Amia Srinivasan

Our sexual desires dwell privately within us, waiting to emerge when elicited by context. We have no power over what we want, and rarely desire what we would be wise to. Or so it’s long been thought. This idea—that desire is private, natural, fixed—is both a timeless precept and a defining feature of our contemporary sexual culture. But what might happen if, instead of treating desire as innate, we thought of it as something contingent and politically determined? This idea preoccupies Amia Srinivasan, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. “As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred,” she writes. “But the fact is that our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills.”

This approach is typical of Srinivasan’s sensibility: her commitment to feelings as worthy of serious attention; her interest in the experiences of everyday life; her intention to use the tools of analytic inquiry to think seriously about politics in the world. It is an unusual position to hold within academic philosophy, which is better known for paying attention to narrow abstractions. As a graduate student at Oxford University, Srinivasan often felt her mind was being “pruned.” She feared that being a philosopher would be incompatible with being a public thinker. “When you undergo that training, part of what you have to do is set aside your ambition to speak broadly about the things that feel most important to you,” she says when we meet at her college in Oxford on a drizzly day in early November. 

But Srinivasan, who is now 37, stuck with the subject and has since found a way back to the issues that concern her most. Today, she is regarded as one of the most exciting living public intellectuals. It’s a status that she has acquired quickly, through a flow of essays, a prestigious appointment at Oxford and, most recently, a book about the politics of sexual desire. Srinivasan is also the rarest of things: an analytic philosopher whose work is a joy to read. 

The Right to Sex, a series of essays on desire, consent, pornography and the ethics of sleeping with students, probes the limits of contemporary feminism and is characterized by Srinivasan’s bracing questions and delicate rigor. When faced with the reality of sex within an unequal power dynamic, for example, many people—feminists included—have suggested “consent laws” as a remedy.¹ But there is no blanket agreement that can replace the nuances of true consent. So what is to be done? Srinivasan is wary of apparently simple solutions: “Could the reason that this question is so hard to answer be that the law is simply the wrong tool for the job?”

Srinivasan is spirited and warm in person. She has shiny dark hair that reaches to her waist, and is dressed casually in navy jeans and white sneakers. Her imposing, wood-paneled office at All Souls College is humanized by a trail of objects: framed posters, a magazine on a green velvet sofa, a Mughal miniature and tingsha bells from Ladakh on the mantelpiece. Srinivasan was born in Bahrain to Indian parents. Her mother, to whom the book is dedicated, is a dancer and choreographer; her father a retired banker. She was raised in a Hindu household, where she first encountered Indian philosophy, and had an itinerant childhood, living in New York, Singapore, Taiwan and London.

In some of the interviews she has given since being appointed the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory (I struggled to pronounce the position correctly—she told me the poet Philip Larkin used to rhyme it with “bitchily”), Srinivasan has cut a stern figure.² “I’ve often made a deliberate choice to present myself as more serious than I am. Entirely because I am a young woman,” she tells me. One also imagines that it is because of how some regard her field of inquiry; in the introduction to The Right to Sex, for example, Srinivasan recounts a famous male philosopher who told her that he objected to feminist critiques of sex because “it was only during sex that he felt truly outside politics.” 

“I’ve often made a deliberate choice to present myself as more serious than I am. Entirely because I am a young woman.”

A thread that runs through Srinivasan’s writing is her concern with the way that our beliefs and worldviews are shaped by the contingencies of where and with whom we find ourselves, and whether we could be capable of wanting different things under different circumstances. In Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?—a magisterial essay that went viral after it was published in the London Review of Books during the height of the #MeToo movement in 2018—Srinivasan begins with the case of Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old “incel” (involuntary celibate) who killed six people and injured 14 in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. 

What Rodgers did was twisted, propelled by a nauseating misogynistic and racial hierarchy. But Srinivasan traces in his lengthy manifesto a sense of sexual entitlement to particular bodies (the “stuck-up blonde slut”) that is indicative of the exclusions that shape contemporary sexual politics. That some bodies (including, Rodgers felt, his own) are considered “unfuckable” is a symptom of the way desire is politically constituted and closely tracks our social prejudices. Once, feminism would have offered a way of thinking this through, but female desire is now regarded as an expression of agency rather than a field for political criticism. 

Srinivasan’s embracing of discomfort and complexity is both unfashionable and deeply refreshing. In a review of The Right to Sex, the Irish novelist Naoise Dolan wrote that Srinivasan is “dauntless about the potential scrutiny of people who read books primarily to tweet screenshots. You will not find each paragraph pegged with qualifiers intended to debar you from making her look bad.” Indeed, in person she seems more bothered by the prospect of being willfully misrepresented than by being disagreed with. She is concerned by the anti-intellectual stance that some critics have taken toward her work (one less flattering review of The Right to Sex summarized it as an “Orwellian tract” of “Soviet-style sex re-education”).³ “I’m happy to be the object of people’s ire and anger, but the unwillingness to correctly describe arguments to begin with… I find [that] very troubling,” she says.

Srinivasan’s work has attracted more public interest than most philosophers ever will. Earlier this year, she appeared in Vogue.⁴ I ask her whether philosophers in general have a responsibility to make themselves available and their ideas publicly accessible. Srinivasan admires philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit who made no sharp distinctions between their public and academic writing. “There was a relentless insistence on complexity and difficulty, and the expectation that a non-philosophically trained audience could keep up, which I think it often can.” The problem of communicating complex ideas to a public audience can be a symptom of poor writing, she thinks. But the notion that all knowledge has to be publicly useful also frightens her, insofar as it folds easily into a conservative attack on the arts and humanities. “I think there should be a lot of room for so-called ‘useless’ inquiry,” she says.

At times, the fine brushwork of Srinivasan’s work can seem far removed from the messiness of life outside the classroom. Many of the anecdotes in her book are drawn from her students and academic colleagues. But much has changed over the last decade within universities, too; when Srinivasan was an undergraduate at Yale, which was less than two decades ago, feminism was “completely off the radar.” By contrast, the undergraduate module on feminist theory she now teaches at Oxford was so well-attended before the pandemic that lectures had to be moved to the university’s largest exam room. 

“I’m happy to be the object of ire and anger, but the unwillingness to correctly describe arguments to begin with… I find that troubling.”

The fact that Srinivasan has spent most of her adult life teaching or being taught at elite universities does not always mean she has dwelled comfortably within them. In one 2015 interview in The Rhodes Project, she spoke of feeling like “a stranger in a strange land” while studying for her PhD at Oxford, surrounded by people that she felt little connection to, with no sense of fitting in. When she was asked in that interview what she imagined the next decade of her life would look like, she answered: “I fervently hope not to be bored and not to bore others.” With her resistance to easy answers and reductive thinking, it’s an aspiration she has made into a reality.