Commodified Freedom

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Majas on a Balcony, oil on canvas, ca. 1800–1810, (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

On the currency of desire.

Dear editors,

“It’s all about sex.” It’s a tagline and mantra. Sex sells, dominates, and defines us. The aphorism has been recycled so often it now reeks of tired familiarity.

It would be easy to dismiss our culture’s obsession with sex as sensationalism—just another tactic aimed at capturing our attention spans. But the constant undercurrent that laces every conversation, marketing campaign, and first date makes me wonder if it’s the other way around. What if the phrase was inverted? What if it’s not “all about sex,” but rather that sex is all about something else?

It’s not just that we love sex, but rather that we have come to love desire itself. The world accepts the commodification of bodies. The marketplace of the human body is perpetually open for business, its products on display in browser windows or social media feeds illuminated with electronic lust. Desire is the currency; sex is merely the transaction. The result? A hollowed out, commercialized version of sex that fails to live up to the seductive fantasy we have crafted for it.

Most people never question this fantasy, but philosopher Amia Srinivasan has interrogated the nature of desire: what if we don’t want what we think we want? Srinivasan’s work challenges us to dismantle the idea of “authentic” desire, writing in her book The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, “[t]he roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world.” We claim to desire the intimacy, connection, pleasure of sex. But how much of that desire is genuinely ours? How much of it have we been taught to want as Pavlovian subjects?

Read the full letter at The Harper Review