bad sex in the age of surplus value

so i've been thinking about bad sex. not the awkward kind, not the kind where someone's knee ends up somewhere it shouldn't and you both pretend the ceiling is fascinating. i mean structurally bad. ontologically bankrupt. bad in a way that reveals something rancid at the core of how we fuck and why we fuck and what we delude ourselves into believing we're getting out of it.

here's the thesis, and i'll dispense with the foreplay because there's no point being coy: under capitalism, sex has become a form of labour whose surplus value is extracted not by your boss but by the abstraction of desire itself. and the reason so much sex feels like shit isn't because you're doing it wrong. it's because you're doing it right. in a system that has already decided what sex is for. your dissatisfaction isn't a bug. it's the fucking feature.^*1

let me back up, because i can already hear the pedants sharpening their knives.

marx's basic move was elegantly simple. you work for eight hours. your labour produces value. you get paid enough to survive and reproduce yourself as a worker. the difference between what you produce and what you're paid is surplus value, and the capitalist pockets it. this isn't a moral indictment, it's a structural description. the worker isn't mugged in an alley, they're robbed in the wage contract. the theft is legal, normalized, rendered invisible by the sheer banality of its operation.

now here's where it gets interesting. žižek, that lovable slovenian nightmare in a stained t-shirt, made a career out of pointing out that surplus value has a twin: surplus enjoyment. lacan's plus-de-jouir. the idea is that enjoyment itself, jouissance, operates according to the same logic of excess and extraction. there's a remainder, a surplus, that escapes the subject and gets captured by the symbolic order. you never quite get what you want, and that gap, that structural dissatisfaction, is where ideology lives and breeds and feeds.

so what happens when we drag this apparatus into the bedroom?

sex under capitalism isn't just an act. it's a site of value production. and i don't just mean sex work, though we'll get there. i mean all sex, or at least all sex that happens within the horizon of a society organized around commodity production. the question isn't whether you're getting paid. the question is what your desire is producing, and who or what is skimming off the top. because someone always is.

alan sears wrote a book called eros and alienation that makes this argument with more patience than i have. his point is that erotic life under capitalism is shaped by the same imperatives that shape everything else: growth, accumulation, efficiency. desire gets channeled into forms that reproduce the conditions for capital. not because there's a conspiracy, but because that's what systems do. they reproduce themselves through us. we are the machinery. and we call it love.

think about dating apps. think about the way you swipe. think about the metrics. think about the way you evaluate a potential partner the same way you'd evaluate a product listing on amazon, except the product is a person and the reviews are their instagram feed. this isn't a metaphor. the app is literally a marketplace, and you are both buyer and seller. your desirability is a form of capital, what kaplan and illouz call sexual capital, and like all capital, it can be accumulated, invested, leveraged, and liquidated. they even break it down into categories: embodied sexual capital, neoliberal sexual capital, the "surplus value of the body" deployed by sex workers and waiters and anyone whose job requires them to be fuckable or at least fuckable-adjacent.^*2

the surplus value of the body. let that phrase sit with you for a second. roll it around. feel its grubby little fingers on your skin.

what does it mean to say that your body produces surplus value? it means the value of your body exceeds what you get back from it. it means you are alienated from your own desirability. it means the gap between what you are and what you're worth is where someone else is making a profit. sometimes that someone is literal, a platform, a pimp, an employer. sometimes it's the abstract social relation itself. the market in desire. the great invisible handjob of history.

and this is where bad sex comes in. not as a failure, but as a revelation.

bad sex, structurally speaking, is sex that fails to produce surplus value. or rather, it's sex where the extraction is visible, where the machinery grinds, where the gears of the libidinal economy screech against each other like nails on a chalkboard made of your own disappointed flesh. good sex, under capitalism, is sex that feels spontaneous, that feels like it's outside the economy, that feels like it's for you. but that feeling of escape is itself a product. it's the ideology of sexual liberation, which foucault saw coming: the incitement to discourse, the proliferation of sexualities, the injunction to enjoy. desublimation as a new form of control. you're not repressed anymore. you're just exhausted. and exhausted is the new horny. or maybe horny is the new exhausted. i can never remember.

kollontai, that horny bolshevik, understood something about this. she argued that the buying and selling of caresses destroys the sense of equality between people. but she also thought that socialist relations of production would create the conditions for genuinely free love, love-solidarity, intimacy not mediated by economic dependency. i love her optimism. i really do. it's adorable in the way a child's drawing of a horse is adorable. but i'm not sure she accounted for how thoroughly capital would colonize the libido itself. how it would get inside us. how it would become the very shape of our wanting.

here's the thing. it's not just that sex is commodified. it's that the failure of sex is commodified. think about the proliferation of sex advice, sex therapy, sex tech, the endless optimization of the sexual encounter. there's a whole industry built around the promise that you're doing it wrong and they can fix you. your bad sex is someone's business model. your loneliness is a growth sector. there's an app for that. there's a subscription. there's a podcast. there's a retreat in bali where you can cry about your orgasm gap while drinking activated charcoal.^*3

and this brings me to the sex negativity crowd, who i think are onto something even if they'd probably hate how i'm using them. the basic claim, as articulated by people like copjec and the asca research group, is that sex names a structural antagonism that cannot be resolved. lacan's "there is no sexual relation" isn't a complaint, it's an ontological statement. sex is the site of a fundamental negativity, a hole in the symbolic order, and any attempt to fill that hole with positive content, with "good sex," with "healthy relationships," with "optimal intimacy," is doomed to fail and will probably involve a lot of crying and maybe some crystals.

"we have never had sex," says oxana timofeeva. i find this hilarious and also devastating. it means that the thing we think we're doing when we fuck, the thing we're chasing, the thing that's supposed to complete us, has never actually happened. it's a fantasy structure. and under capitalism, that fantasy structure is a growth market. it's the gig economy of the soul. it's the subscription service you forgot to cancel.

so what would non-capitalist sex even look like?

i don't know. and i'm suspicious of anyone who claims to. but i can tell you what it wouldn't look like. it wouldn't look like the endless pursuit of better sex. it wouldn't look like the optimization of desire. it wouldn't look like the extraction of surplus enjoyment from the body. it wouldn't look like the dating app, the performance review, the self-help book, the onlyfans subscription, the couples therapist, the sex toy subscription box, the tantric workshop, the "intimacy coach," the goddamn wellness industrial complex with its greasy palm outstretched.

it might look like failure. it might look like sex that doesn't work, that doesn't produce anything, that doesn't accumulate. sex that's just there. sex that's bad in the way that a poem is bad when it refuses to mean anything. sex as refusal. sex as sabotage. sex as the thing you do when you've stopped trying to make it mean something and just let it be weird and sad and human.

or maybe i'm full of shit. maybe this is just another way of saying what everyone already knows: that intimacy is hard, that desire is messy, that we're all fucked up. but i don't think so. i think the difference matters. the difference between "sex is hard because people are complicated" and "sex is hard because it has been structured by a system that extracts value from your dissatisfaction" is the difference between a personal problem and a political one. and if there's one thing i've learned from reading too much theory, it's that personal problems are usually political problems wearing a disguise. and that disguise is usually a cute outfit you bought on sale.

so here's what i'm proposing. not a solution. solutions are for people who think the system can be fixed. just a reframing. next time you have bad sex, and you will, don't ask yourself what went wrong. ask yourself what was being extracted. ask yourself who or what was profiting from your failure to connect. ask yourself whether the badness was yours or whether it was structural. whether you were the worker or the product or the surplus or the machine.^*4

you might not like the answer. but at least it'll be honest.

and honestly, in the age of surplus value, honesty is the only thing that isn't for sale.

yet. give it a week. someone's already building the app.