"What does sex positivity mean for the sexually undesirable?"
[Today’s post is an almost entirely unedited WhatsApp conversation with my best friend and eternal interlocutor, Tio Thomas, who is a gay man, Jamaican immigrant, radiation oncologist, and all-around luminous presence in my life who pushes my thoughts and feelings ever forward. He graciously agreed to save me the work of composition by letting me post this chat, which also saved me from the solipsistic narcissism of the personal essay.]
[9/30/21, 6:25:19 AM] Horatio Thomas: oh this morning thoughts: what does sex positivity mean for the sexually undesirable?
[9/30/21, 7:38:43 AM] Kevin Stone: i’m wondering if this will come up in the feminist philosophy book i’m reading
[9/30/21, 7:40:28 AM] Kevin Stone: she called it “the right to sex” based on some incel language and i hope she actually works that out in a complex way bc obviously men aren’t entitled to sex but i think it’s worth thinking a bit about the kind of hurt the undesirable get from sexual relations and not just the kind of hurt that comes from being desirable without wanting to be which i think is what women experience
[9/30/21, 7:51:28 AM] Horatio Thomas: i think actually this is part of what ends up dragging people back into "sex negativity"
[9/30/21, 7:51:38 AM] Horatio Thomas: it's not something you can ensure for all so society errs on the side of minimizing for most
[9/30/21, 7:52:15 AM] Horatio Thomas: because being cut off of accepted promiscuous culture is actually really psychologically daunting
[9/30/21, 8:02:28 AM] Kevin Stone: the right to sex author [Amia Srinivasan] says something that made me get the book bc i think you’ll find it similar to your thoughts — she basically agreed that sex is an economy of power differences and who we have sex with is wrapped up with the social capital we want
[9/30/21, 8:02:51 AM] Kevin Stone: and i think that insight makes sex positivity complicated
[9/30/21, 8:03:35 AM] Kevin Stone: promiscuous subcultures mean that there’s going to be hierarchy because freed of other restraints to sex people start having sex in hierarchical ways
[9/30/21, 8:04:31 AM] Kevin Stone: i dunno, the same problem arises with art right? we think of aesthetic experiences as something that might liberate us from the oppressive parts of everyday life but we live in capitalism so art also has a market and a brutal hierarchy between those who get to practice it as a living vs as a hobby vs as a consumer
[9/30/21, 8:20:50 AM] Kevin Stone: maybe i’ll steal your question for my next substack post
[9/30/21, 8:20:53 AM] Kevin Stone: it’s a good one
[9/30/21, 11:16:49 AM] Horatio Thomas: this is less of an issue with art though because the scale and scope of art is less and also weird art can rise to the forefront. look at rap from 80s/90 to now.
[9/30/21, 11:17:12 AM] Horatio Thomas: i was just thinking about how much "sex" there is all the time.
[9/30/21, 11:17:29 AM] Horatio Thomas: so much advertising for even cereal...
[9/30/21, 11:17:52 AM] Horatio Thomas: the problem is that we think of attraction as this special thing as opposed to one very [specific] way that we express and exercise affinity
[9/30/21, 11:18:04 AM] Horatio Thomas: and ultimately isn't most of what we're worried about in prejudice has to do with affinity and repulsion?
[9/30/21, 11:34:56 AM] Kevin Stone: hmmm i think what becomes hard with sex is that we are so used to thinking of it as an affinity that is deeply personal and deeply tied up with identity / sense of self
[9/30/21, 11:35:30 AM] Kevin Stone: so that making a public argument for why you should like hiphop aesthetically was contentious but acceptable
[9/30/21, 11:36:02 AM] Kevin Stone: while making public arguments for why people should have sexual attractions to particular people is absurd or dystopian
[9/30/21, 11:49:13 AM] Kevin Stone: i actually think there are ways of making public arguments about how people should monitor and categorize their sexual desires [that are] probably a good thing
[9/30/21, 11:49:42 AM] Kevin Stone: but it feels like under our current lefitst balancing of valuing autonomy and personal identity with structural oppression, sexual desire is just an impasse
[9/30/21, 11:49:46 AM] Horatio Thomas: don't we kind of also believe this about friendship, who we go to church or who we invite into our homes
[9/30/21, 11:49:54 AM] Horatio Thomas: i think these things have actually been quite entangled
[9/30/21, 11:50:22 AM] Kevin Stone: there's no way to thread the needle under our current discourse of "sex needs to be consensual and deeply felt" and "sex should not follow the lines of systemic oppressions"
[9/30/21, 11:50:54 AM] Horatio Thomas: yes! i think this is the problem point right
[9/30/21, 11:51:05 AM] Horatio Thomas: but these arguments used to be used about homes and communities
[9/30/21, 11:51:18 AM] Kevin Stone: sex also poses the question of individual identity vs systemic forces in a particularly impossible way
[9/30/21, 11:51:19 AM] Horatio Thomas: this is why we have HOAs that are able to vote on who buys a house in the neighborhood
[9/30/21, 11:51:34 AM] Kevin Stone: you can always have more friends and patronize more art
[9/30/21, 11:51:34 AM] Horatio Thomas: yes, this is why sex is so important
[9/30/21, 11:51:48 AM] Kevin Stone: your consumption of social capital and aesthetic capital is limited but vvery multiple
[9/30/21, 11:52:11 AM] Kevin Stone: while most people have a very limited capacity of sexual partners, and even pretty lefty people would often recommend "1 at a time" as the most just
[9/30/21, 11:52:30 AM] Horatio Thomas: right, but we also have a limited capacity on like the # of CEOs
[9/30/21, 11:52:36 AM] Horatio Thomas: or like the number of executive managers and what not
[9/30/21, 11:52:55 AM] Horatio Thomas: i think we have lots of areas of limited resources
[9/30/21, 11:52:54 AM] Kevin Stone: it feels impossible to thread these things under the ways we currently think about it. like this is where weird contradictions come from like...is it a betrayal of the movement if you're a radical Black activist but end up with a white person?
[9/30/21, 11:53:01 AM] Kevin Stone: is that just a terrible way of posing the question altogether?
[9/30/21, 11:53:11 AM] Kevin Stone: but lots of people _do_ pose it that
[9/30/21, 11:53:12 AM] Kevin Stone: way
[9/30/21, 11:53:22 AM] Horatio Thomas: yeah, this is why i had the whole theory of random assortment of preferences [ie, that the world would be more just if people’s preferences were assorted randomly rather than concentrated around specific categories related to power structures]
[9/30/21, 11:53:30 AM] Kevin Stone: agreed, i just think sex is a particularly fraught and contradictory category
[9/30/21, 11:53:51 AM] Kevin Stone: i don't think it's ontologically different from other affinities, but i think the limits on it are much more pointed than those ones, you know?
[9/30/21, 11:54:42 AM] Kevin Stone: it's a lot easier to just say "even if you dont like hiphop that much it's a super important part of a culture in america with great aesthetic achievements, you can make consumption or study of it part of your general art consumption"
[9/30/21, 11:55:16 AM] Kevin Stone: and even with friendships, most white people _do_ have some friendships and intimacies with POCs at this point [however fraught] if they live anywhere somewhat integrated
[9/30/21, 11:55:25 AM] Kevin Stone: but the demand becomes really weird when it comes to sex
[9/30/21, 11:55:55 AM] Kevin Stone: how do we think through the individual there? is it actually possible to demand of people that they diversify their sex partners to spread sexual capital more equitably?
[9/30/21, 11:58:49 AM] Kevin Stone: this suggests to me that we're just not thinking about these things right at all
[9/30/21, 11:58:58 AM] Kevin Stone: i'm not really sure what the right answer is though
[9/30/21, 12:00:03 PM] Horatio Thomas: lets push this even further
[9/30/21, 12:00:19 PM] Horatio Thomas: Gay men in particularly spend probably a disproportionate amount of income on sex
[9/30/21, 12:00:32 PM] Horatio Thomas: gay bars, tipping gay dancer, subscribing to only fans
[9/30/21, 12:00:53 PM] Horatio Thomas: travelling to visit friends (employing the friends you travel to see)
[9/30/21, 12:01:09 PM] Horatio Thomas: so we can already see the real economic impact of sex in gay communities
[9/30/21, 12:01:36 PM] Horatio Thomas: like we could actually probably quantify how sex contributes to wealth disparities of particularly black people since there is anti-blackness within sex...
[9/30/21, 12:02:39 PM] Horatio Thomas: Gay SF would be an interesting world since so many people derive substantial income from sex
[9/30/21, 12:02:45 PM] Horatio Thomas: and sex related work
[9/30/21, 12:02:55 PM] Horatio Thomas: so then is it equal opportunity employment?
[9/30/21, 12:03:09 PM] Kevin Stone: oh yeah, i agree with this entirely. i'm not using "sexual capital" metaphorically, i think sexual capital is very much analyzable as a kind of social capital, and the whole point of bourdieu is that these things aren't metaphors; they're convertible into one another. look at my own experience -- people read my writing and listen to my thoughts a lot more since i became sexually available to old white men
[9/30/21, 12:03:39 PM] Horatio Thomas: absolutely!
[9/30/21, 12:04:40 PM] Horatio Thomas: i think one of the reasons why we are socially suspicious of sex is that this unreconcilable problem where it consolidates resources but it's not OK to force people to redistribute their bodies
[9/30/21, 12:10:26 PM] Kevin Stone: yes, the body's an important factor here, and i guess part of where i'm not sure if the analysis breaks down? you can cognize your way into having different aesthetic standards, for art certainly and i also think probably even for kinds of friends, right? you can expand your reading and consumption habits and think about stuff a lot, and your aesthetic values might change. it also doesnt feel like a huge violation of your bodily autonomy to be asked to approach a work of art that you're not "inclined" to like. but when we think about sex, it's hard not to fall back on sex drives and attractions as somehow less socially conditioned, less subject to cognition: most people i think experience attraction as this super visceral bodily response even if they're abstractly aware that cultural things condition the response. you can think yourself into liking some challenging art, and maybe even think yourself into trying to like some new kinds of people as friends, but i think it feels like a violation to try to think yourself into having a sexual response to something new because we conceive of our sexual responses as so unmediatedly coming from our bodies, which is also why sexual identity has been such a potent political force ("born this way" and whatnot)
[9/30/21, 12:10:57 PM] Kevin Stone: i don't know that i necessarily think it's, like, philosophically _right_ to think of sexual response that way, but i think that's how people _experience_ it and that's really complicated
[9/30/21, 12:12:47 PM] Horatio Thomas: yeah, i just think we also used to experience other things that way...particularly around language and art
[9/30/21, 12:13:42 PM] Horatio Thomas: i think we may view some of those things different now
[9/30/21, 12:14:20 PM] Horatio Thomas: but i can think of other associations that used to feel like similar violations, though i think nothing rises to the level of sex/rape because it really is a huge body violation
[9/30/21, 12:14:50 PM] Horatio Thomas: we don't punish people as severely for giving someone a good thrashing as we do for raping someone
[9/30/21, 12:14:55 PM] Horatio Thomas: so even then it can't just be about the body
[9/30/21, 12:15:31 PM] Kevin Stone: yeah that might be true. it really took a lot of very abstruse argumentation to get us to the point where people weren't talking about art as, like, expressions of national temperaments with strict hierarchies of goodness and badness. and now all that abstruse argumentation seems ridiculous, all you have to do is have access to the internet and it feels super weird to think of aesthetics as having natural or logical hierarchies instead of just being formed around communities with different values
[9/30/21, 12:16:58 PM] Horatio Thomas: yeah, i really think a lot of things that seem kind of absurd and fungible right now used to actually be really important
[9/30/21, 12:19:01 PM] Kevin Stone: i think a lot about how so much of my "theory" education in undergrad was about all these really complicated notions of social constructedness from the '60s and '70s. and now in a hyperconnected and globalized world it just seems absurd that there was ever very much complicated debate about that
[9/30/21, 12:29:55 PM] Kevin Stone: um random proposal and don't feel pressured to say yes, i can easily write up my thoughts in a different form: would you feel comfortable if i posted this conversation to the substack newsletter i started? i can credit you or anonymize you as you wish. i just realized i was going to write up a post about the question you raised about "what does sex positivity mean for the sexually undesirable?" and then i realized our conversation was much better with your contributions anyway, haha
[9/30/21, 12:36:17 PM] Horatio Thomas: haha, sure that's fine
[9/30/21, 12:36:34 PM] Horatio Thomas: i wasn't being super formal in my responses. i could have framed this stuff much better
[9/30/21, 12:37:12 PM] Horatio Thomas: one thing to consider is that in sex positive world, the problem is that the sexually desirable tend to not find spaces for the sexually undesirable
[9/30/21, 12:37:23 PM] Horatio Thomas: at best they allow them to hang around and ignore them
[9/30/21, 12:37:29 PM] Kevin Stone: that's why i think it turned out well! i'm trying to get much more comfortable with informal writing. i think it tends to raise questions as interestingly or more so than a lot of academic writing anyway
[9/30/21, 12:37:30 PM] Horatio Thomas: at worse, they don't' allow them to really enter the spaces at all