2023-05-23

What's It Like to Have Sex? (Against The Political Impositions of Dogmatic Natural Science)

     The year is 202X, and alien life has finally found its way to Earth. These Alien beings are far more technologically advanced than us humans. In a matter of months, they teach us what would have taken centuries to discover: travel at the speed of light, among other things. These Aliens reproduce sexually, just like us. However, they go about it by means of external fertilization—the female lays her eggs in a location where, later, a male will fertilize them. These eggs develop without the attention of either parents until a baby Alien is formed, whereby the society at large ensures for their survival and instruction. All Alien literature is devoid of sexual reference or impetus. After teaching us so much, the Aliens ask us, What’s It Like to Have Sex?

    Well, we might start by showing the Aliens pornography. The Aliens watch in shock; this is sex? They prepare for war to eradicate our clearly backwards species. They gawk at this rehearsed horror, so clearly to them devoid of any pleasure or interpersonal connection. We intervene at the last second, just as the Alien lasers are prepared to destroy all humanity. Hold on! We say, that isn’t really sex. The Aliens appear befuddled. We find ourselves explaining— pornography isn’t like real sex, it’s more of a simulation, a perversion. We invite the Aliens to secretly observe an intimate sexual act between two established and well-beloved partners. They watch and are more satiated, ready to call off their attack, but they are still confused. We explain to them in concrete terms insemination, orgasm, anatomy. The Alien policy makers, still wary, conduct their own investigation and observe many consensual sexual acts between people, secretly. They see the most uplifting and loving interactions, few and far between the depraved, the painful, the unsatisfying, and the self-deprecating. They are now more confused than before. They have the empirical data, both from observation and biological mechanics, but they have yet the question: why do so many choose to involve themselves in deprecating sex lives when there is the clearly accessible but underutilized intimacy, connection?

    At this point, realizing our mistake, we decide to show the Aliens a novel. Wouldn’t this have been a better choice from the start? Think, for a moment—from where do we as people learn about sex? Where are the intricacies of sex most commonly expressed? It is certainly not in a laboratory, before a third-party observer, or in a scientific report. Most of us would implicitly reject this sort of cold, scientific observation in our sex lives. Think again—what can science tell us about sex? It can tell us a lot! How fertilization works, the way anatomic neurons respond to certain stimuli to produce orgasm, it could even tell us of the areas of the brain that see the most neurochemical activity during sex, indicating signs of excitement and interpersonal connection. We are still left wondering, though, why people continually choose to have sex that would be deemed psychologically unhealthy; why some, after having numerous middling to bad experiences that leave them, testimonially, emotionally bereft, continue to engage in said destructive behavior, while even presenting to the observer the knowledge that they will not likely have good sex. Natural scientists are unable to answer these questions.

    We take this problem to the behavioral and cognitive scientists. They do their own studies, gathering the testimonies I alluded to above and more. They probe the research subjects with numerous questions, asking them what motivates their behavior, asking them how it makes them feel. They conduct research, too, on different groups of people engaged in differing types of sexual activity. They find what we already knew—that people in long term partnerships typically identify themselves as more emotionally fulfilled and with a higher sense of self-esteem, compared to those who engage in hookups, casual sexual activity, and those who align themselves with BDSM-adjacent activity.¹ The researchers find something curious, though—many of those engaged in long-term partner focused sexual activity also find themselves unfulfilled in a partnered role. Some partners cheat or find other sexual encounters to engage in. Many of these people find themselves in similar tumult to the non-partner oriented. Indeed, the researchers see that majority of people, sexually involved or not, with a long-term partner or not, watch pornography, ² which was empirically found to cater more towards (and correlate with expresions of) sadistic/masochistic dynamics, power imbalances, and aberrant fantasy.³ What is going on? The social scientists can discover these things we all already know, but they can never touch the Why, the motivating factor, other than the clear conclusion that people are not motivated by narrow self-interest/traditional definitions of pleasure.

    The closest answer we can find is in Art, in media, where sexual activity – as I alluded to earlier – is most discussed, problematized, debated, and depicted. Only Art can come close to exhibiting the tumult, the contradiction of the deprecating sexual encounter, enumerating in a million different ways the felt decision making process. ⁴ Imagine yourself in a world with no Art or media. How would our relation to sex be different, feel different? Indeed, media is the arbiter of sex as natural science is the arbiter of chemistry. Media personnel or artists make sex one of the primary focuses of the practice as a whole, there are many rappers, singers, authors, which make sex the prima facie subject of their work. It is a specialization in a field like any other. Sex can only make itself heard in its essence via Art; Science, for this one, will not do.

    What I have somewhat sillily problematized in the above passage corresponds to French philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of the four Truth Procedures—Art, Politics, Science, and Love. Each of these four Procedures, via a process known as Event, produce a fully enumerated Truth gleaned from empirical knowledge gained from subjective experience. ⁵ What I have tried to show above is a distinction between the Truth procedures of Science and Art related to the question of sex. Science is a Truth procedure viz. things like chemistry, biology, and other questions of description. Science tells us of how things move but can’t speak to other things related to aspects of subjective experience. This is why I chose to problematize sex, the truth of which Science can only grasp at. I don’t think it would be zealous to assert that many would rather relate to the questions of sex via poetry, literature, or music than by a study stuck to the rules of the scientific Truth Procedure, nor would it be zealous to extrapolate this preference of Truth through Art towards questions of friendship and beauty. There’s a reason that the overwhelming feeling of awe at seeing the sun rise over a mountainous landscape is the subject of countless paintings, while the field of cognitive science can only gesture towards feelings of pleasure suspected to be evolved from biological needs.

    Artistic Truth, though, is being widely discredited. The uncontestable Truth of artistic experience, of using language, images, or sounds to make widely receivable the formerly strictly personal subjective experience—how could it be anything but Truth? It is the translation of empirical, observable experience; pure facts, actualities that one encounters in every living moment of perception. The critics of the absoluteness of artistic Truth will point to Science and its replicability and say this is Truth, that Truth can only be ensured by what can be replicated and shown to be True again and again. This is a misdirection. Of course, scientific Truth is replicable—that’s what it is; it makes its mission all that is beyond interpersonal, all that can be separated from the continuously different and unreplicable human subjective experience. This is why social science and its tenants fall flat on their face: the replication crisis. In social science, Science has attempted to apply its Truth procedure to those empirical facts of experience which cannot be replicated, isolated, or explainable by descriptive materialist phenomena. And yet people the nation and world over continue to refute artistic Truth, making the isolatable Truths the sole arbiters of action, meaning, and debate.

    What Philosophy shows us is that Truth procedures can be integrated. Politics can be made scientific, as in Marxism. Science can be made artistic, as in Children’s Museums. Love can be made artistic, by poesis, language. Indeed, all Truth procedures influence each other by demarcating the fields to which they can be successfully applied. This too means that, at the margins, all Truth procedures bear on the others. All art is political. All art grapples with love. All art is scientific by means of what is replicable—the patterns, the shared and reproduced meanings of experience. ⁶ And all Truth procedures discover something inadequate in the others, in themselves, and the way Truth is accounted for in the world. It is via this analysis that we can reach the conclusion that the attack on all Truths via Science is not an imposition of Science, but of an entrenched political apparatus intent to reduce the discovered truths of all the procedures.

    If the Truth Procedures identify what is being expressed in reality, then they express the need for change which is antithetical to the established political order. Via Ideology, they use a limited view of the scientific procedure to foreclose all Truth Procedures, including Science, to conform to the ossified state. Science itself is foreclosed by brute force, by the continuation of market incentives to carry on research or methods shown to be a dead end, to prevent the discipline itself from self-reform. The fields of medicine and psychology are in an existential crisis, and all data that challenges the maintenance of the system which produces unhealthy but minimally functional adults, dependent on that very marketized system, are sidelined in order to keep them working. ⁷ To the other Truth procedures this foreclosure is done trickily. Art and literature are made unable to assert Truths on the nature of people, on their motivations, for these are questions only for behavioral and cognitive scientists. The market culture only allows for expressions of people as the market sees them: disgusting, immoral consumers and workers. It keeps Art from bearing on the question of social organization by giving it appropriate modes of expression and subject matter; anything deemed too subversive will be labeled either pretentious or offensive, and the acceptable art is shown in designated places and bears only on that which will serve the current system and its intricately maintained cultural apparatus. Politics is most obviously denied space for exploration, too in the vein of pragmatics, by the mechanism of ideological scientific foreclosure which holds that Truths must be ahistorical. It bolsters its own political “science” of economics, whose reproducibility hinges on the very maintenance of its own system and forcibly sidelines all theories or findings outside that system, repressing and killing political opponents who use those findings. The culture industry briefly touches on these repressions in order to more successfully toss them aside. Love suffers too, maybe the most, by the false scientific notion that Truth can only be that what is put into words, by what is observable. The culture industry enforces this one as they do the others, art in media claims to know all about Love, calling it broken, facetious, and shallow. Art knows that it can only talk around Love and not of Love, but indeed the same scientific foreclosure has relegated the artists to claim their incomplete expression of Love as the thing itself, doing so in a cruel turn that deprives Art of its Truths like sex, interpersonal phenomena, and beauty due to their lack of replicability, while at the same time granting it authority in the domain of Love, something it knows of as only ephemera, if not for the sole fact that Love’s truths cannot be expressed in language or image, anathema to the false scientific cultural ideology that permeates our lives. It has gotten to the point where most cannot even experience Love due to the cultural confusion, accepting as real the very simulacra of the thing itself.

    Now we can see the functioning—false notions of science and art are raised above via the interaction between the positioning of replicability-as-Truth and ideology’s dissemination through the carefully controlled cultural industry, so as to bear false idols as the arbiters of Truth, while the unfulfilled drive towards Truth that they long to experience through the prohibited and devalued foreclosed aspects of Science and Art, infinite Politics not apparent in the historical moment, and Love as such. What we become are husks, barely human, unable to pursue and recognize what we know to be true. In other words, we are all living a lie, a lie that we are forced to believe first before anything else. This is why there’s a problem with sex: Art and Love have either been hollowed out or destroyed. ⁸ Any sexual expression that is not in service of a continually depressed, hating, alienated populace will not be permitted in the cultural apparatus. So, then, we have a continual reinforcement of sex as a solitary and alienating activity, perverting our need for sexual connection into an evil and destroying drive, created in part by the preventing of Art to speak to the Truth of sex, forcing it to be culturally unacceptable. The problem of contemporary sex lies in its very foreclosure, the foreclosure of the expression of what it actually is.

    You said to me the other day that dreams have no bearing on people, that behavioral scientists have empirically reduced dreams to busywork, something for your brain to do while it’s asleep. I counter your assertion in two parts.

1. Dreams are frequently used in Art, as are all other subjective and individual phenomenal experiences. To characterize dreams as having no bearing is like saying your emotions have no bearing, but you counter this with the thought that one has control over their emotions and not their dreams. Control in the sense that one at least should be obligated to compare their emotions with the phenomena that preceded them to then decide if they are appropriate. If they are not, the imperative to change, thus the imperative to control. How often are you able to do this? What do we do with the emotions we can’t control? We repress them and remove them from our self-narrativization to rear their ugly heads at a later time, to incur further distress. Not dissimilar from how we characterize our more unfavorable dreams, no?

2. Not only is it wrong to say that dreams have no bearing, but it is destructive. Your dreams disturb your self-conception—they are too self-centered, angry, tragic, violent, indulgent. Same with impulsive thoughts. You, and we, are scared to accept these mental ephemera because they are often portrayed as immoral, and we are ashamed of the parts of our mind that express such things because they don’t fit our self-conception. Your stance, then, is to remove these expressions, dreams, impulsive thoughts from the conception of the self, and you are half right. You are right because these things are not expressions of the self, but expressions of the mind, which the self, your identity, clearly makes itself distinct from. The issue is in the privileging of the self as the domain of your true nature. Empirical experience tell us that everyone thinks they are a good person—it is the self, the “I,” that tells them this. It is also the self that seeks moral implications, to constantly evaluate and reconfigure its own conception. Thus, mental ephemera such as dreams do not come from “yourself” as such, but they do come from you; they do not bear morally, but they teach us a side of the mind we choose to ignore, and even when we ignore that side it will continue to express itself, not in the ways of the images we choose to ignore – the image is never the thing itself – but rather in ways that will be continually confusing and hurtful.

    Don’t fall for the dogmatic perversion of natural science into the domains of all Truth, you will live your life in ignorance of the facts of your existence and learn these only in the final moments, when all pretenses can be dropped, and you will think yourself a fool.