Sex and analytic philosophy are not promising bedfellows. But when it comes to feminist philosophy, it is no mere pun to say that sex is where the action is. The revival of this neglected feminist concern is principally owed to Amia Srinivasan, the 36-year-old star of Oxford philosophy and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College. Srinivasan began her career making influential contributions to formal epistemology and shot up the academic rungs; she has since found a public audience as a critic and essayist of remarkable precision and range. In her new essay collection, The Right to Sex, Srinivasan writes about consent, pornography and the ideological shaping of desire, attempting “to remake the political critique of sex for the 21st century.” Here, the political isn’t just personal; it’s intimate.
Readers may approach the book with misgivings. With what authority does academic philosophy address itself to the sexual imagination, fantasy and our intimate lives? There are other ways that philosophy can fail us besides being false; bad philosophy—like bad sex—can be formulaic and uninspired. When it comes to our ethical lives, philosophy wins authority not just by telling the truth about things, but by making sense of them. Philosophy, beyond being true, ought to ring true. Notoriously, when the heavy artillery of analytic philosophy—reduction, abstraction and theory-building—is turned on the landscape of moral and political life, the result is usually desolating.
“Sometimes,” Srinivasan writes, we just “don’t need another crank of the reason machine,” another spin of the “intellectual assembly line, endlessly performing the same task on different, fungible objects.” Philosophy, Srinivasan once admitted, is “a thing I love but whose instantiations often fill me with boredom and despair” (as good a characterisation of the subject as any).
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” Srinivasan starts, “but anyway, I’ll say it: philosophically-orientated theorists have been systematically failing to meet the moment very clearly since, I think, 2008 onwards… and, I think, for a lot longer than that.” Not only can philosophy sometimes alienate its readers, but in certain styles it fails to acknowledge where the theory of politics must yield to politics itself. All too often, Srinivasan explains, theorists have an “unjustified conviction… that what activists or political actors need are better philosophical tools and better philosophical concepts.”
“I think the problem,” she laughs, “is that often what they need is just more political power. So, if you really want to help the cause, you should probably just be joining your union and going on the picket line.”
“Porn has, in Srinivasan’s idiom, ‘world-making’ power”
The Chichele chair, named after a medieval archbishop of Canterbury who founded All Souls, will not be a seat of armchair philosophy, remote from worldly struggle, while Srinivasan is sitting on it. Her “world-directed” approach accounts for her apprehensive philosophical style, the sense she conveys—on the page and in person—of there being something at stake. As a young scholar, Srinivasan was turned off by the distasteful tendency in political philosophy to play intellectual games with matters of moral seriousness. Raised in Taiwan, New York and Singapore, she came to Oxford from Yale in 2007. Just when she might have gone back to the US, to law or graduate school, she won the coveted All Souls prize fellowship.
At Oxford, she “feared that being a philosopher and being a public thinker were simply two different things.” Even her previous byline at the London Review of Books wryly advertised her divided loyalty: “Amia Srinivasan teaches at Oxford but surfs in LA.” Now it simply refers to her Chichele appointment, doubtless itself a source of conflicted feeling to a philosopher who cares resolutely for radical politics and the possibility of “revolution.” (A wary ambivalence in the revered chair is not entirely new: GA Cohen, Srinivasan’s Marxist predecessor-but-one, once told the following joke: “Question: ‘How many fellows of All Souls does it take to change a light bulb?’ Answer: ‘Change?!?’”)
Talking to Srinivasan from her room in Oxford felt initially like being back in a philosophy tutorial: having my long-winded, ill-formulated questions charitably reconstructed and then answered with consideration and poise. In other ways it was not quite the same. For instance, though as an undergraduate it very often would have been true, it seldom seemed apropos to announce, an hour or so in, as I did to Srinivasan: “I’d like to talk about gay porn now, if that’s alright.”
One of the essays in Srinivasan’s book, “Talking to my Students about Porn,” refers back to the “Porn Wars” of the 1980s, when pornography was considered a robustly contestable political phenomenon. It has since become unfashionable to subject pornography, and the market of desire it serves, to ethical critique, largely because of the broader embrace of an ethic of “sex positivity”: we have learned to think “you do you” (or indeed anyone else) when it comes to people’s shocking sexual tastes or self-abasing kinks. We have become—for sound political reasons—nervous of diagnosing false consciousness; sexual desire is implicitly considered to be “pre-political,” assimilated to a private sphere immune from political critique.
Srinivasan’s work rehabilitates a more questioning attitude. To anti-porn feminists, porn was a metonym “for sex that took no account of women’s pleasure, for sadomasochistic sex, for prostitution, for rape fantasies, for sex without love, for sex across power differentials, for sex with men.” Its power, though, was more than totemic. As Catherine MacKinnon influentially argued, porn effectuates its message: it has, in Srinivasan’s idiom, “world-making” power. Porn is a machine for reproducing ideology; it eroticises women’s subordination and cultivates in men an ethic of entitlement and aggression. Porn tells lies about women, but it tells the truth about men.
When pornography existed on centrefolds, videotapes, and the backs of playing cards, campaigners might have succeeded in suppressing it. Now, it seems, nothing short of a technological armageddon could loosen porn’s grip on the collective imagination. With some irony, Srinivasan writes, “the warnings of the anti-porn feminists seem to have been belatedly realised: sex for my students is what porn says it is.”
So, as I was asking, what about gay porn? Whatever its negative qualities, these cannot straightforwardly consist in sexist conditioning or the objectification of women. As the philosopher Les Green has suggested, gay porn might even provide a positive service to gay men by objectifying them, giving them a robust sense of themselves as sex objects. This notwithstanding, perhaps the more disagreeable conventions of mainstream gay porn—of gay life, generally—involve a kind of imitation of the pernicious features of its heterosexual counterpart. Srinivasan agrees: “I think it’s undeniable that some of the problematic dynamics you find in mainstream gay male culture take their model from the heterosexual dynamic. That’s just obviously the case.”
But, Srinivasan argues, what mainstream porn of all varieties embodies is a vast, and perhaps irreversible, pedagogical failure. Its grip on the imagination is to be regretted, its disabling power owed as much to its cinematic qualities as anything else. The “logic of the screen” pacifies the viewer, compelling him to identify with his on-screen surrogate. “It etches deep grooves in the psyche, forming powerful associations between arousal and selected stimuli… if the viewer times things right—online, unlike in the cinema, one can always pause, fast-forward, rewind—it becomes his semen on her face and breasts.”
“Srinivasan asks whether we can subject our sexual desires to reflective criticism and some degree of wilful control”
Better sex education, Srinivasan argues, is now an impotent remedy. It fails to meet porn on its own terms, attempting to counter its immersive power with something cognitive and discursive: “porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains.” A remaining hope, Srinivasan concludes, is the onset of a kind of “negative education.” “What we need,” she explains, “isn’t a kind of positive hermeneutics to be inculcated in viewers of pornography, so that they can better interpret what is going on… what we need is the onslaught of images to just stop for a moment.”
I put it to Srinivasan that her critique shares some of its spirit with conservative objections to porn: the worry that porn’s logic of commodification corrupts the value of sex, manifest perhaps in the creeping feeling—all too easily evoked whenever one finds oneself choosing from a menu with pictures—that one is engaged in something debasing. “I totally agree,” Srinivasan says—“the conservative way of putting it is that we have this kind of sacred thing that’s being degraded by being placed on this screen. I more specifically want to say the thing we’re losing is a certain kind of creative capacity which then gets dulled by its over-reliance on the screen.”
Such arguments, she adds, are another reason to read conservative philosophers—“to understand that part of us, which is very much drawn to and recognises the truth in conservatism, because it’s a very false radical politics that thinks that progress does not come with loss.”
It is inherent to sexual life, with its vast comedy and small tragedies, that our desires can take us by surprise. But Srinivasan asks whether we can subject our sexual desires to reflective criticism and some degree of wilful control. Proposals along these lines are similiar to those of the “body positivity” movements, which invite us to find fat or disabled bodies attractive: to resist hegemonic standards of “fuckability.”
Srinivasan hopes that, with greater self-understanding, more enlightened desire might re-assert itself, “cut against what politics has chosen for us and choose for itself.” The task of sifting one’s authentic desires—those which are genuine or autonomous expressions of the sexual self—from those that are ideological deposits seems to me potentially paranoia-inducing. But that is only, Srinivasan replies, if one subscribes to the fantasy of the “pre-political desire” or “purely authentic self.” The point, she says ruefully, is not to ask whether we can sift the clean from the tainted—“the point is that everything is tainted.”
I wonder whether this project of radical sexual self-criticism recommends liberalism: an environment of free and self-examining enquiry; perhaps, in that rather quaint phrase of John Stuart Mill’s, “experiments in living.” I almost inquire whether Srinivasan considers herself a liberal, but—even following on from all the talk about sex and gay porn—it seems rather too personal a question. “There is,” though, she says, “a certain aspect to liberalism that is profoundly attractive, and shouldn’t only be owned by liberals, which is the fundamental respect for individual life, projects and forms of experimentation.”
In its totality, however, Srinivasan regards liberalism as tragic. In matters of sexuality, it purchases an equality in respect for taste at the price of deceiving us about the immutability of desires. Srinivasan thinks stories about fixed sexual preference, and the “born-this-way” narrative, are political, not metaphysical, claims. They have been very useful in seeing off prejudice. But it would be better if we could live without them, while retaining, indeed augmenting, the political equality they have secured. “I am not some kind of Whiggish person,” she says, “but I believe that the kind of defence of queer lifestyles in terms of involuntariness has got to be a fleeting historical moment that we get past, and it’s got to be high up on the agenda for a radical queer politics to get past it.”
But don’t the political forces at work on us, I put it to her, make us into creatures unfit for utopia? “That has to be right,” Srinivasan agrees: “I think it’s an extraordinary and striking fact that Moses doesn’t live to see the promised land, and he’s destined not to… as a metaphor, I think that’s right.” We are tied, by relations of nostalgia and rebellion, to the world we seek to liberate ourselves from. “But,” she adds, “I think that’s a hopeful thought too, because it means that I’m not going to have to be forced to live in a world in which I’m uncomfortable either. I’ll help to bring it into existence and then die.”
