Hatred of Sex

Like democracy, sex is messy and disordering, hateable as well as desirable. While some hatred of sex is unavoidable, its intensifying exploitation by the bureaucracies of neoliberal governance must be resisted. We challenge the malignant spread of this hatred by elaborating on the following provocative claims:

Sex, defined in terms of its capacity for harm, must be redefined in terms of pleasure.

Sex is incompatible with identity and with identity politics.

Hatred of sex is enfeebling the discipline of queer studies, which finds ever subtler ways of avoiding the sexual through recourse to gender, intersectionality, affect, and attachment.

Attachment theory has intensified the hatred of sex through its parasitic destruction of Freudian psychoanalysis and the subsequent weaponization of
John Bowlby’s work in the traumatological clinic.

Attachment theory supplies the sex-­hating template for “appropriate” forms of relating; “appropriate” is the new normal.

Traumatology’s worst excesses (e.g., “satanic ritual abuse”) are the product of fundamental flaws in the general approach championed by Judith Herman, which tends to recode benign sexual inappropriateness as abuse.

Traumatology laid the groundwork for QAnon.

By insisting that all sex is potentially abuse, traumatology elicits acceptance for the bureaucracies of neoliberal governance that would monitor us ever more closely.