from puritanism to decadence.

continuing from here, I guess; also the previous post.

Katha Pollitt: Why Do So Many Leftists Want Sex Work to Be the New Normal?
A response at Jacobin (I won't bother with Hamas jokes this time)

"Melissa Gira Grant is a writer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Glamour, the Guardian, the Nation, Wired, and the Atlantic. She is also a contributing editor to Jacobin."

American leftists [sic] now confuse anti-bourgeois with anti-capitalist. Europeans aren't so naive.  The puritanical left of the 70s and puritanical feminism failed. As Susie Bright said: "Andrea Dworkin was a great pornographer."

The contemporary programmatic left now descends from programmatic liberalism in it's sense of individualism, forgetting as I said that libertines are libertarian.  It's all bourgeois self-indulgence of one sort or another; the switch is from a focus on autonomous independent and non-contradictory ideas, hence moralism, to autonomous independent non-contradictory people; from ideologized politics to the ideologized, mythologized, self. In both cases any sense of divided consciousness is off limits.

You can acknowledge yourself for what you are, what the world made you and what you've chosen or chosen to accept, without defending yourself as a saint, or true, or right. Most sexworkers wouldn't want their kids to grow up to be sexworkers. If we're damaged, we find a way to incorporate the damage into our sense of self, and integrity is a 'good'. Camp is tragedy played as comedy because it's the only way to make it bearable. You can't understand it, or value it, if you don't understand the duality.

Programmatic politics denies ambiguity just as Weberian pseudoscience denies the enchantment of the world. How That's why liberals have no choice but to be hypocrites. Art is honesty not morality.  I'd never ask Gursky to forgo his nihilism, but angry self-pity is dishonest.