Porn - Running with way too blunt scissors and still hurting yourself

I was sending  the link to this text to the people masturbating on www.manroulette.com with the text "but then again, you don't have to do it here". The results were very interesting. 

Porn is no less important than the president/PM

Porn is politically relevant. Porn is an ideological state apparatus. I guess there are zero males and not all that many females whose sexuality hasn't substaintailly been influenced by porn. And given that sexuality is perceived as the ultimate truth of the individual in the advanced capitalism ("most intimate", "defining all we actually desire (to possess)"), we have to take porn seriously.

By and large, since in capitalism your masturabtion is your (most?) private thing, and there is no serious political discussion of it possible, it's no wonder that porn can get away being  the bastion of the phallocentric, dehumanising, non-fluffy discourse, which I am trying to defy here. But before you decide I am just vandalising your daily bread without a clear project, let me focus on one aspect which seems crucial to me - it is crucially dehumanising to the masturbator as well.


Self-dehumanisation

The obvious part, common to all phallocentric sex, is that you are reducing yourself to the poor_and_needy_being_which_just_needs_one_thing, suspending all your creativity and uniqueness for the moment. This, I believe, amounts to training ourselves in a dangerous skill - taking a break from accountability, we learn how to suspend our humanity, how to objectivise the other, a skill which comes in handy when it comes to Africa, or Afganistan, or beating someone to death.

But there is more. We do wrong to our "body" as well. Watching porn typically means closing down our body's affectability down, reducing one's senses to vision and one's body to the genitals. We are less_than_human to our "regular" selves. Consequently, we are missing the whole world of sensations, the whole life (in the sense of zoe) we are high functionaries of.

Or let me put it bluntly: sustainably fluffy people have better sex and better masturbation.


Every time you come/cum for a wrong reason

Every time you come/cum for a wrong reason, you are saying no to the life in you. (The one which doesn't answer to your name, the one you are time-sharing, as Rosi Braidotti would put it.)

But don't you worry, life/zoe will ask you the same question many more times and you will always have the chance to say yes. And  don't you worry about all the toilet paper you wasted in front of your computer, ethical responsability is a feature of the very moment when the decision is being taken and there is no god, no community, no entity whatsoever that can judge you for wasting the life in you in this way. After things have happened, that decision becomes part of the past you cannot change, but you can learn from.


So what do you do when you do yourself?

I am not really sure, I believe in ultimalty individual sexualities. I tend to think of the natural fecundity of things and the natural affectability of all people. I guess you are on your own there. And there is exactly where you should be on your own.

Is romantic love dehumanising?

This is the summary of a long discussion I have had with a number of people on a number of places.

My question:

Dehumanisation is usually conceived of as considering others as less_than_human. For instance, the collateral victims of the war in Iraq and women as represented in most porn production are often dehumanised, perceived as living lives which are less worthy than ours. These subjects are then seen as the ones who lack a life story worth telling.

This is crucially different from the temporary instrumentalisation which characterises our everyday social traffic - the checkout girl is only a checkout girl for me, but in this case I can be only a customer for her as well. So, I do not have to forget that "every human being, whatever her qualities, has her unjudgable splendor in a personal identity that is irrefutably her story" (Adriana Cavarero), I can just "suspend" this knowledge.

The question I would like to pose here is whether romantic love (as scripted in the popular culture, by which we are all influenced) is dehumanising. Does it amount to making others more_than_human? Does that also imply turning our head away from what we know from day 1 and what constitutes us as humans? Does the idea of "match made in heaven" actually imply depriving others of their story and rereading this story from our own perspective and for our purposes? Does the discourse of ultimate sense-giving through love (and making love qualitatively different from everything else in the universe of human interaction) give rise to an anxiety humans are not able to handle? Finally, don't we dehumanise ourselves by entering such an equation?

My answer (preceded by a huge quote from Secomb):


". . . he . . . who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing . . .
(Sappho: fragment 31)


This may speak perhaps of an intertwining of jealousy with love or it may, as Anne Carson suggests, indicate the necessary triangulation of love (Carson 1986: 12–17). This is not just the re-enactment of the conventional love triangle but also the articulation of the three components necessary for love. If love is lack, as Diotima’s account of Eros as the lacking child of Poverty and Plenty suggests, there needs to be not only lover and beloved but also that which comes between. Love desires what it lacks and its fulfilment would quench the passion of love. Love, thus, requires an obstacle that defers or displaces, preserving the lack and ensuring the preservation of desire. The beloved’s companion is not simply a rival to be overcome but the principle of obstruction that keeps love alive."
(Linnell Secomb, "Philosophy and Love - From Plato to Popular Culture")

Reading Secomb I grew aware of the enormous number of paralels between the transcendental philosophy and transcendental (romantic) love. They both essentially try to overcome life and access the higher, the eternal and the transcendent. Romantic love is therefore life-denying, in that it requires one to overcome mortality (by lasting forever), corporeality (by denying presence of attraction to others) and contingency (by the meant-to-be narrative). In sum, if the norm of romantic love is dehumanising, this is because it recruits one for life-denying goals.
As usually, it costs one much creativity to come up with a sustainable counterpart of this life-denying institute, but that is the only way out I can imagine.

Why gay marriage is nonsense

Actually, gay marriage is a contradiction in terms.
The whole idea of marriage has to do with a union of two (complex and unique) human beings who decide to make their ties socially/politically relevant.
The whole idea of being "gay" has to do with an abstract and general preference for a certain type of interaction with a certain type of human genitalia (an identity I tend to see as unnecessary and molar, but that's not crucial here).
Now predicating something like "gayness" on marriage clearly leads to a paradox - your choice for one person to "love officially" is orthogonal to what you generally like to do/see/have/enter. What's more, as the history of love has tought us, it is possible (and it is even enormously fluffy) to love someone in spite of their attributes, against our general preference, to go for the who in spite of the what.
It that sense, I am against gay marriage as a goal on the social agenda. Of course, I am for opening the institute of marriage for every group of consenting humans, regardless of gender or anything else. But ranting about gay marriage has nothing to do with opening, it has to do with closing, entrenching and pigeonholing. And if this ranting goes on long enough, the society will eventually get a mojoritarian and molar formation ("community") which will code and prescribe what gay marriage is - a coding which will necessarily be more detailed than that for the "other", "heterosexual" marriage. This molar formation exists in the Netherlands already (Rosi Braidotti) and I can imagine other European societies with emancipatory programmes for homosexuals will develop their own very soon.
What is to be done then? I think it's all about reframing. You could say I'm asking you to use an unnecessary complicated formulation, because if you are fighting for/supporting "opening of the institute of marriage for every group of consenting humans" in the world we live in, you are basically talking about "gays" and "lesbians", ergo you are fighting for/supporting "gay marriage".
Well, I would like to claim that there is a crucial difference: if you are for "gay marriage", you are supporting a "gays'" cause, you are doing something for the "the gays", you are hoping "the gays" will get there and then you will be happy for "them". In other words, in case you don't read my quotation marks, I think you then participate in building another molar formation.
On the other hand, if you are fighting for/supporting "the opening of the institution of marriage", you are fighting for/supporting a cause which belongs to all of us who think that the gender of their spouses should not be of interest to the state, you are fighting for a society in which there is a public and political recognition of the simple fact that we have no right to constrain consenting adults of inhabiting the institute of marriage. To be sure, I am not pleading for a genderless society here and I am not asking people to pretend that the gender of their spouses is irrelevant to them. I am just asking for it to be irrelevant in front of the authorities. It is like being a teacher or a checkout person - of course I have noticed that my first class teacher was a man and that the checkout girl today was a girl, but I am glad it could have been the other way around as well. The state should be blind/indifferent when it comes to marriage just as it (hopefully) was when that teacher and that checkout girl were being hired.

A friend, a famous author and very many kitchen knives

This is not a story, since there is only one event in it and even that one is hypothetical. In case you aren’t really paying attention, I will warn you when the event hypothetically occurs.

But still, meet my two characters – A Friend (AF) and a Famous Author (FA). I will make them both male, although they are based on very many females as well. But then again, who isn't?

I know you can’t summarise a person, so I won’t. I shall tell you what AF and FA believe to be their ultimate personal truths, what they believe to be in the summaries preceding their records in the omniscient cosmic computer.

AF is young and good looking. AF is generally fluffy and generally hoping to be met, snatched away and held tight the rest of his earthly existence. AF deserves to experience real love. AF would also expect a number of facts concerning his penis and his sexual fantasies to be in that record.

FA is rich and famous. FA is generally considered attractive and generally hoping to meet someone whom he will consider interesting and inspiring enough to be able to say he is happy that that person is alive. FA is also proficient at pretending that he’s happy that people are alive. AF would also expect a number of facts concerning his penis and his sexual experiences to be in that record.

Now I have to interrupt the “story” in order (1) to add something important that the omniscient computer, AF, FA, you and me know, but no one ever puts in their expected record and (2,3) to tell you why I am mentioning AF and FA together.

(1) Due to a development of ideas which has to do with an Athenian homosexual gang, a hippie from Judea and a doctor from Vienna, both AF and FA believe that having sexual desire is “naughty”. Due to the fact that the way the hippie from Judea influences most of us has changed considerably in the last period, neither AF nor FA believes that it is “naughty” with respect to some transcendental moral authority, they simply believe that their desire is essentially violent to others and therefore unethical/nasty.

(2) Possibly somehow due to (1), both AF and FA have the exactly same gaze in most of their interaction with strangers (and that keeps striking me). I have no idea whether they would notice that if they were to meet (that was your hypothetical event!), but they would look at each other in exactly same way. It is the you-don’t-want-to-know-what-I-am-thinking-right-now-in-my-naughty-nasty-porn-cinema-head gaze, the you-have-no-idea-what-my-inner-animal-has-up-its-sleeve gaze, the there-is-a-smoky-underground-casino-and-an-old-prostitute-saying-hi-through-this-gaze-gaze. Some people would call it flirty, I wouldn’t.

(3) Both AF and FA spoke to me recently and both of them claimed they had learned so much from talking to me, whereas I had learned so little from them. This is evidence that nothing is less true.

Oh, the knives. Well, you know, both AF and FA carry their desire as people carry daggers, only or primarily intended to restrict the freedom/life of others. I deeply believe that desire is a kitchen knife - something entirely indispensable for so many functions, a thing that, if used creatively, can help one make so many beautiful things/futures for oneself and others. Of course you can stab people with a kitchen knife, but you can also stab people with a pencil. You can stab people with anything if there is enough talking about stabbing.

The gaze shared by AF and FA is a form of permanent talking about stabbing. I guess there has been enough effort to hide/bury all the daggers. I am hereby proposing trying to turn them back into what they really are – kitchen knives.