Why write about sex?
Sex is everywhere. Why add to the tawdry glut?
What are the advantages and disadvantages—to individuals, to socialgroups—of elaborating and developing sex as a central form of expression, one that defines identity and is seen as a primary source of energy and pleasure?
In spite of its publicity, sex remains oddly taboo, particularly for women. The widespread exposure to sexual imagery and talk seems not to have made a dent in the embarrassment. The sexual shame that begins in childhood—and which the entire culture endlessly recreates—keeps the sense of taboo alive even in a blitz of the sexually explicit. Perhaps taboo and shame are among the necessary products of capitalism; certainly shame, guilt, and trauma can short-circuit the radical traditions that have named sex as creative and life-affirming, so that even the most progressive works on sex are often stilted, cautious, or imbued with the melancholy of sex, its proverbial tristesse. But however much either the morally righteous or die politically earnest call sex trivial, a self-indulgent luxury, or one more consumer item in the capitalist marketplace, the commercialization of sex has failed to reduce it to a mere product. Perhaps, as novelist Jane Rule has observed, "A body we know is designed to die will never be a simple plaything."
French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault gives a subtle rendering of the general argument that sex and capitalism have gone hand-in-hand too long for sex to be interpreted at face value as a radical force.2 Foucault suggests that the public discussion of sex constitutes a chief way in which modern social institutions manipulate the consciousness and intimate experiences of great masses of people. Sex is supposedly secret and private, yet we do nothing but speak of it, he argues, and in speaking we unwittingly define and proscribe who may desire whom, when, and how. To advance the cause of sexual freedom, then, may paradoxically tighten the grip of the system.

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