Sexualized sublation

Promoted as sex to disguise their nature is the operative clause, and the disguise is what the term exists to remove. Sublation is the external occupation of ownership of the innermost circles of self, taking the will of another, and humiliation is the shame mechanism working on the same target. Neither becomes something else by being presented as sexual, and the presentation is what makes them hard to name, since the vocabulary of desire is available to describe them and the vocabulary of domination is not. Marsh insists on the separation for practical reasons. These acts ought to be considered separately from sexualized connection because they are fundamentally different interactions, and knowing which is occurring matters more than anything else about the act. The endogroup power of sex is the mechanism, since it can be used to sublate one self to another within an endogroup membrane, and the endosocial power supplies the membrane that encloses the pair. What is taken is what sublation always takes, which is the will, and the person emerges with less of their own rather than with an experience they did not enjoy. Marsh's account of why this is sought follows her general account of supply. Bullies are those who have suffered loss of dignity and confidence and attempt to repair themselves by damaging others, and if what they lost can be found in another person that is where they will look for it.

Feminist theory has debated for decades whether sexuality under unequal conditions can be separated from domination, with Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin arguing that it cannot and sex-positive feminists insisting on the distinction Marsh also draws. Research on coercive control describes domination achieved through means other than force. Objectification theory studies the effects of being treated as a thing. Marsh's contribution is the naming, since giving the disguised interaction its own term separates it from both sides of the older argument, allowing sexual connection to be defended without having to defend everything presented as sex.