Amia Srinivasan on Desires

Amia Srinivasan writes 

...the very idea of fixed sexual preference is political, not metaphysical.

Sexual behaviour, being directly linked to reproduction and thus subject to intense selective pressure, is largely genetically determined in animals and humans.

Politics has to accommodate biology, it can't determine it.

Demarcating the political from the biological is part and parcel of metaphysics. Thus to say 'the very idea' of x is political is a wholly metaphysical statement.

As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred:

This is wholly untrue. We don't treat the preferences of the rapist or the murderer or the thief as sacred. Indeed, we treat no preference- revealed though it may have been in a non repugnant market- to be sacred at all. An action or intention may be sacred. A preference is not. I may hold Liberty to be sacred. This may involve your freedom to like or dislike certain things. But 'Liking' can't be held sacred. That would be silly.

we are rightly wary of speaking of what people really want, or what some idealised version of them would want.

Nonsense! All policy prescriptions are of the form 'to give the people what they really ought to want such and such measure must be implemented.' This is because public intellectuals are assumed to have an asymmetric informational endowment. That is why they get paid to pontificate.

That way, we know, authoritarianism lies.

We know no such thing. Authoritarianism arises where power is concentrated in a manner devoid of any checks and balances. Mahatma Gandhi spent a lot of time telling people what they really want or should want under idealised circumstances. He was not an authoritarianism because he never sought any office where power was concentrated.

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.

A rapist  only invokes 'real or ideal desires' if he has been caught and is standing in the dock. Otherwise no such invocations are made. It would be silly to do so.

Why does Amiya not mention heterosexual men? They too get raped. Consider the paradigmatic case of Sir John Hudson, the Queen's dwarf, enslaved by the Barbary pirates at the age of 30. He claimed that he doubled in height as a result of the incessant buggery he was forced to endure. No doubt, this forcible and unwarranted enlargement affected his earning power and fame.

It appears that pygmy men are the preferred victims of rape in certain parts of the world because of the belief that sodomising them yields magical powers.

Clearly, these are very important issues which we as a Society need to confront. Britain is considering implementing anti-casteist legislation so as to tackle the social evil engendered by Amiya's own Iyengar disdain for us Iyers. Similarly, we need robust legislative actions and effective administrative measures to tackle the social evil associated with sodomising Persons of Restricted Growth whether or not this results in the enlargement of the victim or whether or not the violator gains magical powers.

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.

Yes. Biologicially, humans have been endowed with greater cognitive as well as sexual plasticity. Certainly, most Religions and some Ideologies or systems of 'Therapy'  claim that they have a method for regulating sexuality. Generally these claims are bogus.

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.

Everyone can attest that nothing conforms to our own naive sense of it. Gay people are not different from anyone else in this regard.

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love.

So can hunger or thirst or boredom or mental illness or intoxicants or business or...urm, anything you can name.

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.

I suppose Amiya means things like bi-racial marriages in segregated societies. The trouble is such marriages don't actually change politics at all. Consider the Bosnian conflict- a lot of the people involved had a parent or in-laws who was of 'mixed' origin. This made no difference at all. It appears that mixed marriages in places like Mostar have greatly declined in the last couple of decades because of the conflict. Politics, it seems, can cut against what Desire chooses more effectively than the other way round.

Amiya lives in England. Currently, an English woman who marries a man from a non EU country can't bring her spouse to this country to live with her unless she earns more than about 18 grand a year. A woman who earns less has a desire which 'cuts against what politics has chosen' for her but that desire can't change anything. But then desires, by themselves, don't change anything at all. I desire to levitate. Mahesh Yogi pretended he could teach people to levitate. His followers created a political party- 'The Natural Law Party'- and put up candidates in every constituency in England. It changed nothing because though a lot of English people truly desired to levitate- and were willing to believe that a Society where everyone could levitate would be more peaceful and harmonious- still, most English people didn't teach Philosophy at Oxbridge and thus weren't as stupid as Prof. Srinivasan.