![]() ![]() What was great was that it brought out of the woodwork lots of students who you would have thought wouldn’t be interested in this stuff. And she just said, Look, I think it’s about time that we read these.Īnd then a little later on, I ran a reading group in feminist philosophy. Literally what happened was that one summer, my best friend, who was then a grad student in philosophy at NYU, handed me a copy of The Second Sex, and I think she had a copy of The Feminine Mystique. So, feminism was an entirely extracurricular thing that I came to as a graduate student at Oxford. ![]() And then, when I was an undergraduate, I’m horrified to say that among the mainstream humanities students, feminism wasn’t seen as something very intellectually serious. And we looked at her as if she was asking, Which of you identify as Levelers? Right? Some historical category that just seemed completely inappropriate and also deeply unsexy. I remember distinctly a French teacher in school-I guess I was in sixth form-asking which of us identified as feminists. I had no relationship to feminism growing up. ![]() That essay, Srinivasan told me recently on Zoom, “is the one that I’ve had women most consistently write to me about.” “On Not Sleeping with Your Students” upends a cherished Ivy League defense of professor-student romances, making the case that people who initiate students into new ways of thinking might well (and arguably should) inspire feelings of excitement and attraction-yet their responsibility is precisely to direct those feelings to advance the student’s learning, not to gratify the professor’s vanity or lust. There’s a piece on the fierce and profound engagement of Srinivasan’s students with once derided antiporn figures like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, whose arguments have a new force for those who feel that online porn has meaningfully structured their own consciousness and sexualities, and another on the increasing coziness with state and corporate interests that has marked mainstream UK and U.S. “The Conspiracy against Men” swiftly dismantles many common misconceptions about false rape accusations, Title IX, and cancel culture, some of which have grown invisible through repetition. It offers a formidable account of the workings of race, class, and institutional power within our sexual politics. Srinivasan’s new book, The Right to Sex, is a collection of bold yet subtle essays, equally distinguished by their capaciousness and economy, full of sharp turns and trapdoors. Most readers, however, will know her for her rich and entertaining pieces in magazines like The New Yorker and the London Review, including my favorite, a 2017 paean to octopuses-“the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.” In 2019, she was given the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory once occupied by Isaiah Berlin she is the first woman, the first person of color, and the youngest person ever to take up her post. Srinivasan trained as a philosopher at Yale and then Oxford, where she has since established herself at the heart of the old boys’ club that is analytic philosophy. When Amia Srinivasan published her essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” in the London Review of Books in early 2018, several months into the public discussions surrounding #MeToo, it provoked many strong feelings-not to mention gave the world the sentence: “Sex is not a sandwich.” Opening with a reading of the incel manifesto written by the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings, it became a far-reaching meditation on the ideological, political, and public dimensions of sexual desire and how we might begin to think more critically about them. ![]()
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