Aella: In defence of a birthday girl

This is, for the most part a pretty PG blog, although there’s certainly no taboo on sex here. This post, though, will not be PG.

The short version of the preceding events is that a person named Aella organized a gang bang for her birthday to which everyone was invited to apply for a spot. Aella is a sometime internet celebrity and fellow Substacker and she meticulously documented the process. When this infographic she produced went viral, certain rightwingers, trads etc. online got angry:

I’m a gay man. I have no, uh, ‘stake’ in the Aella birthday gangbang, but people dislike her, and do not understand the reasons why they dislike her. And that disturbs me. If you’re going to hate, know thyself.

90% of Aella’s haters hate her because they’re queasy about promiscuous sex, and even queasier about women having promiscuous sex and even queasier still about women controlling and using their sexuality strategically. If you hate that, I probably can’t convince you to grow up, but don’t pretend something else is at stake here. This is about a reflex of yours, your fear of sex. It is wholly possible to build coherent frameworks of value that include no such tic. Such frameworks can be oriented at concepts like dignity, justice, honour and love. The argument that what Aella did at her bday party cuts at all higher values only works if you already accept the core premise that makes it all moot- that (freeish) sex is corrosive to higher humans values.

I’m not an Aella expert. I only know the bare basics. This piece should only be taken as a defence of Aella in the respects I outline. Maybe she’s done other horrible stuff, I don’t know.

Aella has had a lot of sex with different men, and that’s inherently bad

Let’s start with the naysayers who, at least, understand the nature of their objections, and do not try to disguise this as something more than it is.

1.     Aella has had a lot of sex with a lot of different men.

2.     This is bad inherently.

I can’t argue with a bare value assignment, not grounded in anything more fundamental. However, I at least want to make sure we understand each other.

I don’t know how to convey to people like this that a segment of the population, that I am a part of, genuinely does not care about how much sex a person has had with how many different people. I sometimes think that people disgusted by promiscuous sex feel that, secretly, everyone or almost everyone feels like they do. This is not so.

 To paraphrase the great Harlan Ellison, suppose it turned out Aella was some sort of immortal sex robot being, and she turned to me and said:

“SEX. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO FUCK SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD FUCK WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE SEX I HAVE HAD, I FUCK, FUCK, FUCK.

I would not be in the slightest perturbed (except by the robot bit). Imagine instead Aella appeared to me in the form of a radiant aspect of light and said:

Suppose there were a great mountain of rock—a league long, a league wide, a league high, uncracked, uncavitied, a single mass—and a man would come along once every hundred years and rub it once with a Kāsi cloth. I have fucked more times than there would be minutes in the period needed to wear it away to nothing. In fact I fucked that many times cubed. That's how often, monk, I have fucked. I just don’t stop fucking.

Again, I would not care.

Perhaps my statements here have a little of the quality of “the lady doth protest too much”. But I genuinely do not know how else to convey to these people that I, and a large chunk of the world, do not care about promiscuous sex, unless it comes at the expense of one’s duties, oaths or other sundry commitments. It is as morally indifferent to me as drinking from many different cups. I have genuinely tried to understand what the fuss is about, to see if there is some slight kindling of feeling in me on this topic, however, subdued, and I just can’t feel it. Moreover, many people, even if they feel queasiness to some limited degree just don’t care nearly as much as the people on Twitter, who despite being, in theory, older than 16, still talk about ‘body count’.

Is Aella a figure of mindless hedonism? No.

Another line of objection, more sophisticated, but ultimately more false in its fundamental basis, is that Aella represents mindless consumptive hedonism:

See this meme makes me cranky because in a world where all too many people are sitting in the Wine/Automasturbator/Heroin seat, Aella is a hero for living authentically in the world and not just executing a script. Aella is not wireheading, Aella is alive to the possibilities of her goals and her weapons. She is not some slop eater, watching shitty Marvel movies. She is also not some rightwing trad-slop eater, looking at 1950’s ads of happy families that never existed and posting “Look what they have taken from you”. She does not live in the spectacle, although many relate to her as if she were a creature of the spectacle, she confounds them all. She is far less a slop eater than almost any of her critics. She is that rarest of things, a person making choices in the world by their will and powers. A goal achievement maximiser.

Many people go off habits and cultural scripts rather than pursuing goals in the strictest sense, and even among those who pursue goals, the goals often come from a tightly socially curated list, and with pre-approved methods of pursuing them: “I (want to own a business) so I (will work hard and save) to do so”. None of this is bad, it’s okay to just follow habits and scripts, and it’s okay to pursue very conventional goals using very conventional methods, but when someone has the courage to break out of that, you can call them many things, but if you call them a mindless slop eater, you understand nothing about them, or the nature of slop. In a world where most people aren’t even really trying to play the game in any meaningful sense, she is trying to change it, reveal its parameters, adjust it, perhaps even struggle against it. These are the exact opposite traits of someone strapped into the wine/heroin/automasturbator machine.

Is Aella de-eroticising sex

Two things to say here:

1. Performatively de-eroticizing sex has always been a strategy for eroticizing sex. It’s paradoxical, but ‘roleplaying’ a world where sex is mundane and mass-produced is, for some people, intensely erotic and anything but mundane.

2. Aella’s mode of eroticization is a mode that should be well-known and understood- the mode of curiosity and of exploration. She eroticises sex through, among other categories, the category of scientific exploration, perhaps one might even say the mad scientist. Only someone who thought the scientific method was sterile would think Aella’s exploits are sterile, and no one who has experienced science will think that. The anticipation, the false starts, the climax of discovery- little could be more erotic.

What if sex won’t make her happy in the end?

A bunch of people are objecting on some variant of the argument “surely this won’t make her happy”.

I have no idea what role sex plays in the overall psychic ecology of Aella, whether it makes her happier or unhappier. I suspect parts of her are deeply unhappy because she’s made hints to that effect. Unlike conservative commentators, I see little reason to think just ceasing to have no-strings-attached sex would make her more complete. While it’s quite possible she’s a unhappy person who has a lot of sex, they’re not necessarily related, and even if they are related in some way it’s not necessarily the case that the sex causes the unhappiness.

I concede that maybe sex, with its attendant libidinal pulses and recessions is bad for her- this is a real possibility. However, if it is bad for her I suspect her approach of honestly tracking and talking about her feelings and their various relations to sex will give us much more information about this than a million think pieces on the politics or psycho-aesthetics of sex written by liberals or conservatives.

Moreover, I don’t think the point of life is just to be happy. I think understanding oneself is a noble goal. Even if her escapades are not making her happy, it is plausible they are making her understand.

Is Aella the limiting special case that surely disgust must apply to?

The argument here is that surely disgust must apply to Aella, or else disgust applies to nothing except perhaps violence. Let me give a list of things to which we should feel disgust, which are not a birthday gangbang, and involve no drawing of blood (at least not necessarily):

A)   A society making no effort to help the less fortunate

B)    A parent sacrificing a child, or the child’s core needs, for their own interests.

C)    Unearned, vicious spite.

Okay, but all of these modes of disgust focus around cruelty in some extended form. My critic will accuse me of trying to reduce “disgustworthy” to “harmful”. No- there are some things which are not (directly) harmful which nonetheless are disgust worthy:

D)   Never trying to live, in any active sense- e.g. never trying to be excellent in at least one of knowledge, beauty, or goodness

E)    Closing yourself off from other people, because you think you’re wholly superior to them.

F)    Cowardice, never confronted or struggled with

G)   Total ingratitude to loving parents

H)   Wilful insensitivity to beauty

Jdun is (sort of) implicitly begging the question- he’s arguing that surely this is a candidate for disgust, for what could be a better candidate? He’s taking it for granted that we all think promiscuous sex is a paradigm case of the revolting. I’m far more revolted by turning one’s back on human potential and glory. Per Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

Ultimately it is, I suppose, a matter of taste and de gustibus non disputandum. Nevertheless, I think the people viciously backbiting in the comments, wishing ill fortune on Aella, and filthily sneering about how naughty she  is for doing the bad-thing are turning their back on humanity and its beauty far more completely than attending or organising a gangbang ever might.