[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection.

Srinivasan is clear about the need to do something about our desires but not about what, exactly, we should do.

Srinivasan covers a lot of ground: pornography, sex work, Title IX, #MeToo, the racial politics of desirability, the incel movement, student-teacher relationships, carceral feminism.

Srinivasan’s true subject is the need for nuance and generosity in contemporary discourse on sex. She demonstrates the value of clear thinking by testing it on a range of topics. You don’t need to agree with her on everything to admire her even-handedness, her commitment.

The title...has a triumphant ring.

This book has clarity in abundance, but it also asks us to bear with complexity when it is required. Srinivasan refuses quick solutions.

Writing from an unmistakably feminist perspective, Srinivasan reiterates a number of arguments that have become axiomatic in some feminist circles: Teachers should not sleep with their students; sex work is work; and there is no feminism that is not intersectional. Yet more than many contemporary feminist thinkers, she draws on the work of second-wave feminists, including those with whom she disagrees.

For Srinivasan, the notion that people who are fat or transgender or simply don’t fit the white and blond mould are sexually undesirable is a matter for political contestation and moral analysis.

The Right to Sex...engages with some of the most complex hot-button cultural issues to emerge around sex and consent in the 21st century. With intelligence and clarity, Srinivasan unpacks the moral and philosophical underpinnings of such topics as false rape accusations, pornography and teacher-student relationships, making her book an invaluable companion for readers interested in nuanced analysis rather than hasty clickbait.

The thing she comes for is a truer feminist project, one which retrofits second-wave thought for the intersectional era and reminds a movement’s cynical grandchildren of the once-utopian feminist imagination.

The first, third and fifth chapters are diligently researched, expertly synthesized accounts of the events, theories and materials which have formed the primary interests of much of the last decade’s popular feminist writing on sexual power and consent.

A succinct and clear writer, Srinivasan defines her terms in helpful and revealing ways.

Srinivasan’s argument is at its most challenging to current feminist orthodoxies when she questions the injunction to 'believe women' who accuse men of sexual assault. False accusations of rape are uncommon, yet in a society that imprisons a disproportionate number of black men for sexual crimes, feminists should be wary of siding with the carceral state.

[An] exhilarating title essay.

Her nuanced analysis of complex problems feels fresh. Is it utopian, though? Socialism in other societies has not solved oppression, but Srinivasan is right that the status quo is failing many of us..

After all this build-up, you might be expecting something as shocking as Germaine Greer, as analytical as Simone de Beauvoir, as radical as Andrea Dworkin. The Right to Sex does not, sadly, deliver the bang it promises.

The end of the subordination of women is wrapped up with the end of categories that seek to contain and name desire — the categories of gender, sexuality, and race, among others. This is a bold claim, and one of its logical conclusions is that the goal of feminism is the abolition of women as a category. But Srinivasan arrives at this idea over the course of five essays, in which she rigorously deconstructs today’s dizzying array of gender and sexuality discourses.

A collection that poses more questions than it answers.

... [a] necessary treatise of the modern age.

One of the best books to contend with the politics of desire.

Srinivasan is one of those philosophers who is, first and foremost, an exceptional prose stylist – an exemplar of what academic writing, specifically, both could and should be. Her writing is unadorned and perfectly-tuned, like listening to someone play the piano incredibly well: at times her sentences resonate with an almost luminous clarity, reducing some horrendously tangled rat-king of philosophical concepts and material concerns to an insight which beams out perfectly in the relations between her paragraphs.

These essays provide a useful introduction to contemporary feminism, its permutations and positions, for those who may, somehow, have missed the debate.

Overall, the essays bring many of the foundational tensions of the women’s liberation movement into the political and cultural climate of the 21st century.

... sharp and thoughtful.

Approaching each of her topics, Srinivasan orients readers with care, nuance, and intersectionality.

Potent, thought-provoking ruminations on feminism as a political movement capable of eradicating the subordination of women.

... a fascinating collection of essays.