CAN MEN LOVE WOMEN?

Amia Srinivasan’s much-feted new book, The Right to Sex, forces readers to think about freedom and desire, asking if it might be possible for us to have both

- Amrita Narayanan

At 36, Oxford professor AMIA SRINIVASAN is being hailed as “a star” who is changing the way we think about sexual consent

What kind of men do feminist women want to have sex with? In 2004, the African-American feminist bell hooks came up with one response: women want to be with men who can love. In The Will to Change: On Men, Masculinity and Love, hooks argued that the women’s liberation movement had failed to get women the sex that they wanted. Even when sex became socially permissible for women, satisfying sex remained elusive because the family and the world produced men who had a deficit in their capacity for love as a part of sex.

In 2021, Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex reminds us that the dream of sexual freedom remains a distant aspiration for feminists. Srinivasan caught my attention in 2017 with her captivating essay on the Octopus; last year, I assigned her essay ‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’ as reading for my undergraduate class on gender and sexuality. Today, she has the attention of the international feminist community: she is perhaps one of the youngest women to earn a seat at the table of the celebrity intellectual—a table historically reluctant to open seats for women.

Like hooks, Srinivasan believes the internalised idea of male sexual entitlement—‘he’s gotta have it’—makes our discussions of consent circumspect. The set of essays—which would be more fairly titled Men’s Right to Sex—cuts through the idea that sex is ‘natural’ and underscores its socialised nature. Men and women arrive at the private act of sex laden with cultural scripts—written with the sexually-entitled male as protagonist—packed with instructions on whom to desire, how to feel about them, what sounds to make.