On the things we like to call ?sexuality? ? The Loyal Opposition to ...

Finally, after a day of travel all of the North end of South Korea, I am back at dorm room apartment. ?Oh, the life of an expatriate lecturer, one gets to live in a ?dormitory? well into their early 30s. ?Anyway, after vowing to move this blog anyway from abstractions, and mix things up a bit.

I am getting married to a wonderful woman: I was?hesitant in some ways for a variety of reason, and I am hesitant to talk about my views on the contradictions within our concept of marriage. ?With a caveat, I opposed the idea of marriage for most of my early 20s and did, again, after my first divorce. ?My ex-wife and I are actually still great friends and both did and didn?t divorce for the common reasons: ?it was not infidelity, it was lifestyle incompatibility and money issues that stem from said incompatibility. I used to joke that I being a ?Married male of any orientation should be a different gender category from an unmarried one.? ? I still, actually, feel that way in a sense.

Now, I am also a believer that no marriage arrangement is entirely natural: both polygamy and monogamy come with some strain and tension with most individuals inclinations and thus cannot be said to be or not be natural unless the social and environmental constraints are accounted for in a realistic fashion. ? I also a believer that very little avoidances of marriage are entirely without their aleinations even in a particular context, in Northern Europe where divorce and marriage are no longer common, the unmarried relationships often assume a form resembling in almost all domestic aspects a marriage. ??Christopher Ryan?and Cacilda Jeth? document pretty convincingly that most narratives on sexuality have had a present bias and a pretty?moralistically?bleak view of libidinal economy, even in good works by Darwin and so forth. ?The book ?Sex at Dawn? which is often taken as a defensive of polyamory can be properly be read as a defense of contextual relationships.

That said, both the abstracted notions of sex on sees in liberal-radicals like Judith Butler (who would never use that phrase) as well as hyper-conservative notions on sees in most people who defend traditional values as ?biological? is highly problematic. ? Traditional values may have been biological in a specific context, but it takes more than will-power for a traditional context to make sense. ?In this sense, it?is?not without problems to see our current openness about sex and hook-up culture as a form of liberation. ?It seems to me that it makes the real objects of sex taboo and also allows us to turn people into objects in lieu of taking about the real objects of sex.

I use ?objects? and not object because I think both ?radical? and ?conservative? discourse about sexuality is entirely reductive to a stupid degree: if sex were about merely procreation then we would have ?heat? cycles to ensure pregnancy like, well, most other males, and if it were merely about pleasure then ?the female orgasm would not be so elusive. ?Evolution is a harsh mattress and not a teleologically consistent one: ?it?s an ad hoc universe ?in the biological sphere. (This, of course, makes speaking about ?nature? coherently almost in possible? Even nature has a context).

This is not to deny that there are real limits to human sexuality and real battles fought over it. ?But in a way, our dialogue on what the ?meaning? of sex is may be incoherent to the point of?schizotypal because a decoupling of social context and biologic context, but a severing into a dialectical tension that which is not in fundamental contradiction in its unalienated state.

Wait, here I revere to tendencies I dislike about philosophy writing, the tendency to over-abstract: ?people love and people fuck for a variety of different reasons in ?a variety of different contexts. ? Almost none of us are comfortable with that because some form of ?other? enjoyment indicates a lack created by our ability to articulate.

What is it Lacan says? ?Lack is created by language. ?Before we speak, we cannot?postulate?that which is not?

So I?ll try to avoid name dropping, with the caveat that Foucault?s basic premise that sexuality is a socially situated, seems to be more or less right. ?The problem is, as always, that our conceptions of biological and social are falsely separated: ? while I am critical of the metaphor as ?nature? as a ?machine,? I ?do fundamentally think that social structures and biological structures are in a feedback loop. ?I desire someone both because I have a genetic impulse to desire them, but how I desire them and what forms that relationship takes are, in no small part, socially shaped. ? The real dialectical conflicts come when social notions no longer fit biological reality, even if biological reality has changed for essentially social reasons.

Technology changes who you are. ?How can you not think it changes your relationships to people?

This leads to all sorts of issues: ?I am gay or straight or bisexual? ?How is that it appears that while sexuality is definitely determined by social pressures and yet we cannot castigate certain practices out of existence? ? Does it make sense to get married?

In my personal life this plays out in a lot of strange ways: ?I am getting married to a woman because I love her. ?Now, I realize in the grand scheme of things, even from personal experience, love is a weak reason for marriage. In fact, it?s not even a good predictor of martial happiness. ?The information on arranged marriages startlingly conflicts with the notion that peer-love marriage is a good means for contentment for most people who are belong a certain social class and income range. ?Even the sexual revolution, interestingly, has been more positive for upper middle class women and men who seem to benefit from?promiscuity? then still get into relatively stable marriages (of varying degrees of openness) whereas the poor who often value marriage more as a social good see fewer marriages and fewer of its benefits? ? ?I love a few women quite deeply, and yet I choose one of them because I love her and it seems conductive to that kind of social relationship.

In a way, just talking about fucking is avoiding the a lot of the larger issues here isn?t it.

Nothing in modernity seems to be without its contradictions. ?Particularly in sex where anything viewed long enough and believed in general in mass culture seems to be fraught with outright contradictions. I, as I stated, am no exception: the polyamorous man entering into a relationship that is rooted in monogamy. Doing so willingly and knowing from personal failure the dangers involved, and yet when I am honest with myself even in my most polyamorous moments my relationships have been based on fundamental rules and commitments that are both from my partners and the larger social?milieu. Sometimes, I find it more than a little ironic that liberals for all their emphasis on social importance ?and social contextualization, take a completely individualistic view on love and sex.

Funny how so many refuse to look honestly at the contradictions in their lives: dialectics, as I understand it, is a way to look at one?s contradictions honestly and try to move past them. ?Most people, however, from the pain of cognitive dissonance cannot do this: doing this in one?s most intimate relationship is even more traumatic.

But it is spring time, after all, and thus we like to think we should talk about love.

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