Review of ‘The Right to Sex’

I think it's a bit rich, Amia calling herself a feminist whilst quoting that Katie Barker piece. Also embarrassing for an academic. I can't imagine this book or this so called philosopher will get much traction? Who does it appeal to and why? Is it to look good on a woke bookshelf?

LRB have had the worst record in terms of publishing women, if you check the VIDA count.

OldCrone, that Katie Barker piece was quoted extensively in this article, also in the London Review of Books.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n10/lauren-oyler/why-are-some-people-punks

I was sad that the LRB would publish this. It uses t*rf as a pejorative, sneers at mothers and middle aged women, and laughably criticises them for being distracted from structural issues.

I wondered if there would be any letters calling any of this out, but there weren’t - or none that were published. Sad to see the LRB become an echo chamber.

That's the article I was remembering old! Thank you....

One thing that might be in operation is future reverse ferret insurance. So positioning oneself quite ambivalently leaves room for 'oh, I was being ironic/clever/devil's advocate'.

I would guess that anyone who is intelligent has a certain amount of - if not doubt, then at least cognitive dissonance - going on and will want to leave htemselves room to make a swift & frictionless exit without tanking career if and when this particular 'right side of history' slides down from the ascendancy.

I'd expect her to mention the names of some more academic researchers and talk about their findings…She could also have done some of her own research which she could have talked about

Agreed. She had the ready option of consulting Prof. Sarah Pedersen's research on Mumsnet: The Politicization of Mumsnet

www.amazon.co.uk/Politicization-Mumsnet-SocietyNow-Sarah-Pedersen/dp/1839094710/?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

The question of the construction of sexual desire isn't new in feminism, or really in culture generally. I think you'd have a hard time finding many people who don't recognize this at some level. But mostly, people recognize there is quite a mishmash of cultural, individual, and biological factors which are almost impossible to tease out.

And from a historical standpoint it's pretty clear that this also applies to sexuality in the larger sense - there are significantly different practices around homosexual sex in different cultures, which wouldn't be the case if it were only about innate biological orientation, though that seems to be significant as well.

So maybe if we wanted to we could create a culture where there were far fewer sexual boundaries, and they were not so strongly drawn. We've accomplished that to some extent. I'm not convinced that would necessarily be a good thing, and I think that's the more interesting argument to be had - what function do sexual boundaries play in a society, and what happens when we try and loosen them, or say they are inherently discriminatory? Do we end up with a society where people like to watch low paid workers screw dogs for fun? Or where consent isn't given much respect since it's just about sex anyway?

There are a lot of good questions we could ask about the removal of boundaries as a principle and she seems to be just scratching the surface of them, and seeing them too only in terms of power which is typical for someone committed to identity politics. But I don't think it's worthy of someone who is supposed to be an amazing philosophical mind.

If anyone has anything that sets out a good argument against my awful GC rules, could you share? I've been searching desperately for about a year to understand why I'm wrong and just hit a brick wall.

The Lux article is interesting reading. Why doesn't she explain why mumsnet gender critical people are wrong? It felt quite sexist. Like because I'm a mother and a woman, I'm a bit silly. A bit snide imo.

On the other hand, it's true that in really repressive regimes, this technique of writing between the lines was used. Because if you didn't, your work would never see the light of day, or if somehow it did you would simply lose your position and platform completely. The only way to communicate in ways that questioned the orthodoxy was to seem not to question it.

I'm not sure if we are there yet. There are people for whom it's probably the case, young people trying to get a foothold in academia for example. But for a supposed star of philosophy, a woman, not white, in a prestigious academic chair? That's as close to having power as you can get at the moment. I think those are precisely the kind of people who would have some ability to speak out and say what they mean. Even if it's just - this argument, this idea, is incoherent, rather than making a positive statement about what is coherent.

If I look at people like John McWhorter, who has been speaking out about CRT and seems to feel more responsibility to do so because as a black man with tenure, he has some protection, the idea that it's necessary to use double-speak in this book doesn't really seem authentic to me.

I have no idea why MN have hidden my post. I posted a link to an archive version of the article in Quentin's post, which might have been the trigger, so I'll repost without that link.

That article was written by Sophie Lewis, who Amia mentioned when she was talking about British feminism. She also mentioned Katie Baker who wrote this piece about Mumsnet:

lux-magazine.com/article/the-road-to-terfdom/

It seems odd to me that an academic is citing popular articles by opinion writers as the source of her information. I know this interview is for a general audience, so making it a dry academic discussion would be inappropriate, but I'd expect her to mention the names of some more academic researchers and talk about their findings. When she mentioned Sophie Lewis and Katie Baker (neither of whom I had heard of) I assumed these were people of some academic standing, not just journalists and bloggers.

She could also have done some of her own research which she could have talked about. She could have joined mumsnet and come and discussed these issues with us herself, rather than relying on second hand information from people who are coming from their own biased viewpoints.

Oldcrone. Amia was uncertain throughout. She didn't have the power of her convictions.

oldcrone That first paragraph really chimed with another article I read - on googling I think it must've been this one
www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.amp.html

It's quite annoying not to mention sexist, for our arguments are written off as "bored mums".

Also talking about facts is not "radicalisation". DARVO.

I transcribed (roughly) the part about Mumsnet from the OJ interview.

Mumsnet [is] an incredibly effective platform for the radicalisation of women who for very good reason feel justified grievance about the sidelining of young mothers, the eradication or at least the erosion of material state support for families and mothers and who end up turning that legitimate grievance against the so-called trans lobby. So I do think you’re right that there’s a kind of process of radicalisation where you have lots of women who have justified grievances and who are then taught to target those grievances at what is in fact a tiny minority of the population who are disenfranchised in all sorts of ways.

So according to her, young mothers are being radicalised into blaming the lack of state support for families on the trans lobby.

She also complains about: people who at once claim that what they want are more open and difficult and honest conversations about complexities of identities and gender and sex but whenever they’re confronted with those conversations, like, shut them down in the most ideological and policing way possible, which just gives a lie, I think to the idea that what they’re concerned about is free debate and tells the truth that what they’re concerned about is the public recognition of the rights of transwomen and to a lesser extent transmen which they’re less obsessed about.

It seems that asking them hard questions which they don't like and can't answer is 'shutting down the conversation'.

And then she says that the reason that the GC feminist movement is bigger over here than in the US is because feminists over there have more of a history of siding with the conservatives. She gives the example of siding with Reagan in the fight against pornography. They remember that that all went wrong because the Republicans were also anti-gay and the feminists weren't (I'm not sure what this had to do with porn - she doesn't explain). So we're just ignorant and naive, and the American feminists know that it's a bad idea to side with the right.

I only watched the last 10 mins as recommended by Franca123 (thank you for that tip), but she seemed very hesitant in this part, as though she didn't have a clue what she was talking about. If she was really GC and just trying to show up bad arguments, I think she'd have made a better job of stating the poor TRA arguments, rather than just looking like someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

While looking for the essay from 2018 referenced upthread I came across a transcript of an interview where she discusses why she wrote the book and explains the ideas and preoccupations that prompted it.

www.anothermag.com/design-living/13510/the-right-to-sex-how-amia-srinivasan-wrote-the-most-divisive-book-of-2021

is it that males get all the personal, individual agency, to choose how they define themselves with no fetters,

In the interview I saw (not available publicly) she discussed an example she gives in the book, afaict. It was to do with the way in which a white man and an Asian man are approached on Grindr and the racialised fantasies and derogations/agency assumptions about sex with an Asian man v. somebody who is white. (One of those 'same bio', different names expts. although I can't remember what they did with the photographs.)

I haven't seen the interview with OJ so I've no idea if she discussed the same example there. It would have been an interesting discussion given how readily OJ draws an equivalence between racism and transphobia.

Amia doesn't mention the refusal of gay men to sleep with trans men to Owen Jones, no. The interview showed me that she really doesn't understand these arguments at all. I think she isn't an expert in feminist thought and theory. My believe is, she's a technical philosopher who has grabbed this subject as something topical which will propel her career into book deals and media interviews. Watch it if you will but you'll be astonished in a different way to what you expect. Owen Jones looked bored..... her arguments are pedestrian. I would however you watch (I think) the last 10mins where she talks about gender critical feminists on mumsnet. It's hilarious.

I still think the logical end point of her argument is conversion therapy. Why can't LGBT people just choose to be straight?

By focussing on males who make demands on women she appears to be making an obvious comparison between incels who believe they are entitled to sex with women and males who identify as transgender who believe they are entitled to sex with women. Is this her intent or just sloppy thinking? The latter would seem unlikely from someone in her position.

I haven't watched the Owen Jones interview (despite posting the link). I don't suppose she mentioned the trans exclusionary attitude of gay men like OJ to transmen (he once called someone homophobic for suggesting that he should sleep with transmen).

policy: 'a set of ideas or a plan of what to do in particular situations that has been agreed to officially by a group of people, a business organization, a government, or a political party: '

The word 'policy' seems to remove all trace of individuality from the person referred to.

A person is not a group of people. For someone who appears to endorse the extreme individualism of queer theory, this is a really odd way of framing someone's personal agency. Seems really incongruous.

Oh, hold on - is it that males get all the personal, individual agency, to choose how they define themselves with no fetters, and females are duty bound to have their decisions made by some arbitrary male-pleasing committee and noted as a matter of 'policy'?

A matter of 'policy'? What does she think women are, a public service provider?

Oh.

Srinivasan is contemptuous of lesbian feminists who ‘want to resist any possible analogy between the white person who as a matter of policy doesn’t sleep with black people, and the cis lesbian who as a matter of policy doesn’t sleep with trans women’.

So sick of this language manipulation. This, one million times over, is why we need invariably to use the word men when men is what we are discussing.

One context to desire is ignored entirely by Srinivasan: love. She seems far happier leaving emotional intimacy out of a discussion of sex entirely

From that Spiked review. Somehow I found that simultaneously surprising, and not surprising at all. It really is a big book of incel thinking then. What possible value is there in a book-length discussion of sex and “fuckability” that doesn’t talk about emotional intimacy?

Tsk. You’d think she would have tried to be more inclusive to demisexuals.