“Let’s just focus on the nice pretty parts of human sexuality”

rolequeer:

gchoule:

rolequeer:

Any analysis of sex that focusses only on all the ‘good healthy desires’ people have and not on the unethical desires, complex selfharming desires, desires rooted in trauma, etc is a lazy excuse to get to an orgasm without feeling shame and guilt and has no interest in developing a real ethics of sex. 

As a test, just bring up the biggest taboo: ask someone who has a whole theory on fetish and kink where pedophilia fits into their theory. If they go “eww, that’s sick. It fits in the ‘things we don’t analyse because they are too sickening and everyone who desires that is a monster’ box. we are all good people here”, you hit the hypocrisy jackpot. 

(and if they go “just do Daddy/little-girl play with a consenting girl over 18!” you’ve hit the super creepy hypocrisy jackpot). 

This is a really interesting (if prickly!) line of thought – could I ask you to elaborate your own thoughts on the subject in the context of rolequeer?

Rolequeerness acts from the basic premises that not all our desires are ethical, not all our desires are good for us and not all desires are good for our partners.  

Rolequeerness also acts from the basic premises that our desires can not be traced back to a single easy source, as if we were ‘born this way’ with all our kinks and types already mapped out. Just like much of our relationship to food was shaped by our nature, experiences, advertisements and diet culture, so too has much of our relationship to sex been shaped by our nature, experiences, representations of sexuality in media and porn and rape culture. 

When huge numbers of men have the hots for a skinny young blonde white girl with big breasts in a society which eroticizes just that type of girl, that is not because all these men were ‘born that way’. When huge numbers of people have the hots for rape in a society which eroticizes rape all the time, that is not because all these people were ‘born that way’.

And while rolequeerness makes a very clear distinction between those who come from rape culture having the hots for being the oppressor and those who come out of it having the hots for being oppressed, and while rolequeerness acts with great viciousness against people who choose to build an identity around justifying their unethical desires (Dominants), it does not try to create a fiction where us over here have only ethical desires and those people over there have only unethical desires. 

Rolequeerness is commited to making everyone look more critically at their desires. Because rape culture has left it’s mark on us all. That doesn’t mean we’re ‘all the same’ or ‘we all need to be okay with having unethical desires’. Quite the contrary. But we all need to be absolutely ruthless in facing our own acts that perpetuate rape culture and even more ruthless in facing that our own acts may violate someone’s consent. (A rolequeer mantra: you may be a rapist if it never occurs to you that rape is something you’re capable off’).

What we do not want is an understanding of sexuality that places some sexualities in the box of shame to remain unanalyzed and not deconstructed, while other sexualities are put on a pedestal as inherently purely ethical and inherently never abusive and certainly not political. Leaving unethical desires unanalyzed and ‘othered’ is not going to help us deal with those desires, and putting desires on a pedestal beyond reproach is not going to help us recognize and deal with rapists and abusers. 

See also:

• Locating Rolequeer within the Landscape of Sexuality Politics