Libidinal Architecture
“Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.”
An AP investigative story reporting on the systemic torturous rape methods used by Israeli guards on Palestinian prisoners is quote tweeted by BAPKahanist1488 accusing the outlet of propaganda; they retort that gays are thrown off buildings in Gaza. The tweet receives 46 thousand likes. Rabbi Shmuley retweets it linking to a website for his daughter’s sex shop in Tel Aviv. A fourth account — with a profile picture depicting themselves as an anthropomorphized animated wolf — replies to the former with their self-made art that reads
Free Palestine
No one is Illegal on Stolen Land
Free HRT for all
Adorning the background of the piece are a mishmash of emblems including the Palestinian keffiyah clashing against cartoon-ified strap-ons. Two tweets below, a niche leftist Asian-American micro-celebrity posts her iPhone press release solemnly apologizing for a “Get Ready with Me” video where she calls for white people to be summarily banned from “Asian supermarkets” after Twitter users uncovered photos of her white boyfriend.
Under the “suggested for you” tab, an anonymous account followed by the vice president of the United States posts plot graphs indicating a declining birth rate for American whites from 1980 to 2020, demanding their followers vote Republican in the upcoming midterms. The first reply immediately beneath is an advertisement for a sports betting app while the following two are verbatim accusations of liberal white women fucking Black men into white men’s extinction. One of the two is seething in anger while the other is unabashedly aroused.
Under the “trending” tab is a minute-long clip from a young, up-and-coming politician’s livestream where she compares her experience hiding in fear during the January 6th riots to her own personal experience being sexually assaulted.
Sex is good, sex is bad, sex sells, sex should be sold, sex should be public, sex should be private, sex should be mandated, sex should be outlawed, sex should be racially segregated, sex should be all-inclusively accessible, sex is a privilege, sex is a right, sex is vulgar, sex is beautiful, etcetera, etcetera and into perpetuity.
Most of the superstructure in the West is downstream from the implicit and explicit sexual motivations, frustrations and insecurities of the population. Some spheres seem more naturally inclined towards dealing with questions of sex than others; for example, the logical line from sex to advertising runs relatively straight. The conceit of sex in marketing relies on three relatively uncontroversial implications; if you purchase a given product, you’ll be more sexually attractive, you’ll have more or better sex, or you’ll feel sexier.
Sex takes an even higher precedence in the superstructure of politics in the Western world than it does in advertising. In politics, sex doesn’t begin and end with scandalous or even abusive and predatory relationships between staffers and elected officials. It runs deeper than legislating women’s access to reproductive technologies.
While the left-right political spectrum has been the West’s Rosetta Stone for interpreting increasingly abstract political ideologies (are you leftist/liberal/socialist/communist/woke/progressive/libtard/dark-woke/shit-lib/dem-soc or are you right/rightoid/capitalist/free-market/race realist/based/red-pilled/bronze-aged/groyper-pilled?), we shouldn’t forget the terms “left” and “right” first appeared only three centuries ago during the French Revolution to differentiate between supporters of the Ancien Régime who sat on the right side of the president in the National Assembly, and supporters of the revolution who sat on his left. Fellow supporters of the same cause began to recognize each other and sat together as to avoid “the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp.” Today, there’s even less consensus on what differentiates one on the left from one on the right. In the West, however, sex and implicit sexual obsession is actually the dividing line from which one separates the political “left” wing from its “right” counterpart.
The Repressed Right
One might assume the libidinal motivations for the modern conservative right would find its roots in the repressive tradition of enforced silence forged throughout the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church; a sterile conception of man and wife devoid of sensuality, beings created simply for the purpose of further procreation. Countless conservative Evangelical organizations pride themselves on the priority of the “nuclear family” in their advocacy work and while the Handmaids Tale is a compelling television show, it’s unfortunately an outdated stereotype for mapping the psycho-sexual nodes on conservative consciousness (a stereotype we will return to in the mind of the liberal). More appropriate are the lasting effects of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade on the conservative brain. The slave trade, specifically the forcible and violent transposition of the Bantu to the Americas, was a dual exercise in establishing the two priorities that would become absolutely inextricable from the Western project; the primacy of liberal marketization and the inevitable necessity to address the Negro Question.
A manifesto allegedly penned by the teenage perpetrators of a mass shooting at a San Diego mosque, titled “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant”, contains content that indicates the shooters were inculcated into an increasingly popular violent anti-social subculture that grooms children and teenagers into committing acts of racially motivated mass violence. The culture blends elements of abject nihilism, satanic imagery, snuff films and national socialist literature with the explicit intent of luring children from platforms like Roblox and Discord onto unmoderated forums where they can be further radicalized. The title of the manifesto references the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings that left 51 dead. The perpetrator has since been mentioned in countless manifestos as inspiration for each respective attack, enacted or otherwise. When an 18-year-old (who himself indicates he was groomed by online nihilists) travelled three hours in 2022 to commit a mass shooting at a supermarket in a predominantly Black area in Buffalo, he described his main inspiration as the Christchurch shooter.
The opening line of the 2019 Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, and the fundamental pathology by which the psychological profile of these mass shooters is built around, reads “it’s the birth rates” — a reference to the Great Replacement theory. Despite its pseudoscientific name, GR theory actually comes in many diffusive forms making it hard to systematize and analyze. Specific dimensions of GR discourse are mobilized in some contexts and at certain moments, while others remain absent or in the background. In The Politics of Replacement: From “Race Suicide” to the “Great Replacement, Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar identify the loose definition of “race” (in the words of Stuart Hall, race is a ‘floating signifier’ that has no fixed biological definition, instead constantly changing with historical, cultural and political context) as a source of potential logical inconsistencies within GR theory.
For example, despite GR theory historically targeting Muslims as the archetypical invader par excellence (ostensibly why the Christchurch and San Diego shooters targeted mosques), the 2022 Buffalo shooter targeted a supermarket in a predominantly African-American area and, while they are non-white, African-Americans are decidedly not immigrants. African-Americans (as distinct from Black immigrants from African nations) have a presence in America as old as other “heritage Americans” and cannot reasonably be considered “invaders” by any stretch of the imagination (which actually contributes to a form of anti-African racism predominantly espoused by African-Americans). Bracke and Aguilar define a concept of GR theory to account for these continuous shifting dimensions:
The palimpsest of population replacement stands in as a piece of writing in constant re-making while keeping the core ideas intact: the white (masculine) Western world is declining, and such decline is not accidental but rather the outcome of a nefarious plot deploying migration and birth rates as warfare tactics.
The depiction of both immigration and birth rates as mechanisms for white replacement expands the targets from non-white immigrants to all non-whites in the West, including the descendants of African slaves forcibly brought to the West throughout the 16th to 19th centuries. The “one-drop” rule (the defining legal principle of racial classification in the United States in the 20th-century) asserted that any person with even a single ancestor of Black African ancestry is considered Negro and functionally restricted “whiteness” to strict endogamy while relegating “blackness” to something akin to a parasite — a condition that can be caught and inherited if you weren’t on high enough alert. White people could, for lack of a better term, become “blacked”, but Black people couldn’t necessarily become “whited”.
Furthermore, the emphasis of birth rates means that GR theory, as well as the traditional and para-political ideologies that it supports (which, yes, includes white nationalism), are fundamentally concerned with issues of sex, gender and sexual practices as much as they are race, genetic inheritability and eye-que. The explicit use of the one-drop rule to prevent interracial marriages post-abolition was a violent reinforcement of one Western value (the necessity to address the Negro Question) in response to the devastating loss of the other (the primacy of liberal marketization) in the form of granting slave’s personhood.
Maintaining a “white majority” in America through extra-immigration means will unambiguously require the strict policing white people’s sexual habits, most likely the sexual habits of white women (who routinely are targeted as the co-conspirators of falling birth rates among whites, either through access to abortion and contraceptives or by having sex with non-whites). This violent and seething obsession with combating the great white replacement by policing their sexual habits is the obverse of a coin that represents the conservative mind whole; the reverse of which is the cuckold.
A cuckold is a man whose wife has sex with another man. Traditionally, he feels deeply hurt and angry, sometimes to the point of inflicting harm onto his wife and her lover. However, in some cases, a cuckold might have a paraphilia where he feels immense pleasure at the thought of his wife with another man. Curiously, the cuckold fetish seems to be exclusive to the West; A search for the term “cuckold” in the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) turned up references from 32 cultures. None of them indicate that a cuckold can derive sexual pleasure from being cuckolded. The emotional response is usually negative. The cuckold fetish is also rare cross-historically, as it is absent from traditional Greco-Roman literature, which nonetheless attest to a wide array of alternative sexual proclivities.
The earliest references to men actively seeking to be cuckolded is provided in 17th century England. The “contended cuckold” became such a common trope in plays that it even had a name: the wittol. It may be significant that the wittol is usually described as a merchant (so much so that one Shakespearean scholar asks: “Why are merchants so often cuckolds, and cuckolds so often merchants?”) because it was around this time that England began opening itself up to international trade, including the slave trade.
By the 20th century, this philia was incredibly common. As quoted by an elderly Black American to Eldridge Cleaver during the 1960’s:
There is a sickness in the white that … makes them act in many different ways. But there is one way it makes some of them act that seems to contradict everything we know about whitey and shakes many blacks up when they first encounter it. … There are white men who will pay you to fuck their wives. They approach you and say, ‘How would you like to fuck a white woman?’ … ‘It’s all right. She’s my wife.’
A google search for the term “wife breeding” turned up 1.8 million hits in 2023, up from around 800,000 in 2011, including videos specially developed for the emerging market. Many, if not nearly all, videos in this genre have a Black man as the cuckolder with a white man as the cuckold. In this context, shooting up a supermarket full of Black people, and eating a Black man’s semen out of your wife are the two diametric ends of a scale that measures how well the Western mind addresses its anxieties about the Negro Question and potential sexual inadequacy. Why else would the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooter inscribe his rifle with “Buck Status: Broken” if not to signal his perceived simultaneous sexual and moral superiority to his victims (referencing the act known as ‘buck breaking’ where white slave owners would publicly punish male slaves by raping them in front of other slaves in order to humiliate them)?
Does this mean that I’m accusing most, if not all, stringent white nativist/nationalist/supremacist/identitarian ideologues of grappling with feelings of perceived sexual inadequacy and a latent cuckoldry fetish? Well… yes. To be deeply and politically invested in the advancement of the “white race” is to be deeply and fundamentally invested in white sexuality and ultimately protective of it. It requires the development of surveillance technologies deployed unto your own people and a rigorous, borderline obsessive, understanding of the sexuality of your perceived enemy (especially if you are convinced they’re naturally more libidinally inclined than you). How do they fuck, why do they fuck, how do you stop them from fucking, how do you stop us from wanting to fuck them, how can we tell if a fucking has taken place, how do we punish those who’ve fucked? This falls well outside the regular purview of procreative sex emphasized by the Church.
During slavery, these two seemingly diametric opposite feelings of hatred and obsession were deeply intertwined with little cognitive dissonance for whites. In The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture, Vincent Woodward examined the homoeroticism innate to the metaphorical and literal culture of cannibalism that occurred during slavery in the United States;
On the level of acquired taste for the Negro, Cartwright’s pseudo-medical science portrays how myths of the Negro child, of the exoticized and animal-like African, stoked white appetites and made the Negro into a delectable, desirous object. Such references to black people as animal-like, infantile, and disfigured proliferate in pro-slavery rhetoric. They are so common that we do not naturally think of them as indexes of desire — of white people’s fixations upon and obsessions with black bodies and sex.
Buck breaking is just one of numerous examples of the homoerotic affection and sexualized violence that emerged during slavery. Woodward uses a 1911 cartoon published in the French journal Le Rire to demonstrate how Europeans themselves admitted to and documented a connection between European global expansion and a sexual/libidinal appetite for African flesh. The cartoon depicts a group of Bakongo men salivating over a European victim skewered. The right panel depicts a parallel scene of colonial soldiers standing over their Bakongo victim, with some notable differences. The word “Congo” is plastered on the Bakongo victim’s clothing, referencing the carving up of Africa by European powers. The most striking thing about the cartoon is the use of knife size to represent the phallic obsession that underlies the European-African relationship, tying together the themes of colonialism, slavery, sex and consumption of the African body.
Foundational to white discourse is the premise that there is a sexually transmittable condition that must be of top concern and investigation for white powers, the nexus site of which is a Black penis. Immigration law, public education, zoning laws, tax formulations; if conservatives themselves proclaim that the law is an expression of the West’s civilizational fight for the future of whiteness then their fight definitionally must determine the future of the Black phallus as well. Conservative discourse is downstream from the implication that strict sexual endogamy between races be maintained, therefore all other values are fungible in this monomaniacal pursuit against or towards the Black penis.
The Libertine Left
Where the conservative is accused of being repressed, incapable of addressing their primal sexual considerations, the liberal/leftist/socialist emerges to proudly and openly emancipate labour and sex alike from the oppressive grip of the bourgeoise — declaring they, unlike the conservative, are free from all repressive inclinations. Therefore the relationship between sex and the leftist is simple; sexuality and freedom are indicators of one another.
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One of the major figures to whom we owe the marriage of sexual and economic considerations is the Marquis de Sade; a political activist during the French Revolution whose prolific oeuvre of libertine work led to his incarceration at Charenton insane asylum, where he would die. An avowed supporter of the French Revolution, Sade renounced his noble lineage and dedicated his life to continuing the revolutionary work of Robespierre by flouting blasphemy laws through novels, short stories, plays and pamphlets, among other things. Political theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno identify Sade as the principal figure behind European demystification of sexual behaviour through his aggressively rational approach to human sexual tendencies. Sade believed in sexual freedom taken to its absolute limits; the decriminalization of adultery, sodomy, prostitution, incest and rape were of the utmost importance to revolutionary success. He warned that if society didn’t smash the sexual shibboleths installed by the powers that be then the revolution was doomed to fail, and the monarchy would undoubtedly regain control.
Centuries later, it seems that many of Sade’s prescriptions have taken hold as children born out of wedlock are increasingly common, industries of sex work have become economic pillars, and queer people get an entire month! Sade’s approach to politics is predicated on an understanding of sexual history that remains foundational in discourse all these centuries later: the seventeenth century saw a marked shift in the way we talk about sex. What used to be a certain frankness with regards to the fluidity of human sexuality was replaced by a strict regime of silence imposed by changing and emerging powers. Sexuality was then solitarily confined to the single locus of authority: the marital bedroom where the legitimate and procreative couple were the sole administrators. Outside of those confines, sexuality (or more specifically deviance from it) was to be hounded and relegated to non-existence. Any concessions made by power were integrated into shameful sites of profit; the brothel, the mental institution, the Republican Primary Convention and so on.
This conception of sexual history, dubbed the ‘repressive hypothesis’ by Michel Foucault, is what makes the mere act of speaking about sexuality seem so transgressive and liberatory, let alone being an unconventional sexuality. From the French Revolution to the Sexual Revolution of the 60’s, the emancipation of sexuality from the bourgeois has been seen as integral to revolutionary success.
Foucault, however, urges us to approach the repressive hypothesis with skepticism;
A suspicious mind might wonder if taking so many precautions in order to give the history of sex such an impressive filiation does not bear traces of the same old prudishness: as if those valorizing correlations were necessary before such a discourse could be formulated or accepted. (The History of Sexuality, pg. 6)
He claims this hypothesis is so appealing because it squarely coincides the emergence of the age of repression with the development of capitalism, making it an integral part of the bourgeois order. In reality, Foucault posits, the relationship between sex and power has not historically been one of strict repression, rather there has been a veritable explosion in sexual discourse across those three centuries. This explosion can be traced to pastoral tradition of Christian confession that took root in the Middle Ages and persisted until the seventeenth century. The emphasis on penance made confession a fundamental aspect of Christianity and required the rigorous self-examination of every aspect of one’s personhood — down to the most minute and delicate sensation;
I am not talking about the obligation to admit to violations of the laws of sex, as required by traditional penance; but of the nearly infinite task of telling, telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex. (The History of Sexuality, pg. 20).
This tradition of deep, rigorous and erotic self-examination is transcribed almost exactly onto Sade’s injunction to document the most perverse desires one could conjure down to the smallest sensation. Confession was given a lofty status, so much so that it became liberatory in nature. The one who confesses becomes ‘freed’ and ‘unburdened’ from their guilt. This incitement to discourse continued to persist, even after the explicit grip of the Church began to wane, giving way to a new “public interest” — population and demography. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Western society began to develop theories on sexuality in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification and specification. Society was transitioning from a “people” derived from morality towards a Malthusian “population” derived from rationality. This rational public interest eventually broke apart and scattered into distinct spaces and industries that continued to proliferate discourse on sex at an exponential rate; biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism have all supplanted the role of the Church in the tradition of confession, constantly replicating the pastoral dynamic of penance between patient/doctor, child/parent, student/teacher, etc. The confession has no purpose if it isn’t heard and validated with the ultimate goal of confirming the subject. The modern tools of confession are extensive; interrogations, interviews, consultations, appointments, autobiographical narratives, letters that are constantly being recorded, investigated, transcribed, assembled into dossiers of truth, published and commented on. These institutions, therefore, are the knowledge apparatus where sexuality is deployed and truth is obtained.
This intensification and proliferation of discourse made sex an object of knowledge, something to be investigated and subsequently learned from, and because it’s so intimate, we believe it can reveal truths about ourselves. Furthermore, while it may seem to follow that this proliferation of sexual discourse was aimed at reducing all forms of non-reproductive sex, it was in fact this discourse itself that produced various forms of sexual “perversions”.
The various crimes and taboos that were covered by the canonical Sixth commandment or the all-encompassing civil category of “debauchery” diffused into a stratum of infractions; adultery, rape, incest, sodomy, seducing a nun, defiling a cadaver, engaging in sadism or deceiving one’s wife all became essentially different. From this debris, Western society developed separate registers to codify the natural laws of matrimony vs. the immanent rules of sexuality. Those whose actions defied the latter were hounded but not always by the law; they were cruel or maniacal husbands, overly onanistic schoolboys, practicers of sodomy, and ramblers with bizarre impulses who haunted the penal colonies, tribunals and asylums. Over time their status transitioned from “moral folly”, to “genital neurosis,” to “aberration of the genetic instinct” to “degenerescence”. This scrutiny over non-procreative forms of sexual acts, while critical and negative, was not seeking to eliminate them, rather it sought to persecute and incorporate them.
This incorporation of perversion as a specification of individual took what used to be considered a category of forbidden act and transformed it into something inextricable from personhood;
The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. (The History of Sexuality, pg. 43).
In the eyes of power, a sodomite was a temporary aberration whereas the homosexual was a new species, just one of the many aberrations given entomology. There were zoophiles and zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, mixoscophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexothestic inverts and dyspareunist women. The deployment and magnification of these “deviancies” were different from that of the law proper, rather fields like medicine and psychology sought to extract these “sexual truths” from subjects and solidify them as personhood. As well, this personhood became the springboard by which all other manifestations developed. From the bad habits of children to medical maladies and generational illnesses, the arena of “sexuality” was developed to explain them.
Thus, the Western Christian tradition of confession and penance combined with emerging scientific discourse to create our modern concept of sexuality, which has more to do with the discourses surrounding sex than with sex itself. This innovation made it possible for the “theory of degeneracy” to emerge in the early nineteenth century, positing that various hereditary maladies (with no difference to whether it was organic, functional or mental) ended with producing a “pervert” in their bloodline. Further, it posited that sexual perversion would result in the depletion of one’s line of descent, jeopardizing future generations. This conception of perversion-heredity-degeneration formed a new nucleus for these new technologies of sex.
Foucault credits Freud as the seminal figure that embodies the injunction made by the field of psychology and psychoanalysis in this state-mandated pursuit to combat perversion-heredity-degeneration. Psychoanalysis supplanted the theory of degeneracy by establishing simultaneous new functions; it anchored sexuality to the family (via the Oedipus complex), it replaced biology with psychic history as an origin of deviance, and it was a class differentiator (access to psychoanalysis is traditionally cost prohibitive and bourgeois).
Key to Foucault’s analysis is his theory of power. Traditionally, society has a “juridico-discursive” understanding of power, meaning we perceive power, especially as established through law, as subjugating, dominating, limiting or negative — something we are subservient to. In actuality, power is everywhere and produced as a spontaneous force between asymmetric or unequal interactions. Power isn’t a static binary; rather power relationships emerge at all levels of society and are constantly subject to shifting dynamics. Furthermore, resistance to power may in fact be part of a power relationship itself and not external. Resistance to power is not a steady singular method but equally spontaneous as dynamics of power change.
What does power want? Simply put, power wants to maintain itself and will reconstitute to do so when necessary. Power as a positive force is a much more secretive method, fueled by confession and self-identification. The discourses that have attempted to investigate sexuality are in fact part of the production of sexuality itself. Psychoanalysis as a discourse places the family at the nexus of sexuality confirming the family, not as a repressive force in sexuality, but as the nurturing point.
As well, sexuality wasn’t originally deployed to exploit the working class, rather it was developed to enhance the ruling class. Prior to the seventeenth century, the ruling class asserted their special character through blood in the form of the antiquity of its ancestry and the value of its alliances. The bourgeois, in comparison, looked to their progeny for value and dedicated themselves to ensuring its longevity by enhancing the specific body. The concern with degeneracy became a preoccupation with heredity. Sexuality is, therefore, historically bourgeois and was deployed as an affirmation of self, proliferating, innovating, annexing and increasingly scrutinizing forms of surveillance with particular attention paid to the pedagogization of children’s sex, the hysterization of women’s bodies, the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure and the socialization of procreative behavior. Finding the truth of extending life through these technologies became the purview of the bourgeois and was now linked to the rigorous investigation of sexual taboos through psychoanalysis.
In summary, the deployment of sexuality in history is more about the deployment of psychoanalysis continuing the role of confession in society. This deployment tied “repression” (the adversary of confession) to general mechanisms of domination and exploitation and linking together the processes that make it possible to free oneself from both repression and domination.
It is against this backdrop that, during the interwar period, Wilheim Reich, an Austrian psychoanalyst, developed the hypothesis of repression, most notably in his work The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich, who actually coined the term “sexual revolution”, believed fascist authoritarians came to power through ideologically-oriented sexual repression of the masses, which translated into strict conformity; “In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation.” Reich echoed the Marquis de Sade in his prescription for a sexual revolution that challenged popular social norms and codes of behaviour in pursuit of a harmonious society that enables a fulfilling life for its citizens (through an energetic life force Reich dubbed “orgones” associated with sexual urges and libido). The hypothesis of repression is, then, not only wrong about power, but it is an appendage of power itself reconstituting to maintain dominance and surveillance over the innumerable sites that compose the individual (a domain which has become indispensable with regards to maintaining a polity).
In the chapter “The PMC Has Sex” from her book Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class cultural theorist, author and professor Catherine Liu picks up where Foucault left off: with a critical examination of how revolutionary sexual politics can often mask a world of radical rationality and reduction of life, specifically with regards to the role of the professional-managerial class (PMC). A term coined in 1976 by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, the PMC is defined as “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations”. The PMC are psychologists, doctors, journalists, scientists, industry creatives, professors, bankers and lawyers who play managerial roles in large organizations — precisely the discursive spheres ascribed to the deployment of sexuality by Foucault.
The Ehrenreich’s describe the PMC as highly credentialed deracinated liberal professionals who’ve self-inherited the labels of “progressive” and “socialist” but maintain a strikingly combative position towards the working class. Liu’s book is a diatribe against the PMC and their work towards mitigating class consciousness in exchange for legalistic intersectionality. Liu focuses specifically on the ‘post-68 PMC’, referring to the famous counter cultural protests that spread across Western Europe in May 1968, originally sparked by student demonstrations in Paris and Berlin (students in the uprisings would scrawl the name of Wilheim Reich on walls and throw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police). The post-68 PMC, who dominated the New Left and its diffusive countercultural movements throughout the 60’s and 70’s, replicated the Sadean sexual enlightenment through their own “sexual revolution” which coincided with second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement.
In Liu’s words “To be part of this revolution, you had to accept that the private experiences and lives of elite PMC people were the most important sites of meaningful political and cultural activity”. Contrasted with the enlightened PMC are the masses of socially backward working class who are represented as eternally trapped within the nefarious crystal of “oppression” refracting off the various walls of “misogyny”, “homophobia”, “transphobia”, “queerphobia” and unable to communicate their erotic needs. This instrumental obsession with sexual violence and sexual excess is the inheritance of confession from American Puritanism. The moral superiority of queer sexualities (the inheritance of taboo/crime, to degeneration, to genital neurosis, to sexuality) in the sexual enlightenment, which makes up a significant part of counter-culture inheritance of the PMC, then just replicates an inverted (albeit weaker) power structure where deviation from the sexual “average” or “norm” and revolutionary zeal have a positively linear relationship. Inherent to this is the inverse; adherence to conventional sexual standards is less enlightened, less progressive and subconsciously less committed to revolution.
Naturally, this conception of sexuality might confer some level of shame to those leftists who (gasp) consider themselves sexually conventional. This might sound laughable, but what else can explain the rise of opinion articles opining whether it’s become embarrassing to have a boyfriend as a woman, whether someone “chose” to be a lesbian or ways to stay “connected to your bisexuality in a straight passing relationship”. Don’t even think about broaching a relationship with a straight white man. The author of the second article mentioned literally writes that their decision to exclusively date women was because of her attraction to “a condition of existing in opposition to patriarchy”. She states in no uncertain terms that sexuality is not entirely about sensations, attractions and feelings but, in part, an active political choice.
Liu also highlights how this discourse from PMC was reflected in the policy of the first Obama Administration. Instead of addressing reform in the financial sector after the most devastating economic crash in modern history, Obama used his momentous electoral victory specifically to address sexual violence on college campuses. In 2011, Obama’s Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to more than seven thousand colleges and universities, warning them that they would be at risk of losing federal funding under Title IX if they did not take action to prevent and remedy sexual violence and sexual assault on their campuses; “Legal commentators today admit that college administrations reacted to the letter with overcompliance. Many Title IX offices rejected innocent-until-proven-guilty principles that form the democratic rule of law and set up campus investigative panels and bodies that became little more than kangaroo courts.”
Despite data showing that non-college-going women were 1.2 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than their college-going counterparts, the PMC elite sought to bring the culture war to college campuses and away from the workplace lest the economic structure that supports workplace sexual harassment be exposed. In the absence of “Dear Colleague” letters to big banks, Big Pharma, billionaires evading tax laws, fossil fuel companies and the like, the PMC elite chose to foment moral panic around college campus sex over modest redistributive policies.
Due to the sensitive nature inherent to discourse on sexual violence, this is also when the language of “trauma” began entering popular lexicon. Whereas the post-68 PMC validated their socialist credentials through “sexually enlightened” moments like the dirt covered orgies of Woodstock and Burning Man or through the innumerable new age cults that ended up being fronts for sex trafficking, the PMC of today validate their values through a form of trauma sharing. The concept of intersectionality flattened different socio-political concepts into static binary dichotomies at all levels; straight vs queer, man vs woman, cis vs transgender, etc. All of these are simply replicating the discourse of sexual enlightenment vs ignorance pioneered during the French Revolution, now projected onto the working class. Being traumatized from the standpoint of any of these oppressed identities became a fast-pass to political authenticity and authority. One’s “lived experience” became the only data necessary to consider themselves sufficiently “leftist” or “socialist”. If you did not live an experience that was sufficiently sexually liberated, or traumatized, you were unwittingly an adversary of the revolution.
Liu ends her chapter with a case study of Emma Sulkowicz, a graduate student from Columbia University with a BA in Visual Arts who fulfilled her final degree requirements with a performance titled Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight. For the performance, Sulkowicz spent her senior year on the campus carrying the mattress she alleges a fellow student, Paul Nungesser, sexually assaulted her on. Her performance acted as a “protest” against the Columbia University administration’s decision to not expel Nungesser after an internal inquiry found him not responsible for the alleged assault. As evidence against the claims made against him, Nungesser provided friendly texts between the two in the weeks after the alleged attack (which Sulkowicz maintains doesn’t negate her account of events).
Sulkowicz’s (who’s the child of PMC Manhattan-based psychiatrists) work is the encapsulation of the objectification of trauma. Her publicizing something she had to endure in private was responding to our continuing craving for “enlightened” discourse on sex, sexuality, gender and gendered interactions (which are, from this perspective, inherently sexual). After graduating from Columbia, Sulkowicz continued her artistic work with Ceci n’est pas un viol (This is not a rape), a video restaging of her rape and a piece where she gets tied up by an S&M professional while wearing a white bikini. Much of her work continued the discourse about “fem bodies” and positioned it as a site of inherent sexuality. Two years later, however, Sulkowicz would be featured in a Cut article titled “Did Emma Sulkowicz Get Red Pilled?” where she admits her passionate liberal politics had simmered down and she’d begun an open-minded political journey, befriending many conservatives and libertarians along the way. The kicker? Her born again political journey began when a man she found “distasteful” super-liked her on Tinder. The man, whom she described as someone she’d never consider befriending in the past, was “very blond, law school, cut jawline, trapezoidal body figure, tweed suit kind of vibe, but something inside of me made me swipe right, I don’t know.”
The West has a relationship with sex completely unlike societies of the past. The deployment of sexuality has successfully linked our most base instincts and physical sensations to a range of political, social and epistemological considerations. It consistently occupies the mind of white nationalism, ever vigilant against the Black threat, devising ordinances and laws to protect from miscegenation. It also presents itself as the resistance to oppressive laws, begging subjects to confess the sins of their flesh once more. It demands equal parts shame and pride, and above all it demands attention. It has infiltrated every aspect of our lives so deeply, we consider it the essential part of “us”. A part of us that must be uncovered, a part that holds untapped truths. It’s this consideration of sexuality that makes it an ideal site for the deployment of surveillance and population control.
The PMC that has established a monopoly on sexual politics routinely use and abuse progressive discourse to mask the exploitative nature of neoliberal life, couching referendums on military invasion of Muslim countries with the language of “liberation” and “women’s freedom”. They prioritize images of Iranian and Afghani women removing their hijabs as paragons of moral virtue while demonizing their men as barbaric misogynistic rapists. They limit domestic politics to what means-tested policies can be spit out by think-tanks and research organizations funded by big business interests so long as the sovereign whose signature validates the law identifies as “queer”.
The fact that so many things were able to change in the sexual behavior of Western societies without any of the promises or political conditions predicted by Reich being realized is sufficient proof that this whole sexual “revolution,” this whole “anti repressive” struggle, represented nothing more, but nothing less-and its importance is undeniable-than a tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment of sexuality (The History of Sexuality, pg. 131).
Originally published at https://bbfendies.substack.com.
