Karl Marx once criticised the idealism of his time by remarking: the point is not to understand the world but to change it.[1] Amia Srinivasan echoes in The Right to Sex, as a poignant reminder to contemporary feminism that risks becoming increasingly abstract and theoretical:
At its best, feminist theory discloses the possibilities for women’s lives that are latent in women’s struggles, drawing those possibilities closer. 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. [2]
This remark, as I see it, makes clear the background relative to which Srinivasan’s philosophising takes place, and without an understanding of which objections can easily be misplaced. Among the mixed reception of the book, there are concrete criticisms on the more substantial points, like Rae Langton’s concern for Srinivasan’s distrust of legal powers,[3] and Sally Haslanger’s reservations about Srinivasan’s neglect of social theories (both will be discussed in more detail later).[4] But a more common criticism stems from a general dissatisfaction towards the lack of answers, of theoretical unity, and thus of comfort, which Srinivasan explicitly rejects the need to provide. For her, The Right to Sex is a book that points out intricacies in our social practices, raises a plethora of problems, and questions any ready-to-hand, once-for-all solutions. It attempts to ‘dwell, where necessary, in discomfort and ambivalence’, and to confess, where necessary, her confusion and hesitation. ‘These essays do not offer a home’, she writes in the preface, anticipating dissatisfactions, ‘But I hope they do offer, for some, a place of recognition.’[5]
The book is composed of six essays, interconnected but also relatively independent. The first addresses the issue of rape, and calls on the notion of intersectionality to explicate the myths behind it. The second essay is concerned with pornography and the increasing (mis-)educational effect pornography has on the younger generations. It also touches on the topic of a political critique of desire, which is extended in the third and fourth essay. These two interconnected essays begin with the case of Elliot Rodger (who, being desperately sexually frustrated, killed 6 people and injured 14 others during a misogynistic terror attack), and go on to discuss the ways in which our (sexual) desires are shaped by problematic social, political and cultural forces, and how we could free ourselves from them. The fifth essay shifts the focus to student-teacher relationships, and argues that the wrongness of them is not (as is traditionally conceived) rooted in a failure of consent, but rather a pedagogical failure. The end of the essay questions the effectiveness of stricter university regulations, which blossoms into the sixth essay, likely the most controversial one in the book. There she objects to what she calls ‘carceral feminism’ – feminism that appeals to the power of the state in order to achieve gender justice – based on the observation that it often harms the most vulnerable group of women.
In this review I pick up and discuss three relatively distinct themes in this book. The first is anti-carceralism rooted in the recognition of intersectionality; the second is a political critique of desire; the third is the lack of theories and the emphasis on practical reason. All of them are controversial among feminists. This review aims to explicate these themes and discuss some objections and concerns without settling the question either way.
Anti-carceralism and intersectionality
It would be best to start backwards, with the last essay where she offers the most systematic critique of carceralism. There she begins by contrasting two feminist approaches to prostitution: one advocates for its abolition because it sees prostitution as a ‘distillation of women’s condition under patriarchy’,[6] a perfect symbol for patriarchal inequality and oppression; the other proposes to decriminalise prostitution because it is the best way to concretely protect the prostitutes, seen as a particularly poor and vulnerable group of women. Srinivasan sides resolutely with the latter group: she agrees that symbols sometimes matter, but argues that when the demands of symbolism stand in tension with that of the real women, we should never ‘mess over people in the name of politics’.[7]
For clarity of discussion, here I reconstruct her argument for anti-carceralism (about prostitution) as an argument with three premises:
- P1: Criminalising prostitution can neither abolish nor reduce prostitution.
- P2: Ceteris paribus, the lives of prostitutes would be better if prostitution is legal.
- C1: Given P1&2, criminalising prostitution generally makes the lives of prostitutes worse without making other lives better.
- P3: The wellbeing of real people is more important than symbolic value of politics.
- C2: We should decriminalise prostitution.
P2 and P3 are straightforward. P2 is a relatively uncontroversial fact, and P3 is treated just as an assertion. P1 is supported by two reasons: first, historical and empirical evidence suggests that criminalisation does not work: ‘The criminalisation… of sex work has never, in practice, got rid of prostitution. Sex work has thrived under every legal regime; what has varied are the conditions under which sex is bought and sold…’[8] Second, there is an underlying explanation of why this is so: ‘under current economic conditions many women will be compelled to sell sex, and… under current ideological conditions many men will buy it’.[9] Wealth inequality on the one hand, patriarchal ideology on the other; the law, as Srinivasan sees it, is impotent compared to these two deeply entrenched socio-economic powers.
This draws on a broader discussion of intersectionality, which, as Srinivasan points out, is not the mere addition of two orthogonal forms of oppression; rather, it says that ‘any liberation movement… that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group… have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.’[10] There (Chapter 1) her example is: only to stress ‘believe women’ (which, as she notes, carries the implicit injunction ‘don’t believe men’) is likely to make black men more vulnerable to false accusations. In the second essay, the example is that attempts ‘to legislate against porn… invariably harm the women who financially depend on it the most.’[11] Here, in the context of prostitution, the intersection between sex and class means that abolitionism – the doctrine that focuses on what the oppression of women have in common – will only serve the women that are least oppressed, while harming those in the lowest social class, those that are forced into prostitution.
This argument can be challenged on two fronts, and both have been done by Haslanger and Langton. On P3: sometimes symbols are more important than Srinivasan seems to assume. Sometimes symbolic victory is precisely what we want because it will have more profound, long-term impacts: it might help to transform social consciousness. Langton refers to the Hart-Devlin debate on homosexuality to illustrate the fact that legal consciousness may precede and lead social consciousness.[12] Haslanger concurs: ‘the relationship between law and culture is complicated and variable, and feminist legal theorists and critical race theorists have been developing social theory for decades to address the very question she [Srinivasan] poses.’ Langton also points out that the symbolic value of the law is probably its main function: the point of having a legal system is more about its deterring power than the actual punishment of the criminals. On P1: while it is true that prostitution cannot be wiped out by legal changes, it is also an exaggeration to say that the law is completely impotent against prostitution. It might still effectively control the scale of prostitution. Haslanger adds: ‘The law may not be our friend, but it can be useful, and we surely don’t want it to be our enemy.’
It is noteworthy that both the argument and objections are made on pragmatic grounds. Srinivasan criticises carceralism as being unrealistic: it does not attend to the actual lives of prostitutes. Langton and Haslanger retort that Srinivasan is actually the one being unrealistic: yes, changing the law is probably not the best way, and certainly not the most fundamental way, to address the problem of patriarchy; nonetheless, it is our most practical way to redress imminent injustices. Social consciousness is our end goal, but usually it takes much longer for it to change.
A political critique of desire
We can criticise our beliefs for failing to fit the world, says traditional epistemology, since it is in the nature of our beliefs that they aim to correspond to the world. However, it continues, a parallel critique cannot be made for desires, because it has a different ‘direction of fit’: desires aim to change the world to fit our desires. They were used to be taken as given, and not quite susceptible to criticism (for either political or epistemological reasons). So how is it possible for us to offer a political critique of desire?
The first step is to notice that our desires are mostly not innate, not something that we naturally have and are born with; they are largely shaped by socio-cultural powers. The desire to eat is biological, but the desire to eat certain kinds of food and not others is socio-cultural; the desire to have sex is biological, but the desire to have sex with certain kinds of people and not others is even more socio-cultural. And these structural powers can be oppressive, hierarchical, and thus, susceptible to political critique.[13]
Take the case of Elliot Rodger. His misogynist terror attack was largely due to his desperation with being an ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) and deemed ‘unfuckable’ (Srinivasan’s term). But by whom? Not by any woman simpliciter; but by the ‘hot sorority blondes’, as he writes in his manifesto.[14] Implicitly he is appealing to a ‘hierarchy of fuckability’, which is ‘a racialised hierarchy that places the white woman above the brown or black woman, the light-skinned brown or black woman above the dark-skinned brown or black woman, and so on.’[15] It is indubitably a social construction, and a highly problematic one. To criticise that hierarchy is, to a large extent already, a political critique of sexual desires.
Similarly, pornography is one of the major forces that shape our sexual desire (given the fact that a majority of people receive their chief sex education through watching it), and commonly subjected to feminists’ criticism. Pornography commonly depicts women as submissive, depicts them as enjoying being submissive, and depicts submissive women as attractive. Through the lens of pornography, women’s resistance is commonly interpreted as consent. Pornography inculcates – often subconsciously – a desire for a certain kind of women, which, as Srinivasan and many other feminists argue,[16] cannot simply be treated as a matter of personal preference. The desire is shaped by patriarchal powers, reinforces the subordinate status of women, and encourages us to see rapes as consented sex. It can, and should, be subjected to a political critique.
However, it might be worried that a political critique of desires also carries political dangers and undesirable consequences. People often have the natural and understandable desire to be left alone, especially when facing the coercive power of communities or governments. If my desires are to be criticised, and, further, to be disciplined, who will do the disciplining? We have seen in history, repetitively, the disastrous consequences of governments or communities telling people what they should or should not desire, or what are the right things to feel.[17]
Srinivasan, given her anti-carceralism, is well aware of that danger. She warns against using governmental powers, and sometimes against ‘telling people to change their desires’ as well. Instead, she suggests that we ask ourselves ‘what we want, why we want it, and what it is that we want to want’,[18] and that through self-reflection and consciousness-raising, the critique of desire could be truly emancipatory rather than disciplinary. But then a further worry arises: feminism targets at a structural evil (patriarchy) rather than specific individuals; putting too much personal responsibility on individuals risks obscuring the fundamental need for a structural solution. To this worry Srinivasan responds: ‘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… What does it mean to say that we want to transform the political world – but that we ourselves will remain unchanged?’[19]
In summary, I see three dimensions on which we need to walk a fine middle way. First, between taking our desires as given and disciplining them politically, we need to find a middle way of an emancipatory critique of desire, which might consist of a blend of consciousness-raising, self-reflection and a political ideologiekritik. Second, between treating sexual preferences as undiscussable and the misogynistic logic of ‘sexual entitlement’ (that is, seeing ‘fuckability’ as a social good that should be fairly distributed), we need to ‘dwell in the ambivalent space where we acknowledge that no one is obligated 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’.[20] Third, between replacing a political and structural struggle with a personal one and absolving the individuals the responsibility of self-reflection, we need a balanced blend of self-critique and recognition of the structural nature of the feminist project. How to tread this middle way is a delicate question answerable only, in her (and my) view, by practical reasons. ‘We do not know [the answer]’, she writes at the very beginning of the book, ‘let us try and see.’[21]
Practical reasons
As is noticed from the start, the book does not contain much argumentation or theorising. This is probably to be expected given that it is not strictly a book of academic philosophy; it also aims at the general public, calling for actions and demonstrating what Haslanger calls the ‘feminist critical consciousness’. And this is doubly expected because the wrongness of most instances in the book is so apparent that we can easily condemn them without needing an overarching normative theory. However, Haslanger notes that while normative theories are not necessary or even relevant, social theories are crucial for Srinivasan’s end. For without a ‘theory that offers an account of how societies – or at least the societies we are interested in – work’, what concrete actions should we take to make the world a better place for women?
Haslanger focuses, again, on Srinivasan’s anti-carceralism and emphasis on social and cultural changes. The recognition that we need fundamental cultural reforms is not a new message; it has been made by feminists over and over again. The crux is to point out what to do and where to go next. As Haslanger notes, probably most feminists agree that ‘the work of social reproduction must be the work of society’,[22] or that ‘the law [cannot] transform the most basic terms of engagement between women and men’,[23] but how helpful is that observation? We need, Haslanger argues, an understanding of how societies (what a complex institution!) work and how societal changes are possible to know what to do next. She asks: ‘I fully embrace the idea that we begin with a feminist critical consciousness, but where do we take it? Or where does it take us?’
This is not a call for theoretical unity or comfort. Haslanger fully agrees with Srinivasan’s point that feminist politics should not provide a home for comfort. Her point is, again, pragmatic: what is the best way to do feminist movements? Is it helpful to have a social theory that guides us? Would we be lost without it? In defence of Srinivasan, she need not deny the usefulness of social theories altogether. She might point out that this is more of a difference of emphasis than a substantial disagreement: she might be content if the book helps to raise the social critical consciousness, and it need not provide a step-to-step guide for action.
But there might be more to a mere difference of emphasis. Srinivasan’s emphasis of know-how suggests that she might have some doubts about the guiding effect of social theories. Here is an indicative passage: ‘The answer to the question, I take it, is a practical one – a matter, as philosophers like to say, not of knowing-that, but of knowing-how. Know-how is to be found not through theoretical investigation but through experiments of living.’[24] Here she might be suggesting that, in this messy and ever-changing reality, theoretical rationality cannot provide much help; rather what we need is the Aristotelian phronesis, the practical rationality: we need to try and see what works, keeping a flexible and open mindset. Because of idiosyncratic contexts, practical knowledge is often a kind of ‘tacit knowledge’, to borrow the term from Michael Polanyi,[25] that is ‘suggestive and illuminative rather than explicit and determinate’.[26] In these cases theories cannot guide action; we can only do piecemeal theorising as we go along. If this is the right interpretation, then the difference between Srinivasan and Haslanger is a profound disagreement on the relation between theoretical and practical rationality, a disagreement which goes back for more than two thousand years and which I, for sure, cannot seek to resolve here.
[This review was originally published in Critique, issue. MMXXII.]
- [1] Marx, Karl, (1888), “Theses on Feuerbach”, Marx/Engels Selected Works, Progress Publisher, Vol.1, p. 13 – 15.
- [2] Srinivasan, Amia, (2021), The Right to Sex, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, xvi.
- [3] Remarks made by Rae Langton during sessions of a feminist discussion group. Same for all references to Langton below.
- [4] Haslanger, Sally, (2021), “Feminism and the Question of Theory”, The Raven (Fall 2021). https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/feminist-critical-consciousness-and-the-question-of-theory/ Same for all references to Haslanger below.
- [5] Srinivasan, op. cit., xv.
- [6] Ibid., p.151.
- [7] Ibid., p.159.
- [8] Ibid., p.154.
- 9] Ibid., p.151.
- [10] Ibid., p.17.
- [11] Ibid., p.60.
- [12] The debate centred around the issue of decriminalising homosexual behaviour in a time where homosexuality is still regarded as morally wrong by the majority of people in the society. For an illustrative discussion, see Cane, Peter, (2006), “Taking Law Seriously: Starting Points of the Hart/Devlin Debate.” The Journal of Ethics, 10(1/2), 21–51.
- [13] As a sidenote, Langton argues that we can also criticise and transform the more innate desires. Xenophobia, as her example goes, is probably a natural disposition given our tribal evolutionary history, but we might wish to change that.
- [14] See ‘Elliot Rodger Manifesto: My Twisted World’, contributed by Lauren Johnston, at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1173808-elliot-rodger-manifesto
- [15] Srinivasan, op. cit., p.103.
- [16] For example, see MacKinnon, Catharine, (1993), Only Words. Harvard University Press.
- [17] Kundera’s novels provide some great illustrations for this point.
- [18] Srinivasan, op. cit., p.100.
- [19] Ibid., p.101.
- [20] Ibid., p.90.
- [21] Ibid., xi.
- [22] Ibid., p.175-6.
- [23] Ibid., p.178.
- [24] Ibid., p.102.
- [25] Polanyi, Michael, (1966), The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday & Co.
- [26] Gadamer, Hans-Georg, (1989), Truth and Method (2nd edition). Sheed and Ward.