negationparty

Jul. 7, 2011 at 1:51pm with 46 notes

oh god what have i done oh god publishing something so hardline feels so vulnerable oh god

Against Sex Positivity: A First Draft Of A Likely Shitstorm

My life is one ordered almost entirely under a regime of “sex positivity,” and it is still a life lived under patriarchy. The sex positive has failed in its mission, because of its fundamental failure to implicate the deepest structures of patriarchy. It was smart to negate the sexuality pushed by some feminists – to fuck as if separatism can truly ever be enacted. It seems almost obvious by now that sex work and sex trade and pornography should not be especially stigmatized and that slut shaming is no radical option. But patriarchal relations keep happening, among the most “sex positive” no less than anyone else. I find myself in a position similar to many 70s feminists; just as free love was a lie, sex positivity is a lie.

I have been a part of so many accountability processes that have desperately sought to leave the world of identity politics, of “oppressor raped/assaulted/bad fucked oppressed person,” and because of the deep taboo against “going there” could not implicate the structure of sex itself. The specter of “positive sexuality” remained and the discourse remained stuck in a moral/political imperative to purge “negative sexuality.”

Amongst radicals, queers no less than anarchy-bros, there remains the deeply held belief that I am “naturally” going to have sex, and as such am available to have sex. I am valorized because I am beautiful, because I am young, because I am white, because I am kinky, because I am promiscuous. Because I am pretty and I fuck, I either have value there for the taking, am expected to “enjoy” another’s value, or am expected to switch between the two roles. Likewise, those bodies seen as unwanted or unavailable are systematically excluded and shit talked.

I am surrounded by the gaping holes of sex positivity and as such, where a certain remnant of “positivity” is not useful, seek to abandon it in its entirety, and in doing so must abandon any attachment to sex as something good.

“We condemn even the most consensual sex for being the gendered event

it is. Regardless of how seductive each little object might be, our focus

remains the narrative, the totality of social relations: constitutive lack.”

Letters to Chris Kraus: Kiss Me, Fuck Me, Or Rape Me

natural

When the challenge is made to sex and its presumed naturalness and value, it is greeted with no more than laughter, asking “are you kidding me?”, and foreclosing on the debate with “that’s fucking stupid.” Perhaps more gently they’ll simply listen and move on, as if what was said was too impossible to absorb. To explicitly state the argument “sex is natural, and everybody does it” would be to inadequately naturalize it; instead one must foreclose on the very possibility of a challenge to sex.

When one speaks of not having sex or lacking a “sex drive,” the subsequent reaction is one of pity and condescension. Your lack of sex precludes you from wholeness, from being truly healthy and in your pitiful, damaged state the “natural” is wholly inaccessible. A helping hand can only offer hope of finding the right person and recovering from your trauma.

In spite of such silence and denial, sex, like population growth, has never been a natural feature of human existence. We may point to the many people who have simply refused to have sex (and their frequent violent normalization or exclusion), but these may be explained as aberrations or only sensible as individual acts of strike. Instead, much as Silvia Federici points out that historically, population growth has been something impelled and augmented by technologies of the body, we must point out that sex has in the whole of its history been something necessarily proscribed and forced upon us. As men became defined as those who fuck, and materially gained (babies, housework, pleasure) from doing so, they began to fuck. As women became defined as either takers of dicks or failures subject to death, exclusion, or rape, they began to take dicks. It is counterproductive to assert that there was, prior to the existence of patriarchy, a “natural” sexuality that has constantly persisted and been perverted. Such ahistoricism denies us the ability to ask honestly how it is our sexualities have been constructed, forced upon us, and subsequently resisted. If we must still have an origin story, it is that prior to patriarchy, to men and women and the social technologies accompanying them, there was only a nameless void in which bodies interacted in nameless ways that we could never characterize as “sex.” Everything after that has been constructed.

Our understanding of sex must then dispose of all naturalized notions of sex – sex as sacred rite, sex as communion, sex as fundamental aspect of life, and sex as the necessary means by which bodies are discovered and explored. First and foremost, sex is work. Not merely the obvious work of making babies (though this is often key in certain contexts), but a vast array of functions within the labor of maintaining a body of workers. Nonprocreative sex is allowed and fostered not because of society’s moving any closer towards freedom, but because the reproductive labor demanded by modern capital is not merely that of population growth, but of the creation of the self, the individual, and consequently the productive, positive identity.

In this, the narrative of modern virginity loss becomes elucidated; it is not an archaic sale into the slavery of reproductive labor, but a pluralistic coming into one’s self repeated infinitely in each act of sex. This is for some, a moment in which one takes refuge in the body of the other, one constructed as a warm, giving place onto which some primal impotence may be resolved. For others, it is a field by which one can become understood, can articulate themself in terms alien and ever present: beauty, one’s physicality, one’s availability (called “desire”) for sex. One may even, due to the benevolence of society’s progress, fulfill to some degree both roles, in what is called “empowered” and “mutual.”

Here we may find the impossibility resting at the foundation of “radical” conceptions of consent – the liberal subject. At the outset, radical consent presumes that we can, theoretically, have sex in such a way that nobody is objectified, nobody hurt. We can all be beautiful, we can all be empowered, we can all have sex in ways that feel right to us, and if rape culture is too totalizing right now, at the least what’s important is that we engage in the project of moving towards consent – and thus casting out nonconsent. What seems beautiful and full of hope so quickly becomes seen to be an almost meaningless lie, precisely because the degree to which the structure of sex itself is not implicated. If one takes sex not to be a natural function of bodies, and as such sees it as a form of reproductive labor, sex must be understood as something inextricably determined by notions of value. Some bodies produce value – be it babies, satisfaction, beauty, sense of self, etc. - and other bodies reap the benefit of such value in the exchange of sex.

Liberal feminism’s concept of “sexual empowerment” can then be taken as an urge towards self-ownership, to benefit from one’s own value production. This is not necessarily useless* but as an aim in and of itself it is a demand for greater representation in a phallic economy of sex. Radical consent takes this demand even further until it becomes almost self-parodying: everybody may have access to the subject position, and as such everybody may benefit from their own value production. But phallic economy does not allow for such utopianism. Even if for one encounter it can feel mutual, feel decided upon by free and equal actors, the underlying mechanics of sex have not been challenged. The subject position necessitates the object; any value produced may always be expropriated and will always be expedient to expropriate. The act of rape will in such a context always be available, and when vengeance against the rapist can be circumvented, will always be enacted.

*One could characterize it at its most radical (ie. a “my body, my choice” violently defended) as a seizure of the modes of reproduction – something not necessarily entailing any sort of negation of one’s position as reproductive laborer, but useful in the project of self abolition.

One may propose an urge to build a sexuality not molded into reproductive labor – a ludic interplay of desires not tied to the value form, but again this is a hopeless project. Not without trying, attempts at an “alternative” sexuality have quickly proved themselves to reproduce the same dynamic. At the end of the orgy, we all returned to work, all found ourselves forced to reproduce ourselves or others as workers or find someone to reproduce for us. Queer and feminist sexualities are proliferated only to find themselves false and having always been so; the queer sexuality is impossible – it may only be a mimicry of the same phallic economy. Individual apparatuses of sex – the nuclear family, compulsory heterosexuality, non-explicitly negotiated sex – may be destroyed, but the root remains and as such some even more diffuse and resilient manifestation of it’s foundational horror emerges. Not until the superstructures ordering our lives – the totality named in its particularity as capital, biopower, patriarchy, white supremacy, heterosexism, and so on – are abolished in their entirety can we begin to conceive of an interplay of bodies not ordered by the value form of sex.

The straw-man constructed by enemies of the second wave, that of Andrea Dworkin claiming “all sex is rape” is, in a sense, true. All sex is structured according to the dictates of capital, which is to say the violent production and extraction of use value, which is to say rape culture. As such, all sex is to be placed within rape culture and implicated in its functioning.

Obviously “all sex is rape” is hopelessly reductive, and it is pertinent to make distinctions between the extraordinarily brutal forms of exploitation called “rape” and the normal, if not gentle, forms of exploitation that constitute the majority of our sexual interactions. But they must be recognized as qualitatively different manifestations of the same structure as opposed to entirely different phenomena.

frigid

Sex, being a function of capital, must be treated like all the other apparatuses which order our lives – we find ways of survival within the system in order to better destroy it. Nechaev style militancy, total self denial in the service of the revolution, is as much a dead end as lifestyleist attempts at pleasant survival and separatist attempts at total disengagement. I am not arguing that we never have sex so we can get on with negating, nor am I arguing we never have sex so as to avoid implication within patriarchy. Rather, we must critically examine what within our conditions prevents us from self abolition and do what it takes to effectively move on with the project of total destruction of the existent – bearing in mind that nothing, no means of survival, can be saved.

The modes of survival appropriate to individuals and collectivities are not something to affirm as “good,” are without objective truth or moral content, and as such are something that cannot be programmatized and mandated. We may point towards methods that have worked for some and replicate them as we see fit, but there is no pure method, no sacred name that can bring about the coming of the messiah. There are only provisional structures, alienated, imperfect means that can destabilize the basis of patriarchal relations provided they fail to affirm themselves.

——-

I don’t let anyone touch my cunt or my tits. I stop touching other people’s. Mostly I just hit and bite and scratch and get hit and bit and scratched but never ever with men. I cuddle with my friends a lot. I ask before I do most things with other people’s bodies and ask that other people do the same with me or ask them to stop or yell at them a lot maybe with death threats. Waged labor is fucking hard to get and I’m pretty and young so I get a job as a sex worker with a feminist boss who pays me pretty allright. I self destruct in less scary, less uncontrollable ways. I write essays and read books and talk to friends and say what’s on my mind as loud as I can and try to avoid people who don’t care to listen. Maybe it’s working because I know I’m not free and still want to die, still want everything in the world to be something else entirely, but I can turn my misery outward and feel like I have enough power to drag down something important with me. I guess if I didn’t have books and a radical scene and shit I’d be drunker and crazier and more anorexic and maybe I’d sink down so forcefully it would make “man” and “woman” and “transsexual” scarier, less stable places to be. I imagine other people will do different things and say different things and justify their lives in different ways and I don’t really care. I just want them to destroy some things and not get in the way of destroying everything.

Queer porn still sucks because it’s still porn and it’s pieces of our bodies cut off and commodified and it’s another fucking lifestyle with another fucking identity being created by us and sold to us. It’s a less fucked up feeling hustle and I guess it’s fun to watch some times but I’m sick of being told greater representation means anything is okay.

I don’t want to be stigmatized for sex work or having lots of sex but I don’t want anyone acting like it’s not another job, more exploitation that’s always a moment away from horror, more capital, more sadness and boredom and lives wasted on dead time.

——-

on the body positive

All bodies are disgusting. White bodies are disgusting because they make non-white bodies disgusting. Cisgender bodies are disgusting because they make trans and intersex bodies disgusting. Thin, “healthy” bodies are disgusting because they make fat and disabled bodies disgusting. If there was ever any truth in my anorexia it is the harshness with which it reveals the mechanisms that produced my body. Starvation showed with such elegance the cold, grotesque, violent abjection which has produced my body as a white, able bodied, “passing” transsexual. If there has ever been a fight against anorexia, it is the fight against the blunt and ruthless means of speech possessed by the voiceless. Its deathlike pallor and exposed ribs express a stance unacceptable to patriarchy – this, this disgusting process, is what has produced my body as a woman, and if it what I am consigned to then at least I want it to kill me.

I see no hope in simply expanding what is “beautiful.” Thus far it has only allowed for a more diffuse mechanism of “beauty,” definitions expanded just far enough to get us to reproduce its logic, make us feel we have a stake, but never enough to undermine the mechanisms of exclusion. And it never will. “Beauty” is meaningless without the ugly; the good must express itself onto the evil in order to be legible. A world in which everyone is beautiful is a world where everybody is their own boss. Which is to say, in which everyone is a worker, with their exploitation managed only by a social relation.

We can’t all be beautiful so I wish a total death to beauty. Where I am ugly I turn it outwards, cast the disgust coded into my body onto all who claim beauty. I abolish them as beautiful and in doing so become illegible as ugly. This is the project of self abolition: the hysteric object’s all devouring disgust.