The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan

The Right to Sex is a collection of essays by feminist scholar Amia Srinivasan.

There is at least a modest amount of overlap between this book and the topics and the perspective of JoAnn Wypijewski’s What We Don’t Talk About that I read recently. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, but in the end I’d say I found Wypijewski’s book more persuasive, like it fit me and the way I conceptualize and approach these issues a bit better.

The opening essay is The Conspiracy Against Men.

My initial reaction to this essay—and so my first response to the book—is that it had a bit more of a meandering quality to it, frankly more like these blog essays of mine (where I generally try to have some logical organization, with some editing, some rewriting, etc., but where I don’t hold myself up to high standards in that regard) than I would expect in a formally published book, and one that has received such strong praise. Beyond that, though, it struck me as mostly right-headed, as raising relevant issues and making good points concerning them, though I did have at least a quibble here and there.

As I understand it, these are some of her main points:

• False accusations of rape (and sex crimes and sexual wrongdoing in general) against men certainly happen, and are not to be dismissed or their importance minimized, but they’re fairly uncommon, certainly dwarfed by the number of women who are raped and don’t get justice (i.e., the number of men who “get away with it”).

• While it’s tempting from a feminist standpoint to say that women claiming rape should be more readily believed and that, in general, the playing field should be adjusted to be less tilted against women, from a social justice standpoint you have to take into account racial components, to understand that accused white men fare much better than accused non-white men, and that accuser white women fare much better than accuser non-white women. Non-white men, black men especially, are stereotypically regarded as more apt to be unwilling or unable to contain their sex drive, to rape, to be violent, to lie about it, etc. Non-white women are stereotypically regarded as oversexed, as presumed to be willing to have sex and thus not rapeable. Carceral solutions to rape especially run the risk of compounding racial injustice because that’s where these stereotypes are most pronounced and have the severest consequences.

• It’s a category mistake to object to efforts to inflict consequences on accused rapists and sex offenders outside the criminal justice system, such as through social media shaming campaigns, as violating the principle of innocent until proven guilty, as that principle applies specifically and only to the criminal justice system.

• Here and there, though, you do have to be aware that participating in social media uproars can have unjust or dubious consequences.

• The backlash against MeToo and such efforts to hold offenders responsible has mostly been unjustified and routinely overstates how much accused men have suffered as a result of it. The men accused in the highly publicized MeToo cases typically either don’t apologize and take responsibility at all, or they do initially, perhaps in a perfunctory way, and then quickly switch to the mode of feeling sorry for themselves and insisting that they’re really the victim.

• It’s generally not accurate for those accused of sexual wrongdoing to claim that “the rules changed,” and they shouldn’t be blamed retroactively for what used to be acceptable behavior; typically what they’re accused of was knowably wrong all along, even if it gets more publicity now, or the consequences if they’re caught can be more severe now. (Or, as she asks rhetorically, “How many men are truly unable to distinguish between wanted and unwanted sex, between welcome and ‘gross’ behavior, between decency and degradation?”)

• Laws and policies that more strictly govern sex, that, for instance, narrow what counts as consent so as to broaden what counts as rape or sexual assault, can have their place and may be justified, but there’s something deeper that needs to be addressed concerning certain still commonplace attitudes in society—“the psychosocial structures that make men want to have sex with women who don’t really want it, or make them feel that it’s their job to overcome a woman’s resistance, and that make women feel they must have sex with men when they don’t want to.”

There’s plenty more, but hopefully I’m not misrepresenting some of the main points she’s trying to get across in this first essay.

So what are my thoughts? This subject matter is very sensitive, and I sense myself reacting on more of an emotional level than I do to most things I read, and while I’m in agreement with a fair amount of what she says, I still have a gut feeling that there’s something about the essay, or certain aspects of the essay, that I’m not OK with.

And so I ask myself, to what extent is my discomfort a defensiveness caused by her contesting certain unjustified beliefs or attitudes that I have, of challenging my “privilege,” as they say, in a way that I’m not used to it being challenged and don’t appreciate it being challenged?

I tend to think that there’s a small amount of that at most. Like, it’s plausible to me that, because I’m a male, it’s easier for me to empathize with men who might be unjustly accused of rape than with women who might be unjustly disbelieved when they claim they were raped, easier for me to imagine myself in their shoes.

But it feels like there’s considerably more than that going on in my reaction (in the limited part of it that’s a skeptical or negative reaction, that is). I’m sure I won’t be able to articulate much of it, or at least won’t be able to articulate it well—which could understandably be interpreted as evidence that there’s little or no merit in my objections and that they are indeed simply a sexist resistance to uncomfortable truths—but I’ll try to say what I can say.

There may be multiple related points running around in my mind here, but as a starting point I suspect my reaction is in part a distaste for the social justice practice of thinking so much in terms of groups rather than individuals.

There’s a general theme that runs through the essay that I would summarize as “the oppressed—i.e., members of oppressed groups—can do no wrong (and to suggest otherwise would constitute blaming the victim).”

Even when she makes corrective points about how it’s important not to automatically side with any woman against any man, it turns out to be because in so doing you’re not divvying up the groups quite right. So, “Blame the man” is too simplistic in her eyes because there’s already a tendency to overblame certain kinds of men—e.g., black men accused of raping white women; we certainly don’t need to be sending more of them to prison than we already do. But it doesn’t sound like she’d have much of a problem with “Blame the rich, straight, cisgendered, etc. white men.” I think for her it’s more a matter of keeping your eye on who the true oppressor group is, and not inadvertently dealing more harshly than you should with folks who only overlap (“intersectionally”) with the oppressors in one or a few ways and are themselves oppressed in other respects.

Now, I don’t deny that it can make some sense to say that group problems require group analysis or group solutions, that as long as racism, sexism, ableism, what have you, exist—as unjust ways of thinking and behaving toward people on the basis of what group they’re regarded as belonging to—you shouldn’t rule out addressing them in terms of groups. I don’t want to be in a position of claiming that “reverse racism” or “reverse sexism” is always wrong in the very same way and to the very same degree as racism and sexism, or that a race-conscious or sex-conscious policy like affirmative action always has to be unjust.

But there’s something about the current social justice way of looking at things that still doesn’t sit well with me. I think even if race-conscious and sex-conscious approaches aren’t necessarily always unjust as “reverse racism” or “reverse sexism,” that there should still be a certain presumption against them for not judging people as individuals—a presumption that can be overridden, but that should make alarm bells go off, especially when accompanied by a self-righteous attitude that you’re fighting the good fight for the oppressed whenever you approach issues that way.

I want to be a little more specific, though, about this sense I have that the essay goes too far in the direction of “the oppressed can do no wrong (and the oppressors can do no right).”

Recall that part about “the psychosocial structures that make men want to have sex with women who don’t really want it, or make them feel that it’s their job to overcome a woman’s resistance, and that make women feel they must have sex with men when they don’t want to.” I think it’s quite revealing that she words it that way.

I very much remember how the seduction and mating rituals were long, long ago, when I first came of age. I remember, because I admit that I engaged in them.

The male was very much expected to be the aggressor. When you got a woman alone, you pushed for as much as you could. You got handsy with her, you cajoled, you pleaded, you bargained, whatever. The woman was the gatekeeper. She decided how far things would go. It could be assumed that the male’s preference was always that they go all the way, so whether they did, or they went 80% of the way, or 50% of the way, or 10% of the way, or were cut off abruptly 0% of the way, that outcome was fully up to the woman.

There was also still some residual sense back then that it was at some level morally “better” that women resist a certain amount, that if they allowed too much too quickly to too many guys, then there was something distastefully slutty about that, something not respectable. (Though it’s worth noting that, one, this attitude had already lessened considerably compared to pre-sexual revolution days, and, two, it tended to be socially enforced more by women on each other than by men.)

So there routinely was this angle to it where a part of the game was convincing the woman—or really her convincing herself—that she wasn’t fully intentionally, fully responsibly, going along with however far the sex went. Thus the “getting her drunk” phenomenon. It wasn’t nearly as much a matter of the man maliciously getting the woman into a state where she wasn’t able to resist his advances (as it would be if, say, one surreptitiously slipped her some knockout drops or something), as it was a matter of participating in her own ruse to lessen how responsible she felt about what happened—i.e., you didn’t “get her drunk”; she got drunk, which might include going along with your urgings to do so, because at some conscious or unconscious level she wanted to go farther sexually than she was likely to go if she were fully sober.

Or if not booze, it could be drugs, or it could just be a particularly skilled manly persuasiveness (he “swept me off my feet” and somehow his dick ended up in my vagina; hell if I know how).

Like I say, I played the game back then. But only to a limited extent and for a limited time, like for probably five years or less starting in my teens. Because I recognized from the beginning how asinine it was.

I don’t mean by that—importantly—that I realized that in participating in these rituals I was engaging in rape or something objectionable in that way. I just thought it was asinine because to me it made entirely more sense to think of sex as a really positive, enjoyable thing that of course people would want to do when the opportunity presented itself. This notion that one of the genders has to feign reluctance, and has to be drunk or otherwise have some reason to feel that they weren’t really in control of themselves and what happened, I thought was ridiculous. My attitude was, “Sheesh, be a fucking grown-up and have sex if you want to have sex and don’t have sex if you don’t want to have sex. Let’s not play this ‘Oh, we really shouldn’t’ game. I don’t want to overcome your resistance. I’d rather just go home.”

And honestly, precisely because I got impatient with that ritual and largely stopped bothering with it when I was still quite young, I missed out on sexual opportunities. Not saying I would have gotten laid some huge amount, but I would have done so more than the quite modest amount I really did.

Rather than finding women more sexually desirable when they were drinking or on drugs (because it would enable them to give in without feeling fully responsible for doing so), I always found it a decided turn-off. I mean, if you think about it, it’s an insult in a way: “I’ll have sex with you drunk but I wouldn’t if I were sober.”

I remember times when I elicited kind of eye-rolling “are you really that naïve?” reactions when I didn’t follow the expected steps of the ritual, when I immediately backed off when a woman showed reluctance. I remember more than once getting a look like, “Um, what are you doing? This is when you’re supposed to redouble your efforts. You know I can’t give in right away. Are you really that new at this?”

So, yeah, I thought it was all pretty stupid. But to respond to one of the points she makes, damn right I’d feel aggrieved if someone tried to punish me today for participating to the very limited extent that I did in those silly rituals when I was a teenager. That absolutely would be a case of retroactively punishing me after changing the rules, and not a case of “Oh give me a break! Men knew all along even back then that they were forcing women into unwanted sex, behaving grossly, degrading women, etc. The only difference is that they used to be better able to get away with it and now they’re upset that that’s changed.”

I didn’t want to “get away with it.” I thought the “psychosocial structures” definitely were fucked up and should be different.

But the important point is that the “psychosocial structures” were, and are, extraordinarily complex things that grew up out of countless factors, countless interactions, countless choices, of both men and women. It’s not some sort of evil system that men impose on women because we live in a patriarchy that enables men to manipulate the rules that way.

So, to speak of the “psychosocial structures that make men want to have sex with women who don’t really want it, or make them feel that it’s their job to overcome a woman’s resistance, and that make women feel they must have sex with men when they don’t want to” is misleading and incomplete at best.

I lived during a time when things were considerably more backward in feminist terms than today—a day so long ago that the enlightened social justice types hadn’t yet informed us that there was something self-evidently “rapey” about Baby, It’s Cold Outside—and it’s a poor description even of how things were then.

I didn’t want to have sex with women who “didn’t really want it.” I did feel some pressure from social expectations that it was “my job to overcome a woman’s resistance,” but only in the sense of this back-and-forth make-believe resistance. I don’t recall encountering any women who felt that they “must have sex with me when they didn’t want to” (no, in my experience they were really good at making sure that didn’t happen), though I certainly encountered many women who felt at some level that it was morally suspect for them to voluntarily, responsibly, let sex happen.

But think about the implications of her wording. When it comes to sex, the woman is the hapless victim, being pressured or forced to do things she doesn’t want to do, and the man is the perpetrator who is forcing the matter. When in fact the whole silly ritual was jointly sustained and participated in by both sexes, with neither consciously choosing it and imposing it on the other.

Indeed, ironically I, as a male, was a lot more hesitant to play that game than the women I found myself with. I was the one pressured to go along with the ritual if I wanted any chance of having sex.

Yeah, yeah, I know, “Oh, so you’re saying women were ‘asking for it,’ so whatever you did was their own fault!” Asking to be raped, absolutely not. Asking to be put in a position where they don’t have to feel guilty that it was totally their own free and uninfluenced choice to have to have sex, yes, I am saying that.

Also, I don’t mean that this kind of male-female dynamic only applied in the bedroom, that it only had relevance for a dude trying to get laid and a girl deciding how much she should fend him off. In a sense it applied across the board in relationships.

Here’s an illustration that fits what I mean perfectly: There was an episode—I suppose this would have been in the early ’80s—of the sitcom One Day at a Time, about the single mother raising two teenage daughters, where one of the daughters (the hotter one, the one who later married a rock star in real life) goes on a date with a new guy (who would become a regular on the show; this was how he was introduced).

She gets home from her date fuming, and proceeds to tell her mother all about the outrage she suffered. It seems that her date was not her first choice, just kind of a guy she was settling for unless and until some guy she was more interested in asked her out. Somehow—I don’t remember the details of it—as her date was driving her to dinner or whatever, she realized she had an opportunity to opt for someone more to her liking and made a perfunctory excuse and told him to take her home or drop her back where he had picked her up or something. Instead, he refused to stop the car despite her increasingly angry insistence, and drove them to a restaurant a great distance out of town, letting her know that he would not allow himself to be disrespected, that they were going to have a date as they’d agreed, they were going to have dinner as they’d agreed, and only then would he be happy to bring her home. She glumly tolerated dinner because she felt she had no choice, basically doing her time until her release. As promised he then drove her home.

Her mother listens to all this, and observes her daughter with empathy, but at the same time recognizes, perhaps even before the daughter herself is conscious of it, that “She really likes this guy.” Because despite her anger and indignation, the daughter knows that she was in the wrong to attempt to blow him off for someone else, and the fact that he hadn’t let her get away with it, that he had stood up for himself and manifested assertiveness in requiring her to keep her commitment, pushed the buttons inside her that made her realize that he was a man worthy of respect and attractive to her on that all-important visceral level. And indeed, she agreed to see him again, and if memory serves during some future season of the show they got married.

Those were the prevalent values as recently as 40 years ago. Not a glorification of rape certainly, but the idea that a real man will take charge of a woman, and not let her get away with her bullshit. Indeed, talk to my friend who spent some time hiring himself out as a dating coach, and he’ll tell you that it’s all part of the game, that women are constantly “testing” men in this way, seeing how they are and are not allowed to disrespect them, and that you only “pass” the test by asserting your masculine dominance and not accepting their disrespect. (Whereas the guys who try to get women to like them by being maximally agreeable and letting the woman run things are doomed to always be in the “friend zone.”)

Now, I think things have changed considerably in the ensuing years since my youth, and that the current mating rituals are quite a bit different from what they were back then. Are they ideal now, are both parties truly equal where both take full responsibility for the decision to have sex without one gender being expected to push and the other expected to feign resistance? No, but things have moved in that direction compared to where they were, and that is a decidedly positive change.

Though I would also say that that depends very much on what subgroup of the population we’re talking about. An educated feminist woman on an elite university campus probably doesn’t overlap more than very slightly with the girls I was trying to bed when I was 18. On the other hand, there are still plenty of women, mostly of lower socioeconomic classes, maybe conservative, maybe more rural, etc., who have these same attitudes from long ago about such things. (A good marker is if you hear a woman insistently proclaim “I want the man to be the man!”) For a sizable portion of the population, what my friend the former dating coach says probably still applies.

In conclusion—because I’ve talked about this first essay way more than I intended—I’m pretty sure that she and I would mostly agree about what would constitute healthy changes in the “psychosocial structures” around sex; I’m just somewhat defensive insofar as I feel that the essay is saying that I—because of my chromosomes and to a lesser extent my race and income level and so on—benefit from the present less healthy structures and am looking to preserve them so as to preserve my “privilege.”

Actually I will quickly mention a couple other things about this first essay.

I’m aware of the “black men as oversexed brutes who are unsafe to allow around white women” stereotype (though my guess is that it is about 15% as prevalent today as it was at its peak, and about 5% as impactful as you’d think if you were used to a steady diet of contemporary social justice university classes), but I don’t think I had ever come across this stereotype of nonwhite women being hypersexual. Insofar as their sexual victimization is downplayed compared to that of white women (a phenomenon that I would guess is also something like 15% as strong as at its peak), I would have thought it was more a matter of “Those women are of less intrinsic moral weight, since they’re not of our tribe, so raping them is a lesser wrong,” rather than “Those women are natural nymphos who always want sex so there’s no such thing as nonconsensual sex with them.” I mean, maybe she’s right, but I don’t think it’s an attitude I’ve come across, certainly not something I’d say is pervasive in society, that nonwhite women are constantly horny and never say no to sex. (Again, they don’t seem to have had noticeably more difficulty than any other women saying no to me, for what it’s worth.)

She also makes a point about rape in passing that was quite striking to me. Needless to say, a much, much higher percentage of rape victims in this country are female than male (while perpetrators are close to a hundred percent male). But, that’s only if you exclude prison. Because the U.S. incarcerates a massive percentage of its population compared to pretty much any country in history, and because its prison conditions are more horrible than in any country that has any justification in considering itself civilized, if you were to estimate the number of rapes that occur in prison and add them to the total, it would probably end up pretty close as far as whether more total women or men are raped in this country.

The essay Talking to My Students About Porn held my interest as well as any in the book, and again I felt like there was plenty to agree with in it, but also that in some respects it missed the mark or at least was somewhat askew relative to my viewpoint.

She opens by describing how she anticipated that her students would respond negatively to her teaching about the “Porn Wars” of feminism’s history, that porn is now so ubiquitous and accepted that they would have trouble understanding or caring how feminists of the past could have treated the porn debate as such a huge part of feminism and gotten so worked up about trying to ban porn.

She finds that her students’ experiences and opinions about porn are quite a bit different from what she expected (and given the generally approving way she describes them, we can infer she finds them right-headed on the whole).

Roughly speaking, her students’ position is that the biggest negative of porn is that it is where males learn what (they think) sex is supposed to be, and that as a result the social expectations, the dating expectations, nowadays are that women will readily agree to sex pretty much immediately and that the sex itself will then be very male-oriented—lots of blow jobs, women accepting and indeed preferring being “taken” roughly, the guy cumming in the woman’s face, the woman being keen to fulfill whatever the guy’s sexual fantasies happen to be, maybe some S&M type beating, bondage, or humiliation of the woman, etc.

“You’re not doing it right!” being now a common insult or manifestation of disapproval and disappointment directed at any girl who does not behave like a porn star. And, to some extent, under that pressure, they do indeed try to act as required, which, not surprisingly, typically doesn’t result in very rewarding sex for them.

Young males, the author says, routinely cite the “educational” value of porn even more than its usefulness to them in getting themselves off. They openly describe how otherwise they’d have no clue what to do sexually with a girl. Less commonly do girls consume porn the same way. They seem much more aware of its unreality. Insofar as they emulate porn, it’s more because the boys expect it to be that way and they don’t want to disappoint them rather than because they themselves think it’s supposed to be that way.

As far as banning or restricting porn, as the author anticipated her students are almost all against it. Generally not, she reports, because they care about civil liberties or free speech issues (sad, but not surprising in a gender studies class), but simply because of how hopeless it would be. This isn’t the era of blocking newsstands from carrying smutty magazines, or banning dirty movies from the U.S. mail. It would be somewhat difficult to stop the average 50 year old from accessing porn if you really tried, and basically impossible to stop the average 10 year old. Young people are just way, way, way too tech savvy; they’ll always get porn.

Her students, she says, are the first generation that had ubiquitous porn from as soon as they became aware, something that will now be true of every generation. So that’s just the reality we have to deal with.

When she discusses porn, I’d say she mostly accepts the premises of the anti-porn feminist warriors of the past (even if she agrees with her students that those warriors’ preferred solution is no longer realistic): Porn degrades women. It teaches that women are sex objects that exist solely for the pleasure of men, and that it is enjoyable and appropriate to brutalize them. It further identifies non-white women as even “lower” objects. Insofar as it constitutes “expression,” that expression basically comes down to “Women should be raped,” etc., and even if you oppose banning any expression, including the most offensive, on civil liberty grounds, you can make a good case that porn goes beyond expressing a point of view like that in advocating and providing instruction in how to commit violent crimes, and that kind of speech generally isn’t afforded First Amendment protection. But that doesn’t mean that prohibition and censorship are the best options, since when you get the government involved it often or usually just means that the hammer comes down on the kind of “obscenity” that feminists don’t object to, on female and nonwhite sex workers, etc.

Again, hopefully I’m not misrepresenting her position. But that’s how I would summarize her take on porn.

Since there’s no realistic way to block the porn messages that young people receive (not just “young,” but starting, like, at grade school age), one would hope that it would be possible to counter “bad speech” with “good speech,” to educate kids that sex isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, what they see in porn. But, she says, good luck with that. In a world, especially in a country like the U.S., that is scared shitless by any association of children with sex, what are the chances 8 year olds are going to be taught all about healthy, mutually enjoyable, mutually respectful, non-pornlike sex? What are the chances that school will provide an alternative education in “how to do it” that can compete with and overcome the “education” provided by porn?

As far as my reaction to some of this, let me start with this last point about sex education. I agree a hundred percent that the public would never allow (at least not unless and until there is some almost unimaginably dramatic change in attitudes) any kind of meaningful sex education like this that goes into the “how to do it” specifics. I mean, in the abstract, like any good liberal, I’m “pro”-sex education. But at the same time I have considerable ambivalence about sex (and all the currently controversial gender stuff and all the rest) being taught in schools, because I have no confidence at all in who is doing the teaching. I think in most places it’s going to be either fundamentalist Christian types, or at least those who have been forced to compromise massively in that direction to placate those folks, or it’s going to be people, frankly like this author I suppose, who will teach as dogma whatever are the currently mandatory social justice positions in gender studies and the like. The first I think is clearly worse than excluding such matters from the curriculum entirely. The second may be a tiny bit better than excluding them, but it’s a close call.

So, sure, if my (wise and utterly reasonable of course) ideas about sex and the like were to be taught in the schools, I’d be all for it. But that’s not a realistic option.

I also agree that opening the door to banning porn generally means that plenty of material the Left doesn’t object to will get cracked down on in the process (though I don’t like the feeling I get from her that if feminists really could get their way and the likes of Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were put in charge of what sexually explicit material we’re allowed to see and what we’re not, that that would be fine).

But as far as her general take on porn, again it doesn’t fully line up with my experience. There’s something overconfident and simplistic about her descriptions, just matter-of-factly identifying porn as basically manuals in how to abuse and rape women.

Porn to me is an extraordinarily mixed bag. You can certainly find within it everything she hates, but that’s different than saying “porn” in a broad sense is all and only those things.

I mean, of course you can cherry pick your evidence. You can triumphantly hold up the video of a make-believe gang rape of some terrified woman, who then at the end admits she loved it and can’t wait to experience it again, or the photos of the black chick letting some white dude piss in her face. Plenty of that stuff exists, because pretty much every imaginable form of porn exists.

Not that she out-and-out denies that there are other forms of porn—dominatrixes abusing men, gay and lesbian sex, whatever—but she mentions any such porn in passing as if it is not relevant as counter evidence to the notion of porn as advocacy of men’s entitlement to rape and degrade women.

So would the response be that there are too few exceptions to matter, that so overwhelmingly much of porn is about coercing and degrading women (and members of oppressed groups in general) that it’s not misleading to describe the whole of it that way?

I don’t know what percentage of porn involves brutalizing women (and treating minority women especially bad, etc.) in the ways that infuriate feminists. Obviously it’s not 100%. I’m quite confident it’s not 98% or 96% or anything like that. Purely anecdotally, based on all the porn I’ve ever seen in my life, it would be well under 50%. But that’s because what I’ve seen is decidedly not a random sample, but is a product of what I’ve searched for, what porn site algorithms have steered me toward based on my history, etc. Still, even though likely the percentage is considerably higher than what I’ve seen, I seriously doubt it’s anywhere near as high as you would guess if all you had to go by were feminist anti-porn tirades.

I think it’s also important to note how democratized porn has become in the era of the Internet. A large percentage of the content now is amateur—“real people” sending dirty photos and videos to their lover or some small circle of people they know, or, for whatever commercial or exhibitionist motives, uploading them to porn sites, swinger sites, etc. If you try to abolish, restrict, or control porn, you’re not just moving against some evil male-dominated corporations imposing patriarchal, violent sexual themes on a vulnerable population of oppressed folks, but lots of ordinary people who get off on letting others watch them fuck, or who like the fact that they can make a few bucks without ever having to leave their home because so many people want to see them on camera naked or sticking a cucumber in their cunt or whatever. Those are the modern porn producers.

Then again, it also depends on how you’re defining what’s degrading to women. Certainly you can say that, on the whole, porn caters to the preferences and fantasies of men more than women. Is that inequality in and of itself enough to count as disvaluing women and their perspective?

Porn is consumed mostly by men (though not even close to a hundred percent; Srinivasan says it’s about two-thirds). So a lot more of it is what men presumably want to see, with women behaving more like how men wish women were.

Some of that difference, some of that unreality, relates to what I talked about regarding the first essay. Traditionally—certainly when I came of age, though I gather this is not as universally the case today as it was then—the dating and sex rituals were such that the male could pretty much always be assumed to want sex and to be willing to do just about anything to get it, and the female served as the gatekeeper. In a sense, she was the one in control. Both parties had to turn their key for the missiles to fire, but since the one party always turned his key, in practice the missile’s firing or not was entirely determined by the other.

Well, in porn the women always put out. The men don’t need to be patient, they don’t need to jump through hoops, they don’t need to pay, they don’t need to deal with the uncertainty that no matter what they do there’s a good chance there will be no sex after all. The women are always willing, immediately; the sex always happens.

And of course the women always look the way the male porn consumer wants them to look. Though note that because there are a near-infinite range of preferences among men, porn women fit into a near-infinite number of niches. If you have no experience of it, you might assume that all the porn would be of 18 year old super skinny blondes with giant breasts and shaved pussies or whatever, but you’d be wrong. There are teenagers, middle-aged women, and grandmothers; white, black, and Asian; super tall, average height and literal dwarves; thin, extremely obese, and everything in between; very white bread “all-American” faces, and blatantly ethnic features; amputees, etc., because there are guys into basically every possible type of “look.”

And, yes, the specific acts the women do, or have done to them, are also typically what the male porn consumer wants to see. Though, again, that hardly means all or almost all porn fits the feminist stereotype of raping and degrading women. Go on the internet right now and you can easily find a video of a girl gang-banged by ten guys insulting her and calling her names who then laughingly boot her out the door naked and cum-splattered when they’re through with her, because there’s a (mostly male) audience for that. But you can also quickly find a video of a guy giving head to a sexually empowered woman who’s clearly calling the shots in their encounter, or a video of a woman shitting in a guy’s mouth, because there’s a (mostly male) audience for that too.

You can argue that all these porn types still objectify the women by valuing them only insofar as they fit some male fantasy, whether a given such fantasy happens to involve blatantly abusing and humiliating a woman or not. And I suppose that’s true. In the same sense that you objectify the protagonist in a romance novel by how well they fit your fantasy of the perfect guy, or you objectify the actor in an action movie by how well they combine with the ultra-expensive special effects to get your adrenaline going, or you objectify a wide receiver by focusing on how many points his performance in today’s game earned for your fantasy team. I mean, that’s kind of par for the course that we routinely value people—especially public figures who are strangers to us of whom we’re just consuming images—for how they meet our needs, and don’t in some ideal sense appreciate them and every aspect of them as complete human beings equally important as ourselves.

Admittedly, it remains the case that porn is still mostly male-driven—whether it’s depicting men degrading women, women degrading men, or sex without anyone being particularly degraded—and so in this particular case of objectification we’re talking about objectifying disproportionately women, but so what? Of course the market is going to cater to what consumers want. You’re more than welcome to change that balance by uploading other types of porn of your own, or simply bringing your more female (or gay, or Latina, or transgender, or Hmong, or what have you) preferences to the market and thereby changing the resulting supply by changing the demand.

As you can gather, I’m mostly pro-porn and don’t agree with its critics. I think the fact that so much porn, of almost every imaginable variety, is easily available, and for free at that, is a major plus of the era we live in. I think women are phenomenally beautiful—admittedly, some more than others—especially without clothes so you can actually see everything, and I certainly don’t want it to be the case that the only naked women I see in my entire life are the (extremely) few I’m fortunate enough to get to sleep with. And as awesome as it is to see naked women, seeing them in various sexual contexts is all the awesomer. I definitely don’t want to lose that.

But it’s not like I can’t see the other side, like I think that porn is an unmixed good, like there is no plausible anti-porn position.

For one thing, let’s go back to the point about the porn market. I’m not an extremist believer in laissez faire capitalism, in general or as it concerns porn specifically; I don’t think you can end all debate simply by saying that the market serves to give us the porn we want, and that it’s a good thing when we get what we want.

“The market gives us what we want” is oversimplified, indeed oversimplified enough to be false. That isn’t how capitalist markets work. It’s a loop—demand affects supply but supply also affects demand. What’s available, what we’re given, affects what we want, generally in the direction of what generates the most profits for us to want. Sometimes this is a largely impersonal, unintentional process that develops as a byproduct of a huge number of decisions made for other reasons, and sometimes it happens through conscious manipulation. But it’s not like there is some pre-existing, unchanging set of consumer porn preferences in the world—those preferences are constantly evolving, constantly being shaped.

And even if the market did just respond to our desires in an uncomplicated, unidirectional way, would it always be a good thing?

Our free choices filtered through the market might result in us consuming certain forms of porn in a way analogous to our consuming lots of fast food and sugary beverages and the like. Sure, people are getting what they want in a sense, but that doesn’t rule out that their doing so is unhealthy for them as individuals, for society as a whole, or both.

The capitalist form of freedom not uncommonly has deleterious consequences. It wouldn’t be surprising if the ready availability of porn has deleterious consequences. Indeed, maybe some of those deleterious consequences involve the only issues that woke folks tend to notice, which is to make life even shittier for members of the designated oppressed groups.

So I’m not closed-minded to a discussion of such issues, like this essay. What is the process that determines what porn we get and what opportunities are there to change that? What are the harms and the benefits of porn as it is, and what would the harms and benefits be of the realistic alternatives? To what extent would we have to limit people’s freedom in order to do porn differently? Etc.

Let me respond to a couple other things from this essay.

For one thing, though initially I’m inclined to agree with Srinivasan (and her students) that it’s no longer realistic to think one could successfully censor or block porn, is that really true?

I mean, to eliminate porn from the face of the earth, sure, that’s not going to happen. But to drastically reduce its consumption? I don’t know that modern technology and the like renders it “too late” to do that.

Think about what has been done with kiddie porn. Certainly such porn exists, but in many decades of consuming porn—magazines, rented videos, the Internet, etc.—you know how many images or films of kiddie porn I have seen in my life? Zero.

Well, that’s only because you never looked for it, one might respond. True, but there are plenty of forms of porn that I’ve seen prior to ever intentionally looking for them. The fact is there’s enormously less kiddie porn around and it’s enormously harder to access because of the criminal sanctions.

Further, it’s not just that it’s harder to access if you try, but that you’re heavily incentivized not to try. It happens not to be a subject matter that turns me on at all, but who’s to say I wouldn’t have at some point sought to access it for other reasons? Like, the way you might slow down and look at an accident, not because it’s a turn-on to see mangled cars or mangled bodies, but just from the kind of morbid curiosity that can make gross things fascinating.

Or, depending on what specifically we’re talking about, maybe I shouldn’t say it automatically wouldn’t be a turn-on for me. Surely plenty of 16 and 17 year old girls are indistinguishable looking from plenty of 18, 19, and 20 year old girls, so since I definitely am turned on by the latter, presumably I would be by the former as well.

But I haven’t sought, and won’t seek, to access any such material because of the deterrent effects of the punishment.

So it’s not a matter of underage porn being non-existent or impossible to consume. The point is that, as a result of the laws and regulations, the number of people who consume underage porn is low to very low, because it requires taking major risks of major harm.

If tomorrow all the laws and regulations against underage porn were broadened to include all porn, surely the total consumption of porn would plummet.

Obviously I’m not saying that I’m in favor of that, that it would be good to do that. I’m just saying it wouldn’t be impossible to do it, that it’s not futile to move against porn in that way.

But I also want to return to her discussion of her female students’ description of the effects of porn on their dating reality, the way it pressures them in the way it alters young males’ expectations of what sex is and how women are supposed to behave sexually.

I find that kind of thing fascinating—human behavior and all the factors that influence it, especially in as important and emotionally intense an area of life as sex.

One thought I have is, why is there this gender difference in porn as “education”? Allegedly, the boys pretty much take porn at face value to be revealing to them what sex is really like in the adult world, how things work in this previously hidden area of life, whereas it doesn’t generate the same false beliefs in the girls. Why is the unreality of porn apparent to one gender and not the other? And what needs to happen for it to be equally apparent to both?

But I also find myself instinctively reacting against the implied weakness of girls, this notion that girls somehow have no choice but to go along with whatever expectations the patriarchy has used porn to instill into boys. For heaven’s sake, pull up your socks and say no. No dopey teenage boy’s “expectations” can force you to blow him and swallow, regardless of what porn he has consumed.

Which is not to say that I’m denying there is ever such pressure. I’m sure her students are being sincere in what they report. But I’m skeptical that the primary response should be to lessen that pressure by moving against porn in some way. I think the focus should be on empowering people.

Because in one form or other the pressure will always be there. That is, I don’t think you will ever create a world where there are never intimate situations where one party has sexual expectations, desires, preferences of the other party that run contrary to what that other party wants.

The bottom line needs to be that everyone, regardless of gender, regardless of gay or straight, regardless of member of oppressed group or member of oppressor group, needs to have the strength and the confidence to not go along with something sexual that is unwanted. Everybody should be doing all and only what they want to do, and if that happens to put you in conflict with the present trends in porn, so be it, because it’s up to you.

If it’s a question of rape, if it’s a question of something coercive, then that’s different. But if it’s a matter of disappointing some dude and his porn-inspired fantasies, that doesn’t obligate you in the slightest. Chicks have always disappointed dudes in those circumstances (believe me); you can too.

I mean, where were these girls when I was that age? I don’t recall girls giving in so readily to horny guys’ pressure.

“Well, that’s because, as the essay says, porn is different now.” OK, maybe. Or maybe it’s that now when a girl complains “This boy tried to pressure me to go farther with him sexually than I was comfortable with,” the response they’re likely to get is, “I fully empathize with you. What you’re experiencing is the effects of patriarchy and porn. You’re the victim, and it’s just one of the ways you’re being oppressed. We need to continue our work to defeat the oppressors so people like you need never experience such discomfort,” instead of what it should be, which is, “Really? Did you tell him to go fuck himself?”

To be clear, I’m absolutely not opposed to a girl emulating the raunchiest of porn sluts. But it should be if and only if it’s what she wants.

Well, I have plenty more to say on this essay and on porn, but I have to stop myself from going on forever, so let’s move on to the third essay, the title essay, The Right to Sex.

Srinivasan begins this essay with the story of Elliot Rodgers, and more broadly the “incel” phenomenon.

Rodgers was a loon who murdered a bunch of people in a rage because women—high dating market value women especially—unjustly refused to have sex with him.

Incels are people, like Rodgers, who self-identify as “involuntarily celibate” and lament that women dispense their sexual favors according to an implicit system of dating market value of which they are at the bottom, and that therefore they don’t get to participate in this essential area of life.

Srinivasan makes the obvious point that Rodgers and guys like him are mistaken to think that they are entitled to sex, and that women who refuse them are thereby wronging them. But she goes on to speculate about ways in which it still might make sense to criticize and question sexual desire—who we find attractive, who we choose to have sex with, etc.

The history of feminism, she recounts, has been filled with debates of this kind, often quite bitter. There are feminists who insisted that any kind of sex other than lesbianism constituted acquiescing in an unjust patriarchal system, fraternizing with the enemy basically. Others widened this critique to include lesbianism as well, arguing that lesbian couples were just duplicating the unjust heterosexual hierarchy, with one lesbian in effect functioning as the (male) oppressor and the other functioning as the (female) oppressed, and that therefore transcending sexuality and choosing celibacy was the only politically correct option. Others celebrated the female empowerment of women having whatever kind of sex they wanted—heterosexual, homosexual, vanilla, kinky, paid, whatever.

Her position is that it’s a mistake to treat sexual preferences as a given, that it’s important to recognize that they are a product of the patriarchy. (That is, the hierarchy of desirability reflects the hierarchy of privilege. White folks are more desired as partners than black folks, cis-gendered than trans, abled than disabled, etc., because they are more privileged.)

And while it’s wrong to legally or morally require people to have sex in ways that combat this hierarchy, it’s not wrong in quite as obvious or simplistic a way as it might at first seem.

One commentator, for instance, dismissed the matter by saying that you can’t be obligated to have sex with someone any more than you can be obligated to share your sandwich with them. But wait, Srinivasan says, you sort of can be obligated to share your sandwich with someone.

Say, for example, that the clique of popular kids at school established a practice of getting together every day at lunch and trading and sharing their sandwiches as a bonding kind of thing, and as a form of inclusion and exclusion, since they made sure that the minorities, disabled, fat, etc. kids knew that they were not welcome to participate. It really wouldn’t be so unreasonable, she says, for a teacher or a school to institute a policy that if you’re going to share sandwiches like that you have to include everyone. (I remember when I was in grade school, there was a rule that you weren’t allowed to give out birthday party invitations on school grounds during the school day unless you were inviting everyone—or at least everyone of your gender—from your class.)

However, she goes on, let’s say a group of kids like that is getting together regularly for sexual experimentation, and similarly excluding the “less desirable” kids. Presumably no one would ever advocate a policy of requiring the popular kids to have sex with anybody and everybody.

So I believe her bottom line is that sex is a special case. Normally it can be good to encourage if not require sharing more broadly and allowing more broad participation in an activity so that the people disvalued by the patriarchy aren’t left out. But sex’s being such an important, sensitive, personal, intimate area of life is enough to override this consideration of fairness.

The position she ends up advocating is that, on both an individual and societal level, we need to work on changing our sexual desires to the extent that they are malleable. No, you can’t just wave a magic wand and instantly think morbidly obese people are hot if you’ve felt the opposite your whole life. But there is at least some wiggle room with such desires, some ability to gradually transform them by consciously focusing on how you’ve been manipulated into having the desires you have, how acting on them has made you a participant in a system of oppression, and how you’d be a better person and feel better about yourself insofar as you came to have different desires.

And on a societal level, activism should push for inclusion of the oppressed when it comes to the celebrities, the models used in marketing, etc. that are held out as standards of beauty. (This already happens of course. Hence the models with terrible skin conditions that have popped up in recent years, the controversy over that beer company using a transgender model, etc.)

So let me offer a few thoughts.

First off, it’s ludicrous to think you’re entitled to be sexually desired, entitled to have the partner of your choosing or any partner for that matter.

That’s why women who get so upset about males almost always preferring younger women get no sympathy from me, especially the more accusatory and judgmental they are about it, because it manifests that same sense of entitlement.

I get it. You’re fifty and 99% of guys, all else being equal, would rather fuck your twenty year old daughter than you. That’s unfortunate for you. But women routinely prefer other men to me because they have more money, or a more alpha personality, or a more prestigious job, or, yes, are considerably younger than me, and while I obviously would prefer instead to be every woman’s first choice, it would never in a million years occur to me to be mad at women about this.

You like what you like. On the rare occasions that happens to be me, that’s awesome. When it means I get passed over, so be it. You’re not wronging me. Any more than anyone is wronging you because they’re more attracted to some other woman because of age or weight or whatever.

I’m also not convinced that dating market values reflect the woke system of oppressor/oppressed anywhere near as neatly as she implies.

Asians are oppressed in the woke system, right? (Not at the very bottom, but somewhere below the middle, anyway.) But my impression is that Asian women tend to have fairly high dating market value. (Certainly, anecdotally, the men I’ve known in my life have typically been equally or more attracted to them as they have been to white women.) Hispanics (or Latinx people or whatever this week’s mandatory nomenclature is) are oppressed too, yet there sure seem to be a lot of Latina sex symbols in Hollywood, popular music, etc. Blacks are surely oppressed if anyone is; someone will have to inform Denzel Washington, Idris Elba, Wilt Chamberlain and his claimed ten thousand lifetime sex partners, etc. that that’s why women are always passing them by to throw themselves at white guys.

And that’s just the—I don’t want to say “natural” desires—but the desires as they are independent of activism intentionally seeking to change them. That’s not counting the heavier Barbies, the black Disney princesses, the Downs syndrome, wheelchair, and transgender models now used in advertising because people raised enough of a stink about young, thin, blonde, white women previously supposedly being held out as the sole paragons of beauty.

By the way, shouldn’t white males all be gay for each other if the most privileged people are the most desirable? Why are we sullying ourselves with dames at all?

Yet in the end I do see some merit to her position, that whom we desire sexually is neither some purely biological given nor something we have full conscious control of, but is something that is malleable to some extent, and furthermore that there is reason to seek to adjust in certain directions.

For example, I think in a lot of ways my preferences as far as whom I’d want to date, whom I find sexually attractive, etc. fit the conventional system of dating market value and in a lot of ways they don’t. For whatever complex reasons—genes, environment, whatever.

I don’t find literally all female body types attractive, but I find many, many of them attractive—thin, medium-build and fat. (And by fat, I don’t mean women who are barely plump or thick, like 160 pounds or something, but genuinely fat women.) Again, not all body types in these categories, but plenty of thin women, plenty of medium-build women, and plenty of fat women have bodies I think are hot to very hot.

Race has minimal impact for me. I suppose I’m attracted to a higher percentage of white women, but it’s not remotely close to a deal breaker if a woman is some other race. (And for that matter, within the category of white, I’m equally or more attracted to subsets that the woke folks would count as at least somewhat oppressed—e.g., Latina, Arab, etc.)

All heights are fine, certainly. If anything I find myself especially drawn to unusually tall women, but, again, it’s certainly not some kind of deal breaker if a woman isn’t in the top 5% or whatever of women heightwise. (Though truth be told, the whole transgender fad has kind of fucked with this one. When I see some 6’2” woman and my first reaction is to think how hot she is, now I immediately feel that hesitation of, “Oh wait. That might be a dude. Or at least used to be a dude.”)

Actually plenty of factors—being absurdly tall like that, having unusually big tits, having waist-length hair, whatever—are like wonderful bonuses if they happen to be there, while not at all being negatives if they’re lacking. Or say, it would be hot if a girl had a sexy French accent, but it’s not like I feel some sort of disappointment about the 99%+ women who don’t.

As far as personality, I’m guessing the patriarchy wants me to be most drawn to women who are submissive, eager to meet my needs and desires without requiring the same degree of reciprocation, etc. If so, then I definitely defy that one. All else being equal, I am at least as attracted to women who would be considered independent, assertive, etc.

On the other hand, I’m not the feminist wet dream as far as my preferences. The obvious factor that will immediately mark me as the enemy is age. There’s no getting around the fact that, all else being equal, the average 20 year old woman is hotter than the average 30 year old, who’s hotter than the average 40 year old, who’s hotter than the average 50 year old, and so on.

I’ll also admit I’m typically not going to be as attracted to disabled women.

So, alas, I’m a sexist pig after all in not seeing all women as equally, maximally, beautiful and desirable as sex partners.

But the thing is, I recognize that my life is likely better by having as broad tastes (as broad tastes in broads) as I do than if I were obsessed with only some very narrow societal ideal of female beauty, and that it would likely be better still if my tastes were even broader. And that furthermore, the broadness of my tastes is not just good or bad for me but in its way good or bad for the objects of my desire. (Granted, 99% of women couldn’t care less if I’m attracted to them or not, but what I mean is that I see what she’s saying that the world would be a better place the more I, and people in general, were able to see more women as desirable.)

It’s a good thing, in some sense, that there are both 100 pound women and 300 pound women that I think are really hot. It would also be a good thing, in some sense, if there were not only 22 year old women but also 62 year old women that I thought were really hot.

I also find her position plausible that we have at least some limited control over our desires, that my not being attracted to 62 year old women is a mental block (imposed by the patriarchy or otherwise) that there’s a nonzero chance I could gradually overcome if I put my mind to it.

And not only that we have some limited ability to make changes in our desires, but that there can be an obligation to do so. To use an extreme example, if the only kind of woman you find yourself at all drawn to are Chinese women who have basically been crippled by having their feet bound, you have a problem that needs to be addressed.

In Coda: The Politics of Desire, Srinivasan follows up by discussing the responses, the comments, from fellow feminists and others, that she received on her The Right to Sex essay.

She chooses a peculiar form for this piece, listing eighty-eight distinct, numbered, one-paragraph points. (It’s funny that in some ways our minds work similarly. In these pieces, so often I feel like I’m just kind of listing various points I want to make—albeit not explicitly numbered—and kind of giving myself permission not to get too caught up in making sure they’re ordered and organized just right to fit an overarching structure.)

I’m not going to say as much about this piece—of course I won’t respond to all eighty-eight points—but I do want to make a couple of comments.

She points out that typically it’s not sex that’s denied the whiny incels, but sex with the woman they, and for the most part society, hold out as the most desirable. There are in reality extremely few men (or people in general) who are literally unable to secure a sex partner if they really want one. But as far as the top 5% hot blonde cheerleaders or whatever, yeah, extremely few guys end up fucking them. If you insist on having one of them or nothing, odds are it’s going to be nothing. But truly that makes you a voluntary celibate, not an involuntary celibate.

Furthermore, she contends, the dating market value of women is largely a function of which women will bestow the most prestige on a guy by fucking him. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that a guy would rather have sex with a woman he’s not attracted to that will impress society, than a woman he is attracted to that will elicit but a shrug from society. The idea instead is that the desires themselves are largely shaped by these expectations of approval. So, for the most part you really do desire the hot white woman over the obese Native American woman, but the reason you do is that on some subconscious level you know that you’re supposed to desire the hot white woman more, that it’ll be a much bigger boost for your reputation if you’re known to have scored with her.

I think there’s something to that. I don’t know that I value it all that much, or that it has shaped my preferences to the extent she’s describing, but it’s a factor of some nonzero weight for me. If two women are exactly equal across the board in terms of all the things that attract me, as well as being exactly equally available to me, but one is a woman society thinks is really hot and the other is one society thinks is unattractive, I know I’ll care about that at least as a tiebreaker. I don’t relish having to, in effect, reassure my friends, “No, believe me. I’m not settling because she’s the best I can get. I’m genuinely attracted to her and really into her,” when the alternative is being with someone that’ll make people think, “Whoa! Good job!”

Thankfully, it’s a pretty small factor. I’ve been with women who would be considered pretty damn hot (though 99% of women of that level instead reject me) and with women who would be considered to have quite low dating market value (though 95% of women of that level instead reject me). So the status boost is clearly not essential; I’m just admitting it’s not completely irrelevant to me.

One point she makes here that’s interesting is that, while some critics of her essay took her to task for trying to impose new desires on oneself out of political motives, the better way to understand what she’s suggesting is that we should seek to strip away the influence of the political factors that have been implicitly, involuntarily, imposed on us by the patriarchy. That is, don’t choose desires based on what’s politically correct; recognize that the desires you already have were largely shaped by what’s politically incorrect and do what you can to free yourself of these political factors.

The implication seems to be that if it weren’t for these artificial patriarchal factors (mis)shaping us, then we would truly be able to see all women, all people, as beautiful, whatever race, whatever body type, whatever disability, whether cis- or transgendered, etc.

Which seemingly means there are no “natural” preferences concerning sexual attraction, nothing determined by biology, by evolution, that any deviation from finding everyone equally beautiful and desirable is a product of (bad) politics, of the dreaded patriarchy fucking with us again.

If that is indeed what she’s saying, I don’t find it plausible. I would think that there are some such factors that are culturally determined like that—e.g., women are more likely, all else being equal, to want to fuck a guy in an expensive suit and tie of the type that is typically worn by men of substantial wealth and power—but that there are others that are in whole or in part not so determined. I wouldn’t be surprised if, for instance—assuming we could indeed strip away all the political stuff—all else being equal, more people would be sexually attracted to people in the age range of fertility, or that have visible signs of being in good health, (or that don’t have overpowering B.O.)

The fifth essay in the book is On Not Sleeping with Your Students.

She’s talking about at the college level specifically—professors sleeping with undergraduate and graduate students.

I entered academia in the early ’80s and was out by the ’90s. I was an undergraduate student, a graduate student (during which time I also taught classes, so simultaneously in both teacher and student roles), and a full-time instructor at the community college level.

Professors dating students wasn’t ubiquitous during those years in my experience, but nor was it all that uncommon. My impression was that it had been frowned on—if not outright prohibited—more in the past, but that by my time, with the sexual revolution having already happened and people having loosened up so much in their attitudes about sex in general, a lot fewer people cared or were particularly disapproving about it, roughly comparable to attitudes about premarital sex I suppose.

According to Srinivasan’s account, though, the trend was in the opposite direction from what I would have guessed. For most of history there was minimal challenge to the practice of relationships between professors and students. It was only starting in the ’80s and picking up steam gradually from there that feminists directed their fire against the practice, resulting in more and more schools prohibiting such relationships.

It varies. In some institutions it’s more frowned on than formally prohibited, but in general, attitudes—at least as reflected in official policies that can be influenced by activism—are considerably more anti than they would have been decades ago.

But attitudes were a mixed bag even in my day. There were professors who disapproved of the practice and didn’t participate in it. My undergraduate mentor was one such professor. His position was that it was a bad idea, that it was unprofessional. Not to mention a good percentage of professors were married so they were not in the dating market anyway. (Which I know doesn’t rule out their cheating with a student, but I don’t think that was anything at all common.) I would guess, and it’s only a guess, that half or so of single professors were open to dating students (in the sense of not disapproving of it, not in the sense that all of them were in fact engaging in the practice).

So plenty of people on all sides of the issue. But I think the consensus was that, in any case, it’s a matter of individual moral judgment. It was just one of the countless aspects of being a professor and making your own decisions about your classroom and students that was left to you as a professional to determine. I don’t recall there being any push anywhere I was for any kind of formal prohibition.

That’s as regards consensual relationships. Sexual harassment type concerns were indeed becoming more of an issue toward the tail end of my time in academia. That got to be quite controversial and consequential; more on that below.

I think when I got my first teaching position as a graduate student, I pretty much followed the lead of my mentor and figured it was unprofessional to mix my occupational role with something as personal as dating and sex. Eventually, though, I loosened up and dropped that self-restriction.

Some of it I’m sure was just the peer-influence that almost no one else seemed to care about such things or ethically assess the phenomenon that way. I doubt that was all that much of a factor, though, since I’ve never been one to seek to stay morally in step with those around me. I’ve always been a maverick or non-conformist about such things, for better or worse.

Probably the bigger factor was simply that I was a horny young dude and I didn’t want to artificially close off a whole set of potential opportunities.

I mean, in the abstract there are probably reasons to be wary of just about any way of coupling up: Don’t sleep with someone you work with, don’t sleep with someone who used to be involved with a friend of yours, don’t sleep with your student, don’t sleep with someone more than x years apart from you in age, don’t sleep with someone who started off as a friend as it could fuck up the friendship, don’t sleep with someone who’s emotionally vulnerable, etc. For that matter, should we really be hitting on women in bars and social situations like that, taking things in a sexual direction with a total stranger just because her externals attract us?

It’s like, as long as it’s not someone you know or someone you don’t know, you’re fine. Otherwise keep it in your pants.

So at some point I suppose I figured, fuck it, I rarely get laid because I’m a shy guy who doesn’t even interact with women much, so I’m not going to look for reasons to rule out the few women who happen to be in my life in some capacity.

I never, though, got to where I “pursued” students. I was never motivated by it. That is, I never made decisions about how to lecture, when to have office hours, how much individual feedback to give students, etc. based on the idea that I’d somehow be more likely to get laid if I did it this way rather than that way. I certainly never treated a student differently because I was or wanted to be sleeping with her.

It was more like (and we’re talking, by the way, about a quite small number of people during all those years, and most or all of them former rather than current students of mine), if it turned out we happened to enjoy each other’s company, if things flowed well between us, and if things then kind of drifted in a certain direction, then so be it. It didn’t feel—and maybe I’m kidding myself—like somehow I was seducing them or they were seducing me. It was just like meeting someone in any area of life and gradually coming to think that you might be compatible with each other and so you end up seeing each other romantically.

Anyway, Srinivasan is good about acknowledging why many people, including many feminists, oppose the increasing tendency for schools to discourage or prohibit professor-student relationships, but in the end she defends this trend.

She says that while female professor-male student relationships, gay relationships, etc. are by no means unheard of, you can’t ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of the time we’re talking about male professors—in a position of authority and much older—and female students, and all the implications that has for the usual woke concerns about the oppressors and the oppressed.

I don’t claim that she describes the professors in a cartoon villain way, but there’s certainly something predatory in her depictions, with the young and inexperienced schoolgirls being correspondingly vulnerable to the exploitative efforts of the professors.

I would say there are two main components to her discomfort with such relationships. One is much like my mentor’s position, that it’s unprofessional. She suggests that a professor should be striving for a certain ideal relationship with his or her students, and that seeing them as potential sex partners is not compatible with this ideal. Like an analyst and a patient, there’s a certain kind of mental openness and vulnerability that is healthiest for the professor-student relationship, and this is harmed by combining it with some kind of sexual tension or interaction, whether the dynamic of fending off someone who is or might be interested in you sexually, or the dynamic of willingly acceding to a sexual relationship and all the things that go along with that.

The second—not unrelated—reason she objects is more the woke thing of there being something inherently unhealthy about intimate connections between powerful males and powerless females.

As to the second, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin is famous for claiming that in an unjust sexist society like ours, all heterosexual intercourse is rape. That is, just as we presumably would question how “consensual” a sexual relationship between a master and a slave in the antebellum South could be, we should assess heterosexual sex in the contemporary world similarly as involving pseudo-consent at best, since males are oppressors and females are oppressed. (I’ve since read that she didn’t mean it as extreme as people interpreted it, that her position is more nuanced. But if not her, then I’m sure there have been feminists this radical on this point.)

My read on Srinivasan is that she’s kind of Dworkin-lite in this area. That is, she wouldn’t say that every time a male and a female have sex it is implicitly non-consensual due to the power dynamics of oppression in society overall, but that there is something at least suspect about it, that it really doesn’t take much more to tip it over into the category of non-consensual sex or rape.

So really the oppressed should be having sex with each other in solidarity (hurray lesbianism!), but OK, if you really must have heterosexual sex or otherwise fraternize with the enemy, let’s at least be really really careful with that and understand how easy it is for it to cross ethical lines of exploitation.

I see some merit in the first component of her position, and minimal though perhaps nonzero merit in the second component. On the whole I suppose I’m still on the other side of the issue from her, but I agree that there are reasons to have at least some misgivings about professors sleeping with students.

The factor that it still mostly comes down to for me is that we’re talking about adults who should be allowed to make their own choices about something as personal as dating and sex. Not that Srinivasan is dismissive of this consideration. But she thinks the negative consequences of these relationships is just enough to overcome the pro-freedom point. Whereas I think they fall short of doing so.

To me, there’s still a creepy infantilization to this radical feminist tendency to override women’s choices because they just don’t understand how they’re being exploited. There’s this notion that young women are being swept off their feet by these suave professors in positions of authority, vaguely seeking education and enlightenment and somehow ending up instead being used yet again as sex objects by men in ways that they only sort of consented to, and being severely damaged before their eyes are opened to what has really been done to them, and that they have to be protected from making the choices that put them in that position.

To which I reply: you know, sometimes two people, whether of different ages, different occupational roles, or whatever, decide they like each other and decide to have sex. Sometimes it works out really well for all concerned and they live happily ever after, sometimes one or both parties is seriously hurt and there’s a lot of rancor and regret, and usually it’s somewhere in between. That’s life. It’s true that—as a rule of thumb—you make less wise decisions about sex when you’re young and inexperienced than later, but that’s life too. You navigate through these things as best you can, and you hope to get better as you go along.

I don’t think it’s helpful to run such experiences through the interpretive filter of, “Oh, but it’s different when it’s a member of the oppressor class and a member of the oppressed class hooking up. Then it’s victimization.” No, sex in general is complicated and an emotional land mine (not to mention something that can be extraordinarily positive). You can give what advice you want to people about avoiding this or that choice as unwise and that’s fine, but in the end people have to make their own decisions in this area.

If you’re going to take the choice out of their hands and ban certain relationships, the bar for showing that the choice doesn’t really count as meaningful consent (because of age, mental capacity, whatever) needs to be set very high.

It’s also important to be aware of unintended consequences in this area. Aside from consensual relationships, late in my time in academia, like I say, there was considerably more attention given to “protecting” female students from sexual harassment, real and imagined.

I know it’s bad form for the “oppressors” to complain about something like this, but it was a scary time to be a (male) instructor. One misstep, or one accusation, and you could lose your career, maybe before it ever got off the ground.

Indeed, Srinivasan mentions a point I’ve often made, that you have to be careful about framing the issue as one of the powerful versus the powerless, because it’s plausible to see that dynamic as the opposite of what it seems on the surface.

That is, if I’m the most evil villainous professor ever, there’s a limit to what I can really do to a student. “Sleep with me or I’ll flunk you” is not a threat with no teeth at all, but it’s typically not going to do irreparable harm. Maybe you unjustly have to retake a class, maybe you have to do without a letter of recommendation that you deserve. Mostly it’s emotional harm. You’re insulted and used by someone who really should be acting in your best interests and should have a certain kind of healthy teaching relationship with you.

Not insignificant by any means, but let’s look at the flip side. If you bring a false accusation of sexual harassment against me, whether malicious or sincerely deluded, that could blow up my professional life. A professor has invested many, many years of training in academia, maybe gone heavily into debt in the process, probably isn’t trained to do much else in life for an income once he’s been on this track long enough, etc. You could easily cost me my job, and cause me to carry a stigma that makes me unemployable in the future. (When I applied for academic positions, there were typically triple digit applicants per job. It was all about ruling people out so the hiring committee could concentrate on only the remaining handful.) The professor typically has much, much farther to fall, in effect.

Anyway, the people I taught with, for better or worse, were very aware of and very responsive to the changing dynamic. As one of my fellow graduate student/instructors observed one time, “I used to be a lot freer with my students. If I saw some of them at a bar I’d sit and have a drink with them. If it was more convenient than meeting in the office I’ve met students at their apartment or at mine. I got invited along and went hiking with some students one time. Just various random social things like that here and there. But nowadays I really have my guard up when it comes to my female students. Things like that with my male students, no one cares. I can still be myself around them, still hang out, whatever. But no way in hell I’d have any kind of interaction like that with a female student anymore. I will never see them except in the classroom or in my office during designated office hours with the door open. I can’t take the risk; this is my career.”

He went on to talk about the ramifications of this, how it wasn’t at all clear that his female students were better off because he refused to interact with them in the ways he could still interact with male students, that maybe that kind of informal socializing and barrier breaking was a good thing that students benefitted from to some degree, and now half his students were excluded from that.

Sure, one response is that the problem here is the inequality, and that the solution is that he should cut off all but the most formal interactions with his male students as well to make it equal. But that could be seen as leveling downward. Maybe he’s right that there’s at least some small benefit to students to seeing their instructor as a real person, having open-ended friendly chats with him at the bar, whatever. I don’t know that it’s much of a solution to say, well, let’s just deprive both sexes of any such benefits rather than only one in order to make it equal.

But like I say, I am sympathetic to a degree with Srinivasan’s position. Just as my mentor explained it to me decades ago, there’s something to be said for regarding the teaching relationship as an ideal, as something close to sacred, and of not risking that relationship by adding a romantic or sexual element to it. I’d still leave it up to the individual judgment of the people involved, but I’d respect someone who rules out in advance any sexual interaction with students.

These are complicated ethical issues, with a lot of factors cutting in different directions. I don’t think what she says in this essay is in any way crazy or unreasonable.

The book’s final essay is Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism.

She talks about a number of issues here, but I think the theme is that feminism, and leftist politics in general, needs to navigate through a lot of tricky areas, make a lot of difficult choices. There can be conflicts between short term goals (bettering the lot of the oppressed today, within current structures) and long term goals (increasing the probability of defeating and overturning current structures and somewhere in the distant future establishing something better). There can be problems focusing on, say, the oppression that all or almost all women have in common and contesting that, when it ignores the fact that women closer to the bottom are probably suffering much more from other oppression that women closer to the top don’t have to contend with. Feminists can be insufficiently willing to acknowledge and contend with forms of oppression other than sexism and seek useful alliances, etc. in contesting them, or too willing to do so to where significant feminist concerns get short shrift or are ignored. Certain choices can be made for their symbolic or rhetorical appeal, which turn out to have unintended consequences that can outweigh any such symbolic benefit.

As important as anything, though feminists emphasize the relative powerlessness of women and oppressed folks in general, in certain pockets of society, on certain issues, they in fact have gotten themselves into position to wield significant power, and there the challenge is how to do so responsibly, how to avoid mimicking the deleterious choices of others who wield power.

Specifically, to what extend should feminists seek and wield the power of the carceral state, and use coercion and punishment in general against their enemies when they have the opportunity to do so?

She talks at some length, for instance, about prostitution. Pretty much all feminists agree that prostitution is a manifestation of patriarchal oppression, that johns exercise their privilege by buying the services of prostitutes who have to sell their bodies in order to survive. The question, then, is what to do about that, insofar as you gain sufficient power to set the policies.

You can use a punitive approach of criminalizing it and severely punishing everyone involved—pimps, prostitutes, johns. You can use some more selective criminalization approach, such as by licensing and regulating a certain limited number of prostitutes in certain areas and criminalizing anyone else involved in prostitution, criminalizing the buying but not the selling of sex, etc. You can decriminalize prostitution and treat it as no different than the buying and selling of any other service. You can ignore or set the issue to one side while you focus a hundred percent on seeking the kinds of more general societal solutions (sufficient jobs at a living wage for everyone who wants one, universal health care, universal child care, etc.) that will eventually change the facts on the ground to where no one is forced to prostitute themselves to survive.

The evidence, she says, indicates that the punitive approaches, whatever the intentions behind them, invariably end up harming the sex workers themselves the most. That if you want to do more than strike a symbolic blow against the patriarchy and establish your anti-prostitution bona fides, and you want to help the people who suffer the most from prostitution, you’ll probably want to try a different approach.

On prostitution, though, I want to step back and talk about her opening assumption, which is that prostitution constitutes men (rich, white, native-born, cis-gendered, heterosexual, etc. men especially) oppressing women.

When I look at something like prostitution, I see a phenomenon that surely was created and is sustained through an extraordinarily complex combination of economic factors, social factors, religious factors, psychological factors, moral factors, and God knows what else that I could never begin to untangle and understand. Are sexism and other various “isms” among the reasons prostitution exists in its present form? I would think so. But I would also think that there’s way more to it.

Basically, there are some people who lack sex and want it bad enough (or a certain kind of sex, or sex with a certain kind of partner, etc.) that they’re willing to pay for it, and other people who are able to meet that need who are willing to accept money for doing so.

At a certain level it’s pretty fortunate to be of the gender such that you can more or less get sex whenever you want just because you have tits and a pussy, and, if you choose, you can have the other gender—that can’t get sex so automatically—pay you just because you have tits and a pussy.

Am I oppressing you by taking advantage of your financial need by paying you for sex? Are you oppressing me by taking advantage of my sex need by having me pay you for sex? Some of each? Is there no oppression or exploitation at all but just a free exchange of one good (money) for another (sex)?

She would say that the john is oppressing the prostitute because in the grand scheme of things it’s men who have the power and money and women who lack it, and the overwhelming majority of johns are men and the overwhelming majority of prostitutes are women.

But even if the average man has more power and money than the average woman, there are an enormous number of poor men and rich women.

Some prostitution more or less fits what she’s saying and some doesn’t. There are sex workers who have no realistic way of getting enough money for their drug habit except by prostituting themselves in the most degrading ways, and there are sex workers who make a comfortable six-figure income and have many, many other options but do this for money because they want to. (Believe me. I knew one personally. She had a master’s degree and was highly employable in well-paid, white collar jobs. The patriarchy didn’t block her from surviving, and indeed thriving, without prostitution. But she liked the work, thought it was a hoot, liked setting her own hours and being self-employed, and made really good money at it.) There are johns who get off on the fact that what to them is some pittance of easily disposable income gives them the opportunity to fuck some desperate hot teenager up the ass or whatever, and there are working class guys who develop the equivalent of addictions to cam girls and run up massive credit card debts that they can’t possibly afford because at some subconscious level they think paying all this money will make this pretty naked girl like them.

The question of who’s using who varies on a case-by-case basis.

I mean, it’s not that I don’t get what she’s saying. I remember long ago reading in an online forum of sports fans some idle conversation about sex tourism, and the one guy kind of boasting about all the fun he had had over the years with his various Thai prostitutes (or whatever Asian country it was). One could gather from other of his posts that he was a pretty far right wing Republican type as far as his political and social views. I remember thinking: It’s not as if those facts are unrelated. This is a guy who, if he could wave a magic wand and institute various social programs and wealth transfer programs and the like such that all the world’s people could have at least a minimally decent life without having to do things that degrade them, he would never in a million years do so, because that would mean that 15 year old Thai girls would no longer be so desperate that they have to give blow jobs to middle-aged to older Harvey Weinstein-looking assholes like him.

So certainly there can be connections between prostitution and injustice, between prostitution and a system that—motivated in part by things like sexism and racism—generates desperate people with few options.

But that’s not the whole story, any more than saying that, in prostitution, one person freely exchanges money with another person who freely exchanges sex is the whole story.

Moving on, she’s clearly wary of carceral solutions to feminist problems in general in this essay.

Again, in a lot of cases there’s the matter of unintended consequences.

For example, as she relates, in some jurisdictions, feminists have successfully fought for mandatory arrest policies in domestic violence cases. That is, if a woman, say, calls 911 because her mate is beating her, threatening her, whatever, and the police come out to investigate, they no longer have the option of not escalating beyond a warning. In the past, it was not uncommon in such situations, feminists knew, for a woman to change her story and insist nothing untoward had happened, or to declare that she didn’t want to press charges, that they were confident that they would work things out as a couple, because the guy had threatened her that she damn well better say that and get rid of the cops or else. The idea was, you can protect women from being coerced into shielding their abusers like that by requiring the cops to arrest the guy regardless of what the couple says after they get there.

What the evidence shows has happened, though, is that such laws have made women far less likely to call the cops on their abusers in the first place, because they don’t like losing that choice over what happens to him. It may be that the man’s being incarcerated indefinitely is an even worse option for the woman than his remaining free (and maybe getting a scare put into him by having the cops come out). If she relies on him financially, what will happen to her if he’s incarcerated? If he’s incarcerated because of her, will he come out in a much more murderous rage in a month or six months or whenever he’s released? Will she lose him permanently if he’s incarcerated long term, or if he’s undocumented and deported? Granted, he was abusing her enough on this occasion to warrant seeking help, but does that have to mean she doesn’t love him and is OK with his being out of her life permanently?

Some women decide it’s best not to start down that road at all if doing so means the inevitable arrest of their partner, which is contrary to the whole feminist purpose of such laws.

In general, she says, feminists and leftists need to be very, very careful about allying themselves with the carceral state and other right wing forces, with relying on punitive measures carried out primarily by the very people and institutions that keep down women and other oppressed people.

With new power comes new difficulties and new responsibilities. This is especially true for those whose acquisition of power rests on their ethical authority: on their promise to bring into being something new and better. Feminists need not abjure power—it is, in any case, too late for that—but they must make plans for what to do when they have it. Too often, feminists with power have denied their own entanglement with violence, acting as if there were no hard choices to be made: between helping some and harming others, between symbolism and efficacy, between punishment and liberation.

There were more things I thought about to say concerning this essay, and for that matter I could have said plenty more about the other essays, but I want instead to offer more of a general reaction to this book.

The book reads to me as being the product of a certain bubble, as taking for granted certain fundamental theoretical claims and so only really being addressed to those who share that same framework and only want to debate and work out the remaining details.

It’s written from the leftist perspective now common in certain academic circles (and that has to some extent broken out beyond those circles through social media, etc. in recent years) that sees the world hierarchically, with people’s positions in the hierarchy being determined by their race, gender, sexuality, and various other factors like that.

According to this worldview, there are a few people at the very top who are pure oppressors and a few at the very bottom who are pure oppressed, because they check all the boxes in every category, but mostly people are oppressors in certain respects and oppressed in others. It’s morally obligatory to “check your privilege” for all the categories where you are, relatively, on top, and to acknowledge the legitimate claims of all those who are below you in that category.

Thus, say, white, straight, non-immigrant, non-poor women are right to see men as the enemy and to seek to overthrow them from their position of tyranny, but at the same time, it’s imperative that they understand that a black woman, a lesbian, a transgender woman, a disabled woman, etc. has claims against them and must be deferred to, and furthermore that men are not monolithically oppressors but one must instead recognize that while black men, Native American men, Palestinian men, gay men, etc. lose points for being men, they need to be, in other respects, accepted and respected as co-oppressed.

And so everyone is kind of ranked, “intersectionally” as they say, according to all their group memberships.

Furthermore, these forms of discrimination, these forms of oppression, are so pervasive, are so wrapped up in and responsible for all the evils of the world, that it is morally and politically obligatory to be laser-focused on them to the exclusion of all else. (Hence the common refrain of critics of these folks: “Why do you have to make everything about race?,” etc.)

In every interaction, every relation, everything that the relative oppressor party does, says, feels, values, etc. is to be understood in terms of their seeking to safeguard and extend their privilege. Everything that the relative oppressed party does is to be understood as a product of their oppression or of their efforts to cope with it or fight back against it.

Every issue, every question of means or ends, is run through this same filter. To know whether you should support or oppose involvement in this war, abide by or override this particular civil liberties principle, use violence or nonviolence, support or oppose this potential candidate, law, policy change, revolution, or what have you, the question that always must be asked is: On the whole will it change things for the better for members of the recognized oppressed groups (where the lower in the hierarchy the group is, the more weight its members deserve in the calculations)?

To let other factors intercede—to insist, for instance, that principles of free speech or nonviolence or democratic majority vote or free markets or rationality or whatever must be adhered to regardless of their effects on the social justice struggle on behalf of the oppressed groups—is to allow these other factors to, in effect, become tools of oppression.

Which, again, is not to say that everything is totally dogmatic from this standpoint. As long as you accept this basic framework, there is room to disagree about, for instance, whether it is wise or unwise to censor porn, to criminalize prostitution, etc.

Certainly I don’t think that this worldview is completely wrong in all respects. I don’t think its depiction of the world is as inaccurate as, say, a QAnon account of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities killing and eating babies or whatever. But on the other hand I’m pretty far from fully accepting it.

And so it feels like this kind of book can never connect with me in more than a limited way.

I appreciate it in a way, though. I had no trouble sticking with this book, reading it all the way through, and considering all it had to say. It’s a point of view that I feel like I benefit from exposing myself to. Not swallowing it hook, line, and sinker, but being open to it and letting it provoke various thoughts and reactions.

Yet I have the sense that that’s not reciprocal, that while I’m open to this perspective, woke people like this are not open to mine.

I mean, when she talks about her students and the issues they have with men pressuring them for sex, when she talks about how prostitutes experience life, when she talks about various feminist scholars in history and how they’ve positioned themselves and fought for certain changes, when she talks about correspondence she has had with transgender women and how they do or don’t feel welcomed by mainstream feminism, etc., I like hearing all those points of view. I find people and how they deal with life and what matters to them endlessly fascinating. But what I don’t hear in this book is anything I recognize as my perspective.

Now the obvious response would be that we don’t need to hear that perspective because the world is already dominated by the perspective of straight white males. That perspective is in this book and everywhere else because it’s ubiquitous. What matters is instead to give voice to the relatively voiceless, not to reiterate for the millionth time how the people on top see the world.

Except my perspective is not implicit here, not as far as I can discern. The only supposed version of me I see here are academic, impersonal, abstract oppressors. Women, transgendered folks, etc. in the book feel like flesh and blood people with thoughts, feelings, and experiences worth sharing, facing tough choices, being bounced around by forces not of their own choosing that they can’t fully understand, sometimes having to navigate through bad sex or bad relationships, etc. But the people not recognized as oppressed—which I guess in most respects would include me—are just a sort of undifferentiated Other or Enemy that must ultimately be defeated to free the rest of the world.

In a sense it feels like the people of this bubble are not speaking to me, and that while I have some willingness to listen to them anyway, they have no interest in listening to me. I feel like they’ve kind of cut themselves off, content to limit themselves to bonding with their co-oppressed in the struggle for social justice, but wary of fraternizing outside that group. It’s a kind of siege mentality, like they’ve convinced themselves of what victims they are and now base their identity on that, and find meaning in life by making everything about battling against this injustice that they suffer from.

In the end, insofar as I differ with the author and this perspective of the woke bubble, I’m not left with a feeling of defensiveness or anger or anything like that, as much as one of sadness. I’ll leave it at that.