All the eye contact in the bar, the pseudo-intellectual/pseudo-drunk chats about Kant, the informal drink and more formal dinner…its, well, fun. And the funny thing is, there were some really very physicallyattractive men down there, though I couldn’t have been less interested in that context. While for some this is potentially liberating – no longer having to depend on external signifiers to seem or feel attractive – my problem was that I totally missed the cloak it really is what I find most attractive in someone. Your desire is, in a way, totally ‘uncloaked.’ It’s always nice to wonder what his body will look like once he takes off that top, no? Always makes one giddy to flirt indirectly through a discussion of music or literature before you eventually get to have sex? Every signifier of personality is also chucked away with at the door – the cloak we are so used to wearing everyday, signifying the kind of person we are through choice of clothing, gesture, accessories, idiosyncratic vocabulary etc… is incinerated the second you pick up your towel. And quite frankly, I missed the suggestion, the sexual politics, the pre-amble that comes before actually going to bed with someone. All signifiers of desire are dispensed with for a very literal, non-suggestive-experience. No flirting is necessary – there’s not even any talking: nothing. What’s so odd about a sauna is that everyone is already there, naked, ready to have sex. I left completely untouched and totally unsatisfied.Īnd I’ve been trying to work out why. I couldn’t have wanted to have sex any less, actually. I have never been so turned off and un-aroused in the entirety of my human existence. Having genuinely opened my mind to the remarkable thought of these philosophers, I thought my experience at the sauna would be productively meaningless – just excessive desire for desire’s sake, with no emotional logic to what I was doing. This is how one might explain episodes of Bestiality, say, or orgiastic festivals occurring from the time of Dionysius to the literature of Marquis de Sade. Desire just fuels more desire, which accumulatively fuels more and more. we desire an object or another person because they fulfill a lack within ourselves, a lack stemming from our entry into the world of signifiers and the separation from mommy’s bosom – Deleuze and Guattari persuade that desire is inherently “productive.” There is no lack to begin with. Unlike for linguistic-psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, where desire is based on the premise of ‘ lack’ – i.e. Rather than concentrating on the significance or backlogged source of desire – which for them is totally meaningless to begin with – Deleuze and Guattari instead believe in its actual processes how it operates on a very real, social scale, avowing that desire does not come from the ‘repressed unconscious,’ say, but just inexplicably exists as a potent, physical force, circulating around society at all times.
“I sleep with dogs because my daddy didn’t love me,” or “I have issues cumming during sex because I was too close with my mother,” blah blah blah. The most important factor for the pair is that desire is NOT representational: Freud’s Oedipal complex where desire is born out of the will to bed mommy and kill daddy is nothing more than a fictitious theatrical stage, having propelled psychoanalysts – even today – to continually trace manifestations of desire back to the family unit-i.e. I’ve just written a paper concentrating on the slightly barmy philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly focusing on their post-structural approach to human desire.
I’m putting it all down to my current academic research.
When paying my reduced entry free in exchange for a towel and locker key, descending into the den of unbridled sexual promiscuity, I couldn’t quite believe what I was doing. All it costs is 10 quid (only 5 if you’re a student-literally: student discounts at a gay sex institution.) And they’re peppered all around London, you’ve probably walked past them a hundred times without even knowing.
'Barry' Has Never Been Darker, and Henry Winkler Is Having the Time of His LifeĪll the Scripted Broadcast TV Shows Cancelled, Renewed, or on the Bubble (So Far)Įmmy Predictions: Outstanding Television Movieįor those not in the know, a gay sauna is as an underground complex of showers, saunas, steam rooms and sex booths where gay men go to relax and have totally anonymous sex of all sorts.