IN A LOT OF GENERAL BOOKSTORES, books on sex education are now presented with works for young people, graphic novels and cartoons, illustrated books, school publications, boy-scout novels, etc. If the volumes are well displayed, many of the young people walking by stop and look at them—but as a novelty that is suspect. In fact, until now, all that was intended for them were those pink biology manuals that the enlightened middle class offered their children, who discovered in this way how babies are born. As for teenagers, they could attempt to buy books for adults; but in principal, they were forbidden sex information. Suddenly, here they are for sale: and what arouses the suspicions of the customers I’ve seen is probably the division of this merchandise into age-appropriate slices. Such discrimination signifies too clearly that the books are keeping to what’s allowed to be said. For physiology, they brazenly offer a massive amount of difficult information; however, when it comes to the “sex life,” they are simplistic, and, torn between what’s left of scientific honesty and the obligation to respect the morality of families, keep to the edge of what the minor himself already knows.
It’s clear that the medicalization of sex information is nothing more than science taking charge of the old moral order, reworked according to some liberal principles of public health, with the essential prohibitions unchanged.
This could have been predicted, since life in society hasn’t changed, either. And the imposture is that the books claim to make up for a shortage of
information
for an audience whose real lack is sexual
activity.
Therefore, teenagers glance through the books intended for those older than them, and they disregard the gynecological diagrams, all the various kinds of fetuses, the couplings shown in color cross-sections—in favor of a few photos of naked women and some idealized (I mean delicately unfocused) cunts. At least those images have a certain relationship to their frustration— which the educational discourse, for its part, understanding^ acknowledges, but just to show which inviolable principle of psychic health justifies it. Prevented from having sex, minors will now know that when it comes to tolerance, there are books for that.
You don’t go to bed with a book. Printed tits are only soiled paper; dissected “genital organs” are plumbing; whereas all medical imagery about sexuality calls to mind the gargoyles of Notre Dame. The hell of love as re-imagined by doctors has been purged of its Catholic monsters in favor of naturalistic fauna that includes embryos, prostates, uteruses, Fallopian tubes, “first spermatic emissions,” fixations-regressions-perversions, gonococci, treponemes, spermatozoids that “discover mucus is a very favorable medium during ovulation,” pubic symphyses, urethral meatuses, involutions of yellow bodies, papas barbus, soft chancres, condoms, tubes that become entangled and fat, gooey babies.
Of course, the physiological study of sexuality is necessary and fascinating; it can help to combat the superstitions, fears, ignorancethat were kept alive by complete prohibition. But it’s ridiculous for the biology of higher mammals to be passed off as an initiation to human sexuality. Because sexuality begins only when the organic machinery no longer limits desire, but submits to its randomness and favors its multiplicity.
This is what medical rationalism frequently denies: it describes our biological machinery, then it deduces from it a model of functioning; next it catalogues, under the name of deviances, all the sexual behaviors that contradict this mechanistic philosophy. But it dares not call deviant the crippled and hypersocialized sexual practices imposed by our morals. As a result, sexology ends up altering its descriptions to match what it wants to prove: ignoring or falsifying phenomena that aren’t in agreement with the values that it defends; and continually mixing ideological vocabulary, moral assessments and scientific terminology into its conceptual tools.
Thus, it is neither an “accurate” nor a “human” science. Its official dissemination is a
repressive response
to the problem that suggests that contemporary society should recognize sexuality as a respectable sphere of freedom for all. Sexology observes the human body and claims to discover in it a universal truth about sexuality, in the name of which a rational order for the exercise of desire could be substituted for the old order. But, actually, this “truth” is not an endpoint of sex research: it is its premise. At the point of departure of its labors is a declaration of faith that maintains the existence and the permanent reality of a certain ideal “human nature,” which will abide by the research that is carried out and the interpretation of the material that has been gathered. This postulate tries to reconcile the major humanist values of the exploitive middle class, the order of industrial society and the reformist spirit upon which its survival depends. On the other hand, as soon as the philosophical-politicalposition of a sexologist is dissenting (and you’ll see the same thing in psychoanalysis and psychiatry), his work suddenly accumulates the data, the conclusions that contradict established knowledge: we end up with a sexology of the left and a sexology of the right. {
4
} All that’s missing, it seems, is a “revolutionary” sexology; perhaps because a scientific system of sexuality is being confused with the defense of a precise moral order, whereas dissenting thought has no model of order to propose, only forms of order to bring down; and where middle class knowledge sees commandments from “Nature,” dissenting thought denounces the unspeakable laws that one part of humanity imposes upon the other.
Sexology manufactures a pyramid of sexual phenomena: the base is formed by biological data; and the tip is the adult and responsible subject, the scrupulous manager of instinctual capital—private property supervised by the State. All sexual behavior is, in fact, evaluated as
management techniques,
some aberrant (they squander instinctual capital), the others as commendable (they make the corporeality of the subject productive in an orthodox way). Sexuality is therefore understood as a function of a single criterion: its profitability. In this way, sexology copies both the values of middle class morality and those that serve to measure the health of a capitalist enterprise.
This manner of assessment rejects the notion of costless orgasms (and because it can’t deny them, stigmatizes them morally), and it reduces to fragments the phenomenon of sex on a global scale. The study of sexology divides itself into isolated categories; among them there is only a simple relationship of
value
, from the inferior to the superior, a relationship that “justifies” a medicalized theory of psychosomatic “development”—in love, marriage, procreation, well-accepted socio-sexual roles. The child’s sexuality is declared lowly and immature; it’s opposed to the ossified monosexuality of the normal adult; and between these two poles the other kinds of behavior are distributed, from
least
to
most,
from bad to good. The pyramid of phenomena is no more than a list of winners. It’s as if you were watching the win, place and show at the races: there are the winning bets and the losing bets, the good and the bad horses; the instinctual associations sanctioned by a certificate of civic-mindedness or health, and those which, disregarding the finish line, roll around in the mud of the track or ramble about—and the latter are monstrous, nobody’s earning anything from them and the society of exploitation could have kicked itself as a result. The salaried guy who gets married at twenty-one and shortly after has a child, a house and a car gets a gold star from the sexologists; and like the schoolboy who succeeds at an arithmetic problem, he can say: I passed.
Sexology would have us believe that its atomization of sexuality is a response to a methodology. But since that method arises frommoral presuppositions, obscures the interpretation of phenomena, censors what produces them and denies what links them together, it is scientifically nonviable. The sex specialists, however, insist upon it, since changing their method would mean changing their ideology, which they don’t want to do. From the hands of the moral Order, they receive an object of study that has been cut into slices and stacked hierarchically like the circles of Hell; sometimes they change the position of one or another of these slices (for example, masturbation has been “pushed up” and is becoming “good”), but they’re very careful not to challenge the slicing-up itself. On the other hand, they increase the discriminations, the subtle differences, and infinitely fragment the data about the sexual experience. This tactic allows them to ignore in particular the socio-economic determinants of this experience and to allow psychological determinants only if they can submit to the biologism of the medical mind.
It’s clear that sexology in its social aspect is the exercise of an abusive power. The discourse on sexuality is—even more than the discourse on mankind, art, civilization—the cultural privilege of the class in power. In France, the physicians’ Conseil de l’Ordre, as we know, brings together members of the upper middle class who adhere openly to a conservative agenda, and who disown those practitioners whose professional behavior is dissident (for example, those who perform “illicit abortions” that are not very profitable, or spread sex information that is not very repressive). In our country, the institutional right to
talk sex
serves to crush a sexuality that has been condemned to silence. All scientific discourse that focuses exclusively on sex implies that the sex is censored. The medical source can lie, fake, falsify the knowledge that he dispenses as he pleases: because it isn’t to his fellow citizens that he’s accountable, but to the repression of the State.
In this way, the absence of a collective sexual discourse, of freedom of sexual practice, gets endorsed, and what’s prohibited is intensified by sexuality being presented as a highly technical field, into which it’s risky and forbidden to venture without a guide, and which the ignorant person can only approach after having subscribed to the abstract, regulated knowledge manufactured for his use—knowledge meaning, in this case, distance. Approach/avoidance: that is the very paradox of sex education.
As soon as the information ceases to be propagandist, economic and cultural frameworks restrict a large part of the access to it. The less reactionary it is, the less it becomes available as merchandise; you need to be cultured to understand it, persistent (“obsessed,” in fact) to find it and “deviant” to criticize its weaknesses.
Here, as everywhere, information about it is distributed selectively; and the incapacity to judge it that results within the poorly informed silent majority is dubbed “freedom of opinion.” The average citizen randomly manufactures his sexuality for himself with shreds of knowledge, the traumas of childhood, instinctual vestiges more or less well resewn together, and a neurotic selection of family taboos. Obliged to subject his sex life to social pressures that run contrary to it, he usually discovers only one solution: making a clean sweep, castration. Adult desire, whether it’s “normal” or “perverted,” has a mode of residual survival that is determined by a misunderstood and unnoticed exterior order. The search for a state of equilibrium in the context of desire, for the least suffering, the least frustration and a minimum of
ostracization
(either in relation to the behavior of the majority, or in relation to the codes of a “deviant” subculture) produces a sexuality that timorously obeys received patterns and aggressively imposes them on others. You have to respect the order so that it will respect you; and fight thosewho flout this great principle, or they could actually destroy the prison that protects you, steal the sexual rewards that you’ve learned how to obtain, depreciate the
actions
in which you’ve invested your libidinal capital in order to protect a fragment of it and sleep better at night.
The sex education of minors is accountable to the same process. Such cases begin with misappropriation, the deprivation of speech and corporality. We speak about sex to children and adolescents after having denied them all rights to sexuality. This “stolen sexuality” is restored to the minor in the form of a prescriptive and theoretical discourse. Sex as reinvented by this educational-scientific speech will play the same role as programming does in relation to an electronic device: it will dictate to the psyche the impulses and behaviors that exploitive society requires of us.
From then on, the minor will hear the voice of governmental sexology, he will be the spectator of another’s sexuality, he will be
the voyeur of parental erotism.
He will remain without a sex, because society will only grant him one after fifteen to twenty years of brainwashing that only systematic frustration can render effective.
The child deprived of all social autonomy, of all spontaneous relationship to others, impaired, submissive, made to fall back on a father, a mother, the idiot box and a school that alienates, is given an “initiation” that informs him of the sexuality of big people and censors or ridicules his own eroticism. He is repeatedly told that desire is procreation, that prepubescence is impotence, that the practice of sex absolutely requires the possession of “operational” sex organs that allow intercourse between adults and impregnation. His urges are carefully socialized, he is “oedipalized,” or, in other words, forced into a closed circuit of sexual economy that simultaneously harnesses his desire and prohibits it; and his mind is madeto retrain desire into aggression, the search for pleasure into the acquisition of power, and erotic pleasure into owning objects.
The teenager—who is “free” to fool around a bit (if he is a bold and good-looking fellow) and to masturbate at night (if his family doesn’t frequent too many priests)—is inflicted with an indoctrination designed to render plausible the prohibitions to which he continues to be subjected, now that he’s the owner of that celebrated “potent” organism that prepubescence forced him to do without. But prolonging the frustration is indispensable: it creates the lust and blindness with which the frustrated person, once he reaches majority, throws himself into the sexual institutions that the State places gaping before him. A superior after having been a slave, new warder of female, childish or deviant humanity, he will be able to become that Father, owner and cop they’d promised he’d become if he first let himself be squashed for twenty years.