clearly what our bodies and minds are being tasked with, and just say, “Nope.”
Make sense? Okay then, let me take those three big words (patriarchy, objectification, consumerism) one at a time and break them down into their meaningful, useful parts. Because let’s be real here: you cannot make sex good without first uprooting all the insidious ways our global media sell, sell, sell you into making sex bad. Which really translates into all the richness and complexity of human sexuality and sensuality having been squeezed into a power-infused, commodified, hedonistic, tight little package of…alienation.
Yeah, alienation. Ever felt super alone and kind of empty after sex? Keep reading.
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