In the West, at least, everyone has become massively aware
of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations.
However, we should bear in mind also the (no less
significant) fact that millions of people on a daily basis flirt and play the
game of seduction, with the clear aim of finding a partner for making love. The
result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an
active role in this game.
When women dress provocatively to attract the male gaze or
when they “objectify” themselves to seduce them, they don’t do it
offering themselves as passive objects: instead they are the active agents of
their own “objectification,” manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including
reserving the full right to step out of the game at any moment even if, to the
male gaze, this appears in contradiction with previous “signals.”
This freedom women enjoy bothers all kinds of
fundamentalists, from Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and
playing with bananas and other fruit which resembles the penis to our own
ordinary male chauvinist who explodes in violence against a woman who
first “provokes” him and then rejects his advances.
Female sexual liberation is not just a puritan withdrawal
from being “objectivized” (as a sexual object for men) but the right
to actively play with self-objectivization, offering herself and withdrawing at
will. But will it be still possible to proclaim these simple facts, or will the
politically-correct pressure compel us to accompany all these games with some
formal-legal proclamation (of consensuality, etc.)?
New thinking
A recent, politically-correct idea is the so-called “Consent
Conscious Kit,” currently on sale in the US: a small bag with a condom, a
pen, some breath mints, and a simple contract stating that both participants
freely consent to a shared sexual act. The suggestion is that a couple ready to
have sex either takes a photo holding in their hands the contract, or that they
both date and sign it.
Yet, although the “Consent Conscious Kit” addresses
a very real problem, it does it in a way which is not only silly but directly
counter-productive – and why is that?
The underlying idea is how a sex act, if it to be cleansed
of any suspicion of coercion, has to be declared, in advance, as a freely-made
conscious decision of both participants – to put it in Lacanian terms, it has
to be registered by the big Other, and inscribed into the symbolic order.
As such, the “Consent Conscious Kit” is just an
extreme expression of an attitude that grows all around the US – for example,
the state of California passed a law requiring all colleges that accept state
funding to adopt policies requiring their students to obtain affirmative
consent — which it defines as “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary
agreement to engage in sexual activity” that is “ongoing” and
not given when too drunk, before engaging in sexual activity, or else risk
punishment for sexual assault.
Bigger picture
“Affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” – by
whom? The first thing to do here is to mobilize the Freudian triad of Ego,
Superego, and Id (in a simplified version: my conscious self-awareness, the
agency of moral responsibility enforcing norms on me, and my deepest
half-disavowed passions).
What if there is a conflict between the three? If, under
the pressure of the Superego, my Ego say NO, but my Id resists and clings to
the denied desire? Or (a much more interesting case) the opposite: I say YES to
the sexual invitation, surrendering to my Id passion, but in the midst of
performing the act, my Superego triggers an unbearable guilt feeling?
Thus, to bring things to the absurd, should the contract be
signed by the Ego, Superego, and Id of each party, so that it is valid only if
all three say YES? Plus, what if the male partner also uses his contractual
right to step back and cancel the agreement at any moment in the sexual
activity? Imagine that, after obtaining the woman’s consent, when the
prospective lovers find themselves naked in bed, some tiny bodily detail (an
unpleasant sound like a vulgar belching) dispels the erotic charm and makes the
man withdraw? Is this not in itself an extreme humiliation for the woman?
The ideology that sustains this promotion of “sexual
respect” deserves a closer look. The basic formula is: “Yes means
yes!” – it has to be an explicit yes, not just the absence of a no. “No
no” does not automatically amount to a “yes”: because if a woman who is
being seduced does not actively resist it, this still leaves the space open for
different forms of coercion.
Mood killer
Here, however, problems multiply: what if a woman
passionately desires it but is too embarrassed to openly declare it? What if,
for both partners, ironically playing coercion is part of the erotic game? And
a yes to what, precisely, to what types of sexual activity, is a declared yes?
Should then the contract form be more detailed, so that the principal consent
is specified: a yes to vaginal but not anal intercourse, a yes to fellatio but not
swallowing the sperm, a yes to light spanking but not harsh blows, etc.etc.
One can easily imagine a long bureaucratic negotiation,
which can kill all desire for the act, but it can also get libidinally invested
on its own. These problems are far from secondary, they concern the very core
of erotic interplay from which one cannot withdraw into a neutral position and
declare one's readiness (or unreadiness) to do it: every such act is part of
the interplay and either de-eroticizes the situation or gets eroticized on its
own.
The “yes means yes’ sexual rule is an exemplary
case of the narcissistic notion of subjectivity that predominates today. A
subject is experienced as something vulnerable, something that has to be
protected by a complex set of rules, warned in advance about all possible
intrusions that may disturb him/her.
Remember how, upon its release, ET was prohibited in
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark: because it’s non-sympathetic portrayal of adults
was considered dangerous for relations between children and their parents. (An
ingenious detail confirms this accusation: in the first 10 minutes of the film,
all adults are seen only below their belts, like the adults in cartoons who
threaten Tom and Jerry…)
From today’s perspective, we can see this prohibition as an
early sign of the politically-correct obsession with protecting individuals
from any experience that may hurt them in any way. And the list can go on
indefinitely – recall the proposal to digitally delete smoking from Hollywood
classics…
Yes, sex is traversed by power games, violent obscenities,
etc., but the difficult thing to admit is that it’s inherent to it. Some
perspicuous observers have already noticed how the only form of sexual relation
that fully meets the politically correct criteria would have been a contract
drawn between sadomasochist partners.
Thus, the rise of Political Correctness and the rise of
violence are two sides of the same coin: insofar as the basic premise of
Political Correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual
consent. And the French linguist Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how
the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which
stipulate extreme forms of sadomasochist sex (treating a person like a dog on a
collar, slave trading, torture, up to consented killing).
In such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of
the contract negates itself: and slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of
freedom. It is as if Jacques Lacan’s motif “Kant with Sade” (Marquis
de Sade’s brutal hedonism as the truth of Kant’s rigorous ethics) becomes
reality in an unexpected way. But, before we dismiss this motif as just a
provocative paradox, we should reflect upon how this paradox is at work in our
social reality itself.
Slavoj Žižek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior
researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of
Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and
international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the
University of London.
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