Glueboot

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Sex & Glamasochism

I find myself disagreeing with k-punk's post on sex/glamasochism for a number of reasons so I thought that I would write something about it as it is interesting and fraught with a number of questions/problems that I feel need to be thought about.

The first thing is the quote from Infinite Thought that 'sex is boring' (thought I don't think this is meant to be taken entirely literally on N.'s part). Sex is not boring' I can say that with absolute certainty (one of the few things that I am certain about). Sex can be boring, especially teenage fumbling that never knows quite what goes where, embarrassed giggles and the occasional painful penetration. But age definitely lends an amount of experience and sex becomes far more interesting and pleasurable. I am loath to use the word sex, I find it an incredibly banal word, 'making love' makes it sound like something sweet (which it isn't either)... I prefer fucking... it's a good word, it has connotations of passion and violence. Anyway, sex/fucking/whatever, does not necessarily have to include the actual act of penetration, there are a lot of sexual acts and there's few that I find boring. I find it hard to find intense experiences of pleasure boring. If someone were to say ask me what I thought of a wonderful meal I wouldn't say 'that was boring,' I would say, 'that was lush, I enjoyed it... give me more please ,' the same goes for sex.

So, first point out of the way. Sex is not boring and just because someone, anyone writes that it is doesn't mean that the physical act is. However, discourse on sex is boring and this is perhaps where the tension arises. Discourse on Eroticism is incredibly interesting (who doesn't enjoy reading Bataille, Masoch or Deleuze's 'Coldness and Cruelty?') The two need to be separated and yet one often implicates the other. Teenage fumblings are not erotic' they are experimentation, curiousity' something that needs to be developed. Sex is not necessarily erotic, and yet it can be erotic; that depends on what one finds erotic. To say that all people find the same things erotic is a gross exaggeration. This was quite amusingly demonstrated to me once by a lecturer who was giving a class on eroticism and who had built it up by saying that it was going to be incredibly exciting. When we walked into the classroom he had an ohp of a woman in a snorkel and mask on the wall. 'What is this?' We exclaimed, 'this is not exciting, this is definitely not sexual.' But for certain people it would be incredibly erotic, it would be their fetish, something that banal and seemingly boring can arouse intense erotic feelings in a person. The erotic can be found anywhere; feet, snorkels, the female form, a certain smell or taste but for a lot of people an erotic moment is found in the build up, or the act of sex. Perhaps the sexual act is as banal as the snorkel and mask (just as the snorkel and mask don't need discourse, neither does the sexual act) but the erotic moment that is possible in relation to that act is interesting, and can be written about.

Okay... where am I now? Sex is not boring, it is an intensely pleasurable experience that we should be allowed to enjoy; discourse on sex is boring; discourse on eroticism is interesting. Onto 'glamasochism,' I have some serious problems with this idea, I'll try to write something about it first of all in relation to Masoch and to Deleuze's 'Coldness and Cruelty' (though I haven't finished it and a lusty wench has my copy so I'm unable to quote) and then what I think about it all.

The valorisation / fetishization of the female form has a number of problems. Of course I am a great advocate of women using their bodies for whatever they wish ('it is my body, if I want to sell it it's my own business') but this is entirely different from allowing a cult of the female form to come about. I find in Masoch that it is not Severin but Wanda who becomes more trapped by the confines of their contract. Severin projects a vision of the perfect female onto her and it is up to her to live up to it, to push herself into a creation that just is not reasonable for any woman. She must be Venus in Furs because it was what he wants her to be, he is the instructor, the manipulator, the sculptor of a living woman into the statue that he sees in the garden. Wanda becomes his tool in the pursuit of his idealist fantasy. As Deleuze points out (correct me if I'm wrong as it's been a while since I've read it), masochism is about suspension. Therefore it was Wanda who becomes suspended by Severin, unable to become-other and it is Severin who is the true Master of the relationship, despite his crying about being her eternal slave. And Wanda, as Wanda, can never live up to his ideal because it is his ideal, not hers. It is not surprising that she eventually leaves for someone else for who can ever live up to someone else's ideal? Especially when it remains unchanging and stifling.

The problem with 'glamasochism' then is that it places an ideal onto the female which really is not there. I am happy enough for men to look at women, I agree that the female form can be beautiful, but to look at women as this masochistic ideal places them within a contract that cannot be conformed to and which can eventually create intense neuroses by creating an unrealistic image of woman. As Mark says, The profound and inherent perversity of glamasochism, by contrast, lies in its departure from sexuality in the direction of a wholly artificialized or synthetic eroticism . And that is exactly the problem with it. It as an artificial ideal of woman that we cannot, nor do we want to, live up to. It is a rare woman who would want to be Venus in Furs, to fit into that category, but if we propound this image, this idealized female, we will create as many problems for the woman who can not be Venus as for the man who feels incomplete because he does not have enough sex. And when it comes down to it, the woman who is placed upon that pedestal and idealised will eventually fall because every person is flawed and no one can ever live up to another's ideal (as Wanda proved). Fine, has your fantasies about women but do not expect any woman to live up to them because in the end they are only fantasies. We aren't really erogenous zones, or zones of intensities or anything else like that. We are people who are as flawed as men, with as many issues and problems and we don't need any more by being told that we are something which we really are not.

It seems that all glamasochism does is exchange the neuroses that are generated in men and attempts to create new ones for woman. This is obviously not the intention but that is what would happen because I, nor any other female, can not be that woman . What is needed instead is an acceptance that sex is not everything, that it does not shape our lives and that we cannot place are own unrealistic ideals upon other people. This is difficult within a capitalist society which places so much emphasis upon sex and image and even if we do do it, if we attempt to live outside the enforced body image and what it means to be a sexual being, it does not mean that we have to completely damn sex, discount it as boring because 'I,' the rational entity, do not need it. If you find sex boring, fine. But Foucault can write about it in a book, or anyone else for that matter, and that does not mean that it is true (what does sex have to do with truth anyway?)

posted at 5:20 pm by Siobhan