Theorizing sex and having sex

The discussion that we had today about heterosexual sex (as context for the discussion of the relationship between sexuality, agency, and consent) implicated some questions that hit a little too close to home. Being at all compelled by this book makes it damn near impossible not to see that there are gendered power dynamics in sex (as a noun and as a verb). While that's easy to recognize in the abstract, it is harder to recognize in concrete contexts, yet the existence of concrete contexts is undeniable - I am a person who is sexual/has sex. Sex is this thing that, in the book, is gender oppression, torture, and abuse - it is not to me - but are they linked? 

Is it a question of baseness? Does the oppression of sex come in the alienation of self that it takes to have sex with strangers, on sidewalks, an for money? In the involuntariness? In other things that people see as depersonalizing sex (e.g., S & M or something like that)? Or is it more complicated than that? More pervasive? Is it, like we talked about, in the very existence of sexuality between people that are identified as men and people that are identified as women, so long as those things are unequal? Or is the locus elsewhere? What is the significance of her calling what men do to her at knifepoint "making love" rather than rape, having sex, or fucking? 

Sometimes, it is comfortable to separate objectifying sex from intimate sex, but that line suggests that the lines aren't as clean as we might want to make them. After all, if the "good" sex (purity-speaking) is the sort between people who are in love - the inherited conventional wisdom, when does that not become the "good" sex - when you do it for pure sport with someone that you love? When you do it with someone who loves you who you don't love or the other way around? What does love have to do with it? Can sex purely for entertainment be empty of oppression? Does it matter which sex people it is for? Are these relationships neat and delineable, or is it something we know when we see, or is it something that we can't know? 

A friend of mine recently suggested that I had been injured by a past including a fair amount of sex for entertainment, in that sex for entertainment treats people as things. That person's argument was that, even if I had initiated that sex, and it had been because it feels good and I like to get off instead of some lack of confidence or search for attention or something, it made me value myself less because I allowed someone to treat me like an object, regardless of whether the transaction was carried out respectfully or whether I used the person as an object as well. S/he contended that I could have been injured by that dehumanization (literal, rather than figurative) without realizing or recognizing it. My argument is that, with Andrea, I see the dehumanization in oppressive sex, in sex where there is no "I chose" in the sentence regardless of agency, in a base sense of sex that looks and feels like concrete - but that sort of sex isn't the same sort of sex as the liberating kind of sex for entertainment I have, right? 

But for there to be something to the purity of "making love" (contra Andrea's argument), doesn't there have to be a baseness to anything outside? But then, another theme in Andrea's work is the depersonification of sex, right? Where it is the darkness and the pavement and the knife? But then it moves to names and heartbeats? Like its a combination of human and inhuman and that's what is cruel about it? 

I can't help but think about Donna Haraway's work on cyborg bodies as an analogy here, where cyborgs are couplings of organism and machine, the human and the inhuman, where fractured identities of the human and the dehumanized are part of a whole instead of a clear opposition; together in oppression an together in emancipation. Perhaps it is not for us to look at the human and the inhuman, the injuring moment and the injury, but instead to look at the composite. 

The part of Chapter 2 that made me sick to my stomach was the part where it made the experience of being raped seem romantic, like the pain had with it some sense of inspiration or substance or something like that. But in reality, we always look for an upside of tragedies, a lesson to be taken from it, a way to deal with it and move on, etc. .. how is Andrea's singing not that? 

I guess that it is easy for me translate Andrea's writing into discomfort with what happened to her, and into identification with my own experience with non-consensual sex. Where it is harder, and where I still struggle, is figuring out what it means for other sexualities and experiences, or even other non-sexual gendered interactions. 

I think I fall on the side that I am not damaged goods for the positive, affirming sexual choices that I've made, but I'm not sure I could win the argument. Ultimately, though, its not clear that I'd win that argument, in an argument. I'm also not sure that matters, though - because I think one of the things I've most identified with about Andrea's writing so far is that sexuality is what our social contexts make of it. Mine is certainly gender-subordinative, but not in the same way; it certainly contains power dynamics, but doesn't relieve me of all agency. Sure, I can't know whether I actually like sex or I just think I like sex, but let's be honest, that problem is non-unique to social and political life - I also can't be sure about the genuineness (whatever that might be) of my political preferences, my food preferences, or any other desire. While I'm loathe to sign up with a "if it feels good, do it" approach (even with the caveat about it hurting other people), it does seem to me like there's a (serious, important) distinction between the sex oppression in (casual) heterosexual sex (to the extent that it exists) and the the sex oppression in violent, forced, sex. 

Back to last week's discussion, maybe the thing that gets to us about the rape victim being a ten-year-old especially is actually about agency - she didn't have the words when she was ten, she couldn't identify the men by the time she was 14, prostitution is something that just happened to her ... maybe what is really the most horrifying is that the oppression happens in the separation of a person from the ability to make these decisions? Maybe?