Sexual Liberalism as Wantonism: A Frankfurtian Defense of Srinivasan

Edited by Micheal Habib

Abstract

In "The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century", Amia Srinivasan offers a new view of sexual desire situated between sexual conservatism and liberalism. She argues that sexual desire should be within the purview of feminist critique given that conventional desires often reflect systems of domination, and that the critique of desire is a way to emancipate ourselves from such systems. However, critics worry that any kind of critique of desire runs the risk of returning to sexual conservatism. To help motivate Srinivasan’s theory, I introduce Harry Frankfurt’s “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” to draw upon the concept of a “wanton” to first help critique the liberal view of desire, and to offer a way of critiquing our own desire without running into the problems of sexual conservatism.