Response to P: Top Seven PLUS!

I enjoyed the radio interview. I am not like my celebrated wife in one respect: I don't worry about "getting it all said" in such a venue but about getting in two or three major moments of impressive insight/cleverness out of ten or so that I prep to address intelligently. This is supposed to be a conversation, and I do worry about turning it into a lecture, especially one that isn't technically pertinent to (or workable within) the show format. I use the leftover airtime and the resulting slack to score style points: celebrity theory looms large in my lifestyle.

I do have an "agenda" where sexuality is concerned, however, and I don't want to leave the impression that I came to this blog with nothing to say about its most prominent issue. I could have continued for another two hours of interview time if I'd wanted to get really verbose. Here are the top seven issues about which I would have had the most to say:

1. MONOGAMISM The biggest racket in the history of civilization. I don't think the words "being set up to fail" are strong enough to describe the situation. But the absurdity continues, and one concludes that society is deliberately maintaining the standard, with heavy penalties for early withdrawal, because society loves nothing more than it does a good old-fashioned no-win scenario.

2. VEGAS It's odd that no one talks about local culture here, at least not the way one gets to hear about the vagaries of various neighborhoods (indeed, various STREETS) in New York City, e.g. Las Vegas is a major fashion center, an entertainment center of sorts, and has other claims to cultural presence, if not depth. Sin City has, in a way that most urban centers cannot even aspire to have, the potential to be a place with a lifestyle, not just a life. But it went in under eighteen months in 2007 and 2008 from being a strong economy and a "best-kept secret" to compulsively playing poor. Nobody wants to tell Vegas stories any more except about how we're all doomed unless we adopt all of Sandoval's budget cuts and let Harry Reid strip away (excuse the expression) the last elements of uniqueness about the place. There are several reasons why such posturing is poisonous not just to the construction and maintenance of valid local culture but to love and libido; it is almost enough to point out that it is so far from having a party atmosphere once you get half a mile off Las Vegas Boulevard that you begin to wonder if residents are deliberately having as little fun as possible until the "downturn" is over just to be on the safe side. "Paris in the spring" it ain't. P.S. Henderson is even worse, of course.

3. XENOPHOBIA A great deal of the airtime was spent talking about prejudice in one form or another. I could have talked about it a lot more, if I'd been inclined. To keep things as relevant to sex and sexuality as possible, I will just point out here that stigmatization doesn't mix well with the erotic, and conversely (and this is another point I could have discussed at length and may later), a greater emphasis in society on seeing to it that the erotic goes well would probably wash away a lot of the momentum of stigmatization.

4. SOCIAL CONTEXT The path leading to the bedroom is as interesting as what happens once everyone has assembled there. Placing sexuality in social context opens the discussion to a lot of the real dynamics at play, and it is exciting in its own right. Sexuality has a path that extends backwards some distance from the bedroom, a fact that some people know intuitively and others figure out rapidly.

5. CLINICAL SEXUALITY I've mentioned before in this blog that I have mixed feelings about clinical language having taken over "responsible" sexual discourse in the English-speaking countries. The case against begins with (1) Foucault's contention that attempts to turn sexuality into a discourse are coercive, and (2) the prevailing impression that sexuality is to be shaped to fit so that it doesn't interfere with the mores and mechanisms of society is a reversal of priorities: sexuality is a strong element of identity, and the goal of society should therefore be to preserve it, or at least to work around it. I stop just short of arguing that fucking is the only thing that IS relevant as a practical matter.

6. THE OTHER 95% OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION One of the more appalling elements of the culture on this continent is the belief that the residents are uniquely qualified to address sexual matters and to dismiss the possibility of contribution by offshore populations developing their own views of such matters. I leave the observation as its own case statement and speculate on how hypocritical it might finally be for such methodological mediocrity to go hand-in-hand with a supposed distaste for sexual assault, in symbolic forms as in material ones. As Spivak called for a "worlding of the world," I would call for a "worlding of the erotic" and of discussion about the erotic.

7. IT'S ALWAYS TIME FOR SEX I am suspicious of the partitioning that goes on regarding sex and sexuality: this time of day is not "appropriate," that location is not "appropriate," &c. I tend to think a lot of the boundaries have been set just to discourage and even to stigmatize sexuality itself: the real message behind fencing it in is that it is the sort of thing that deserves fencing in. The arguments for such boundaries should have and do have a heavy burden of proof to sustain. Otherwise, the idea that the local culture is "sex-positive" is as much of a joke, and for the same reasons, as the signs designating "free speech zones" that now dominate, and indeed could be said to define, the local culture.

Sexuality has endured despite centuries of attempts to end it, or to gear it exclusively to the ends of certain groups of people. I don't mean to imply above that all of the pissing in the pool by such oppressive social entities has ruined it or destroyed the possibility of its growth. I do mean to say that for the pissing in the pool to have reached the point where it is considered the "responsible" and "rational" approach to the subject is a real coup. And anyone who wants to engage in any other sort of potentially valid approach to the issue has to understand he is facing a discursive hypocrisy of legendary proportions. Perhaps the defining feature of the erotic is that it bugs the hell out of some people for no good reason and that these people have gone to great lengths to suppress it and hand each other laurels for their benevolence and wisdom in so doing. The net result is that the subject becomes closed for discussion, and everyone "just knows" that that is optimal. The oppressive effort didn't just have control as a goal; it had rectitude as one. It really wanted to be in the right. It isn't, and to know that it isn't is the beginning of the individual's journey towards real rewards in this area. Suddenly there is more to talk about than we can even fit into the day. But simultaneously, and for the most rewarding of "reasons," there is the release from the oppressive construction of "reason" and no obligation to "get it all said." And I did mention that that appealed to me, didn't I? :)