Petty Demons
Sexuality has never seemed to me to be an area of life in which the construction of a meaningful autonomy is possible. The image of the confident, liberated person who exercises full rights of ownership over their own body, knows just what they want and is uninhibited in pursuing it seems utterly remote from the way I live (with considerable frustration) in my body, the way I understand and act upon my own (confused and contradictory) needs and desires. I don’t understand the feminism that wants women to be able to be that person, because I have no real concept of what it would be like for anybody to be that person. It seems to me to be an eidolon made in the image of the consumer, that petty demon of the marketplace.
If that’s what you think it’s like to be a sexual being, I guess you’ll be comfortable with the gratifications offered to you as a sexual consumer: the availability, on convenient terms, of other people qua sexual commodities. You may suppose yourself to be more liberated, the more congenial the terms and the greater the range of gratifications that lie within reach of your purchasing power. To me the whole set-up has always seemed perfectly foul, and rather spectacularly pointless – it simply doesn’t connect with anything that I think or feel, and certainly has no relation to either equality or emancipation as I understand them. But I suppose it simplifies things, in a way; as anodynelite points out, a large part of what the clients of sex workers seem to want is just this simplification, just this evacuation of the other person’s confused and inconsistent desires and demands from the sexual arena (which rather underscores my point that what the sex worker thinks and feels is structurally irrelevant…). To maintain an image of oneself as someone who simply wants “sex”, and has the pulling (or, failing that, purchasing) power to obtain it, is undoubtedly a lot easier than undergoing the continual wrong-footing and renegotiation of one’s sexual imago that occurs in the context of a committed relationship. But this is something one hopes people will grow out of, in spite of the cultural pressure (on males especially, but not exclusively) to remain in a state of emotional infantility.
I joyfully endorse Badiou’s dictum that love demonstrates the vacuity of any notion of sexual autonomy, and his demand that love must be defended against the libertinism of the “left” as much as against the control-freakery of the “right”. It should be pointed out that Badiou’s not massively keen on the heteronormative “family”, which he describes as the construction of a “mutilated present”: this isn’t an argument for settling down into a lifelong pattern of reciprocal repression, the wearying dialectic of male proprietorship and female resentment, finally made tolerable by illicit extra-marital sorties, mutual deceit and exhausted, suffocating contempt. That also is a simplifying, infantilising arrangement, quite properly described by old-school feminists as legalised prostitution.
Badiou is not trying to drive us all, straight and gay, into the arms of marriage partners so that we can live out our mutual resignation under the sanctified tutelage of the state. But his demand for a love that is violent and creative, that desanctifies the individual and enchants the world, is as absolutely opposed to the regime of commercial sexuality, as absolutely incompatible with the sale and purchase of sexual “services”, as it is opposed to the confinement of women as chattel property and incompatible with the moralised policing of sexual acts. It demonstrates, finally, the fundamental complicity of the “left” and “right” positions, their mutual hostility to anything that threatens the infantilising simplifications through which they seek to circumscribe and control the real of sex, so as to ensure that it neither gives rise to any amorous encounter nor permits the construction of any truth.
March 11th, 2009 at 10:10 am
It should be reasonably clear that the complaint that men are allowed to be sexual consumers, so why not women too, is not one to which I am remotely sympathetic. Sure, all human beings are equally capable of infantile self-centredness. So what?
My sympathies are, in fact, rather more in this direction.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
I don’t understand the feminism that wants women to be able to be that person, because I have no real concept of what it would be like for anybody to be that person.
Well, quite. But you seem to be suggesting that sexuality in particular is not “an area of life in which the construction of a meaningful autonomy is possible.” If autonomy in all cases is a mystification (and it is), what does it mean to say that sexual autonomy is especially a mystification?
March 11th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Personal autonomy is a mystification, simply by virtue of what a person is qua social being…
I think sexuality is heavily invested with this kind of ideology because it sutures “cultural identity” and “biological nature” – my sex is treated as the index of both “who I am” in terms of tribal affiliation, and “what I am” in terms of mysterious innermost being.
Sexual autonomy is accordingly full membership of the tribe of “consenting adults” – from which children alone are excluded, so that not to be treated as a member of this tribe is to be treated as a child, the worst possible insult – and bodily independence: not to be sexually autonomous is to be confined, disabled, obstructed from finding out what a body can do.
This ideology runs into all kinds of vexations, unsurprisingly enough, when it has to deal with the sexualities of children and the severely disabled. Like the consumerism it shadows, it favours healthy young adults with disposable income, although increasingly it branches out into other demographics.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
“I don’t understand the feminism that wants women to be able to be that person, because I have no real concept of what it would be like for anybody to be that person. ”
Clearly.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
“which rather underscores my point that what the sex worker thinks and feels is structurally irrelevant…). ”
No it doesn’t. What it points out is that johns believe in the illusion that’s being offered by the performance, while most prostitutes knowingly con johns into believing that they want them, really truly, want them. (Who is the clueless one here?)
Men pay for this illusion because they have no real sexual power. Men with real sexual power don’t have to pay for this illusion, because it is a reality for them. They want a girl, and they’re attractive and socially graceful enough to actually sometimes get her. Fantasy becomes reality.
For johns, fantasy never becomes reality, except in their little heads.
There’s nothing scarier than acknowledging that females have sexual power, at least for some people, apparently.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
What happened to the idea that people are mammals? Why is the longterm monogamous relationship so central to all “sexual morality” in your mind? What are you basing this on, outside of your own personal preference for sexual relations within monogamous commitments?
March 12th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
“This ideology runs into all kinds of vexations, unsurprisingly enough, when it has to deal with the sexualities of children and the severely disabled.”
No, it doesn’t. People who can’t make informed consent (like children or elderly bedridden patients) under this “ideology” are afforded all the rights they deserve to have, namely, they are protected from being coerced into sexual action by the law.
What do you suggest as an alternative to this? A society in which women are considered inferior to men, mentally and emotionally, and are therefore barred from being able to make informed consent- a society in which healthy sexually active women are actually just “invalids” and victims? One in which people are allowed free reign to molest or rape children the disabled, just because strippers exist and you don’t like that?
One thing that’s oddly lacking in your picture is the fact that women are often on the giving end of sexual abuse and rape, not always on the receiving end.
The idea that men are the sole perpetraters of rape and sexual abuse is simply not factual. Many male rapists and abusers, in fact, come by misogyny rather “naturally” after they are sexually abused by their own mothers and female caregivers. Many psychologists believe there are nearly equal numbers of male and female child molesters–it’s simply women are better at manipulating their victims, not as likely to come under suspicion, and better and not getting caught. Also, they benefit from the fact that most people think males (even male children) are incapable of having sex forced upon them by women. Think again.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
And really, the more you try to insist that no one else can actually have “amorous encounters”, the sillier and more naive you look. Speak for yourself, kiddo.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
I’m not going to waste my time explaining why this has nothing to do with my position. I think I’ve made my argument reasonably clearly. If you want to shadow-box with some imaginary conservative moralist in my comments box, go ahead. Obviously someone wants to stop you having all the fun you’re entitled to. Go ahead, tell that person how wrong they are! I’ll be, uh, elsewhere.
March 12th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I love how when you can’t answer something, you back out with your finale–the “I’m obviously right because I keep insisting that I’m right”, without answering anyone’s very obvious objections to your claims.
Bravo. Have fun telling women they can’t consent to sex. I’m sure that’ll get you far in your radical feminist militant mission,
March 12th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
“I’ll be, uh, elsewhere.”
You mean like my comments box?
March 12th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
I also love here how you insist that anyone who disagrees with you about “abasement” and “consent” does so because they *endorse* stripping and sex work.
I don’t endorse it at all, I just refuse to pretend that women have no agency in the matter whatsoever, and I refuse to pretend that men alone, sexist pigs in particular, determine “social reality” and what the sum of “social relations” amounts to.
March 12th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
“But you seem to be suggesting that sexuality in particular is not “an area of life in which the construction of a meaningful autonomy is possible.” If autonomy in all cases is a mystification (and it is), what does it mean to say that sexual autonomy is especially a mystification?”
Why would autonomy be a “mystification” and not just another product of a “set of social relations” like many other things in this picture are? If women are not afforded the same privileges to enjoy sex and consent to sex as men are, this is because female autonomy (agency, subjectivity, whatever you want to call it) is not being constructed in our social relations. The way to fix this problem is not to further restrict female sexual expression, but to broaden it to include everything it already includes for men under the law, and in our daily lives.
The purity myth runs deep, though, and many, many people do not want to believe that women can do “dirty” sexual things. Christian guilt is powerful in its own right.
March 12th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
I like how you are making a public display of your twitter comments. Always classy.
Me, an ex-fundie? You are admitted a Christian *now*… I have never once, not once, ever in my life, professed a faith in any God. I was forced to go to church when I was a kid.