Today, the incel culture has permeated across societies. If one goes back a decade or two, in the late 1990s, it was Alana, a nerdy queer woman, who coined the term ‘invcel’, that is, ‘involuntary celibate’. With ‘v’ removed later, it came to be popularised as incel. Alana’s Involuntary Celibate Project became a forum for the community of men, women, and LGBTQ group members to share their depression, loneliness, and awkwardness. Later, when Alana began dating someone, she handed over the forum moderation to another member and left for her happy life.
However, it wasn’t until May 2014, when Eliot Rodger, a twenty-something college dropout, self-proclaimed as an ‘involuntary celibate’, decided to stab two of his housemates to death, and go on a shooting rampage across UC Santa Barbara, and eventually, shoot himself in the head, that incel culture was deemed all very problematic.
In between his killing rampage, Rodger got down to grab a coffee at the Starbucks and upload a video titled “Eliot Rodger’s Retribution” to his YouTube channel. He also emailed a 100,000-word file containing his manifesto to his family and friends. He aptly called it: ‘My Twisted World’. And in those pages, Rodger documented what may have transpired in his twisted mind. In the back of Rodger’s mind lurked the thought that he was owed sex and that he was denied it. Somewhere in the document, Rodger wrote: ‘How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me?’ (p. 74).
The incel phenomenon has since gained a lot of internet traction. Several Reddit forums and other internet community forums have emerged over the years where the sexually deprived men blamed women for not giving them sex, which they claim they are rightfully owed. And more recently, the Netflix four-episode crime drama ‘Adolescence’, produced by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, has shed light on how incel culture has now penetrated into schools and classrooms. The series follows a 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) after he was arrested and charged with the murder of his classmate, Katie.
In an exceptional debut book published in 2021, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan, a Chichele Professor of philosophy at Oxford, argues that the sexual entitlement—as was evident in Rodger’s logic that he was owed sex because he belonged to the white Aristocratic race—is a symptom of patriarchal ideology. And part of the con patriarchy tends to play, Srinivasan suggests, is deeming hierarchy of attractiveness in men: geeks, nerds, effete men, old men, men with dad bods, etc. In doing so, patriarchy itself creates a hierarchy in terms of who is more fuckable and who is deemed unfuckable.
Are men entitled to sex?
Srinivasan says: No. In fact, ‘there is no right to sex’, and ‘to think otherwise is to think like a rapist’ (p. 95). Sex is not a sandwich. It cannot be distributed in society. Just like a sandwich, which every child might get in your class, except for you, because of your race or whatever, the distributive nature of sex is itself problematic.
Prominently, there are those who get more sex, as with hierarchies of those who are conventionally deemed more attractive, hot blonds, and those who are less likely to make it to that bar, for instance, women of colour. Racism is predominantly entrenched in how sex is distributed in society. But that does not mean that sex itself is deemed distributable. ‘To liberate sex from the distortions of oppression is not the same as just saying everyone can desire whatever or whomever they want’ (p. 96).
Well, how, then, do you engage in political critique of sex without alluding to the ‘misogynistic logic of sexual entitlement’? I do not know. I do not really know if Srinivasan provides a straight-jacketed answer to this. But, what the author hints at is that fuckability itself is not ‘some good’ that deems distributing—it isn’t a good at all (p. 104).
The entitlement of some men to have sex with the so-called supremely fuckable women is itself a desire for upward mobility in sexual choices, which are, in themselves, problematic. That is, these incels, despite their entitlement to want sex, aren’t interested in dating women, who, in subreddit r/trufemcels, refer to themselves as ‘never been kissed, never had sex, never had a boyfriend’ (p. 115). In some sense, incels are just interested in their own status that comes with having sex with women who are deemed conventionally hot.
Srinivasan’s book, a collection of essays, does not stop at whether sex is a right; it touches on other key questions in feminist debates about sex: What does it take for sex to be really free? Who are the victims of false rape accusations? Is porn a tool of patriarchy? Should prostitution, as anti-sex feminists argue, be made illegal? Is it okay for professors to have sex with their students? And what does a feminist future in relation to sexual relations look like? Srinivasan engages with each of these complex debates with ease and with the intellectual prowess she admirably holds.
Take the case of those who are predominantly falsely accused of rape in our societies. In most cases, as Srinivasan has shown us, it is the poor, black, and colonised peoples. Women, white and wealthy, at times, falsely accuse men of colour of sexual harassment. But the false accusations do not just stop at gender; it is often about class, caste, and race.
It is about how law—and legal structures—tend to treat a white man accused of rape as opposed to a man of colour. But, more specifically, it is always about how race and class intersect with gender. It deems a racialised gender rapeable and not rapeable. That is, as Angela Davis has argued, it shows that black hypersexuality—making the black men rapists, while deeming black women unrapeable (p. 14). This is not just restricted to how the police and judiciary function.
In India, almost every day, Dalit women are raped by upper-caste men, but these women barely get anyone’s notice. These women, society construes, are unrapeable. And therefore, every once in a while, when there is a sexual violence against upper-caste women, it is all over the news, and when it is a Dalit woman, there is no mention in mainstream media.
In another essay, Srinivasan asks: ‘Did porn kill feminism?’ (p. 33). When talking to her students about porn, Srinivasan discovered that it was only through porn that men and women—her students—were able to learn about sex. And much of what they deemed as sex was deeply problematic. Because today the internet is replete, and the porn industry thrives, there is less and less control over what one thinks of sex and understands as sex.
Moreover, it also, in some sense, sets standards—deeply unrealistic ones—for what sex means. But, feminists, since the mid-1970s, have argued that ‘porn is a lynchpin of patriarchy’—that is, as Robin Morgan declared, ‘Pornography is a theory, and rape is a practice’ (p. 37). These feminists argued that porn tends to make women a subordinate entity, and that it, in inciting and legitimising kinkiness, acts to perpetrate violence against women.
Srinivasan highlights that since the students in her class belong to different eras, those who are born after the 1990s and those who understand sex as what porn says, it is critical to point out what needs to be done in relation to porn. Any attempts at legislating against porn and attempts at legislating sex tend to financially harm those women who depend on it. There is also piracy—despite how hard the state goes at banning sites—porn sites function unscathed.
Moreover, because it trains individuals, it is important to see ways porn could be altered to deem its use empowering and educational. In 1984, Candida Royalle sought to provide an alternative sex education, which revealed the sexiness of bodies, and whose acts did not conform to heterosexist, racist and erotic standards.
However, such ventures, although beautiful and egalitarian in their sexual ethos, are costly—they are expensive to watch. These feminist and indie porn movies are rarely free, and because they are rarely free, ‘it would hardly fly as formal sex education’ (p. 70). And since screens are an inescapable reality today, the best we could do is a better representation.
What, then, is it with sleeping with your students? Is it ethical for a professor to sleep with their students? In 1992, Jane Gallop, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, wrote a book titled Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, where she argued, ‘If schools decide to prohibit not only sex but “amorous relations” between teacher and student, the “consensual amorous relation” that will be banned from our campuses might just be teaching itself’ (quoted in p. 124).
Sexual harassment, by definition, does not include consensual sexual relations between professors and students. But there is a differential of power between the powerful (professor) and the powerless (student). ‘When the relatively powerless students consent with the powerful, is it consent worth the name?’ (p. 127).
How, then, does a professor respond when a student expresses their love for them? What is the best pedagogical practice in such situations? Srinivasan writes: ‘It would involve, presumably, the professor “convincing” the student that her desire for him is a form of projection: that what she really desires isn’t the professor at all, but what he represents. To switch from Freud’s terms to Plato’s, the teacher must redirect the student’s erotic energies from himself towards their proper object: knowledge, truth, understanding’ (p. 129). Because when a student expresses their desire to sleep with their professor, they might want to be him, and if not become him, at least have him.
Those women who end up having sex with their professors, Srinivasan adds, may sometimes have to drop out of their universities when the relationship ends. There is a certain awkwardness all around—in classrooms since the male professor starts to treat his male and female students (with whom he has sex) differently, between lectures, outside with the professor’s colleagues who now treat you as someone’s chick. And in several cases, women drop out of their universities, while male professors would have moved on from one student to another in their sex spree.
In the final essay, titled “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism”, Srinivasan asks: ‘What should feminists do if they win?’ This might sound weird, the author alludes, because if feminists were powerful, then they would have already won. Or that the feminists are powerless. This, Srinivasan, tells us is wrong. Feminists have been powerful. And those feminists with power have predominantly remained rich, wealthy, and white, and in Western societies.
But there is a whole set of women, say, women prostitutes, who live their lives differently. For them, their ability to survive matters more than feminist ideals. And so, when anti-prostitution feminists deem the prostitutes as anathema to society, and as doing injustice to the feminist movement by being subordinate to men, and by being privy to the perpetuated violence by men, there is a serious danger of not understanding what sex work means to sex workers. It is a means to their livelihood. For sex workers, Srinivasan writes, ‘the choice between men’s punishment and their own survival is all too clear’ (p. 153).
Moreover, there is a demand from feminists (who advocate “carceral feminism”—a feminism that looks at the coercive power of the state to achieve gender justice) for the state to regulate sex work. But what is missing in this is also that all forms of regulation of sex ban in terms of whether the receiver of sex is punished or the provider acts as a disadvantage to women who sell sex. Moreover, in several instances, it is the police who tend to commit lots of sexual violence against women, a specific set of women who are vulnerable in racial, caste, and class terms.
There are two worlds in which feminism operates. And when feminism seeks a unified global solidarity of action, it obfuscates all forms of material inequality that these feminist worlds hold. It is crucial for feminism to account for material differences so as to make a ‘working class movement anything but feminist’ (p. 176). Therefore, the feminist movement must now turn to those who do not have power, and ‘those who still have not won, those for whom winning so far means surviving’ (p. 179).
Because, for Srinivasan, feminism is a ‘political movement’, what does it mean to seek to ‘end political, social, economic, psychological, and physical subordination of women?’ And, as the author shows us in the final chapter, it lies in challenging our own feminism in ways we seek to articulate differences in power terms—and to think of ways in which feminism could work to benefit the worst-off person in our society.
However, there were some questions I wished Srinivasan had spoken more about. While Srinivasan acknowledges that her work has centred around the United States, Britain, and at times, India, there was so very little about the Indian case in each of these debates. For instance, in relation to sex, orthodox patriarchy deems sex itself as a sacrosanct act in India, and as a result, deems feminist thinking about porn, sex, and even sexual violence a challenge. I also wanted to know how Indian parents reprimand their children for having sex, and as a result, parks and public spaces become secret spots for intimacy, and what challenges this poses to how sex becomes free.
Moreover, several women—educated and feminist even—tend to take the initials of their spouses, and what implication does that have on the equality of sexual relations, and patriarchal norms. Or more generally, just what it means for a well-educated feminist woman (for instance, Spivak) to drop their initials for their spouses in terms of what implications it has for feminist movements. These, too, much like Srinivasan’s other essays, can illuminate some critical implications for feminism. And I hope, Srinivasan—or maybe, someone else, or even me as and when I muster enough courage to write something—writes on this.
What Srinivasan does in The Right to Sex is to turn feminism on its head and ask uncomfortable questions that, even when they animate our present world, are difficult to answer. In her very own exquisite narration, Srinivasan asks us questions and thinks with us, and in thinking with us, gives us so much to think that all forms of certitude blur by the end of it. The author engages with a wide range of topics—from gender equality to politics of desire to # MeToo movement to incels to fuckability to carceral politics to capitalism—with ease. Srinivasan’s prose, although dense, is elegant. And I recommend everyone to read this book.