Why Right to Sex is the next step to empowering women

Sex is something that is shaped by outside forces. A place where ethics breed, pleasure cannot. 

Amia Srinivas

Sex is seen as something that is a private act, something to be kept hidden. When it comes to women, sex is always something done to them in consensual and non-consensual ways. Sex is something that is shaped by outside forces – a place where ethics breed, but pleasure cannot. With her stunning intellect and laser-cut writing, author Amia Srinivas talked about sex beyond commercialisation, beyond the political realm and questioned if women have an agency to sex. In the session titled Right to Sex on the third day of JLF2023, she deliberated over its deep relation to gender, class, power, and race.

Seeing the right to sex as a fundamental right 

Remembering her school and college days, Amia said that she was always taught by men who thought of feminism as something unreal, and not interesting. But luckily she stumbled upon the book ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir. 

“I realized early on in my life that fear of complexity and truth is disastrous if you want to make a change.” 

The conspiracy against men 

The book ‘Right To Sex’ opens with false rape accusations, and talks about how it has changed the whole political system and perspective for rapes happening in reality. 

As per Amia, “Men are obsessing over the idea of false rape accusations, and the whole thing has become hostile.” A feminist response to this would be that more magnitudes of men and women are raped than being falsely accused of rape.  

The MeToo Movement

“MeToo is about women using non-formal means to spread words about abusive and harassing men.”

What do you do when the process isn’t efficient and unfair? It’s extremely tempting and seems just to use other means available to you like social media. Right? “It is a very reasonable response to failing systems, a single voice on Twitter can’t do anything, but many people together tweeting proofs can make one accountable,” says Amia. 

It’s very unfair to say to a woman that you finally got some power after years and decades of abuse. 

Feminism and pornography

The problem with commercial porn is that it is boring and unimaginative. It is being fed to you in a way that you tastes become more like others.

Amia Srinivas

People are struck by the idea that pornography feeds you norms for what’s sexually attractive and how male domination and female submission is. Here, We are talking about mainstream pornography that is targeted mainly at boys, and these sites just want to make money. “But the problem with commercial porn is that it is boring and unimaginative,” she said, before adding, “It is being fed to you in a way that your tastes become more like others.”