7 September 2010: "Craiglist ‘cock blocks’ hard, won’t let u buy & sell local prostitutes n e more"

This post is about homosocial desire. In Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the "male traffic in women," to borrow, as she does, Levi-Strauss's piquant phrase, replicates and relies upon a triangular structure of desire in which male-male libidinous energy is, as it were, laundered through its being routed through subordinated and subject-ed women under patriarchal relations.

In any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desires and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence.

Carles traces this congruence in his own textual narrative, which discusses through anecdotal strategies precisely the persistence of prostitution and thus patrraiarchy in postindustrial capitalism, through the radical use of rupture, of a literal lacuna in the fabric of his discourse:

I purchased my first ‘hooker’ off craigslist. It really is a great place to meet new people, and ‘have ur way with them.’ I met a user who was named “Samantha – 23 all natural big titties.’ She was located in a Ramada Inn close to the airport. I went to her room, and she was a little bit uglier than she looked in the pictures, but I was still super hornie, and got ‘turned on’ because I was doing something illegal. I had very aggressive sex with her, and said hateful, and potentially racists things 2 her. It was actually a positive experience, because I accepted that I was a ‘homosexual’ afterwards, and was only dominating women to deal with my

Here the text abruptly fragments itself, leaving the thought uncompleted, but in a larger sense, more than complete, as its resolution is of course overdetermined. The need to "dominate" women is coordinate with the expression of the priority of male-male relations as those properly constituitive of society, reinforcing the principle that men alone can form meaningful contractual bonds that shape the distribution of property, work, responsibility and leisure. Prostitution is simply the reverse of these male-male relations, a shadowplay or dumb show in which the male enacts his psychic distance from the libidinous desire of the female through the introjection of commerce -- mechanizing and rationalizing the expression of sexual desire for the other and neutralizing it, suppressing the possibility of a disruptive "love" that might upset patriarchal prerogatives. Women are bought and shared among men as property that solidifies the male bond, and certifies their mutual desire for the other's maintained mastery.

Carles is quick to posit the universality of this experience -- "What is ur craiglists prostitution experience?" -- which frames his assertion that Craigslist's efforts to thwart the practice of prostitution can only be regarded from within patriarchy as a "cockblock" -- a prevention of two "cocks" confirming one another's efficacy over the body of the purchased female, dehumanized as chattel, reduced to the level of "a fixed gear bicycle" or "a used IKEA sofa for $50," as Carles points out, using salient examples from contemporary Western life-styles.

But Carles hopes not only to underscore the ubiquity of homosocial desire but to contest its apparent naturalness: "Was it weird to go into their pussie/mouth/butt hole after some1 else had been in it hours before?" he asks of the generic male client of a prostitute, emphasizing the continuity of the circuit of somatic frictions that sustain the fiction of the given-ness of patriarchy. In Carles's interrogatory gambit, the phallus is marked and unmasked by its very absence, and by the persistence of its trace after its copulatory withdrawal. His point is that the phallus necessarily haunts all transactions of desire, even those that are purely linguistic in nature, and that the raw conjunction of meanings and signifiers too is a kind of marked sexual congress, a phantasm of presence that universalizes not male power but male guilt.

Hence Carles points out that the "Craigslist killer" -- more a metaphor than a particular villain in this construction -- "seems normal-looking, like any other bro just ‘trying to get off.’" The criminality of the patriarchal enterprise is normalized, homogenized (pun intended) by the nature of the orifice impregnated by the phallo-logos -- the process of meaning making is the scene of the crime, the primal scene, where the name of the father is both forbidden and always already echoing in our ears.

The question then becomes, as Carles limns it, "Do u know any better solutions 4 eCommerce than craigslist?" That is, does online sociality and networked digitial interfaces necessarily reinforce the bars of the prison-house of patriarachy, or can they model alternative forms of exchange and property relations that don't require the female body to sanctify? Are there forms of desire that transcend the homosocial yet retain structurating power? In the absence of these forms, the taboo markers of racial prejudice and miscegenation leap to the fore as organizing principles: "Would u rather be a ‘black pimp’ or a ‘drugged out white whore’?" Carles asks, delineating the constricted subjectivities available under the phallologocentric-postcolonialist regimes of control. Sexual relations are race relations are power relations are biopolitical relations. QED.