I had a problem with the general emotional dishonesty of Bad Sex, the book by Nona Willis Aronowitz (NWA), but I raised my eyebrows at some race-related things too.
Why does she feel the need to justify her “sex positive” beliefs in terms of black feminism? What’s black sexuality mean to her, anyway?
The demand for fortitude went double for Black women. Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, whose first albums were released a week apat in the fall of 1996, were definitely pleasure seeking, but it was the most invulnerable version of pleasure seeking there could possibly be, and whether it was on their own terms was an open question. Hip-hop writer and feminist Joan Morgan didn’t feel liberated by Lil’ Kim’s sex-drenched lyrics, because they were centered so much in maleness. She felt the specter of Biggie and the Bad Boy crew looming over Kim, and the pressures of a commercial market that insisted she be both hypersexual and unflappable…
As a teenager who came of age during the height of the superslut, I remember Kim and Foxy as the first sexual idols I had. I was 12 when their albums were released, when I was just barely in the throes of puberty and had never kissed anyone outside of a game of spin the bottle. I heard about them from my precocious best friend, Sarah, whose views on both sex and pop culture I considered gospel. We spent hours in her bedroom listening to Hard Core and Ill Na Na in tandem. We squealed over Foxy’s “ta-tas perkin'”, her “sex drive all night like a trucker.” We could scarcely imagine what oral sex felt like, but we learned from Kim that it’s something we should demand: “I don’t want dick tonight / Eat my pussy right,” she declared.
I belted out these lyrics within earshot of my mom, who seemed to prefer them to the misogyny in the male hip-hop I listened to. But I’m no quite sure about that, because she never commented either way. I didn’t often seek her counsel on things like puberty and sex, and she didn’t pry or even offer. This often perplexes people, even the ones who knew her parenting was in some ways hands-off–why didn’t one of the preeminent pro-sex feminists pass along her wisdom to her daughter?
[paragraph about her mom wanting to respect her privacy]
…In one sense I’m grateful that she never tried to police my sexuality. I never had to worry whether she was going to ransack my room in search of my diary, like other friends’ moms had done. Yet sometimes I wonder if she erred on the side of giving me too much privacy. She might not have realized that in the absence of her guidance, I fully let my peers educate me instead.
In other words, she absorbed the standard sexual imagery of black people from pop culture, and her mom did nothing to prevent it.
The abuse of Audre Lorde and Sadiya Hartman is pretty egregious.
This is where she introduces Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic:
Feminist thinkers began pointing out that, throughout Western society, male desire has largely been encouraged while female desire, in turn, has been suppressed in order to uphold the patriarchy–a truism now, but a revelatory statement then. In 1978, Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde declared sexual pleasure an essential tool for fighting oppression. The erotic “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation,” she writes in her classic “Uses of the Erotic.” We’d been raised to fear “our deepest cravings”, but embracing our erotic impulse urges us “not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe…In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that this line of thinking had anything to do with me, a white, educated woman–I was liberated, sexual, certainly not oppressed!–until my dad’s crisis pushed me to see how much I’d waved away desires of my own.
Next, she explains how she demanded to open up her relationship after learning about nonmonogamy from “Dan Savage and a shady guy I hooked up with in college who supposedly had permission to fuck around on the side because his girlfriend’s antidepressants had dampened her sex drive.” Eventually it starts to bum her husband out and he asks her to slow down with the fucking other people, so she starts sleeping with Rob from Kentucky behind his back. “I remember being impressed that he, too, had read The Other Hollywood, a moderately obscure oral history of 1970s porn…
In the months that followed, I broke rule after rule to squeeze in weekly sex with Rob. Each encounter was baroque, circumscribed, and often planned out beforehand: Tomorrow I’d like to come over, silently blow you, and leave like it never happened, I would text him. Tuesday I’ll bring the handcuffs and tie you up and come in your mouth, he would text me…The surfeit of sexual energy sometimes spilled over to Aaron’s and my bed. When we fucked, I was even more mentally far away than usual; he was blissfully unaware (or in denial?) about what was suddenly making me hornier.
…Of course, despite its lack of histrionics, my relationship with Rob ran roughshod over my own morals. I was lying to my partner and routinely ashamed of my selfishness. I knew somewhere deep in the recesses of my concupiscent mind that this cathartic sex was going to break any lingering bond I had with Aaron. In a certain way, that was precisely the appeal.
She’s very direct that it was a celebration of selfishness for its own sake, after blaming the affair on having to take care of her dad after he had a stroke.
After interviewing hundreds of women for her 1992 book The Erotic Silence of the American Wife, journalist Dalma Heyn identifies one function of an affair for married mothers. It was a way to get away from “selflessness and obligations to fill others’ needs” and represented an opportunity to step into the role of a “sexually joyous and self-interested person.” Heyn’s argument recasts selfishness as a quality that can be positive or, at the very least, one that can combat deep-seated dissatisfaction. “Finding at home the kind of self-absorption that is essential to erotic pleasure proves a challenge,” sex and relationship therapist Esther Perel would write two years after my affair with Rob. “When you have an affair, you know for a fact that you’re not doing it to take care of anyone else.”
Seeing Rob became a way to assert the autonomy I didn’t consciously understand I wanted. I did, however, consciously want to keep having amazing sex with him. At that time my inner self-righteousness was louder than my moral standards: Why shouldn’t I listen to my own desires, rather than the desires of two needy men and the social mandates that tie me to them?
My cravings to see Rob were straightforward and devoid of outside expectation. I want this, I thought, when I met him on a Sunday at work in his giant corporate office building,where he led me by the hand to various empty rooms, pulled my hair as he pressed me against the wall, then fucked me on a random colleague’s file cabinet.
She has a meltdown after learning his dad’s caregiver used his credit cards to buy plane tickets. Rob says she can leave with no hard feelings or stay and he can try to make her feel better.
I chose option B. We smoked a joint. He cuffed my wrists and ankles and hooked them together. He instructed me to lie down on the couch on my stomach. He warned me not to move, not to struggle–or else. Then, firmly doling out commands as he went, using his fingers and a Hitach Magic Wand, he made me come for many minutes on end. It was archetypical BDSM: the rush of surrender, the act of trusting someone to take over and deliver pleasure.
In Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”, she describes how, as a child living through WWII, she’d buy packets of white margarine with a “tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz” tucked inside. She’d pinch the pllet in the bag until it penetrated the pale goop by releasing an ecstatic rush of hue. During previous encounters with Rob, my mind was mercifully blank, as if someone had wrapped my brain in a sugary, benzo-laced gauze. But this time was different. As the panic wafting out of my body was replaced by pleasure, I felt like that bag of margarine slowly turning golden. When the erotic is released from its concentrated capsule, Lorde writes, “it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.”
So she fucked Rob for a while until he was like, “Thanks for the blowjobs, I’m moving in with my real girlfriend.”
The turning point came in March 2016, four months after Aaron and I had cut short our up-state weekend to tend to my dad, when Rob texted a long, fumbling explanation of why he really appreciated those mock-anonymous drive-by blowjobs (besides the obvious). “It’s what you want, and you get it, and never once have I felt like I’m getting one over on you,” he texted. “Which is pretty great.”
My cheeks burned. It was one of the most cherished texts I’d ever received. This plain admiration of my most unvarnished desires, which up until this moment I’d seen as evidence of depravity and cowardice, reminded me of a Velvet Underground song that frequently played in my house as a kid. In “I’ll be you mirror,” Nico sings that she can detect her lover’s goodness, even through their self-hating cynicism: “Please put down your hands / ‘Cause I see you.”
Not long after this compliment, Rob told me he was moving in with his girlfriend and that they’d decided to put the nonmonogamy on hold for a little while. I sent him the least chill text of our whole relationship: that he and this had been special to me, that I was realy glad I met him, that he was a sweet and thoughtful person in addition to being a great lay. His response was caring but noticeably more detached–a reminder that, unlike me, Rob wasn’t having an affair. I was not his escape hatch, and he was considering his partner’s needs in a way that I was not.
Audre Lorde is turning in her grave over this bullshit. As much as NWA wants to claim her, Audre Lorde was on Team Sex Negative, which has much higher standards for what counts as emotional honesty about our deepest selves.
NWA leaves out the fact that Audre Lorde contrasted the erotic with the pornographic:
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made
into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have
often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and
information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. 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.
Does NWA’s writing about sex seem more erotic or pornographic?
You can’t do something in bad faith erotically, by definition. Audre Lorde wasn’t talking about giving no-strings-attached blowjobs to Rob from Kentucky.
This is what comes right before the passage NWA quoted about the erotic as antidote to despair and powerlessness:
When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than
from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within
ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a
structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live
from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that
power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be
responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings,
we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the
numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against
oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.
A major running theme of the book is how much she lives her life based on the idea of herself as this liberated empowered blah blah blah person, denying the parts of herself that feel jealousy and want commitment. But that’s totally not in the spirit of Lorde at all:
To share the power of each other’s
feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the
other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those
others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.
In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling
is a human need. But within the European-American tradition, this need is satisfied by certain
proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a
simultaneous looking away, pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a f mob [?]
violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming the need and the deed give rise to that
distortion which result in pornography and obscenity – the abuse of feeling.When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and
sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in
concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the
satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be
conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a
large part of the experience and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the
abused, and the absurd.
And to practice BDSM in Lorde’s name is even more ridiculous, since she was explicitly against that too.
Leigh: What about the doctrine of “live and let live” and civil liberties issues?
Audre: I don’t see that as the point. I’m not questioning anyone’s right to live. I’m saying we
must observe the implications of our lives. If what we are talking about is feminism, then the
personal is political and we can subject everything in our lives to scrutiny. We have been
nurtured in a sick, abnormal society, and we should be about the process of reclaiming
ourselves as well as the terms of that society. This is complex. I speak not about
condemnation but about recognizing what is happening and questioning what it means. I’m
not willing to regiment anyone’s life, but if we are to scrutinize our human relationships, we
must be willing to scrutinize all aspects of those relationships. The subject of revolution is
ourselves, is our lives.Sadomasochism is an institutionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships.
And, it prepares us either to accept subordination or to enforce dominance. Even in play, to
affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, is empowering, is to set the
emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship, politically, socially, and
economically.Sadomasochism feeds the belief that domination is inevitable and legitimately enjoyable. It
can be compared to the phenomenon of worshipping a godhead with two faces, and
worshipping only the white part on the full moon and the black part on the dark of the moon,
as if totally separate. But you cannot corral any aspect within your life, divorce its
implications, whether it’s what you eat for breakfast or how you say good-bye. This is what
integrity means.
Meanwhile, NWA talks about stuff like “the playground of power dynamics” or says “the appeal must have been the power imbalance itself.”
BDSM is most obviously a slavery reenactment.
Speaking of slavery, I was surprised to see that chapter 5, the “race chapter”, has an opening quote from Sadiya Hartman. Notably, she’s a big fan of the later Hartman, of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and makes no mention at all of the early Hartman, from Scenes of Subjection (see here).
The misuse of Hartman is just as egregious:
Hartman seeks to correct the record of America’s sexual revolutions. She calls the flapper a “pale imitation of the ghetto girl” and lovingly injects agency, joy, and defiance into the stories of women who were criminalized, pitied, or ignored by white people and shamed by middle-class Black people, simply for existing outside their strict standards of virtue. For a Black woman, Hartman writes, “the mere willingness to have a good time with a stranger was sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.”…
…Expressions of pleasure are all the more important for women of color, queer people, and other marginalized groups not despite but precisely because of the overwhelming shadow of sexual violence. “Witnessing an embodied yes in the body of a historically oppressed person is irresistible to me,” brown writes. It’s a concept that can be traced back to Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” which rejected “the false belief that only b the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong.” That strength, that lack of vulnerability, “is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.”
There were historians of Black feminism here and there like Stephanie Camp, who wrote that enslaved women attended secret parties, wearing stylish hoop skirts they’d fashioned with gravepines and tree limbs, to “make their bodies spaces of personal expression and pleasure.” But most scholarship had focused on Black women’s bodies as a site of suffering and violation. It was a necessary corrective, Joan Morgan wrote in her 2015 essay, “Why we get off,” but the downside was a “mulish inattentiveness to black women’s engagements with pleasure–the complx, messy, sticky, and even joyous negotiations of agency and desire that are irrevocably twinned with our pain.” Black feminists had become “overly reliant” on Lorde, Kimberle Crenshaw, and a few others, Morgan wrote, “bequeating them the sanctity of dogma.” It was time for explicit, fresh conversations about sexual pleasure.”
In Scenes of Subjection one of Hartman’s major points is the need for white people to believe black people are enjoying ourselves. Another one was that the idea of agency has primarily been used against black people. The slaves being raped really wanted it. The sharecroppers were free laborers entering into contracts. And slave owners were the ones promoting those parties as part of their overall slave management system.
The particular status of the slave as object and as subject requires a careful consideration of the notion of agency if one wants to do more than “endow” the enslaved with agency as some sort of gift dispensed by historians and critics to the dispossessed. Certainly the constraints of agency are great in this situation, and it is difficult to imagine a way in which the interpellation of the slave as subject enables forms of agency that do not reinscribe the terms of subjugation…Slavery is characterized by direct and simple forms of domination, the brutal asymmetry of power, the regular exercise of violence, and the denial of liberty that make it difficult, if not impossible, to direct one’s own conduct, let alone the conduct of others. As Foucault remarks, “There cannot be relations of power [as opposed to domination] unless subjects are free. If one were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty.” Certainly this seriously challenges facile assertions of slave agency and casts doubt on the capaciousness of transgression. In a state of domination, the operations of power appear more repressive than productive, and the attendant forms of subjection seem intent on preventing the captive from gaining any measure of agency that is not met with punishment, thereby confirming the slave’s existence as the object of violence.
Hartman wrote a lot about raping slaves. To have cited her like she’s on your team, and then write this…SMH:
Scholars Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson really took it there: they mentioned slavery and orgasms in the same breath. A paper they cowrote side-eyed the widespread condemnation of a 2013 YouTube video called “The Harriet Tubman Sextape”, a parody that depicted Tubman using sex to blackmail a plantation owner into freeing the people he had enslaved. The video wasn’t very funny, the authors conceded, but it was worth asking why an eroticized version of Tubman was considered such a desecration.
Even though slavery was rife with sexual violence, reimagining Tubman and other enslaved women as having their own “sexual interiority”, as “erotic subject[s] with desires and intimate needs,” was essential to granting them humanity and agency. So was emphasizing the fact that sex can be liberatory and a tool of resistance, even teh sex between enslavers and the enslaved that blurred the boundaries of consent and power. “Political goals of the moment do not rewrite the sexual lives, desires, and choices of enslaved and free women of color,” wroet Lindsey and Johnson. “But they can obscure those lives to our detriment.
If we can instead “imagine ecstatic moments for slaves, if only brief and painfully ephemeral,” they wrote,” then “radical histories of black community can be created.” It’s a way to restore humanity, and in turn vulnerability, to the Strong Black Woman stereotype, to any harmful stereotype–even if we have to fill in the gaps with our imaginations, or dig through a white landlady’s diary, or simply tune in to the flickers of pleasure nestled in the pages of Black women’s own memoirs. “Owning nothing and subsisting on so little, they let the heart decide everything,” Hartman writes of Mamie and James. “Love was their only anchor”…
Notice how “granting them humanity and agency” is almost word-for-word what Hartman was talking about.
This shit is painfully white and out of touch. This white lady is saying that, in order to undermine the Strong Black Woman stereotype, it’s important to emphasize there must’ve been cases where the slaves got off on being raped.
Compare Hartman on seduction to pro-BDSM talking points:
As a theory of power, seduction contends that there is an ostensible equality between the dominant and the dominated. The dominated acquire power based on the identification of force and feeling. As Jean Baudrillard writes, “Seduction play[s] triumphantly with weakness.” The artifice of weakness not only provides seduction with its power but also defines its essential character, for the enactment of weakness and the “impenetrable obscurity” of femininity and blackness harbor a conspiracy of power. The dominated catalyze reversals of power, not by challenges presented to the system but by succumbing to the system’s logic. Thus power comes to be defined not by domination but by the manipulations of the dominated. The reversibility of power and the play of the dominated discredit the force of violence through the assertion of reciprocal and intimate relations. In this regard, the recognition of the agency of the dominated and the power of the weak secures the fetters of subjection, while proclaiming the power and influence of those shackled and fettered.
The proslavery ideologue George Fitzhugh, like Baudrillard, also celebrated the reversibility of power enacted through surrender. In Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters, Fitzhugh argued that the strength of weakness disrupts the hierarchy of power within the family, as well as the master-slave relationship…: “The humble and obedient slave exercises more or less control over the most brutal and hard-hearted master. It is an invariable law of nature, that weakness and dependence are elements of strength, and generally sufficiently limit that universal despotism, observable throughout human and animal nature. If, as Fitzhugh insists, the greatest slave is the master of the household, and the enslaved rule by virtue of the “strength of weakness”, then, in effect, the slave is made the master of her subjection…
As Fitzhugh envisioned, kindness and affection undergirded the relations of subordination and dependency. As a model of social order, the patriarchal family depended upon duty, status, and protection rather than consent, equality, and civil freedom. Subjection was not only naturalized but also consonant with the sentimental equality of reciprocity, inasmuch as the power of affection licensed the strength of weakness. Essentially, “the strength of weakness” prevailed due to the goodness of the father. “The armor of affection and benevolence.” The generosity of the father enabled the victory claimed by the slave, the tyrannical child, and the brooding wife…Thus we are to believe that the exercise of control by the weak softens universal despotism, subdues the power of the father by commanding his care, and guarantees the harmony of slave relations.
Seduction erects a family romance–in this case, the elaboration of a racial and sexual fantasy in which domination is transposed into the bonds of mutual affection, subjection idealized as the pathway to equality, and perfect subordination declared the means of ensuring great happiness and harmony.
Again, NWA needs someone to explain what’s wrong with the Harriet Tubman sex tape thing. How can a white liberal, who doesn’t want to really engage with slavery, ever understand where rape culture comes from and what’s so offensive about objectification?