The Right to Sex - The Conspiracy Against Men
Part One in a Six Part Series on Amia Srinivasan's book 'The Right to Sex'
As I introduced in the latest Dinner Table Digest: Sex Edition, I have excitedly purchased the latest book to be overtaking public philosophy, this time a book on sexuality by Oxford philosopher Amia Srnivasan. Subject to a fair amount of popular press, the book promises a challenge to standard third wave feminism, suggesting that consent is not enough in which to ground a positive sexual ethic. Srinivasan promises a closer look at intersectionality, pointing out the many ways that third wave feminism’s approach to sexuality has excluded non-white people, often poor and on the margins, from conversations about sexual ethics.
Over six pieces I will explore each chapter of the book, all of which deal not just in theory but primarily in practice. The first chapter tackles the challenge of Men, which, when it comes to building a 21st feminism, is a significant challenge indeed. Throughout each piece I will lay out the central thesis of the chapter, and then offer a few thoughts of my own.
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The first chapter of The Right to Sex wastes no time getting to the meat of the issue: who has a right to sexual activity and how do they acquire that right? Starting with what has become known in the world of right-wing snowflakes as The Conspiracy Against Men. Srinivasan takes us on a thoughtful tour through the who’s who of the creeps of the #MeToo movement, from Louis C.K. and John Roddenberry to Brock Turner and Brett Kavanaugh, pointing out that all are wealthy, white men with the expectation that their misdeeds will go unpunished. Interestingly, though, Srinivasan does not unwaveringly accept the dictum to #BelieveWomen, tracing out several complicated cases, including the case of Kwadwo Bonsu, below, infused with racial overtones, which have resulted in outsized consequences for Black Men. In one telling statistic, she points to Colgate University, where “only 4.2% of the student body was Black during the 2013-2014 academic year; and yet 50% of accusations of sexual violation that year were against Black students.”1 Bonsu, a student at UMass Amherst, was accused based on what the complainant “felt in her bones wasn’t right:”2
Bonsu's lawsuit stated that the allegations brought against him were "false." This is in one sense misleading: by Bonsu's own admission, what she said happened did in fact happen. But, at least so far as UMass and the state of Massachusetts were concerned, these details did not add up to rape." For her part, the alleged victim insisted that Bonsu did not force her to do anything, that he listened when she said no, that she initiated all the sex acts, that she was not afraid of him, that she knew she could have stopped and walked out the door, that she gave multiple indications of wanting to proceed. Nonetheless, something had happened to her that she "felt in [her] bones wasn't right." She had been "violated."
While the Title IX legal machinery for expulsion had not yet been set-up, Bonsu was railroaded out of school, with significant restrictions placed on how he could interact with the student body and where he could be on campus. I say this not to engender empathy for Bonsu - despite the fact that no forced sex occurred, the complainant understood that she was being sexually assaulted, making it a sexual assault. I say this to point out that Bonsu is Black and the complainant is white. Srinivasan writes early on,3
There is no general conspiracy against men. But there is a conspiracy against certain classes of men. Of the 147 men who were exonerated of sexual assault on the basis of a false accusation or perjury in the US between 1989 and 2020, 85 were non-white and 62 white. Of those 85 non-white men, 76 were black, which means that black men make up 52 percent of those convicted of rape on the basis of false accusations or perjury. Yet black men make up only about 14 percent of the US male population, and 27 percent of men convicted of rape." A black man serving time for sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than a white man convicted of sexual assault." He is also very likely to be poor not just because black people in the US are disproportionately poor, but because most incarcerated Americans, of all races, are poor.
Srinivasan spends a bit of time talking about why Black people, in particular, are a target, from the expectation that Black men are criminally violent and overly sexual aggressive to the hypersexualization of Black women, creating a contradictory cultural expectation that Black men are rapists and Black women can’t be raped. The big takeaway of the first chapter, then, is that while it is important to #BelieveWomen, the cultural conversation is still fairly limited to believing white women. Recent advances in sexual equality of women, much like they have been in the past, therefore, are limited to white women, especially when the accused is a Black man.
I don’t have a lot to personally add about the chapter - it was in line with the press I’d already read about the book. Her criticism of white feminist intersectionality is also not, itself, new, though it hasn’t always had an easy time making itself heard, especially over the loud din of TERFs and other popular white feminist philosophers. Early in the book I also learned, to my surprise, that the bulk of false rape accusations against men are made by other men, not by women, As Srinivasan says, “the anxiety about false rape accusations is … actually it is about gender, about innocent men being harmed by malignant women. It is an anxiety, too, about race and class: about the possibility that the law might treat wealthy white men as it routinely treats poor black and brown men of color, the white woman's false rape accusation is just one element in a matrix of vulnerability to state power.”4 Thus, false rape allegations have much more to do with racial, gender and socioeconomic differences than they do about whatever the acts in question are about. Even if an allegation is false, it is overwhelmingly likely that the target will be a poor Black man and not, indeed, the kind of case that typically captures the cultural imagination, that of the kind man being targeted by a spurned lover with revenge on her mind.
The next chapter, about pornography, promises to be a fascinating discussion. Srinivasan has already engaged with some of second wave feminism’s greatest anti-porn crusaders, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon (whose New York Times article on OnlyFans I featured in the most recent Sex Edition), and her fearless ability to challenge feminist orthodoxy in a way that is easy to understand has me excited to learn about what Srinivasan does with the ubiquitous world of internet pornography.
The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan, pp. 11
pp. 26
pp. 4
pp. 5-6