Conversations with tyler is produced by the mercatus center at george mason university, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Today i'm here chatting with amia srini wassen, who has rapidly become one of the best and best known philosophers. She's a professor at oxford university,. She has a new book out, which has made best cellar lists everywhere, called the right sex. It has been one of the huge, big hit books of the year. I think not even speaking about the utopia. I'v just speaking about how we should think about performative utterances right now. And in comedy, just how much stand up
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