The moment I began to define myself as a feminist was after attending the 2017 women’s march. I had been interested in feminist ideas before the march, but it was after walking for three hours—holding a bright pink poster that said “on Wednesdays we smash the patriarchy”—that I really felt like I solidified it as a true facet of my personality. The following year, I watched a livestream of Christine Blasey-Ford testifying against Brett Kavanaugh. As a feminist, I felt that I was called to action, that I needed to contribute to some sort of solution. In high school, I had no idea what that meant. Then, I found the hashtag #/BelieveWomen that began trending on social media following this hearing and saw power in this movement fueled by vast social media influence.
The phrase ‘Believe Women’ is one of the first topics Amia Srinivasan broaches in her essay collection “The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century.” In this collection, Srinivasan sets out to explore “the politics and ethics of sex” in a way that embraces “discomfort and ambivalence.” The sense of ambivalence is immediately visible in her opening essay, “The Conspiracy Against Men,” where she criticizes the unequivocal stance of ‘Believe Women,’ calling it a “blunt tool.” Srinivasan writes the following:
"But this zero-sum logic – she’s telling the truth, he’s lying – presumes that nothing but sex difference is at work in the assessment of rape allegations. Especially when factors other than gender – race, class, religion, immigration status, sexuality – come into play, it is far from clear to whom we owe a gesture of epistemic solidarity."
Srinvasan raises an example: at Colgate, a liberal arts college with a 4.2% Black population during 2013-2014, 50% of the rape allegations were against Black students in the same time period. In a case like this, it is hard to justify standing behind a simple phrase with little concrete action—especially given the historic hypersexualization of Black bodies that likely had contributed to this racist discrepancy of rape accusations. Short slogans like #/BelieveWomen are easy to champion. Just include it on a quick Instagram story. And boom! You are fighting the patriarchy. Yet, this simplicity is also its weakness as slogans like #/BelieveWomen give no room or time for nuance, offering a generic feminist mantra that cannot possibly cover the complex dynamics at play in sexual assault allegations.
The analysis of “Believe Women” exemplifies much of Srinivasan’s work throughout the book, for Srinivasan takes examples of contemporary feminist activism and complicates them. Overall, I enjoyed the essay collection greatly, especially how it delved into provocative new perspectives not usually visible in the mainstream feminism I was familiar with. However, it’s worth mentioning that the opposite opinion also exists: on Goodreads, many reviewers mentioned that Srinivasan’s claims didn’t necessarily strike them as novel given their previous experience with feminist discourse. Therefore, I think “The Right to Sex” is better suited for readers like me who’s feminism has been more defined by popular culture than by theory as it serves as an excellent introduction to deeper feminist thought.
When she warned of “discomfort” in the preface, I expected to contend with tragic or shocking facts that would illuminate the subjugation of marginalized bodies. However, reading her work introduced a new kind of discomfort. She helped me realize that many of the structures I had leaned on to feel like a feminist in fact rarely encapsulated—and hardly ever did anything to solve—the problem.
Consent is another example of a popular topic that Srinivasan explores. As awareness for sexual assault grows, discussions over consent are taking an increasingly important role in the American educational system: most of my friends and I recall being shown the “Tea and Consent” video, where a man with a British accent compares asking for tea to asking for consent to help high schoolers understand what kind of sex is okay and what kind isn’t; Columbia too emphasizes consent in its Sexual Respect Module required of all new students, where videos compare consent to a baseball, a pizza, a sandwich.
But sex is far more than a sandwich. Throughout the book, Srinivasan interrogates the idea that obtaining consent is enough to render a sexual encounter unproblematic. She raises the possibility that “the problem is something deeper, to do with the psychosocial structures that make men want to have sex with women who don’t really want it,” arguing that the emphasis on consent alone cannot take away the patriarchal structures that encourage the domination over a female body. Even while consensual, there are many underlying power dynamics at play in sex that beg the question of whether one’s choice to have sex is truly a free one. In “On Not Sleeping With Your Students,” Srinivasan mentions how a student may choose to sleep with a professor out of fear for “a bad grade, a lackluster recommendation.” Everyone is consenting- but does that render these encounters unproblematic?
Srinivasan explicitly references the sex-as-a-sandwich analogy in the titular essay “The Right to Sex.” The seemingly simple idea that “you don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you” is much more nuanced in dating apps like Tinder and Grindr, where certain identities often have a much more difficult time finding matches. Srinivasan cites a video released where an Asian guy switches his Grindr profile with a white guy, instantly getting many more admirers, while the white guy using the Asian profile receives little attention. The users of Grindr have no obligation to consent to a romantic or sexual encounter (sharing their sandwich) with Asian men, yet the situation is still uncomfortable. Srinivasan points out that often, the guise of “personal preference” allows “racism, ableism, transphobia and every other oppressive system” to propagate.
Through her discussion of these nuanced dimensions of ‘Believe Women’ and of consent, Srinivasan shows that few of the ideas championed in contemporary feminism can be considered the cure-all we may have hoped for them to be. Near the end of each essay, Srinivasan usually shifts from criticism to ideology, positing potential solutions to these problems in abstract terms. Yet these abstractions are potentially at odds with the problems Srinivasan points out—problematic hashtags, rape allegation statistics, dating app preferences—that are specific, concrete examples. In response to the limitations of ‘Believe Women,’ Srinivasan emphasizes the importance of the theoretical framework of intersectionality, stating “a feminism that deals only with ‘pure’ cases of patriarchal oppression – cases that are ‘uncomplicated’ by factors of caste, race or class – will end up serving the needs of rich white or high-caste women.” After arguing that consensual sex can still be oppressive, Srinivasan asks feminists to shift away from the sole emphasis on consent education or consent-enforcing laws as the solution. Rather, feminists should become emphatically “imaginative.” Both Srinivasan’s discussion of intersectionality and her beckoning for imagination are conceptual nudges rather than concrete solutions, advocating for us to think rather than to immediately act. She does not provide guidelines for how these broad ideas should address practical issues like how to treat rape allegations that may be influenced by other biases, or how to educate young adults to work towards more equitable power dynamics in sex.
Srinivasan is slightly more specific as she hints at a solution after explicating the blurring of personal preference and discrimination on dating apps. She asks her audience to reconsider their sexual preferences, to no longer regard it as immutable or an innate part of their nature but instead to see these preferences as also affected by conventional norms that marginalize select identities. I like this suggestion; still, I wonder if the people who write “NO ARABS, NO RICE NO SPICE” on their dating profiles will really be the ones reading Srinivasan. I also wonder whether just thinking about these issues is enough. And if it isn’t, is there anything we can do about it?
I don’t think it was Srinivasan’s mission to provide any exact solution to the problems she presents. To do so would risk conforming to the same phenomenon she criticizes- delineating complex situations into clean-cut, one-size-fits-all answers. But just as I found #/BelieveWomen to be comforting amidst the confusion and frustration of the Kavanaugh trial, I also hoped for a clear set of directions from Srinivasan so that I could feel like I could be active in addressing these problems. Perhaps the same sense of desire for action also motivated much of the feminist movements that Srinivasan criticizes.
In my Asian American Literature class, I learned about a quote from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari:
"Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are...what is real is the becoming itself, the [obstacles to] becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that whom becomes passes."
I use this quote to serve as a conceptual nudge for myself on how to deal with the ambiguities and discomfort left behind after Srinivasan deconstructs the solutions I had leaned on. I think that maybe the act of figuring out how to ensure equitable gender relations in sex, or how to ensure equitable gender relations as a whole does not have to be a process defined by its end result. Perhaps the “becoming,” the pondering of the difficult questions that Srinivasan poses, should be an okay state to exist in, not an intermediary we hurry to escape from.