Sex, Contracts, and Manners - The Philosophical Salon

Sex, Contracts, and Manners - The Philosophical Salon: "In the West, at least, we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However, we should also bear in mind the (no less massive) fact that millions of people on a daily basis flirt, play the game of seduction, with the clear aim to get a partner for making love. The result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an active role in this game. When women dress provocatively to attract a male gaze, when they “objectify” themselves to seduce them, they don’t do it offering themselves as passive objects: they are the active agents of their own “objectification,” manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including the full right to step out of the game at any moment even if, to the male gaze, this appears in contradiction with previous “signals.” This active role of women is their freedom, which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists—from Muslims who have recently prohibited women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit which resemble a penis to our own ordinary male chauvinist who explodes in violence against a woman who first “provokes” him and then rejects his advances. Feminine sexual liberation is not just a puritan withdrawal from being “objectivized” (as a sexual object for men) but the right to actively play with self-objectivization, offering herself and withdrawing at will. Will it be still possible to proclaim these simple facts in the near future, or will the Politically Correct pressure compel us to accompany all these games with some formal-legal proclamation (of consensuality, etc.)?



Yes, sex is traversed by power games, violent obscenities, etc., but the difficult thing to admit is that these are immanent to it. Some perspicuous observers have already noticed how the only form of sexual relation that fully meets the Politically Correct criteria would have been a contract drawn between sadomasochist partners. The rise of Politically Correct criteria would have been a contract drawn between sadomasochist partners. The rise of Political Correctness and the rise of violence are thus two sides of the same coin: insofar as the basic premise of Political Correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual consent, Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which stipulate extreme forms of sadomasochist sex (treating a person like a dog on a collar, slave trading, torture, up to consented killing). In such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of a contract negates itself: slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom. It is as if Jacques Lacan’s motif “Kant with Sade” (Marquis de Sade’s brutal hedonism as the truth of Kant’s rigorous ethics) became reality in an unexpected way. Before we dismiss this motif as just a provocative paradox, we should reflect upon how this paradox is at work in our social reality itself.



The declared aim of proposals for sexual contracts which are popping up all around in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, from the US and UK to Sweden, are, of course, clear: to exclude elements of violence and domination through sexual contacts. The idea is that, before doing it, both partners should sign a document stating their identity, their consent to engage in sexual intercourse, as well as the conditions and limitations of their activity (use of condom, of dirty language, the inviolable right of each partner to step back and interrupt the act at any moment, to inform his/her partner about his health (AIDS) and religion, etc.). Sounds good, but a series of problems and ambiguities arise immediately."

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or, to quote Arthur Koestler: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”

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