Why Do Women Fight for Their Servitude as Stubbornly as Though It Were Their Salvation?A Polemic Against the Sexual Revolution

The fundamental problem in political philosophy, as Deleuze famously proclaims in Anti-Oedipus, is one that Spinoza had identified four centuries ago: “Why do men fight so for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” The organization of social institutions produces a desire in individuals for even the most destructive forms of social subjectivation. Ruinous forces of servitude appear as seductive as pornography. The most fundamental problem in contemporary feminist philosophy is a direct offset of these “More taxes! Less Bread!” values of the Enlightenment: “Why do women fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

In contemporary feminist discourse, the rallying call for a sexual revolution echoes above all others. The myth of sexual liberation provides an idyllic vision for a society unrestrained by what is believed to be puritanical repression. Looking through this lens, Judeo-Christianity seeps into every nook and cranny of what is considered to be the “hegemonic ethic”. Salvation of the soul necessitates the repression of the body under the masculine force of God. In order to break the chains of oppression, women must no longer exist as prudes. The hammer that disintegrates our chains must be the libidinal economy!

In reality, the cult of the body has formed its own religion. The body has “become an object of salvation” as Baudrillard declares in The Consumer Society. Within contemporary society, there is a constant stream of unabating propaganda convincing people to believe in their bodies. Instead of the command to save your soul, there is now the imperative: “You have a body, and you must put it to good use. You must derive pleasure from it”. Rather than individualized desire towards an object, contemporary society demands that individuals generalize their bodily curiosity towards all forms of pleasure. Perhaps the unfulfillment in your life could be precluded by Japanese fetishes. Perhaps ketamine will be your salvation. The liberation of the body does nothing but turn it into another consumer object. Current structures of consumption force the body to be represented, in its supposed liberation, as both capital and fetish. 

The mythos of the sexual revolution is nothing but an offset of this body-fetishism. Sexual liberation demands the liberation of the body from repression, a repression that only exists in simulacrum to maintain the body’s status as a consumer object. As well as contributing to modern economic conditions, the sexual revolution advances the state of female repression. Transactional sex requires the mutual objectification of the other. Both parties become objects for the other with no use-value beyond pleasure. This form of objectification holds different connotations for men and women. Men are no strangers to turning women into pleasure-objects. Whether or not a woman can objectify a man holds no comparable social or existential value. The sexual revolution is thus the sexual objectification of woman repackaged with the image of liberation. Not only this, but it gives the woman an illusion of freedom that precludes any real revolutionary ideology. If women are content with their repression and believe it to be liberation, why would they rebel against this structure? Why do women fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation? It is because their servitude appears to them wearing the skin of salvation.

In modern mythology, the repression of the body and the exploitation of the woman were carried out in one fell swoop. Both were repressed in the same spirit and became inextricably interlinked. The emancipation of both women and the body were also carried out in the same spirit, forgetting to sever the tie that binds them together. Now, in contemporary society, the woman is yet again inextricably interlinked with the body. This is the origin for the mythos of sexual liberation, the mythos that women must save their bodies before they can save their souls. In reality, insofar as women sexually liberate themselves, they become more inextricably interlinked with their bodies. The more women fall for the mythos of the sexual revolution, the more they become the fetishized sex-object, the consumer-object. Real liberation is impossible if women continue to be illusioned by the image of salvation that only provides their servitude.

None of this should come as a surprise if we acknowledge feminism’s origins in the Enlightenment. Designating the nonspecific and ever-failing notion of “equality” as its goal should have been the first sign. Above all, manifestations of feminism evoke the enlightenment in their subjugation of the soul to the body. The soul is uncertain, fallible, indeterminate. Only the body we can know. In the Enlightenment’s aim to have a fundamental ontology of the world, it in turn ends in the body-fetishism so indicative of modern feminism.

This is not a condemnation of liberation or of feminism. It is a call to acknowledge the anti-liberatory structures that women are inculcated to accept. Only when we reject this body-fetishism and reject the mythos of sexual liberation, finally disentangling the woman from the body, will it be possible to move towards a true liberatory ideology.