In the era of “born this way” rhetoric, the suggestion that people question what they want sexually can, understandably, feel oppressive and abusive. And yet, a lot of pain, harm and dissatisfaction emanates from the way that our culture practices sexual and amorous relationships, and these practices are oppressive and abusive in their own right. What’s more, they certainly don’t need to be!
A great jumping-off point for critically interrogating sexual desires with the requisite nuance and sensitivity is Amia Srinivasan’s article for the London Review of Books entitled “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” {#} Srinivasan—a social and political theory professor at Oxford—politicizes the way that sexual desire plays out in contemporary culture. Her starting point is the conflict that has erupted between so-called “incels”—or people who are celibate, against their wishes—and the sort of mainstream liberal feminist community, with its embrace of consent as a compass for navigating the difficult dynamics of sex and harm in the twenty-first century. Here, the involuntarily celibate—who are usually, but not always men—insist that in the dating market, less attractive people are systematically denied sexual opportunity, while more attractive people enjoy all of the sexual opportunity. Incels claim that men—and again, men are much more commonly represented under the heading of “incel”—are especially disadvantaged by this situation, since through cosmetics and men’s relative non-pickyness, the “top 80%” of women have access to the top 20% of men, leaving the bottom 80% of men in competition for the bottom 20% of women. In the face of this, some incels have called for a redistribution of sex, through, for example, compulsory monogamy and other more nefarious means.
This position runs headlong into the consent-oriented worldview of mainstream, sex-positive liberal feminists and their allies, who place sovereignty in people’s—and especially women’s—sexual choices. To them, the incel grievance is nothing but an expression of male entitlement to women’s bodies—women who owe them less than nothing. Nothing could be more anathema to the consent-oriented ethos of sex-positive feminism than a “redistribution of sex”—and the questioning of one’s desires is deemed to be an insidious step in that direction. Who one chooses to have consensual sex with, in this view, is a matter of personal choice, not political economy.
Yet, Srinivasan reminds, the personal is political, and reminds her readers that “It used to be . . . that if you wanted a political critique of desire, feminism was where you would turn”—a tendency that has been largely abandoned by sex-positive feminism in the twenty-first century. In their haste to liberate women from the burden of puritanical sexual norms, sex-positive feminism has strayed away from the more cautious insistence of radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon, who insisted that under asymmetrical power dynamics, women could never fully consent to heterosexual sex, because the circumstances in which they made their decisions were never truly free of coercion. {#}
Srinivasan points to the “convergence . . . between sex positivity and liberalism in their shared reluctance to interrogate the formation of our desires.” The result has been major progress in the realm of freeing some people sexually, but it has come at a cost. “When we see consent as the sole constraint on OK sex,” she explains, “we are pushed towards a naturalisation of sexual preference in which the rape fantasy becomes a primordial rather than a political fact. But not only the rape fantasy. Consider the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishisation and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies. These too are political facts, which a truly intersectional feminism should demand that we take seriously. But the sex-positive gaze . . . threatens to neutralise these facts, treating them as pre-political givens. In other words, the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’.”
Srinivasan returns to the problem of sexual scarcity pointed out by incels, but radically expands it, to include the many ways in which sex and sexual preference exclude and reproduce hierarchy and rigid boundaries and power differentials. “The question,” Srinivasan insists, “is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.” And this applies to incels as much as to anyone else—as the vast accumulation of resentful Reddit posts about “hot women” reveal, many self-identifying incels remain attached to rigid, normative beauty standards and therefore play an active part in upholding sexual stratification and hierarchy. The tragedy of it is the general lack of recognition that they are contributing to the very dynamics that have created their own predicament.
Srinivasan properly politicizes sexual desire—problematizing it not as a purely personal choice, but as a political and ethical choice. Yet the question remains: if sexual desire is acknowledged to be political, yet nobody is obligated to desire or have sex with anyone else, what might a politics of sexual desire look like? How can a politics of sexual desire be universally emancipatory, rather than simply reinforcing existing desires and hierarchies?
The first thing we need to do, in my view, is to stop trying to assess and address the problem of desire at the individual, or psychological level. The main problem with liberal approaches to social problems is the insistence on framing collective problems in terms of individual ethics. The solution is not to call individuals out for being racist or classist in their desires, but to analyze how institutions produced these collectively-held views, and to try to produce new cultural and social institutions that generate better people. This is the cultural variation of Coherent Extrapolated Volition. {#} Like an AI ethics that realizes that the things we want are often flawed and bound to make us unhappy (if not lead to our own extinction, as threatens to be the case with the development of artificial intelligence), it is better to build for what we, were we wiser, smarter, and kinder, would want, rather than what we do want.
As mentioned, the first step in this direction is to recognize the highly political and cultural ways in which desires are formed. Turning away from merely psychological (and especially evolutionary psychological) explanations for desire, we ought to look at the social production of sentiment.
In her book Why Love Hurts, the critical sociologist of romance Eva Illouz analyzes the social construction of desire. “[M]y objection to the current dominant psychological ethos is three-fold:”
1) “that what we take to be individual aspiration and experience have in fact much social and collective content to them;”
2) “that psychic differences are often—though not always—nothing but differences in social positions and social aspirations;”
3) “that the impact of modernity on the formation of the self and identity is precisely to lay bare individuals’ psychic attributes and to grant them a crucial role in determining their destinies, both romantic and social.” {14.2.M}
Rather than focusing on the individual, psychological origins of desire, Illouz looks at “the structures which organize [romantic] actions and sentiments,” focusing especially on “[h]ow the will is structured, how recognition is constituted, and how desire is activated.” {7, 6.1.E} Attached to each of these is one of the following questions:
1) How is romantic will structured to shape what we want and how we come to implement what we want with a sexual partner?
2) What makes the self feel vulnerable and/or unworthy of love?
3) how is our thinking and evaluation of desire structured—specifically the content of the thoughts and emotions which activate our erotic and romantic desires? {6.1.ME}
These lines of inquiry seek to reject both the illusion of unbridled free will and dogmatic notion of biological determinism, in favor of an emphasis on the social and cultural organization of desire. I am not going to spend a long time talking about human nature, or biological determinism—not because it’s irrelevant, but because I’m more interested in the social construction of ideals and expectations. (I should say, at this point, in case there is confusion or suspicion: I am not some totally unmoored relativist who thinks that humans are blank slates. However, whatever human nature is [and it’s probably varied and inconsistent across the population], the way in which it gets expressed clearly varies across time and space. It is important for me to emphasize: “human nature” and “social construction” are not mutually exclusive.) An an historian, I look a lot at how things have changed over time, precisely to get a sense of the fact that things have not always been this way, and also to tell the story of the effort and conspiring that went into building up the status quo—one that we have subsequently taken to be natural and immutable. In other words, it took a lot of effort to make people want what they want, and if desire were just some raw expression of biological instinct, this would not be necessary. What’s more likely is that biological instincts or drives are channeled and shaped in terms of the ways that they get expressed.
Perhaps a rather shallow example of how desires and ideals have changed over time is illustrated in this silly video, which shows how different attributes have been seen as attractive in different time periods, as culture has shifted and changed through the centuries.
Besides physical attributes, another highly variable aspect of desire is the idealized form of sexual relationship, or the relational context in which sex is deemed as desirable and permissible. In contemporary culture, our romantic lives have tended to be seen as central to how we understand ourselves and how we live our lives. Just think about how much people’s identities are pinned around their “relationship status,” the people they date, their sexual orientation, and their families. In contemporary culture, we tend, as well, to bundle sex, romance, commitment and emotional intimacy—all into one relationship. As historians have shown, this is a relatively recent phenomenon to have been adopted as mainstream. In the early twentieth century, marriages became reimagined as being built around a romantic relationship—this is the middle-class “companionate marriage” that continues to be the normative template for love and marriage in our own time. {#}
This centering of identity, reproduction and intimate life around sexual, amorous relationships would be difficult in a society where there wasn’t a strong cultural cultivation of tastes and preferences—both for certain kinds of partners, and certain kinds of relationships. In fact, the two reinforce each other. If sex is culturally conceptualized as being a precursor to a potentially lifelong, exclusive commitment, then one had better be extremely picky in their choice of mate (and this is especially true when your social status and material welfare are on the line). Eva Illouz points out that sex and love are strongly tied to a series of what she calls “modes of self-consultation,” or “ways in which a person consults his or her emotions, knowledge, and formal reasoning to reach a decision” about whether and how to proceed with a sexual connection. {20.1.M} In this way, sex and love are continually problematized and routed through complex criteria of inspection and evaluation—a process that Illouz calls the “architecture of choice.” (This is part of what is subverted by glory holes and anonymous and semi-anonymous sexual encounters (online, blind relationships; experimental “dating in the dark” events [where you remove the visual dimension from a date with a stranger, thereby removing a fraction of the signal to be processed in the so-called “architecture of choice”]), etc.).
This becomes evident in the way that people approach “swiping” or—perhaps more tellingly—when making a choice about whether to go on a second date with someone (since the second date is often understood as truly opting in with both eyes wide-open). In contemporary culture, sexual decisions have tended to be treated (or are meant to appear to be treated) as big, meaningful decisions.
This architecture of choice has a very clear history, as social reformers, governmental agencies, advertisers and cultural figures shaped romantic expectations and gender norms to make sex artificially scarce. Especially in the early 20th century, during the Progressive era, World War I, and the 1920s (a period in which the United States settled, in many ways, into its modern form), sexual meanings and expectations became increasingly codified. The 1920s are generally seen as an era in which sex “liberalized,” as we shifted out of a Victorian purity-based culture into a modern consumer culture. However, this period also witnessed the rise of modern advertising, Hollywood, and other mass media platforms—all of which were used by elite representatives of the upper and upper-middle classes to try to shape culture in the interest of social stability and commercial prosperity. While these two things were sometimes in tension, there was generally a massive effort to channel human ambition, taste, and aspiration into both consumer goods and family life, to drive commerce and secure social values and social reproduction.
How did this affect sex and love?
During World War I, American military leaders were extremely worried about two conditions “diminishing” the efficiency of their troops: venereal disease, and sexual “dissipation.” In short, military planners thought that both disease and sexual satiation threatened to make troops less efficient and motivated to fight in the war, and generally believed that troops who were denied sex would be more susceptible to sentimental wartime propaganda that pleaded them to go overseas and fight for their mothers, sisters, wives and sweethearts. It was therefore imperative to control the sexual conditions of military training camps and war camps. To do this, the military set up the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), and through this organization, effectively took iron control of the conditions of the military training camps, closing nearly all red light districts and brothels in the United States, and arresting and imprisoning 30,000 women accused of engaging in prostitution or even promiscuous, non-commercial sex with soldiers. In addition to this, the CTCA policed the moral environment of the camps and nearby cities, providing “wholesome” leisure activities and entertainment, while intentionally bringing soldiers into regular contact with vetted-to-be-attractive female nurses, canteen workers and posters and illustrations, yet always in conditions that would preclude or prevent sex (camp-sponsored dances would be chaperoned; female canteen workers and nurses, besides needing to be considered attractive, also needed to be devoutly religious and to have their sexual morals vouched for, so that they would not have sex with soldiers in the camps; female visitors to camps were only permitted to make contact with soldiers in “Hostess Houses,” which were open-plan and staffed by watchful older Christian matrons, etc.). The idea was for these women—and the thought of the women at home—to serve as motivation for the young men to fight harder and to demonstrate their bravery on the battlefield. Yet this motivation (or morale) would be wasted if the men actually had sex—a belief based on the ideology that a “strenuous life” is necessary for maximum vigor, and that vitality or energy would be wasted in sexual indulgence.
This pairing of sexual repression/frustration and stimulation would inform postwar cultural representations of sexuality. This is perhaps most evident in the sex education campaigns of the 1920s, which were a direct continuation of wartime social hygiene campaigns designed to keep soldiers in line. Unlike earlier “social purity” campaigns, these campaigns sexualized self-restraint, and openly advocated the sublimation of thwarted sexual energy into work. Just like wartime campaigns that stigmatized “slackers” who did not fight or support the war effort, and idealized brave, heroic men, post-war advertisements idealized striving, accomplished men. As for women, chaste, “unspoiled,” and “beautiful” doting women were exalted, and sex education literature overtly sexualized women who possessed poise and self-control.
Likewise, Hollywood employed these same tropes—and there, the portrayal of desirability would eventually be codified by the “Hayes Code,” which explicitly prescribed that good outcomes could not befall promiscuous characters. Like in the war camps, women were to be both alluring and chaste—the prize that the hero gets at the end, when he properly proves his worth. Similarly, romance novels reinforced the idea that men compete for “beautiful” and “deserving” women, and affixed women’s desirability to their ability to maintain and protect their “dignity. Moreover, sexuality was increasingly used by advertising to sell products, while social regulations remained in-effect for preventing truly free sexuality from undermining sex’s motivational power.
All-in-all, what these dynamics created was a form of sexuality that was not really “free” or “liberated,” but which had a high social price. The underlying logic behind this regime of desirability was a mode of desiring that attaches value to scarcity. It is an extension of a competitive economic logic that attaches a higher value to rare and scarce resources, and devalues anything that is in abundance. Such an attitude thwarts post-scarcity social and political programs, since once a material, social and/or economic good ceases to be scarce, it loses its value. Likewise with sex.
Sex education campaigns, Hollywood movies, romance novels, and advertisements—like the canteen workers in World War I—deployed what has been called, in other contexts, “parasexuality”—a dynamic in which a person (or persons) commands the sexual desire of many without reciprocating that desire. And this parasexuality has persisted in our culture ever since, even surviving so-called “sexual revolutions.” The way we attract sexual attention has tended to model itself on the way we sell products: BLAST your alluring image at a crowd, and filter whatever swims into your net until you land a buyer you want. This is neither a puritan society, with its nervous avoidance of stimulation, nor a liberated society, where we all share in abundance. It is, in some ways, the worst of both worlds: the taunt of abundance and the lived experience of scarcity.
With this history in mind, we might return to thinking about the question of what a politics of sexual desire might look like. What strikes me—especially as a social and cultural historian—is how unwilling anyone is, especially in the era of #MeToo, to consider that perhaps sexual frustration could be understood as a human-created phenomenon, with historical—and not just biological—origins. What’s more, it has had a clear set of external beneficiaries: essentially anyone who can exploit or sublimate sexuality to boost motivation, to drive work and/or consumption.
The answer to Srinivasan’s question: does anyone have a right to sex? is, from this angle: no, but they do have a right to live in a society that doesn’t make sex artificially scarce. And it’s not just incels, but all of us who are affected by such artificial scarcity—a scarcity that has been produced through the shaping of desires. The infrastructure of these institutions exists in our very desires an expectations—of others; of our life trajectories; of our ideal relationship arrangements and ideal partners, etc.
These are the concrete forms that a so-called “architecture of choice” takes, and they are formed in a competitive, high-stakes social environment, where, as previously mentioned, a lot is potentially at stake as we make sexual choices. What these conditions demand of us is that we choose wisely, and choose carefully, to protect our reputations, plans for the future, access to material resources, etc. This choosiness, especially in a world where desirability criteria have been explicitly defined by mass culture, demands discrimination. Theodore Gracyk claims that “taste requires preference,” and “preference involves discrimination.” This is because “preference for one thing involves a conscious rejection of some other;” and therefore “discrimination must occur, where one thing is chosen over another based on objective qualities or features known by the person to be present and to be more enjoyable than alternatives.” {118.1} “Good taste is developed by learning consciously to make the discrimination necessary to specify what aspects make an object [or experience] aesthetically good or bad, where one’s enjoyment is grounded in the process of identifying the good and bad features of one’s preference. . . . In other words, education refines one’s experience and so one’s natural likings become preferences for specific objects [and experiences].” {121.1.M} In Gracyk’s schema, enjoyment is not merely derived from the object of one’s affection, but from the self-recognition of choosing wisely, and in good taste. In our culture, social worth and status are often tied to the people we date, love, marry, etc. Who hasn’t feared “what their friends will think” if they showed up to a party with their new Tinder date, or how exes or future partners might rank their desirability status based upon who they’ve dated in the past? Conversely, who hasn’t met someone who had that too-perfect boyfriend or girlfriend; who seemed like more of an accessory than a companion?
What’s more, preferences have a momentum and tend to self-reinforce. The more time and energy one invests in one path of desirability, the more, in Gracyk’s words, this “creates a specialization in which one’s pleasures are so dependent upon the specific features of that style that it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve a comparable richness of experience further afield.” {125.1.E} This is really important to remember in a world where the self-consciousness of the institutions that continue to circulate desirability criteria has diminished. The reform organizations and government agencies that pioneered our desirability criteria have long crumbled, but some version of these criteria persists; endlessly re-produced and re-performed.
One of the most persistent forms that this self-reinforcing fetishization takes is gendered presentation. As Judith Butler has argued, in our society, we tend to constrain our behavior to be palatable and legible within gender identities, which are themselves conditioned by heterosexuality. Heterosexuality—and here, I’m referring less to the fact of there being sexual relations been males and females than the cultural institutions that mediate the relationship between normative men and normative women—therefore plays a major role in shaping social behaviors (and, by the way, this affects homosexual relationships too: gendered legibility—deriving from a heterosexually-conditioned gender binary—continues to organize the identities and conditions for legibility among homosexual gendered beings) this is the cunning power of what Butler calls the “heterosexual matrix.” Here, we might step back and look upon heterosexuality through new eyes—not as a primordial, “baked-in,” fundamentally human activity, but as a sexual culture. As one scholar puts it, “[h]eterosexuality, has, until relatively recently, remained an invisible, unexamined and taken-for-granted norm. Its naturalization has often meant that it is rarely acknowledged as a sexuality.” And here, what’s meant by “sexuality” is a series of social behaviors that are conditioned by participation in a culturally-constructed sexual identity position. For Butler, this position is performed in a myriad of everyday, pedestrian actions—many of which seemingly have nothing to do with sex.
The point of all of this is to say that sex—and our relationship to it—has tended to structure much of how we view ourselves and relate to the world and to the rest of society. It is important to consider is that, in a culture where we tend to bundle sex, romance, commitment and emotional intimacy, sexual prowess not only becomes a passport to many other things; it becomes a condition of social legibility. This tells us a great deal about not only the condition of so-called incels, but also, probably, about some of the motivations that likely stir and animate everyone. If you are “poor” in the sexual economy, you also lose your access to love, companionship, material security and, according to many people’s evaluation, the very purpose of existence: to love, be loved, and to feel secure among kin.
I use this term “sexual economy” advisedly. Desires generally develop in “economies,” wherein aggregations of choices constrain and enable opportunities for others. {16.1.E} Illouz speaks of “marriage markets,” and “the ecology of choice, or the social environment that compels one to make choices in a certain direction,” which “might be the outcome either of an intended and consciously designed policy or of unplanned social dynamics and processes.” {19.3.BM, 19.3.E}
To give a concrete example, if you live in a place where monogamous marriage is common, then there will be competition to secure a mate, and a real scramble not to miss out on your opportunity. To not marry would not only mean to miss out on marriage, but sex, access to intimacy, companionship, and maybe even housing, if the housing stock is designed for that specific social arrangement. The “environment”—be it social or physical—conditions your choices by presenting incentives for behaving in certain ways and obstacles to behaving in others.
And, if you pay attention, polyamorous folks are not immune. If you live in a sex-positive city, unless the desirability criteria are critically examined—by you, or by your prospective partners—then you still might find yourself out in the cold, or else bouncing from precarious relationship to precarious relationship. This can be especially jarring if you, or your partners, still have a head full of Disney.
One of the questions I have recently been asking is, if sex and love exist in an “economy,” is there such a thing as a “bad economy”? The recently coined phenomenon of “heteropessimism,” like the whole incel issue, seems to to suggest so. According to, Indiana Seresin—the term’s originator—many people—and especially women—are embarrassed by their heterosexuality. As Seresin explains, “During the media storm surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing . . . the comedian Solomon Georgio tweeted (to the tune of over 23,000 retweets and 142,000 likes): ‘Today is a reminder that if homosexuality was a choice, there would be 2, maybe 3, straight women left after today.’” There is, she claims, in the world of men, a “particular awfulness of the present.”
It’s clear that cis men are in the doghouse with woke women, and, if the so-called “Man-o-sphere,” with its outbursts against feminism and women’s empowerment is any indication, there is some mutuality in the frustrations between men and women.
Seresin points to both the recent blast of activism and awareness-raising around sexual assault as a potential cause of heteropessimism, and also implicates dating apps like Tinder, with their individualizing tendencies. But I can’t help wondering whether the more important cause is the decline of conditions that would enable would-be partners—and especially men—to be eligible. If desirability criteria are linked to economic performance, education, shows of bravery and vitality, then might today’s world, with its lack of traditional “male” roles and jobs, alongside women’s comparative advance into the economy, and the all-too-easy-to-fall-into traps of online porn and video games serving as analogues of real relationships and material achievement—all of this—might it be setting us up for failure in a world of high relationship expectations? In short, aren’t we in a “bad economy”?
The only way out of this, I think, is to design institutions that cultivate our desires differently. As Lauren Berlant insists, “It is a time for using the impasse that we’re in to learn something about how to imagine better economies of intimacy and labor.” What could be a better goal, in the era of heteropessimism? And, as I hope I’ve successfully alluded to, this could get us part of the way toward solving some of the motivational bases for people’s participation in other, seemingly unrelated institutions and hierarchies. I don’t see this work as being divorced from addressing war, climate, or other existential threats, even if it obviously cannot solve these on its own. Let me be explicit here: I do not believe we can build the politics that we need for addressing climate, war, etc., without fundamentally changing how we allocate and engage in sex and care.
But what is to be done?
The first step would be to develop a method for critically assessing how desire in our communities works—and I have been calling this project “Critical Hedonism(s)”—the guiding questions of which I have been using to structure this talk.
So, just to enumerate those:
-how are these desires harmful to the desirer?
-how are these desires harmful to others?
-what institutional forces shape these desires?
-who benefits from the pursuit of these desires?
-how do these desires aggregate into a “social totality” or world?
Critical Hedonism(s) has sought to be a project that investigates and eventually propounds ways of desiring, without relying on existing norms.
In the 1960s and 70s, feminist and gay liberation organizations used “consciousness-raising” groups to both raise awareness of power structures, and to attempt to remake themselves and their communities along less oppressive lines. What was so powerful about these groups was that they sought to theorize the problem and to take action on it at the same time.
Today, just as then, self-knowledge alone is not sufficient for escaping. As Theodore Gracyk insists, “Even knowing [what we know about desire formation], it is no small feat to keep it in mind in everyday life.” {125.2.E} It takes much experimentation and exploration.
Perhaps what we need are new institutions. But, because institutions have shaped what we want in ways that are incoherent, discriminatory and destructive, we cannot trust our current version of ourselves to design these institutions based upon our current wants. Recent critics of neoliberal feminism have leveled versions of this charge against the way that normative and exploitative desires have been justified as feminism—just because they are held by women. Much of the “empowerment” discourse fails to critically evaluate the structural environment in which empowerment occurs, or how this empowerment merely reinforces oppressive power dynamics. The same can obviously be said of many of our recent desperate attempts to “empower” ourselves within a zero-sum politics, culture and economy. Taking this as a cautionary tale, perhaps what are needed are institutions designed according to a cultural version of Yudkowsky’s “Coherent Extrapolated Volition” (an approach to AI ethics)—that encourage us to want in ways that we want to want, and which do not merely exacerbate and deepen the glaring scarcities of zero-sum dynamics.
Writing in the early twentieth century, the sociologist William Ogburn described what he called “cultural lag”—the phenomenon of people’s personal sensibilities and social relations lagging behind the potentialities of technology and change. The result was a dizzying sensation as people failed to adapt to the realities or to live up to the potentials presented by modernity. Perhaps we are in a similar situation with respect to our desires, and the way that these butt up against our politics. Here, the “cruel optimist” would try to re-bend reality to meet the expectations of their desires—a tendency that has infected, to varying degrees, all sides of the “culture war” (as evidenced by the resentment and confusion of the gender war and heteropessimism, which may be understood as symptoms of our own dizzying cultural lag). We therefore need a framework that extrapolates our wish to be better/different people, and that does not lock us into brittle norms that will fail when conditions change.
Anyway, I hope I’ve convinced you that sexual desire is political, and that it is also worth our time and attention to seek to transform the things we desire. I’ve done my best to theorize how we might approach the remaking of our desire, and I suppose the last thing I’ll do is to invite you to experiment with how desire works in your own communities, and to build institutions that shift collectively-held expectations and aspirations.