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 typic...