Fucking Law: The Search For Her Sexual Ethics

By Victoria Brooks

Fucking Law is an urgent call for everyone, not just academics and researchers, to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality. Since a sex life is full of so many diverse moments of joy and suffering, for each and everybody, the book attempts to bridge a gap between philosophical and non-philosophical questioning. Central to the book is the reality that everyone can challenge the ethics and laws of sexuality and ask questions, even where they seem frightening, or worse, even when we are told not to – by institutions and lovers alike. Non-philosophical and accessible, Fucking Law is risky, explicit and provocative as it bridges the gap between academic and every-day questioning of sexual encounters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Jun 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789040685

Victoria Brooks

Victoria Brooks is a writer and researcher in the area of law and sexual ethics. She writes academically and non-academically. Victoria has published work on the themes of sexuality and is currently working on the future of consent, and an anthology of erotic philosophical fiction. She lives in London, UK.

Book preview

experience.

Part I

Fucking Philosophy

Chapter 1

Fucking Concepts

Dirty little incomprehensible concepts. Let’s be one, together. Breathe their countless consonants out heavily, onto my clitoris. Breathe back in their vowels, violently across the opening of my cunt—IiiiiiiiiMMMMMaaaaahNNNeeeehhhNNNCCCCCSSSSSSssss—the end of immanence felt so almost intolerably delicate on my clitoris, would you do it again? End immanence. I like that fold there, that bit where your shaft becomes your glans, I’ll play with it with my tongue, who knew your cock had folds too? You hid them well. I’ll lick them with the whole of my volatile body, with my leaking body, my rupturing body, my body that provokes fucking Kant and Hegel and all his friends, and Butler, probably her too, pick any name and tell me their thoughts, repackage them in my image. Tell me what I am, penetrate me, I am a woman, I need to be penetrated, slip inside my slippery slit, destroy me with your words, I can’t orgasm otherwise, didn’t you know that?

She never stopped being excited by London, where she has lived for over 10 years, since she was 22. Its filthy air and sticky streets and seedy places have always hurt, freed and aroused her, and hurt her again. She loves walking at night the most; when the red-light glistens on the soaked Docklands cobbles, where the faint trace of the pervert’s footprint waits for her to place her own shoe within it and wait to bleed out into his body. She likes to experiment, to feel like these men, to be these women, too. She feels like she can, when London gives her this airy and misty gift when she stumbles on the red light, an air which smells of both cosy Dickensian charming domesticity, and the sweat and PVC of the frightening perversion of London’s brothels. She is a romantic, and she is a whore. She has been with men to whom she would admit neither of these things, because she knows perfectly well they love and are terrified by both. London suits this perfectly, for her, and has been her most enduring relationship. She thinks about it all the time. She has thought about it since she was a child. She can remember being ten years old and wanting to have sex, although of course she could not tell anyone that, nor did she know about its complex meanings. Her body had yearned for touch, even then. Throughout her life, she has been loved and abused by men. She cannot say she has had a tragic life though. She thinks she has had a glorious life, but people often feel sorry for her; this annoys her, deeply, which means she has become formidable and resilient, yet vulnerable.⁶

On this night, she felt sorry for herself. She sat at a small desk in the room she shared in the house she lived in with her boyfriend for the past five years. When she first came to London, she came because she wanted to be a lawyer; that and she sought the realization of its filthy promises. It turned out that with seeking the practice of law, she found the filth. She came to London and found a flat share, with a live-in landlord, who became her boyfriend of seven years. He was with her through her decision to go to university and become a student at 23. She excelled. Every part a lawyer. Every part a lawyer, since while solving the most intricate of legal problems, she also took cocaine, and went to sex parties and brothels. She did this (she told herself) to please her boyfriend. She suffered, but there was a part of her that did not quite enjoy the experience, but rejoiced in how she could go without judgment, and take satisfaction in the reflections she was brought to feel. The suffering though, is what brought her to wonder if she was the only one in this very strange situation.

She sat at her plain little wooden desk, adding the finishing touches to her final undergraduate dissertation. She had been reading Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus painfully closely, as if it were a newly discovered biblical text. She wanted it to give her a less painful moral code: a more liberated way of living and loving. Her dissertation supervisor had facilitated her first love affair; she was introduced by him to Deleuze, and after that, he became her postgraduate supervisor, too.⁷ The magic of the text was painfully beautiful to her. The text inscribed itself throughout and across her body. It skinned her: it replaced a skin, tanned by many luxury holidays, softened by expensive creams, toned by regular exercise and presented and packaged for consumption. The text gave her back her body, and when she looked at it afresh—she saw it as a Dogon egg—full of loathsome worms.⁸ Her lambent tan was across a taut surface presented to these violent machines—luckily it was slippery as fuck—their grip was clearly not as established as she first thought.

Pornography. I prefer the stories, rather than the images. Stories of men telling me how it feels to be hard. I always write philosophy on my laptop and these stories are constantly there, a fuck whenever I want it during the process of writing, millions of men (and women) waiting for me to succumb to them again. The surge of wetness comes always like a wave:I must stop writing. I have to touch myself, fuck myself, concentration is impossible. Tell me more about your throbbing cock, how you must be touched, how you can’t help but fuck. Are you so different from me?

Deleuze ignited in her a fragile bravery. Deleuze ignited in her a rage, but also a sadness. The sadness for her was that her life as it was then had to stop, or rather, it had to become something else. She had many rows with her boyfriend. She no longer wanted to be a well-paid lawyer. She turned down offers of prestigious opportunities. She turned down postgraduate study at Oxford. She turned down the possibility of a scholarship at another university. The only path open to her as she saw it, was the only one that was open. It was called a PhD, but all she knew was that she needed some answers, which she foolishly sought. She had no money, and she was told that she would not be supported in her decision. How she loved this new philosophical world, and how it changed her body and gave her a place where she felt unsafely safe, rich with potentials. While her world was turned upside-down, she saw that she could find beauty in the home of other troubled souls. She read every moment that she could. She had never read philosophy before. She was insecure and vulnerable, but she loved these words so much, they touched and caressed her, played with her, without judgment, like no man had ever done.

Deleuze seemed to ooze compersion, like someone sheltering you with their own joy at the possibility they generate for fucking, should you want to. Another of her philosophical fucks in this time, was Michel Houellebecq. She aspired to have the grace of Platform’s tortured Valerie, or indeed Atomised’s Annabelle.⁹ These female fictional figures she felt were far from misogynistic visions of the Houellebecqian mournful scoundrel, but rather insightfully and delicately sketched visions of a sexuality within her, the trace of what she felt was so misunderstood about her own sexuality. These feminine, motherly, submissive, yet softly strong women, who understood men, and matched their desire. Yes, she loved Houellebecq for this. For this, and for providing her with many orgasms, as she touched herself in the bath, reading his prose. This is not surprising, since Houellebecq is a philosopher too, who took his wife, Marie-Pierre, to the Cap too, to the Cléopâtra libertine club in Cap d’Agde. He took her there for an experiment, or scientific study of social change, or rather, a search for happiness (with a strict and scientific methodology).¹⁰ She would have been interested to talk to Marie-Pierre about her clear penchant for philosophers, and whether she managed to reach the dizzying heights of compersion that Valerie and Annabelle