Anyone paying attention in recent years has noticed rapid changes in attitudes about sex, sexuality, and gender throughout the West. As conservatives continue to lose ground in struggles over these issues, they’ve begun to catch up with insights from Michel Foucault. The French philosopher argued in his 1976 History of Sexuality that talk of sexual “liberation” concealed a pseudoreligious project through which elites affirm their superiority and project their power.
Foucault began by noting that discussions of sexuality today depend on the premise that, until recently, sexuality had been repressed. We are told that after centuries of silence, people are speaking up, transforming attitudes, and ushering us into a new, liberated era. This is our modern “sexual sermon.” Those who call on us to liberate ourselves from repression are the equivalent of prophets, promising that if we follow their injunctions, then “tomorrow, sex will be good again.”
Like other religions, the “sexual sermon” offers believers a number of concealed pleasures. It lets them participate in a heroic struggle that the righteous are fated to win on the day we overcome the gender binary, slut-shaming, and other harmful legacies of the past. It grants significance and moral status to the otherwise trivial pursuit of pleasure. And it makes such sacred objects as sexuality and gender identity seem unquestionably real, in much the way that souls, lust, and demonic temptation came to seem real for Christians called on by their priests to explain what might otherwise have seemed the irrelevant ephemera of everyday life in terms of unseen spiritual forces. Foucault, however, encourages us to question these pleasures and to ask whose interests they serve.
For instance, it’s not obvious that “sexuality,” understood as a template of sexual behavior that persists throughout a life and can be categorized as one of a number of types (heterosexual, homosexual, etc.), exists. The category includes such disparate phenomena as acts, desires, and pleasures. The fact that we experience sexuality as if it were a stable and foundational aspect of our identity is a contingent feature of modern history.
Sexuality had not existed as a concept in classical Greece, where moralists had asked their disciples to study human nature and pursue pleasure with moderation. Later, the ancient Stoics introduced new practices of self-discipline that summoned individuals to record and report on their own lives, scrutinizing themselves for inadequacies. Christianity radicalized this reorientation of the moral life of the West by transferring such practices of self-surveillance from the private domain of philosophers to the public institution of the Church, the moral experts of which were charged with governing their congregations. Through practices such as confession, believers were asked to reveal intimate acts and longings, which priests could classify and regulate on their behalf.
In the increasingly secular 19th and 20th centuries, control of the concept of sexuality passed from the Church to the market. During this period, according to Foucault, the bourgeoisie used the idea of sexuality as an instrument of its power. Capitalist elites, “in an arrogant political affirmation,” convinced themselves that their bodies, desires, pleasures, and identities were fascinating and important. Although today we typically understand, say, Victorian parents’ efforts to prevent their children from pleasuring themselves as a form of sexual repression, Foucault saw such practices as part of a new and elaborate discourse about sex, one that featured parenting guides, pedagogical texts, and medical literature endlessly discussing the supposedly taboo subject. The sexualities of the lower classes, meanwhile, came to seem inferior, defective, and in need of control by educational, medical, and legal experts. For example, as Christopher Chitty points out in Sexual Hegemony, the sexual activity of sailors, day laborers, and other itinerant working-class men became a source of anxiety for elites, who saw these men as vectors of deviance to be reformed and reeducated or, failing that, kept away from respectable citizens.
Since the mid-20th century, the values of Western elites have transformed once again. Whereas sexual minorities once faced surveillance, confinement, and violence at the hands of state authorities, today, they are not only tolerated but actively celebrated, at least by elites and their institutions. But this apparent moral revolution has left the structure of “sexuality” intact. Developed by clerics and capitalists, this concept remains at the service of those who rule. When elites explain the virtues of polyamory or the complexities of their gender identities or congratulate themselves for their brave confessions of personal truths, we should recognize this as a familiar strategy of domination.
Elites’ “self-affirmation” goes hand in hand with their efforts to monitor and manipulate the sexualities of others. The particular sexual values associated with elites are almost irrelevant — it does not matter whether they celebrate themselves as chastely heterosexual or tolerantly polymorphous. What matters for the exercise of class power is our collective belief in a thing called “sexuality,” in the sense of a set of sexual behaviors, desires, and emotions that reveal the inner essence of a person’s character. (Consider, for instance, the common assertion that a preference for monogamy reflects a patriarchal and authoritarian personality.) Such a belief authorizes elites’ narcissistic displays of their own sexual virtue as well as their persecutorial invasions of nonelites’ private lives.
Elites now wield power through sexuality by appealing to values opposed to those of many Christians and conservatives. Some of the latter, with the wisdom of defeat, are beginning to grow skeptical about both the power of elites and the existence of sexuality. This new skepticism is commendable, but it should not be an excuse for conspiratorial thinking that posits sexual minorities as the pawns of capital. Far-right bloggers and Twitter users have begun referring to “globohomo,” implying that pleas for sexual tolerance are part of a globalist plot for world domination. This is hardly distinguishable from 20th-century communist condemnations of homosexuality as a tool of capitalists and fascists. Such “anti-elite” homophobia merely revives a previous mode of politicizing sexuality, one that elites have now discarded, rather than challenging the use of sexuality as a tool of power.
Could we liberate ourselves from sexuality? Doing so would mean more than revealing the fraught history of the concept. It would mean suspending the many practices and discourse that make sexuality seem real. These include not only the liberal “sexual sermons” of elites, but also discrimination and violence against people identified as having deviant sexualities.
People who fear persecution on the basis of sexuality have used sexuality to resist persecution and make political claims. They might well fear that the skepticism expressed about sexuality in venues such as First Things is nothing but nostalgia for a time when elites used sexuality to pathologize and punish sexual minorities. If the Right is interested in freeing itself from the liberal “sexual sermon,” from the cultural and political projects that elites pursue on the basis of sexuality, it will need to ease these suspicions and cultivate surprising alliances.
Blake Smith is a Harper Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago, where he works on cultural ties between France and India.
