Intimacy as healing and activism: Bonkerballs bedroom backlash

Sex in the future will be, as it has always been, a site of conflict in the so-called “culture war” of continuous generational change, fought between those who wish to liberate us to explore our nature safely, sanely, and consensually, and those who wish to control our nature by forcing their particular culture upon it.

There’s a concept in psychology called “reality testing,” which was initially developed by Freud to describe how we explore the boundaries between internal and external reality, and has outlived the rest of his theory of the mind as a dynamic pressure system. Nowadays, the APA defines reality testing as “any means by which an individual determines and assesses their limitations in the face of biological, physiological, social, or environmental actualities or exigencies. It enables the individual to distinguish between self and nonself and between fantasy and real life. Defective reality testing is the major feature of psychosis.” The concept is used broadly, from individual therapeutic contexts to just living your life.

Reality-testing our sexual roles

Bedroom experimentation is a form of reality testing. It plays with roles and their performance, even if it’s something as simple as changing positions, or as wholesome as whiling away a free afternoon lazily enjoying each other’s bodies. The “reality” this tests is with respect to our roles in sex, and how it feels to engage in various culturally-atypical performances thereof, whether by averting, subverting, inverting, converting, everting, or merely diverting.

At the most basic level, the reality being tested could be as simple as, “I never thought I’d like this, but I also never thought about it that much, so I wonder what will happen if I give it a try.” But living as we do under patriarchy, we are each instilled with a whole raft of bizarre ideas, cobbled together into a narrative about how sex is “supposed to go”: maybe some meaningful looks, perhaps some kissing and touching, but ultimately sex is “supposed to be” male-initiated man-on-top missionary position until he has an orgasm, and then he goes to sleep and she rests well in the satisfaction of a wifely duty fulfilled. She can moan, but only a little, or she’s a slut. He has to be silent and stoic the whole time, or he’s gay. It's not about mutual pleasure, it's about adequately performing your gender role.

As an Alert Reader commented on my first column, this reductionist analysis of purpose goes all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, who have once again joined the chat: Aristotelian natural law theory, explicated ad nauseam by the likes of Aquinas but still in use today, goes all the way back to Aristotle’s idea of teleology. According to Plato’s favorite student, every extant “kind of thing” has a telos, an “end” that its kind naturally seeks. There is, in other words, a “something it’s for” to everything under the Sun. This purpose then goes on to inform the ethics of whatever it is.

In the first place, things can have more than one “proper” function. But more to the point, using this reductionist analysis as a blueprint for society is just instrumentalization of human life writ large. Your life’s purpose is not for you to decide, it is “for” the fulfillment of a goal that is dictated to you by someone else. Making your own decisions is selfish, childish, and constitutive of moral failure. So the idea of everything having an inherent purpose baked into its very existence is about as sound as Aristotelian ideas about trajectory:

Last week I sketched out how the rich use financial, structural, and cultural influences to funnel people into productive marriages, which all but breeds us like livestock to keep their whole system running. Just last year, alt-right mouthpiece Ben Shapiro took his mask off and said out loud with his human mouth that “utility to the state” is the basis for marriage-worthiness of relationships:

“The argument against gay marriage… is not even an argument against… anybody else living a life that they want to live. The purpose of marriage, for literally all of human history, was the bearing and rearing of children. The definition of marriage on a fundamental level sort of shifted culturally in the 1960s, into ‘two people who love each other.’ I agree that under that rubric, gay people count. Right? Two men can love each other, two women, obviously. But, under the rubric of, ‘are all relationships created equal in terms of their utility to the state,’ and the utility to the state is: two parents make baby, baby lives with married mom and dad. Then yes, of course, the form of marriage that ought to be subsidized is the form of marriage that produces children.”

Shapiro's opponent then deftly asks if he'll be seeking divorce after his four kids are grown and moved out, to which Shapiro only laughs, and then the video cuts out. But this argument has played out all over the blogosphere in the last ten years already: sterile straight people have always been able to get straight-married, unproductive marriages aren’t dissolved by the state, sex also functions in pair-bonding independent of impregnation, sex also functions as stress relief and has myriad health benefits. For these reasons and more, sex and marriage are just factually and practically not about kids in any principled or exclusionary way. The only reason to allow sterile or “completed” marriages to continue to exist, but gay marriages not to exist at all, is out of hatred for gay people (and hiding your hatred behind Divine Command Theory doesn’t fool anyone).

Perfectly natural

Because frankly, homosexuality is perfectly natural, and gay marriages are indeed of utility to the state. Homosexuality has been observed in over 1,500 species (including over 250 mammal species) and counting. While many homosexual behaviors are about group cohesion and conflict resolution, those homosexual relationships also function within animal populations as a sort of childcare buffer. When mom and dad die or otherwise fall off, gay relatives can step in to raise the kids. Similarly, gay married couples with the same structural benefits as their straight relatives will be better positioned to step in and do the best job they can, just as easily as any childless straight couple. What’s more, study after study shows that gay relationships and marriages are capable of being just as healthy, happy, and stable as straight ones. Children raised by gay parents do no worse than those raised by straight parents in school, on measures of emotional health, and in general wellbeing—except when you blame queerphobic stigma on queer people instead of on bigots. That’s literally the only way gay relationships or kids raised in them get worse: if bigots ruin their lives.

And so, we run into tension: an ideology that insists gay marriage is in any way inferior to straight marriage does not find any purchase when looking to the rigorously documentable facts, to the best of our peer-reviewed ability to determine those facts so far. I’ll quote from Dan Olson’s video In Search of a Flat Earth, in which he explores how QAnon became a Big Tent conspiracy theory that slotted easily into the alt-right pipeline (which has evolved into the new-age-to-fascism pipeline) to resolve this tension:

“All reactionary movements are in tension with reality, a tension that eventually results in psychological crisis, and belief systems like QAnon are the endpoint of that crisis, the point where reality itself becomes an enemy. Because ultimately it’s not about facts, it’s about power. QAnons are not otherwise empty vessels who believe one wacky thing. They have an agenda. QAnon, what it accepts, what it believes, is driven by the outcomes it justifies. The reason they aren’t more bothered by Q constantly getting things wrong, why they aren’t more bothered by the extreme inconsistencies and outright contradictions, by the claims that are just materially wrong, is because it gives them power over others who are bound by something as weak and flimsy as reality… They engage in wild hypocrisy as an act of domination, adhering to something demonstrably untrue out of spite, because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it, and what greater sign of will than the ability to override truth? Their will is a hammer that they are using to beat reality itself into a shape of their choosing, a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right and their enemies are silent. They are trying to build a Flat Earth.”

Reality testing the civilizational guardrails of our gender roles, even privately in the bedroom, constitutes a threat to the status quo's ability to maintain itself. If we start testing reality there, then we might start testing it elsewhere, and then the guardrails might not hold anymore. (Enter Primordial Chaos, stage left, carrying a bat that just says “SMASH.”) Since anyone might get this ball rolling at any time, what is therefore needed to prevent this reality testing from ever taking off is unquestioning compliance with the status quo, including strict adherence to patriarchal sex myths. No oral (receiving oral is bottoming and doesn’t get her pregnant), no anal (it’s gay), no cowgirl (too submissive), and NO TALKING! The male initiator will just know what to do, and the receptive female will just submit to his advances, and then hooray, maybe baby, The End.

The killing irony, for me, is that they insist reducing sex to “male-initiated man-on-top missionary for kids” is the only way to properly express our human nature. Human nature is so much more wild and varied than that—but then they shoot back that the essence of human nature itself is to override our animal nature and assert whatever's left. Even Aristotle called humankind the anima rationale, the rational soul, and apparently they mostly agree that the most rational way to do sex is to make sure you have to be a good citizen first to have it, and then only have it to benefit society, which promotes Societally Approved Success Indicators. And that, they say, constitutes human flourishing.

But Aristotle wasn’t the only trend-setter back in the day, and the Ancient Greek hedonists are seeing a modern-day resurgence. So next time we’ll look at how polyamorous social media spaces are catching up on rebuilding queer cultural production and spreading our values to straight people in the process.