Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford and a contributing editor at the LRB. Her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century, was published in 2021. The title essay was first published in the LRB as ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’ She’s also written for the paper on subjects including free speech on campus, pronouns, octopuses, bestiality and sharks.
On 15 September, 26-year-old Arthur Medici was killed by a great white shark off Newcomb Hollow Beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He was thirty yards from the shore, boogie boarding, when the shark attacked. A witness says that everything was calm until he saw ‘a giant eruption of water’ and then ‘a tail and a lot of thrashing’. Medici was pulled from the water...
To take this question seriously requires that we recognise that the very idea of fixed sexual preference is political, not metaphysical. As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred: we are rightly wary of speaking of what people really want, or what some idealised version of them would want. That way, we know, authoritarianism lies. This is true, most of all, in sex, where invocations of real or ideal desires have long been used as a cover for the rape of women and gay men. But the fact is that our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills – not automatically, but not impossibly either.
Octopuses frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour. Just how refined their abilities are is a matter of scientific debate: their very strangeness makes octopuses hard to study. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. They are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.
Amia Srinivasan’s article in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here.
At the Rhodes Scholarship interview, candidates are often asked how they intend to ‘fight the world’s fight’, a phrase inherited from the scholarship’s founder, Cecil Rhodes. The exceeding ambition that has always been demanded of Rhodes scholars takes its cue from Rhodes’s own imperial fantasies: ‘Why should we not form a secret society with but one...
Amia Srinivasan discusses the UK’s recent appointment of a ‘free speech tsar’, whether students are increasingly leaning left and how activists across the political spectrum weaponise the concept...
Amia Srinivasan talks to Thomas Jones about the long search for a third person singular, gender-neutral pronoun, and the resurgence of the pronoun debate in recent years.
Leïla Slimani talks to Amia Srinivasan about her latest book Sex and Lies, which departs from fiction to explore the lives of and give a voice to the young women of Morocco, struggling to survive and...
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