Many years ago, I was writing for my college newspaper and was assigned a story about a new policy banning student-faculty dating. I dutifully set out to interview a few of my professors to get their reactions. I don’t remember much of what they said; I think they all agreed it was basically a good idea. I do recall that as I got up to leave the office of my government professor, he leaned forward and said, “I mean, of course, teaching is a very erotic process. But you can’t say that in your article. It’s too complicated; people won’t understand it.” Even then I knew enough to be put off that he was peddling a cliché as something forbidden and complex.

I thought about that exchange while reading Amia Srinivasan’s essay collection The Right to Sex. So often, arguments about relationships between professors and students — not to mention the countless, usually lifeless, depictions in novels, movies, and television shows — are marked by this gap. The “transgression” — and the debates that swirl around it — are not only familiar and banal; they are scripted in advance. So too with many debates around pornography, sexual assault, and the other questions to which Srinivasan turns her attention and immense talents as a writer and thinker.

The Right to Sex begins by declaring, “Feminism is not a philosophy, or a theory, or even a point of view. It is a political movement to transform the world beyond recognition.” Yet the book is not an analysis of existing feminist movements or a prescription for how to organize. Instead, it’s an attempt to reimagine familiar debates in a way that might serve a revitalized movement.