Reading reviews of Amia Srinivasan’s appealingly entitled essay collection The Right to Sex and her main essay “Does Anyone Have a Right to Sex” (a title and topic that could hardly fail to command the attention of the reading public), I am struck once again, as so often before, by the thematic preponderance of love-as-sex in intellectual and feminist discussion, a dominance that seems to come at the expense of the related but distinct topic of friendship-as-love. There is a tendency to postulate in reading documents from the past that any warm declaration of passionate love in fact betokened sexual passion. This can only be assumed if we assume that all love as friendship issues naturally and invariably in sexual desire. But why should this be the case? We know that family love and most youthful friendships do not fit this pattern.
One sentence in the New Yorker review by Alexandra Schwartz struck me as especially revealing: “Our sexual marketplace is explicitly and brutally judgmental, especially now that dating and hook up apps make it easier than ever to ‘shop’ for partners according to a set of predetermined preferences—as if shopping for groceries online—and such ‘preferences,’ Srinivasan thinks, tend to involve race.” It’s of course possible to ascertain here, as in so many other matters, that racism is at work, and I suppose that it is. But how does that injustice, and the inculcated prejudice of desire, compare to the very obvious reduction of interpersonal relationships to sexual commodities? The reductionism and commodification render the desirous preference quantifiable. Goods, services, or commodities can be priced and evaluated purely as objects. What essential difference does it make that in one case the currency of exchange is money and in the other our “exchange value” ? What distinguishes true friendship is its resistance to monetarization. What characterizes love is its unpredictably. People fall in love who are not supposed to do so, people who do not benefit and perhaps lose a great deal by doing so.
Writing about these topics at an advanced age imposes or makes possible a distinct perspective. Contrary to what the promoters of Viagra would have us believe, it is possible, even natural in fact, to lose interest in sex. Contrary to what a sex-centered culture would have us believe; this is not at all tragic. Brecht who certainly knew what it meant to be horny wrote, “Beneidenswert wer frei davon.” Count yourself lucky to be rid of all that. My tender affections for my wife of thirty years are in a special category that resonates with the most beautiful moments of my life; but this is something different from the preposterous images of desire attributed to older men in Pharma advertising. There is something grotesque and pathetic about those who, for whatever reason, are temporarily or perpetually celibate who self-flagellate and complain to the heavens of the injustice of it all. I would suggest that this may be increasingly the case because of two developments: first, because sex has become a stand in for all human needs for friendship or love of any kind, and, second and in consequence of the first, because it has been turned into an index of human worth and a key to self-respect. In some indirect sense, Srinivasan is right to link the “incel” with the sex-positive feminist: both buy into an interpretation of sex which makes their very different positions plausible or even inevitable. Sex, unlike other habits or inclinations, becomes like food or air or sleep. We have to have it. Its importance overshadows disinterested friendship or human solidarity. Sex is the mirage-paradise of the anomic. The “incel” has been driven to madness and murder by the siren song emanating, with all the incentives of a sexualized commercial culture, from that mirage of paradise. A paradise that is over in minutes or at most hours is a mirage that will disintegrate leaving them even lonelier than before.
If the leftist community of friendship and solidarity is ever realized, I would propose a restored culture of conversation (remember that “intercourse” did not only or mainly signify sexual activity) and a culture of dance, a physical interaction, usually involving touch, which can be joyous without sexual intimacy or exclusion. Barbara Ehrenreich called attention to the ancient and universal and at times mystical aspect of dance in binding communities together and rejuvenating them (“Dancing in the Streets”). Virginie Despentes approaches the same theme in forming the mystical convergences that transform and unite participants in volume three of her Vernon Subutex trilogy.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 