The end of sex
Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex is a brave but fatally limited exploration of sexual politics.
Sex scares feminists who came of age in the world of #MeToo. Sex can be the physical expression of uninhibited passion and desire. But it can also embody the complex emotions and power differentials that people bring to all interactions. The very same actions can be spontaneous fun, freely entered into love-making or a transaction exchanging access to a person’s body for money, commitment, security or status. Sometimes it is all of these things at the same time. What’s more, the private, intimate nature of sex means it still largely escapes regulation, despite the best efforts of a generation of feminists to discipline desire and alter behaviour through consent classes and legal changes.
In her new book, The Right to Sex, philosopher Amia Srinivasan discusses the politics and ethics of sex. Writing about sex opens up a private act to public discussion. For Srinivasan, this opening up is important because sex, she explains, is ‘a cultural thing posing as a natural one’. We ‘think of [sex] as the most private of acts’, but it is ‘in reality a public thing’. Her analysis is firmly grounded in an older tradition of feminism which sees sex ‘as a political phenomenon’. Bringing sex out of the bedroom and into the debating chamber makes room for the titular question: is there a right to sex?