If Prostitution is legal then anyone not incarcerated- above a certain age and free of certain types of disease- has a right to sex to the extent that they can pay for it. However, they can save themselves some money by just having a wank now and then.
Amia Srinivasan wrote in her famous essay- 'Does anyone have the right to sex?'
It used to be the case that if you wanted a political critique of desire, feminism was where you would turn.
This is strange. Srinivasan comes from India. Gandhi gave a political critique of sexual desire which was very influential. Both the Prime Minister of India and the Chief Minister of the largest state are celibate. So too is Mamta Bannerjee who single handedly brought down the Communist tyranny in West Bengal.
Political critiques of desire underwrote every theocracy or regime with an Established Church. However, those 'political critiques' were discovered to be shit as the Life Sciences burgeoned. It could be argued that a country which has laws on marriage, age of consent, indecency etc, is still bound by such a critique, which, it must be said, women have contributed to from the earliest times. However, in modern polities we generally find that the 'political critique' has no binding force. It is regarded as stupid shit. Still, for various purely political reasons, such shibboleths have salience as 'wedge issues'- i.e. they are kept in play for strategic, not alethic, reasons.
Back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this was not always obvious to some women who were studying shit subjects at University. Furthermore, they believed that 'activism' might get them tenure- or a lucrative publishing contract. But they were competing with all sorts of crackpots.
Third Wave Feminism failed almost immediately. Why? Ordinary women refused to buy into the hysterical self-pity of the half-baked savant. They shouted them down with their own more horrendous tales of woe. The lesson was simple. Men may be prepared to outsource craziness. Don't get into a competition with a woman as to who be more kray kray.
A few decades ago feminists were nearly alone in thinking about the way sexual desire – its objects and expressions, fetishes and fantasies – is shaped by oppression. (Frantz Fanon and Edward Said’s discussions of the erotics of racial and colonial oppression are important exceptions.)
This is silly. The feminists were merely following in the footsteps of male phenomenologists and psychoanalysts. Though furiously denouncing 'Dead White Men' they only got by by fraudulently cashing their pension checks.
On the other hand, it is certainly true that the British were only able to hold India down thanks to the Viceroy's ruthless habit of subjecting each and every 'native' to fellatio and cunnilingus. Frantz Fanon was constantly having his bottom pinched by leering French officials. Edward Said was repeatedly raped by Zionist harridans. Golda Meier sat on Arafat's face till the poor fellow felt obliged to take up arms.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Catharine MacKinnon demanded that we abandon the Freudian view of sexual desire as ‘an innate primary natural prepolitical unconditioned drive divided along the biological gender line’ and recognise that sex under patriarchy is inherently violent; that ‘hostility and contempt, or arousal of master to slave, together with awe and vulnerability, or arousal of slave to master’ are its constitutive emotions.
The woman is a law professor. Don't ask what she had to go through to get tenure. Anyway, science had decided Freud was a fraud. In 1980, the American Medical Association removed the term 'neurosis' from its diagnostic manual.
Sexual desire, like the desire to beat or kill people and take their cool shiny stuff, or the desire to write shite, exists under all political regimes.
Why did America ban slavery? I suppose it was because Abraham Lincoln had a vagina. So did Ronald Reagan- which is why women voted for him. MacKinnon, like other feminists of the time, probably had a very large penis and kept slapping bitches with it. That's why third wave Feminism caused a backlash against it on the part of sensible women.
For the radical feminists who shared MacKinnon’s view, the terms and texture of sex were set by patriarchal domination – and embodied in, and sustained by, pornography.
A lot of them were lesbian. Perhaps they were dominating each other and insisting they be called 'Daddy'.
(In Robin Morgan’s words, ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’)
There's lots of Lesbian porn around.
That there were women who seemed capable of achieving pleasure under these conditions was a sign of how bad things were.
What about all those toffs who pay women to beat them or piss on them or shit on their chests? Trump, it was widely believed, had been pissed on by Russian whores.
For some the solution lay in the self-disciplining of desire demanded by political lesbianism. But perhaps even lesbian sex offered no decisive escape: as MacKinnon suggested, sex under male supremacy might well be ‘so gender marked that it carries dominance and submission with it, no matter the gender of its participants’.
MacKinnon failed to point out that the species of its participants is equally irrelevant. Indeed, even imaginary people are constantly being ass-raped by Joe Biden.
Some feminists in the 1980s and 1990s
i.e. some tenure craving hacks
pushed back against the radical critique of sex advanced by MacKinnon and other anti-porn feminists. They insisted on the possibility of genuine sexual pleasure under patriarchy,
Vibrators were getting better and better. About half of all American women use one.
and the importance of allowing women the freedom to pursue it.
Sadly some States ban their sale. That's a feminist issue right there!
MacKinnon disparaged such ‘pro-sex’ feminists for confusing accommodation with freedom, and for buying into the idea that ‘women do just need a good fuck.’
No. They need better and cheaper vibrators.
To be fair, MacKinnon’s pro-sex adversaries weren’t arguing that women needed a good fuck – though some came uncomfortably close to suggesting that MacKinnon did.
She could purchase the thing easily enough.
Instead they insisted that women were entitled to sex free of guilt, including heterosexual sex, if they wanted it. In ‘Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?’, the essay that inaugurated sex-positive feminism, Ellen Willis set out the basic case against the MacKinnonite critique of sex: that it not only denied women the right to sexual pleasure, but also reinforced the ‘neoVictorian’ idea that men desire sex while women merely put up with it, an idea whose ‘chief social function’, Willis said, was to curtail women’s autonomy in areas outside the bedroom (or the alleyway). Anti-porn feminism, Willis wrote, asked ‘women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men’s sexual freedom as a substitute for real power’.
Willis was a Professor of Journalism, not Philosophy. Thus she couldn't dash off just any old bollocks.
It is likely that as sex aids for men improve, an increasing proportion of the male population will give up on heterosexual relationships. The game is not worth the candle. According to one survey, only 30 percent of young Japanese men are trying to date. About half may remain virgins all their lives.
This makes sense. Women can buy alpha sperm if they really want a child. Why should non-alphas want to contribute their genetic material? Society will be better off if they don't reproduce. Indeed, genetic studies show that most male lineages die out very quickly. Ancestral Adam lived a very long time after Ancestral Eve. Mitochondrial DNA has much greater diversity. However, as technology improves, non alpha women too won't want to have babies. Let the alphas repopulate the world through sperm banks and babies grown in artificial wombs. Meanwhile we can always buy a robot baby to snuggle and to take on walks along with our robot dogs.
There was once a 'Radical' Sexual philosophy which proposed a world where everything would be held in common. You took what you needed and you gave what others in need asked for. This included sex. One of the great attractions of the 'hippy' commune, but also of some quasi religious or political cults, was that your sexual needs would be taken care of- though, no doubt, you too would have to make some sacrifices.
The big problem with this radicalism was that little kiddies too were on the menu. This is the big problem with heterosexual sex. It can lead to babies coming into the world. Either the baby matters more than either parent or it too is a means to an inhuman end.
Amia quotes the example of Fourier- though what he was saying was nothing new at all. There had always been radical movements which wanted land and women to be held in common.
(The utopian socialist Charles Fourier proposed a guaranteed ‘sexual minimum’, akin to a guaranteed basic income, for every man and woman, regardless of age or infirmity; only with sexual deprivation eliminated, Fourier thought, could romantic relationships be truly free. This social service would be provided by an ‘amorous nobility’ who, Fourier said, ‘know how to subordinate love to the dictates of honour’.) Of course, it matters just what those interventions would look like: disability activists, for example, have long called for more inclusive sex education in schools, and many would welcome regulation that ensured diversity in advertising and the media. But to think that such measures would be enough to alter our sexual desires, to free them entirely from the grooves of discrimination, is naive.
Sexual desires are plastic. The right combination of drugs could cause you to copulate with a giraffe or a porpoise. What is naive is thinking you can impose crazy laws on a population which is smarter and much much stronger than you.
And whereas you can quite reasonably demand that a group of children share their sandwiches inclusively,
Not in my neighbourhood. You'd be stabbed before you had finished speaking.
you just can’t do the same with sex.
Nonsense! I have been demanding that Netanyahu put out to Hamas for many years now. That's one Pornhub video I'd watch.
What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either.
You can buy a sandwich and you can buy sex. But they just won't be any good compared to what your beloved provides. Most young people don't know how to cook. Yet they show a passionate liking for the food their soul-mate cooks. It is only after a few years of marriage that they realize they are being poisoned.
There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal.
I am sorry to say that sex is not political at all. Fiscal policy, which affects household formation, child-care, etc is political. But it isn't ideological. Some daft academics may get paid for dispensing the warmed up sick of the Seventies. But we are laughing at them.
For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.
And make money out of it as the creators of Viagra and Rampant Rabbit and so forth have done.
Yet simply to say to a trans woman, or a disabled woman, or an Asian man, ‘No one is required to have sex with you,’ is to skate over something crucial.
No it isn't. It is just plain rude. How would Amia like it if I rang her up in the middle of the night and shouted 'no one is required to have sex with you!' and slammed down the phone? Perhaps she'd prefer it if I said 'You don't have the right to chop off people's heads and then poop down their necks!'
The reason it is wrong to say these things is because the presupposition is that the person in question is pestering people for sex before chopping off their heads and pooping down their necks.
There is no entitlement to sex,
There may be. In some jurisdictions, or at some periods in time, you could sue for 'restitution of conjugal rights' or specific performance under a contract for sexual services.
Interestingly, a young Indian woman- later one of the first female Doctors- refused to comply with a court order to co-habit with her husband. She was threatened with jail but she stood firm. The might of the British Empire discovered it hadn't the power even to dispose of the body of a teen-age girl.
and everyone is entitled to want what they want, but personal preferences – NO DICKS, NO FEMS, NO FATS, NO BLACKS, NO ARABS, NO RICE NO SPICE, MASCFOR-MASC – are never just personal.
Yes they are. A prejudice is something personal. If the thing was political- e.g. there were laws against miscegenation- then there would be no need to specify it.
In a recent piece for n+1, the feminist and trans theorist Andrea Long Chu argued that the trans experience, contrary to how we have become accustomed to think of it, ‘expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire’. Being trans, she says, is ‘a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants’.
That is interesting. A lot of people have the idea that trans-people were 'born in the wrong body' and that once it is medically safe to do so, they should be helped to transition and given various types of support so as to establish themselves successfully.
Does it matter whether a person transitions just because she wants to? I hope medical science will quickly advance to a point where the thing is safely and cheaply reversible. Philosophers sticking their oar in, or politicians exploiting this as a 'wedge issue', are acting mischievously.
She goes on: I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my make-up in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts.
This lady writes well. How come? The answer is she did a lot of theatre in College. Good for her.
But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.
But we have a meta-preference for wanting the things we should. This isn't really a big problem.
This declaration, as Chu is well aware, threatens to bolster the argument made by anti-trans feminists: that trans women equate, and conflate, womanhood with the trappings of traditional femininity, thereby strengthening the hand of patriarchy.
But the hand of patriarchy is in the glove of Neo-Liberalism which is conducting a proctological exam of the asshole of Repressive Desublimation! Who gives a fuck if that hand gets strengthened? It will be elbow deep in shit soon enough coz Repressive Desublimation has irritable bowel syndrome.
Chu’s response is not to insist, as many trans women do, that being trans is about identity rather than desire: about already being a woman, rather than wanting to become a woman.
So, some transpeople were born in the wrong gendered body while others wish to transition for some other reason. What's wrong with that? People are individuals. They can be put into a class for a particular purpose but, for some other purpose, they may be in different classes. True, if you have a paranoid theory about the 'hand of Patriarchy' secretly fisting you then you may want there to be only one set of people- viz. those who will catch that sneaky hand and beat it with a sledge-hammer. That way you can at last sleep safely without worrying about it fisting you incessantly.
(Once one recognises that trans women are women, complaints about their ‘excessive femininity’ – one doesn’t hear so many complaints about the ‘excessive femininity’ of cis women – begin to look invidious.)
Daddy would often criticize me for my excessive femininity. Which good Iyer boy would marry me if I insisted on kissing my girl friend and even sleeping naked with her? And, if no good Iyer boy would marry me and provide for me financially, I'd just continue to sponge off my parents. Mummy said 'Don't discourage the boy. I have done special Puja in Tirupati. Any day now, some nice Gay boy will marry him and so he will be able to give up pretending to be a writer and just be a house-husband.'
Sadly, Mum's special Puja was to no avail. Still, I did move out and got a job which was a good thing coz kissing and sleeping naked with the g.f can get her preggers. Who knew?
Instead, Chu insists that ‘nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle,’ including desire for the very things that are the symptoms of women’s oppression: Daisy Dukes, bikini tops and ‘benevolent chauvinism’. She takes this to be ‘the true lesson of political lesbianism as a failed project’. What we need, in other words, is to fully exorcise the radical feminist ambition to develop a political critique of sex.
Radical feminists were stupid and useless. But so was every variety of Radical back in the Seventies. That's why people voted for Thatcher and Reagan and also why the Berlin Wall fell.
Amia next makes a sophomoric category mistake.
The argument cuts both ways.
No it doesn't. Saying 'political critique' is shit does not mean some other political critique aint also shit.
If all desire must be immune from political critique,
because political critique is shit
then
you are talking shit, Amia.
so must the desires that exclude and marginalise trans women:
because politically critiquing them remains a shitty way to spend your time.
not just erotic desires for certain kinds of body, but the desire not to share womanhood itself with the ‘wrong’ kinds of woman.
The fact that shit is shit is the reason the desire to be shit is shitty. Saying that some women- e.g. those who don't want to share womanhood with 'wrong kinds of women' for some stupid reason linked to political critique- are worthless pieces of shit is a good thing, if you are a woman, because that's how women roll y'all. Bitches be kray kray.
Of course, any practical measure protecting some women from other women for a sound, objective, reason- e.g. female prisoners from rape by chicks with dicks, or female athletes from having to compete with much stronger people who claim to be transitioning- can be approved for the same reason that we have laws protecting some men for certain other men.
The dichotomy between identity and desire, as Chu suggests, is surely a false one; and in any case the rights of trans people should not rest on it, any more than the rights of gay people should rest on the idea that homosexuality is innate rather than chosen (a matter of who gay people are rather than what they want).
Amia does not understand that rights are linked to remedies under a bond of law. They have nothing to do with philosophical arguments. The rights of gay people rest upon the same thing as the rights of heterosexual people. True, this was not always the case and, in some places, still isn't. But there is a clear politico-juristic path to establishing equality. This has nothing to do with any shitty political critique. There may have been a time back in the Seventies when everybody was dropping so much acid that they babbled various types of shite but this caused a backlash towards sensible, pragmatic, policies.
But a feminism that totally abjures the political critique of desire is a feminism
which focuses on making the lives of women better. Sadly, this also greatly helps men. Without 'political critique' Feminism wouldn't be utterly shite.
with little to say about the injustices of exclusion and misrecognition suffered by the women who arguably need feminism the most.
Very true. When ISIS started selling Yezidi women as sex-slaves, the ladies concerned didn't ask for help from the American army. No. They demanded help from academic feminists who needed to study and explain the 'injustices of exclusion and misrecognition' which were having an adverse impact on their welfare.
Why is Philosophy now considered to be utterly useless? It is because people like Amia get promoted for writing shite like this-
The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that
Cats are not dogs while also believing that all cats are dogs.
no one is obligated to desire anyone else,
which is true as far as the Law is concerned.
that no one has a right to be desired,
which is false as far as the Law is concerned. I have the right to be desired though the remedy is left in my own hands. True, there are some limits on what I can do to make myself more desirable- e.g. I am prohibited from running naked down the Mall with a radish up my bum in the hope of seducing her Majesty the Queen, Gor' bless 'er.
but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question,
It simply isn't. You may believe that the Post Office is a front for a pedophile ring or that Capitalism only came into existence so that women would be brainwashed into thinking it might be nice to have a baby or that shape-shifting Lizards from Planet X are running things, but these aren't really political questions at all. In the short run, conspiracy theories may gains some purchase among a lunatic fringe, but politics is all about managing such outbursts of craziness. The Seventies was 'peak crazy'. Then everybody started voting for Thatcher or Reagan or a Mitterrand who ditched the Reds.
a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.
Very true! How come you see these post office vans all over the place? Obviously they are being used to traffic little kiddies to the likes of Oprah Winfrey. OMG! I just saw a postman push something through my neighbor's letterbox! That old lady- who looks so sweet and nice- is part of the conspiracy!
It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies,
No they don't. Some men are rapists. But it generally turns out that they are married. It simply isn't true that a guy who isn't getting any nookie is prone to drag women off the streets. The reverse may be the case.
women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment.
Nonsense! Women who aren't getting laid may have cats- which are delightful companions, it must be said- or they may be more religious or have various interests and hobbies. They would have less reason to bang on about 'empowerment' precisely because they don't have a whiney husband and a fat and lazy son whose 'excessive femininity' consists in not getting a job and moving the fuck out.
Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies.
Like they'd kick Brad Pitt, or Angelina for that matter, out of bed!
That said, the radical self-love movements among black, fat and disabled women do ask us to treat our sexual preferences as less than perfectly fixed.
Our sexual preferences are less than perfectly fixed. They are highly plastic. Then you meet your soul-mate and suddenly sex is the last thing on your mind. You can just hold hands and look into each other's eyes till suddenly you notice that the Sun has come out. People are going to work... and little kiddies are going to school.
‘Black is beautiful’ and ‘Big is beautiful’ are not just slogans of empowerment,
They are billion dollar marketing concepts.
but proposals for a revaluation of our values. Lindy West describes studying photographs of fat women and asking herself what it would be to see these bodies – bodies that previously filled her with shame and self-loathing – as objectively beautiful. This, she says, isn’t a theoretical issue, but a perceptual one: a way of looking at certain bodies – one’s own and others’ – sidelong, inviting and coaxing a gestalt-shift from revulsion to admiration. The question posed by radical self-love movements is not whether there is a right to sex (there isn’t), but whether there is a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires.
Bill Gates is getting a divorce. What would I need to do to transfigure his desires so I become the next Melinda?
To take this question seriously requires that we recognise that the very idea of fixed sexual preference is political, not metaphysical.
No. Sexual preference is biological. Advances in the Life Sciences caused legal and political ideas to change. Anything physical can have various metaphysical theories attached to it. However, politics has to adjust to the physical. The reverse can't be done- as King Canute discovered when he ordered the tide to turn back.
As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred:
No. Politics has found it wise to separate the secular from the sacred. The Law confers Hohfeldian immunities to certain preferences. Politics can change laws but it does so on the basis of utilitarian or pragmatic considerations.
we are rightly wary of speaking of what people really want, or what some idealised version of them would want.
No. It is perfectly legitimate to say poor people want to have more disposable income or that young thugs would be happier playing football rather than knifing each other.
That way, we know, authoritarianism lies.
This is not true. Authoritarianism arises where there is unchecked power. It is not the case that Saddam Hussein's big problem was that he cared too deeply about what the Iraqi people should really want. He knew well enough that they didn't want to be robbed, raped, and killed so he and his goons could continue to rule the roost.
This is true, most of all, in sex, where invocations of real or ideal desires have long been used as a cover for the rape of women and gay men.
No. Violence is used to rape people. It is not the case that rapists invoke real or ideal desires. They beat and hold down their victims. They may pretend, if caught, that the thing was consensual. But a thief may say 'I didn't steal the lady's purse. She gave it to me saying I reminded her of her daughter.' This sort of statement is obviously false. I don't have a daughter. Also, it wasn't a purse. It was an 'ultimate man-bag' specifically designed for use by Navy SEALS. Anyway, I'm not a woman.
But the fact is that our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills – not automatically, but not impossibly either.
Preferences alter. D'uh!
What’s more, sexual desire doesn’t always neatly conform to our own sense of it, as generations of gay men and women can attest.
This is true of all people- as generations of men who have shagged their vacuum cleaner can attest.
Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go,
Like the A&E with a smartphone up our pooper.
or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love.
I never thought I'd kiss a girl on her mouth. The thing seemed yucky.
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.
Desire has always chosen for itself. No politician not utterly mad ever thought he could get people to desire copulating with giraffes- though the thing would undoubtedly be entertaining to watch.
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