Davis and Dean's "Hatred of Sex" Is A Scathing Anti-Identity Manifesto

Why does everyone suddenly hate sex? A new book on psychoanalytic philosophy tries to figure it out.

By Eric Shorey

One thing that seems to be on the minds of every psychoanalyst lately is how many of our patients — especially the queer ones — absolutely loathe sex. They don’t wanna have it — or they imagine they simply can’t. In the minds of these patients, sex has been transformed into something that causes harm rather than something that affords pleasure.

This is the starting point of Oliver Davis and Tim Dean’s caustic little book, appropriately titled Hatred of Sex. Davis and Dean are two queer, white men — and they’re hyper-aware from the jump of how, by this very distinction, their arguments are likely to be discredited and dismissed in a cynical game of oppressed identity one-upmanship.

From what I can tell, neither Davis nor Dean are psychoanalysts (the former is a professor of French studies at the University of Warwick, the latter an English professor at the University of Illinois) — but unlike almost every other text on psychoanalytic theory written by academics, the duo are far more connected to the actual clinical and/or real world implications of what they’re postulating. (The bizarro academic version of psychoanalytic theory is usually so far divorced from actual psychoanalytic practices that it becomes almost unrecognizable to most working clinicians. Psychoanalysis in universities tends to be obscurantist, abstract, jargonistic, and divorced entirely from human lives — philosophers tend to imagine psychoanalysis as some weirdo, epistemological language game rather than something that actually helps people.)

Hatred of Sex begins with this strongly worded manifesto:

Sex, defined in terms of its capacity for harm, must be redefined in terms of pleasure.

Sex is incompatible with identity and with identity politics.

Hatred of sex is enfeebling the discipline of queer studies, which finds ever subtler ways of avoiding the sexual through recourse to gender, intersectionality, affect, and attachment.

Attachment theory has intensified the hatred of sex through its parasitic destruction of Freudian psychoanalysis and the subsequent weaponization of John Bowlby’s work in the traumatological clinic.

Attachment theory supplies the sex-hating template for “appropriate” forms of relating; “appropriate” is the new normal.

Traumatology’s worst excesses (e.g., “satanic ritual abuse”) are the product of fundamental flaws in the general approach championed by Judith Herman, which tends to recode benign sexual inappropriateness as abuse.

Traumatology laid the groundwork for QAnon.

By insisting that all sex is potentially abuse, traumatology elicits acceptance for the bureaucracies of neoliberal governance that would monitor us ever more closely.

The rest of the book essentially explodes out each of these statements, then picks apart the specific histories behind each train of thought. Hatred of Sex makes a compelling argument for each bullet point in its intro — but the book’s most glaring flaw is that it’s probably incomprehensible to anyone without some kind of graduate degree in theory, philosophy, or literature. (Sadly, I have a graduate degree and therefore got what they were giving, but I wouldn’t expect someone who didn’t stupidly drop upwards of $50k on a useless certificate to be able to follow along.)

Clearly Davis and Dean are mega-smart guys, but they can’t really be that smart if they’re unable to write this shit in plain ass English — without all the academic bloviating. I’ll do my best to summarize and interpret some of their arguments below, because despite my anti-intellectual complaints, I think their ideas are stunningly prescient.

Hatred of Sex is careful in specifying that “sex” here is not used as a contrast to “gender” — nor does “sex” in the book refer specifically to genitals. In this philosophical cosmology, “sex” is defined as the potential for the body to provide and receive excesses of pleasure. The two argue that because sex is inherently connected to excess, it always carries with it the possibility of danger (to the ego or to the self). That is to say: sex will always have the potential to be dis-integrating — and because of this potential, it always was and always will be scorned and feared.

(The authors use the French political philosopher Jacques Rancière’s argument about democracy as a parallel: that an inherent part of democracy will always be a hatred of democracy, because democracy forces us to deal with the unseemliest parts of the populace to whom we don’t actually wan’t to give any power. Deplorables and deplorability are endemic aspects of both democracy and sex.)

The most notable through-line of Hatred of Sex is that identity is a defense against sex, or can be used defensively to protect someone from the scary, messy, and anxiety-provoking parts of sex. Because adopting an identity requires the enforcement, instantiation, or implantation of a kind of rigidity about who you fundamentally are, identity is antithetical to sex, which is inherently unwieldy, destabilizing, and disorganizing. While it would be easy to call up images from my own psychoanalytic practice to demonstrate this point and how this dynamic plays out with certain marginalized groups, the point isn’t that marginalized identity is a defense against sex but that identity as a category is the problem — and that includes QAnon or Trumpism as much as whatever identity is in vogue on the left:

Trumpism has made abundantly evident that there exist no nontoxic identity formations. The psychic mechanism through which they come into being renders all identities inherently conservative.

We are well aware of the objections such claims are likely to provoke in an age when appeals to identity tend to be understood as generally liberal or progressive. No individual or group likes having their narcissism challenged—or, for that matter, having their commitment to identity described as an expression of narcissism. Learning that pride in one’s political identity may amount to little more than an ego defense hardly qualifies as welcome news. For a complex set of historical reasons, we have become invested in not just our own individual identities but the very idea of identity. A rhetoric of identity—along with an array of largely covert identitarian assumptions—has colonized subjective, social, and political intelligibility: identities have become the lens through which too many people, progressive as well as conservative, view the world … Identities encode strong disincentives to see outside themselves, rendering us oblivious to our commonalities, to that which we share before or beyond our manifold differences. What we share is our equality.

One could say that there’s a false equivalency here: that certain marginalized identities face disproportionate violence, hatred, and discrimination in ways that these other political identities do not, and therefore they’re necessary constructions for the sake of naming specific oppressions and experiences: fair enough, I guess. But that’s sort of besides the point. That distinction doesn’t make the category or construction of identity itself any less sex-phobic or defensive.

The victim identity in particular (which, again, exists in various formations and iterations in every political sphere) — crystallized through a long history of sex panics on both the left and right — is a compelling example: in which, because one identifies as a victim, all sex is rendered as something potentially injurious rather than potentially fun. Here’s how they sum it up in the book’s mean little conclusion:

“[…V]ictimized identities have become objects of mimetic desire in the social and therapeutic marketplace, whether as lucrative sources of individual redress against institutions, ways of excusing underachievement in a world that judges failure harshly, or as shortcuts to accruing emotional capital within the family circle, in a smash-and-grab raid on the attention and sympathy of anyone who will listen."

It’s no surprise that so much of this plays out on social media, where victim identities (or performances of victim identities) come with a whole lot of secondary gains: implicit, perverse advantages that come along with self-reported (and sometimes self-inflicted) emotional wounds and illnesses. The more marginalized your identity on social media, the harder it is for you to lose an argument: “oppression” (imagined or real) becomes a kind of social currency that can be exchanged for moral superiority. (This probably explains why right-wingers create the psychotic, false narrative that it is White Christian America that is Really Oppressed.)

Davis and Dean are also saying that the public’s arbitrary obsession with sexual “appropriateness” is a new way for people to police each other and has little or nothing to do with the actual “harm” sex causes. The idea of sexual appropriateness comes from attachment theory — a school of psychological thought that unsurprisingly has become a favorite topic on TikTok. Dean and Davis argue convincingly that because of its schematic, almost horoscope-like assortment of personalities into discrete categories based on the types of mothering received in infancy, attachment theory is actually a corruption of psychoanalysis, which maintains a contrasting position of radical openness and views individuals as radically idiosyncratic. The idea of “appropriateness” is a kind of normativity in disguise as something else, and it’s no wonder that what is deemed appropriate resembles conservative ideas of heterosexual marriage. Even too much pleasurable and consensual sex can be considered inappropriate! In their words: “it is occasional or infrequent sex in the context of a long-term secure, amative, intimate, emotionally rich, age-appropriate, and marriage-like relationship that is the new standard.”

In another chapter, Dean and Davis say that “gender” became a fixation amongst queer theorists as a way to protect themselves from the deplorable aspects of sex — which, at one point, was precisely what the word “queer” referred to. The writers trace a history of queer thinkers and demonstrate how sex disappeared from queer theory, instead replaced with an obsessional focus on (hyper-abstracted and disembodied ideas about) “gender,” “gender identity,” and intersectionality. Here, when the authors (and the authors they are critiquing) are discussing “gender” and “gender identity” they are more-so referring to these ideas as academic concepts rather than than the lived experience of actual people. Nonetheless, they assert that the enthusiasm for intersectionality is particularly pernicious because despite its dream of providing more axes by which to understand human experience, the intersectional worldview instead sub-divides people into endless exclusionary categories, many of which are based entirely on subjective experiences. These identities are then pitted against each other in struggles for power. In the authors’ words:

The fundamental democratic ideal of inclusiveness exacerbates a regrettable tendency to misinterpret feelings of being left out as evidence of motivated exclusion. To be raised in a kinship arrangement of any sort entails experiencing at one point or another the painful sense of being left out; our political discourses, both inside and outside the university, provide templates for understanding such feelings as signs of exclusion based on one’s identifying features (gender, race, sexuality, and so on) and thus as discriminatory. Thinking in terms of identity thus invites paranoia on the question of inclusivity. The aspiration of infinite inclusion—which motivates intersectionality and is supercharged by it—unfortunately triggers all those narcissistic pathologies of identity … Intersectionality has become a buzzword to denote the liberal value of hyperinclusiveness.

I get the feeling those on the left will have a real hard time hearing this particular argument, having become so enamored with intersectionality as a kind of platitudinous catch-all.

Although Dean and Davis are particularly hard on what queer theory has become — even rightly calling attention to the self-aggrandizing way in which queer theorists treat their inscrutable work as heroic, ha! — I have to wonder: why bother? Is queer theory even worth trying to rescue? Of course, queer academics will argue that queer theory has a liberatory potential, but to me (and I think to Dean and Davis as well), this new-fangled form of queer theory in which sex has totally disappeared (but, also, probably queer theory even before its sex-phobic turn) is more-so used a defense against painful aspects of reality than as something that can actually save anyone.

Anyway, the two most useful concepts in the book are the idea of “neurotic-mimetic self-traumatization” and “benign sexual inappropriateness.”

“Neurotic-mimetic self-traumatization” refers to the ways in which, because of the advantages afforded by victim identities and the contagious nature of mental illness, people will unconsciously rewrite otherwise “innocent” memories as trauma. “Benign sexual inappropriateness” is an attempt at creating a category outside of the simplistic idea of “abuse” to describe sexual experiences that may have been uncomfortable, un-pleasurable, or regretful — but weren’t necessarily soul-destroying or traumatic.

The authors use the word “traumatology” throughout the book to describe a sort of bastardized version of attachment theory and psychoanalysis that seeks to root out “trauma” — whether it really exists or not — as a source of psychological pain. Traumatology’s zenith was the Satanic Ritual Abuse scandals of the late 80’s and early 90’s, in which therapists, through a process of mutual suggestion, were able to implant false traumatic memories in their patients. What Dean and Davis don’t say is that this same kind of logic is what plays out on mental health TikTok and mental health Twitter, where influencers, hucksters, gurus, healers, and experts alike discuss trauma as if it were some kind of ever-present ghost that haunts literally everyone, literally always. These social media personalities encourage us to find trauma where it wasn’t and want us to see all human behavior, pathological or otherwise, as a “trauma response.” Traumatology as described by Dean and Davis is synonymous with the most ubiquitous forms of pop psychology. Traumatology contributes to the culture’s growing hatred of sex by re-inscribing, through suggestion, a social media user’s memories of “benign sexual inappropriateness” as traumatic. And there sure is a lot of money to be made in doing so: the writers point out how an entire industry is based on the kind of loyalty mutually created by patients and their traumatologically-oriented therapists (and the insurance industry!) who extract significant capital along the way. Indeed, real world experience from analysts can support this idea: patients these days are constantly seeking out therapists who will explicitly, endlessly, and exclusively “affirm” both their “identity” and their “trauma” — as opposed to more “classical” patients who had generally hoped to gain insight or even question previously held ideas about themselves.

Hatred of Sex is an excoriation of the sort of hysterical madness that proliferates contemporary politics, in which participants seek a sadistic kind of solace through a perverse game in which both trauma and identity are wielded as weapons — both as swords and shields — against each other and the (sexual) world. But I don’t think it’s a message the extremely online denizens of Twitter and TikTok are ready to hear. They’re too invested in winning the game.

FINAL JUDGEMENT: B+

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