Within queer circles, it is not uncommon to hear people say that desire is political, that you should expand your desires, and that not doing so makes you a bad person.
Interesting topic! I'm thinking that the origins of this difficulty come from the ideologies of statecraft and all the groups that have been fighting to have Only Their Side heard. I'm recalling sources like Wilhelm Reich speaking about how the State Church and then religion in general has worked hard to divide people from their POWER SPOTS. So to then use the energies left over to run the colonial/neocolonial system.
What i basically wanted to touch on here tho is how we've been systematically separated from our power spots, and especially our ancient intuitve memories. Like the kind of memory that kicks in when one sees a bear close up. You (as i when i first saw one this way) may want to look at the bear, but SOMETHING INSIDE YOU STOPS you!!! For me, my whole body froze, independent of my OWN consciousness!!!!
So what i'm building up to is that ALL our desires are part of this ancient excellence, this body memory, where ALL of our tendencies could be BACKED UP and READILY GIVEN COMMUNITY AFFIRMATION. And that's the key.
What we have today, i think, is how specialization (college grads needing 'careers') has TAKEN OVER that depth we had for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Government grants, in the 1970s, spearheaded by Walter Mondale and co's (all Trilateralists), provided for specializations to build up and run amock. As, today, SO MANY have INTERNALIZED THE VALUES of this Rollback Imperative of State.
Noam Chomsky's analysis exposed this for me, in his "Media Control" speech. "Media Control, The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda" perhaps Chomsky's BEST speech, made in Kentfield, CA. Worth looking up since the small book version is too heavily edited, i say.
The Bottom Line is that world elites seek to keep their "human resource" masses 'under reign' and easily exploitable. The cult-ure that has been bought and paid for is not authentic for good reason (even tho the careerists might have their superficially-challenged minds in 'the right place' --like all 'good little Eichmanns'.
Further, consider this radical article by Joshua Stylman. He touches on this cult-ure (my word) in a perhaps surprising yet in-the-heart way!! :
Moralized desire is a game with more than one iteration. If someone broadcasts that they'll only date (insert group X), then opportunistic suitors will start to conform to the characteristics of group X. To be clear, very rarely do I think someone will fake being trans or racialized, but they might fake their political beliefs, their demeanor, or their gender conformity generally. This probably doesn't confer much of an advantage in the dating marketplace, so guys who do this will likely just end up lonely and bitter for all their efforts, leading to more arrested development and unsatisfying romantic interactions.
Thank you very much for this article. I personally had a very nasty experience with this very phenomenon. After a long hiatus, I tried dating again. I matched with a Trans woman and decided to give it a chance. The date... didn't go well. It was clear she had either photoshopped her profile pic or it was quite old. I did find her funny and fun, but the attraction just wasn't there. I suggested 'let's be friends.'
Her demeanor changed instantly. She became furious, left me 7 angry voice messages and then I was deluged with angry texts from people I didn't know. These same people found my Facebook account and flooded my wall with angry posts calling me a "bigot" and a "transphobe". One of them took it a step further and used my interest in Anime to call me a pedophile.
Desire is essentially normative, because it aims at what we believe to be good. To make sense of these beliefs we have to understand ourselves as sometimes getting it right, and sometimes getting it wrong. Someone who non-instrumentally desires to drink a cup of mud has uncontroversially gotten it wrong.
The more interesting incoherence to explore is the tension between the social pressure on the left to desire the marginalized (suggesting that desires are not immutable) and the retreat to the immutability of desire when defending more risqué positions against conservative criticism.
Drop the link here if you end up writing about that tension—I'd definitely give it a read. Exploring Lacanian psychoanalysis has changed how I think about desire since publishing this piece, which I'll be writing about before long. Cheers!
This is such a tricky area to talk about. I can think of many ways desire has been considered a moral and/or a political issue in the past. Queer love and or extramarital love are obviously still problems in the eyes of many people currently. But in the past, loving someone with a different religion, politics, skin colour, or nationality could get you disowned from your family. I personally know of several cases of English born people who were disowned when they married an Irish person.
And then there is the way class or caste intersects with desire. In my community there was a young woman named Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu who was from a wealthy landowning family. She married a poor rickshaw driver secretly against the wishes of some of her family members. A year later she was murdered in India and her husband was badly beaten. Eventually it came out that her own mother and uncle had arranged for their murders.
I suppose all desire exists within a societal context of some sort and approval or disapproval follows from that. It begs the question: Are humans innately moralizing or rule-creating creatures? If so, how does that serve us at an individual, family or community level? Is it possible for us to create a world without right or wrong, good or bad? I wonder …
i happen to think you're missing an entire context: That of us living in an empire. And in empires there are less openings for freeing ourselves than, say, pre-colonized societies. All of these things, these consequences, are coming as a result of very very alienating policies, due to the imposed "Need" for "War Readiness". Thus our myriad division is not "innate" (a curious distraction), but in the severe, almost impossible-seeming context of empire. What do folks here think of that?
Nice work, kier! Very glad to have access to your voice. You're a testament to the sanity and common sense that await those who shake free of the cult.
I'd love to read more of your real life experience from the times you calibrated desire with politics. It might give me the courage to write along the same theme, because I've done that too.
Hey Mike! I'll definitely consider it. It's tricky to know how private to get and when; right now, my most personal writing is going into my memoir manuscript. If you do end up writing about your experience with this, please drop a link here so I can read it!
Interesting topic! I'm thinking that the origins of this difficulty come from the ideologies of statecraft and all the groups that have been fighting to have Only Their Side heard. I'm recalling sources like Wilhelm Reich speaking about how the State Church and then religion in general has worked hard to divide people from their POWER SPOTS. So to then use the energies left over to run the colonial/neocolonial system.
What i basically wanted to touch on here tho is how we've been systematically separated from our power spots, and especially our ancient intuitve memories. Like the kind of memory that kicks in when one sees a bear close up. You (as i when i first saw one this way) may want to look at the bear, but SOMETHING INSIDE YOU STOPS you!!! For me, my whole body froze, independent of my OWN consciousness!!!!
So what i'm building up to is that ALL our desires are part of this ancient excellence, this body memory, where ALL of our tendencies could be BACKED UP and READILY GIVEN COMMUNITY AFFIRMATION. And that's the key.
What we have today, i think, is how specialization (college grads needing 'careers') has TAKEN OVER that depth we had for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Government grants, in the 1970s, spearheaded by Walter Mondale and co's (all Trilateralists), provided for specializations to build up and run amock. As, today, SO MANY have INTERNALIZED THE VALUES of this Rollback Imperative of State.
Noam Chomsky's analysis exposed this for me, in his "Media Control" speech. "Media Control, The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda" perhaps Chomsky's BEST speech, made in Kentfield, CA. Worth looking up since the small book version is too heavily edited, i say.
The Bottom Line is that world elites seek to keep their "human resource" masses 'under reign' and easily exploitable. The cult-ure that has been bought and paid for is not authentic for good reason (even tho the careerists might have their superficially-challenged minds in 'the right place' --like all 'good little Eichmanns'.
Further, consider this radical article by Joshua Stylman. He touches on this cult-ure (my word) in a perhaps surprising yet in-the-heart way!! :
https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-cowards-bargain?publication_id=24667&post_id=166277693&isFreemail=true&r=2hz7sg&triedRedirect=true
Moralized desire is a game with more than one iteration. If someone broadcasts that they'll only date (insert group X), then opportunistic suitors will start to conform to the characteristics of group X. To be clear, very rarely do I think someone will fake being trans or racialized, but they might fake their political beliefs, their demeanor, or their gender conformity generally. This probably doesn't confer much of an advantage in the dating marketplace, so guys who do this will likely just end up lonely and bitter for all their efforts, leading to more arrested development and unsatisfying romantic interactions.
Thank you very much for this article. I personally had a very nasty experience with this very phenomenon. After a long hiatus, I tried dating again. I matched with a Trans woman and decided to give it a chance. The date... didn't go well. It was clear she had either photoshopped her profile pic or it was quite old. I did find her funny and fun, but the attraction just wasn't there. I suggested 'let's be friends.'
Her demeanor changed instantly. She became furious, left me 7 angry voice messages and then I was deluged with angry texts from people I didn't know. These same people found my Facebook account and flooded my wall with angry posts calling me a "bigot" and a "transphobe". One of them took it a step further and used my interest in Anime to call me a pedophile.
Desire is essentially normative, because it aims at what we believe to be good. To make sense of these beliefs we have to understand ourselves as sometimes getting it right, and sometimes getting it wrong. Someone who non-instrumentally desires to drink a cup of mud has uncontroversially gotten it wrong.
The more interesting incoherence to explore is the tension between the social pressure on the left to desire the marginalized (suggesting that desires are not immutable) and the retreat to the immutability of desire when defending more risqué positions against conservative criticism.
Drop the link here if you end up writing about that tension—I'd definitely give it a read. Exploring Lacanian psychoanalysis has changed how I think about desire since publishing this piece, which I'll be writing about before long. Cheers!
Thanks for the encouragement. Been thinking of writing about the normativity of sexual desire and ick lists…
I think you should!
This is such a tricky area to talk about. I can think of many ways desire has been considered a moral and/or a political issue in the past. Queer love and or extramarital love are obviously still problems in the eyes of many people currently. But in the past, loving someone with a different religion, politics, skin colour, or nationality could get you disowned from your family. I personally know of several cases of English born people who were disowned when they married an Irish person.
And then there is the way class or caste intersects with desire. In my community there was a young woman named Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu who was from a wealthy landowning family. She married a poor rickshaw driver secretly against the wishes of some of her family members. A year later she was murdered in India and her husband was badly beaten. Eventually it came out that her own mother and uncle had arranged for their murders.
I suppose all desire exists within a societal context of some sort and approval or disapproval follows from that. It begs the question: Are humans innately moralizing or rule-creating creatures? If so, how does that serve us at an individual, family or community level? Is it possible for us to create a world without right or wrong, good or bad? I wonder …
i happen to think you're missing an entire context: That of us living in an empire. And in empires there are less openings for freeing ourselves than, say, pre-colonized societies. All of these things, these consequences, are coming as a result of very very alienating policies, due to the imposed "Need" for "War Readiness". Thus our myriad division is not "innate" (a curious distraction), but in the severe, almost impossible-seeming context of empire. What do folks here think of that?
Nice work, kier! Very glad to have access to your voice. You're a testament to the sanity and common sense that await those who shake free of the cult.
Thanks so much, Jim!
I'd love to read more of your real life experience from the times you calibrated desire with politics. It might give me the courage to write along the same theme, because I've done that too.
Hey Mike! I'll definitely consider it. It's tricky to know how private to get and when; right now, my most personal writing is going into my memoir manuscript. If you do end up writing about your experience with this, please drop a link here so I can read it!