The Right to Sex

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERBLACKWELL’S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2022Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers – a guide to what everybody is talking about today‘Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing’ JIA TOLENTINO‘I believe Amia Srinivasan’s work will change the world’ KATHERINE RUNDELL‘Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year‘ PANDORA SYKES————————-How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity – its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power – we need to move beyond ‘yes and no’, wanted and unwanted. We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon. Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.