Something is lost here

But something is lost here. While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty. In Intercourse (1987) Andrea Dworkin warned of just this:

Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which in only — pathetically — a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses.

If sex education sought to endow young people not just with better "rote responses" but with an emboldened sexual imagination — the capacity to bring forth "new meanings, new forms" — it would have to be, I think, a kind of negative education. It wouldn't assert its authority to tell the truth about sex, but rather remind young people that the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them. Sex can, if they choose, remain as generations before them have choses: violent, selfish and unequal. Or sex can — if they choose — be something more joyful, more equal, freer. 

— from "Talking to My Students about Porn," in The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan.

(What would it be like to discover sex with a wholly open mind, with child-like innocence, without media influence? Instead, we live in a world where porn is now if not ubiquitous then very readily acquired. Granted, my generation sneaked peeks at girly magazines stashed in their dads' garages and  videos pilfered from adult-only backrooms. Sometimes I think I would've benefited from an education of this sort, beyond the romance and passion modeled for me by mainstream film and television. But it's all so performative, so results-oriented; and even when it's different, it's same same.)

The essays in The Right to Sex cover #MeToo, incels, porn, sex positivity, race, TERFs, sex work, carceralism. Clearly, sex is political. Mostly accessibly written, veering slightly into the overly academic, many of the issues described here are at the heart of today's feminist thinking. Endless questions raised, no clear answers offered. 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn't imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

Essays
Does anyone have the right to sex?"  
Who lost the sex wars? 

Reviews
Is a new book feminism’s next new wave or yesterday’s backlash?  
Who Gets to Be Desirable?  
Questioning Desire