Home > Author > Amia Srinivasan
41 " At its best, feminist theory is grounded in what women think when they are by themselves, what they say to each other on the picket line and on the assembly line and on the street corner and in the bedroom, "
― Amia Srinivasan , The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
42 " (It’s easy to forget, but in almost all mainstream porn men have real orgasms and women fake it.) "
43 " How do we formulate a regulation that prohibits the sort of sex that is produced by patriarchy? "
44 " I am saying that a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better—not just fairer, but more imaginative—than men have been. "
45 " When the teacher takes the student’s longing for epistemic power and transposes it into a sexual key, allowing himself to be—or worse, making himself—the object of her desire, he has failed her as a teacher. "
46 " In particular, it does not record the deployment of the false rape accusation in the Jim Crow period as, in Ida B. Wells’s words, “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized. "
47 " It is an anxiety, too, about race and class: about the possibility that the law might treat wealthy white men as it routinely treats poor black and brown men. "
48 " Michelle Goldberg writes, “but I don’t think they feel sorry for women, or think about women’s experience much at all. "
49 " Whatever may be in the student’s mind, it is surely the case that Kincaid’s focus, as a teacher, should be on directing his student’s desire away from himself, and toward its proper object: her epistemic empowerment. "
50 " Well-off white men instinctively and correctly trust that the legal justice system will take care of them: will not plant drugs on them, will not gun them down and later claim to have seen a weapon, will not harass them for walking in a neighborhood where they “don’t belong,” will give them a pass for carrying that gram of cocaine or bag of weed. But in the case of rape, well-off white men worry that the growing demand that women be believed will cut against their right to be shielded from the prejudices of the law.19 "
51 " Kincaid doesn’t want us to see him as a cliché. He also presumably doesn’t want us thinking about—or isn’t himself aware of—the gender dynamics that underpin this cliché. By this I don’t only mean the way that boys and men are socialized to find domination sexy, and girls and women to find subordination sexy; or the way that some male professors blend sexual entitlement with intellectual narcissism, seeing sex with women students as the delayed reward for suffering through an adolescence in which brawn or cool were prized more highly than brains. "
52 " Adrienne Rich described the institution of “compulsory heterosexuality” as a political structure that compels all women, straight and gay alike, to regulate their relations to other women in a way that is congenial to patriarchy "
53 " Would SB 967 have solved problems at UMass? It depends on precisely what you think “the problem” is. If it’s men having sex with women without first securing an active “yes,” then an affirmative consent law is perhaps an effective, if “unpretty,” solution. But if the problem is something deeper, to do with the psychosocial structures that make men want to have sex with women who don’t really want it, or make them feel that it’s their job to overcome a woman’s resistance, and that make women feel they must have sex with men when they don’t want to, it’s far less clear what a law like SB 967 achieves. "
54 " The appropriate response is envy, not desire. You must want to be like that woman; it could never be that you simply want her. But when it comes to the men they find compelling, the opposite applies: it must be that you want him, it can’t be that you want to be like him. "
55 " And, like an animal, Brock is imagined to exist outside the moral order. "
56 " The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement—feminism, anti-racism, the labor movement—that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of color, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed. "
57 " Believe women” operates as a corrective norm, "
58 " And, what is just as important, it reproduces the very dynamics on which it feeds, by making sure that the benefits of education will not accrue equally to men and women. "
59 " norms of the law do not set the norms of rational belief. "
60 " Adrienne Rich, in a lecture she gave in 1978 to the teachers of women students, spoke of what she called the “misleading concept” of “coeducation”: “that because women and men are sitting in the same classrooms, hearing the same lectures, reading the same books, performing the same laboratory experiments, they are receiving an equal education. "