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A problem I have concerned myself with for some years now is that of the construction

of human society (not, you understand, in a top down, arbitrated way - “society” as

simply a network of human relations). This is both a political and an anthropological

problem that can also be considered historically (in terms of how people, historically,

have organised themselves). In the course of my thinking about this problem, and the

years of researches it has so far involved, I came to imagine myself, as a direct result, as a

kind of anarchist, something I would now term a kind of social egoist (which is what I

imagine anarchism practically is, a social egoism). Another aspect of this realisation

through thought and study, however, is the bringing to light of three fundamentally

important things to emancipated human communities:

1. Self-organisation

2. Voluntary relationships

3. Sexual relationships

In the few brief chapters that follow in this short and very preliminary text I begin trying

to work out what these three things mean (and entail) practically, more especially in

terms of the values, ethics and practices that should guide a revolutionary world of

human relationships and where that might lead. My aim is to imagine what versions of

these things would create a human society of self-responsible, liberty-loving and non-

exploitative kinds of people who could live without hierarchy or believing that life is

about centralised control of others and of resources. This concentration on

relationships, I believe, is to ask how people can come together, in whatever forms they

freely decide, and live as self-supporting and non-dependent communities of people in

relationships they have formed and determined for themselves, uncoerced by outside

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others. This, necessarily, will be a destructive project before it is a creative one and so

one must also set out what is to be destroyed (because it is standing in the way) before

one can imagine what should be built in its place. Thus, the first chapter here is relatively

more destructive (if anticipatory) and the second is more imaginative and creative. These

are only values and ideas though so please remember that thinking about them and

seeing where that takes you is more important than either agreeing or disagreeing with

them.

1. Some Articles of Relationship

In this chapter I want to mainly highlight problems, things that we need to deconstruct.

It seems useful to do this by setting out some basic articles or principles as a result:

1. We dissolve “the myth of the one” inherent in what is most commonly known as the

fiction of “romance” or “romantic love” and, as a result, de-privilege such ideas whole

and entire, removing both their assumed moral desirability (if not superiority) and their

wholly coerced actualisation.

2. We repudiate the notion that love is to be found uniquely between two people in

what has come to be known popularly as “pair-bonding”. Upon scientific observation,

which has now been ongoing for centuries, it is found that it is not at all true that such a

notion is “nature’s way”. Nature, to the contrary, has no such preference and often

seems to favour promiscuity in observed practice. As a consequence, we affirm the

possibility to love, and even the desirability of loving, multiple partners in whatever

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combinations, or circumstances, are consensually agreeable, whether envisaged as semi-

permanent or temporary.

3. We disdain the notion of marriage (particularly as an institution) as a closed, singular

and dominating relation promulgating an unnecessary, and often harmful, exclusivity.

The point of love or sex is not to initiate and maintain an exclusive relationship.

4. We oppose the idea of ANY sexual normality labelled “heterosexuality” which

becomes a dominating standard for sexed human relationship, something, of necessity,

superior to “homosexuality” (with which it is jointly constituted) or any other imagined

sexuality. We believe strongly that sexed relationships have no need to be regularised in

a conceivably free society of human agency, personal autonomy and free association and

that, in regularising them, they become ossified, controlling and controlled.

5. We reject, in fact, the notion of “a sexuality” as an existing entity or organic reality at

all and regard it as something which comes from a preference for a metaphysics of

presence which then insists on a fixed, static and innate sexual orientation for the

human being as a means of classification and imposition of order. We reject this as both

a dominating and a fantasy understanding of human sexuality that is fundamentally in

error - regardless of how universally it is taught as fact.

6. Along with “a sexuality”, the idea of material gender is also rejected. Gender is, thus,

neither simply imagined as involuntary and material (something about biological bodies)

nor as simply an abstract “choice” (i.e. entirely voluntary). Gender we describe as “a lived

social and fictional construct” of self and relationships between “choice” and “not

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choice” related both to bodies and social interactions that are mediated in numerous

ways by social fictions. “Gender”, we suggest, is a socially understood corporeal inter-

relation.

7. Important for all of this is a context for all human relations (social and political and

economic and ethical) that we could simply term “anarchy” (a historical tradition about

human freedom as relationships) but which is made manifest particularly in the reality of

agency, autonomy and free association in people’s lives and relationships, besides the

absence of their centralised control, leading to a social context of affinity relations.

Where there is not such a reality, coercion to institutionalised and policed forms of

appearance, self-understanding and relationship will always be present. Freedom of

belief, morality and relationship is then a pre-requisite to manifested sexual and

gendered relationships outside of, or beyond, inappropriately enforced norms. There

can be no sexual or gender freedom in a world that is not more generally made up of

free human relations.

8. We resist false binaries (or the reduction of sexed or gendered options to binaries)

even as we reject the false imposition of heterosexuality (which relies on a false binary

itself and sets up a binary understanding of sex for an inherently reproductive purpose -

something it isn’t and which it should never be reduced to). Even if reduced to an

unacceptable materiality, human beings are infinitely more diverse than a dogma of two

types.

9. We propose a revision of terms, combinations of descriptions of sexed bodies and

gendered expressions and performances, to arrive at ones more simply descriptive and

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linguistically useful than personally identifying or empirically objective - in the context of

language imagined as simply a tool for the socially useful manipulation of lived reality

rather than as an imaginary entity which inherently corresponds to, and thus re-presents,

the reality of the universe. Proposed, as they are used in biology of other, non-human,

animals, are the terms male, female, feminised male, masculinised female and intersex.

This is not to suggest there are five types of human being (on two poles) and neither is it

to arbitrarily limit human sexed and gendered manifestation to five, and just five, set

types. (Strictly speaking, there are no “types” but a simple, always individualised, range

of human possibilities. Diversity is the authentic and actual, genuinely existing, social

and biological reality.) Rather, it is a new beginning and further additions are imagined

and anticipated (asexual, agender, genderqueer, genderfluid, and queermale, etc., are all

viable additions).

10. The goal is a polysexual and polygendered understanding of human relationship that

better integrates with the common, yet multiply diverse, manifestations of sexual and

gendered human being. The aim is a desirable openness and inclusivity rather than a

cruel and arbitrary dogmatism, as well as to be cross-cultural and intersectional in

practice in terms of the sexed and gendered imagination.

11. If one is to admit of multiple, non-binary understandings of sex and gender that have

social integrity then it is entirely proper, first and foremost, to discuss all people of all

sexed body types, sexualities and genders, as HUMAN BEINGS and to discuss their

“rights” or, better, freedoms, as a whole. Individual freedoms are all of a piece with social

freedoms (for freedom is a relation not a possession) and cannot, and should not, be

separated out between partisan groupings where one is played off against another.

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What applies to one should apply to all without separation or discrimination: a human

liberty and dignity. The appropriate question here is then not the partisan question,

“What is a woman?”, but the species level question that expresses our fundamental

commonality in individual diversity, “What is a human being?”

12. We believe that sexuality and gender expression are both irreducibly PERSONAL

matters that should never be subject to ANY overt external coercion from any side. In

other words, if you really want people to be left alone to make their own decisions, as

many rhetorically say they do, then do exactly that. Only those who truly respect a

person’s sexual and gender integrity as a matter for them to decide upon for themselves

without interference will be able to do that. In this test social actors thus reveal

themselves as either lovers of personal and social emancipation or personal and social

control.

13. We believe that human relationships should, as both an ideal and a lived reality, be

non-dominating, non-coercive, non-exploitative and non-controlling (socially,

economically, morally and politically). They should manifest every possibility for free

human expression within an understanding of human beings as a diversity in common

that neither privileges nor excludes anyone but leaves them to create their own lives,

relationships and associations on the basis of their own agency and autonomy according

to their experienced affinities. This, ultimately, mandates the reality of “Self-ID”,

something many are prepared to concede in the matter of “sexual orientation” (or, more

pointedly, for themselves!) but apparently not nearly so often with gender expression or

performance. This, however, must become an absolute reality of our future selves. Self-

ID is to be understood as a basic human freedom, a matter of our agency and autonomy.

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The above articles are pretty much just one description of beliefs and attitudes which,

put into practice, would deconstruct and dismantle any society organised around:

a. a sex binary;

b. pair-bonding;

c. the idea that “permanent” relationships between exclusively related people

(“marriage”) are “better” or “the ideal”;

d. heterosexuality (or, indeed, the notion of having “a sexuality” at all);

e. gender as either “a choice” or “not a choice”;

f. controlling or coercing people politically, economically and morally;

g. set terms which “designate” or “assign” people sexually or in gendered terms from

birth to death;

h. dividing people into artificial classifications as sub-divisions of “human” which are

imposed socially, politically and often violently;

i. anything other than self-ID in regard to sex and gender.

As such, it is hoped that such articles or principles show how self-understandings of sex

and gender – which are always in a social and political context – are constitutive of the

societies in which they are manifested. In other words, who we think ourselves to be, in

terms of the sex and gender which will shape and govern HOW and WHY we relate to

each other at all, are socially and politically consequential things. One, as has been

shown elsewhere in numerous anthropological texts, can build whole communities and

societies based on sexed and gendered relations and it is virtually never the case that

these relations, and the terms in which they are conducted, are set in stone or stable

from culture to culture. Actual historical and anthropological study in fact reveals a

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pleasing diversity of understandings and configurations, all of which, perhaps even in

their own, unique ways, function (i.e. work) at the societal level in one way or another.

Human relationships, and the societies they constitute, can thus be made and re-made

again and again and are never forced to be the same – unless they are precisely FORCED

to be the same by acts of social and political coercion. They are means to imagined ends

and each have their own consequences just as, for example, we see in the zoological

world with the many different types of animal relationships or even in the botanical

world with plants. Relations need not be one thing for life, nor the reproduction of one

set of relations, at all; left to their own anarchistic and self-organising ways, self-

organising organisms can always find another way to exist together.

This being the case, however, it begs the questions of what those ways are, what they

can or could be, and even what they should be. If we set aside the tendency society has

to naturalise the current condition of things in its relational reality, we can open up a

space in which “the possible” or even “the desirable” comes into view. I have tried to

make the case most strongly in the articles above that sexual and engendered relations

are not a one shot deal: they are part of a wider context of socially-understood human

freedom which, for brevity’s sake, I term “anarchy”. I have discussed the history,

philosophy and consequences of that in excruciating detail elsewhere but it is summed

up in the desire for human agency, personal autonomy, free and entirely voluntary

association, an end to centralising control of human lives and new lives based in human

affinity one for another. This does not then tell people how to configure their relations

or what goals such relations, and the communities they foster, should have. But it does

suggest it should always be up to them, in whatever relational configurations they

create for themselves, rather than dominating, coercive and exploitative others to

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decide. This, I believe, is the context of sexual and gender freedom, a freedom which is

both as personal as it could ever be but also ineluctably social, which can create

communities constructed along non-dominating, non-coercive and non-exploitative

lines.

These articles then need to be written, and this further explanation and contextualising

of them needs to be provided, because this concept of freedom, personal and social, is

not currently the case. In many respects you will see why from the articles themselves

and the things they wish to dissolve, deconstruct and dissipate. It is the contention in

even writing these articles, in fact, that human relations on models pioneered and

enforced by the culture of the patriarchal, heteronormative and dimorphic white West

are dominating, coercive ones. Thus, it is suggested that their configurations of such

institutions as marriage, the family, personhood, sexuality and gender are deliberately

and purposefully controlling and suitable only to a controlling society such as it has

become. These articles then appear as stated terms of resistance and revolt against the

cultural and societal control such things attempt to place us under and enculturate (as,

indeed, does the focus on RELATIONSHIPS as opposed to essences or imaginary “fixed

realities”). They argue that such institutions, as configured and perhaps even simply as

institutions, have no moral standing or authority and that they are enforced only by and

as political control – eventually amounting to a universal attempt to enforce what

relations human beings shall, and shall not, be allowed to have. That the anarchistically

contextualised understanding of human being that I am putting forward here as a basis

and context for sex and gender cannot tolerate for it insists on human relationships

formed by agency, autonomy, free association and affinity in a context devoid of

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centralising control. Thus, these are Jolly Roger’s articles of relationship and function as

an act of piracy against the relational impositions and cultural enclosures of the West.

2. Sexual Politics: A Thought Experiment

How do we go about incarnating the ideas and values of chapter one? I suggest the

answer is a purposefully sexual politics which turns principles into practices. The phrase

“sexual politics”, however, is often understood to mean “the politics of sex” – as in the

matter of how sexual relations are conducted. It doesn’t mean that in this thought

experiment though. In this case, “sexual politics” indicates not the politics of sex but the

sex of politics: a politics that is sexual. This is to say that it is concerning how politics, the

business of human inter-relationships and self-organisation, is made more sexual or

more about sex and what sex is about. In such a definition, the “politics” concerned here

is not the corrupt, bought and bureaucratic kind practised today in nation states that is a

matter of the various apparatuses of formal, authoritarian governments and their

attendant exploitative capitalism. Here, instead, politics is conceived of as a

phenomenon much more from below, immediate, intimate, as the simple business of

human (self-)organisation through every human relationship, not least in and through

sex.

Lets Talk About Sex

We might begin here by asking what sex itself is about. We must do this as openly as

possible and not by immediately falling into our enculturated habits and morals

regarding it. Sex, then, understood this way, is about intimate bodily interactions as

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something necessarily cooperative in nature, for the purposes of mutual pleasure and

enjoyment derived from such contact and interaction. There is no set number for how

many people may partake in such activities simultaneously at one time. It requires

commitment to a necessarily shared experience and possibly a shared goal or goals. It

requires that one give of oneself and be willing to receive from others. It involves mutual

openness and trust and the ability to put oneself in another’s hands. It necessarily

requires a certain level of physical and emotional maturity in order to be a human being

with agency in regard to it. It requires the freedom, discipline and creativity of play and a

spontaneity which never loses itself in imposed expectations. These are all not only

good sexual beliefs, attitudes and values but good political ones as well.

We see such things in action, in rudimentary forms, in all kinds of sexual places where

differences are put aside, or even (quite literally) embraced, for the creation and sharing

of sexual pleasure. This can be between two people (of any sexuality or gender as

conventionally imagined) or between a crowd of people – as in various kinds of orgy or

indigenous group sex activity. Everywhere, in fact, people are having sex, in private and

public, and, in doing so, cooperating, their other differences set aside, for the pursuance

of mutual sexual benefit and satisfaction without undue coercion. Of course, I do not

intend here to be unduly idealistic about this. There is also horrible, nasty and violent

coercive sex, that done for personal gratification and that produced for exploitative

profit, but that is not my point here. My point is that people quite naturally come

together, with people with whom they have affinity or common cause, to engage in

cooperative ways of having sex. To all their benefit. They do this even in places where

morals, customs or laws forbid it, in fact. Their desire is greater than their fear.

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So we must also say that what sex is not about, in this context, is a controlling sexual

morality and the practices of social control – such as marriage, partner exclusivity, an

ethic of sexual possession and jealousy or the romantic notions of “pair-bonding” and

“the one for me” – that go along with it. Sex, in this understanding, is in fact not primarily

about reproduction (although, depending on sexual interactions, possible pregnancy is

always an issue to be considered when engaging in it if one is being responsible). Neither

is it about finding one special lifelong partner or the various binaries “reproductive

thinking” sets up (heterosexuality-homosexuality, male-female) which are often made to

become normative and judgmental things. Instead, it is about the sexual realities of self-

care, the need and requirement for physically reinforced love, and community bonding -

such as were much more in evidence in that many thousands of years long era when

human beings lived as close knit, self-organising communities of autonomous forager

people without any overarching law or government or centralising control over their

lives. Such societies were societies bonded and formed by communal, or more broadly

social, sexual relations, sexual relations between the members of the community more

generally. They were the basis of social and political life. So my argument here is not that

we initiate some never before tried wacky social experiment or some libertarian, sex-

obsessed, free for all: its saying human beings have lived like this before and that sex

was politic in such times and places. And that this happened for thousands and

thousands of years.

Sex and Politics

But what does this have to do with politics? Quite a lot really if those not really so

ancient forebears are anything to go by – not to mention our own societies which are

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normally based on fixed family understandings and nepotistic networks of relations.

Comparing the former with the latter what we expose, on the understanding that the

relationship realities and possibilities of your time and place delineate and constitute

your experience of reality, is that aspect of social control about current arrangements

which, quite frankly, was lacking in former times, times which lasted for far longer than

the current situation has been going on. Even today, in fact, there are tribal societies

where sexuality is organised in disparate ways, everything from matriarchies where

children are brought up without fixed parents to places where group sex is arranged at

the communal level as a community activity and group event of all the adults as part of

community life and relations with the result that any children resulting are regarded as

community responsibilities. The difference here, I contend, is not simply contextual but

one of values or ethics and that leads into a concise discussion of the political and ethical

values in play here in my imagined scenario.

First, there are some principles at play here, matters of ethics and politics which create

what I have in the past referred to as the basis of an anarchist economy. These are:

Open commensality (an open table where food is freely shared as a community product

at a table of horizontal equals)

Mutual aid (the observed basis of biological survival across species)

Gifting (supplying others’ needs and wants without counting the cost)

Commonism (the attitude of sharing and the belief that “private property” is socially

destructive)

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These are practices, relations in action (they are done: they are not merely beliefs),

which create a cooperative social situation which tends towards a lived mutualism (I help

you, you help me). But there are some further values, individual and social, which should

be added to this imagined anarchist economy, ones I have already referred to above:

Personal agency (the social relations I imagine here are motivated by the idea that every

healthy human being has, and should have, their own constantly educated personal

agency which is the basis of all their activity in the world)

Individual and social autonomy (this is both an autonomy of persons and self-selecting

communities – communities being things made up of autonomous persons)

Free association (the absolute and unrestricted ability for human beings to associate with

whosoever they please for whatever reasons they imagine good)

Affinity relations (the idea that people, if left to themselves, will naturally form relations

with those with whom they imagine to have some affinity)

Decentralisation (decentralisation is the reality of a social world in which arbitrary and

authoritative apparatuses or institutions of social control – which you are forced to

acknowledge and defer to – no longer exist [and so activity and practices which create

and maintain this reality]; thus, everything becomes necessarily more locally responsible

and the ability to create macro-dependency in others is undercut as more immediate

relations assume a much greater personal and social importance)

Now putting this economy and these values together I call the end product, this guiding

mentality, a sort of social egoism or anarchy as I have already stated. But what would

social reality look like in this world of sexual-political relations, taking this socially egoist

economy and values on board and the observations about sex that I made before them?

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The simple answer is that there no one way to describe that – and that would be exactly

the point! When you set out to delineate a society by its relationships you can only set

out the values and ethics that seem important in doing so and then leave to people

themselves to incarnate them in their own diverse and personally appropriate ways for,

as was made clear above, their agency and autonomy, their ability to freely associate and

create relationships of affinity for their own reasons and nothing but their own reasons,

is entirely the matter at issue.

Consequently, when I imagine such a scenario, as I am attempting to do in this short text,

I think of polycules; I think of self-selecting communities of people and relationship-

centred networks of human relationships rather than hierarchical societies; I think of

ground up, not top down, human self-organisation that is constitutionally contingent

and diverse (things being both temporary, for their purpose and time alone, and being

diverse being natural barriers to the centralisation which can control whole societies

from a central point or through an authoritative and arbitrating [set of] institution[s]); I

think of self-organising relationships that operate on the basis of biology and life itself

(which must necessarily be self-organising in order to survive); I think of social

relationships organised such that structural dominance is imagined as destructive of the

very relationships which constitute any physically and emotionally and intellectually

nourishing society itself; I think of sex as a political facilitator - yet not in a coercive way

but in a cooperative and mutually beneficial and bonding kind of a way, a way which

naturally facilitates strong and consequential relationships and creates social coherence.

My argument here is then essentially that a necessarily closer, more inter-dependent,

more cooperative and mutualist form of human relationship, one such a scenario would

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necessitate, might best be configured, from the ground up, as a sexually motivated and

maintained one. Here sexuality is imagined as a necessarily and naturally interactive

human attribute to be freely made use of in the sharing and interaction of our bodies as

a socially bonding and unifying force and as a form of attack against social control. This

completely recontextualises sex in a modern Western context, stripping away its use as a

political-moral system of control and turning it into a liberating force, an activity of

revolt. It creates a new and different society that is both personal and social in context.

We should, I then submit, see just such a generous and social concept of sex exactly as

politics, but, more than this, as the politics of revolt against social control and of anarchy

in the social, egoist and relational senses of anarchy as I have understood this above.

Epilogue

This has been far from a comprehensive take on the idea I am trying to get across here.

That particular take, constituting a much larger book, is being written and the ideas here

will be a central part of it and much more fully laid bare. The purposes of this preliminary

text were more about setting out preliminary markers, boundaries, points by which

readers could orientate themselves to the landscape I envisage us moving in if we want

to live as free human beings. This, in my estimation, will take a minimum of two steps,

one which intellectually, morally, economically and politically destroys the controlling

construction of relationships in which we are currently (and purposefully) mired, and one

which builds new constructions on the ashes of the old. We can do this now, wherever

we are, in and through our personal and sexual relationships. (In fact, we must. There’s

no other way. And that’s my point.) Sexuality, so it seems to me, is a natural facilitator in

this area, very much a means of how we create socially-enabling relations, and its one I

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pick up on from anarchist forebears such as Emma Goldman and Emile Armand who were

not shy of rhetorically emphasising and reinforcing the sexual nature of human beings

and the beneficial engagement with it which its reality makes possible.

Yet I also take this from the example of outwardly sexual people all across the globe too,

people who, by prissy, puritan and petty Western moral standards, are acting far too

freely with their sex. This is not just those people in the West who flaunt their sexuality

(with which there is absolutely nothing wrong), often being encouraged to for money

(which is more problematic when money, particularly an inequality in access to it, is itself

control). One of my major points here, one which underpins my whole thesis, is that sex

is not just another exploitable commodity. It is something that is part of human make up

and desire, something by which people communicate and form bonds, something most

intimately personal yet necessarily social, something with the power to create

relationships and form communities of either generosity or control. My point is that

people can be, are, and have been, sexual – outside of prevailing morality and even in

spite of it – probably forever and that, in doing so, they have facilitated a politics in and

how they practised and understood that. Nudity, sex and the body are political things

and my suggestion is that, in a better society, one more about social freedom and

cooperation, they would be at the centre of it (as some would say they are at the centre

of the relationships of the West right now where this is equated with a ubiquitous

commodifying of sex) in a new and liberating way such as can be seen elsewhere in

anthropological literature in which sex is an activity of social connection and fraternity

rather than an individual possession to be commodified and exploited. Perhaps, then,

the lesson here is “as the ethics and values of a society, so the sex” but, that being so, I

imagine that, through liberating sex, we might change the values and ethics accordingly.

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