Amia Srinivasan believes that an honest and radical feminist account of sex must ask such questions and interrogate its answers. For Srinivasan, a philosopher and professor of political theory at the University of Oxford, reckoning with sex means learning to resolve, by way of difficult examination, one of feminism’s most longstanding epistemological problems: how can feminism at once take women’s experiences and their accounts of those experiences as foundational, while acknowledging them to be constructed by and interpreted under systems of oppression (i.e. the patriarchy). Yet these essays – intelligent, clear, and candid as each one may be – neither perform what Srinivasan calls the necessary and relentless ‘truth-telling’ of sex, nor show us what it would take ‘for sex really to be free’.

Srinivasan begins by disputing the notion that consent determines whether sex is okay or not. ‘Sex is no longer morally problematic or unproblematic,’ she writes; instead, we merely say yes or no to it. She argues persuasively that a monocular focus on consent has led mainstream feminism into an uncritical relation to the state and has occluded otherwise powerful critiques of desire. Sexual liberation should, she argues, neither rely on carceral policies nor rest in liberal doldrums demurely respecting public and private divides. There we can only offer a reluctant thumbs-up to a transactional mode of sexual relations, unable to say anything about the ‘yes’ that, although not a ‘no’ per se, is nonetheless a sea of feelings, deliberations, expectations, and acculturations made to flow through that one straight, narrow gate of affirmation.

In her three central essays, which cover the right to sex, student–teacher relationships, and pornography, Srinivasan tries to think beyond consent. But here is where she runs into difficulties – difficulties she cannot cope with. She can say, for example, nothing of or to a woman who has rape fantasies and who gets off on them. She can only say that most feminists would suggest that we need to take this woman at her word (while, Srinivasan would add, scrutinising her desires without presuming her to be self-deceived). She can say little about women who enjoy watching ‘strip-blow-fuck-cum’ porn. Much like the anti-porn feminists Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin before her, Srinivasan thinks porn is the most effective training ground imaginable for male sexual violence. Censoring porn aside, she is therefore left either saying suspiciously, ‘Well, if you really like it …’ or proffering an indie porno, where everyone is paid well, everyone who wants an orgasm gets one, and no one is getting fucked while stuck in a washing machine.

Here is where literature, strangely absent from Srinivasan’s work, could have loosened her from a sceptical bind. Srinivasan intentionally works within an Anglo-American post-1960s feminist tradition, and omits the unassured deliberations of contemporary fiction. Mary Gaitskill, Anne Carson, Jean Stafford, Toni Morrison, Maggie Nelson, Alice Munro, Mieko Kawakami, Dennis Cooper, and Alexis Wright, to mention only a handful, disenthrall readers from their efforts to know for sure what someone really wants, and allow them to experience characters living in want, darkened and enlightened by desires not exclusively of their own making.

Srinivasan often acknowledges that her approaches are insufficient. But she then glides away from these difficulties towards what can only be described as a Rousseau-like faith in a good, innate desire that is only made bad by oppressive regimes, and which could, were we only to let it, set us free. This recurring uplift at the end of her essays falters not because it is utopian. Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich both conjure a similar transformative erotic force, but they convince – Srinivasan does not. Indeed, she disarms herself. She admits that convincing others is not her goal: ‘These essays are not intended to convince or persuade anyone of anything.’ Can you imagine MacKinnon, Lorde, or Rich writing that?

Srinivasan is trying to respect her political principles by drawing boundaries around her role as a public intellectual. She does not want to talk down to women, but to direct a reader to their voices. She does not want to moralise. And she wants to acknowledge the degree to which sexual liberation – true liberation – will rely, not upon this book, but upon revolutionary socio-economic change. Yet she is also arrested between a desire to be like her radical sisters and a determination to remain a circumspect, careful, correct philosopher. Her voice, judicious and cool, can neither show Bauer’s students what it would be to desire freely nor to make their silences sound.