The banality of disenchantment

Review of Rethinking Sex — A Provocation, by Christine Emba. Sentinel/Penguin/Random House, 2022, 204 pages.

“Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.”

— Wendell Berry

The subject of sexual disenchantment is reoccurring on my page lately, first with the podcast “Mary Harrington & Cyborgs,” then with “Listen to your mother,” a review of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and now it appears we have a trilogy, with this review of Christine Emba’s book, Rethinking Sex.

I’m just starting work on a book about desire, and the sexual face of desire is one of many I want to explore. What these three writers — Harrington, Perry, and Emba — confront us with, however, is not just the desire to, but the question of ought to. They seek the reintroduction of critical and ethical reflection on the subject of sex beyond the imposed discursive boundaries of cultural libertarianism. In a Venn diagram of all three authors, the center merges over (1) the disaster of sex constructed as a mere transaction, and (2) refreshingly honest discussions about why the consent standard is such a woefully inadequate metric by which to judge sexual ethics.

And yes, I think sex should be subject to judgement. Shoot me. Not the self-serving and self-righteous “judgement” of gossips and hypocrites. The virtue of good judgement is essential for getting by in the world as a decent human being in a way that doesn’t leave a thoughtless damage path in his or her wake.

Segue to virtue: virtue ethics are at the heart of Emba’s book. She’s a Catholic — it takes one to know one — and this Catholic has seen her playbook. For most readers, though, she’s “translating” virtue ethics into whatever it is they speak now. For me — like Perry and Harrington — she’s translating modern dating culture for a reclusive old reader who’s been out of the dating “market” (what a horrifying phrase!) for several decades. What I’m hearing and reading is none too comforting.

I’ve never used a “dating app,” thank God, but it’s pretty apparent on its face that they are — especially for women — analogous to rolling in beef liver to take a swim out past the surf line.

Christine Emba is a Washington Post columnist. Her professional discipline shows admirably in the directness, accessibility, and clarity of her prose. I’ll give one extended quote, not just to show off said accessibility and clarity, but also because it goes directly to my own current entanglement in the squirming, tentacled topic of desire.

Sex is not amoral. Some desires are worse than others. Yet the bias toward unquestioning acceptance makes it difficult to say so, even when something feels obviously wrong. Because apart from nonconsent, is it possible for anything to be wrong?

The critic Michael Sacasas has written about how modern Western societies have come to think about desire, compared with other cultures and traditions. Generally speaking, he thinks, “we’re less likely to judge our desires negatively on conclude that they ought to be deferred, circumscribed, or even possibly denied.” It’s not a particularly attractive stance, when stated baldly — in fact it reeks of self-centeredness. But we have built a web of justifications for it, ones that we are willing to state aloud and ones that we tend not to want to acknowledge, even to ourselves.

Some of the justifications are admirably open-hearted. An increased appreciation of intersectionality has led to the understanding that lived experience is shaped in different ways by race, gender, and class, making people who are committed to equal rights justifiably wary of endorsing universal prescriptions. Having adopted the “born this way” ethos to support LGBTQ rights in particular, many of us are loathe to pull back and suggest that desire is mutable. We don;t want to suggest that some orientations might be a choice, and risk those groups’ marginalization. We are uncomfortable imposing our personal views on others; in a free society, morality is seen as a private affair.

Other justifications are a predictable result of an increasingly capitalist, market-logic culture — “the very principle of which is that what we want, we should have,” in Sacasas’s words. We’re urged to fully explore our inclinations and multiply our paths to personal fulfillment. But to question the primacy of desire would eventually mean suggesting that some forms of sexual expression [Emba had just described a woman’s experience with a guy who wanted to choke her during sex] are better or worse than others, or harmful if their consented to. It feels like a slippery slope. We don’t want to judge other people’s desires for fear of being judged ourselves. Who will get to decide what’s allowed and what’s not? Whose desires will be disapproved? Will they be ours? These are not easy questions to answer, and a consumerist culture has trained us to jealously guard access to all of our options. Any boundary is seen as a threat.

But at the heart of many justifications is an unwillingness to be inconvenienced in any real way. We fear being asked to look too closely at our own desires. We are wary of being pressed to acknowledge what they say about us or what impact they may have on others. Because if we agree that some things are normatively good or bad, that some acts are morally acceptable and others are always wrong, or that some preferences and appetites might be unhealthy, that would mean that we might have to do “good” things that we don’t want to do, or might no longer be able to do the “bad” things we enjoy. We might have to acknowledge that we could be better than we are. We might have to change. (pp. 135–7)

Hey, her subtitle is “A Provocation.”

The book is organized into nine chapters. Each chapter includes excerpts from interviews — graphic in places, and searing — with women and men, especially her fellow millennials, who are or have been immersed in metropolitan sexual culture. They’ve tried to fit in with it’s atomized, self-serving, be-free-be-me ideology and ended up feeling like shit about it and not quite knowing why. This book is a refreshing departure from discussions of sex and sexual culture that appear to be locked in a room with legalisms, or worse yet, cluelessly en-bubbled post-Nietzschean academics trying to find their “authentic selves.”

Emba says the consent standard “functions as an iron curtain.” You’re on one side or the other, without nuance. We’ve precluded any discussion of sex beyond considerations of law. On one side of the iron curtain, everything is prohibited, on the other side it’s all okay. Emba’s interviews are telling us about the many people who’s actual lives and experience are excluded, concealed, and denied in this legalesque confinement. There is almost a cultural prohibition against so much as acknowledging the consent standard’s insufficiency for fear of stepping on the imaginary slippery slope from honest critique to jack-booted sex police.

In one anecdote, Emba recounts a female acquaintance telling her about feeling uncomfortable over her new boyfriend’s desire to choke her during sex, then asking Emba if her own discomfort was okay. This account epitomizes Emba’s focus, in this excellent book, on the painful and confused discovery by her generation, especially by women, that the prevailing market ideology of sex, and market ideology in general, is not living up to its promises of unfettered joy. In fact, people feel increasingly lost, depressed, restlessly dissatisfied, and alone.

In addition to the too many people — especially women — who now live with the emotional wreckage of sexual abuse, assault, and rape, there are legions of uncomfortably perplexed people who question their own prerogative to feel uncomfortable with self-objectification, loneliness, and abuse. People who have been indoctrinated for their entire lives with the lie that the good life is based on concupiscence, on self-referential hedonism. Their actual lives are more and more characterized by a kind of malaise, a slow-poison banality, as they encounter something most of them never heard of: disenchantment.

Nothing makes us more alone and empty than the disenchantment of intimacy. The balm for it, according to today’s sexual culture, is chill-the-fuck-out. Pretty dude-bro (and they say the “masculine” perspective has been thankfully absorbed). Emba quotes Alana Massey, who said, “Chill has now slithered into our romantic lives and forced those among us who would like to exchange feelings and accountability to compete in the Blasé Olympics with whomever we’re dating.” Robin West, a feminist law professor cited in the book, invented two terms, as unfortunately therapeutic as they are, for this disenchanted malaise wherein women accept that an abundance of degrading, humiliating, soulless, and shitty sex is “just sex”: hedonic dysphoria and physical and psychic gaslighting. (pp. 108–9)

Think about it; the author’s friend felt the need to ask permission to feel uncomfortable about a new beau who, unannounced, started choking her during sex.

It’s not just Emba cherry-picking anecdotes. She cites a short story published in the New Yorker, titled “Cat Person,” about a woman, Margo, who goes on a bad date where she consents to sex that she doesn’t want.

Margo’s experience is not seen as particularly disastrous — it’s more banal than anything else. And it seems to reflect the disappointing state of affairs that has somehow, maybe without our fully realizing it, come to the new normal in sexual relations — at least for women. (p. 3)

The short story went viral. Two and a half million readers checked the online version within the first twenty-four hours. Emba’s point? It was not a story about consent.

[A]n ethic that makes consent the only rule doesn’t account for how our actions are constrained by biology, by society, by norms we did not choose. It doesn’t address our fundamental personhood, the fact that events resonate within us long after the deeds are done. I doesn’t ask what, if anything, we owe to each other. It doesn’t tell us what behavior is right or wrong or what values should inform how we treat each other. (pp. 18–9)

One whole chapter is named, “We’re Liberated, and We’re Miserable.” Cross referencing here with Mary Harrington on two points: (1) feminism emerged within late liberal and capitalist modernity and in many cases shares liberalism’s philosophical (and dare I say, male-generated) “priors”; (2) employing those philosophical priors, feminism came to aim as something called liberation. Harrington suggests feminism — interpreting social phenomena from women’s standpoints — break away from liberalism at the root, and instead of fitting itself to some universal pretension of “freedom” — which always gets entangles in contradictions — seek to identify and advocate for actual women’s interests. At least, says Harrington, and this writer agrees, interests can be identified in the context of actually-existing particulars.

Christine Emba’s virtue ethics, with the emphasis on forming persons with sufficiently formed ethical capacities (habituated virtues) to interpret what is right and wrong in variable particular circumstances, is the right fit for an alternative sexual ethics — one that doesn’t ask people to pretend their experience is joyously unconfined when inside they feel like characters in a Kafka story. Practices and norms, she points out, are mutually constituted. We wouldn’t want to watch a ball game that had no rules, and we wouldn’t want to attend a wedding where people engaged in food fights. Courtship should likewise be ordered by boundaries and norms. Liberalism — a philosophy that corresponds to the rise of and eventual hegemony of capitalism — does not like restraint (especially on capital accumulation), and restrictive norms only serve capital until they don’t.

The me-first attitude of the most reptile-minded capitalist is mirrored in the cultivation of a me-first ethos — which can sell more commodities through the creation of or inflammation of more and more desires. Then liberation becomes an ad pitch. You’ll even get the academics and cultural “influencers” on board. In a series of sensitive interviews, Emba highlights the first glimmerings of a public thus-objectified now stirring from its narcotic state after years of being told that hedonism is happiness while feeling like a goldfish in a broken bowl. That boundary wasn’t just a limitation on the fish’s freedom after all.

One of the most pernicious products sold to women by faux-feminism is — I hate this word like I hate Twitter and kidney pie — empowerment. Earlier feminisms aimed at whatever conceptions of justice, and at the interests of women as a class, not as rootless individuals. “Post-feminists,” power-feminists, and “girlboss” feminists turned to . . . well, power. Earlier feminists actually called for males to become less uncaring and less promiscuous. That is, masculine-sex in a paradigm where masculinity is associated with power and domination and conquest was seen as fundamentally wrong, whereas the feminine-sex paradigm emphasizing friendship, love, and commitment was maybe better. In the attempt to overturn “the whole thing,” many purported feminists failed to see how the quest for greater power (which underwrites liberal feminism) corresponds to male practices-in-power, just as they failed to appreciate that in the polarity of the old paradigm, the “feminine” emphases on love and care would contribute far more to the common good — and to justice, however conceived — than the inherently aggressive and objectifying framework of “masculine” sex. It seems no accident that just as so-called feminists (including “feminists” who wanted to erase the very category that was feminism’s object of concern — women) embraced Nietzsche — a horrifying misogynist, and a celebrator of ruthless domination and conquest — we saw the emergence of “power-feminism.” Certain soils only grow certain crops.

[T]he dissatisfaction shows up in the stories women tell each other — through literature. at parties, over whisper networks, and on “shitty men” lists. The stories often go viral because they align with the ones many women haven’t felt free to tell — still don’t feel free to tell, because any critique of sexual permissiveness is seen as puritanical or even childish: a rejection of the loud, proud, unapologetically libertine culture that has reclaimed the word slut and equates promiscuity with empowerment. (p. 35)

It’s goddamn Orwellian is what it is. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Don’t get Emba (or me) wrong. We’re not judging (in the self-righteous sense, I won’t even tell you about my youth) promiscuous women, even as we call on men, for their own good, to be less promiscuous. We’re both Christians, and when you read your Gospels (though many “Christians” are selective readers) they tell you no one is qualified to throw that stone. We’re saying, “It won’t make you happy, it’s not good for you.” That’s what you say to people you love.

Love is the missing integer in all this blather about “democratic hedonism” and empowerment through self-objectification and self-commodification. The reason people are left unfulfilled by snapping to attention before every manufactured desire is that we are not “individuals,” we’re social creatures who want to love and be loved. Love, however, presupposes vulnerability. The boundary between you and I has to be permeable before we can experience the paradox of love — that I am yours and still mine, and you are mine and still yours. Non-Christians will excuse me for a moment as I point out that Emba and I worship that most paradoxical of deities — a vulnerable God.

I made quite a big deal of the vulnerability-love connection in Borderline, a book on gender and militarism, and on power-driven masculinity. Power is about “hardening the heart,” about impermeable boundaries, about the male-enculturated denial of and disdain for vulnerability. There’s a reason men successfully kill themselves at much higher rates than women. We are more often and more ruthlessly trained to cut ourselves off from love. “Empowerment,” my ass! Vulnerability is a gift we give and receive. The exercise of real power requires not-caring. This is the tragedy of male socialization, all the ways in which many men are cut off from love and care.

In Rethinking Sex, Emba describes a high school creative writing exercise used by the late David Graeber, in which he asked the students to describe a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. The girls wrote long, detailed pieces. Many of the boys refused to participate. There was a period in my own youth where I embraced Ayn Rand’s preposterous libertarianism. I remember how every day — as a kind of cult captive — I had to fight down the realization that I wasn’t happy trying to pretend I was happy pretending to “not care,” when I couldn’t not care.

“I think it’s a fallacy of feminism [sic] that somehow it’s liberating not to care,” [Lori] Gottlieb told me in the course of her conversation. “If anything, that lowers your power. People think, ‘I’m so empowered because I don’t care. I don’t care what he does or who I sleep with. I don’t care.’ But then you become valueless. You’re saying, ‘I don’t care. I don’t have any worth [in this encounter]. I’m not placing worth on myself.” (p. 57)

Emba’s book is about sex, but this disenchanted “I don’t care” is applicable across every field of our lives in capitalist “culture.” With every new exploitation and every new form of commodification, care is the first thing that has to be murdered, cut down, burned, or abandoned. Disenchantment, as feminist historian Carolyn Merchant showed, was a critical feature of early capital accumulation, when Bacon and his scientistic cohort had to kill nature, render it epistemologically inert, objectify it, and remove it from care in order to extract its secrets and thereby its monetary value. The wreckage is piled onto an “I don’t care” heap, or in the bloodless language of economics, externalized. It should be no surprise that when nature has been extracted to its screaming limits as it has now, disenchantment is the accomplice who shows up for ever-fresh forms of commodification . Even our most intimate practices are evermore reduced to mere transactions.

The roadblock, this timely book shows us, is that in the realm of sexual intimacy, this increasingly difficult to get away with. Apart from our children, sex is perhaps the hardest thing about which we can pretend not to care.

How often do we say, “I don’t care,” when what we mean is the opposite — like that pimply lad I was when I was reading Atlas Shrugged and thinking it was great literature. “I don’t care” can be one version of whistling past the graveyard, or paradoxically worse . . . fitting in.

There’s no form of “resistance” or “transgression” or “rebellion” that capital can’t or won’t domesticate, fashionalize, and sell back to you as a commodity. From the moment we shifted our moral focus from thoughtfulness, selflessness, and goodwill to the cult of the self, our very selves became the commodity. Gender equality now means women can be as ruthless as some men, and men can — like women — be compelled to “market” themselves as sexual commodities. Yay, equality! You can all self-objectify. (Now buy our shit!) Emba describes one woman who used dating apps for mindless, instrumental hook-ups who called it “ordering a man on delivery.”

Why did she describe it the way she did, with a flippancy that gave her pause when she repeated it aloud. Despite the seemingly self-contained nature of her dating life, she wondered, justifiably, about how it bled into other parts of her life. How did having sex in that way change her mindset? What about everyone else’s? In the moment, her hookup felt like it had taken place in a sort of bubble — a private space of desire fulfilled. But had it?

Plus, there were says in which existing in that bubble might be slightly less delightful than she assumed. “He also could have murdered me, I guess,” she mused at one point. (pp. 122–3)

Dating apps aren’t just more of what Emba calls “thinned-out connection,” they are yet another space where women, by default, bear most of the risk. Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, and Christine Emba are saying this critical thing in a three-part harmony: men and women are different.They’re saying something else, too. In numerous ways, ideologically denying this difference in the realm of sex has enabled the worst practices and predispositions in men, and this denial has facilitated a raw deal for the vast majority of women.

“Equality” is, like the “individual,” a liberal political fiction. No two people are alike, therefore no two people can ever be “equal.” Of course, the aspiration is not sameness, but “equality in the eyes of the law.” There are several problems with this fanciful idea, the first of which is that the law is not a sensible being with eyes. It’s a code, a set of rules, created, interpreted, and applied by human beings who always have been members of ruling strata. This is no less true in modern “democracies” than it was in a ninth century fiefdom. The blindness of the law is a pretense, an intentional exclusion of facts and circumstances that demonstrate “inequalities” prior to the law. The law pretends that the poor person in need of a job is the equal of the rich person who wants to exploit the poor person by paying him or her a horrible wage for crappy work. They are equals in the eyes of the law when they make the employment contract. They have both, in the eyes of the law, consented to that contract because one didn’t hold a gun on other. By pretending they were equals, the law thereby reproduces, and even paradoxically increases, their actual disparities. This works well for capitalists; and it has worked well — post-sexual-revolution — for exploitative men. Workers and women, not so much.

Emba has one chapter called “Men and Women Are Not The Same.” That this has become controversial is one sign of a general intellectual and cultural decay. In addition to the social inequalities prior to the law that women in general share with workers in general, women and men are different in terms of their sexed bodies. The fact that political essentialists and patriarchal restorationists wield this fact opportunistically is not a sufficient reason to refuse to acknowledge it. One way to ensure your debate opponents don’t get the best of you is not fighting them when they’re right.

Not only are men and women different by definition, in the biological sense, this sexual embodiment is expressed in inevitably cultural terms that give rise to differences that are not “purely biological.” There’s no such thing as pure biology in conscious humans. Surveys, for example, of men’s and women’s attitudes and inclinations consistently show strong differences in the aggregate. Yes, there are always exceptions, but they are exceptional, no? (Someone else can have the nature-nurture debate; I think it’s a stupid debate. Does up make down, or does down make up? But I digress . . .)

Men don’t get pregnant. Men don’t give birth. Men don’t have menstrual cycles. Men don’t nurse babies. Men don’t go through menopause. Men need not worry about their “biological clocks” with regard to thinking about children. Men don’t have abortions.

Many men embraced the “sexual revolution,” not because it “liberated” women, but because they wanted more unrestricted access to women’s bodies. Men embraced “the pill” for this reason, and we still don’t have enough discussion about what chemical contraception actually does to women. It’s actually quite horrible. First of all, it fails eventually with nine percent of its users. But more than that, it’s a method that powerfully tinkers with a woman’s endocrine system . . . and thus, her whole body. Many of the women I know and have known complained that it made them feel like hell. They gained weight, got moody and depressed, lost their libidos, had painful intercourse, suffered migraines, had sore breasts, and spotted between periods. Hormonal contraception has also been associated with increased risk of breast cancer, hypertension, emboli, cardiovascular disease, and liver ailments. Yay, liberation!

Equality in they eyes of the law is not equality of either embodiment or experience.

Emba begins her book with an epigraph from the late Andrea Dworkin. In Tough Gynes — Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men, I began with a Dworkin epigraph, too:

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

Andrea didn’t play. And her point — which went to the heart of the idea of women being liberated by having sex like triflin’ men — was that liberation is not everyone getting to act like the oppressor. In fact — and Emba, Perry, and Harrington all touch on this — most of the women who peddle this notion are insulated form its worst effects by their membership in the un-precarious comfortable class.

If you want to know the gender problem with dating apps, as one example, or the “sexual empowerment” of bar hookups, let’s look at a male-female aggregate statistic. The average woman has around 60 percent of the upper body strength of the average man, and 70 percent of his lower body strength. As Emba’s interlocutor said, “He could have murdered me, I guess.” Few men need fear an anonymous hookup. Every woman should.

And the “right to privacy?” This notion was invented by bourgeois men. Conceived as the “castle doctrine,” the private realm was where a man could beat the shit out of his wife and children with impunity, and in politics it has most well served the capitalist class by protecting them from public scrutiny and accountability. When ideas are invented by men and for men, there’s a pretty fair chance that women will get the nasty end of the stick.

Like it or not, many men (and not a few women) still have a whore-Madonna complex. Women might be encouraged to promiscuity by opportunistic men, and those same men will exclude, degrade, humiliate, and shun women who have been promiscuous. They exclude them in advance from consideration as life partners. Heads I win, tails you lose.

The truth that men and women are different is frightening because of the worry that any difference discovered [or acknowledged] will be used as evidence of female inferiority. But things don’t have to be zero-sum. We can acknowledge inequalities and dedicate ourselves to treating each other well despite them. Women shouldn’t have to surmount their biology as an obstacle in relationships, and what makes women women should not — logically or ethically — be seen as a liability. Different can just mean different, not worse. (p. 90)

Opportunists and demagogues will work it. Tell the truth anyway. When women are being encouraged to do anything by shitty men, it’s time to stop and take account. It doesn’t turn out well for women.

The radical feminists of the seventies warned us. I don’t share the rad-fems naive (and fundamentally liberal) commitment to “gender abolition,” but they said it in the face of ferocious, often poisonous, opposition: unprincipled men — and most men in power qualify — would make the “sexual revolution” their own. At the root of the rad-fem critique was something with which any Jesus-chaser ought to agree: objectifying other human beings is wrong. Full stop. That includes objectifying oneself. Promiscuity, pornography, and prostitution are not empowering. Most people without graduate degrees understand that, because their lives are more precarious less insulated from the unwanted consequences.

The pretense that sex can be reduced to a transaction, that it’s not all that serious (chill out, dude!) is just that — a disingenuous pretense. Emba has a chapter called “Sex Is Spiritual,” within which is a sub-chapter entitled “Sex Is Serious.” Some will flinch at the word “spiritual.” If it makes you feel better, substitute the more sociological “disenchanted.” As to sex’s seriousness, Emba points out, just as Perry did to great effect, the blatant contradiction between liberal claims of disenchantment with regard to “sex work” (that odious quesiton-begging phrase) or porn (just ignore all that misogyny and racism, we’re speaking in the abstract) or “zipless fucks,” and liberal enthusiasm for #metoo. Too many women knew the deal from their own experience to get away with feigned gullibility about harassment, assault, and rape. The central point of #metoo was correct. Mashers and rapists need to be held to account. The liberal demand for harsher penalties for mashers and rapists, harsher, for example, than for simple assault — say, a man punching another man in a drunken argument — is a tacit admission that sex is different, that sex is, in one second-wave phrase, “what is most one’s own and most taken away.” I’ve never known any liberal who would encourage his or her daughter to work as a fluffer for porn shoots; and I never will. For those who respond, “that’s just your cultural conditioning,” I say, “You’re goddamn right, because cultural conditions establish some necessary guardrails.”

“‘Freedom,’ in isolation, is not an actual good,” writes Emba, reaching for her inner St. Thomas and Aristotle. “It can be a frame that allows us to space to seek the good within it, but it’s not the good itself.” (p. 63)

In one chapter, she cites a Masha Gessen op-ed called “When Does a Watershed Become a Sex Panic?” In fact, it was Gessen who was panicked, by the potential for #metoo to undermine the disenchanted account of sex. In one telling sentence, Gessen says, without blushing, “The policing of sex seems to assume that it’s better to have ten times less sex than to risk having a non-consensual sexual experience.”

“. . . a non-consensual sexual experience.” Bernhard Pörksen, the German media critic, would call this “plastic language,” the modular lexicon of modernity that my old alma mater, the military, used to torture language into the service of its dissimulation. Human beings killed in attacks are “targets.” Lots of people to kill is “a target rich environment.” Rape becomes “a non-consensual sexual experience.” Regular folks call these weasel words.

One remarkable story in this book was that 80 percent of those who approached one particular priest seeking exorcisms were sexual abuse survivors. In a paradoxical way, that form of sex was certainly spiritual for them.

I think this is an important book, and a counter-cultural one at that. I also think Emba (and many of the rest of us) are on an uphill slog with what we’re saying, because the market-liberal ideology has been pushed into the very molecules of our minds. I watched a panel discussion in which she participated earlier this month with three other women — like her, college-educated. I think one taught at university. During that discussion, which was ostensibly about feminists who had become “disillusioned with liberalism.” I was shocked, frankly, and a little disheartened at how the other women on the panel, especially two of them, had actually read the book and utterly missed one of it’s main points. One interlocutor ,whose opposition to liberalism was obviously Butler school, rattled on manically about the “democratization of hedonism,” even though Emba had specifically cited this atrocious idea in the book and set it afire. The other woman couldn’t seem to find her way out of herself, constantly returning, like a moth to a porch light, to “how do I discover my own authentic desires?” These are both absolutely Nietzschean perspectives, and they are also — paradoxically, because Nietzsche himself hated liberalism for its Christian vestiges — absolutely liberal, with their fetishes of “choice” and “autonomy.” They had read Emba’s words:

When it comes to the sort of independence [advertized], we have actually bought into an illusion: that the choices we’re making — in favor of autonomy, privacy, and extreme flexibility — are themselves independently arrived at, that this particular preference has emerged fully out of the vacuum of our own personality. Yet (and sorry in advance for getting meta) even our own vision of the level of privacy we desire is itself not independently constructed. It’s still shaped by a larger, communal norm that we didn’t necessarily choose for ourselves.

Capitalism frames our modern lives so completely that we’re liable to forget that it’s even there. (p. 125)

I worry about their apparent reading comprehension difficulties, and — as they are academics — about their philosophical and even feminist-historical illiteracy (the feminist critique of contract theory [the consent standard] and the “private” sphere is in the canon). My hope is that regular readers of this book will comprehend it more directly, not having had their brains rotted by years of cloistered intellectual masturbation (something Ellul warned us about). Emba is to be congratulated on having escaped that at Princeton; and I suspect her faith is exactly what inoculated her. If you believe the world and the people in it are created and cherished by God, at least in the Catholic tradition, disenchantment (read: the objectification of the world and the people in it) is a non-starter.

It’s kind of funny to me that Emba would be invited to talk by the American Enterprise Institute — an institution wholly devoted to capitalist apologetics, and one which shares the above-mentioned philosophical commitments (autonomy, choice, contract, consent). In one particularly telling description, Emba recounts an interviewee explaining how she kept dating app spreadsheets as a way of getting a leg up on the competition. Transactional sex meets the competitive marketplace. Emba’s critique aims an arrow at the very heart of capital; but the decaying left will have nothing to do with her. It’s ultra-materialism left it open to the okeydoke of disenchanted, transactional sex, making much of the left appear to be . . . well, libertarians. Alas, the left also fails, in its universalizing pretense, to understand virtue of the kind Emba describes. Much of the left also fails to grasp disenchantment with regard to nature itself. They don’t get it: the same disenchantment they apply to sex is part and parcel of the “conquest of nature” fantasy that is shared by clear-cutters, mine-operators, and sexual reassignment devotees. We had to “kill” nature, objectify it (including sex) in order to turn it into a menu of “resources,” and from there into basket of commodities. How many leftists do you know who call for “alternative energy,” which kicks the can about six inches down the road? How many do you know who call for drastic and immediate conservation? Nearly none, I’ll wager. Disenchantment was the prerequisite for disrupting our entire global biosphere, but the techno-optimistic left marches on.

Conservation is not “conservative,” and neither is Emba. Some describe Catholics like her (and me, for that matter) as economically left and culturally right. It might be a handy place-holder, but it’s fundamentally a misapprehension. We’re not culturally conservative. We know there will be no “restoration” of the past. We believe in the precautionary principle. In plain language, you don’t throw things overboard (1) if you don’t fully understand why they were on the boat in the first place, and (2) if you haven’t fully considered the potential outcomes of abandoning them.

It seems almost quaint, speaking of environmental crisis, to be having debates about sex when the world is in the grip of manifold crisis — ecological, political, financial, cultural, epistemological — when we are looking into the gun barrel of civilizational collapse. I know I sound like (gasp!) a doomer when I say that; but lying about it to make ourselves feel better is no better than lying to ourselves about the joy of disenchanted sex. Both are threads in the same fabric of lies — the fabric of liberal fictions. Economic man. The fetishization of the commodity. Unlimited economic “growth.” Disenchanted nature. The culture-nature dichotomy. The “conquest of nature.”

It all reminds me of the great film based on the late P. D. James novel, Children of Men, when human beings had become, for reasons no one clearly understood, incapable of having children, and were going inevitably extinct. Still, they continued to play power games, political games . . . war games . . . as if they mattered. Here we are in the maw of unprecedented biospheric disorganization, brought on by those lies — and by that more transhistorical feature of broken humanity, pride — and we’re having nuclear-armed standoffs and scratching out the last bands of copper, nickel, and a menu of disappearing precious metals to make electric fucking cars to drive through our wrecked landscapes while famine approaches us by the billions. Why are we even writing books, or reading them, about sex?

Christine Emba’s book points to part of the answer.

Unlike the clueless conservatives who are asking her to the dance because her critique corresponds in certain aspects to theirs, she displays no yearning for some form of restoration of the past. There will be no restoration (do you hear me, integralist?). You can’t restore the 1950s or the Middle Ages any more than you can restore Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Politics and culture are embedded, situated, rooted in a web of very specific material and semiotic conditions, and those conditions are all past.

We will adapt, and not happily or easily, to the coming changes; and because those changes will often be unpredictable, those adaptations can’t all be planned. We are on the cusp (many in the world are already in it) of a very long period of painful improvisation in an increasingly dangerous network of crisis-wracked societies. Not the fantasy dystopias of screenplays or American gun-lunatics, but a grinding, miserable, and often banal descent into what I’ve called “Haiti, writ large.”

Emba’s book is aiming us at what it will take to act in this world and the one coming, even as desperate bricloeurs in a capricious period of cascading disorder. She’s hinting, in this very diplomatic “provocation,” that what we will most need, and need to become, are virtuous human beings, whether she shares my doomer grief and anxiety or not. We need to become people with courage, judgement, prudence, temperance, and compassion, who can navigate the challenges to come without tumbling into dog-eat-dog nihilism.

The great virtue ethics philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre scoffed at the liberal notion of (capitalized) Morality — a set of impersonal rules for one and all. Like law, Morality is too blunt an instrument to capture or adapt to the dynamic complexity of human affairs, even in the beat of times. If we are to have courageous, judicious, prudent, temperate, and compassionate responses to unpredictable circumstances, aimed at selflessly producing common goods, then these virtues have to be cultivated in the persons and practices on the ground.

One of those practices is sex. Sex is a relation between persons, and there is such a thing as right-relation and wrong-relation. Domination, objectification, humiliation, and exploitation (even if a broken person consents to be exploited) are wrong relations, and they don’t become right because they’re legal or because you can get away with it. (I speak not as a righteous man, but as a sinner.) And Emba’s book is not shaming or blaming the people who’ve been caught up in a hegemonic culture. That’s the nature of hegemony. Jesus said, “Forgive them . . . for they know not what they do.”

She approached her subject and her subjects with incredible sensitivity and compassion. She is not scolding, but listening. And she’s telling us (and them) what she’s heard, in the hope that people who’ve felt the same discomforts, suffered the same doubts and anxieties, and felt the same shame and pain, to discover they are not alone.

In a story by John Steinbeck, a group of men tramping across the country in search of work meet around a hobo fire. One says, “I lost my farm.” Another says, “I lost mine, too.” Steinbeck says that in this moment, the embryo of a revolution shuddered and came to life.

I hope Christine Emba’s book reaches a wide audience, and I hope she’s working on her next one.