It is in this promiscuity and this ubiquity of images, in this viral contamination of things by images, that our obscenity exists. And there is no limit to this, because images (today we generally prefer photographic details of a painting to the painting itself) are not animal species governed by internal codes (the human species used to be governed by such codes but there is a possibility that this is changing). Nothing preserves images from unbounded proliferation precisely because images are not sexually engendered, images know neither sex nor death, and it is perhaps because of this that we are obsessed with them, in this, a period of retrenchment affecting both sex and death. We are perhaps daydreaming through images about the immorality of protozoa, who boundlessly proliferate through more contiguousness and know nothing other than an asexual momentum.

Male strippers

Even at male strip shows it is still the women that are watched; we see the public of women, with their avid faces, as a united sex. They are more obscene devouring the anatomy of the male than if they were dancing naked before us. They are obscene because of the sexual spillage evident in their faces––a kind of monstrous extroversion––but even more because they are exercising their right to revenge on the occasion of male nudity, and rights are obscene, particularly the right to pleasure. Getting your due may be fair but is also lascivious.

No one has any right to pleasure, any more than to air or to life––the very notion is absurd. Let us leave that form of legalism to the workplace and to the various categories of slavery, to which alone any valid laws apply. Already today, one’s lifetime has been rendered obscene by the right to leisure time. Now sex is being rendered obscene by the right to one’s sexuality. Obscenity thus lies in wait for all things through its legalistic retribution system.

The right to joy and the right to suffering (which will soon follow) are inaugurating a culture of hysteria and apostasy. The ecstasy of these strip-joint customers can now be added to the ecstasy of the female saints of Lisieux, for the same form of voracious religiosity is directed at the male sex as to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

A body onstage is never obscene. The obscenity is in the cannibalistic expressions of these women absorbed as they are in their symbolic revenge and in the acute humiliation of the male. Men who go to female strip shows and peep shows are touching in their contemplation––they pay a confused homage, through the act of looking, to the perfection of a body that is not missing any parts. This is so because mean really don’t believe in all that nonsense about the castrated woman. They dream, they desire, they know that woman is a perfect being who will always be complete. And the gaze they carry to her nakedness is witness to this: if the female body can thus offer itself naked for all the world to see, without inhibition and with total ease, it must be a sign of great power (what man could do it?).

Female strip-joint customers, however, come to demolish with their eyes, they come in desperation to behold, and therein the castration. To tell the truth, they alone believe in it. And therein they are obscene, therein the spectacle is obscene, because the looking has no other issue than simply to turn back toward women as castrates, these women desperate in their castration, these women now the very sullied subjects of castration, as opposed to pure object, naked, with all powers of illusion, on the pornographic stage of the body.

Female mud wrestling

The female in Quest for Fire. Goldfinger.

Sweet Movie: the woman in liquid chocolate.

Native women in mud masks.

Blacks with gleaming skins. Greased bodies on beaches

Lubricity is that which is lubricated. That which slides. That which resembles a sex that has emerged from a sex, or a child emerging from its mother’s placenta. In these instances skin can in some way approximate the interior spectacle of the body, can approximate slimy origins, the humidity of sex. Anything dry, anything erect is never obscene; what is obscene is what is humid, visceral, sticky. A sweat body begins to offer erotic repulsion and attraction––the body’s urge to cloak itself in its secretions.

It takes but a tiny drop of water trickling down a body, or down a smooth stone, to render it erotic. Anything that slides evokes joy, even the wind. Why not oil or mud? It is life itself to give the body over to its liquid form, it is the contrary of Goldfinger, whose victim dies transfixed in a golden casing. But the liquid should never be too liquid. It is the viscosity of mud that makes one rejoice; even one’s glance can slide and make itself viscous. Slipperiness would thus be the source of all pleasure, and the incision and the source of all sensation.

Peep show, strip tease, exhibition

These are not all instances of a woman’s prostituted body being victimized by the sadistic or obsessed eyes of the viewer––that would be insufferable––but are, on the contrary, instances in which the body holds the respect and the desire of the other, and this not by any shameful dissimulation, but by its very exhibition, even to the extent of flagrant excess. One would have to analyze prostitution itself as an example of this sacred effect which holds desire in respect and the world in suspense.