Foucault and the Rhetoric of Safer Sex
 

High     Receptive anal intercourse
Risk     Insertive anal intercourse
            Receptive vaginal intercourse
            Insertive vaginal intercourse

            Oral sex on man with ejaculation
            Oral sex on man without ejaculation
Low     Oral sex on a woman
Risk     Oral-anal contact
            Intimate kissing
            Casual kissing
            Touching, massage
No       Masturbation
Risk     Talking, fantasy
            Abstinence

The human body is very important in Foucault’s discussions, and a Foucauldian interrogation of the rhetoric of safer sex might show exactly how important the human body is in his discourse. Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon, the systematized all-seeing yet unseen eyes of the disciplining agent, is one I’ve found useful to analyze how internalized homophobia affects the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgendered communities. How might I find the idea of Panopticism useful in examining safer sex? Also, I’ve used Foucault’s notion of the docile body, the body that, through various social controls, has been made paradoxically both potent and impotent, virile and docile. How might this apply to the rhetoric of safer sex? Also, his ideas about how we might create new, particularly non-genital, modes of pleasure in our society I find intriguing. And I find that it has a direct relation to our society’s discourse of safer sex.

A Brief History: An entire generation of gay men, myself included, have grown up with the discourses of HIV/AIDS and safer sex. The messages of safer sex have bombarded us through our classrooms, through health clinics, and through gay-oriented periodicals. Sometimes, these messages were confused, such as whether wet kissing, vaginal intercourse, or oral sex were considered dangerous, or what level of risk they would be considered. This discourse has fundamentally changed what it means to be a gay male. Monogamy became a life-or-death issue for gay male couples. Of course, it must be noted, as Alan Sinfield does, that "while the myth says that unprotected sex occurs in anonymous encounters, more often it is the attempt of people in relationships to express closeness and commitment" (94). Bisexuality became vilified among heterosexuals who saw bisexual men as the vector of infection between gay men and the heterosexual community. For the first time, gay men had to learn to use condoms, not as a prophylactic to prevent pregnancy or even the annoyance of an STD, but to prevent death. Gay male pornography has experienced a boom in business, as have other businesses that specialize in alternate forms of sex. More and more gay male phone sex businesses are coming into operation. Gay-oriented Internet sites are becoming more abundant, including sites that deliver "live video" of nude men. The famous gay bathhouses of New York and San Francisco were shut down in the mid-1980s, although now gay sex clubs are opening in San Francisco and Los Angeles, causing quite a bit of controversy in the queer communities. Safer sex is the norm in these sex clubs, strictly enforced by employees of the clubs. The rate of HIV/AIDS infection in gay men had begun to decline, indicating that gay men were adhering to safer sexual behaviors. However, in the last couple months, there has been a rise among younger gay and bisexual men of a phenomenon known as "barebacking," anal sex without a condom between men, causing an older generation of gay men to wring their hands and ask "Don’t they know it’s dangerous?"

Of course the younger gay men are aware that barebacking is considered to be unsafe. Hocquenghem noted that "[h]omosexuality is always connected with the anus, even though -- as Kinsey’s precious statistics demonstrate -- anal intercourse is still the exception even among homosexuals." Even among homosexuals a decade before HIV and AIDS. The rhetoric of safer sex has become a power of its own, even though it started out from the attempt to resist AIDS in the first place, and the upsurge of gay men practicing unsafe sexual behaviors is a resistance to the dominant discourse within the gay male community. Alan Sinfield exhorts gay men to:
 

. . . look with more subtlety at safer-sex messages and at the psychology of the condom. But, in the final analysis, if an informed person chooses to put him- or herself at risk - as with substance abuse, from saturated fats through alcohol and tobacco to heroin - we have to allow that he or she may have some serious reasons. I write this with reluctance, because I belong to that cohort that picked up rumours of the ‘gay plague’ before the HIV virus was identified - before we knew how it was transmitted. (94)

As I mentioned earlier, the bathhouses of San Francisco and New York were closed after people began to die in the mid-1980s, but that now gay sex clubs have been opening up in the past couple years. Leo Bersani writes "[s]ex clubs are thriving (and, perhaps related to this, the incidence of HIV has risen among young queers, many of whom apparently think AIDS is a generational disease)" (20). In many of these clubs, there are no rooms with doors and no rooms without lights. Employees of the clubs walk around with flashlights, separating anyone engaging in what the club considers to be unsafe sexual practices, often throwing those persons out of the club. Bersani notes that "[o]nce we agreed to be seen, we also agreed to being policed" (12). Some of these clubs only allow masturbation, others allow other behaviors. All of them have safer sex codes posted, with condoms and lubricants abundantly available to members. Some of the strict adherence to safer sex codes is due to the experience of the 1980s bathhouses, but it’s also in part due to the fact that in L.A. and S.F., many of these clubs are under close scrutiny by health inspectors of their respective cities. As with is often the case with the discourses surrounding AIDS, homosexuality continues to be equated with disease, and therefore gay sex clubs are held to higher standards of hygiene and are inspected far more often than heterosexual sex clubs. Guy Hocquenghem, more than a decade before AIDS was even identified, notes that "[v]enereal diseases seem to play the leading role in the paranoiac ideology concerning homosexuality" (70). Many of the gay sex clubs hold themselves to higher standards than their heterosexual counterparts, who aren’t held to such levels of scrutiny. So, the gay clubs discipline themselves, utilizing architectural modes very similar to Bentham’s Panopticon. This disciplining of the experience of pleasure, of the human body, I believe would have fascinated Foucault, one of the frequenters of the bathhouses in San Francisco.

While it might be debatable whose values the discourses of safer sex honestly reflect, it has certainly become the rule among gay men. Gay men, at least those who adhere to safer sex behaviors, limit their sexual practices and discipline themselves according to the latest safer sex code, showing how a society’s disciplinary discourse can have a direct impact upon the human body, upon human pleasures. Foucault’s notions of the docile body seem to apply in this situation. Gay men are still capable of certain sex acts, and in fact those acts may have been hyper-eroticized by the discourses of safer sex, but many gay men will not practice those acts, condom or not, monogamous or not, rendering them docile to the safer sex rhetoric. Jeffrey Weeks notes that ". . . the body is a fickle master or mistress: its needs change; it falls prey to want or plenty; to sickness and physical decay; its sources of pleasures can be transformed, whether through chance, training, physical alteration, mental control - or, increasingly, the demands of a new regime of ‘safer sex’" (91). The notion of the examination is also important to this concept, and to the concept of discipline in general; that at any time, the prisoner, the factory worker, or the student might be tested one way or another. The discourse of safer sex includes this through the HIV test, a simple positive or negative test which makes all gay men into our HIV status. In some circles, gay men would have an HIV test every six months regularly.

Another of the developments after AIDS began to decimate the gay male community was that of phone sex, and now in the 1990s, that of Internet-based sex. Weeks writes that
 

The culture as a whole may shiver at telephone sex lines, ‘jack-off parties’ and computer sex, sex toys, or consensual S&M, which whatever its other pains and pleasures tends to downplay penetrative sex. Only a perverse moral imagination could see this ‘eroticization of the whole body’ as ‘wrong’ when compared to the risk of transmission of HIV through unprotected and unsafe sex; the epidemic has not so much invented (we live, after all in a polymorphously unperverse world) as highlighted the incitement to sexual experimentation. (139)

I don’t intend anything in this paper to be considered to advocate unsafe sex between men, or at all. I do, however, find some of the aspects of this self-disciplining within the gay community to be disturbing, particularly after looking at them in from a Foucauldian perspective. To me, it shows exactly how powerfully a discourse can affect human bodies, what impact words can have upon human pleasures. Is the body important in Foucault’s discussions? I believe so, and I believe it entirely appropriate to examine discourses which affect our bodies with Foucault in mind. This goes not only for the discourses of safer sex, but also for other discourses such as those of fitness and nutrition, or many other medical discourses. And also, these examinations aren’t to point out that these discourses are wrong, but to illuminate the fact that they have physical, bodily effects; that discipline has an impact upon human bodies, and to draw that impact out into the open where it might be discussed.
 
 

Works Cited

Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. Trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: Volume I. 1978. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Hocquenghem, Guy. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Homosexual Desire. 1972. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993.

Sinfield, Alan. Gay and After. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998.

Weeks, Jeffrey. Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.