Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): How should we think 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. How should we talk about sex? 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 do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. Review: As a crash course to modern feminist theory, The Right to Sex is particularly helpful. (I speak as someone who has never formally studied feminist theory.) As a work aspiring to anything deeper than that, it falls short. All essay collections have their hits and misses, and The Right to Sex is no exception. The first two essays, “The Conspiracy Against Men” and “Talking to My Students About Porn” feel particularly weak and their revelations, self-evident. Srinivasan dedicates large chunks of each chapter to explaining other feminist thinkers’ work. Of course, no scholarship exists in a vacuum, but such extended references beg the question, what exactly does Srinivasan herself think? A thread of uncertainty and nervousness runs through this collection. There are many moments where Srinivasan wanders in her argument—moments where she falters, or attempts to mount too wide of a scope, or concedes too much. These moments appear to be symptoms of Srinivasan’s insistence on a holistic assessment of the factors underpinning today’s female condition(s), but they add up to a book that is frustratingly inscrutable. It is difficult to understand what Srinivasan is arguing, and sometimes if she is arguing anything at all. Thankfully, the final four essays showcase more of Srinivasan’s original thought. “On Not Sleeping with Your Students” is the clear winner from this collection, partially because Srinivasan reveals her own sardonic voice, her own opinions, the most in this essay. Is it too sterile, too boring to suggest that instead of sleeping with his student, this professor should have been—teaching her?
The Right to Sex is not 2021’s Second Sex, nor does it have to be. But it is a promising afternoon read, and a worthwhile opportunity to engage with issues of sex, gender, and exploitation that modern society has considered foregone conclusions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
From the ArchiveWhile my main reviews are organized by seasons and I try to write reviews immediately after I finish reading, there are always stories that lose to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From the Archive is a redemptive collection of mini-reviews of books I read in the past that continue to captivate me.
Reviews |