When you asked me my view on modality gen not unphilosophical, but your view on you. Could you have become a lawyer, as you once suggested might have been the case? Or was that just a mistaken view that never could have happened? I haven't read the marquis de sad since i was an undergraduate because i was acting as a dramatar for a play about sad. But you could argue he sees there's something wrong with the enlightenment or liberal understanding of desire and that it actually leads to untenable places. Are we reading too much into him? No, i mean, i think that's an interesting reading. And i'm not very preoccupied by the question
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