We with Freud: Sex, power, the black hole

Today, the World Health Organization no longer considers homosexuality or gender incongruence pathological. Many countries now guarantee equality between women and men, legalize abortion and gender affirmation, recognize family rights for same-sex couples, and enforce anti-discrimination laws to protect sexual minorities. Meanwhile, customs have changed everywhere: in families, schools, workplaces, media, and social networks. Sex is no longer taboo; on the contrary, it is omnipresent—no longer forbidden but encouraged. The internet saturates everyday life with pornography. The contraceptive pill, anxiolytics, antidepressants, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and Post-Exposure Prophylaxis for HIV, hormone therapies to delay menopause and those for gender affirmation, puberty blockers for gender-diverse youth, therapies and practices of assisted reproduction, Cialis and Viagra for assisted erection, cocaine, methamphetamines, GHB, the whole range of chemsex drugs…—this whole chemical arsenal, legal or illegal, now saturates our sexualized bodies. Some even claim prostitution is “work like any other,” even in countries—such as Italy—where, legally speaking, it is not. And for large parts of the population, so-called sex-positive thinking has now become mainstream: we tell ourselves, essentially, that today sex is no longer a political problem. That it no longer has anything scandalous, negative, or traumatic, that it is all positive, healthy, even therapeutic, and empowering. Is this what the sexual liberation movements of the 1970s had envisioned? The anti-capitalist revolution clearly failed: after the collapse of the USSR, neoliberalism triumphed across the globe. Yet can we say that the sexual revolution has succeeded—within capitalism, though, and not beyond it? Is neoliberal society the civilization of fulfilled sexual freedom? Has the relation between sex and power been finally resolved? Donald Trump’s executive order banning the concept of gender and declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female, defined by the reproductive cells a body produces—eggs or sperm—keeps the issue open. What is sex? What is power? What relation ties one to the other? Keeping in the background the neo-fascist moment that global politics is currently experiencing, this essay will not answer but rather explode these questions into many other questions. Whether listeners are Trumpian reactionaries, progressive liberals, or cynical nihilists, they will be sadistically guided all together on an empty tour, as if on an orbit around a black hole, in the company of Sigmund Freud—until they are sucked into the abyss of the drive.