THE MESS OF SEXUAL LIBERATION: FOUR OLD (BUT STILL TIMELY) REFLECTIONS

Aubrey Beardsley

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More than half a century after the May ’68 events in Paris (and elsewhere), the time has come to reflect upon similarities and differences between the sexual liberation and feminism of the 1960s and the protest movements that flourish today.

In the aftermath of ‘68, the French “progressive” press published a whole series of petitions demanding the decriminalization of paedophilia, claiming that in this way the artificial and oppressive culturally-constricted frontier that separates children from adults will be abolished and the right to freely dispose with one’s body will be extended also to children, so only dark forces of “reaction” and oppression can oppose this measure – among the signatories were Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Aragon, Guattari, Deleuze, Lyotard… Today, however, paedophilia is perceived as one of the worst crime and, instead of fighting for it in the name of anti-Catholic progress, it is rather associated with the dark side of the Catholic church, so that fighting against paedophilia is today a progressive task directed at the forces of reaction… The comic victim of this shift was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, still living in the old spirit of the 60s, recently described in an interview how, while, in his young years, he worked in a kindegarten, he regularly played masturbatory games with young girls; to his surprise, he faced a brutal backlash, demanding his removal from the European parliament and prosecution.

This gap that separates the ’68 sexual liberation from today’s struggle for sexual emancipation is clearly discernible in a recent polemical exchange between Germaine Greer and some feminists who swiftly reacted to her critical remarks on MeToo. Their main point was that, while Greer’s main thesis – women should sexually liberate themselves from male domination and assume active sexual life without any recourse to victimhood – was valid in the sexual-liberation movement of the 1960s, today the situation is different. What happened in between is that sexual emancipation of women (their assuming social life as active sexual beings with full freedom of initiative) was itself commodified: true, women are no longer perceived as passive objects of male desire, but their active sexuality itself now appears (in male eyes) as their permanent availability, readiness to engage in sexual interaction. In these new circumstances, saying brutally NO is not a mere self-victimization since it implies the rejection of this new form of sexual subjectivization of women, of demanding of women not only to passively submit to male sexual domination but to act as if they actively want it.

While there is a strong element of truth in this line of argumentation, one should nonetheless also admit how problematic it is too ground the authority of one’s political demands on one’s victimhood status. Is the basic characteristic of today's subjectivity not the weird combination of the free subject who experienced himself as ultimately responsible for his fate and the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status of a victim of circumstances beyond his control? Every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat - if the other smokes, if he casts a covetous glance at me, he already hurts me; this logic of victimization is today universalized, reaching well beyond the standard cases of sexual or racist harassment - recall the growing financial industry of paying damage claims… This notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the extreme Narcissistic perspective: every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject's precarious balance. The paradox is that, in today's predominant form of individuality, the self-centred assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.

One cannot get rid of the suspicion that the Politically Correct cultural Left is getting so fanatical in advocating “progress,” in fighting new and new battles against cultural and sexist “apartheids,” to cover up its own full immersion into global capitalism. Its space is the space in which LGBT+ and MeToo meet Tim Cook and Bill Gates. How did we come to this? As many conservatives noticed (and they are right here), our time is marked by the progressive disintegration of a shared network of customs which ground what George Orwell approvingly referred to as “common decency” - such standards are dismissed as a yoke that subordinates individual freedom to some proto-Fascist organic social forms. In such a situation, the liberal vision of minimalist laws (which should not regulate social life too much but just prevent individuals to encroach upon - to “harass” - each other) reverts into an explosion of legal and moral rules, into an endless process of legalization/moralization called “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores that are allowed to influence the law, only the fact of “harassing” other subjects, who – in the absence of such mores – will decide what counts as “harassment”? There are, in France, associations of obese people which demand that all public campaigns against obesity and for healthy eating habits be stopped, since they hurt the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the “specieism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal – for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegetophobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And so on and so on: incest-marriage, consensual murder and cannibalism…

The problem is here the obvious arbitrariness of the ever new rules – let us take child sexuality: one can argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one can also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on here: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest against the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies, worry when someone condemns members of foreign cultures who live among us for doing exactly this (say, the Roma people preventing children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case of meddling with other “ways of life”… It is thus for necessary structural reasons that this “fight against discrimination” is an endless process endlessly postponing its final point, a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Jean-Claude Michea put it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.”

SEX, CONTRACTS, AND MANNERS

Yes, sex is traversed by power games and violent obscenities, but the difficult thing to admit is that this dimension is immanent to it. Some perspicuous observers have already noticed how the only form of sexual relation that fully meets the Politically Correct criteria would have been a contract drawn between sado-masochist partners. The rise of Political Correctness and the rise of violence are thus two sides of the same coin: insofar as the basic premise of Political Correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual consent, Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which stipulate extreme forms of sado-masochist sex (treating a person like a dog on a collar, slave trading, torture, up to consented killing). In such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of contract negates itself: slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom. It is as if Jacques Lacan’s motif “Kant with Sade” (Marquis de Sade’s brutal hedonism as the truth of Kant’s rigorous ethics) becomes reality in an unexpected way. Before we dismiss this motif as just a provocative paradox, we should reflect upon how this paradox is at work in our social reality itself.

    The declared aim of proposals for sexual contracts which are popping up all around, from the US and UK to Sweden, are, of course, clear: to exclude elements of violence and domination in sexual contacts. The idea is that, before doing it, both partners should sign a document stating their identity, their consent to engage in sexual intercourse, as well as the conditions and limitations of their activity (use of condom, of dirty language, the inviolable right of each partner to step back and interrupt the act at any moment, to inform his/her/their partner about his health (AIDS) and religion, etc.). Sounds good, but a series of problems and ambiguities arise immediately.

    The right to withdraw from sexual interaction at any moment opens up new modes of violence. What if the woman, after seeing her partner naked with erected penis, begins to mock him and tells him to leave? What if the man does the same to her? Can one imagine a more humiliating situation? Clearly, one can find an appropriate way to resolve such impasses only through manners and sensitivity, which by definition cannot be legislated. If one wants to prevent violence and brutality by adding new clauses to the contract, one loses a central feature of sexual interplay which is precisely a delicate balance between what is said and what is not said.

Although I am not a fan of Sex and the City, there is an interesting point made in one of the episodes where Miranda gets involved with a guy who like to talk dirty all the time during sex, and since she prefer to keep silent while making love, he solicits her to also talk whatever dirty things pop up in her mind, with no restraint. First she resists, but then she also gets caught in this game, and things work well, their sex is intense and passionate, till… till she says something that really disturbs her lover, makes him totally withdraw into himself, and leads to the break of their relationship. In the middle of her babble, she mentions that she noticed how he enjoys when, while he makes love to her, she pushes her finger into his ass. Unknowingly, she thereby touches the exception: yes, talk about anything you want, spill out all the dirty images that pop up in your head, except that.

The lesson of this incident is important: even the universality of talking freely is based on some exception, not in the sense of extreme brutality. The prohibited detail is in itself a minor and rather innocent thing, and we can only guess what the guy is so sensitive about it – in all probability, it is because the passive experience it involved (anal penetration) disturbs his masculine identification. Sexual interplay is full of such exceptions where a silent understanding and tact offer the only way to proceed when one wants things done but not explicitly spoken about, when extreme emotional brutality can be enacted in the guise of politeness and when moderate violence itself can get sexualized. 

    Last but not least, should such contracts be legally binding or not? If not, what prevents brutal men just to sign it and then violate it? If yes, can one even imagine the legal nightmare its violation may involve? This does not mean that we should endorse the French letter signed by Catherine Deneuve and others which criticizes the “excesses” of MeToo “puritanism” and defended traditional forms of gallantry and seduction. The problem is not that MeToo goes too far, sometimes approaching witch hunt, and that more moderation and understanding are needed, but that the way MeToo addresses the issue. In downplaying the complexity of sexual interaction, it not only blurs the line between lewd misconduct and criminal violence but also makes invisible forms of extreme psychological violence masked as politeness and respect.

In replying to those who insisted on a difference between Weinstein and Louis CK, MeToo activists claimed that those who say this have no idea about how male violence works and is experienced, and that a masturbation in front of women can be experienced as no less violent than physical imposition. Although there is a moment of truth in these claims, one should nonetheless pose a clear limit to the logic that sustains this argumentation: what one feels cannot be the ultimate measure of authenticity since feelings can also lie – if we deny this, we simply deny the Freudian unconscious. In a truly effective patriarchal domination, a woman doesn’t even experience her role as that of a humiliated and exploited victim, she simply accepts her submission as part of the order of things.

    One should also bear in mind that patriarchal domination corrupts both of its poles, inclusive of its victims – or, to quote Arthur Koestler: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.” Consequently, one should also talk about feminine manipulation and emotional brutality (ultimately as a desperate reply to male domination) – women fight back any way they can. And one should admit that, in many parts of our society in which traditional patriarchy is to a large extent undermined, men are no less under pressure, so the proper strategy should be to address also male anxieties and to strive for a pact between women’s struggle for emancipation and male concern’s. Male violence against women is to a large extent a panicky reaction to the fact that their traditional authority is undermined, and part of the struggle for emancipation should be to demonstrate to men how accepting emancipated women will release them of their anxieties and enable them to lead more satisfied lives.

    The main problem with contractual sex is not only its legal form but also its hidden bias: contractual form obviously privileges casual sex where partners don’t yet know each other and want to avoid misunderstandings about their one-night stand. One needs to extend our attention also to the long-term relationship permeated with forms of violence and domination in much more subtle ways than the spectacular Weinstein style enforced sex. 

Ultimately, no laws and contracts help here, only a revolution in mores. But why talk about politeness and manners today when we are facing what appears to be much more pressing “real” problems? In doing it, do we not regress to the level of de Quincey’s famous quip about the simple art of murder – “How many people began with unleashing terror and economic catastrophes, and ended up with behaving badly at a party?” But manners DO matter – in tense situations, they are a matter of life and death, a thin line that separates barbarism from civilization. There is one surprising fact about the latest outbursts of public vulgarities that deserves to be noted. Back in the 1960s, occasional vulgarities were associated with political Left: student revolutionaries often used common language to emphasize their contrast to official politics with its polished jargon. Today, vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical Right, so that the Left finds itself in a surprising position of the defender of decency and public manners.

Politeness (manners, gallantry) is more than just obeying external legality and less than pure moral activity – it is the ambiguously imprecise domain of what one is not strictly obliged to do (if one doesn’t do it, one doesn’t break any laws), but what one is nonetheless expected to do. We are dealing here with implicit unspoken regulations, with questions of tact, with something towards which subject has as a rule a non-reflected relationship: something that is part of our spontaneous sensitivity, a thick texture of customs and expectations which is part of our inherited substance of mores. Therein resides the self-destructive deadlock of Political Correctness: it tries to explicitly formulate, legalize even, the stuff of manners.

A LESSON FROM SUMMA THEOLOGICA

In the West, at least, we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However, we should bear in mind also the (no less massive) fact millions of people on a daily basis flirt, play the game of seduction, with the clear aim to get a partner for making love. The result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an active role in this game. When women dress provocatively to attract male gaze, when they “objectify” themselves to seduce them, they don’t do it offering themselves as passive objects: they are the active agents of their own “objectification,” manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including the full right to step out of the game at any moment even if, to the male gaze, this appears in contradiction with previous “signals.” This active role of women is their freedom which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists, from Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit which resembles penis to our own ordinary male chauvinist who explodes in violence against a woman who first “provokes” him and then rejects his advances. Feminine sexual liberation is not just a puritan withdrawal from being “objectivized” (as sexual object for men) but the right to actively play with self-objectivization, offering herself and withdrawing at will. Will it be still possible to proclaim these simple facts, or will the Politically Correct pressure compel us to accompany all these games with some formal-legal proclamation (of consensuality, etc.)?

    This marginal but crucial moment is what Lacan called surplus-enjoyment, and we find another unexpected example of it in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica where he draws the conclusion that the blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful for them (and St. John Bosco draw the same conclusion in the opposite direction: the damned in Hell will also be able to see the joy of those in Heaven, which will add to their suffering). Aquinas, of course, takes care to avoid the obscene implication that good souls in Heaven can find pleasure in observing the terrible suffering of other souls: good Christians should feel pity when they see suffering — will the blessed in Heaven also feel pity for the torments of the damned? Aquinas’s answer is no: not because they directly enjoy seeing suffering, but because they enjoy the exercise of divine justice… But what if enjoying Divine Justice is the rationalization, the moral cover-up, for sadistically enjoying the neighbor’s eternal suffering? What makes Aquinas’s formulation suspicious is the surplus enjoyment it introduces: as if the simple pleasure of living in the bliss of Heaven is not enough, and has to be supplemented by an additional surplus enjoyment of being allowed to take a look at another’s suffering—only in this way, the blessed souls “may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly” … We can here easily imagine the appropriate scene in Heaven: when some blessed souls complain that the nectar served was not as tasty as the last time, and that blissful life up there is rather boring after all, angels serving the blessed souls would snap back: “You don’t like it here? So take a look at how life is down there, at the other end, and maybe you will learn how lucky you are to be here!” And the corresponding scene in Hell should also be imagined as totally different from St John Bosco’s vision: far away from the Divine gaze and control, the damned soul enjoy an intense and pleasurable life in Hell—only from time to time, when Devil’s administrators of Hell learn that the blessed souls from Heaven will be allowed to observe briefly life in Hell, they kindly implore the damned souls to stage a performance and pretend to suffer terribly in order to impress the idiots from Heaven … In short, the sight of the other’s suffering is the objet a, the obscure cause of desire which sustains our own happiness (bliss in Heaven)—if we take it away, our bliss appears in all its sterile stupidity. (Incidentally, does the same not hold for our daily portion of Third World horrors – wars, starvations, violence – on TV screens? We need it to sustain the happiness of our consumerist Heaven…) So, perhaps, this would be the way to read Lubitsch’s title “Heaven can wait” – let’s stay in Hell… Heaven can wait because the only true heaven is a moderate pleasant hell.

As Laurent de Sutter demonstrated, chemistry (in its scientific version) is becoming part of us: large aspects of our lives are characterized by the management of our emotions by drugs, from everyday use of sleeping pills and anti-depressants to hard narcotics. We are not just controlled by impenetrable social powers, our very emotions are “outsourced” to chemical stimulation. The stakes of this chemical intervention are double and contradictory: we use drugs to keep external excitement (shocks, anxieties, etc.) under control, i.e., to de-sensitize us for them, and to generate artificial excitement if we are depressed and lack desire. Drugs thus react to the two opposed threats to our daily lives, over-excitement and depression, and it is crucial to notice how these two uses of drugs relate to the couple of private and public: in the developed Western countries, our public lives more and more lack collective excitement (exemplarily provided by a genuine political engagement), while drugs supplant this lack with private (or, rather, intimate) forms of excitement - drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitation of private life.

But why talk about politeness and public manners today when we are facing what appears to be much more pressing “real” problems? In doing it, do we not regress to the level of de Quincey’s famous quip about the simple art of murder – “How many people began with unleashing terror and economic catastrophes, and ended up with behaving badly at a party?” But manners DO matter – in tense situations, they are a matter of life and death, a thin line that separates barbarism from civilization. There is one surprising fact about the latest outbursts of public vulgarities that deserves to be noted. Back in the 1960s, occasional vulgarities were associated with political Left: student revolutionaries often used common language to emphasize their contrast to official politics with its polished jargon. Today, vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical Right, so that the Left finds itself in a surprising position of the defender of decency and public manners. Politeness (manners, gallantry) is more than just obeying external legality and less than pure moral activity – it is the ambiguously imprecise domain of what one is not strictly obliged to do (if one doesn’t do it, one doesn’t break any laws), but what one is nonetheless expected to do. We are dealing here with implicit unspoken regulations, with questions of tact, with something towards which subject has as a rule a non-reflected relationship: something that is part of our spontaneous sensitivity, a thick texture of customs and expectations which is part of our inherited substance of mores (Sitten). Therein resides the self-destructive deadlock of Political Correctness: it tries to explicitly formulate, legalize even, the stuff of manners.

DO SEXBOTS HAVE RIGHTS?

The Politically Correct moralism reached one of its peaks in the recent debate about the need to regulate the human–sexbots (sexual robots) relations – here is a report on this weird phenomenon:

“Last year a sex robot named Samantha was ‘molested’ and seriously damaged at a tech industry festival; the incident spurred debate on the need to raise the issue of ethics in relation to machines. / While the developers of sexbots have claimed that their projects will do anything to indulge their customers’ desires, it seems that they might start rejecting some persistent men. /…/ people ignore the fact that they may seriously damage the machine, just because it cannot say ‘no’ to their ‘advances’. /…/ future humanoid sex robots might be sophisticated enough to ‘enjoy a certain degree of consciousness’ to consent to sexual intercourse, albeit, to their mind, conscious feelings were not necessary components of being able to give or withhold consent. /…/ in legal terms, introduction of the notion of consent into human-robot sexual relationships is vital in a way similar to sexual relations between humans and it will help prevent the creation of a ‘class of legally incorporated sex-slaves.’”[1]

Although these ideas are just a specific application of the proposal of the EU to impose the basic “rights” of AI entities, the domain of sexbots brings out in a clear way the implicit presuppositions that determine such thinking. We are basically dealing with a laziness in thinking: by adopting such “ethical” attitude, we comfortably avoid the complex web of underlying problems. We should avoid the trap of getting caught in the debate about the status of sexbots with AI: do they really possess some kind of autonomy or dignity and therefore deserve some rights? The answer to this question is, at least for the time being, obviously negative: our sexbots are just mechanic dolls with no inner life. The heart of the matter lies elsewhere: the first suspicion is that the proponents of such demands do not really care about AI machine (they are well aware that they cannot really experience pain and humiliation) but about aggressive humans: what they want is not to alleviate the suffering of the machines but to squash the problematic aggressive desires, fantasies and pleasures of us, humans.

This becomes clear the moment we include the topic of video games and virtual reality: if, instead of sexbots (actual plastic bodies whose (re)actions are regulated by AI), we imagine games in virtual reality (or, even more plastic, augmented reality) in which we can sexually torture and brutally exploit persons – although, in this case, it is clear that no actual entity is suffering, the proponents of the rights of AI machines would nonetheless in all probability insist on imposing some limitations on what we, humans, can do in virtual space. The argument that those who fantasize about such things are prone to do them in real life very problematic: the relationship between imagining and doing it in real life is much more complex in both relations. We often do horrible things while imagining that we are doing something noble, and vice versa, we often secretly daydream about doing things we would in no way be able to perform in real life. We enter thereby the old debate: if someone has brutal tendencies, is it better to allow him to play with them in virtual space or with machines, with the hope that, in this way, he will be satisfied enough and not do them in real life? We encounter here the structure of fetishist disavowal: while the offender brutally mistreats his sexbot, he knows very well that he is just playing with a mechanic plastic doll, but he nonetheless gets caught in his fiction and enjoys it for the real (the simple proof: his orgasm, if he reaches it, is real, not his fiction). The implication of this fetishist structure is not that the subject who participates in it is naively stupid but, on the contrary, that even in our real sexual interaction with another living human being, fiction is already at work, i.e., I use my partner as an object through which I stage my fictions. Concretely, even a brutal sadist who mistreats an actual woman uses her to enact his fictions.  

    Another question: if a sexbot rejects our rough advances, does this not simply mean that it was programmed in this way? So why not re-program it in a different way? Or, to go to the end, why not program it in such a way that it welcomes our brutal mistreatment? (The catch is, of course, will we, the sadistic perpetrators, still enjoy it in this case? The sadist wants his victim to be terrified and ashamed.) Yet another question: what if an evil programmer makes the sexbots themselves sadists who enjoy brutally mistreating us, its partners? If we confer rights to AI sexbots and prohibit their brutal mistreating, this means that we treat them as minimally autonomous and responsible entities – so should we also treat them as minimally “guilty” if they mistreat us, or should we just blame their programmer?

    But the basic mistake of the advocates of rights of AI entities is that they presuppose our, human, standards (and rights) as the highest norm. What if, with the explosive development of AI, new entities will emerge with what we could conditionally call a “psychology” (series of attitudes or mind sets) which will be incompatible with ours, but in some sense definitely “higher” than ours (measured by our standards, they can appear either more “evil” or more “good” than ours)? What right do WE (humans) have to measure them with our ethical standards? 

    So let’s conclude this detour with a provocative thought: maybe, a true sign of ethical and subjective autonomy of a sexbot would have been not that it rejects our advances but that, even if it was programmed to reject our brutal treatment, secretly starts to enjoy it? In this way, the sexbot would become a true subject of desire, divided and inconsistent as we humans are.      

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[1] Quoted from https://sputniknews.com/science/201804101063394315-sex-robots-reject-humans/.