2 September 2021. Sex | Money

Sex and the trouble with consent; if societies can do it, societies can afford it

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.

#1: Sex and the trouble with consent

Amia Srinivasan is the current Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, following in the footsteps of Isaiah Berlin and G.D.H. Cole, among others. She’s the first woman to hold the post, and the first person of colour, and the first to be interviewed by Vogue or to write a book about the philosophy of sex. (OK, I’m taking a wild guess on the last two).

Her book, The Right to Sex, grew out of an essay in the London Review of Books that was a response to the “incel” movement (involuntary celibacy) that has plagued a certain type of young man over the last few years. The book has been well reviewed.

Timing is always your friend in publishing and it helped that came out just around the same time that we discovered that the most recent British mass shooter, Elliott Rodger, had been visiting incel sites before he killed his mother and several strangers in Plymouth.

The best interview I found with Amia Srinivasan was at Dazed, where they started off by discussing the limits of contemporary “girlboss” feminism:

As we’ve seen in the pandemic, women and people of colour have been on the sharp end of precarity, not just in terms of sickness and death, but also job loss and increased amounts of domestic labour. 

So there’s been a broader sense of social dissatisfaction and a sense that people have been sold a lie – (namely) that they exist in a system where if they work hard and play by the rules, they’ll have lives worth living. The girlboss feminism is part of that lie, which says that all women need to do is just lean in and be tougher. This is true for some highly privileged women, but it doesn’t even begin to touch the vast immiseration of most women who have no table to lean in to. 

The essay that the book takes its name from was controversial when it was first published in the LRB, and it seems that it is still controversial:

(Elliott Rodger) claimed that he was marginalised within the sexual economy and the economy of desire because of his race and because he didn’t satisfy the demands of heteronormativity. I don’t think this is true... But in principle, this idea that some people are sexually and romantically marginalised because of oppressive political regimes, like racism or ableism, is true. It’s the sort of thing that Black women, Asian women, and femme gay men have all been saying for a long time.

There are interesting discussions in the interview about pornography—a ubiquitous experience for many young people in the age of the web, which also shapes their experience sex. But the third extract I want to pick up is from an interview she has in AnOther—which, interestingly, covers different ground in mostly different ways. This picks up on the connections between the idea of “consent” and notions of the marketplace:

I think that the logic of the marketplace infects how we think and talk about sex. For example, the idea of consent presupposes a contract: someone is asking to do something to you, and they have to get permission to do it. But think about what it’s like when you spend time with your best friend. How often do you ask for your best friend’s consent to comfort them when they’re upset? You don’t have to, because you already have a relationship of mutuality, where you are sensitive to each other’s wants and needs. You don’t want to do anything to your friend that they don’t want, and therefore have to consent to. The consent model presumes an oppositional relationship (between sexual partners), where you have a buyer and seller. 

#2: If societies can do it, societies can afford it

Much of the economic historian Adam Tooze’s Substack is behind a paywall no, and the free editions are covered with marketing for the subscription edition, but the content is still worthwhile.

In a recent edition, he discusses the idea—originally formulated by Keynes—that the constraint on societies doing things they want to do is not money, but capacity. Of course, this point was made pretty forcibly during the pandemic, but as the risks receded, some people have been queuing up to present this as a special case. Tooze is basically saying that it’s not. If we have the capacity to do something, we can afford it.

(Image by r2hox, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0)

This is the actual quote from Keynes, which Tooze first noticed in an article by the radical economist Ann Pettifor, used by Tooze here in the context of pandemic vaccines—or, so far, the lack of them in the global South:

We can, as one of my favorite quotes from Keynes says, pay for ‘this and much more. Anything we can actually do we can afford.”

The whole piece—based on an article he has in the New York Times to mark the publication of his latest book—goes into a long—interesting—discussion of Keynes and the way in which his economics were (and are) a challenge to mainstream views of economics. I haven’t got time to go far into it here, and some of it is a little technical. But this is the core point:

The fascination in the quote lies in the tense balance between the liberality of “assuredly we can afford this … we can afford anything” …. and the weighty counterbalance implied by “anything, we can actually do”.

Once you have cleared away the obfuscation of budgetary arithmetic, it is the doing that is the problem. 2020 has delivered a grim lesson on that score.

As Chuck Sabel my brilliant colleague at Columbia put it to me recently: In the actual doing, what counts is the recalcitrance of stuff and the recalcitrance of power.

Keynes was centrally involved in the economics of post-war Britain, defending the Beveridge welfare state proposals against, inevitably, the hawks of the UK Treasury. (Some things never change.) His point was that a lot of things, when delivered, simply paid for themselves. Vaccinating the world also comes into that category:

The IMF estimates gains in the order of trillions of $9 dollars from a comprehensive vaccine program. But we cannot find the commitment and funding to accelerate a program that might cost, at most, between $50 and $100 billion... for Keynes, who believed in the possibility of improvement, it was shocking, inexcusable and, ultimately, puzzling - like the $9 trillion in economic advantage left lying on the pavement for lack of an adequate global vaccine program.

And as Tooze points out, there’s no shortage of things that we can do at the moment that will pay for themselves. But we have to escape from the dead hand of finance first. 

#j2t160

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