The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics

by Janet R. Jakobsen

Finalist, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies

Offers a way to undo the inextricable American knot of sex, politics, religion, and power

American politics are obsessed with sex. Before the first televised presidential debate, John F. Kennedy trailed Richard Nixon in the polls. As Americans tuned in, however, they found Kennedy a younger, more vivacious, and more attractive choice than Nixon. Sexier. The political significance of Kennedy’s telegenic sex appeal is now widely accepted – but taking sexual politics seriously is not. Janet R. Jakobsen examines how, for the last several decades, gender and sexuality have reappeared time and again at the center of political life, marked by a series of widely recognized issues and movements – women’s liberation and gay liberation in the 1960s and ’70s, the AIDS crisis and ACT UP in the ‘80s and ’90s, welfare and immigration “reform” in the ‘90s, wars claiming to “save women” in the 2000s, and battles over health care in the 2010s, to recent demands for reproductive justice, trans liberation, and the explosive exposures of #MeToo.

Religion has been wound up in these political struggles, and blamed for not a little of the resistance to meaningful change in America political life. Jakobsen acknowledges that religion is a force to be reckoned with, but decisively breaks with the common sense that religion and sex are the fixed binary of American political life. She instead follows the kaleidoscopic ways in which sexual politics are embedded in social relations of all kinds – not only the intimate relations of love and family with which gender and sex are routinely associated, but also secularism, freedom, race, disability, capitalism, nation and state, housing and the environment.

In the midst of these obsessions, Jakobsen’s promiscuous ethical imagination guides us forward. Drawing on examples from collaborative projects among activists, academics and artists, Jakobsen shows that sexual politics can contribute to building justice from the ground up. Gender and sexual relations are practices through which values emerge and communities are made. Sex and desire, gender and embodiment emerge as bases of ethical possibility, breaking political stalemate and opening new possibility.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Politics, Sociology, Sexuality, Womens, Philosophy

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are all taught in school that the reason that the US is so hung up on sex, and how we should all keep it in our pants, is that the Puritins brought it over with them when the colonized North America, but the author says that really isn't how we got to be how we are.

She also addresses how sexual freedom is not the same as being anti-religious, which is what all the right wing people seem to think.

Thanks to the publisher for making this book available for an honest review.

[Krystelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book with a focus on the fixation that America has on sex and the political nose that likes to stick itself into other people's bedrooms, this proves to be an interesting but a rather quick read. There are some interesting points about the scandals that have pervaded American politics throughout the decades and the bills that have been spawned prohibiting certain activities from people behaving just as 'improperly' themselves.

One thing I really enjoyed about this book was how it approached the hope that the country has for eventually moving towards a freer world and legislative jurisdiction, but also how it highlights just how much needs to change. Some startling things include the way that people vote according to their perception of attractiveness and the willingness of people to accord value to conservative values in the face of contradictory evidence.

Overall, an interesting book that could have done with a little more research and substance, but I understand this may be largely due to the fact that this, again, constitutes a thesis. Certainly a little bit more of an academic piece, but interesting nonetheless.

[MLDunk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, the title of this book misled me. Sexual politics is used as the main feature of a metaphor to describe all of American politics rather than being the main focus. It's more of a holistic view of all politics, secularism, and religion. This is densely packed with sources and history, but it is not the most invigorating read. Additionally, if you are reading this as a resource for sexuality, sexual history, or sex in American politics, it may not be your best option. It gives helpful insights on how politics is not as simple as they make it seem, constantly navigating intersections by foregrounding and backgrounding issues to appear coherent, but other than that, the aid it provides someone looking for further studies on sexual politics in America is the attention needing to be paid to an intersectional approach.

[Lisa Konet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very similar to another book I finished "Entitled: how male privilege hurts women by Kate Manne". Some of the same comparisons between rich men in high ranking titles and men in general and their perception of being the preferred gender. This book goes further in to sex in politics and mentions some of the infamous scandals. A good reference for this topic that is quite current.

Both of these books were well written and researched but the content was getting repetitive and wish I had read this books further apart to get better appreciation of each. Overall, another necessary book.

Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and author for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Available: 8/25/20

[Maggie Kirwin]

My brain is fried. Thankful I am done! I will not be rating because it is objectively a good book, I just found it confusing.

[Squirrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I arrived late to hear the author speak at my university and I was sure that it was the lateness and the fact that I hadn't read the book as many others had was the reason why the conversation felt so slippery and disjointed.

Having now finished the Sex Obsession, I can say that I think it is a deliberate strategy/way of thinking on the part of the author. While the breadth of the book is impressive, I feel like I don't have anything concrete to grab onto. Like I'm not sure exactly what the author is advocating. Although maybe it's the right to change one's mind, to be intellectually promiscuous, to seek out the in-betweens rather than the either-ors, and to build new structures that accommodate more people rather than forcing people into those structures. Honestly I think the clearest section of what the author is really getting at exists in her Conclusion. My grad school hack of reading just the Introduction, the first chapter, and the Conclusion hold for this book and I think 90% of the argument is contained therein. The rest of the book reiterates a lot of the same ideas of kaleidoscopes and woven fabric of stasis found earlier in the book.

What I think the author is hinting at is that most of the political scene as it exists is just plain stuck in certain ruts and that the truth lies outside of the binaries being imposed and that those ruts help to create a certain stasis that looks like movement. The example the author uses in the first chapter is that religion's opposite isn't secularism, in part because "religion" has been confined to represent a very specific kind of evangelical Christianity that doesn't represent the plurality of existence. And that to give both sexual morality and religion to these narrow-minded people is to confine us all. In the same way, secularism will not save us either. As in, secularism is as much a western construction with its own dogmas as the religious right, and in many ways it shares a lot in common with the religious right. The author's example is President Obama's focus on creating good fathers in monogamous relationships as a way to shore up the social fabric of American society, and to focus on individuals and the nuclear family as sites of change. Although there's a stamp of secularism on the initiative, it contains more than a whiff of the fundamental conservative idea that the nuclear family headed by a man that supports a nation state.

I think what the author is advocating for is to not settle for the either-or, because the either-or has helped create a stable construct of oppression disguised as progress. Her example is the merry-go-round of the US Supreme Court, as rights are taken away as much as they're given. In some ways this analogy holds (I'm reminded of the recent set of pro-Indigenous rulings in contrast to the stripping of reproductive rights by the same court.). In other ways I think that we can see the ways in which totalitarianism is increasingly slipping into all parts of government and society in the US.

I've only given this book three stars because this book is a synthesis of a large number of sometimes conflicting ideas, combined with an attempt at gesturing towards practical applications, but I'm not sure that it does any of the ideas justice. There's just 10 lbs of content in a 5 lb bag and it makes it very difficult to actually discuss the book itself. Instead there are fragments that make sense, and to which the conversation gravitated when the book was discussed in person. I'm thinking specifically of the way in which the author presents the idea that caregivers and disabled people need a better framework that works for both groups rather than the current system which creates a zero-sum game between caregivers and the disabled people for whom they care.

There are a lot of ideas in this book but what I think is the most helpful is the reminder to do away with false dichotomies and that multiple approaches to a problem are good, actually. Incremental change can work hand in hand with work to bring down a system, small-scale mutual aid groups are just as much a part of changing things as legislative change. And basically it is impossible to know what will actually work until after the fact, so you might as well do the thing that feels best to you to change things without worrying if it is the absolute best thing for causing change. So in some ways this book is really depressing, as it highlights the ways in which the system contorts itself to fit the actions, but at the same time it is freeing to be like, maybe all of these endless discussions are maybe not super useful, but doing anything at all can be and is.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jakobsen does a wonderful job of disentangling the ways in which sex and religion are intertwined, showing that our framing of "religion vs sexual freedom" has become reductive and narrows our vision to what is possible.