Review of Dennis Altman, Global sex
Bridget Haire
Global sex
By Dennis Altman
Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2001
Global sex is not an even-textured read. If it were a foodstuff, it might be compared to a gourmet sort of muesli studded from time to time with the delicious and the unexpected, but demanding upon the digestion. Like a top-notch muesli, it feels good for you and you are rewarded for wading through its dense sections with tasty morsels – often comprising pop cultural references. Who’d have thought Dennis Altman would be a Melrose Place watcher? Or that he’d admit it in an academic tome?
Altman prefaces the book with a riveting round-up of three of major sex scandals of the late twentieth century — the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, the trial of Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim and the excruciating media moment where Prince Charles’s desire to be Camilla Parker-Bowles’ tampon became public property. Both the Clinton and the Anwar examples illustrate how deviation from accepted sexual behaviour – either real or trumped-up – retains its power to destroy in the political arena (if carefully manipulated by powerful opponents). The Charles and Camilla story arguably exemplifies the lowbrow lust for the prurient and pathetic sex lives of others fostered by tabloid culture. But importantly Altman uses a thumbnail analysis of these familiar sex scandals as a device to link into arguments about how sex is positioned and used in political economies in the era of globalisation, which, in the chapter following, are expanded upon in a more academic style.
In the chapter ‘Sex and political economy’ Altman describes his approach as ‘ an attempt … to link a Marxist and a Freudian reading of social life’ (p.35). While this sounds daunting to the non-academic reader, what follows is an admirable attempt to demystify the theory in plain-language: ‘What makes it possible to link Freud’s theories to those of Marx is that both understand the way in which a great deal of what is taken for granted is constructed by human beings, for Marx through the relationship of social and economic forces in history, for Freud through their impact on the unconscious.’ (p.35). Altman goes on to argue that both behaviour and emotions are shaped by economic and cultural forces, with values changing after contact with outside influences and technologies. Although the processes of influence flow both ways, from rich countries to poor and vice-versa, the interactions are also structured by power relationships, which can result in the perceived sexual ‘hotness’ of some cultures becoming commodified for the consumption of the rich.
The discussion of commercial sex industries (including ‘mail order brides’, sex tourism and pornography) includes an analysis of how the lot of any specific sex worker is structured by gender, affluence, class and race, the circumstances under which he/she took up the profession and the relative wealth of his/her country, in addition to the legality or otherwise of sex work. It is very satisfying to read an analysis of sex industry that has such complexity and that rejects simplistic notions such as ‘sex work degrades women’ or, conversely, ‘sex work is empowering’. Indeed, Altman states, ‘Sex work can be both oppressive and liberating’, and points out that moral indignation is an inadequate response to situations where people are forced to sell sex for survival, and inappropriate in circumstances where people choose to sell sex as a free enterprise (noting however that such ‘freedom’ is relatively rare). What I missed in this section was more thorough analysis of the buying of sexual services – the provision of sexualised rest and recreation for the army is dealt with, but otherwise the ‘john’ remains unexplored, apart from a brief Edmund White quote dealing presumably with the purchase of male-to-male sex. Perhaps I was hoping for a bit more Freudian influence and less Marx and this juncture.
HIV/AIDS, writes Altman, is both a product and cause of globalisation, an epidemic that make a mockery of national borders while simultaneously highlighting the differences that shape the experience of human sexuality in different cultures. It is an epidemic that has had enormous impact on what he calls ‘regimes’ of sexuality gender, in part because the primary means of prevention, use of condoms, forces into the public arena discussion of sexual behaviour. (Remember Ita Buttrose and her radical celibacy?) That globalisation forces bear a responsibility for the extent of the epidemic is illustrated by the example of the World Bank putting money into AIDS work in Brazil and India, when it was the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs that contributed to these epidemics by undermining national health infrastructure.
Of course, AIDS was and is deemed by the religious Right to be the product of recreational and irresponsible sex. Altman argues that AIDS has transformed understandings of sex, linking it to danger and disease – once again. ‘Once again’ because rather disarmingly he recognises that sex (and pregnancy) has arguably long been women’s dominant experience of sex, before safe and effective contraception and antenatal care. (The flashes of feminist insight in the text were quite frequent, but never failed to surprise — and frequently delighted – me.) This little pleasure is counter balanced, however in the discussion of ACT UP. In the context of globalised activism Altman is dismissive of ACT UP’s role in global treatment access campaigns: ‘… At recent AIDS Conferences ACT UP groups from France and the United States sought to make global access to treatment a central demand, without much input from those for whom this approach was allegedly intended to help’ (p.126). This summation is, from my observations of ACT UP Paris and Philadelphia at last year’s Durban conference, unfair and inaccurate. But perhaps it is unfair of me as a reviewer to harp upon a little aside when so much of Altman’s analysis of HIV/AIDS and responses to the epidemic is so well considered.
Gay, lesbian and transgender identities and sexuality are discussed primarily in the chapter ‘The Globalisation of Sexual Identities’. (Gay male sex and culture is of course also included in HIV/AIDS-related sections). In comparing the globalised post-clone ghetto gay sexual identity with the gender non-conformity of so-called ‘traditional’ cultural forms of men who have sex with men, such as Samoan f’afafine, Filipino bakkla or Thai kathoey, Altman notes that the gender non-conformists paradoxically could be read as the more transgressive identity. However he also points out that that one must be wary of invocations of ‘traditional culture’, which may be attempts to posit an a-historical culturally and temporally static imagined past (often, presumably, for reactionary political purposes). Interestingly, Altman does not discuss the fact that a gender non-conformist identity might be imposed for the purposes of distribution of labour, rather than adopted by the individual, an issue that was pointed out to me by my Samoan girlfriend in relation to f’afafine.
One of the many strengths of this interesting book is that Altman makes no pretence at objectivity. He is up-front about how his life experience influences his scholarship, how the countries in which he has lived frame his sense of the world and how sexuality and the HIV/AIDS epidemic impact on perception. He is also prepared to admit to knowledge of Pretty woman, Agatha Christie and the musical Chess. He explicitly rejects ‘a refusal to take sides or make to make political or moral choices’ (p.xii). The reader is left in no doubt as to Altman’s position: he defines a set of relationships provide a kind of map of how the economics of globalisation perpetuate (and create) exploitative sexual economies and cultures. But he also positions movements for sexual freedom, if linked to other struggles for freedom and equality as an impetus for change toward a more just world (cautioning that without the link it risks becoming meaningless sex-consumerism). In conclusion, he states, ‘In that struggle [for a more just and equitable world] sexuality is both a battlefield and a legitimate area for political action.’ Utopian, perhaps, but certainly inspirational.
© Bridget Haire, 2001.
Bridget Haire works in HIV media and around HIV vaccine trials.
Word is Out 1, December 2001:24-25
www.wordisout.info