Enter The Queen
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Article:
Enter the Queen, Porn and Politics.
There is nothing wrong with sex.
We all enjoy it. And the reason we like sex is it makes us feel good. It actually feels pleasurable. So sex, in and of itself, is a positive thing. It makes us feel good and it makes babies. And ultimately that’s what we’re all practising to do – keep our species alive (for better or worse).
The reason we don’t like pornography – which is supposed to be about sex – is because people believe that it objectifies women, that it demeans them in some way.
This is true, it often does.
Equally it often demeans men, although they (and those watching) do not usually understand that effect.
The other main reason people don’t like pornography is because it reminds them of their deeper, lower urges, and the fact that although they may have revelled in sex at some stage in their lives – or not – they have disconnected from that delight in copulation.
The significant issue here is that in our society many things demean men, and demean women, and undermine them, and objectify them. Business, for example, considers it absolutely acceptable to say “This isn’t personal, it’s just business”. But it is this depersonalisation of the person that is the issue.
When it is depersonalised, lovemaking becomes mere sex, or worse - rape. That’s the difference between them – one is a wonderful agreement, the other is completely impersonal and one person is treated as an object.
So the fact of intercourse isn’t the issue. And the fact of looking at people fucking isn’t an issue. The fact of wanting sex, or wanting to fuck or be fucked isn’t the issue. The issue is the depersonalisation of the one with whom one is meant to be connecting.
Ultimately that is the point of the sexual act – to connect with another person. And ideally, to connect in more ways than one. The physical connection is the first and most obvious. The mental, the intellectual, is the next. The emotional is a little more difficult for many people to grasp, and yet this too adds massively to the connection. And the spiritual (for example Tantra) is the most fugitive, the most challenging, to accept or experience, and is therefore also the most rewarding when it is experienced.
In Enter the Queen the Queen is seeking, just like all of us.
She moves through all the states of connection. She begins in the sensual physical realm where everything is in her control, moves into the emotional, denies this by moving into the brutal physical, thinks through all this in her internal dialogue, and ultimately accepts the significance of the spiritual as well, and returns to the place where she believes all four states of connection are available.
She deals with father issues, gender politics (in a fabulous, conceptually laden scene in which she literally kills the masculine within herself, leading her to accept the fullness of her womanhood), she has some fabulous lines (“I am more of a man than he is. People with cocks do not have a monopoly on masculinity”), and correctly addresses the issue that it is okay to discuss murder and write and read of it (and we watch it on television now, nightly), but watching fucking is prohibited, and writing about it considered cheap and disgusting.
However in the one free area of Western existence, the internet, sex is about the biggest thing, coming immediately after water, air, and food in that order. Funny that.
It’s the same order in our lives.
We think about sex daily. Some people think about it hourly. 90% of people want more sex in their lives. Who knows how disconnected the other 10% are from their bodies – physical, emotional or otherwise. All of us have some disconnection.
There is no question that this is a very challenging book. But then whose life hasn’t had some seriously squirmy moments? There is redemption here that is worth accessing. Perhaps we should learn from the Marquise and her partner Francoise in this sexual dynamite of a book and embrace the sex act yet more into our lives, but approach it with yet more sensitivity, and gentleness, and spirit?