Don’t F*ck the Ocean, Do It With Yourself
What is a dildo’s role in the doing of gender? How can we use such insights to inform our understanding of gender-environment relations?
In 2017, the ‘Don’t F*ck the Ocean, Do It with Yourself’ campaign collected, liquified and moulded salvaged marine plastic debris (MPD) into a limited-edition range of dildos. Flows of plastics into the Earth’s hydrological system have substantially increased following the mass production of modern plastics since the 1940s (Niaounakis, 2017). Durable fossil fuel-based polymer plastics (as the most common) accumulate in sediment ‘patches’ across the surface of water bodies (Ibid). Ecosystem impacts of this MPD rest upon the issue that they only degrade to increasingly smaller sediments, rather than fully decompose; altering the chemical and biophysical processes of earth systems. Supported by MTV Brazil, these recycled plastic dildos represented not only a small situated example of green consumerism; labelled goods which work to support ethical environmental action and remediation (Hawkins, 2012), they expounded the neglect of materialist, embodied sexuality within dominant poststructural environmental discourses.
While gender and environment theory has extended into the private sphere of the home, addressing the gendering of sustainable household work (Organo et al, 2012), heating (Jalas and Rikenen, 2016) and maternity (MacKendrick, 2014), tension between the public and private seems none more pertinent than in the neglect of the inner private sphere of sexual embodiment and performance. As an object of desire and paradoxical blurring/affirmation of gender, the dildo makes a valuable case to queer socio-environmentalism. The work rhetoric of household sustainability (Harding,1996), and the care rhetoric of health technologies (Pols, 2017), fall short in unequivocally addressing objects of sexual pleasure. Bodily exertion of work coupled with experiences of pleasure suggests that an alternative theoretical synthesis is required to theorise the dildo’s representational materiality as an object of sexed environmentalism.
The role of the dildo in the doing of, or representing, ‘gender’ is explored with reference to the individual in the home. Engagements of the dildo with partners, in groups and in public spheres (porn/ecosex) are explicitly avoided, for they should be reserved for their own analyses of a ‘deviant sexuality’ resisting the ‘hegemonic public of sex’ protecting a heterosexual privacy (see Berlant and Warner, 1998: 550). Sexuality’s relationship with environment has often been exercised in an essentialising conflation of heteronormativity with ‘natural’ (at least in its perpetuation), and any other sexual engagements as queer/‘unnatural’ (Alaimo, 2010b).
This essay references the discursive limits of ‘gender’ as a representational analytical tool, embracing queer ecology as a means to galvanise one political resolution to gender’s shortcomings in environmentalism. Through tracing the sexed and ecological contours of a plastic dildo through felt pleasure and unfelt (trans)corporeality, queer environmentalism is effective in taking Alaimo’s Green Queer Theory of Pleasure (GQTP), as collusion between culture, bodies and environments, to attempt to make objects ‘matter’ (Alaimo, 2010b; Barad, 2003). Using a felt approach to this object has a dual utility: it recognises the individual consciousness in what Nancy Fraser proposes as a ‘rhetoric of bodies and pleasures’ (1989: 62) but also widens environmental understandings of what Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands raises as ‘multiple effects of various toxicants’ (2005: 54), addressing the need to include diverse accounts of sexuality within ecocritical discussions of plastic pollution.
DILDO IN THE DOING OF GENDER
A turn to the question of sexuality within feminist philosophies of science is required to provide a suitable analytical point of entry to the doing of gender. Donna Haraway (1991)’s call to epistemologically include animals in how we might understand our relationship with the environment, is said by Jennifer Terry to ask how animals might ‘help us tell stories about ourselves, especially when it comes to matters of sexuality’ (2000: 151). Terry’s reading of Haraway as propositioning humans to reflect upon animal behaviour sustains the privileging of the non-human animal over non-sentient materials and subjects. In a similar investigation, Margrit Shildrick takes issue with Haraway’s 1991 poststructuralist ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ disregarding a place for the feminine in context to sexual desire (1997: 159). Haraway’s manifesto refers to neither woman nor human in avoiding identity boundaries of ‘being’ female, but instead refers to the affinity of the ‘Cyborg’ machine-organism (1991). Shildrick voices doubt over the purchase of sexual difference in Haraway’s new cyborg world. She sees implications of Haraways’ postmodern philosophy of affinities in assemblages omitting sexuality, of which the dildo is representative. In the case of the recycled dildo, it becomes necessary to consult non-sentient objects to help us tell these stories about our sexed selves, as an environment with and in.
Figures 1-3: Promotional images used by MTV Brazil for the ‘Don’t F*ck the Ocean, Do It With Yourself’ campaign in 2017. (Source: Dieline 2017)
MTV’s recycled dildos are phallic, smooth and multicoloured owing to their salvaged plastic origin (figures 1-3). Throughout Western civilisation, representations of the penis were a gauge of men’s place in the world as an ecstatic and life-creating force (Friedman, 2002). Plato’s conception of the penis as ‘form’, an active and masculine ‘idea’, conflates the symbolic erect penis with the ‘idea’ of power (ibid). For Plato, matter was passive and female; the antithesis of form. As with many Western philosophies, Plato’s form and matter are reborn and interpreted in each society according to cultural beliefs. For a dildo, the performance of ‘man’ is continual and solidified in plastic matter. The ubiquity of plastic as material then might denote a ubiquitous representation of the male gender. This contention however has its flaws if we are to consider Barad’s atomised ontology of matter (Barad, 2003). The male gender is rather a performative phenomenon determined by the intra-actions of the plastic with oxygen and the bonds of polymer chains which make the embodied dildo material become meaningful (2003: 815).
Performativity has become one dominant epistemology of feminist, queer and science studies. For Barad, Michel Foucault’s analytic of power makes progress in associating discursive practice of ‘gender’ with the materiality of the body (2003). Whilst constrained by Foucault’s omission of exactly how discursive practices produce material bodies, Barad calls that there must be a ‘materialisation of all bodies’ (2003: 810). In reference to Andrew Pickering’s use of a performative idiom (1995), Barad notes a negligence to performativity’s ‘inherently queer genealogy’ (2003: 807). Instead, the dildo as an object of gender performance in both representing ‘male’ through the ‘male’ organ, but also female, in having bodily space for this organ also needs to be considered intersectionally in terms of other identities and sexuality. Men who use dildos thus both affirm ‘male’-ness with using a replication of their own (assumed) penis, whilst homosexuality creates ‘new’ spaces for the penis (orally/anally) not actively included in normative considerations of how the ‘male’ gender is ‘done’. The dildo’s role in the doing of gender is therefore hinged upon sexuality.
There is value in noting the scale of the dildo. As an object of sexual pleasure, its use is intimate; used in the inner bodily private in the already private home. Household and bodily scales are often identified by gender and environment scholars as ‘female’. Traditional geographical confines of ‘women’ to these scales, such as the housewife and as reproductive agents have informed the work by Cairns et al., 2012; Kennedy and Kmec, 2018 and Oakley, 1974. It might then be easy to consider the locale inferred by the dildo as holding a mirror to a woman’s body being the ‘first human environment’, an inner home (Stiengraber, 1999). Such a contention is highly problematic. Doing so would not only betray Barad’s call for the materialisation of all bodies, in ignoring the political body performing acts of sexual pleasure beyond reproduction. More significantly, it would reinforce an essentialised anthropocentrism of analytical scale. Whilst sexual pleasure as symbolised by the dildo takes us into and around the body and genitalia (not necessarily female), Alaimo’s trans-corporeality takes us into and around the environment with this body (2010a).
Gender itself as an object of study is thus owed careful reflection. In a social justice analysis of gender as critical practice, Robyn Weigman uses Queer Studies to offer a valuable analytic into the politics which animate identity fields (2012). For her, the critical utility of gender as an object of study, is dependent on gender’s ‘commensurability with the political desire invested in it’ (2012: 26). ‘Gender’ as falling short in achieving representational inclusion of the sexual and corporeal object relations with plastics, presses environmentalism to reflect upon the practice of sexuality. In reading Ian Halley’s argument that critics must ‘take a break from feminism’ (2004: 7), as a rejection of the convergent thinking which conflates analyses of sexuality with that of gender, there appears to be a utility of mapping such a divergence between Haraway’s environmental feminism and Alaimo’s ecological queer theory. Such divergence lends to a field imaginary which addresses the political desire invested in using ‘green’ sexual products not as a process of gender embodiment, but rather a process of queer sexual desire.
The dildo then as an object of sexuality and gender, but not reproduction, is queer. How might this framing inform gendered relationships with the environment? The answer is complex. We must not only make clear the political desire creating gender but also use an object of study which permits a more progressive investigation of the dildo. Acting as one iteration of Halley’s call for critical divergence, Alaimo’s GQTP stipulates our ‘universe of differing naturecultures’ is fuelled by the pursuit of pleasure, an unappreciated force subsumed by other environmental dynamisms (2010b: 64). GQTP and her thesis of ‘trans-corporeality’ has value in resisting the naturalisation of sex as an act of heterosexual reproduction (Alaimo, 2010a; 2010b).
FEELING GENDER-ENVIRONMENT RELATIONS
Plastic pollution is spatially and temporally ubiquitous. Mass consumption of plastic goods has contributed to land-based plastic sources accounting for up to 80% of MPD (Niaounakis, 2017). It has been estimated by Jambeck et al. (2015), that in 2010, 275 million tonnes of plastic waste were generated by 192 coastal countries (93% of the global population). With 1.7%-4.6% entering the ocean, the rest to landfills, sewerage and dumpsites. The recycled dildos represent a temporary visual alleviation to the crisis of plastic pollution contributed to by 93% of our global population. While the nature, origins and socio-political functions of these plastics are attempted to be quantified, the chemical dangers of plastic within our global hydrological system as part of an earth system, have been denied the same press as plastic’s visible materiality.
FEELING CARE THROUGH DESIRE
The felt affect of the dildo is determined by its use. In using a feeling analytic, we begin to understand human sentience drives much of environmentalism’s normative categorisations. Those which are sentient/non-sentient exist both in assemblage with each other according to Haraway, however, there is a tendency to pit values of sentience against one another (Haraway, 1991). One such example is Carolyn Merchant’s environmental ‘Partnership Ethic’, which places humans as the driving sentient actors in forging partnership with other beings and abiota (1996). Being careful not to delve too far into the complexity of feminist science’s ethical philosophies, Merchant’s ethic, though similar to Alaimo’s trans-corporeality in acknowledging the value in all materials in an environment, centres value around a human notion of care rather than a material notion of care. What does this tell us about how we feel environment through a dildo? As an object of doing sexuality there are issues surrounding the capacity of the recycled dildo to achieve the same feeling as a ‘real’ penis. If this recycled dildo did not produce the desired (sexual) feeling in a body, tension arises between care for one’s own body, and care for the environment. As such, it must be questioned how sexual pleasure might be valued against environmental care. There indeed may have to be a sacrifice of feeling bodily pleasure to mitigate issues which threaten the materiality of the environment. This conception of valuing care is less centred around one (human) body’s sentience and more so around the compromise between the materiality of the plastic dildo, the increasing oceanic plastic pollution and a body’s pleasure.
We might conceive the dildo as representative of our interconnections with the wider environment. As the recycled dildo is derived from flows of oceanic plastic, the body is derived from flows of sexual fluids which move from within the human (symbolically sentient and female) outwards into the non-human environment (natural and passive). Where then does the human body as culture end and environment, as nature, begin? To take the introduction to Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010a: 18), ‘the ethical space of trans-corporeality is never an elsewhere but is always already here’, we see that attempting to delineate a body from the wider environment is to delineate what ethics govern each sphere. The body as gendered and cultured attempting to ‘do good’ for the environment through green consumerism both reinforces a nature/culture dualism of which Alaimo’s GQTP seems to destabilise. As bodily leakiness as a material transference threatens bodily-certainty, so too does GQTP threaten technical discourses of environmental issues. The limited production period of the MTV recycled dildos, along with other ‘green’ sex products creating socio-economic barriers to consumers (explicitly labelled organic vegan lubricant sold at £6.96 for 75 ml (Female First, 2019) and ‘100%’ sustainably managed bamboo dildos sold by holistic sexual empowerment businesses in conjunction with costly mentoring sessions (Red Tent Sisters, 2019) forge a false perception of closeness with nature. In commodifying a ‘doing good’ rhetoric of environmental closeness, it encourages the idea of an antecedent environmental distance.
UNFLET MATTER
There seems to be a normative ignorance to the carbon footprint of one’s orgasm. In the ‘eco-sex’ market, there are indeed efforts to embrace legislation which in Canada as of 2016 prohibits the use of phthalates, chemicals which give children’s toy plastics a ‘soft and flexible’ materiality (Kingston, 2009). Phthalates are also widely used in sex toys, though they are not explicitly written into Canada’s policy (Kingston, 2009). Dominant environmental anti-toxics movements appeal to cultural fears of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in phthalates as threatening the normative materiality of humans and other (sentient) species (Di Chiro, 2010). Work regarding the gendered aspect of EDCs by Celia Roberts (2017), refers to the paradoxical effects of these compounds. As chemicals enter the body’s endocrine system (glands, hormones and organs facilitating cellular activity associated with growth, health, sexual development and associated behaviours (Roberts, 2017)), the material effects are complex. Small accumulations of these chemicals may actually create more profound changes to the endocrine systems than larger accumulations (Ibid).
The dildo as representative of accumulative global plastic pollution and of bodily sexual pleasure, forces us to take Roberts’ EDC paradox as highly alarming. The object of the dildo may alter one’s chemical capacity to reproduce or grow ‘normally’ more significantly than vast ocean ‘patches’ of visible pollution. Even non-porous medical-grade silicon may have chemical fallout occurring across temporalities beyond human comprehension (Kingston, 2009). Roberts’ explanation of EDCs’ oestrogenic effect on bodies is termed ‘transxenoestrogenesis’ by Hayward (2014). This term forces us to re-evaluate popular discourse of anti-toxin anxiety and instead see that EDCs produce both danger and promise. In some bodies, higher oestrogen may be health and life-affirming rather than deteriorating. Ah-King and Hayward (2013), ask us to refigure EDCs as a ‘potential rather than harm’ (2013:8). Whilst there is value in regarding these chemical changes as challenging the idea of ‘natural masculinity’ and ‘normal’ sexual reproduction, we must consider what is meant by ‘potential rather than harm’. We have seen Alaimo and Barad’s concern with taking a humanist stance on environmental issues, and whilst Hayward and Ah-King shift thinking towards a queerer notion of bodies, they remain abstract. It is not bold to suggest that their ambivalence over whom these ‘potentials’ impact reinforces an anthropocentric narrative. Many of the microbiota which feed are fed from ecological chains are intersex (Di Chiro, 2010). How then might we attempt to explain gender environment relations when bodies are leaky, chemically shifting and laden with intersex organisms? Which organisms as well as humans reap the potentials of EDCs and which face the harms?
Susanne Antonetta’s autobiographical memoir Body Toxic (2001), is for Alaimo’s trans-corporeality an exploration of the ‘struggle to understand the substance of the self’ in a world which nurtures ignorance of our toxic body-environment interconnections (2010a: 99). Alaimo emphasises one’s understanding of place in space is connected with the formation of that place by space. She convincingly paraphrases Antonetta’s thesis; ‘As place becomes blood, blood becomes landscape’, (2010a: 102). Using Alaimo’s own GQTP as a means to queer this thesis taking into account the diversity of life and organisms in and around us, the recycled dildo as an object of sexuality would create a new theory;
As place becomes blood, blood becomes landscape,
And as objects become body’s lubricant, the landscape becomes object.
Though there are indeed issues with this grand statement, it seems to convey much of what Haraway (1991) and Merchant (1996) omit, without falling into the challenges of Barad’s more abstract thinking (2003). It is understood that the environmental, anatomical, discursive and material bodies are mutually constitutive. None can be accessible independently of the other. Posthuman/More-than-human/Non-human philosophies therefore need an explicit queering. Alaimo’s trans-corporeality as guided by her more grounded Green Queer Theory of Pleasure seems to provide the most pertinent iteration of more-than-humanism. This synthesis considers flows and interconnections without denying the human, but also refutes normative categorisations of non-sentient and intersex materials.
If we see the recycled dildo as a material object of sexuality and environmental ethics, we might see how sexual pleasure is environmental ‘work’ and ‘care’. Chemical bonds, invisible to the eye, have to be considered as constitutive to the materiality of the landscape of which the body exists in and as. Matter is theorised as felt concern/pleasure but also as the physical matter of atoms and chemicals which move across and reside in all bodies in an environment. In this sense, if environmentalist work matters in an ethical sense of doing good, and in Barad’s sense of embodied matter, then the recycled dildo represents how work matters, and that matter is sexed.
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