Can Poly, Kinky, Queer Sexuality Address Root-Cause Social Issues?
Over a beer, my sweet friend Chad expressed skepticism that polyamory is radical, pointing out that at its heart is a basic, normal human desire: people like to fuck.
Almost as common as breathing, shitting, pissing, crying, and dying, getting off is something most people do. Everybody shits and almost everybody fucks. Many people fuck more than one person-some do it ethically and others don’t. Most people fantasize about fucking more than one person.
Joining the ranks of bicycling, gardening, canning, cooking, and knitting, kinky, queer, open sexualities have gained “radical chique” in the last decades. Looking at the spectrum of banal acts that constitute radical politics, we’re left asking what radical means and what sexuality might have to do with it?
From my perspective, “radical” acts address root-cause issues of oppression, domination, and violence with direct solutions.
Nothing about biking is inherently radical; however, pedaling day-after-day, at risk of death, to reduce fossil fuel usage, build body strength, and slow our culture down, mundane pedaling becomes an act of resistance.
Sex is similar. Nothing about being gay, queer, trans, poly, or kinky is inherently radical. What is radical is the life-and-death public defiance of an oppressive social structure, the public transgression of the myths of monogamy, heterosexuality, procreative sex, possession, the violation of consent, gender conformity, and the creation of more humane, psychologically honest, and hotter forms of relating.
Sexuality is a territory within which we explore our relationships to the world, to others, to life. It is an inherently experimental territory and one in which we negotiate the root causes of exploitation and domination. Marriage, dating, pornography, sex-work, procreation, sex-industries, the health care system, and the state all exist within economic systems and structures. How we choose to negotiate these systems sexually can be resistant and creative within the bedroom, on a date, or in an orgy.
Building creative sexual economies, relational structures, families, and social support networks can profoundly impact the root of individual and public psychological and economic systems. Open conversations about sexuality help us recognize each other’s physicality, not only as consumers of products and information, but as tangible, real, authentic, embodied beings with full capacity to feel pleasure, pain, and variations in between.
Learning to be transparent about our feelings, needs, and experiences and negotiating difficult emotions can go a long way to building individual capacity in conflict resolution, restorative justice, and other non-violent, radical, systemic solutions.
Being transparent about our desires to dominate and be dominated, to hurt and be hurt and chaneling those feelings into consensual, safe, hot, sober, sane scenes might help us aid our system in finding outlets for systemically repressed desires manifest in war, prisons, animal exploitation, torture, racism, eugenics, economic exploitation, rape, and domestic violence.
In touch with the world, our desires and our bodies, we can better understand oppression. We heighten our ability to destroy systems of violence and build systems of desire, pleasure, joy, and possibility when we feel intensely the touch, feelings, and thoughts of the rest of the earth, its inhabitants, and its people.
Learning to control our complex emotions, desires, spirits, and bodies in relationship to each other, we can fulfill our potential as respectful, loving, feeling, growing people working symbiotically with the earth and each other to create the world we want to live in, a world of compassion, consensus, liberation, energy, orgasm and love.
Let’s get together and create the world we wanna see with a little rough sex.
My friend Cynthia posted this on facebook.
Everyone breathes, shits, pisses, and dies. Almost everyone cries. Everyone has relationships. But – as the post admitted – not everyone fucks.
And as you also mentioned, not everyone fucks more than one person. And just because someone fantasizes about something they don’t do, doesn’t mean they’re repressed. For example, I usually fantasize about copious casual straight sex (and I mean SUPER STRAIGHT), while in practice I’m kinkier and genderfuckier, not to mention more emotional, intimate & celibate. Does that mean I’m really a repressed closeted poly cis hetero?
Well, maybe, but moving on… The difference between monogamous and poly people seems to be simple – how many people they are fucking. Both kinds of people are sometimes ethical about it, sometimes not, sometimes “repressed,” sometimes not. And don’t forget many people are single, celibate, or asexual. (Including priests and nuns, and who have that thinly-veiled “sex with God” thing! Deisexual??? Oh speaking of which one time I was tripping and I had sex with the universe and holy shit it was the best sex of my life!!(no offense to anyone)!!!)
I totally agree that building alternative ways of relating/family structures is one of the coolest radical things about queer communities. Totally.
But I wonder why should we center sex when building these families and social networks? A philosophical question – what is the center of relationship? Self? Relation? Emptiness? I dunno, but I think sex is one form of relating (albeit perhaps the blogger’s favorite) among many.
I would even go so far as to argue that the centralization of sex in the definition of relationship is something that queers, radicals, etc have borrowed (perhaps dangerously) from dominant culture. After all, they define family by “blood,” and reproduction, and good ol’ reproductive S-E-X.
Queers, among others, have broadened definitions of sex (non reproductive, kinky, etc) to be more about pleasure and relationship than reproduction. I say let’s keep broadening it to remember that all kinds of relationship and intimacy, as well as relating to oneself, or a lack of relationship, can all be pleasurable.
And I really don’t think dominant culture is sexually repressive (I think the radical queer hypersexual philosopher Foucault had something to say about this), or that everyone’s liberation lies in “discovering” and “liberating” our sexual desires. Actually it’s a mistake to generalize or universalize in any way what people’s liberation is. Not saying that you specifically are doing that, but it seems to be a big part of what counts as “radical queer culture” these days. And fuck that.
Lastly, re: Cynthia, is something that calls itself asexuality, non-sexuality, autosexuality, anti-sexuality, celibacy, deisexuality or less-sexuality also already radical?
Ariel–
Brilliantly put. I need to go revisit Foucault on the point about repression–as I recall he was discussing the Victorian era. I imagine he probably had other ways of talking about this stuff that I need to remind myself of and that might hone my thinking.
You make an excellent point that making generalizations about what liberation means for different people is a mistake. That being said, what role is there for blueprints, guidebooks, and paths grounded in sexuality? Not everyone’s interested in, say, farming, but I think that liberation is contingent in at least some folks addressing our relationship to the earth (not everybody in the same way…)
I appreciate the way you champion various types of asexuality, autosexuality, celibacy, etc…I want to reflect more on these subjects.
Additionally, I think its important to distinguish sexuality from fucking. I disagree that the difference between mono and poly is how many people someone fucks (considering many Mono people fuck tons of folks other than their partners–cheating is a regular practice…) and many poly people are celibate or only having one relationship(fucking-wise) but love many others (as you point out.)
I’m not sure I buy the idea that relationships have centers–sex, sexuality, love, economics, security, health, etc…are all determining factors, but centers? Not sure centers can exist (perhaps as nodes? sites of intersectionality?). Maps through intersecting spiritualities, economics, theories, cultural identities, affective patterns, labor practices, sex practices, and domestic/care-taking/collective styles might be useful in libratory projects (not in a prescriptive sense–but in a let’s try this out way.)
OK, I’m wanting to bite off more than I can chew for now.
Oh, and though I like sex, fucking, etc…I don’t have relational favorites anymore than centers. I’m just writing a lot about sex! I also like organizing, chatting, drinking, healing, intimate without physical, spiritual, and philosophical relationships. Maybe I’ll write more about how queerness relates to these later.
Finally, I’d love to here more about expanded notions of what queer culture is if sexuality is decentralized. I also want to stew on that.
xoxoxo,
kyle
[...] I’m considering the question posed by queerradical when he wonders whether there is really anything radical about poly-kinky sex and invites us to create spaces for collective sharing of sensuous skills. [...]