The Right to Sex

By Amia Srinivasan,

Book cover of The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

Book description

“Laser-cut writing and a stunning intellect. If only every writer made this much beautiful sense.”
—Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer—no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. In stripping the new politics of sex…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Right to Sex as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I spent a lot of the last year pressing The Right to Sex into the hands of my smartest friends.

This book tackles some of the thorniest issues in sexual politics today, teasing out the seeming contradictions in feminist thought on campus sexual assault investigations, the Me Too movement, incels, and more. It’s compulsively readable; I was hooked from the first essay.

Srinivasan is clearly an amazing teacher, deeply attentive to her students, and extraordinarily honest and open herself. It is evident her honesty is reciprocated. Much of this book is based on reports from the classroom, and as a longtime educator myself, I was awed by her ability to engage in remarkably fruitful discussions about irresolvable questions of desire and consent. Writing with grace and precision, she explores a terrain in which gender, race, class, and sex overlap, with emphasis on how that terrain looks to people new at navigating it.  

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