The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan
Notes • 1,407 Words • Books, Philosophy, 2026 • 04/07/2026
Thrilling, sharp, and deeply humane, philosopher Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.
There are 1486 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 8 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2026-04-07 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
This book was historically grounding feminist issues and debates but also showing how they show up in modernity. We now have the data to look back on what has resulted from the various waves of feminism. This doesn’t purport to solve them, but she does weigh in and offer her own opinion, but more often tees up questions for others to further develop outside of this work.
Most of these notes are taken directly from the text whether or not indicated by quotes. I had little to add to this because of how prescient Srinivasan seems to be about how people might receive her argumentation. If I thought I had something to add, she would address it later on in the essay, sometimes on the next line.
The Conspiracy Against Men
- False sexual assault accusations are quite rare and anxieties about them are anxieties about the law
- “There is no general conspiracy against men. But there is a conspiracy against certain classes of men.”
- Actual consequences and application of (false) sexual assault accusations follow time-worn patterns — against poor men of color
- Things like who we even see as victims comes into play
- If a social movement only focuses on one shared dimension then it will create an assimilationist politic that benefits the members who are the least oppressed
- The tension between sexualized stereotypes of certain men and women of color make it hard for women to speak up against members of their own communities
- The rules haven’t really changed on men; they are just being held to a kind of bare minimum standard
- How should the law punish offenders? Is online social vigilantism ethical or good? Good for now? Good as a replacement? A retaking of power?
- “What consequences should follow?”
- Is the law the right tool? Lest we repeat the sins of our past
- Legal proceedings often have to deal with the grey area of consent and become sex bureaucracies
- Consent is not a solved philosophical problem and some argue it is not the right tool at all for the challenge
- Patriarchy creates conditions and internalizations that create certain kinds of sex that can undermine consent
Talking to My Students About Porn
- Porn as a world-maker
- Perpetuates objectification, sets standards, actualizes subordination of women
- Anti-porn feminists may have been right all along, just too early
- Internet porn mediating sex and sexual expectations in Gen Z (maybe millennial) and onward
- “Porn as a virtual training ground for male sexual aggression. Is it true?”
- Yes, and no; slippery slope — more suggestible people will take more radical action, but it also operates through a normalization/expectation-setting dynamic that is more behind the scenes, like objectification or rougher sex acts
- This seems like a very tough correlation versus causation research obstacle
- Much of it is an education problem
- Porn has no formal authority, but it does if you believe in it
- “Second-wave feminists, and other people, sometimes put too much power in it and have too little faith in their ability to resist it” (paraphrased)
- Obscenity legislation usually does more harm than good, especially to sex workers
- It also starts to legislate what sex should look like
- Is porn free speech? How could it be regulated if it is or isn’t?
- Better porn can help with representation and combating stereotypes, but how will that reach people when they are sexually developing?
- Porn normalizes but may do nothing to develop “sexual imagination,” which aims to go beyond mere sexual representation that is being consumed
- What kind of sexual education could be given to instill this?
The Right to Sex / Coda: The Politics of Desire
- Anti-sex feminism can undermine women’s agency, which seems counterintuitive, but at the same time they are right to talk about how patriarchy shapes sex
- Women (and men) have sexual desire and that should just be taken at its face in some ways
- At the same time we should question what shapes desire
- No one is entitled to sex, but at the same time there are forces that deem certain classes more unworthy of sex, and this does not seem egalitarian
- Responding to sexual marginalization with entitlement versus empowerment
- How can we change our desires — in an emancipatory way instead of a disciplinary one?
- It is a structural problem and we cannot discount that when we encourage personal action, but at the same time we shouldn’t let that be an obstacle to personal action
- There seems to be a fine line between moral thinking and so-called moralism — it somehow crosses a boundary — and so we want to engage in political critique without slipping into misogynistic logic or moral authoritarianism, as Srinivasan states
- How are we to treat the loneliness of incels? It certainly points at something important, but when it mixes with privilege and misogyny, bad things happen
On Not Sleeping With Your Students
- The kind of amorous feelings that can arise from the student-teacher relationship are most likely some sort of Freudian transference
- A good teacher would call out or redirect this transference and focus on teaching
- Focusing on or thinking of your students in that way seems to detract from your ability to be a good teacher
- The teacher has a kind of epistemic power over the student, which furthers the power differential in a way that’s different from simply noting they’re both adults
- Furthermore, a male teacher should be held responsible because he has failed to not take advantage of female socialization under patriarchy
- To teach under patriarchy and to proceed as you might in normal life is to fail to treat your female students on equal terms with the male ones
- Sexual harassment harms women by enforcing their subordinate roles
- Compared to therapists, teachers don’t really get any training in the idea of transference at all — and in the US especially, teachers at the collegiate level don’t really get any pedagogical training at all
- Srinivasan somewhat offhandedly asks if there’s anything distinctive about the teacher-therapist relationship — and yes, there is some kind of vulnerability gap in these relationships. It’s closer to Nightingale syndrome-type transference. But if she means to ask whether there’s any quality that makes them so different they can’t be compared, I don’t think so. It’s actually a pretty good analogy, though not a perfect one
- Even without sexual harassment, there is a certain kind of harm done to the female student that is akin to sexual discrimination: she is, in some ways, denied education on the basis of her sex, because after engaging in a relationship, she isn’t able to receive all the educational benefits in the same way as other students
- In a lot of ways, any kind of sexual orientation means that you are treating different sexes differently, unless you are bisexual — which is less on the basis of sex, but should still count as discrimination in some way
- Instead it is about treatment that reproduces inequality
- What can be changed with law versus social change, and what will changes in law do to reproduce equality?
- Well-meaning legislation can still be abused
Sex, Carceralism, and Capitalism
- Some feminists do have power, and it seems strange to deny it
- Prostitution and harm reduction
- At the symbolic level, it certainly feels very gendered and reminiscent of power dynamics
- Criminalization actually makes the job more dangerous
- An inclusive feminist politic certainly cares about the experiences and thoughts of sex workers
- Criminalization may stem partly from a desire to punish patriarchal men, but this sometimes comes at the expense of the welfare of sex workers
- Some might argue that abolition of sex work makes workers worse off now but sets up for the future
- However, it does seem naïve to believe that we can abolish sex work
- The harm reduction parallel is similar to abortion: material conditions still require it, but criminalization just makes it more dangerous
- It is fascinating that it all comes down to labor conversations — trying to make it recognized as work — and how that dovetails into refusal, value, protection, and regulation
- But can sex work be compared to the wages-for-housework movement? Does it just reinforce stereotypes?
- “Any reform may be emptied of its revolutionary significance and reabsorbed by capitalism”
- There was a carceral turn in feminism, maybe co-opted by privileged women talking about bringing women into the global economy, which starts to become more capitalist and more participatory in the system — which does not allow for true liberation