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On Sex Play
Paper Presented at “Playtime!: The Cultures of Play, Gaming and Sport” 2nd European Summer School,
Diederik F. Janssen, MD, BA [download me in PDF]
[This paper has two parts. 1 and 2] On Sex Play (1)
“Is he allowed to take a few favorite toys to bed with him so that before he goes to sleep and after he wakes up, he has things to keep him happy and busy?”[2]
Contemporaneous play is likely to be seen as entitled to an intersectionalist digestion, being that crossroads of the Derridean lure, developmentalist imperative, existential aesthetic, and consumer duty. If not elsewhere, in the case of “forbidden” games (Brincar de osadia[3], Erotische Kinderspiele[4], Kunyenga[5], troca-troca[6], Undize[7], and so on) the pressure is on the gaze that needs to reconcile these necessities informing a subject that the eye ought not meet when not at play, informing it in absentia and by extrapolation.[8] This subject, to recall Foucault’s keen premonition, is “no longer […] a kind of behavior hedged in by precise prohibitions, but a kind of roaming danger, a sort of omnipresent phantom, a phantom that will be played out between men and women, children and adults, and possibly between adults themselves, etc.”[9] No rules, then, but dangeur, risk society, not play but risk behaviour, not playability but risk management. In keeping with this now overly familiar pedagogical turn, modern play, as sex, is always diagnostic, it is either an abject presence or an embarrassing Nietzschean vacancy. As such, play is being constituted by the opportune interventionalism of the advice industry selling healthy sex that works, delivers and fulfils¾ “Do it in the car. Do it on an office desk. Do it somewhere dangerous and forbidden. Do it with toys, with whipped cream. Do it fully clothed. Fantasize, role play, pillow talk, and then do it.”[10] If we are to sink back for a second into the econo-repressive Reichean-Marxist stance on the matter, play’s multiplying negatives arguably include gonadality, The Journal of Sex Research, anthropologists on “normal sex”[11], pornography, Disney World, sex therapy à Insofar as gamesmanship is a narratively accomplished localisation of the erotic (a departure from its amorphia, fuzziness, carpopedal spasms, and extra-moral idiosyncrasy) any contemporary analytic intervention in sex games will be informed by the aesthetic appropriation of “games”, “role-play” and allied jargon for late capitalist “adult” pleasure landscapes. Consider adding to this massive lexical license Bly’s parentless Sibling Society[15], Richard Burt’s Kiddie Culture[16] von Franz’s Puer Aeternus,[17] Hymowitz’s teening of childhood,[18] the teening of society as a whole,[19] sexologically ambivalent ‘new’ consumer strata such as the ‘tween’,[20] “crosswords, mazes, and other fun puzzles and exercises”[21] ensuring a facile differential diagnosis of good play and bad play, and the re/production of genderism, pornotypes, and age stratification in/as new (digital) markets of play[22] ¾briefly, here lies a broad panorama of ethnotheoretical, subcultural, commercial, and auto/biographical negotiations of pre/ludic sex. In sexualibus, play is part of a pan-curricular rhetorical performance that establishes the accountable, performs the liminal[23], and negotiates the inconsequential.[24] Historically, anthropological ludus has been indexed as oriented (in fact ultrastructural) to what may be called the Curriculum (Totem, imago, career), that cultural order that delimits and prescribes the backbone schedule of official formalities and imperatives of social reproduction and biography. The Phallus is curricular, it is Gonadal, it fixes the player in playtime, it schedules play. (As the Bafia say, “Jetzt ist das “tepampam” zu Ende!”[25]) Speaking with Van Gennep, one observes a place for ludic eroticism in the preliminal anticipation of the curricularly entitled, in liminal flouting of gonadal institute and interdiction, as well as criminal subversion of postliminal comportment or evasion of bulwark agenda. Sex play is where the Gonadal is formally rehearsed ante datum (pre-initiatory naught), where it is institutionally received (the anti-structure of bachelor parties, puberty schools, and fattening huts), and where it is achieved extra curriculum, by its parody, denial, defusion, revolution, inversion, commercialisation and opportune trivialisation (the play of the Casanova, Onanist, queer, Uranian, catamite, drag, hippie, porna, hetaera, or any of its cultural variants). Liminal play, apart from the ever implied indoctrination toward productivity, apart from the duty and work in heterosex, is that divine parallel institute where the exquisitely erotic side-tracks the necessity of the flesh as that of the lineage, a refined aesthetic contemplation of the warrior’s pedagogy, i.e., of his pedagogical Other. To recall, Foucault[26] points out that in the εραστής-ερωμένος dyad, pleasures did not reveal an alien nature in the person who experienced them, instead “their use demanded a special stylistics”. For we are dealing with “[…] a whole game of delays and obstacles designed to put off the moment of closure, and to integrate it into a series of subsidiary activities and relations [...] a game that was ‘open’ [...] a game of refusals, evasions, and escapes [...]”. In his canonical text, Foucault juxtaposes this game to the case of marriage as a statutory relation pivoted around, as in the cases of the slave and the free-born child, “the moderation that needed to be shown in exercising power”, a πολιτικά which becomes complicated in this other courtship game where “an ethics of pleasures would have to bring into play- across age differences- subtle strategies that would make allowance for the other’s [boy’s] freedom, his ability to refuse, and his required consent”. Other than in economics and dietetics, where the voluntary moderation of the man was mainly based on his relation to himself, “in Erotics, the game was more complicated; it implied self-mastery on the part of the lover; it also implied an ability on the part of the beloved to establish a relation of domination over himself; and lastly, it implied a relationship between their two moderations, expressed in their deliberate choice of one another”. What delimited the delicate play was not so much “frenzied, uncontrolled” passion (παιδομανία), however the qualification of “wolf” or “raven” would be taken as joking[27], as the compromised honour associated with a boy’s easiness, and the φιλία between moderate men that was to characterise the definitive bond¾ἔρως being supplanted by the συνουσία of friendship. Honourability not enjoyment, then, was paramount - that “ “strategic” point around which a complex game was required”, in fact one which represented the “antinomy of the boy”, the paradox of the play’s passive role played agonistically, politically, responsively other than by identifying with it, by surrender. Where man’s erotic playmate, variously named[28], has typically been the young male in a proprietary, agogical or temporary pseudo-affinal scheme, play has been updated to quadrennial Gay Games, San Francisco LGBT Pride Parades, and Hollywood World Famous Alter Ego Fetish Parties. Some of these events referencing fixed proud classifiable Id-entities with demonstrable rights, others staging the performances of the ultra-eccentric, play has become stylistic of lives scheduled by what formerly appeared quaint, immoral, or impossible: the autobiographical self, the symmetric, the infantile, the imagination staged, indeed, the ego altered. The premodern boy-muse, harlot, devdasi, geisha, child-wife, Maasai ditos, Babunda Mombanda[29], and so on, are now paralleled by the scenester, the ‘risk aware consensual kink’, the peer gamer, in short one’s circumstantial equal defined by a staged (if transgressed) ethical locality, an ethos that is emergent only insofar as it is being localised: anonymous, ad hoc and anew. Foucault’s arguably “consequential” bio has been celebrated the paradigm case[30], the anarchist arch-poststructurist’s limit-experience, his Dionysian abandon, and its abundantly premeditated interruption. Sex play had been that “major achievement of the feminist movement”[31] seeking to subvert and survive earnest patriarchy. Postfeminist play culture, in turn, became an eventualist peer culture that where formerly it produced and disclosed (rather than relieving, assessing and engaging) the gam/est/er¾that happy (Kinseyean) consumer not venturing beyond and past modernist Self-pleasures¾now has to accommodate radical, post-sexual play, that is to say, the will to it. Canonically, we go from causal play (the body at play with its pedagogue/patron to tease into being the kosmos, πόλις, lineage and an honourable locus in them), to players (pedagogised bodies at play with their discursive antecedents and precedents[32], in an endless neurotic and “paraphilic” rough-and-tumble), to Deleuzean playgrounds (hacking, browsing aspirant-cyborgs en passant in scenes, on stages, on web cams). While the premodern body had to play along with its antinomicπαίδεια agenda if only to avoid public disgrace and rumours, and where the normal body would play only insofar as it was being constituted by its problematic psychosexual curricularity, the post-normal body can not play except in arbitrarily sexual niches that by virtue of their temporality allow a denial of sexual Curriculum as such. Insofar as this does not already mean that the contemporary subject simply cannot but play, a meta-ludic imperative now occurs, where pedagogy is still Erotic (as a sizeable bibliography shows) yet eclectively and contingently so, hide-and-seek wise: as a tight-roped ethos and/or as a dramatis personae and/or as an opportune, post-curricular (“accessory”) framework. Elements of this are seen in backstage/centre-court coding of S/M scenes[33], where three power dimensions (structure, technology, logistics) concur in a denotative, annotative and connotative blur. The non-closure, the indecision whether the sex scene is either facilitative, as the γυμνάσια and συμπόσια were to the εραστής[34], or “primal”, constitutive and transferential, or a host to a parasitic dividual or non-Id-entity, is the game. Surely this would be ultimate sex play: where subject(ed) sex escapes any singular escapist schedule. At least it would seem to entail a perennial dialectic (dialudus?) as indeed, and to a profound degree, “The social practices of one generation tend to get codified into the ‘game’ of the next”.[35] To such a profound degree in fact, that we might have to say that “The games of one generation tend to get codified into the ‘game’ of the next”.[36] But that would not do. Play would have to escape any constituent dialectic moment (sex/sex-play), but also any trace of economic and discursive immanence¾one will want to surpass fooling around, then saying “It wasn’t me”¾after all: limits are to be experienced, not negotiated or “codified”. In the orthodox scenario, the postmodern player’s mobility is that of a body toying with its own spatial docility, playing the field, to live out the spatial trope of the post-Self “situation” without the stuff of embodiment, a hyperspatial exercise in discontinuity. “Fetish play, sex play, edge sex” one commentator asserts, “these disturb the efficiency and utility of bodily orientations, skewing the mapping of body parts as purposeful, unified, and an adequate image of my “self.” A kind of Brownian motion introduced into the performed field of sexuality, such play may involve spatial reorientations and unruly kinetic exchanges at the collective level”.[37]
Such a collective disturbance of (but not utter departure from) the auctorial (if quoted) Self in a “Journal of Rhetoric and Power” inaugural issue—we are to concur— is more serious as a rereading of auctorial sex than it is of playing ‘it’, which would be, to follow the metaphor, to add to it. Per Horowitz[38], we’re in the Foucauldian “impasse” of “excessive” dandyist antiessentialism, where erotic play becomes so playful that it stops being erotic, that it can not be erotic. Poststructural sex, being play, is only that in terms of its being inadequately so, being a logical fringe: the performative centre is still the author with body parts and a sexuality (qua field) and if not a childhood paternal to man at least a Marcusean “basic repression”. As most commentators agree, digital sex play merely operates on the self (albeit a fashionably ‘incoherent, scattered, shattered’[39] one) as it is only spuriously remade from an asset to an agenda, from a singular to a set, from being to having (a phallus/strap-on dildo/joystick, an audience), from ethic to score. Playing the Self brings out the Self more distinctly, it demarcates rather than destructures. To revisit my earlier definition, play is narratively accomplished, yet it isn’t narratively consummated; contemporary radical play, then, answers to the psychodynamic sobering of militant Foucauldianism in that “the sexual” exists, submerged in Eros, root reciprocity¾not the agogical plot but the agogical structure (as exteriorly in pederastic performance). A new story is a story still.[40] While one can play around relative centres like the allos (another of the same kind), the heteros (another of a different kind), the horaios (the seasoned, ripe, mature), the xenos, the phallus, sexus, and so on, and while surely one can rethink “risk”[41], one cannot unplay the necessity of gamesmanship. How play will remain accomplishable, to summarise, depends on the assessment of the necessity of juxtaposing glorifying biographies and defensive critiques of parental intellectuals in order to preserve the idea of resolvable “impasses”, and/or that of accepting philosophically unconsummated ontologies, where plots are realised only (if at all) where they fail to deliver what they propose¾bodies and pleasure. For these are always already playable. §
On Sex Play (2)
“Quod licet puerulo, non licet puero und umgekehrt”[42] “If you notice, it is the puppies that seem to go against Nature, but grown dogs, never”[43]
“Did you go to ‘t so young? Were you a gamester at five or at seven?”[44]
“In the Morning in front of the elders, the parrot Starts mimicking the sounds Of last night’s love-play. Embarrassed, she claps her hands, “Dance! Dance!” she orders the children The chatter of the parrot is lost in the jingle of her bangles”[45]
Elsewhere[46] as in my wider reviewing efforts[47] I have been interested in discursive delimitations of sexuality’s playful excursions versus its ultimate and ultimately tragic moment, its propaedeusis (inauguration). A proliferating poststructural decursus on adult (postinaugural?) play troubles a return to the preadolescent case, for it seems to have vanished, re-appearing as, and only as, adult (or, adulterated) text. For instance why would early sex have to be latent and self-consolidating rather than complementary[48], and clearly sex play does not end “when the final act begins, narrowing choice, dictating tempo, and giving reign to “nature” ”?[49] Why, for that matter, should children’s experimental pleasures “embody the political logic of local sexualities”?[50] With children “queered”[51], the strange conundrum of paraphilic “onsets”[52], the increasingly impossible cult/folklore of sexarche¾what remains of child’s play? By “adult text” I do not want to rehearse spastic age dichotomies but simply to note the inverse of play’s metaphorical production of sex, namely that
‘sex’ is an increasingly arthritic centre of pedagogical play, and therapy. Play is “readerly accomplished”¾it is immanent in the hermeneutic moment: the hermeneut cannot be a player, cannot be at play. For instance, the Latin comfort of ludus has fitted American psychologising of this other utter comfort, “love”, for instance as the Ovidean among six “love styles”, where ludus is the empirical evil twin of eros and agape, at least where “intimacy, passion, commitment, and satisfaction” are stylistic desiderata.[53] Of course, the curiously popular “style” metaphor invites a reflection on social
propaedeusis and meta-metaphoric utility: what would it mean to ‘play’ ‘ludic love’, to foreplay a style? Beyond the childhood years, the notion of sex games has fed a professionalised lamentation of (especially Afro-American) divergence from the white middle class heterosexual non-serial monogamy maxim.[54] Illustratively, two quite overtly racist (or at least anticultural) articles by Burgest juxtapose destructive, delusive, perpetrated “games” (situating “the psyche of Black America”) and healthy, genuine, lasting, authentic, “positive and fruitful” relationships.[55] What is clearly at stake in sex play is what not even irritates celebrated First, what is so sexy in games? Foucault had argued that “the child has a flow of pleasure for which the ‘sex’ grid is a veritable prison.”[58] What can be said about this grid? Until the Advent of Orgasm, states Hall[59] (who as may be recalled is usually heralded as the inventor of the Occident’s adolescence fixture), genitalia provide “a sea of knismogenic (knismos=tickling) sensations” which later become “extremely gelogenic (gelos=laughter)”. However, even before puberty, Fox[60] notes, at least “boyhood bliss” includes “ ‘ripples’ of continuous, smaller climaxes preceding the major ending or quiet cessation of the activity”. The problem obviously is that of hegemonic lexis of the adult aesthetic and its imperialism into what it allows as childhood territory, an aesthetic of “knowing” anticipation, progressive repetition, intelligent delay, consummated climax, and post-climactic contemplation. This gonadal lexis, this postpubescent imperative of style and of the flesh, can not but extrapolate and encroach upon what remains as the pre-gonadarchal, in fact the adrenarchal experience where orgasm exists as, adorably, “[…] a chopper to chop off your head […]”.[61] This is a Platonean dichotomy embodied: frivolity versus Ideal, motivated play.[62] Sex in the playhood years, as a defect, lacks not the visceral but the proper visceral, the visceral appropriated— indeed, in a worn-out epigenetic discourse, it craves the proper visceral moment to organise, direct, and orient the aspecifically carnal. As psychoanalysts seem to have discontinued to speculate, under the pressure of masturbatory inhibitions, direct motor stimulation of the genitalia would be transformed to “an expression of drive activity utilizing movement of the entire body”[63], such as disorganised jumping, organised athletic activities, and organised total body movement in play. “The girl in jumping rope acts out the to and fro movement of the man during sex intercourse. Her own body takes the part of the active man, while the swinging rope imitates her own body adjusting to the movement of the man's. In this game, the girl acts both the role of the man and of the woman”.[64]
Confirming this displacement discourse, Blyler (1966)[65], concluding on children in grades 2-6, suggests that the subjects prefer songs with melodies possessing “strong melodic movement, strong climaxes, and definite points of repose”. Appropriately, Winnicot’s pedagogical recommendations include the thesis that “substitute climaxes have to be provided- notably meals- but also parties, outings, special moments […] a forfeit, a prize, someone is caught or killed, someone has won, and so on”. As for an interim conclusion, then, we have a crypto-biological end-pleasure ‘principle’ that inhabits and frustrates a soma that fails to host and implement it properly (without anxiety[66]), that it to say, other than in a form that aligns with a (proper) Kinderculture. This Kinderculture, crucially, is to provide orgasm to the preorgasmic, gonadal bread-and-games for the adrenal masses (masses awaiting endogenously motivated rebellion against what then will be felt as phallic oppression but is now internalised as constitutive ¾that is, exciting¾ pastime), while among the savages, of course, ‘good’ sex is routinised per se (as a sui juris gonadal solution).[67] In the West, child sex play is only anomalous when it adopts, when subjected to, the routines, schedules and mania of the gonad (think penetrative purposive heterosex, ‘sexual identity’, reputation economy, pleasure metabolism, the sexualised child, “participating victims”) rather than that of the rush and the blush of the play scene (surveillance subverted, Toms peeping, flashing, pantsing, piss fights, circle jerks).[68] Second, what is so frolicsome about sex? In an attempt to reference “sex play” where it (to use a Von Krafft-Ebingian term[69]) paradoxically involves the genitals, we stumble upon the heavy-handed propaganda of a welfare dispositif that sheds, contains and controls the playsome and the rapturous (or ravaging or rampant or rational or any other un-play) as such. Definitional politics over sex play are embedded in the chronology wars (more generally the politics of eventuality[70]) waged by both a neoconservative forum that celebrates abstinent-only (playless? play-only? happy-only?) trajectories, and by a paradigmatically anti-traumatic pedagogy, both somehow superimposed on the existing functionalist straightjacketing of play. Even Sutton-Smith and Kelly-Byrne[71] in their mid-1980s critique of ideal play essentialised “it”, play, as the stuff of pre-adulthood[72]. In any case the authors briefly stage the existence of sex play as corrosive of play’s general idealisms. During the 1990s one notes an embarrassing “appropriateness” paradigm that served to legitimate diagnostic aggression toward ideal sex play’s multiplying negatives from which it had to be cleansed: harassment, betrayal, sexism, homophobia, and that all-purpose notion, abuse. As sex play informs the notion of play “where it dares not go”, illegal sex play informs the notion of innocuous sex play “where is ought not go”. In the West, virgin play informs “never identities,” a subcategory of the “various identities based on not engaging in particular acts (simply, “not doings”)”.[73] As evidenced in nineteenth-century British novels play needs to be studied as it occurs in “qualitatively different states of neverness”, innocent play versus pure play. Sex play, in its domesticated “Your Child is Growing Up” variety, is play of the citizen that can not but play, can not participate in or receive consummated consensuality nor deliver performative totality. Maturity is the ‘all the way’ option not chosen by “courtship”-disintegrators[74] who break not only the courtship routine but also the law: exhibitionists, frotteurs, voyeurs and rapists. Play is also the trick, or unnature, of the paedophile contemplating the death of Narcissus (as in the classic psychodynamic reading[75]), or some grooming plot, in the necessary apologia of access and entry, as Marvell resolves,
Whole fair Blossoms are too green Yet for lust, but not for Love[76].
Play is the staged-recalcitrant nympholeptic claim, as in the Humbertian register:
“Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up”[77].
…as indeed it is Peter Pan snapshot bewildered and puzzled before the chase:
TIGER LILY: Suppose Tiger Lily runs into wood? Peter Pale face attack her – what then? PETER: [bewildered] Paleface can never catch Indian girl, they run so fast. TIGER LILY: If Peter Pale face chase Tiger Lily - she no run very fast - she tumble into heap what then? [Peter puzzled. She addresses Indians.] What then? ALL INDIANS: She him's squaw. (MS Scene 3 p 2)[78].
According to the psychodynamic binary, of course, play is the erotic implicated, erotics the passion of activity, the unwritten read; play’s carnality must be excavated, dismantled, unplayed. How is Neverland (as, de jure, certain pop stars’ estates[79]) the verso of Eros’ recto, then, that “realm of romance, untroubled by memory, anticipation, or any other causal tie”?[80] What about the ‘troll-like libido’, Peter’s pan pipe virtuosity, are these the Id-play of repressed “Peter Pan is, however, about our inability to have make-believe and the true stick together: it dramatizes an artistic failure, the failure to make the vision of play persuasive”.[82] Illustratively, Hook (1991), Spielberg’s pop psychological triad of workaholism, Peter Pan syndrome, and the inner child is a grotesque therapeutic attempt at this failure[83]. To sum up, Play’s unsexuality is the erotic Other of its cultural reader who is (and indeed when s/he) is trying to locate his dangerous gaze elsewhere, onto the ludophile, that regressive aggressor. Who can play what play with whom? is a progressively (and progressively dull) chronometric matter. Not explicitly invited by upcoming special issue of the international journal Social Semiotics CfP on The Michael Jackson Trial, but covered by September 2004 Yale University’s interdisciplinary two-day conference on Regarding Michael Jackson: Performing Racial, Gender, and Sexual Difference Center Stage is the increasingly politicised interface between “persuasive” (sexual) performance, “sustainable” (sexual) iconicity, and “sufficiently” proven yet imperatively incomplete (sexual) maturity. Obviously this interface is increasingly one of double negation, against the background of American (‘adult’) sexuality’s managerialism[84] and accessorialism[85], therapeutism and commercialism: performance can not be ambivalent or unproductive, mediocrity should be resolved, immaturity should be disproved though not fully so, the measure of it all being that sales don’t drop. Therapy prescribes play to render its fashionable referent, sex, more productive of claimable worthwhile pleasure. And, again obviously, the advise and welfare Mahlstrom allows an evermore total antipodal idée fixe, sex play that is essential, necessary in some ephemeral way, age-appropriate, and “entitled” to increased surveillance irritating the playful developments formerly contained merely as ‘natural’, ‘functional’, indeed ‘important’ assets to (or precursors of) straight unqueer maturity. Lastly, how is play “readerly accomplished” in the infrastructural era, the web-generation? Folklore still heavily invests in concepts of “having sex”, however an increasingly politicised and ambiguous[86] site, and its preliminary: abortive, “uninformed” or “mistaken”, and therefore ridiculous[87] sex. In the evermore efficient chronocentric analysis, play is prepropaedeutic and masturbatory to that pivot of pivots, coitarche. According to Siegel and Shaughnessy (1995)[88], American sexual and social “firsts” would still be “imbued with an inordinate amount of emotional investment”[89] which almost necessitates a “healthy” non-first and “cute” proto-erotic. Apart from the perversion and therapy registers, then, semi-public play ‘around’ and ‘about’ sexuality as an ultimate spatial realism (“introduction”, “seduction”, “initiation”) is just that— spatial: it stages pre-pubescent ante portam anxiety and teen angst, as it situates the production of heterosexual hierarchies[90] and conforms the player to locally salient chronologies of ‘exposure’.[91] The spatial here is pretextual, a tactic, a move. Sutton-Smith[92] mused that semi-public games such as Spin-the-Bottle in fact perform exposure as, eclectically, reward and punishment; they regiment the frightfully unregimented, allow formal approximation through a motivational alibi, and —hence— grant formal competence in lieu of intentional mastery over the dreaded implications of the play’s referents: “total and serious” intimacy, the heterosexual Self scrutinised, impotence confessed, and erratic promiscuity revealed. Semi-public games stage exposure to contain its imminent excess.[93] The normative body’s malleability, through its “orderly conduct and competitive but neighbourly ethos of games”[94], resides where bodies confess and play what they could have been doing (yet resist to do) all evening, at least: to excess. In other words, for the modern subject, sexuality’s play idiom performs the excessively important juncture between virginity and its excessively important bankruptcy. [A relative of this inferred function (which we might call allocation of sexual performance) is dislocation. Karniol (2001)[95] provides support for the contention that “feminine” male media stars idolised by adolescent Israeli girls provide a “safe” target of romantic love, to practice “feeling norms” on the remote, the icon, the imaginary play-boy/girl.] Sex is too important, it does not want to be played, it must be played. That is to say: the body is too important, it does not want to be read, it must be read. The player fails its modern subjectivity, he decompensates and does what he should be, does what he should have become but cannot. Playmates are constitutive by the castration of the player’s persona, by reading too much in it, reading it too much. Sex play, the domestic kid’s version, still is the author-body regulating, supervising, directing and prefacing a spatially delimited reading, when reading is demanding beyond lexically Gonadal emergent subjectivity. Hazardously, the opportunity to “be read” is an issue contained in a safety and child rights apparatus, and thus progressively disengaged with the opportunity to “read”, which is less effectively surveyed, or at least surveyed in alternatives registers. This is an effect of late capitalism’s textualism, where the consumer reads what is to be read, and where he himself is not read but written, continuously and from all sides. “The general sexualization of commodities has also included people. It provides an outlet for expressing previously suppressed sexual urges. Adolescents, most of all, make use of this possibility, and their demand generates a further supply. With the help of new fashions it is possible to advertise oneself as, above all, a sexual being.”[96] §
Janssen, D. F., Growing Up Sexually. Last revised: Sep 2004 |
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Notes