The body exhibited with such indifference and ease is the very closest possibility that we have of existing as pure objects––which is everyone’s dream. It is this dream that men pursue––deliverance from otherness––this is what they try to seize with their vague stares: the body’s indifference to being looked at, the body’s victory over the stare of the viewer. At this sort of show, the audience alone is in a position of virtual obscenity. Which it knows all too well––since it tries to offset this through sarcasm, through an affected indifference which tries to equal the sumptuous indifference of the prostituted body.

Obscenity’s revenge is always double-edged: it’s never where you think its is, it’s always there where there are those thinking of it.

The Obscenario

One day, in a seminar on seduction regularly attended by a physically and verbally handicapped man who nevertheless spoke constantly and specifically about seduction, thereby causing a chill to permeate the auditorium with every interjection, a beautiful and feminist young woman arrived to wage war against seduction, which to her is a sexist ideology. She sat down next to the handicapped man and throughout her (aggressive) argument leaned tenderly toward him, slipping a lit cigarette in and out of his mouth to enable him to smoke. With the rhythm of someone tending a pipe, she had him suck his butt as though she were a nursing mother, for this poor wreck of a male, who served as crutch and alibi, as she vituperated against males who think only of seduction. Beautiful, provocative girl doling out her little revenge through a poor, impotent polio case. And him glowing painfully with the pleasure of this unexpected rape.

Ah yes, the roles should have been reversed, but in what sense? She was making me “smoke” too with the naughty pleasure that she was getting out of this scene and that I found echoed in the self-contained joy of the bland cripple who hated me from the start and from whom I had never been able to conceal my revulsion––but this new revulsion was still worse because I found myself identifying with him as he underwent the girl’s symbolic caresses; she was soliciting me as she practically masturbated him before my eyes, she was saying to me: “Look, if you were a monogoloid, an impotent, you would have the right to my favors, I am raping you through him and there’s nothing you can do about it.” (Later, when I ran into her by chance at a party, she started to cruise me shamelessly––but I would have preferred, for a seminar, to have been that cripple between whose lips she placed the cigarette.)

She did not know him at all. It was a stroke of genius to place herself next to him and to use him as a foil. It was obscene, but it had genius. Without him she would have been just a ridiculous type of feminist.

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Femininity depends deeply on secrecy, masculinity on obscenity. This makes it such that repressed femininity is atrocious (it is simply repudiated, and can no longer act as a secret) but it also makes it such that femininity liberated, triumphant is odious (it then takes on all masculine traits, and thus all the traits of a directive).

Masculinity has nothing to do with a secret game; it is not made for ambiguity, it is unbearable when disguised, whereas femininity in disguise is sublime (Victor/Victoria). Masculinity is only truly itself in its obscene self-evidence, it really only exists as an erection, and is therefore always a slightly comic spectacle (whereas femininity through the game of absences is, like a secret, rather ironic).

Stations of the cross for an ironic pornography

An ironic pornography would be one where femininity revives, beyond the heavy burden of liberation, without ideology, and without sexual hysteria as well; in seductive and joyous provocation, in a form of free lustful exhibition, with an ironic plot about sex without desire. It would counter that which is libidinal, the allegory of the body; it would be the game of the body within the limits of pornography but without ever succumbing to it. . . It would perhaps involve a new form of allusive pleasure, a new form of exhibition without pretensions, a new form of life perversion, transparent, but without pretense, narcissistic, but without real identity.

“I desire you” is obscene

“You please me” is more subtle––it makes of the other not the object of desire, but rather the grammatical subject of pleasure.

In other times, pleasing and pleasure were able to substitute for desire. But these light strategies gave way to the heavy, subjective, and obscene economy of desire. In these tormented times, desire has replaced pleasure, and it often erases from joy the very idea of pleasure, which is to please.