This week, while our audio team is on summer break, we’re featuring an episode from one of our favorite podcasts: Conversations with Tyler, hosted by the wonderful Tyler Cowen. It’s a conversation with philosopher Amia Srinivasan about her book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. They debate questions such as: do we have a “right” to be desired? How are our sexual desires shaped by the society around us? Is consent sufficient for a sexual relationship? How should we address falling fertility rates? What did women learn about egalitarianism during the pandemic? Why, according to her, progress requires regress. And much, much more. . .
The episode received a lot of attention and reactions, for reasons you’ll understand when you listen to it. Most importantly, it’s contentious yet respectful in a way that I think is increasingly rare in public life. As Tyler wrote at the time, on his blog Marginal Revolution, about the conversation: “You have to learn to learn from people who bother, annoy, or frustrate you. If you do, they will not in fact bother, annoy, or frustrate you.”
I couldn’t agree more. In fact, this conversation between Tyler and Amia was a big inspiration for our first-ever Free Press live debate, which is happening next week in L.A. The proposition: has the sexual revolution failed? If this conversation inspires you too, please consider buying a ticket to the event: Wednesday, September 13, at the Ace Theatre in downtown L.A.
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Bari must be involved in some very advanced intellectual efforting to have got any conciliating normative “resolution tunneling” from a feminist Marxian of her ilk. I thought her anti-normative normative norming of the feminist dialectic was, to say the least, illuminating on several key points, especially in the important area of clarity bias of the modern feminist “anti-feminist” feministing synthesis. That’s about all I got out of the talk. Verrrry deep. Woof. Also she talks like Elizabeth Holmes (low register growl) when on stage, which is really threatening to men. Score!
It's always helpful to hear other opinions - and occasionally acceptable to listen to someone who so screwed up that it feels like Srinivasan has been dropped onto the planet by aliens. She couldn't be more screwed up if she tried.
By identifying as a utopian (google spell-check doesn't seem to like "utopiast", she forces herself to assume that if people have exactly the same "perfect" lives, they will live in perfect harmony. She seems unable to understand that every single human society is managed by those that have power (through money, force, or other coercive means) over those who do not. That applies most obviously to the North Koreas and Chinas of the world, but applies in a different way to democratic societies like the USA in a frankly more insidious manner.
Therefore, her entire premise is impossible. If sex workers have the right to work as they wish, someone will be around to manage them and maximize their output to maximize their income and power. Elimination of gender will simply be replaced by a patriarchy equivalent...everyone must be queer in order for us to evolve beyond our historical tendencies.
I'd add her to my list of people that should be invited to go on one of Elon's one-way trips to Mars. That way, we'd be sending her home.