What is the most transgressive thing that one can say about sex today? And which position can, as Michel Foucault or Donald Trump might have it, “make sex great again”? These two questions are intimately related. As Kavya Krishnamurthy wrote in The Harper Review last spring, “We like to talk about sex as if it is a secret because secrets are erotic, and we would like sex to be erotic. We would like it to be transgressive.” The resurgence of the patriarchy, the allure of submission, the popularity of tradwives can all be understood as elements within necessary and perpetual rebellions of the erotic.
Individual rebellions are derivative of societal ones—sex, and the rest of our desires, are not really ours. They are driven by what Lillian Fishman, in a review of pornography for The Point, postulates “must haunt every puritanical and sex-negative society: to disavow what we want and still get it.” Even in the most essential parts of our selves, even those parts in open revolt, one finds society pulling the strings. We don’t care to offer a way out, but we found an answer to the first questions while laughing at The Sex Lives of Puppets.
A distinctly British affair flown over for Chicago’s annual International Puppet Festival, the show is a series of interviews. The first couple we meet is Meryl and Jeremy, both married to other puppets, who proclaim, “Sex is just good fun.” Meryl’s vagina is named Robin Williams, for being overactive and excited. Jeremy’s penis is named Roger, for reasons unknown but nonetheless unfortunate, as Meryl’s husband is also named Roger. They insist “they are not in love—that spoils things”; it’s just that Roger’s Roger isn’t so Roger anymore and, well, “it is a need” after all. The point being, sex is not so serious. The most transgressive sexual act might be laughter.
Later, we meet Marcus and Preston, nursing home lovers who have discovered that blow jobs get noticeably better “when you can take the teeth out.” There’s Daz, who is asked to describe his sex life in the style of an avant-garde monologue (“I’ll tell you the truth—I want you to hurt me”) and, during choking-aided orgasm, ascends into heaven swimming like a fish through the air. Meanwhile Suki, a sultry actress seducing her rival’s lover, kills the first man to ever reject her advances with a gun she pries from his trousers (he was not, it turns out, just happy to see her). And who could forget Dimitri, the finely dressed financier who role-plays a cat with his second wife?
The climax of the show, besides the sex-palooza pre-intermission shadow-puppet porn fest set to jazz, was the communal joy (dare we say Durkheimian collective effervescence) of experiencing such an event with a packed house of complete strangers. Stifled or uncontrollable laughter-turned-groans and gags generated another source of comedy. What live, raucous theater provides for “filthy-minded people,” as the principal puppeteer called us, is the possibility for spectating to be its own kind of participation. We need not dwell on how or why civic engagement in all its forms has become so rare, in an age inhabited by private citizens who are free of both politics and the greatness that comes with it.
But if we may venture one more anecdote: On the way to the event, I (Liam) read Hannah Arendt on the Red Line and was falsely recognized as Criminal Minds’s autodidact Dr. Spencer Reid by an elderly man sitting across from me. He told me the Chicago Police Department is hiring and could use someone of my talents (esoteric math? Baudelaire recitations? sex puppet commentary?). As ridiculous as it was, the endearingly earnest conversation led us to realize that participating in public life does not necessitate critiquing it. The most effective criticism is a symptom, not a cause of robust political life. Politics concerns the proper uses of the state’s power, but only poor, incestuous politics is about power itself. Just so with sex. Good sex does not hold itself up as a project in and of itself. Rather, it finds meaning in the pleasure, the laughter, the pulse—thumping beneath the dull buzz of progress.
Pleasurably,
Liam Eifert & Nora Holmes
Image: Adriaen Brouwer, The Smokers, oil on wood, ca. 1636 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).