Thread by @SevenDeviled

Our newly minted Nobel laureate apparently once said:

"There are few forces more powerful than sexual desire and few forms of inequality more palpable than inequality of access to sex."

...inequality of access to sex...access to sex...access to sex...

I want to sit with that for a moment. What can we "access" & what can we not? Resources? Commodities? Access also suggests a process, a mode of production so that something has to be processed, packaged, stored, displayed, before it can enter the stage of "access," right?

Like water is there in rivers & lakes, but it has to be extracted, transported, stored & distributed so people can "access" it. So how does this work with sex...? Questions, questions, questions.

Because our Nobel hero explicitly frames "access" as a heterosexual male problem, let us play along. So the source of the commodity "sex" is women (as a collective, hence singular) & the cishet male problem is that the source of a commodity is restricting access to the commodity.

Hence, "access" becomes competitive & resources i.e. consensual sex with presumably willing women, are scarce. Nobel hero says" "Having that inequality being thrown at your face, day in and day out, by A LANGUAGE OF THE BODY that leaves little to the imagination..."(my emphasis).

So we have another layer of complication here: The source (women) restrict access to a commodity (sex) & taunt the (male) consumer with the unequal distribution of sexual access through a language (i.e. body).

The commodity has now entered the stage of discourse. Fascinating.

Of course, the discourse is one of negation, refusal, non-consent. This is the premise of feminist sex-lib, radical & liberatory. But not for our Nobel champion, no, for him, a commodity has refused to be consumed, inconceivable in this fantasy market economy of gender relations.

Now it gets more interesting. Nobel genius asks: "What are we doing as a society to reduce inequality of access to sex? I don’t mean publicly provided brothels — though those are not unknown in history — but just the right to a normal conjugal life."

"nOrMaL cOnJuGaL lIfE"

To our intrepid empiricist, "publicly provided brothels" i.e. where predominantly caste-based sex work operates as work (that's hereditary & high-risky), transactions that provide wages (unstable, precarious wages) & that reify caste, are not a solution to iNeQuAlItY oF sEx.

Instead, it is "conjugal life" where iNeQuAlItY oF sEx it seems is most apparent. Our Nobel winner now launches into a muddled tangent about the paucity of urban housing, how people don't have a place to have sex, that young lovers have to loiter in the streets (OH THE HORROR)...

... and that somehow in the process "conjugal life" has been denied to them. Men who dont have a house cant have sex, can't have a family, hence, they are incels.

The real incel tragedy for Banerjee here is then not of sex of but of lack of blissful conjugality. Very telling.

Euro-American incel culture has primarily been a problem of sex. But for Banerjee, it's more than sex, it's the material life around which sex can happen that marks the iNeQuAlItY oF sEx. But before we rush to presume he is being so materialist & radical here...

...let us ask: Is conjugal life a right? Is there a right to marriage as much as there is a right to sex as much as there is a right to a house where you can have sex? Who has this right? What makes an elite Brahmin male like Banerjee presume such a right is reasonable?

Perhaps... Brahminism?

The same Brahminism that treats marriage as a contract, women & their bodies as commodities through which capital can be accumulated & caste-class relations reproduced...? Perhaps only a male Brahmin economist can tell us to "get real" about this system.

But of course, Banerjee's obnoxious logic is premised on women's bodies & sexual labour as commodities, of male-female relations as one of exchange, extraction & accumulation & MARRIAGE as a liberating force for sexual freedoms.

Anticaste feminists should only LOL.

But the thing is the SACW website where Banerjee's article is reproduced also has a response by two upper-caste feminists -- Srimati Basu & Brinda Bose. And their response is disappointingly but unsurprisingly equally Brahminical.

That a conjugal home - premised on endogamous marriage & caste-segregated urban housing - can be a space for an "exciting" social & sexual life isn't something feminists should state easily. Yet, they do.
Without a caste-construction of gender relations, this is hollow feminism.

And any male who wants to speak of inequality without once factoring in female, queer, transgender subjectivities to sex & desire, without factoring in critiques of heteronormative marriage (how do you miss the whole 2nd wave, ffs), keeping only a superficial logic of "access"...

... to class relations is complicit in rape culture. This article is not even a defence of rape culture or incels so much as a defence of caste culture & caste economy. Banerjee's soft-RSS stance elsewhere is also no surprise.
Full article & response here: sacw.net/article3297.ht…

My own reading (in case anyone wants reccos) is based on Ambedkar's 'Castes in India,' Marx's 'Economic & Political Manuscripts' especially on labor, Engels' 'Origins of Family, Private Property, State,' & Federici's Caliban & the Witch (& some other essays).