On Desire

Excerpt: Most of all, terms like “sapiosexual” and “demisexual” seek to make stable and coherent and legible and understandable a part of our lives that is simply not something we can easily contain: Desire.

I found Samantha Allen’s hilarious and biting critique of “sapiosexuals,” “Pretentious Is Not a Sexual Orientation,” and posted it on Twitter. While in conversation with someone about the concept, I recounted my own tale of Desire, included here at the end. I thought I’d turn out a quick and short piece on the concept of “sapiosexuals” and the hyper-calibration of identities on the web and in real life, but I also wanted to separate myself from the part of the deeply racist left that loves to “critique identity politics” and really only means to whine, “Why can’t we just pretend that only white men matter?” At the same time, I wanted to write about the silliness of trauma-posturing in queer radical circles while also thinking about Desire. Most of all, I wanted to have some fun with all this.

You can also listen to an audio recording of this piece here:

Have you heard of “sapiosexuals?” The term has been around for some years and, as such terms and utterly stupid ideas often will, recently started floating up in feeds everywhere, much as an ancient turd, made solid by years of slime and gunk adhering to it, will do every now and then.

According to Urban Dictionary, a sapiosexual is “One who finds the contents of someone else’s mind to be their most attractive attribute, above and before their physical characteristics.” I’m not sure why this qualifies as anything in particular to be named. In an excellent take-down (published in 2015, so sometimes good things also come floating back up to the top), Samantha Allen points to additional problems with the concept:

In every scientific and sociological sense of the term, sapiosexuality is not a sexual orientation. A person who likes writers is not a scribosexual, a person who likes lawyers is not a jurosexual, and a person who loudly proclaims that they only date smart people might be dangerously full of themselves, but they’re not a “sapiosexual.”

I love the internet, I really do. Without it, my writing career would have been impossible, without it, I wouldn’t be back in touch with childhood friends, without it, I wouldn’t have some of the best and dearest friends I have, many of whom I first met or continue to still meet online, and so on. But the internet also has its perils, and one is that it allows us to diagnose ourselves into paranoid fits of hysteria about our physical health (a wart is an indication of a tumour, and gas is stomach cancer). That kind of self-diagnosis has more recently become part of a new kind of identity-formation gone wild. For example: suddenly, seemingly, everyone is “on the spectrum,” a term used to signify that one is perhaps a bit odd, perhaps unable to strike up a conversation, perhaps even downright rude, but quite definitely a veritable genius and thus to be bowed down to or at least excused for, perhaps, shitty manners and obnoxious behaviour.

None of this does any good to the hard and uphill battle still fought by sincere and genuine autism activists, many of them beleaguered parents, who would like systems of education and employment and, you know, the world in general, to open up to people with varying degrees of autism.

Those of us who try, damned hard, to organise in radical queer communities find it maddeningly difficult because Our People are prone to self-diagnose With Multiple Conditions Some of Which Were Invented Five Minutes Ago, and they will use those Conditions to claim they just can’t do the work of organising itself. Indeed, too often, many of us find that the work of organising becomes the work of tending to multiple Problems brought on by various Conditions (“I can’t possibly make those flyers for the event today because I woke up feeling bad about something.”) Self-Diagnosis with Multiple Conditions (SDMC) is the drug of choice amongst us: go to any queer gathering and people are doing lines of that shit on every available surface. You dare not speak of anything with anything less than complete enthusiasm and multiple affirmations, for fear you will at least injure if not break someone’s heart. And you dare not even touch anyone for fear of literally breaking something or triggering them about something.

What does this have to do with sapiosexuals, who exist only in their own mind?

“Sapiosexual” is part of the hyper-calibration of identities that proliferate on the web and in real life.

I state all this as someone on the left—in some quarters, I’m considered so out-there-left that even Famous Marxists have denounced me as “Ultra Left,” for my critiques of gay marriage and Greta Thunberg, for example (I like to think of myself as a really strong detergent, washing away the sins of the left: UtraLeft for the stains you thought you’d never get rid of!). And on the left, it’s considered currently very hip to say that “identity” is the problem, a view held mostly by stodgy white lefty men and the women who emulate them, and many lefties of colour who wish to prove they’re every bit as left as their white comrades. Most of this kind of argumentation is just plain old racism poured into a lovely red bottle. The left mourns the days when we could just talk about class, class, class and wishes that everyone would just shut up about the messy stuff like race and gender. Recall, if you will, that the 2016 election saw a number of brazenly racist pieces from lefties like Jodi Dean and Connor Kilpatrick that dog-whistled the exact kind of racist politics they claimed to be above: pay attention to the white working class, they admonished us. For the white-dominated left, a critique of identity politics is little more than asserting the dominance of whiteness, a nostalgia for the days when we could all just march through the streets to the tune of “The Internationale” united by nothing more than class consciousness.

But a truly useful critique of identity isn’t mired in this kind of nostalgia which ignores, for instance, the fact that vast swaths of the working class in the United States are in fact black and/or migrant and often undocumented workers moving from place to place but also forming connective tissues with cities and towns, the sort of ties and re-formations of “America” that are still to be discerned by the traditional left. A useful critique of identity is to acknowledge not that it’s not important but that it structures people’s lives within their quest for rightly wished for left utopias—that Black radical leftist professor, for instance, will be stopped by security guards from entering his own office at night or, worse, shot. That fact of raw discrimination is not something you can dematerialise—so how do we on the left both acknowledge its materiality and use it to think about how capital works to enforce vulnerabilities and brutalities upon, say, “the life of the mind”? What use is a critique of capitalism that will not acknowledge that the critique itself is bounded by strategies of exclusion that can include raw death?

My point here is to very carefully extricate myself from the racist shittery of a left which uses a “critique of identity politics” to reinscribe its historical racism (and we will not start here to look at the left’s history of misogyny and homophobia because then, oh, my, we will be here all day and night). My point is also to say, though, that we in certain parts of the left have in fact taken to the art of identity with too much ardour: even pain and trauma have become identities we proudly affix to our fabulous clothes, like the many buttons that declare our politics.

And this is where “sapiosexual” comes in, even if not all of its claimants are queer. It’s yet another useless identity category that does nothing but provide yet another useless set of definitions for something we need not define. Labels like “sapiosexual” and “demisexual” (someone who only has sex with an emotional connection) may seem liberatory, but they’re really the opposite: they’re about further delimiting and defining sexual desire and acts. Why do we need to specify that we’re “demisexuals” if we’re not also somehow invested in maintaining our sense of superiority and sheer specialness over those who randomly hook up, in a time when casual sex is more prevalent and accepted? Why assert that you’re attracted to people’s minds, as if sexual desire has not always been a complex intermingling of intellectual and physical conjoining?

Most of all, terms like “sapiosexual” and “demisexual” seek to make stable and coherent and legible and understandable a part of our lives that is simply not something we can easily contain: Desire.

Allow me to give you an example. I was at a movie screening with a couple of friends, at the Music Box, and the preview was a short documentary about these women drummers (I forget all relevant details). I couldn’t tell you what kind of drums (a range) they played, but I can assure you they were not the usual sort of women I associate with drumming: lesbian or queer drummers who connect to Mother Earth and leave me with my eyes rolling as they talk about the spiritual aspects of drumming, or something. No, these women were hardcore, and they were really damned good. At one point, all three of them stood around three giant drums and pounded away and oh, glory, they were nothing at all like the lesbian drummers of my yore. And at that moment, well, actually, for several such before that, my heart and my libido rushed and bounded and burst. I turned to R., sitting to my right and said, “I’m attracted to female drummers! I mean, really attracted.” Even in the dim light, I could see R’s right eyebrow arch up, as it is apt to do, as he asked, with no judgement, only curiosity, “Since when?” “Since about now,” I responded.

Which is really the only point I want to make: Desire is weird and odd, and it comes upon us unbidden, joyously grabbing us by the hands. You may want to think that all that attracts you in any person is their mind, and then the very next day you find yourself deeply attracted to someone because she is utterly gorgeous and uncaring, like a 1920s flapper girl on the precipice of an era now glorious with newness and adventure, only some years before the world crashes and she knows the time is now, and she is wild and uncaring and who knows if she can even spell “sapiosexual” and who cares? Or you might think you’re a “demisexual,” yet another idiotic term which you use to insist that you are one of those who can only have sex with people with whom you have an emotional connection and that very night you find yourself under the bar with the bartender whose name you don’t learn and then you return the next night and then the next and so on and you don’t dare tell your friends—or your girlfriend—about all the mindless fucking you get up to because you’d have to explain how it is that you now fuck without “an emotional connection.”

Rather than strut around the world with a term like “sapiosexual,” why not just accept that you can never define your desire? You can only give in to it.

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