Sex and Power
It is commonly acknowledged that the discourse on sex in the U.S. is more repressed than in European countries, due to our Puritanical roots. However, apart from the tendency of Americans to perhaps blush a bit at the mention of sex in an offhand manner, and the fewer amount of nude beaches located in the U.S. than in France, it does seem as if sex is viewed in a fundamentally similar light throughout most of the world. Perhaps this is due to globalization and the Western presence in other countries, in which we spread our daily habits along with our religious belief systems. The notion that the West was able to influence the perception of sex in other nations, perhaps even those that formerly practiced variations of the ars erotica, demonstrates the ever- present connection of power to sexuality.
As Jeffrey Weeks notes in “The Social Construction of Sexuality,” sex can be accompanied by a variety of emotions, including anger and aggression. However, sexual education courses in U.S. high schools teach about those in committed relationships using sex to consummate their love, not as a method of coping after a bad day. As the bourgeoisie believed in the necessity of using sexual repression as a way to demonstrate their power over their bodies and their minds, they espoused the societal more that sexual intercourse should only take place between a married couple. The manners in which societies choose to present sex is a method of demonstrating power; it can be argued that teenagers nowadays have more power in that they are able to seize control over their sexuality, since they can choose whether to engage in sexual relations in their various relationships, while this was not an accepted practice for unmarried individuals during the Victorian Era.
Foucault also makes an interesting point when he argues that instead of power being used as a tool to control others, power is in the hands of everyone to do with as they wish. Those who react against a force of power acting against them are also asserting their power. This insight is fascinating in regard to the role of power in the situation of rape. The act of rape is frequently less about sex, and more about the show of force and subjugation of one party over another. When an individual is lying helpless mid- act, or even if the person is fighting back, but is overpowered, most of us would not regard this individual as having any source of power whatsoever. Perhaps the victim has the “power” to give pleasure to the rapist, but this “power” is merely the power that previously belonged to the victim, which was surrendered when the victim lost his/her ability to govern the acts of pleasure or pain experienced by his/her own body.
-Ariella Medows
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February 13th, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Hi Ariella,
Take another look at the distinctions that Foucault makes between the kinds of power relations in the system of alliance and the deployment of sexuality to see where the act of rape would be understood according to that distinction. This is brief but we will talk about this at length in class.