Two days ago—nope, nope, that’s last week now. Middle child developed the puking plague and everything was delayed.
Five days ago, then. I think. Maybe. There was a lot of vomiting.
So five days ago—no, six now, the toddler also began puking—I hectored an undeserving friend (SORRY DAVID YOU’RE IN THE NEWSLETTER AGAIN) who gently reported that he had heard one shouldn’t use “poorly” anymore, as in “I am feeling poorly,” because it associated poverty with illness and general undesirability.
You can, of course, make this (specious) argument that using “poor” to indicate “ill” or “undesirable” implicitly undermines the worth of poor people as human beings created in the image of God—and that scrubbing this use from the language somehow inclines the haves to view the have-nots more favorably, or mirabile deus, work to improve their state. I used to give this argument some credence. I also used to view the American keyboard left with a hell of a lot more optimism.
First of all, poverty is bad. Poor people do not want to be poor. They in fact still know you mean poor if you say “low-income” or “socioeconomically disadvantaged” or “underprivileged.” Second of all, this kind of rhetorical policing produces no meaningful change in poverty rates while simultaneously looping back in on itself to function as a mechanism of gatekeeping for the most informed, the most online, the most….oh, wait. Privileged. Who has the energy to police their language at the outer edge of what is currently seen as proper, in order to perform moral virtue for others similarly invested in morally sanctioned rhetoric? Right. Rich people.
But Tara, you say, I heard this from a low-income disabled queer Black femme on Twitter! Girl. Please. How many scandals do we have to have to figure out that the people screaming their heads off about this petty shit are usually NOT WHO THEY CLAIM TO BE. How. Many. Power replicates itself by co-opting the language of the oppressed. It is what it is.
People who are fighting the struggle usually are too fucking busy* to conflate rhetorical microshifts with change.
With Ukraine on fire this week, Texas declaring (further) war on trans kids, and a nonzero chunk of my colleagues deciding the thing to do here is whatabout NATO with the destruction of the post-WWII order seemingly imminent, it seemed like a good time to point out that PERHAPS those of us in the humanities could have better spent the energy we used to start our micro-linguistic madness on idk, food banks and buying trans women’s books. Get off my fucking lawn, folks. (NOT YOU DAVID YOU’RE FINE I’M SORRY BRO).
*Now that said, I know that plenty of folks whose lives are wrapped up in their particular movement get sucked into internecine fights on terminology. For instance, I could fill this entire newsletter with my rage at how the energy the repro movement spent stabbing each other in the neck over terms could have been better spent elsewhere and didn’t make a damn bit of difference in the end.
Cooking Nonsense
Last week I discovered you can take regular mayonnaise, whisk lemon juice and seasonings into it, and have a delicious sauce. That’s really it. Also, here are some dumplings. You should eat here if you can manage it:
I took this photo immediately before the server, a very fashionable, very gay child, approached me to complement my style….and then tell me exactly where he thought I should shop, because it’s where he just bought his stepmother some clothes as a birthday present.
Yeah. I’m Stacy’s Mom. I dig it, but also….not.
My grand plans for this week include figuring out how to use tofu in a sheet-pan recipe (THERE MUST BE A WAY) and using the last winter squash from last September for soup. Maybe there will also be pizza.
Gardening Fuckery
First crocuses and snowdrops are up!
Meanwhile I’m keeping all the citrus alive inside, sowed a bunch of poppies outside, and started some radishes and fava beans under protection outside. It’ll be time to start all the indoor seeds soon, which will be…a space challenge.
Went to Longwood to watch elderly women drop cash money on obscene flowers, too. I desperately want to meet the filthy old bag who bred this orchid from a seed the size of a speck of dust and painstakingly reared it to flowering for 5-10 years with the full intent of naming it….this.
Yes Means Yes, Or Cultural Bullshit
If we can do this,
Cupid is no longer an archer: his glory shall be
ours, for we are the only love-gods.
—Don Pedro*, Much Ado About Nothing
*arguably a consent violator. sorry, shax.
Ridding itself of religion without collapsing into murky, overdetermined heuristics remains one of the persistent difficulties of secular Western ethics in general and sexual ethics in particular. After all, secular Christian society has only been trying to do ethics without God for a hot minute and tends to replicate it when it tries.
Many of our gut-instinct responses to moral quandaries—particularly ones around sex, death, and money—are not so easily untangled from religion. It is not trivial to come up with a new ethics unhooked from religion after marinating in it for the entirety of human history. The answers we’ve fallen back on in the West hinge heavily on consent underpinned with a heavy helping of secularized Christianity. Consent, while a useful concept as far as it goes, cannot stand up to the weight we’ve put it under. Since consent is most often applied to sex, and sex is most often given serious consideration in queer and feminist discourse, let’s begin there.
Animals, corpses, and children can’t consent! That’s the primly delivered, lockstep answer to theocratic attempts to make a slippery-slope argument for the legalization of queer sex as a gateway to bestiality, necrophilia, and pedophilia. But “consent” is absolutely not a relevant metric for the first two scenarios, and only a partial one for the third.
We may object to necrophilia because it causes social harm, or because it violates human dignity, or because it causes harm to the families of the deceased, but we cannot object to it on the basis of consent. Consent exists between persons; corpses are in no sensible framework, persons. As Joseph Fischel puts it in Screw Consent, “Consent is undeniably a human construct in relation to human transactions under conditions of human cognition” (118).
Similarly, one may object to bestiality on similar grounds to other forms of animal exploitation (slaughter, labor, and so forth). Or, one may object on similarly dignitarian grounds to necrophilia—something about sex with animals inherently degrades human civilization.
But even ignoring that animals are not persons, objecting to bestiality on consent while still eating meat and finding pig farmers masturbating sows for larger litters morally and legally licit is somewhat specious. Bestiality, like necrophilia, by and large disgusts us because it is an ancient, cross-cultural social and religious taboo: consent has very little useful to say here.
Pedophilia is the trickier case here, and while I find Fischel far too willing to allow that sex with minors is not always already harmful, he is correct that consent is insufficient to describe why it is morally wrong (130). Rather, an overlapping, over-determined network of wrongness—only some of which has to do with consent, some of the time—makes pedophilia especially heinous. Sex with minors is alternately exploitative, non-consensual, harmful, abusive or all of these at once—limiting its wrongness to consent minimizes its horror.
Third-wave feminism, for its part, never answered the pressing questions of second-wave feminism or its quibbles with the sexual revolution—-what is to be done about pornography? what is to be done about heterosexual marriage? about straight sex? about bad sex? what is to be done?—with anything other than an all-caps freshman presentation on CONSENT and YES MEANS YES. We are giving SEX POSITIVITY, baby, we are giving ASSERTIVE SLUTS THAT KNOW WHAT THEY WANT, we are giving Cosmo telling you to put your man’s penis in a donut and eat the donut. Or something.
If at any time you feel weird about “consent” as the only valid tenant of sexual ethics, just add an adjective, folks! Enthusiastic! Informed! Risk-Aware!
Zoomers, sensing a certain mucky instability here, an essential lack of anything but a neoliberal concept of contract rounded up to ethics (consent: we all agree to terms, and thus the terms are moral, the terms are just), have somehow made consent—originally the free-love freedom from Leviticus, the burning lists of mortal sins—Puritanical. Yes, it’s tiresome, but the yearly Twitter shitstorm over Pride parades is somewhat illustrative: No kink at pride! I didn’t consent to see that! I didn’t consent to hear that! I didn’t consent to this debate! CHILDREN could be subjected to SEX, you pervert! You didn’t get consent from everyone in the public square!
I’m sympathetic to the void they’re attempting to fill here, the gap the atheistic, sex-positivity phase of white feminism left them between yes means yes and but why the fuck do I still feel awful about sex? but it just doesn’t work.
There’s not a lot written about this gap yet, because to suggest that consent might not be quite up to snuff gets people heated. First they assume you’re going full Camille Paglia, then they assume you just haven’t added a sufficient number of adjectives to consent. And indeed, consent is probably the least-bad legal standard we have for determining when sex becomes assault. But it becomes the “assume a frictionless surface” of ethics when we try to apply it to life more broadly, to use it to solve the problems of sex that are not best solved by the state. Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again puts it like so:
But the problem with consent is not that sex can and should never be contractual—the safety of sex workers relies precisely on the notion of a contract, and the possibility of its violation, in order that they can be understood as having been assaulted. Nor is it that consent is unsexy or unromantic. The problem, instead, is that an attachment to consent as the rubric for our thinking about sex—the problem with our being ‘magnetized’ by it, as Joseph Fischel puts it—ignores a crucial aspect of being a person: that individuals do not bear equal relationships of power to one another. The attachment to consent as the overarching framework for thinking about good and bad sex amounts to holding onto the fantasy of liberalism, in which, as Emily A. Owens puts it, ‘equality simply exists’ (Angel, 30).
Angel’s entire book reads like this stunningly lucid paragraph. But she also holds herself back, dissecting the problem of consent culture and the politics of desire without telling us what to do, what is to be done? How to account for the fact that we never meet on an equal ground of power, without infantilizing those with less? It’s a wise choice to hold back, perhaps even a principled one—there’s a certain way in which her refusal to give an answer is itself a (very Foucauldian*) answer. She gives us a premise, “we shouldn’t have to know ourselves in order to be safe from violence,” (40) but she does not tell us how to get there. Partly that’s because the book is a collection of essays—the first, “On Consent,” might have been expanded into a book.
Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex—also an essay collection, which says something about the conditions placed on nonfiction publishing—goes there, but does so disastrously. Well, perhaps not disastrously if one truly believes that freedom of speech is a racist conceit at its core, as is the distinction between speech, performative speech act, and action, and that artistic expression is only speech when its good for you. Look, this sounds harsh, but I went into this book hoping for a serious consideration on the problems of mainstream pornography and got “moving pictures are bad, actually, they rot the youths’ brains.”
In her chapter “Talking to My Students about Porn,” Srinivasan declares that “filmed sex" forecloses the imagination because it is filmed, “making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified.” Film makes us into a “mimesis-machine” (70). To restore the “lost power” of sexual imagination we must stop the “onslaught” of both sexual speech and images (71). Srinivasan refuses to say she longs for an era where obscenity laws were in force, as she admits this would largely be used to harm the vulnerable, but her phrasing here is nonetheless alarmingly carceral. She at one point claims it is “their onslaught [sexual words and images] that would have to be arrested” in order to cure what ails us (71). Needless to say, this entire take is astonishingly regressive.
(She also insists that female ejaculation is not a feature of mainstream pornography (57), which, wow, there’s an entire essay you could have written there around how porn fetishizes specific, showy kinds of female pleasure (squirting, multiple orgasms) while simultaneously making that pleasure about masculinity.)
I put the book down after that. May go back to it later.
Despite my disagreement with Srinivasan, though, I think her book has balls for attempting to go there, to fill the insufficiencies of consent as an overarching sexual ethic and to answer “what is to be done" beyond a shrug and some vague Levinasian gestures towards radical vulnerability as an ethics of care.
But fuck if I feel comfortable signing onto The New Rules for Sex. We’re still dragging ourselves out of Leviticus’ long-ass shadow, after all. Is it even time yet, for a new sexual ethics that fills this need for rules and regulations? Judging by how “consent” has been put to use for just that, feminists and queer folks certainly want new rules, and they want them now. One thing I’m sure about: consent ain’t it. Consent is the floor.
*New information about Foucault strongly suggests that he was a pedophile that preyed on young Tunisian boys. I would hope that we can bear in mind that his philosophical impulses against disclosure and state power are not necessarily wrong, in spite of this horrifying fact.