Foeda Cognitio

Preamble: This is something I ended up writing as both a therapeutic and intellectual exercise, so I am, disclaimer, not committed to all the claims made in it. I simply wanted to develop and flesh out the implications of the particular trauma-induced brainworm that is the thesis “sex is intrinsically unjust.” I do think some of this remains of interest for me to explore. First, I am very much willing to throw that thesis out. While I did notice its utility in comparing the different political approaches to sex/sexuality, I think this would have been possible anyway if I instead transformed the claim into a psychoanalytic and existential rather than moral one instead. Further, by the end of writing this I felt inspired to perhaps explore further the relationship between sexual hazing, heteronormativity, and the sexual social contract. I also am fascinated by the idea that the secularized “problem of (natural) evil” allows for a very minimalist notion of “inescapable evil” that is primarily existential in character and motivates compassion as a root/core or foundational moral sentiment. The only appropriate constraint on, or condition for, moral thinking and action. In any case, though it may come off otherwise here due to the pessimistic lens, I very much enjoy sex and find connection and intimacy to be unrivaled social goods.

The Secularized Problem of Evil: The Indifferent Distribution of Suffering

The problem of evil is often assumed to be a purely theological one, in the context of Christian monotheism. However, there is a clear secular one if one accepts the concept of “natural evils,” examples of which are that of natural disasters and predator-prey relations. The only way in which a concept of “natural evil” is tenable as a secular one is if evil is identified with suffering, or if evil is understood to be the gap between the execution of abstract, universal prescriptions discovered or constructed by humanity and the arbitration of the contingent, particularities of nature. Now, one might say that this kind of evil does not present a secular problem of evil, as the problem of evil, to be a problem, presumes that the genesis of such natural evil is a benevolent agent without which such natural evils would not exist.

However, there is another version of the problem of evil once it is secularized which comes from the seeming moral indifference of nature: that nature, in its indifference rather than benevolence, could produce organisms that do not have this indifference and therefore can experience such cosmic indifference as suffering. One might say that this still is not really a problem, because it is immediately solved as soon as it has been introduced: this suffering is alleviated by the ability to account for its existence on the basis of cosmic indifference rather than some creative intention. In other words, there is simply no problem to resolve precisely because the moral indifference of nature explains the extant suffering that is disconnected from moral concerns.

However, one must consider that if “natural evil” is simply that which is natural and, despite its moral indifference, that which can be morally judged, then suffering is not simply a sensory response to the physical world but also a product of precisely the abstract cognition involved in moral judgment. That is to say, the very mechanism that allows us to reject and flee from suffering can itself produce a higher-order suffering: the gap between our moral judgment and the moral indifference of nature itself can produce suffering, and can itself be submitted to moral judgment based on that suffering it produces. In other words, the secular problem of evil is not suffering in nature per se, but the fact that the existence of moral thought in an otherwise morally indifferent cosmos must set an organism against its very own conditions of existence because of the fundamental injustice of moral indifference in the face of extant moral agents. The simultaneous necessity of nature for the capacity to morally judge and the evils found in nature given the reality of such moral judgment puts us in a conundrum. This conundrum is something antinatalists are subconsciously cognizant of, as they come to try and assess the moral value of being born at all, that is to say of existing given one exists in that way which makes that existence a moral problem. After all, it is birth the very thing which grants moral thinking relevance for and to that suffering given the indifference of nature.

Sex and Suffering

And so nature condemns itself for its morally indifferent distribution of suffering. The two basic conditions of life that confronts us with this injustice are death and sex. While death can provide relief, death and processes of suffering are intertwined, enough that relief itself is an ecstatic bitter-sweetness for the dying. It is that which provides death and life with their beauty, their aesthetic quality. Yet it is also what allows it to be morally unjust, let alone the loss it causes for the living. Sex is a more complicated source of suffering, as it is filled with pleasure rather than pain—or in some cases pleasure despite pain. Yet, sex presupposes death and, like death, is a mechanism of selection for evolution. And self of course anticipates the moral problem of existence posed by the antinatalists.

Sex, reproductive or otherwise, is the most basic foundation of sociality, i.e. of social animality. Unlike with asexual reproduction, sexual reproduction simultaneously separates us from our own ability to replicate, to be solely and independently capable of producing community on our own, as it drives us more desperately to commune with each other. That is, sex places individual organisms in a situation of precarious reproduction. Community then is not just a matter of specialization and distribution of tasks in order to offload environmental pressures, as in asexual reproduction. For the sexually reproductive organism, community becomes also a mechanism through which to access what would have otherwise been its own powers of replication and growth. That is, community is no longer simply a strategy in the tool-kit for survival, but something strictly essential for any kind of survival at all. Most infants would fail to survive in the wild without guidance, and, as aforementioned, no lineage could continue if organisms were to be content surviving in their lonesome if they somehow managed to. This is speaking strictly from the standpoint of evolutionary population-level survival. It is of course apparent that in the details, not all organisms will have sex—some may not even wish to bother with it. After all, population variability is just as important as a probabilistic gamble for survival, but even more-so in orgasms with bodies that tend to be built with sexual reproduction in mind.

Those caveats aside, generally sex, as an attribute of an organism, under sexual reproduction is something gained by that organism surrendering a portion of its own individual control or agency over its own local fitness landscape. Environmental selection pressures are transformed into sociocultural selection pressures. Suddenly, the injustice of suffering under nature becomes the injustice of precarity within society, which itself engenders suffering if of a peculiar self-inflicted kind. This suffering takes different shapes and contours historically, depending on the forms of power and homogeneity or hegemony of socialized preference operative in a given period, both of which in turn depend on the particular modes of consumption or exchange that help sustain them. To be jettisoned by sex also often is accompanied by already existing at the margins or periphery of human community and connection, or at the very least to have the intimacy and thereby depth of that community or connection truncated or deferred. To be jettisoned by sex, again, does not mean just to not receive sexual engagement and reciprocity, but it can also mean to have the wrong sexuality or the wrong “sex” (the wrong body) to be able to enter into community, to be integrated into society. Organisms that may not be much into (having) sex nonetheless are sideways-affected by sex, as an abstract phenomenon, that preconditions community for organisms.

Sex and Prejudice

Sex in some sense already contains a germ of eugenics in it, insofar as it allows organisms to rank and and prioritize people as socially desirable or not. Insofar as sex conditions community, this is the same as to say that sex also conditions the tendencies of human communities, including the tendency to scapegoat, to engage in social rivalry, to revel in self-conscious grooming (risking obsession with notions of cleanliness and purity). All the eugenics programs of avid interest to interwar far right extremists emerged from the simple and final recognition of sex as a proto-social or pre-social force, thereby turning it into a preter-social one. These aforementioned tendencies within sex became sources of ideological rationalization for particular models of community, namely Eurocentric white supremacist and expansionist ones. Of course, it seems obvious that sex does not always lead to eugenic thinking in any ideologically regimented and systematic sense. It also seems obvious that participating in sex does not mean we must accept some degree of eugenic worldview. The reason sex contains a germ of eugenic thinking, or otherwise a potential safe haven for prejudices more generally whether for better or for worse, is because of the strategies us humans must engage in to deny the injustices intrinsic to sex, those injustices being:

1. The social precarity and therefore diminished independence it leads to for us.
2. The conditionality it presents for community through sociocultural selection pressures.
3. Its seemingly morally arbitrary and drifting distribution among organisms.
4. The secular problem of natural evil it forces us to confront in birth.

The strategies for dealing with these injustices are many. Some involve denying that our acquisition of individual sexual pleasure involves a bargain whereby overall suffering for humanity is increased, that bargain trading in a moral distribution of pleasure and pain for a fulfillment of morally arbitrary or amoral socially-inculcated individual preferences. Some strategies of dealing with these injustices also involve denying that our pleasure in the act of sex is just as much if not more due to who is excluded from the act as who is included. This way, the injustices of sex become subconscious or unconscious.

One enjoys oneself in the sexual encounter to the degree that one has a narrative that there is some other person that did not earn or deserve that encounter, or that such an encounter is impossible due to the lack of a sufficient or legitimate interior in someone else. This “someone else” can even simply be our past selves, “who we once were,” despite the fact that this person still lives in us and deserves credit for who we are today. We must be and must have done something correct that reflects some intrinsic capacity in us to have sex, independent of space and time. We simultaneously uphold the sexual encounter as contingent yet also proof of our own prowess, of the impact of our self-regard (i.e., our “confidence” or “self-esteem”), and a sign of our social competence. As necessary and intrinsic to having had sex. This is what most people seem to do. They block out the fact that abused people can be tolerant enough of, and comfortable enough with, abuse that they can repeatedly grant serial abusers sex, the intimacy of human community and the potential ability to expand that community.

Perhaps serial abusers also delude themselves in this way; they tell themselves, “I have been able to have sex not in spite of being a terrible human being, but because I am a good exemplar of what a human being is.” The abused person may delude themselves into thinking that abuse is the ceiling of moral rectitude, and could we blame their choice to self-delude when we desperately attempt to understand sex as anything but unjust moral indifference and arbitrariness? Sex becomes its own self-justifying engine—we select for sex those who have sex or that we perceive either to have had sex or that will have sex (and we try to give off this impression). Under heteronormative monogamy, this contributes to a sense of scarcity that intensifies competitive rivalry.

The Quiet Part Out Loud

Similarly, in popular circles people will call other people virgins as an insult, especially if those people are insecure in this manner. Virginity, and all that which becomes attached to it (e.g., social incompetence or particular, cultivated kinds of programmed lack of self-regard), is a character flaw, rather than an accident of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong mind, and the wrong upbringing. The figure of the virgin is a social scapegoat used to obfuscate and disavow the fundamental injustice of sex, a morally indifferent force, so that it can be reaffirmed that those who deserve relationships have them and that those who don't do not have them. We criticize and dismiss incels in particular, who have frank and open discussions about who “deserves” sex and who doesn't, as they work to supposedly earn it despite their repulsive misogyny. But it seems to me incels are simply the only people who say the quiet part out loud: that as a society we wish people to “deserve” sex. Sex is, after all, something people treat as something “earned,” despite all evidence to the contrary. If someone is disconnected and separated from sex, to many of us its because they have failed or are morally reprehensible. We tell incels when we witness their misogyny that, alas, this is why they do not deserve sex, without a clue that in doing so we've accepted the assumption, along with incels, that some people then indeed deserve sex and some people don't deserve sex. Further than incels, we also then have assumed that misogyny has indeed empirically shown itself an obstacle to having relationships, regardless of their quality or duration. Even some people who happen to be in relationships have, to the consternation of the incel community at large, identified as incels. It is this desire to deserve, against all evidence towards the irrelevance of desserts, that drives the current economy of sex, and it is also what allows us to affirm false explanations for the distribution of sex in society. And the desire to deserve is distinct from, though it may precipitate, entitlement.

Entitlement as Incel Disavowal

The misogyny of incels certainly comes from entitlement, but nobody seems to ask where this entitlement comes from. People allege the entitlement comes from misogyny, but this leads to a chicken or egg question and an infinite regress: the entitlement comes from the misogyny which explains the entitlement, etc. I contend that the entitlement comes from the fact that incels are both cognizant of the injustice of sex and yet in denial of this injustice being intrinsic to and inextricable from sex. Entitlement practically speaking is a disavowal of the intrinsic and inevitable nature of the injustice of sex, as it is a proposal to make sex more just: sex is to be made a right, not a privilege. It is to be made an entitlement. Naturally, there is no way to distribute this supposed right or entitlement without further entrenching and codifying hierarchies of social desirability, hence incel's obsessive misogynistic fantasies and flirting with eugenics. It is clear from this psychological strategy of dealing with the trauma of sex, with the secularized problem of natural evil more generally, that trying to enact our own sense of justice on impersonal forces like sex or death can actually produce far more injustice than the initial injustice that we sough to correct. And often this is because that injustice is intrinsic to the preconditions of or for existence itself: sex.

It is perhaps curious why, if indeed both our own actions but also that of the incels lead incels into a self-fulfilling prophesy of rejection and social marginality, incels do not cease and desist when it comes to their horrifying practices that themselves also reinforce social marginality. It would seem they would have the most to gain from it. I think this is because incels feel the alternative they are given is to disavow, not the intrinsic and inevitable nature of the injustice of sex, but that sex is unjust at all. This is what they feel they are being asked to do, implicitly, when asked to change their thinking about sex if not relationships. It is like asking them to fool themselves about their realization that sex is unjust.

Feminist Disavowals

Feminism, with its more egalitarian and libertarian impulses, has more sophisticated, varied responses to the secularized problem of natural evil—more sophisticated responses to the injustice of sex, as a result. The most popular one is the contract-based liberal feminist approach. Like incels do, these feminists disavow that the injustice of sex is intrinsic to it, but instead of making sex an entitlement it becomes an object of contractual negotiation and drafting. This seems much better, yet, even ignoring patriarchy, sexual difference, like any and all difference, can come packaged with all sorts of associated differences itself. And difference can always be weaponized and used as a tool against others or oneself. A man may have a starting advantage in upper-body muscularity on average than a woman for purely genetic reasons such that, even in a non-patriarchal society, a given man could very well weaponize this advantage in theory. This physical power may subconsciously inform those heterosexual interpersonal relationships.

In sum, difference, for the sake of reproduction, strengthens the drive for partnership, but also fills it with danger and risk. How one responds to and manages these things are part of the process of consent. Consent is a process that requires ongoing responsiveness to new contexts for given behaviors, new, sometimes omitted, hidden or assumed aims and intentions and impacts surrounding those behaviors. It requires more than mere acceptance or rejection of a single discrete and isolated act comprising a behavior. It involves tapping into a constantly changing understanding of the complex relationships between our different, sometimes circumstantially conflicting, desires and the meanings things have for us. A contract is not an ongoing process, but a stage or state that is an output of this process at a given point in time and place in space. Yet, it is the contract which becomes an objective social measure of the presence of consent. Inevitably, certain things can be lost and can occur in the resulting gap.

Disavowal of Meta-Desire

Meanings and intentions can be enough to regard a situation as abusive and manipulative. We can see this in the case of Jonah Hill's deployment of boundary-setting, which many have clearly pointed out is actually emotionally manipulative. Jonah Hill asserted boundaries, not for himself, but for others. He issued an ultimatum about who he wants his partner to be, rather than who he himself is willing to be with and put up with. But to say that this is emotionally manipulative is to acknowledge the inadequacy of, if not consent, at the very least of contract which is used to track consent, in assessing the morality of a relationship. The difference between Jonah Hill's wishes and that of his girlfriend at the time was weaponized by Jonah Hill against his girlfriend. The weaponization of this difference is apparent in the fact that he consented to something he did not wish to admit was mired in the contradictions of the workings of his desire, and wished to offload the work of resolving that onto his girlfriend rather than doing it himself. If we consent to anything, isn't consent an expression of desire, however contradictory and epistemically opaque desire may be? To offload this task is thereby to withdraw from the work or process of consent. In Jonah Hill's ultimatum, he fell back on contractual reasoning instead, albeit faulty contractual reasoning: he told his girlfriend that this is the new contract he wants her to sign if things are to continue, rather than exploring where his feelings come from and who his girlfriend is to decide if he should break things off. With contractual reasoning like this, the victim of such emotional manipulation, his girlfriend, seems to be under no threat beyond breaking the new contract or voiding the old one, and there was seemingly no expectation for her to assent to Jonah Hill's explicit and straight-forward new contract.

Ultimately, contract and consent does not destroy the Kantian insight that sex, even at its most “noble” where intimate connection has been achieved prior, is instrumental in some fundamental sense. It requires treating people not as ends-in-themselves, but a means to an end, whether that be sexual pleasure or romantic expression. This is so in spite of the presence of consent. And this is why it is difficult for consent and contract to account for manipulation. We can say that Jonah Hill and his girlfriend engaged in everything with consent, perhaps except the manipulation. Nonetheless to simply call the manipulation non-consensual can allow us to ignore the fact that Jonah Hill used consideration of his girlfriend's ability to consent, in this case through his ultimatum, to manipulate her. That is, it's not just that manipulation is non-consensual, but that its non-consenting nature relies on their being exercises of “consent” at lower-order, concrete levels. Is it possible to consent to literally every implication of every desire? Certainly not. That is why manipulation transcends the question of consent, becoming a question of abuse irrespective of consent. This leaves manipulation difficult to detect using a purely “objective” measure, instead relying on inductive extrapolation of other's intentions and motives, some of which may even be hidden from themselves. A contractual model, then, can only make sex just if we've ignored this fact. That is, if we disavow the complex nature of desire.

Disavowal of the Pleasure of Sex

It is no wonder the sexual anxiety with which younger generations regard age gaps among adults, income differences between adults, or differing living arrangements among adults, as all potential red flags, given the risks and dangers inherent to difference. All signs of difference borne by a male is especially a red flag because such difference can be used to construe the relationship as manipulative if one apparently consents to it. After all, sex intrinsically involves a certain use, however mutual it may be, of others: sex being instrumental, the difference between a man and a woman must be a means to, or factor of, the pleasure found in the relationship by the man. Hence, sex must be by default suspected as manipulative before it may be regarded as anything else. Heterosexual women must constantly have their decisions to have sex questioned, because all decisions that involve sex allow her to be a means of male pleasure, the pleasure of a privileged subject, irrespective of whether she happens to feel pleasure in it herself. Sex is unjust, so sex requires consent—but true consent is only possible if the pleasure derived from it is evaded. To place pleasure beyond and above cognitive matters is to not make a truly informed decision as a woman.

For “sex-negative” radical feminists, even in the happiest, least abusive and transparently consensual relationship, wherein a man's power if any may lie dead and without exercise, there is a default suspicion that should enter the relationship even if it comes at the cost of mutual trust and the pleasures of intimacy such mutual trust allows for. Sex, because it presupposes instrumentalized sexual difference, which affords and equips inequalities, regardless of the origin of sexual difference, is unjust. Yet, difference is part of what allows for attraction, at least in heterosexuality. This means heterosexuals must sterilize sex and replace it with suspicion and paranoia so that they can be truly sure that when they say “yes” in spite of it all, they have truly consented to have sex. How can one truly consent to something that one derives unquestioning pleasure from if it is that very thing that highlights one's differences and inequalities? How does one get fucked while not having their pussy dry up at the thought of patriarchy watching? And yet, how could one ever consent in an informed way to getting fucked if thoughts of patriarchy are not at the forefront of one's mind? Yet if it took all this to consent to sex, one would wonder whether anyone would actually bother. Perhaps there is thrill to be found in inoperative inequalities—inequalities that are dormant and therefore capable of being managed and consumed without producing political inequalities, e.g. without producing unequal rights or second-class citizenship. One would imagine this ambivalence and tension, from trying to treat as a rational decision something motivated irrationally, is a source of much distress under the cisheternormative regime.

Sexual Contract and the Amnesia of Sexual Hazing

More fundamentally, the proposal of making sex more just by making it contractual ignores one of the basic aforementioned observations about sex: the reliance its pleasure has on exclusion, or the inseparability of the overall lonely and deprived suffering in society from the relative benefit sex affords individuals. That is, it ignores that sex's distribution is ultimately arbitrary. The contractual approach seeks to make sex just by allowing us to attempt to take control of it, allot it to those we view as deserving without once forcing anyone to have sex with anyone, all while nonetheless ignoring that the major ways in which sex is unjust are those ways which have little to do with the question of control in the first place.

Who is a party to the contract and in what capacity? As a nonbinary queer, I recognize that being born a certain sex, which is to say with a certain body designated to be something or other, affects the way the entire adult world engages with and regards an infant and how their development and growth is to be assisted, and therefore what long-term meaning the adult body can have for, in and to the sexual encounter. We enter the contract of sex, via sexual difference, before we are even able to consent to its ramifications. The sexual contract is predicated on the passing down of rites of passage that constitute a kind of generalized process of hazing so that one is legitimated as a party to the contract, as a valid or legitimate “sex.” If you can survive the cruelty and shame and guilt and embarrassment of this systematic hazing, then you are allowed to consent to sex somewhere down the line and will find a good portion of people willing and able to do so.

One hears of feminine men who work out and build strong muscles as a bargaining chip to allow themselves to be heard or respected by other men despite, or along with, their displays of femininity. One hears of masculine men who have “toughened up” now and can manage to be somehow functional enough, equally found among feminists and ideologically-committed misogynists. All these different men have had to let their suffering shape them in some way that bestows on them sufficient perceived value to enter the sexual contract. Even those men who rail against this hazing in retrospect have to concede at some level, even if with a tone of “irony” and “ironic parody,” to the violent forces of this hazing so they can even be included in the sexual contract. People, after all, do not listen to “failed men.” Ironically, dismissing failed men is even easier if they share this prejudice with us, as they are then more likely misogynistic enough, in their attempts to understand their own failure, to be excused from the committee of sex.

The further irony and paradox is, of course, that incels, for example, are misogynistic precisely in order to be heard by the very men they are ambivalent towards due to the place those men have in the sexual contract. How else can a narrative of failure or “virginity,” narratives of those undeserving of sex in our view that yet wish to claim they deserve it, be heard, especially by other men, if not within the trappings of masculine bravado and mastery? Incels express this mastery in their fantasies of revenge toward women, their feigned mastery over the subject of sexuality through the concoctions of such figures as the “Chad” and the “Stacy” and obsessive reading and misreading of sexual statistics. Everything, even failure to successfully pass through sexual hazing and into sex, has to be, and is, filtered and tarnished through the verbiage and frameworks of that sexual hazing. It is no coincidence that incels seem to compulsively repeat the self-conscious sexual insecurities of adolescence, as, not having successfully survived sexual hazing, they are stuck in these adolescent masculine performances.

Does the contractualist idea of making sex more just via contract really do so when it simply ignores the costs and losses incurred, and adaptations imposed, in order to even be a party to the contract in the first place? It is perhaps a good thing most people are incapable of mourning what they never had. Cis-straight men do not typically mourn having not been pushed by other factors into a different and more feminine trajectory. Same with cis-straight women, despite perhaps having more reasons to have preferred masculinity under patriarchy. Or so it is said.

Final Strategy: Biting the Bullet?

Instead of engaging in the disavowal of sex's intrinsic injustice, perhaps it is best to bite the bullet and embrace the injustice of sex fully. This does not mean converting the injustice of sex into some kind of justice, which is simply a eugenicist move. It also does not mean doing away with more reasonable ways of softening the pain of sexual injustice (such as the ever-updating sexual contract and the general prioritization of consent). If anything, that has been a crucial step in a reasonable engagement with sex. All biting the bullet on the injustice intrinsic to sex means is to accept that injustice will always be a part of sex to some degree. It is unclear what this would lead to practically speaking. For me, biting the bullet meant enduring, at first, an overwhelming desire to destroy sex itself. There was no way to make sex more just, at the very least without reproducing far more injustice, so all that was left was to utterly annihilate sex. This move is analogous to the antinatalist one in the face of natural evil. Having a male body came with sociocultural curses laid down by wrathful forefathers and vengeful foremothers that could not be banished and were intense enough to weigh on me and my movements and desire for change. I wished to be a eunuch, a Christ-like figure to absorb all the suffering of sex that would be unavoidable into my genitals only then for them to finally be crushed and removed. In a sense, this became my own, private asocial hazing ritual fantasy, an innovation and improvement that would not deny the suffering of those left in the loneliness of the gender prison constituted by the sexual contract. This was of course a rather grandiose mental interlude in my life, approximating a psychotic break if only I hadn't been self-aware through the entire thing. But I survived it.

Luckily, I never enacted this fantasy, as my aim was to endure whatever came from biting the bullet. Through this holding tight to the tension of sex, I somehow managed to come out the other side. I came to the realization that I was a non-binary individual with a desire for femininity as an escape from the soul-destroying vicissitudes of masculinity. I realized, with alternative gender communities, and available medical techniques, that perhaps it would be finally possible to engage in creative and constructive projects of sub- and counter- cultural accelerating mini- sexual contracts. Gender anarchy makes sex so much sweeter. The chaos of simulation and simulacrum, the sexuality of the machine with its virtual open landscapes, allows us to bypass and short-circuit, to rebel against, while taking advantage of, the sociocultural selection pressures and the oppressive hazing of society that has been a useful tool of patriarchy for ages. We are quite lucky that culture and technology is a double-edged sword. It is only sadder and more ironic that more recent radical feminists are very much opposed in practice to the path of gender experimentation and would rather unwittingly evacuate pleasure from sex via increasing social rationalization before all else. I fear they may unwittingly produce their own monsters and witch hunts, and perhaps only more-so now that that is already underway.

But, I'm confident their efforts will fail. They will not win, because only one possible response could ever save us from the secularized problem of natural evil: compassion.