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monsters in favor of naturalistic fauna that includes embryos, prostates, uteruses, Fallopian tubes, “first spermatic emissions,” fixations-regressions-perversions, gonococci, treponemes, spermatozoids that “discover mucus is a very favorable medium during ovulation,” pubic symphyses, urethral meatuses, involutions of yellow bodies, papas barbus, soft chancres, condoms, tubes that become entangled and fat, gooey babies.
    Of course, the physiological study of sexuality is necessary and fascinating; it can help to combat the superstitions, fears, ignorancethat were kept alive by complete prohibition. But it’s ridiculous for the biology of higher mammals to be passed off as an initiation to human sexuality. Because sexuality begins only when the organic machinery no longer limits desire, but submits to its randomness and favors its multiplicity.
    This is what medical rationalism frequently denies: it describes our biological machinery, then it deduces from it a model of functioning; next it catalogues, under the name of deviances, all the sexual behaviors that contradict this mechanistic philosophy. But it dares not call deviant the crippled and hypersocialized sexual practices imposed by our morals. As a result, sexology ends up altering its descriptions to match what it wants to prove: ignoring or falsifying phenomena that aren’t in agreement with the values that it defends; and continually mixing ideological vocabulary, moral assessments and scientific terminology into its conceptual tools.
    Thus, it is neither an “accurate” nor a “human” science. Its official dissemination is a repressive response to the problem that suggests that contemporary society should recognize sexuality as a respectable sphere of freedom for all. Sexology observes the human body and claims to discover in it a universal truth about sexuality, in the name of which a rational order for the exercise of desire could be substituted for the old order. But, actually, this “truth” is not an endpoint of sex research: it is its premise. At the point of departure of its labors is a declaration of faith that maintains the existence and the permanent reality of a certain ideal “human nature,” which will abide by the research that is carried out and the interpretation of the material that has been gathered. This postulate tries to reconcile the major humanist values of the exploitive middle class, the order of industrial society and the reformist spirit upon which its survival depends. On the other hand, as soon as the philosophical-politicalposition of a sexologist is dissenting (and you’ll see the same thing in psychoanalysis and psychiatry), his work suddenly accumulates the data, the conclusions that contradict established knowledge: we end up with a sexology of the left and a sexology of the right. { 4 } All that’s missing, it seems, is a “revolutionary” sexology; perhaps because a scientific system of sexuality is being confused with the defense of a precise moral order, whereas dissenting thought has no model of order to propose, only forms of order to bring down; and where middle class knowledge sees commandments from “Nature,” dissenting thought denounces the unspeakable laws that one part of humanity imposes upon the other.
    Sexology manufactures a pyramid of sexual phenomena: the base is formed by biological data; and the tip is the adult and responsible subject, the scrupulous manager of instinctual capital—private property supervised by the State. All sexual behavior is, in fact, evaluated as management techniques, some aberrant (they squander instinctual capital), the others as commendable (they make the corporeality of the subject productive in an orthodox way). Sexuality is therefore understood as a function of a single criterion: its profitability. In this way, sexology copies both the values of middle class morality and those that serve to measure the health of a capitalist enterprise.
    This manner of