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

“No, I don't think it's odd to not have a view on something about which there has been a great deal of ink spilled. So there are philosophers, theorists of games and sports in general who spend a lot of time thinking about how we should organize competitions, gaming competitions in particular. And I don't know what it means to be opposed to segregation as such. I mean, I'm opposed to racial segregation. That is true. I'm not opposed to other forms of quote-unquote segregation like age segregation. So I think, for example, that it's okay for certain amusement parks, like clubs, nightclubs shouldn't allow kids under 18 if you're in this country or under 21. I think there are interesting questions here. I don't play chess and I don't follow competitive chess, so I don't really have a view.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's distinct from the question of what natural predispositions we might have. It's not unrelated, but I don't think any of us think we should just be forming societies that simply allow us to express our most quote-unquote natural orientations.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No it really wouldn't. Part of why I find this whole kind of discourse problematic is because, I mean, I think we should be suspicious when we find ourselves attracted to data, very, very thin and weak data that seems to justify beliefs that have held great currency in lots of societies throughout history in a way that is conducive to the oppression of large segments of the population in this particular case, women. But I also think one era that is consistently made in this discourse and this kind of conversation about what's innate or what's natural is to think about what's natural in terms of what's necessary. So this is a point that Shulmith Firestone made a very long time ago about that very few people register, which is that, and it was actually made again to me recently by a philosopher of science, a philosopher of biology, which is that, look, what's now...”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“bold and energetic and creative, you know, girls are like sweet and pretty. I mean, the idea that this sort of thing, that there's any example of a known society where we're so distant from that such that we can start to get a good grip on what women and men are innately like, I think is epistemically naive. I'm not saying that this stuff isn't interesting and you might end up being right in the end. I might end up being wrong.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely those conclusions that have been drawn over and over again in the history of thinking about women and men and thinking about gender, conclusions that would want to suggest that women are innately drawn towards certain forms of activity and labor and self-expression. So just to give you some examples here, have you looked at the data on gendering and infancy, the way in which you can get young children? And by the way, this happens in the Nordic countries as well, they can actually identify those toys that are associated with girls and boys, like pre-verbally. There's also data that shows that the way that parents interact with their infants differs greatly depending on the infant's sex, right? So boy children are allowed to row more freely on the ground. They are picked up less often, held less often. They're described in different terms, so boys are like,”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no. So there is great variation in legal regimes, right, in how they treat sex work. So you have a country like the US where sex work is almost entirely criminalized and very heavily criminalized as well. So laws against sex work are routinely enforced by a very powerful police system. And then you have countries like the Nordic countries, which experiment with the so-called Nordic model, which are supposed to attack demand but not supply. You have countries like the US where you again have sex work, but it has a different regulatory form. New Zealand, New South Wales. And there have been very intensive studies about the different effects on sex workers in these different regimes, and sex workers write about these things all the time. So it's not like I'm a nihilist whatsoever, or certainly not a skeptic. I mean, I think we should look at the evidence. But I think we should also be intensely cautious about drawing”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like calling them socialist. Like, yes, they are slightly more socialist as compared with the US, but the idea that they are gender egalitarian is to just massively understate what it is that feminists and what it is they envision when they're talking about liberation from patriarchy. It's much more than just slightly lower rates of sexual violence, smaller wage gap. I mean, these are the kind of things that the feminists of the late 60s and the early 70s, the radical feminists of the women's liberation movement, they fought those things were just trivial. They demanded them, but they thought that they should be answerable very quickly. Now, they were wrong about that. They were wrong about just how deeply entrenched the status quo was, and they were also wrong about the rise of the new right in the US and the UK. But their sites have always been set on something far more demanding than what we see in the Nordic countries today.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, Tyler, I'm just going to stop you here. We are not going to have a productive conversation if you begin by just describing the Nordic countries as gender egalitarian countries.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't exist, right? So you have people with varying different kinds of bodies. So to restate your hypothetical is the question, how would I feel about a world in which people who are quote unquote female bodied were like gravitated towards certain things and people who are male-bodied gravitated towards other things?”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, relatively, I don't think those places are, I mean, in the Nordic countries, I mean, single mothers are still the worst off demographic. You still have very entrenched gender stereotypes, you still have very high rates of sexual violence. I mean, when we're talking about gender equality, yes, they are better in some ways, but I don't think these differences are profound enough to be able to give us any deep sense of what it would look like to do something that many feminists like me would like to do, which is abolish gender as such. I think it would be just as Mill thought, it was ridiculous to try and ascertain what women were kind of innately oriented towards doing or what their capacities were for doing, what their capacities were under the conditions of 19th century patriarchal England. I think it's pretty ridiculous to try and read it off of like the differentials between Iran and the Nordic countries. So I'm imagining a world in which gender”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ritual tradition, but in ways that aren't pressive. And I suppose that my closest path to conservatism would be if I were the kind of person, which I'm not, who just thinks that actually the only plausible model for those things is a kind of non-secular, you know, broadly speaking religious, but also culturally and ethnically insular vision of community. I in no way endorse that, but I think that I have, and we on the left generally, I'm not including you, people who are on the left generally, you know, do have more time for that part of the conservative critique than just sort of liberals who think that, well, no, you can just have a basic pluralistic society in which everyone is within certain constraints able to like live their vision of the good life so long as it doesn't impinge on anyone else's ability to do the same. And that's totally workable. I think that vision.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's an interesting, really interesting question. I'm not sure I'm going to give a very good answer to it. I think there are interesting questions about the place of community, tradition, ritual, continuity in human life and their relationship to value. And I think conservatives, in the true sense of conservatives, are sometimes correctly criticized the left for not paying enough attention to some of those things that really do give human life value. And there's a question about how you make room for those things in a society that's also radically democratic and plural. I think liberalism's answer hasn't been a hugely successful one. And so the left has to offer an alternative, right? An alternative vision on which you can have real community affinity, certain forms of collective”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, I should say that while I'm ambivalent about some things, I am very adamant about some other things in the book, right? So it's not that my general take is one where we should be ambivalent about every question, or we feel like we can't come down on certain sides. So, for example, I have very strong and I think within the American mainstream, very controversial views about the decriminalization of sex work. For example, I think there's a very clear case grounded in basic political considerations and ethical considerations for why we should decriminalize sex work totally. But I do think there are other cases, for example, where we're thinking about how to deal with sexually abusive men or the relationship between radical politics and state power where we have to be more circumspect and ambivalent, right? And so I don't want to say that I just, my general kind of political outlook is one of ambivalence. So what's the closest path counterfactually, right? Is that the question?”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“humor, love, intimacy, friendship. I just don't think that's true. I think, in fact, what the end of domination would do is release us more fully into the specific things that make human life worth living, including humor.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I don't think the utopia or the kind of post-revolutionary world is a place forout any form of brutality, and it's certainly not a place without humor. It's going to have disappointment and heartache and tragedy and tragicomedy. Human foibles will still exist. Heartbreak will exist. And so with all of those things, you have humor. I mean, what I think is very limited is the thought, I'm not suggesting that you're advocating for this thought, which is that what you basically need structures of organized political oppression like racism to have humor. I mean, the Greeks said humor without having racism, right? They had other systems of domination, but they had a great and an advanced set of humor, often directed at intellectuals and philosophers who I think are often very much a worthy target. I think there can be this view on which ending forms of domination and oppression somehow drains life of all that is special and textured about it.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“problematic might not be but then let's be honest like if you've spent any time in a comedy club and I recently did that when I was last in LA I mean there is just a lot of quite naked sexism there. It's pretty shocking despite the fact of this kind of feminist revolution in comedy just how much stand-up comedy is just really quite comedically boring in sexist. Now there's this question about I take it that one of the thoughts you have is something like humor.”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not sure about room for compartmentalization. I do think there's a lot of room for context. So for example, you know, when you're thinking about the violence in rap lyrics, right, an obsession that began in the kind of conservative pearl clutching right in the 80s, you've got to think about what those invocations of violence are doing performatively in a piece of art that is rap music. And it's not the same thing as someone standing up in the middle of the town square, trying to deliberately incite violence against people, right? So I think not even speaking about the utopia of just speaking about, you know, how we should think about performative utterances right now, I think we need to address them with a great deal of contextual sensitivity and think about, in general, what is happening in these particular cases, right? So what seems to be”
2021-09-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source