Desire at All Costs – A review of Tal Madesta's Book On Compulsory Sexuality

Review of Tal Madesta, Désirer à tout prix, Paris, Binge Audio Éditions, 2022. By Heta Rundgren 

What if the couples that did not have sex were not considered as unhappy? What if the idea that a body that does not desire sex is a suffering body was demolished? What if we put in the center of our life, celebrated even, the relationships that do not need sexuality to exist?

Writing against compulsory sexuality, Tal Madesta wishes to direct our attention to circuits and modes of affection that do not need sex to flourish.

Madesta’s essay interrogates patriarchal and capitalist arrangements of love and sexuality building on earlier feminist and queer work, especially on lesbian feminist literature interrogating compulsory heterosexuality (Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich), recent trans materialist work (Matérialismes trans published in 2021) and, to a lesser extent, asexuality studies (Ela Przybylo’s work).

Tal Madesta is a trans feminist activist and freelance journalist, member of XY Média [put the link], the first transfeminist audiovisual media in France. On Instagram, he publishes on feminist and trans issues.

Desire at All Costs is divided in two parts: “Investing Desire: The Price to Pay” and “Disinvesting Desire: the Power of Alternative Relationships”. Madesta starts from the idea that (almost) no female or gender-non-normative body can escape sexual violence today. He then goes on to question the way some feminist and LGBT+ activists participate in entertaining the myth of sexual freedom or liberation through sexuality.

For Madesta, it is urgent to imagine a freedom from sexuality, which for him is closely related to freedom from heterosexuality and the idea of the nuclear family as the basic unit of (capitalist and patriarchal) society. What we should do, he proposes, is to try and (re)think ourselves outside sexuality, to decenter the importance of sexuality in our lives, direct our attention elsewhere. To take a concrete step in that direction, in the second part of the book, Madesta shares stories of alternative homes, of love between friends, and pleasure without sex.

Madesta begins by telling his personal story of witnessing his father beating his mother at the age of five, and soon being the victim of the same man himself, for ten years, until they leave home with his mother and his little brother. He explains how what he earlier saw as a young woman’s reappropriation of her sexuality– seeking sexual experiences with the hope of feeling something – he now interprets as a traumatic response (disassociating body and feelings) to years of violence. He talks about slowly coming to the realization that he is not the only one accumulating sexual experience without enjoying sex. His pathological condition thus turned out to be a “normal” and quite common response to violence lived in a patriarchal, capitalist society.

Madesta moves on, then, to analyse the bodily consequences of a system built on sexual violence, looking at bodies and behaviors considered sexually healthy – those that desire enough and get enough satisfaction – and those that are pathologized because they lack sexual desire and satisfaction. Madesta uses the concept of the body-machine to refer to a phenomenon where a body that does not desire is a body to be healed (when sexuality is a medical subject) or fixed (when sexuality is a social issue). Sexual well-being and emancipation by sexual well-being can be achieved by buying and consuming goods and services in a capitalist society. Madesta talks about the “optimization” of desire and pleasure, and of a vicious capitalist circle thus established:

Madesta concludes that individuals suffocated by this dynamic can only lose, apart from straight cis-men who are the “big time winners” (53). He does not ask which straight cis-men, though. He probably refers to those who win both money and sexual satisfaction in this circuit. Of course not all straight cis-men fit this picture and other factors besides gender and sexuality (race, ability, class, etc.) will have to be taken into account, as Madesta does note elsewhere in the essay.

Madesta then goes on to explain Monique Wittig’s and Adrienne Rich’s work on heterosexuality, explaining how (Western, contemporary) society is organized on the right and the responsibility to have sex with the opposite sex, and how heterosexuality becomes a political regime.  

Madesta does not think (the right to) sexual enjoyment could ever bring about a revolution, because sexual pleasure, “individual and unhindered”, is for him a liberal premise. From the materialist feminist perspective that Madesta embraces, enjoyment as the horizon of emancipation depoliticizes the question of liberation. Instead, we should think about unpaid work and sharing of domestic and family responsibilities. This is of course what materialist feminism has been telling us for a while now.

Madesta thus explains that he wants to talk about the fact that sexuality is obligatory for us all. He cites Ela Przybyło’s notion sexusociety, coined to bring to light the workings of the sexual imperative, the way sex and sexuality “organize our practices of joy and loving, life and fulfillment as well as institutional structures” (Przybylo, in this interview LINK). Przybylo is a scholar working on asexuality, although, as she explains, her work is “less about an identity and more about critiquing sexually overdetermined modes of relating.” (Przybyło 2019, 3) Madesta’s work resonates strongly with the last part of this declaration: he has a problem with how sexuality is been “sold” to us all, as something we cannot happily live without.

In the second part of the book Madesta then scatters some seeds of stories on love, intimacy and pleasure without sex. He has gathered most of them thanks to a call on Instagram, where he asked people to tell their stories of alternative intimacies and family arrangements, as well as of ways of feeling desire and pleasure not related to sexuality.

Talking about home and not family, he thinks the only way to put an end to the vicious circle of sexual violence is to decenter the nuclear family as its basic unit. Therefore stories of alternative homes, in the here and now, are important. However, Madesta also quickly sketches a herstory of female communities not based on marital sexuality, mentioning Boston marriages and the Beguines, followed by 1970s lesbian communities. He points out that alternative homes are to be found in the margins, where the dominant model breaks, which does not mean that life there is easy: to break with traditional ways often, if not always, brings a sanction. The alternative homes Madesta puts forth are constructed around roommates or a child, one or two parents (without a sexual bond between them) and friends and relatives. He also looks at friendship as the most significant love of people’s lives.

Madesta thinks that the burden to be sexual and sexually active could be especially poignant in (some) feminist and lgbtiq+ communities, and that “transforming a place of present and past violence into a space where the horizon of pleasure and giving up of control were made possible” can be a task too difficult to fulfil, or even a trap set by capitalist patriarchy. Putting the question of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment on hold, we would necessarily see things differently, which, in extension, would open up the space for change without necessarily resolving these questions. For Madesta, as long as we live in a patriarchal capitalist world, the questions of sexual desire and fulfillment cannot be resolved.

Madesta suggests that for some bodies, the recognition that they do not take pleasure in investing the space of sexuality could be the only revolutionary movement, the one capable of leading them towards a livable life here and now.

Interestingly, Audre Lorde’s famous essay “The Uses of the Erotic – The Erotic as Power”, inspires both Madesta’s and aforementioned Ela Przybylo’s thought. Lorde’s way of conceptualizing the erotic – as something distinct of the sexual – sparks up a more holistic way of thinking about life, relationships and political activism. She asks us to pay attention to acts, feelings and connections that are not necessarily sexual but that we feel in our guts powerfully, that we profoundly enjoy and that are life-affirming. That is what the erotic, as power, is to Lorde: a life-affirming action – political, poetical, social, individual – that creates affinities and ignites love beyond sexuality. The last subchapter of Madesta’s book, “When the space of pleasure is already taken – desiring otherwise” relates with Lorde’s proposition and with Przybylo’s crucial Asexual Erotics. I finish with an excerpt from one of the personal stories that Madesta shares:

Singing, the whole body is important and singing has an effect on the whole body. When I allow myself to sing freely, powerfully, I release my emotions, I feel how my voice evolves. I feel my strength, my vulnerability. Something moves, an affect that connects me to my body. And it is also a powerful way to connect to others. The more I learn to understand my body outside the prism of desire and sexuality, the more I learn to renew the way I look at others.

Underlying the essay is the question of the necessity of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment for a full, happy life. As these have definitely been seen as something to aspire to both in feminist and sexual minorities’ combats for “liberation”, to put them aside and think about how our bodies and feelings relate to other bodies and objects in a myriad of ways remains a politically salient gesture.