"What You Do Best" - Letter to an Onanizing Teen

written January 2005

Dear Timothy,

You’re fifteen years old, and you just “came out.” It seems as though the whole world is either condemning or congratulating you. On the off chance you’ve grown tired of this attention, I have some refreshing news for you. I don’t particularly care. My reaction to your confessed aberrant identity is of no consequence. What is important is that your confession – or perhaps more importantly, your family’s reaction -- situates you within a complex network of power relations facilitated through numerous and structured sexual discourses. The reason this is important has nothing to do with you. Rather, this is important because it illustrates the theories presented in my text The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.

Sexuality is not some inherently stable entity preexisting time and human interactions. Rather, “it is the name that can be given to a historical construct” (105). Within our current social order, sex has been constructed both as a primary location for the exercise of power and as the primary tool for acquiring knowledge of all that identifies us as human beings; “it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds us in darkness” (77). As I’ve argued, the family has become an “obligatory locus” (108) for the construction and perpetuation of sexuality; “its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with a permanent support” (108). In this sense, your relationship with your mother provides an ideal lens through which to convey what I mean by “power-knowledge-pleasure.”

When you made your “big announcement,” your mother made no attempt to disagree with your conclusion. You didn’t have to explain what you meant when employing the category “gay.” In addition, she did not request your silence, but suggested you speak more openly and to a greater number of individuals. Your gay seminarian stepbrother, your mother’s lesbian friends and colleagues and your stepfather the leftist pastor were all suggested as conduits through which to plug you into “will to knowledge” discourses.
There already existed a proliferation of discourses dating back to the 18th century for explaining, identifying, cataloguing, medicalizing and institutionalizing your aberrant sexual self. It became immediately clear that your sexuality would now influence not only your sex acts, but everything that constitutes the construction of “Timothy.” You “became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into [your] total composition was unaffected by [your] sexuality” (43). Assumed qualities such as these, imbedded in the institutional construction of “homosexual,” are a key facet of the “will to knowledge.” Your mother did not repress you. She characterized you. She willed you to transform your “desire into discourse” (21) so that she might experience the pleasure imbedded in her power over your confession. In so doing, she encouraged you to continue your own pursuit of knowledge through pleasure and pleasure through knowledge.

The process of confession has been a key component of the regulation of sexual knowledge through decentralized relations of sex-connected power. After your announcement, your mother subjected you to a fascinating (and very telling) process of sexual interrogation. She asked you not just whether you masturbated, but how often and with what materials. Congratulations, my son! You’re a corresponding figure for one of the four strategic unities in the deployment of sexuality. The “pedagogization of children’s sex” has been one of the most frequently identifiable means through which sexual “truth” and power are both constructed and sought after. Your mother’s declaration that masturbation is normal so long as you don’t do it “too often,” coupled with her assertion that pornography is objectification and therefore an unhealthy expression of sexuality, confirms widely-held notions of children’s sex as “at the same time “natural” and “contrary to nature”” (104). Your sex is “dangerous and endangered” (104). In expressing her concern for your sexual health, your mother experiences a special power-pleasure that comes from her position as “monitor” and “protector.” Additionally, her actions and imparted values strengthen a set of willed knowledges regarding the sexuality of children.

It may seem as though you are entirely at her merciful mercilessness. But not so fast! You are far from powerless. When your mother asked you how often you masturbate, you weren’t exactly truthful. “Once a week,” you said, neglecting to mention that in actuality you masturbate at least once daily, often locking yourself in public restrooms in the pursuit of self gratification. How might your mother react if she knew you went through most of your life in an onanistic stupor? Again, this is of little consequence. What is of consequence is the pleasure and power you experience through the very act of evasion. While your mother exerts power through regulating and policing (but never repressing) your behavior, you know the “pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it” (45). This evasion is itself empowering, “power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing or resisting. Capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement,” (45) you and your mother play out the self-perpetuating power games that define my “power-knowledge-pleasure” principles.

Contrary to widely-held notions, sex is not repressed. In fact, sex is discussed constantly and frequently through a proliferation of discourses fueling numerous and decentralized relations of power. A sexual “will to knowledge” manifests itself both as shared constructions of sexual truths and identities and through the pursuit of a human truth understood to be imbedded in sexuality. Pleasure is experienced through the exertion and evasion of power. The experiences of power, knowledge and pleasure are inextricably connected in our understandings of sexuality.

Timothy, I predict the following in your very near future. Your mother will enter your bedroom uninvited, asking you how your day was while eyeing you with “benevolent” suspicion. You will tell her in no uncertain terms to “foucalf.” Then you will lock the door and do what you do best.
Sincerely,
Michel Foucalt