Thread by @deontologistics

Here's a hypothesis I just explained to @mojozozoe that I may as well put out here. DNA is not a map of an organism but a sequence of densely interlinked instructions for constructing one. The Y chromosome provides a very minimal way of modulating this process of construction.

Any attempt to understand (statistical/functional) sexual dimorphism has to begin from this fact, which is made obvious by the size of the Y chromosome relative to not just the X but all the other ones. This has a lot of interesting consequences for thinking about sexuality.

If there's one thing Freud got right about human sexuality it's that it's something that's assembled as the genetic process of constructing an adult organism gets modulated by the social process of producing a (gendered) person. The genesis of sexuality can be *very* extended.

But the way that these interlinked processes encourage us to see sex (and gender) is as a completed product that is mirrored by our genes (or our intrinsic self), rather that something that evolves on not just individually (organism/person) but collectively (species/culture).

To use some more psychoanalytic terminology in a circumspect manner, there are a bunch of drives that aim at 'partial objects' (shapes, gestures, genitals) that get booted up by genes and then need integrating through social experience to produce full blown 'objects' of desire.

We tend to think about sexuality at the personal level, in either first person terms of sexual agency or third person terms of sexual patiency, and, as Firestone speculated, not just the gendering of this split but its very basis on are a product of our regime of reproduction.

When you move to the subpersonal level you find that the recognitive mechanisms that get socially calibrated, differentiated, and integrated into a more or less stable boundary between self (first person) and other (third person) are a source of polymorphously perverse potential.

One of the tragedies of the ongoing culture war over sex, gender, and sexuality is that it encourages us to simplify these potentials in order to defend the legitimacy of certain relatively stable modes of desire that they produce with statistical frequency.

Theoretical and practical defences of the 'queer' are meant to counter such ossification and the forms of complicity it breeds (e.g., being accepted as homosexual as long as one dissociates from 'those' queers). But conceptual tangles emerge even in these quarters (cf. trans/NB).

For instance, for the most part, we're still encouraged to see narcissism as a degenerate product of these complex processes. Here I don't mean the expanded sociological sense of 'narcissism', but the literal sexual fascination with one's self-image, though there will be overlap.

Even in the age of open kink, in which the drives behind masochism and sadism can be discussed, aestheticised, and cultivated in more or less psychologically and sociologically healthy ways, there are other desires that we refuse to see in the same terms, for better or worse.

The most obvious is pedophilia, in which our social impulses to give no quarter to the abuse of children all too easily close down discussion of its genesis. For good reason, we insist that this can only be handled by the discourse of treatment, rather than aesthetic cultivation.

But this hard line is usually enforced with impulses that are themselves rejected when we look at other areas of the libidinal map, even if this rejection is also motivated by good reasons. Take the concept of 'autogynephilia' in the continuing battle for trans rights.

This has to be dismissed as a possible psycho-sexual pathway from masculine/male to feminine/female modes of (social/bodily) self-recognition, because the opponents of such pathways want to use it as a literally *perverse* exemplar of a wide range of possible subjectivations.

Yet as with narcissism, it's worth asking: is there really anything wrong with these impulses, or the various ways in which they can be integrated (subjects/objects)? Is fucking under a mirror, or recalibrating one's internal mirror, really a problem, let alone anyone's business?

When I say 'you do you', the implicit point is that 'you' are something that is done by a bunch of complex recognitive mechanisms whose evolution is the trajectory of your personhood. Personality is a control loop, rather than a libidinal homunculus with its hands on the reigns.

However you need to reconfigure these recognitive mechanisms to make that trajectory not just *tolerable*, but *interesting*, is most likely fine by me. There are exceptions of various kinds, some of which are handled by evolved culture mechanisms (cf. the incest taboo).

The trick is to analyse and maintain these mechanisms without generating unnecessary suffering or curtailing (sexual) autonomy. This is extremely difficult, but I'm with the (radical) queers in thinking that a maximally tolerant approach to desire is generally the right one.

The question is: how do we depoliticise desire without seeing it as something that exists behind some natural fence between the political and non-political? If there's one thing we know about desire, it's that it loves sitting on fences, and even bursting through them with gusto.

Desire will inevitably politicise itself, left to its own devices. The question is thus how best to steer it, and when it's okay to let it take the wheel. Enjoy your self-control guys. 🖖

CODA: For anyone wondering: 'isn't this all a bit like Deleuze & Guattari? Congratulations! Have a body without organs on which to run your own personal becomings in VM. Lines of flight sold separately. Threads you may also enjoy include:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1346847439060348928?s=20

Inspired by interactions with @mojozozoe, @m0lpe, @peligrietzer, @PETARDHOISTER, @HelenHester, @dynamic_proxy, and more.