Maybe I am a hopeless boring pragmatist bourgeois liberal -- I don't pretend to be anything else -- but I don't quite get your point here. I have a Domme friend who's writing a book -- the initial sketch was the post from 2004 or whenever it was that is in the archives, for which I suggested the subtitle "kinky sex for normal people." I guess you think this is a bad thing.
What would you leave out -- the "consensual play"? The "mentally competent adults"? You want kinksters to fulfill Charles' bleakest fantasies and physically and sexually assault the unconsenting or the mentally incompetent? I agree (along with that boring liberal Bentham) that pleasure is its own justification, but is there something wrong with sexual activity being intellectually interesting or community-promoting?
I don't, actually, think that _being kinky_ is its own point, it's sort of like people who like to take radical political positions just to annoy their parents. The point is to have fun in -- yes -- an ethical, mentally stimulating, and nonalienated (i.e., community-building) way -- not just to be weird and freak people out. That may be OK if you're 17 or 22, but Yoshie, we're well past that age, I'm sorry to report.
So I agree with your earlier thought: nonstandard sex is not per se politically radical. It's delusional to think you can change the world by doing it with leather and chains. What nonstandard sex can do is make _sex_ more interesting and maybe relations with partners deeper and stronger. If that's not enough, if that's just too bourgeois, well, too fucking bad. It's what you get unless you want to be a real sicko or an actual criminal. Or at least bad, an immature twenty-something.
On the other hand, if nonstandard sex _is_ radicalizing, which I doubt, the more widespread it is is, the more "normal" it is, the less people think of it as weird and strange but just as something you do, the better, because more people will be doing something radical and transformative.
Maybe you don't think it's fun unless other people think what you do is weird, edgy, strange, sick -- anything else is boring. Well, I am sure you can always find something to do that other people find sickening, just to keep yourself interested and different. There's a lot of that stuff on the net if you look for it.
Bear in mind, however, that if you end up committing acts of violence on the unconsenting or the mentally deficient you are likely to end up in prison, and you will certain deserve to, either side of the Revo -- and it's not clear to me that you would want to be the object of such "radical" attentions yourself -- or is your own consent too-too dull and tres bourgeois to count? Scarlett O'Hara found being raped exciting, but I don't necessarily think that she's the model of a modern revolutionary.
So, put me in with the dull old stick-in-the-mudsters who expect sexual activities of any sort to be consensual, adult, intelligent, and maybe even community building. Normal, in other words. You can be weird -- I'll even defend you if you get arrested or sued for doing sick things in a state where I'm licensed to practice. But don't expect me to join in your fun.
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/8/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Jan 8, 2007, at 12:12 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
> >
> > > My own experience is that leftists hate on kinky
> BDSM sex ALL the
> > > time, maybe even more than honkie america. I've
> gotten in so many
> > > arguments about this with radicals over the
> years. It's so
> > > strange. Why do so many leftos have mean things
> to say about
> > > BDSM? Can someone on this list make whatever
> argument there is to
> > > make, about BDSM being bad or fundamentally
> oppressive or
> > > whatever? I just can't imagine what
> intellectual content there
> > > could be to any such assertion.
> >
> > It's obvious, no? BDSM is violent and
> hierarchical. Even worse, it
> > eroticizes violence and hierarchy, even if in a
> scripted, theatrical
> > fashion. We're supposed to be gentle and
> egalitarian in our desires;
> > anything else is unauthorized and deeply suspect.
> Humans shouldn't
> > discharge their aggressive urges through play; we
> shouldn't have them
> > at all.
>
> The way leftists -- practitioners as well as
> supporters -- discuss and
> defend BDSM, though, it essentially reduces it to
> gentle, egalitarian
> desires that promote virtue within the limits of
> political liberalism:
> consensual play between mentally competent adults,
> good for
> intellectual enlightenment and community building.
> So, the paradox is
> that supposedly kinky sex, in discourse on the Left,
> becomes not so
> kinky after all. "Bad" becomes "good," which is to
> say, on the way to
> becoming boring. Such a defense suggests an anxiety
> that pleasure
> still isn't its own justification even for a
> harmless activity, a
> curiously un-hedonistic defense of hedonism, taming
> sex again.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
> ___________________________________
>
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>
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