First of all, I want to apologize for the lack of regular S&C columns this semester. I promise I will try my best to stick to the biweekly schedule. A lot has happened since my last column, including Halloween. I’m sure that, for many, a lot happened in the department of sex on Halloweekend, so let’s recap. What stands out to me from Halloweekend is the sheer amount of damage. Homes were trashed, people’s things were stolen, hearts, lungs, noses, and kidneys were fucked. I was thinking about the houses that were trashed, I couldn’t help but wonder: in parties and in sex, are we simply selfish?
James Baldwin, in Giovanni’s Room, writes about an adolescent love and sexual experience, and he describes it as “a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation.”* I wonder if Reedies have not yet grown beyond this form of sex, and even yet, this form of communal existence. We go to parties and in a moment of intoxication start messing with things, stealing things, damaging, and even shitting where you should not. These things happen in a moment of pure egoism. By messing up someone’s house, you get a sense of power over the material thing, a sense of pleasure from the freedom that comes with doing whatever you want. But this pleasure only exists for the one person doing the damage, while others are left cleaning the mess. In parties, where the community is meant to come together for each other’s enjoyment and pleasure, instead, some are engaged in this egoistic pleasure that can only be described as the social life equivalent of masturbation. This is not a judgement on masturbation, but simply that it lacks the pleasure of another (well usually).
At Reed, sometimes it feels like Jacques Lacan was right about sex: “there is no sexual relation.” People come together to fulfill their sexual pleasure, but they do it in an egoistic way. We are not really engaging with the other person so much as engaging with ourselves and our own pleasure. The mind is good at tricking us into thinking that we are not, to create a fantasy of true merging of pleasures and souls through sex, but sometimes we are simply being selfish and do not want to realize it. This is sometimes present in hookups, in crushes to distract ourselves from boredom, or in relationships to get over an ex. In these instances, we don’t really care about the other person, only how our relations with them will affect us. So, how much damage are we doing in order to fulfill our own pleasures? Not a lot, I hope, but judging by the way some find pleasure in non-sexual social interactions, I am not so optimistic.
I hope everyone is able to experience sex in the way that proves Lacan wrong; that sex is not merely egoistic; that in a moment of sex you come to recognize yourself in the other, to care for the pleasure of the other, and to truly understand the other. I hope this is experienced in non-sexual relations, too; that in a party, you enjoy that others are enjoying themselves, even if this requires some reservation and basic decency. Maybe we should stop fucking ourselves, in parties and in sex.
*I have already brought up this quote in a previous column. I apologize for the redundancy.