The politicization of sexuality - the voice, the gaze, autism and consent

 

I: JACQUES LACAN – SEX AND THE REAL

 

            Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had often made a point that “There is no signifier of sexual difference in the symbolic order” that I think is particularly relevant in today’s age of the politicization of human sexuality. Human sexuality has always been a political subject throughout history, politics itself using the law as a tool to control the inherently chaotic nature of sex (by sex, referring here to both “man and woman” as well as sexual intercourse itself). Since the law is the primary instrument of the political, this has always led to “problems”: contradictions, paradoxes, exceptions and so on – it is almost as if sex itself is a radioactive or “nuclear” substance that cannot be kept into the confines of the law, and thus, a certain part of it always “slips”, creating a surplus that cannot be codified into the explicit nature of law itself.

This was Lacan’s main point, that there is no possible explicit symbolization of sex as such, that any attempt to do so is doomed to fail, that human sexuality is precisely that energy that is developed in such a way such as to escape the confines of symbolization through language.

The politicization of sex in the past few decades is primarily concerned with issues of sexual exception (in the case where “sex” here refers to sexual difference – this includes topics related to LGBT+) or with issues of sexual transgression (in the case where “sex” here refers to sexual intercourse/activity – this includes topics related to rape, sexual harassment and consent).

Lacan’s psychoanalysis is particularly relevant nowadays in understanding the politicization of the topics surrounding consent and sexual harassment, and the limit between speech, the freedom of speech, censorship and the law surrounding it. Any illegal transgression on the boundaries of sexual activity must be explicitly codified into a law that makes the “rules of sex” clear, so to speak. There is a problem whenever such an attempt is done, however, since the law does not allow for context, subtext, implications or vagueness – the letter of the law is by definition literal, explicit and de-contextualized. Sex is the “evil twin” of the letter of the law, since sexual activity is the activity that is most dependent on context, subtext and implications, it is by its nature both metaphorical and metonymical. In other words, sex and the letter of the law are like oil and water – to make a law that clarifies what constitutes explicit and implicit consent, sexual harassment, the limit between friendly flirting and violent cat-calling and so on is doomed to allow, if you allow me a paradoxical expression, “exceptions as the rule and the rule as the exception”.

One of the best examples that I’ve seen in contemporary society on how sexuality can easily “pervert” or “invert” the letter of the law is in the laws regarding child molestation and child grooming. Where I live in Romania, we also had a Youtuber that was doing a similar version of that “To Catch a Predator” show: he would make fake accounts online where he pretended to be a minor below the age of consent, pedophiles would message his account and flirt with his fake account, they would plan to meet up in person and he would show up and call the police on them. However, now in Romania we do not have a strong law against child grooming, and thus, it’s only illegal to make explicit sexual demands for a minor below the age of consent. What is the consequence of this? The predators that this Youtuber was catching were usually divided into two categories: the smart manipulators who would try to first gain the (fake) minor’s trust, and the idiots with no social skills who were very sexually obscene from the start. The law in this country could only punish the latter category, and whenever the Youtuber would catch a predator in the former category, the police wouldn’t be able to do anything to them, because “I didn’t plan to have sex with the minor, I called them in my hotel room in the middle of the night only to play Monopoly!” now becomes a legitimate legal defense. Why do I say that sex “inverts” or “perverts” the letter of the law? Because this situation here is inherently ironical: the more dangerous a predator is, the less likely they are to be punished by the law. The smartest and most socially skilled ones are invincible in front of the law, and yet precisely the ones with no social skills that have almost zero chance of actually seducing even a child are those who are most likely to be punished by the law.

Lacanian theory makes the point that sex is inherently traumatic and violent by nature because it is a confrontation with the real. To quote one of my previous articles:

 

“The real” for Jacques Lacan is not just “physical reality”, but instead is defined as whatever is neither symbolic, nor imaginary. In other words, it is unimaginable and unsymbolizable, it is whatever is impossible to think about (unimaginable) and impossible to talk about (unsymbolizable). It is the locus of “nonsense”, contradiction, chance, randomness, the unexplainable, etc. Despite the real being “invisible” to both thought and speech, it has a profound effect on our reality. It is exactly that nothingness, that nonsensical void that still changes our reality. You can never directly interact with the real, but you can feel its effects. The best example of “the real” in our universe is the singularity of a black hole. It morphs time and space around it, and yet time and space stops working inside the singularity itself, and thus, by definition, we can never perceive what is inside the singularity of a black hole because our perception relies on the working of time and space in the first place. So, despite the fact that we will never see or even become able to imagine what is inside a black hole, it has a huge effect on the space around it.

Since we can never experience the real (by definition), it must be mediated through fantasy. Whenever we experience the real, it is too much of a traumatic experience to deal with, so we must create a “story inside our heads” to retroactively explain what just happened after our encounter with the real. As a fun fact, this was Freud’s basis for his theory of PTSD, that what we consider trauma is not the traumatic event itself (the real), but the story we tell ourselves to retroactively explain it after the event. Whenever we experience the real, it shatters the stability of our experience, it destructs all the stories we tell ourselves and we enter the realm of instability, of the new, and of the vulnerable. Meaning is deconstructed, things stop “making sense” and there is no order of things, and there is no system of how to make sense of things in the first place. One only needs to speak to a war veteran or a rape victim suffering from PTSD in order to understand the unexplainable and unspeakable horror of the traumatic event that most often leaves the subject in silence as their only possible reaction.

(Source: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-real-phantasy-of-dating-of.html)

 

            Lacan’s theory of sex as the (impossible to symbolize) confrontation with the real will be the first pillar in building my theory of the politicization of human sexuality.

 

II: HEGEL AND MARX – CONTRADICTION AND THE DIALECTIC

 

            Moving on, if sex is contradictory and paradoxical in of itself, do we just give up on it entirely? That would be absurd of course, else we wouldn’t even be able to reproduce. It is, however, what a philosophy like Immanuel Kant’s philosophy would indirectly guide us to believe: that whenever we reach a contradiction, we have made a mistake in our reasoning and we must question the premises we started out with (the “reductio ad absurdum” principle in logic and mathematics). Kant was the philosopher of “perfection” and of fundamentalism: he saw the universe and reality as perfect and complete, without contradictions, and came to the conclusion that if we have arrived at a contradiction then it is us who is “wrong”, not reality.

            Hegel inverted Kant’s philosophy on its head, so to speak. Hegel was the philosopher of contradiction and paradox, and postulated that contradictions are inherent to reality and the universe as such, so if we have arrived at a contradiction (a conclusion that is both true and false at the same time, for example), then our reasoning could as well have been right. Quantum mechanics is the best example of this (if all objects are made up of molecules, all molecules are made up of atoms, all atoms are made of subatomic particles, and subatomic particles are paradoxical by nature, where one particle can be in two places at once, or be and not be in a place at the same time; then we may as well conclude that the entire universe is one big paradox), but bear in mind that Hegel discovered all this in the early 1800’s, before quantum physics was even a thing.

            My favorite example of a “true contradiction” is the very idea of change or motion. To quote someone else, who explained it better than I could:

 

Hegel is right, Priest argues, that change, and motion in particular, are examples of real or existing contradictions. What distinguishes motion, as a process, from a situation in which something is simply here at one time and then some other place at some other time is the embodiment of contradiction: that, in a process of motion, there is one (span of) time in which something is both here and not here at the same time (in that span of time).

(Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/)

 

            I bring up this point because later in the article I will give examples inside the politicization of sexuality in which certain political camps (what Americans roughly call “the liberal left-wing” or “the conservative right-wing”) give contradictory statements and demands in regards to how we deal with sexuality. If a liberal or a conservative demands from you two opposite things (a contradiction), the properly Hegelian point here would not be to assume (like Kant would, for example) that the liberal or the conservative is simply wrong, that they should stop contradicting themselves, and simply choose one side or the other. Instead, what if that contradiction is inherent to reality and the universe itself? Combining this idea of Hegelian contradiction with my previous point about Jacques Lacan and the impossibility of the symbolization of sex – perhaps sex itself is full of contradictions, so if a political camp demands two opposite things from you, perhaps they have discovered a “true contradiction” inside sexuality as such, something contradictory that was always there inside sex itself to begin with?

            An important feature of Hegel’s philosophy of contradiction is the idea of the dialectic. Hegelian dialectics argue that the tension between two opposites gives rise to new useful material. For instance, in “The Science Of Logic”, Hegel starts by arguing that the contradiction between “Being” and “Nothing” gives rise to the idea of “Becoming” as the resolution to the conflict between being and nothing (becoming as the movement from being into nothing and from nothing into being). One way in which you can view the idea of the dialectic is like the idea of tension in physics: an object is dragged in two opposite directions by two forces until it “breaks” or “snaps”. Imagine an elastic cord that I drag with both of my hands in two opposite directions: it will keep stretching and stretching until one moment in which it will snap, and from a circular elastic cord it will transform into a simple line.

            Karl Marx invented the philosophy of dialectical materialism in which he argued that Hegel’s dialectic can be applied to the material conditions inside an economic system. He argued that each economic system (hunter-gatherer economy, feudalism, capitalism, etc.) was marked by certain contradictions, these contradictions creating a tension between two opposite forces until, at a certain point, that tension will end up “snapping” the economic system in two, giving rise to a revolution in which the next economic system will be created (just like an elastic band can be snapped in two with enough force). For example, the contradictions inherent in feudalism became larger and larger, until the tension accumulated enough that this tension “exploded” in the French revolution of 1789, giving rise to what we now know was “capitalism”.

            This idea of the dialectic will be my second pillar in building my theory of the politicization of sexuality. I argue with the help of Lacan (and soon enough, Sigmund Freud as well) that there are certain contradictions inside sex itself. However, alike Karl Marx, I also think that each economic system has a different way of handling these contradictions. The more society advances inside an economic system, the more these contradictions “surface” and the tension inside them becomes larger and larger. These tensions are not only economic in nature, but concern sexuality itself. Capitalism itself has a certain way of dealing with the contradictory problematic of sex (for example, with the notions of: consent, freedom of choice, dating being viewed as a “free market of potential partners” where all the laws of capitalism apply such as supply and demand, etc.) and I believe that we are closer to the later stages of capitalism in which the tension between opposites is large enough that soon enough (perhaps in our life time, perhaps a century later) it will “snap in two”.

            However, there are two mainstream “political camps” in most countries today, what most people call “social conservatism” (parties voted by old people) vs. “social progressivism” (parties voted by young people). This “social dimension” does not necessarily need to correlate with the economic left-right wing axis like it does in the USA, for example here in Romania, the only “socially progressive” party is economically right-wing. I will attempt to argue that both of these positions are unconsciously following capitalist ideology, but in a different “area” of sexuality, so to speak. Hence, neither are “revolutionary” or “progressive” in the true Marxist sense, but are simply two different ways in which you can follow ideology (if “liberalism” is the ideology of capitalism, then we could separate them between “reformist liberals” and “conservative liberals”). But in order to understand the difference between reformist liberals and conservatives in their way to deal with sexuality, we must turn to Freud.

 

III: FREUD AND LACAN – THE FOUR PARTIAL DRIVES

 

            Sigmund Freud argued that sexuality is “polymorphic” in the early stages of human development (what Carl Jung would’ve perhaps called “undifferentiated”) – that is, it is not centered around a certain particular zone of the body. Touch of the skin itself is pleasurable and violently painful at the same time, it is simply intense, producing a mix of pleasure and pain (that Lacan would’ve latter called “jouissance”). Later, in the development of the child, achieving physical pleasure through touch is differentiated into various erogenous zones of the body. Each erogenous zone corresponds to a certain partial drive. However, we must understand the difference between the notion of “drive” and “instinct”:

 

“Whereas instinct denotes a mythical pre-linguistic need, the drive is completely removed from the realm of biology.

The drives differ from biological needs in that they can never be satisfied, and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it. Lacan argues that the purpose of the drive is not to reach a goal (a final destination) but to follow its aim (the way itself), which is to circle round the object.

Thus, the real purpose of the drive is not some mythical goal of full satisfaction, but to return to its circular path, and the real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit.

Lacan emphasizes the partial nature of all drives, but differs from Freud on two points:

 

Lacan rejects the idea that the partial drives can ever attain any complete organization or fusion, aruging that the priamcy of the genital zone, if achieved, is always a highly precarious affair.

He thus challenges the notion, put forward by some psychoanalysts after Freud, of a genital drive in which the partial drives are completely integrated in a harmonious relation.

Lacan argues that the drives are partial, not in the sense that they are parts of a whole (a 'genital drive'), but in the sense that they only represent sexuality partially; they do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of enjoyment.”

(Source: https://nosubject.com/Drive)

 

What are the four partial drives identified by Lacan? The four partial drives are: the scopic drive (“to see”), the invocatory drive (“to hear”), the oral drive (“to suck”) and the anal drive (“to shit”). Each of these four drives corresponds to a certain erogenous zone: the eyes, the ears, the lips and the anus, respectively. They also correspond to four partial objects of the drive: the gaze, the voice, the breast and the feces, respectively.

 

What must be understood is that, as previously quoted, the aim of the drive is not satisfaction but repetition, and hence those four objects are not objects that must be acquired in order to reach state of satisfaction and “equilibrium”, but objects that the drive must circle around, always getting closer and closer to obtaining them but never achieving full satisfaction, being “almost there”, at 99% into obtaining them, then leading the subject to unconsciously self-sabotage themselves, having to start over. (The infamous “the journey is more important than the destination” cliché; to give a non-sexual example of the drive: think of how many people have an addiction to shopping itself as an activity, not caring about the objects that they buy – the idea is that the drives make you addicted to the chase, only pretending to care about reaching the destination, hence the goal-post always being constantly moved (you want more and more) and/or you never reach the goal post through unintentional self-sabotage.)

Each of these four partial drives includes a certain contradiction. On one hand, the object of the drive must be covered up, masked, veiled or somehow “censored”, because it is too obscene and “vulgar”. On the other hand, the object of the drive must be exposed in order to please and sexually stimulate. In this way, the object is constantly pulled in two opposite directions at once – to be perceived and not perceived simultaneously.

Each of the two mainstream political stances today is fixated on the contradictions inside a different partial drive:

“Social conservatives” (ex: the archetypal US Republican) are fixated on the contradictions inside the scopic drive. Hence, they are constantly pulling the object of the scopic drive (the gaze) in two opposite directions. The verb of the gaze is “to see”, and hence, conservatives come with a contradictory demand: on one hand, everything must be seen. On the other hand, nothing must be seen. How you present yourself visually is of upmost importance to conservatives, as well as anything involving the body, since to communicate through the body (your clothing, how much skin you show, how your body looks, etc.) means to modify the object of the other’s gaze. Hence, anything involving visual communication as well as modifications to the body are a “touchy subject” or a “sensitive topic” that easily triggers conservatives: vaccines (a foreign liquid invading the body), masks (covers up a part of your face, changes your visual appearance, technically an article of clothing), abortion (changes to the body), transgender surgeries (modifications to the body), formal clothing (ex: remember when Obama wore a tan suit and most conservatives lost their shit?), and so on.

The same is in the domain of sexuality. When it comes to sexuality, conservatives pull you in two opposite directions: on one hand, do not show too much (or any) skin, because that is too vulgar, obscene or indecent – you are incentivized to not show skin in order to preserve “decency” (if a woman shows too much skin or dresses too revealingly, she may be accused of being a whore, of “asking to be raped”, of distracting other men in the room, etc.). On the other hand, if you don’t show enough skin you are not attractive enough. Since women use their body and their visual appearance (clothing, make-up, etc.) more than men in seduction, this attitude negatively affects women disproportionately more than men. Hence, the archetypal woman is pulled in two opposite directions by conservative ideology: on one hand, she needs to be the pure, holy virgin, on the other hand, she needs to be the sexy whore to please men.

Most of this is not usually true for progressives/liberals – they usually don’t care about what you wear or what you do with your body – they will let you cover up your skin as little or as much as you want.

“Social liberals” (ex: the archetypal US Democrat) are fixated on the contradictions inside the invocatory drive. Hence, they are constantly pulling the object of the invocatory drive (the voice) in two opposite directions. The verb of the voice is “to hear”, and hence, progressives come with a contradictory demand: on one hand – cover up your words with “a mask” or “a veil”, engage in soft language, because stating your mind directly through “hard language” is too offensive, hurts people’s feelings, or is too “obscene” or “vulgar”. On the other hand, take people’s speech at face value, interpret everything literally, because otherwise you are putting words in people’s mouths and you risk misunderstanding. Hence, anything involving verbal/written communication as well as modifications to language are the “touchy subject” or “sensitive topic” that easily triggers progressives: political correctness, euphemisms and soft language on offensive topics, etc.

The same is in the domain of sexuality. When it comes to sexuality, progressives pull you in two opposite directions: on one hand, they are extremely sensitive to verbal sexual harassment, sexual harassment in the workplace, cat-calling and so on – implying that it should be illegal to make too direct unwanted sexual advances, hence the need for indirect communication (the equivalent of “clothing to preserve decency” for conservatives). On the other hand, sexual intercourse requires explicit verbal consent (see: “yes means yes” in the #MeToo movement) in liberal ideology, and hence, the need for an explicit and “hard” language when expressing sexual desire (the equivalent of “showing skin” for conservatives). The sexed contradiction that they fixate on is the contradiction that if you speak too much, you are accused of sexual harassment, if you speak too little, you are at risk of being accused of rape later because you didn’t have explicit consent. Since men use words in seduction more often than women, this attitude negatively affects men disproportionately more than women. The “archetypal man” is pulled in two opposite directions by “progressive” liberal ideology: on one hand, he should be an autist who speaks his mind directly and interprets every social situation literally, on the other hand, he shall become a mind-reader who can read between the lines better than anyone.

Most of this is not usually true for social conservatives – if you make explicit sexual advances to strangers to the point of vulgarity (“cat-calling”, etc.), conservatives will find a way to justify it (freedom of speech, etc.); but if you read between the lines to the point of absurdity, conservatives will also find a way to justify it (“she was looking in your direction all night so she was asking to be raped”, etc.). Hence, just like liberals allow people to be as “indirect” or “directly vulgar” with how much skin they show and what they do with their body, conservatives allow people to use language however they want. In short: conservatives seek to police people’s bodies while liberals seek to police people’s speech. Both of them are involved in sexuality, but when it comes to heterosexual courtship, men are more reliant on seductive speech while women are more reliant on seductive imagery – hence liberals indirectly policing men while conservatives indirectly policing women (nothing new…).

With all this being put into perspective, both mainstream liberalism and mainstream conservatives are just two sides of capitalist ideology – one is a way of men having power over women and the other is a way of women having power over men, in other words, two different ways to divide the working class. Who would’ve thought?

The correctly Hegelian response to this contradiction, if you want to survive inside capitalism, is not to resolve the contradiction (“you are asking me for two contradictory things, choose one or the other!”), nor to “synthesize” it like Johan Ficthe would’ve suggested; but to learn how to live with the contradiction itself. Else, there is nothing much you can do other than learn how to be a whore pretending to be holy, a holy virgin pretending to be a slut, an autistic idiot pretending to be socially aware or someone who is socially skilled pretending to be a clueless autist. Since sex and the letter of the law are like water and oil (like I suggested in the beginning), any legal sexual activity involves at least a certain degree of contradiction and paradox, regardless of whether we are conscious of it or not. Any attempt to resolve sexual contradictions leads to either illegality (rape, cat-calling, molestation, etc.) or abstinence.

 

IV: AUTISM AND LIBERALISM

 

            It is not unheard of for psychiatry and clinical psychology to be politically influenced (think of how both the introduction and the removal of homosexuality as a mental illness was based on no actual research but mere social norms and politics). Nowhere is this truer than in the domain of human sexuality. As Zizek explains around 1:26 here 

 

Michelle Foucault noticed in a very nice way somewhere how the key power decision of a psychoanalyst is: “what is a symptom that has to be analyzed as a clinical case and what is just a normal state that doesn’t deserve to be analyzed?”. A very simple stupid example: more than half-a-century ago: if you are married and you are promiscuous, sleeping around with others, it was considered pathological, something to be interpreted. The idea was “What are you running from? Why this fear from stable relations, whatever, blah blah”. Today, they told me, it’s the opposite: if you are faithful to your spouse, they are like “oh my god, you have a traumatic fixation that needs to be resolved”.

 

            Couldn’t we also say a similar thing in regards to autism? Consider the movement from the second to the fifth edition of the DSM, where the further you go back in history, the more “serious” of a disorder it was considered. In the first and second editions of the DSM, autism was strongly related to schizophrenia, schizophrenia probably being the most “serious” or “grave” mental disorder in the public’s eye. In the DSM-III, autism was more strongly separated from schizophrenia, making it seem less “grave” but still grave enough. In the DSM-IV, the category of “Asperger’s disorder” was created, which was a lesser form of autism, less “grave”. In the DSM-V, Asperger’s was removed and now you have “autism spectrum disorders”. In other words, with each edition of the DSM, the threshold for being considered autistic gets lower and lower, and the definition of “high-functioning” autism keeps being extended more and more in order to include more people.

            I unironically believe that inside psychology there is a subtle movement of the normalization of autism. The idea was that psychology in its early days (especially when psychoanalysis was more popular than cognitive and behavioral therapies) was focused on interpretation: how to “read people”, how to read the room based on facial expressions, etc. and this applied to both academic and “pop” psychology. Knowing how to “read minds” was considered a healthy skill and a necessary skill for any serious psychologist. Slowly, modern, mainstream psychology moves in a direction where these sorts of social skills are slowly pathologized, and instead what was previously pathologized (the lack of social skills -> autism) is normalized. Decades ago, people who interpreted all social situations literally and weren’t able to understand, for example, when someone wasn’t interested in the conversation but wouldn’t say it out loud in order to be polite, were considered to have at least one symptom of autism. Nowadays, you see more and more of a trend in “mainstream psychology” (CBT, DBT, etc.) that what was before considered a normal and healthy set of social skills is now considered “putting words into people’s mouths”, having an “unhealthy attachment style that doesn’t allow for directly communicating what you want, resulting in subtle manipulation tactics, because in childhood your parents didn’t allow you to openly express your wishes” and so on and so on.

In Freudian fashion, I claim that this has the deepest roots in a sexual conflict – and it is (reformist/”progressive”) liberal ideology at heart (since most US psychologists are liberal, simple as that). Basic social skills are slowly and subtly pathologized because they allow for the potential of misunderstanding and thus deny the concept of “explicit consent” in sexual matters. If psychology were to continue being on the side of metaphor/metonymy (on interpretation), then it would have to somehow deal with the rape-apologists who are making extreme claims trying to read women’s minds and justify how they actually “asked for it”. The solution of mainstream psychology was to abandon interpretation altogether – psychodynamic treatments (based on interpretation, where no speech of the patient is taken at face-value) were taken out of popularity by CBT and its cousins (ACT, DBT, MCBT, REBT, etc. where almost all speech of the patient is taken at face-value), and indirect speech was replaced with literal (“autistic”) speech as the default and “healthy” form of communication. One could say, with a little exaggeration, that in liberal ideology, the ideal man is an autistic woman (but also one who is secretly a mentalist).

Probably the most autistic concept prevalent in today’s liberal ideology is the “consent form” – a written document where both parties who participate in sexual intercourse have to explicitly write what acts they consent to and then sign the dated documents before the act. It’s so absurd that most probably even the people who believe in it don’t actually believe in it. Imagine being in the 60’s or 70’s and going to a random clinical psychologist and telling them “Hey, there is this person who came up with the idea of a “consent form”, what do you think about it?”, they would have likely replied something like “Oh, it’s very likely a person suffering from an autistic-related disorder or some sort of developmental disorder who has trouble reading social cues and understanding social situations, and this was their way of rationalizing the situation as a coping mechanism. Poor guy.” – now if you were to show them the consent form, they wouldn’t call it “autism” but “liberalism”. It’s the same thing with “consent unicorns”, to quote Slavoj Zizek:

 

“The intricate problem of how to verify consent in a sexual interplay is resolved by the presence of a hired controlling agent. The club is a hedonistic playground where “anything goes”. One of its most popular features is the introduction of “consenticorns”, people whose job it is to monitor the goings on and ensure no one’s consent is being violated. In the House of Yes, customers can do anything from naked hot tubs to drag wrestling, but they have to adhere to a strict consent policy, which is ultimately enforced by “consenticorns,” the “consent guardians” who wear light-up unicorn horns.

They observe interactions and look for signs that someone might feel unsafe. In most cases, making eye contact is enough to prevent trouble. Sometimes, a more direct intervention is needed: the consenticorn dances up to the couple and inquires if there are any problems. If it is necessary, the person responsible for the trouble is asked to leave. (…)

I must confess that I don’t want even to imagine such a place. Remember we are talking about having (intimate, sexualised) fun, and the implication of Mahdawi’s claim is that, in today’s society, the consent required for pure fun can only be enforced through tight control – the stricter the control over us is, the more fun everyone can have.”

(Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/consent-sex-clubs-house-of-yes-consenticorns-sadomasochism-freud-capitalism-a8705551.html)

 

V: CONSENT AS AN IDEOLOGICAL CATEGORY

 

I mentioned earlier in the article that each economic system had a certain way of handling the contradictions inside sex. Capitalism solves the contradictions inside sexuality by inventing the category of “consent”, but it is doomed to fail, since sex is by definition something you cannot completely consent to. Consent is better than nothing (of course, I am not advocating a return to feudalism!) but it is not perfect, it is only a patch, it does not fix the issue itself; it is as if sex was an infection and consent was a painkiller, not an antibiotic. It is a partial solution. Informed consent involves both participants knowing the details of what is about to happen. Informed consent is something that is possible to be realized in regards to storing and processing your data (ex: GDPR regulations) or in regards to participating in a scientific experiment. Sex always was and always will be at least partially violent, chaotic and unpredictable, and hence consent can only be partial. Sexual consent is only partially informed since one cannot plan out the details of sexual intercourse beforehand (imagine the absurdity of asking for consent every two-three seconds before you make any move or touch any body part). It’s also only partially explicit and partially implied (implied not necessarily only by non-verbal cues, but also by context – the history of the relationship between the two people, etc.). This is the paradox of capitalism: consent is most important precisely when it is impossible. Consent is realizable in regards to data protection, research experiments, terms and conditions of buying an app, but precisely then people care about it the least.

Since everything in this world is about sex, other than sex, which is about power, each economic system had a different answer to “who has the power”. In feudalism, for instance, that answer was “the patriarch” – hence it was the father who arranged marriages between individuals. In capitalism, the fantasy is “self-mastery”, capitalism’s lie is that you have more power and freedom of choice than you actually have. This is why consent is inherently a category inside capitalism, not only in sexuality but also in economic matters, matters of data privacy, in participating in a research experiment (“informed consent”), etc. Consent does not make sense inside another economic system, like feudalism, because the one who decides for you was someone else. In capitalism, the idea is for someone else to decide for you and for the subject to be lied to that it was actually their decision (“you not only have to obey, you have to do it out of your own free will”). The way capitalist ideology works is this: you have the freedom to choose between multiple options, but you don’t decide the options. This is why capitalism gives us so much false “freedom”: you have the freedom to choose between Coke and Pepsi, between a corrupt political party and a slightly less corrupt political party, between working with your horrible boss or quitting your job and dying of starvation, etc. Zizek argues that true emancipatory freedom is not going into the store and choosing what to buy from the shelves, but choosing what is on the shelves in the first place. Similarly enough, true democracy is not only being able to vote for anyone on the ballot, but being able to choose who ends up on the ballot in the first place.

I will quote my recently-released book now:

 

“The YouTube channel “EXPLORE WITH US” released a video about “The Disturbing Case of the Amazon Review Killer”. It analyzed a case of a man who, among other things, kidnapped a young woman and kept her alive in his CONEX box in the middle of nowhere in order to rape her regularly. However, he has said to her something interesting that will help us better understand ideology. He told her (around minute 18:00 in the video) that he did not “believe in rape” so if he wanted to do something to her that she did not like, he wouldn’t force himself on her. However, he also mentioned how if she does not want to have sex with him, then she would be useless to him so he would kill her.

What is going on here, exactly? This is clearly rape from both a legal and an ethical perspective, but his discourse was purely ideological (here, I am using “ideology” in the way Zizek uses it). The discourse of ideology is not “you have to do what I tell you, otherwise you will be punished”, the discourse of ideology is “you have to do what I tell you, and you must do it out of your own free will”. This is how the killer raped the girl, in his mind, he didn’t ‘theoretically’ rape her, since she gave her verbal consent. The problem is, she was pressured to give her consent, otherwise she would have been killed. So, the way he raped her wasn’t “I will rape you and there is nothing you can do about it”, but “I won’t force myself on you, but I will make every other alternative even worse”. In this case, she wasn’t “theoretically” forced to have sex with him, she was free to refuse. It’s just that if she refused, she would be killed. This is even worse than “classic” rape, since not only you are forced to have sex with him, but you must also pretend to enjoy it, you are not allowed to complain.

This is how the rape scene itself was made to seem less violent on the “surface level” (it was less violent to the “big Other”) while in reality it was even more violent. If he raped her normally, she, at least, would be allowed to complain (to scream, to resist, etc.), which would make the sexual act itself seem more violent on the surface. In this case, however, she was not only forced to have sex with him, but she wasn’t allowed to complain, and she was forced to pretend to enjoy it.

What the killer used here is exactly the capitalist discourse. If you do not like your job, you are “free” to leave and not come to work, no one is ‘technically’ forcing you to come to work. The only problem is, if you don’t come to work, you don’t have money and you die of hunger. Thus, capitalists rape us the same way the Amazon review killer raped his victim: not only are we forced to do things against our own will, but we must paradoxically pretend to do them out of our own will. “I am not technically forcing you to come to work, but if you don’t come to work you will die, so you have no choice”.

This is what happens when right-wing neoliberals and libertarians say that soldiers who get drafted shouldn’t complain that politicians sent them to war, because they personally chose to enroll in the army. This form of ideological oppression is, in some ways, worse than the “classic” one where you are straight-up forced to do something, since you give your written consent to be oppressed out of the lack of alternatives. Perhaps those soldiers who “chose” to enroll in the army didn’t really have a choice since the other job opportunities were even worse from various points of view.”

(Ștefan “Lastrevio” Boros, “Love, Politics, Social Norms and Sex”, Chapter X: Relationships, Ideology and Capitalism)

 

Left-liberal “progressive” ideology is still, nonetheless, ideology. In the past three decades, they have moved from a “no-means-no” model of consent to a “yes-means-yes” model of consent. Here you go, above you have an example in which yes can mean no, hence, “yes means yes” is also not radical enough. Of course, no one sane enough would suggest that what the Amazon review killer wasn’t rape, but the gray zone of power and manipulation extends further in ambiguous cases of rape: what if someone has power over you (ex: a boss, a teacher) and they throw hints that if you don’t have sex with them, they will fire you/fail you/etc. ? What if you owe someone money or someone owes you money (informally) and the relationship ends up being sexual, but the person who owes you money indirectly threatens to cut contact with you if you don’t have sex (and thus, they have a collateral)? Where is consent given, if you are indirectly pressured to say “yes”?

Yet this is precisely how capitalism functions: out of the multitude of horrible jobs, the worker is indirectly pressured to work for the “least bad” employer, and then they are also not allowed to complain, since they are told it was “their choice” to work here and that they are “technically” allowed to quit any time!

This view of consent as pure ideology allows us to retroactively understand the previous chapters of this article better – what I have labeled as “social liberals” and “social conservatives” are simply two coping mechanisms against ideology, two different ways to deal with the problem of consent. The social liberal ideology (and its inherent contradictions) is an ideology of consent that gives power to “the one who is desired” or “the chased” (which is usually a woman, in heterosexual relationships), whereas the conservative ideology (and its inherent contradictions) is an ideology of consent that gives power to “the one who desires” or “the chaser” (which is usually a man, in heterosexual relationships). Both of them are followers of ideology – viewing human relationships through the confines of “freedom of choice between multiple options”, the “free market of potential partners”, the laws of supply and demand, etc.

 

VI: TO CONCLUDE – ZIZEK’S BEST JOKE

 

            My favorite Zizek joke is this: the idiot who has his first sexual experience. Once, there was an idiot who didn’t receive a good sexual education from his parents, and he didn’t receive it from school either, and the internet did not exist. Hence, he ended up in his 20’s and he didn’t know how children are made. Somehow, he ends up in bed with a woman. They start making out, they undress, and after that he confesses that he has no idea what to do next, and asks for guidance. The woman says “ugh, fine” and instructs him: “first, you have to take your instrument and put it inside me”. And the idiot puts it in. And then he asks “now what?”. “Now, you have to take it out”, and the idiot takes it out. “Now what?” the idiot asks again. “Now, you have to put it in again”, the woman replies. The idiot is already confused and scratches his head but then he puts it in, and then asks “now what do I do?”. “Now, you take it out again”. And so on they go all night, he puts it in, and then he takes it out, and then he puts it in again, and then he takes it out. What is the conclusion that the idiot draws at the end of the night? “Women don’t know what they want, they just can’t make up their mind, now they want you to put it in, next moment they want you to pull it out, then they want you to stick it in again!”.

            I love this joke because you can interpret it in four different ways:

1.     This joke illustrates the concept of the drive in psychoanalysis – the endless repetition of an act whose aim is not to obtain the object of the drive, but to circle around it endlessly. The purpose of the drive is to follow its aim, the repeat a task endlessly because the journey is more important than the destination and because you are addicted to the chase itself, not to the object you are chasing.

2.     This joke illustrates the concept of the dialectic in both Hegelian (idealist) and Marxist (materialist) philosophy. The dialectic is a tension of opposites, and precisely the tension of this movement from one into its opposite is what produces a new, third element (just like sexual intercourse itself is dialectical).

3.     This joke illustrates how men think that women don’t know what they want, when in fact, the man may be an idiot.

4.     Since the idiot got laid anyway, the joke illustrates how, if you are a man inside capitalism, you can get laid by pretending to be a clueless idiot.

Hence, this joke synthesizes all the previous sections of this article: from the part about repetition and drives, to the part about Hegelian dialectics, to the part about the politicization of sex and gender roles for each political camp, to the part about autism.