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Human Sexuality Is Innately Perverse PDF
Human Sexuality Is Innately Perverse PDF
Slavoj Žižek
This is why explicit free consent of both partners in a sexual act is not enough to preclude
violence. Even if a written contract or a selfie of both partners is not required, the
minimum that those who worry about violence in sex demand is explicit verbal consent,
as is required by a new law proposed in New South Wales. What this vision ignores is
violence immanent to sex; sex ‘in itself’ is not a domain of joyful pleasures distorted from
outside by relations of domination and violence, the sadomasochist component is
constitutive of it.
In an interesting comment on the role of consent in sexual relations, Eva Wiseman refers
to ‘a moment in The Butterfly Effect, Jon Ronson’s podcast series about the aftershocks
of internet porn. On the set of a porn film an actor lost his erection mid-scene — to coax
it back, he turned away from the woman, naked below him, grabbed his phone and
searched Pornhub. Which struck me as vaguely apocalyptic’ — and, she concludes:
‘Something is rotten in the state of sex.’
I agree, but I would add the lesson of psychoanalysis: something is constitutively rotten
in the state of sex, human sexuality is in itself perverted, exposed to sadomasochist
reversals and, specifically, to the mixture of reality and fantasy. Even when I am alone
with my partner, my (sexual) interaction with him / her is inextricably intertwined with
my fantasies, i.e., every sexual interaction is potentially structured like ‘masturbation with
a real partner’, I use the flesh and body of my partner as a prop to enact my fantasies. We
cannot reduce this gap between the bodily reality of my partner and the universe of
fantasies to a distortion opened up by patriarchy and social domination or exploitation —
the gap is here from the very beginning.
So I quite understand the actor who, in order to regain erection, searched Pornhub — he
was looking for phantasmatic support of his performance. It is for this same reason that,
as part of the sexual intercourse, one partner asks the other to go on talking, usually
narrating something ‘dirty’ — even when you hold in your hands the ‘thing itself’ (the
beloved partner’s naked body), this presence has to be supplemented by verbal
fantasizing.
So, back to Wiseman, who concludes her comment: ‘By attempting to understand the
shadowed new landscapes of porn, we may come closer to a healthy relationship with our
own sexuality.’ But what if sexuality is in itself not quite healthy, what if the shadowy
aspects of porn do not just disturb from outside healthy sexuality but are rendered possible
by its unhealthy aspect?
In December 2016, upon learning of the sudden death of Carrie Fisher, Steve Martin
tweeted: ‘When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had
ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well.’ There was an immediate backlash
— Martin was accused of ‘objectifying’ Fisher, of focusing on her physicality instead of
her talents or her impact — one user on Twitter replied: ‘I think she aspired to be
something higher than just being pretty. How do you want to be remembered?’ So Martin
deleted his tweet. The accusation seems to me ridiculous since Martin clearly locates his
fascination with Fisher’s beauty into first encounters, and then immediately moves in
‘witty and bright’ — the whole point of his tweet is that she was MORE than just
beautiful. However, more important is that in our (and in all) societies there are
historically-specific prevalent notions of beauty, and that is a woman (or a man!)
outstandingly fits these criteria, s/he is noted as beautiful or (which is not always the
same, of course) sexually attractive.
To prohibit talking about this, noticing it, means suspending not just ‘objectification’ but
sexuality as such. The sad trauma of those who are ‘ugly’ and find it difficult to get
attractive sexual partners is thus not only not resolved but just ignored and in this way
continues its subterranean work, leading to possible explosions of envy, frustration, etc.
Incels are here much more honest: they openly admit their ugliness and try to enact it
playfully as a positive feature.