Re: Sex--a revolutionary view Part I

[Rubyg580@xxxxxxx]

I've been following with interest the "sex" thread here,and I want to
offer this contribution.  It is from the final section of a book called
"Women's Liberation in China" by Claudie Broyelle, Humanities
Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1977:

..."We all have natural sexual needs and drives, so the theory goes.
Different social norms suppress them and repress them in order to
ensure male supremacy and to hammer submissiveness and fearful
respect into us.  If all such norms are eliminated, and morality itself
is destroyed, sexuality will be liberated and find its 'natural' expression.

Incidentally, this subversive practice will also destroy the roots of
authoritarian power in the ideological submissiveness which follows
sexual repression.
     This may be convenient, but unfortunately it's also completely
wrong.  There is no such thing as 'natural' sexuality, or else all the
different forms of sexuality occurring throughout history are 'natural':
it's natural that in a feudal society a man takes all the women he
wants for his pleasure, his pleasure even being to take women
without their consent; that in some primitive societies sexual relations
take place with several partners; that in a capitalist society a woman
should be a virgin when she marries, a faithful wife after her marriage
to a man who is, in fact, polygamous before and after marriage; that
in all exploiting societies battalions of women are reduced to sexual
commerce, the production of pleasure for men.  It's only when a ruling
class collapses, dragging in its wake the morality it had forged for itself,
that 'natural' sexuality is revealed for what it is: the pretence that
disguises a squalid relation of exploitation.
     Furthermore, not only is the allegedly natural behavior by which
we satisfy our sexual needs determined by the existing social system,
but those sexual needs themselves are also the products of society.
Marx said "...production produces consumption...by creating in the
consumer a need for the objects which it first presents as products.
It therefore produces the object of consumption, the mode of consumption
and the urge to consume."   This is no less true of sexuality.
     Sexuality has become another commodity, bought and sold like
the rest, subject to the laws of supply and demand like the rest,
destroyed by consumption like the rest.  It makes no difference whether
this commodity changes hands legally or illegally, with society's
blessing or without it, between people of the opposite sex or of the
same sex--it is still a commodity.  We must ask ourselves what
function our sexual culture serves in our society.
     That is the fundamental quesiton, and it must be answered
before anything else.".....

"... In a society where the division of labor becomes more accentuated,
where the vast majority of people are deliberately deprived of creativity,
where work has no other value than its explicit monetary one, sexuality
becomes a means of escaping from society through self-centered
sexual consumption, RATHER THAN THE FULL EXPRESSION OF
INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS.  This can only be an illusory
escape in which the fugitive merely rediscovers all society's detestable
features.  The relationship between oppressed and oppressor, market
value, selfishness, consumtion for consumption's sake--all are there in
another form.  But illusion though it may be, it is nevertheless an
important vehicle by means of which the ruling class can impose its
own ethics and its vulgar materialism on the people in the guise of the
true meaning of life.

....to be continued.  this is from p. 138-39; the quote is from
"Critique of Polotical Economy (London, Lawrence & Wishart,
1971, p.197

Gina/ Detroit


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