Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2021

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is our right to be desired? How are our sexual desires shaped by the society around us? Is consent sufficient for a sexual relationship? In the wake of the #MeToo movement, public debates about sex work, and the rise in popularity of “incel culture”, philosopher Amia Srinivasan explores these questions and more in her new book of essays, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Amia’s interests lay in how our internal perspectives and desires are shaped by external forces, and the question of how we might alter those forces to achieve a more just, equitable society.

Amia joined Tyler to discuss the importance of context in her vision of feminism, what social conservatives are right about, why she’s skeptical about extrapolating from the experience of women in Nordic countries, the feminist critique of the role of consent in sex, whether disabled individuals should be given sex vouchers, how to address falling fertility rates, what women learned about egalitarianism during the pandemic, why progress requires regress, her thoughts on Susan Sontag, the stroke of fate that stopped her from pursuing a law degree, the “profound dialectic” in Walt Whitman’s poetry, how Hinduism has shaped her metaphysics, how Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit influenced her, the anarchic strain in her philosophy, why she calls herself a socialist, her next book on genealogy, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded September 8th, 2021

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:08.4	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
0:12.6	Learn more at mercatis.org.
0:15.2	And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit
0:20.4	ConversationsWithT Tyler.com.
0:26.0	Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations With Tyler.
0:29.6	Today I'm here chatting with Amia Srinivasan, who has rapidly become one of the best and
0:34.8	best known philosophers.
0:36.7	She's a professor at Oxford University.
0:39.5	She has a new book out which has made bestseller lists everywhere called The Right to Sex.
0:44.4	It has been one of the huge big hit books of the year.
0:47.4	Amia, welcome.
0:48.4	Thank you so much for having me Tyler.
0:50.4	I'm really pleased to be here.
0:51.9	Now you've described yourself as a utopian feminist.
0:56.1	So in your vision of utopian feminism, how much room is there for what I would call compartmentalization?
1:02.8	So just to give a simple example, if you look at say stand up comedy, a lot of it is sexist
1:08.2	or racist or even if it's not, it's perceived as such.
1:11.8	What happens to that in the utopia?
1:13.8	Do we just compartmentalize and let it continue?
1:16.6	Or how do you treat it?
1:18.6	I'm not sure about room for compartmentalization.
	...

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