It’s no secret that the United States is a country with deeply prudish cultural attitudes towards sexuality. Americans are puritanical towards nudity, public expressions of sexuality, and eroticism in art, leading to such ironic contradictions as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) weighing sexuality as more significant than gore and violence as to whether a film is inappropriate for younger people. This pairs with the domination of restrictive sexual politics in public administration, such as in political rallying around opposition to abortion access and LGBT rights.
While this is a well-recognized characteristic of the mainstream, many of us younger Americans consider ourselves to be more sexually liberated or sexually progressive than previous generations. Overall, attitudes among American adults have shifted toward being more accepting of premarital sex, single mothers, and LGBT people.¹ Younger Americans have an especially progressive orientation regarding these issues, being the most supportive of the LGBT community.² This typically comes with an objection to conservative, restrictive orientations in public policy as interfering in the freedom of individuals, and the rationale that to be supportive of sexual independence for women and accepting of LGBT people is the greatest means of enabling people to do what they wish.
Women now compose the majority of the American workforce, and have far greater economic independence from men than they did in previous generations.³ Marriages have generally declined.⁴ Considering these two facts, it is evident that marriage dominates the lives, and thus sexuality, of women far less than it once did. This gives women greater choice in partners and autonomy from them. Among younger women especially, this contributes to a greater ability to act autonomously from fathers or husbands.
However, this does not mean women are autonomous as such. Nor that any of us are. As I discussed in my previous article, “A Lonely Life,” the restructuring of American society and labor in the era of neoliberalism has produced a thoroughly atomistic, isolated state of affairs. The new turn is towards a greater direct integration into the circuitry of the market. The same applies for sexuality, both literally, such as in the rise of platforms like OnlyFans, and figuratively, via the greater domination of a market logic around sexuality.
The figure of the specific, “personal” patriarch (father, husband, etc.) continues to be confined more to the orientations of conservative politicians towards sexuality which is not restricted by the bonds of heterosexual marriage. This does not mean that capitalism has abolished patriarchy. Rather, the patriarch is less and less a person and more and more the impersonal power of the market, controlling our sexuality just as the institution of marriage historically does.
I hope to demonstrate how this domination of abstract value, literally and figuratively, results in the self-negation of the individualist concept of sexual liberation. Where we see sexual liberation as mere freedom of choice for the individual, as the ability to choose commodities on a free market, we fail to liberate ourselves. Contrary to neoliberal ideology, being chained tightly to the market is not freedom, and certainly not when this logic is extended to sexuality.
I want to point towards a concept of sexual liberation which opens the way for collective action and critical self-consciousness as a means for liberating sexuality from oppressive social relations. I am neither a “prude,” obsessed with restricting sexuality in order to properly regulate reproduction and gender, nor a “pervert,” obsessed with responding to the “prude” and operating in the same terms. I am a communist. I wish to transcend the entire framework.
The Sexual Revolution:
As a historical term, the phrase “sexual revolution” refers to the turn in American cultural attitudes towards sexuality in the mid-20th century, associated especially with the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s. This corresponded to challenges towards the monopoly of marriage in sexuality and romance, greater access to contraceptives (owing, for example, to the entrance of the birth control pill on the market), and advocacy for sexual openness against the prudish attitudes of post-World War II America.⁵ Ironically, this critical turn against the repressive atmosphere of American sexual culture was based directly on the consumer boom of the preceding era.
After WWII, more women participated in public waged labor, many being employed in the consumer industries which benefited significantly from the post-War boom in consumer spending.⁶ The promotion of individual success in careers and accumulation of wealth ended up coming into tension with the restrictiveness of the sexual ethics which were then dominated by marriage and the nuclear family.⁷ This association between consumerist ethics and the challenge to marriage-bonded sexuality is especially evident in the role played by bourgeois entrepreneurs in the early American sex industry, such as Hugh Hefner’s promotion of the “singles life” by means of Playboy Magazine.⁸
The challenge to the sexual restrictions of nuclear family ideology, which demanded that sexuality be confined to marriage, that marital sexuality be confined to the purpose of procreation, and that women essentially be the property of their husbands, ended up reproducing the logic of American capitalist individualism. Freedom was freedom from others, from society. It was freedom to be a self-acting atom, an amoeba which is not bonded to others.
It is understandable why this appeared to be a natural reaction to many people, since such individualism was “common sense” to them owing to the hegemony of liberalism in American life, and because oppressive sexual ethics were expressed in the terms of personal bondage. However, it ended up fundamentally failing to challenge the basic foundation of these sexual ethics in the regulation of biological and social reproduction in line with ruling class interests. It merely served to open up sexuality as a semi-legitimate site of consumption, but failed to pose any sustained challenge to sexual repression.
In the 1970s and ’80s, the backlash to the New Left, in this case the feminist and free love movements especially, fed into a strong conservative turn. American politics came to be dominated by the Religious Right for decades to come.⁹ We are only now emerging from this period, as sexual attitudes once again shift towards greater permissiveness and American youth lead the new reorientation. In order to avoid failing like the first “sexual revolution,” it is necessary to investigate what tendencies we share with them which contributed to their downfall.
The revolutionary activist, psychoanalyst, and sexual educator Wilhelm Reich offered a conception of sexual revolution which counteracts this reformist, individualist approach and points to a way forward. Reich was a German Communist who considered sexual repression to serve the function of ruling class social control, such as through the regulation of property ownership via the family and control of women’s reproductive labor. He argued that liberation from sexual repression must recognize the need to restructure society, pointing towards the more permissive sexual ethics of classless communalist societies as a model. He criticized his peers in the Communist Party for failing to account for the importance of sexual liberation in projects for overturning the existing society.
Unlike the individualists, Reich conceived of sexual liberation as a collective endeavor. It required bringing sexuality out of the hushed-up confines of the nuclear family and discussing it frankly, especially through education in sexual health. Through therapeutic sessions, he hoped to demonstrate to young people especially that their sexual frustrations were tied directly into the economic structure of society, and that thus to reach towards satisfaction they must challenge the existing order. Essentially, he hoped to show that the personal is political.
Reich was not free of his own issues in theoretical formulations, such as in considering a clear distinction between public production (the “economic”) and the private, domestic sphere of sexuality. He did not consider them to be independent of each other, but in his formulation of a dual-systems concept, where capitalism and patriarchy are clearly distinguishable as their own formulations, undermined his ability to recognize the historical specificity of capitalist patriarchy and its flexibility. For example, unlike other forms of patriarchy, capitalist patriarchy depends on a public-private distinction, such as in exploiting the reproductive labor of working class women in caring for their husbands, free of charge for their employers, and raising a new generation of workers.
The labor of the husband is considered public because it is “economic,” it is a money-relation, whereas the labor of the wife is considered private because it is a non-money-relation. The distinction is also a means of superexploiting “feminine” industries such as domestic labor and caretaking, since they are considered lesser or are paid wages according to the assumption that their husbands are breadwinners. Further, the definition of femininity according to domesticity contributes to the ostracization and degradation of proletarianized women, especially where class distinctions have historically been formed by colonialism. Working class women, especially the Black women among them, are considered to be masculine and grotesque by the standards of this domestic femininity.
This distinction between public-masculine and private-feminine has been central to capitalist patriarchy historically, especially in the nuclear family model and the domination of husband-breadwinners. However, with the decline of marriage and penetration of direct money-relations into sexuality (such as with the rise of OnlyFans, up to now at least), it’s clear that a dual-systems concept is lacking. Rather, social reproduction is inseparable from capitalist production.
As Reich himself demonstrated, although sexuality emerges from biologically-produced functions and drives, the content of it is always socially and historically specific. To merely demand the freedom to realize our sexual drives and “do what we want,” free of the restrictions of other people or society, is to fail to recognize this. Sexuality is already a social relation. If we wish to realize its liberation, we must first recognize this. By recognizing this, we open the door for a more nuanced conception of sexual repression, and thus, whether our current concept of sexual liberation actually transcends it.
Sexual Repression:
In the mainstream liberal conception, prudishness or sexual repression is essentially an expression of ignorance or backwardness. To be conservative regarding sexuality is always merely backwardness, and to support the liberal individualist concept of sexual liberation is always enlightened and forward-thinking. At best, liberals will say that, for example, men express misogynistic sentiments towards women who are sexually open because they are insecure.
This is at least a step forward from the simple ignorance explanation, but it still fails to recognize sexual repression as performing a social function which has been historically produced. Instead, it plays on the liberal idea of a trans-historic opposition between the liberty of the individual and society, with sexual liberation being the power of the individual against society and sexual conservatism being the power of society against the individual.
In truth, sexual repression is a means of controlling social reproduction. This is sometimes recognized in the US during debates over abortion, where pro-choicers point out logical inconsistencies in the arguments of pro-lifers, and the fact that their real goal is to control women’s bodies. This is a step towards an important realization. Sexual repression serves to regulate reproduction, and does so in socially and historically specific manners. For example, in the US, kissing is considered to be directly tied to romance, and so to kiss a platonic acquaintance is considered taboo. This is quite different to, say, Mexico, where kissing is not given such a significance in all contexts.
However, both the US and Mexico have a function of organizing sexual repression and sexual activities within the model of the nuclear family and monogamous marriage. In marriage, the sexuality of a partner, especially women paired with men, is considered to be the exclusive property of the partner. Historically, this has served the function of ensuring the inheritance of the patriarch’s property by his primarily male heirs, by controlling the reproduction of women. It also gives the patriarch, as the head of the household, control over the labor of all in the household. Theorists from Friedrich Engels to Eleanor Burke Leacock have investigated the history of this and the operation of patriarchal social relations.
In the United States, women were not considered equal partners in a marriage until recently. In fact, no-fault divorces were practically nonexistent in the US until the early 1970s.¹⁰ Marital rape was not even recognized as a crime nationwide until 1993.¹¹ The fact that marriage is this repressive and in particular binds women as property of their husbands, even if only de facto, is why it was such a site of objection for the original Sexual Revolution.
The tight regulation of behavior according to the logic of marriage and the nuclear family produces a certain distance between people, especially men and women. Man and Woman are defined in a hard and fast way, to be expected when the categories are so important for the control of wealth. The interactions between Man and Woman are stiff and stultified, following the rituals of fidelity. That is, because Man-Woman interactions are always considered to be tied to sexuality, and because in marriage ideology the sexuality of a Woman is owned by a Man, Men develop pathological obsessions with the potential appearance of infidelity among women.
Yet this infidelity is widely defined. Women do not want to appear as “sluts,” and men do not want to appear as too sexually voracious or crude. Man and Woman perform the rituals of romance, monogamy, and prudish bourgeois morality. They must perform their archetypes well, or else they are socially ostracized. If they are too personable with each other, if they let down the mask of their archetypes too much and seek any form of intimacy, this is branded with the code of sexuality and thus burdened with shame, ostracism, and whatever sanction applies in the case. Sexuality is unfree and depersonalized.
The confinement of affection and care to the nuclear family does not apply to romance alone. It also extends to nurturing, which marital ideology itself narrowly defines as a motherly characteristic. Womanhood is identified with being a wife, being a wife is identified with being a woman. The regulation of reproduction reigns. The coding of the family boxes in nurturing and care, but the particular model of the nuclear family isolates it even further from extended kinship networks and a broader concept of motherhood.
In the nuclear family, this relationship with the mother is one’s tie to others, to society, through her role in private social reproduction and nurturing. Yet even this nurturing, although obsessed over by reactionary defenders of the nuclear family, is itself rejected implicitly and explicitly by the logic of masculine individualism. All ties of dependency must be dissolved for me to be free, so I must reject mothering and all nurturing. Jessica Benjamin writes:
“Each gender is able to represent only one aspect of the self- other relationship, either merging or separating, and each gender plays a part in a polarized whole. But neither attains true independence. For even the male posture of attaining independence by denying the mother is a defensive stance: the overemphasis on boundaries between me and not me means that selfhood is defined negatively as separateness from others.”¹²
Thus, we see in the abstract how this capitalist patriarchal notion of individual freedom itself leads to the negation of the nuclear family unit. The nuclear family unit still represents ties of dependency. We have not, however, analyzed these ties of dependency themselves sufficiently to move into the present direction of things.
Marriage is not some neutral, ahistorical social institution which is purely a matter of arbitrary personal choice. Historically, the form of marriage we are familiar with originates in ancient Mesopotamia.¹² There, marriage was explicitly recognized as a means of men controlling women, particularly to ensure the inheritance of property along their lineage. Wedding ceremonies, like ours, were organized as the passage of women from the ownership of the father to the ownership of the husband. While wives were expected to practice strict fidelity, husbands could take concubines, who occupied an inferior position to their wives and lacked the same legal status as them. Nevertheless, the matrimony was clearly carried out as an unequal bondage.
Mesopotamian patriarchal marriage spread to other civilizations in the course of history, including the ancient Hebrews and Greeks.¹⁴ From here, it influenced the development of the Roman family.¹⁵ The Roman family was organized around the right of the paterfamilias, the patriarchal head of the household.¹⁶ Although wives who were citizens had rights relative to their husbands, once again marriage was essentially a passage of them from fathers to husbands. Under their rights as paterfamilias, patriarchs controlled their wives, their children, and all slaves living in the household. In short, all were bonded to the power of the patriarch.
This form of marriage would become the primary basis for that which would later be promoted throughout Europe by the Roman Catholic Church, although Germanic familial laws still held influence in much of Northern Europe and granted women a somewhat stronger status.¹⁷ Germanic law gave women the right of the morgengabe, including the right to own property via the inheritance of estates by widows. The rise of the dowry, where the family of the bride gave a sum of money to the groom, represented a decline in the position of women.¹⁸ While in some countries, wives could have some control over how their husbands used the dowry, the ultimate ownership of the husband over the sum disempowered women. While women’s status in marriage varied and was contested throughout medieval European history, the general orientation was one of patriarchal bondage.
When this patriarchal form of relationship was brought by the Spanish and English to the Americas, it necessitated a general attack on alternative familial forms among Indigenous peoples.¹⁹ The status of women was undermined, alternative gender systems were violently attacked, and the right of the husband as owner of his wife was affirmed.²⁰ Later, in the United States and Canada, the new capitalist relations would be brutally reinforced by Indian Agents and genocidal residential schools, including in gender and family structure.²¹
Any form of sexuality which was not confined to marriage, the control of patriarchs over women, and bondage to the hegemony of the Church and colonial state was attacked. The hard and fast coding of gender into Man and Woman, and the significances attached to those two categories, are not merely human nature, but are attached to the history of European class societies and their drives to expand their systems. The rigidity of their coding is aimed at a form of social control associated with the demands of class exploitation and relations of private property.
In the majority of the history discussed, marriage of love or choice was practically non-existent. The main point was that the partners represented their estates or families. Rather than being a union or contract between distinct individuals, the point was the individuals as embodied manifestations of broad institutions. Marriages were often arranged in the name of social climbing, or for political alliances. That marriage of choice is a very recent phenomena makes it quite evident that love is not the historical basis of marriage. The point is the power of the patriarch, the head of household, over his wife and all other members of the household. The point is power over production and reproduction, historically varying arrangements of class society. The role of paterfamilias, of patriarchal Father, is ultimately one of exploitation and extraction.
There is a reason that sexual exploitation tends to go hand in hand with this role. The Roman paterfamilias raped his slaves, as did the Antebellum Southern aristocrat. At the same time as they controlled the labor of their slaves in production, they controlled them in reproduction. The Padres of the California Missions raped their Indigenous victims, who they confined in the holy concentration camps in order to force them into “civilization.” The American bourgeois father rapes his wife and trafficked children in places like Epstein Island alike.
Yet, it is important that we not merely dismiss the phenomena of marriage for love. It is often used to object to the idea that marriage is oppressive. This objection fails to account for certain questions which surface upon further consideration. Why do we consider marriage to be a superior form of expressing love to a purely voluntary relationship based on trust and commitment? Why is the legal bondage of marriage considered the only “true” way to express commitment? It’s true that many people prefer marriage to voluntary relationships due to the legal status which comes with marriage and thus rights, but why does this status above and beyond other relationships exist in the first place? People choose marriage because marriage has a legal standing, yes, but marriage has legal standing above and beyond voluntary relationships due to the very foundations of marriage in the formation of our class society.
Why do we have to mediate our relationships through such a depersonalized institution? While most of our marriages are no longer marriages wherein we represent estates or our families, there is still that element of marriage mediating our relations through a generalizing notion of love. This notion still clearly has the trappings of patriarchy. It is still the case that the majority of homemakers are women.²² Thus, in marriages, men still dominated the funds of the pair, making the bondage an unequal one. The difficulties and stigmas associated with divorce can also bond two people whose relationship has gone rotten, to say nothing of those tied by financial dependency.
There is a reason the Sexual Revolution focused to such a significant extent on challenging marriage. And yet their turn against marriage was limited by their own concept of self-determination. Their concept of personal choice was one of the consumer, of the liberal atomistic individual. While many of them were socialists who recognized the power of capital itself as oppressive, the actual orientation of the cultural turn was merely towards a more dynamic capitalist consumerism. Relationships could take many more forms, as long as they still followed the basic logic of capitalism. This directly mirrored the turn towards diversified methods of producing consumer products, and thus greater personal choice in what to purchase.
As has been made clear, we agree with the importance of the power of personal choice in sexuality, especially in combating sexual repression. Yet, the individualist conception fails to recognize that commodity production and class society do not enable autonomous choice. Desires are literally mass produced by the multi-billion dollar culture industry, particularly that sector of it committed to advertising.
Our desires are not some ahistoric, asocial expression of our “authentic” soul or essence, but are inseparable from the social relations we are a part of. Even our conception of freedom of choice as something one exercises by freeing oneself from the influence from others is historically produced. It is a liberal idea, and its frame itself obscures how all the behavioral “material” we work with is social and historical. We aren’t born into a void. We are born into a world which is already historical, and we are born a part of it. The idea of sexual liberation being the unshackling of an authentic self, of the ability of the individual to express some underlying inherent, essential category, is a false one. It fails to reach the basic point of the question in the restructuring of society.
The marital form of nuclear family sexual repression is now being undermined by a restructuring of social life and radical atomization. This does not mean sexual repression no longer exists. Rather, it means we must recognize that sexual repression is not merely associated with the home as an atomistic unit. Such attitudes as slut-shaming, the regulation of the display of skin by women, the restriction of behaviors socially coded as sexual or romantic in nature, and so on do not happen in the home alone, and they are furthermore not motivated by the interests of the home alone. The regulation of reproduction serves to maintain the particular social structure via various means.
For example, where capitalists depend on the unpaid domestic labor of women to take care of their workforce, and wish to increase the population of laborers, they may encourage stay-at-home motherhood through various means, such as structuring wages as “family wages.” They may, conversely, encourage the use of contraceptives among certain populations, especially the unemployed poor and “undesirables,” in order to reduce what they see as a burden on their capital stocks in the form of social assistance.
There is also the element of the logic of the social system demanding that it be applied as a general rule, with challenges to that logic in the home being recognized as a potential challenge to the logic as a whole. This may encourage a response of repression, or one of co-option where the questioning is reframed in hegemonic logic. For example, when the question of the pay gap comes up, the issue might be reframed by bourgeois politicians as a question of treating all labor-power as equal rather than asking why there is a global tendency toward the devaluing of and superexploitation of women’s labor, such as in sweatshop factories in the Global South.
As a Marxist, it is no secret that I consider capitalist society to be unfree. If the regulation of reproduction and sexual repression are not confined only to marriage, but are a basic social function, it follows that the current decline of marriage we are witnessing does not simply mean that therefore sexuality is becoming liberated. Just because sexuality is no longer dominated by the parochial, family-inheritance logic of marriage nearly as much as it once was does not mean it is now beyond patriarchy.
Marriage represents the confinement of sexuality to Husband and Wife in a strictly regulated form of “private” sexuality. The new turn towards a more normalized, public concept of sexuality, especially among my generation, is not in itself a turn towards post-patriarchy or true sexual liberation. Rather, it represents the direct domination of the value-form, of capital, over sexuality, rather than operating by means of the husband-patriarch. This direct power of commodity-logic, whether through literal commodification or merely the extension of the logic itself, represents merely another form of patriarchy and sexual repression.
Sexuality entering public life from out of the “private” sphere is not liberatory where the “public” sphere is itself oppressive. We believe that it is because we only recognize bonds to specific, embodied people as bonds, which is clear in the case of marriage. Where our social relations are mediated by objects, such as in commodity production, those bonds are obscured. It’s harder to recognize the operation of patriarchy when there is not a flesh-figure to directly identify as the patriarch. In this case, the abstracting power of capital itself, the domination of the drive to profit over the flesh, the subjection of the concrete to the abstract, is the form which patriarchy takes.
Sexual Pathologies:
Here we reach the question of sexual pathologies. Earlier, we mentioned Wilhelm Reich. Reich engaged critically with psychoanalysis, considering it a tool for liberation if used correctly. Unlike his mentor Sigmund Freud, Reich took significant influence from Marxism in his analysis of pathologies. Very insightfully, he noted that sexual pathologies are specific to historically specific social relations. For example, the Oedipus Complex which Freud famously theorized is a pathology associated with the bourgeois nuclear family and its strict regulation of sexuality according to familial logic. The regulation of sexuality by the nuclear family, especially the punishment or shaming of expressions of sexuality by children and the positions of wives and children relative to the Father-Husband-Patriarch, produces a tendency towards the Complex.²³
Reich’s observations pair nicely with those of Michel Foucault, who noted that the obsession of the Victorian nuclear family with regulating sexuality, especially child sexuality, in fact produced a plethora of new categories for sexuality to be expressed through.²⁴ In a word, prudishness produces perversion. Both fixate on sexuality as a taboo, and both tend to operate with the same categories. Perversion is only comprehensible as a response to prudishness, and prudishness tends to wring its hands over the spectre of perversion which it itself feeds.
This interlocked wrestle between prudishness and perversion, two conjoined twins, is expressed in the current decline of the nuclear family. Those of us who believe we are sexually liberated tend to obsess with subverting the norms of prudishness. We want to flaunt our sexual openness, our rejection of sexual norms, and our ability to do what we want in the face of shame. Yet this ties us directly to the categories and conceptions produced by prudishness. We always have to prove ourselves by its standards, even if we believe we are trying to escape it. This dependent pathology represents a failure to transcend the basic terms of the relation, owing ultimately to a failure to challenge the social system which produces and reproduces it.
This struggle extends into our views of relationships, even the supposedly perverse or rebellious among us. Marriage is still reflected in our view of relationships, whether we are cisgender, heterosexual, monogamous, or LGBT, polyamorous, etc. The prudes and perverts alike bestow a certain significance to relationships, even when we approach them in an extractive way. We see them as a uniquely important or lofty means of searching for someone or something that “completes” us. This might take the form of a relationship with one person who is to be partnered with for life, or it might take the form of the activity of sex itself. This is, on various levels of consciousness, a search for some unity between the particular and the universal, stilted by the limitations of marital ideology and sexual repression.
We might try to escape this logic of sexual repression through our personal choices and personal relationships, but this does not change the “material” that we work with or the general “common sense” norms of society. Compulsory heterosexuality, tied hand in hand with marital ideology, closely regulates our interpersonal interactions with others. You must be a proper Man or Woman, and if you act outside of the code, you are ostracized or even purged. To have a relationship which is not heterosexual or strictly monogamous does not mean one has transcended the logic either, as we all operate within the extractive, repressed logic of the mainstream culture. This includes our tendency towards fetishizing domination of, control of, and extraction from our partners.
In the mainstream, those with “non-traditional” relationships and gender identities are only allowed in a co-opted way. You can only be as such if you follow the logic of bourgeois norms, and fall short of challenging the entire logic of the system. You must be respectable, you must defend yourself on the basis of the rationale of liberal individualism, and you must work within the “material” given to you.
The idea that gender and sexuality are pure personal choice and must be defended on the basis of the rights of the liberal citizen does not comprehend the nature of gender historically. It is evident that biology is not destiny, this much we agree strongly with. Yet discoursing about gender without understanding it as a social-historical phenomenon obscures the role of social struggle in its formation, and thus the fact that overcoming gender oppression requires a collective project of social revolution rather than mere individualism. Biology is the basis for social relations, but it is not destiny; biology always operates historically, just as nature as a whole does. Gender categories center around the control over reproduction, but they are not static. They are historically contested.
The various constellations of gender systems can be stretched to their limits within their logic, and they can be transcended on their own basis as well. For example, Joan of Arc, a French peasant-warrior, stretched the role of Woman in 15th century Western Europe to its limit, and so was executed as a heretic by the English authorities.²⁵ The Cathars and Waldensians operated outside of Church hegemony, granted the right to publicly preach to women, and challenged the definition of Womanhood as biological reproduction, and so were branded heretics.²⁶
The logic of a gender constellation can also be pushed in the other direction. The 1965 Moynihan Report claimed that the Black American family had been distorted by the development of a matriarchy originating in Antebellum slavery.²⁷ The lack of a legally recognized marital bond between two slaves, and the ability of slaveowners to rape women slaves, meant that the only reliable means of tracing lineage was through the mother. As a result, the mother became the center of the family rather than the father.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan claimed that the prevalence of single-motherhood was the source of much of the “backwardness” of Black people, and that a proper patriarchal family had to be promoted. The report was taken up by white conservatives to simultaneously reinforce nuclear family ideology and blame Black people for their conditions. The logic of a gender constellation can both be stretched to its limits and negated within its own logic and be reproduced to reinforce the existing social order.
Hopefully, it is evident by now that sexual pathologies are socially and historically produced, rather than being some simple expression of genetic predispositions of individuals. While libido is biologically driven, our biological functions do not happen in a void. We always live in a specific society, and a specific society with a given history to the formation of its dynamic structures and the concepts at play in the activity of its participants.
To give an example, all humans must consume nutrition to survive. However, what we consume is always specific. A European eating corn as a snack has historical significance rather than being merely neutral. It relates to, for example, the colonization of Mesoamerica by the Spanish and the commencement of the Columbian Exchange, which enabled the export of corn to Europe. How we eat is also socially and historically specific. Do we eat alone or with others? If others, with how many? What is our relation to them? Who cooked our food? Was our food put on a market? Was it produced for exchange? Where do we eat our food?
The same principle applies to sexuality. The “material” that our libidos work with has a specific historically-produced content. This can include histories of oppressive social relations, especially those significant to the “constellations” of our worldviews and concepts.
Colonialism features heavily here. Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychoanalyst-turned-revolutionary, noted the influence of colonialism in sexual pathologies:
“For the majority of white men the Negro represents the sexual instinct (in its raw state). The Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions. The women among the whites, by a genuine process of induction, invariably view the Negro as the keeper of the impalpable gate that opens into the realm of orgies, of bacchanals, of delirious sexual sensations[…]”²⁸
The categories of Man-Woman do not operate merely in abstraction, but vary according to social relations, as Fanon makes evident. This includes variations in colonial relations. Historically, Black women are considered to be distortions of womanhood, making them both monstrosities to mock and condemn and exotic spectacles to fixate on. Prudishness becomes perversity.
The view of Black men as sexual threats which Fanon describes is a pathological paranoia of the colonizers where they can only think in the terms of colonialism. Either one dominates, or one is dominated. It must be this way, and it is simply an either-or situation. The colonizer can only imagine the situation as reversed rather than transcended. Thus, when they see the colonized stir for their freedom, they think their own freedom is threatened. As they have exploited the sexuality of Black women for centuries, they believe the favor will be returned to white women, and so they develop a pathological obsession with this possibility. They make Black people both objects of rage and objects of fetishization. Once again, prudishness becomes perversity.
In commodity production, these historically produced abstract archetypes are transformed into objects of exchange. Pornography catering to these social fixations is produced, and succeeds as a spectacle at the center of white, bourgeois society’s subconscious. The colonized are a spectacle, and the abstraction of them into objects of perverse exoticism for colonial society is a means of producing commodities catering to this desire.
The obsession with colonial violence also finds its expression here. The domination of colonizers over colonized is acted out, both in sexual commodities and in commodity-informed sexual fetishes. Slavery, genocide, rape by border officials, human trafficking of migrants and so on are played out for the enjoyment of consumers and participants in these fetishes.
Conversely, the nightmare situation of the upside-down version of the situation is fixated on, played out in a setting which is confined and controlled. At the same time as repressed paranoiac fixations are acted out for the satisfaction of consumers, the conception of the colonized men as barbaric and sexually voracious and colonized women as sexually loose is confirmed in the mind of colonial society.
The fixation in our sexual culture on extraction from others, domination, pleasure derived from the unfreedom of another, sadism, masochism, bondage etc. have a blatant and uncomfortable association with colonial violence and class exploitation. They reflect the ultimate orientation of our society towards freedom for some at the expense of others, and the domination of the concrete by the abstract. Why do we derive pleasure from pain, from suffering, from domination, even if they are not literal? Why do we fixate on them? Why do we fixate on relations such as master-slave, father-daughter, boss-worker, cop-criminal, border guard-migrant? Why do we wish to dominate, and be a person this way, or to be dominated, and to have our personhood temporarily shattered this way?
We are ultimately operating with the “material” and logic of our society. To simply shout “let people do what they want” and to refuse introspection and critique is to refuse to recognize that sexuality is a social relation. The personal is political. To critique is not to shame, this is important to keep in mind. If we simply shut our eyes in the name of the liberty of the individual against others, we ignore how sexuality is already a part of society. Our sexuality is already socially produced. In our drive to liberate it, we must recognize this.
I would also like to emphasize here that I do not wish to come off as if I am prudish toward sexual expression in itself. Quite the opposite. I consider pornography and the commodification of sexuality as a whole to in themselves be obstacles to liberation. Why is the domination of people, especially women, by the despotism of value in their sexuality preferable to the despotism of the Father-Husband-Patriarch? The sex industry does not offer a means of genuine autonomous expression of sexuality, as the “other” who recognizes one’s identity in sexuality is the market, and one is still in the bonds of dependency. The power of the market has sway over what one produces, how they produce it, who consumes it, and how it is consumed.
Furthermore, the majority of producers in the sex trade are not independent professionals, but proletarians just trying to get by. Sexuality is hardened and enclosed into a commodity-form, the ability of the self to express themselves is hampered. The distinction between pornography and erotic art is the distinction between commodified “perversion” and sexuality which recognizes itself as a social relation and is not repressed by the commodity-form.
Pornography makes sexuality a spectacle, which is necessarily an expression of perversion as the twin of prudishness, and it encloses this spectacle into a stereotype, into a caricature, feeding a market informed by and informing patriarchal desire. I am not saying sexual content + commodification = pornography automatically. The key characteristic is the marking off of sexuality as such into an archetype of fixation, where the point is not sexuality as a relation between real people but to transform sexuality-in-general into a commodity category.
This encloses sexuality into relations of the market, and encloses the very definitions of the sexual. Sexuality tends to take on the character of the pornographic. By pornographic, I mean those things which are not literally porn, but share that characteristic treatment of sexuality. This could be pornographic personal sexual tastes, or it could be the use of pornographic sexuality in advertisements.
On the other hand, erotic art recognizes sexuality as an expression of life-activity. It does not, for example, transform fixations on body parts which are objects of prudishness-perversion — such as breasts — into exaggerated things which compose the cast of pathological sexuality. Nor does it operate within the abstract, broad archetype of sexuality as such which pornography does. It operates through real relations between real people, emphasizing the concrete, living flesh and blood of sexuality whereas pornography turns sexuality into an abstract, dead archetype dominated by value.
We ought to point out the hypocrisy of those who moralize over the “filthiness” of women in the sex trade at the same time that we attack the value-form’s domination over sexuality. Commodification is not agency, commodification is not liberation.
As I discussed in “A Lonely Life,” my generation is making a turn towards commodity-logic in all of our interpersonal relations. Liberalism’s concept of the individual as an atom, and as free to the extent that it is free from society, serves as the basis for this. We consider there to be a dichotomy between ourselves and others, and see others as either assets or liabilities. We tend to view them like commodities, desirable or undesirable, to be kept or disposed of according to their worth to us as investments. We evaluate them according to abstract measures and archetypes, directly mirroring the exchange of commodities of different, distinct use-values and concrete characteristics according to abstract value.
Due to our society’s Puritanical orientation, we tend to consider intimacy to be associated with romance, and romance tied directly to a property-sexuality. Sexuality is considered to be above and beyond all other interpersonal relationships. Even those who wish to prove that sex is no different to them than breathing implicitly have this concept in mind, as they wish to prove themselves by its standard. As social relations are atomized, and the flows of potentials for interpersonal relationships are torn apart, the commodification of sexuality represents the congealing of a socially significant form of intimacy into an even more distanced experience.
This is not to say marital sexuality is somehow better by being a bond between specific persons. It is simply a more personal form of domination. In this case, we consider our sexual empowerment to be wrought by commodifying interpersonal intimacy as a sex-commodity. We do not invest in others unless we can extract from them. We associate intimacy with sex, and when sex is privatized by the commodity-form, we confine intimacy even further.
The logic of commodity production is becoming evident in our sexuality. We evaluate others according to whether they fit given archetypes, which are our “types” or even fetishes. We approach them more as use-values arranged according to common abstract exchange-values, rather than approaching them in a personable way. We approach our sexual interactions extractively, even where they take place in the context of a romantic relationship.
Once again, this is not to say that marital sexuality is somehow superior or more authentic by virtue of bonding sexuality to a specific person. We are not slut-shaming here. Both the old marital sexuality and our commodity-sexuality are expressions of bourgeois society. Commodity-sexuality is simply emerging as a dominant form because capital is unable to sustain stable social structures where it craves commodification. For commodification to thrive, it must shatter things apart in order to enclose them into commodities. We are watching this commodification occur in the site of sexuality.
In terms of the pathologies which are produced by this commodity-logic in sexuality, they occur both in our perceptions of others and ourselves. We fixate on interchangeable abstract qualities and archetypes rather than specificities. We search for the exaggeration of these qualities and archetypes as a result of the lack of an anchoring function by a concern with specificity that marital sexuality tends to be associated with. For example, we want bigger breasts, longer penises, bigger asses, greater height… In the case of fetishes, this exaggeration and search for caricature becomes especially evident. Further, as discussed earlier, the market logic tends to fixate on proving its perversity in the terms of prudishness. Thus, commodity-sexuality is associated with pathological insecurities around a sense of inadequacy of the self in sexual characteristics and performance, or in some circles being too “vanilla.”
Not only do we seek out people as mere embodiments of archetypes and abstract characteristics, we also wish to reconstruct ourselves according to these archetypes. These archetypes tend to be the dichotomous concepts of Manliness and Womanhood. However, it also extends to the exotic archetypes which are fixated on as spectacles, such as gender variant people.
We feel a pressure to abide by these archetypes, making them the measure of ourselves. The closer we are to these ideal images, the more “good” we are, and vice versa for the further we are. The plastic surgery industry in particular feeds off of this desire, literally altering people’s physical characteristics after the images produced by the market. Even if we believe we are doing this for ourselves, since we have no particular person in mind when we do it, and that we are therefore empowered, we ignore that our desires and insecurities are socially produced. Capital merely reproduces patriarchy here, and the male gaze becomes the gaze of the market.
This market logic becomes the basis for the direct commodification of sexuality. We are told that selling our sexual services, or the objectified form of our sexuality in the form of images, videos and so on is a means of independence, self-determination, and empowerment. Yet, this is based on the premise that the market is simply a medium for self-expression, and that it exerts no influence on us.
In reality, the market exerts dominance through bonds of dependency, especially in the sexual market. Producers must conform to the tastes of consumers, must produce an output sufficient to survive, and their concrete labor is dominated by abstract capital. They are treated poorly by consumers, who view them primarily as sex-archetypes, and despise any activity outside of this as representing a deficiency.
Capital calcifies archetypes, stereotypes, and social desires into objects of consumption through the standardized, rationalized system of mass production. It produces and reproduces these images in a feedback loop. Historically, with the capital of the West dominating the world, it has in particular mass-produced an ideal image which is white, bourgeois, and Masculine or Feminine in accordance with the norms of Western societies.
The desire to become this image is still present in most of the world, and colonized consciousness drives the darker peoples of the world to hate their “ethnic” features as self-failures. They are catered to by the makeup industry, which offers means of lightening the skin, or even plastic surgeons, who remold facial features and skin colors in accordance with the ideal image. Today, there is a certain diversification of the ideal image, but the same logic ultimately still applies. At best, we are still taught to worship the bourgeoisie, but instead a more diverse bourgeoisie.
Thus, the individualistic concept of sexual liberation turns right around into another constellation of sexual repression. The domination of the value-form in the place of the Father-Husband-Patriarch does not transcend the cordoning off of and regimentation of sexuality. The decline of marriage and the nuclear family in place of greater integration of women into the public labor market does open the way for challenging the logic of patriarchy and associated sexual repression. It produces an environment where, for example, my generation can be especially progressive regarding gender and sexuality. However, where the domination of the market remains, so, too, does unfree sexuality.
Commodity-sexuality in some ways operates as a parody of historically produced sexual pathologies, but it is a parody which does not question the terms of our sexual regime itself. It tends to drive us into caricature, and at best produces a plethora of caricatures to abide by. In bourgeois eyes, freedom is the freedom to choose what we consume. We fence ourselves off by this individualistic logic, and we destroy any sense of community with others in the name of this concept of freedom. And yet, sexual liberation can only be wrought by recognizing that the individual is always a social individual. We must stop limiting ourselves to the individual as the limit of our analysis and ethics, and be willing to recognize that, in the words of Karl Marx:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”²⁹
Marx gestures towards an important conception which would be helpful to elaborate. As I have mentioned repeatedly, our biological functions always have a historically specific content. Yet this is an incomplete elaboration. Our social-historical activity has a twofold productive influence. On one hand, labor objectifies our activity by literally molding materials into a product of labor. On the other hand, we are shaped by our activity in producing.
This can take the form of, say, calloused hands, or it can take the form of the chronic illnesses and disabilities which Friedrich Engels described in The Condition of the Working Class in England³⁰ or Marx in Capital, Volume One.³¹ This social activity also produces conceptions, especially in repetitive activities. These concepts are produced by our activity, mediate our interactions with the world, and also are what we work with in our activity. We shape the world, and the world which we act upon shapes us in the course of us. Physiologically and psychologically.
If inhuman working and living conditions can be objectified in our bodies, such as in high rates of cancer among coal miners, then can’t they also take the form of pathologies or “mental illnesses?” Why shouldn’t we consider structural isolation of individuals when we discuss depression? Or the fact that we interact with others on such a distant basis? Of course these illnesses are associated with certain forms of neurological activity or deficiencies, but what is the “material” being worked with? Doesn’t health have to do with what one takes in? We have to extend our investigation beyond the boundaries of our skin, and beyond our families. Why are so many people depressed and lonely? Why are we considered healthy if we are able to work according to a standardized schedule, even if we are still in agony? Why do pathologies and mental illnesses seem to be produced on an industrial scale?
Trauma is itself the objectification of distressing experiences in our physio-psychological operations. Our basic operations, our “common sense” assumptions, our self-preserving instincts are shifted in adaptation to traumatic experiences. The concept of trauma as an individual experience is inaccurate, as it ignores the production of traumas in line with social relations, as well as what our fundamental outlooks are which might be shaken by traumatic experiences.
Sexual pathologies are also, in a word, the objectification of our social activity into psychological concepts and fixations. These concepts guide our interactions with sexuality in the world, including how we evaluate others and express our preferences, or even conceive of the notion of sexual preferences itself. At the same time, these concepts are literally objectified in our flesh: through how we present ourselves, through our performances, and most literally in such practices as plastic surgery. Where commodity production dominates sexuality, we remake ourselves in the image of commodity-archetypes.
Our society produces traumas, pathologies, and illnesses on an industrial scale because our system of rationalized, standardized production premises on hyper-specialization of labor is oriented not towards life, but abstract value. Capitalism is literally inhuman. We can never be enough for capital. We are seemingly always alone, always deficient, always lost. Illness, physical and psychological, is built into the system. Our concept of becoming healthy is to merely be adjusted to the whole monstrosity, restoring our ability to go to work. For a genuinely healthy society, we must recognize that health is not all about individual choice, including sexual health and our attitudes around sexuality.
Self-Consciousness and Revolution:
We have made it quite clear that our current concept of sexual liberation is deficient, so how can we move forward? We need to fundamentally challenge the terms of capitalist ideology and liberal individualism. The problem should not be framed as the self in isolation, needing to have the liberty to sexually express themselves expanded against society, but the self as a node in a social web.
The whole idea of a public-private distinction, of an individual-society antagonism, is ultimately rooted in capitalism. The confinement of sexuality to the domestic private sphere has historically been the basis for the oppression of women and exploitation of their unpaid reproductive labor as a means of subsidizing the public labor of men. It also represents a means of ostracizing women who are forced to engage in sexuality as a career, especially marginalized proletarian women, since they violate the confinement of sexuality to the private sphere. Yet, merely bringing sexuality into the public sphere is not enough, because to be dominated by commodity production instead of familial relations is no liberation from sexual repression.
In a crude sense, the public sphere originates in that which concerns capitalists directly, like waged-labor, taxation and the use of tax-funds, and all market activity. The private sphere originates in that which is not directly the capitalist’s concern, or which they do not wish to be responsible for, such as what we do when not working. If we want to transcend capitalism, we have to transcend the whole dichotomy of private-public. We cannot do this by making atomistic individualism an absolute principle. We have to reconsider how we think about the boundaries of the individual, of identity, of desire, of health, of everything. We have to recognize ourselves as social beings.
To simply bury our heads in the sand on the question of sexuality and consign it to the operations of commodity-actors is to merely act on liberal principles. Sexuality is already a social relation. Sexual liberation, genuine sexual liberation, requires recognizing this and acting collectively. This does not mean we wish for the enforcement of ostracism, shame, or repression around sexuality. We are not conservatives. We simply wish to hammer home that, if we operate in an individualist framework where the point is freedom of individual consumption by monads, we do not make any step towards sexual liberation. We merely extend the horizon of commodification. The personal is political, regardless of whether one tries to pretend as if desire comes from nowhere.
It is important to develop a practice of recognizing and questioning our “common sense” concepts of good and bad in relationships and sexuality. Why do we consider sexuality to be a sphere above and superior to platonic friendship? Why do we view others in terms of caricatures in our sexuality? Why do we fixate on domination and extraction? And importantly, why do we default to the dismissive phrase of “let people do what they want”? Why do they want what they want? How do we behave through historically-produced social relations?
Ownership in sexuality, whether through the bondage of marriage or through the market in sexuality, ultimately produces distance between people at the same time that it seeks to monopolize sexuality for given interests. The control of reproduction, particularly through the coding of gender, produces this distancing and contributes to dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. This includes sexual repression.
To end the coding of reproduction, it is necessary to on one hand, develop the “means of reproduction,” to borrow a phrase from Shulamith Firestone. That is, to decouple sexuality from reproduction, and thus the forcible bordering and definition of gendered categories, it is necessary to combat the gendered division of labor. Domestic labor must be socialized, and the marking of “feminine” and “masculine” social activities must be challenged.
This challenge to the ideology of patriarchy is important if we wish to avoid simple economic reductionism. The distancing effect of archetypes associated with repressive sexuality must be abolished by the turn towards a mode of production premised on person-person relationships, where concrete relations with particular people are the key to the operation of the system. In sexuality, this means ending the mediation of objectified archetypes in our interactions with others.
This does not mean we seek to establish some system where everyone has sex with everyone all the time, or individual pairings as such are abolished. This is not our point at all. The idea that communists’ commitment to free love means collectivizing bodies is an old, reactionary trope. The point is to abolish the domination and exploitation produced by monopolistic, private property-sexuality. Rather than obligation, such as to the Father-Husband-Patriarch, or exchange of equivalent “values,” such as in commodity-sexuality, we ought to seek a sexuality based on interpersonal expression and recognition of the self’s identity as one’s relations with others. The flesh and blood person, the specific person, must be restored in how we approach each other.
Rather than a shameful thing, a painful experience, or a transaction, we must seek a sexuality which is treated in a frank way, and is recognized as another form of life-expression. That is, another means of expressing the universal community, without the stultifying and painful bondage of abuse, extraction, exploitation, depersonalization, loneliness, and insecurity. Sexuality should be a genuine means of connecting with others, rather than something hidden by taboo and the control of personal bonds or the impersonal power of capital.
This notion of sexuality transcends the whole framework of prudishness and perversion. The key is to de-stigmatize sexuality, not to take the current form of it as a repressed taboo and to toss the taboo-form everywhere. We do not wish to prove ourselves in the terms of prudishness, nor do we wish to develop yet another industry in the consumption of taboos as commodities. This is important for health in every sense, from frank and open education in physiological sexual health and preventing the spread of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) to a healthy relationship with sexuality.
Fixations on sexuality as a spectacle, subversion, or search for the universal do not move towards this in a meaningful way. Sex addiction has an ideological association with the current status of sexuality as both taboo and supposed unique means of extraction. Sex addiction might be motivated by some search for pleasure, or numbing, or it might even be motivated by a drive for self-negation of the self as an unconscious desire to connect with the universal. Yet this universal can only be realized by recognizing the particular as the basis for the universal. The universal ought not negate the particular, nor should we seek to approach all things in an extractivist way. Love of the self must be premised on love for others, and vice versa. Revolution must seek to restore the balance and metabolism of life, against the chaotic self-destructive drive of capitalism.
A communal concept of sexuality must be restored. This one must be transformative. To leave sexuality to the privatization of marriage or the market is to cede to capital. The liberation of the concrete from the abstract, of living from dead labor, of society from capitalism must take the form of the establishment of a universal community. This does not mean we simply establish some utopia apart from existing society. Existing society has already laid the basis for its own transcendence in its internal operations. Capital sabotages its own reproduction, as it is concerned first and foremost with feeding abstract value. In the site of sexuality, we must use our existing links with each other and potentials for solidarity (for example, between and among women, LGBT people, etc.) which have been situated by this “constellation” to our advantage.
We need not merely defect from society. In fact, by doing this, we tend to instead merely replicate the basic logic of the social relations objectified in us. If we imagine a utopia, can we help operating with the material which has been bestowed to us by the “common sense” of our specific society? Rather than run, we ought to fight for a self-conscious revolutionary movement and work to bring ourselves to self-consciousness. Sexuality need not be a thing of shame, dissatisfaction, pain, and humiliation. Restoring it as a means of expressing communal life is possible. In fact, an entirely different world is possible.
Special thanks to SM for help in working through this essay.
