Hello my dear friends, I am back! I apologise for my two month absence. I have no real excuse other than I didn’t feel like doing much of anything and my brain felt like soup. The New York Times calls this “languishing” but I’m too embarrassed to identify with anything written by an organisational psychologist.
The last time I was in your inbox, I wrote about the allegations levelled against BooksActually (no follow ups from them yet, by the way!) and promised to write more about some of the feminist books I’d read. I feel like too much time has passed for me to do justice to the two books I said I’d review — The Right To Sex and Full Surrogacy Now — so you must forgive me if these reviews are not my best.
The Right To Sex by Amia Srinivasan
This is a collection of essays from the Oxford-based philosopher Amia Srinivasan. As the title might imply, each essay puzzles over a different aspect of contemporary sex like pornography, incels, and the politics of attraction. What frustrated me the most about this collection was how good Srinivasan is at dissecting a problem but how hesitant she is to make her personal stand legible. One of the strongest essays in the book is titled “On Not Sleeping With Your Students”. In it, she dismantles the arguments that some university professors have made for blurring the lines between romance and professionalism: that students can be consenting adults, that it is not unusual for an erotic connection to form when something as intimate as education is happening. Instead of arguing along the lines of consent and coercion, Srinivasan makes the point that the teacher who enters a relationship with a student fails to teach. This is Srinivasan at her best, when she dodges the well-trodden paths and forges a completely new argument. Srinivasan herself is an educator and her stake in this game is very clear.
The central essays of the book, “The Right to Sex” and the follow-up “Coda: The Politics of Desire” are ambitious and instructive. But they left me feeling dissatisfied. The Right to Sex was originally published in the London Review of Books begins by engaging with the issue of male incel violence and hate for women. It then segues into a discussion about the formation and politics of desire.
When we see consent as the sole constraint on OK sex, we are pushed towards a naturalisation of sexual preference in which the rape fantasy becomes a primordial rather than a political fact. But not only the rape fantasy. Consider the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishisation and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies. These too are political facts, which a truly intersectional feminism should demand that we take seriously. But the sex-positive gaze, unmoored from Willis’s call to ambivalence, threatens to neutralise these facts, treating them as pre-political givens. In other words, the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’.
This essay is well worth reading and brings up some very difficult questions. Nobody is entitled to sex but some people, due to their identities and bodies, receive far less of it than others. This isn’t incel apologism, it’s an attempt to cut through conventional feminist wisdom by asking the questions that are impolite. “Coda” responds to the critique Srinivasan received after publishing this essay (including this excellent rejoinder from Andrea Long Chu in The Point). Written in a series of numbered statements, the essay is coherent and reasonable. However, it ends weakly. There is an understanding that desire must be transformed. Srinivasan suggests that “setting our desires free from politics” can be emancipatory. But how does one go about changing what they desire? We cannot know.
(If you’d like to read a better and more exciting assessment of this book, I recommend this.)
Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis
Full Surrogacy Now makes a bold claim: pregnancy, gestation, and birth should be seen as work. There is no better case study to test this theory on than the surrogacy industry. A lot of this book is dedicated to the study of a specific surrogacy clinic, the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in India, and that alone makes it an interesting read. However, the crux of the argument rests on the idea that “mother” is not a natural category, it is a constructed one. The future of feminism could very well be in the deconstruction of motherhood and family and recognising pregnancy for the manual labour that it is would be a solid step towards that.
It’s been a while since I read this book so I can’t give you a more considered review. I thought the arguments were interesting, if a little dense. What I enjoyed about it the most was how much I was forced to reconsider. Of course the familial unit is ideological. But Lewis’ book pushed me in directions I didn’t even know existed.
I’m really not kidding when I say that the book is dense. It took me an unusually long time to get through it. Was it my languishing or was it complex ideas? Probably both. If you’d like to learn more about Lewis’ ideas but would rather not read the book, I recommend this interview by Rosemarie Ho for The Nation.
RH: But to be more specific, how does surrogacy as a praxis generate space for a revolutionary politics? What does it mean to demand “full surrogacy now”?
SL: Currently, the whole logic of surrogacy is to excise the surrogate from the family picture; the whole point of being a surrogate is that you are never really there. That’s something I want to challenge, the idea that babies belong to anyone—the idea that the product of gestational labor gets transferred as property to a set of people. That is actually one of the revolutionary horizons that the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers advocated for: how children should belong to no one but themselves.
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski (bonus book! I read this last week and thought I’d share it with you)
Ratjkowski, or Emrata as she’s more commonly referred to, is most famous for her role in the Robin Thicke and Pharrell music video “Blurred Lines”. When I think of Emrata, however, I can’t help but remember this image of her and her baby that went viral recently. Her baby hangs awkwardly by her side as she holds him up with one arm. His swim shorts match the bikini (is it one from her own brand?) that crisscrosses around her concave tummy. Her thighs don’t touch. She smoulders for the camera.
I’m describing her body precisely because Emrata’s book is about her body. She inhabits one of the most well-known bodies globally; she has 28 million Instagram followers and countless brand endorsements. I will never know what it’s like to be known solely for my physical beauty. I can only imagine that it can be disempowering. My Body is a bid for legitimacy, to be seen as more than a beautiful body.
I first read Emrata’s writing in The Cut. She had published an essay titled “Buying Myself Back” about the men who had profited off her image and her not having any right to stop it. It’s a strong essay that discusses how she was turned into a literal commodity to be traded. We all commoditise ourselves in order to make a living under capitalism. But it’s easier to split your labour and time from your sense of self than your image.
Emrata is very good at examining the ways in which men’s desire and power subjugate her. In her line of work, she has faced the full gamut of misogyny: assault, abuse, condescension. Men hold most of the power in the modelling industry, women are just the faces of it. And because her image is so public, men feel more entitled to objectifying her.
The problem with this book is Emrata’s failure to recognise that she’s not alone in this. Sexual harassment and condescension and assault happen to women in all industries, whether or not they are as conventionally attractive as Emrata. Oppression is a shared experience for women, it just takes on a different flavour when you’re a model. In fact, women don’t figure very much into the view of this book. There is no sense that the issues she grapples with are universal, they seem to be because she’s just so beautiful. When she does talk about women, the main undercurrent is envy. The first essay in the collection is about her mother and is a nuanced and clever look at their relationship — specifically how her mother has prized beauty above almost everything else.
I got the distinct sense that the writer was trying very hard to trade in self-awareness but I fear it does not go far enough. She glibly mentions that she’s “a white girl” and that other women “list their ethnicities in an attempt to sound quote unquote exotic”. She also reveals that she takes Instagram too seriously and brings the reader through the experience of accruing a million likes off of a bikini photograph. These observations don’t jeopardise her position at all. They make her likeable but they are not vulnerable enough — they do not examine where and how she does have power.
There are strange moments in the book where she reflects on not being a “real” rich person. These are jarring because she also reveals in this book that Jho Low (of 1MDB fame) paid her $25,000 to show up at a party. She talks about her insecurity in being shorter than other models or not high fashion enough because she has curves. But she doesn’t acknowledge the elephant in the room. The modelling industry runs on two main emotions: the desire of men and the insecurity of women. More generously, this can be rephrased as the aspiration of women. Emrata has a body that is unachievable for many women without surgery. There is nothing immoral about having that body. She’s not even consciously setting the unattainable beauty standard. But she does profit off it. There is no mention of the labour it takes to maintain the way she looks. Instead we get the insulting claim that she has “never been good about taking care” of her body. The sentence puts it as “taking care of [her]self” but she is referring specifically to her body. She doesn’t take care of her teeth, she doesn’t like to clean herself, she doesn’t stretch after intercontinental air travel. Those things might be true but what about her hair, her skin, her waist, her face?
My Body is, unfortunately for Emrata, a book that was published only because she’s Emrata. The essay in The Cut is fantastic but the rest of the collection is merely padding. She is a decent writer but this book does not break the ground she wishes it had. The last essay here covers pregnancy and motherhood. She arrives at a conclusion that is common in the body positivity sphere – bodies are good for what they do, not what they look like. It’s a valid sentiment but hard to square with the fact that what Emrata’s body does is what it looks like.
I’m writing this from the airport (!!) I have to run to my gate now so please accept my apologies for anything I could have fixed with a little more editing.
The next issue of the newsletter will arrive SOON and it will be a GIFT GUIDE. I love spending money.
Talk soon!!
(I got a conure recently so now I’m a bird girl. Enjoy these cuties.)