If you want to talk safely about the topic of sexual preferences, you must begin with the following disclaimer: “I don’t care what people do in …”

In what? The privacy of their homes? Insofar as they’re old enough to be drafted? To vote? So long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses? Whatever the provisos are, so long as you’ve met them and established your credibility, you can proceed (cautiously) to say what’s on your mind.

So why do I bring it up? Is there anything wrong with preliminarily putting down that cautionary proviso? Yes, there’s just one thing wrong with it. You do care. And I care too. Maybe more than we quite know. The degree of our involvement might be of the kind expressed in the song about Kentucky’s Bloody Harlan County: 

There are no neutrals here.

As the readers of a recent column may recall, I’ve lately been reading a feminist theoretician named Judith Butler. By now, I’ve gone through her Giving an Account of Oneself, as well as Gender Trouble and recently have begun to read Bodies that Matter. Her message is not easy to reduce to a slogan. But it’s at least clear that she doesn’t want the heterosexual couple to enjoy the social advantages it has monopolized in the post-classical cultures of Western civilization. In her view, equal social favor should go to other erotic combinations: same sex monogamous, or serial, or plural rotating, or what have you.

Sounds fair. So what’s wrong with that? Especially since (as Butler and other feminists have agreed) the boy/girl stuff has got itself hopelessly contaminated by patriarchy. Given that patriarchy is in turn found allied with racism, colonialism and other forms of oppression – isn’t it fairer just to delete from heterosexuality its inherited pride of place? To allow patriarchy-contaminated heterosexuality to remain unaffected by other proposed changes in the erotic playing field would be like giving one team a ten point advantage before the others can even get into the game.

By the way, what game are we talking about? I think it must be the game of life, where the key thing (the condition of trustworthiness in a discussion) is to get real. Real about the stakes. Real about the playing field. Real about the rules of the game.

The stakes here concern the trajectory of desire. Of course, the primary desire must be the desire to go on living – what Spinoza calls the desire to persevere in one’s own being. Most people are instinctively aware that, if you can’t make contact with that desire, you’re in bad trouble. And you’ll need to find some reason to go on. Having talked two friends out of their vehemently-voiced desire to commit suicide, I can speak with some degree of confidence on this point.

Erotic desire concerns the fulfillment of bodily and life purposes, separately or in some kind of combination. So what’s wrong with affirming that non-heterosexuality, formerly downrated, should now get highgrade support from society?

What’s wrong is the bad faith in it. It denies the most salient fact about erotic life. It’s competitive! 

One time, a bohemian friend invited me to go downtown with her to a lesbian dance. I no longer recall the auspices of the dance, but it was held in a big dance hall with only women in the room. I wasn’t there to dance, just to see what it was like. You know, qua philosopher? Anyway, the feature that most struck me were … the wallflowers! The girls who didn’t get asked to dance! Tearful girls, or women who had lost their partners to the more assertive women who’d cut in!

My word! Who knew? Is there no erotic safety in this world? And that’s a report – I’m pretty sure generalizable – from within the frame of one same-sex dance hall.

A propos, I recall an upper-class brother and sister, whom we happened to know in Australia, complaining that lately the parties they’d attend with the hope of meeting possible partners of the opposite sex were getting atmospherically dominated by the same sex attendees whose presence made man/woman courtship somehow recessive – overshadowed, as it were.

The human condition includes erotic rivalry.

It occurs within heterosexual social life, within same-sex social life, and between types of erotic playing fields. All erotic modalities are competitive, both internally and externally. If someone tells me that heterosexuality ought now to recede to the periphery of social life, because its previous prestige came at a cost to other erotic forms, I’ll want to know how much social space the new combinations will yet reserve for boy/girl romance. After all, associating man/woman romance with capitalism, racism, colonialism et al is a point-scoring tactical move: now the same-sex spokespersons can capture the high ground by pulling moral rank on their previously-predominant erotic rivals!

Behind all this erotic bad faith, something still more serious is going on. In Plato’s Republic, the state as a whole is conceived as the soul of the individual “writ large.” If there is that part/whole connection, then a civilization plays a role in providing the motivation for erotic desire on the personal level. 

Our civilization no longer knows what it should desire and why it should go on wanting to live.

We need to find out.

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