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The Sexual Is Political
- ericjang 10y agoAuthor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek What justifies the limitation to the binary form of marriage? Why not even a marriage with animals? After all we already know about the finesse of animal emotions. Is to exclude marriage with an animal not a clear case of “speciesism,” an unjust privileging of the human species? This is a question I like to entertain, and was wondering if the HN community had thoughts on the matter. Most argue that romantic/sexual relationships with animals is wrong because: 1. an animal is incapable of consent. 2. even if the relationship was "consensual", there is a power dynamic that the human enjoys over the pet animal that the animal has little control over, so the relationship is still predicated on some kind of exploitation. This suggests that we can only seek ethical relationships with intellectual and equally independent entities. Now replace "animal" with "mentally disabled" or "children". Are they capable of consent? Who are they allowed to have a relationship with? I am not suggesting that children or the mentally disabled are equivalent to animals - I just find the arguments very similar. Edit: it's my life objective to maximize HN karma, so my feelings get hurt when I get downvoted. I'd like to hear why you disagree!
- amelius 10y agoI guess it is a slippery slope. The next target might be children.
- duaneb 10y agoMarriage should be a social declaration of dependency, not anything romantic or sexual. If I want my dog to be able to visit me in the hospital, who are you to judge that? That dog is my pride and joy.
- eximius 10y agoThat is why I've ways favored the idea of having a secular, legal idea of a civil union that is independent of the baggage associated with 'marriage'. If two people want to have a joint legal status without being in a relationship, is that not a valid desire?
- duaneb 10y agoI can't agree more. There are even camps in the (academic at least) queer community that argued against gay marriage: we should not be opting to include individual minority groups (while excluding others like the poly community, though the benefits and rights with those would be an absolute headache to legislate) in heterosexual norms, but working to remove the recognition heterosexual norms from secular government. Even just renaming it from "marriage" to "civil union" would ameliorate a lot of the tension surrounding it. There's no reason a religious or personal ceremony should be of any interest to the government; it's only the rights and benefits that matter.
- sevenless 10y ago> an animal is incapable of consent. They don't exactly consent to being killed and eaten, either. Looking for consistency in human ethics, particularly sexual ethics, always seemed a bit foolish to me. We didn't develop them with ethical consistency in mind, nor do our basic biological drives care.
- ericjang 10y agoWithout ethical consistency, of what use are the ethics?
- sevenless 10y agoI'd say that ethics define a local and situational landscape of guidance, rather than global policies. There are cases where our ethical intuition breaks down altogether or gives contradictory answers depending on how you argue, such as the trolley problem, utilitarianism/deontology - and really, many of the great social liberal/conservative arguments are based on different ethical approaches to the same situation. Like the mathematical value of 0/0, it all depends on how you get there. This is to be expected, since after all, we're social animals. Our ethics, such as the sense that murder is generally wrong, evolved and developed over many thousands of years as value systems (via government, law and religion) that preserved cooperative and successful societies. I expect meta-ethics/attempts to codify our ethics, in general, not to succeed, since they never developed as cohesive, all-encompassing systems in the first place. Our society's code of law is as close as we get, and that's a long way off being ethically coherent.
- amelius 10y ago> Which man has not caught himself in momentary doubt: “Do I really have the right to enter GENTLEMEN? Am I really a man?” Honestly, I never had this thought. Am I strange?
- cfmcdonald 10y agoNo.
- allengeorge 10y agoNo.
- tomwalker 10y agoNo.
- jelly 10y agoWhen I was younger and saw the full word "Gentlemen" on a toilet door I would wonder whether I was polite enough to qualify.
- c0nducktr 10y agoWas this killed by flags? What happened?
- jessaustin 10y agoIt appeared so, but then I clicked "vouch" and it came back. Of course, this may just be a sort of hell-vouch, visible only to me? [EDIT:] No, not a hell-vouch; it still appears in incognito. [EDIT 2:] ...and now it's flagged again. Philosophy on HN casts pearls before swine. If I were illiterate I would call it "ironic". A simple essay that addresses matters of broad public discussion (certainly on HN) in slightly idiosyncratic fashion (not rude, not disrespectful, only a bit out of the rut of banal everyday discourse), is immediately round-filed by the right-thinking brigade? Could there be a more convincing proof of TFA's title?
- ericjang 10y agoHow much karma does one need to vouch?
- justinpombrio 10y agoI suspect it was flagged by left-thinking people. I'd flag it if I could: in the second paragraph the author conflates transgender people with postgenderists calling for the abolition of gender. None of the trans people I know believe anything like that. It's possible there's some subtle argument that's going over my head, but either way this article seems like poorly grounded flamewar fodder.
- eximius 10y agoI think he was saying that transgenderists don't take things to the full logical conclusion of postgenderism. Not that I agree with that in any way, I just think its more representative of his claim.
- jessaustin 10y agoHaha, every line is a point, when viewed sideways. The reactionary "whew I've made it in now close the bathroom door" position you ascribe to certain "T" people wouldn't be shared by all that many "Q" folk, although it is of a piece with some "G" voices elsewhere in this thread. There is a natural tension in any political coalition, between those who join for ethical reasons and those who are primarily self-interested (and, one supposes, those for whom the whole movement is only a political tool). Do we see some fraying around the edges? Perhaps TFA is flamewar fodder, but that says more about this forum than about TFA itself, which when taken on its own terms is interesting and imaginative.
- gaur 10y ago> The vision of social relations that sustains transgenderism is the so-called postgenderism: a social, political and cultural movement whose adherents advocate a voluntary abolition of gender, rendered possible by recent scientific progress in biotechnology and reproductive technologies. What a bizarre claim.
- Bartweiss 10y agoNot just bizarre, but actively backwards. There's a decent amount of conflict between people advocating "no one is gendered" postgenderism and transgender people going "I'm suffering for my gender identity, get out of here with that nonsense". I'm a bit baffled by the claim that "I am gender A, not gender B" is somehow a call for "abolition of gender".
- slavik81 10y agoUnless I misunderstood, I thought that was part of the conflict they're discussing.
- justinpombrio 10y agoUnfortunately, the writing style makes it almost impossible to tell.
- chongli 10y agoŽižek is a challenging read if you're not accustomed to it. Typical for a philosopher (or indeed any expert), he uses technical terms with the assumption that the reader knows them or at least will take the time to look them up.
- duaneb 10y agoI wish I could select the text to quote on iOS but I can't. However, there's a core premise of the article that I disagree with: it is not more acceptable to emphasize your identity as a minority. People emphasize identity as a white, as male, as part of their class every day. People are OBLIGATED to make an effort to embrace or at least accept and work with minority cultures, but are not restricted from emphasizing or being proud of their own. I certainly know a few Germans and Scandinavian Americans who have no issues celebrating their heritage non-offensively. I think the same applies to sexuality. Cis people have no issues expressing their identity as cis daily. To draw a parallel to the black lives matter movement, the reason #AllLivesMatter is offensive is not because all lives DONT matter, but because it negates the efforts of other people to raise awareness of minority issues. Similarly, nobody is going to give you shit for being cis unless you do some thing like try to start a heterosexual pride day--that's just the norm, EVERY day is heterosexual pride day. You can be joyful of your sexuality daily and express how much you enjoy it to the world. It's called pop music! Secondly, there was a lot of talk about a class binary. This isn't really a thing outside of dialectical materialism, to my knowledge, and the rhetoric about the 1% vs the 99%. Neither of those describe a social class structure but certain interesting economic behaviors characteristic of the times in question. A revolution is inherently binary; a class queer economic revolution isn't an idea that makes sense. Third, the mention of the end of sexual reproduction was... Weird. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything but the end of the male sex thought experiment. Certainly not related to anything happening today. At this point, I stopped reading. Some sources or building on other material would be helpful to see the conclusions in an incremental manner; this reads as a manic rant by a young student who reads philosophy but neglected anything about the topic in question.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago> the reason #AllLivesMatter is offensive is not because all lives DONT matter I'm not sure I agree with that wording. To be clear: * No lives matter outside the narrow scope of humanity. The universe is an uncaring void. In the context of the universe, no lives matter. * Within the context of human society, all lives should matter. Fairness requires a certain amount of equality and equity.
- aiiane 10y agoI really wish philosophers would stop using a half baked understanding of trans folk as an intellectual plaything.
- joe5150 10y agoI really feel like Zizek must be aware of the fact that practically all of the social, ontological, etc. issues he brings up about transgenderism have been discussed and debated within and outside of academia for many years, and he just doesn't care and doesn't believe his opinions need to be informed by any of it.
- duaneb 10y agoI recommend all people interested in philosophy engage in it, but go to classes for critical theory. This is where most of the interesting philosophy of the last 50 years has taken place, including the entirety of queer theory. His view is so backwards from where the jargon he uses comes from I wonder if european philosophers are even aware of the field of queer theory.
- sevenless 10y agoThis is gibberish.
- hx87 10y agoI expect nothing more of Slavoj Zizek.
- jessaustin 10y agoLGBTQQIAAP FTW! The speechifying conventioneers of the last several weeks had enough trouble pronouncing "LGBT". A more mellifluous acronym (or, dare one suggest, actual word) would make this an easier topic to discuss, but perhaps that wouldn't do justice to it: is every new letter a new inclusiveness? TFA takes the bathroom brouhaha as its starting point. ISTM the only tenable long-term solution is to have any number of single-toilet rooms, each of which may be used by whoever wants to use it. In locations that serve many people at once, these could be supplemented by a single many-toilet room, reserved for those who are comfortable eliminating in the presence of other humans. Future generations will laugh at us silly Victorians.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- duaneb 10y agoI don't get why people don't just use "queer", which is a true catch all for, well, queered identities. It doesn't seem to take off outside of academia, where it is rigorously used and defined.
- sevenless 10y agoBecause: (1) it's an insult. Some of us grew up with 'Smear the Queer' played in school. I am not 'queer', I'm gay (or homosexual, if you want to be clinical). (2) There is nothing we have in common with these other groups to justify conflating them with gay people. Their causes aren't mine. Gay people aren't the other letters. I neither support lumping all these disparate groups together, nor had any say on it. Actually, why not just call us 'sex weirdos'? It's got the same meaning coming from straight people.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Actually, why not just call us 'sex weirdos'? It's got the same meaning coming from straight people. No, it doesn't (it has roughly the same meaning coming from heteronormative bigots, but that set is not coextensive with the set of straight people.)
- joe5150 10y agoZizek is so far out of his depth here that it's comical, and it shows in his juvenile "trans leads to bestiality" concern troll. Idiotic. Does LARB have an editor, or are they just supremely aware of the fact that even the worst garbage by name-brand thinkers will get eyeballs on the page? I don't even know how to approach the weird discourse on Jews....
- eximius 10y ago1. That was painful to read. 2. Be excellent to each other.
- hinkley 10y agoStation!