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bloodygranuaileIt’s not that often that I manage to get myself to read, like, real theory or academic writing of any kind without a book club to make me, but one of the recent exceptions was when I put in an order at Ohio State University Press for two of the volumes in their “Abnormativities” series: Ela Pyrzbylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality and Alyson K. Spurgas’ Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century. Spurgas’ book arrived first and despite knowing that my brain was completely squooshed from the national convention and I should do something nice and light for it instead, I couldn’t help but take a look at the introduction, and then I was compelled to read the entire thing.
Diagnosing Desire is broadly a critique of the supposedly objective, “apolitical” science in the fields of sex research and sex therapy and particularly of the DSM-5’s new replacement for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, the gender-specific “Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder.” It is also a qualitative study of a number of women who had been diagnosed--officially or via self-diagnosis--with low desire, some of whom had sought formal medical treatment, and others of whom had gone the self-care/self-improvement/alternative medicine routes. In addition to the study participants, Sturgas also interviews a number of professional sex therapists, researchers, workshop coaches, etc., in varying degrees of Calculated To Drive Me Personally Batty. (Celeste’s quotes in particular nearly gave me a nosebleed, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
Spurgas starts by taking us through the history of sex research and particularly the history of feminist-identified sex research, which these days finds itself in an awkward position. Following the work of Masters & Johnson in the ‘60s and a lot of writing by a lot of irrepressibly horny sex-positive feminists, the old notion that women aren’t supposed to have sexual feelings of their own has been debunked, and the new notion that women are Just As Horny As Men, Actually, has come to the fore. Only women continue to have higher rates than men of both diagnosed sexual dysfunction and asexuality, which is a little distressing for the sorts of people who think we liberated women sexually by giving them, like, permission to be liberated, and by permission we of course mean that these are the new marching orders that everyone must follow or be deemed broken and subject to fixing.
Now, I am the sort of old-fashioned feminist that thinks that feminism is a left-wing political movement for the liberation of women as a class via the overthrow of patriarchy, and to me it seems reasonable, if not downright obvious, that there’s more to the collective sexual liberation of women as a class than merely declaring us Liberated, and if women are exhibiting higher rates of being Not That Horny After All then there is perhaps some kind of society-wide turnoff in effect, like the patriarchy continuing to exist, or men being terrible, or all these people chattering on about evolutionary psychology all the time, which is unsexy and crass. However, this is a rather niche and old-timey definition of feminism, and most of the self-identified feminist sex research going on now uses the newer definition: the tautological and fairly useless claim that one believes one’s own opinions about gender stuff to be correct.
It is this drive for an “apolitical” but somehow still feminist sex research--not the old downer kind of feminism that talks about patriarchy and the sociocultural traumas women face, just the new fun kind of feminism that talks about sex a lot and doesn’t upset anybody’s ideas about gender essentialism--that has landed the various fields of sex study in the shameful condition they are in now, pushing something Spurgas dubs the “feminized responsive desire framework.” This framework is a newfangled spin on the quite old and rather dubious conception of female sexuality as being predominantly reactive and receptive and not independently driven and it’ll wake up if you just, like, keep trying to put her in the mood, we’re sure--and not only that it will, but, now that this is the model, that it’s supposed to, and if it doesn’t then something has gone wrong. Gussied up with a load of evolutionary psychology--and evolutionary psychology does not appear to have gotten any more scientifically rigorous since the last time some unimaginative numbnuts tried to use it to argue me into bed--this model is now actively being taught to women who seek treatment for low desire, apparently sometimes in lieu of even the most basic inquiries into their relationship condition, like “do you think the people you’re trying to have sex with but are mysteriously lacking in desire for are attractive?” (One participant, after going through a pretty bad experience with a clinical treatment program for sexual dysfunction, was able to ‘cure’ her low desire by divorcing her shitty husband and becoming a lesbian.)
My initial response as someone who does identify on the asexual spectrum is to be defensive about “low desire” being a category of dysfunction at all, so it was very informative for me to read about the perspectives of women who did feel like losing their desire was an interruption of normal functioning. It’s clear that there are not (yet, anyway) any real cut-and-dried, easily identifiable answers about when we are pathologizing natural human variation vs. when we are naturalizing the effects of patriarchal oppression (and then, of course, pathologizing that in order to redirect efforts away from political solutions and toward individual women individually working to not Let Themselves be affected by, y’know, the structures of our entire society, through personal strength of character or sheer irrepressibility or whatever victim-blaming nonsense we’re spouting this week). An interesting aspect for me as a reader was that, while half the time I felt like I was reading about space aliens--as is usually the case when I read about sex--I also found myself relating quite a lot to many of these women’s stories about Things That Have Sucked, both subtly and less subtly, about being involved with cis men, in regards to my infrequent forays into heterosexual experimentation. It is nice to know that I am not insane for a) finding them to have sucked and b) experiencing the expectation that nothing could ever suck in a way that’s demotivating, that if something doesn’t work for you you should be endlessly motivated to Keep Exploring, as a demand for a pretty significant amount of work, which it is possible to then find tiring and like things are being demanded of you. I was familiar with the concept of compulsory sexuality before this but not so much with biopolitics, so I found the sections on sexual self-optimization and its ties to the more general neoliberal cooptation of self-care to be particularly fascinating.
There is also a lot about sexual carework, a thing I have simply never had any interest in doing, and how it is related to modern (white, middle-class, able-bodied) femininity, a thing I do not feel compelled to “succeed” at and do not particularly value (femininity is just gender conformity for women and, while my appearance is pretty gender-conforming, I don’t think anybody who’s ever met me could accuse me of valuing conformity). I found all this stuff particularly interesting because it highlighted to me the degree to which my asexuality/aromanticism really are, in part, tied up in my politics, in a way that much of the rest of the community doesn’t seem to share--from the execrable dedication of Angela Chen’s otherwise excellent Ace to the relentless “Aces can still…” discourse of mainstream journalism, there’s an often-showcased desire to be normal and a view of “normal” sexual and romantic relationships as satisfying and desirable that I just… don’t see! I see a sexual landscape that women are expected to navigate their way towards extracting enjoyment from, but from over here that landscape really just looks dreadful and I do not want to spend a lot of time learning to navigate it. I would possibly be more interested if it sucked less, although maybe not. So it was nice to read a book that really discussed in depth all the ways in which the terrain that women are developing and performing their sexuality on really is still quite rocky, and that a scientific consensus that depends on and simultaneously refuses to engage with the traumas and demands made of feminized populations results in regimes of “treatment” and “advice” that wind up producing sexual difference, thus exacerbating the problems they are in theory terribly concerned with solving, and, in fact, producing women’s sexuality as a problem to be managed and treated and brought in line with a complementarian vision of heterosexual fulfillment.
While this book certainly jammed a lot of very chewable content into my poor exhausted brainpan that I will be ruminating upon for quite a while, it ALSO reminded me of how much other stuff I need to read! I’m so under-read in so many areas! I will be going back through the works cited pages multiple times, I am sure, even if that does mean my eyeballs will be assaulted with the citation of Karl Marx’s Capital using the year the Penguin Classics edition was published and not, you know, the year it was published originally. (I am sure this is a house style thing and do not wish to blame the author for it but it really is my biggest criticism of the book; no reader should have to suffer through seeing the citation (Marx, 1990).)
Anyway, final verdict is that this book was REALLY fascinating and now I sort of regret not having a book club to discuss it with, so if anyone wants to borrow my copy so that I have someone to talk about it with, please let me know!
Diagnosing Desire is broadly a critique of the supposedly objective, “apolitical” science in the fields of sex research and sex therapy and particularly of the DSM-5’s new replacement for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, the gender-specific “Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder.” It is also a qualitative study of a number of women who had been diagnosed--officially or via self-diagnosis--with low desire, some of whom had sought formal medical treatment, and others of whom had gone the self-care/self-improvement/alternative medicine routes. In addition to the study participants, Sturgas also interviews a number of professional sex therapists, researchers, workshop coaches, etc., in varying degrees of Calculated To Drive Me Personally Batty. (Celeste’s quotes in particular nearly gave me a nosebleed, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
Spurgas starts by taking us through the history of sex research and particularly the history of feminist-identified sex research, which these days finds itself in an awkward position. Following the work of Masters & Johnson in the ‘60s and a lot of writing by a lot of irrepressibly horny sex-positive feminists, the old notion that women aren’t supposed to have sexual feelings of their own has been debunked, and the new notion that women are Just As Horny As Men, Actually, has come to the fore. Only women continue to have higher rates than men of both diagnosed sexual dysfunction and asexuality, which is a little distressing for the sorts of people who think we liberated women sexually by giving them, like, permission to be liberated, and by permission we of course mean that these are the new marching orders that everyone must follow or be deemed broken and subject to fixing.
Now, I am the sort of old-fashioned feminist that thinks that feminism is a left-wing political movement for the liberation of women as a class via the overthrow of patriarchy, and to me it seems reasonable, if not downright obvious, that there’s more to the collective sexual liberation of women as a class than merely declaring us Liberated, and if women are exhibiting higher rates of being Not That Horny After All then there is perhaps some kind of society-wide turnoff in effect, like the patriarchy continuing to exist, or men being terrible, or all these people chattering on about evolutionary psychology all the time, which is unsexy and crass. However, this is a rather niche and old-timey definition of feminism, and most of the self-identified feminist sex research going on now uses the newer definition: the tautological and fairly useless claim that one believes one’s own opinions about gender stuff to be correct.
It is this drive for an “apolitical” but somehow still feminist sex research--not the old downer kind of feminism that talks about patriarchy and the sociocultural traumas women face, just the new fun kind of feminism that talks about sex a lot and doesn’t upset anybody’s ideas about gender essentialism--that has landed the various fields of sex study in the shameful condition they are in now, pushing something Spurgas dubs the “feminized responsive desire framework.” This framework is a newfangled spin on the quite old and rather dubious conception of female sexuality as being predominantly reactive and receptive and not independently driven and it’ll wake up if you just, like, keep trying to put her in the mood, we’re sure--and not only that it will, but, now that this is the model, that it’s supposed to, and if it doesn’t then something has gone wrong. Gussied up with a load of evolutionary psychology--and evolutionary psychology does not appear to have gotten any more scientifically rigorous since the last time some unimaginative numbnuts tried to use it to argue me into bed--this model is now actively being taught to women who seek treatment for low desire, apparently sometimes in lieu of even the most basic inquiries into their relationship condition, like “do you think the people you’re trying to have sex with but are mysteriously lacking in desire for are attractive?” (One participant, after going through a pretty bad experience with a clinical treatment program for sexual dysfunction, was able to ‘cure’ her low desire by divorcing her shitty husband and becoming a lesbian.)
My initial response as someone who does identify on the asexual spectrum is to be defensive about “low desire” being a category of dysfunction at all, so it was very informative for me to read about the perspectives of women who did feel like losing their desire was an interruption of normal functioning. It’s clear that there are not (yet, anyway) any real cut-and-dried, easily identifiable answers about when we are pathologizing natural human variation vs. when we are naturalizing the effects of patriarchal oppression (and then, of course, pathologizing that in order to redirect efforts away from political solutions and toward individual women individually working to not Let Themselves be affected by, y’know, the structures of our entire society, through personal strength of character or sheer irrepressibility or whatever victim-blaming nonsense we’re spouting this week). An interesting aspect for me as a reader was that, while half the time I felt like I was reading about space aliens--as is usually the case when I read about sex--I also found myself relating quite a lot to many of these women’s stories about Things That Have Sucked, both subtly and less subtly, about being involved with cis men, in regards to my infrequent forays into heterosexual experimentation. It is nice to know that I am not insane for a) finding them to have sucked and b) experiencing the expectation that nothing could ever suck in a way that’s demotivating, that if something doesn’t work for you you should be endlessly motivated to Keep Exploring, as a demand for a pretty significant amount of work, which it is possible to then find tiring and like things are being demanded of you. I was familiar with the concept of compulsory sexuality before this but not so much with biopolitics, so I found the sections on sexual self-optimization and its ties to the more general neoliberal cooptation of self-care to be particularly fascinating.
There is also a lot about sexual carework, a thing I have simply never had any interest in doing, and how it is related to modern (white, middle-class, able-bodied) femininity, a thing I do not feel compelled to “succeed” at and do not particularly value (femininity is just gender conformity for women and, while my appearance is pretty gender-conforming, I don’t think anybody who’s ever met me could accuse me of valuing conformity). I found all this stuff particularly interesting because it highlighted to me the degree to which my asexuality/aromanticism really are, in part, tied up in my politics, in a way that much of the rest of the community doesn’t seem to share--from the execrable dedication of Angela Chen’s otherwise excellent Ace to the relentless “Aces can still…” discourse of mainstream journalism, there’s an often-showcased desire to be normal and a view of “normal” sexual and romantic relationships as satisfying and desirable that I just… don’t see! I see a sexual landscape that women are expected to navigate their way towards extracting enjoyment from, but from over here that landscape really just looks dreadful and I do not want to spend a lot of time learning to navigate it. I would possibly be more interested if it sucked less, although maybe not. So it was nice to read a book that really discussed in depth all the ways in which the terrain that women are developing and performing their sexuality on really is still quite rocky, and that a scientific consensus that depends on and simultaneously refuses to engage with the traumas and demands made of feminized populations results in regimes of “treatment” and “advice” that wind up producing sexual difference, thus exacerbating the problems they are in theory terribly concerned with solving, and, in fact, producing women’s sexuality as a problem to be managed and treated and brought in line with a complementarian vision of heterosexual fulfillment.
While this book certainly jammed a lot of very chewable content into my poor exhausted brainpan that I will be ruminating upon for quite a while, it ALSO reminded me of how much other stuff I need to read! I’m so under-read in so many areas! I will be going back through the works cited pages multiple times, I am sure, even if that does mean my eyeballs will be assaulted with the citation of Karl Marx’s Capital using the year the Penguin Classics edition was published and not, you know, the year it was published originally. (I am sure this is a house style thing and do not wish to blame the author for it but it really is my biggest criticism of the book; no reader should have to suffer through seeing the citation (Marx, 1990).)
Anyway, final verdict is that this book was REALLY fascinating and now I sort of regret not having a book club to discuss it with, so if anyone wants to borrow my copy so that I have someone to talk about it with, please let me know!