In a kind of utopian society, you wouldn't have people who operate as sexual saragats, right? So charles furrier, the utopian socialist, imagined precisely this. The problem is that we're working against a background, a patriarchal backdrop, on which men routinely think that they are sexually entitled to women's bodies. And when that's the real social backdrop, it becomes, i think, very difficult to have these further questions about things like sexual saragacy in a way that doesn't problematically feed in to the re inscription of women as having a role to play in the sexual servicing of men.
What is our right to be desired? How are our sexual desires shaped by the society around us? Is consent sufficient for a sexual relationship? In the wake of the #MeToo movement, public debates about sex work, and the rise in popularity of “incel culture”, philosopher Amia Srinivasan explores these questions and more in her new book of essays, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Amia’s interests lay in how our internal perspectives and desires are shaped by external forces, and the question of how we might alter those forces to achieve a more just, equitable society.
Amia joined Tyler to discuss the importance of context in her vision of feminism, what social conservatives are right about, why she’s skeptical about extrapolating from the experience of women in Nordic countries, the feminist critique of the role of consent in sex, whether disabled individuals should be given sex vouchers, how to address falling fertility rates, what women learned about egalitarianism during the pandemic, why progress requires regress, her thoughts on Susan Sontag, the stroke of fate that stopped her from pursuing a law degree, the “profound dialectic” in Walt Whitman’s poetry, how Hinduism has shaped her metaphysics, how Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit influenced her, the anarchic strain in her philosophy, why she calls herself a socialist, her next book on genealogy, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded September 8th, 2021 Other ways to connect
Thumbnail photo credit: Nina Subin