Patriarchy, as I think of it, is the pervasive and largely undisputed, almost entirely unacknowledged assumption that men are first. Not that they are superior, necessarily—although that can be one flavor of firstness. But just simply that they are first, fundamental, the standard. First Adam, then Eve. First male presidents, then (someday, maybe) a woman. And when it comes to sex, it’s often, first you, then me.
Patriarchy does lots of stuff. But the biggest thing it does is give some people (i.e., men) more power than others (i.e., women and people who are gender-nonconforming). It’s a kind of service economy where one gender gets the goods, and the others provide the goods. This is a profoundly shitty arrangement for men, women, and those who don’t fall easily into these categories because, as a way of being, unchecked male-firstness fundamentally disconnects us all from the possibility of real, nonhierarchical, loving relationships with each other, where pleasure is equally shared.
Objectification is a close cousin of patriarchy. It’s the sense of looking at ourselves from outside our bodies. It’s the surfacing of experience. The sense that we are always being looked at, always under the gaze of another, that even when we are alone in our room, we are somehow being examined, measured, rated. While this dynamic is most classically related to being a woman—and women have historically been more damaged by this sense of being under the microscope—the advent of social media, smartphones, selfies, and the incessant public chronicling of experience has made it an epically excruciating phenomenon from which no one escapes. And it’s so utterly omnipresent that most people don’t even know they are looking at themselves as if from outside themselves, continually performing their physicality for an invisible (or often visible) impersonal lens.
Still with me? Great, then let’s talk consumerism. Which is a largely undisputed two-pronged idea: first, that stuff will make us happy, and second, that people are just part of the stuff that can serve to make us happy.
The idea that stuff will make us happy, of course, is nothing new. Humans have been acquiring and treasuring stuff ever since there was stuff to acquire and treasure. But with mass production and worldwide economic growth, pleasant experiences have become the norm for vast swaths of humans around the globe. So people, especially in the United States and especially in the middle class, now expect a continual series of pleasant events and are increasingly averse to unpleasant experiences of any kind, while many other folks around the world, even in so-called developed economies, are shelved, blocked, and otherwise excluded from these pleasures. Add to that the advertising-enhanced cultural message that, if you don’t manage to line up the next pleasant experience, you’re kind of a loser, and you start to see what a honey-tipped trap this all really is.
It’s the second prong of consumerism, though, that concerns me most. At this level, we tend to harbor the sense that other people are not agents in their own right. Instead, they become, primarily at least, the sources of our pleasure. This kind of consumerism is like a blend of patriarchy and objectification on the rocks with a twist. We see it in nearly every arena of post-capitalist global society. And sexuality is no exception. Put simply, consuming people as objects means that everything we do is about either getting somebody or giving ourselves away. It undermines our dignity, from both sides. Boys are taught to look and take. Girls are taught to be looked at and to give. And nonbinary folks are often shoved to the margins, disqualified from playing a role in the whole giddy production.
The message here is that this combination of objectifying patriarchal consumerism leads to a strange shallowing, a disembodiment, a living at arm’s length from oneself, as if you were always looking in, and not kindly, at your every move, your every body part. And more and more, these dynamics are meta-gendered, in that they impact men and women and those who don’t identify in the binary, without particular discrimination, putting us all at risk for weirdly pervasive and unexamined suffering in the realm of sex, sexuality, and just about everything else.
Okay, so now we know the problem: objectifying patriarchal consumerism—or that dynamic, fluid, and complex set of processes by which
men are first,
perspective is outsourced, and
everything, including other people, becomes a commodity.
So that’s the problem with a whole lot of things in the post-modern, post-industrial age, but it’s especially the problem with sexuality. Because when you apply these three shorthands to sexuality, you can see clearly how sex would be very much not good, right? I mean, how are we supposed to make sex good when men’s pleasure is central and everyone else’s pleasure is secondary? That’s not good for men or for women, and it’s certainly not good for those who don’t fit easily into these rigidly scripted categories. How are we supposed to make sex good when we’re being asked to continually stand outside of ourselves looking in with judge-y, evaluating eyes? And how are we supposed to make sex good—make it rich, make it wholesome and connected—when we’re being trained, every moment of every day, to treat the world and all its people as nonsentient quasi-products to be consumed for our pleasure?
The answer is that when we treat ourselves and others in this way, when we live the mainstream, globalized, mechanized, capitalized ethos of our times, our sex will not be very good. It will not be very good at all.
So what’s the answer? Four simple words: take back your body.
TAKE BACK YOUR BODY
In the beginning of this chapter I talked a little about that first moment of body shame. That moment when I put on my new turtleneck at ten years old, saw my belly, and suddenly and irrevocably divorced my body. I became, in that moment, a divided person, with one part of me living in the body while another part of me stood somehow at arm’s length, in a continuous and horrified state of judgment, looking shamefully, angrily back at myself, wishing and willing it to be different.
By age fifteen, this bizarre twin consciousness, this sense of being two different selves, one torturing the other, had solidified to the point where I stood for long minutes in front of the mirror, staring at my mostly naked body every morning and every evening, looking for flaws. I began to exercise, then to over-exercise, then to control my eating, and then to over-control my eating. While I was lucky to never fully tip into anorexia, my eating—or lack of it—hit a painful crescendo during my two years in a sorority. I ate almost nothing, lost too much weight, and successfully landed the hottest boy on campus, a bronze-skinned Filipino American quarterback whom I accompanied (externally smiling, internally freaking out) through a rotating door of fraternity parties.
How was the sex? you might ask.
Not good. I mean, we loved each other. He tried his best. But by this point, internalized patriarchy was the daily weather pattern inside and I had no idea what I actually wanted. I didn’t know what turned me on. Or if anything really turned me on. And all the cultural signposts seemed to point to making myself as ravishingly desirable as possible, without too much concern for what my body actually needed. And so most of our sex consisted of me turning him on and then going numb. Waiting until we were done so that I could go on a run or to the gym, or back to my dorm to tell my friends that we were, after all, having sex.