Forensic Sexualities. Some thoughts on shame
Research question: To what extent is sexuality not simply a means of gaining or increasing pleasure, but a catalyst, a medium with which something is processed that is stuck in our bodies?
I come to the question after a conversation with friends about shame. There is this consensus that shame is something bad and must be gone so that we can finally be liberated. Although I don’t think that’s completely incorrect, something in me is resisting. It seems too simple – if it were so simple, why haven’t we got rid of the shame long ago? I am also against this approach because I am afraid of the short-circuit reaction, that you simply repress the shame and pretend not to be ashamed. As we all know, everything repressed comes back at some point, finds its cracks and niches to crawl back to the surface. It cannot simply be pushed away, must be worked through. On top of that, I’m afraid that we’ll start to feel ashamed of the shame or do shame-shaming. Last but not least, there is a bunch of very unpleasant contemporaries who behave shamelessly and one wishes their over-ego would be stronger… Finally, I consider the purely aesthetic argument: shame has many beautiful sides. These blushing cheeks And you can play with it so well…! How intimate the moment when someone wants to hold their hands in front of their face and hide but is prevented from doing so – and you look exactly into THIS face (on the basis of an agreed play). Maybe shame makes a situation erotic in the first place before it slips into pornography (not that pornography is bad. Only different).
When I unravel this further, I realize that I want to understand and get to know my shame before I get rid of it. It tells me something about who I am and the world I live in. Shame is not an anthropological constant that is simply there. It has grown into part of my biography and it is unique. There are classical shame factors like nudity and body excretions, but everybody is ashamed of something else and reacts differently to shame.
Interestingly, there is this close union of sexuality and shame. And at the moment I’m contemplating how sexuality uncovers and processes what is difficult and violent in our bodies. As if it were a means of forensics!
Reading Klaus Theweleit I find a lot of formulations and analyses that help me to keep track of my question and intuition.
„Every loving contact with another body can […] in principle be contaminated by sentences said by a boss, a colleague, a casual person with bad or good intentions, hours before, days before, or even for years again and again. Because sexual touch is the closest that human bodies have to each other at certain times of their development, it is not possible to keep out the other social touches in which they live. Sexuality is the field in which everything is negotiated, all the rest of life – at least as long as sexuality is seen as the field in which one wants to unfold and develop one’s own life.“ (transl. by BA)
The more I think about it, the more obvious this assumption is – and yet very little is said about it! Many hedonistic approaches – such as most sex-positive festivals and workshops with their glittery promotions – or the many advices and tricks – such as those in Cosmopoliton and other lifestyle magazines – are not able to pay tribute to this notion.
In a video interview with Ilan Stephani I found something of this nature. She’s all about making room for anger and fear as a prerequisite for ecstasy. Unfortunately I can’t find it anymore, but she advises you to just grab a pillow during sex, press your face and roar into it. And to give up the sexy bedroom look and make grimaces instead. Or to clatter and shake your teeth to allow yourself to feel the terror in your body. Feeling more is the result. To not always having to be super cool. And for shame I would suggest something similar. If it shows up, then allow it and perhaps make it even bigger, incorporate it completely, instead of exhibiting your brazenness and appearing super-cool as a Libertine. You can very well learn that from the hysterics of the 19th century. They were supposed to function and defended themselves by going totally into the irrational, bending themselves abnormally and being completely bodies, even more bodies than they were supposed to embody (because, as is well known, since Aristotle, the mind has been associated with masculinity while femininity has been reduced to the material, to being only a body). Why did they defend themselves in this manner, why didn’t they want to follow the imperatives to function as they were supposed to function? Why could it be important to defend one’s shame – even if there are good arguments against it? Maybe simply because if there is this peer pressure that you have to lose your shame it would mean to lose the contact you have with yourself. An outer force did put the shame into you and now an outer force wants you to be free of it. Obeying to both doesn’t help understanding shame’s structures and conditions. But trying to learn about one’s conditions creates a feeling of gravity and sense. I am sure that only then you can decide to get rid of shame; maybe not by changing yourself, but – in a more political manner – by changing the shaming circumstances. For this you have to make contact with your shame. And that goes quite well over sex. Whereby sex can also be used to avoid shame, for example as a skipping action…
Sexuality and pleasure as a means of processing and realization.
After my last course in an e-mail correspondence with a participant, still freshly tumbled out of the workshop, we trace and feel into our experiences and shame is a topic. We tell each other when the feelings of shame appeared. It was being seen in one’s own whole neediness and then feeling like an infant: you want, you need, you yearn and crave, you are naked and exposed. I write:
„Many of the pictures that pass my mind have such a punctum that it hits me, because I am touched by it – actually it even gives me a more of a stab. Especially in this simplicity and straightforwardness (because we didn’t have much more than us and our naked bodies, I didn’t put so much extra into it to hold on to it, so that you don’t cling to your patterns by massaging or doing rope bondage or what else you can do well anyway… but just like a baby had to start all over again, and had to discover and be inventive, and stumble and be clumsy) I realize how radical these spaces are, that can bring out so much and confront us with so much… the uncertainties, the longings, which I feel again and again in these spaces… it touches something very deep inside me every time, like my amphibian brain… because it reminds me so much of this whole unbearable weirdness of being thrown on this often magnificent and too often also cruel star. I see that we are these affect-bundles, who want, who need. And when I see and feel that, it also overwhelms me. Which is not bad. It only proves once more how extreme these spaces are. In their insolence. In their simplicity. In their ’no bullshit‘. This is much more than just ‚an erotic evening‘. It is too! And it can be for many. But the potential is even more radical. And I notice more and more how sexuality is actually not just a means of pleasure, but a means of knowledge: because we can recognize and learn so much about the many stories that are in ourselves. Have been put into us also over generations. And shame plays a very important role here. And that’s why I find it so foolish when people just say: ‚We need to get rid of shame‘ because then we won’t listen to it anymore. It wants to tell us something. About us. How we became who we are. It is a part of us. I think it can only really dissolve after embracing it and when it is dropped when it is no longer useful for us. Not by demonizing it and wanting it to be gone.“
And after so much thinking about the serious and the existential, I recommend Nikki Glaser’s Stand-Up Comedy, which also unravels the whole comedy of sexus and why it can somehow also be a compliment to say „You ought to be ashamed of yourself!“ with a grin and a wink – especially here from minute 4:58:
