cestmavieelleestennuyeux asked: Why do you think you have so many haters? I mean you seem like a great writer, great cook, opinionated [but not in a way that's offensive], fashionable, outgoing and extremely intelligent [harvard?]. I don't understand how people could hate someone such as you quite that much [i.e. the haters you receive on tumblr, the haters on autosubmit]

OH YAY, an opportunity to cite Foucault! It’s not everyday that one can use biopower to explain slut-shaming ;)

First of all, THANK YOU FOR THE FLATTERY but I must correct you! I am afraid I am quite unremarkable in real life. For example, I have been known to make fashion blunders, and none of my readers (to my knowledge) have tried my cooking, so for all you know, my food just might LOOK really good but taste craptastic. In fact, I burn things! I just don’t blog about those kitchen disasters (so as to preserve my image as the perfect homemaker, of course). In any case, even if one were an unfashionable, anti-social, shitty writer who couldn’t cook, does that make one deserving of the vitriol I’ve received? Not really! It really speaks to how deeply entrenched sexual morality is in our society that I feel the need to lead as “perfect” a life as possible in order to reduce the amount of hate spewed.

So, why do I get so much criticism? This is one of those rare instances when citing Foucault actually makes sense (and doesn’t just serve as an essay-fluffing device).   Lesley Kinzel, who writes about body politics on her blog, Two Whole Cakes, sums up Foucault’s theory of the Panopticon in laymen’s terms much better than I can:

“Culture, according to Foucault, [uses] disciplinary systems … in which each body may be observed and assessed at any time. This has a controlling and normalizing effect, in which bodies are encouraged to meet expected standards at all times. Think CCTV systems, or Big Brother. If one is never sure if one is being watched, it makes one less likely to openly transgress the rules. I’m also inclined to argue that this arrangement ultimately results not only in the self-policing of one’s own behavior, but in a broader social system that expects and rewards the individual policing of others’ bodies and behaviors. Those who subvert social norms are, ostensibly, people who have forgotten that they can be seen, publicly, at any time. Therefore, when they transgress social norms—by expressing physical affection for a person not visibly coded as the opposite sex, for example, or by being fat and rejecting social and bodily invisibility—they need to be reminded of this omniscient social gaze, and in the absence of institutional discipline, must be punished so they do not transgress again. This is the mechanism by which a dude who sees me in a vividly-colored dress, walking alone as though I either don’t know or don’t care that I am defying bodily norms, feels compelled to scream “UGLY FAT BITCH” at me. He is applying social discipline and teaching me a lesson: Everyone can see you, and your body and/or behavior are unacceptable.”

Kinzel is talking primarily about societal reactions to and antipathy toward fatness, but this is just as applicable to transgressive sexual behavior (the stuff Foucault originally wrote about). There has been a long, long history of the state policing the sexuality of its population. Forced sterilization of “undesirables” (prisoners, women of color, people with mental illness). Implicit and explicit population control (such as China’s one-child policy). Miscegenation laws against interracial marriage. Sodomy laws against homosexuality. These are all forms of social control that have occurred within the last century, and Westerners are so gosh-darn sold on our “freedom” and our superiority to supposedly backward societies that a lot of folks believe that they are somehow exempt from being policed. Reality check: just because we’ve enjoyed a few decades of increased personal freedom does not mean that we’ve reached sexual liberation. Because you want to know the scary flip-side of freedom? The government doesn’t have to police its citizens when its citizens happily do that to each other.

People hate me because I behave in a manner that has historically been punishable by community standards or by law. That doesn’t happen so easily nowadays but it doesn’t mean that haters aren’t going to hate and try their damndest to fuck shit up for me. I realized recently when I was looking back on my sex blogging days that the most transgressive thing I’ve done is not even writing a sex blog but rather, refusing to be ashamed for writing a sex blog. Because shame is the true root of sexual morality’s power in modern “free” society. As I wrote in my Salon piece:

“If I’m honest, I never did feel bad for writing Sex And The Ivy and I never once felt the need to apologize. Shame wasn’t something that came naturally to me. It was something that I learned against my will, and now that I know it inside and out, I don’t know how one can possibly unlearn it. Sexual freedom is a sham. Over my blogging years, I’ve become acquainted with enough erstwhile sexual radicals to realize that my story is not an isolated incident. I am just one data point, and what happened to me at Harvard is one example of the consequences faced by those who do not fall in line with sexual morality.”

Call it naivety, but my 19-year-old self didn’t think there’d be consequences to writing about my sex life. Therefore, other people — that is, concerned members of society — took it upon themselves to teach me to be frightened of judgment. And fuck yeah, I’ve learned my lesson well.