Philosophy
Srinivasan examines desire, consent, pornography and power while resisting simple solutions to morally difficult sexual politics.
Being turned down for sex violates nobody's rights, because each person has the right to decide who they sleep with. The author argues this can be held together with an uncomfortable question: whether the patterns behind who gets desired are themselves unjust. The question about desire does not create any claim on another person's body.
Asking political questions about desire need not mean ordering people whom they ought to want. The author's hope is a desire released from the injustices that currently bind it, not one regulated by the demands of justice. On this view, our desires have never yet been free.
If every sexual desire is declared off-limits to political critique, that protection covers the desires that exclude and marginalise disfavoured groups, such as trans women. A blanket rule of 'preferences are private' cannot pick out only the harmless ones. To criticise any exclusion, you have to accept that desire can be examined.
Consent is necessary, but as a test for sexual justice it is a blunt tool. A practice can be fully consensual between the people involved and still do damage at the level of the whole system. Asking only 'did both agree?' leaves out what shaped the agreement and what the practice reinforces.
When young people meet explicit images long before they have sex, those images supply a script: the moves, the sounds, the feelings to perform, and who holds power. Porn is not meant to teach, but it often functions as if it did. The author reports that sex for many of her students had become what porn says it is.
How people experience sex cannot be separated from how they experience being men or women. The author argues that unequal power between the sexes does not merely tint sex; it forms what sex is. So questions about sex are already questions about gender hierarchy.
A student may sincerely want a professor, so the case against such relationships cannot rest on denying her desire. Her longing may really be a wish to become like the teacher, confused with or swapped for wanting to have him. The teacher's job is to meet that longing by teaching, not by taking advantage of it.
Feminist analysis goes wrong when it sorts people into pure oppressors and pure victims. Being oppressed along one dimension, such as sex, does not rule out oppressing others along another, such as race or class. Each person has to be seen in every position they occupy at once.
Who we find desirable feels like a private, fixed fact about us, but the author argues it is formed by social hierarchies of race, body, gender and status. Treating preference as untouchable nature hides that shaping from criticism. The author holds that sex is a personal preference shaped by outside forces.