Perhaps, though, we could just chuck it in ChatGPT? According to a 2025 LexisNexis survey, 61% of UK lawyers have used generative AI for work, with 49% relying on general-purpose chatbot programs rather than specialist legal tools. On the consumer end, “robo-lawyers” are finding clients aplenty. A study by JUSTICE, a legal charity, and the Administrative Fairness Lab found that one-in-six respondents who had experienced a recent legal dispute had consulted an AI chatbot for help.

No longer the exclusive preserve of a cloistered elite, meanwhile, legal research now appears within the competence of sophisticated large language models. A September 2026 report evaluated AI models on practical Dutch legal research. Its best-performing model, Claude Fable 5.1, satisfied 75.7% of individual legal and citation criteria.

One can envision a near future where much lawyering is undertaken by AI. Perhaps clients interact with an interface, which then turns their conversation into a formal submission to the court. Human judges, retained for tradition, then provide desk-based assessments, with neither counsel nor client required to appear. If this premonition is accurate, lawyers are looking increasingly obsolete.

At the risk of breaking the magician’s code, the legal profession has been obfuscating how simple legal argument is for centuries. Behind all the Latin conjurations and private-school wankery, much lawyering involves rote syllogistic reasoning. A general legal rule (“drivers owe a duty of care to other road users“) is applied to the facts of a particular case (“the defendant was driving and the claimant was another road user”) to reach a conclusion (“the defendant owed the claimant a duty of care”).

Once you know the elements of a cause of action or criminal offense, applying the relevant rules to the available facts supplies a framework for assessing probable legal liability and what legal arguments could prove fruitful in court. Ambiguities may exist, particularly when legislation or case law contains open-textured phraseology like “reasonable” or “ordinary”. Yet the arguments that can be put forward follow fairly consistent conventions.

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Even attempts to soften the law’s rigidity have produced new forms of it. “Equity” emerged in the Court of Chancery to alleviate injustices caused by the strict application of common-law rules. This allowed litigants to seek injunctions restraining immoral conduct, or the rescission of a contract induced by undue influence or misrepresentation. Over time, however, these remedies became governed by elaborate doctrines with strict conditions on how and when courts would intervene.

It has never been easier for amateurs to approximate “black-letter” lawyering: a term for the routine application of well-established principles and rules, named after the heavy Gothic type face used by medieval scribes. “Plain-language” reforms in the last century stripped legal drafting of unnecessary obscurity (“Anton Piller orders” became “search orders”; “Mareva injunctions” became “freezing injunctions”), while widespread digital archiving has brought statutes and case judgments within reach of anyone with an internet connection.

This was not always so easy. As legal scholar Desmond Manderson has noted, for much of common law history legal principles appeared to the public “as runes”, “priestly signs” whose authority was heightened by mystery. The Magna Carta addressed the world firstly in Latin, then French, languages understood by only tiny minorities at the time. The first complete English translation appeared in 1534, three centuries later, and was still largely unintelligible to a mostly illiterate public. The rise of the machines, therefore, is part of a welcome democratization of legal knowledge and expanded access to justice.

So what place is there for counsel in carne in this Brave New World of automated lawyering? In my view, it is precisely in those aspects of advocacy often argued to be archaic and questionable, in the deeply human practice of veiling conflict in ceremony and adorning argument with eloquence.

Legal rationality — rule-bound and amenable to syllogism — may be susceptible to mechanical imitation. That, however, is merely the science of legal practice, not the art. Logical propositions are just part of the advocate’s repertoire. The true power of the legal profession is found not in judgments but in pageantry.

Philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics offers a useful lens in his distinction between knowledge that can be gained from textbooks and the kind of experiential understanding which constitutes cultivated connoisseurship. Oakeshott calls the first technical knowledge, whose chief characteristic is that it is susceptible to “precise formulation”. The second, practical knowledge, “exists only in use” and “cannot be formulated in rules”.

Oakeshott’s distinction is familiar enough in any solicitor’s office. Taking instructions from a client is about more than simply extracting facts and applying rules. The solicitor must receive a client’s account with sufficient sympathy to encourage candor but with sufficient skepticism to discover what has been omitted. One’s role is part social worker, part detective. For a barrister, an entire dramaturgy attends the presenting of one’s case. Like a grand Shakespearean director, counsel orchestrates the show: whether it’s concessions negotiated with opposing counsel, witnesses brought back to inconvenient particulars, or gentle corrections of judicial misapprehensions. Merely knowing the rules encyclopedically, as an AI program will soon be able to, can never capture the talents for commanding a room and furthering an argument.

Viewed with an eye for performance, the spirit of lawyering is centered around a choreography of manners. For Manderson, a true apologist for the occult features of law, a lawyer of substance must attend to “the ambient, the metaphorical, and the rhetorical effects of language”. Take Cicero’s defense of Quintus Ligarius, prosecuted for supporting Caesar’s opponents in Africa during the civil war. In Plutarch’s retelling, Caesar had already condemned Ligarius in his own mind as “a villain and an enemy”, but agreed to hear the celebrated orator out. As Cicero spoke, Caesar’s face “changed color” when he recalled that Ligarius’s prosecutor had fought against him in the Battle of Pharsalus. In the end, Caesar “was so greatly affected that his body shook and he dropped from his hand some of his documents”. Ligarius was spared, as Caesar would soon have cause to regret, given he joined the conspiracy to assassinate him.

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Whatever allowance we make for Plutarch’s exaggeration, the scene captures advocacy as an art of dramatic revelation and an appeal to the passions. Voice, gesture, stillness and the ordering of disclosures shape how a story unfolds, helping give a client’s perspective presence before strangers. Romanticization is weaponized in the service of empathy and understanding.

In recent times, “rhetoric” has acquired an unfortunate reputation as trickery and, when applied to legal practice, often conjures up images of sleazy hired guns willing to argue — in the words of Jonathan Swift — “that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid”. But true rhetoric concerns the means by which one person makes something intelligible and persuasive to another. This goes deeper than doctrinal analysis, to decisions of emphasis and allusion. As literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish has argued, the meanings of legal arguments are not “embedded in words but emerge and are perspicuous in the light of background conditions of intelligibility”. Whether one’s audience is judge or jury, a cutting distinction can make an overlooked experience legally significant while a well-crafted analogy can move others more than cold deductive reasoning.

Though much of the pomp and ceremony of the courtroom can appear terribly old-fashioned, even the quaintest rituals serve a purpose, one foundational to civilization. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Athena establishes a court to judge Orestes for killing his mother. His acquittal leaves his accusers, the Furies, threatening vengeance upon Athens. Peace comes only when Athena persuades them to accept an honored place within the city, to be seduced into civility. This “show” of authority gives adversaries a way to submit their quarrels to judgment without surrendering their dignity. Ornate performance, whether the supplicant bow before an elevated bench or the regality of judicial attire, signals that trial and judgment are public acts delivered with restraint.

This is natural justice, a practice more conventional than “rational”. Philosopher Roger Scruton famously understood the common law as an inheritance formed through particular disputes, remaining “close to human life and bound up with a given history”. Such experiential nuances are unlikely to be appreciated by an AI which, rather than grounding its decision on the tangled particulars of human circumstance, is designed to string words together on the basis of static, narrow learned parameters.

To ground lawyering in rhetorical artistry necessitates a shift in legal education. If AI can handle the drudgery of locating authorities and assembling arguments, then the human element becomes even more central. Future generation of lawyers will require a capacity for cultivated passions, what C.S. Lewis called the chest: the seat of “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments”. It also requires a magnanimity of character sufficient to captivate and seduce an audience. Literature, history and poetics deserve a place alongside doctrine. An education devoted exclusively to producing correct answers prioritizes “technical knowledge” over the sensitive, well-rounded soul required for legal practice. We can leave the grunt work to AI, in short, but the delicate business of civilizing conflict still calls for a human touch.

In interviews and debates, Paglia would spout aphoristic daggers at her opponents: mostly liberal academics and contemporary feminists, with Gloria Steinem a particularly manic obsession. Her quick, declarative speech-style rattled off grand cultural verdicts, insightful analyses of art history, and bitchy asides like a machine gun discharging a belt of ammunition: “leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist”; “male urination is a form of commentary”; “incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name”.

In subsequent essays and books, Paglia defended child pornography and snuff films; treated campus sexual assault as hysteria; framed the AIDS epidemic as nature’s revenge against homosexual excess; and defended both the right to have an abortion and the right to characterize abortion as murder. Also, somehow, Madonna “cured the ills of feminism by reasserting women’s command of the sexual realm.”

Paglia’s performance as popular provocateur was ridiculous, at times insightful but more often than not just exhausting. This potential to overburden an audience is clear from her debut book — both in its excruciating length and in its sweeping generalizations about history and the human condition. As critic Roger Kimball noted, Paglia has a tendency “to skid suddenly from the measured to the outrageous, from the reasonable and well supported to the utterly fantastic”. Yet for every misstep in Sexual Personae, every overconfident declaration, there follows a statement so electric one has to pause to breathe it all in:

“A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage.”

The ambition of Sexual Personae is nothing less than civilizational, charting an epic battle across centuries in Western culture between Apollonian form and Dionysian chaos. This dynamic was first popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), describing the twin artistic impulses of Greek tragedy. Nietzsche cast the god Apollo as the deity of image, dream, distance and beautiful illusion; and the trickster Dionysus as the god of music, intoxication and ecstatic dissolution. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy reached excellence by holding these forces together and giving form to suffering without denying the terrifying, irrational energies bubbling sinisterly underneath.

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Paglia translates this Nietzschean lens beyond the narrow purview of Greek tragedy to encompass a variety of motifs throughout Western aesthetics. In her hands, Apollo is line, distance, sculpture, classification, hierarchy, but also the eye, the column and the sculpted hard body. Dionysus is music, frenzy, sex and intoxication but also the “chthonian” in nature: the dark, abject and underworldly — including mud, blood, rot and ooze.

Sexual Personae goes yet further: in marrying Nietzsche with Freud, linking embodied sex differences and familial psychodrama to the production of different visual art forms. Under Paglia’s vision, heterosexuality and Greek tragedy are one and the same. Womanhood has a rightful mythic place within the Dionysian, while masculinity exists as an anxious Apollonian defense against engulfing nature. Female embodiment is the unbearable truth of chthonian forces: the body as a site of blood, fertility, vulnerability and cyclical shifts in mood. Female sexuality is shaped less by a single linear drive than by blurring states of receptivity and sensitivity. In contrast, testosterone-fueled male embodiment, in Paglia’s view, is “manic depressive” driven by obsessive projective urges of spontaneous desire, visual literalness, violence, competition and excitation.

In Paglian speculative pre-history, Dionysian matriarchy reigned supreme, an “earth cult” of animality, death, vegetation and maternal abundance. Pre-historic art centered on fertile womanhood, epitomized by the Venus of Willendorf, with her swollen belly, pendulous breasts and exaggerated hips. “She is the too-muchness of nature, which man longs to direct to his salvation” notes Paglia.

It is in Ancient Egypt that we see the masculine Apollo take control. Egyptian art is described by Paglia as an intricate balancing of “earth cult” with “sky cult”. The bust of Nefertiti is all geometry and symmetry, the cosmetic correction of swollen Dionysian fertility idols. For Paglia, “Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity”. This invention of refinement is epitomized by Egyptian feline cults, particularly of Bastet, as cats are those “uncanny creatures of the night” who mold elegance with vicious cruelty. This meshing of Apollonian and Dionysian forces also gives rise to the first “sexual personae” or recurrent erotic archetypes which plague Western culture: the femme fatale, the androgyne, the vampire, the beautiful boy and the Great Mother.

Ancient Greek civilization would continue this blending of forces. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, war, lust, pride, grief and death are not sanitized nor moralized but beautified in myth and image. Greek theology is a sky cult but with roots in the earth. The Olympians are luminous fascists playing in the primordial goo in which man is drowning. It’s here that we get the first portrayals of war-like womanhood, which Paglia views as distinctive of Western culture. The Amazonian myth, Artemis the Huntress and glorious Athena are projections of a male mind seeking to reconcile nature’s engulfing feminine power with the hard outlines of heroic form. The kouros — free standing sculptures of male youths — depict smooth, hard, youthful, bodies detached from the muck of reproduction. They exist, for Paglia, as “a living idol of the Apollonian eye”.

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Whilst Nietzsche documents a decline moving from the early tragic vision of Homer into the rise of Socratic rationalism, Paglia sees such times of “decadence” as cauldrons for great art. We see during this later period an incapacity for culture to integrate the Dionysian, which it then must aestheticize or condemn. Euripides’ Bacchae shows civilization unable to contain the feminized frenzy and liquefying force of Dionysus. In the playwright’s Medea, the barbarian sorceress becomes another eruption of chthonian womanhood into civic order.

It’s as we move out of antiquity that the central thesis of Sexual Personae becomes rather unconvincing. If you share Paglia’s vision of history, there is no aspect of Western literature or visual art that doesn’t contain some veiled reference to sexual personae. In her pagan eyes, the entire edifice of Western art is merely a series of veiled projections against devouring mothers, oozing sex, lust for twinkish ephebes and hidden transsexual desire.

That’s not to say all her claims are implausible. The Renaissance, of course, sought to revive pagan iconography along with corresponding sexual personae in the process. That Donatello’s “David” is “perverse and pederastic” is no coincidence. Also inarguable is that Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” is blatant Apollonian aestheticism, womanhood masked and constrained in beauty. Finally, there’s no denying that the 18th-century dandy is pure pagan throwback. Oscar Wilde, who gets two chapters all to himself, is decadent aestheticism free of womanly influence with his lust for rent boys and cult of beauty.

There is also merit in Paglia’s notion in Sexual Personae that there are two strands of Romanticism: one strand epitomized by Rousseau in his sentimentalization of nature as innocence, and the other by the Marquis de Sade, who embraced nature as Dionysian cruelty and domination. For Paglia, it was the tendency of Romanticism to flip from the former to the latter which gave rise to the decadent genres of gothic horror, where nature’s ugly side is masked through sexual personae of vampires and ghouls.

All the same, Paglia has to make some ridiculous leaps in order to extend her psychosexual drama across centuries of art. It’s one thing to say that Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is “the most extended meditation on sex in the history of poetry”. It’s quite another to claim that the English epic is mere set dressing for Spenser’s desire to explore a “encyclopedic catalog of perversions” that would make Bonnie Blue blush. Goethe’s genius apparently came from an inner “hermaphroditism”; Lord Byron was channeling the beautiful boy personae linking him spiritually with — I kid you not — Elvis Presley given their shared “brooding menace” and “urbane magnanimity”. By the time you get to “Emily Dickinson is the female Sade” it’s difficult to mount any resistance. Sure, why not?

It can be tempting to extend Paglia’s critique into the 21st century, as she did in the Nineties as part of the feminist “sex wars” over pornography and BDSM. Is looksmaxxing a masculine Apollonian resistance? Do K-pop idols signal the “beautiful boy” is in full bloom? Is the trans movement a sign of burgeoning decadence in culture? However, this would be continuing the mistake in assuming our pagan heritage is still within us. Under Paglia’s theory of the Western eye, our visual culture of buzzing screens and ceaseless images should be a high point of Apollonian artistic achievement. That it isn’t should signal that there is more to cultural flourishing than dazzling spectacle.

The strongest parts of Sexual Personae remain in its early chapters describing the pagan vision of early civilization. A pagan view of modern culture is desperately needed as an alternative to the increasingly exhausting ideologies of liberal progressivism and Christian nationalism. Nietzsche’s vision of an intricate integration of both Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of life in pagan culture, a beautiful melding of the primal and the classical, remains a powerful ideal. However, Paglia’s simplification of these elements — her visions of a humanity separated into two distinct groups with one side responsible for the entirety of civilization and the other signaling its imminent downfall — is absurd.

Given the questionable validity of Freudian psychoanalysis, one has to wonder why man, just as much a composite of ooze and filth as woman, is not also at risk of signaling dissolution. Paglia’s oft-quoted line that “[i]f civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” envisions a certain heroic, stable masculinity that has not existed since the fall of the Roman Empire. Your average modern man is, both physically and spiritually, more Venus of Willendorf than Achilles.

Perhaps, a more universal pagan lesson can be taken from Sexual Personae, free of gender war and silly provocation: that it is our duty to our Western heritage to wrestle beauty and splendor from the muck and that both sexes are required for the hard labor of civilization.

Claims that homophobia is “surging” particularly among young men are proving promising fodder for clickbait publications as well as for fundraising drives by LGBT advocacy groups. The non-profit GLAAD has warned of a steady uptick in anti-LGBTQ incidents. This, in turn, seems to be causing unnecessary worry: Stonewall has claimed that less than half of LGBTQ+ people feel safe holding their partner’s hand in public.

The good news is nearly all of such claims of a growing homophobia “epidemic” in Western countries are completely unfounded. The bad news? Correcting this sort of narrative requires careful attention to survey design, trend interpretation, and definitional changes, precisely the kind of work that most readers and much popular media will not do.

Here’s an example. Last month, PinkNews reported that “men born in the 2000s are far more likely to hold conservative views on LGBTQ+ rights compared to previous generations”. This narrative was picked up by other media outlets and spread across social media. Soon a flurry of speculation on potential causes erupted on social media. Is this because of incel forums and far-Right propaganda? Have trans issues caused a backlash against the LGBs? Are we entering a new era of Christian traditionalism?

For those asking if there was any truth behind the original premise, the short answer is no. It’s true that PinkNews based their article on credible research undertaken by Dr Ryan Burge at the American Institute for Boys and Men. Yet Dr Burge’s research was not about generational attitudes towards homosexuality; instead it looked at how changing religious views correspond to gender. When I contacted Dr Burge about the PinkNews reporting he called it a misrepresentation. “The Pew Religious Landscape Survey data does not indicate increasing homophobia among young men,” he clarified. Any apparent difference amongst young men today and previous generations “is almost certainly a methodological artifact, not a real trend”, he explained to me.

But the “take economy” allows no time to carefully sift through the numbers. Content-oriented media outlets like PinkNews are structurally incentivized to privilege speed, moral urgency, and emotional resonance over careful methodological scrutiny.

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No surprise, then, that PinkNews has distorted data before. In response to UK Home Office figures last year which indicated that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes were down for the second year in the row, the news site claimed they were false statistics. PinkNews’s argument wasn’t just that hate crimes are chronically underreported (which they certainly are), but that the Met Police’s data, which covers most of London, was excluded, and thus “likely under-represents national totals for LGBTQ+ hate crime”. The implication was that actual hate crime numbers could be skyrocketing.

This conveniently leaves out why the Met Police’s data was excluded last year. A flaw in the previous system meant that hate crime “markers” which applied to one offense could be automatically applied to all offenses within the same incident. As a result, Met statistics from 2021 to 2024 had overstated the number of hate crime offenses. Even with that inflation, LGBTQ+ hate crime numbers had continued to decline. Perhaps things really aren’t as terrible as PinkNews would like them to be?

We can’t only blame the journalists, though. Sometimes researchers on homophobia oversell their conclusions. In a recent New York Times guest essay, psychologists Dr Tessa Charlesworth and Dr Eli Finkel argued that apparent cultural progress in gay acceptance — reflected (for some reason) in the widespread popularity of gay hockey show Heated Rivalry — masked a far more troubling reversal in public attitudes.

According to Charlesworth’s research, “the decades-long rise in the acceptance of gay people in the United States peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then”. This conclusion was based on large-scale survey data which captured implicit and explicit social attitudes in the US. Between 2021 and 2024, anti-gay bias had risen by around 10%, with the trends being “distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25”.

Again, the data is misleading. Far from supporting the implication that young Americans are driving a new wave of homophobia, the reported “increase” in anti-gay bias amounts to a modest proportional rise from historically low baselines. It’s not a return to earlier levels of hostility. Even after the post-2021 uptick, Gen Z and Alpha remain the least anti-gay cohorts in absolute terms: they show the lowest average anti-gay/pro-straight bias scores compared with their elders.

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So what is the real story about social attitudes towards gay people in Western countries? Long-running attitude surveys, which continue to offer the strongest evidence of social change, reveal that a persistent majority accepts, not merely tolerates, gay relationships.

In the United States, Gallup’s long-running Values and Beliefs polling shows that Americans’ acceptance of gay or lesbian relations has increased markedly over the past two decades. In 2001, only about 40% of US adults said same-sex relations were morally acceptable. That proportion rose steadily to a high of 71% in 2022. Since then, the trend has evened out to roughly 64% across the past few years.

Approval of same-sex marriage in the US has followed a similar trajectory. When Gallup first asked the question in 1996, only about 27% of Americans said same-sex marriage should be legal. By 2004, support had grown to around 42%, and in 2011 it reached a majority for the first time, remaining above 50% into the early 2010s. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, support continued to climb, reaching around 70–71% in Gallup polling in 2022–2023. This year, in subsequent surveys, support plateaued at around 68%.

The plateauing of social attitudes in these surveys is sometimes framed as a “backlash”. However, the flattening of trend lines after a period of rapid social change is actually the norm. Attitudes rarely move in a straight upward line indefinitely. Once a broad social consensus has formed, gains tend to slow down and fluctuate within a narrow band year-to-year. We see identical trends with acceptance of divorce or moral permissibility of sex outside of marriage, both of which showed long plateaus once majority approval was reached.

One survey in the UK has been asking about the acceptability of same-sex relationships since 1983. According to the British Social Attitudes’ latest report, attitudes toward same-sex relationships have transformed over the past four decades. In 1983, 17% of adults said a sexual relationship between two people of the same sex is “never wrong”; by 2022 that number had risen to 67%. As expected, those who said such relationships are “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9% over the same period. Other surveys, like YouGov Polling, have found similar results.

By all accounts, despite the headlines, gays and lesbians in Western countries have never been more accepted. It’s important to pause and reflect on just how rapid this moral victory has been. In 1988, the year I was born, the UK Parliament passed Section 28 of the Local Government Act, prohibiting local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” — a measure with widespread support. A year earlier, The Sun published an article entitled “Fly away gays – and we will pay!” offering free one-way plane tickets to Norway to gay activists so they could leave the country for good. Such a world now seems unimaginable to us.

Creating a narrative of rising homophobia without solid evidence also causes real, tangible damage. Research about “minority stress” shows that anticipated violence and perceived stigma significantly contribute to anxiety and are associated with rising rates of depression. These effects do not require an increase in experiences of homophobia; they require only the belief that homophobic experiences are likely. When the underlying data is ambiguous, “rising homophobia” narratives risk intensifying perceived danger and worsening distress unnecessarily.

We gays and lesbians should be celebrating our victories, not indulging in panic over dubious numbers. Ignore the doom merchants, the future is brighter — and gayer — than you’ve been led to believe.

Such boozy traditions are becoming rather old hat. The young, we are informed, are increasingly giving up alcohol in favor of more health-conscious habits. The industry, desperate to keep pace, now churns out non-alcoholic beers and buzz-free approximations of spirits for this increasingly peculiar demographic.

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While “sober-curious” Gen Z have yet to spoil the occasion for us aging drunks, it’s worth pausing to ask the question you’ve been pushing to the back of your mind: is this annual ritual of alcoholic debauchery really justified?

Objectively, of course, alcohol is a disaster. The cause of numerous afflictions from liver disease to seven types of cancer, booze fuels a litany of social ills including domestic violence, public disorder, accidental death, car crashes and infidelity. Worst of all, it makes you fat!

Yet like all hopeless addicts we persist in constructing elaborate apologetics. We tell ourselves that it’s all about balance, that one has to consider alcohol’s compensating virtues along with its vices. It’s a “social lubricant” which brings us all together in a pleasantly warm buzz. It lowers our inhibitions to allow us to be our true selves. The poet Panyasis praised wine as “like fire, an aid and sweet relief” which “wards off all ills and comforts every grief”. Notorious booze-hound Simone de Beauvoir romanticized drunkenness as an “an exaltation of the moment and a complicity with other men”. Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson offered perhaps the most charming defense when he described wine simply as “bottled poetry”.

However, this sentimental view collapses quickly under scrutiny. While downing a few drinks no doubt provides some pleasure, its primary effects are anesthetic not empathogenic. Alcohol does not reveal our authentic selves, it dissolves the self. It loosens the tongue by dulling the mind, and provokes an urge to dance and sing by temporarily paralyzing the parts of the brain designed to preserve our dignity. For this temporary sedation, we are rewarded the next day with pain, vomiting and regret.

Alcohol’s virtues don’t come from reinvigorating the spirit, but by numbing the senses. There is a much darker side to our favorite drug. As Charles Bukowski famously put it when drunk: “the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” The joy in drunken revelry is really the relief which comes from escaping our miseries. Our lust for libations masks a deeper thirst for the void.

For a more honest account of our poor habits, one has to swallow some difficult realities. The pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a true Commissar of Curmudgeons, insisted that life is not a steady ascent toward fulfillment but an endless slog that “oscillates like a pendulum between pain and boredom”. Consciousness, in his telling, is a curse, a biological catastrophe which places man at war with the blind, ceaseless striving of the “Will” — the metaphysical force which underlies all existence. Yet Schopenhauer also believed in rare, sacred moments where this torment loosens, most notably in the experience of beauty, especially music, which dissolves the self and grants “a liberation from the individual will and its torments”. While he had no time for drunkards, Schopenhauer did concede that alcohol, properly consumed, could provide such temporary transcendence.

There is something refreshingly pagan about decadent, supposedly Christian, drunken festivities. In antiquity, this dark undercurrent of intoxication was idealized in the figure of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, frenzy and dissolution. His festivals were ritualized descents into chaos, moments where the self loosened its grip and individuals dissolved into a primal, undifferentiated swarm. The same daemonic drive persists to this day: generous servings of egg nog and mulled wine are ostensibly offered out to enable partakers to “unwind” and “relax”, but secretly the enactment is an ancient, ritualized ode to oblivion. Even the most tepid office celebration carries the faint scent of Dionysian madness.

On balance the pains brought by alcohol both to the individual and society far outweigh the pleasures. Yet the desire to drink isn’t merely a hedonistic impulse; it is a far more esoteric half-conscious urge to slip the chains of the Will and dissolve, however briefly, into something beyond ourselves.

We turn to “bottled poetry” because modern life lacks the touch of the sacred mysticism and beauty which nourished us in the past. The old forms of exalted communion — in shared prayer, ritual and awe — are now substituted with shared chemical escape. Alcohol steps into the vacuum as a cheap, fast and brutally effective sacrament. Behind every third glass of prosecco is an urge to avoid thoughts of mismatched desires, loneliness and the never-ending torment of time.

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This self-destructive urge has some value. In many ways drinking culture acts as a counterbalance against the far more pernicious modern obsession with “self-optimization” regarding health, longevity and productivity. We are currently swimming in propaganda marketing by fitness companies and wellness influencers, who tell us that we should fixate on every calorie, heartbeat and hour of sleep. Amid the modern tyranny of healthism, downing a Class 1 carcinogen to quiet one’s thoughts feels like a tremendous act of rebellion.

It’s no surprise that as we’ve seen a dramatic decline in alcohol consumption amongst the young, we’ve also seen a dramatic spike in mental health problems, celibacy and risk aversion. Raw dogging consciousness was always going to produce frayed nerves and quietly miserable lives.

Sobriety may be suitable for certain temperaments, particularly those for whom bacchanal joy can quickly descend into foolishness and bastardry. But for the romantic, one who demands more from life and can finely balance civilized restraint and pagan excess, a suitable dose of intoxicated ecstasy can offer genuine spiritual solace in a cold world.

Drinking is not healthy. It is not admirable. It is, however, a reprieve. As the booze apologist and conservative philosopher Roger Scruton once put it: “wine, drunk at the right time, in the right place, and the right company, is the path to meditation.”

So Merry Christmas, Evoe Dionysos. Raise a glass to temporary oblivion!

So it’s not surprising then that we are seeing a splintering of gay men away from big tent “queer” identity. One faction is the “LGB without the T” crowd who wish to segregate sexual deviance from gender bending. Another is formed of the homo-nationalist movements, who seek to align gay liberation with a white Western ideal.

Despite appearances of a united front, rabid infighting has generally been the norm within the so-called LGBT community — or the LGBTQQIAAP2S+ community (yes, really), as some now insist on calling it. Lesbians, and particularly lesbian-feminists, have wavered back and forth in their tolerance for gay male sexual excesses. In her book, Anticlimax (1990), the radical feminist Sheila Jefferys famously documented what she saw as an “eroticizing of power difference” inherent to gay male subcultures — particularly our penchant for sadomasochism and the rise of macho “clone culture”.

Among gay men too, the Nineties and early 2000s saw significant divides. “Anti-assimilationist” queers such as Michael Warner questioned the gay movement’s focus on inclusion within traditional institutions like marriage and the military in his book The Trouble with Normal (1999). The homosexual conservative Andrew Sullivan meanwhile argued in his own book, Virtually Normal (1995), that gays should become model citizens in order to be embraced by mainstream society.

More recently, a new group of gay male academics, writers and artists have entered the fray providing “post-liberal” or “dissident” perspectives on gay life. Their essays are collected in a new book Inversion: Gay Life After The Homosexual (Verdurin) edited by Pierre d’Alancaisez and Amir Naaman.

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The editors frame the collection around what they call a “crisis” in homosexuality — the crisis being that gay men have become “normies”, “albeit a peculiar kind of normies that get a whole month of Pride dedicated to them.” Their fear is that as the LGBTQ+ umbrella expands and various formerly fringe gay identities become ever more mainstream, “it becomes difficult to articulate what position gay men, former social pioneers and cultural taboo breakers, play in society. Even the historical characterization of the homosexual as exceptional is thrown into doubt with the advent of this crisis.”

One clear theme unites the gay dissidents who contribute essays to Inversion — a wish to reinvigorate a sense of profanity and vice within homosexuality. Unlike previous anti-assimilationist queer movements, the contributors do not wish to abolish “institutions of normalcy” nor to frame mainstream heterosexual culture as the enemy. Indeed, in their view, homosexuality ought to be pushed to the margins in order for it to thrive.

Anthropologist Roger Lancaster, in his contribution, bemoans the “professional managerial class” for sanitizing homosexuality into a consumerist lifestyle, and seeks — through Marxist analysis — to posit a more authentic “working class” faggotry bubbling under the surface. In a similar vein, the writer Travis Jeppenson laments the loss of the early queer punk scene, where homosexuality and nihilistic rebellion were intimately intertwined in the music of Pansy Division and Tribe 8 or the films of Bruce LaBruce and Gregg Araki. He calls on modern gay men to “nurture our inner faggotry” and to externalize “the sordidness that resides within”.

For these post-liberals, there is an inherent “scandal” to homosexuality — one that cannot and should not be normalized or sanitized by corporate Pride parades or cutesy Netflix shows about gay teen romance. In their reading, the authentic gay man is not happily partnered in the suburbs but on his knees in a public toilet.

He is also perpetually alone. According to co-editor d’Alancaisez, there is an irresolvable individualism to gay male identity precluding all strong community bonds. He argues that gay men are best understood as lone wolves “freely dissociating from a community that he is no longer able to imagine, deserving neither pity nor rescue”. Only when these men are threatened does a “gay community” form — whether during the AIDS crisis or the shared grief that followed the Admiral Duncan nail bombings of 1999. Without a clear enemy, any hope of gay communion is impossible.

Underlying many of the contributions in Inversion is sexual grievance. Most of the writers are older millennials — and they complain surprisingly frequently about being overlooked on Grindr due to their perceived politics or ideology. Co-editor Naaman constructs an elaborate theory of sexual psychopathology in order to air out his dating troubles. As an Israeli gay man living in Europe, he is sick of being “expected to voice his stance on the war in Gaza before he can be allowed to participate in chills, druggy, after-parties, or random hookups”. Pro-Palestinian homosexuals, he argues, are driven by an erotic attraction to primitive rebellion. He notes — in overloaded syntax — that these men are “…locked in a masturbatory, fetishizing gaze at the theaters of violence on their phones: in the onanistic eroticizing of morality, yearning to become one with the actors in the tragedy playing out on the screen.”

A deep fear of “biopolitics” also plagues many of the gay dissidents in the collection. The term, popularized by Michel Foucault, describes how modern institutions regulate through the setting of norms of health and productivity. Here, it is deployed to critique HIV-prevention efforts like PrEP and an undue focus on LGBT mental health. Writer and “independent researcher” David Moulton appears to be in a state of post-Covid paranoia. He fears that society has ruined the uniquely “gay art of suffering” reflected in the literary works of unrepentant sodomites like Jean Genet, who occupied a world of pimps, prostitutes and erotic longing.

In the most extreme case, Marcas Lancaster speaks in a derivative Burroughsian register about his early life of sexual abuse and neglect while romanticizing the tragic excesses of AIDS-era perversion. Lancaster describes himself as a “failed gay” for not becoming one of the “Sadian heroes, who wore their lesions like badges of honor” and for “making the ultimate sacrifice for what they believed was a higher cause”. For the post-liberals, the AIDS crisis haunts all attempts to normalize homosexuality, revealing as it does the underlying degeneracy of gay sex. The lesson that they draw from this is that we must all make peace with our place at the fringes of society.

Of all the attempts to chart a course for gay men away from mainstream queer culture, theirs is the most depressing. It is, thankfully, also not very convincing.

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It’s telling that there is no mention of romantic love anywhere in Inversion’s near 500 pages. Indeed any hint at emotional warmth is quickly shunned for an empty “transgression” — lacking any transcendent ideal. I suspect many of the gay male critics in the collection could very well resolve their inner turmoil through a simple combination of the — troublingly “biopolitical” — interventions of sunlight, cardio and tender affection.

There is, however, a slim glimmer of hope buried in one contribution. Philosopher Ran Heilbrunn outlines the failures of queer theory to account for gay male desire. One such desire is the preference amongst gay men for distinctly masculine physical beauty — contrary to the anti-hierarchical gender bending of the queer theorists. The obsession with male beauty is the thread that runs through a variety of homoerotic traditions, from Theognis of Megara to Robert Mapplethorpe. It strikes me that such high aestheticism — vitalist and passionate — could very well form the basis of a post-queer culture, but such a model is fundamentally anathema to the vacant despair preferred by our post-liberal essayists.

This more aspirational vision of gay male community is not without precedent. As historian Blake Smith notes in this collection, prior to the modern “gay homosexual” there existed a variety of homoerotic subcultures: from the formalized pederasty of Ancient Greece to the effeminate “invert” men (“fairies” or “mollies”) of the early 20th century who sought out rent boys and heterosexual “trade”. As I’ve written before, the mostly forgotten artists, scientists and thinkers who clustered around Adolf Brand’s magazine Der Eigene in late-19th-century Germany, saw their desires as an extension of refined taste and romantic male friendship. The past was complex and it demonstrates that homosexuality can come in many forms, both the lowly and degrading and cultivated and meaningful.

So desperate are the post-liberal dissidents to reject the “normie” homosexual that they have become trapped in an ironic appreciation for the worst features of past homosexual subcultures. I can only hope that their cynicism does not catch on and that gay men who find themselves out of place within contemporary queer culture aspire to something far more beautiful, communal and sustaining.

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”

Grindr launched as a mobile app in 2009, the brainchild of a gay Israeli-American tech entrepreneur, Joel Simkhai. It provided a seamless tech-mediated way for gay and bisexual men to interact in their area. The app promised, and arguably delivered, a hassle-free way to screen and select casual sexual partners with none of the pitfalls of in-person conversation. It was a runaway success, earning Simkhai millions, and becoming a staple in the lives of gay men across the world. The company went public in 2022, a feat which was hailed by commentators as a sign of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the business and finance world.

On paper, being anti-Grindr seems a bit like being “anti-freedom” — the projection of prudish, old-fashioned sensibilities onto techno-sexual liberation. Even the typical propogandists of grievance, those who accuse the app of perpetuating racism or “body fascism” or “femme-phobia”, just want equal access to this clearly emancipatory tool for the gay community. Gay men, particularly young gay men, are promiscuous; it’s in our nature. We do not play by the same rules of fidelity and desire as those of more conventional taste. But Grindr, far from furthering and expanding the opportunity for gay desire, has not truly augmented this state of affairs. Instead, it has diminished it, fundamentally reducing the erotic frisson, if not the availability, of casual encounters.

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Algorithmic screening, of course, is no longer just for gay guys. In her studies Cold Intimacies and Why Love Hurts, Eva Illouz has extensively documented the pernicious effects that the rise of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge has had on heterosexual romantic love. Dating apps, by design, have led to the over-intellectualisation and rationalisation of mate-selection. Many young people are now paralysed by choice and the exhausted task of trying to dissect and screen a potential partner, applying a cold set of metrics to ensure time is not wasted on hopeless duds. What Illouz documents for straight romance is equally true of the role of apps like Grindr on gay sex.

There are essentially two types of casual sex. There’s the functional, “get-your-rocks-off” kind where all that’s desired is a cheap orgasm with minimal effort. And then there’s the truly erotic, where a roll in the sack leaves a lasting memory. But this kind of eroticism requires something almost external to sexuality: a degree of mystery. Like Illouz, philosopher Byung Chul-Han has noted that our overly tech-mediated “pornographic” social world has lost the art of experiencing one’s sexual partner as truly “Other”. In The Agony of Eros he writes:

“Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other.”

This lack of otherness, in turn, diminishes sexual encounters into ego-centric, utilitarian pursuits — masturbation with another person attached. Modern, tech-mediated sex is that of Nietzsche’s “last man” in Thus Spake Zarathustra who “has his little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night”, without ever realising what’s been lost. It’s no wonder that the rise of apps is correlated with the rise of various stripes of asexual identity. Why bother with sex if this is all that’s on offer?

Grindr flattens desire by design. To play the game, users must advertise themselves through curated, sexually enticing images. The notorious “headless torso” image, the brass tacks of sexual marketing, gets to the heart of what’s on offer here — not a person but a body. Metrics on height, weight, sexual position and penis size further allow users to screen each other by pre-determined criteria and preferences.

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There is then a boilerplate set of steps for organising an encounter. One man prompts “you looking?” the other “can you host?”, a brief exchange of dick pics occurs and locations are sent. One textual analysis of Grindr conversations notes, grimly, that “metaphors of consumption or ‘meat market’ are pervasive” with users said to be “on the hunt” for sexual prey. Yet before one gets to this brief transactional exchange, you first must do the necessary labour: the endless scroll. One survey found that nearly 40% of Grindr users were on the app daily, checking in over eight times and spending around 1.3 hours per day just scrolling. The inevitable result of constantly hitting refresh is not finding the perfect partner, but merely settling for whoever was “good enough” given time spent — a sexual sunk-cost fallacy.

The end result is an in-person sexual encounter, sure, but one that’s already been ruined in advance. Disappointments begin at the front door (how old is that photo?), followed by some prescribed sexual motions (one’s “intos” having been agreed in advance), and then some brief post-coital conversation as you struggle to find your pants. Contrast this tech-mediated disaster with the typical gay hook-ups of yesteryear. One didn’t have to hyper-intellectualise the screening process as encounters were determined by chance. Your options were whoever was at the bar, sauna or beat: limited of course, but liberated at least from the mental tyranny of scrolling down an endless menu.

Rather than brief transactional exchanges, men are forced to perform an intricate set of glances, touches and maybe even a little flirting. Chul-Han speaks frequently about the collapse of little rituals in modern life, seemingly silly irrational habits which in fact add an inarticulable weightiness to encounters. In-person cruising also maintains the mystery of the Other, absent the overthinking of every pixel in an image or word in a sentence. The result is real sex, a raw unmediated encounter with another person where one briefly loses oneself in the intensity of pleasure. Grindr hasn’t killed the gay bar. Yet, with all conveniences, it’s not surprising that many gay men are choosing to sit on their couch rather than go out for more meaningful pursuits. After all, rejection in-person wounds far more than being ignored on an app.

New tech deeply embeds itself, and mere criticism of its pitfalls doesn’t make it go away. While some outlets have claimed Zoomers are ditching the apps for real-life connection, the reality is far bleaker: concerns about their image and fear of rejection are putting much of Gen Z off looking for love (and sex) altogether. Cures are not so easily prescribed. Because of their pervasiveness, “getting off the apps” is just as likely to result in prolonged solitude as it is more meaningful encounters. Pernicious tech must be soldiered through, recontextualised, and made to work for the user rather than passively consumed. Yet glimmers of light can be found in Chul-Han’s recommendation for little rituals and for maintaining a certain mystique.

Perhaps the solution is less getting off the apps entirely and more about taking a risk on what constitutes a “match” — leaving final judgements to an in-face encounter, and meeting at a bar first before the bedroom. Perhaps placing your bets on irrational, unpredictable physical “chemistry” over hyper-rationalised profiles can carve out some heterotopic space for homoerotic desire. One must not lose hope of aiming higher — of not settling for junk food sex when more refined erotic experiences await the patient and brave. Forster’s story ultimately ends with mother and son perishing as the machine crumbles around them. But just before their demise they share a single moment in which they feel the real presence of one another for the first time:

She crawled over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands. “Quicker,” he gasped, “I am dying — but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.”

In fact, Gustavson himself — who is due to be sentenced this week after admitting conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm — maintained a now-defunct “Eunuch Maker” website, for men who are or aspire to be “nullos” (short for genital nullification). Not only did the site promote the niche fetish, it featured videos of these procedures for subscribers. Many of Gustavson’s co-conspirators have pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm, their crimes ranging from freezing limbs for removal to the resection of nipples. But legal cases involving instances of consensual castration are becoming increasingly common.

In 2021, Oklahoman newlyweds Bob Lee Allen, 53, and Thomas Evan Gates, 42, were convicted of a variety of offences — including practising medicine without a licence — after they were found to have performed backyard castrations in their isolated cabin. That same year, an Australian named Ryan Andrew King, 28, was given a three and a half year suspended sentence for removing the testicles of two men with their consent in a backpacker hostel. At sentencing, both of King’s “victims” gave evidence that they had “no complaints” with the procedure, with one adding: “I am eternally grateful to Ryan for enabling me to enjoy life.”

Eunuchs, of course, are nothing new. In ancient China, imperial servants were commonly castrated while serving as high-ranking advisors to royalty. In ancient Rome, slaves were castrated in order to remain docile and subservient, their lack of sex drive making them ideal guards for harems. In 16th-century Italy, boys were castrated to preserve their youthful singing voices. The male psyche has traditionally been preoccupied with keeping one’s balls intact rather than lopping them off. The fetishisation of castration, combined with a growing subculture of nullos who have acted out their desires, is an entirely contemporary phenomenon — one worth taking seriously, given that it presents profound challenges to liberal ideals of consent and bodily autonomy.

Online communities catering to nullo fetishists — which have been around since the late Nineties — involve sexualising the submissive role of castrato. Men attracted to these forums post gruesome fantasy fiction and share castration tips. In one fantasy story posted on The Eunuch Archive, a young prostitute in Victorian London knocks to the ground a man they suspect is Jack the Ripper. The Dickensian dominatrix then swiftly removes the Ripper’s penis with a scalpel. In another, slave boys wriggle against restraints as they are castrated like cattle and sold off to servitude.

Focused as they are on the derivation of pleasure from pain and humiliation, nullos are part of the BDSM community — but they are of course at the very extreme end of the sadomasochistic spectrum. Like all kinks, fantasies of castration have complex roots. A 2007 survey of men who posted on The Eunuch Archive found that castration ideation often correlated with a history of child abuse (which may include parental threats of castration), exposure to animal castration in early years and/or religious condemnation of sexuality, and being gay.

Less is known about the self-described “cutters”, who perform the backyard castrations, although the limited evidence suggests they are often motivated by their own sexual preferences for domination and control, probably supplemented by the desire to make money. One survey found that cutters were more likely to present themselves as traditionally masculine, and have histories of self-harm and sexually inappropriate behaviour, compared with their submissive nullo counterparts.

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None of this information necessarily enables the law to decide how to respond to cases of consensual castration. So far, the UK has relied on existing legal precedent, based on the House of Lords’ 1993 ruling on R v Brown — also known as the Spanner case — which upheld the conviction a group of gay men who had engaged in consensual sadomasochistic activities that led to injury. Recorded on VHS tapes discovered as a result of “Operation Spanner”, a police operation targeting obscenity, the activities included whipping, wax play and, much discussed in the tabloids, the nailing of one man’s foreskin to a block of wood — all of which were freely consented to. A 3-to-2 majority upheld the conviction on the basis that the unique harms of consensual sadomasochism were worthy of prosecution, regardless of the consent of all those involved. “Society is entitled and bound to protect itself against a cult of violence,” declared Lord Templeman. “Pleasure derived from the infliction of pain is an evil thing. Cruelty is uncivilised.”

This doctrine, that consent is irrelevant to certain extreme sexual activities, has been adopted wholesale in the UK’s recently passed Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which states that “consent to serious harm for sexual gratification is not a defence in circumstances where a person inflicts serious harm on another”. While one may be satisfied with the use of this principle in the case of Gustavson, it’s a peculiar feature of UK law that one’s consent to a risky activity is dismissed merely because there is a sexual component at play. In a liberal society, we accept that people can consent to all manner of activities that may harm them — from extreme sports to boxing matches to various forms of elective, unnecessary cosmetic procedures. Some, such as Dr Senthorun Raj from Manchester Metropolitan University, have argued that the Spanner case is nothing more than an expression of judicial disgust at unusual activities, particularly those pursued by gay men.

The 1996 Court of Appeal decision of R v Wilson certainly bares out this hypocrisy. In this case, consent was recognised as a defence where a husband was charged with branding his initials onto his wife’s buttocks with a hot butter knife. The court distinguished its reasoning from the Spanner case by categorising the activity as non-sexual and analogous to tattooing, despite the fact that branding is a known fantasy in the BDSM scene.

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And yet, in 2018 Brendan McCarthy, the self-described “body-modification practitioner” known as Dr Evil, was successfully prosecuted for consensual procedures performed at his tattoo parlour. McCarthy was convicted of three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm for removing one customer’s ear, another customer’s nipple and splitting another’s tongue — all of which were done with full consent. Relying on the Spanner Case, the Court of Appeal found that consent to extreme body modifications is not a defence to criminal charges. In summing up, Justice Nawaz stated that “the personal autonomy of the appellant’s customers did not justify removing body modification from the ambit of the law of assault.”

One does not necessarily need to sympathise with the nullos or other extreme kinksters to quibble with the current state of the law. I’m of the view that the reasoning of the Spanner case and its recent codification in statute are not fit for purpose, as they wrongheadedly prioritise “social harm” over actual harm. A different model is required, one that understands the capacity for adults to consent to harm but allows some protection for the most vulnerable. Does this mean we should allow live-streamed castration surgeries without any recourse to the criminal law? Not in my view. Even the most ardent liberal understands the need to deter people from self-destructive behaviour and protect against exploitation.

It’s hard to see how the removal of a submissive’s genitals for sexual pleasure is anything other than gross negligence. However, that hasn’t stopped some groups from trying to legitimise the practice. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) recently included fresh guidelines for the treatment of “eunuchs” in its Standards of Care. These guidelines disingenuously downplay the sexual motivations of nullos, choosing to frame their desires as coming under the transgender umbrella — a framing with which most self-described nullos do not agree. Most view themselves as men who wish to fulfil a sexual fantasy.

Before we start going down the road of medically approved nullo surgeries, which already occur to a limited extent in the United States, it’s worth stepping back to appreciate that this kink begins as sexual daydreaming. At least one online survey of nullos found that the vast majority of people who engage in discussions about these desires have no interest in actually being castrated. Once upon a time, keeping unsafe fantasies purely in one’s own mind would have been seen as the sensible and ethical choice.

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One case I often raise to challenge the liberal sensibilities of my students is that of German cannibal, Armin Meiwes, who was convicted of manslaughter in 2001, after he killed and ate a man named Bernd Brandes — with his full consent. The pair met on a website called The Cannibal Café, which catered to individuals interested in eating a person or being eaten. Most people who hear this story tend to think Meiwes deserves to be punished by the criminal law, regardless of the consent involved — particularly because Brandes was not a well man, having suffered from depression for much of his life and having what prosecutors called “a strong desire for self-destruction”.

In cases of BDSM, it is clear that a duty of care is owed by the “dominant” (or “active”) party in the activity to the “submissive” (or “passive”) party: the dominant has an obligation to protect against unnecessary psychological and physical harm to the submissive regardless of consent.

This understanding of relational obligations had pride of place within BDSM communities under the banner of “safe, sane and consensual” — a motto coined in the Eighties. As a sign of our times, many BDSM groups have now moved away from the ethos of ‘safe, sane and consensual’ in favour of a model of ethical conduct known as “risk-aware consensual kink”, or RACK. RACK reflects a distinctly libertarian approach to BDSM, born out of a sex-positive turn that prioritises consent over considerations of health, safety or dignity. The removal of the “sane” element was justified on the basis it is “ableist” to deny people suffering from chronic mental health issues or severe trauma the pleasures of extreme BDSM. Under this model, many forms of extreme BDSM — from choking till unconsciousness to knife play — are legitimised as “ethical” merely because all participants are well-informed of the risks and fully consent. But the extreme cases filtering into the courts would suggest that this shift in the “rules” around BDSM has been dangerous.

As such, it seems appropriate for the law to define when the dominant’s disregard for the submissive’s wellbeing becomes so abhorrent that criminal punishment in warranted. In the case of Meiwes, clearly, he was aware that anyone seeking to be killed and eaten was vulnerable, yet he chose to end the life of another to fulfil his own deviant fantasies. This is objectionable, despite Brandes’s consent. When it comes to nullos, the actions of self-described cutters in performing unsafe, permanently damaging procedures on others — for the sake of a sexual kink — very much reflects the kind of gross negligence deserving of criminal punishment. The law needs to reflect the traditional, ethical model of BDSM: it would thereby allow for most “safe” forms — while protecting against unconscionable acts of violence.

The concepts of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” didn’t actually come into being until the late 19th century. As soon as they did, people who were homoerotically inclined were compelled to consider the meaning of their desires, where earlier generations might have simply acted on them. For the followers of Der Eigene, who were predominately men, homosexuality was best understood not as an identity — as we now understand it — but as a form of refined taste, and an extension of male friendship. In a kind of “manifesto” for the journal, its founder Adolf Brand wrote that he strove for, “beside the sense of female beauty, also the sense for male beauty, and by again setting friend-love beside woman-love as having completely equal rights”.

As with later gay liberation movements, the first gay rights groups were motivated more by shared enemies than affinities. In Germany at the time, many widely different groups were united in campaigns to repeal Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalised sodomy. But homosexuals differed greatly in their conceptualisation of homoerotic desire. The intellectual strand most opposed to the ideas of Der Eigene, followed the physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee who pioneered the idea that homosexuality (and transsexuality) were an innate condition traceable to biological cause. Gay people, in Hirschfeld’s view, were a “third sex” whose hermaphroditic nature gave rise to unique differences in attitude and behaviour. While these ideas have evolved greatly over time, we can hear echoes of Hirschfeld in the supposedly progressive scientific obsession with biologically classifying those who are sexually diverse, leading to the questionable notion of “gay genes”.

For the homosexuals who wrote and contributed to Der Eigene, which included many prominent men of the day — including political journalist Kurt Hiller and the novelist Thomas Mann — all this talk of an inherent hermaphroditic soul was ahistorical and wrongheaded. From Greek antiquity to European aristocracy, they argued, sexual acts between men could be seen as a natural extension of passionate male friendship. To describe this worldview, artist and scholar Elisar von Kupffer coined the term “Lieblingminne” in Der Eigene, combining the virtues of Freundesliebe, love of friends, with Minne, chivalric love.

Many German homosexuals were inspired by von Kupffer’s collections of homoerotic literature, which highlighted that same-sex desires had been felt by many historically-significant figures, from Zeno of Citium to Alexander The Great to Michelangelo. Rather than supporting Hirschfeld’s theory of innate homosexuality, this was seen as key evidence against a medical model. As sexologist Benedict Friedländer, wrote in Der Eigene:

“[To accept Hirschfeld’s view] in ancient Hellas in particular most of the generals, artists and thinkers would have to have been hermaphrodites. Every people from whose initiative in all higher human endeavours every later European culture fed must have consisted in great part of sick, hybrid individuals.”

For the contributors to Der Eigene, it seemed only natural that strong male friendship would occasionally incorporate an erotic component. But for them, sexual desire was culturally contingent: homoerotic desire has waxed and waned over time, driven by the sentiments and spirit of the age. Dutch author Peter Hamecher wrote in the journal that, “I altogether hold the sexual instinct, in all its apparent determinacy, to be something very intangible, something swinging back and forth between extremes”.

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Male friendship was particularly sentimental in the 19th century. Expressions of love between friends bordered on the outright romantic — the letters exchanged by Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed being a prime example. Given the gender segregation in many aspects of life, and the strict heterosexual courting rituals, sexual contact between young men was also relatively common. It was in cultures which prioritised beauty, whether physical or spiritual, that the homoerotic sentiment was most cultivated in the wider population.

The decriminalisation of homosexuality, for Der Eigene, was therefore not about protecting a minority, but rather invigorating Germany’s potential for homoeroticism. The journal’s ideals were tied closely to naturist movements of the time — focused on nudism, bodybuilding, and co-existence with nature. Homoeroticism is presented as a way to raise oneself above the pedestrian, bourgeois ideals of industry and production.

Contemporary LGBT scholars are often quick to dismiss Der Eigene as “masculinist” in orientation and even “proto-fascist” in its aesthetics, despite the fact that the journal was a target of Nazi purges. Professor Andrew Stewart from the University of Toronto caricatures Brand’s ideas as calling for a racially pure, bisexual Ubermensch to replace the tainted, effeminate homosexual:

“The importance of physical health and fitness, hyper-masculinity, and white supremacy find modern parallels in the experiences of some queer people of colour, trans people, and others who do not achieve the standards of beauty as set by a white, cisgender, and masculine gay culture.”

These accusations aren’t entirely baseless. Brand and Friedländer were not what we would now call “intersectional”. They criticised early feminist movements, viewing women’s calls for men to take greater responsibility for family life as being contrary to the journal’s goal of re-establishing a homoerotic male culture. Further, unlike the early Swiss gay journal Der Kreis, which they inspired, Der Eigene rarely published lesbian writers.

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to throw out the unique perspective of early gay rights activists, merely because some prominent members had outdated views — especially because their views were not universal across Der Eigene. Frequent contributor Edwin Bab held strong feminist sympathies, writing:

“I assert that there is no difference between man and woman in the psychic and intellectual characteristics … only our customs, which make every productive activity highly difficult for the woman, are to blame for the fact that the number of productive women is relatively small.”

Attempts to connect the journal to National Socialism are even more spurious: Brand, who leant Left politically, was never a supporter of the Nazi Party and was highly critical of homosexual members such as Ernst Röhm, calling him a “hypocrite and a traitor”. However, as scholar Harry Oosterhuis has pointed out, Brand was not as discriminating as he should have been when publishing people who criticised Hirschfeld — who, it should be noted, was Jewish. He ran an article by Röhm’s friend, the Nazi Karl Günther Heimsoth, who gave us the phrase “homophile”. Heimsoth criticised Hirschfeld, Oosterhuis writes, by “asserting that the ‘homosexual feminism’ of the ‘Jewish Committee’ was dangerous to the ‘German eros’”. And, Oosterhuis goes on, “instead of refusing the article or expunging the anti-Semitic phrases, Brand only wrote a preface stating that he did not agree with all of the author’s views”.

Nevertheless, Der Eigene is forgotten today less because the original contributors are deemed “problematic” than their views on homosexuality running counter to how modern gays and lesbians have been taught to see themselves. That one is “born this way” is a key pillar of contemporary LGBT thinking. But in the pages of the first gay journal, sexual desire is better conceptualised as a taste — an appreciation of beauty cultivated through early experience and culture. One is not born homosexual (or heterosexual) but with a capacity to perceive aesthetics; over time, this capacity, combined with experience, shapes sexual preferences.

Despite now being lost to time, these ideas still had currency amongst mid-20th century gay rights activists both in the US and Europe. For example, American gay activist Carl Whitman’s influential 1970 “A Gay Manifesto” notes that:

“Homosexuality is not a lot of things. It is not a makeshift in the absence of the opposite sex; it is not hatred or rejection of the opposite sex; it is not genetic; it is not the result of broken homes except inasmuch as we could see the shame of American marriage. Homosexuality is the capacity to love someone of the same sex.”

Michel Foucault also echoed the goals of Der Eigene in his comments during an interview with The Advocate 1984, where he notes: “I think what the gay movement needs is much more the art of life than a science … Sexuality is something that we ourselves create — it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire.”

While some contemporary “queer” academics take up this anti-essentialist mantle, they do so without appreciating homoerotic desire as a beautifying force. Theorists such as Lee Edelman are quick to frame homosexuality as inherently “transgressive”: the Freudian death drive in opposition to procreative sexual desire. The contributors to Der Eigene, however, understood homoeroticism as constructive — a practice that encouraged healthy and flourishing individuals. Whereas today’s nihilistic queer theory is libertarian, Der Eigene’s was restrained. “Every sexual excess and every sexual dissolution is of course decidedly to be advised against,” wrote Brand in one of the journal’s early issues.

Rather than advocating a full liberation of desire, contributors to Der Eigene often expressed concern about, say, the effects of excessive masturbation, the spread of venereal disease, or the predatory behaviour of men towards young women. Homoeroticism was seen as a cure for the social ills of male sexual desire run amok.

It’s a shame that this view of homosexuality, as neither fixed biological orientation nor “radical” disruptive force, has been forgotten. Key victories in gay rights have not given way to a “post-gay” moment of self-reflection for those who feel predominantly same-sex desire see themselves not as “other” but as universally human. Instead, we see a doubling down of identitarianism, particularly online, where every kink, feeling and sexual experience is ripe for categorisation. The New Left notions of “authenticity” and “finding oneself”, which shaped early gay rights movements have evolved with the internet into what philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio call “profilicity”, where one’s identity is a process of obsessive self-marketing. There are now labels for those who want both love and sex (demisexuals), who prefer just masturbating to porn (technosexuals), and who don’t like having sex at all (asexuals).

The brilliance of Brand and the other contributors to Der Eigene was that they could move beyond the delusions of sexual identity, while advocating and defending homoeroticism. The group tackled moralist tirades that equated same-sex desire with degeneracy by pointing to the historical and aesthetic evidence that cultures of homosexuality and cultures of greatness were one in the same. It’s precisely at this current time of sexual hysteria, when intimacy has been declared dead and queer theory diffuse, that our current paradigms of homosexuality should be questioned — and we should look to the past to inform our sexual future.

Is it unethical to attend a “no loads refused” pimped-out cumdump event if the bottom has blocked you on Twitter even though you’ve never talked to them and have no idea why?

Twitter freaked out: “What exactly is a ‘pimped-out cumdump event’?” “How strict is this ‘no loads refused’ policy?” “Is an anonymous block really an undumpable load offence?”

While this dude’s attempt to grapple with the social niceties of the orgy might seem a particularly extreme example, the online furore it attracted does seem to reflect a cultural misunderstanding of gay male sexuality. It is deemed problematic — an attitude that is often accompanied by a desire to do something about it.

Soon after the MeToo movement kicked off in 2017, there were calls to look beyond the violence of men against women, to include the (perceived) toxic sexual norms among gay men. Camila Martinez-Granata wrote in VICE about “pervasive” sexual harassment in gay bars, where getting groped and squeezed without warning is practically a rite of passage. She called for the fostering of “truly safe spaces in queer nightlife” — ones that rejected the “normalisation of sexual harassment”. A year later, Michael Segalov wrote in the Guardian that “the conversation around consent for gay men has been stifled”.

Some of the statistics cited in these articles depict an epidemic of sexual assault within gay spaces. Half of gay men in both the UK and the US say they have experienced sexual touching without their consent. Researchers have also noted the normalisation of “sexual coercion” among gay men — defined broadly as “a range of ways in which men may be forced or pressured to have unwanted sex”. Examples include pressure to accept undesired “top” or “bottom” positions, for the satisfaction of one’s sexual partner.

MeToo has seen some prominent gay men called out for their predatory behaviour: Kevin Spacey was rightly shunned from Hollywood for assaulting the underage Anthony Rapp, while Terry Crews and other straight male actors have called out the culture of unwanted groping by prominent gay producers. However, there has been a notable lack of reckonings for gay male culture more broadly, despite claims that “toxic” norms are rife in our sexual lives.

Sexual assault researchers appear particularly incredulous that gay men aren’t fighting back. After finding that 70% of a sample of gay men had experienced “unwanted sexual touching”, researchers at the University of Georgia decried the norms of “sexually aggressive” behaviour among gay men, before lamenting that they “do not perceive what happened to them as sexual violence”. In a similar vein, researchers within The Journal of Sex Research complained, with the necessary proviso that “the authors are sex positive”, that problematic sexual scripts were exhibited by gay men — from “hypersexual male identity” to a “lack of emotional responsibility”, particularly for casual partners.

However, such criticisms are incredibly patronising, reflecting a wilful ignorance of gay desire. Commentators apparently struggle to grasp that norms designed to stop the predatory behaviour of men towards women may be ill-suited to the dynamics of sex between men.

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Gay men are known for being “sexually adventurous” — a polite way of saying that we’ve got so many notches in our belt, our trousers can barely stay up. While most gay men ultimately wish for (and find) emotionally committed “monagamish” relationships, based around romantic love, it’s also very common to have a period of sowing one’s wild oats, actively seeking out novel sexual encounters with strangers. Gay fantasies often revolve around dangerous liaisons, with non-verbal anonymous sexual encounters as well the eroticising of thuggish “rough trade” personas.

This has been true since the origins of gay male identity. The novels of early 20th-century gay French author Jean Genet — described by Richard Howard as “the first and perhaps the only texts to set forth for the Western imagination an explicit realisation of homosexual eros” — are rife with sadomasochistic gay fantasy. Take this expression of desire from Genet’s novel, Quarelle of Brest:

He could get away with anything. Spit me in the face, call me by my first name.
“You’re getting overly familiar!” I’d say to “Him”.
The blow he would strike me with his fist, right in the mouth,
Would make my ears ring with this oboe murmur: “My vulgarity
is regal, and it accords me every right.”

Gay bars and clubs are known for their “seedy” undercurrent because their primary function — much more so than heterosexual spaces — is to enable sexual conquest. This is why the presence of women in gay bars is seen as so ruinous and why the rise of hook-up apps like Grindr threaten the long term viability of these (supposed) “safe spaces”. The perennial art of “cruising” — seeking out strange men in sex clubs, saunas and public toilets — once rationalised as a form of “self-hatred”, is now clearly understood as simply what many gay men like to do.

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The average sauna hook-up occurs via a barely lit labyrinth with interlocking rooms playing pornography. Partners are selected through elaborate non-verbal interactions, looks are exchanged, buttocks and crotches are groped and you’re either led into a room or given a swift rejection. Young gay men quickly learn to master the intricate art of seeking and self-defence: keeping your towel up with one hand, while playing an elaborate game of whack a mole with the prying hands of ugly men with the other.

The high prevalence of non-consensual groping in these environments is part of the ritual gay men have signed up to in order to embrace their sadomasochistic fantasies. It’s also why applying norms of “affirmative consent” — designed to reflect the needs of vulnerable women — can be problematic when applied to gay men.

Feminist Sheila Jefferys, in her influential work Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution, could barely conceal her disgust at gay desires, which “eroticised power difference” and were reflective of the “worship of masculinity”. However, this is a classic case of applying feminist norms, designed by and for women, to a group which may not share the same wants and needs.

Recently, an Australian politician was asked to explain how newly-imposed affirmative consent laws would work within the context of a gay sauna. In relation to the physical tête-à-tête which occurs while cruising, she noted: “if the person is consenting, they might lean their body into the other person or engage in reciprocal touching.” As for sex, her response was that consent must be given within a “reasonable time” and “might include verbal or non-verbal interactions about consent and the parameters of the sexual act to occur before entering the dark room, provided they continue negotiating consent through ongoing and mutual negotiation”.

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This response reflects the awkwardness of applying the norms of consent demanded by MeToo to sexual encounters between men. Focus groups with gay men on the of topic affirmative consent have consistently shown a disconnect between the safeguarding goals of advocates and the kind of sexual encounters they want to have. One researcher noted that most gay men believe affirmative consent “was not created with them or the diversity of gay sexual culture and subcultures in mind”.

The divide between female and male desire has become even more pronounced as various MeToo offshoots have proliferated. There has been much discussion about age gaps, for instance: differences in age are seen to reflect a “power imbalance” that is inherently coercive. This is a laughable idea from the perspective of many gay couplings, where large age gaps are incredibly common, seemingly driven by mutual desires for maturity and youth.

Last year, Labour MP Luke Pollard was bombarded with abuse after a Valentine’s Day post on social media revealed his significantly younger boyfriend. Reflecting on the backlash, writer Christopher Sherwood noted that he received similar accusations of being “taken advantage of” when he entering into a relationship with a 61-year-old man at the age of 24. “My attraction to older people has nothing to do with emotional and material needs,” he notes, going on to clarify he was motivated by a “seemingly innate sexual attraction to the mature physical form”.

It very well may be that many young women often find relationships with older men harmful (although clearly for some women they aren’t) — but this logic shouldn’t be wholesale applied to gay relationships with their own longings and dynamics. It’s unwise to encourage commentators and researchers to apply their own criteria of “healthy sex” to gay men — or indeed any group — who do not see their experiences as problematic. What counts as a predatory violation for some may not be for others.

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Still, one can criticise the application of MeToo’s new frameworks to gay spaces without supporting sexual anarchy. There is no doubt that many gay men have experienced sexual violence, and moral norms should be developed to encourage restraint. While pervy saunas and “no loads refused” parties may give off the aesthetic of Dionysian excess, respect for bodily autonomy and awareness of potential harm should always be paramount.

But defining the boundaries of assault should be left to gay men — we should be able to generate a response free from the feminist assumptions generated by the fraught conflicts of heterosexuality. Do gay men need a MeToo moment? No, but we should be having our own conversations about setting the appropriate limits on desire, to ensure sadomasochistic gay fantasy doesn’t turn into outright brutalisation.

The same move is made by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories. They argue that the adoption of French theory — particularly the work of Michel Foucault — has given rise to bizarre, grievance-filled academic specialties which threaten all claims to knowledge.

Peterson, Lindsay, and Pluckrose are wrong, and perhaps even guilty of Francophobia. Contrary to their claims, French theory is not the original sin from which our current woes sprang. What’s missed in their analysis are the distinctly American cultural influences driving a political culture of cancellations, violent protests and hypersensitivity.

Let’s focus on the ultimate fall guy for ‘wokeism’, the French philosopher Michel Foucault. If you were to read anti-woke commentary about Foucault, you would be under the impression that his main insights are: nothing is true, all truth is power and all claims to truth are oppressive. This is a deliberately misleading.

Despite what you’ve been told, Foucault was not a rabid ‘activist’ bent on tearing down scientific institutions, but a historian of ideas. His work documents how knowledge changes over time, how some ideas become valorised whilst others get pushed to the margins, and how expertise shifts as a result of cultural and historical change.

He was not denying truth, but helping to place it within a broader historical context. Truth could not help being “a thing of this world”, he wrote. Every society had a regime of truth, and a “general politics” of truth. These are simply types of discourse which society “accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”

Foucault focused on the history of the “self” noting the scientific quest to understand phenomena such as madness, criminality and sexual deviancy. He frequently refers to “power” in his explanations, but his definition of power is not what you think. It describes a “a mode of action upon the action of others”. There is no moral connotation to Foucault’s use of “power”; it can have both positive and negative effects. His most useful insight is that power can be “constructive” – generating subjectivities that hadn’t previously existed.

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Michel Houellebecq is a hopeless romantic

By Jarryd Bartle

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault challenged the “repressive hypothesis” that Western society, beginning in the 17^th century right up until the mid-20^th century, gradually became more prudish and repressed. Instead, Foucault’s work demonstrates that all societies have had elaborate taboos on sexuality and that they stem from differing understandings of the self. Moreover, the so-called “prudish Victorians” actually led to the proliferation of thought regarding sexual habits that created, rather than repressed, new ways of viewing ones desires. Because of those prudes, the modern “homosexual” was born.

These insights are useful, they show us that our understanding of what makes a human being is often subject to significant change. What Foucault is calling for isn’t activism. It’s humility in the face of history.

Attempts to connect Foucault to the excesses of woke politics have to take some significant conceptual leaps. In Cynical Theories, the authors do this by separating out postmodernism proper from the “applied postmodernism” of activist circles. But this involves turning the descriptive work of scholars like Foucault into a prescriptive model for political action. This isn’t just nit-picking about historical narratives, but crucial to understanding French theory itself.

Foucault was heavily influenced by the work of German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche. His approach to ideas is directly inspired by Nietzsche’s Of The Genealogy of Morality, a work charting the evolution of moral concepts over time. Foucault, like Nietzsche, was highly sceptical of claims of absolute morality, seeing life as a chaotic unfolding of a blind will to power. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes:

Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals … will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power.

The sheer moral certainty one sees in the American Left — that they are “on the right side of history” as Barack Obama often put it  — doesn’t reflect this more contemplative and historical perspective on the nature of morality. In fact, one valid criticism of many 20^th century French intellectuals from Foucault to Derrida to Baudrillard is that they weren’t moral enough. If anything, they frequently circled the drain of nihilism. They stared too deeply into the abyss.

It’s important, then, to note that the emergence of queer, post-colonial, broadly anti-Racist and fat activist movements within the United States have their own local histories. These movements (often labelled “identity politics”) have distinctly American scholarly influences: from Peggy McIntosh’s descriptions of white privilege in “Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack” to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional approach to anti-discrimination.

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Contrary to certain popular accounts, “standpoint theory” which seeks to prioritise personal knowledge and perspectives as a means to objectivity, is not a position advocated for by Foucault, but, instead, by American philosopher Sandra Harding. Foucault never had the view that marginalised individuals held a unique, more authoritative perspective, on the world.

And he always maintained the scholarly virtue of disinterestedness in his work: “I do in fact seek to place myself outside the culture to which we belong, to analyse its formal conditions in order to make a critique of it, not in the sense of reducing its values, but in order to see how it was actually constituted.”

What’s commonly called identity politics emerged out of broader counter-cultural trends of the 1960s. These movements were influenced by American ideas of freedom, and were heavily focused on individual liberation and smashing stuffy bourgeois sentiments. This led to the development of humanist psychologies that promised to maximise individual self-actualisation. The nexus of social justice activism and psychology is still seen today in discussions of “toxic masculinity” and  “implicit bias” as well as the heavy focus on “trauma” and “minority stress”.

Identity politics has never been well received by French thinkers, or even President Macron, either because it is seen as a divisive force — prioritising the personal over the Republic — or it treats historically contingent subjectivities as essentialist. Foucault, who was homosexual, always had an ambivalence to American attempts to categorise desire for the sake of political action. In an interview for the American LGBT magazine The Advocate, he noted his wariness over identity. If it became “the problem of sexual existence” then identity would “become the law, the principle” of people’s existence. Identity then becomes another way of controlling people.

Whilst it’s true American progressives will often cite Foucault and other French theorists as influences, they tend to fragment their work in ways that serve particular purposes. So, The History of Sexuality will be cited to praise a queer liberationist future of a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” — but fail to mention Foucault’s silence as to whether this will be better than the status quo or his critique of identity.

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This co-option also tends to downplay the old Left political sympathies of French scholars, many of whom were self-avowed communists (although Foucault’s political leanings were more obscure). There’s also a shift from the contemplative demeanour of French philosophy toward an individualistic emphasis on confrontation, shock and transgression.

François Cusset, in his excellent book “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida & Co Transformed The Intellectual Life Of The United States” succinctly describes the strange way that French theory was adopted by American universities in the 1980s. American scholars did not study French theory, nor advance it in a meaningful direction. Rather, they co-opted it, and removed so much of its context that it no longer made sense. For Cusset this co-option of French theory in pursuit of American cultural politics was a “structural misunderstanding”.

Rather than blame the French, and Foucault, for current trends in American activism — which are quickly spreading across the globe — it’s crucial to re-evaluate some of values and claims to truth which underpin this activism. I’ve got just the philosopher for the task.

I’ve had many strange gigs, but being a consultant to the sex industry had the most promise for literary inspiration. Alas, no matter the degree of perversity I surrounded myself with, everything had an air of mediocrity. From brothels to strip clubs to porn sets, it turns out the business of pleasure is as mundane as the business of anything else.

While talking to the owner about the intricacies of “reputational risk”, I caught the eye of the young man heading for the exit (his paramour remained, on the prowl for round two no doubt). I glimpsed his surprisingly anxious eyes. For him, weekday sodomy may have been genuinely transgressive, a moment where his lust overwhelmed all personal injunctions. More than likely though, he was just getting off.

The author and poet Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel Anéantir is published today, is renowned for capturing our current state of sexual ambivalence. His novels depict aimless contemporary masculinity, often either institutionalised corporate bores (Extension du domaine de la lutte and Sérotonine) or failed lotharios (Lanzarote, Plateforme, Les particules elémentaires). His most archetypal protagonist is Bruno, from Les particules élémentaires (Atomised, in English), a loner who attempts to sublimate the misery of a broken childhood through hedonistic conquests. His story is a series of bleak, pathetic attempts to gain meaning by attending sex parties with his ageing lover:

Imitating the frenetic rhythm of porn actresses, they brutally jerked his cock in a ridiculous piston motion as though it was a piece of dead meat (the ubiquity of techno in the clubs, rather than more sensual rhythms, probably contributed to the mechanical nature of their technique) . He came quickly, with no real pleasure, and after that, the evening was over as far as he was concerned.

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As the academic Gerald Moore has noted of Bruno: “Nietzsche’s supposedly revolutionary affirmation of life is reduced to the futile but comforting banality of one who hopes that naughty consumption (ice cream!) and unconventional sex are enough to redeem the misery of existence.”

Despite his aggressive ambivalence about sex, Houellebecq’s novels are often lumped within the genre of “transgressive fiction”. Indeed, Houellebecq’s whole persona is seen as a kind of transgression of contemporary norms to many critics. So tightly has this reputation held, that an event was organised in 2018 at which scholars from Australia, England, France, Northern Ireland and Switzerland at the University of London were brought together to “discuss and debate Michel Houellebecq’s cultural transgressions”.

Transgression, as philosopher Michel Foucault defined it in his Preface to Transgression, is a rapture which “opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight…It was originally linked to the divine, or rather, from this limit marked by the sacred it opens the space where the divine functions.”

Transgressive authors of the 20th century generally produced narratives which were virulently anti-social (often sexually graphic and violent); both the junky psychedelia of William S Burroughs and the hip psychopathy of Bret Easton Ellis fit into this mould. The archbishop of transgression, though, is undoubtably the dissident surrealist and “excremental philosopher” Georges Bataille, who not only produced transgressive works, such as his pornographic novel Story of the Eye, but provided a theoretical foundation for the genre in his works Erotism and Literature and Evil.

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For Bataille, civilisation involves a tension between social taboos (norms of rationality, morality and purity) and the desire to transgress into the heterogeneous (madness, evil and filth). “I believe that the Evil — an acute form of Evil — which [literature] expresses, has a sovereign value for us,” he notes.

To cross the threshold from civilised mind into mad ecstasy (even if merely through art), was what gave man a taste of unindividuated nothingness — complete ego-death both terrifying and exquisite. Bataille deemed non-productive sexuality (from orgies to “high prostitution”) to be crucial to this. For him, a brothel was a church. But, as Houellebecq notes in his novels, to the extent that this was ever true, the sexual revolution of the Sixties has led to the de-stigmatisation of sex, rendering it both moral and healthy. Contemporary sexuality is well and truly within the realm of the normative and rational, which is why it is so susceptible to free market transactional logic.

Bataille himself noted that sacred sexuality required taboo: “If there was not in us a prohibition which is deeply opposed to the freedom of our erotic activity, we would not have erotic activity.” But if transgression through virility and violence is now impossible, how then has Houellebecq managed to capture the spirit of transgression? I’d argue he has done it through a particular form of radical honesty.

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Cultural critics who frame Houellebecq as a mere enfant terrible, a provocateur characterised by xenophobia and misogyny, are blind to the deeply spiritual quality of his writing. As a follower of arch-pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Houellebecq’s words hurt, they are painfully true. His ironically titled poem “L’amour, l’amour” includes this cutting stanza:

I speak to all those whom one has never loved, who has never been able to please:
I speak to those absent from liberated sexuality,
from normal enjoyment

Houellebecq’s spiritual pessimism is similar to early 20th century Romanian essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran. Cioran’s cynical aphorisms (“What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself”) sound quintessentially Houellebecqian to modern ears. Interestingly, though, Cioran was also a mystic — for whom nihilism was a passage to the absolute.

The spark of transgression in Houellebecq’s writing, unlike Bataille’s violent sexual drive, is that of raw, emotional fragility. As the (likely self-insert) character of Michel notes in Les Particules élémentaires: “Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.”

In a 2007 interview with Le magazine littéraire, Houellebecq angrily dismissed comparisons between his work and Bataille, saying: “Pour moi, le sexe et la transgression n’ont rien à voir” (For me, sex and transgression aren’t related), going on to lament “Je n’aime pas cette confusion entre le sexe et le mal qui fait que tous les gens sont hors sujet” (I don’t like the confusion between sex and evil which means real people end up irrelevant).

Following this, Russell Williams argued that perhaps “Houellebecq’s true transgression lies in the extent to which his novels, even in the face of the insidious creep of neoliberalism, consistently champion the outmoded what Barthes terms ‘l’obscénité sentimentale’: old-fashioned romantic love”.

Indeed, despite his cynical view of sex, Houellebecq is an apologist for the self-shattering potential of love. As the character Florent-Claude Labrouste, bemoans in Sérotonine:  “The outside world was harsh, merciless towards the weak, and hardly ever kept its promises, and love remained the only thing in which one could still, perhaps, have faith.” It is this brutal longing which makes Houellebecq’s novels truly transgressive. He is a hopeless romantic in a world of excess, a sentimentalist in a time of tech-mediated spectacle. Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening lines to his poem, Loin de bonheur:

The world is disenchanted.
All that has the nature of appearance has the nature of cessation. Yes. And so? I loved her. I love her. From the very first second this love was perfect, complete. You cannot really say that love appears; rather, it manifests itself. If you believe in reincarnation, the phenomenon becomes explicable. The joy of finding again someone you have already met, who you have always already met, forever, in an infinity of previous incarnations.
If you don’t believe in it, it is a mystery.