[lbo-talk] Taming Sex Again (was Re: Privelege)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 1/9/07, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> People aren't into BDSM because it is "bad" although being "bad" can be
> part of the roleplaying.
>
> Would it be a bad thing if BDSM and other kinky stuff became less kinky
> and transgressive? I don't see anything bad about sexual practices
> becoming more normalized if that ends the hostility, arrogance,
> persecution and worse perpetrated against people into kink.

People who enjoy BDSM without philosophizing about it too much might
enjoy it even if President Bush himself extolled its virtue and
established the National Day of BDSM, like the National Day of Prayer.

 :->

Besides, mastery and submission, at the heart of BDSM, is also at the
heart of religion, sports, art, and other perfectly normalized
activities that billions find extremely pleasurable, so BDSM might
still yield the same quantity of pleasure after normalization.

But people who take philosophical interest in BDSM (whether or not
they actually practice it), as many LBO-talk subscribers appear to do,
do so in large part because it is considered "transgressive."  For
them, normalization might mean the diminution if not end of pleasure.
After all, it's a head game.

More to the point, if your defense of BDSM rests on the idea that
sexual desire isn't necessarily gentle, egalitarian, and virtuous, as
Doug puts it, it is ironic that the rhetoric of its defense is
essentially one of gentle, virtuous egalitarianism.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>