Good Sex Illustrated (2 page)

Building conduits between seemingly unrelated systems of thought is argument by metaphor. When such a technique is sustained to the extent that it is in
Good Sex Illustrated,
sparks fly, because an entirely new system of thought is being created by the synthesis. In most cases, this results in one side of the metaphor being reduced to ashes; and in this case, all of our assumptions about sexual innocence and corruption, marriage, birth, child-rearing and child education go up in smoke when they are applied to capitalist economics. This is why I have referred to
Good Sex Illustrated
as “nearly delirious.” It is a ferocious, all-out attack on one of our most entrenched traditions. An entire ideology is being dismantled by the raging of Duvert’s mind through every aspect of our sexual order. I hope you enjoy the ride.

—Bruce Benderson, Miami Beach, 2007

  THE SEXUAL ORDER AND WHAT IT SERVES

A CHILD’S COCK GETTING HARD. This illustration is a same-size reproduction of a photograph that appears in the Encyclopédie de la vie sexuelle. {
1
}

This isn’t an object of desire or an organ of pleasure: for us, it’s a very rare document that will reveal to run-of-the-mill Frenchwomen, and to highly buttoned-up, run-of-the-mill Frenchmen, an obscure feature of a boy’s anatomy. It’s an extremely useful document if you can imagine being a man or woman and living for eighty years in our society, and even producing children and bringing them up, without ever risking much of a chance of seeing this. And I’m afraid that some men have forgotten having caught a glimpse of it on the lower pare of their body, whereas they’re closely familiar with their nostrils, their toes or their yellow earwax.

Like those photos that reveal the hidden face of the moon, this picture represents an elsewhere that is infinitely far away, almost always concealed. The paradox comes from the fact that we’re not talking about some heavenly body in revolution 239,000 miles away from us, but about an organ that graces half of humanity, whether beardless or hairy; and about a condition of that organ that, contrary to eclipses of the sun, occurs several times every day and night.

It’s a cute cock; it has a showy little glans, a foreskin like the nipple of a baby’s bottle, a nice tummy for it to stand out from, a nice shape of thighs to support it; the balls are nestled between the legs; we don’t get to see the rest of the child—legs, chest and head—because being able to would turn this medical, public-spirited document (which you’re certainly not supposed to talk about like I just have) into something immoral, indiscreet and against the law; a face and an erection at the same time, being too human an image, are called pornography.

In the following chapters I have wanted to sketch out some analyses dedicated to the
sexual order
and the way in which it is passed on
to children and to adolescents.
 {
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} I selected the material for my study from this encyclopedia, because it’s both exemplary and a new thing for France. At the moment when sex education is going to be doled out by the government, these works are presentingthemselves as so many civics instruction manuals, supposedly up-to-date and liberal (which is why they’re being attacked by the right-wing press), but nonetheless intended to produce the kind of sexuality required by the Family and the State. They are written to match the age of their audience and those well-meaning educational principles held in regard today. That is what made the three first volumes (ages 7–9, 10–13, 14–16) so interesting as a basis for my work. The final volumes (ages 17–18 and adults) are more like the kind of sexology that has been sold for a long time in train stations and bookshops or in paperback.

These five works complement each other rigorously in terms of their psychological effect. The propaganda they undertake begins by exploiting repressions and forms of censure already acquired in the context of the family and during interactions in the child’s environment. Then it adapts the subject to the series of alienations encountered while growing up, ending with the final stage: adult age, marriage, procreation, production-consumption, confinement within the family, obedience—state-sanctioned sexuality, which keeps all of it in place and will turn out to have created it:
good sex.

I must make it clear that I haven’t particularly wanted to lay into the authors of this collection, whom it would be unfair to single out from their colleagues. Each of them is merely an irresponsible and more or less clever transmitter of received ideas: the editors of the
Encyclopédie de la vie sexuelle
merely have the privilege of being to the left of what is published these days in this genre, and that is what points them out for attention.

In fact, the official writings of this type, whether “progressive” or not, get away from those who author them: they’re actually a creation of the “silent majority,” an offshoot of the conservativecommunity—not to say an excrement of public order, a product of its foundations. And whoever attempts to examine these accounts of the social body will do well to put on the famous
écrase-merdres pour fiant de gendarme
found in
Ubu cocu
: they seem to be the reading instruments best adapted to works that were created by each side of the same ass: medical learning and the police mind.

Throughout this book I’ve often used the word “doctor” in a pejorative, or even insulting, sense; this was purely for utility in writing, and as a result it should be understood that I don’t at all place the authors of the
Encyclopedie
and the doctors who don’t share their opinions on the same level; I address my sincere apologies to the latter.

In opening, I’ve forgotten to make it clear that the illustration I’ve shown here was the only picture of a “member getting an erection” (as children are wont to say) that can be seen among the 900 or so illustrations in this encyclopedia by Hachette. On the other hand, there are about 60 photos of babies {
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}—which ought to satisfy the immense public curiosity about them. There are a few unattractive and stony anthropometric nudes: the men have penises as limp and wrinkled as could be found, and our little headless hard-on is thus responsible for being the sole courageous representative of everything to do with “virility.”

Not that “the opposite sex” is better treated by medical Puritanism. Indeed, there is no photograph of a vulva, except for the very chaste pubes of a little girl and, well sealed off under a haze of fur, a few female groins; but there are 26 brutally realistic photosof childbirth, in which cunts finally appear—distended by the slimy newborn they’re expulsing.

I’d like to point out, quickly and without any complications, the way in which order in a society of exploitation is based on the misappropriation of bodies—a phenomenon illustrated most directly by the sexual order. I hope that no one holds it against me if I now summarize certain ideas that different authors havemaintained or could have maintained under a much more coherent form, using more valid terms.

It seems as if human communities are formed merely to assure the well-being of certain individuals to the detriment of all others. Life in society offers ordinary mortals the meager advantage of being destroyed by man rather than by the harshness of the environment. The sciences devoted to the study of human societies, whether primitive or civilized, current or past, therefore tell us, each in their own language, who exploits whom, under what pretext, using what means, which ideology or belief, to what ends, for what consequences, what profit, and how this maximum order is kept in place altered or unchanged generation after generation, in order to resist every attack, and how it is perfected to an excessive and ruinous point.

Thus, the narrow frameworks of our sex life are constructed according to rules and prohibitions that vary from one society or one period to another but always aim for same goal:
capitalizing bodies
and exploiting them. A society that exploits people needs by definition a rigorous sexual order, without which no misappropriation, no commandeering, no slavery, no privilege, no decisive and lasting injustice would be possible.

We devote ourselves to a large variety of actions, in which what’s useful and productive competes with what’s unproductive and superfluous: and there are at least as many “squanderings” as investments in our corporeal economy. Compared to useful expenditure, which produces or harnesses something, “free” expenditure (outside of any theory about it) is very original: as celebration, play, pleasure, it generates no “good,” yields no profit; it isn’t recovered or handed down, it doesn’t even work toward our biological health; and its only justification, if it needs one, is the pleasure it brings.

Among these expenditures, the easiest, the most abundant, the most banal and the most recuperable is “sexual” activity. There’s an enormous disproportion between our capacity for sexual expenditure and the intermittent, very modest needs of reproduction: our body is, in this capacity, an underdetermined erotic machine, which produces “needless” desire, pleasure with no sequel, energy without function that is perpetually expendable and reconstituted. Humans are permanently provided with a “surplus of sexuality” that they can discharge anywhere at all and whose immediate expenditure, contrary to other muscular or nervous activities, is a pleasure sufficient in itself.

This ability, and the need that comes along with it, take a particular turn in nonegalitarian societies: monopolizing pleasure, giving themselves the means to enjoy it more while exploiting others is, and obviously remains, the affair of certain men—or should we say all, though few succeed. Through them prosper the structures of exploitation that so many societies have in common.

Man is only exploitable if he produces something; the golden rule of a society of exploitation will therefore be: all expenditure must produce. Sexual expenditure becomes what is most severely restrained, since it’s unproductive. It’s organized so that it remains chained to profit: reproduction of the exploited, a market of pleasures and sexual objects, and especially the handing down of goods or powers that were made to support family structures established to that end.

In these cases, the powerful members of the group secure the most extensive privileges; they stabilize them: ownership of people, the means of production and products; right to control and virtually limitless repression; codes that formalize their power; institutions that petrify it and, in some way, distribute it; mythsthat legitimize it, exploiting the unknown and the fear of the Outside, encouraging the least strong not to desert the group, blinding them to their servitude and inventing justifications for what they’re suffering. The rituals of sexual ownership that have been reported in certain packs of monkeys, in which the older males exert against the younger an exaggerated right to females, ironically illustrate the nature of the capitalization of bodies and the rule of maximum pleasure. It’s true, at least, that the older monkey doesn’t make those whom he is inhibiting do any work; he prevents a sexual expenditure, but he doesn’t recuperate it. Should he ever achieve this (“exploitative” behavior has already been observed among monkeys), the planet will have a new society that is altogether worthy of ours. Because it’s precisely this inordinate animalism that industrial society has baptized “civilization.”

A human being that you want to exploit is like a source that you harness; his body is commandeered and enslaved, his expenditures are channeled, he’s deprived of sexual satisfaction and plugged to machines and behaviors that will use, for the profit of a third, the expended energy. There will exist a system of permissions and prohibitions, values and beliefs that will define how the exploited must, on every occasion, plug in his body and invest his energy. The individual story of each of us, starting at birth, is one of misappropriations that have been inflicted upon us; because a humble human being is a voracious engine of pleasure, an extraordinary squanderer of himself; and to educate him according to our norms—to socialize him to a high degree—is to teach him to withhold himself and to save, as well as to point out to him the “good” investments. These artificial activities of desire and production recuperate the subject in full; in compensation, a minimal part will be given back to him that will help him to survive and tobelieve that the investments into which he has been forced are actually good.