Operation Sexual Anarchy and the Post-Anarchic Academic

Postkink

Last week I read an article on "postanarchism" (a highly academic anarchism that uses the tools of postmodern analysis to ferret out the structural features of our existing power structures, mostly as a way of trying to find their weak points and tear them down) and how it relates to BDSM. In the essay, the writer asserts that "Anarchists should be very interested in the BDSM phenomenon that sometimes power can flow in accordance with an ethics of freedom as a symbolic challenge to the forms of social, economic, and political power against which they struggle."

I think this is a pointless exercise. Anarchists are now trying to cast human beings in the same mold as Libertarians and Soviet Communists: limiting the human animal's capabilities to ones they prefer, and discarding everything else about that human being as irrelevant, immoral, even inhuman. People who enjoy consensual power exchanges are as rare as those who deeply enjoy the fundamentals of cooking, or those who actually enjoy reading books deeply even in a world full of Twitter and Netflix.

I have long maintained that, while there are a significant number of people who feel driven into having sex, the number of people who enjoy making sex is much, much smaller. I also strongly suspect that the numbers are badly skewed by sex, and that the number of women who would enjoy sex is much, much higher than that of men.

In the musical South Pacific, the song "Nothing Like a Dame," contains the following lyrics:

We feel ev'ry kind of feelin',
But the feeling of relief
We feel hungry as the wolf felt
When he met Red Hiding-hood

While the metaphor to a destructive hunger for a victim is front and foremost there, I'm fascinated that the writer chose to use the word "relief" to describe what the men are really after. Relief rather than pleasure. It's a drive, almost a curse, and it takes an entire song, one that ends with a reminder that one can find that relief even with a woman who "ain't right" and has "all kinds of flaws."

Dan Savage recently echoed my thesis when he said,

When you’re told about sex before puberty you’re just appalled: Why would anyone do such a thing? And along comes puberty and the thing that you swore when you were 7 years old you would never do, ’cause that’s so gross, and before long, you’re drafted into this army that you never wanted to serve in. And I think that there’s always a bit of discomfort and alienation from your own body that goes on because in a way you experience it as a betrayal. We’re told this lie when we’re children that one day we’re gonna grow up and have sex, when in reality one day we grow up and sex has us.

He goes on to talk about how we have kinks and fetishes and orientations and preferences over which we have very little control— a Buddhist idea, that we don't have thoughts, thoughts have us— and that our inability to consciously choose these, for the most part, alienates our sense of "self" from this critical component of ourselves, our sexuality.

It's precisely because sex happens at puberty, long after all the other basic body things like sleeping and eating and excreting have been mastered, that makes it so alien. It happens at the same time adult consciousness is happening and our brains are rewiring themselves for moral ambiguity and moral decision-making.

I don't think the Anarchist program is immoral; I just think it's tilting at an invisible— and invincible— windmill. Trying to take the unequal power relationship out of sex isn't going to work; we already experience our experience with sex itself as an unequal power relationship when it's imposed on us by puberty. Most people are going to struggle with that unequal power relationship between themselves and their sexual desires most of their lives. (I consider myself doubly lucky; on the one hand, I've always treated sex as a hobby, something I should study and get good at, something I should make as one makes a great dinner, and not something I should take, as one does a microwave burrito; and on the other I seem to have dodged an entire host of unfortunate fetishes, the ones that intrinsically lead to harm to myself or others.)

When a kinky person runs for office, here's what they should say.

So, a few years ago when Omaha was doing a lot of political things, one of the more prominent members of the Democratic Party asked her if she ever intended to run for public office. Omaha said no, she hadn't, because she feared she had too much historical baggage, starting with putting herself through university as a stripper (AKA sex worker), and followed through by ending up as Washington State Ms. Leather in 1997. In the current atmosphere, a background like that could be a serious detriment. Around that time, someone asked me if I thought Omaha's history, since she's completely unapologetic about it all, would be a problem. At the time, I hemmed and hawed because I wasn't sure. I've finally figured out what to say:

Have you been to a professional or political conference in the past few years? Did it have a Code of Conduct? Did you read it?

Every conference code of conduct you've ever read started with one written by a kinky person. In the late 1990s and very early 2000s the internet started to give women an outlet to complain about all the creepy, awful crap they put up with whenever they go to professional events. Men getting drunk and handsy, groping and even assaulting women who came to teach and learn, not be leered at or mistreated.

At some meeting where event organizers discuss these things, someone said, "This is awful. Women will stop coming if we don't get this under control. Our reputation is at stake." And someone else said, "I have some experience with this. Let me gather some documents and we can discuss this at the next meeting."

That person went home and found the Code of Conduct for their local BDSM dungeon, typed it in, cleaned it up so that it didn't mention all the sexy stuff, and presented it as the starting point of the conversation. Every Code of Conduct you've read since descended from that document.

Kinky people have been dealing with this issue for thirty five years. Ever since Pat Califia published the S&M Safety Manual in 1982, we have discussed and experimented and studied how to manage when creepy guys invade a public space where deeply intimate and possibly dangerous things are happening. If we can do it, then so can professional events where not so intimate or physically risky things are going on.

The whole MeToo thing, the conversations about consent and negotiation and using your words and learning to be unafraid to talk about what you want and need in an intimate setting— that vocabulary came from kink, and it belongs to kink, and we give it to you as a gift, because you vanilla folk need it. How to deal with creeps, and event codes of conduct, and explicit rules about keeping your hands to yourself, is also ours, and we need you to have it, because it's the only way to move forward in a world where health care and birth control mean women aren't shackled to their beds for the first 20 years of their adult lives trying to have babies.

Do I think Omaha's past is a problem? Hell no. I think it's a benefit. Aside from all her other passions about the environment, about quality of life issues in urban spaces, alleviating impoverishment, invisibile disabilities, or transportation issues, when it comes to talking about issues like workplace harassment or teaching students consent, Omaha has more experience with the debate, and more familiarity with the solutions, than any other candidate you could name.

It's totally l'esprit de l'escalier and theoretical at this point, but it's useful to have this idea in my head.

To Hell with your Cruelty

Christopher Roberts, a Roman Catholic deacon, recently penned an explanation of why it's okay to take gay people at face value as unalterably gay while still condemning them to a life of celibacy, deceit, or general unhappiness. He writes:

Most any result of the Fall — having Down’s Syndrome or Aspergers, having a short temper or being greedy — can be like this. Substitute any disability, sin, proclivity or “thorn in the flesh” in the above paragraph, and you can imagine cases where somebody matured, embraced the necessary asceticism, and turned their weakness or woundedness to spiritual profit.

This is the point where I felt a deep stab of nausea, because I immediately recognized this thought process. Greg Egan, famously neuro-atypical himself, wrote of this passionately when he wrote the novel Distress.

What's the first thing you can do for people you don't agree with? Offer to heal them. Convince them they're sick and then hold out the hope of relief. The power of medical science is about to go hyperbolic, but what is the endpoint of 'health?' Whoever successfully claims the right to define the distinction between health and disease claims the right to define everything.

They get to define what a "baseline" human being is. They get to define what Adam and Eve were like, and decide which deviations from that baseline are worthy of intervention and which ones are not. They impose on those who are "too far" beyond the baseline a special burden: either conform or live with disapproval, excommunication, and banishment.

Roberts may be a priest, but the horror of demanding everyone who's gay or lesbian or in any way not gender-conforming to a life without the unique affection and physical sweetness of sexual skin-on-skin love. The brain is a part of the body and inevitably the physical manifestation, infrastructure, and organizational basis of the mind and the soul, and to assert that a simple variation in the body exiles someone from living a full and joyful life is cruel. Father Roberts is actually trying to refute God by disapproving of some people who God created and in whom the light of God is visible.

Father Roberts' is approving not of a lifestyle, but of a deathstyle. The slow, agonizing death of one's soul when one surrenders to the unending pressure of their society and "maturely embraces the necessary asceticism."

To Hell with that variety of Catholicism.