The second half of this, which ends with me elaborating the various reasons for why discourses on seduction are passed down to us in an already gendered way.
Then, however, I realized in a sort of dialectical twist the real brilliance of Y.’s insight: I thought about (perhaps thought about again, because I enjoy thinking about this moment and have thought about it a few times since it happened) Y. sitting next to me on a couch at a party, remarking with a shy (mischievous?) smile:
Y: “You know, I didn’t tell you this, but I had a crush on you…”
Me [surprised, intrigued]: “Oh really? When was this?”
Y.: “Yeah, really. Recently…”
and how this moment led to a kiss, which led to (as kisses tend to) more kisses, and the good kind of shivers and elevated heart-rate &etc., in a way that I totally hadn’t anticipated and realized that perhaps I had been seduced. And when I thought a little more about this, I realized that Y. had taken the initiative more than a few times since that first remark, which started within me this whole cascade / avalanche of mental reassessment: nearly all of the women who have stolen my heart in the last year or so had initiated or advanced at significant points the romantic angle of the relationship, yet I had been (in my own mental narrative of the romance) totally oblivious to this.
The realization was that I was translating my own subjective experience into terms such that what one would almost have to classify as seduction was sort of passed over when it came from women; I was selectively structuring my own perception (at an unconscious level) in such a way that it reaffirmed my own conceptions, rather than allowing these notions of a male-dominated theory of seduction to be challenged. This, of course, is the whole point of Foucault’s Order of Things: one realizes that we think with the terms that we have, that what is even thinkable is dependent on the terms that we have, that we tend to perceive lived experience in the world in the discourses we have already at hand and that we are generally being the most oblivious precisely when we think we are being the most clever.
So what are the implications of realizing that my own notion of what counted as “seduction” was reifying some sort of male-centric notion and discounting acts of female agency? I mean, I partially answered the question just in the way I posed it: it seems fairly evident to me now that my former understanding was designed to privilege male agency over female, making my own actions active and the object of my affection precisely that, an object. Further, it seems as if latent in that understanding, or that valorization of male seduction, would be something like an idea that female sexual desire isn’t as powerful or self-willed as male desire, that a man sort of intuitively has an active libido and that women have to be persuaded or drawn into desiring. Thus, there’s a sort of harmony of theory and praxis (or the potential for combining theory with lived experience): knowledge of a sort of Foucauldian discourse-theoretical approach provides me with a tool for uncovering (slowly) some of the blind spots in my own subjectivity, a tool for critiquing (and becoming more open to) my own lived experience. Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own:
For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex — to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head.
Where all this is heading is simply a complication of my own concept of seduction; I still think that there are active/passive roles (at least potentially) in the rhetoric of seduction regardless of gender, but that one might first have to re-evaluate what exactly is understood under the concept of seduction to see how this idea might privilege certain gendered forms of seduction over others. I’ve also been thinking, based on Y.’s prompting, about instances of seduction in literature that would complicate the one I laid out there; I’m not sure that I have any examples coming to mind immediately, although I definitely re-read big chunks of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own while thinking about this (particularly the section about “Olivia liked Chloe…” ).
Of course, at a much simpler and less theoretically reflected (less self-critical) level, there’s the answer I posted a while back in one of my other ramblings on the nature of falling in love. This, I think, is perhaps the best explanation for the gender of my pronouns (and this explanation, of course, is a move loaded with “dark glasses”:
One might say that every discussion of love (however detached its tonality) inevitably involves a secret allocution (I am addressing someone whom you do not know but who is there, at the end of my maxims)… there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is for someone.
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, “Talking”.
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