A Swedish translation of this text was published in Paletten #319
Sex – the actual act of fucking – is ridiculous. All that straining and grunting, imperfect nakedness and overacting, eager to signal that we are really having a good time. For something so fleeting and frequently awkward we do tend to take it rather seriously. Except for Michael Portnoy. His new video Progressive Touch (2019) is a satire in the form of a good sex guide, which does nothing to make dick look dignified. Good here means not only more pleasurable but more ethical, communal and politically progressive. But rather than liberating the libido, in line with the free-love ethos of the 1970s, Portnoy finds a core of moralising hidden in supposedly forward-thinking theories of sex.
Portnoy taps into a current concern over the political implications of how we perform sex, something long thought to be a truly private matter. Two years ago in the London Review of Books Amia Srinivasan wrote of emerging social movements – notably the Incels (Involuntary Celibates) – whose members feel denied access to sex because they have been judged too old, fat, socially awkward or deemed non-desirable as a result of racism. Drawing upon queer and feminist scholarship, she argues that sex is not private but political, with definitions and desires changing as societies change. If we fail to examine our sexual impulses, we treat these as fixed biological facts, exactly what the theorists alluded to have long sought to dispute. From this she concludes that we should all, as far as we are able, notice and revise the hidden prejudices behind our sexual preferences. Srinivasan gives few examples as to how this could be done. She isn’t talking about whether violent desires can and should be controlled, but the more everyday (if you’re lucky) act of choosing a sexual partner. The problem here is that this so easily shades into prescriptiveness or morality: telling people not only how to treat others, but that even desiring certain things is wrong.
A little exploratory probing suggests that capitalism might have a role in this climate of sexual alienation. Pick-up joints and cruisy clubs both gay and straight have long been referred to as ‘meat markets’ in which the leanest, most muscular cuts command the highest price. Desire is an economy, and a particularly brutal one. For all sex is more openly discussed in many societies, we are a long way from the liberation of desire promised during the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Back then thinkers like Herbert Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich were popularly (mis)read as claiming that desire is a revolutionary force simply waiting to be unleashed. If libidinal impulses could be unshackled from sexual reproduction and given free reign, they might transform the family, society and capital.
Michael Portnoy, Progressive Touch (2019).
Progressive Touch nods to this period of idealism by scoring its sex-ed demonstrations to a prog rock soundtrack. As a genre of music associated with the overblown ambitions of Spinal Tap (1984) it’s hardly the subtle vehicle required for intervening in today’s sensitive sexual politics. Portnoy claims there is method behind this madness. Sex, he argues, is so fully commercialised that even the rhythms of fucking have become regulated and routine, modelled on images in cinema and advertising. Like pistons in a factory, we fuck in time. Only by re-choreographing sex to the more complicated, irregular compositions of prog rock might sex be released from commodification, freer and equitable.
For an educational video opposing the industrialisation of sex, everything looks rather laboured and rehearsed. Three scenes chart three couples – one hetero, one homo and one lesbian – as they get their rocks off to unruly prog sounds. A man operates his dick like a gearstick, while a woman beckons him to her vagina as if it were a runway and he the plane. It’s a pitiful image of choreographed consent. Two men engage in coitus that veers from penile air-guitar to a butt-fuck as drum-solo. A female couple exaggeratedly arc their tongues, performing not cunnilingus but a pussy excavation. The last scene shows naked performers either alone or in multiples in a stark black studio; a vision of the non-hierarchical future of sex. The coitus is so self-consciously woke that it looks more funny than fun.
Michael Portnoy, Progressive Touch (2019).
In Portnoy’s vocabulary the words ‘improvement’ and satire are more or less interchangeable. He improved participatory art practices, by poking fun at their often dictatorial terms of engagement and anything goes attitude to the aesthetic, in a project unforgivingly titled Relational Stalinism (2016). So too in Progressive Touch he finds irony in the idea that sex can be made fairer by providing more rules for how and with whom it should be done. Free love has never been free. Think of 70s gay group the Radical Faeries, who made it a rule that nobody could refuse sex to anyone else. Overcoming the issue of erotic exclusion by making it impossible for anyone to give or refuse consent hardly sounds all that fair. The artist’s decision to turn sex education into a source of comedy, produces slapstick from the idea of learning to have more spontaneous sex, or that liberation might be turned into a set of mimicked behaviours. At the same time, it acknowledges that sex looks ridiculous precisely because it is usually a poor imitation of learned behaviours – every one of us is failing to have sex as we think we are supposed to have it.
Progressive Touch picks up where sexual liberation fell down, acknowledging that capitalism, far from repressing desire, encourages and attempts to control it, and finds current solutions to this problem to be woefully lacking. As the title suggests, the video charts a progression from heterosexuality – basic reproduction – to a final scene of polysexuality. It would be easy to assume that the latter represents an anti-elitist, fundamentally democratic form of desire because, well, you’re open to all comers. But if you’ve ever been to an orgy, you’ll know that it’s a far from utopian situation. More choice does not necessarily mean more progress. Sexual expansiveness can be riven with power struggles and exclusions, something recent artistic celebrations of the bathhouse or cruising tend to forget. And isn’t there something essentialist in all of this anyway: as if by getting rid of social restrictions we’d find ourselves capable of wanting anyone at all, implying that the libido is naturally open?
Michael Portnoy, Progressive Touch (2019).
Sex is everywhere in the contemporary art gallery, and extensive with its wider commercialisation. Take the advertising campaign for Tate Modern’s Modigliani exhibition, a year or two ago, which featured a female nude on posters, her breasts and vagina blacked out. The object was clearly not to repress, but more to titillate – likening the artistic nude to pornographic obscenity, with the hope of selling tickets. So long as the ‘taboo’ can be turned to profit, it is tolerated, nullified of its radical political power. ‘A touch of sentimentalism’ wrote Roland Barthes, ‘would that not be the ultimate transgression?’ aware that rule-breaking was exactly what commercial markets desire. The alternative of sentimentalism hardly feels better. A preference for feeling over thought can quickly shade into dogma, however, as emotion goes uninterrogated.
Portnoy’s comedy also deflates the ability of such explicit imagery to excite or to signify transgression – well, at least for me. Barthes reflections on sentimentalism show that he was aware of the fact, that after the sexual revolution capitalism had adopted the pose of rule-breaking as a commercial incitement for youth cultures, or as a means of opening up new, soon to be contained markets such as gay culture. Explicit imagery, or the selling of sex is no longer transgressive even in the high-minded art gallery, so long as it has the sheen of critical reflexivity: just look at the slew of recent exhibitions on porn at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, FRAC, Paris, and Auto Italia South East, London, or the ubiquity of sexy dancers’ bodies at art openings, offering the very objectification from which they also recoil. Transgression is often shaped by the very boundary it seeks to cross. More slippery, and less easily commodified, is the comedy Portnoy employs, playing up ambiguities or failures in the very idea of sexual innovation. Even polysexuality at the end of his video shifts between possibility and passionless learned behaviour.
In the guise of being ethically better or more open, Portnoy seems to suggest, sexual politics risks becoming a grand spectacle – a rock opera, if you will – in which the players try to outdo each other by being more radical. One alienating sexual marketplace is replaced by another, in which certain desires or identities are seen as more progressive or resistant to being co-opted than others. Think of the recent trend that writer Indiana Seresin calls ‘heteropessimism’: straight people publicly distancing themselves from heterosexuality, as if to desire the opposite sex were inherently oppressive or just uncool. Rather than escaping capitalism, such competition between desires only extends it, turning sexual identity into a form of conspicuous ethical consumerism or a means to shame others. Why buy organic when you can buy queer?
This is far from the origins of queer theory in the early 1990s, when the focus was not on promoting queer as some new transgressive identity, but instead on disturbing all sexual definitions or boundaries, finding a core of perversity already existing in the most straight-laced, conventional relationships. Sexual politics are not made fairer or less oppressive by pitting one set of desires against another, but by troubling the values and meanings that privilege any one way of doing it over the many others. As the great porn studies scholar Linda Williams wrote, there is no ‘truth’ to sex.
But we act as though there were, or as though desires or identities could be neatly categorised as progressive or conservative – a moral division that comes undone the moment you see the oppressive effects of supposedly progressive ‘heteropessimism’. As queer thinker Leo Bersani once argued, behind both the sex-positive claim that sex is community building, and the moralist’s claim that sex is about monogamy and intimacy, lies the same impulse to make sex less messy and ambiguous by giving it a morally redeeming purpose. Acting ethically is not the same as moralising according to absolute rules. It is possible, in fact vital, to insist on the fair and kind treatment of others, without believing that any one sex act is inherently oppressive. The implications of any one fuck are contingent, based on the power relations that evolve in that moment, rather than being the learnable code of conduct Portnoy parodies. Not that thinkers like Srinivasan argue for moralising nor for hierarchies of desire, but it is hard to imagine how the act of choosing would not, in practice, be seen as inherently bad, when preference as such is defined as oppressive. Don't we already disparage tastes that conform to norms, which we snottily call 'basic', meaning not sophisticated? Then there's the question of fetishising the minority, choosing them because they buck the trend or worse still, to prove our own ethical standing – aren't I a good person, because I sleep with this often neglected body type, race etc.?
Perhaps ethics might be found in irony, allowing us to give each sex act less absolute meaning, by taking it less seriously. Sex certainly looks pretty stupid in Portnoy’s video, which despite being a parody is not so far-fetched. Fucking is frequently embarrassing, sometimes great and often just OK, rather than an earth-shattering means of personal or political transformation. The ideas attached to sex acts not only change from one era to the next, but are often out of proportion to the fleeting pleasures they actually produce. Rather than trying to improve sex, we might try making it less important, softening slightly its role in establishing our self-worth, as a cause of shame or a means of demonstrating our ethical credentials. Of course, it would be foolish to claim that if we stop idealising sex – a long term project if ever there was one – questions of competition, conflict or exclusion would disappear. If Progressive Touch communicates anything, it’s the foolishness of trying to provide a template for better sex and a better world.