David Davis XI, Part 3
On the erotic
The other day I opened the fridge and found a tupperware of teriyaki tofu I had forgotten about.
Leaning over the counter, I ate the tofu with my fingers while I listened to my sister scream in her room. “brother says i can’t go outside brother is a bad brother brother said the air is not good that’s not very nice of him!” She didn’t understand that I wanted to protect her lungs. There were pieces of tamari-fattened, oil-browned garlic in the sauce. “Last Christmas” by George Michael came on shuffle. “i’ll never talk to brother again he is not a nice brother brother can’t tell me what to do!”
The track’s careful whisper feels extra angelic when it’s unexpected. Though the AQI was in the “unhealthy” range, the sun was almost the right color, and through the window over the sink I could see that the sky was blue. I was still edgy from a long morning, but I was also feeling fairly strong and even a little youthful. I started laughing, because the tofu tasted good and because George is dead. It seemed silly to be upset by noise. I licked my fingers.
What was an erotic thing you did today? I started asking myself this question recently, and the answer is often both disappointing and invigorating in its banality. Most of us use the word erotic to describe a genre of naughty book or strain of cheesy dramatic thriller. Otherwise, it doesn’t make it into most peoples’ lexica very much, whereas sex is talked about (and not talked about) constantly. Sex takes up space. The erotic—too voluptuous, too supernatural, too capacious, as McKenzie Wark says, to easily be taken in earnest—does not.
As I wrote in the first installment of this entry, sex, as we have been made to know it, allows almost no room for the erotic. I suggested that if we can define our sex, as many of us have learned to do outside of normative conceptions of what that can mean, we can find our way to eros, too (as well as better understand interplay between the two of them). But what is the erotic?
I don’t have the space, time, or will to truly unpack it—this is a newsletter, not a book👀—but since Audre Lorde’s complex engagement with BDSM has been on my mind for more or less the past ten years, I thought I’d do a little digging around there. While it would be easier, and probably more fun, to go through her official interview about BDSM and rebut her, claim by claim, I think a more substantial access point is her famous essay on the erotic.
Lorde describes the erotic as a kind of natural power that women are forced by patriarchy to suppress. The superficially erotic—that which is seen as sexual, sexualized—has been unfairly maligned as a sign of “female inferiority.”
“It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong,” Lorde explains. The erotic may be a power misappropriated for the service of men through women’s subservience, but for the woman who does not “fear its revelation,” it can be a “replenishing, provocative force.”
Unfortunately, writes Lorde, most women don’t understand their true erotic power because it has been both misidentified and reduced to mere “sensation,” deprived of its natural depth and richness. Instead, we confuse it with what Lorde calls the “pornographic,” a broader epithet which, I’m gonna assume, contains the common contemporary definition of the word (i.e., images and movies, or content, as we’re calling it these days, of people explicitly fucking). “But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling,” writes Lorde.
Interestingly, the way Lorde describes the erotic reminds me of Fucktheory’s working definition of fantasy, which I’ve referred to before. For Lorde, the erotic is “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.” For FT, fantasy is “a middle ground between desire and reality and hence a terrain for the unfolding of ethical and metaphysical questions.” Both descriptions seem to summon and yet the subvert body/mind dichotomies, multiplying or layercaking senses of self and consciousness.
If they’re not being twisted to suit the purposes of white supremacist capitalism, the powers of the erotic and fantasy are both dismissed as obscenity, to our detriment, of course. “The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need…is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment,” says Lorde. “Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love.”
So for Lorde, the erotic is a life-force, often confused with the “merely” or debased sexual; it is essential, a concept she traces back to its Greek origin—“personifying creative power and harmony.” This life-force is a way of self-knowledge, which makes it dangerous to the status quo, and which is why, Lorde says, it is slandered and relegated to the bedroom.
Lorde sees the erotic and the pornographic in opposition to each other—“two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual”—as a distraction from truth, which is a sexuality integrated into the erotic. I don’t fully disagree with this positioning, which highlights our contemporary experience of the sexual as crisis, key to which has been its commodification. But I wonder if Lorde, whose opinions on BDSM seem to stem from ignorance of the scene (not atypical for someone who wasn’t a leatherwoman. As my friend S says, it either gets you wet or it doesn’t.), replicates here that false belief from earlier—that “only by the suppression of the [sexual] within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong”—with her conception of the “pornographic.”
I’d suggest that what Lorde calls pornographic is informed by the same kind of whorephobia—a respectability politics grounded in transmisogyny, racism, classism, ableism, etc.—from which she seeks to disentangle the true erotic. I think that there is plenty of pornography with “true feeling,” even by Lorde’s standards, though I would also question why any action or depiction of sexuality needs to have “feeling” to be justifiable, forgivable, or considered to be something other than patriarchal propaganda. I recognize and respect her request that leatherpeople, including leatherdykes, interrogate our desires and actions, and I think that for the most part we do, which is why we are constantly having intracommunity conversations about stuff like ageplay, raceplay, Nazi and cop uniforms, public sex, etc. I deeply and vehemently disagree with her claim that sadomasochism is institutionalized. Non-consensual sadomasochism is institutionalized; interpersonal consent practices of any kind are not only not institutionalized, but are not even normalized among people in general—like have you ever wondered why the people who are most familiar with and versed in consent practices are the criminalized (and overlapping) subcultures of sex workers and leatherfolk? And as Rubin points out in Thinking Sex, the same line of thinking that medicalizes, pathologizes, and criminalizes homosexuality casts its Sauron-eye on sadists, masochists, and gender-deviants. Why is Lorde’s lesbianism safer than mine?
Lorde was wrong about BDSM, but I think I disagree with her condemnation least out of any other 2nd-wave “feminists,” if that makes sense. This may sound like a copout, but it’s because I think if she had survived her cancer (I highly recommend her The Cancer Journals, especially for those with disabilities and/or chronic illness), she would have eventually come around. I don’t know if that’s disrespectful, and as a trans person aware of the dangers of posthumous revisionism, perhaps risky, but that’s my suspicion. I see Lorde’s thinking on BDSM as being shaped by a lack of information about my erotic history which, whether she would have liked it or not, includes hers; I can’t think of another way to account for her careful, contemplative genius failing to see that liberation should include bad gays, too.
So. We’ve established that sex is in crisis and that the erotic does not exist. This certainly rings true for me personally: My own sexuality had to be in crisis for me to begin exploring the erotic with SM, and I had to explore the erotic in order to understand what sex, aside from SM, means and does for me.
At the beginning of this short series, I mentioned the octopus-fucking controversy from a few weeks back, which started when Sophie Lewis did a funny, whimsical thread about a documentary chronicling a man and his octopus. In the ensuing Twitter pile-on, Lewis was accused of, among other things, “promoting” bestiality for pondering the erotic charge of a guy who is obsessed with a gloopy sea critter.
Following that pile-on, Grace Lavery—who defended Lewis on Twitter—published a newsletter sharing her thoughts about the incident (she had been interviewed by a journalist, but the interview never went live), queer theory, and the erotic potential of octopus friendship. As I’ve come to expect from her Substack, her take is thought-provoking and funny (when not over my head; I am not an academic). Since then, I’ve been thinking about something she said about the heteronormative resistance to the integrated erotic: “Str8 thought, recoiling against the erotic drive, attempts to split desire into different kinds; it understands queerness as a kind of desire rather than as a coalitional politics founded on the fact of desire as a prohibited social condition.”
It is the project, or at least the hope, that one day we’ll no longer undercut our own coalitional politics by following suit in the str8 segmentation of desires—that we’ll refrain from calling the cops on queers who fuck in public, or at least hit the brakes on calling another queer an octopus fucker for having a public conversation about the erotic. The thing about crises is that, from inside, they seem eternal. It’s only when you can step away from the panic they cause that you can see their limitations, their beginning, shape, and potential conclusion. So I ask again, what happens after the affair? What happens after the crisis?
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
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