Consider The Fist And Other Essays
TAS alums debating morals and kinky sex? Where do I sign up!
By now the intellectual internet has read Emily Witt’s excellent n+1 essay, which is fascinating and is self-consciously only superficially about an extreme BDSM porn shoot in San Francisco. (In this post I will assume you’ve read the essay and will not censor my language.)
Here’s Rod Dreher calling it a glimpse of hell.
Here’s TAS Alum Noah Millman reacting to the essay and Rod’s post saying, essentially, why are you a bunch of squares (obviously his post is much smarter than this), and pushing back at the idea that there should be an ideal of morality that we should all conform to.
Here’s TAS Alum Alan Jacobs reacting to Noah and asserting the case against degrading sex with a poetic followup noting how lonely extreme sex can be.
EDIT: I had missed this additional post by Rod.
Here’s Noah taking Alan’s point and a further followup querying the concept of consent.
All of it is fascinating and very good, but I just sort of want to take a step back, because it seems to me that the discussion is headed in a direction that, while important, actually misses what was so striking about this essay. The question that Rod and Noah and Alan are sort of batting around is: are some kinds of sex intrinsically degrading? If yes, what and what does that mean; if not, why not and what does that mean. (There’s also a sub-debate about the difference, and whether there is one, between participating in sexual rituals and watching them over the internet.)
That’s an important discussion to have these days but I do think within the context of this essay it risks missing the forest for the trees.
There are several threads to Witt’s essay: there’s the Kink shoot, but there’s also the San Francisco Googleplex of smart beautiful healthy empty robotic people, there are also as Alan notes glimpses of the human devastation that San Francisco’s sheen hides but that all San Franciscans know (“A Greek chorus of the homeless and mentally ill”; “a side street haunted by drug addicts and the mentally ill just south of the Tenderloin”), and there is finally Witt’s own ruderless personal life.
What is the thing that binds these things all together? It’s not kinky sex. It is, and the piece screams this at me, an utter absence of love.
What this piece is is a description of is what happens when not only people don’t love each other but don’t even have the idea that that is something they ought to do.
If with orthodox Christian theology we describe Hell as the absence of God and God as love, then Rod is absolutely correct that this piece is a glimpse of a Hell on Earth, but perhaps not for the reasons Rod had in mind.
And so while Alan is right to push back against Noah’s notion that getting anally fisted in public is just in Noah’s phrase “San Franciscans flying their freak flags” and to point out that this is self-degradation, I think the right way to understand the piece is to query what is it that makes us want to be degraded, or degrade, or watch people be degraded (while we degrade ourselves), rather than whether degrading is degrading.
Because, to talk about the kinky sex for one second, degradation is what it’s about. What’s arousing about a Kink video is not the anal fisting; what’s arousing is what happens before: the girl being paraded with a sign reading “I’M A WORTHLESS CUNT.” This is the subtext, and this is what generates the arousal. Unless you have an anal fisting fetish, which is not true of enough people to make Kink a viable business enterprise (and even then one might query the reason for the fetish), anal fisting is a turn-on not because of the act itself but because of what it means; that is to say, degradation.
What’s most striking about BDSM is how much of a prisoner it is of Christian sexual ethics. For all the talk of BDSM practitioners about how they are free from “vanilla” sexuality, they are in fact their slave: they simply take vanilla sexuality, and then do the opposite. If you define yourself in opposition to something you are not free from it; you are enslaved to it. And this isn’t just about “putting tab A into slot B”, but about the requirement of traditional sexual morality that sex must be radically other-centered and therefore radically equal—so BDSM must be radically authoritarian. If you could have a definition of Christian sex, a good one would be “a radical denunciation of power”—so of course BDSM must be all about power. If Christian sex is all about self-giving, then BDSM is all about possession. (And the well-known point that in BDSM, it is actually, if you think about it for two seconds, the “sub” who is the master, does nothing to change that.)
And by the way, this is why it’s so powerful, right? Power, domination, possession, these are all the things we crave, deeply, and powerfully, and BDSM promises to give them to us in a radical, deep way through one of the most powerful experiences of humanity, which is sexuality. Good BDSM sex is great.
Christianity cares about sex ultimately because it recognizes that sex is a microcosm of human nature, with its potential for the highest or the lowest. Within sex, we can radically give ourselves to another, but within sex, we can indulge our deep, deep needs for power, or powerlessness—that is to say, in either case, selfishness.
Once we’ve said all of this, we can safely realize that what matters when we think about sex is less specific acts than what they entail and what we are actually doing.
But let’s forget about the sex and God for a second.
If you were to describe how everyone in the piece behaves—the people at the Kink shoot, the Googlers, and Witt herself—, a good place to start would be to say that they’re behaving as anti-Kantians. No one is treating anyone as an end in themselves. Everyone is treating everyone as a means.
In our contemporary sexual hellscape, the thread that binds everything together is that we treat ourselves as means. The Google Princes treat everything as means. The Kink people, obviously—the female porn star is here for an experience, she doesn’t care about Princess Donna or anyone else; the male porn star and Princess Donna are here for a pay check; the bystanders are here for, take your pick, satisfying base urges or simply cheap thrills. (This is where Alan was right to push back against Noah’s notion that they were behaving in a “civilized” way—they were, within the bounds of that particular culture, polite but they were very much uncivilized in the sense that everything they were doing was about them. That’s the difference between politeness (in French, the word for “polite” and the word for “polished” are the same) and courtesy: politeness is merely formal adherence to external standards of conduct, while courtesy is the expression of care for other people which may or may not come through adherence to external standards of conduct properly understood. True civilization is courteous before it is polite. And the discussion about consent, while interesting, leads us astray from this, I think, deeper point.) And Witt, finally, in her own personal life, is treating others as means. She was once looking for a permanent relationship, but she didn’t really know why, except for a vague sense that it would be good for her, and so then she looked for hook-ups, but that hurt other people, and she doesn’t really know how to feel about that, and now she doesn’t know what she wants. (I want to say that I admire Witt’s courage for laying it all out, and I’m certainly not casting stones. It’s not her fault that she lacks the moral vocabulary to understand her actions.)
The thing that all these things have in common is not anal fisting. The thing that all these things have in common is that everybody is treating each other like means and not end in themselves, and not only that, but they don’t seem to even have the concept that there is another way to treat people.
And obviously I think the best way to be a Kantian is to be a Christian. Treating other people as ends in themselves is a wonderful idea, but why, and how, should we do that? The only answer, it seems to me, is love. (And that love, in turn, can only be credible if it is a person.)
Witt writes:
I had made no conscious decision to be single, but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Because of this, people around me continued to view love as a sort of messianic event, and my friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love was something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape. I had known love, but having known love I knew how powerless I was to instigate it or ensure its duration. Whether love was going to arrive or not, I could not suspend my life in the expectation of its arrival. So, back in New York, I was single, but only very rarely would more than a few weeks pass without some kind of sexual encounter.
As if love was something…no human could escape.
What sadness. Of course, we are powerless to “instigate” love or “ensure its duration” if we live in a society that is completely fixated on everything else and on extinguishing it. If everyone is fixated on themselves. If we’re all dangled toys in front of each other, whether labelled “nice car”, “anal fisting videos” or, perhaps the worst, “keeping my options open”. Oh yes, by all means, seek out love, but don’t commit to anything, particularly not early, particularly when there might be so many other interesting things out there to see or do.
And thus, how is it possible to not understand this:
After a decade or so of living this way, with occasional suspensions for relationships that would first revive my belief in romantic love and its attendant structures of domesticity, and then once again fail and extinguish them, I started finding it difficult to revere the couple as the fundamental unit of society. I became a little ornery about it, to be honest: that couples paid lower taxes together, that they could afford better apartments, that there were so few structures of support to ease the raising of a child as a single person, that the divorced experience a sense of failure, that failed marriages are accompanied by so much logistical stress on top of the emotional difficulties. All this because we privilege a certain idea of love. The thought of the natural progression of couples, growing more and more insular, buying nicer and nicer furniture, shutting down the world, accruing things, relaxing into habit, scared me. … Why was love between couples more exceptional? Because it attached itself to material objects, and to children? Because it ordered civilization? I probably would not have a baby without love, and buying a home seemed impossible for all kinds of reasons, but I could have sex. I had a body.
Yes, if “love” is about getting a house and getting a car, and paying less taxes, and if it’s an endlessly receding horizon, then it starts to feel a bit of a ripoff, doesn’t it?
“But, you can have sex. You have a body.” (No, by the way, you are a body.)
That’s when the anal fisting comes, but that’s not where the despair is. The despair is before.
Yes, we’re all getting screwed, in more ways than we realize.
I wonder if you’ve read Witt’s essay on online dating from last year?
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n20/emily-witt/diary
It’s interesting in its own right, plus it provides some interesting context & emotional counter-currents, as it is about some things in the same time period.
The theme of both is loneliness, not extreme sex necessarily.
— StPaulite · May 15, 09:45 PM · #
very very interesting…but stupid
— plebe · May 16, 06:01 AM · #
Sigh…here we go. Conservative men intellectualizing their visceral disgust. I mean, there is some interesting and well-articulated intellectualizing going on in this discussion, but I still find myself discouraged.
You have never been and never will be kinky, and you have never known the joys, thrills, freedoms, challenges, and releases it brings to those who practice it. Because it disgusts you, you transform it into an object of objective moral disgust. (Some conservatives also love doing this with gay people/gay sex. Similar deal, actually, in that gay folks have always fantasized about the same sex; kinky folks have always fantasized about spanking, dungeons, etc.)
On the “civilized/polite” question, sorry, but you are simply full of shit. Consent, and the DEEP respect for consent that the kink community has, is utterly civilized.
— Emily · May 16, 07:06 AM · #
StPaulite: No, I haven’t read it. If I have some time I will.
plebe: Thanks! I am very often stupid, so this is a hypothesis we can’t discount.
Emily:
Man, if you only knew…
— PEG · May 16, 07:52 AM · #
PEG, this is a marvelous post. I’ve been following the Dreher/Jacobs/Millman exchange with interest, and this is the most interesting thing I’ve read on Witt’s original essay.
Your point about Kant and love really resonated – I’ve just finished doing an exam on Kant, and over the course of studying his ethics I think I basically agree with them… except for his view of love. Kant seems to see ‘love’ as a feeling that will only cloud the rational mind and discourage people from doing their duty; but he needs a broader definition. Love is, as you say, simply the real-life meaning of “treat other people as ends in themselves, never as a means only”.
It’s also noteworthy that to my mind the weakest bit of Kantian ethics is his attempt to provide a justification for his morality that does not require God. If love, or treating others as ends in themselves, or whatever, is not a fundamental part of that which is most Real about our world, then why exactly should we do it?
— Albert Pond · May 16, 09:50 AM · #
PEG: “Man, if you only knew…”
Oh? Going back and re-reading with this comment in mind, perhaps my comment would have been more fairly directed at Rod, but I was just sick of the implicit or explicit judgment of BDSM in all these responses (Noah’s being by far the least offensive/irritating).
I recall now where you said “good BDSM sex is GREAT,” but it was easy to miss that in the paragraphs upon paragraphs of polarized morality, whereby “Christian” sex is about giving and the other (how do you figure that, by the way??) and BDSM isn’t. If you know how good BDSM works, then you know it’s about giving AND receiving power, and pleasure, and both self and other all at once.
And BDSM practices are not always about degradation at base level! Sometimes it’s just about the excitement of a particular act. Not everybody who practices BDSM is into verbal humiliation, for instance. Sometimes getting tied up in ropes is about subjugation, and sometimes it’s about how nifty and extreme being tied up in ropes feels on a sensation level. But for those who DO dig the 24/7 master/slave lifestyle, they experience it as the most profound form of love and giving.
I’m one to acknowledge that a TRUE other-focus, with NO focus on self, is near non-existent in this world, and I think that’s just fine. We focus on others because it makes us feel good, even if it’s the grim pleasure of fulfilling a sense of duty or “doing the right thing.”
Maybe Witt’s behavior has been selfish, though your “I’m not judging but I’m gonna call her morally illiterate” comment was…well.
I’d also raise like five eyebrows at equating “Christian” with “vanilla in a loving relationship” in sex. Though your comments about BDSM being prisoner to that system by defining itself in opposition were interesting, and there may be something to that.
— Emily · May 16, 07:13 PM · #
I’m also not a fan of the intellectualization of this, though for opposite reasons. some things should just be dismissed.
The analogy upthread to discomfort with homosexuality only works in a really general sense. There’s a variety of things people feel viscerally disgusted by, that doesn’t mean they don’t distinguish between them.
— plebe · May 17, 02:03 AM · #
Formed in deficit, in our halfness utterly unstill, we roam the earth as if stunned, ready to suffer any debasement to solve the original lack; except THIS craving, ready to sacrifice anything for the whole which we crave.
— ovaut · May 17, 03:49 AM · #
Emily: Hey, thanks for your thoughtful comment. I only just connected it to the Twitter account. #dumb
I don’t really disagree with anything you say about BDSM. BDSM at its best does have not only thrills and pleasure, but giving, and selflessness, and even—I’m not afraid to say it—transcendence. But—it says right there in the name—it is also at its core about, well, domination and pain. That the pain is pleasurable and that within the D/s dynamic there can be selflessness and self-giving and (especially) blissful abandon doesn’t really change that. BDSM says (at least within the context of its practice) “This is what sex is about” and what it says about it is anti-Kantian, even if people find ways to be Kantian within that anti-Kantian framework, if that makes sense.
As far as Christian sex being about self-giving, well, it’s what traditional Christian teaching says. I agree that the Church has been very bad at communicating it, and even very good at ignoring it.
I realize how my talking about Witt might come off, but I really wasn’t trying to judge her. I wasn’t trying to say that she’s “completely” morally illiterate, but that—clearly—she lacks a moral language to analyze her life and the things she looks at. I think it’s just obvious from her story. She visits a bunch of polyamorous googlers and then goes home and cries, but she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know if she should get married, or why, or why not, or if she should keep hooking up, or why, or why not. This is a story about her ignorance (or, if you prefer, her search). Saying she lacks a moral language to analyze this is not (at least from my perspective) derogatory—it’s what her piece is about.
— PEG · May 17, 12:46 PM · #
PEG gets it half right, half very, very wrong (setting aside the talk of Christianity, which as a Jewish atheist I doubt there’s any purpose in discussing without any common ground).
You’re very right that Witt lacks “the moral language to analyze her life,” so long as we can agree that such language might come from either a secular humanist or religious perspective (though its content might differ, of course).
You’re wrong to then read that conclusion onto the people Witt encounters. The participants in the Kink.com shoot, the Google employees, everyone else she encounters. Because she has no such window into herself, she’s not in any sense a reliable guide to what windows others have into themselves.
What bothers me most about the fact that discussion of the N+1 essay is happening among a narrow group of people who share numerous common blind spots and biases is that, in essence, when you talk “people as means” and “people as ends”, you’re having a discussion about objectification, a discussion that’s been going on in feminist and liberal circles for decades now, without inviting any of the seasoned thinkers on objectification to the party.
I’ve read all the essays written in response to N+1 that I can get my hands on. The word “objectification” appears in none of them, except once in the comments section, written by a feminist in reply to Rod Dreher’s follow-up.
To the people who have actually engaged in those discussions and that intellectual tradition, this all seems, well… pretty basic. People are not simply objectifiers or objectified; the same individual can be both means and end, whether to various people or to a single person, all dependent on all sorts of contexts. Including social and power contexts. Your generalizations about the people participating in Kink.com hinges on the extrapolation from their (indirectly perceived) participation in one specific experience to all their other experiences; it’s as if you read an essayist write that she saw a man across the room at a restaurant eating a hamburger, extrapolate that he does not eat anything other than hamburgers nor ever drink liquids, and then proceed to pronounce about him accordingly. For lack of better terms, it’s silly and un-serious.
To be honest, it reminds me a lot of race or class or gender-related discussions amongst conservatives where concepts involving privilege are obliquely referenced, but the word “privilege” is never, ever uttered, with the effect (intentional or unintentional) of shutting an entire long and rich narrative out of the discussion.
— Joe · May 17, 05:49 PM · #
“Donna, like a trainer during a boxing match, removed Penny’s false eyelashes, gave her water, and kissed her on the cheek.”
Do boxing trainers give their boxers kisses? There’s a tenderness there…an awareness that this is a fellow person (not a means to an end), but a human choosing to do something difficult, for many reasons which are personal to her. Donna respects Penny and her choices. If the author doesn’t share that respect, or if you don’t… that doesn’t mean that Donna is treating Penny as a means rather than an end.
— Erica · May 17, 09:08 PM · #
“Radically other-centered and therefore radically equal” – no, that does emphatically not follow: “other-centered” does not imply “equal” unless equality is what is wanted by this “other”. BDSM is, as I understand it, every bit as “other-centered” as any sex. Or not – much self-centered vanilla out there, as well as kink. It all depends on what your imaginary “other” actually wants. Which is what bothers me most about this discussion: the way none of the various bloggers have even mentioned the moral – and sexual – agency of the people in the original shoot, other than to wave their lacquered fans and clamor for smelling salts.
And @Emily – Yes! Exactly and exactingly right. PEG’s retort that well, it’s still about domination and pain completely misses the point – intent and desire make all the difference. Power exchange is not power abrogation, and power does not flow uni-directionally, or simply.
— Pedro Dias · May 18, 03:13 AM · #
Hey ya’ll, I just want to say this is a really good comment thread.
Albert Pond:
Thanks!
I don’t think Kant’s attempt to build a morality without God is “weak” at all—in fact, I think it’s the strongest one. And I do believe it’s possible to build a functioning moral framework without God (albeit a wonky one), and Kant’s is by far the best.
ovaut: Nice.
Joe:
A few points:
1- Just because Witt lacks moral language (in my view) does not mean she’s not a reliable guide to what she sees and experiences. At least not necessarily so. In fact, that’s what makes her essay so impressive and even great—she’s a faithful recorder of her experiences.
2- Good point about “objectification.” It’s true that the concept lines up very well with the point I’m trying to make about Kant. Objectification and taking the other as means are pretty close substitutes, and I could definitely be using that language, and maybe I should have. But I want to speak up not only for the Kantian perspective but also the Kantian language simply because I find it not only useful but under-used.
And finally, with regard to conservatives being unable to talk about privilege—well, one of the (conservative) founders of this site wrote a book called “Privilege.”
Erica: What this passage tells me is just that Donna is a consummate professional. A kiss can mean many things.
Pedro Dias: Actually, yes, equality does follow from other-centeredness. If I take you as an end in yourself, I cannot be either your superior or your inferior.
And look, re BDSM, if you want to deny that having a domination fantasy means that you want to dominate, knock yourself out. I don’t find that to be a very consistent proposition. The fact that you can do it in a way that is mutually beneficial and even loving is important, but it doesn’t really change that.
— PEG · May 18, 12:50 PM · #
@PEG: In that case, we’re going to have to define what this “equality” actually consists of: if you mean both partners’ wants and desires get equal weight, then yes. But what about that implies vanillin-scented rose petals? If the desires of the participants are complementary, then each get fulfilled. You seem to be implying that this can only happen in a particular sexual configuration, and that strikes as obviously false.
And yes, in many cases domination and submission fantasies do not imply an actual desire to dominate or submit, other than in a very, very circumscribed context. That’s certainly true in my experience, anyway. The opposite, if anything. Which connects laterally with the above: the idea that BDSM deprives one partner of agency seems common with people who have no knowledge of actual practice. But it simply is not the case.
Out of curiosity: would it change the equation at all if the “victim” were male? If there is no maiden to rescue, just big hairy apes doing their bestial thing, is the indignation lessened?
— Pedro Dias · May 18, 02:50 PM · #
If it weren’t being recorded, would you be more open to seeing the people as helping each other, rather than using each other?
Can you differentiate between what Witt observed and professional boxing, football, and hockey?
— Erica · May 18, 04:38 PM · #
@PEG: Much of your piece is quite insightful, and I couldn’t agree more about love’s absence forming the unifying thread of Witt’s essay. However, in describing everyone in her essay as anti-Kantian, I think you underestimate the importance of consent, precisely from a Kantian perspective. That consent constitutes the absolute condition of the BDSM sexual ethos suggests that an absolute respect for the agency of others grounds that interpersonal relation. And what is such an absolute respect for the other’s agency if not precisely the moral attitude most befitting Kant’s Formula of Humanity? (I’m not suggesting that the people in Witt’s essay don’t also use each other as means. But Kant’s formula doesn’t preclude others being used as means, or serving instrumentally in the realization of one’s own objectives: it precludes using others as MERE means, i.e., not ALSO as ends-in-themselves. Consent as absolute criterion ensures that whatever else is in play, one treat others also as ends-in-themselves.)
Yet I agree with you about the absence of love in the world Witt describes. But the right conclusion doesn’t seem to be that that world isn’t Kantian enough; if anything, much as I love me some Kant, the right conclusion seems to be that Kantian respect for the humanity of others is not yet love. (Perhaps it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for love.)
— CSP · May 19, 10:20 PM · #
“He would have been a good blogger. . . if it had been somebody there to fist him every minute of his life.”
— the Misfit · May 20, 12:52 AM · #
“it’s as if you read an essayist write that she saw a man across the room at a restaurant eating a hamburger, extrapolate that he does not eat anything other than hamburgers” bad analogy
“Can you differentiate between what Witt observed and professional boxing, football, and hockey?” bad analogy
why are the critics the ones being psychoanalyzed in this thread while a positive view of this is just assumed, as though someone can’t be damaged/have issues and not admit it
— plebe · May 20, 01:01 AM · #
> As far as Christian sex being about self-giving, well, it’s what traditional Christian teaching says. I agree that the Church has been very bad at communicating it, and even very good at ignoring it.
Look, when the church hasn’t preached it and the flock hasn’t practiced it, you don’t get to call self-giving sex traditionally Christian. In fact, given Christian societies’ track record of sexual subjugation of women, it’s a pretty steep hill to climb just to make the argument that sex between equals is compatible with Christianity at all.
— Anders Widebrant · May 23, 10:36 AM · #