"possibility is not a luxury."

radical love letters | filling in the gaps of mainstream sex discourse

“Diary of a Conference” from the Barnard Sex Conference, 1982. one sample of a long archive of feminists thinking deeply about sex & culture.

As much as it pains me to say so, the latest ill-informed conservative commentary from New York Times opinion columnist, Ross Douthat, came at exactly the right time. I was in central Ohio, in a renovated barn, attempting to get back to my second book manuscript which is, broadly, an attempt to check in with where we’re at nearly fifty years after the origins of the Feminist Sex Wars. The early movement in-fighting about porn, kink, and sexual violence are inarguably precursors to the culture wars surrounding sex today, which has expanded to debates around reproductive justice, trans people’s livability, #MeToo, and the best way to be in relationships (from tradwives to triads). In the book, I’m trying to bring an updated lens to struggles around sex and gender by asking different questions than the ones that have led us in circles through the same tired discourse. In his essay “The Quest for a New Vision of Sexual Morality,” Douthat handed me on a silver platter/a singular link nearly all of the problems of contemporary analysis that I’m trying to address.

Douthat’s piece begins offering “context” to where we’re at now. As both an academic and a person who has been a part of social movements for twenty years, I always look at the context when investigating phenomenon. It’s probably my biggest gripe with the internet — people having conversations without any sense of history or where we’ve heard these things before. So points to Douthat for trying, but his “context” for contemporary views on sex begins in 2017 with “[t]he death of Hugh Hefner and the dawn of the #MeToo era.” This was, says Douthat, “a turning point”: 

“Out, at last, went Hefner’s sex-positive utopianism, the no-prudes-here giddiness and aspirational promiscuity that linked his ‘Playboy philosophy’ to 1980s sex comedies, 1990s lad magazines, liberal excuses for Bill Clinton’s priapism and the sweeping cultural triumph of pornography. 

In came #MeToo feminism, founded on outrage over rape and sexual assault, but inclined more broadly to regard hookup culture as a zone of danger, male desire as a force in need of correction and control, and bare consent as an insufficient criterion for sexual morality.” 

Let’s pause here. This is one version of context, but in a piece that’s attempting to engage feminism’s relationship to sex culture, completely ignoring the feminist origins of sex-positivity is a pretty egregious oversight. The aforementioned sex wars began because one segment of feminists —mainly lesbian feminists, for what it’s worth — insisted that challenging rape and sexual violence did not require doing away with porn, kink, or a robust centering of sexual pleasure in feminist spaces. So for Douthat to foil sex-positivity, credited to Hefner, to what the feminists wanted (by way of a sloppy summary of #MeToo)….I was already audibly scoffing. 

But Douthat goes on to do something I too am interested in doing—checking out what bigger media outlets are saying is relevant in matters of sex and gender. I don’t have any qualms with  his methodology of analyzing three recent New York Magazine cover stories: the one about polyamory (that focused mainly on wealthy people’s open marriages), the one about Andrew Huberman (someone I didn’t know by name, but after reading his deal, instantly recognized as similar to many other evo-psych-“alpha”-types who came before him), and the recent Andrea Long Chu essay that weaved a review of the new Judith Butler book into an analysis of the current state of trans-antagonism and what gender freedom might uncomfortably require from us. Worthy sites of analysis, but, if I may be so bold, Douthat—known for his anti-abortion stances, an essay about Magic Mike XXL titled “Is Sex Necessary?”, an unfortunate description of a sexual dalliance at Harvard in which he describes his sex partner as a “chunkier Reese Witherspoon''---is perhaps an unworthy writer to interrogate them. 

Unfortunately, a lot of my work on this current book is taking seriously what both the Right and reactionary feminists are saying about sex. And so, I pushed on. 

Douthat makes what he probably probably assumes is a spicy take: how can the libs at New York Magazine celebrate the desecration of the institution of marriage when it’s under the guise of polyamory, but then criticize Huberman for having unprotected sex with multiple woman and lying about it? “Riddle me this,” I imagine Douthat saying to me over a bar table, sipping scotch and tilting a fedora in anticipation of what he thinks will be a real gotchya,  “how come it’s okay when women do it, but not men? Huh? Huh??” What he actually says: “[Polyamory] reflects a desire to maintain the permissive sexual ethic that men like Hefner turned to their own exploitative ends, but to make it healthier and therapeutic, more female-friendly and egalitarian, safer and more structured.” (Female-friendly was my second outloud scoff.) 

If I’m being generous, I’ll grant that he goes on to make a slightly more nuanced observation about a growing cultural obsession with optimization and pop-therapy: “Polyamory isn’t being offered as an alternative to conservative monogamy, in this sense, so much as an alternative to more dangerous, irresponsible, and deceptive forms of promiscuity — a responsible, spreadsheet-enabled, therapeutic version of the sexual revolution, in which transparency replaces cheating, and everything is permitted so long as you carefully negotiate permission.” I actually…don’t disagree with that. 

What Douthat is missing though is, again, actual knowledge about the kind of context that’s important here: a history of nonmonogamy started by the libidinous queers he erases from his supposed feminist history who were (and in certain realms continue to be) invested in the dangerous, the irresponsible, the risky, but within and alongside of movements that were centering care and talking way more openly about power than Douthat seems capable of addressing. But Douthat, and mainstream journalists across the land, will rarely even nod towards the existence of the radical unless it has been packaged in a way that they can make their own. Instead, we are left with Douthat’s obsession with classical political theory, in which he writes only about a spectrum consisting of libertarian, conservative, classical liberalism, and social liberalism. (It sometimes reads like an undergraduate Poli Sci 101 paper whose prompt was “apply these four frameworks to a cultural phenomenon.”¹) 

Which brings us to Douthat’s third piece of evidence: Andrea Long Chu’s “Freedom of Sex” essay which Douthat summarizes as making the case for “allowing kids experiencing gender dysphoria to undergo interventions like puberty blockers and mastectomies regardless of what medical or psychological claims are made about where the desire to change their sex comes from.” Chu does say something like that, but Douthat is clearly responding from a defensive place, as he’s part of the same ilk that Chu spends most of her time criticizing: the trans-agnostic reactionary liberal, or TARL, who shows up loudly in places like The New York Times opinion column. 

“The TARL’s primary concern, to hear him tell it, lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left, which, by forcing the orthodoxy of gender down the public’s throat and viciously attacking anyone who dares to ask questions, is trafficking in censorship, intimidation, and quasi-religious fanaticism. On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations,” writes Chu. 

She then says plainly: “The leading voice for such ideas in the United States is the Times.” 

Douthat’s attempt to link Chu’s piece to the polyamory and Huberman essays is to say that Chu is doing the opposite of kowtowing to process-oriented safety, and that this aspiration is hopeless. “What Chu is attacking, in the name of a more radical liberation, is the way that youth transitioning has been presented to the public across the last decade: as a matter of certain, ‘settled’ science, as a therapeutic best practice backed up by careful study and trustworthy expertise, in which the fraught, life-altering desire of a teenager can be granted so long as the right safeguards are in place.” 

That’s an accurate summary. But even while getting so close by using the term ‘radical liberation’, his conclusion falls back on the default of binary political consciousness: “You can have a culture of hard moral constraint, a conservative order that imposes norms that intentionally limit human freedom — remain faithful to your chosen spouse, live with your given body. Or you can have the kind of freedom-maximizing culture that removes limits and strictures but creates new regrets, new kinds of suffering, new dangers for the vulnerable and weak.” 

If I am ever accused of being a one-note writer, it will be for saying this: there is life outside of liberal and conservative thought. There are entire histories and movements and tomes of books devoted to imagining what extends beyond the limited scope of freedom/danger, social control/safety. And when it comes to sex and gender, there are even more histories and movements and books! We cannot allow the mainstream voices on any kind of “quest” for any kind of “sexual morality” to exist without a robust effort to fill in the gaps of what they leave out — namely queer and feminist movements who have been thinking radically and rigorously about what real liberation might look like. 

This is, ultimately, what I hope my book will become; an offering to fill in the gaps, to invite people to think outside of what the war-fueling mainstream press offers us. (And I am certainly not alone in this mission — see Jules Gill-Peterson, Shuli Branson, Judith Butler, Amia Srinivasan, Sohpie Lewis, Mona Eltahawy, and many others). What I’ll say here, by way of preview, in a much more concise way: gender and sexual liberation is different than the “freedom” we are trained to believe in in the West. This is not liberal or nationalist freedom, this is getting free from domination, a dismantling of hierarchies that put us in positions where our decisions become so high-stakes. We want a getting free that means you can practice self-determination in and around your body and it won’t impact whether or not you can afford to eat or have a home or play sports. But more importantly, the liberation that so many anarchists (and feminists with radical imaginations, and anti-state communists, and so many Indigenous cosmologies) have put forth is not a freedom with “new dangers for the weak,” because as our most favorite (and purposefully aspirational) adage goes: “We take care of us.”

The point of imagaining, as Chu does, a world where people can play with gender — transition, detransition, transition again, or, feel chill with doing a pretty normative style of gender — is that it will require an entirely new world. Which is the point. (Similarly, I would argue, a radical approach to sexuality would be one in which people could experiment with monogamy, nonmonogamy, and a whole bunch of things in between, without fear of social or economic repercussions, and with a commitment to respect for everyone involved — not because of spreadsheet checklists, but because we care; we take care of us.) 

The problem is that Douthat, and too many voices that get centered in conversations about sex and gender, want to shove radical visions into normative political logics. We deserve better, we deserve more possibility. 

And to quote vintage Judith Butler: “Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.” 

1. No offense to undergraduate papers, many of which are very good.