Feminists want to liberate the
female body from the stigmata of patriarchy: The vulva is also to be
reconquered. The methods for this liberation struggle are unsexy on
several levels.
Slavoj Žižek14.3.2019, 05:30
clock
The fight against genuine (and
alleged) sexism has long been at a standstill. Feminists meanwhile demand
that we should stop fetishizing the female breast. Ironically she! Instead,
one should consider the breast as a normal part of the female body. For
this fight of liberated nipples, women in larger cities even take part in
protest marches. The goal here is obviously the Ent-Erotisierung, yes the
re-normalization of the female body.
If we continue this logic of
thinking, we come to a new demand: The sexual object is to be demystified in
itself. This can be seen on the books of Laura Dodsworth: After the
photographer had published two works with portraits of penises and breasts, she
photographed now in her new book 100 Vulvas. "The vulva is often
associated with sexual activity," says Dodsworth, "and we've talked
about so many areas that are rather unsexy: menstrual cycles, menopause,
infertility, miscarriages, abortions, pregnancy, birth, cancer."
The mysterious object
Soon "Vagina: A
Re-education" will be published, a book by British author Lynn
Enrights. Liv Strömquist's bestselling "Fruit of Knowledge"
(subtitle: "Vulva vs. Patriarchy and with stabs at Freud") deals with
the vulva and menstruation. There is a British musical called
"Vulvarine". Live events in which the body is recaptured are
enjoying great popularity, from "body-positivity" courses in life
drawing to "pussy exploration workshops".
Is this really a
progress? If so, then we should consistently finish this idea and also
demystify and defecate excrement. Some of us may still remember the scene
from Buñuel's "Le fantôme de la liberté", in which the functions of
eating and leaving are reversed: people sit around a table in their toilets,
conversing nicely and eating something They ask quietly and shame the
housekeeper: "Where is the dining room?"
The argument behind this
phenomenon is clear: The male fetishization of the vagina as the ultimate
mysterious object of (male) desire must be overcome. Instead, the vulva
for women is to be reconquered, in all the complexity that is free from sexist
myths.
Banal needs
What's wrong with
that? Let's go back to Buñuel: There are a number of films dealing with
the same motive, in Buñuel's own words: "the inexplicable impossibility of
satisfying a simple need". For example, in "L'Age d'or" a
couple wants to have sex, which is repeatedly prevented by nonsensical
accidents; In "Ensayo de un crimen" the hero wants to commit a
murder, but all attempts fail; in "El ángel exterminador" a
group of young rich people fails to break the threshold after a party to leave
the house; Finally, in Cet obscur objet du désir, the paradoxical behavior
of a woman is shown, who, through various tricks, repeatedly shifts the joyous
reunion with her old love.
What is common to all these
films? It is impossible to carry out a simple everyday action when the
action occupies the impossible place of the (exalted) "thing" and
thus begins to embody the sublime object of desire. But as soon as the
object occupies the forbidden, empty space of the other, a whole heap of
insurmountable hurdles arises. The thing remains unattainable.
Loss of eroticism
Here we should recall Jacques
Lacan's definition of sublimation: "An object is raised to the dignity of
the thing". An ordinary thing or action suddenly appears in a sort of
short circuit as the appearance of the impossible real thing. Therefore -
in reverse - in the intense erotic game, one wrong word, one false gesture, is
enough to trigger a violent desublimation. We fall from one moment to the
other from the erotic tension into vulgar copulation.
Imagine that one, driven by
erotic passion, takes a close look at the beloved woman's vagina, trembling, as
the pleasure comes in as expected. But then something happens: as if one
had lost contact with her, one falls out of erotic pleasure, and the flesh
before the eyes suddenly appears in all its vulgar reality, with the smell of
urine and sweat (you can feel the same Also present scene with a
penis). So what happens here?
The vagina ceases to be an
object "raised to the dignity of the thing," and becomes part of the
ordinary reality again. In this precise sense, sublimation is not the
opposite of sexualization but the same.
Repressive desublimation
Even in the erotic it is
therefore only a small step between the sublime and the ridiculous. The
sexual and the comic act are mutually exclusive. The sexual act represents
intimate employment par excellence, a situation in which the participant can
never take on the attitude of the ironic, external observer. And for that
reason, the sexual act may seem ridiculous even to those who are not directly
involved in it. The comical effect comes from the discrepancy between the
intensity of the act and the indifferent calm of everyday life.
This brings us back to the
attempts to "demystify" the vulva. To use an old adage, those
who do this do not realize that they are dumping the baby in the bath. The
attack of the feminists on the idea of the vagina as a fetishized object of
male desire is thus also an attack on the basic structure of sublimation,
without which the erotic would not exist - what would then remain would be a boring
ordinary world in which no more erotic tension existed between people. The
"fetishized" organs would then give the feminists what they are: body
organs.
The moment when we recognize
the arbitrary nature of sublimation (any simple object can be lifted to the
level of the impossible thing) also makes it clear that sexual sublimation can
be easily liberated from the alleged patriarchal mystification. But what
we get instead of this new sphere of eroticism is a version of what Adorno and
Horkheimer - the two masters of Marxism at the Frankfurt School - called
"repressive de-sublimation": the result is not a new freedom, but the
gray one Reality in which sex is completely suppressed. Is that what we
want?
Translated by Judith Basad.
