Ideas I found interesting: Amia Srinivasan's "The Right to Sex"

Our choice of laundry liquids or clothes brands - that is, our individual consumer choices- cannot solve climate change or poverty. Similarly, we do not trust individuals’ ability to alter their own decision-making when it comes to issues such as discrimination during hiring. The typical progressive impulse in such situations is to impose centralised rule-making and authority: environmental protection laws, progressive taxation, and anti-discrimination legislation. 

What about desire: romantic, sexual desire?

Amia Srinivasan’s essay, “Does anyone have the right to sex?” poses two questions. The first is, does the allocation of desire, including who receives our own, and its distribution across the population, have a political or ethical quality? Having answered this in the affirmative, she poses a more difficult question: what ought we to do about this? To be clear, I will start my discussion by stating an unchallengeable axiom: bodily autonomy is sacrosanct, and so no one ever has an obligation to have sex with someone else. This immediately precludes us from the typical progressive option of government intervention to ‘redistribute’ sex, such as that envisioned in incel forum discussions.

Srinivasan surveys the history of discussion related to this topic: from political lesbianism, which held that it was impossible to have heteresexual sex without playing into and reinforcing the patriarchy, and that women who did want to do so were in fact experiencing a form of false consciousness, to the emergence of sex-positive feminism with Elizabeth Hull, who argued that feminists - and more generally, women - should not be made to feel guilty about the shape of their desires. This is an argument not only against an authoritarian direct intervention in people’s sex lives, but also against a censorious moralism which tells women that their desires are not their own, and therefore, are invalid.

So: believe what women - and people - say they desire. Seems simple enough, but the story does not end there. We can draw a comparison between current strands of sex-positivism and liberalism which characterise people as agents freely acting on their desires (whether hitting on someone at a bar, or selling their time and effort to a corporation), but which are both reluctant to interrogate the factors shaping those desires. Our desires are undoubtedly political - they are influenced by factors such as race, conformance to gender norms, wealth, and more. It would hardly seem appropriate to only try to make friends with people from a certain race; yet people’s ‘type’ - even if they do not explicitly acknowledge it - includes racial preferences. As Srinivasan explains,

“Yet simply to say to a trans woman, or a disabled woman, or an Asian man, ‘No one is required to have sex with you,’ is to skate over something crucial. There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want, but personal preferences – no dicks, no fems, no fats, no blacks, no arabs, no rice no spice, masc-for-masc – are never just personal.”Srinivasan concludes by acknowledging the ambiguity of the space that she finds herself in: no one has the right to be desired (or conversely, the obligation to desire someone else), but many (perhaps all) people’s desires are shaped by discriminatory forces that we would consider unacceptable in many other contexts. The question, then, is whether we have a duty to ‘transfigure, as best we can, our desires’ - a question she leaves open.

Funnily enough, I remember thinking about this topic and discussing it with my friends seven years ago, approximately when Srinivasan’s article was published. There are two threads that I suspect will come up time and again in this series of essays. Firstly, it really is remarkable how influential authors’ ideas permeate public consciousness - Srinivasan’s presentation of the intellectual history of the ‘sex wars’ in feminism felt like common knowledge to me, even though I didn’t know any of the names of the feminist authors who propelled their ideas into the mainstream. Being truly influential seems to be when your ideas are known further afield than your name. The second thread is that philosophy takes its most satisfying form - at least to me - when it takes a basic idea, the sort of idea you might think of in the shower, and takes it seriously. It would be lovely to have that level of confidence one day.

Back to the essay. How are we to shape our desires? This includes two sub-questions: 1) what factors ought I to introduce or remove from my desires, and 2) how can I actually genuinely achieve this? Luckily for you, I do not know the answer to either, so I will not pontificate or offer dating tips. I actually have very little experience of having a ‘type’ as such, and so perhaps I am not best placed to write this essay. I am dimly aware that I find red hair attractive, and yet have never acted on this historically, and so it seems unlikely to be a decisive factor in my desire. That main commonality (other than gender) between the people I have been attracted to is an expressive face (although, somewhat horrifyingly, every person I ended up in a relationship with has a trust fund and an engineer for a father - the first of which facts I learned only a while into each relationship, I should add).

But what constitutes an ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ reason to desire someone? Srinivasan notably focuses on typical axes of oppression - race, gender, class - when discussing the ways in which desire is political. I would posit, however, that we ought to go further than simplistically, for example, attempting to render ourselves appropriately ‘race-blind’ or ‘class-blind’ in our desires. A simple example from my own life, close to the ‘unacceptable’ end of the spectrum, was when an acquaintance said that they were dating someone because she had ‘the largest boobs of any girl who has been interested in me’. Physical attributes - height, weight, body type, breast or penis size - are commonly touted as factors which inform our desires. Those which are most out of our control, such as height, seem obviously unfair. Even supposing that other factors, such as weight or musculature are within our control (itself a highly contestable assumption), it is not clear to me why whether someone has control over an aspect of themselves makes it an acceptable factor in shaping our desire towards them.

Even if we focus on attributes of the mind - personality, intelligence, humour - complexities emerge. Of my previous partners, many or all have mentioned that my intelligence was attractive to them. This has always discomfited me, to a degree, because I have never viewed being ‘smart’ as a virtue, and indeed it is largely a product of both genetic and socio-economic luck.

That is all to say - while I could point to some specific cases (‘largest boobs’) as being unacceptable motivations for desire, I find it extremely difficult to describe generic criteria for deciding so. Srinivasan does not offer much more; her final suggestion is that we should leave ourselves open to desire, even where it may contradict what might normally be expected of us. This is hardly much of a revelation. The much more difficult question is whether we ought to shape our desire, so that it produces such unexpected outcomes in the first place.

Thus far, we have focused on whether we have a duty to adjust our desires. There is a flip side: what if I feel that I am desired by someone else for reasons I think are inappropriate in some way? The first thing to say on this topic is that I am not the most susceptible to this concern. As a straight white man, I have no clue what it would feel like to be fetishised for my race, as I have observed second-hand among female Asian friends. However, I recently read an article in Eleanor Gordon-Smiths’ Leading Questions segment, which reminded me of something in my own experience. A woman who had been on Ozempic and lost 50 kilograms was perplexed at how people treated her more nicely - in Gordon-Smith’s words, they would ‘turn on a switch you didn’t know they had’. As she notes, when people ‘hand over their attraction or attention or approval now that you’ve lost weight, they simultaneously undermine its value’. 

I myself was once very lanky and scrawny (some might argue against my use of the past tense), and while on an overseas exchange, I put on about ten kilograms of muscle because I lived literally on top of a gym. When I returned, I experienced far more interest from women who previously wouldn’t have given me the time of day. At the time, I was frankly resentful of this sudden shift in attitude. Yet looking back now, aside from the obvious (would I have preferred to have continued to be ignored?), my resentment seems ill-founded. Perhaps any of my increased maturity, confidence, or even just interesting life experiences may have been attractive. This points to a practical question which enters the picture: even supposing we know what we would like to be desired for, how could we possibly tell what factors are causing others to desire us? For that matter, can we even truly perceive the true cause of our own desires? This also raises another problem, which my housemate aptly termed ‘incel brain’. Does subjecting others’ desire of us to this level of scrutiny and interrogation ultimately poison our experience of that desire, even if we don’t detect any unacceptable reasons for the desire? My own experience suggests so.

I started this essay by mentioning how individual consumer choice cannot bring systemic change. Srinivasan finishes her essay in an uplifting tone about the possibility of following our desire beyond what society or politics might expect of us; perhaps even of influencing a shift in cultural norms through calls for self-empowerment such as ‘Black is beautiful’ or ‘big is beautiful’. While this sounds nice, and is likely an individually enlightening and empowering experience, she hardly makes the case that it might lead to actual changes in our desires - in the same way that anti-discrimination legislation can be argued to have made a dent in discriminatory hiring practices.

It hardly seems a satisfying conclusion. Srinivasan notes that the gay men in her life see themselves as ‘perpetrators and victims alike’; my female friends wince a little as they admit to only dating guys taller than them; I work out in the gym at least in some part to make myself more attractive and thereby make my own contribution to beauty standards’ race to the bottom. Even if individuals diligently do their best to leave themselves open to desiring a wider range of people, their efforts to make themselves more attractive deepen the grooves of the structures causing all the trouble in the first place - gender norms, class markers, and conformance to expectations. Yet there seems to be little else we can do. I have deliberately used the words ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ throughout this essay. Faced with the seeming lack of options to shift the norms of people’s desire, perhaps this state of affairs is something that we must accept not only begrudgingly, but also ethically. I am sorry to end this essay on a dour note: the prescription seems to be a world in which we act on our desire while trying to broaden its scope; but in which we make changes to be more attractive to others while attempting to stay true to ourselves.