David Davis XI, Part 1
As I was jerking off the other night, I thought about how Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair uses the word crisis in place of orgasm. In fact, I’m almost always thinking about Greene’s crisis as I approach my own little death. Considering where I have to go to get there, his polite but chilling euphemism is especially á propos. As Affair’s Maurice notes, “As long as one suffers one lives.”
What was not usual for this particular jerkoff session was that it occurred to me that Greene’s word—crisis—is an apt metaphor for how sexuality is viewed in our culture. A true sexual act, done to “completion,” as they say, is constituted by cis, heterosexual intercourse with vaginal penetration followed by male orgasm. No vaginal penetration? No cis dude nut? No sex! (That’s why we modify oral and anal sex the way we do, by the way. Even with straight people, they’re sex-lite). Any other sexual activity is not really or completely sex, which is how we can decide that the way that gay people or kinky people or people doing other kinds of intimacy are not really or completely having sex. It’s also how we can create a hierarchy of sexual violence by which to legislate, discipline, and punish (“oral rape,” for example, being a subset of “real” rape, until 2014 anyway), at the top of which are the “especially heinous” crimes. The sex I have with myself is not real sex. The sex I have with my girlfriend is not real sex. The sexy things I do with my friends is not real sex. Sometimes I wonder if, being genderqueer, I can even really have sex; if I can only enact and have enacted upon me sexual violence.
And funnily enough, the discreet Britishism of crisis—like mid-century America’s enceinte or today’s “LGBTQ,” used by straight people who are afraid to call us our true names—is perfectly suited for both the despairing horniness of post-World War II London and the sexuality of the here and now. Which isn’t to say that things here and now aren’t changing, or that some of us aren’t invested in that change, but that’s what the crisis is: the promise/threat of difference.
As the meaning of sex is destabilized, so is the meaning of sexual harm. And as most of us already lack the language to talk with nuance about both sexuality and sexual harm, we have learned that sometimes the only way to make ourselves heard about nonconsensual experiences of sexual discomfort, pressure, coercion, and/or violence is to conflate it with the worst violence that we can imagine. Overstating harm, as Sarah Schulman calls it (as DaemonumX helpfully reminded me) in her famously controversial Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, happens when people “inflate accusations of harm” to “avoid accountability,” as well as to get acknowledgement, protection, or “justice,” such as it is, in an environment where only crises are theoretically accorded concern. (During a week like this, I cannot fail to note that the power to inflate accusations of harm falls along lines of marginalization: those with more social power can martial their “privilege” to do so more easily and safely than those with less.)
Which means that, like everything else, sex—as act and action, as identity and identification, as a means of discipline and control and power—is and remains in crisis. Perhaps orgasm, as the heteronormative lynchpin of what we broadly understand sex to be, metonymizes that perspective. Which begs the question, for me, anyway, alone in bed at my mom’s house taking full advantage of the half-hour of privacy I have over the course of my 18-hour day: What shape would sex take if not crisis? And why is it that the kind of sex that I enjoy, which is identical to the current norm in tone if not in substance, is nevertheless taboo?
I’ve written a lot about fantasy here on DAVID, which I like to think of, as Fuck Theory calls it, “the middle ground between desire and reality.” Sex as crisis is as much a fantasy as sex as, well, anything else. So what does that crisis tell us? What can we learn from this version of pleasure?
When we recognize that the predominant construction of sex as we know it is mutable, we can start asking ourselves what our version of sex is, what it allows and what it forecloses on. We realize that sex, as we have been made to know it, allows almost no room for the erotic, as recent discourses—pinkwashing, moral panics, octopus-fucking—as well as broader narratives have made clear. But when we can define our sex, we can define our eros, too, and see where these two things overlap, intertwine, even fuck. Because while what makes orgasm fun is its timelessness, it is sadly not eternal; time returns when it is done and over with, and then we must keep living.
What happens after the affair? What happens after the crisis?
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.