Almost obligatory:
Ever went over a friend’s house to eat
And the food just ain’t no good?
I mean the macaroni’s soggy, the peas are mushed,
And the chicken tastes like wood.
So you try to play it off like you think you can
By saying that you’re full,
And then your friend says, “Mama, he’s just being polite
He ain’t finished, uh-uh, that’s bull!”
So your heart starts pumpin’ and you think of a lie
And you say that you already ate.
And your friend says “Man, there’s plenty of food”
So he piles some more on your plate.
While the stinky food’s steamin’, your mind starts to dreamin’
Of the moment that it’s time to leave,
And then you look at your plate and your chicken’s slowly rottin’
Into something that looks like cheese.
So you say “That’s it, I gotta leave this place
I don’t care what these people think,
I’m just sittin’ here makin’ myself nauseous
With this ugly food that stinks.”
So you bust out the door while it’s still closed
Still sick from the food you ate,
And then you run to the store for quick relief
From a bottle of Kaopectate.
And then you call your friend two weeks later
To see how he has been,
And he says, “I understand about the food,
Baby Bubba, but we’re still friends.”
–Rappers Delight, The Sugarhill Gang
Yeah, they’re different in both kind and degree, and it’s probably useful to separate the social from the personal. Plenty of wars and insurrections have been fought over social consents being asserted or withdrawn; that’s not a new frontier of thought. But interpersonal interactions, especially sexual ones, necessarily involve more elements of one’s physical body as the territory under dispute, as it were, as opposed to land or resources or, to a lesser degree, religions and such. Conventional progressive wisdom would hold that each person’s body is their temple and their castle, and the dispensation of that castle is solely subject to the whims of its owner’s mind and soul, so if my castle gets it into its head to have a sexual interaction with your castle, we two castle-keepers have to negotiate the terms of the interaction, each of us maintaining veto power and ultimate discretion over what we allow to happen to our own castle. That’s the usual way it is done.
Now, it’s not intellectually dishonest to seek an alternative to that negotiation, necessarily, but many other forms of that negotiation would involve ceding a certain amount of control over one’s castle. Are agency and absolute authority over one’s castle somewhat selfish states? Sure, by definition, if one agrees that one has a self in the first place. Is that in any way inferior to ceding control to other parties, even in cases where trust is absolute? You do seem to imply that the selfishness of demanding control over one’s own body is less “sophisticated” than opening up one’s control of that territory to a communal framework.
And here’s the problem: not too much of that kind of experimentation is going to result in situations that haven’t been tried in the past, often with disastrous results. Sex as ritual, as lottery, as commune… how many exploitative cults have not employed one or more of those frameworks? How many cultists thought they entered into those relationships in clear-eyed, understanding willingness?
This (rather annoyingly) presupposes that being “attached” to one’s bodily integrity, or being “attached” to one’s lovers in an even slightly possessive form (which is a huge umbrella that covers laudable states including protectiveness, fondness, affinity, and a desire to “earn” reciprocal affection) are the kind of “selfish” attachments to be “avoided.” How social can one be without caring about others? How can one care for another without indulging in the very least bit of, for lack of a stronger vocabulary this day, “ownership” that leads one to want Good Things for that person? Now don’t misunderstand: I don’t mean we actually can or should take ownership of those we love or fuck. We have no controlling interest to speak of, as it were. But isn’t it a trifle dishonest to think or speak of “my wife” or “my boyfriend” or “my date” or “my partners” or “my kids” solely in terms that omit or forbid the possessive “my”?
I mean, I’m not one to insist that sex with total randos is necessarily better or worse than sex with a lifetime lover. But it seems to me that a lot of conceivable configurations are best left as concepts, and would be destined to turn out to be failed experiments if implemented. And that’s only because I can conceive of a lot of configurations.
Still, even though a whole lot of people seem to find serial monogamy to be more-or-less their jam (or at least what they’re comfortable thinking about, whether or not that’s the result of ancient and outdated social pressures or simply what blows their skirt up), there are plenty of people who seek alternate constructs, and many who find fulfillment in them. However, when you bring up this point:
…then you start requiring that people cede control of their bodies over to external authorities, and that happens a lot throughout history, and very often ends in tears. You start getting things like sex-as-civic-duty, or sex-as-marital-duty, or sex-as-holy-requirement. I’m perfectly happy to postulate that we can evolve ourselves beyond the pure biological reproductive imperative and just have sex 'cause it’s fun and we want to. But that condition (“fun”) is as subjective a determination as love and desire and jealousy and possessiveness. “Fun” isn’t a comfortable fit with pure altruism, if for no other reason than that plenty of fun things are far from altruistic. But if you’re not having sex for the fun and pleasure of it, then why do it at all? 'Cause you want to have kids? Great! Welcome to the 12th century BCE! 'Cause you want to make someone else feel good? Okay, swell, that’s awfully nice of you. Can you do that well (or halfway convincingly) if you don’t really want to do it yourself?
Well, first of all, how many discouraged nerds have asked this, after having been turned down and rejected by a hundred potential mates who simply aren’t interested in them that way? All of them.
But your point holds true, to a certain extent. Not 100%. I have had a couple dozen romantic and/or sexual relationships in my life, of varying degrees of intensity and longevity, and some of them contained some ineffable biochemical component that can only be described as “chemistry” that had nothing much to do with social conditioning and everything to do with “oh my god, I feel so wonderful when I’m right next to this person that I gotta be there now and always,” which feeling did a lot to offset other incompatibilities, some of which were quite serious, and occasionally ended up being dealbreakers. And some of those relationships were built almost entirely upon foundations that lay upon social conditioning forces rooted deep in puritanical WASPy values that surrounded our childhoods. And weirdly, both foundations seemed to have an equivalent chance at relatively long-term success, though (as anecdotal as anything can be) my current 10-year-marriage does have that strong chemistry component working for it.
That said, although this kind of self-examination is healthy, at a certain point I think it’s best to assume that most people know what they like and what they don’t, and we ought to trust them in that. Once we remove the “self-deterministic” engine for consent, then we cede that control to somebody else, and we have to trust that that somebody else isn’t going to exploit us for their gain and at our expense. Even if you yourself wouldn’t mind volunteering your body parts for the entertainment use of somebody with whom you have no specific consent agreement, few others indeed would find that a desirable headspace to inhabit, I’ll bet.
