Reading Sexuality Beyond Consent in Beirut

Nour NAHHAS

Review of Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality beyond consent: Risk, race, traumatophilia. In Sexuality Beyond Consent. New York University Press.

Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avgi Saketopoulou pushes us to work with the sexual as a probe instead of an affirmation that offers socially acceptable intelligibility. Saketopoulou carefully explores the nuances of perverse sexual practices today and the big questions of trauma and consent. By delving into traumatisms, affirmative and limit consent, sensible sadism, and exigent sadism, the author gives us ample theoretical and practical knowledge to imagine our sexuality as an experience that can produce authentic intimacies and transformation.

I read this book in a moment of continuous rupture, and there is no guarantee of generative re-translation. Beirut, the city where I lived all my life, relentlessly overwhelms and shatters with almost no intermission. The time and space from which I engage with this book is a real that always puts us in the face of the unknown, quite sadistically and nonconsensually. Belonging to a place and time that performs increasingly destructive practices on our psyches and bodies is a traumatic experience. To discuss sex in Beirut is, inevitably, to have a conversation about rape and sexual assault. Over the past five years, a number of sexual assault scandals have surfaced. Women used social media platforms to expose men who sexually assaulted them. This was always followed by an online spectacle of debating consent, justice, and punishment. With this context, I ask what it means to read Sexuality Beyond Consent today from where I stand. To me, it means that we must expand our understanding of sex and sexuality as more than a matter of feminism, gender, trauma, justice, and healing.

Sex and sexuality are heavily contested areas that compel almost everyone. A culmination of our anxieties about our histories and what they make us want to do with our bodies drives the work and thought of psychoanalysts, queer theorists, and feminists, always seeking to answer the “why” of perverse sexual practices. The why here is an anxious one that comes from a desire to contain the sexual drive and rid it of an enigma that risks danger and trauma, or more accurately, more danger and more trauma than what the Other already introduces into our interiority. We often look to keep our chaotic sexualities on a leash, minimizing their disruptive potential. We take safety measures that conceal enigma: consent, equality, mutuality, conventional intimacy, and trauma repair. Through these, the potential that our sexuality can have in elucidating our relation to the other inside us and around us is reduced to a politically sterile phenomenon that does the heavy lifting of neoliberal sexual politics, which traps sexuality inside the realm of comfort, validation, control, and safety, and obscures our efforts towards transformation by diverting action towards the goal of corrective and punitive justice.

In what follows, I offer a brief summary of the book and then discuss the political implications of “feminist consent” and retributive measures in existing struggles towards justice in sexual assault scenarios, and I contrast this praxis with exigent sadism, a framework that explores sex, (non)consent and trauma through the caring yet arduous touching of wounds.

Through a Laplanchean lens, Avgi Saketopoulou brings the concepts of trauma, consent, sexuality, and power to light, exploring how current understandings of them are dangerously rigid. This rigidity is promoted by the assimilative translation that our ego executes and which our unconscious resists through sexual perversity, aiming to preserve the dynamism and productive potential of our psyche. Ungoverned and untranslated psychic material is opaque and unintelligible, and the author invites us to settle in this opacity via case studies of queer patients and couples engaging in polymorphous sexual practices with sadist and masochistic dynamics. By putting opacity in dialogue with the ego’s assimilative tendencies, we can expand sexuality through cumulative intensification, the more and more of the sexual drive, potentially reaching overwhelm and rupture, where the potent untranslated opaque inside us interacts with itself, as it comes into contact with the opacity of the other. Exigent sadism is the method through which this can happen, and it requires a steady and expansive touching of our touch-demanding wounds. Exigent sadism, according to Saketopoulou, is a ruthless yet ethical and necessary experiment in risk and passibility between the sadist and the masochist, as they root themselves in patience and vulnerability to possibly encounter an unknown, setting in motion something that allows newness to emerge. A necessary violence on the ego’s compulsion to translate needs to be willed into action via a repetition that re-presents instead of one that merely represents. Exigent sadism is not representational, and it does not simulate the unequal power dynamics between sadist and masochist. Instead, it is both the sadist and the masochist giving themselves over to the opacity in themselves and in each other, from their different positionalities, without imposing prerequisite meaning on the encounter, thus creating space for a tender but ruthless slap in the face kind of experience, which allows transformation and connection beyond egoic constructs.

In one of our catch-ups over coffee, a friend and I discussed BDSM. She says, “Many things happen that you don’t account for, and you just let them slide.” What she describes is a practice that compromises the integrity of informed and affirmative consent “in the heat of the moment.” This moment, with its chaotic and unguaranteed outcomes and my friend’s discovery of having to let something slide, is a source of anxiety in feminist discourse on sex and pleasure. Letting something slide would imply being coerced into accepting an unwanted act that is unbounded by the mutually sanctioned consensual act. It is directly seen as a silence that replaces verbal or physical objection. This is symptomatic of the politics of affirmative consent that wants to retroactively rectify violence in a non-existing after-the-fact scenario. Coercion is viewed to be a consequence of power imbalance and an exercise of force that affirmative consent seeks to remedy through clear and static communication about the boundaries of the sexual encounter.

I want to take this type of consent a step further, calling it the consent of feminism, which a woman gives to a man, hoping that he handles it with care. I insist here on the scenario of a heteronormative dynamic because it is the very type of dynamic that egoic feminism looks to eradicate but actually reinforces. Feminist consent is given to prevent the harm that results from breaking it by the one with more power. The sexual encounter is, therefore, entered with the concern that things could get out of hand and lead to violence. The preoccupation with safety implies that sex is an idea and practice driven by the man’s desire, rendering it too dangerous to roam by a woman without the armor of consent. Through feminist consent, the sexual encounter is made inclusive of a woman’s desire under the condition that she is crystal clear about it, within the binary of “yes” and “no,” warding off the dangerous opacity of the male sexual. Feminist consent is a one-sided speculation, with the trauma of violent masculinity as its prerequisite. The scenario of violating it is the elephant in the room, asserting that the encounter must be under the moderation of language and reason. In that, the sexual is a risk that must not be taken. It remains unquestioned: a goal-oriented venture that involves the ascribed gender roles and identities of the ones partaking in it, disavowing any unplanned alterity that may be introduced into it and hiding behind the noble guise of pleasure and intimacy. Sex in the realm of feminist consent organizes around the patching up of historical wounds in service of an equal and just experience as the only way of fostering intimacy. While it antagonizes the historical subjugation of women by men, it inaugurates a traumatophobic sexual encounter geared towards de-traumatizing, producing less and less trauma, making it the essential problematic of sex. Through this perspective, the why of sexual perversities, like a woman desiring rape play, while accepted and celebrated as her practicing her sexual agency, is attributed to the compulsive repetition of the traumatic experience in order to work through it and heal from it. Rape is, therefore, the intelligible answer to why some women engage in rape play. This approach equates rape, a violating act, with a scripted simulation enacted by the two characters, rapist and victim, at surface level, with the distinct goal of initiating the process of healing through repeated exposure. What is actually in repetition is the pre-assigned and unquestioned meaning and appearance of rape, with the fantasy of consent included in the dynamic, which at this point is a wish, as all fantasies are: a wish for it to have been present at the time it was violently erased.

Here, I want to go back to the danger in our limited notions of sex, trauma, and consent by linking their association to the retroactive wish of consent. In her book, Saketopoulou spends time differentiating between shattering and damaging in perversities that weave in them the traumas of slavery, nazism, and misogyny. What shatters in the re-presentation and the re-acting of trauma is our relation to our narrativization of it. We come undone as a result of this shattering as we give up the wish of consent and work at the level of limit consent, a non-paranoid position promoted by the will of non-willfulness. This is possible when the engaged parties surrender to their uncensored opacities, allowing for the expansion of experience beyond language instead of the expansion of its languaged moderation.

Rupture happens here, and it is not of a damaging nature. What is actually damaging is a script of an experience written on the grounds of the wish for it to have never happened. I see in this a denial of the collective histories of subjugation of women, black people, and queer people. We are prohibited from revisiting our histories freely and are confined to the realm of victimhood and trauma. It is important to look at the repetition of trauma in traumatized subjects as a demand rather than an aimless and self-destructive compulsion. Born out of necessity and possible within the framework of limit consent, repeating a history is a commitment between the sadist and masochist characters, radically involved in the act of the moment instead of its symbol through care, patience, and vulnerability. Recognizing the fragility of the boundary between yes and no is the primary feature of limit consent. It takes as a starting point the tension between the two opposing poles, liberating them from the dynamics of who says yes or no and why. Limit consent is a particularly passible position to adopt during the sexual encounter that allows it to reveal itself to us and initiate a transformation.

Feminist discourse sees this as a risk and avoids it through feminist consent, as it cannot recognize this work’s caring, vulnerable, and patient aspects and only reacts to its outrageous symbolization. It also refuses to accept its contradictions: How can consent be hinted at while being absent? How will trauma be healed if the same encounter is happening again and again? How do we get rid of trauma by re-inviting it into our bodies? These apprehensions stem from the ego’s fight against passibility and its quest to purge what it cannot assimilate to repair.

I move to the political implications of a liberal framework of feminist consent. The ego’s translations guide our political action in consent and trauma. Transformative justice and accountability are praxes that seek to restore a pre-violence condition where the perpetrator is held accountable and potentially punished for what he did. The victim, in a utopian scenario, enjoys the benefits of retribution and goes on to heal from her trauma. By breaking down justice and accountability this way, I do not seek to fully critique it, but I intend to delve into its fixation on the perpetrator and his craved downfall. I do not necessarily imply a need for sympathy with persons who perform sexually violent and damaging acts on others. What I am trying to say is that this form of justice and accountability is zero-sum: the violence committed must be recognized and named fully for us to achieve, on the other hand, the recognition of the victim’s pain and trauma. I see this as the other’s intromission through a rational diagnosis and treatment of harm and its consequent pain. This constitutes traumatophobic just action that intends to eliminate harm and pain at all costs by fixating on stripping the perpetrator of the power he exercised through punitive action and restoring it for the victim through trauma healing. Traumatophobia promotes re-traumatization as it repeats the intromissions generated by the social’s pre-conditioned meanings, adopting them as symbols too evident to question. There is no time to question when a rupture has happened, and it is imperative to suture it. In this, there is the implicit wish for the assault to have never happened and a tacit conviction that the victim is imprinted with this trauma forever. As it repeats, justice discourse is more concerned with the rapist’s relation to what they did than the victim’s relation to what took place and how it impacted her. This is synonymous with sensible sadism that is based on the compulsion to repeat the rationalized meaning of the trauma, in contrast with our psyche’s demand to revisit our relation to it, to potentially change it. We can see this kind of sadism at the core of current waves of justice in sexual assault incidents. It also exists in trauma-informed approaches and therapies and cultural phenomena like trigger warnings and politically correct references.

So, what works for trauma? According to Avgi Saketopoulou, re-presentations of trauma stem from a demand to come alive again and manifest similarly to how they first appeared, without the paranoiac concern of avoiding further injury. This practice requires the coexistence of care and ruthlessness with both sadist and masochist. If this method seems to be a stretch in scenarios where actual harm was committed, it’s because it is. Exigent sadism does not ask a traumatized woman, for instance, to reenact a violating interaction with the man who raped her. A practice of exigent sadism, in the cases of sexual trauma, necessitates infrastructure that allows for care, vulnerability, patience, and ruthlessness to exist simultaneously as the traumatized subject delves into opacities related to the traumatizing situation in a space where tender but relentless intensifications of an experience can take place, allowing the transformation of her connection to the fact, after the fact, beyond egoic constructs.

In the last chapter of the book, Avgi endorses the necessary sadism in the traumatism brought about by a photograph, a play, a BDSM session, and a psychoanalysis session. She challenges the conventional view that art, sex, and therapy are spheres of emptying out the unconscious from the other’s intromissions by verbalizing and transforming them into a different symbol. She asks us to allow words and images to penetrate us and invite our alertness to what might make us feel. Alertness to an unexpected feeling is what exigent sadism requires from us and our politics. Letting the other immerse in us is a particularly freeing position in relation to our interiority and alterity. It offers a space of resistance to the ego’s binding urges that seek to swipe new material under the rug of the dominant neoliberal necro-capitalist and consumerist domains. In that, exigent sadism’s demand of passibility empowers us to feed the generative drive of our unconscious as we experience more and more as a necessary measure of care and vulnerability. It is crucial for us as subjects to recognize the destructive sadism in our world and go beyond it instead of appeasing it with sense. The practice of this recognition starts with us, not as individuals and not entirely as subjects but as others capable of working with the opacity of otherness. I don’t mean that exigent sadism is the process of sitting with our difficult feelings or pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zones to maximize our potential in life. This is a clearly individualistic and egoic approach to experience and transformation. To practice exigent sadism with ourselves and in our politics is to recognize the limits of our passibility to alterity, which our ego constantly fights. To conclude, exigent sadism creates mutuality in our relating to the other together. We open ourselves and each other to experience, and we become porous to transformation because we need each other and, as such, are able to commit to vulnerability and surrender only together.

Work Cited

Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York University Press.

Contributor

Nour Nahhas is a writer, researcher and activist based in Beirut. She holds a BA in Psychology from Haigazian University. Her writing and practice explore the nuances in gender, sexuality, migration, mental health and political economy. Her practice is rooted in anti-capitalist approaches to solidarity, mutuality, knowledge creation and care, with the goal of merging theory and practice and promoting critical perspectives to social and political issues.