Sexualization, Violence and the Paradoxes of Consent | The Politics of the Language of Sexuality
“What
was half a century ago an object of torture you can now buy, and we live in a
crazy world where we can do that consensually, but you cannot call somebody a
wrong name"1
-Slavoj
Zizek
Today,
the politicization of sexuality gives rise to many counter-intuitive paradoxes
and legislative loopholes in the intersection of sex, language and violence. On
one hand, we deal with the paradoxes of the intersection between language and
sexuality in issues related to censorship and how we talk about sex, on the
other hand, we deal with paradoxes of the intersection between violence and
sexuality in issues regarding rape and sexual harassment, and all the legal implications.
The aim of this article is to provide a theoretical framework helping us
analyze these phenomena with the tools of certain branch of psychoanalysis. Lacanian
psychoanalysis can be especially helpful in today’s world, since it posits that
sexuality is first and foremost a linguistic/symbolic phenomena, and only
secondarily a biological one, proving superior in explaining today’s contradictions,
compared to other frameworks like evolutionary psychology, or behaviorism.
I:
WHAT IS SEXUALIZATION?
In
her book “What IS sex?”, Alenka Zupancic defines sex as the gap, failure
and inconsistency inside human language itself. The way she uses the word “sex”
is a bit more similar to the way we use words like “sexuality” or “sexualization”.
I believe that the latter is more useful in our analysis since a term like ‘sexualization’
implies an attribute that someone applies onto something else, not a
noun that exists in and for itself.
What
does it mean to sexualize something? Zupancic provides a joke to explain how a
lack inside language can itself be treated as a thing in of itself: “A guy
goes into a restaurant and says to the waiter: “Coffee without cream, please.”
The waiter replies: “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re out of cream. Could it be
without milk?””2. The aim of this joke is to show how negativity
can be inscribed into the symbolic order itself: what something is not
is part of what something is, yet this is a purely symbolic function. Lack,
according to Lacan, does not exist in the real, it is a symbolic function based
upon expectations and pattern-recognition: when I see a book missing in the
library, it is because I expected the book to be there according to a
memory or a pattern, but the physical book itself might still exist in reality
in another place. In a similar way, “coffee without milk” and “coffee without
cream” are different at the symbolic level of language: they are both
physically/materially the same, and yet, one is “with-without” something and
the other is ”with-without” something else. One is coffee which “should have
had” cream, and the other should have had milk.
Sexualization
works in a similar fashion. Two actions can be almost identical from the point
of view of behavior itself, and the material/physical objects, and yet only one
of the two to be “sexual” in any sense of the word. A picture of a naked child
in a biology manual is not sexual, but an almost identical picture of that
child can be sexual(ized) in another context (and categorized as child pornography),
because of the implications of the surrounding context. A doctor touching
a patient’s breast to test her for cancer is not a sexual act because of the
surrounding context, but the exact same movement of the hand can very quickly
become sexual(ized) if one of the two says something before, during, or after,
changing the meaning or signification of the act. Hence, what
makes something sexual is the same operation of what makes something “lacking” –
whether your cup of coffee is “with-without cream” or “with-without milk”
depends upon a larger signifying structure of the surrounding context.
Another
joke can help explain how signification works: let’s say you want to buy a
gallon of milk at a grocery store which did not have milk the previous day, but
you accidentally enter the shoe store next to it and, unaware, ask the
shopkeeper: “Do you still not have milk in store?”. Imagine if the
shopkeeper were to respond with: “You idiot! It is not us who do not have
milk, it is the grocery store next to us who still does not have milk!”.
The irony of the situation is that neither of them have milk to sell, but only
the grocery store lacks milk. Hence, there are multiple types of “nothing”
here, two different ways of not having milk. The grocery store lacks milk (there
is a symbolic expectation for something to be there), while the shoe
store should not have ever had milk in the first place. Similarly enough,
sexuality is more of an absence than a presence, a symbolic construction based
on a complex interactions of signifiers forming a longer signifying-chain.
What makes something “sexual” or not has more to do with the implications, with
whatever is not present or observable. Pattern-recognition is the human capability
to fill in the blank: “1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, …, 128” – we can infer that the
missing number was “64”. The number was whatever was lacking, there was
an expectation for 64 to be there, but only because of the surrounding context.
The pattern “1, 3, 5, 7, 9, …, 13” also does not have 64 in it, but it does not
lack 64, there are two different ways of “not-having-64”. This is what
allows people to say expressions like “It’s not weird unless you make it
weird” – an ambiguous situation with an unclear interpretation can be sexualized
not by the introduction of any physical, material thing in reality, but simply
by the addition or removal of a signifier (ex: a word said or sound evoked while
someone is waxing a client’s pubic hair).
This
is what allows Zupancic to claim, in another article, that “Human sexuality
is sexualized in the strong meaning of the word (...) It is never “just sex.”
Or, perhaps more precisely, the closer it gets to “just sex,” the further it is
from any kind of “animality”. The further the sex departs from the “pure”
copulating movement (i.e., the wider the range of elements it includes in its
activity), the more “sexual” it can become. Sexuality gets sexualized precisely
in this constitutive interval that separates it from itself”3.
II:
WHAT IS “TALKING ABOUT SEX”?
Furthermore,
Alenka Zupancic adds that “The moment we try to provide a clear definition
of what sexual activity is, we get into trouble”3. This provides
a great deal of difficulty whenever we try to talk (or more generally, communicate)
about sexuality as an object-of-conversation. The greatest illusion is to fall
into the trap of thinking that sex is a product of what Freud would’ve called “secondary
repression” instead of “primary repression”. In secondary repression, an object
of desire is personally repulsive, socially unacceptable, it provokes feelings
of guilt or shame or is for some other reason “negative”, and therefore it ends
up “hidden”, and being replaced by a substitute. To give an example of
secondary repression, consider the censorship of authoritarian regimes. In
Russia right now, you are not allowed to say that there is a war going on, so it
is replaced by a substitute euphemism (“special military operation”). In a
social situation, if it is impolite to call your colleague’s intervention
boring and stupid, you may instead indirectly call it that by saying it is “interesting”
and hoping your colleague gets the hint. Thus, one basic axiom of psychoanalysis
is that whatever is repressed returns back in encrypted and symbolic form, and
thus must be interpreted or deciphered4, in the same way that
computer encryption works, for instance. This is what allows Jacques Lacan to
conclude that “the unconscious is structured like a language”5,
because the same operations that the unconscious is composed of (displacement
and condensation) are analogous to the same operations that language is
composed of (metonymy and metaphor).
Freud
discovered another defense mechanism beyond the ordinary (“secondary”) repression:
primary repression. It is not simply an ordinary object of desire that
is repressed, being replaced by a more socially or personally acceptable
substitute. It is the fundamental “repression of all repressions”, a repression
of nothing at all, of nothingness itself, that allows a priori the very
operation of secondary repression to function in the first place. Lacan further
associates this primary repression with sexuality. Zupancic explains it
like this: “And it is in this perspective that we should understand one of
the key emphases of this book: that something concerning sexuality is
constitutively unconscious. That is to say: unconscious even when it first
occurs, and not simply due to a subsequent repression. There is something about
sexuality that appears only as repressed, something that registers in reality
only in the form of repression (and not as something that first is, and is
then repressed). This is to say that the relation between the unconscious
and sexuality is not that between some content and its container; sexuality
pertains to the very being-there of the unconscious, in its very ontological
uncertainty.”6.
The implications of this
are immense. If sex was simply a product of secondary repression, this would
imply the commonly-held mainstream ‘sex positive’ view that sex is for some
reason shameful, taboo or disgusting to most people, hence the need for
allusive language, euphemisms and indirect communication (censorship), giving
the illusion that if we just became a bit more comfortable with sex as a
society, we would finally reach that utopic ideal where we would finally be
able to talk about sex “as if it were just some random any other thing”. Yet we
know that it is never possible to directly talk about sex without desexualizing
it. If we were to subscribe to the sex-positive view that we should treat
sexuality not as a “big deal”, and as just some random normal other thing, then
in order to be consistent, we would also have to remove all legal categories of
sexual assault and harassment, because touching someone’s genitals would be just
some random any other thing like touching someone’s shoulders without
permission, and we would also need to remove the category of sexual harassment
because asking random strangers for sexual favors would be just some random any
other thing like asking them for a cigarette. There would be nothing “sexual”
about it. Hence, it is impossible to directly talk about sexuality.
Sexuality in
psychoanalysis is not the act of reproduction, it is the very inconsistency
inside language itself. Reproduction is simply the easiest activity to
sexualize, but acts that have nothing to do with genitals can also be
sexualized (sexuality “sticks to” reproduction better). This is why the only
possible attitude to have towards sexuality is sex-negative, but not
sex-negative in this mainstream conservative sense that sex is in itself
positive and we ourselves, subjectively, need to have a negative attitude towards
it (sex in of itself is shameful and we need to make an active effort into censoring
it in our speech or repressing it). It is not us who can have a positive or
negative attitude towards sexuality, sex in of itself is negative in this
strict mathematical sense. In mathematics, subtraction, represented the minus
(-) sign, is not a thing that exists in of itself, but an operation that is
done upon something else (a number). Human sexuality is literally the minus
sign of language, it is therefore not a secondary, but a primary repression
– it is not “something” that we can directly talk about (the sex positive
fantasy), neither “something” that we must indirectly talk about because it is
shameful (the sex negative fantasy). Instead, it is “nothing”. That’s the difference
between “not-being-anything” and “being-nothing”, only in the latter is
nothingness or lack treated as a positive term, quite paradoxically. We shouldn’t
say that there isn’t anything inside sex, but that there is-nothing, it
is the fundamental nothingness or gap inside language itself. Hence, it is impossible
to communicate directly about sexuality, since this would de-sexualize
it. It is also impossible to communicate indirectly about sexuality
through hints and euphemisms, since this is precisely the retroactive illusion
that is created (the illusion of secondary repression). The third, correct way
to view this issue is that human sexuality is the very a priori condition that
allows us to have indirect communication in the first place. Without sexuality,
human language would be impossible. For example, telling a guest “it’s
getting late outside…” can be an indirect way of telling them to get out of
your house, for the sake of politeness, this is an example of secondary
repression, of an ordinary case of encrypted speech that must be decoded.
Sexuality does not work like this, instead human sexuality is the very a priori
(primary) repression that allows us the possibility for speaking like this
about every other thing in the first place.
Cognitive linguists and
psychologists like Noam Chomsky or Steven Pinker correctly criticized Skinner’s
pure behaviorism, noticing how humans differ from animals in that human
language is not the result of classical and operand conditioning, instead humans
having a unique “language-acquisition-device”7. This is not incompatible
with Lacanian psychoanalysis: to this we add that the language-acquisition
device that allows children to learn their native language is inherently tied
to the uniquely human ability to sexualize things, since both of them
are symbolic operations tied to a larger context. No new human language could
be produced without metaphor and metonymy (connotation), and no metaphor and
metonymy can be produced without the “ultimate connotation of all connotations”
(sex). Sex is not something that we speak metaphorically about, nor a
metaphor that we use in order to speak about something else. Instead, it
is a metaphor for nothing or nothingness. In everyday speech, we
can allude to different “somethings”, and when we sexualize an object of activity,
we are alluding-towards-nothing, we are creating a code for how to talk
about the void. Without the unique ability of humans to make sexuality “a big
deal”, we would also not have the unique human ability to learn language.
III:
DISCOUSES ON SEXUAL POLITICS
To sum it up: it is
impossible to directly “talk about sex” since sex is not even a noun in the
proper sense, but more of a verb (“to sexualize”), just like the minus
sign in mathematics is not a number that we can talk about, but an operation
between two numbers. An implication of this is that we can not quantify “how
much” or “how repressed” a discourse is on sexuality. In this section, we
debunk the myth that American left-liberals are “more open” when talking about
sexuality than social conservatives. Instead, it is impossible to measure or quantify
exactly how much someone is open to talking about sexuality in a certain
discourse, just like it is impossible to measure in mathematics “how large” a
minus sign is compared to a certain number. Therefore, we can only have qualitative
dimensions inside certain discourses. Michel Foucault’s genius was noticing in
his volumes on History of Sexuality that sex was never repressed in modernity, people
did not shame you for talking about sex, they shamed you for talking about sex
in the wrong way, the ideological message was (“Don’t talk about sex in this
way, but you are pressured to talk about it in this other way”8). In
other words, it is impossible for us to talk about sex more or less,
instead it is only a question of “in what way”.
Western politics are
often divided into a “social progressive” camp that is thought to be more open
towards talking about sex and a “social conservative” camp that is thought to
be more closed towards talking about sex. This is an illusion, since they
simply talk about sex in different ways, neither of them is more “open” or “closed”.
To view this, we need to make a distinction between the speaking subject and
the object of speech (what follows are generalizations and mostly apply to
contemporary American politics in the past decade).
Social conservatives (“sex
negative” camp) tend to repress the object in favor of liberating the subject. It
is shameful and disgusting for many religious conservatives to talk about
sex only when viewed from the outside. However, all subjective desire must be
liberated. This is how we can see the paradox of many alt-right male chauvinists
thinking it is shameful to talk about sex to children in sex ed, however being
the first people to bring up freedom of speech when women are cat-called on the
street. When someone is making sexual demands and invitations, we are not trying
to talk about sex “from the outside”, instead it is sexuality itself that speaks,
in the position of subject. This is why American conservatives are more likely
to defend freedom of speech only when “sex speaks”, in the position of subject,
but seeking to censor it in the position of the object. The sex negative
fantasy implies veiling the object of desire while unveiling desire itself.
Social progressives (“sex
positive” camp) do the opposite, tending to unveil the object of desire while,
in this process, killing all desire itself. This is the result of the infamous “political
correctness”, which does not truly liberate sexuality from the confines of
linguistic censorship, but simply switches one type of censorship for another. The
other extreme characterized by this political camp defends freedom of speech in
the reversed circumstances, when sex is “tamed down”, talked about from the
outside, ‘objectively’, but seeking censorship and repression when sexuality
itself speaks in the position of subject (ex: the obsession that any slightly
flirting remark might be considered sexual harassment, offensive, etc.). Slavoj
Zizek has an article about clubs which have “consenticorns”9 in
order to properly display this paradox: an exhibitionist sex club in America has
employees wearing unicorn-hats to monitor the place, watching over everyone to
ensure that strict guidelines for consent are maintained. The result is the
loss of desire itself in the favor of the object-of-desire, people can no
longer “lose themselves” in sex, it takes the form of a business-like, rigidly
planned out contract, a bureaucratic process in which everything is monitored
and must be asked for approval before initiating any move.
Hence, what resulted in
the attempt at “un-censoring” sexuality simply switched one type of linguistic
repression for another. Like Joan Copjec says, “sex, in opposing itself to
sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication”10.
IV:
SEXUALIZATION OF VIOLENCE – COMPROMISE FORMATIONS
Since we established that
sexuality itself is not what is repressed, but the a priori condition for any
secondary repression to exist in the first place (sexualization = “the minus sign
operation”), this leads to a further paradox regarding compromise formations.
Compromise formation was a
defense mechanism proposed by Freud in which repression is used in such a way
such as to find a compromise a “best of both worlds” whenever an object of
desire is negative in some sense (ex: socially unacceptable). Censorship is one
example of compromise-formation, by telling my friend “Hey, it’s getting a bit
late outside…” I can benefit from a compromise between kicking my friend out
and looking polite. Freud postulated that many mental disorders and
psychosomatic symptoms can be a similar compromise formation11, for
instance I may feel guilty for asking my parents to give me attention, so my
brain develops certain symptoms in me (without my conscious awareness of this
process) that would force my relatives into taking care of me while also not
needing me to go directly asking them, thus getting the best of both worlds.
But sexuality is not a
positive object that can be repressed, so it ‘perverts’ the entire process of
compromise-formation in the first place. Thus, we notice certain relevant
paradoxes today in the politicization of sexuality in which the opposite of
what one may expect from secondary repression occurs: a socially
unacceptable act becomes acceptable once sexualized. Thus, in behavior we
are dealing with the opposite operation that happens within language:
1. In
language: sex is thought of as shameful of “taboo”, so we censor it,
substituting it with a replacement. Thus, we use a non-sexual object as a
pretext to talk about sex.
2. In
behavior: some other non-sexual act is shameful or taboo for a reason
altogether unrelated to sex, and it becomes acceptable once sexualized. Thus,
we use sex as an excuse to enjoy the non-sexual activity.
The sexualization of physical
violence is the best example of our counter-intuitive paradoxes today. Physical
violence, quite paradoxically, becomes less taboo once sexualized. In
most societies today, cutting yourself or engaging in asphyxiation (without the
intent of suicide) is almost universally prohibited and unaccepted and will
likely even get you involuntarily hospitalized in most countries. However, scratching
your (or the other’s) skin during sexual intercourse, or engaging in auto-erotic
asphyxiation, are also somewhat socially unacceptable, although way less. Asphyxiation
is unacceptable until you are during it during masturbation: after that,
many people are less worried, only being concerned for practical, utilitarian
reasons (“make sure you don’t die, do it safely…”). The operation of
sexualizing, here, is used as an excuse to enjoy a non-sexual activity that
would have otherwise been unacceptable.
Verbal violence is
another paradox of sex-positive political correctness today, and the best empirical
example of the psychoanalytic notion that “repression is the return of the
repressed” on a mass-scale, social level. For the American liberal left, offensive
and insulting language are becoming more and more prohibited, yet sex is the
only exception where it is allowed (in BDSM, etc.). Using degrading language
towards women, or even physically hitting one is always prohibited, unless
she explicitly asked for it during sex. It also allows the paradox that a woman
is only allowed to ask for it during sex – if one were to ask to be beaten or
degraded in a non-sexual context, it would immediately raise suspicion: why is
she doing this? Sexualizing immediately makes it more acceptable (“it’s your
kink, so we understand”). The irony of the situation is how in the alt-right
reactionary fantasy, a woman engaging in a non-sexual behavior is “asking for
it” (sex), while in the liberal-left progressive fantasy, a woman engaging in
sexual behavior is only then allowed to “ask for it” (where it = non-sexual
taboo).
We can conclude this by
saying that human sexuality is the equivalent of the mathematical multiplication
by (-1) – it turns everything into its opposite. This is the paradox of sexual
consent: whatever is acceptable in a non-sexual context suddenly becomes
unacceptable in sex, and vice-versa. For instance, sexual consent is the only
type of consent in which you are forbidden from consenting “for your future
self”, thus, it can be revoked at any moment (we do not deal with this in consent
in scientific experiments, GDPR data protection, business contracts, where you
can consent in such a way such that you can not revoke it). What is
accepted in non-sexual contexts (assuming someone’s intent, inventing a consent
that cannot be revoked later, etc.) is less acceptable during sex, because sex
is the exception. But the opposite operation takes hold as well: what is unacceptable
outside sex (self-harm, asphyxiation, degrading language) becomes acceptable
during sex. One implication of primary repression is thus: ‘There is no
exception to which sex is not the exception’12. Whatever is acceptable
outside sex becomes prohibited during sex and whatever is prohibited outside
sex becomes acceptable during sex. Thus, we can now re-visit and understand the
quote by Slavoj Zizek in the beginning of the article: it is legal in the US to
consent to having your testicles crushed by a torture device invented by the
Nazis, but calling someone the wrong name will get you kicked out of university.
NOTES AND REFERENCES:
1: Slavoj Žižek: Wokeness, Psychoanalysis, and Quantum
Mechanics | Robinson's Podcast #109 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxmZ4AVac7U
2: Alenka Zupancic, “What IS sex?”, p. 48
3: Alenka Zupancic, “Sexual difference and ontology”
(2012), http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8948423.pdf
4: See also: Sigmund Freud, “The interpretation of
dreams”, Chapter IV: Distortion in dreams
5: Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The four fundamental
concepts of psychoanalysis, p. 20
6: Alenka Zupancic, “What IS sex?”, p. 12
7: Noam Chomsky, A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal
Behavior (1967), https://chomsky.info/1967____/
8: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol. 1,
Chapter 1: The Incitement to Discourse
10: https://nosubject.com/Sexual_relationship#cite_ref-11
11: See: Sigmund Freud, 1926: “THE QUESTION OF LAY
ANALYSIS - Conversations with an Impartial Person”; Part V
12: Sex and love as two confrontations with the real: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/sex-and-love-as-two-confrontations-with.html
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