We are all
as hysterical about sex as any religious fundamentalist, despite our
superior ideologies. Yes, now we recognise the legitimacy of
homosexuality and we recognise womens' right to their own bodies.
Now, as a
culture, we possess the word “consent” against which we can place
all sexual acts to judge their validity. “Consent” is an
entirely new dimension in the development of human sexuality. Male
ownership of female bodies, passed from father to husband at
marriage, has not been the norm for most of human social life, though
it has been the norm in our culture until the much more recent
idea of marriage as a partnership. Surely there have been many
permutations, all equally arbitrary but some more successful than
others. Male sexual violence against women has been a trait of our
culture that we have very recently recognised and begun to address. It has been an entirely unsuccessful trait because human beings
refuse to live in misery and violence and always, eventually, they
stand up and defy the cultural institutions that their ancestors
maintained.
The concept
of “consent” is a significant and necessary step in the
development of human sexuality. Sexuality is not a matter of
individuals, it is not a matter of “preference”, it is not a form
of self-expression. Sexuality is social, it is about how we relate
to each other. Sexuality is one of the myriad ways in which we
interact and experience the world as social beings. I reject the
theory of individuality. The best that I can say about the idea of
“individuality” is that it has been used to free us from the
repression of theocracy and slavery. It is now a core ideology of
Corporate America, with the holy text being the American
Constitution, of the free market and of consumerism. “Individualism”
has lead to urban alienation, segregating us with fences and walls
into separate locked houses, separate bedrooms, separate beds. We
are not individuals. We are a social species. We thrive and evolve
socially. We build cities not to facilitate economic transactions,
but to create diverse and complex communities. Within cities of
millions of people we form tribes, tribes of bankers, tribes of
artists, tribes of Christians, tribes that perhaps represent the size
and interdependence of the tribes we have lived in for thousands of
years, before evolution, before language, the continual successful
tendency of human development.
We develop
and maintain social and cultural practices that are successful and we
(eventually) reject what does not work (or allow ourselves to be
crushed by the consequences of our own cultural practises). This is
why I believe that “consent” will survive. It is necessary. But
it is new and it will evolve. While this concept slowly emerges from
global culture, like a mushroom emerging from the rich filth of cow
shit, we cling to and eventually release the arbitrary and
destructive cultural divisions that have dysfunctionally brought us
to this moment. We use the concept of consent to justify the
trauma-induced boundaries and violences that we continue to
perpetuate. We try to define in court whether consent was given. We
deny sexuality to everyone below the age of 16, claiming they are
unable to consent because they are somehow incomplete. We devise
infinite ways of alienating ourselves from the fellow humans we are
having sex with. We call it fucking and we do fuck. We learn how to
fuck from pornography, which is readily available everywhere, with
average degrading magazines available from every convenience store in
the Capitalist world, portraying human bodies as objects to be
fucked, orifices. Arbitrary standards of acceptability limit the
depravity of these magazines while on the internet anything can be
found, as depraved and dehumanising as you like. Arbitrary standards
are impossible to enforce on the internet. However, in the cinema,
on television, in the classroom and the library, where ideas are
freely exchanged, there are no standards whatsoever; sexuality is
simply not allowed to be discussed. Perhaps we have observed the
change over the years in what can be discussed, but still, though we
now discuss contraception, abortion, homosexuality and consent, we
only accepts concepts into the discussion once they have been
thoroughly defined and culturally-sanctioned. Anything that connects
us with the complexity of the situation is confronting and therefore
dangerous. Ambiguity, above all else, is unacceptable.
Ambiguity
is where we all live, however, and the culturally-sanctioned concepts
that we slowly develop are necessary and positive, but they are too
slow. We underestimate our own intelligence. We assume the
mainstream media is indicative of the minds of many, whereas the
mainstream media is constructed under the assumption that most people
are stupid and can only understand well-defined simplistic
superficial ideas. Television sitcoms play with sexuality without
confronting it, dealing with pursuit, drama and innuendo but never
following the couple into the bedroom. What could be more revealing
than watching a couple take their clothes off, stand naked before one
another, look into each others' eyes, kiss, breathe the same breath,
touch and find a way of communicating, to devise together in that
moment, silently, just the two of them, an entirely new language.
Not a verbal language, but a physical language. Not a language of
symbols and representation, but of direct communication, straight
from one body of the human experience to another body of the human
experience. Communication not veiled with language, not defined and
understood through culture, not covered in clothes and concepts, but
fully and undeniably experienced and shared. This is not experienced individually, this is a form of telepathy. Despite the widespread
availability of pornography, this scene would not be allowed on television.
In our hysterical fear of sexual violence we ban all public
depictions of sexuality, not understanding nor seeking to understand
what creates unity and what promotes separation.
When a
human being sits upon another human being, when they are both naked,
whether or not they are excited or scared, when they pause and look
into each others' eyes, “consent” becomes confusingly ambiguous
and centrally important. To say adolescents cannot give consent, to
say “no means no” or “she said yes”, to project any mental
concept onto the intensity and immediacy of that moment, is to deny
that moment for you both. That moment should be shared and fully
experienced and when this happens it can only transform our lives,
our relationships and our approach to the world. When we sit on
someone and we desire them we take full responsibility for every
aspect of their being. We cannot separate our desire from theirs, we
cannot separate our consent from theirs, we cannot make decisions
based on irrelevant laws that we did not agree upon. We have to be
there, we have to accept their frailty as much as our excitement, we
have to accept that the ideas in our head that torment us with
desire, guilt, fear and loneliness cannot be projected onto this
sacred moment. We are here now, we are safe and warm in bed, we are
naked, it is dark, we are together. We are human, fully and
mutually, away from the prying eyes of culture, law and discourse.
We cannot fuck someone, because we are merely stabbing ourself with
the repetitive pain of past trauma.
Why do we
define the sexuality of children from the sexuality of adults? We
draw the arbitrary line at 16, while we know that adolescence draws
the line at 13 or 14. What draws the line of adult sexuality if not
puberty? I suggest trauma. Adults are damaged. Adults are damaged
in various ways and in various degrees, but when it comes to
sexuality it is almost universal. We know this and we know children
are born innocent of this trauma. We want to protect them and yet we
must be failing if we all enter adulthood traumatised by abuse or
shame or silence or religion or pornography. How can it be almost
universally agreed upon that adults should not have sex with children
and yet entirely taboo to try to understand and confront why that
might be? There is a fluid diversity of complexity between adulthood
and childhood, between mutual consent and rape, “non-sexual” and
“sexual” communication. Our definitions must enable us and not
limit us. They must enable us to discuss and understand in
thoughtful moments what we know to be true in passionate moments, when
thought is not possible. We must recognise each other and accept
each other, fully embrace each other, protect each other and
therefore allow ourselves to become vulnerable. We must listen to each
other when we say “yes” or “no”, we must notice when a look, a kiss or a frightened muscle tension is the only communication.
When we
take responsibility for our own behaviour we take responsibility for
each others' well-being. What may not be defined as “rape” may
still leave our lover weak and vulnerable and we are responsible for
them. We are linked to them in real ways that can be observed and
experienced when we are connected to our own body and the bodies of
our fellow humans. If we want to break ties with someone we have
shared sexuality with for only a moment, we must communicate and
understand what that means for each of us and for both of us. Mutual
understanding is essential and mutual understanding is what sexuality
is seeking to achieve. If the sex is merely functional, then mutual
understanding must be a pre-requisite.
When we are
fully human, when we are fully honest with each other, naked together
and free from generations of trauma, sexuality is a fluid and normal
part of life. It is intimate and it is ecstatic, but it is on a
continuum. There is hugging, there is wrestling, there is playing
and there is laughing. There is working together, there is eating
together, there is childbirth and breastfeeding, there is
conversation, quiet and intimate or public. There is kissing and
touching that may or may not lead to orgasm. I feel safe because I
am safe. How could I possibly want to hurt you? Every shared
moment is as vitally delicate as making love and every interaction is
an act of love. I feel desire welling up inside me when I talk to
you and I know we will never have sex so I draw you into the love
that my desire allows through this conversation that delights us
both. We are both so precious and delicate and nothing is more
important to me in my life, not money, not power, not real estate.
Only the human beings I experience this world with are this precious
to me, and every moment with them is sacred and delicious and I will
protect you and honour you.
We become
like animals, sex as easy and fundamental as food. We sleep in
piles, snuggling up together like a litter of piglets. But we're too
aware of ourselves and we're too aware of each other and we not only
have love and desire and passion and this violence that we are
exorcising from our bodies like trauma and eradicating from our
culture like a toxic ideology, we have this thing we call “consent”
that is so much more complex and ambiguous than we pretend, but that
still we fundamentally understand. But first we have to face
reality. First we engage with our own body as a conduit for the
experience of being alive and present in the material world. We are
present in the physical world through nothing other than our physical
body and thus this is our only source of information. We use this
body to navigate through the world in which we find ourselves. We
discover the dimension that we could call “our environment” and
we learn to interact with it, to communicate with it, to live in
peace with it. We discover other beings just like us and we
instantly realise that nothing is more compelling or more significant
in our world than these other beings. They also experience this
shared world through the conduits of their bodies and so we share our
bodies and therefore enrich our lives. When we become confused in
the cultural haze, we use “consent” as a guiding light, but
beyond that there is the infinity that we experience outside of our
bodies. Profoundly and unexpectedly, we discover that even in this
infinity we are not alone, even in the dark warm silence of our bed
we are together.
