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The philosopher Amia Srinivasan on sex, ethics, consent, and Freud.
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The 36-year-old Oxford moral philosopher Amia Srinivasan, author of a series of eloquent essays for the London Review of Books about sex, feminism, culture, and ethics, has been a fixture in the world of ideas for the last several years. That work — especially her 2018 essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” — is the backbone of her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century, just out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The book’s penultimate chapter, “On Not Sleeping With Your Students,” was adapted recently in The New York Times. Srinivasan has a knack for engaging old debates in a fresh way, in this case the argument over what, in my recent conversation with her, she referred to as “the specter of the faculty-student relationship” — a specter so ubiquitous and so familiar that it might seem hard to find anything new to say about it. Her strategy is to lower the temperature: Rather than asking, for instance, whether consent across power differentials is possible (she says that it is), she asks: Is sex with one’s students compatible with the goals of pedagogy?
Her way into this problem is Jane Gallop’s 1997 book, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, in which Gallop describes her own run-ins with faculty-student sex proscriptions. “In her formal response to her students’ sexual-harassment complaints,” Srinivasan writes, “Gallop appealed to Freud’s notion of transference, the patient’s tendency to unconsciously project feelings … onto the analyst. Transference, Gallop says, ‘is also an inevitable part of any relationship we have to a teacher who really makes a difference.’ Falling in love with our teachers, in other words, is a sign that pedagogy has gone well.”
But Srinivasan turns Gallop’s invocation of Freudian transference against Gallop. “Gallop overlooks Freud’s insistence that analysts are ‘absolutely debarred’ from engaging romantically or sexually with their analysands … Instead, Freud says, the analyst must use the transference-relation as a tool in the therapeutic process.” Teaching, by analogy, should similarly debar romantic or sexual involvement — not because consent is impossible, and not because the love isn’t real (on the Freudian model, all love, not just the love between patient...