Hardcore for Nerds

“ It is perhaps only people who haven’t felt the full power of sex over their logical selves who can remain uncensorious and liberally ‘modern’ on the subject.

—

The remainder, and opening of the quote below from Alain de Botton on pornography, which I think merits a response of its own. Which is, isn’t this ridiculous?

It’s like a puritanical and deeply conservative reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as applied to sexual desire. If you open yourself to the dark continent of human sexuality, you’ll turn into a raving, monstrous madman; except not a madman -

“Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear - concentrated upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance - barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn’t so good, on account of the unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.”

It’s only someone completed isolated, or weirdly dissociated, from society - in all its modern faults, liberties and polite illusions - could come to that conclusion about sex, whatever about man’s inhumanity to man. (Although I guess in a certain Freudian reading the two are closely related)

conrad sex psychology

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» Alain de Botton: let's talk about sex

There’s something infuriatingly sanctimonious I find in Alain de Botton’s writing, even when he’s making an argument which in parts I agree with. This is from a rather interesting ‘live Q&A’ on the Guardian website, in which he notes that pornography has the capacity to be more virtuous and ambitious rather than ask, as it does currently (at least, I’d say, in its more typical forms), “that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it.” Later someone brings up the recent proposals in the UK for restricting access to online pornography on a ‘opt-in’ basis, to which de Botton responds:

“… Philosophies of sexual liberation appeal mostly to people who don’t have anything too destructive or weird that that they wish to do once they have been liberated.

However, anyone who has experienced the power of sex in general and internet pornography in particular to reroute our priorities is unlikely to be so sanguine about liberty. Pornography, like alcohol and drugs, weakens our ability to endure the kinds of suffering that are necessary for us to direct our lives properly. In particular, it reduces our capacity to tolerate those two ambiguous goods, anxiety and boredom. Our anxious moods are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so they need to be listened to and patiently interpreted – which is unlikely to happen when we have to hand one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, it is a deliverer of constant excitement which we have no innate capacity to resist, a system which leads us down paths many of which have nothing to do with our real needs. Furthermore, pornography weakens our tolerance for the kind of boredom which is vital to give our minds the space in which good ideas can emerge, the sort of creative boredom we experience in a bath or on a long train journey. It is at moments when we feel an irresistible desire to escape from ourselves that we can be sure that there is something important we need to bring to consciousness – and yet it is precisely at such pregnant moments that internet pornography has a habit of exerting its maddening pull, thereby helping us to destroy our future.”

I like the bolded part, and the idea about boredom and anxiety. But painting us as being at the mercy of uncontrollable urges - if we’re given the means to fulfil them - and unable to combine or balance action with inaction, stimulation with reflection, indulgence with quiescence; that rings false to me. If that therefore also means that anyone who is ‘liberated’ beyond the most vanilla and polite desires is destined for hedonistic ruin, not because of the social structure around them, but solely because of their unleashed inner demons; that doubly rings false. The problem with the internet - its distractiveness, its lack of empathy - is not so much within people as it is between them.

sex internet psychology philosophy

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on gay marriage (and religion)

I

Interesting piece by the novelist Edmund White in The Guardian, that takes on the argument, as put rather polemically here, that gay marriage is inherently conservative and shouldn’t be seen as such an object of progress:

“If the president has “evolved” in his affirmation of gay marriage, so have I. Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours. When the president “came out” he was careful about mentioning the many gay couples he knew, even some in government, who had loving, “committed” relationships and who were parenting children. All pretty suburban, in my opinion. Must we be among the “good gays” in order to win our civil rights? If we’re too sexual, if we’re wearing drag or leather, if we have multiple partners, if we’re seropositive, will we be thrust beyond the pale? What if we don’t want to live with the same partner for many years or adopt a Korean daughter and join the parent-teacher association?

But I became pro-marriage equality once I realised how opposed to it the Christian right is in our country.Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office. The Republicans are the party of the rich, of the top 1% of the population. If they are going to command majorities, they must invent phony “moral” issues that will appeal to their middle-class constituents. The assault against women’s reproductive rights is one such issue; a similar struggle against gay marriage is the other leading issue in the culture wars.”

(Well, I’m a European and I’d like to know more about this claim. What exactly is a ‘personal conversation with Jesus Christ’ - isn’t that basically what prayer is supposed to be, or does conversation therefore imply that (you think) he answers back? Or is this the ‘coming to Jesus’ idea that makes Christianity in the US more of a vocational activity than the cultural religion that most people in Europe are born into and remain, mostly unaffected by? The statistic is either bizarre or spurious, and although it may be my (in)credulity, I’m leaning towards the latter - if it even exists, I doubt it comes from a nationally representative sample - an unfortunate overreach on an otherwise valid point. Or can anyone else enlighten me?)

II

Essentially, I think that as long as we have straight marriage we should have gay marriage too. Of course there are many other material or even violent inequalities in our world that need addressing, but as long as we pretend to be some kind of a consensual democracy then the need to allow consensual marriages speaks pretty deeply to our personal rights and responsibilities. The situation in Ireland is currently stuck pretty firmly in the (rapidly receding) US middle ground: we have, since just recently, civil partnerships and we don’t have any law against gay marriage, per se. What we do have is the following article (41.3.1) in the Constitution:

“The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”

I’ve never really seen this discussed, but nowhere else in the document is ‘Marriage’ defined as solely between man and a woman, so for all the defence of marriage implied, it doesn’t actually preclude gay marriage. In fact, it may even make a case for it, as “guard with special care” could mean that by preserving marriage as a modern institution relevant to the contemporary Republic of Ireland, it should be opened up to both heterosexual and homosexual relationships rather than discriminate against the latter.

It may be stretching the influence of de Valera (and his long bony hand) a little too much to say this, but in drafting a constitution to protect the commonly-agreed social values of the time, he also produced a document that has proved flexible enough to adapt to changes in those values. Often, of course, that has had to be done by amendment - such as removing the Catholic Church’s ‘special position’, or amending the second part of this article to allow for divorce - but in this case the original is open to simple reinterpretation.

III

The problem is not with the civil law; instead it lies with the remaining influence of religion and religious doctrine. Unlike in America, where religious conservatism appears to be a potent political force, in Europe its influence is more marginal and indirect. Rather than a popular and potent issue, gay marriage is merely objected to by most people here from a basic level of conservatism - they don’t like it, but they’re not particularly exercised by it on an American scale. Essentially, the establishment churches in Ireland or Britain are facing a rearguard action, in flight from declining attendances and influence, to preserve an item of civil life thought to be under their control.

Gay marriage, in this view, threatens marriage as a religious sacrament - why can’t homosexuals, to the extent that they are already tolerated, be happy with a civil union and leave marriage to the churches, who claim a right to preserve their traditions and not lose them to a wholly secular society (whether such a thing exists or is acceptable depends on the conservatism of the church)? Well, since marriage has always been more than a purely religious institution, there is no good reason to deny it to those whom certain churches don’t find to be acceptable spouses. And consequently, I think that if they don’t recognise the basic rights of equality, we shouldn’t personally consider them to be acceptable churches.

Although in Ireland the predominant influence on religion is that of the Catholic Church, I was never brought up in that faith, so what that church says is really of very little concern to me. Instead, I’m what I like to think of as an atheist and a lapsed Anglican, in that I still have a good deal of respect for the cultural tradition of the Church of Ireland - including a relatively progress stance on, say, the ordination of women priests, or at times what seemed to be quite a moderate approach to homosexuality. However, the latest position - or, admittedly, reiteration of their existing position - on marriage and sexuality makes me determined not to go back for reasons beyond pure atheism.

According to Canon 31, marriage is and will remain “a holy mystery in which one man and one woman become one flesh”; and, to add insult to injury, “The Church of Ireland teaches therefore that faithfulness within marriage is the only normative context for sexual intercourse.” In other words, not only do we define marriage, but by defining marriage we exclude homosexual relationships from the “normative context for sexual relationships”. Whatever your opinion on premarital sex, I reckon it’s okay for the church to set a ‘normative context’ on the issue - they’re not all celibate men, for a start - but not if it excludes homosexuality from that context.

However, the following statement is more than crocodile tears, in my opinion:

“The Church of Ireland welcomes all people to be members of the Church. It is acknowledged, however, that members of the Church have at times hurt and wounded people by words and actions, in relation to human sexuality.

Therefore, in order that the Church of Ireland is experienced as a ‘safe place’ and enabled in its reflection, the Church of Ireland affirms:

A continuing commitment to love our neighbour, and opposition to all unbiblical and uncharitable actions and attitudes in respect of human sexuality from whatever perspective, including bigotry, hurtful words or actions, and demeaning or damaging language;

A willingness to increase our awareness of the complex issues regarding human sexuality;

A determination to welcome and make disciples of all people.”

This is pretty much what our President was talking about here; and it’s the civil side of the discussion that religion can contribute to, drawing on a long (if not unmixed) tradition of preaching, or promoting, tolerance between people. I can forgive, for now, their intransigence on the central point - for a naturally conservative body they’ve come a long way, and there are plenty of laypeople and clergy in the Church of Ireland you’re not going to push into accepting gay marriage any time soon - if it allows for a kinder and more honest dialogue on the issues in society generally. It’s no longer my church, but credit where it’s due…

politics irish american exceptionalism religion sex

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“The persecution of homosexuals fulfils the same function on ‘bad faith’ as racial prejudice or discrimination. In both cases, one’s own shaky identity is guaranteed by the counter-image of the despised group. As Sartre has shown in his description of the despised anti-Semite, one legitimates oneself by hating the figure one has set up as the opposite of oneself. The white man despises the Negro and in that very act confirms his own identity as one entitled to show contempt. In the same way, one comes to believe one’s own dubious virility as one spits upon the homosexual. If contemporary psychology has proved anything, it is the synthetic character of the virility of the homme sexuel moyen, that same erotic Babbit who likes to play the role of Torquemada in the persecution of sexual heresy. One does not have to develop great psychological sophistication to perceive the cold panic that lurks behind the gruff male demeanour of such types. The ‘bad faith’ in the act of persecution has the same roots that ‘bad faith’ has everywhere - the flight from one’s own freedom, including that terrifying freedom (terrifying, at any rate, to the persecutor) of desiring a man instead of a woman. Again, it would be naive to maintain that sociologists are not capable of such inauthenticity. However, we contend once more that sociological perspective on these phenomena will simultaneously relativize and humanize them. It will induce scepticism about the conceptual apparatus with which society assigns some human beings to darkness and others to light (including that modern modification of such an apparatus that identifies the darkness with ‘pathology’). It will be conducive to the realization that all men struggle against powerful odds to define for themselves a constantly threatened and therefore all the more precious identity within that brief span of time that is their own.”

Peter L. Berger, An Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (1963)

sociology berger sex bisexuality

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PhiLOLZophy Talks With Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart

philolzophy:

A few weeks ago, I became aware of this Huffington Post essay by Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart. I thought it was really thought-provoking, so I asked him if he was interested in talking to me about it further. What follows is our conversation about sexual identity, social convention, and, well, fun.

An excellent intellectual discussion about being bi (and fun). I kinda wish it could have been a little longer, but I guess that’s what the dude’s music is there for! Read it for thoughts about non-absolute conceptions about identity and who the hell cares, anyway.

bisexuality philosophy sex xiu xiu queer

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» “We Have Chosen To Be Gay”

(h/t the New Inquiry)

“Those who “choose to be gay” offer the disturbing possibility that attachments and affiliations can be chosen outside of state-sanctioned norms. That there are ways of living not envisioned in school textbooks. That how we choose to live matters just as much, if not more, than how we are supposed to live.

To choose what one “likes” over one’s “duty.”

So much depends on the latter.

Too much.”

politics sex philosophy

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» "I get the sense that asexuality is part of her hippie aesthetic."

marathonpacks:

About one of the most resolutely sexual albums of the last few years. A shame that Grantland’s huge audience is exposed to this level of crude misrepresentation masquerading as coy/self-effacing insight.

I dunno, it might help to include the surrounding paragraph:

“tUnE-yArDs is essentially one person, a somewhat androgynous American woman named Merrill Garbus. This is her second album. I get the sense that asexuality is part of her hippie aesthetic, because I just looked at the tUnE-yArDs Wikipedia page and noticed that the wiki writer put a lot of effort into never using gender-specific pronouns.”

It’s fairly clear that he means ‘asexual’ in the associated meaning of androgynous, or neither one gender (‘sex’) or the other. Of course, unfortunately asexual doesn’t mean quite that, rather implying the absence of sexuality altogether. I’m not trying to save Klosterman’s thesis here (save for objecting to the crude dismissal of it altogether) but the response points up the equally unfortunate fact that sexuality is generally seen in an exclusively gendered form. Really, if you’re talking about tUnE-yArDs being androgynous*, that is in no way sufficient to assume she is asexual (or to assume that is the inference on the author’s part); it’s simply a commentary on gender, not sexuality. Bad choice of words, not (necessarily) a bad idea.

I don’t know if I like tUnE-yArDs at all, but I find Klosterman’s** article a bit more interesting than the panties-twisting/chest-thumping going on around it.

*if anything, she’s acameral

** incidentally, how come people don’t make more of the (probable) fact that ‘Klosterman’ means “man in the monastery (cloister)” in German?

sex tune-yards

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“ said he was a fag but you know he was a pretty man
don’t you know they all look pretty to me?

—

EMA, ‘Anteroom’

h/t to philolzophy for the best definition of sexuality ever (and one I guess I subscribe to also): “kinda bi and straight”

EMA or 'heteroqueer' sex philosophy

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Regulator Watts - ‘Candy Bullet O’ from The Aesthetics of No-Drag (1997)

This is one of the times I regret not having a physical copy of this album, and thus no lyrics sheet*. It’s pretty impossible to work out what Alex Dunham is singing about, from sound alone, so all one is left with is the chorus-y part:

“said fuck her, said fuck her slow

nine to five at a standstill

seven minutes to go”

which isn’t necessarily all that much help. The fact that ‘candy bullet’ is the name of a vibrator makes it fairly clear what the ‘O’ refers to, but beyond that?

It’s far from the best song on the album (that probably has to go to the equally suggestively titled ‘Ballad of St. Tinnitus’, or the simply phenomenal closer ‘Witchduck’**) but it’s, well, pretty forceful - or as I described it before, “hynotic [and] penetrating” - and another example of the post-Hoover aesthetic Dunham pretty relentlessly churned out on this and the Mercury CD; before calming down a little and expanding on the more focused song-writing of Radio Flyer (though the fire definitely came back when he joined former Hoover bandmate Fred T. Erskine’s band Abilene for their second album, Two Guns, Twin Arrows). Great music to wrap yourself in and remember what it’s like to have screaming guitar and pulsing bass rhythms ricocheting around your mind.

*though I think at least a couple of my followers might have it?

**here’s Andrew writing about it, in a way that doesn’t make it sound masturbatory at all (j/k!):

“It’s due to Alex Dunham’s prowess at his instrument that things stay so interesting, and he continually twists and pulls at his guitar strings with his fingers, wringing squeals, screams, and tortured harmonics from it even as he keeps the main riff moving along constantly. It’s amazing to hear him unleashed in such raw, powerful form, especially considering that he’s Regulator Watts’s only guitarist. He didn’t do this much in Hoover, even with Joseph McRedmond’s rhythm guitar available to keep the song grounded. It’s almost as if being locked within the musical constraints that come with being the sole guitarist in a band have somehow freed him, given him license to reach limits on his own that he never tested when he was playing with someone else.”

hoover post-hardcore regulator watts punk sex 90s

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Sensation (2010), Dir. Tom Hall, starring Domhnall Gleeson, Luanne Gordon

I

I really enjoyed this film, just released in Irish cinemas; although it’s hardly much of a comedy at all, packed as it is with moments of sheer pathetic grimness. There’s a good review here which opens with an insightful point:

“It is an endless source of fascination as to why we in Ireland wrap up wonderfully grim dramas in the broad appeal of comedies. Films such as In Bruges, I Went Down and to a lesser extent The Butcher Boy have hid their real intentions particularly in their respective trailers. This is probably due to the fact that Irish people have a sense of humour that could be described as mordant.”

It’s true that the description of the opening scene - a young farmer masturbating over a magazine in a field full of sheep - would seem to suggest a somewhat farcical sex comedy, but there’s no real joke in it other than its own bleakness. From there on a succession of awkward social vignettes lead to the main character using his new-found wealth from the death of his father to purchase the services of an escort. So far, so plausible - and equally so depressing, because up to this point the film is relentless in its message that the seeking of pleasure only leads to its fulfilment in the most dispiriting, objectified, minimal way that it can possibly be portrayed.

What happens next - the striking up what another review terms an “unlikely friendship” (the operative word being ‘unlikely’) between the young farmer and the decade-or-so older escort, which is in fact rather more of an under-defined relationship, and then their going in to business together as a exurban brothel - at least occurs gradually, if not entirely logically. I can forgive the film its patchy sense of realism at this point, as by avoiding farce it stays grounded in some of the deeper absurdities of modern Irish life; perhaps not quite (from the review above) “a beautifully judged film on the difficulties of making a connection with another human being”, but if some of the aspects of the relationships don’t ring true, then at least enough do in order to keep it interesting and affecting.

II

There’s a more academic review here which sees the film less as about people than as about society:

“One of the director’s avowed intentions is to highlight how sexuality, mediated via the sex industry in the broad sense, has so rapidly displaced other forms of cultural exchange in the Ireland of the last two decades. The film attempts to present a blackly comic portrait of a society which has leapt eagerly into this along the myriad routes opened by broadband. Hall seeks to display his characters not as innocent dupes of ‘pornification’ but as knowingly complicit and parasitic upon it.”

but overreaches itself with the following reading of another of the film’s typically awkward scenes:

“In a telling gesture towards the rise of racism in contemporary Ireland, one punter, a farmer who has earlier conned Donal into selling his sheep for too little, chooses the white Irish girl over the black economic migrant from England, but asks that the one dons the fetish attire of the other.”

Except as I recall the scene, the “white Irish girl” was the New Zealander Kim/Courtney, Donal’s partner in sex, business and, ultimately, crime. It’s in that later denouement - satisfyingly realistic for a film trading on fantasy - when the more traditional cultural xenophobia of Ireland, particularly rural Ireland, rears its head: she’s the “blow-in” and “harlot”. In any case, I’d hardly see the declining of the services of a younger black girl as an example of racism - surely sexual preference, however sordid the context, is above such a charge - and more a neutral expression of conservatism in the sex-starved Irish male. This isn’t a film about social justice - it has an ambivalence verging on nihilism about ‘sex work’, understandable given its portrayal of its acceptance amongst an atomised generation of young men who really couldn’t give a fuck, except when it comes to getting one.

One of the film’s few actual jokes seems almost designed to pass unnoticed, a sotto voce remark about the “cute hoor” - in the Irish vocabulary, a smooth operator, taken originally from the accented version of ‘whore’ - but it accentuates the other archetype in the tagline quote, “it’s not Pretty Woman”. The side-effect of the implausibility of some of the happenings and the central relationship in the film is that communication breaks down and is restored with a wearying frequency, while the play for power goes on in the undertones and the seamy underbelly of the whole less-than-believable situation. When it all collapses, which it inevitably must, the film is thrown back on a version of the real world, with all the judgement of disapproving cultural mores. It’s as if the whole preceding story was a fantasy - indeed, a repeat of an earlier moment of pathos contained in a shot of Donal crouched naked in his shower (0.24 above) gives the strongest sense both of return and of personal failure.

III

It’s perhaps wrong to regard this as a film about sex at all, at least in the direct sense. In regards to this quote from Domhnall Gleeson:

“They have dealt with that [sexuality] in the States: with social realism, with romantic comedy. But I can’t think of any Irish films that have sex as a central theme. So the idea of dealing with sex in an Irish context is really funny and really important. The notion of Irish men having sex still seems faintly ridiculous unless you’re Colin Farrell.”

Sensation neither functions exactly as social realism, nor as romantic comedy/sexual farce - as discussed above - which would indeed give rise to images of ridiculous displays of comic sex, possibly still involving Colin Farrell. Yet there are only two actual sex scenes in the entire movie: one is grubby, vulgar and pornographic - and disturbingly empty - just as the other is tenderly romantic and, the film would have you believe, fulfilling. Rather it’s a film dealing with the trappings surrounding sex, in a dysfunctional, socially heterodox fashion which still reflects the reality of society enough to function as social commentary. It is also primarily art which creates vibrant, far from uniformly likeable or dislikeable characters and places them in a situation a mirror of our own (the film is ostensibly set in the midlands of Ireland, or specifically just over the Tipp border from Limerick, but my eyes recognise the countryside of Wicklow and the urban presence of Dublin, confirmed by IMDB’s shooting locations; really its nowhere-land is more akin to that of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and its queer, narratively distorted country).

IV

The best part of the film was the moment when it finished - on a high note, punctuating (if briefly) the final persistent layer of grim (if deserved) oppression, with its last gesture of slightly unrealistic but human feeling - and cut to a song by Si Schroeder. If the plot may have wobbled at times, the actor’s generally commendable performances not quite enough to convince one of its every turn, the careful, deliberate cinematography and unobtrusive but resonant soundtrack created just the right aesthetic for this dark Irish comedy.

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