I awoke with a shot at 4am this morning, which reminded me of years back when grad school seemed scary - and, y’know, like a real thing - and I would sneak outta bed and walk miles to my campus closet/office. Today grad school is several time zones away, so I read a graphic novel about sex work consumption, instead (more in a minute - hold your horses!) I hoped I’d doze back asleep but I didn’t doze for shit.

There’s a bunch of ways in which having an Iphone’s made me a dumber, worse person. One such drubbing has come from the suggested cultivation of a garden of apps - fucking apps! - in order to make one’s limitless non-phone experience the cultivated garden it threatens to be.  Well, as it turns out: no so many apps are interesting to me. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not interesting? Self-improvement, organization et. al. have never seemed more dead end-y, so I’m left only apping around in obvious areas like twtr, tmblr, googuhl and fbook.  Also - surprise! - I consume a lotta political wonkery, which is how I ended up with the Huffingtron Prost on my phone, which is how I’ve ended up knowing a lot of blah smut about celebs whom I mostly still couldn’t pick out of a lineup. Anywho, this magical trustfall into Apple’s invitation into a self-loving, other-loving trustfall led me to this item, in which Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon mouths taboo ideation that made me want to hi-five her. Never a fan of women’s shoes one way or the other [- I guess I know what I don’t like, it’d be fair to say, not that you asked -] I’ve never seen the show for which Nixon’s most famous.  But I find the real life swamp she’s found herself in bookoo sympathetique.

I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.

The issue here is a delicate matter of what Spivak calls “strategic essentialism” in identity politics.  For millions of gay Americans, it is advantageous to promote homosexuality (and bisexuality, for that matter) as a genetically-determined outcome, not a choice. This bestows a biological legitimacy on homosexuality, I suppose, in the same way that the gay rights movement’s foregrounding of marriage equality (and monogamy) bestows  cultural legitimacy.  It should go without saying that for a marginalized, persecuted minority, these strategies are unavoidable, if not inevitable.  (I of course support the advancement of both causes from my safe hetero confines.)  But somebody, somewhere, must be allowed to address which practices, desires, identities and ambiguities such strategies truncate.  And we’ll know that we - and I mean an inclusive “we,” because all of our sexualities are tied up in this struggle - are getting somewhere when people can choose their homosexuality out of thin air, or identify their heterosexuality as a learned behavior and not an evolutionary imperative, without fear of reprisal from the essentialism police. 

Let’s say I’ve entertained the notion of inserting something in myself, and even of having a same-sexed subject insert such a thing…should I bar the door to such behavior because it’s obviously more a half-assed whim than a foundational want or a genetic drive? [No, I should bar the door because I’m a married dude, duh.] How “seriously,” - either through your genes or through the conspicuous appropriation and enactment of “lifestyle” - do you have to be tethered to desires in order to enact them sexually? It’s a damn shame.  All of us who loathe essentialist views of subjectivity, but have learned of the frailties of political action without an essentialized political identity, know that the population’s paying a gnarly price: some of us only through orgasms missed out on, others of us in a much more severe torture chamber of exclusion, demonization and manufactured moral panics.  Christ knows this is not the LGBTQ community’s fault; au contraire, it’s the allegedly christ-driven essentialists’, for whom identity’s an iron cage and genitals are slippery slopes that force us into lying our way into (or, too often, out of) the truth of our wanting.

In other news, I mentioned waking this morning to the graphic stylings and deadpan storytelling of Chester Brown’s Paying For It: A Comic Strip Memoir About Being a John.  I vacillate between saying I first read it reviewed in Bust - not sure I did - or juxtaposing it to the sex writing in that mag: plenty of people have questioned the Etsy-fication of Bust, and my wife says the girl-power-porn is embarrassingly bad, but I tend to support all media outlets which supply Julie Klausner with a paycheck.

Back to the book. I’m loathe to begin by praising Brown’s “honesty” in writing Paying For It, as we all know that there’s a certain currency attached to talking about fucking (and drawing about sucking) that’s really only available to hetero dudes. (And besides, who wants to be praised for “honesty?” James Taylor does, and he’s the biggest lie ever perpetrated on white wine aficianados, ever.) Female writers like Lisa Carver or the aforementioned Julie Klausner are putting more on the line, I think, when they document their sex lives. (And Joni Mitchell’s way honest-er, and a better guitar player, than Sweet Baby J.)

For his part, Brown doesn’t fuck with us by overplaying the senses of shame or alterity that accompanied his decision, after a couple-three failed monogamous tryouts, to spend years and years sexing with sex workers.  He begins by weighing his yearning to enrich his characterization of the women against his desire to keep their identities secret, and I am wont to give him a pass on this question of representation. If anything blocks Brown’s entry into the consciousnesses of these women, it’s either the women themselves or Brown’s vividly depicted fixation on, duh, getting laid. Thus, in addition to vignettes of before- or after-sex small talk that are admittedly poignant, we often find out little by way of distinguishing characteristics among the sex workers save, alas, who blew him with or without a condom, whether they sucked on his balls (Brown doesn’t dig that!) and whether lube was or wasn’t featured as, you know, a lubricant.

Fair enough, as it goes, but Brown is unwilling or unable to let these encounters stand alone.  Instead, the sex vignettes are interspersed with Brown sharing his exploits with friends and former lovers, as they go about doing the half-philosophical, half-sociological holding forth many of us recognize (and should be ashamed to recognize) as the shit that friends do.  It’s in these scenes that Brown’s somewhat tinny critique of romantic love emerges, as does his somewhat more rigorous defense of prostitution and advocacy for its legalization.  The takedowns of monogamy and romantic love - sociocultural constructs that they are, not “the way it’s always been” - are as thin as they are welcome.  (As a married guy, I never understood why people got married until I met a particular person. In general, I still don’t understand why people besides me get married, anymore than I understand why Brown needs to tackle monogamy in order to justify or merely distinguish his penchant for strange.) Any oldies station can tell you that romantic love is a blood-washed confession booth and/or toilet, but we are treated to several scenes of Brown affirming and reaffirming said thesis to his exes and buds.  He leaves the reader - spoiler alert! - with the news that he has been “with” a particular sex worker for 6 years, who has subsequently stopped taking any clients besides himself.  But that’s not monogamy, mind you!  It’s commerce plus fucking, featuring the slow-cooked ambiance of intimacy that attaches itself to sexy non-monogamy. 

Again, fair enough.  Admirably, Brown ends the work with a lengthy, prose appendix pertaining to various aspects addressed or half-addressed.  (This appendix, by the way, reminds me of nothing so much as that which accompanied the large, Yellow pressing of Naked Lunch so many jackasses of my demographic read when they were 15, then again when they were 20.) Without hyperlinks to advocacy organizations or addresses for suggested donations, Brown makes plain his belief that prostitution should be legal, and does his best to bemoan sex trafficking, sex slavery and all of the other aspects of the sex-working world that both undermine the presumed innocence of Brown’s foray and, ultimately, make the case for taking the oldest profession out of the shadows once and for all, into the light of legalization, unionization, etc. Brown does enough to nod towards how any paid sexual interaction could be exploitative that one could be forgiven for feeling left to wonder, predictably, if every paid sexual interaction is exploitative.  But that’s trafficking in generalities: back-and-forthing best left among friends. On the contrary, Brown’s willingness to depict his pursuit of self-satisfaction against the persistent humanity of women in situations of starkly embodied commodification, merits hesitant acclaim far beyond that of his “honest” talking about fucking.  In the end, I may have fallen for the old trick of believing in the artwork because its author is cocksure enough to push me in the direction of disliking him.

I imagine this is the kind of post that could attract a lot of mad people from the internet.  I would never identify any of my politics, anywhere, as libertarian, and I simply haven’t lived the kind of life to qualify those politics as that of the libertine I’d like to say I’d once been, but haven’t. I have, however, treated people like shit in the course of romantic fro-ing and to-ing, and there’s no better description of exactly how a meek,  well-intentioned fart like me could do such a thing than that which comes in Julie Klausner’s I Don’t Care About Your Band. I like to think I’m past those pretentious ticks and dishonest hangups now, but lads of a certain bent - you know who you are - would do very well to read the critique of the slack-y, one-dimensional Dude in a Band contained therein. Also ladies, and all people who enjoy laughter and the truth, should also purchase this book.

Ha, let me also mention the sexual ramifications of major depressive disorder, as experienced by someone I know whose been closer to suicide and hospitalization than he ever planned. On the one hand, sex is predictably and Freudian-ish-ly the best available substitute for a death drive that’s better off repressed: pleasure and oblivion at a Nice Price that doesn’t involve abandoning loved ones to solo-creep this besmirched earth. On the other hand, one finds oneself so damned drugged that your body is unaccountable, like an undomesticated yak.  Meanwhile that vaunted pleasure-oblivion spectrum, subject to your dimmed-down and your dumbed-down feelings, narrows to the distance between drinking too much coffee and feeling a chill wind whipping up your ankle socks. There’s a renaissance of holding hands and hanging out that reminds one how one came to choose so-and-so for so-and-so forever. And that’s great. What’s less great is wearing the anatomically correct armor of a gelatin mannequin as the chill wind whips ass up your ankle socks. 

No more sex talk for a while, now. Back to semi-prude-y indie rock, politico-wonk and Exorcist/Jaws allusions. Thanks for playing, g’nite.