technical images and linear text

So, it’s been a considerable amount of time since I’ve posted much of anything on here. And I have a serious need of getting back into the discipline of thinking in text according to my own ideas, and I’ve also been having this really weird thought in my head since last night. I’m poring over the Critique of Pure Reason this morning, and this little germ of an idea keeps building upon itself in the ol’ think-box, so in a useful concatenation of mental state and external necessity, I’m going to walk said idea through a little bit of digital exegesis. In the interest of starting things off in a fun and provocative way, here is the most reactionary form of this ‘thesis’ that’s in my head: wrestling is sublimated homosexual rape. My goals with this exegesis are to uncover some of the interesting subconscious detritus which underpins wrestling and its curious subculture, but also to engage in a little bit of critical thinking with regard to rape and homosocial desire.

Here we go!

Because I do love to get into thorny issues, let’s start this discussion off with a little deconstruction of rape. For the sake of political correctness, I would just like to point out that no part of this upcoming paragraph (in spite of whatever knee-jerk readings may emerge in the intersection between reader and text) in any way delegitimizes the pain or trauma of the rape experience, but rather, this is merely an attempt to problematize the conventional ‘rational’ understanding of rape. I argue that, just as writing is not an inessential supplement added onto speech, rape is not an inessential and subordinate sexual practice, but in fact lies at the heart of the sex act. This is immediately evident when we witness the courtship patterns of animals. These are certainly not ‘courtship’ in the conventionalized human sense, but in fact bear a far stronger phenomenological resemblance to pursuit, forced submission, and rape. ‘Desire’ in the human sense cannot figure into animal sexuality. Thus, ‘rape,’ on its bare definition as sexual encounter in the absence of mutual consent, comes before this rational construct of desire that we call ‘consensual sex.’ With sex, animals are simply expressing an evolutionary ‘desire’ which is in our terms more along the lines of a biological imperative. Desire, in its highly rationalized and coded human form, is simply appended to the sex drive ‘itself.’ The ego-structure of the rational subject requires self-presence, and so we demand a rationalized (as opposed to forcible) mode of consent when it comes to our procreative instincts: rape is suppressed by the symbolic order, but endlessly resurges from the reptilian depths of the mind in both concrete (ie. actual rape) and sublimated forms.

Last night, as I was engaging in this wonderful and beautiful unity of rational subjects we call ‘consensual sex,’ I allowed my consciousness to engage in a little bit of drifting for tantra’s sake, and I was struck by the odd similarities between the play of leverage between bodies in the sex act, and the forcible contest of leverage that is wrestling. Setting aside for now the rather hilarious implications of this weighty realization in the context of the moment (let’s just say that these sorts of deconstructive tangents are far less useful for tantric purposes than, say, trying to remember the names of all 50 US states); this is a pretty significant connection. Given that wrestling developed as the exclusive province of nude, well-oiled male bodies in Ancient Greece, with all its well-known institutionalized perversions, it is certainly no stretch to draw the conclusion expressed at the beginning of this short piece. Wrestling, like all pseudosexual acts, is a game of submission: whereas consensual sex requires mutual, rationalized consent (itself sublimated into, and produced by, various human courtship rituals), rape is a strategy of forcible submission that culminates in a sex act. While consensualized sex is a play of leverage between agreeing subjects, wrestling enacts a play of leverage between aggressive bodies, which culminates in a conspicuously absent homosexual sex act.

This relates directly to Eve Sedgwick’s work on ‘homosocial desire,’ as when she asks of Reagan and Jesse Helms, “Doesn’t the continuum between ‘men-loving-men’ and ‘men-promoting-the-interests-of-men’ have the same intuitive force that it has for women?” Likewise, I ask: doesn’t the continuum between ‘men-raping-men’ and ‘men-forcing-men-into-submission’ have a self-evident intuitive force? Wrestlers play at homosexual sex by enacting a hidden desire. But while heterosexual rape enacts a subconscious desire for the dominance of a ‘male presence’ over a female body conceived (incorrectly, as it barely merits mentioning) as an opposite ‘absence,’ the sport of wrestling sublimates that same drive into a desire for a contest of equals, a play between two male presences which has become so highly coded and socialized that the implied sex act is no longer required.

This, of course, leads on to some extremely significant questions with regard to this concept of a battle between ‘presences’ as it relates to homosexuality in general, as well as the libidinal force which wrestling spectators often exhibit and how it may relate to a latent homosexuality which may underpin even the most conventionally ‘heterosexual’ social practices. For the time being, however, I will break with this particular bit of playful analysis and get back to my dear Immanuel.