When it comes to politics, radicalism and pragmatism might seem to be entirely at odds, but Srinivasan dares us to see how they need to be connected. She quotes the Black lesbian feminists of the Combahee River Collective, whose 1977 manifesto stated plainly that the ends did not always justify the means: “We do not want to mess over people in the name of politics.” Srinivasan places the most vulnerable people at the center of her analysis, insisting that any action has to be judged in terms of its effect on them. For a book by a philosopher that makes a vibrant case for theory, “The Right to Sex” keeps returning to the reality of lived experience. Paying attention to difference isn’t enough, she says. This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common - and reductive - understanding of the term. But after describing both men’s (very different) situations, she says that she knows “many more than two women who have been raped”: “With just one exception, none of the women I know pressed criminal charges or made a report to the police.”

In the first sentence of “The Conspiracy Against Men,” she says that she knows two men who were falsely accused of rape. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it. These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. She also makes space for ambivalence, for idiosyncrasy, for autonomy and choice. She wants nothing less than “to remake the political critique of sex for the 21st century: to take seriously the complex relationship of sex to race, class, disability, nationality and caste.” She writes about pornography and the internet, misogyny and violence, capitalism and incarceration. This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill. Moralizing has often been used as a way to exclude, to scold and to discipline, “wrongly imposing our ‘personal’ choices and ways of seeing onto others.” Laws enacted in the name of vulnerable and marginalized groups were, in actual practice, used against them - harming sex workers, buttressing the state’s police power, outlawing porn produced by sexual minorities while leaving mainstream pornography “untouched.” There were, Srinivasan concedes, good reasons for this shift. (The subtitle of the book’s American edition is “Feminism in the Twenty-First Century” - curiously not included on the British edition, which appeared first.) That older generation talked unapologetically about “morality” and “the patriarchy” since the 1980s, there’s been a turn away from that approach, Srinivasan writes, yielding “a feminism which does not moralize about women’s sexual desires, and which insists that acting on those desires is morally constrained only by the boundaries of consent.” The notion that the personal is political was of course central to the second-wave feminists of the 1960s and ’70s, whose critiques of sex Srinivasan takes inspiration from here, even if she doesn’t always agree with them. But Srinivasan, a professor of social and political theory at Oxford, wants us to think more fully about sex, as a personal experience with social implications: “Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing.”

Talk about it, yes argue over it, most definitely. Americans don’t think about sex nearly enough - this occurred to me after reading “The Right to Sex,” Amia Srinivasan’s quietly dazzling new essay collection.

Lost to time goodreada