The Right To Sex

Amia Srinivasan Bloomsbury £20

The Right To Sex is a highly anticipated debut collection of essays by 36-year-old Amia Srinivasan (right), the rock-star philosopher and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Each chapter ruminates on some matter pertaining to sex, from ‘Incels’ to sex work to whether or not academics ought to sleep with their students.

The book is an expansion on Srinivasan’s widely read 2018 essay for the London Review Of Books titled Does Anyone Have The Right To Sex?, which suggested that, although we do have the right not to have sex with people we don’t fancy, we should probably feel a bit guilty about it, since the biological basis of sexual desire has an annoying habit of getting in the way of quests for Utopia.

These other, newer essays are similar in style. Srinivasan writes in elegant and meandering prose, occasionally playing with challenging ideas, but then losing her nerve at the last moment. Gaps in the argument are filled with rhetorical questions and disjointed leaps to the next subsection. A chapter on porn flirts with the case for stronger regulation, but then shies away from saying anything meaningful, concluding that, hey, porn is bad, but maybe legal restrictions are worse? (Are they? Aren’t they?)

Gushing praise describes The Right To Sex as ‘extraordinary’, ‘a classic’ and set to ‘change the world’. But what’s really extraordinary about this book is that someone as obviously clever as Srinivasan could have wrestled with her subject, applied her considerable intellect to the task, and then just happened to arrive at a set of opinions shared by almost everyone else in her peer group.

This is essentially a very stylish defence of mainstream feminism in 2021, written by a thinker who is either disappointingly conventional, or else afraid of upsetting her colleagues (or maybe both).