So la la. Installation. Video still. Vienna – Graz. 1985. Copy-right Gudrun Bielz
Films
‘Repulsion’. A film by Roman Polanski. 1965. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO0niGPR5S4>.
‘Hiroshima mon amour’. A film by Alain Resnais. 1959. Trailer. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjGdLZNAdRc&feature=related>.
Text
‘The specific satisfaction sought and found in female sex life and motherhood are of masochistic nature. The content of the early sexual wishes and fantasies concerning the father is the desire to be mutilated, that is, castrated by him. … What the woman secretly desires in intercourse is rape and violence, or in the mental sphere, humiliation.’ (Horney).
The desire for humiliation cannot be a desire for the above. This must be a mistake. This narrative rings false. Horney must be wrong. Everything is allowed and permitted during sex when all parties agree to it, even if this would include the death of one party? This has happened and I am going to talk about this later in this text. Why humiliation? Sexuality can be so much more than the idea of sexuality; and making love to somebody and feeling the animal human being held down and oscillating between tenderness and animal lust with some force is not humiliation. Is it seen as humiliating because the official narrative is to f*ck the middle class way just like we make conversation with some niceties, and nice little penis saying: Hello, may I enter you lovely pussy and pussycat is happily meowing away? I can extend this to ‘Hello nice little penis please visit my nice bottom hole or nice little penis please rub your nice friend or nice pussy I would love to rub your pussy at mine’. Sometimes they make an excursion into other classes and talk about their Elisabeth Regina (Cockney slang) rubbing somebody’s Mars and Venus. These niceties do not happen when we have sex, do they? The darkness of sexuality that is not darkness other than if there is sadism or whatever can be called perversion involved is more about passion and boundless pleasure. This can change into pain and back to pleasure and getting stuck in between becoming something like ‘plainure’ or ‘please’. Perversion is a model with different and new flavours that have changed in societies with their oscillating moral constructions. Wasn’t there a time in Victorian England when it was perverted to have sex other than for reproduction and naked bodies were not permitted? I envisage two people in nightdresses, carefully avoiding the gaze and targeting each other’s primary sexual organs, cautiously staying away from any lust, joy and fun, and anxiously evading any nakedness and passion. Behind closed doors, away from the official version, there was the adoration of the bust, the foot, the nightdress, the strand of hair, the eye, the body part, the long slender fingers, and the genitals. All of this nicely compartmentalised and put into boxes. It finds it perhaps absolute and really disturbing narrative in the killing of objects that are not allowed to be objects with their own want and identity. See http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/cannibals1.html.
So, thinking about the mechanics of sex, women on women, men on men and men on women as well as the other way around are masturbating each other with new technical toys as well as ancient rubber toys and ducks and leather fetishes, glass, diamonds, fluff, jam and chocolate, ropes and robes, purple hand-cuffs and silver plated candle holders. As a habit it is about desperation and boredom, about obsession and compulsive actions, one cannot live without any more. It is about adding tools like hammers and screwdrivers, rubber stuff and feather fluff to the business of pleasure without contributing to intimacy. It is about introducing interfaces between bodies that separate them. If you feed an object by stuffing it with pâté using a fork or by stuffing it with sexual goo by using a yellow rubber duck, does not make that great a difference anymore. Too much food and too much sex make you tired and throw up. Though even vomit can become part of the sexual narrative. Objects want always more and are never satisfied; they have not enough money and pleasure, not enough sex and control. They have to carry the Gucci handbags of sexual desire, pleasure or perversion and they like to think about an ultimate status symbol, the Lamborghini of sex with an object of desire, be it male or female, draped around its bonnet, always available but only on the terms of the buyer. There is always a better car, a better bag, a better object of desire looming in the darkness, waiting to be woken up by your money or your touch, by your staging of sexual rituals and by your wish to control the momentary loss of control by all parties involved. This is a devious narrative as it is about control all along. Even loss of control is carefully orchestrated and implies that control is a primary narrative.
Being on your own, but not being alone as networked into this virtual set-up of computing power with real voices and images that promise the authentic event, you are sitting here, on your own, in front of your computer immersed in the virtual illusion of nirvana. You let either your hands or machines and toys do the business while pretending that there is intimacy while you are listening to the voices of seduction or commands, of dirty language or sweet promises and watching the seductive gestures of bodies offering themselves to your exploitation. They are set up in generic ways, compartmentalised and put into the drawers of sexual flavours, seducing you with cold precision into a scenario that you have selected as your favourite dish. They give you what you want; if not so, you will switch the channel, going more hard-core if it is pornography or more hard language if it is a chat room or any other virtual environment with the illusion of real time interaction. You don’t even know if you are having sex with a guy, a woman or a dog as avatars are representations of an imagined self, an other persona, the persona you want to be or never wanted to be, a non persona perhaps. So you can do what you do best, close your eyes, let the machines touch your crotch and pretend that you are having sex with the star of your dreams while talking dirty to an avatar who could be any object, even a shoe or a handbag if you want so. What do you do after you have had your ejaculation or your orgasm? Use your Kleenex or have a shower or just continue like nothing has happened as a momentary satisfaction has made your stomach feel fuller and your dread about life less dreadful? For a moment you have fulfilled an object’s dream of avoiding intimacy by creating the illusion of closeness but actually engaging in another service that is on offer for free or against payment and part of a utilitarian scenario. This is commodity fetishism. Is this that different from what we had been told about Victorian sexuality? The toys and instruments of pleasure are displayed like in a manual by Marquis de Sade or on the trays in my dentist’s practice. I am not talking about sadism here or masochism. I am talking about toys having taken over the production of sexual pleasure and adding to the narrative of the MUST of pleasure. Second Life ‘sex clubs’ offered toys that can be attached to programmes and the computer would direct your sexual pleasure with real toys while intercourse took place between avatars.
Fetishism and rituals deflect from feeling and loving and experiencing sex in an animal way or perhaps an object way. Can I still use the term subject as it seems to be outdated terminology coming from philosophy/psychology? Perhaps, we have been made to believe that subject is not as good as object because less objective? I would like to add that it is a term that defines what constitutes female far more than the term object with its extension objectivity, a fictitious absolute and a figment of male control over nature that is not natural or possibly does not even exist while subjectivity connected to subjects is far more about intrinsic experience. Possibly, I am creating my own mythology, but it is in my best interest as I am a woman. Unfortunately, it is also a narrative that has to be erased by objectivity. Though, I am quite in love with the term object myself as there are these gooey chewy soft and caramel pudding-like objects with particles of preservative stuck to its surface while being pleasantly soft and fudge-like inside. This is fudgable. I will remind us that subject is a female narrative, part of a female principle that has been neglected, ignored and erased in many cultures and during the last millennia.
Fetishism and rituals make the body into the object body; and if we all are objects, who will hinder us to kill any object body out of sexual pleasure that in some cases is only the pleasure of one and the pain of the other. Of course, it can be an agreement between lovers; and the game with life and death can become the ultimate sexual act by one person eating up the other in an act of lust and love. Armin Meiwes killed his lover who he had found via the Internet. Obviously, he must have eaten him with great gusto <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3443803.stm>. Being eaten up and expecting death as the ultimate act of sexual or more ecstatic pleasure is certainly a perversion, isn’t it? What has gone through the mind of the object to be swallowed up by a lover who behaved like the praying mantis that is eating the male after copulation? Has the object of desire been sedated before he was taken apart? This would mean that he had been cheated from experiencing the ecstasy of whatever had been agreed as the commodity value of pleasure between the two parties, all set up in a contract of perhaps not so mutual agreement.
Fetishism and SM scenarios depend on contractual agreements. Otherwise the narrative is one of real oppression and exploitation, of sex-slavery and abuse. So fetishism and SM is something like a business, a utilitarian agreement between people, an advanced massage parlour, a good example for commodity fetishism. Fetishism is a narrative of religious and capitalist ritualisation of the commodity sexual object. This object can be a human object of any gender, a rubber doll, a shoe, and any item that has been put into the sexual arena. All of these objects are objects of desire and none is worth more than the other or if they are then only because of their usefulness.
‘People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object’ (Felluga). This translates that people in a fetish or SM scenario thus begin to treat their objects of desire as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of living their life of lust and love, gooeyness and consciousness expended to produce the object.
Here some quotes that might lead to another text and make for some interesting reading:
‘Suffering, or even self-inflicting pain, in more primitive tribes, may be an expression of magical thinking meant to ward off danger, and may have nothing to do with individual masochism.’ (Horney).
‘Furthermore, as far as men indulge in masochistic fantasies or performances, these represent an expression of their desire to play the female role.’ (Horney).
Fetishism and anxiety as well as the dread of the vagina: ‘Venus in Furs’ by Leopold Sacher Masoch, an Austro-Hungarian who gave masochism its name.
Like fetishism, exhibitionsm and others, Kaplan says that masochism is ‘one of the male perversions that deludes the male subject into falsifying his means of control’. It is a way of overcoming the trauma of childhood. (Hinton).
‘In its larger, more encompassing meaning, fetishism is about the deadening and dehumanization of otherwise alive and therefore threateningly dangerous, unpredictable desires.’ (Kaplan)
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2
Lit.:
Horney, Karen. “The problem of feminine masochism” in Feminine Psychology. Norton & Company. New York, London. 1993.
Kaplan, Louise J. Cultures of Fetishism. Palgrave Macmillan. New York. 2006.
Hinton, Laura. The perverse gaze of sympathy:Sadomasochistic sentiments from Clarissa to rescue 911. State University of New York Press. 1999.
Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Marx: On Fetishism.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 25 Aug 2011. <http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/marxism/modules/marxfetishism.html>.
26 Aug 2011. <http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/cannibals1.html>.
Music
Lunatic. Booba feat. 2010. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb0Rh32BlhQ>.
Darth Vader Fetish Chic
(Photo source: boingboing.net)
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