Amia Srinivasan

Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers – a guide to what everybody is talking about today 'Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing' JIA TOLENTINO 'I believe Amia Srinivasan's work will change the world' KATHERINE RUNDELL 'Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year' PANDORA SYKES ------------------------- How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity – its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power – we need to move beyond 'yes and no', wanted and unwanted. We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon. Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.

The Right to Sex

Karolina

Helen 

A woman going on with sex act she no longer wants to perform, knowing she can a n get up and walk away but knowing at the same time that this will make her a blue-balling tease, an object of male contempt: there is more going on here than mere ambivalence, unpleasantness and regret t. There is also a kind of coercion: not directly by Bonsu, perhaps but by the informal regulatory system of gendered sexual expec- Sometimes the price for violating these expectations is steep, even fatal. That is why there is a connection between these episodes of 'ordinary' sex and the 'actual wrongs and harms' of sexual assault. 

As Catharine MacKinnon has pointed out, affirmative consent laws simply shift the goalposts on what constitutes legally acceptable sex: whereas previously men had to stop when women said no, now they just have to get women to say yes, How do we formulate a regulation that prohibits the sort of sex that is produced by patriarchy? Could the reason that this question is so hard to answer be that the law is simply the wrong tool for the job? 

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?

A 2010 meta-analysis concluded that there is a 'signiicant over- all relationship between pornography consumption and attitudes supporting violence against women.The association was 'signif- cantly stronger' in the case of pornography classed as 'violent, but was still statistically significant in the case of 'non-violent' pornography. 

You're doing it wrong. Porn w for this young man the normative standard of sex, against which i. girlfriend was measured and found wanting, Porn is not pedagogy yet it often functions as if it were. 

Still we can ask: why does the woman viewer have to become man to exert power? 

A feminism that trades too freely in notions of self-deception is a fem- inism that risks dominating the subjects it presumes to liberate.

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