Who cares what SHE feels like doing? It’s her conjugal duty to get over a massive physical event that has literally rearranged her organs and stretched her parts beyond comprehension and brought her through a life-or-death portal as soon as humanly possible. As in this post by a woman on Marriage Missions, a Christian website that hopes “to help those who are married and those preparing for marriage to be PRO-ACTIVE in helping to save marriage from divorce”: “I felt what I did all day was meet other people’s needs. Whether it was caring for my children, working in ministry, or washing my husband’s clothes, by the end of the day I wanted to be done need-meeting. I wanted my pillow and a magazine. But God prompted me: Are the “needs” you meet for your husband the needs he wants met?’” The answer of course is NO! No less than GOD says she needs to put aside the sanity-producing magazine and pillow and start fucking her husband! Get over yourself and start fucking! God says, get GGG!
GGG: Good, Giving, and Game. That’s sex-advice columnist Dan Savage’s acronym, meaning “good in bed,” “giving equal time and equal pleasure,” and “game for anything — within reason.” “If you are expected to be monogamous and have one person be all things sexually for you, then you have to be whores for each other,” Savage says. “You have to be up for anything.”
These are solid guidelines to which I have long aspired. But now I think we have a right to our kink and our fatigue, both.
In an age all too happy to collapse the sodomitical mother into the MILF, how can rampant, “deviant” sexual activity remain the marker of radicality? What sense does it make to align “queer” with “sexual deviance,” when the ostensibly straight world is having no trouble keeping pace? Who, in the straight world, besides some diehard religious conservatives, truly experiences sexual pleasure as inextricably linked to reproductive function? Has anyone looked at the endless list of fetishes on a “straight” porn website recently? Have you read, as I did this morning, about the trial of Officer Gilberto Valle? If queerness is about disturbing normative sexual assumptions and practices, isn’t one of these that sex is the be-all and end-all? What if Beatriz Preciado is right — what if we’ve entered a new, post-Fordist era of capitalism that Preciado calls the “pharma-copornographic era,” whose principal economic resource is nothing other than “the insatiable bodies of the multitudes — their cocks, clitorises, anuses, hormones, and neurosexual synapses … [our] desire, excitement, sexuality, seduction, and … pleasure”?
Faced with the warp speed of this “new kind of hot, psychotropic, punk capitalism,” especially from my station of fatigue, exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped.
I first met Sedgwick in a graduate seminar titled Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology. By way of introduction, she announced that she had started going to therapy because she wanted to be happier. To hear a scary theoretical heavyweight admit such a thing changed my life. Then, without missing a beat, she said she wanted to play a quick get-to-know-you game involving totem animals.
Totem animals? How could it be that I had fled the spacey Haight-Ashbury of my youth for hard-core, intellectual New York, explicitly to escape games involving totem animals, only to find myself in the middle of one in a doctoral classroom? The game placed an icy finger on my identity phobia: it was but a short leap from here, I felt, to the index card, Sharpie, and lapel pin.
Perhaps anticipating this horror, Sedgwick explained to us that the game had a kind of out. She said that we were free to offer up a fake animal, a kind of decoy identification, if we so desired — if, for example, we had a “real” totem animal that we would prefer to keep to ourselves.
I didn’t have a real or fake animal, and so I just sweated as we went around the room. When it got to me, I burped out otter. Which was a form of true. It was important to me back then to feel, to be wily. To feel small, slick, quick, amphibious, dexterous, capable. I didn’t know then Barthes’s book The Neutral, but if I had, it would have been my anthem — the Neutral being that which, in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away. The otter was thus a complex sort of stand-in, or fake-out, another identity I felt sure I could shimmy out of.
But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again — not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
“Many people doing all kinds of work are able to take pleasure in aspects of their work,” Sedgwick once wrote, “but something different happens when the pleasure is not only taken but openly displayed. I like to make that different thing happen.”
One happy thing that can happen, according to Sedgwick, is that pleasure becomes accretive as well as autotelic: the more it’s felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual, it becomes.
But, as Sedgwick knew well, there are other, more sinister models. A famous example from Sedgwick’s own life makes this clear. In 1991, the year Sedgwick was first diagnosed with breast cancer, Sedgwick’s essay “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” was made notorious by right-wing culture warriors before Sedgwick had even written it. (They found the title in a Modern Language Association program and went to town from there.) About learning she was ill just as the “journalistic hologram bearing [her] name” became the object of ugly vitriol, she writes: “I don’t know a gentler way to say it than that at a time when I’ve needed to make especially deep draughts on the reservoir of a desire to live and thrive, that resource has shown the cumulative effects of my culture’s wasting depletion of it.” She then names a few of the “thousand things [that] make it impossible to mistake the verdict on queer lives and on women’s lives, as on the lives of those who are poor or are not white.” This verdict can become a chorus of voices in our heads, standing by to inhibit our capacity to contend with illness, dread, and devaluation. “[These voices] speak to us,” Sedgwick says. “They have an amazing clarity.”
The way Sedgwick interprets it, it wasn’t just her linking of a canonical writer with the filthy specter of self-pleasuring that struck her critics as depraved. More galling was the spectacle of a writer or thinker — be it Sedgwick or Austen — who finds her work happy-making, and who celebrates it publicly as such. Worse still, in a culture committed to bleeding the humanities to death, along with any other labors of love that don’t serve the God of capitaclass="underline" the spectacle of someone who likes her pointless, perverse work and gets paid — even paid well — for it.