A Summary of Amia Srinivasan’s “Does anyone have the right to sex?”

                                                                 

In her essay “Does Anyone have the Right to Sex?”, which appeared in the London Review of books in March 2018, Amia Srinivasan responds to the Elliot Rodger mass murder, a famous incel (involuntary celibate) mass murderer. Srinivasan notices that politics and oppression is playing a role in the desire present in Rodger’s case; for instance, Rodger desires ‘hot blonde bitches’ and sees this sort of woman as the norm. Rodger also is incredulous that his black friend was able to ‘get’ a white girl. Srinivasan also notes, however, that an analysis of the desire at work in the Rodger mass murder has not been present in much of the feminist discourse regarding the murder.

An analysis of sexual desire and the way that the political landscape creates sexual desire is not common among the majority of feminist discourse today. Instead, liberal feminism tends to focus on consent as that which matters when it comes to ethical sex; consensual sex is good sex, unconsensual sex is bad sex, enough said. Srinivasan notices a parallel between this way of thinking about sex and the way that exchange is treated under capitalism: as Srinivasan puts it, under capitalist free-exchange “[w]hat matters is not what conditions give rise to the dynamics of supply and demand – why some people need to sell their labour while others buy it – but only that both buyer and seller have agreed to the transfer”. When this is the only consideration taken into account about the ethics of such transactions, a great deal of exploitation is overlooked. Srinivasan’s idea is that the same thing is true with regards to sex; when we only take consent into account when theorizing about the ethics of sex, we ignore the conditions that gave rise to the sex (desire and the formation of that desire). Just as the conditions that give rise to exchange under capitalism are unequal and unjust, so are the conditions that give rise to sexual desire – in fact, in large part they are overlapping conditions. Without denying that sex should be consensual, Srinivasan recommends that we interrogate the conditions that give rise to consensual sex.

In order to better understand why an account of the formation of sexual desire is lacking in mainstream feminism today, Srinivasan gives a brief overview of the history of feminist analyses of desire, beginning with an account of the theories of Catharine MacKinnon in the 1980s. MacKinnon contested the idea that sexual desire is primordial; she theorized that desire was created by patriarchy, a system that dominates women. As such, domination is created as sexually desirable, and this sort of desire is harmful for women. Those who accepted MaKinnon’s theory of sexual desire posited the notion of a false consciousness according to which women’s sexual desires, despite seemly their own, are actually created by and enforced on them by patriarchal systems. Thus, women’s perceptions of their own sexual desires as autonomous is a mistaken perception.

Against MacKinnon, ‘pro-sex’ feminists, led by Ellen Willis, argued that the sort of theory of desire that MacKinnon gave was harmful rather than liberating for women. Willis argued that this sort of analysis denies women the right to sexual pleasure, as it framed sex as something harmful for women, and furthered the harmful idea that men want sex while women don’t really want sex but merely put up with it. Additionally, Feminism’s move towards intersectionality compounded the move away from MacKinnonite critiques of desire. Intersectional feminism brought with it the conviction that no oppression under patriarchy is universal; as such, we cannot give a universal analysis of how desire is formed under patriarchy. Furthermore, intersectional feminists critiqued the MacKinnonite idea of a false consciousness on the grounds that such ideas deny the autonomy of marginalized individuals. In Srinivasan’s apt words “a feminism that trades too freely in notions of self-deception is a feminism that risks dominating the subjects it wants to liberate”. We might have further grounds to be suspicious of the idea of a false consciousness when we recognize that such a notion is at work in many rape myths (“she might have said no, but I knew by the way she was dressed that she wanted it!”).

It is for these reasons that analysing the formation of desire has fallen out of favour with feminism today. Instead of examining the origins of desire, these ‘pro-sex’ feminists, who have prevailed in mainstream feminist conversation, treat desire as a given. It is important to determine whether or not sex is consensual, but the sexual desire that leads to sex in the first place is left unquestioned and unjudged. At the core of this way of thinking is the fact that no one is obligated to have sex with anyone else, and that no one is entitled to sex; one’s desires should be respected. With this core principle Srinivasan wholeheartedly agrees, despite the apparent tension between this thought and the idea that sexual desire is ideologically constructed. It is with these two thoughts, then, that Srinivasan wrestles with as she proposes that we analyse the politics at work in the shaping of desire.  

Once we recognise that desire is, at least in part, ideologically shaped in conjunction with the idea that no one is obligated to have sex with anyone else, and that no one is entitled to being desired, we are left with relatively few moves left to make. We cannot enforce equal sexual opportunity given this second principle, yet to look at sex only through the lens of consent is to miss the oppressive politics that work to shape sexual desire. That said, there is some room left to maneuver: once we interrogate our own desires we might find that those who we find most desirable are those whom our current political system most privileges and that we find those who are disadvantaged undesirable. If we don’t like this realisation, perhaps with the sort of intentional paradigm shifts proposed by radical self-love movements, there is some room for us to broaden our sexual desires.

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