Entering Barbieland
Friendship in Barbieland [1/6]: There Is No Ethical Consumption under Sexualism (Or, All Sex Is Problematic)
This series will (hopefully) proceed in parts released weekly. After this post, the parts will (hopefully) come in addition to the normal monthly/etc. posts.
Whatever—no one cares about the post schedule except for me. Anyway, enjoy. Spoilers for all.
Reviewed:
Barbie (2023)
Friendship (2024)
Notes from the Underground (1864)
East of Eden (1952)
Bereshit (????)
I am in the midst of writing a series on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, so let’s start there.
I. Kant and Sex
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was very much a prude. We have no accounts of him ever having a romantic or sexual partner, nor any hinting remarks from friends or townsmen of some “confirmed” status to his bachelorhood. If he lived today, we might call him asexual. From his beliefs on the morality of homosexuality, some might also suggest that he could be a very strong-willed repressed gay man—one in a particularly sturdy closet.
Kant was an extremely dutiful man. There is an old story that local villagers would set their watches to his morning walk, but few who tell it include that those walks were to meet one of his closest friends, and it was that friend who was such a stickler for punctuality. Kant was just respecting his friend’s wishes. By no accounts was he stodgy or authoritarian in his disposition—his lectures were packed with students and he threw dinner parties that were by all accounts well-attended (in both quantity and quality). He was dutiful, and perhaps in his own way severe, but he was not unkind or imperious. He just wanted to be good.
Kant believed that goodness was about acting with respect to other people as rational, thinking, autonomous individuals. Respect meant seeing other people and their freedom as the ultimate objective of our lives, and disrespect meant using others as a mere tool or source of gratification. The fundamental moral error, here, is to make an exception for yourself or others, holding someone above or below the rest. This is a love, but a love of equality and autonomy, not one of blood and heat.
Kant believed that marriage was the only way to have ethical sex. I think it is quite easy to dismiss such propositions as old hat—the effect of time rather than thought. However, an important intellectual principle of mine is to always argue for something before arguing against it. Kant was not merely a leaf in the winds of the ages—he moved the intellectual air as much as he imbibed it. For instance, his moral theorizing led him away from his initial justification of colonialism and towards a striking anti-colonial stance. He was willing to uproot much from his original soil if his moral commitments demanded it.
Kant believed that marriage was the only way to have ethical sex because sexual desire requires you to use your body and another’s as tools of pleasure. Consider that, unlike other desires, our erotic desires are despotic and particular. When I want to have sex with someone, I want them, and I want them especially in the sense of their body. I am not treating them as a rational agent—an individual that I respect as an equal. Instead, the primary object of my desire is their body—that thing to which they are most intimately attached, from which they cannot extricate themselves.
In this manner, it is a fundamentally objectifying activity. Contrast sex with another situation where I “use” someone for my desires: ordering coffee. Here, the object of my desire is the coffee, and I am relating that desire to the barista in order to get that coffee. It is easy, here, to treat the barista with respect, because I can address them as a rational being and have no need to infringe on their free action. I can request a coffee, and then leave it to the barista to make me a coffee if the barista so chooses. If not, I can get the coffee from somewhere and someone else.
With sex, my desire is for my counterpart’s body—I cannot simply address them as a rational being, because it is their very body (their capacity to act in the world) which I desire. If they deny me, they deny my desire in the whole—I cannot get it from anyone else. In a real sense, I desire consuming them. And specifically them. And in a way that they cannot escape or disregard without entirely thwarting my desire.
The only way to retain respect for yourself and another in the course of such delicate ethical terrain is to give yourself to another and take another as part of yourself—marriage. Marriage functions as a form of super-consent: it is not merely that one consents to sex, but that both spouse is so identified with the other that it does not make sense to speak of consent or non-consent.1
In our time, we have become more suspicious of such a total, temporally-extended identification of persons. So, we have exchanged marriage for discrete, bounded consent as our primary moral test. But the logic is the same. It is a curious irony: exactly when some person is most particularly the object of my desire, I cannot help disrespecting them, by using them (as a rational being) as a means to my object (them as an embodied being).
Sex and Unease
It is for things which give us unease that we create rules and rituals. And there are few things in life for which we have invented more rules and rituals than sex.
I would not be the first to locate a prurience within the exaggerated prudence of certain religious traditionalists. Such concern for sexual propriety does not spring merely from a strong sense of the moral issues of sex, but from a combination of that strong sense with its counterpart: a strong desire for sex itself. With only the first (the moral concern), there is no need for the multiplying boundaries and taboos—just don’t have sex if it would be degrading.2 It is when one feels both so strongly that one begins searching for ways to euphemize sex.3
From the beginning of American evangelism in the Great Awakenings of the 19th century, sex featured prominently. Gilbert Seldes writes in The Stammering Century:
The phrases of revivalism seem at times to consist of nothing but reference to food and to sex. In the same way revivalists attacked the young and particularly the adolescent. The period of puberty with its stirrings of unsuspected forces, when the mind is filled with misgivings about the future, the evangelist found extremely receptive to his labors.
. . .
It is not possible to reject the connection between sexual excitement and religious hysteria; the evidence is too strong. . . . There is nothing alarming in this connection. It would seem to indicate only that the two emotions lie so close together at the very center of our being, and are both so concerned with tremendous objects, that they often work together and are sometimes interchanged.
It is not just the religious revivalists that felt uneasy about sex. One might assume that cult leaders, with their curiously self-justifying systems of sexual ritual, are supremely confident regarding sex. Much of the history of cults suggests otherwise. Gilbert Seldes writes of the (strikingly successful) Christian communist, John Humphrey Noyes:
Like many theorists of the supremacy of sex, Noyes was always a little uneasy about it. When Dixon accused him of drunkenness and wantoning in the flesh, Noyes gave his own account of one unhappy winter in New York, when he “descended into cellars where abandoned men and women were gathered and talked familiarly with them about their ways of life, beseeching them to believe in Christ, that they might be saved from their sins. They listened to me without abuse. One woman seemed much affected. I gave her a Bible. To another a gave a Testament. Sometimes when I had money, I gave to the wretches whom I found in those dark places. These were the only dealings I had with them.” At Brimfield, he fled from a kiss of peace [from one of his own followers, walking miles in the snow away from the woman who kissed him]. All familiarity made him uncomfortable until his religious ideas had sanctified the relation.
Noyes proceeded to create a complex system of sexual ritual to purify and give moral cause to the familiarity which worried him so.4
The despotism and particularism of sexual desire render it—as the kids say—problematic. But unlike its modern use as a noncommital imprecation, I mean problematic in the philosophical, traditional sense: something unsettled; that which has problems.
Sexual desire is dangerous to our moral ends, and our moral sentiments balance precariously along our sexual lives. Look upon the long history of terrible and murderous sexual acts. Look upon the quiet misdeeds done for sexual desire and the loud fires of ancient towns burning and women screaming. Look upon all the anxiety and tension of courtship—the deep desire to consume, but at the same time needing to be consumed.
I don’t think we are so much more evolved. For all our bluster, we are far less unbothered by sex than we like to imagine. Our professed sexual libertinism is one more reaction to our profound uneasiness regarding our sexual impulses. We pronounce our impulses pure and unbothered while erecting boundaries sharp and strong. The most fundamental of these modern boundaries is consent. Here, I believe, there is truth. For at the core too of Kant’s trouble was this: for sex which respects the moral being, sexual parties must rationally give over their bodies and selves to each other. Kant believed this required marriage—I am not so convinced. However, consent seems to me to be at least a minimal condition for such a rational exchange.
Notice, though, how such a boundary presses up against sexual desires we know exist. There are those who enjoy the excitement and guessing of a wordless sexual encounter, who love the play in the body and the eyes much more than the flat, serious, considered “yes.” Such desires can find their place, but they require further infrastructure within our consent-based system.
We have other boundaries. Some concern inegalitarian social positions: student-teacher, player-coach, employee-boss, young-old. These are less impenetrable than that around consent, but they tend to require at least some work to overcome.
Sex is dear to us; it is important. But it brings much unease. Look upon our own modern neuroses, in times less sexually liberated than they seem. Look upon our furrowed brows and pursed lips when we see power differences in sexual contexts. Look upon our distinct outrages over rape and sexual assault—indeed, often those who most profess indifference to sexual mores (“it’s just one more thing people do together for fun!”) are most deeply activated by this incursion of barbarism bubbling over the borders we have erected.
Sex is a time that is supple and soft, open and unguarded. It is a time when we touch each other, when there is far less between us than at almost any other time in our lives. Of course we feel uneasy about sex; it is intimate: it is both deep within us and outside our grasp, it is both in our hearts and upon our skin, it is both within and without. It makes us uneasy because it crosses boundaries and bridges that which we keep separate.
When sex makes us uneasy, we don’t just sit with the unease. We are a practical thing: we try to fix it. We create ideas and rituals to take our despotic desire for another’s body and make it legitimate.
Unease and Culture
Wherever some special problem of humanity sits taut and tangled, there are those, like Noyes, who cut after it with a wild eye. But most content themselves with the tools common to their region.
Most of us take the stories of our culture and say, “okay, this is how it’s done. If I do it like this, I’m doing alright.” It’s not necessarily a matter of coercion or gullibility, but we come into the world having very little sense of how to treat other people and when those much smarter and older and bigger than us tell us what works, we agree with them just like we agree that grass gets energy from the sun and Santa is real and winter will end and the sky is blue and you need to give your grandmother a hug and squares have four sides of equal length and the US was founded in 1789 and there’s no harm in asking and lights are waves and she’ll like it if you get her flowers and oxygen is highly reactive and you’ve just gotta put yourself out there and going to college is a good investment and the economy is in the shitter and sometimes he isn’t going to take the initiative and markets clear when quantity supplied equals quantity demanded and love is the most important thing.
All of this information comes to you together, and the distinction we have increasingly made between social norms and natural truths is not itself natural to us.
I have said this elsewhere, but one of my stronger beliefs is that modernity is not a lack of provinciality (i.e., the sense that one is not from anywhere). Rather, modernity is the only condition under which “provinciality” makes sense as a concept. Before you are confronted constantly with other ways of life, your province is just “how things are done.” Now, we are aware of our own provinciality, and that has created conceptual space between our social structures and the world.
In some ways, this distance makes it more difficult for our culture to fully set our minds at ease regarding the things that trouble us. If we know there are other ways of doing things, it’s not so clear that ours is right or necessary. In other ways, this distance allows us more opportunity to create values that work better for us. There was no state of nature where we had a culture that worked for everyone; humans have always created and changed and moved. There was no state of nature where we didn’t try to solve our own problems. However, in our current wealth of provinces, we have so much material with which to create. Since this is Substack, and I am doing a Big Think, I am required to say that there are also problems with modernity. But come on. You’d rather just roll the dice and hope you lucked into a culture that fit your proclivities?
One place you can see our increasing distinction between society and nature is sex. Only in the last few decades have we decoupled sex (biological classification) from gender (social role). This is an extremely helpful decoupling, but it raises questions (indeed, one of the reasons it is so helpful is that it raises questions). What is the relationship between sex and gender? What is the use of gender?5
Sex, as we have discussed, is a very touchy topic. I am not particularly well-versed in gender theory, but I think this is a fairly banal claim: one of the primary uses of gender is to format the heterosexual relationship.
We’ll get into that next time.
Note that it was only in the 20th century that any countries started considering marital rape a possible crime. Before then, the theory of coverture held that a woman’s legal rights (including to her own body) were subsumed by those of her husband. Kant’s theory was more egalitarian—each spouse subsumed their rights to the other—but would probably have the same effect.
Of course, different people have different ideas of what sex can be degrading, but I have never met anyone, I don’t believe, who thinks that there is no such thing as degrading sex—at the minimum, nonconsensual or pedophilic sex is degrading.
The combination of both an intense sexual desire and intense moral concern regarding that desire can also tend to eroticize the possibly-degrading aspects of sex. The mind locks on the most concerning aspects of sex and so might start identifying sex (and sexual desire) with those most concerning aspects.
Noyes, to be fair, had a system less self-serving than many others. The 19th-century cult leader Mattias argued that he was able to annull one of his follower’s marriages because the minister who had performed it confessed himself a sinner and therefore the marriage was illegitimate. Mattias, as sinless, could annull the illegal marriage and perform a new one marrying himself to the follower’s wife.
Noyes’s system of “ascending fellowship” formalized a communal means of reproduction. All virgins’ first sexual love would be with an elder person of the opposite sex. Noyes “rejected the whole idea of spontaneous affinity in love.” Youth might become infatuated, but there was not “vast literature of love” to invite it and whenever a man desired a woman for a mate, the proposal was made in the presence of a third party, usually an older woman. Marriages were impermanent.
Noyes, separately, discovered what he termed “male continence”:
I conceived the idea that the sexual organs have a social function which is distinct from the propagative function; and that these functions may be separated practically. I experimented on this idea, and found that the self-control which it required was not difficult; also that my enjoyment was increased; also that my wife’s experience was very satisfactory, as it had never been before; also that we had escaped the horrors and the fear of involuntary propagation. This was a great deliverance. It made a happy household.
Seldes comments (in 1927):
Whatever Noyes wrote on the subject is sober, rather severely expressed, and emphatic. But as it describes a means of preventing unwanted children from being born, I am not permitted, under the laws of the United States and under the eye of The Society for the Suppression of Vice, to quote him. What he means by saying that the sexual organs have a social function is that the early stages of coition have a spiritual quality and a richness of emotion which is dissipated by the physical excitement of the later, propagative, stages. What he proposes is to prolong this early pleasure of presence and communion, and to “refrain from furious excitement.”
Noyes, I suppose, discovered foreplay and called it holy.
He also quickly realized that this “social function” would allow his eugenicist ideals to be put into practice with minimal oppression. This gave the “social function” a proper moral use. The 19th century was an interesting time.
I wrote some about this in relation to anime’s increased prevalence, especially among young men.