february
16, 1998, 9:20 p.m.
| ecstasy
unlimited
With school & correspondence from this and my
other site, I have a lot of catching up to do. For
various reasons, however, I've been
pre-occupied with personal dramas that, while not having quite
faded away, are finally settling down to a more manageable level.
And to answer
a question that seems to keep popping up: no, I don't hate all
white people and I can't imagine where one might get that
idea. I mean, some of my best friends are white! (Picture
me batting my eyelashes in wide-eyed innocence.)
So I don't
have a completely coherent new column, but I'm gonna fake out
with an excerpt from the manuscript of Laura Kipnis' amazing
video "Ectasy Unlimited: The Interpenetrations of Sex and
Capital" (1985) to introduce some ideas that have been in
my head for some time, revisited when a friend of mine mentioned
a brief conversation she had with a South Asian feminist and
sex worker about race, desire, and sex radicalism. (The Kipnis
excerpt doesn't deal with race specifically, but it connects.)
Like a lot of the dialogue around porn, the discussion over "sex
radicalism" has been largely dominated by white, middle-class
women arrayed on either side of the issue and armed with complementary
arguments, and while I come down on the "pro-sex" side,
I'm frustrated with the political narrowness and privileged simplicity
of the rhetoric.
This was most
obviously illustrated to me several years ago in a "female
sexuality" class I took my last semester as an undergrad--a
class which, in part, consisted of watching feminist porn movies.
Which is all fine and dandy, but at some point sitting in a dark
room with twenty other giggling girls watching four white women
in various get-ups (i.e., pearls and white heels, combat boots
and short hair, vinyl straps and cap, et cetera) jack off...well,
I thought to myself, "Great, all the white women are liberating
themselves through the wonders of female ejaculation now
that they're bored with those totally unsexy and positively ungrateful
oppressed peoples living five blocks and/or five thousand miles
away." What's often dropped out then are race and class
relations --nevermind geopolitics for now (I'll get back to this
later)-- and also a fundamental understanding of the way
in which capital subverts subversion...a point that Kipnis makes
absolutely clear while purposefully inducing, well, me
at least to fall off my chair in the media center, cackling away
like the ninny I am.
FEMALE NARRATOR: (voice-over) Are you sexually unfulfilled?
There's no use trying to hide it. We see it in the way you nervously
tap your fingers, the way you cross and uncross your legs, the
rigidity with which you hold your cold, unfulfilled body. Hey,
get with it! The body-racking, mind-blowing blockbuster orgasm
is within every modern woman's reach, says Cosmopolitan.
Perhaps you have a boner for your collie? Well, "Bow-wow,"
says the Playboy Advisor. Enjoy a little pain with your
pleasure? Any practice between consenting adults is all right
with the author of More Joy of Sex. For what used to be
called sexual aberrations you can now find instruction manuals.
How reassuring that even the perversions are under the administration
and control of experts.
Perhaps
you suffer from "masturbatory orgasmic inadequacy"?
Not to worry. Teaching women how to masturbate pleasurably is
the life's work of San Francisco sex therapist Lonnie Barbach.
Think of it! Before this new era of sexual openness you could
have been masturbating wrong and not even known it!
Sexual
fulfillment isn't only your right, it's your obligation. Commit
yourself to hunting down sexual satisfaction, to pursuing it,
rooting it out from whatever nook or crevice it might be hiding
in. Be a foot soldier in the war for sexual liberation, fight
the good fight for freedom from repression.
(confidentially)
Yes,
I am a woman whose quest is sexual pleasure, whatever
the price. I am a sexual adventurer, expanding the frontiers
of pleasure, extending the horizons of desire, fulfilling the
Manifest Destiny of sexuality.
What
a radical concept. Our own sexuality offers us liberation here
on earth, in our own lifetime. Whether you're a Democrat or Republican,
whether you're an industrialist or on welfare, whether you're
a struggling young artist or have vast holdings in South Africa,
you too can be liberated. Why bother to demonstrate, contribute
to Amnesty International, or try to change the system when you
can now achieve liberation in the privacy of your own bedroom?
And it only gets
better (and funnier, and more incisive) from there. Kipnis maps
out the "management" of desire and its commodification
by liberal capitalism ("capital has finally discovered sexuality
as a prime site for investment and speculation"), complete
with Sesame Street-type illustrations, New Wave ditties, and
"XXX" excerpts, totally complicating the usual binarisms
of "pro-sex"/"anti-porn" positions.
Now again,
I'm ostensibly "pro-sex," as in, I have it, I like
it, I admit it, whatever, I support sex workers in their
attempts to destigmatize, unionize and/or legalize, et cetera,
et cetera. And hey, I even own two vibrators, though one (the
purty, pearl-colored one) is sadly reduced to a merely decorative
state after having been dropped on the floor one too many times.
(It sits on my desk next to a sticker that reads "RIOT BYKE"
and a noirish girlie photograph of Jennifer Tilly, the femme-dyke
fatale of the film Bound.) But looking at the box my vibrator
came in, I can't help but notice that it reads "Made In
China" and I can't help but start to ponder the geopolitical
implications and transnational capital flows involved. I mean,
I think about the production of these and other sex toys by women
being paid less than living wages in warehouse-like factories
in China or Malaysia --toys that can cross national borders in
ways the workers who put them together can't-- for the consumption
of Western feminist sex radicals cruising Good Vibrations on
Valencia in the Mission District (a Latina/o neighborhood in
the process of being gentrified) in San Francisco, and well,
the feel-good pro-sex rhetoric of "liberation" and
"empowerment" attached to their consumption falls a
little flat. And let's not even get into the potentially contradictory
material and psychic relationships between the women workers
and the sex toys they're putting together: talk about another
can of worms....
So it's a huge
topic ripe for discussion and I have lots of thoughts, not quite
coherent yet, but, basically, "pro-sex" rhetoric needs
to begin to take into account power (and I'm not talking SM here),
social relations and material institutions, and this means, among
other things, transnational capital and sexual(-ized) racialization
(i.e., my pet Web-peeve: the very creepy neocolonial dimensions
of a lot of racialized porn, as in all the assholes who find
themselves here after searching for "asian+girls+porn").
Any thoughts? (And please note I totally wrote this off the top
of my head.)
So have sex,
masturbate, whatever. But don't kid yourself. As Laura Kipnis
writes:
The commodified ectasy of the thirty-minute Extended Sexual Orgasm
gives us the means to forget, for thirty minutes, the sexual
torture supported by our tax dollars in other parts of the world.
How long can you make the amnesia last? And if you manage to
forget it, do you really think it stays forgotten?
Laura Kipnis is
so cool.