> I dont' think he used the words "objective standards." In his own day,
> the notion of viewing a woman as a sexual subject (rather than an
> object) was pretty radical. I assume he was interested in
> non-exploitative, reciprocal relations (even sexual relations) because
> he was interested in ending exploitation and because he was interested
> in freedom in a non trivial way.
>
> I have no desire to interfere in any consensual sexual act between
> grownups. In my own experience I found S/M to be a crashing bore, but
> that's only insofar as I find any form of scripted sex boring.
It's an implication of the ontological claim that values are objective so that it's possible for reason to discover ethical truths, i.e. to answer the question what relations, including what sexual relations, would be ideal. An additional claim is that the best feeling (in a wholly positive sense) would be associated with realizing the ideal so that e.g. Othello would have been capable of more satisfying sex if he'd been Benedick, i.e. if he'd been closer to an actualized species-being able to enter into relations of mutual recognition. (I don't think, by the may, that these claims are "modern." The modern view is that reason can only be the "slave" of the passions.)
It's not contradicted by the fact of variation in actual sexual desires or by the fact that many forms of sexual pleasure don't involve or require relations of mutual recognition.
It should be possible to test these claims empirically if by this we mean through experience treated phenomenologically (I would include in this the kind of exploration of sexual desire characteristic of psychoanalysis). At the moment, however, we can try out what is claimed would be the best sex only in imagination since it's not part of anyone's real potentiality.
By a desire for violently transgressive sex I didn't mean a desire for consensual sado-masochism (which, in any event, is only mildly transgressive e.g. it's consensual and, as Joanna says, "scripted"). The transgressiveness I had in mind includes transgression of the requirement for consent, i.e. to satisfy the desire the sex must be non-consensual. Moreover, I wasn't attributing to Marx a moralistic claim about this or the other kinds of sexual desire I listed. I was only attributing to him the claim that the sexual feeling obtainable from sex involving mutual recognition would be better than the sexual feeling obtainable from these other kinds.
Ted