Touch Cylinder

Chokehold 1

Sex must be deconstructed! Masturbation has been rendered the minor term in the binary between sex and onanism. In the process of deconstruction, we must temporarily flip the hierarchy between the minor and major term, momentarily privileging the minor term to unseat the binary that binds them. Speech / writing, white / black, man / woman, mind / body, and, now, sex / masturbation. 

In Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, speech is rendered the intuitive term which implies true meaning, while writing is seen as a supplement to speech. Similarly, “masturbation comes to be added to so-called normal sexual experience.” It is additional, but not essential. But what does it mean to privilege autoerotic stimulation in the history of sexuality? 

A deconstruction of sex requires critically considering the metaphysics of non-presence which determine the act of sex itself. I challenge us to consider that, perhaps, we have sex so we can masturbate to the encounter later. Now a full dissemination of this thesis will be explored in a monograph-to-come, but I will sketch out the outline of the argument here. 

First, let us establish the critique of self-pleasure as follows: masturbation is lesser than sex, it is imitation of sex, a poor copy of the pure presence that sex offers. Sex is like speaking, for when we have sex, we engage in the other directly. . . Is it possible though that pure presence in sex is a myth? Indeed, many sex acts shroud themselves in fantasy and idealization—some even imagine having sex with someone else during the act itself.

Meanwhile, masturbation is the origin point of its major term sex. It is arche-writing. Most people play with themselves more than with others; their first contact with sexuality is (as Freud shows) through playing with their autogenitals; it is common to wank prior to having sex to last longer. Masturbation is the rope holding up the illusion of mastery in the bedroom. Perhaps much of our sexual lives (temporally) is constructed by and around onanism: so why don’t we value it more? 

We, of course, proceed with a degree of caution. The terrain of onanism has become territorialized by a culture of pornography: fap capitalism. Although Porn Studies is a discourse of emissive plentitude, my analysis focuses less on the forest of these images and more on the structure of seed. Uncovering this seed requires us to momentarily discharge the pornographic in order to discover the in-it-of-itself of auto-eroticism. It is imperative to perform a transvaluation of our sexual values. Our conceptualization of onanism has become overdetermined by pornography, but we must understand the structure of the autoerotic beyond these terms. Onanism as signifier not signified. Wittgenstein jerked it to mathematical equations.

Consider: the sex act is always contained to a timeframe dictated by the bounds of human endurance. Meanwhile, recalling that encounter in a future session gives you weeks, months, maybe even years of erotic mileage. The afterlife of sex outlives its encounter. Sex is transient and passing, but masturbation, the encoding of sex into a memory, wraps and embalms the act into the rope of time. The memory exceeds the event, and in turn replaces it. It opens up the sex act to the explosive foams of historical fabulation. A blanched sexual encounter can become a bubbling ecstasy, for, in the harbor of the mind, the seaman fucks without end. A parrot croons. Fabulated in the sexual archive, an excess where fiction exceeds history. Masturbation is tale-telling, histoire–history and narrative–fastened gestural rewrites. Only in the revision are we able to discover what happened. À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust was a vicious onanist. Il n'y aurait pas de Recherche sans masturbation). Autoeroticism is, thus, our body’s relationship with sexual memory. We have sex to generate more sexual memories: that we have sex to masturbate to it later.