Amia Srinivasan opens her piece, “Does anyone have the right to sex?” with a discussion of ‘Incel’ culture – involuntarily celibate men enraged at women for depriving them of sex. Srinivasan affirms that such men are obviously in the wrong; their anger at women has no basis and their advocation for rape is horrendous. However, there is something to investigate here, she says – while the answer to her titular question is a resounding “No,” some men are excluded from the sexual sphere of society for problematic reasons. That is, people have a right to their sexual desires, but we cannot ignore the fact these desires are politically shaped; it is not random chance that there is societal level fat-phobia or sexual bias against Asian men. Thus, we must think deeply about the formation of our desires and perhaps try to change them. This is a noble undertaking, but Srinivasan does not make it clear to what exactly we should change our desires. I will show that we while must embrace sex-positivity (everyone’s right to their sexual proclivities), we should distinguish between two things Srinivasan conflates: going against the political grain of sexual desire, and allowing desire to choose ‘for itself.’ The latter, I argue, is impossible. We can, however, let those who have yet to form sexual desires to develop such preferences freely, devoid of political influence. This, then, is a better goal to focus on.

Srinivasan’s main argument is difficult to contest. She first states the obvious: that no one is obligated to have sex with anyone else. This is where incels go wrong; perhaps some men struggle to find sexual partners for unfair reasons, but the issue is the politics which shape men’s and women’s desires; it is a problem of patriarchy, not women that owe men sex. This issue revolves around ‘negative’ desires, one might say – the fact we all have desires not to have sex with certain people. Srinivasan claims we must treat these desires as axiomatic, but we must treat ‘positive’ sexual desires as axiomatic, too. This is sex-positive feminism: if a woman says she enjoys partaking in the rape fantasy, feminists (and everyone, really) have an obligation to believe her. To say it is a problem of false consciousness – that the woman doesn’t know her own best interests – is to stray into the realm of authoritarian moralism, which we must not do; this would deny women the right to sexual pleasure (and it’s important to note that while Srinivasan talks of a ‘right’ to sexual pleasure, or a ‘right’ to guilt-free sex, this is in the context of having a consenting partner; no one, however, has a right to a consenting partner). However, to stop here – to simply validate everyone’s sexual preferences and move on – is problematic, she argues. Our desires are unquestionably linked to politics, popular culture, our upbringings, and society’s general superstructure. We know that this superstructure contains racial prejudice, misogyny, and other oppressive ways of thinking, and as these filter into our sexual preferences, Srinivasan writes that it is not enough to simply tell sexually marginalized groups, “No one is required to have sex with you.”

Srinivasan uses stories of gay men on Grindr to emphasize that there are broad trends of sexual racism and fat-phobia present in the US. The bigger problem, she says, is that the gay community acknowledges this – and thinks it should change – while straight people, though guilty of the same trends, do not. Particularly, it is white, able-bodied cis straight people that fail to recognize there might be something wrong with who they have sex with, since they fail to recognize it is a political question. This brings home her conclusion: while embracing sex-positivity, we must not lose sight of the political shaping of our sexual desires; we must interrogate where these desires come from. The end result of this interrogation is not explicitly spelled out, but Srinivasan gives us hope that one can work on their biases and, for example, come to view overweight women as objectively beautiful. She claims that breaking out of what politics has chosen for us, sexually, allows us to choose for ourselves – to answer the question of what we would choose if we had a real, or free choice.

The issue is that these two things – sexually breaking from politics and making a ‘free’ choice – are completely different. Going against what politics has chosen for us is perhaps feasible, but making a free choice is not; it is too late. I say “perhaps” because it is impossible to know for sure just which sexual desires are a result of politics. Here may be where I break from Srinivasan: who we have sex with is certainly a political question, but it is not entirely political. In the best cases, people can develop preferences apolitically; this is what saying something like, “if we had a free choice” means. I will not enter any discussion of free will or determinism, but I think it is clear our sexual desires are a result of a number of factors: a combination of nature, nurture (including politics), and random chance. We can use the following framework: imagine that X is the set of all things we are okay with influencing one’s sexual preferences. In a hypothetical scenario, X would lead Bob, as he grows up and lives his life, to develop a set of sexual desires A. These would be his “freely” chosen desires, and while one could debate how free they are, we are assuming this is the best case; X does not include anything political, like biases, stereotypes, etc. What, then, would A look like? I purport that it is mostly random. This is fine, though – Bob has developed a set of essentially random preferences, and we assume that if everyone were like Bob, there would be no sexually-marginalized groups; who we have sex with would cease to be a political question. Sadly, this is not how the world works. Instead, Bob has been influenced by a broader, more political set of things, leading him to develop his actual preferences, B. Here is what I claim: Bob can introspect all he wants – and he can make guesses – but he can never know which things in B are purely political in nature. Any of them might have been in A anyway.

Now, this could be contested. My assumption here is that people dodevelop certain ‘free’ sexual preferences, and that sexual preferences can look like anything (A and B could even be the same). One might argue against this – for instance, that any sexual preference for one race over another is inherently racist and would never come about unless it is an instance of broader racism in society trickling into (and disguising itself as) a sexual preference. But, if one allows for any sexual preference, including race, to possibly be the result of random chance – a free choice – then one mustadmit that they cannot be sure, for any given preference, whether it is political in nature or random chance, even while maintaining that most racial preferences are political (and racist). Likewise, if a women says she enjoys the rape fantasy, and it’s possible to freely choose enjoying the rape fantasy, how can one know (for sure!) if her preference is political or not? If one argues that women’s desires are all political, then it’s unclear what to do. Feminist reasoning says to introspect on what your freely chosen sexual preferences would have been, but I have just shown that it’s too late to ever figure this out. Nobody can know what they ‘would have’ chosen had politics not influenced them.

Where does this leave us? It is too late to let desire choose for itself, but Srinivasan also points out that we have the power to shape our own desires, consciously. This is good – while we cannot know which desires are fully political in nature, we can nevertheless choose to change those sexual desires which fit with unjust societal trends, for the sake of justice and distributing sex more fairly. This is what desire ‘cutting against politics’ means; it is a hopeful view because, while we cannot transition our desire set from B to A, we can simply work on expanding it to be as broad as possible, or changing it to be more socially just. But this is different than what Srinivasan advocates. We can consciously change our desires in order to defy political trends, yes, but it is not developing ‘freely’ chosen desires. If we do seek a world where everyone has realized their desire set A, then what we should focus on is preventing political bias from influencing people yet to develop their sexual preferences. Younger people (and those yet to be born) are the only ones who have a chance of answering the question, “What would I choose if I had a free choice?” since politics has yet to corrupt their preferences.

Srinivasan rightly notes that we cannot enforce any policies too authoritative, like encouraging citizens to share sex more equally. She uses the analogy of sandwich sharing: how we might encourage fair sandwich sharing within schools, but we can’t do the same for sex since it’s so different. The key here, however, is not that sharing a sandwich and having sex are such different acts (though they are), but that sexual preferences and sandwich-sharing preferences are inherently different. Again, we might allow for racial sexual preferences to be okay, so long as they’re not politically formed or come with other biases, whereas not sharing a sandwich with someone solely because of their race is never benign. The former is sex-positivity; the latter is just racism and discrimination – people don’t have that kind of “random” preference for sandwich-sharing.

Srinivasan’s call for us to think about our sexual desires, and to potentially change them, is an admirable one. While it might be too late for making ‘free’ choices, we can still intentionally change our desires to cut against political trends for the purpose of justice (crudely, a fairer distribution of sex). Perhaps cutting against politics is getting closer to making a free choice, to transitioning from the set B to A, but you cannot know for sure – and that might be fine. Since our preferences can change, it is tempting to think removing racial prejudice and fat-phobia from our societal superstructure will naturally lead to people’s free (or more random) preferences arising, but even Srinivasan admits this is a little naïve; changing current desires will take conscious effort. The question to ask ourselves, then, is notwhat a free choice would look like, but more explicit: what should I change my desires to?