At a very abstract level, *one says* that GR links sexuality to control, technology, and death. This is, in one sense, the central theme of the book: The Penis [Slothrop] Thought Was His Own. His apparently free sex life is actually conditioned by Jamf and tied to concepts like "synthetics", "finance capital", "war", and even "genocide". We might say that there is a split here between his imaginary ego and the symbolic structures of his unconscious. It all sounds very smart and interesting.
Anyway, when you get down to it, is there any actual sexuality in the novel? Pudding eats Katje's doodoo; we all laugh, and someone says "actually, it's a statement about waste and autopoietic processes we are only dimly aware of, similar to the toothpaste tubes in the Evensong section 🧐". The next person raises his hand and says something about survivor's guilt or the old guard, about indole people and polymers. It's all good fun and provides ample material for smart talk, but it's not sexy.
What's Slothrop's sex life like? Well, he gets a boner, there's a woman nearby, so he sticks it in her. It's hardly something for the reader to get off on or even sympathize with. It all takes place at a very high level of abstraction where it's always "making a point", but there's a kind of massive disconnect from actual sexuality. It's more or less like the limericks in the Mittelwerke, which I've just left in my own reading.
What you end up with, it seems, is a kind of academic truth about how modern technology influences human sexuality, but without any kind of exploration of the ground-level mechanisms of attraction, interest, or horniness. It's all very in-the-sky and technically correct without any of the horny bits. But presumably the horny bits are, you know, the bits that are controlled or controlling, the very processes we're supposed to be thinking about.
When I get home and see my handsome boyfriend and his rugged good looks and his masculine demeanor and I wanna play with his chest hair and suck his dick—that's all fun, and it's very visceral and immediate and attractive. It's also, you know, not unrelated to patriarchal relations of control and subjugation, an ideal of the primal father, a hierarchy, and even exploitation. There's lots of stuff in there: self-degradation, even self-destruction, worship, secondary sex characteristics becoming signifiers anchored to narratives about masculinity, etc.
Most of all, there's.... sex. Sexuality. Attraction. The actual thing that doesn't really seem to appear anywhere in the novel, but which is the missing link that explains how abstract notions like "control" and "technology" condescend to actual human reality and have some kind of effect, as opposed to just being thought-provoking material for saying something smart in the classroom.
Does the book ever actually deal with sex?
