FAQ U: What Is Phallic Desire?

Dear Reddit: am I the asshole?

I jumped into a conversation on the OSR discord about how people often write TTRPG adventures (or texts more broadly, I think) with such a utilitarian mindset geared towards play that they often neglect to write anything actually interesting or pleasurable to read—you know how often the pendulum swings one way or the other. This inspired something in me, so I was like “Yeah!!! And isn’t that the fun part anyway?” Some people agreed, but for the most part it was like that reaction picture of girls staring at you because you said something weird at a party, but instead of girls it’s a bunch of sweaty guys because I forgor what server I was in (no offense—the OSR will be the OSR). I thought it was a bit and then I kept posting Lacan’s sexuation table as if to point fingers and be like “MALE!” (boom) “PHALLIC!” (boom) “CASTRATED!” (boom) Oh God. I am the asshole. Shit. Fuck. Damnit.

But I thought it was interesting when I DM’d someone about it and was like, oh shit, they were for real but I totally didn’t peg them as a “writing sucks and is a pain” guy. My friend tried to clarify the person’s perspective as like, “he’s monklike about it! writing sucks and is a pain but is a worthy pursuit / enjoyed best when the labor is done”—but I was like, no, that’s what I mean. The OSR is full of monks, not nuns, because it’s a predominantly male (etc.) space. Then I realized that the monk/nun comparison is actually very apt and useful to understand the structural difference between typically masculine/feminine pathways of enjoyment: the monk toils all day and night doing his studies and depriving himself of those good good material pleasures, in hopes that through deep focus and meditation he can arrive at a glimpse of the divine; the nun on the other hand is just having visions and ecstasies and shit because she loves Jesus that much, and her prayers and meditations do not feel like work at all because she finds them pleasurable in themselves (even if others may find the work tedious and toilsome). It’s stereotypical, but, hey. I didn’t say it.

Some more examples. I remember some guy on a TTRPG discord server, maybe the same, who tried to explain his relationship to being a game master (or something like that?) as weight-training at the gym. It’s terrible, and feels terrible, but we all do it so we become stronger at the end of the day. Right? Except I also popped in then because I was like, sir, why are you weight-training if you don’t enjoy it? I used to love going to the gym because it was very therapeutic for me: listening to my music, sweat rolling off my body, muscles pleasantly sore from being squeezed and stretched. It didn’t occur to me that someone else not only wouldn’t find it pleasurable, but would nevertheless suffer through it just to get some fucking gains or whatever. You may also remember that this is a lens through which I analyzed D&D a couple times, or at least nasty grimy old-school D&D, making it unsurprising that Gygax himself understood this (although only trapped in the thought-cave of biological essentialism). It’s also how old patriarchal religions often conceptualize the situation of men: on one hand being forced to till the earth and marry women in order to merely survive, but on the other hand attaining glory for themselves before the gods and other men in fulfilling that duty. “Woe is me!” type shit. Very sad.

The long and short of it is that the typical male subject (and he is typical) attains pleasure through formalized pathways full of bullshit obstacles which seem to stand in his way, but the typical female subject (and she is typical) also attains pleasure just by doing the thing. There’s a phrase, “for the love of the game”, which characterizes the latter case very well, but it’s almost never applied to typical women because it’s mostly applied to men who are atypical with respect to their pleasure of the “game” (literally or broadly). The question is: are you motivated by attaining mastery or recognition or perfection, or are you motivated by simply “love for the game”? Most people know where they fall (though if you don’t, try asking a friend! they know you and they’ll tell you). Though, of course, not all women and not all men are typical, and people often have different orientations in different contexts: we are each, after all, composites of many pathways (which Žižek characterizes, by way of inverting Deleuze and Guattari’s formula, as “organs without bodies”).

Now that’s where the everyday part of psychoanalysis ends, kinda the same as how most people don’t need to read Marx to understand what it means to be exploited at work, and now we get into the freak shit which helps us understand why the normal shit is how it is. Lacan seems hoity-toity but even he is an orthodox Freudian. Do forgive my abridgement: Baby loves Mommy, but Baby is kind of stupid. Baby doesn’t even realize it’s a living thing, much less one distinct from Mommy or vice versa. Baby becomes less stupid eventually, but when it realizes that it and Mommy are distinct, it also realizes that it competes with other things for Mommy’s attention. Baby tries to become what it thinks Mommy wants, but realizes it can’t be what really fulfills Mommy. That’s Daddy’s job, and he’s great at it. Baby has two options: become a daddy-substitute so he can attain a mommy-substitute, or become a mommy-substitute so she can be attained by a daddy-substitute. The Boy in the first case sees his life revolve around trying to fulfill Daddy’s role, though as much as he tries he can’t recreate his original attachment to Mommy: the Girl in the second case, though, tries to become like Mommy not only for the Boy (and this is a house of mirrors) but also for herself. Those are very “normal” cases, of course, and Lacan was actually into cases where the subject doesn’t turn out either of those normal ways: perhaps not even realizing that they’re separate from Mommy (the psychotic), or perhaps pretending that they can indeed continue to fulfill what Mommy and others want by basically “speaking” on their behalf (the pervert). But we’re all normal here, aren’t we?

Now we arrive at this really cool graph. Let’s look at the bottom half first. The left side is the male, and the right side is the female. The male subject (represented by $ with a slash, like a dollar sign; this stands for “the subject” in Lacanese) has one relation and it is w.r.t. the object a which is only possessed by the female side (the a stands for autre or “other”, essentially what the male wants in his mommy-substitute; not to be confused with big A); only by contending with the female side can the male side fulfill himself with that object. The female side however is complicated: on one hand, she (represented by uh… Woman) wants what Mommy wants which is supposed to be on the male side (represented by Φ, or the “imaginary phallus”; not to be confused with φ, the “symbolic phallus” or daddy-substitute) but she also finds pleasure on her own side in her striving to be like Mommy (signified here not as a which is what the male wants to attain, but as S(A) which is what she herself wants to be).

The top half is more obscure. I’d refer to Larval Subjects’ article except I don’t like how the author integrates the topic with object-oriented ontology bullshit, so I’m just going to speak off the cuff. Each side gets two equations, but the male side treats x as a member of the set of all males whereas the female side treats x as a “piece” of the female subject. The Φ here refers to the phallic or castrating function, which refers to the realization that the subject cannot totally fulfill Mommy’s lack. Okay, here goes. The left/male side reads: “One man is not castrated; (but) all men are castrated”; the former is Daddy, who’s the archetypal man but only exists in the imagination of others. The right/female side reads: “Not one woman isn’t castrated, but not all of woman is castrated.” If this sounds like our favorite French charlatan doing bullshit he shouldn’t be doing with discrete mathematics, you’d be right. But as bullshit as the presentation is, we should at least consider his point: that masculine desire toils because it holds itself to an unreal standard, whereas feminine desire tends to be pretty chill.

Yadda yadda yadda, boilerplate about how the masculine/feminine positions are socially normative at best and not definitive of biological or social being, yadda yadda yadda. I also would like to shoutout obsessive versus hysterical structures of neurotic fantasy because it's related and a nice shorthand for the above conversation (masculine being $ <> a, and feminine being a <> A: essentially the masculine subject $ strives against the excluded term A for the object a, whereas the feminine subject $ wants to be a for the Other A and in doing so erases herself). More here; blah blah blah. I also want to indicate I’ve anonymized references to people because I don’t want to give the impression of calling them out. There’s nothing immoral about phallic enjoyment: it’s just about how one relates to their pathways of enjoyment. Let’s be considerate of different orientations, and not prescribe “proper” relationships to pathways based on what works for your half of the population. I’ll do my part if others do theirs! Though I’ll still make fun of them for it.