Political Pornography

the disembodied sexuality of politics in our aegosexual age

Most of my “knowledge” isn’t first-hand. I don’t watch the Odyssey, but I see the twitter posts, and develop an opinion on that basis. I don’t read the book, I read the Wikipedia summary. I don’t listen to Slavoj Žižek, I hear my friend explain him to me.

According to one such explanation, Zizek describes the way in which men might someday have sex with robots. Since these robots would be designed for the pleasure of the man, and be cheap to mass produce and manufacture, men would begin to prefer sex with robots over sex with real women. Similarly, women would prefer sex with robots over sex with real men. Eventually, men and women would entirely separate, living with their robot partners instead of real partners.

But at some point, these robots might have sex with one another, either by accident, or out of the curiosity of their owners. Since these robots are literally “sex machines,” their form of sex would be more exciting, more invigorating, and more arousing than anything humans could achieve. Thus, humans might prefer, at some point, to watch two sex robots have sex, rather than having sex themselves.

Then, as this process becomes normalized, you could get a couple, male and female, who, instead of having sex with one another, both voyeuristically watch their two sex robots go at it. This sounds ridiculous, of course, but there are many ways in which you can see this as a metaphor for things we already do.

Porn, obviously, is the act of watching others have sex. But I would also describe politics as “pornographic.”

When I say that politics is pornographic, the first objection I receive is that I am overly sexualizing everything, which, supposedly, is the chief sin of our “oversexualized society.” I think this is a fundamental mistake.