The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

The Right to Sex contains six essays, but each returns to the same problem: how should feminism speak about freedom when sex is at once intimate and shaped by race, class, gender, disability, capital, and state power? Amia Srinivasan recovers the second wave’s willingness to carry “the personal is political” into desire itself while refusing its episodes of moral authoritarianism. Her aim is not to certify every sexual act as politically pure or impure. It is to restore a capacity for judgment weakened by a flattened version of sex positivity in which consent is asked to settle every question.

“The Conspiracy Against Men” begins with the conflict between “believe women” and anxiety about false rape allegations. Srinivasan treats belief as a necessary corrective to rape culture and institutional disbelief, but not as a formula detached from race and class. White women’s allegations have historically been weaponized against Black men, while police and prosecutors’ wrongful pursuit of poor defendants of color often disappears from the popular image of a false accusation. The point is not to discredit testimony about sexual violence; it is to see how patriarchy and the carceral state distribute credibility and innocence together.

“Talking to My Students About Porn” reopens the feminist sex wars of the 1970s and 1980s under the conditions of digital pornography. For many young people porn does more than represent an existing desire: it functions as sexual pedagogy, training bodily scripts, expectations, and hierarchies of desirability. Yet turning that diagnosis directly into censorship can strengthen conservatism, homophobia, and state control. Srinivasan’s achievement is not to declare the anti-porn or sex-positive side victorious, but to keep two truths in view: pornography can produce relations of power, and anti-porn politics can itself become oppressive.

The title essay begins with Elliot Rodger, the self-described incel who murdered six people, and unequivocally denies that anyone has a right to another person’s body, sex, or desire. It nonetheless asks why some bodies are systematically rendered undesirable while others are racialized as fetishes. Racism, ableism, class, and heteromasculinity do enter desire, but naming that injustice does not oblige an individual to desire anyone “correctly.” The accompanying coda therefore holds a necessary tension: desire is open to political criticism and collective reimagining, but cannot be remade through shame, quotas, or moral command.

“On Not Sleeping with Your Students” shows why consent is a necessary floor for sexual ethics without being its ceiling. Srinivasan does not simply declare adult students incapable of consent. She reframes the issue through a teacher’s duty: admiration, transference, and intellectual desire within education should be directed toward learning, and a teacher who converts that energy into sexual validation fails as a teacher. When male professors routinely sleep with female students, the practice also makes every woman student wonder whether mentorship, opportunity, and evaluation carry sexual conditions, degrading a classroom rather than only one relationship.

“Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism” then moves from interpersonal ethics to institutions. It criticizes carceral feminism’s reliance on police, prosecution, prisons, and punitive campus systems, which frequently bear down first on poor people, people of color, migrants, and sex workers. Srinivasan supports decriminalizing sex work because current workers need safety and collective rights, while refusing to declare every market exchange liberating. So long as poverty, care crises, and restricted labor choices remain, neither legal prohibition nor consumer freedom can abolish exploitation. Housing, income, health care, and labor power become preconditions of sexual freedom.

The book is strongest—and most unsettling—when it prevents the reader from occupying a spotless position. It defends consent as a historic feminist achievement while showing that consensual sex can still exploit; it criticizes punishment without pretending violence needs no response; it subjects desire to politics without licensing another round of discipline against women, queer people, or marginal sexual practices. This dialectical method sometimes dismantles more readily than it builds, and its cases lean toward British and American universities and public debate. It cannot substitute for knowledge produced by sex workers, survivors, or movements in the Global South.

Read the six essays in order and separate three levels in each: what harm is being described, what shortcut is being refused, and what work is left to collective politics. The title must not be mistaken for a defense of male sexual entitlement, nor should “beyond consent” be read as lowering the standard of consent. Srinivasan asks what comes after preserving that unequivocal baseline: power, care, and material equality. Pairing the book with Black feminist anti-carceral writing, sex-worker-led arguments for decriminalization, and disability justice makes its philosophical provocations a more complete feminist practice.