The Right to Sex

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The Right to Sex

By: Amia Srinivasan

Narrated by: Andia Winslow

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About this listen

Bloomsbury presents The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, read by Andia Winslow.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
BLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2022

Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers – a guide to what everybody is talking about today

‘Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing’ JIA TOLENTINO

‘I believe Amia Srinivasan’s work will change the world’ KATHERINE RUNDELL

‘Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year’ PANDORA SYKES

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How should we talk 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.

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 need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon.

Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.

Amia SrinivasanAndia WinslowBloomsbury Publishing Plc

Gender Studies

Social Sciences

South Asian Creators

Discrimination

Social justice

Socialism

Capitalism

Gender Studies Social Sciences South Asian Creators Discrimination Social justice Socialism Capitalism

Most relevant

I first came across Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books, in a truly remarkable analysis of the the “Incel” phenomenon, where her key insights included identifying traditional masculinity and its role in sustaining social hierarchy as the real enemy of the incels, as well as questioning the pre-political status accorded to sexual desire. This is repeated here, alongside many other key insights and points - backed up with real statistics and case studies.

Going far outside the usual stories in the press, from Hollywood and Washington, Srinivasan exposes the racial and class tensions in #BelieveHer, the way that even something that seems positive and simple can rebound to the advantage of those at the top of the social hierarchy. Myths, commonly believed but baseless, are exploded, including the classic trope about the false rape-accusing woman. Srinivasan correctly identifies the role of the state as the problem - the enemy of a man accused of rape is not the woman, it is police and prosecutorial misconduct, in the main.

Questions are asked about what we should demand, from the state, from employers, from each other, in a way that goes beyond the really boneheaded rubbish one sees in the press, both by so-called “feminists” or the blowhard micro-penis types one reads in the conservative press, throwing their dummies out of the pram because anyone dares question the privileges of wealthy, white, able-bodied men. For my money this book is a sensitive, nuanced book that everyone, regardless of their perspective, will get something out of.