the conference happen but first confiscated all 1,500 copies of the Diary, declaring it pornography. At the conference itself, anti-porn feminists wore T-shirts that said “For a Feminist Sexuality” on the front and “Against S/M” on the back, handing out leaflets accusing the organisers of supporting patriarchy and child abuse. (One of the organisers had, in fairness, written in the Diary: “I understand the advanced position on porn, on s and m, but I can’t understand the argument for pederasty!”) Andrea Dworkin mailed photocopies of the zine with a cover letter calling it “perniciously antiwoman and anti-feminist.” Off our backs, then the newspaper of record of the feminist movement, devoted most of its June issue to attacking the conference.

The organisers remembered “a McCarthyite atmosphere of witch-hunting and purges.” The feminist philosopher Gayle Rubin, who ran a Barnard workshop, was still, in 2011, writing about “the horror of having been there.” In 1986, a conference at Mount Holyoke descended into a “pitched battle.” In 1993 a group of anti-porn feminists wrote to the Australian National University demanding that invitations to Rubin and Vance be rescinded. One of the signatories was Sheila Jeffreys, who, Srinivasan dryly notes, “in recent years has decried the ‘vilification’ and ‘censoring’ of feminists who, like her, are trans-exclusionary,” and “apparently does not recognise the irony in objecting to the same tactics that she and other anti-porn feminists pioneered forty years ago."

"All this fuss over porn?”

The obvious contemporary response — “at a practical and technological level, albeit not a philosophical one, the internet has settled the ‘porn question’ for us” — risks missing what the porn wars were actually about. Srinivasan is careful here. For feminists of an earlier generation, porn served as “a metonym for ‘problematic’ sex in general: for sex that took no account of women’s pleasure, for sadomasochistic sex, for prostitution, for rape fantasies, for sex without love, for sex across power differentials, for sex with men.” It was the stand-in for two incompatible views of sex itself. On the anti-sex view, sex as we know it is “a patriarchal construct — an eroticisation of gender inequality” from which there is no true liberation without a revolution between the sexes. On the pro-sex view, freedom requires “women’s right to have sex when, how and (subject to the other party’s consent) with whom they liked, without stigma or shame.” Contemporary feminism has mostly picked up the pro-sex framing. But the older worry — that sex itself needs revolutionary transformation — is “still with us.”

How the anti-porn movement got built

Srinivasan walks through the 1970s with care. In 1969, record companies under FBI pressure pulled advertising from underground New Left newspapers, and the papers, needing money, started running pornographic ads instead. The misogyny of the supposedly radical men was no surprise to the women’s liberation movement — the movement had been forged largely in reaction to it. In 1970, thirty women occupied the offices of Grove Press, whose owner Barney Rosset (tagged “The Old Smut Peddler” by Life) had moved from defending D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller to distributing porn films; he had also fired Robin Morgan and eight others for trying to unionise. By the mid-1970s, with a backlash against feminism rising, feminists identified porn as the lynchpin of patriarchy. “Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice,” Robin Morgan declared in 1974.

The first feminist anti-porn group, Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, was founded in 1976 in the Bay Area. That same year, Andrea Dworkin organised a picket of a New York movie theatre showing Snuff — a film that claimed to depict real footage of a pregnant woman being murdered and dismembered by a film crew in Argentina (“The film that could only be made in South America … where Life is CHEAP!”). The group became Women Against Pornography (WAP) and began running biweekly “tours” of Times Square sex shops, peep shows and topless bars. A New York Times reporter went on one with Susan Brownmiller: “A dozen women stared frozen-faced in the tiny storefront, as images of women being bound, beaten and abused flashed across the screen.” Srinivasan adds, in parenthesis, that “some feminists later admitted to having been aroused by WAP’s slideshows.” WAP was given rent-free headquarters on Ninth Avenue by the mayor’s Midtown Enforcement Project, which had previously evicted a “soul food restaurant and gathering place for transvestites and prostitutes.” The project’s director explained: “Obviously the issue of pornography is a matter of concern to both the city and the feminists.”

Across the country, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) protested the Black and Blue billboard (“I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from The Rolling Stones — and I love it!”). The British Campaign Against Pornography launched in 1986 against tabloid page-three girls. In New Zealand, activists demanded the resignation of the country’s chief censor for passing I Spit on Your Grave.

Porn as propaganda, porn as worldmaking

For the anti-porn feminists of this era, porn wasn’t just misogynistic representation. It was, in their phrase, “propaganda, no more and no less.” The clearest statement is Catharine MacKinnon’s, from Only Words (1993):

The message of these materials … is “get her,” pointing at all women, to the perpetrators’ benefit of ten billion dollars a year and counting. This message is addressed directly to the penis, delivered through an erection, and taken out on women in the real world. The content of this message is not unique to pornography. It is the function of pornography in effectuating it that is unique.

Srinivasan draws out the move. To say porn effectuates its message is to treat porn not as depicting the world but as making it. Porn, on this view, is “a machine for the production and reproduction of an ideology which, by eroticising women’s subordination, thereby made it real.”

Black feminists sharpened the frame. Alice Walker traced “the ancient roots of modern pornography” to “the almost always pornographic treatment of black women who, from the moment they entered slavery … were subjected to rape as the ‘logical’ convergence of sex and violence.” Patricia Hill Collins, in Black Feminist Thought, pointed to the “bred” mixed-race slave women who “approximated the images of beauty, asexuality, and chastity forced on white women,” but “inside was a highly sexual whore, a ‘slave mistress’ ready to cater to her owner’s pleasure.” From this, Collins suggested, mainstream porn inherited its canonical female persona: “the demure slut.”

The seminar

Then the voice shifts. Srinivasan, teaching introductory feminist theory at Oxford, assumed her students would find anti-porn feminism prudish and outdated. Her heart wasn’t in the unit. “I needn’t have worried. They were riveted.”

Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalisation of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.

And not only the women. The men were saying yes too, sometimes more emphatically. A young woman raised the example of feminist porn. But we don’t watch that, the men said — they watched “the hardcore stuff, the aggressive stuff — what is now, on the internet, the free stuff.” The male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform. One asked whether sex that was “loving and mutual and not about domination and submission” was too utopian to imagine. The women talked about the neglect of their own pleasure, and wondered if there was a connection between what porn cut out and what their own sex lives lacked. “But if it weren’t for pornography,” one woman said, “how would we ever learn to have sex?”

Talking to her teaching assistant afterwards, Srinivasan registered what should have been obvious. These were the first students truly raised on internet porn. “Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he first wanted it, or didn’t want it, in front of a screen. And almost every woman in the class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been.” Sex had arrived for them “fully formed, fully interpreted, fully categorised — teen, gangbang, MILF, stepdaughter — waiting on the screen.” The script was in place before the act. “The psyches of my students are products of pornography. In them, the warnings of the anti-porn feminists seem to have been belatedly realised: sex for my students is what porn says it is.”

One student came to her office hours after the seminar. Her ex-boyfriend had always told her she was doing it wrong. “I see now he wanted me to be like those women’ — the women in porn. She wasn’t like that, didn’t know how to be like that, so he dumped her.”

Does porn cause rape?

Srinivasan treats the empirical question fairly. MacKinnon’s Only Words offers a vivid picture — porn as virtual training ground for male sexual aggression:

Sooner or later, the consumers want to live out the pornography further in three dimensions … As pornography consumers, teachers may become epistemically incapable of seeing their women students as their potential equals … Doctors may molest anaesthetised women, enjoy watching and inflicting pain during childbirth … Some consumers write on bathroom walls. Some undoubtedly write judicial opinions. Some … gang rape women in fraternities and at rest stops on highways … Some become serial rapists and sex murderers — using and making pornography is inextricable to these acts.

Is this true? Ronald Dworkin — no relation to Andrea — wrote a scathing review in 1993 arguing that porn wasn’t pervasive enough to have the effects MacKinnon claimed; soap operas and advertising were bigger culprits. That was plausible then. It is less plausible now. In 2018, the top five porn sites logged more than six billion visits per month. PornHub alone claimed 28.5 billion visits in 2017. A 2010 meta-analysis found “a significant overall relationship between pornography consumption and attitudes supporting violence against women,” stronger for violent porn but still statistically significant for non-violent porn. MacKinnon would ask, reasonably: where’s the line?

Is it violent if he smacks her? If he calls her a bitch? If he ejaculates on her face? If he tells her that she likes it, that she wants it? If her “No” finally becomes a “Yes”?

Men who watch porn frequently are less likely to support affirmative action for women, less likely to empathise with rape victims, more likely to report an intent to rape, more likely to commit sexual assault. Sorority women who watch porn are less likely to intervene when they see other women being sexually assaulted. Critics raise the usual cautions: other studies, adults distinguishing fantasy from fact, women watching porn too (32% of PornHub users), correlation versus causation. Srinivasan is not interested in settling the argument here. Her interest lies elsewhere.

You’re doing it wrong

What struck her about her student’s story wasn’t the causal chain from porn to mistreatment but the phrase her boyfriend used: You’re doing it wrong. Porn had become the normative standard against which his girlfriend was measured and found wanting. “Porn is not pedagogy, yet it often functions as if it were.”

A 2013 report for the UK Office of the Children’s Commissioner interviewed boys aged fourteen to eighteen. What they said, in their own words:

You learn how to have sex, you’re learning new moves.

You get to see the way it’s done, and the way people do it … you have a kind of idea of how you might be able to do it.

The main reason I think people look at pornography is for information, what’s doing, how to do stuff.

What is remarkable, Srinivasan notes, is “how little the boys talk about using porn to get off.” They turn to porn “to ‘learn’, to ‘have a kind of idea’, to ‘pick up things’, for ‘information.’” Some of them presumably virgins, they are “quick to treat porn as an authority on how to have sex.” The girls in the same study knew perfectly well what porn was:

I think young people expect sex to be like porn. There’s that standard where if it’s not like that, then sex isn’t good.

It sort of makes boys’ fantasies become like real because it’s real people. And then they will assume [that’s] what it’s always like … and it can be a bit aggressive, a bit forceful.

I think at this age boys are really quite naive and it’s about who [you] can trust and you know if they’re watching this kind of stuff, you’re not really sure how they will treat you.

The girls could distinguish fantasy from fact. They knew their boyfriends couldn’t — or wouldn’t.

Speech, authority, umpires

This is where Srinivasan sits with the legal theory for a while, carefully. MacKinnon’s argument requires that porn do something more than merely represent. Think of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre: the stampede is not an accident of speech but the point of it. Porn, on MacKinnon’s view, similarly performs the speech act of “licensing the subordination of women, and conferring on women an inferior civic status.” But that only works if porn has authority.

The philosopher Rae Langton asks whether porn is more like an umpire — authorised, dispositive — or a bystander shouting from the sidelines. “If you believe … that pornographic utterances are made by a powerless minority, a fringe group especially vulnerable to moralistic persecution,” then porn is a bystander. “Not so if you believe … that pornography’s voice is the voice of the ruling power.”

No one elected the pornographers. But the internet has rotted the distinction between authority and power. Platforms for speech were, until recently, allocated by broadcasters and publishers. Now they are infinitely available and practically free, and “individual speakers can amass great power — ‘influence’, as we have learned to call it.” The porn star Stoya, writing in the New York Times, put it plainly: “I didn’t want the responsibility of shaping young minds. And yet thanks to this country’s nonfunctional sex education system and the ubiquitous access to porn by anyone with an internet connection, I have that responsibility anyway… . Sometimes, it keeps me awake at night.”

The law, and what it couldn’t do

Srinivasan tracks the legislative history carefully. In 1972, Deep Throat was given a broad mainstream release — starring Linda Boreman (stage name Linda Lovelace), whose pornographic memoir at the time described the emancipatory experience of making the film. Eight years later, Boreman wrote Ordeal, revealing she had been forced into pornography and prostitution and raped by her husband-manager Chuck Traynor. She made the charges at a press conference alongside MacKinnon and Dworkin. Afterwards MacKinnon and Dworkin began working on the law.

Their innovation was to bypass traditional obscenity arguments (“indecent,” “community standards”) and frame porn as sex discrimination — as a deprivation of women’s civil rights. In 1983 they drafted an anti-pornography ordinance for Minneapolis. It passed the city council; the mayor vetoed it. A version passed in Indianapolis in 1984 was struck down by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in American Booksellers v. Hudnut. Judge Easterbrook actually conceded the feminist premise — “Depictions of subordination tend to perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status of women in turn leads to affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home, battery and rape on the streets” — only to turn it around: “this simply demonstrates the power of pornography as speech.”

To call porn “speech” in the US is to cover it with the shield of the First Amendment. Srinivasan draws a telling parallel to R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992), in which the Supreme Court, unanimously, struck down a Minnesota ordinance that had been used to charge a white teenager for burning a cross on a black family’s lawn. Scalia’s majority opinion reasoned that the ordinance targeted cross-burning because of the viewpoint it expressed — that black people are inferior. That viewpoint might be abhorrent, but its expression must be protected. “In the ‘debate’ between white supremacists and black people over racial equality, the state couldn’t take sides.” The same logic, applied to porn, protected pornographers’ right “to express their viewpoint that women were objects for the sexual use of men.”

MacKinnon, in Only Words, refused this framing on two grounds. First, porn “silences” women: it teaches men “to hear ‘Yes’ when women say ‘No’; to disbelieve women who say they were harassed or raped; to see resistance as coyness, and coyness as invitation.” The exercise of one speech right destroys another. Second, porn isn’t “only words.” Shouting “Kill!” to a trained attack dog is not a speech act; it’s ordering an attack. “When the dog’s owner is arrested, is his freedom of speech being violated? If not, MacKinnon asks, why are things different for men who, by creating porn, order attacks on women?” The legal category of free speech, MacKinnon argues, is not neutral — it is “an ideological tool selectively deployed to protect the freedoms of the dominant class.”

Srinivasan gives this a lot in. “The Supreme Court’s decision on cross burning, like its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) that political spending is protected speech, shows just how easily ‘free speech’ can function ideologically to buttress existing regimes of power.” But then she turns the second face of the question. In 1992, the Canadian Supreme Court in R. v. Butler did take MacKinnon’s reasoning seriously, expanding obscenity law to criminalise porn that depicts violence and “degrading or dehumanising” non-violent porn. “This was not big bad state power jumping on poor powerless individual citizen,” MacKinnon wrote, “but a law passed to stand behind a comparatively powerless group in its social fight for equality.”

Within months, Canadian police seized copies of Bad Attitude, a lesbian erotic fiction magazine, from Glad Day Bookshop — Canada’s first gay and lesbian bookstore — which was then convicted of criminal obscenity. Meanwhile Randy Jorgensen, owner of Canada’s (and the world’s) largest adult video chain, built twenty new stores in the two years after Butler, untouched. MacKinnon was right about the intent of the law. It did not change what the law did.

The alliance that wasn’t noticed

This is where Srinivasan’s two-handed honesty tightens. The American anti-porn movement reached its peak precisely as the New Right was consolidating — religious conservatives fused with neoliberals, mobilised against everything Roe v. Wade represented. “Central to the New Right’s ideological programme was a reversal of feminist achievements.” And the conservative worldview — with its distinction between “good” women (who need protection) and “bad” women (who need discipline), and its picture of men as naturally rapacious, in need of taming by marriage — found strange harmony with radical feminist arguments about pornography. When a version of the Dworkin–MacKinnon ordinance reached Suffolk County, it was amended to describe pornography as a primary cause of “sodomy” and “a serious threat to the health, safety, morals and general welfare” of citizens. It was Ronald Reagan who commissioned the 1,960-page Meese Report on porn, which repeated Robin Morgan’s “pornography is the theory, rape the practice” line — but, pointedly, not the warning Morgan issued in the same essay:

I’m aware … that a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women, or books containing lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with “See Him Tear and Kill Her” … Nor do I place much trust in a male-run judiciary … I feel that censorship often boils down to some male judges sitting up on their benches, getting to read a lot of dirty books with one hand.

The oddness of what gets banned

Srinivasan surveys a small rogues’ gallery of national attempts. The UK’s 2014 law banned, among other things in porn: spanking, caning, aggressive whipping, physical restraint, humiliation, female ejaculation, strangulation, facesitting, fisting. The list “makes sense only when you see what it leaves out: good old-fashioned straight ‘strip-blow-fuck-cum’ porn — the sort of porn that Stoya describes making, the kind where hot blondes suck dicks, get fucked hard, told that they like it, and end up with semen on their face.” The acts banned are mostly characteristic of femdom porn — women dominating men — or, in the case of female ejaculation, “emblematic of women’s pleasure and almost never features in mainstream porn.” The mainstream, which is the actual object of the feminist critique, gets protected. “To prohibit only what is marginal in sex is to reinforce the hegemony of mainstream sexuality: to reinforce mainstream misogyny.”

The pattern repeats. Iceland considered banning “violent and hateful” porn in 2013. China in 2011 arrested thirty-two authors of yaoi, a homoerotic animated genre made by women for women. Nepal in 2018 banned 24,000 websites, including sex-positivity and queer platforms. Australia’s John Howard, in 2007, responded to a report on child abuse in Aboriginal communities by staging a military occupation of the Northern Territories and banning porn possession — but only in Aboriginal communities. “There is no ban on the consumption of pornography by white Australians,” even though Australia is the ninth-biggest consumer on PornHub and Australians view “rough sex” tagged videos 88 percent more often than the global average.

The pattern: laws aimed at porn land on the marginal, not the mainstream, and the women most harmed are the ones who depend on sex work to eat. During the pandemic, mass unemployment drove tens of thousands of new performers to cam sites. OnlyFans signed up 60,000 new models in the first two weeks of March 2020. IsMyGirl ran a “special offer” to fired McDonald’s workers. “Whatever the law says, porn is going to be made, bought and sold. What should matter most to feminists is not what the law says about porn, but what the law does for and to the women who work in it.”

Sex education as Plato conceived it, and as the school conceives it

Not one of her students, over years of teaching, has suggested legislating porn away. Not because they’re free speech absolutists — because they’re pragmatists. They know the internet can’t be contained. They know they are themselves becoming porn’s producers, “for whom uploading a sex video is on a continuum with taking a selfie.” Like Stoya, they blame inadequate sex education. Only 25 percent of young Britons rate their sex education “good” or “very good.” Only 41 percent of British teachers say they have had adequate training. Across the US, only thirty states mandate sex ed, and twenty-six of those require stress on abstinence. “Girls who have abstinence education are more likely to have sex for the first time with a significantly older partner, and more likely to describe their first time having sex as unwanted.”

But Srinivasan pushes against the confidence here. If we understand education as Plato did — “the sum total of words and images and signs and tropes to which we are exposed from birth” — then yes, porn is a problem of education. But formal sex education, taught by teachers in schools, cannot match porn on porn’s own ground. “Who teaches the teachers?” Teachers watch porn. Male teachers, if we take MacKinnon seriously, notice the thong. Formal sex education speaks to the intellect. It asks students to deliberate. “But porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains. It etches deep grooves in the psyche, forming powerful associations between arousal and selected stimuli, bypassing that part of us which pauses, considers, thinks.”

The film is the thing

Srinivasan spends some of the most precise pages of the essay on film itself. Porn works because it is film. The moving picture “needs nothing from us — no input, no elaboration. It requires only our enthralled attention, which we are compelled to give, and give willingly.” The browser becomes “a window onto the world, the pornworld, in which slick bodies fuck and are fucked for their own pleasure.” Mainstream porn is made for men, not only because men mostly consume it but because, following Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), its visual grammar compels the viewer to project himself onto “his screen surrogate”: the male actor. The camera replicates his point of view. The only part of the male body given real screen time is the erect penis — “a stand-in for the viewer’s own.” The Film Maker’s Guide to Pornography (1977) was blunt about the formula: “If you don’t have the come shots, you don’t have a porno picture.” The film, canonically, ends with ejaculation on the woman’s body, which the camera pins in place. With a pause button and a rewind, “it becomes his semen on her face and breasts.”

Where does this put the woman viewer? She can identify, most obviously, with the women on screen, “whose sexual pleasure is mediated through the display of male desire and its satisfaction through physical and psychic dominance: through ordering, demanding, shoving, pounding.” She can also, as Ellen Willis asked, identify with the rapist rather than the victim — “this form of sex-inverted identification is presumably very common.” Srinivasan concedes the real possibilities of cross-identification, and the pro-porn feminist case for porn’s salutary side: Jennifer Nash’s argument that black women’s presence in porn can represent blackness as “a locus of pleasure and sexual arousal”; Leslie Green’s argument that gay male porn lets gay men feel their own objectivity, without which their sexuality “cannot be hot, wet or fun.”

Then she turns. “It is interesting how few if any pro-porn theorists suggest that men who watch rape porn identify with the raped woman, or that white men who watch interracial porn identify with the black woman.” And the real question:

Why does the woman viewer have to become a man to exert power? Why does the fem gay man or black woman need to watch someone who looks like them be bent over and fucked to know that they, in their femness or blackness, are desirable? … I am asking that we do not confuse the necessities of negotiation under oppression with the signs of emancipation.

The algorithm and the taxonomy

Rule 34, the internet meme: “If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.” True, near enough. You can find porn with elderly performers, visible disabilities, Star Trek porn. But the mainstream has trend lines. “Of the top twenty most popular stars on PornHub in 2017, all but two were white, and all were slim, able-bodied, fem, cis and waxed to pre-pubescent hairlessness.” Piper Perri, number seventeen, is ninety pounds, four feet ten — “the same height — coincidentally? — as Nabokov’s Lolita. She has braces on her perfectly straight teeth, and looks no older than fourteen.” Srinivasan proposes Rule 35: “Whatever’s ugly in our sexual politics, it’s wildly popular in porn.”

The algorithm does the rest. PornHub’s recommendation system, like YouTube’s and Amazon’s, “learn[s] and then shape[s] users’ preferences.” It serves up, to each user, what others in his demographic like. It bends sexual tastes towards uniformity. It teaches users to think about sex itself in “prescribed categories.” Shira Tarrant, author of The Pornography Industry: “If you are interested in something like double oral, and you put that into a browser, you’re going to get two women giving one guy a blowjob … you’re not likely to get two men or two people giving a woman oral sex.” Actresses between twenty-three and thirty — too old for teen, too young for MILF — “now find it extremely difficult to get booked for shoots.” There is no category for them.

Feminist porn, and why it isn’t enough

Srinivasan walks through the pro-sex porn tradition with respect. Candida Royalle’s Femme Productions (1984) was the first feminist porn house; Royalle skipped money shots (“as an actress, I had asked, ‘Why are they in there?’ They said ‘To prove it’s really happening’”) and consulted sex therapists. Erika Lust, the Barcelona-based feminist porn director, credits her move to indie porn to Linda Williams’s academic book Hard Core. Shine Louise Houston, black queer director with a San Francisco Art Institute film degree, made The Crash Pad (2005) a dyke porn cult classic; her actors pick their own acts and are all paid the same flat fee — bucking an industry that normally pays a strict hierarchy (anal over vaginal, double over single, straight over lesbian). Her performers describe themselves as “nonbinary butch femmes, witches, trans lesbians, transdykes, ‘non-human women’, bears, genderqueer unicorns, butch futch trans girl enby dykes, sex nerds, and ftM sadist sexual omnivores.” Episodes come with content warnings and behind-the-scenes debriefs.

But feminist and indie porn “are rarely free.” Free sites dominate, algorithmically tuned to mainstream desire. Even if states subsidised feminist porn, it couldn’t legally be shown to anyone under eighteen. “How do you teach people to read texts you can’t show them?” Some of Srinivasan’s students welcome the idea of a different kind of porn. Others feel “it’s too late for them, that they are already too old to reconfigure their desires. Children of the internet, with its infinite variety, somehow they find all but one possibility foreclosed.”

Imagination versus mimesis

The essay closes with a surprising turn back to Andrea Dworkin. The argument that young people need better representations of sex, Srinivasan suggests, leaves in place a more basic problem: “the logic of the screen, according to which sex must be mediated; and the imagination is limited to imitation.” Filmed sex “shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified.” It turns imagination into “a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty.” Andrea Dworkin, in Intercourse (1987), had warned of this:

Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which is only — pathetically — a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses.

So the sex education Srinivasan ends up suggesting is not the more and better speech the pragmatists want. It’s “a kind of negative education.” One that “wouldn’t assert its authority to tell the truth about sex, but rather remind young people that the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them.” Sex can stay, “if they choose … violent, selfish and unequal. Or sex can — if they choose — be something more joyful, more equal, freer.” What would it take to achieve? She doesn’t know. “There are no laws to draft, no easy curriculums to roll out.” Rather than more speech or more images, “it is their onslaught that would have to be arrested.” Perhaps then the sexual imagination — not fantasy, imagination — “could be coaxed, even briefly, to recall its lost power.”

The anti-porn feminists, she has implied all along, were not hysterical. They were early. “What if they weren’t hysterical, but prescient?” Forty years later, with her students confirming yes to every question, the point is no longer whether porn causes rape. The point is what porn teaches about what counts as sex — and whether the sexual imagination has any ground of its own left to stand on.

Essay 3: The Right to Sex

This is the essay that gave the book its name, and you can feel Srinivasan working it out as she writes. She begins with a killer and ends in a question, and between those two points she refuses — deliberately, conscientiously — to land.

Elliot Rodger, and the shape of “incel”

On 23 May 2014, a twenty-two-year-old college dropout named Elliot Rodger stabbed his two housemates and their friend 134 times inside his apartment on Seville Road in Isla Vista, California. He then drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house at UC Santa Barbara, shot three women outside (killing two), went on a drive-by spree that killed a fourth student in a deli, wounded fourteen others, and finally shot himself in the head inside a crashed BMW. In the hours between the stabbings and the shootings, he went to Starbucks, ordered a coffee, and uploaded a video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution” to YouTube. He also emailed a 107,000-word memoir-manifesto — “My Twisted World” — to his parents and therapist.

Srinivasan lets Rodger speak for himself, and it’s worse than any gloss of him could be:

All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.

The details Srinivasan picks from the manifesto are doing careful work. Rodger was half white and half Malaysian Chinese. He dyed his hair blond because blond people were “so much more beautiful.” He found sanctuary in Halo and World of Warcraft. He was “incensed” by the sex lives of his peers — in particular by the fact that, as he wrote, “an inferior, ugly black boy” could “get a white girl” when he could not. (“I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.”) He fantasised about ruling the world and outlawing sex: “All women must be quarantined like the plague they are.” And he would target Alpha Phi, he said, because it was “the hottest sorority of UCSB,” full of “spoiled, heartless, wicked bitches.”

Srinivasan notes that in the end Rodger didn’t even manage to shoot the women he lusted after. Katherine Cooper and Veronika Weiss were non-blondes from a different sorority who happened to be walking past. The manosphere read this as final confirmation of his “omega” status.

She also notes a smaller, sadder fact from the manifesto itself: the bullies who made Rodger’s life hell at school were overwhelmingly boys. Boys called him a loser; boys shoved him into lockers; boys mocked his virginity. But it was girls who had denied him sex — and so it was girls who had to be destroyed. The very system that had humiliated him by the standards of heteromasculinity was the one he was trying to enforce with a gun.

In 2017, Reddit shut down its 40,000-member “Incel” support group after adopting a new policy against content that “encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence.” A companion forum called “Truecels” was also banned. Its sidebar had read: “No encouraging or inciting violence, or other illegal activities such as rape. But of course it is OK to say, for example, that rape should have a lighter punishment or even that it should be legalised and that slutty women deserve rape.”

The first move: no one has a right to sex

Srinivasan makes the obvious, foundational point first, because it has to be made. No woman owed Elliot Rodger anything. His entitlement was patriarchy in its most undiluted form. The incel writing that bubbled up after the murders — “had one of those wicked bitches just fucked Elliot Rodger he wouldn’t have had to kill anyone” — is a case study in what happens when men are taught to believe they have a claim on women’s bodies.

This is the axiom. Sex is not owed. Consent is the floor. She will not move off this.

And yet

But Srinivasan isn’t writing an incel-takedown. She’s writing about desire, and this is where the essay turns.

Could it also be said that Rodger’s unfuckability was a symptom of the internalisation of patriarchal norms of male sexual attractiveness on the part of women?

She doesn’t say yes. She complicates the question. Rodger was a creep, and plenty of nerdy non-homicidal guys get laid — part of the injustice of patriarchy, she notes, is that it makes even “supposedly unattractive” categories of men attractive. Geeks, nerds, dad bods, effete men, old men — patriarchy leaves room for them. Whereas the acceptable women are all “tautbodied and hot, minor variations on the same normative paradigm.” (“Can we imagine GQ carrying an article celebrating ‘mom bod’?”)

Still, the hot sorority blondes Rodger was fixated on don’t, as a rule, date short awkward half-Malaysian kids with hair they’ve bleached blond. That has something to do with patriarchal norms. And Rodger’s own desires — that erotic fixation on the “spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut,” with “hot blonde” becoming a metonym for all women — were themselves shaped by patriarchy.

From this opening, she makes her real move: feminist commentary on Rodger and the incels has said a great deal about male entitlement, objectification, violence. It has said almost nothing about desire. Men’s desire, women’s desire, the political formation of both.

What feminism used to be willing to say

Srinivasan detours through the history of radical feminism — not as nostalgia, but as reminder. A few decades ago, feminism was nearly alone in being willing to ask whether desire itself was political. Catharine MacKinnon called out the Freudian picture of sexuality as “an innate primary natural prepolitical unconditioned drive divided along the biological gender line.” Radical feminists argued that under patriarchy, sex was constituted by “hostility and contempt, or arousal of master to slave, together with awe and vulnerability, or arousal of slave to master.”

Some of them drew a hard conclusion: refuse sex with men. Ti-Grace Atkinson’s group The Feminists capped its membership of cohabiting-or-married women at one-third. Cell 16 in Boston practiced celibacy, separatism, and karate, and opened meetings by reading Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, which claimed the female could “easily — far more easily than she may think — condition away her sex drive.” Cell 16’s founder, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, thought the celibate was “the most lucid person.”

Against them, “pro-woman” feminists — Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, the Redstockings — argued that women’s desire for men wasn’t false consciousness, it was reasonable negotiation with a rough world, and what you needed to change was men, not women’s wants. Then the “political lesbians” arrived — the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, the Furies, Adrienne Rich — arguing that lesbianism was a political choice, a commitment to other women, not merely an innate orientation. The Furies: “lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to … end male supremacy.”

By the 1980s, Ellen Willis had threaded her way between all these factions into what she called “pro-sex” feminism: women are sexual subjects in their own right, consent is morally dispositive, keep authoritarian moralism out of the bedroom.

Willis’s “and yet”

This is where Srinivasan finds her pivot, and she borrows it from Willis herself. At the end of her 1981 essay “Lust Horizons,” Willis lays out the pro-sex case and then, with no warning, turns:

A truly radical movement must look … beyond the right to choose, and keep focusing on the fundamental questions. Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?

Srinivasan reads this as the exact move feminism has let slip. Willis gave with both hands — an axiom of sexual autonomy, and a standing question about how free those choices really are. The generation that came after took the first hand and dropped the second.

What I am suggesting is that, in our rush to do the former, feminists risk forgetting to do the latter.

Who gets to be fuckable

Here the essay sharpens to its hardest point. Once consent is the only constraint we’re willing to think with, desire becomes a “primordial rather than a political fact.” But desire is not primordial. Srinivasan lists what everyone knows but isn’t supposed to say aloud:

Consider the supreme fuckability of “hot blonde sluts” and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishisation and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies.

These, she says, are “political facts.” Not natural, not given, not pre-political. Patterns of desirability that happen to track exactly onto the oldest fault lines of race, gender, ability, and body size. A “sex-positive gaze, unmoored from Willis’s call to ambivalence” will absorb all of this and call it personal preference.

In other words, the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of “personal preference.”

A friend tells her: “The beautiful torsos on Grindr are mostly Asian men hiding their faces.” She watches a Grindr web series called “What the Flip?” in which a white guy and an East Asian guy swap profiles. The Asian guy’s inbox fills up instantly. The white guy, using the Asian profile, is ignored — and when he is approached, it’s by men announcing they’re “Rice Queens” who want Asian men because they’re “good at bottoming.” The episode hugs it out awkwardly: “You’re not everybody’s cup of tea, but you’re going to be somebody’s.”

The point isn’t that Grindr invented any of this. It’s that Tinder, Grindr, Bumble have “distilled attraction down to the essentials: face, height, weight, age, race, witty tagline.” They’ve taken what was already the worst part of the landscape and institutionalised it on our screens. And, Srinivasan notes dryly, you can imagine Grindr making a show that asks gay men to examine their sexual racism. Can you imagine Tinder making one for straight people? She doesn’t think so, and not because straight people are any better behaved — “it’s because straight people … aren’t much in the habit of thinking there’s anything wrong with how they have sex.”

The sandwich that isn’t a sandwich

So: how do we hold “no one is owed sex” and “desire is political” in the same hand? The temptation, if you take the second half too literally, is to slide toward the incel demand — an entitlement to other people’s bodies dressed up in the language of justice. Srinivasan is careful to refuse this. Unfuckability is a political fact; a right to be fucked is a monstrosity.

She uses Rebecca Solnit’s line — “you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you,” just as “you don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you” — and then she breaks the analogy. Imagine, she says, that your child comes home and tells you the other kids share sandwiches but not with her. Suppose she’s brown, or fat, or disabled, or doesn’t speak English well. Suddenly “no one’s obliged to share” doesn’t sound like a complete answer.

But then she breaks the analogy the other way too. A teacher can institute a sandwich-sharing policy. A state cannot institute a sex-sharing policy without tipping into something grotesque. (She mentions Charles Fourier’s proposal of a “sexual minimum” guaranteed by an “amorous nobility” who “know how to subordinate love to the dictates of honour,” and lets the absurdity sit.) Disability activists asking for inclusive sex ed and more varied media are one thing. A redistributive scheme for desire is another.

Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal.

The cotton ceiling, and Andrea Long Chu

The point where this argument gets hardest, in contemporary feminism, is around trans women — and especially around the trans porn actress Drew DeVeaux’s phrase the “cotton ceiling,” meaning the tendency of some lesbian cis women to “take trans women seriously as women” in the abstract while excluding them sexually. Srinivasan notes that “cotton ceiling” is an unfortunate coinage: the glass ceiling names a violation of rights, and there is no right to someone else’s body. But, she says:

Simply to say to a trans woman, or a disabled woman, or an Asian man, “No one is required to have sex with you,” is to skate over something crucial. There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want, but personal preferences — NO DICKS, NO FEMS, NO FATS, NO BLACKS, NO ARABS, NO RICE NO SPICE, MASC-FOR-MASC — are rarely just personal.

Here she brings in Andrea Long Chu’s provocation that being trans “expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire” — not who one is, but what one wants. Chu’s essay lists what she transitioned for: “lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys … for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for … Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts.” Chu then turns the knife: “But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.”

Chu’s position is that a feminism that tries to train desire toward its political principles has already failed — “the true lesson of political lesbianism as a failed project.” Srinivasan half-agrees, half-refuses. If desire is insulated from political critique, then so are the desires that exclude trans women in the first place. You can’t have it both ways — or rather, we do have it both ways, uneasily, and we should.

The ambivalent place

This is where Srinivasan asks the reader to stay with her:

The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obliged to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question often answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.

She points out a striking asymmetry: when men feel sexually marginalised they tend to turn it into entitlement — a claim on women. When women organise around their own sexual marginalisation — black women, fat women, disabled women — they speak of empowerment and respect, not of owed bodies. “Black is beautiful” and “big is beautiful” are, she says, “not just slogans of empowerment, but proposals for a revaluation of our values.” Lindy West describes studying photographs of fat women and asking herself what it would be to see these bodies as objectively beautiful — not as theory, but as a “perceptual” task, a “gestalt shift from revulsion to admiration.”

The question Srinivasan arrives at, near the end, is not whether there is a right to sex — there isn’t — but whether there is, maybe, “a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires.”

She doesn’t answer. She flags the risk. Authoritarianism lives down the road of telling people what they really want, and that road has been used to rape women and gay men out of their actual desires for centuries. She won’t endorse training desire. But she won’t protect desire from politics either. And she ends on something almost hopeful, something closer to a permission than a program:

Our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills — not automatically, but not impossibly either … Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

That’s how the essay ends. Not with a policy, not with a thesis. With a description of the way desire, at its best, mutinies against the very systems that made it. You can feel her reaching for something she won’t quite close her hand around. That’s the whole argument. The thinking hasn’t finished; she’s just showing you what it looks like to do it honestly.

Essay 4: Coda — The Politics of Desire

This is Srinivasan thinking again, in public, about an essay that got away from her. She’d begun the previous piece in 2014, after Elliot Rodger’s manifesto — not to join the chorus, but because she was struck by what the chorus refused to hear. Feminists had correctly named Rodger a misogynist. What they had not done was take seriously his claim that racism and the norms of masculinity had placed him beyond the reach of desire. His self-diagnosis was, as she puts it, “no doubt mistaken” and “deeply self-serving” — he enforced the same racial and sexual hierarchies that had excluded him. But the structural claim at its heart was not, in principle, wrong. “Racism and heteronormativity do extend into the sphere of romance and sex; indeed it is in this intimate sphere, protected by the logic of ‘personal preference,’ that they sink some of their deepest roots.” Did feminists, she wanted to know, have nothing to say about this?

They did. Much of what they said, once her essay appeared, was angry. This coda is her reply.

Not “redistribution” — something else

One feminist tweeted: “Could we please stop discussing whether or not there is a right to sex? Of course there is not. There is a right not to be raped. Enough hand-wringing. The end.” As a “small addendum”: the observation that who gets what out of life is a matter of “luck and happenstance and privilege” is “about as banal as it gets.”

Srinivasan grants the first half. “There is no right to sex. (To think otherwise is to think like a rapist.)” But is it really banal to notice that racism, classism, ableism and heteronormativity shape whom we desire and who desires us? “That would be news to the people of colour and the working-class, queer and disabled people who have drawn a clear connection between the more obvious, public dimensions of their oppression and the more hidden, private mechanisms that enable and partly constitute it, including the mechanisms of the club, the dating app, the bedroom, the school dance.”

Her main move here is to separate two demands that her critics have been conflating. One is liberal: everyone can desire whomever they want, and that’s the end of it. The other is radical: liberate sex from the distortions of oppression. The liberal demand is often fuelled, she notes, by “an individualist suspicion of the coercive power of the community. If my desire must be disciplined, who will do the disciplining? And if my desire refuses to be disciplined, what will happen to me then?” She is not dismissive of this fear. “It is not perverse to want to be left alone.”

But the radical demand isn’t about discipline at all. When she’d written that desire could “cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself,” she wasn’t imagining a desire regulated by justice but a desire set free from injustice. “I am asking what might happen if we were to look at bodies, our own and others’, and allow ourselves to feel admiration, appreciation, want, where politics tells us we should not.” What is disciplined, in this picture, is not desire itself but “the political forces that presume to instruct it.”

A gay man wrote to her about his husband of fourteen years, a large, fat man he loves, with whom he has a satisfying sex life. “And yet he has ‘had to work, deliberately and consciously, to let him be sexy, if that makes sense’.” The husband went on: “while we cannot alter what does and does not turn us on, we can on the one hand displace what might be getting in the way of erotic excitement and on the other teach ourselves to eroticize what is happening in front of us during sex.”

“Is this an act of discipline,” Srinivasan asks, “or of love?”

Adrienne Rich, and the question of “preference”

She reaches back to 1980 and Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” to press further. Rich’s point was that heterosexuality is not a default human condition but a political institution — one maintained by force as well as by psychic internalisation, one that compels even straight women to regulate their intimacies in ways that “often betray what it is they really want.” Rich asked straight women to think back to the first time they set aside a female friendship for male attention. Was that natural? Inevitable? “What if the envy you feel for another woman’s body, her face, her charm, her ease, her brilliance, were not envy at all — but desire?”

Rich herself had put the point sharply: to acknowledge that heterosexuality for women “may not be a ‘preference’ at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and ‘innately’ heterosexual.” It will “call for a special quality of courage in heterosexually identified feminists.”

The ideology of innate preference has its uses. “Born this way” has been politically vital for gay rights, “trapped in the wrong body” for trans rights, in a world where blame gets attached to choice rather than to nature. “Political claims are often dialectical,” Srinivasan notes, “best understood as responses to the normative terrain as it stands in the moment they are made, not in some hoped-for future.”

But the innateness story has limits. When Cynthia Nixon said in 2012 that being gay was, for her, a choice — “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better” — gay activists were furious. Does Nixon’s choice make her less gay? Silvia Federici asks, on behalf of straight women: “But can we really afford relations with men?” Srinivasan follows the thought. The well-worn distinction between “political” lesbianism and “real, desire-based” lesbianism begins to look suspect. “How often is there a lesbian relationship that is not in some important sense political — that is not at a deep level about honouring what women, outside the script of heterosexual male domination, can have and be together?”

Andrea Long Chu, and the line between critique and moralism

Into this Andrea Long Chu enters. Chu concedes the political fact — “Obviously something like ‘no fats, no femmes, no Asians’ is a desire that has a history, and has a politics, that can be described by reference to political processes: imperialism, white supremacy, and also, like, the world-historical defeat of the female sex.” But Chu refuses to act on it. “I can’t stand body positivity. I cannot stand it. It is just anathema to me. It’s moralizing. It’s really fucking hard to figure out a way to tell people to change their desires that isn’t moralistic.”

Srinivasan’s reply is careful. “Is there no difference between ‘telling people to change their desires’ and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want? Must the transformation of desire be a disciplinary project (wilfully altering our desires in line with our politics) — or can it be an emancipatory one (setting our desires free from politics)?” She borrows from Audre Lorde, who wrote in 1978: “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered.”

Chu’s other worry is that “moralism about the desires of the oppressor can be a shell corporation for moralism about the desires of the oppressed” — that a political critique of desire will get turned around on gay men who won’t sleep with non-white men, Black men who prefer light-skinned women, trans women who want the trappings of patriarchal femininity. Srinivasan thinks this smuggles in a false dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed, “as if being oppressed along one dimension exonerates us from the possibility we might oppress anyone else. Are black women not entitled to hold black men to account for their sexual racism?”

And when critics worry that her talk of transforming desire focuses too much on personal responsibility — that structural problems demand structural solutions — she agrees, and then keeps walking. “To say that a problem is structural does not absolve us from thinking about how we, as individuals, are implicated in it, or what we should do about it.” Radical feminists, she notes, rethought “their ways of working, child-rearing, arguing, decision-making, living and loving” not because they were bourgeois moralists but because they understood that a politics which “refuses prefiguration” is its own kind of cop-out. “What does it mean to say that we want to transform the political world — but that we ourselves will remain unchanged?”

The practical question, she says, is “how do we engage in a political critique of sex without slipping into the misogynistic logic of sexual entitlement (‘the right to sex’) or into a moral authoritarianism that disciplines rather than emancipates?” The answer is a matter of knowing-how, not knowing-that. “Know-how is to be found not through theoretical investigation but through experiments of living."

"Fuckability” is not a good

A Black woman on Twitter had pushed back on Srinivasan’s line about “the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men.” The critic’s point: Srinivasan was conflating “fuckability, generally” with how society rewards certain couplings.

Srinivasan clarifies. There is no such thing as “fuckability, generally” if that means some pre-political desirability. Fuckability, like Catharine MacKinnon’s “rapeability,” is a construction of sexual politics. But the critic was onto something real. “The bodies of brown and black women — especially when they belong to women who are also poor, incarcerated or undocumented — are in an important sense supremely fuckable, much more so than the bodies of white women. For these bodies can be violated with impunity and without consequence.” The serial rapist police officer Daniel Holtzclaw “knew what he was doing when he chose a string of poor black women as his victims.”

Which leads her to the essay’s sharpest reframe. “Fuckability is not some good that should be distributed more fairly. It isn’t a good at all.” She quotes Katherine Cross: “To some white men, Asian women top their hierarchies of desirability. But what do those women get out of that? Suffocating stereotypes of docility; discrimination; abuse. These are the wages of being in someone else’s hierarchy."

"MRAsians,” and the letters from the excluded

A man from Sydney, originally from Sri Lanka, adopted by two white parents, wrote her a long, aching letter. “I reassure you that I’m no psychopath like that mixed-race kid who underpins your thesis and massacred those poor souls after rejection based allegedly on his race. I’m rational enough to accept my fate and try and make the best of my short existence.” He described dating profiles listing “no Indians” as a preference. He described loneliness. He asked whether some “white-guy-ethnic-girl relationships” were “a re-enactment of colonial conquest and rescue.” And then: “And if it is? Well that’s their right. It’s consensual. Us ethnic guys just have to suck it up.” He closed: “I certainly don’t feel the right to Sex, nor do I feel the right to Love. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt… Sophistication is a province only found in Caucasia.”

Srinivasan holds this letter with both hands. And she sets it next to another phenomenon: the rise of “MRAsians,” Asian men who, under the banner of antiracism, hurl misogynistic abuse at Asian women who date white men. When NPR’s Yowei Shaw floated a story exploring white-male/Asian-female couples — asking, gently, “is it possible to reprogram your sexual desire? Is this something we should even ask people to do?” — she was immediately accused of importing incel logic. The novelist Celeste Ng received an email from a “huge fan… of watching your son develop mental illness because of your internalized self hate.” Another Asian writer, Christine Tan, was told by correspondents that they wanted to “kill a whole lot of white motherfuckers and their asian sell out bitches.” Some Asian women were told their mixed-race sons would grow up to be the next Elliot Rodger.

Srinivasan will not flatten this. She points out that subreddits like r/AZNidentity, nominally “Pan Asian,” are really forums for Asian men, and take for granted that Asian women are the dominant Asian class, Asian men their victims. “It is perhaps true that in the white imagination — which is much of the world’s imagination — Asian men are less than fully men. But that does not stop Asian men, like men of all races, controlling, exploiting, thwarting, beating and raping Asian women.”

And she notices an asymmetry. “It is on the whole black women who hold to task black men for sexual racism… Here we have a relatively subordinate group (black women) holding to account a relatively dominant group (black men). This inverts the general pattern among Asians.” Black women, she writes, “know how to talk about the political formation of desire without demanding to be desired. For straight men, including straight Asian men, the temptation to misogyny, to entitlement, to the enforcement of mythic ‘rights,’ is always live.”

She reads Wesley Yang on the face of Seung-Hui Cho — “a perfectly unremarkable Korean face… It’s just a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country.” And she reads Yang years later defending Jordan Peterson, celebrating a “natural” masculinity of risk and competition. Her question back: “is it not precisely this ideology of a ‘natural’ masculinity — a masculinity that is inherently risk-taking, adventurous, competitive, dominant; a masculinity that is never fully accessible to a skinny, friendless, pimply East Asian boy — that produced Seung-Hui Cho?”

Her own admission, quieter: “I also have friends who joke that I am ‘basically white.’ Maybe it isn’t a joke.”

The “cotton ceiling” and the limits of innateness

Some gender-critical lesbian feminists had accused her of endorsing the “cotton ceiling” — the idea that cis lesbians are obligated to sleep with trans women. She finds “a small irony” in this, given that the previous essay had explicitly diagnosed the cotton-ceiling frame as a logic of sexual entitlement and rejected it. “What is required, I said, is a discourse not of entitlement but of empowerment and respect.”

Still, she wants to take apart the metaphysics some of her critics lean on. The claim that lesbianism is innate attraction to female genitalia — “what’s more, genitalia from birth” — she finds puzzling. “Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas? Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?” Consider, she writes, “the gay men who express delighted disgust at vaginas. Consider the idea of the ‘Platinum Star Gay,’ the gay man who, birthed via a caesarean, never even made bodily contact with his mother’s vagina. Is this the expression of an innate, and thus permissible revulsion — or a learned and suspect misogyny?”

She cites MacKinnon, in a recent interview, asked how to work with people who insist “woman” must be defined biologically first: “Male dominant society has defined women as a discrete biological group forever. If this was going to produce liberation, we’d be free.”

Srinivasan is careful to preserve space for wariness. “For some women (including some trans women) the penis might be a symbol of male power and violence such that it cannot be, for them, a viable object of desire. The crucial question, in a sense, is whether a sexual aversion to women with penises is best explained by an unjustified transphobia, or a justified wariness of men. But this is precisely the distinction that trans-exclusionary feminists are unwilling to draw.”

The long list

Then, with almost no commentary, she lays down a sequence of dates and bodies. Dylann Roof in Charleston: “I have to do this because y’all are raping our women.” William Atchison, online handle Elliot Rodger, shooting students in New Mexico. Nikolas Cruz in Parkland, who had vowed “Elliot rodger will not be forgotten.” Alek Minassian, the Toronto van attacker: “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” Jarrod Ramos in Maryland, who had stalked and threatened a woman before mass-murdering a newsroom. Mollie Tibbetts, whose killer Trump used as a rationale for the border wall.

“Would the wall have prevented the deaths of the thirty-nine people murdered by Elliot Rodger, Nikolas Cruz, William Atchison, Dylann Roof and Jarrod Ramos?”

A fourteen-year-old in Oklahoma who stabbed a classmate who wouldn’t date him. Scott Beierle at a Tallahassee yoga studio. Tobias Rathjen in Hanau — “a very wild mixture of conspiracy theories, racism, and incel ideology.” A machete attack at a Toronto massage parlour. The Atlanta spa shootings of March 2021: six women of East Asian descent among eight dead. Robert Aaron Long cited his “sex addiction” and said he was trying to “help” other men. “Those who infer from this that race was irrelevant to Long’s actions miss… the way in which anti-East Asian racism is entwined with the sexual fetishisation of East Asian women.”

The list is the argument.

Alana, and what the word used to mean

Tucked into this dark sequence is a strange, tender story. The word “involuntary celibate” was coined in the late 1990s by a young woman named Alana, a “nerdy queer woman” who had never been on a date and wanted a name for her loneliness. Her website was a support forum — women and men, young and old, gay and straight — where people swapped advice on shyness and depression. Eventually she got into a relationship and handed the keys over. She didn’t find out what had become of the movement until twenty years later, reading about Elliot Rodger in Mother Jones. “Incels today claim that there are no women incels, or ‘femcels’.”

Srinivasan compares Alana to Arthur Galston, the plant physiologist whose innocuous dissertation footnote on soybean growth turned out to be the chemical kernel of Agent Orange, and who spent the rest of his life trying to get the weapon retired. Alana now runs a project called Love Not Anger. “It was the combination of loneliness with sexism, misogyny, privilege and entitlement,” she wrote, “that has led many men to be angry that women are not sexually available to them.”

When is undesiredness oppression?

“A vexed question: when is being sexually or romantically marginalised a facet of oppression, and when is it just a matter of bad luck, one of life’s small tragedies?” Her old professor had told her first-year class that there would be heartbreak even in the postcapitalist utopia. Are the un-beautiful oppressed? The short? The chronically shy?

She points to r/trufemcels — a forum of women in their late twenties and thirties who have never been kissed — and notes the recurring observation there: incel men who say they’re too ugly or awkward to find love are themselves explicitly uninterested in ugly or awkward women. What these men actually want, the femcels note, is not intimacy but “the status that comes with attracting hot white women.” On one incel forum someone asks why incels aren’t interested in lower-status women: “You’re upset because people don’t want to fuck actual filth?”

This is where the “redistribution of sex” meme comes in. Ross Douthat in the New York Times had treated Robin Hanson, the George Mason economist, as a “brilliant weirdo” for asking why progressives worry about redistributing wealth but not sex. Feminist critics answered, correctly, that such proposals imply rape. Hanson tried to wriggle out with proposals to subsidise prostitution or revive norms of pre-marital celibacy and “enforced monogamy.” Srinivasan is not impressed. “These proposals, like rape, are also coercive. Women sell sex, on the whole, because they need money; to give sex-less men money with which to pay for sex presupposes that there are women who need to sell sex to live.”

She takes the contradiction at the heart of the incel further than most of her interlocutors have: “Incels hate the commodification of sex and want to be released from it. They hate the idea that sex is governed by market relations, that sex with high-status women is not given out to them freely and lovingly. This is the deep contradiction at the heart of the incel phenomenon: incels oppose themselves to a sexual market in which they see themselves as losers, while being wedded to the status hierarchy that structures that market.” The incel, she argues, represents “a collision of two pathologies” — neoliberalism’s assimilation of life to market logic, and patriarchy’s fantasy of the home as a refuge from the market, with women offering “freely given” care. Those two tendencies, as Selma James, Dalla Costa, Federici and Nancy Fraser have argued, don’t just coexist; they serve each other. “Incels’ real complaint is that there are no women to offer them respite from the very system that their ideology — in its insistence on women as status-conferring commodities — props up.”

The revolution that wasn’t

Douthat’s own preferred answer to all of this is a religiously inflected return to monogamy, chastity and “the special respect owed to the celibate.” Srinivasan, who is more sympathetic to certain pieces of the traditionalist critique than you might expect, is unsparing here. “Monogamous marriage, the heteronormative family and norms of chastity are — like Hanson’s government subsidies for incels — parts of a patriarchal infrastructure designed to secure men’s access to women’s bodies and minds.” And the respect owed to the celibate is fine, “so long as that respect is not a consolation prize for the gay man or woman taught to loathe their own desires.”

She grants Douthat’s one valid point: the 1960s sexual revolution did leave us wanting. But it did not, as he claims, produce new winners and losers or a new hierarchy to displace the old. “What is remarkable about the sexual revolution — this is why it was so formative for the politics of a generation of radical feminists — is how much was left unchanged. Women who say no still really mean yes, and women who say yes are still sluts. Black and brown men are still rapists, and the rape of black and brown women still doesn’t count. Girls are still asking for it. Boys still must learn to give it.”

“Whom exactly, then, did the sexual revolution set free?”

The essay closes on a single line — the quiet, flat kind of line that is harder to shake than a louder one: “We have never yet been free.”

Essay 5: On Not Sleeping With Your Students

The essay opens with a set piece. In 1992, Jane Gallop — Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wisconsin-Milwaukee — was investigated for sexual harassment after two women graduate students complained. She was found to have violated a ban on “consensual amorous relations” and gently reprimanded. Five years later, she published Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, a book that did not so much defend her conduct as elevate it into a pedagogical principle. Yes, she had made out with one of the students at a bar in front of others. Yes, she had announced at a conference that graduate students were her “sexual preference.” Yes, she had engineered her teaching to be flirtatious, charged, intense. And none of it, she argued, was a betrayal of feminism — it was feminism, properly understood. The line Srinivasan pulls out is the one Gallop means as a dare:

At its most intense — and, I would argue, its most productive — the pedagogical relation between teacher and student is, in fact, “a consensual amorous relation.” And if schools decide to prohibit not only sex but “amorous relations” between teacher and student, the “consensual amorous relation” that will be banned from our campuses might just be teaching itself.

Teaching, on Gallop’s view, is already an erotic relation. To regulate that fact is to regulate teaching. Srinivasan spends the rest of the essay taking this claim seriously enough to refute it properly.

How the policies got there

Before getting to Gallop’s argument, Srinivasan lays out the legal scaffolding. American universities only began to discourage, then prohibit, sex between professors and students in the 1980s. (Outside the US such rules are rare. Oxford, where Srinivasan teaches, merely “strongly advises” against it.) The policies grew out of the feminist campaign against workplace sexual harassment. Judges in the 1960s and 70s were still routinely finding that harassment was a “personal” matter, or that firing a woman for refusing to sleep with her boss was discrimination not on the basis of sex but on the basis of “being the sort of woman who didn’t want to have sex with her boss.” (One court upheld the firing of a woman for her “affection for pantsuits.”) Then in 1974 Paulette Barnes sued the EPA after being fired for rebuffing her boss; Catharine MacKinnon, then a Yale law student, slipped the clerks a draft of what would become The Sexual Harassment of Working Women; the DC Circuit recognised what had happened to Barnes as sex discrimination. A few years later MacKinnon helped Yale undergraduates sue the university — Alexander v. Yale (1980) lost at trial but established that sexual harassment counts as discrimination under Title IX, prompting campuses to draw up harassment codes.

Harassment, by definition, requires “unwanted” advances, so consensual professor-student sex initially fell outside the codes. That changed with Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986), where the Supreme Court found that Mechelle Vinson’s consent to sex with her boss — she eventually gave in out of fear of losing her job — did not mean she welcomed it. If consent could be coerced by fear of consequences, then students’ consent to sleep with professors could be too. Universities, worried about liability, began extending harassment policy to cover “consensual” relationships. In 1989, 17 percent of American universities had such policies; by 2014, 84 percent. Yale went first with a blanket ban on faculty-undergraduate relationships in 2010, after a 1997 rule (prompted by a seventeen-year-old freshman who felt “betrayed” and “used” by her mathematics professor) had covered only supervisory relationships. Others followed.

The feminist objection, and why Srinivasan doesn’t buy the easy dismissal

Some feminists denounced the expansion from the start. To say women students cannot consent to sex with their professors, they argued, was to invert “no means yes” into “yes means no” — to infantilise adult women, to play into the hands of the religious right, to reinforce a hierarchical model of pedagogy as powerful-man-versus-vulnerable-girl. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson wrote to Adrienne Rich in 1981: “In the Reagan era, we can hardly afford to romanticize any old norm of a virtuous and moral sexuality.”

Srinivasan, to her credit, does not reach for the easy answer. She concedes the feminist critics their basic point:

It is, no doubt, sometimes the case that women students consent to sex they don’t really want because they are afraid of what will happen if they don’t — a bad grade, a lacklustre recommendation, being ignored by their supervisor. But there are also many women students who consent to sex with their professors out of genuine desire. And there are professors whose romantic and sexual overtures are very much wanted. To insist that the power differential between professor and student precludes consent is either to see women students, like children, as intrinsically incapable of consent to sex — or to see them as somehow incapacitated by the dazzling force of the professor. And which professor is really that good?

The consent frame, then, can’t carry the weight. Students do sometimes want this. And yet:

Imagine a professor who happily accepts the infatuated attentions of his student, takes her out on dates, has sex with her, makes her his girlfriend, perhaps as he has done with many students before. The student has consented, and not out of fear. Are we really prepared to say that there is nothing troubling here? But if there is something troubling, and the problem isn’t a lack of consent, then what is it?

And then the line the whole essay pivots on:

Is it too sterile, too boring to suggest that instead of sleeping with his student, this professor should have been — teaching her?

Transference, and the part Gallop skipped

Gallop’s defence borrowed Freud. Transference — the patient’s unconscious projection of feelings about significant childhood figures onto the analyst — is, Gallop says, “also an inevitable part of any relationship we have to a teacher who really makes a difference.” Students falling for their teachers is a sign that pedagogy is working. Srinivasan grants the observation: most professors became professors because some earlier teacher set loose new wants in them; any teacher recognises the echo of transference not only in adoring students but in hostile ones, too.

What Gallop leaves out is Freud’s next sentence. Analysts, Freud insists, are “absolutely debarred” from responding to transference in kind. The analyst neither reciprocates the love nor retaliates against the hostility. The analyst uses the transference — draws the patient’s attention to it, convinces her that her feelings for the analyst are really a projection — as the central instrument of treatment. “In this way,” Freud writes, “the transference is changed from the strongest weapon of the resistance into the best instrument of the analytic treatment.”

Srinivasan ports this over to teaching. The good teacher redirects the student’s erotic energy away from himself and toward its proper object — knowledge, understanding, the thing the student actually wants to grasp. Plato is usually dragged in on the other side of this argument, but Srinivasan points out that in the Republic Socrates says plainly that “sexual pleasure mustn’t come into” the relationship between philosopher-guardians and the young they educate, “if they are to love and be loved in the right way.” Freud again: however highly the teacher may prize love, he must “prize even more highly the opportunity to help.”

There’s a subtlety Srinivasan won’t let Gallop slip out of. Freud admits that the patient’s transference-love is not fake — projection is “the essential character of every love.” We all fall in love with a smile, a shoulder, a symbol; we then “fabricate a person, compose a character,” as Proust puts it. So the student’s feelings for her professor are not categorically different from any other love. The difference between teacher and student is not that they cannot feel something real for each other; plenty of professors marry former students (a fact, she notes dryly, that defenders of these relationships “frequently trot out, as if we were in a Shakespearean comedy, where all that ends in marriage ends well”). The question isn’t whether real love is possible in the pedagogical context. The question is whether real teaching is.

The love a teacher owes a student, she suggests — borrowing bell hooks — is not the “exclusive, jealous, dyadic love of lovers” but something “more distanced, more controlled, more open to others and the world. It is no lesser a love for that.”

The epistemic asymmetry

The power difference between teacher and student is not mainly what people reach for first (grades, recommendations, references). Srinivasan wants to bracket that — the “un-fun matter of institutional power” — and name something deeper:

Instead, the teacher-student relationship is characterised, in its nature, by a profound epistemic asymmetry. Teachers understand and know how to do certain things; students want to understand and know how to do those same things. Implicit in their relationship is the promise that the asymmetry will be reduced: that the teacher will confer on the student some of his power; will help her become, at least in one respect, more like him. When the teacher takes the student’s longing for epistemic power and transposes it into a sexual key, allowing himself to be — or worse, making himself — the object of her desire, he has failed her as a teacher.

Here she lets a former student-girlfriend speak:

For a long time, I went around feeling naive, humiliated, and ashamed. Many of his colleagues knew the extent of the errands I ran for him … Many of his colleagues were also my professors, and the humiliation I felt in their presence was great. I was ridiculed by students who were aware of what was going on. My emotional attachment to him earned me the title “Professor X’s pitbull”, as though I could not think for myself, only defend my master on command.

The relationship has been inverted. She was supposed to be served by the teaching arrangement; instead she serves him — runs his errands, feeds his ego. Her other professors are no longer her teachers but her boyfriend’s colleagues, watching. “She may still be enrolled, but is she really a student any longer? If she were to leave, would we be surprised?”

The Kincaid set piece

This is the heart of the essay. In a Critical Inquiry exchange prompted by Gallop’s book, James Kincaid — English professor at USC, author of Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture — stepped forward to defend her. His indictment of campus sexual harassment policy was that it lacked a sense of “fun.” To illustrate, he reproduced a letter from one of his own students. Srinivasan quotes it in full:

Dear Professor Kinkade: I never do this kind of thing, but my roommate keeps telling me I should, she says, go ahead and tell him if you feel like it, so I am. I really like your class and the way you have of explaining things. I mean I read these poems and they don’t mean a thing to me until you start talking and then they do. It’s the way you talk that is different from the other teachers I have had in the English Department, who may know more than you but can’t get it across if you know what I mean. But when you were saying that the Romantic poets wrote about feelings, unlike the 17th-century poets like Pope, who didn’t, I knew right away what you meant. I have a lot of feelings myself, though I am not exactly a poet ha ha. But anyhow, I just wanted to say thanks and hope you keep it up because I really like it.

Kincaid reads this as a flirtation, an invitation, a come-on:

That note, unsigned and heartfelt, expresses true desire … My admirer hopes that I will keep it up because he or she likes it, and he or she writes me this note hoping that I will like it. I will like it and he or she will like it and we will, together, keep it up because it is fun for both of us to like and be liked and to keep being liked without end. Nobody reaches the finish line; nobody is empowered, and nobody is victimized, either. If my perceptive student and I go beyond writing notes and make all this material, it will not be because I have something to give and he or she to take, or vice versa, but because we like it and want to keep it up. A physical relationship will not be progress, just difference.

Srinivasan’s reply is the closest she comes to polemic. She notes first the performance of gender-ambiguity — Kincaid keeps saying “he or she,” though we know from the letter that it is a young woman, because her roommate is a “she.” What investment, Srinivasan asks, does a professor have in pretending that the gender of the student doesn’t matter?

And then the reading itself:

As it is, Kincaid’s reading of the letter is a kind of abuse, a pornification of a sweet, earnest declaration of feeling. The student, for the first time, gets the meaning of poetry, and she is awestruck by this professor who has, alone among all the professors she has had, been able to show her what poetry means. Kincaid ignores all this, and focuses instead on the final line, “I hope you keep it up because I really like it”, turning it into a crude sexual pun. He is hard for his student, and she’s enjoying it, and wants it to continue, ad infinitum, just because it’s fun.

But the student didn’t say anything like that. She wants him to keep teaching — not just because it’s enjoyable, but because it unlocks the poems for her. “I read these poems and they don’t mean a thing to me until you start talking and then they do.” She wants, for herself, the capacity to understand poetry, not the pleasure of watching him perform it. Kincaid’s insistence on the masturbatory frame — “keep it up because I really like it” — is what allows him to pretend that if he and his student ended up in bed, “nobody is empowered, and nobody is victimized, either.”

Then Srinivasan goes for the throat:

Is there no difference in power between Kincaid, author of Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, and his student?

She leaves aside, again, the institutional power — who grades whom. She names two other kinds. First, epistemic power: Kincaid can read in a way that makes reading meaningful; the student wants that capacity and doesn’t have it. Part of what’s disturbing about his reading is that his student is not intellectually sophisticated. Calling her “perceptive” is, in this light, “manipulative and cruel, giving her a simulacrum of what she wants — the teacher’s own mastery.” And he reproduces the letter, presumably without her permission, because he’s confident she doesn’t read Critical Inquiry. What if she did? “How might she be expected to feel, seeing her youthful earnestness exhibited as a sexual trophy?”

Second, and worse, metaphysical power — the power not merely to reveal the truth but to make it. Kincaid declares that the letter was latently sexual all along, that sex would only “make all this material.” What happens if he offers that interpretation to his student, who trusts him to know what written things mean? “Did Kincaid have the power to make it true that her letter was, in a sense, sexual all along?”

Srinivasan doesn’t dodge the obvious objection. Maybe Kincaid could, in fact, sleep with this student if he wanted to — without threats, without coercion. “Maybe he wouldn’t have to do much more than read her some Wordsworth, call her ‘perceptive’ and lead her to the bedroom. So what?” The student’s desire may itself be inchoate — she may want to be like Kincaid, or to have him, or take having him as a sign of being like him, or as a second best. It is easy, where a student’s desire is muddled, for the teacher to steer it toward himself. “(What better way to understand the ‘feelings’ of the Romantic poets than to experience those feelings yourself?)” A teacher’s job, whatever the student may be muddled about, is to redirect that energy toward its proper object — the student’s own epistemic empowerment. Kincaid doesn’t even try.

Narcissism, not only sex

Sexualisation is the obvious failure mode of teacherly narcissism, but not the only one. Srinivasan cites the 2018 Avital Ronell case at NYU, where a feminist professor of German and Comparative Literature was suspended for harassing a male graduate student, Nimrod Reitman. What’s striking about the allegations, she notes, is how little of the reported conduct was actually sexual. Ronell had demanded that Reitman spend countless hours in her presence, “schedule his life around her wants and needs,” distance himself from friends and family, not travel out of New York. Had she not also touched him and sent sexually explicit messages, Title IX probably wouldn’t have reached her. “But she would still have failed in her duties as a teacher, insofar as she used her student to gratify her own narcissistic needs.” Harassment policy catches egregious failures. It does not teach people how to teach well.

Gendered scripts for desire

Why does Kincaid find it useful to pretend the student could have been any gender? Because the actual situation — older male professor, younger female student — is the cliché, and he doesn’t want to be one. He also doesn’t want to think about the machinery underneath the cliché. It isn’t only that boys are socialised to find domination sexy and girls subordination, or that some male professors treat sex with women students as delayed compensation for an adolescence in which brains counted less than brawn. What Srinivasan wants named is more specific: women are socialised to interpret their feelings about admirable men in one direction, and about admirable women in another.

Adrienne Rich called it “compulsory heterosexuality.” The script goes: for an admirable woman, you must feel envy — you want to be like her, you don’t want her. For an admirable man, the reverse — you must want him, not to be like him. Regina Barreca puts the question to women who became professors: “At what point … did the moment come for each of us when we realized that we wanted to be the teacher, and not sleep with the teacher?” Becoming a woman teacher requires overriding the default interpretation of your own desire. Male students, relating to male professors, get to skip this step. The difference is not primordial. It is gendered socialisation, and teacher-student sex between male professors and female students runs on it, feeds on it, reproduces it.

So the professor’s failure isn’t only a failure to redirect transference. It’s a failure to decline the use of a system rigged to make that redirection harder for women than for men. And it is a failure that reproduces the rigging. Rich, lecturing teachers of women students in 1978, called “coeducation” a misleading concept: sitting in the same classroom does not mean receiving the same education. Women are assumed less capable, mentored less, told that “evidence of a mind is a sexual liability.” Rich asked: “If it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library, because I am a woman and can be raped, how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel as I sit working in that library?” Srinivasan adds the parallel: “If I know that my professor sees me not (only) as a student to be taught, but (also) as a body to be fucked, how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel sitting in his classroom?”

Two friends, one hand, one gaze

Two small stories do heavy work here. A brilliant woman academic once told a male colleague that, had any of her male mentors ever put a hand on her knee, it would have “destroyed” her. The colleague understood it would have been creepy and wrong — but destroyed? What he didn’t know, she said, was what it is like to have your sense of intellectual worth rest so precariously on the approbation of men.

Second: a young male law professor, a friend of Srinivasan’s, describes sharing a campus gym with his undergraduates. They can look at his body; he, “of course pretends they don’t have bodies at all.” Srinivasan likes the “of course” — it is self-evident to him that he cannot be a good teacher while also contemplating his students as possible sexual partners.

Third: a graduate-student friend, mortified to learn that women students were complaining he stared at their legs when they wore shorts or skirts to class. No one had taught him what it would mean, as a man teaching under patriarchy, to just let his gaze go where it “naturally” went — that he would end up treating women in the room not fully as students, but as bodies, prizes, emotional reservoirs. No one had told him his women students, socialised as they had been, might well go along with it. “As a result, the young women he taught had been let down. But so, too, had this graduate student, whose own teachers had failed to teach him how to teach.”

Contrast this, Srinivasan points out, with how psychotherapists are trained. Anticipating and handling transference is central to their training. Responding in kind is drilled out of them. University professors get none of this — in the US, graduate students and junior faculty get almost no pedagogical training of any kind. And yet the two relationships are structurally similar: asymmetric need, asymmetric trust, intense emotion, aims that sex undermines. “There is nothing obviously distinctive about university teaching that makes teacher-student sex permissible, but not therapist-patient sex.” The difference is historical contingency, she suggests — Freud codified therapy’s sexual ethics at the start of the twentieth century, and every school that followed inherited that code. “Pedagogy has not, in this respect, had its Freud.” Plato is too easily misread.

Not harassment, maybe. Discrimination, though

Having separated the question from consent, Srinivasan takes a legal turn. Imagine that student-girlfriend again — infatuated, pursued her professor, got him, found out later she was one of many, now can’t take his classes, worries which of his colleagues (her teachers) know, suspects rightly that her academic successes will be chalked up to the affair. She was not sexually harassed. But was she “denied the benefits of education on the basis of sex”?

Conventional sex discrimination requires differential treatment of women and men. A professor who sleeps only with female students treats men and women differently; so does a female professor who only sleeps with male students; but a bisexual professor who pursues both poses a puzzle. Which is one reason, she argues, to prefer the older feminist understanding from MacKinnon and Lin Farley: sex discrimination is treatment that reproduces gender inequality. The boss who hits on his female secretary is not discriminating because he doesn’t also hit on male underlings, but because, as MacKinnon put it, his advances “express and reinforce the social inequality of women to men.”

Consensual professor-student relationships, by this standard, often qualify. They derail women’s educations — for those who drop out, and for those who stay on with diminished confidence, suspicious of future mentors, anxious their work will be credited to something else. “These relationships are sometimes, often, wanted. Are they any less discriminatory for that?”

The limits of the law

And yet Srinivasan pulls back from the regulatory conclusion. She’s wary of the prurient cultural fascination with professor-student sex. She’s wary of what sexual harassment policy has already produced. In 1984 a Louisiana State graduate student, Kristine Naragon, was sanctioned for a consensual relationship with a woman undergraduate she wasn’t teaching, after parental complaints about the lesbian relationship; a man in the same department who had slept with a woman student he was grading got nothing. Title IX officers do not track race; the disproportionate targeting of Black students at Colgate with sexual violation complaints is, as a matter of law, of no interest. Janet Halley has documented for years how campus harassment procedures disproportionately target men of colour, undocumented students, trans students.

So: would legally recognising faculty-student relationships as sex-discriminatory under Title IX make campuses fairer for women, for queer people, for immigrants, for the precariously employed, for people of colour? Or would it compound the unfairness already baked into the enforcement apparatus, while handing cultural conservatives a new tool to police women under the guise of protecting them?

The history of sexual harassment law is a story of the mobilisation of the law in service of gender justice. But it’s a history that also points to the limits of the law. Where precisely those limits are — the point beyond which the law must cease trying to guide culture, but instead wait impatiently for it — is a question not of principle, but of politics.

The more interesting possibility, she suggests, is that professors might lead administrators in thinking about this instead of being led by them. Therapists largely wrote the legal norms around therapist-patient relationships, in the terms of what therapists-as-therapists owe patients-as-patients. What might it be for professors to set out a sexual ethics of pedagogy on their own terms — in terms of what teachers owe students as students?

The closing turn

Srinivasan says she started writing this essay in 2012, as a graduate student in philosophy, a discipline she notes with some acid has its unfair share of both harassment and consensual faculty-student relationships. She was struck then by how crude philosophers’ thinking on the question was. “How could the same people who were used to wrestling with the ethics of eugenics and torture (issues you might have imagined were more clear-cut) think that all there was to say about professor-student sex was that it was fine if consensual?” She recalls an anonymous philosophy blog comment — “I can’t imagine it was a woman” — asking why there should be any difference between a professor asking to sleep with a student and asking to play tennis with her. She quotes Michèle Le Dœuff: “When you are a woman and a philosopher, it is useful to be a feminist in order to understand what is happening to you.”

The younger Srinivasan wanted to explain to the men in her field that absence of consent isn’t the only indicator of problematic sex; that consensual practice can be systemically damaging; that teaching comes with responsibilities beyond those we owe each other as persons; that refraining from sleeping with students is not the same as treating students as children.

And now, as a professor, she admits — with characteristic candour — that those arguments don’t grip her the way they used to. Not because she thinks they’re wrong. She still thinks they’re right. But she no longer feels them as necessary arguments, because from the other side of the desk the thing is simply obvious. Her students are, in a sense she carefully brackets as neither legal nor cognitive nor moral, still children. They are so very young. She didn’t know, when she was in their place, how young she was. Their youthfulness is partly a class and race privilege — they have been allowed to stay young in a way many of their contemporaries have not. And partly it is the shape of the student-life itself:

Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed. It is hard sometimes not to envy them. Some professors find it difficult to resist the temptation to try and assimilate themselves to their students. But it seems obvious to me — not as a general moral precept, but in the specific sense of what is called for in the moments of confrontation with our own past selves which are part of what it is to teach — that one must stand back, step away and leave them to get on with it.

She closes with Jane Tompkins: “Life is right in front of me in the classroom, in the faces and bodies of the students. They are life, and I want us to share our lives, make something together, for as long as the course lasts, and let that be enough.” And a small scene from her first week as faculty: a dinner with grad students, wine flowing, the department head leaving early. Eyeing two graduate students horsing around across the table, he laughed: “When they start sitting on each other, I think it’s time to head home.” Srinivasan followed him out, leaving her students to get on with it.

The essay’s case, finally, is not that teacher-student sex is dirty, or that students can’t consent, or that the law should reach further. It is that universities owe their students a duty of care that includes not offering them this use. The question isn’t whether sex gets in. The question is what universities are for.

Essay 6: Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism

”A plan for what to do if they win”

Srinivasan opens the book’s closing essay with a line she keeps returning to. “A black professor I know likes to tell his students they should have a plan for what to do if they win. What should feminists do if they win?” The question sounds hypothetical — feminists, the usual story goes, are speaking truth from a place of relative powerlessness. But, she insists, some feminists already have quite a lot of power. They shape university and workplace harassment policies, global NGOs, the treatment of women in domestic and international law. They run companies and sit in parliaments. Anti-porn and anti-prostitution feminists in the 1970s and 80s, and trans-exclusionary feminists today, have at times worked in “unintentional” alignment with the political right. Social-media feminism has moved whole publics against sexually abusive men. These feminists are mostly wealthy, mostly white, mostly western. “In that sense, feminism has reproduced the world’s inequalities within its own ranks.” But that most women — working-class, immigrant, poor and brown and black — remain disempowered is no reason to pretend that no feminists ever get what they asked for. The real question is what they are doing with it.

The Cologne drive-through brothel

From that question she moves, almost immediately, to a photograph. In September 2019 the Guardian reported on a government-sponsored “drive-thru brothel” in Cologne — a two-acre open-air lot on the edge of town where sex workers could offer their services. Customers drove down a one-way street into a semi-private parking stall. “For safety, each stall allows sex workers to easily flee if necessary — the stall is designed so that the driver’s door can’t be opened, but the passenger one can — and there’s an emergency button to call for help. Social workers are present on site and offer a space to rest, stay warm and access services.”

Two British anti-violence charities tweeted their horror. The CEO of nia: “For me, images of these drive-in brothels, looking so much like live-stock sheds, or garages, exemplify the dehumanisation of prostituted women.” Making Herstory: “Anything to safeguard easy access to abused, impoverished and trafficked-in victims, right?” Srinivasan agrees the building is a provocation. Its function is written into its semiotics: “the anonymous and routinised sexual servicing of men by women,” its panic buttons and escape routes “a frank acknowledgement that a proportion of the clients will be violent.” It is, read symbolically, “a built testament to men’s physical, sexual and economic dominance.”

But then she flips the image. Read it not as a symbol but as a pragmatic response to that dominance, and it looks like “an impulse to make the world more liveable for a particular group of women. Once we take it as given that under current economic conditions many women will be compelled to sell sex, and that under current ideological conditions many men will buy it, the most important question remaining is: what can we do to strengthen the hand of women in this bargain?” A Cologne sex worker, Nicole Schulze, told the Guardian: “I think every city should have a secure space for sex workers to work, to rest. Every city should have that because there’s prostitution in every city.”

Symbol versus survival

This is the fault line that organises the whole essay. At the level of the symbol, prostitution looks like a distillation of patriarchy. “The prostitute is the perfected figure of women’s subordinate status, just as the john is the perfected figure of male domination.” On that reading, the prostitute calls out to be saved, the john to be punished, their transaction to be stopped — for the good of all women.

Anti-prostitution feminists — MacKinnon, Dworkin, Brownmiller, Kathleen Barry, Julie Bindel, Sheila Jeffreys — answer that call through criminalisation. But sex workers have been telling anyone who will listen that criminalisation makes their lives harder. When prostitution is fully criminalised, as in most of the US, “sex workers are raped by johns, and by the police, with impunity.” When it is partly legalised, as in the UK, women who work together for safety are arrested for “brothel-keeping” and, if they are immigrants, deported. When it is legalised but heavily state-regulated, as in Germany and the Netherlands, male managers grow rich while women who can’t meet licensing requirements fall into a “shadowy criminal class.” Under the Nordic model, which criminalises only the purchase, johns demand more privacy and sex workers take greater risks to earn the same money. “Under none of these criminalising regimes are sex workers, as a class, better off.”

Srinivasan is careful not to caricature. Most anti-prostitution feminists are painfully conscious of the grim reality of sex work. (She notes the exception of Julie Burchill, who has said that when “the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.”) Why, then, does their concern end in a politics that sex workers themselves say makes things worse? She turns to Molly Smith and Juno Mac, whose Revolting Prostitutes (2018) grew out of a reading group among sex workers studying anti-prostitution writing. Smith and Mac write with enormous generosity: “For feminist women, the figure of the prostitute often comes to represent the trauma that is inflicted on all women within patriarchy … The client thus becomes the symbol of all violent men: he is the avatar of unadulterated violence against women, the archetypal predator. We deeply sympathise with this perspective … It seems intuitively right to criminalise the men who are, in many ways, the living embodiments of these huge power differentials.”

But intuition, Smith and Mac argue, has to yield to a choice — between the satisfaction of punishing men and the empowerment of women who sell sex in order to live. “The psychic, and perhaps moral, satisfactions of punishing men can be had only at the cost of women — and often the women whose lives are most precarious.” Anti-prostitution feminists, who are as a rule not themselves sex workers, keep up the fantasy that no such trade-off exists. “In so doing, they forget Max Weber’s warning that to do politics is to enter ‘into relations with the satanic powers that lurk in every act of violence.’"

"Abolitionists” and what they actually abolish

Anti-prostitution feminists like to call themselves abolitionists, borrowing the moral charge of the campaign against chattel slavery. A French activist, asked whether criminalising clients makes prostitutes more vulnerable, replied: “Of course it will! I am not scared to say it. But think of the abolition of slavery, it also made life bad for some former slaves. We need to think about the future!” Srinivasan is unimpressed. Prostitution has “thrived under every legal regime”; criminalisation has never actually ended it. “The criminalisation of sex work is in this sense a symbolic abolition: a striking out of prostitution in the law, but not in reality.” In 2018 a Spanish court voided the by-laws of a sex workers’ labour union on the grounds that sex work is not work. The ruling did not apply to women working in “gentlemen’s clubs” — brothels run, almost always, by men. Spanish sex workers who want to work for themselves now have no labour protections, no pensions, no social security, and cannot unionise. “The motto of the Spanish anti-prostitution feminists who led the campaign is #SoyAbolicionista. But what exactly have they abolished?”

Wages, housework, and what revolution sounds like

Smith and Mac argue that the title of abolitionist properly belongs to those campaigning for decriminalisation, because only by recognising sex workers as workers — with legal protection rather than salvation — can they be empowered to refuse sex they don’t want. Here Srinivasan opens up the essay’s theoretical spine. Smith and Mac invoke Silvia Federici, who argued in the context of Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Wages for Housework campaign that calling something work was the first step towards refusing it. Wages would let women “refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore … refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us.”

Angela Davis countered, in Women, Race & Class (1981), that a housework wage might slightly improve working-class women’s lives only by further entrenching their role as domestic labourers. “Cleaning women, domestic workers, maids — these are the women who know better than anyone else what it means to receive wages for housework.” Wages for housework, Davis warned, would “further legitimize this domestic slavery.” The truly revolutionary demand, for her, was the “abolition of housework as the private responsibility of individual women”: the socialisation of childcare, cooking, cleaning.

Srinivasan recognises the same argument inside the sex-work debate. Both sides claim the abolitionist banner. Decriminalisers like Smith and Mac say strengthening sex workers’ labour power would give them enough leverage to demand a restructuring of the economy such that they would no longer need to sell sex to live — that, in André Gorz’s terms, this is a reform with revolutionary potential. Anti-prostitution feminists counter that decriminalisation is at best reformist, marginally improving lives while shoring up patriarchy and the commodification of sex.

“Who is right? To be honest, it’s hard to know.” Any reform, Gorz noted, “may be emptied of its revolutionary significance and re-absorbed by capitalism.” But there is “every reason to think that decriminalisation makes life better for the women who sell sex. From this perspective, to choose criminalisation is to choose the certain immiseration of actual women as a putative means to the notional liberation of all women.”

And even if one insisted there really was a tragic trade-off between today’s sex workers and tomorrow’s world without prostitution, she quotes the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 manifesto as a kind of ethical floor: “In the practice of our politics, we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving ‘correct’ political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics.” Some anti-prostitution feminists, she notes drily, “might not wish to shoot prostitutes as patriarchal collaborators. But they are happy, one way or another, to mess them over.”

Carceral feminism

Here the essay widens its lens. In 2007 the sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein coined the term “carceral feminism” for a politics that looks to police, courts and prisons to deliver gender justice. Over fifty years this approach has become common sense across the world. And the problem, Srinivasan writes, is that “carceral ‘solutions’ tend to make things worse for the women who are already worst off. This is because carceral feminism invites the wielding of the state’s coercive power against the women who suffer most from gendered violence — poor women, immigrant women, women of colour, low-caste women — as well as the men with whom their lives are fatefully entwined. At the same time, the carceral approach fails to address those social realities — poverty, racism, caste — that lie at the root of most crime.”

She stacks examples. Brazil’s 2006 Maria da Penha law, passed after a woman’s husband beat her into paraplegia, introduced mandatory prison sentences and special courts for domestic violence. Domestic violence reporting then dropped — not because violence fell, but because poor Brazilian women feared their partners would be sent to terrible prisons and they would have no way to run a household alone without state support.

In the US, feminist-backed “mandatory arrest” policies from the 1980s increased violence against women of colour, exactly as black and Latina feminists had predicted. A 1992 study in Milwaukee found mandatory arrest reduced violence by employed white men and increased it from unemployed black men: “an across-the-board policy of mandatory arrests prevents 2,504 acts of violence against primarily white women at the price of 5,409 acts of violence against primarily black women.” Under “mandatory” and “dual-arrest” policies, women of colour often end up arrested themselves.

Srinivasan reaches for bell hooks’s 1984 critique of the “common oppression” slogan. “It was a mark of race and class privilege … that middle-class white women were able to make their interests the primary focus of the feminist movement and employ a rhetoric of commonality that made their condition synonymous with ‘oppression.’” The notion of common oppression contains a promise of universal solidarity, but “it is precisely those forms of harm that are not common to all women — those from which some women, by virtue of their wealth, race, citizenship status or caste, are insulated — that are the most grievous to the women who suffer them.”

Carceral feminism presupposes a “pure” oppressed subject, uncomplicated by class and race. It assumes a sex worker has other options and that prostitution, not poverty or immigration law, is her fundamental problem. It assumes an abused woman has no economic or communal stake in the man who beats her. It overlooks the more than half a million women worldwide who are themselves incarcerated — subject, in prison, “to sexual abuse, violence, humiliation, forced sterilisation and the loss of their children.” The US holds 30 per cent of the world’s incarcerated women; 80 per cent of women in US jails are mothers. In Thailand, 80 per cent of incarcerated women are there for non-violent drug offences. At Yarl’s Wood in the UK, hunger strikers were warned their protest might accelerate their deportation. “That many mainstream feminists have little to say to these women comes as no surprise, implicated as they themselves are in the carceral system.”

How feminism got so comfortable with cops

This wasn’t always the shape of feminism. The women’s liberationists of the late 1960s and 70s — Watkins reminds us in New Left Review — were interested in overhauling the whole social order. They demanded universal childcare, healthcare and education; reproductive self-determination and the demise of the heteronormative nuclear family; wealth redistribution, union rights, wages for unwaged domestic work, democratic ownership of the means of production. In 1974, the New York Radical Feminists wrote in Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women: “It must be made clear that rape is not a law-and-order issue. Women are not demanding castration nor are women demanding capital punishment … We do not want to make rape laws more punitive.” Rape could only be eliminated, they said, through “a transformation of the family, of the economic system and the psychology of men and women so that sexual exploitation” became “unimaginable.” Rape was “not a reformist but a revolutionary issue.”

By the 1980s, that politics had been displaced by an “anti-discrimination” paradigm: the real problem was that women did not exist on equal terms with men in the workforce. This was congenial to wealthy (mostly white) women newly freed from domesticity to become doctors, lawyers, bankers, academics. It was also, as Watkins notes, congenial to the American right, which saw anti-discrimination as a way to solve its “Negro problem” — producing a class of “black capitalists” while leaving a vast black underclass to be disciplined by wars on drugs, on crime, on “welfare queens,” on immigrants, eventually on terrorism. “The strategy was explicitly carceral, and has helped the US achieve the largest prison population in the world.” Meanwhile the anti-discrimination feminism of the 1970s onward opened up a chasm between a newly empowered class of largely white professional women and the class of poor, mostly non-white and immigrant women who cleaned their houses and raised their children.

The feminist shelters and rape crisis centres and abortion networks of the early movement gave way to a full embrace of “law and order.” Reagan in 1984: liberals had sold Americans the lie that “individual wrongdoing … was always caused by a lack of material goods, and underprivileged background, or poor socio-economic conditions.” In 1989, a real-estate mogul named Donald Trump paid for full-page ads in four New York papers calling for the execution of the five black and Latino teenagers falsely accused in the Central Park jogger case — “a reminder that Trump’s politics were formed in the context of a broader history of US carceralism.”

Feminists didn’t just absorb this shift; they actively built the carceral state. Beth Richie, whom Srinivasan cites, describes how feminist “anti-violence” professionals became “apologists for the system rather than agents of its transformation.” Feminist lawyers redefined gendered violence as a law-enforcement problem. They participated in the 1980s child sex abuse panic that sent innocent day-care workers to prison. They backed sex offender registries that include juveniles. In 1994 Bill Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act, co-sponsored by Joe Biden, which provided $1.6 billion for investigation and prosecution. “US feminists, who had played a crucial role in the creation and passage of VAWA, rejoiced. It was part of the bipartisan Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which also created sixty new death-penalty offences and got rid of federal funding for prison education programmes.” Two years later Clinton made good on his promise to “end welfare as we know it,” leaving poor women more susceptible to violence; pro-arrest laws sent more poor men and women to prison.

Global feminism, too, took on a distinctively American cast. After the Cold War, the ambition of socialist and anti-colonial feminists to link women’s emancipation with economic justice gave way to the project of pulling the world’s women into global capitalism — through microfinance rather than water, electricity or sanitation. (Devaki Jain in 1984: “Economic development, that magic formula … has become women’s worst enemy.”) Alongside small loans at 20 per cent interest came the “protection” of the carceral state. Laura Bush, days after her husband invaded Afghanistan, on the radio: “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Srinivasan notes what she does not say — the US’s role in making Afghanistan one of the worst places on earth to be a woman, where 90 per cent of women have experienced domestic abuse and 80 per cent of suicides are by women.

#MeToo’s carceral instinct

Of #MeToo, Srinivasan is generous but firm. Tarana Burke had coined the slogan ten years before it went viral in 2017; black women resented being asked to stand in solidarity with white women after their own complaints had been ignored for so long. But the deeper problem, she argues, isn’t inconsistency. It is the assumption that a mass women’s movement must be grounded in what women universally share. “Sexual harassment is a reality for working women. But for many women, being sexually harassed is not the worst thing about their jobs.” There is, she writes, “a profound difference between the situation of a wealthy white woman like Rose McGowan, or well-off black women like Roxane Gay and Ava DuVernay, and the poor immigrant women who clean Hollywood’s bathrooms. When these women are sexually harassed, it only underscores the misery of their low-waged, precarious work.” Time’s Up will help them sue a harasser. “But to whom should they turn when they need money to escape an abusive partner, or healthcare for a sick child, or when immigration comes to ask for their papers?”

Me Too has also leaned hard on the state’s coercive apparatus — protesting light sentences, celebrating when a judge hinted Larry Nassar might be raped in prison, applauding at Weinstein’s verdict, denouncing sceptics of expansive consent doctrine as rape apologists. Srinivasan sympathises: “For centuries men haven’t only assaulted and degraded women, but have used the state’s coercive apparatus to enforce their right to do so. Is it not time women got to wield some of that same power — to express their outrage and to take revenge?” Then, the warning: “Except that once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will mow down.”

Abolition as presence, not absence

The chapter on carceralism shades into the book’s broadest vision. The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 put “defund the police” into the mainstream. Critics asked: if not the police, then who? Srinivasan locates this question inside a basic misunderstanding of the abolitionist tradition. For Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the proposal was never to unleash angry energies onto society. Abolitionists see that carceral practices “substitute control for provision” — that “criminalisation and cages” are “catchall solutions to social problems.” Davis, writing from a Marin County jail in June 1971: “the necessity to resort to such repression is reflective of profound social crisis, of systemic disintegration.” James Forman Jr.: abolitionism asks us to “imagine a world without prisons, and then … work to try to build that world.”

What would that take? “It would involve the decriminalisation of activity, like drug use and sex work, whose criminalisation is known to exacerbate rather than reduce violence. It would involve a restructuring of economic relations such that crimes of survival — food theft, border-crossing, homelessness — were unnecessary. (George Floyd was killed after using a counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes. He had recently lost his job.) It would involve putting in place the social and political arrangements to meet the needs that, when they go unfulfilled, produce interpersonal violence: public housing, healthcare, education and childcare; decent jobs in democratically organised workplaces; guaranteed basic income; local democratic control of community spending and priorities; spaces for leisure, play and social gathering; clean air and water. And it would involve creating a justice system that, wherever possible, sought repair and reconciliation.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “abolition isn’t just absence … abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently.”

Capitalism and the limits of anti-discrimination

Implicit in “defund the police,” Srinivasan writes, is a demand for massive redistribution. The Movement for Black Lives’ 2016 manifesto calls for divestment from carceral institutions and “economic justice for all and a reconstruction of the economy to ensure our communities have collective ownership, not merely access.” She quotes Fred Hampton, the Black Panther murdered in 1969: “We don’t think you fight fire with fire best, we think you fight fire with water best … We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we are going to fight it with socialism.”

She takes time to answer Adolph Reed’s charge that anti-racism and feminism, as currently practised, are simply demands for inclusion in the capitalist order. She concedes the point about anti-discrimination: capitalism is well served by its logic — a smoother labour market, the efficient extraction of talent from all groups, the rebranding of Juneteenth by CEOs while Amazon warehouse workers skip bathroom breaks. But Reed is wrong, she argues, to think a working-class movement can be built by focusing only on the “common oppression” of all poor Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) saw that white racial supremacy served as a “compensation” for the miseries capitalism brought on white workers, precluding solidarity across the colour line. Any serious working-class movement must emerge from, not merely accommodate, the growing share of the working class that is non-white and immigrant. James Baldwin, writing to Davis in 1970 while she sat in jail, captured the stakes: “only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you … is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black ones … the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.”

The right question, she concludes, is not “Can the anti-racist movement ever be sufficiently anti-capitalist?” but “Can a working-class movement afford not to be anti-racist?”

The same holds for feminism. Marxist feminists of the 1970s pointed out that capitalism rested on the unwaged domestic labour of women. In advanced capitalist economies the work of social care — cleaning, nursing, feeding, child-rearing, teaching, tending to the elderly — is increasingly bought and sold, and the low-waged women doing it have become the face of the new working class. “The Covid-19 pandemic has given a stark demonstration of how the patriarchal ideology of the self-sufficient nuclear family entraps not only women but men in lives that are deemed, in that contradiction of contemporary capitalism, at once ‘essential’ and disposable. It has made clear to many what certain feminists have long insisted: that the work of social reproduction must be the work of society. The question isn’t whether feminism can be a working-class movement, but whether a working-class movement can afford to be anything but feminist.”

She will not pretend capital can’t eat these demands too. Universal basic income has its Silicon Valley fans, who see it as a way of pacifying resistance to the erosion of decent middle-skilled jobs. The Notting Hill Women’s Liberation Workshop Group, writing about Selma James’s 1972 list of demands, said they didn’t constitute “a plan for an ideal society” but simply “a force against what capital wants and for what we want. For ultimately the only demand which is not co-optable is the armed population demanding the end of capitalism.” “There is no settling in advance on a political programme that is immune to cooption.” You make your move and watch what happens. Nostalgia, she says, is a barrier to any emancipatory politics — feminism included.

But what about the rapists?

Then, in the essay’s sharpest rhetorical turn, she confronts the objection everyone reaches for:

But what about the rapists?

The question is supposed to be the trump card against abolition. How can a feminist demand the trying, convicting and locking-up of the rapist while criticising patriarchal punishment? She rejects the reply that sexual assault is purely economic or political — that democratising the economy would solve it. Sexual violence is partly a function of those things: racial domination, economic inequality and democratic deficits all correlate with high rates of sexual assault; crises of masculinity from de-industrialisation make women particularly vulnerable. But not entirely. “There are dimensions of gender relations that preexist our current economic arrangements. So long as the critique of capital is made in terms of economic relations alone, it will never fully account for, or remedy, sexual violence.” Anti-capitalist politics that forgets sexual violence abandons women to civil society, “which has for them, as Catharine MacKinnon aptly put it, ‘more closely resembled a state of nature.’”

And then, the abolitionist counter: which rapists? In the US, after excessive force, sexual misconduct is the most common complaint against cops. Between 2005 and 2013, 405 officers were arrested for forcible rape and 219 for forcible sodomy. In England and Wales there were 1,500 accusations of sexual misconduct against police between 2012 and 2018. When, in March 2021, a police officer was charged with kidnapping and murdering a young British woman, the UK government responded by putting plainclothes officers into bars at closing time — “Project Vigilance.” In India in 2014, a woman was gang-raped by four police officers after she went to a station to ask about her husband’s release.

Abolitionist feminists — “often poor women of colour” — are, Srinivasan writes, building community-based institutions to manage interpersonal violence, including sexual violence, without the coercive apparatus of the state. “They seek new ways of holding men accountable, insisting at the same time that men not use their treatment at the hands of the state as an excuse for their own violence. These projects, for their various successes, have proved gruelling, calling on precisely the women most susceptible to gendered violence to create the institutions that will be needed to end it.” Guaranteed income, housing and childcare wouldn’t make the work easy, but would free the world’s poor women to “think about how to make their communities safer and more just — how to teach their sons and brothers and partners what it means to live on equal terms with women and girls.”

The last word: follow the women at the sharp end

The essay — and the book — closes with a short meditation on what power does to a movement.

“There is a paradox in powerlessness. Collectivised, articulated and represented, powerlessness can become powerful. This is not in itself a bad thing. But with new power comes new difficulties and new responsibilities. This is especially true for those whose acquisition of power rests on their ethical authority: on their promise to bring into being something new and better. Feminists need not abjure power — it is, in any case, too late for that — but they must make plans for what to do when they have it. Too often, feminists with power have denied their own entanglement with violence, acting as if there were no hard choices to be made: between helping some and harming others, between symbolism and efficacy, between punishment and liberation.”

Her final move is a kind of ethical orientation for a movement she refuses to abandon. The women who hold feminist power are, she suggests, often the ones least capable of seeing what to do with it. But feminism is a movement. “In it there have always been, always are, those for whom power remains elusive — those who have still not won, those for whom winning so far means surviving. It is these women, at the sharp end of power, to whom the rest of us must turn, and then, turning, follow.”

The book that began with the history of a scolding (“The Conspiracy Against Men”) and the discomfort of the phrase “the right to sex,” and moved through porn, students, the prison of desirability, and the question of whether anyone can truly be owed anyone else’s body, ends here — with the Cologne drive-through, the VAWA, the Minneapolis street, and the women trying to build something neither the market nor the carceral state will build for them. The utopian horizon Srinivasan gestures toward — universal income, housing, healthcare, childcare, the abolition of prisons and of unpaid domestic servitude, the socialisation of care — is also, on her account, a feminist horizon. What she insists, against both the right and the comfortable left, is that these two things cannot be separated: a world worth winning would have to be at once post-capitalist and post-patriarchal. A feminism that wins anything less is a feminism that has, without noticing, already lost.

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Claude’s Take

Score: 9/10.

What works: Srinivasan is the rarest kind of public thinker — one who has genuinely read the tradition she’s working in, and refuses to pretend the tradition has settled what it hasn’t. She will not give you the anti-porn banner or the sex-positive banner. She will not give you the TERF banner or the #BelieveWomen banner. She treats her political opponents as if they have a point, because often they do, and then shows exactly where the point runs out. Her discussions of Ida B. Wells, Shatema Threadcraft on the Black female dead, the Kwadwo Bonsu case, the Nordic model, and the Cologne drive-through brothel are models of how to think politically — hold the symbol in one hand, hold the reality of the actual women involved in the other, and refuse to let either go. The writing, too, is a pleasure. She is funny in the way philosophers are rarely funny — the steak-and-pretzels reading of Dan Turner’s letter, the handshake at Burning Tree, “don’t you know who the fuck they are.” You feel her sentences.

What creaks: the title essay, “The Right to Sex,” is the weakest of the six, and the Coda is itself an admission. The essay gestures at questions it doesn’t finally answer — it wants to say desire has a politics without telling anyone to change their desires, and the net result is a long walk with no conclusion. Some readers find this morally serious; others find it evasive. A fair reading is that it’s both. She is too careful by half in places where Dworkin would have been too careless by half, and neither is exactly the thing you want. The “Talking to My Students About Porn” essay is the inverse — dense with historical material that sometimes overwhelms the thesis. And the book does repeat itself across essays; if you read them back to back you’ll notice the same framings (compulsory heterosexuality, “no one is owed sex,” the sexual-subordination-of-Black-women twin fact) turning up in essay after essay, like a lecturer who can’t fully compress.

Who should read this: not someone looking for a feminism they can tweet. Not someone looking for a hot take on Weinstein or a takedown of JK Rowling. Read this if you want feminism thought through carefully — with statistics, with history, with an explicit racial and class analysis, with sex workers’ voices included, and with a willingness to name who gets hurt at every step of every policy. Read it if you suspect the online feminist conversation has gone badly wrong and want someone to explain, patiently, how. Read it if you grew up in the discourse of #MeToo and want to know what was there before, and what was lost in translation. It is almost the opposite of a self-help book: its aim isn’t to tell you what to do but to sharpen what you’re able to see.

Why 9 and not 10: because the book never quite commits to a positive program. Srinivasan is the world’s best diagnostician of what feminism has gotten wrong; she is more reticent about what it should do next, outside the closing essay’s gestures toward abolition, universal income, the socialisation of care. That reticence is, honestly, probably a virtue — the people who confidently prescribe are usually the ones who get it worst — but it does mean you finish the book having been shown a landscape, not a road. For a first book, and a book this intellectually serious, 9 is the right number. The Right to Sex is already the kind of book that people argue with for years. That’s the highest compliment a book of political theory can earn.