InsERECTION: Deobjectifying Sexuality

“The sexual is a very great thing. By sexual I mean whenever your body is alive, sensuous, throbbing, pulsating—then you are in a sexual state. It may not have anything to do with the genital. For example, when you are dancing you are sexual…the dance energy is sexual energy. It is not genital; you may not be thinking at all about sex, you may have completely forgotten about sex. In fact, when you forget everything about sex and you are dissolved into any deep participation with your total body, it is sexuality.” - Zen by Osho

The paradoxies of Western morality have allowed Western culture to grow saturated with the power of the genital, dripping with compulsive sexualities, self-deceit, and images of  scantily-clad bodies strewn around advertised products; in turn, the sense of the erotic self evaporates from the body and the psyche, leaving us deprived of our most unadulterated—and beautiful—essence. In article “America: Oversexualized and Sexually Repressed” Pamela Wibe, MD echoes this sentiment, arguing that “Americans are overfed, yet starving. It’s the same thing with sex…Our culture rams it down our throat and then says it’s bad, don’t do it.” The sexual has become equated with the genital rather than with the visceral. We now hide from our own bodies. We are trapped within a cacophony of hypocritical values that force us to be hidden from our base desires while simultaneously causing us to misinterpret them.

            This is especially true for LGBT individuals and people of color, for both demographics are highly oversexualized and objectified as deviously ambiguous forces that mystify the white and heteronormative structures that dominate Western society. It is normal for individuals who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer to be defamed as sexually abnormal, or even fetishized.

Anya Josephs touches upon the fetishization of lesbians in her article “The sexualization of queer women in media” when she writes: “There are dozens of TV shows and other kinds of media where women are romantically or sexually involved with each other for the pleasure of male viewers, and far fewer where genuine lesbian relationships are shown. The sexuality of queer women is drowned out by imitations of it centered at pleasing male viewers.” In Western society, lesbian intimacy through the locus of male pleasure is encouraged; lesbian existence is confined into an outlet for—and enabler of—male fantasy and ejaculation. Thus, the intuitive power of the lesbian as a lover and a healer is erased.

Although gay men’s male identity makes them immune from experiencing misogyny (unlike lesbians), they are also targeted by corrupted virtues of pleasure. The treatment of gay men—who are slandered as “…highly sexualized beings possessing insatiable sexual appetites”—within the prison-industrial complex serves as a prime example (Mogul 53). For instance, when HIV-positive inmate Timmy Tucker was raped by another inmate, guards asked him if he “learned [his] lesson” and told him that he should have enjoyed the rape because he was gay (Mogul 102-3). The bodily autonomy of gay men is oftentimes invalidated and nullified by the heterosexual male world. When gay men narrate their social bodies with homosexual identity in the form of “coming out,” their newly-expressed sexual agency threatens the heteronormative, patriarchal order that dominates the Western world. Rather than being viewed as an exertion of subversive power, heteromasculinity represses this act by restricting gay men to the sensations of their erogenous organs—even if they are nonconsensual.

Gay men are not the only individuals who suffer under objectifying stereotypes through the locus of the prison-industrial complex; trans women experience heightened brutality within the prison system. When incarcerated, they are thrown into men’s facilities, where they are “…relegated to a ‘virtual torture chamber’ of incessant sexual assault and humiliation at the hands of staff and other prisoners” and made to believe that “…if you’re not fucking somebody, you’re going to get fucked by everybody.” In one case, a trans inmate grew so traumatized that she attempted to castrate herself twice (Mogul 102, 107, 112). According to keynote lecturer Julia Serano, outside of the prison system, trans women—who are seen as “men in drag”—are forced into the transmisogynist archetypes of: “the gay man who transitions to female in order to seduce unsuspecting straight men, the male pervert who transitions to female in order to fulfill some kind of bizarre sex fantasy, and the overrepresentation of trans women as sex workers” (Mogul 53). Trans female bodies and sexualities are relegated to the ranks of the subhuman, the exotic, and the impostor by Western society—and more specifically, rigid Western gender binaries. This degradation subsequently classifies trans women as objects to toy with, violate, and even destroy.

Queers and transgender people are not the only ones impacted by objectified sexuality. In fact, the systemic stereotypes that violate the autonomies and bodies of LGBT people are often superimposed on nonwhite populations, hence its reincarnation in the form of sexualized racism. According to the authors of Queer (In)Justice, while the black woman is viewed as “…[a participant] in a cluster of ‘deviant female sexualities,’” black men are vilified as “…[rapists] preying on ‘pure’ white women” and individuals who pose a greater threat than ‘sodomites’” (Mogul et al. 6). For instance, in her article “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls,” feminist psychologist Carolyn West notes that the image of the black Jezebel “…[brands] black women as sexually promiscuous and immoral” and “…deserving of sexual assault” (West 294-5). As stated byMichigan Daily reporter Amia Davis, in early 2014, local black men and queer people of color grew so outraged with the hypersexualization of black male bodies that they collaborated together to create a panel event called “Telling the Untold Truth,” an open dialogue that sought to discuss—and dissect—“…the sexual and physical assault descriptions [that often] depict Black men…as the aggressors.”

In addition to blacks being demonized as hypersexual degenerates, women of Asian descent carry the brunt of sexual fetishization as well in the form of being depicted as sex workers. In her article “Breaking Down Sexualized Stereotypes of Asian Women,” Janice Sapigao contends that Asian female sexuality is compartmentalized into two main stereotypes: the “Geisha Girl” and the “China Doll.” She then elaborates on these titles by arguing that “The ‘Geisha Girl’ stereotype is reduced down to that of a [sex worker] or sex entertainer in Western culture” and that the stereotype of the “China Doll” “…portrays Asian women as subservient, complaint, and eager to please…Like dolls for children, Asian women are meant to be seen and played with—their value and worth relies solely on their appearances.”

While Asian women are sexually commodified by Orientalism, Latin@s are sexually commodified by Tropicalism. According to University of Illinois scholars Isabel Molina Guzman and Angharad N. Valdivia, by “…[homogenizing] all that is identified as Latin or Latina/o,” Tropicalism perpetuates the tropes of “the male Latin lover, macho, dark-haired, mustachioed, and the spitfire female Latina characterized by redcolored lips, bright seductive clothing, curvaceous hips and breasts, long brunette hair, and extravagant jewelry” (211). It is no coincidence that in January 1989, immigrant Miguel Castillo was wrongfully charged in court for murdering a gay man—who was an immigrant as well—under the premise that he—despite identifying as heterosexual—was in a relationship with this man and murdered him due to being a “…hot-tempered, jealous Latino male lover who responds with rage and violence” (Mogul et al. 70).

Along with Asian and Latin@ individuals, the hypersexualization of indigenous women’s bodies persists within Western society as well. As stated by Everyday Feminism writer Taté Walker, indigenous women are especially stereotyped in the form of culturally appropriative depictions (e.g., Halloween costumes) and are thus expected to believe that “…a Native girl’s value lies in her exotic, leather-clad (yet idyllically Western) body.” Consequently, according to Walker, this exotification of indigenous women results in abuse, for “…one out of every three Native women will be raped in her lifetime.” We see here that, like black women, Native women are seen as deserving of sexual abuse/assault.

            By shielding us from instinctual longings, cravings, and needs (especially if we are of color or LGBT), Western civilization prohibits us from accessing an important truth: the human body is a vessel that bursts with sexual energy. As Osho reiterated in Zen, this energy transcends the boundaries of genitalia. However, our current culture conflates human sexuality with genital stimulation and nothing else. Black feminist writer Audre Lorde criticizes this conflation in “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” when she states: “We have been taught to suspect this resource [of the erotic], vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society…So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex…When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as…the knowledge and use of what we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (Lorde 89). (In this case, the embodiment of “We” is especially applicable to nonwhites and lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgender people.) French philosopher Georges Bataille furthers Lorde’s point by asserting that “…only men appear to have turned their sexual activity into erotic activity: Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest independent of the natural goal: reproduction and the desire for children…The whole business of eroticism is to strike the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still” (Bataille 11, 17). Instead of recognizing sensuality as a positive force that blissfully enshrouds the body in the mists of passion and grounds it in viscerality (in a way that is not entirely contingent upon the stimulation of the genitals), it is objectified and oversexualized as an oppressive commodity.

            As reiterated by Osho, Lorde, and Bataille, eroticism is more visceral than genital; sexuality cannot—and should not—be solely equated with genital stimulation, and it cannot be contorted into forms of hypersexualization. Rigid Western gender binaries, rape culture, racism, patriarchy, media, and the prison-industrial complex heavily contribute to the byproducts of this equation. Genital-centric sexuality shares the same geneaology with gender essentialism in the sense that both depend on the strict categorization of one’s being based on the type of genitalia that they possess (thus confining—and distorting—the erotic into a socialized cage of oppressive rigidity). A prominent systemic perpetuator of the bastardization of the sensual is the media; it is the powerhouse that produces the imagery and stigma that precipitates acts—and sentiments—of objectified eroticism (specifically towards people of color and LGBT individuals). The hypersexualization of the LGBT community and the bodies of POC (post-mass production of forms of media that demonize these demographics) directly correlates with rape culture, patriarchy, and racism; when sexual assault occurs, members of both groups are victim blamed by those who have been indoctrinated into—and embrace—the idea that these individuals desired the abuse due to their promiscuous “nature.” Consequently, these persecutory discourses are then manifested into instutions such as prisons. In order to deobjectify sexuality, we must deconstuct all of these forces. The bastions that preserve (e.g, the media) and reinforce/continually reanimate (e.g, the prison-industrial complex) the historic legacy of white supremacy/the objectification of brown and black bodies must be destroyed; furthermore, the Western gender binary—which serves as a detriment to trans women, specifically trans women of color—must go along with them. The purity and rawness of the erotic as a form of inner power, love, and strength needs to be reclaimed. Only then will we receive justice and autonomy over our bodies.