Escape Velocity

"do we have to stick to penis and vagina norms?"

The logic of a cultural system founded on the feeling of being oppositional and transgressive forces that system to extend, and extend, and extend. It has to keep going. Cluster B political culture can only be in your face, and then be in your face, and then be in your face. Push push push push push. It cannot declare victory and live quietly on the ground it took.

Society: Okay, we accept (thing that wasn’t accepted ten minutes ago).

Movement: WELL WE DEMAND THAT YOU ACCEPT (bizarre new extension).

So.

“Laura A. Jacobs, LCSW-R (pronouns: she/he/they/none) is a trans and genderqueer psychotherapist, speaker, author and activist specializing in gender and sexual diversity including transgender, gender nonbinary and LGBTQIA+ issues more broadly, as well as kink/BDSM, nonmonogamy and sexworkers.”

A delightful encapsulation of the empowering culture of nonmonogamous trans BDSM. If you want the whole flavor of that in less than two minutes, the meat of the thing — if you see what I did there — has been precisely excerpted on Twitter, so click the link to play the video.

This train is on tracks. You’re looking at the place it was always going to go. WAIT I HAVE AN IDEA WHAT IF GENITALS WERE INFINITE AND INTERCHANGEABLE FLOWERS THAT WE COULD KEEP ON A SHELF AND ROTATE AT WILL AND OUR SO-CALLED PENISES COULD BE SENSATE ABSTRACT SCULPTURE AND AND AND….

Because it had to advance, and it still has to advance. Next week will take us to the next step beyond a rotating blend of shelf-stable snap-on flowerdicks. The transgressive and oppositional thing can’t settle, because then, by definition, it stops being transgressive and oppositional. So we sail right through abstract sculpture neoginas, and go right on the next thing. Can’t wait to find out what that is.

Two long streams of human history are at war in this behavior.

One is the growing sense of privacy and personal autonomy, the modern personhood that allowed serfs and helots to become bourgeois householders whose homes are their castles. Lawrence v. Texas struck down a state sodomy statute on the grounds that personal behavior in the intimate private sphere isn’t subject to the intercession of state power.

That idea came from somewhere. In a famous-to-historians paper, the historian Ruth Bloch argued that wifebeating prosecutions declined in the early American republic because of the emerging conception of household privacy: Why should courts reach inside a man’s home and exert control over the way he handled his own family?¹ The emergence of LGB-centered privacy comes from the emergence of privacy. It’s modern, liberal, and bourgeois. I’ve been yearning to use “bourgeois” in a sentence, just for my own personal entertainment.

The other stream is utopianism and millenarianism, and the long tradition of narcissistic reinvention: everyone else has gotten human existence wrong, so we’re going to completely reinvent it. The French Revolution, the Soviet Revolution, 19th-century utopian communities, the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

One of those threads is sustainable. The other one will do what it always does. The only question is the one of timing. My guess is that YouTube videos about interchangeable flower genitals kind of suggests that we’re getting close to the end.

1. Communities contested this conception of privacy with the ritual of skimmington, or “rough music,” and men who were persistently brutal with their families in the small towns of the early republic were often dragged into the street and…dealt with.