Okay I read the article. I remembered halfway through that I'd read the first half of it before but had stopped, so I finished it this time. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex

The Elliot Rodger incel manifesto is striking to me for many reasons but most importantly because for a community who so deeply HATES women, these men also seem to attach all meaning and value in life to being picked and validated by a woman.

"I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me"

and

"All women must be quarantined like the plague they are"

"Thinking about how patriarchal oppression is inflected by race and class [...] has made feminists reluctant to prescribe universal policies, including universal sexual policies."

I think a big mistake on the side of /feminism/ >>

Patriarchal oppression can mutate thru the factors of race and class but as long as there is a universal system of oppression (patriarchy), we should be able to prescribe universal policies to combat it. I don't buy the idea that universalism here will lead to authoritarianism

"The important thing now is to take women at their word. If a woman says she enjoys working in porn, or being paid to have sex with men, or engaging in rape fantasies, or wearing stilettos [...] then we are required, as feminists, to trust her."

I am also not sold on this idea, and this is definitely not the kind of ~feminist~ I am.

This also reminds me of Agnes's essay >> Here it does sound like belief + trust brings the end of the conversation when it should be an active, dynamic discourse https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/opinion/i-dont-want-you-to-believe-me-i-want-you-to-listen.html

"a feminism that trades too freely in notions of self-deception is a feminism that risks dominating the subjects it wants to liberate."

> I think we are justified to be skeptical of claims about how things that fit perfectly into demands on the patriarchy empower women.

"Sex is no longer morally problematic or unproblematic: it is instead merely wanted or unwanted. In this sense, the norms of sex are like the norms of capitalist free exchange." 1/2

"What matters is not what conditions give rise to the dynamics of supply and demand – why some people need to sell their labour while others buy it – but only that both buyer and seller have agreed to the transfer." 2/2

Probably the most concerning part of this debate

"To say that sex work is ‘just work’ is to forget that all work – men’s work, women’s work – is never just work: it is also sexed."

I am not sure about this. What denotes work being sexed? Just that the majority of people who do it are from one sex?

"the task of feminism: to treat as axiomatic our free sexual choices, while also seeing why, as MacKinnon has always said, such choices, under patriarchy, are rarely free. What I am suggesting is that, in our rush to do the former, feminists risk forgetting to do the latter."

I really like that Srinivasan is pulling out a very particular thread of where these two opposing thinkers (MacKinnon and Willis) converge.

"In other words, the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’."

1) "Some feminists think this is impossible, that any openness to desire-critique will inevitably lead to authoritarian moralism."

2) "But there is a risk too that repoliticising desire will encourage a discourse of sexual entitlement."

"What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms."

Part of the reason I've never understood people who equate making lattes at Starbucks to having sex with someone who pays you for it. It is simply not the same kind of act or labor. You have to be naive or willfully obtuse or on some other level of worldly perception to think so

The "cotton ceiling" discourse seems to equate genitals to other characteristics such as race or gender representation.

Sexuality is driven by sex characteristics, so I don't think saying "no dicks" is similar to saying "no Arabs" at all.

Desire and sexuality are different -- sexuality (whether you are heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual) is an immutable part of you. The formation of your desire within that sphere is what is being politically and socially shaped. If we believe that sexuality itself is socialized 1/

We veer too close to suggesting people can then be socialized out of their sexualities (so basically conversion therapy welcome back). Lesbians who are not sexually turned on by dicks aren't so because they were socialized into it.

"The question posed by radical self-love movements is not whether there is a right to sex (there isn’t), but whether there is a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires." 1/2

"To take this question seriously requires that we recognise that the very idea of fixed sexual preference is political, not metaphysical." 2/2

Desire and sexuality are too intertwined in this essay without clear delineation which I think obscures some of her points.

Srinivasan seems to conflate sexual desire with sexuality itself. This doesn't ring true. Being straight is a sexuality, desiring and preferring "hot blondes" or "petite Asians" exists within that sexuality or as an instantiation of that sexuality.

In the end she says that no, nobody has a right to sex. But that desires can change and can take us by surprise, and we have to question how they are formed.

Overall I think I agree with her on those two fundamental points. Would want to keep reading about this topic for sure.