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Amia Srinivasan QUOTES

Amia Srinivasan QUOTES

1 " As of September 2020, the British mandatory curriculum broadened to include same-sex relationships, sexual assault and 'porn literacy,' and parents will no longer be able to opt-out their children once they reach the age of fifteen. A petition with more than 118,000 signatures protested against the change, insisting that it was the parents' 'fundamental right to teach their child' about sex. What these parents are missing is that their children are already being taught about sex, and not by them. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

2 " Feminism cannot indulge the fantasy that interests always converge; that our plans will have no unexpected, undesirable consequences; that politics is a place of comfort. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

3 " As Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici pointed out in the 1970s, and Nancy Fraser has argued since, the family as a site of feminine care serves capitalism by giving men emotional and sexual compensation for the coercion of market relations. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

4 " It is absurd to contend that … vice, ecstasy, and passion would become impossible if man and woman were concretely peers; the contradictions opposing flesh to spirit, instant to time, the vertigo of immanence to the appeal of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of oblivion will never disappear; "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

5 " When you are a woman and a philosopher,” wrote the French philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff, “it is useful to be a feminist in order to understand what is happening to you. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

6 " Women sell sex, on the whole, because they need money; to give sex-less men money with which to pay for sex presupposes that there are women who need to sell sex to live. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

7 " This is the deep contradiction at the heart of the incel phenomenon: incels oppose themselves to a sexual market in which they see themselves as losers, while being wedded to the status hierarchy that structures that market. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

8 " Sex” in this second sense is also said to be a natural thing, a thing that exists outside politics. Feminism shows that this too is a fiction, and a fiction that serves certain interests. Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing. The roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

9 " A famous philosopher once said to me that he objected to feminist critiques of sex because it was only during sex that he felt truly outside politics, that he felt truly free. I asked him what his wife would say to that. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

10 " Feminists have long dreamed of sexual freedom. What they refuse to accept is its simulacrum: sex that is said to be free, not because it is equal, but because it is ubiquitous. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

11 " women’s autonomy, even if it spares men a good number of problems, will also deny them many conveniences; assuredly, there are certain ways of living the sexual adventure that will be lost in the world of tomorrow: but this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry, and dreams will be banished from it. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

12 " warned that a truly radical politics—that is, a coalitional politics—cannot be a home to its members: "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

13 " But many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors, overwhelmingly male, intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

14 " But Indians are such civilized people,” he said. I wanted to tell him that there is no civilization under patriarchy. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

15 " Feminists anxious about sex under patriarchy found it easier, a group of pro-porn feminists wrote in 1983, “to attack the picture of what oppresses us than the mysterious, elusive … thing itself. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

16 " porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains. It etches deep grooves in the psyche, forming powerful associations between arousal and selected stimuli, bypassing that part of us which pauses, considers, thinks. Those associations, strengthened through repetition, reinforce and reproduce the social meaning assigned by patriarchy to sexual difference. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

17 " Specifically, pornography performs the speech act of licensing the subordination of women, and conferring on women an inferior civic status. Like the stampede that follows my shouting “Fire!,” porn’s effects on women are not just, anti-porn feminists think, the expected result, but moreover the whole point of pornography. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

18 " Once we take it as given that under current economic conditions many women will be compelled to sell sex, and that under current ideological conditions many men will buy it, the most important question remaining is: what can we do to strengthen the hand of women in this bargain? "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

19 " By this I don’t just mean that kids are the ones who most easily grasp the semiotic possibilities of TikTok and Instagram. I also mean that they have a sensitivity to the workings of gendered and racialized power that outstrips anything seen before in the political mainstream. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

20 " But these feminists might counter that they are responding to another, equally real choice, which proponents of sex workers’ rights ignore: the choice between making life better for the women who sell sex now, and bringing into existence a world in which sex is no longer bought and sold. "

― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century