Do you know the story of Myrrha and Cinyras? It appears in Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, alongside more celebrated tales, like that of Orpheus and Eurydice; in fact, Orpheus himself sings of it. Myrrha, he tells us, was the princess of Cyprus, the daughter of King Cinyras, whom she dearly loved—but not as a daughter should. Tormented by forbidden lust, she tried to hang herself, but was discovered in time by her nurse. The nurse then arranged for Myrrha to go to Cinyras during a festival when married women (including Myrrha’s mother, the queen) stayed away from their husbands’ beds. Disguised by the dark, Myrrha spent many blissful nights with her father, until Cinyras at last thought to fetch a light to see the face of his young lover. On learning the truth, he seized his sword, to kill her. She fled and wandered the earth until the gods put an end to her misery by turning her into a tree. That is how we got myrrh.
Two thousand years later, this tale is as strange and harrowing as ever. (The poet Frank Bidart drew on it in his 1997 book, “Desire,” and his telling practically burns the page.) Why is Orpheus singing of such things? He has just lost Eurydice by turning back and taking a forbidden look at her as she followed him up from Hades. Maybe, having ruined his life by succumbing to his own desire, he is taking bitter comfort in the fact that someone else has done the same.
What makes Orpheus’ account of Myrrha even stranger is that it immediately follows the story of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with a statue of his own making. (Cinyras is their grandson.) That is a happy tale, ending with an impossible wish fulfilled. But it, too, contains the bitter seed of female duplicity. Pygmalion’s statue is, in Charles Martin’s translation, “better than any living woman could boast of”—essentially, it is an ivory sex doll—and he’s moved to create it by his disgust at women’s wanton ways:
Pygmalion’s attitude sounds like one that we now associate with incels: involuntary celibates. The most notorious example is Elliot Rodger, the twenty-two-year-old who went on a murderous spree in Isla Vista, California, in May, 2014, to avenge himself on a world of women who, as he claimed in a hundred-thousand-word autobiographical manifesto, acted like rapacious sluts with other men and yet punished him by denying him sex. Thwarted male desire, we know, is a dangerous thing—and so, Myrrha’s story tells us, is female desire fulfilled. Myrrha is cursed from the moment that she recognizes what it is she wants, and she knows it.
This is an ancient belief: that our most ardent desires dwell fully formed within us, only waiting to emerge. It’s at the center of contemporary sexual politics, too; few things have been more critical to the acceptance of gay rights in the United States than the notion that queer people are “born this way.” Change our desire? It seems easier to be changed into a tree.
Has the time come to reconsider? Amia Srinivasan, a professor of philosophy at Oxford and an occasional contributor to this magazine, thinks so. Her new collection of essays, “The Right to Sex” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), takes on a number of topics that are relevant, as its subtitle says, to “feminism in the twenty-first century,” such as porn, consent, and the prospect of sex between students and their teachers. But at its heart is the title essay, in which Srinivasan asks us to imagine what might be possible if we chose to see our own erotic desires as flexible rather than fixed. The essay caused a stir in 2018, when it was first published, in the London Review of Books, in part because its provocative original title, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?,” suggested to certain readers that Srinivasan was prepared to argue that some people did. In fact, she was arguing the opposite; it is “axiomatic,” she writes, “that no one is under an obligation to have sex with anyone else,” and “axiomatic” is a word that philosophers do not just throw around. Still, reading the essay now, you can see why people—conservative commentators, like the columnist Ross Douthat, but also a number of feminists—were freaked out.
Srinivasan begins her discussion with Elliot Rodger. He and other self-declared male incels want to rape and kill women, and, what’s more, they blame us for inspiring them to rape and kill. As many feminists have pointed out, the incel phenomenon is a particularly concentrated form of the misogynistic poison that is aerosolized throughout the general cultural air. Such men feel that they have a right to sex, but so have many men—and, until very recently, the law was often on their side. (Nobody was convicted of marital rape in the United States before 1979.)
So, though what Rodger did was aberrant, “his sense of sexual entitlement was a case study in patriarchal ideology,” Srinivasan writes. This is the consensus position. Then she asks us to look closely at what Rodger’s particular sense of sexual entitlement entailed. Rodger’s mother was Malaysian Chinese, his father white English; in his manifesto, he wrote of his fury at finding himself sexually rejected while “an inferior, ugly black boy” he knew was “able to get a white girl.” Clearly, Rodger’s desire for, and hatred of, women was amplified by a rigid, repellent racial hierarchy. But, Srinivasan wonders, is the incel’s system so different from the one that most so-called normal people in our society use when they go about looking for sex? Rodger, who was erotically obsessed with “the spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut,” was not wrong to recognize that such a person was not likely to return his interest. He might have been looking at women reductively, categorically, but weren’t women doing the same, when they looked at him and saw (as Srinivasan puts it) a “short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy”?
Our sexual marketplace is explicitly and brutally judgmental, especially now that dating and hookup apps make it easier than ever to “shop” for partners according to a set of predetermined preferences—as if shopping for groceries by category online—and such “preferences,” Srinivasan thinks, tend to involve race. Certain bodies confer status to those granted access to them. “Consider the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women,” Srinivasan writes, summoning the values of the marketplace in flesh, “the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishization and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies.” So our desire is not some neutral, private thing. It is mimetic of other people’s, as the scholar René Girard postulated, more than half a century ago. It colludes with society to stratify and imprison us.
Feminism should help point the way out of this predicament, but feminism, Srinivasan believes, bears some blame for getting us into it in the first place. Female desire isn’t seen as an appropriate subject for feminist critique. Sex positivity rules the day: whatever a woman claims she wants is, by definition, a good thing, an expression of female agency, so long as it takes place within the bounds of consent. “Sex is no longer morally problematic or unproblematic,” Srinivasan writes. “It is instead merely wanted or unwanted.”
That wasn’t always the case. Many second-wave feminists of the nineteen-sixties and seventies were concerned with analyzing sex and desire. Enough of Freud and his ridiculous theories, they said. Desire, in Catharine MacKinnon’s words, is not some “innate primary natural pre-political unconditioned drive divided along the biological gender line.” Who and what and how we want is political, conditioned by patriarchy, which is to say, by oppression. What is more, many feminists—“anti-sex feminists,” as they came to be known—believed that the fact of desire itself constituted oppression, at least when it was directed toward men. One obvious solution was to cut men out of the picture. Lesbianism was framed as a political identity, available to all women regardless of sexual preference, though, true to their moniker, some anti-sex feminists decided to go further. Srinivasan writes of a group called Cell 16, based in Boston, which “practiced sex separatism, celibacy and karate” and opened meetings with a reading of Valerie Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto.”
On the other side were “pro-woman” feminists like Ellen Willis, who pointed out that asking women to reshape and restrict their desires according to their politics might not exactly be liberatory. The anti-sex feminists, they said, wanted to apply “personal solutionism” to a problem that was, at root, structural. Men had a lot of work to do, but women didn’t need to forswear their company while they got their act together: the bedroom was the battlefield. Eventually, Willis helped stake out a new position. Feminism, she demanded, needed to stop engaging in “authoritarian moralism” when it came to sex, and to start considering women as empowered sexual agents who got to decide what they did and didn’t like in bed without being told that they were colluding in their own oppression. Women had an absolute right to follow their own desires, within the limits of consent. This was sex positivity, and it anticipated the advent of feminism’s third wave, the one that we are largely still surfing.
Unsurprisingly, sex positivity has had more staying power than celibacy or political lesbianism. Sex is a useful thing to have on your side, but, Srinivasan believes, it comes at a cost. “The important thing now, it is broadly thought, is to take women at their word,” she writes. “If a woman says she enjoys working in porn, or being paid to have sex with men, or engaging in rape fantasies, or wearing stilettos—and even that she doesn’t just enjoy these things but finds them emancipatory, part of her feminist praxis—then we are required, many feminists think, to trust her.” She herself doesn’t seem to think so—her tone here is laced with skepticism, even sarcasm—but she stops short of saying that directly. One reason may be that she sees this kind of because-I-say-so feminism as the by-product of an indisputably good thing that happened to the movement, which is that it got more diverse, and consequently more tolerant. A lot of the fights during the second wave took place among middle-class white women; as feminism broadened its racial and cultural tent, Srinivasan writes, “thinking about the ways patriarchal oppression is inflected by race and class has made feminists reluctant to make universal prescriptions, including universal sexual policies.”
Mainly, she seems to want all of us to think harder about whom and what we like—to “dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obliged to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question often answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.” Srinivasan is clear about the need to do something about our desires but not about what, exactly, we should do. She sees promise in body positivity and other “radical self-love movements,” whose iconic phrases—“Black is beautiful” and “big is beautiful”—are “not just slogans of empowerment, but proposals for a reevaluation of our values.” Such a reëvaluation may be harder to accomplish when you are trying to love people other than yourself. There is already a term for categorical attraction to “the other”: fetishization. There’s a term, too, for preference based on guilt rather than on desire: pity. The first is anathema to love, the second to sex, and both are anathema to dignity.
Srinivasan’s essential counsel—to embrace ambivalence—might seem unlikely to cause offense. But it did. The disgruntled responses to the publication of “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” are the subject of a subsequent essay in Srinivasan’s book, “Coda: The Politics of Desire.” Reading these two pieces together is like chasing a glass of rosé with a shot of fire. In “The Right to Sex,” Srinivasan is temperate and scholarly, treading lightly as she builds her argument. In “Coda,” she is writing with the clarity of anger. She numbers each paragraph—there are eighty-eight in all—like Martin Luther’s theses, as if to make sure that we miss none of what she has to say. And there is another major tonal shift. She embraces the first person, telling us what she only hinted at in “The Right to Sex”: that these questions, for her, are personal.
Srinivasan takes her critics seriously, citing the tweets and the columns of the opposition. They include trans feminists who worry that Srinivasan’s political critique of desire could impinge on the desires of marginalized people; anti-trans lesbians who “want to resist any possible analogy between the white person who as a matter of policy doesn’t sleep with black people, and the cis lesbian who as a matter of policy doesn’t sleep with trans women”; conservatives who see in Srinivasan’s arguments the upending of the old sexual order of female submission to male dominance. (Of course, if the old sexual order had been upended, Srinivasan would not need to write a book addressing the problem of male domination.)
Srinivasan responds by marshalling evidence that the premise of “preference” is used to cover for an astonishing array of injustices and abuses. This requires her to go spelunking through sexist Reddit threads, racist reality-TV shows, and other icky places. But what is most painful is often what is closest to home. She quotes the writer Audrea Lim, who—in an Op-Ed about the tendency, among alt-right men, to date and marry Asian women—described her own experience as a “14-year-old Asian girl in an overwhelmingly white school” who sought favor by “distancing myself from the other Asian kids” and knew she had succeeded when a friend told her that she was “cool,” and therefore white. “I also have friends who joke that I am ‘basically white.’ ” Srinivasan writes. “Maybe it isn’t a joke.” She goes on:
Srinivasan is talking about the unsettling experience of being categorized by others, and looking hard at the way that she might be tempted to adopt these categories. For each of her points, as this passage makes clear, she can find a counterpoint. This must be what it means to “dwell in ambivalence.” Clearly, it’s not a comfortable place to be.
But why should it be comfortable? Confronting one’s own desires is risky, and its history, as a practice, is hardly one of success. Conversion therapy, too, is about trying to change what people want, and by all accounts the experience is not only hell; it is also ineffective. Yet conversion therapy serves a politics of repression. Srinivasan is after liberation. The process of self-interrogation may be painful, but it is part of the quest, she maintains, for greater joy.
In Pedro Almodóvar’s film “Law of Desire” (1987), Antonio Banderas plays Antonio, a smoldering young layabout with a screw loose, who becomes obsessed with Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela), a gay film director. Antonio hangs around the club where he knows Pablo likes to go, waiting to bump into him. “I don’t normally sleep with guys,” he tells Pablo, when at last they meet. But what he normally does or doesn’t do is irrelevant. He has been ambushed by desire, and is determined, as Pablo soon learns, to satisfy it.
Desire changes, and not usually by the mechanism of conscious choice. We meet someone; we want them. Then we meet someone else. Srinivasan recognizes this. Actually, it’s what she thinks we should hope for. “Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after, or love,” she writes, at the end of her “Right to Sex” essay. Maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about how to shift what we want but instead, like Antonio, recognize that we may be wrong about what we think we want, and embrace the possibility of wanting something different.
That is the message of the theorist Katherine Angel’s recent book, “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again” (Verso). Erotic desire, Angel argues, does not sit within us, fully formed, waiting to be mined like ore. It takes shape through a process of exploration, and, ideally, collaboration. (They don’t call it “intercourse” for nothing.) But Angel thinks that this kind of happy discovery is compromised for many women. One clear reason is the threat of male violence. A less obvious culprit is the safeguard that contemporary feminism has formulated to defuse that threat: affirmative consent.
Where Srinivasan’s issue with consent is that it is too permissive a standard to determine what constitutes “good” sex, Angel’s is that it is far too restrictive. For one thing, affirmative consent depends on “the conceit of absolute clarity”: before a woman can agree that she does or doesn’t want to do something, or to have something done to her, she must know just what it is she likes and wants. What if she is uncertain, or doesn’t yet know? Too bad. Angel worries, too, that the focus on consent treats any sexual encounter between a man and a woman as a possible crime scene, which it is up to the woman to police. (Her focus is on the dynamics of heterosexuality.) The man is assumed to be a threat; the woman’s role is to assure him that he is not. This doesn’t exactly make for an equal exchange of pleasure, and it doesn’t seem like a particularly effective way of preventing sexual violence, either.
Angel writes witheringly of “confidence feminists,” who object to female hesitance and uncertainty. Why didn’t you just say what you want? Why didn’t you just leave? That’s what these feminists ask when a woman admits that she was disturbed or confused in the aftermath of an ambiguous sexual encounter. Confidence feminists treat any sign of vulnerability on the part of a woman as an admission of weakness—and vulnerability is exactly the aspect of desire that Angel finds most precious: “A sexual ethics that is worth its name has to allow for obscurity, for opacity and for not-knowing.”
“Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again” is most exciting at the start and at the end, where Angel is boldest in her own ideas. In the middle chapters, she walks us through a lot of other people’s, mainly in the interest of throwing cold water on studies that purport to prove some objective truth about women and desire. If you are tempted to put your faith in tools like the vaginal plethysmograph (“a small, acrylic probe the size of a tampon,” in Angel’s useful description), which measures blood flow to the vagina in an attempt to objectively determine what it is that women want, Angel will disabuse you of the urge. It is a relief when she moves from science to film and literature—that is, to fiction, where the most complex human truths are told. On the recommendation of her enthusiasm, I read Susanna Moore’s novel “In the Cut,” and it nearly melted my face off. As Angel’s interest in that violent, sexy book suggests, she is drawn to the link between eros and danger. Vulnerability entails risk, Angel reminds us, and sex is never free from the dynamics of power. That is what makes it scary, and also, sometimes, wonderful.
Angel is not proposing that we do away with consent. She wants us to treat desire less like an assertion and more like a “conversation, mutual exploration, curiosity, uncertainty—all things, as it happens, that are stigmatized within traditional masculinity.” The modern woman has been told, ad nauseam, to embrace her masculine side: to be declarative, decisive, and confident, to admit no confusion or hesitancy, to “lean in” not only in the boardroom but also in bed. Now, Angel says, it is time for men to act more like women by embracing their own “porousness” and sensitivity. (After all, Angel points out, fondly, what is more vulnerable than the male body, which makes its desires so openly known?) It’s good to see Angel pay attention to heterosexual men, to “welcome them to vulnerability.” They may be the group of people most in need of hearing what she has to say.
One challenge that Srinivasan and Angel confront, as theorists of sex and desire, is that sex and desire are hard to theorize about. It is easier to explain what sex isn’t than what it is. “Sex is not a sandwich,” Srinivasan writes. Angel agrees: sex is not “something to be given and taken,” like an object or a good. It is “a process, a development, an unfolding.” That is why she and Srinivasan care so much about it—not just because it provides pleasure but because it can expand the limits of the self.
And sexual desire can be a creative act, an invitation to imagine. This is something that Srinivasan gets at in an essay called “Talking to My Students About Porn.” Many second-wave feminists believed that porn not merely condoned but in fact conditioned violence against women. Some fought to restrict and ban it, though, as Srinivasan points out, laws restricting sexual expression and its depiction tend to do no favors to women and queer people. Her own problem with porn is the way it insures that “imagination is limited to imitation, riffing on what it has already absorbed.” What people—young ones, particularly—need is “an emboldened sexual imagination.” Sex, she writes, “can, if they choose, remain as generations before them have chosen: violent, selfish, and unequal. Or sex can—if they choose—be something more joyful, more equal, freer.” It’s a lovely vision, though Srinivasan isn’t sure how it can be brought about.
Maybe no one can know—at least, not until such a choice becomes a necessity. Readers of Srinivasan might want to watch Xavier Dolan’s film “Laurence Anyways” (2012), which follows ten years in the lives of a couple in Montreal. When the film begins, in the late nineteen-eighties, Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) is a teacher of literature who lives with his beautiful, vital girlfriend, Fred (Suzanne Clément). They are in an ideal kind of love, inhabiting a private world of two. Then Laurence announces that he is trans. Fred is furious. She feels betrayed. Her mother pushes her to leave; her sister points out that Fred likes men. But Fred decides that she will try to make it work: she, too, will do her best to wrestle with ambiguity, to expand her own imagination of what desire can be. Laurence’s transition, in its social difficulty and personal liberation, is beautiful, but so is the process by which Fred, who wishes everything could stay the same, grapples with change. None of us are static, stable beings, with some fixed, internal true north. The real question may not be whether we can manage to change but whether we can afford not to. ♦
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