What Can Men Want?

tags

Fascism

Duford: Homophobia is only one small part of right-wing rejection of desire, and makes quite a lot of sense in that context.

cf Deleuze and Guattari on desire, via Hans: framing desire as lack misunderstands what desire is in the first place. The problem is much deeper

Notes

What does it mean for a man to fuck a woman in a way that makes him gay?

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isn’t an error but is instead a coherent expression of the right-wing politics of desire. In other words, what if it really is gay to be straight?

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understanding of desire as something that makes us what we are,

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to be a person, like we are, is always to fail to have what we need.

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more expansive understanding of sexuality that doesn’t focus on genital pleasure

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heteropatriarchy requires men to be averse to nongenital sexuality.

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someone who has matured will experience desire and pleasure only genitally and only for a heterosexual object-choice outside of the family. Genital sexuality is when you let go of your mother to find your wife.

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determining the truth about our sexualities in terms of figuring out an identity and its origins (like scientific studies into homosexuality) is less important than what new ways of living are opened up by following and fulfilling our desires.

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homosexuality as something desirable denaturalizes desire. Once desire is denaturalized, we lose access to the normalizing standards of a so-called natural law of sex, gender, or sexuality.

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we generate cultures of sexuality specifically because there is no natural law concerning it.

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it’s the generation of a rule specifically because nature has failed to give us one. If we had a rule from nature, we simply couldn’t have gay sex or change sex.

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authoritarian impulse to control desires

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Sexual deviance seems particularly disturbing for the authoritarian because it can occur privately and leave no lasting evidence. You may be able to control someone’s actions but you cannot control their desires.

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fascism requires a set of seemingly confused norms surrounding gendered sexualities that begin to expand to include all elements of life,

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original use of the term “heterosexual” as a kind of hypersexual perversion of “normal” desire).

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you, as a man, admit that a woman has something you want? Sounds gay.

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To desire women, in this reading, is not to desire masculinity, the only approved form of heterosexuality.

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Heteropatriarchal masculinity is, in this way, a kind of self-affirming self-love that operates through self- denial and punishment.

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rejection of pleasantness, pleasure, comfort, care, or affection. Men are not allowed to want these things because they are coded as feminine

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As Lacan puts it, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”

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Admitting of desire, to want at all, is also admitting to insufficiency

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failure of self-control.

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St. Augustine argued that in the Garden of Eden, Adam had control of his erection.

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explicit connection that sex with women provides men with too much comfort,

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authoritarians believe that the maintenance of sexual control serves as a kind of internalization of authority

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maybe, as a man, you enjoy touching a penis and having your penis touched by a man (in this case, yourself).

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one ought to never sexually touch one’s own penis.

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A man cannot both be a man and be in need. It’s women who are missing something they can only get from men

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the subject without desire, the total and complete subject, is nihilistic—because the absence of desire is death,

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read Fuentes’s discomfort with an other- or even self- directed sexuality as a negation of subjectivity itself.

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The far-right theory of desire doesn’t involve sexual orientation insofar as orientation is a structure that orients desire.

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Heterosexualism, in this context, is a desire for difference—not to assimilate it into oneself and make it sameness, but to cultivate a closeness with and affirmation of what one directly lacks.

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something decidedly anti-fascist about love and desire for what is “different, strange, and other.”

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It is thus not for reasons of sexual orientation that the fascist needs to refrain from sex with women, but for political reasons: men are required to be complete subjects all on their own and to affirm only what is like them.

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for the fascist (or protofascist) man, sexuality is experienced more as an attack on sexuality itself rather than an expression of desire.

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The rejection of a desire for difference, as a rejection of desire, full stop, can be read through all kinds of authoritarian urges to expel, exclude, or annihilate.

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signify how radically queer he believes it is that someone’s subjectivity could admit to being incomplete. For him, and the men who hold his political views, to desire anything at all is a true sign of queerness,

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