I write dirty books.  On the literary side, because I’m a hopeless show-off, but they’re books full of naked people and cuss words and often very little plot.  Why do I do this?  Of all the things I could write, why smut?

Insert obvious noises about it being fun, titillating, and at times very lucrative (if one writes the right kind of smut.) There is of course a great big long theoretical answer as well, because hey, I like trying to live from the heart of my philosophy.

And the evidence suggests I am one of those humans that doesn’t make enough dopamine unless vigorously stimulated.  It often feels like my choices are to write scorching sex scenes almost daily or succumb to an ennui so intense that I must develop another addiction to distract me. Maybe writing smut is my drug of choice.

But then dirty books about those repressed, prudish Victorians?

I follow the framing of landmark French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose work on the social construction of sexuality neatly upends this idea that the Victorians never spoke of sex.  Far from it, as sex became no longer a private activity but a matter of public concern.  Certain classes of people—homosexuals, working class families whose faith and poverty lead to an “excess” of children, wives who were disinterested in providing sexual services to their husbands, and so on—were doing sex wrong, and needed identifying, and where possible correction.  Deviance became not a matter for the church but for the doctor’s office, the psychiatrist’s couch.  Less a sin than a dysfunction to be remedied.  

Set against this is the growing agitation by these same groups, demanding less patronizing treatment from the ruling classes.  Homosexuality was criminalized, but by defining a criminal class who didn’t perceive their own behaviour as a criminal choice, the ruling class forced disparate individuals into a social unit, which then discovered it had significant power by dint of size alone.  The legal enclosure of homosexuality is the dawn of the modern, collectivized, queer rights movement.  State power labelled homosexual people and lumped them together in order to control them.  But as is the way with humans, the subjects of control, once forced into proximity, were able to define commonalities which allowed them to organize against the continued operation of Power.

That this discursive road is rocky as fuck is not really surprising. Winning any kind of space is hard, and those who win often then protect it against all others, even if it was those others (i.e. the trans women who drove the Stonewall uprising) who won them that space. Capitalism and the dogmas it serves want us to hate each other, so that we’ll keep fighting each other and not our masters.  Power right now wants to enclose trans people, but do that and it obliges them to align.  They count heads, and its suddenly not a handful of isolated cases but a sizeable percentage of the population.  One percent of the US population is over three million people. That’s… statistical.  That’s a voting bloc.  That’s how we change the world.