YouSaid · the spoken record

Amia Srinivasan

lines on the record: 67
first: 2021-09-22
most recent: 2021-09-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I hope to be getting back to my book on genealogy, which we've spoken about a little bit, the project on genealogy. I've been working on it for many years now. I sort of set it aside for a little bit to complete this feminism book. But it's a book that begins by thinking about the history of genealogical thinking and then dwells in some of the epistemological problems that we were discussing and finally tries to think about the politics of genealogical arguments.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we have people exercising more direct control over the institutions that shape their lives, including corporate institutions?”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“deeply alienating is not solving the problems that it says that the profit motive is somehow supposed to magically solve. I mean, I think that's the question. Now, when you're asking about what kind of socialist models, I mean, I'm not proposing, and I don't think any plausible socialist does propose, that what we need is a form of Soviet state socialism. I think what we need to be thinking about is the radical democratization of the institutions that shape political and social and family life. You're very, very far away from that in the US. But what I'm fundamentally interested in is power of people to make decisions directly, not indirectly through a rigged voting system which allows them to cast a symbol like every four years for one of basically two identical candidates. I mean, that's not what we mean by democracy. I would hope you would agree as well. So my question is,”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I know, and in fact, I think they know and you know, is that we are in an extraordinary state of crisis. I mean, the other thing I haven't even mentioned is the profound deficit of democracy that capitalism entails. I mean, the idea that the US is a democratic system is just a complete joke. And the idea that what you're going to have is just some campaign finance reform to fix that is ridiculous. I mean, you know, the most important institutions of American political and social life aren't democratically run. That's true not just of the Supreme Court, but it's also true of corporations. So are there trade-offs? Could it be that there would be less growth? Yes. Is that okay? Yes, I think we need to be thinking about a degrowth economy. Is it the case that you're going to maybe have less innovation? Possibly. Are we going to keep on going full steam ahead with a system that causes mass immiseration, that's exploitative?”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We won't even have to talk about the question of exploitation, but just our subjectively very alienating and immiserating for increasingly many people. And finally, a system that has produced the single most potent crisis humanity has ever faced, which is climate change. So my question is, what's next? What do you think? Do you think capitalism is going to solve all of those problems?”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncontroversial or should be uncontroversial that capitalism, understood not just as an economic system that embraces markets, right? Because it's at least on how I would use the notion, you can have market socialism, but an economic and a social system that is founded critically on a class distinction, right? And we can also talk about racialized and gendered forms of capitalism. We won't go into that though here. Or we don't have to. It's uncontroversial or should be that capitalism so understood has been an extraordinary driver trivially of growth but also of innovation, of the alleviation of mass poverty, of technology, of medicine. I mean, you know, there's no question I think about that. I just am pessimistic about the induction from that to the conclusion.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I ever recalled myself one in writing, but I certainly do identify as a socialist that broadly identify as a democratic socialist. So I'm not particularly impressed, I've got to say, by the fact that the last 30 Nobel Prize-winning economists haven't been in favor of socialism. I mean, you'd be hard-pressed to find many socialists in the academy more broadly for always curing about the way in which the university has been overtaken by Marxists but I mean look at philosophy you almost get none why is this well because universities are for all I love them and admire them and think they play or can play an important social function you know are pretty class selecting it's no surprise to me that BaySkew very liberal and very centrist on the whole so I mean I suppose the question is look what do you do about 21st century capitalism I think it's”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“certain human universals and universal forms of human flourishing. Now, I think when we try and articulate what the conditions of human flourishing are beyond the kind of basic, most basic necessities like food and water and safety and shelter, we start getting ourselves into certain forms of political trouble. This is historically been a problem for Marxists, where the theory can seem to rest on a particular vision of species being a particular kind of humanistic picture of what it is to be human and to live a human life well. But I'm attracted to that thought as well. There is that strong part of me as well that thinks that there is some content to the question of what it means to live well with each other. And it's not simply about free exploration and the challenging and disruption of boundaries. So I'm ambivalent between those two things.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being a kind of any kind of political vanguard, just to be clear, but I do think it's true that lots of people who have been active in queer politics and queer theory, Judith Butler is one of them, are interested in articulating the way in which trans lives and queer lives can be seen and read as a form of dissidence against gender, but also against class, against racial domination and so on. But I think there's another part of me, and this gets back to your earlier question about what the closest version of a mia that's a social conservative, who isn't totally ready to just embrace a picture that's fully founded on dissidents and breaking down of hierarchies and norms and boundaries, and that's just about the pursuit of novelty and playfulness. Well, I think this is a certain kind of philosophical foundationalism in me that is attracted to the idea of”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they are, right? State. Yeah. No, no, no. I was talking about the state in particular. So I think the thing you're observing is that I have a huge amount of anxiety about state power and about different forms of domination, including state domination, which distinguishes me from a certain kind of socialist perspective. But I also have, and I think you're also noticing this, a kind of more, not just an anxiety about state power forms of authority, but also an active embrace of forms of dissensis, innovation, novelty, boundary breaking, boundary crossing. And I think that's absolutely right. And I think trans people specifically, but queer people more broadly, often participate in a kind of politics of a dissident politics, right? A politics that wants to slough off certain forms of boundaries and constraints. Not always, right? And I don't think that the rights of queer people have to rest on them.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's interesting. I think you absolutely identified a strain in my thinking, which I think I'd be tempted to call it anarchic more than libertarian. That's fine, yeah. Why you call it libertarian? Libertarians typically have a very particular”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way in which he Yes, no, that's absolutely right. The truth be told, I think his greatest influence on me was just his quite indiscriminate kindness and generosity, philosophically speaking, right? So he was just wanted to know what everyone thought philosophically and treated each and every person he encountered, whether a philosopher or not, as someone who could contribute to his own endeavor of making sense of the world. And it was profoundly democratic. I mean, almost Whitmanian, right? And very startling to encounter. So I knew him well as much as anyone knew him. You know, I knew Derek pretty well. He was my advisor as a graduate student, which isn't the same thing as being my supervisor. So he had no formal kind of pedagogical relationship, but he read a lot of my work and commented on it. But he also just asked me to comment on his work all of the time. And he did this with everyone. There was a kind of generosity.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out essential parts of the nature of the world, right? So you have to take up a certain kind of normatively loaded perspective to be able to describe the world correctly. He's in this, again, in this kind of ambivalent position with respect to these questions about objectivity and value and perspective. And I'm very much interested in that locus of problems.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take one enduring preoccupation. Williams is very interested in the question of perspective and of points of view, and he's very interested in the aspiration to a perfectly neutral scientific description of the world. And very interested in the question of what that leaves out. At the same time, he very much wants to resist a view put forward by Richard Rorty, which begins from a recognition of the contingency of worldviews to a kind of nihilistic or skeptical conclusion about the ability to achieve sort of common understanding. And so I'm very interested in that specific dialectic because Williams isn't some knee-jerk realist who just wants to dismiss Rorty and say, well, look, common sense reasoning just gets us on to the true picture of the world, right? He thinks that, you know, a purely scientific picture of the world leads”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I never came into contact with him. But let me just say something about the writing style, and then I'll say something about the substantive thing because I don't think they're actually that separate. I mean, I think he really does practice philosophy as a humanistic, or he did as a humanistic discipline. And if you look at his essays in, for example, the London Review of Books, they're very different from what goes under the name public philosophy today. They are real works of philosophy, right? What they aren't is a philosopher coming down from his Olympian heights and wheeling out a couple of philosophical distinctions which are supposed to help the masses get clear on things. It's rather Williams just doing philosophy in a way that's respectful of an audience, that expects them to do some work, but that also does some work on his own part. So I think that's very important as a model of how to write about philosophy and how to write for a wider philosophical audience. Substantively, there are lots of things that Williams was interested in that I'm interested in, but just”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and that the separateness of persons was also an important illusion. And, you know, I believe in some sort of metaphysical monism. And this is sort of why I've never really done analytic metaphysics, even though I've done a huge amount of epistemology. The metaphysics has always seemed to me to start from a starting point that I just find very difficult to get behind. What are my metaphysics now? I don't have a worked out metaphysics. I think I'm more inclined now. I've sort of been vetted into the kind of what Peter Vannenwagen called the common Western metaphysics, the kind of common sense there are middle-sized dry goods, there are chairs and tables I'm sitting on one. At the same time, I think that, roughly speaking, Hindu perspective is very much with me. I just don't think it can really be philosophically articulated. I don't think it's fair, at least for me, not interestingly put into conversation with kind of analysts.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oof, I remember walking in to a Yale metaphysics class. Yale has this shopping period like lots of US universities. So I didn't end up taking this class. And part of the reason I didn't end up taking this class was because I don't remember exactly how the professor started, but very soon into the class, there was a description of the common sense that everyone had. Everyone in the class surely believes that there are middle-sized objects, right? There are tables and chairs here. There are people, maybe the people are somehow special and different from the tables and chairs, but we live in this material universe and this is reality. And maybe there's a higher reality as well. But this is the kind of common sense view. And I was just kind of shocked because that wasn't my view at all. It wasn't the view I had been raised to have. I mean, I quite literally believed that, you know, material reality was Maya, was illusion.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do love Whitman. I mean, for one thing is, I read Whitman deeply as an undergraduate. I didn't know when I read him first. I took a class with Harold Bloom, and Bloom is an enormous, was an enormous fan, an admirer of women's. I think what I love in Whitman most of all is the combination of this bombastic, plural, all-encompassing, deeply American, deeply democratic with the lowercase D desire to commune with life in all its complexity. But that feeling gives way in Whitman to these moments of revolt and withdrawal and a desire to preserve the sovereign self. And I think that is a profound dialectic, one that I can feel play out in my own life, but also seems to me central to much social and political. drama but he's also just a beautiful crafter of lines”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, I think that's an interesting reading. And I don't really think I'm not very preoccupied by the question of what his intentions were. I think if it's useful dramatization of that important observation, then it's useful. But I would have to reread some salad to be able to comment any further.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Haven't read the Marquis d'Esade since I was an undergraduate because I was acting as a dramaturge for a play about Saad.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a very coherent, though less happy version of me that's a lawyer, in part just because it's such a common trajectory for American undergraduate students who, especially major in philosophy, which I did, you go to law school if you don't really know what else you were going to do. And I very nearly did that. That was my plan. And then what happened was I won a scholarship to Oxford. So ended up doing graduate school in philosophy. And that's basically what stopped me from going to law school. It's not totally clear to me what I would have done with the law degree. It's more likely that I would have ended up a legal academic, I think, than an actual practicing lawyer giving my dispositions.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It certainly mattered to me a great deal, and I loved writing plays and I had a very close friend of mine who was a director when we were undergrads and he would direct them. And that was a really lovely partnership. And I've always loved the theater and I love reading plays. The plays though themselves, they were very much inflected by the philosophy I was reading at the time. I think the last, one of the last plays I wrote was about a philosophy professor who had just read too much Kierkegaard and then so one day when he's out for a run with his son in Central Park, he tries to sacrifice him, like reliving the kind of Abraham and Isaac story that Kierkegaard meditates on in fear and trembling. And I think the best theater, even when grounded in a certain kind of philosophical tradition, is one that carries its philosophy very lightly, which I don't think my place did.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't read Sundeg since I was an early graduate student. She made a very sort of strong impression on me as a stylist. I loved reading the whole volume that is against interpretation. I think she's due for a revisiting from me. Certainly there was much about her life that was, I think, very cool and enviable. There's an extraordinary essay, though, if you have an interest in the song type by Terry Castle in the LRB about Sontag, which offers quite an extraordinary and very humorous perspective.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Men and then read creatively appropriate them and put them in conversation with each other and do something new is very much a kind of feminist tradition of its own.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That makes some sense. I'm not sure about the word concilience in particular just because it suggests a perfect coherence. Whereas I think I see myself as sometimes just embracing fundamental tensions without trying to offer a perfect synthesis. What you describe is also just very recognizable from lots of feminist theorists who, as you say, found Marx either too objective or too obsessed with quote unquote material insufficiently interested in the psyche and the psychoanalytic, right? So then you bring in Freud, but then Freud and Marx both have their problems, right? They're either an unwillingness to read the family or an over-reading, a misreading, right? So I think that general desire to pick up these various kinds of intellectual strains which often come out of male traditions or traditions founded by”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of lots of theorists in the feminist tradition as being those kinds of prophets and world makers, trying to do something where they were engaged in forms of kind of conceptual innovation, which were supposed to actually restructure materiality in some sort of sense, right? So I think when, for example, prostitutes started calling sex work, calling it sex work, they weren't simply trying to give a new name to something, right? They were trying to do something, reorient our relationship to this practice and have lots of kind of downstream material facts in how we relate to that practice. So the history of feminism is full of these attempts at prophecy and worldmaking.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we should nonetheless do it. Or, I mean, take the mass entry of women into the workforce and the way in which that on one hand has kind of obvious benefits for women. On the other hand, contributes to the demise of the family wage and entraps lots of women in forms of work that are alienating and atomizing. And in particular, and this is something that black feminists warned against, right, when middle class white feminists were arguing for mass entry into the workforce, black feminists were arguing for their right to stay at home and to actually be the beneficiaries of a family wage which they had never been. So I suppose there's that kind of tragic worldview that maybe crosses over from epistemology into feminism. And then there's also the interest in genealogy as a method and worldmaking as a method, which I have a kind of epistemological interest in, but I'm also drawn to the history of feminist thought.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that same spirit of kind of tragedy is built into my feminist outlook. So you called me a utopian. And, you know, I think in some sense that's right, but I also have a view on which there's really no progress without regress. So for example, I mean, take decriminalization of sex work, right? So I told you I'm adamantly in favor of it. But I think there's an interesting question about whether decriminalizing sex work would have the hoped for utopian effect of transforming the basic relations, the wage relation, the relation women have to work would allow sex workers to refuse sex work, whether decriminalization has this kind of transformative ability, or whether all it would do would be to make sex workers better off as workers, but kind of reinscribe sex work into a capitalist order. That might be”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More feminist parts, and you can tell me if any of this rings any bells. So I have this preoccupation. This is what my dissertation was on with the limits of self-knowledge, which is not to say that we never know ourselves, but that this kind of what's called this Cartesian picture, although it's unfairly attributed to Descartes, this Cartesian picture on which our minds are this kind of theater that's totally knowable, which operates as a kind of compensation for the potential unknowability of the external world. I think that's a bad picture of the mind, not for the reasons Freud says, I mean, I think those reasons are right, but those weren't the reasons I gave. I gave a kind of more technical argument in epistemology. And once one has that picture, for a reason I won't totally go into here, it implies that agents can do as best as they can by their own lights, right? And still get things kind of very wrong, whatever the normative system is, right? No matter how much you try to”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I am neither a prophet nor world maker. I would really hoping you were gonna tell me because that's where this felt like this was leading up was like a grand theory of how these things are united. I mean, I share with you the feeling that there is something that unites these different parts of my work and not just the trivial fact that they're all produced by me. I don't think I have a great account of what that is. And this speaks in part to one of my preoccupations, which you identified, which is the non-transparency of ourselves to ourselves, right? the extent to which we can not know ourselves. And in some cases, I think that can lead to what I've called a kind of tragic worldview, but it also implies the kind of necessity of social relations for forms of self-understanding, right? So that's kind of why I was hoping you were going to give me the answer to how this all links up. But maybe I can say I can kind of point to a couple of themes that I think speak across maybe the kind of more epistemological parts of my work.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A settlement, right? So you're reading off the data and saying, oh, it doesn't matter if we did all of that. Even if we did all of that, we would have dwindling fertility rates. And I want to say try it and see. I think you have to rethink also like the nuclear family. I think you have to rethink patterns of family making. I mean, look at what happened during the pandemic. Every woman who thought she was an egalitarian relationship with a man, like almost every woman found out that she wasn't. Why? Well, because she still did all of her employment work and then also had to take the vast majority of social reproduction in childcare, right? That work is systematically undervalued. It's also systematically undervalued when it's privatized in the form of healthcare and nursing. A lot would need to change. Now you might want to just hold out and say, well, you know, it's only under conditions of intense coercion and desperation that women are willing to have children. And if that turns out to be right, I'll bite the bullet and just say, fine.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In which precisely because you implicitly recognize, as does every good economist, that social reproduction is a form of labor, right, on which society depends, but at the same time don't compensate women who disproportionately perform that labor in any way and make their lives harder than ever before. That's just the kind of central contradiction of early 21st century political life in a place like the US. Okay, so what are some things you want? Universal 24-hour childcare. Universal excellent pre-K education. You want non-stagnating wages that don't presuppose two full-time workers, right? You want a better maternal healthcare. You want free universal healthcare. I mean, all of these basic social provisions. Now, you might think, okay, but, you know, Scandinavian countries which have some of this stuff, like don't, well, you know, they have some of this stuff. I think you're already anticipating.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feminists for so long, the country in which you live, since the late nineteen sixties, have been writing at great length about the extraordinary difficulty of child rearing and social reproduction and childbirth in the US. And there are similar things that you find, by the way, in the Italian feminist tradition, if Italy wants to think about this in the British tradition. I mean, someone like Adrian Rich wants to distinguish between the potentiality of human reproduction from the actual political institution that is motherhood. What is that institution? It's an institution that has privatized the responsibility of childbirth, childcare, child rearing into individual families, right? There's still no universal 24-hour childcare. The idea that you're doing everything you could to encourage people to have children in a society”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, Tyler, I'm not. No, I was just saying I want to get specific on the question. The specific problem you were asking is like, what do we do about dropping fertility rates in certain countries? Now, I will get on to the question of what you do as such on the question of correlation between development and dropping fertility rates. I'll get there in one second. I do have thoughts. But I just wanted to say because so many people listen to your podcast that the first thing we should do when we're talking about dropping fertility rates is think about immigration policy. I'm delighted to hear that you are an open borders person. Okay, let's go on to the next question.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heyler, the reason I was addressing this question is because I think that some of the ways you frame debates, and I'm a very much an admirer of yours, but they unthinkingly just replicate, I mean, profoundly misogynistic and racist ways of thinking that come from the American mainstream. I'm not saying that you're invoking some kind of alt-right ways of thinking. I'm like, this is just the way that people talk about this in the US mainstream is just extraordinary. Exhibit A is Japan, not a white country. Just hold on.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, I'm not addressing the question. I'll get to that in a second, the question about what drives falling fertility rates. I was just pointing out that if a country like the US is worried about its population issue, it should be thinking about its immigration policies. This is actually”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, as you yourself just kind of implied, although glossed over, there are countries where a population are increasing, right?”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A hierarchy that rewards men who supposedly get to have sex or are attractive to high-status women. So yes, I do think that you cannot have these conversations about sex work and how to legislate it without centrally engaging with questions about patriarchy.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That thinks that you know, for men, sex is this basic good, like it's like food or water, the women who refuse to have sex with men are depriving them of a basic necessity. Women are both that necessity and the gatekeepers of it. I mean, part of the reason this is such bullsh is that if you look at the incels who spend all of their time ranting in precisely these terms online, they are not interested on the whole in having sex with sex workers and you know who else they aren't interested in having sex with? They're not interested in having sex with non-white women, with women who are not stereotypically attractive, women who are fat, women who are shy, women who are on the autistic spectrum, women who are socially awkward. Why? Well, because they claim that what they're upset about is the deprivation of this basic need, which is sex, but what they're actually upset about is their perceived low status in a sexual hierarchy, right?”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so let me just say you were asking when we're thinking about this policy question, why should we bring in a whole completely orthogonal ideological question? It's like, no, that's what it is to do politics. What it is to do politics and also to do policymaking is to think about the real world consequences of politicies that you put into place. So what I want to know, and I don't know enough about, is what are the effects of the actual women who engage in sex work in the Netherlands? How much do they get paid for this? Are they happy to be doing this? To what extent are they subjected to sexual violence because of this? I mean, how does this change and inflect their labor rights? That is the question. This is not an orthogonal, ideological issue. But yeah, I think I would just get off at the very start when you're just thinking like sex is this basic need for men. I mean, if we're talking about pernicious ideology, like I think that is very much a piece of a pernicious patriarchal ideology.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the biological drivers of these intrinsic differences between male and female attitudes toward sex? On your view.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think very difficult to have these further questions about things like sexual surrogacy in a way that doesn't problematically feed into the reinscription of women as having a role to play in the sexual servicing of men. And this is the view you get from sex workers. So, you know, radical sex workers like Juno, Mack, and Molly Smith, who are the authors of revolting prostitutes, are very uninterested in answering the question of, well, you know, should we in an ideal or even in the real world have sex workers being subsidized by the state to have sex with disabled people? Because they think it's a massive distraction from the reality of sex work for the vast majority of sex workers, which is true.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not to say that in a kind of utopian society, you wouldn't have people who operate as sexual surrogates. So Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist, imagined precisely this. So he thought that there would be a class of people, a kind of amorous nobility, who would have sex with elderly and infirm people who wanted to have sex but who weren't otherwise sexually desired. And these people would do it out of the goodness of their hearts, right? They would do it because they were kind of amorous nobility, a kind of noblace oblige. The problem is thinking about something like that or thinking more generally about the redistribution of sex or thinking about sex as a thing to be potentially redistributed is that like we're working against the background, a patriarchal backdrop on which men routinely think that they are sexually entitled to women's bodies, right? And when that's the real social backdrop, it becomes”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, I'm just going to answer the question Do I think it's a good idea or bad idea? I think it's a really difficult idea. I think we have to start with the perspective of sex workers. So why is it that most women engage in sex work? Well, most women who engage in sex work typically do it because they need the money. They can't get better forms of work, often because of their status as trans women or a lack of documentation or disability, the rights of women with disabilities are really high in sex work. So when you take a population of women who are doing sex work because of those reasons and then you create a voucher system of the kind you're describing, I mean, I think you're in problematic territory. I think in general also Which isn't a safe”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, Tyler, I want to get clear on this because it doesn't matter that that's the literal meaning of the word, right? It's not the literal meaning, that's the etymology of the word. The etymology of the word is involuntary celibate. But in cells, for example, deny that there are women in cells. I mean, on your view, definitionally, there are women in cells, right? So long as there is at least one woman who is not having sex and would like to be having sex. Incel names a member of a certain particular subculture. And I think this is really politically important because there are lots of men, not just men with disabilities, lots of men, lots of women who are romantically and sexually lonely in various kinds of ways fall under the descriptor involuntary celibate, but like wouldn't describe themselves as incels and certainly wouldn't subscribe to a kind of incel ideology. So I think it's extraordinary.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“something that the other person doesn't really want, in some sense to give, where there's a kind of misalliance. There isn't that same kind of level of attunement. I mean, to put it really crudely, lots of people are turned on by the fact that another person in some sense doesn't really want to have that sex, right? So then the ritual of consent becomes necessary. It's not the only reason consent matters, right? The other reason consent might matter, and you see this very clearly in kind of BDSM practices, is that sometimes we just don't know what the other person wants because sex is really complex and people kind of perform in different ways. And so sometimes it's really important to just ask someone straight up, right?”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consent to be able to put your arm around your buddy. And the reason is, because the nature of your relationship as friends involves a fine attunement to your friend's desires and needs and wants, right? You don't go into that interaction with the friend thinking, I want something that they might not want, right? There isn't a kind of implicit presupposed mismatch of desires or wants, right? So it's not a contractual exchange. It's not a negotiation. It's like you wouldn't want to put your arm around your friend if that's not what your friend needed at that moment, right? So the very fact that we have such an emphasis on consent when it comes to sexual relations, I think reveals a certain set of background conditions about how we interact sexually, which is to say there are lots and lots of cases where one party basically wants to have some”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or should be uncontroversially understood to be consensual, but nonetheless are problematic. There's a deeper feminist critique of the role of consent in sex, which objects to the preconditions that make the ritual of consent asking and consent giving necessary in the first place. So when you say to someone, well, imagine sexual interaction without the ritual of consent giving and consent asking. They just imagine sexual violation. But think about all of the times you interact with, I don't know, a really old friend, right? So a really old friend, you're like old high school or college buddy, like loses a child. And you like put your arm around them and you console them. Something we haven't done a huge amount of under the pandemic. You don't ask for that consent. You don't ask for...”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, my skepticism about consent models is very specific in nature. So basically, the way I think that sex exists in our society, which is, say, like a broadly patriarchal society, at the moment, consent effectively operates as a necessary, though not sufficient condition on ethically permissible sexual activity. Probably not with oneself, I don't think one really sort of asks and gives consent to sex with oneself, but with other people, right? A necessary condition, but I think not sufficient because I think there are cases of ethically problematic sex that are consensual. So one example I talk about in the book is Professor Student Sex. Obviously, sometimes professors student sex like sex between adults in general can be non-consensual. But I think there are plenty of cases of professor student sex which are uncontroversial.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so on one hand, I have deep respect for a notion to which we might be gesturing when we talk about self-ownership in terms of the sovereignty of the body and maybe a certain set of rights about disposing of ones like body and labor as one chooses. I don't love the talk of self-ownership. I mean, I think that is to import property model which doesn't totally get our relationship to the self quite right. If you want to know more, you can ask me.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source