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Obviously, sex is exceptional. Why bother pretending it isn't? Moreover, it's not quite like anything else. Every analogy for sex fails. Sex is unique. The truth is that sex is neither good nor bad; or rather, it is both. Sex is plenty good, and abundantly bad. Being "sex positive" is nonsensical. It's like being universally in favour of heavy objects or thinking that everything is okay if it's wet, or coloured red. My real problem with sex-positivity is that it treats 'sex' as if it is completely divorced from its social context: sex is sex is sex, as Ayn Rand once howled into Gertrude Stein. Probably. But no. What makes sex so interesting and so fucking awful is how it becomes a nodal point of all our terrible social relations. Sex (however you choose to define it) is different, but certainly not distinct from everything else we do, from all else that is going on in our awful dreadful horrible murderous homicial human societies. I once half-jokingly suggested here that truly consensual sex was impossible under conditions of capitalism. (One of the posters below did not like this suggestion at all as I recall.) But more and more I think this is true: that sexual fears are our deepest fears indeed. That anxiety about sex and consent is a sideshow mirror reflecting back at us our terrible and hilarious inability to imagine intimate relations outside of the trap of mastery. How has the genocide in Gaza affected your orgasmic energy and sense of sexual aliveness? Answers on a postcard, please. Spot prizes will be awarded to responses incorporating the phrases "lockheed martin vibrating clitoral stimulator" and "if I can't have this absolute enjoyment I will destroy the Other so they can't have it either." Oh no, sex is not harmless. Not for us fallen human creatures. It is not, alas, the innocent pastoral fantasy - Dylan Thomas' beguiling dream of strawberry fields - and those who think kit is are certainly old enough to know better. |