Sexual Legalism

In both Don Juan and the works of De Sade, the horror that sex elicits is not in the sex itself, but the way the sex is removed from sex. For Don Juan, sex becomes an accounting scheme, for De Sade, an exercise in bureaucracy. Sex is reduced to something which is alien to sexuality, with libidinal desires channeled into the inhumanity of something alien to the emotional irrationality which is sexuality. The body upon which this type of sexual legalism is done becomes thus completely desexualized in effect, but then creating a jarring dissonance between the sexuality supposedly pointed to beneath a surface of remarkable asexuality, knowing the existence of the desire which is wasted as its funneled into engines which annihilate desire in their operation.

Such a concept of desire is vital to understanding sexuality. Desire is never consensual because desire is a process of sublimation. A sexual fantasy or kink is never about anything as simple as the object in itself inspiring some lust, but about the unconscious sublimating some libidinal energy into a narrative. It is for this reason that the narratives driving and determining the sex act are so vital to making a sexual fantasy have weight. The sexual fantasy is the sublimation of desire, so the various narratives not only allow for the movement of that energy through the system created that is the desire, but also the energies being weighed in its relation to morality, where now the desire assimilates into the worldview of the individual as both the desire and its prohibition are codependant, the desire being sublimated into the sexual in its indulgence and the desire being sublimated into the political in the moral, both in being moral and immoral.

Unspoken here is the exact nature of the desire. Desire in its sublimation creates a posthuman mediation, some linguistic machine, which is created from the individual’s energies. Machines are thus required to speak to each other in order that any relationships can be had, with two persons equally participating in their own machines, which may or may not be capable of plugging into eachother’s. When compatibility occurs, the individuals are not having sex with each other - as communicating with the other is impossible - but having sex with a desire which is compatible with their own, both communicating, a pair of machines now melding into one.

It is for this reason that legalism of sexuality inspires horror. The machine of legalistic-sexuality is one which is alien to desire, yet perfectly compatible with the end plugs of the desire. The desire is perverted to mean not what is truly desired, but to mean the very thing which results from the fulfillment of this desire, the acts which result from the linguistic movement that truly takes place. Legalistic sexuality is horrifying not only in being alien to all, but also in being parasitic in its ability to latch onto the mind, as one unaware of their own desires will be only able to chase the results of their unconscious machines and may see the legal machine as being one in the same as the result.

Being an alien machine, legalism of sexuality is thus able to be commodified in an eternal number of ways. The only true successor to De Sade, the webcomic Oh Joy Sextoy has this in its very title, with sex having been reduced to only its results (anatomy and objects and motions), it can thus be made into commodities and then plugged into machines which operate on commodities moving as nothing except free-moving props guaranteed by some force, ie, the body without organs of capital and the bureaucracy of finance. With these objects able to be commodified, the mind is thrust with it, dragged along by endless machines far and beyond that which could ever be fueling the desire, tearing the psyche apart as desire is channeled into more and more futile paths through the various perversions of capital: silicon valley “polycule” culture, dating apps, or “kink”. Each of these imitates the end result of something which has at some point been genuinely expressed. Polycules legalize polyamorous relationships, dating apps legalize casual sex and matchmaking, and kink legalizes sadomasochism.