Lacan, sex work, rape and the class war
I:
SURPLUS-ENJOYMENT
For
Jacques Lacan (and to a certain limited extent, the late Freud) sexuality is
not something that is whole, complete or consistent in of itself and that is
repressed “from the outside”, as if there is a possibility of an uninhibited
and “free” sexuality that society/patriarchy/the state/etc. is repressing.
Instead, sexuality is precisely the most inconsistent, incoherent, chaotic and incomplete
thing from the inside. In her book “What is sex?”, Alenka
Zupancic explains how the reason we find it so hard to talk about sex is not
because society, or some external force, is repressing it, but because
sexuality itself is the inner limit of language. That is, sexuality is not some
unsymbolizable and unimaginable thing outside language (it is not transcendent,
like Kant’s noumenon), instead it is the word we use for the very breakdown
of language from within. Language itself is inconsistent, incomplete, and
that lack within language is what humans call “sex”. To “sexualize” something
means to ascribe that inconsistency of language to it – a sexualized activity
is called “having sex”, a sexualized joke is a “dirty” joke, a sexualized body
part becomes a sexual organ, etc.
On
the politicization of sexuality, we should immediately reject the commonly-held
assumption (that even some Lacanians fall under the trap of, like Mladen Dollar
sometime in this video1) that it is only conservatives who find sex
something “taboo” and the liberal-progressives who want to liberate it. This is
only a simulacrum, a mask – in fact, both the “socially conservative” and the “socially
progressive” camp want to repress it and liberate it at the same time, but in
opposite ways. For the socially conservative camp, sexuality is only taboo in
the sense of the object of desire, not in the sense of desire itself – it is
when sexuality is viewed “objectively”, as if from the outside, and constrained
and kept in check, that conservatives find it hard or embarrassing to talk
about it (ex: sex ed in schools). However, when we speak of desire itself, from
the subjective point of view, conservatives are the first to call for freedom
of speech: cat-calling women on the street should be allowed, she was asking to
be raped, etc…
For
the ‘socially progressive’ camp, it is the opposite. Politically correct
sexuality is sexuality without desire, it is the “objective” or “cold” type of
sexuality, which is strictly controlled and regulated and kept in check (which
is itself a form of repression, in no way ‘liberated’…). For social
progressives, we should be more “sex positive”: sexuality is not something to
be ashamed of, we should be more open about sex, etc. However, at the same
time, you should be careful about what you say: say the wrong thing and you are
cancelled, you are a misogynist, a wrong stare or flirting remark can be considered
verbal sexual harassment, etc. “Sex positive” progressives want to liberate
sexuality where conservatives seek to repress it and vice-versa: for the sex
positive camp, sex must be liberated without the subjective ‘unhinged’ element
of desire – but in terms of what you say, you have to follow tightly controlled
and rigid PC rules which is in no way ‘liberated’. From the subjective point of
view of desire, conservative sexuality is more liberated and ‘unhinged’ (you
could say, with a little exaggeration, that conservatives allow you freedom of
speech only when men are “horny”).
The
most important concept in the Freudian-Lacanian paradigm of psychoanalysis when
we talk about sexuality is the notion of surplus-enjoyment. Any sexual
activity is never an end in of itself, it is a means to an end, a way to obtain
something else (usually, the validation and boost in self-esteem not from
having sex, but from having someone agreeing to have sex with you).
There are many examples of this: a man enjoying serial-sexuality because it
boosts his self-esteem, makes him feel “alpha” and high-status, or a feminist
woman engaging in serial-sexuality because she feels like she’s saying a big
fuck-you to the patriarchy by doing so, etc. Sex is always accompanied by a
surplus, a signification, it symbolizes something: “what does it say
about me that I am having sex?”.
This
is why Slavoj Zizek argues, in the first chapter of “The Sublime Object of
Ideology”, that it is Marx who first discovered the symptom, not Freud. The
psychoanalytic notion of surplus-enjoyment is analogous to the Marxist notion
of surplus-value. Marx was correct to notice how in capitalism, a primary form
of consumption is symbolic consumption, since the use-value and the
exchange-value of a product are not the same (Baudrillard and Veblen did a lot
of important work in this area too). Two pieces of clothing, for example, can
have the exact same material, and yet one of them is ten times more expensive
because of the brand. That is, people do not consume products because of their
inherent use-value, but they buy an entire identity with them, it is a symbolic
act. A product can suddenly become more expensive simply because of marketing,
even if the costs of production are the same (Baudrillard criticized Marx and
went as far as to say that use-value is itself a social construct determined by
exchange-value – what we consider “useful” or not is also a product of
marketing and other forms of mass social seduction). Buying a pair of jeans in the
Soviet Union was never “just jeans” – you bought jeans as well as the identity
of feeling like you are rebelling against the state. Buying Dodgecoin is never “just
Dodgecoin”, it is the value of the product plus the identity of feeling
like you are joining the community of Elon Musk fanboys, etc.
Sexuality
works precisely in the same way – all sexuality is surplus-enjoyment, a symbolic
act, sex is never “just sex”, it is precisely that thing that is more than
itself. Just like two t-shirts can have the same material and yet cost
differently because of their brand, in the same way you can have sex with two
people and the physical sexual act itself being identical and yet it being way
more enjoyable with the second person because the second person has a higher
social status (so you feel more validation and a bigger boost in self-esteem by
sheer fact that the person agreed to have sex with you). Sex is always
tied to a higher context. This is why Christianity has such a hard time
accepting sexuality, it is not because it is too concrete and hedonistic and ‘materialistic’,
like many claim, quite the opposite: sexuality is the most abstract and
metaphysical act of humans, which competes with the spiritual metaphysics of
religion.
II:
WHAT IS RAPE?
It should
be obvious now why we should reject all oversimplifications on notions of
sexuality: consent, transgender issues, etc. are never something “simple” and “obvious”
to figure out – there is no concept fuller of ambiguities than sexuality. The only
certain thing we can say is that it’s complicated.
Various
models of consent have been proposed over the years: from “no means no” to “yes
means yes”, enthusiastic consent, etc. and yet it is enough only to visit the
Wikipedia page of sexual consent2 to see how each model lacked
something, had some edge cases that it did not cover.
Here
is an example where “yes means yes” is not enough: The Amazon Review Killer kidnapped a woman and told her “I don’t believe in rape, so if you don’t
want to have sex with me, I will not force myself on you” and then later in
that day told her “By the way, if you don’t want to have sex with me, just
know that you would be useless to me so I would kill you”. The woman was
indirectly coerced into ‘freely’ giving her explicit consent – this is worse
than ‘regular’ rape, because not only was she forced into sexual activity, she
was also forced to pretend to enjoy it, she wasn’t even allowed to complain. “You
will do what I say out of your own free will”.
This
is obviously rape for everyone reading this, but what if the situation gets
even more ambiguous? What if we have an actually smart manipulator with good
social skills who is in a position of power over their victim and who will not
tell the victim directly that they will kill them, but will make hints
and allusions towards it? Just like one can indirectly or non-verbally give
their consent, so we can reverse the logic and say that you can indirectly and
non-verbally tell someone that you will harm them if they don’t have sex with
you: a professor making implicit allusions that they will grade their student
poorly, a strong man dropping hints that they have a gun on themselves or
something, etc… We can see here how the notion of ‘explicit consent’ breaks
down, since we have all four possible cases: explicit consent is given and it’s
not rape (“regular” consent), explicit consent is given and it’s rape (you are
forced to ‘freely’ do as I say), explicit consent is not given and it’s rape (“regular”
rape), explicit consent is not given and it’s not rape (implicit consent).
And
isn’t what the Amazon review killer did precisely the capitalist discourse?
Libertarian economists love to put the blame on the individual for having low
economic success, and yet we are never told how choices are ‘freely imposed on
us’ by the circumstances, and how people end up choosing the lesser evil out of
the lack of alternatives. When your employer tells you “You freely chose to
work here, if you don’t like it, you are always free to leave and work somewhere
else” this is a false freedom, since you chose to work there because the
alternatives were even worse (ex: starving to death). Or when politicians say how
soldiers shouldn’t complain about being drafted to war, because they freely
chose to enroll in the army and so they ‘consented’ to this possibility – yes,
but maybe they chose to enroll in the army because the other alternatives were
even worse…
It is
clear now why Lacan said that “there is no law of sexuality”, here’s another
example that I previously gave:
“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 (…)
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.”3
So
the more dangerous of a pedophile you are, the less likely the law is going to
punish you, and vice-versa… Sex defies all logic, by guiding us by pure ‘logical
reason’ we will always reach some sort of contradiction or paradox in
sexuality.
Isn’t
this precisely the exact same case with the idea of prostitution, or more
generally, sex work? Is sex work “real work”? By simply using logic, I
can reach two contradictory conclusions at the same time.
On
one hand, if telling my victim “I won’t force you to have sex with me, but
just know that if you don’t freely agree to have sex with me, I will kill you”
is rape (and it obviously is), then I can just as easily argue that all sex
work is rape, and all consumers of prostitutes are raping them, since a person
in a bad financial position is indirectly forced to “freely give their consent”
– the person does not choose to have sex because they enjoy it, but because the
other alternative is not having money and potentially dying. Just like the victim
of the Amazon review killer was directly confronted with a ‘free’ choice
(have sex with him or die), so are prostitutes often indirectly
confronted with the same ‘free’ choice (if I don’t have sex with him, I will
have no money so I will die).
Of course,
in all capitalist exploitation there is an element of being “freely forced” to
do something, but when what you have to do is sexual, the tables turn. Hence, one
can immediately notice the contradictions and hypocrisy of the sex positive
argument here – if sex work is just like “any other regular work” (“a person needing
to have sex to not starve to death” = “a person needing to work in construction
to not starve to death”), then why isn’t forcing someone to have sex with you
just like forcing someone to do any other activity (in other words, why is “rape”
even a thing?) or why isn’t touching someone’s private parts without consent
the same as touching someone’s shoulder without consent? Or, better yet, if sex
is “just some any other thing that we should be less ashamed to talk about” why
is ‘verbal sexual harassment’/cat-calling a thing? Why is it more offensive to
randomly ask strangers for sex than to ask them for anything else? Why is verbal
sexual harassment worse than a simple “bullying” non-sexual verbal harassment?
Of
course, it is clear that sex is definitely not “like any other thing”, there is
something special about it. Or, like I said in one of my previous articles,
there is no exception to which sex is not the exception4: in a
series of elements, sex is always the odd-one-out. From a Lacanian standpoint,
what makes rape “rape” is not the forcing itself, but the surplus-enjoyment
accompanied with it. There are many other activities that you can force people
to do, yet none of them are as evil and diabolic as rape, there is something
symbolic, metaphysical and abstract about every sexual act, just like with Marx
we see how there is something symbolic about every consumption.
It is
also why in sexuality it is actually impossible to fully consent across the dimension
of time, since consent can, in theory, always be revoked at any moment. With
other activities, you can sign a contract that you cannot later revoke, hence
having the freedom to restrain your own freedom onto the future, so to speak.
Sexuality is the only activity in which you cannot consent “for your future
self” – the very fact that you are always allowed to change your mind clearly
indicates that sex is not like “just some random any other thing”.
However,
if we are to accept that all sex work is rape, we again face absurd
contradictions, in another way. George Carlin put it best: “if selling is
legal, and fucking is legal, why isn’t selling fucking legal?”. Clearly,
simply stating that all consumers of prostitution are rapists, and on a similar
level of morality to the ‘regular’ violent rapists, is absurd. If I can
convince someone to have sex with me by other grounds – then isn’t all seduction
and dating a bit like an unofficial prostitution? What if I am dating a gold
digger and there is an implicit agreement that she will stop seeing me when I
run out of money? The deeper we dig into the problem, the more we realize that
it’s hard to define what sex work even is in the first place.
The
problem here lies in the distinction between official/unofficial. What we
regularly call “official” in colloquial language is what Lacan calls the big
Other – the big Other knows something when it is literally and explicitly
inscribed in the letter of the law, in some sort of written or verbal contract
or somehow said out loud explicitly. When a man buys a woman a drink in a club,
there is a bit of a lottery there – it is not like regular prostitution in
which a verbal contract is explicitly inscribed into the order of the big
Other. I am reminded here of the Temple economies in the Bronze age, like the
first one that started in the Sumerian empire with the invention of writing: if
I were to oversimplify temple economies to the fullest, imagine a welfare state
with only implicit transactions. It was like “Secret Santa”, an economy based
on gift-giving and unofficial symbolic exchange: people offered gifts to the
temple, and they would receive something else back in return, but without the
possibility of explicitly buying and selling something they wanted, it was
always a bit of a lottery.
Sexuality
is full of contradictions by itself – in a Hegelian fashion we could say that
if we have reached a contradiction, then maybe it’s not our reasoning which is
flawed, but sexuality itself which is inconsistent. Only using logical reason:
sex work is rape and isn’t rape at the same time. And don’t we see similar paradoxes
in the notion of “statutory rape”: where a person can be below the age of
consent or intoxicated enough such that they cannot consent, and yet are still
able to rape someone else? There is no sexuality with ambiguities, perhaps the
cynical conclusion is that we have to accept that there will always be an
element of ‘nonsense’ inscribed in it and choose the “lesser evil”.
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.5
This is the genius of St.
Augustin – who said that sex is not a sin, but the punishment for the
original sin. According to him, when Adam ate the apple from the tree of
knowledge, God punished him by giving him a penis to show him that he’s not the
master in his own house: it will work when you want it not to work and it will
not work when you want it to work… Isn’t all sex like this – it makes sense
only when it does not make sense and it does not make logical sense when it
does?
III:
FROM SEX TO THE CLASS WAR
There is a catch here –
perhaps my reasoning above was indeed a bit flawed! From the phrase “sex work”
I did not put enough emphasis on the latter word “work” which clearly implies a
certain class-conflict, from a Marxist perspective. Let us look again at the example
from above: a poor prostitute is indirectly forced to have sex with her client,
because the alternative is quite literally (starving to) death. But what if the
prostitute is rich? A luxurious sex worker can clearly afford to refuse
clients. It is obviously absurd to put the clients of a rich prostitute on the
same moral level as a violent ‘regular’ rapist. This is the irony of our predicament
today: sex work is rape, if you are poor… And what about the class divide in the clients - aren't there also some correlations between a man's wealth/income and their likelihood of using prostitutes? If everything in this world is about
sex, other than sex, which is about power, then sexuality is the best
instrument of the ruling class to enforce and maintain class divisions.
The answer to whether sex
work should be legal or not is still enigmatic – there are many arguments to be
made in favor: taxing money from the black market, increased safety for sex
workers, better regulation… Yet there are also studies that show that it increases
rates of human trafficking5. Maybe like a confused couple who have
not yet clearly defined their relationship, when asked by a third party whether
they are together or not, the only answer we can give right now is “it’s
complicated”.
NOTES:
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R7SCY5zVLg
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_consent#Education_initiatives_and_policies
3: Source: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-politicization-of-sexuality-voice.html
4: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/sex-and-love-as-two-confrontations-with.html
5: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-politicization-of-sexuality-voice.html
6: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065
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