I was looking forward
to the book, having read the essay which gives the book its title and which was published in the London Review
of Books in 2018. I read it as a cross over book in which professor appears as public intellectual,
seeking to address a wider audience than that comprised of peers and students.
It’s true it’s not a difficult book - I read it in a day - though the short
text of a hundred and ninety pages is followed by ninety pages of academic apparatus.
But though a crossover book, it could readily be assigned as core text for a course
in “Topics in Contemporary Feminism” or some such and I shall imagine myself as course tutor suggesting lines of discussion, despite my evident unsuitability.
I would start us off
with the chapter “The Right to Sex”. I suspect that if you begin with a
narrative of the crimes and thoughts of a violent incel [ involuntary celibate]
like Elliott Rodger, who in 2014 went on one of those killing sprees enabled by
American gun laws, then you are not going to find anyone in the seminar room to
argue that there is a right to sex. No
one wants to side with Elliott Rodger; the only interesting question is whether
he, and those who have followed his path, should be thought of as terrorists or
- to use a term with a long history - criminally insane. Possibly, we need a
new category because the USA sometimes looks from outside like a country as
much at the mercy of terrorists and the criminally insane as of COVID. But deeply unhappy people does not quite cut it.
Within the Western
traditions of political theory only one writer, Charles Fourier (1772 -1837), readily
springs to mind as having argued for a right to sex. He appears briefly at page
87 and I think more could have been made of what he says, not least because his
ideas have - unknowingly - been accepted into fairly common practice. Those who
care for adult people with profound disabilities - people who
need 24-hour care - have to deal with the fact that some of those they care for
want sex and perhaps deserve more than a right to solitary masturbation. A
fairly common but discretely conducted solution is for carers to take their
charges to visit sex workers, quite a few of whom advertise willingness to see
disabled clients and many of whom are willing to see women as well as men.
Public money is quite often used to fund these visits. Fourier would have
wanted to garland the sex workers with ribbons and flowers.
This is not the stuff
of trending social media discussion, though the film The Theory of Everything (2014) does frankly depict aspects of
Stephen Hawking’s sex life. But my fairly simple example of carers accepting the case
for some kind of right to sex could get one into a frame-maintaining discussion
in the way that documenting the activity of incels probably won’t. No one is
going to want to read endless incel manifestos anyway, unless as a student with
forensic interest - think how Freud read the Memoirs of Judge Schreber or
Foucault read Pierre Rivière.
If there was a right to
sex, what would it be a right to? It might be disappointingly minimal and
hardly connect with what we think of as paradigmatic of sexual desire or
fulfilment.
But what is
paradigmatic of sexual desire and its fulfilment? Srinivasan’s discussion of
this is scattered over the whole book, but I would start with her first chapter
“The Conspiracy Against Men”. Over the past half century or more, feminists
have painted a very bleak picture of male sexual desire. Either men are
natural-born rapists [ * see footnote right at end] or they are shaped by patriarchal societies into
less-than-fully-human beings who lose no chance to display a toxic masculinity
[I don’t think that Srinivasan actually uses that expression and that may be a choice] they
don’t even realise is theirs. The only advantage to the second way of thinking
is that it leaves open the possibility that in a different kind of society, men
could be shaped differently. The same either-or framing can, of course, be applied
to female sexuality.
One feminist strategy
has been to argue that sexual relations in general, and not just between men
and women, would be better if regulated (legally, morally) within a shared or
enforced commitment to a basically Kantian ethics in which human beings -
persons - are always to be treated as ends
and never as means. Some feminists
have reckoned that this approach can also be deployed to build a case against
pornography, the subject of Srinivasan’s second chapter, “Talking to my
Students about Porn”. But she doesn’t discuss a Kantian approach as such. It
does run into at least a couple of difficulties, though they pull in opposite
directions.
Back in the 1970s the
British government established a Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship
and, perhaps remarkably, appointed a very talented academic philosopher, Bernard
Williams - Knightbridge Professor in Cambridge - to head it. Williams did look
at the question of whether pornography should be regarded as depersonalising,
and therefore bad on the Kantian view, but found - perhaps to his surprise -
that most of those who figured in the pornography of the time, and however much
they might be turned into subjects of fantasy, were generally given quite
definite personal characteristics and were not “just” bodies. This was true of
Page Three girls but also of characters in what was then called hard core
pornography. In accompanying text, they were generally given names, school
leaver qualifications, ambitions, hobbies, and so on. Whatever people wanted
from pornography it did not appear to be just bodies. The same is probably true
today, and video and cam shows allow for the creation of narratives which the still
photography of older pornography could only supply in accompanying text.
But in another
direction, one of the few academic Anglosphere philosophers to write about
sexual desire - Roger Scruton in his 1987 book Sexual Desire [see my review on this Blog 13 June 2020]
- was not entirely convinced that objectification has no legitimate part in
sexual desire. It is not just that sexual desire in unruly but that it is at
least in part satisfied by objectifications (or less strongly, thematisations)
which are consensual and often playful. The key distinction for Scruton is
between sex considered as (merely) appetitive and sexual desire as
intentionally directed towards persons and thus involving imagination in a way
that “appetite” or “instincts” don’t.
Times change and
Srinivasan addresses the pervasive part internet porn now plays in young
people’s lives. It leads men who have watched porn to say to their girlfriends,
You’re doing it wrong (p. 44) and
that is a worry because it introduces into inter-personal relations ways of
organising experience which have been honed by very large and not disinterested
capitalist enterprises. Fifty years ago, it was women who said You’re doing it wrong to their male
partners and who proceeded to provide elementary sex education, guiding the man
to the location of something called the clitoris and helpful conduct in
relation to it. In 1970 Britain’s National Secular Society published a booklet entitled
Sex Education: the Erroneous Zone
which did indeed show that the sex education offered to young people at the
time was inaccurate and misleading. And many argued: it was meant to be. There
is a long history in which organised religions have sought very actively to
suppress sexual knowledge, including of things (like contraception) which were
known about in very distant pasts. The UK publication of the fully-illustrated The Joy of Sex in 1972 was a
breakthrough and hugely important for many people. An obscure but very
different approach to sex education was provided in the same year by the English translation of Freudian and Marxist Wilhelm
Reich’s The Sexual Struggle of Youth
(1934). The translation was the (unpaid) work of someone who went on to become a
well-known Anglo-American feminist theorist, though I don’t think she ever
claimed credit. It was felt worth doing because Reich challenged a narrowly
economistic socialist politics and at the same time showed that obstacles to sexual
happiness - like lack of privacy - are differentially distributed by social
class. I was reminded of this old book by Srinivasan’s final chapter, of which
more later.
The word “young” in the
previous paragraph leads me to a further point. Sexual desire is something
experienced over a life time and during a lifetime if changes in intensity, in
focus, and in circumstantial exercise. It’s not unreasonable, in my view, to
think of sexual desire as something which for many teenagers is experienced at
the beginning in an urgent, unfocussed way - they just need to orgasm and
beyond that they can’t think very clearly. It is more like something appetitive
in Scruton’s sense. The jazz musician, George Melly, famously wrote when late
in life he became impotent, “It’s wonderful, like being unchained from a
lunatic”.
Time often removes the
original urgency, allowing desire to flourish in the form of marital sexuality.
(For husbands, there is even the word uxorious;
there is no equivalent for wives). Feminists had their doubts about such happy
images of marriage and it was with the institution of marriage that much feminist
writing was concerned; once it gets going, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch of 1970 is simply a
rant against marriage [ see my review on this Blog, 27 September 2016].
But
what about the rapists? as Srinivasan asks to good effect
in her final chapter. Looked at one way, sexual violence often enough looks
like male violence which happens on some occasion to be sexual. Maybe soldiers
who rape are just deploying a different weapon in a context where violence is
part of what they are expected to use. Looked at another way, rape is
specifically sexual and the fantasies or anger or frustrations or whatever
which fuel it have to be analysed within a more specific theory or narratives -
since not all rapes may be alike. One could, of course try to break down this
contrast. Srinivasan does describe cases, some of which are hard to respond to
in a considered fashion. She mentions the case of Jyoti Singh, raped and
murdered in 2012 (pp. 11-12). I knew the story and remembered that at the time
my reaction had been immediate conversion to the righteousness of the death penalty.
Her killers should all be hanged, no doubt at all. End of.
Some feminists have ventured into the demanding
task of making forensic examination of male violence: in 1987 Deborah Cameron [now
an Oxford professor] and Elizabeth Fraser published The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder. But Kate
Millet followed up her Sexual Politics
(1970) with The Basement (1979) a
disturbing study of a single case of the protracted torture and murder of a
teenage girl in which the principal part was played by a woman. I think there
were people who reacted badly to this book, but in principle it could be seen
as an attempt to ask a question about what might be different about (extreme)
female violence.
*
Srinivasan’s book is
full of relevant, topical, and challenging examples. But I have always had
ambivalent feelings about relevance. I think that students should
expect to get from university study fluency
in one or more ways of studying the world, just as a student of a language expects to get fluency in that
language. In that sense, I want university studies to be relevant. So a philosophy
student fluent in Kantianism could pick up and run with the sketchy remarks I
made earlier; a student familiar with the nature of rights-based legal and
political theories would be able to assess whether sex is something which can
helpfully be addressed in the language of rights or whether a rights-based
approach is really too thin, too rationalistic. Some theories are more
all-embracing than others, like Marxism and Freudianism, others are more
limited tool boxes. Feminism sometimes aspires to be a theory - though
Srinivasan calls it a movement rather than theory (page xi and then again on
the last page p 179) - but there is a problem that those supposedly fluent in
it either seem to be speaking different languages or aren’t on speaking terms. True,
it’s a tall order to expect half the world’s population to agree with itself.
But in terms of
relevance considerations, fluency is often achieved pedagogically through the
study of simplified examples rather than full-blown topical narratives to which
we quite often can find no other immediate reaction than shock or outrage, like
my own illustrated above. To achieve understanding of how a theory works and
how it can be made to yield results, it is often necessary to take an
uncomplicated, quieter, example in order to see clearly how the basic machinery
of our thinking works or doesn’t work. In a different context, if I was asked to address the giant (or possibly elephant in the room) Nature / Culture topic, I would start with handedness (left/right-handed). Later on, one can look at hard cases -
Srinivasan’s book provides many such cases and she invites us to see that there
are sometimes no easy answers and sometimes no case to answer.
One approach within
contemporary feminism, that associated with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) strikes me as
obscurantist and impossible to become fluent in, so that instead of effective
analyses we end up with ritual repetitions of positions to which everyone is
expected to nod agreement. Martha Nussbaum provided a trenchant critique back
in 1999. But right at the beginning of her book, Srinivasan invokes Judith
Butler: “Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is
itself already gender in disguise” and then takes us to her very first footnote
reference, to Judith Butler (p.xii. p. 185). Nope. It won’t wash. "Gender in disguise" is a nice try, but it's rhetorical flourish not argument.
Whether
anyone teaches the history of modern social constructionist theories from Alfred
Schütz, through Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann and on to John Searle I don’t
know. But, when considered, I don’t think there is any coherent version of
social constructionism which will lead to the conclusion that the world is a
better place for having “gender reveal” parties. I state my case at
https://www.academia.edu/45141890/Social_Construction_De_Constructed
***
I found Srinivasan’s
final chapter the most impressive and it should be saved for the last course session. “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism” fluently
deploys theory and argument, sweeps up a lot of apparently disparate material,
and points in a clear direction. It’s very well written, refreshing, and
persuasive. It is deeply humane and finds a way of formulating that humanity in
simple terms picked up and then
re-framed from an old 1977 manifesto which includes the sentence, “As
feminists, we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics”.
Srinivasan catches the thread and runs with it: “This basic principle - of not
‘messing over’ people as a means to a political end - implies that any choice
between improving the lives of existing people and holding the line for a
better future must be settled in favour of the former” (p 159). She is at that
point specifically concerned with making the argument for the full
decriminalisation and legalisation of sex work. But if you pause and think about it for a
moment, the formulation is also a rebuke to all those who have been willing to
concede to the Stalins and Maos of the world, big and small, that the end
justifies the means and that it is the Future (as it is imagined for Us by Them)
which trumps the Present (as we experience it).
Srinivasan then
broadens the argument into a critique of what she calls “carceralism” of which
Law & Order feminism has been a sponsor. Here the focus is on the United
States and its extraordinary prison Gulag, fed by an out-of-control police and
(to outsiders) theatrical criminal justice system, and some frankly weird laws.
She rightly makes out the case that those who are already most disadvantaged
are further disadvantaged by Law & Order “solutions” and that the only
solutions which have any chance of working will necessarily involve a big
redistribution of income and wealth from the increasingly rich to the
increasingly poor. I sometimes think that even getting back to where we were forty or fifty years ago
would help a lot. (Switch to the UK for a moment, and answer this question:
When Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, one of her first important acts was
to cut the top rate of income tax from xx% to yy%. What were the values of xx and yy? Answer at the bottom of the page).
Srinivasan has
published a very well written, forthright, committed, and in many respects, unusual, book which
will, I am sure, be much read and appreciated. I look forward to reading in the
next book what she has to say (there is already a lot in article form) in the
narrower part of her role as professional philosopher.
* * *
Times change:
Amia Srinivasan is the
seventh person to be appointed to Oxford University’s Chichele Professorship in
Social and Political Theory since it was created in 1944. The first holder was
G D H Cole (1889-1959), the only holder to be born in the United Kingdom, and
notable as a World War One pacifist, Fabian, Guild Socialist and mentor to two leaders of the Labour Party,
Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson. In Church of England Oxford, he stuck out as
an atheist and when it was his turn to say grace at meal times in All Souls, substituted a two minute silence.
His domestic relations
were rather more conventional; in the biography of her husband which she published
after his death The Life of G D H Cole
(1971), Dame Margaret Cole wrote that though they were married for over forty
years and had three children,
….he
was always under-sexed - low-powered. If he had not married, I doubt very much
he would have had any sex-life at all in the ordinary sense ….For women
generally, except his wife, he never seemed to have any sexual use at all, and
by and large to regard them as rather a low type of being….He believed as
strongly as any anti-Socialist that no woman (except Jane Austen) had ever
achieved first-class honours in art or literature; and he felt that the main
purpose in life of the majority of them was to distract a man from his proper
work …. his sex life diminished gradually to zero for the last twenty years of
his life. Concurrently, he developed by degrees a positive dislike of, and
disgust with, any aspect of sex almost equal to that of the early Christian
fathers …… (pp. 91 - 94)
When they could have
been having sex, husband and wife were instead busy jointly writing popular
detective novels: The Walking Corpse (1931),
Disgrace to the College (1937), Murder at the Munitions Works (1940) -
and over twenty more like that. They employed household servants so one does
not have to imagine titles being worked up as she washed and he dried.
* * *
83% was cut to 60%
***
* Footnote: In 1978 I recall going into a large University of London student dining hall, greeted by a large banner strung across the entire length of the balcony: ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS. As I ate my lunch I tried to think of a disruptive response which might be hung on a second banner, underneath. I reckoned that a syllogism would do the trick.
