Inside the Current Issue

Power/Games: Notes on the Politics of Sexual Role-Playing

Cookie Orlando

A stripper I used to know liked to wax poetic on themes of Bill Clinton's sexuality. His penis seemed to fly like an eternally burning Hindenburg through the cloudscapes of her imagination:

"Man, I'd love to get my hands on Bill Clinton's dick," she'd growl with animal lust. "I'll bet he's got a big, curved dick that gets all dark and purple when it's hard. I'd like to give that big, purple, curved dick a squeeze."

She would go on in this mode for as long as you would listen and the fantasies acquired a baroque intricacy as she got more into it. She once confessed to me that she sometimes imagined that she was with Clinton while she was having sex with her actual lovers.

A woman to whom I recently described this phenomenon exclaimed, "No one fantasizes like that about Bush's dick!" I can see why she said this and she may be right, although in the context of modern America's complex psychopathology it's easy to imagine some red-state soccer mom lost in reverie upon the USS Lincoln with a stern, Stalinesque George W., she in Ambercrombie and Fitch, he in flight suit complete with tumescent jock strap: "Mission Accomplished." How tight are the links between desire and images of decisive power? An opinion piece by Lisa Schiffren, published in The Wall Street Journal on May 9, 2003 provides us with one example of how such feelings might be articulated:

I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham

Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking - how to put it? - really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly "hot," as in virile, sexy and powerful.

Note that the president's sexual appeal is magnified by his military accoutrements ("that amazing uniform") and by his supposed ability command the troops. Whether it's a stripper lusting after Clinton or a neocon housewife, all wet for Bush, the intersection between the arenas of desire and power pose challenging questions to the anti-authoritarian Left. How tight are the links between desire and images of decisive (usually masculine) power? Do anti-authoritarians who get turned on by fascistic images cropping up in, say, industrial or punk music, need to do a stint at the political confessional? Can power be a fun and harmless sex toy, or is it a gateway drug casting us inevitably towards a military pornography of war?

The following examples reflect my own experiences of sexual desire. While I will try to make sense of them in a political context, they should not be read as generalizations about the sexuality of men, women, or anything in between. While I know there are others out there who've had similar experiences, there are also those with very different or opposite ones, which could also add important insights to the conversation.

I'll begin with a relatively impersonal one. During my teens my friends and I amassed a small stockpile of Playboy and Hustler magazines. I remember to this very day my surprise when, after gazing intensely at softly lit photos of the centerfold model sprawled across a pool table while a cue stick leaned suggestively against the wall, I turned the page to find a picture of a fighter jet arcing aggressively across a white-hot sky. The headline (I remember it word-for-word) - was "tomcat in heat" and then there was a little puff piece about the destructive power of the new jet shown in the picture. Although the juxtaposition was opaque to my adolescent consciousness, these days I would hazard a reading of the spread's message as something like, "Your masculine sexuality should be like this military vehicle: blazing of engines, capable of massive destruction without emotional consequences, and incorporated into sharply defined chains of hierarchical command."

Magazines like Playboy help to create the taste of their audiences. But they also speak its existent language. This suggests that many men today identify with a sexual language that speaks to them in terms of highly technologized manifestations of state and military power.

On a more personal level, I can say that most women I've "been involved with" have expected me to display a kind of decisive power, especially during sex. This does not necessarily mean that they expected me to play the part of the patriarch ordering his woman about from the television set - they would not have found that sexy (although one recently told me that she found extremely erotic the idea of performing fellatio while her man read the newspaper and puffed on a tobacco pipe). In general, what I'm pointing to is a more semiotic display of virility and power. Just a few nights ago my female partner was complaining about how long it was taking us to walk to a restaurant in Chinatown. Finally she burst out with "If I'm bitching like that and it's getting on your nerves, you should just tell me to shut up." She made it clear that such stern behavior, a semiotic representation of decisive masculinity, turned her on.

At other times the situation has gotten even more intense. One former girlfriend and I had a system in which, if an argument couldn't be resolved by consensus, I was expected to resolve it absolutely by using the phrase, "I command you." After I said this, she was expected to go along with it and answer, "Yes, master."

Let me state here that this system was just as much her creation as mine. She found it sexy and even a little bit occult-y/black magik-y. I only used it a few times, but each time I did, the sexiness of the ritualized use of power made both of us so hot that it inevitably led to eager, combative bouts of lovemaking. I often wondered, at the time, whether the power she (and other women) were granting me was real, or a mere sex toy. If it was real, was I guilty of a leftist neo-patriarchy? Then again, if it was a toy and got us off, who could complain about that? It didn't take a genius to see that something of our militaristic, imperialistic society had lodged itself in the parts of our minds that craved the touch of flesh. But it felt good and it seemed to be under control, so I went with it.

So far I've expressed anxiety about structures of desire that appear in personal patterns of domination and submission. But the aggressive, almost psychotic policies of the Bush Administration, such as pre-emptive war without any post-war plan, brutal treatment of prisoners, and illegal domestic spying aren't just semiotic games designed to get Laura B. breathing heavy: they're genuine acts of authoritarian state power designed to net control of resources and keep a panopticon eye out for signs of dissent to boot.

Bedroom power games are different from this in fundamental ways, one of the most important of which is simply that the submissive partner engages consensually and therefore holds a form of power that is harder and more real than any semiotic displays of slapping, choking, spanking, et cetera. The submissive man or woman holds the power to continue the game or stop it. The domination performed by the dominant partner becomes a sort of submission, when we consider that the submissive desires it. In this way, even apparently violent acts of domination, performed consensually, are a service to the submissive partner, and the master, seen from this light, is the slave.

This is a drastically different situation from political domination. The people who are directly victimized by imperial wars and neoliberal economic scheming do not grant their explicit consent to the system. While the woman mentioned above (who demanded that I use the imperative when we disagreed) ceased to obey in the months before we broke up, the people on the receiving end of political power can't call off the game. It might be argued that they grant some form of consent in failing to revolt, but countless and increasing acts of resistance, from the furor over cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed to the election of Evo Morales - a candidate who promised to be "a nightmare for the US" - suggest that the submissive is saying the magic word. They want the game to stop, and have wanted it for a long time.

In the David Cronenberg film Videodrome, soft-core porn TV executive Max Renn appears on a talk show in which the host asks him whether the blue movies he provides to the public contribute to social degeneration. Renn smiles boyishly and tells her that the films are "cathartic," and they allow an outlet for impulses that might otherwise manifest in truly destructive forms. Later in the film, as Renn's personality begins to dissolve in an acid bath of lust, sadism, and conspiracy theory, he's told more than once that his remarks on the show were superficial.

The movie asks whether we're strong enough to leave the often cruel and objectifying scripts of sadomasochistic porn on the screen without incorporating them into our most intimate narratives of desire and arousal. While I've noted a few differences between power games and real power above, I still believe it's worthwhile to consider the cryptic messages hidden in the symbols of our own flesh in the moment of pleasure. Can we learn about power by inhabiting it during sex? Why is power such an effective aphrodisiac? What other scripts might we play with, besides ones that depend on domination and submission?

It's easy enough for most of us here at CUNY to reject war, torture, the dismantling of the welfare state, and perhaps even the authority of the government in general. We can denounce the war and be activists against it. And yet, when the logic that one person shouldn't take control over another is extended to the bedroom, we are deprived of some of our most enjoyable sexual experiences. The very same politics that drive our politics of liberation in the public sphere can become instruments of repression and self-policing in the private.

All of this said, some of my sexual appetites make me uncomfortable at times. But the best conversations I've had about power have been with women who have shared it with me, who have brought it to life as an act, a movement, a logic made flesh.

Cookie Orlando is a GC student.