on the male obsession with anal sex.

the current prevalence of anal sex in pornography lends justification to the assumption of a collective obsession with the asshole. it is my belief that this obsession can be explained by psychoanalytical doxa and the success of feminism.

the holy grail of freudian psychoanalysis - the oedipus complex - is certainly susceptible to a certain amount of criticism. by relegating desire to the familial sphere, it resurrects the incest forbidden for the higher classes by the church and keeps sexuality within the family, thereby placing the responsibility for a productive, non-perverted sexuality in the familial sphere (foucault). moreover, in its rejection of non-oedipal desire, it uses force to inscribe the multidirectional desiring-machines in an oedipul framework, thereby severely limiting their revolutionary potential (deleuze). on a more pragmatic note, the oedipus complex is inherently misogynistic and fails to account for bisexuality. nonetheless, in an oedipalized culture, social repression enlists the family as an agent of psychic repression in service of the socius, thereby framing each individual as a corner of the oedipal triangulation (mommy-daddy-me) - the formation of the subject is interpellated as oedipal in nature, and in this way oedipus functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

the oedipus complex leads to the psychological assumption of one's own sex through a process that begins with an awareness of sexual difference and eventually leads to castration fear in boys and penis envy in girls. penis envy is connected to a rejection of the mother and a desire for the father, whereas castration fear leads to a refusal of subjection or indebtedness to other males. karen horney posited womb envy (a concept that gained new relevance with the recent case of thomas beatie) to balance the sexism inherent in freud's penis envy, suggesting penis eny may just be more visible due to the overall greater power wielded by men in society. it is here, i think, that we may find reasons for the current obsession with anal sex.

of course, social and economical equality of the sexes for now remains a fantasy - but our society is no longer grounded on the implicit inferiority of women. the penis is no longer a guarantee of social power, and the vagina has become an active phallic presence itself. in this framework, the vagina no longer signifies an absence that leads to fear of castration, but a presence that leads to fear of competition and needs be disavowed in order to reaffirm male superiority. this socio-economical development coincides (and is indubitably correlated) with the sexual liberation of women, who are now entitled to their own active sexuality. when the vagina is no longer defined as the absence of a penis, but as the presence of a powerful and enigmatic organ, it provokes anxiety rather than contempt.

anal sex is an effective means of suppressing this anxiety, for several reasons:
-it bears strong connotations of submission (to inflict pain is to subject), thereby reiterating male superiority.
-the anus is less enigmatic, hence less threatening than the vagina - for men have one themselves.
-anal sex is (perhaps wrongly) seen as less pleasurable for women than vaginal intercourse - so in the male imaginary, the female right to sexual pleasure is denied.
-our culture has an aversion towards everything wet, slimey and hairy - in kristeva's sense, wetware is abject. (which may be due to the association of wet and hairy with animality and our fascination with technology.) this is the reason women often shave their pubic hair or circumsise their outer labia - but it may just as well cause a rejection of the vagina altogether.

(disclaimer: before you exclaim: "i am not obsessed!" - not all particulars can be susbsumed under the general. in the same vein, not all anal pleasure need be based on domination. but the disproportion between the prevalence of anal sex in porn and the relative rarity of anal sex in private leads me to believe this collective obsession is at least partially founded on a male desire for dominance - which is certainly true for actors like max hardcore.)

(of course it might be that this obsession existed long before emancipation, but gained visibility in pornography only recently with the diminishing restrictions of the genre. but this would be a far more boring hypothesis.)

from gombrowicz's ferdydurke.

"you have a headache, bobkowski? excellent! here before us we have an interesting maxim de malis capitis which most aptly fits the situation. what? you feel an imperious need to leave the room? but, my dear bobkowski, why? for that too we find a precedent among the ancients. i refer you to the famous passage in book V in which caesar's whole army, having eaten bad meat, found itself in the same predicament. the whole army, bobkowski! why do you wish to do the same when you have at hand such a classic description? these books, gentlemen, are life, life!"

transnational agreements.

the conventions and international agreements that have the purpose to ensure the international recognition of fundamental human rights (such as the geneva convention) are mostly framed in the terminology pertaining to the anachronistic dominance of nation-states and wars between nation-states. "terrorism" perpetrated by groups that do not have nation-states behind them is not or hardly covered by these documents, and hence almost by definition illegitimate. the "humane treatment" of the perpetrators is not legally enforced.

the nation-state is clearly becoming ever more obsolete in the light of multinational corporations that defy national boundaries. this leads to a different public consciousness, in which the relation between hegemon and subaltern cannot be framed in terms relating to the nation-state paradigm. what we are seeing today is that the Left takes up a sympathy for these non-national subaltern subjects (palestinians, illegal immigrants, national minorities), whereas the right sticks to the nation-state paradigm, and thereby deems the violence committed on behalf of these minorities illegitimate (or even considers it an act of terrorism - a term that bears the illegitimacy within itself and preemptively rules out sympathy). within this framework, state violence appears as a legitimate reply. the Left currently engages in the conflicts that occur and are phrased within the terms belonging to the nation-state paradigm by placing itself in a dialectic in which the right defends the state, and the left tries to defend minorities from the right and its institutions. this dialectic knows little progress (as michel serres recognized, dialectics seldom do), for leftist activists are interpellated as terrorists (or at least, as dangers to the order of the state), and willfully encounter this interpellation with a hatred of police (in the young radical left) and such. this situation remains problematically inert.

in order to advance in this dialectic, the Left will need to rephrase the terms of the debate. when international agreements (or not international, but universal, for the term international implicitly refers to the old paradigm) speak in terms of universality rather than nationality, or try to establish new boundaries and modes of belonging that are not construed in relation to the nation-state paradigm, the non-national minorities will be granted solid ground from which they can claim their so desired rights. this new terminology might be better suited to deal with contemporary conflict situations (the guantanamo case and the indefinite detention there clearly show the old agreements are not effective in each modern situation), and might blow up the nation-state system from within, by forcing nation-states to recognize that their institutions are, by and large, anachronistic.

who will be the subjects signing these agreements currently remains unclear.

on ketamine.

even burroughs seems at one point to have gotten tired of his heroin addiction, and longed for a drug that "opens up, rather than narrows down" (or something similar - i'm citing from memory). he found this in yage, or ayahuasca. i believe to have found it in ketamine.

in the past the hypothesis has been uttered (and refuted) that the psychological activity induced by a dose of ketamine is comparable to the psychological activity registered in schizophrenics. therefore, it should come as no surprise that this drug has a clearly deleuzian feel to it - it deterritorialises our senses and perceptual apparatus, thereby offering new lines of flight, and opening us up (((in sharp contrast to the drugs that close us down, such as benzodiazepines, cocaine, alcohol, and in nearly all occasions, softdrugs))).

after taking ketamine, i (the singular is imperious here, for the problem with drugs remains the difficulty of establishing intersubjectivity - although this may only be a magnification of a problem that pervades all social sciences) - i, that is, may have the experience of looking at pure time, not time as an immanent concept pervading something else. more commonly, i lose all experience of my own body - my ego dissolves, having no stable ground to stand on, and is overwhelmed by something that can only be called pure (though distorted) perception, which substitutes itself for the i. (in the same way the ego of a child that has not yet gone through the mirror stage cannot be separated from its senses - i hope my use of lacan and deleuze in a single post is acceptable.) ketamine is less superficial than 2c-b, less bewildering than salvia, less visual than lsd - and for me, more philosophical than all of them.

sometimes, after a relatively large dose of ketamine, i may believe to be looking at the process of looking itself - and although this is clearly a mystification of my senses, i do believe this mystification may teach us a phenomenological lesson. i see structures that make the act of looking possible - and although these structures may be severely distorted (or better: deterritorialised), the knowledge of their (potential) existence opens up new lines of thinking about the process of perception in its common state. i leave consensual reality, but hesitate before calling the entered reality merely illusory - there are no hallucinations, no aberrative thought, no monomania - merely another way of being in the world.

after a k-hole, restratification takes place - but the shaking up of the patterns underlying our perception is not without consequences; by opening new ways of thinking, ketamine awakes me (us?) from my (our?) slumber.

ketamine does not lead to any ontological insights; no big revelations, it teaches nothing about the essence of life. (drugs don't teach these things.) however, it may induce an indirect insight into the process of perception by fundamentally altering it. by seeing how perception could function, we realise how it does not - hence, an entire field of potential and realised perceptual patterns is opened. when we learn 3 is not 2, we know more about the nature of both 2 and 3.

although one should resist ontology and beware of other traps that lead to a pompous and shamanic reading of a ketamine experience, i believe a further phenomenological investigation of this drug is warranted.