Let us cavort like the Greeks of old. You know the ones I mean… - Hedonism Bot, Futurama.
I get the job done - Chappel Roan, “The Giver”.
aye, there’s the rub - William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”.
From ancient pederasty to modern boarding school hierarchies, the morphism from competently performed socially hegemonic masculinity to its codomain of not-masculinity is penetration. Under this rule, one’s masculine status is guaranteed as long as one is the penetrator rather than the penetratee. It is better to give than to receive. Or, rather, it is the only way to maintain one’s masculine status in the face of the threat of its sexual invalidation.
Penetrability is a more easily secured, and very slightly but still meaningfully less violent, male sexuality than contemporary no homo and its trans panic defence. Here, penetration is no longer sufficient to underwrite your masculinity. You must be penetrating something that cannot taint your desire with an effeminate lack of mastery of the situation in the eyes of your peers. It may not be gay as long as your balls don’t touch, but how do you know your balls aren’t going to touch hers, bro?
Restoring penetrability as the master signifier’s master signifier, therefore, appears both slightly more progressive and much more theoretically appealing than no homo. Doing so gives us a map of sex (or gender, or fuckability, or whatever) as the distribution of the penetrable. The active role in exploring this map is masculinity-preserving; the passive role isn’t. This concept of activity is defined by penetration rather than enthusiasm, and is unchallenged by reverse cowgirl. This is a better buttress for the patriarchal male ego, with less externalities for those it encounters, than being afraid of wiping your own backside. However, it pushes the majority of human sex into the areas of the map marked here be dragons. Apart from anything else, it simply isn’t true that everyone has an asshole.
To address this, we could try to swap penetration out for envelopment. Vagina dentata becomes the event horizon of masculinity rather than not sticking your dick in tranny. However, this remains masculine-normative and under-powered descriptively. There are no pillow princesses here. If it is better to give than to receive, lying back and letting someone else be active and penetrative without doing anything in return ensures their active status and, therefore, their mastery of their desire. However, they don’t even necessarily have to penetrate. Moreover, if being on top is mastery, reverse cowgirl now becomes a problem for maintaining masculinity. So, then, why is being a pillow princess considered a bad thing?
I think that it is better if we generalize penetration, envelopment, activity and passivity to strategies in games of friction. In these games, topologically speaking, two (oftten separate) surfaces with varying material properties come into contact in an erogenous Riemann space. We don’t have start with men and others then try to explain the others in terms of men in order to maintain a panicked post-hoc logic of active-penetration when sex is the generalization of frottage rather than injection. Rather, men emerge as strategies and surfaces along with everyone else. This flat ontology of sexual activity doesn’t prevent us from doing the anthropology of identifying sociosexual hierarchies, or from tackling their effects politically. What it does do is to prevent us from uncritically baking them in as the axioms of our supposed critique, or begging the question of their terms and thereby affirming them.
The distribution of the penetrable is the given of masculine status anxiety. It is a transhistorical given, but not by any means a universal one. It cannot describe much of the contemporary political landscape of sex or provide us with critical purchase on it, for all that we must be able to describe that landscape in order to do so. That requires a lower-level language. Frictive analysis is a way for us to generate more light than heat.