"There is no sexual relation.”
— Jacques Lacan
What has Beyonce done for me? How has Beyonce, as they say, “empowered” me?
Who’s a better feminist: Beyonce or Hillary Clinton? Hillary’s advocated for paid family leave, a childcare tax credit and universal prekindergarten. She’s advocated for federal funding for abortions for low-income women and rape victims. As secretary of state, she shined a powerful light on the poverty, exclusion and violence faced by the world’s most vulnerable women. She created the Office of Global Women’s Issues. Beyonce sells the dream of a post-racial America led by a “fierce” “queen.”
We postmodernists can only accept a feminism of sex. Because transsexual rights activists have pushed for a more inclusive definition of womanhood, even having a uterus and vagina are no longer necessary. Consequently, everything specific to the female body — even pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing — is less important than issues of identity. The female body doesn’t matter anymore, unless it’s f-----g.
And so third-wave feminism becomes last-wave feminism, part of an insidious obsession with the revelatory, redemptive power of sex.
A man once told me, “It’s important to be yourself when you have sex.” That’s presumptuous on more levels than the obvious one. Indeed, I think sex is about the last time I’m myself. I think I’ve got a better chance of being myself when I go to buy cereal. Yet for young girls like myself — afraid of womanhood, alarmed and allured by manhood — sex is about all we’ve got. At the Panera Bread on Archer Road, squeezed into a booth eating extra rolls and scanning the calorie counts, gabbing about the 30-year-old from Tinder that came on our friend’s chest and wouldn’t use condoms and loved Third Eye Blind, some journalism students exclaimed: “We’re like Sex and the City!”
This is a new type of girl. She watches “Broad City” and “Girls” and dreams of Brooklyn. She reads Tumblr and buys MAC lipstick. She smokes weed and drinks whiskey. She’s into rough sex and “butt stuff” and giving good head. Men don’t matter: She does. Supposedly.
In his essay “Afternoon of the Sex Children,” Mark Greif wrote, “at the deepest level, one says: ‘Whom do I discover myself to be in sex?’—so that sex becomes the social province of self-discovery.” But this fetish for self-discovery turns sex into an antisocial, ultimately narcissistic act; with love sapped of love, we can only love ourselves.
In his essay “Back In New Fire,” David Foster Wallace wrote, “Any animal can f—-. But only humans can experience sexual passion…This has been what’s ‘bad’ about casual sex from the beginning: sex is never bad, but it’s also never casual.”
Wallace had his hang-ups, and I have mine. I suspect the amount of time a person thinks about sex is inversely proportional to the amount of time she spends having it.
And in that spirit, I reflect from my nine square meters of France. A friend once told me sex was so boring she checked the time on her iPhone during it. For many of us, sex was a bomb that didn’t go off. Nothing is ever as good as it might have been. Casual sex has been a non-event, a zero, a skipping on the tape, the least intimate of all acts, less intimate than getting coffee. I may as well have not been in the room.
If anything, we’re ourselves before and after: fishing for fabric in an unmade bed, hesitantly asking where the bathroom is, watching the washed-up, washed-out sunrise play on strange skin. I thought I should remember everything, every time and wanted to remember nothing. Lessons, here, mean a succession of losses. You aren’t yourself until you weren’t.
In the unpeopled, frictionless, ventilated whiteness of the future, events replace ideology: travel, sex, “experiences.” To cry for more from sex is verboten; to cry at all is sacrilege. Simultaneously — sadly — sex must be without meaning and our only meaning. Running on empty and running off-track, it’s all we’ve got.
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
