Global Sex (review)

This provocative and wide-ranging new book by Dennis Altman explores sexual politics in the era of creeping globalization. By turns thoughtful, earnest, and combative, the study offers a compelling framework for understanding how the intersections between sexual behavior, thought, and an incredibly shrinking "brave new world" may be approached.

The premise of the work is that globalization has affected the ways in which sex is viewed, adjudicated, packaged, and practiced worldwide. Altman espies a none too benign neoliberal project at work behind processes that seem inexorably to be refashioning the globe as some sort of McLuhanesque dark paradise. The trouble is, Altman argues, that the results of this reshaping are both uneven and, in many cases, undesirable. These results are irregular because while the sexual culture generally being shilled by global capitalism is essentially American, or at least Western, in origin, there is no telling how it will play out in other corners of the planet. Unafraid to promote his own progressive politics, Altman notes that while Western sexual culture has become increasingly more open and tolerant of difference in recent decades, the export of such may not necessarily promote the same elsewhere.

The first three chapters present Altman's nuanced arguments, sketch the complexity and unpredictability of globalization and how it is received in different arenas, and carefully resist vulgar materialism as well as the tendency of postmodernism to reduce the centrality of material culture to mere discourse. Chapters 4 through 6 examine the apparently insatiable and ever-growing global interest in sex, how AIDS has served both as a reflection of and an agent for globalization, and how the tentacles of neoliberalism have promoted a Western material-cultural project. Chapters 7 through 9 examine sex for sale in the information age and the role of sexual politics in international relations and, finally, raise the specter of how an increasingly permissive, globalized sort of sexual manual plays out with groups championing "traditional morality."

While the work is largely concerned with events of the past twenty-five years, it carefully notes that the processes of globalization date back centuries. That said, what makes the present situation unique is, first, the increasing rapidity with which the world is shrinking and, second, the interactive technologies with which the world is downsizing itself. One result is that change in the dynamics of sexual politics is effected ever more quickly. This poses certain dangers as well as rewards, according to Altman. In the latter case, to the extent that societies become more open and tolerant, one can chalk up an ironic point for neoliberalism. But in the former case, in those places where sexual politics have tended to reflect and embrace excessive paternalism, chauvinistic heterosexuality, and/or a general malaise of misogyny, repressive, even brutal practices are reinforced as frequently as they are undermined. In short, one should no more expect neoliberalism to promote sexual freedom than it has any other variety. "Globalization," Altman writes, "does not abolish difference as much as it redistributes it, so that certain styles and consumer fashions are internationalized while class divides are strengthened, often across national boundaries. The yuppie businesswoman with her portable phone in Kuala Lumpur or São Paulo has more in common with her counterpart in Stuttgart or Minneapolis than do either with the rural or urban poor of their own societies" (21). Yet the insatiable thirst for profits, which drives the neoliberal juggernaut, appears not likely to be slowed—and this book is full of examples.

Always quick—sometimes too quick—with an anecdote to support a point, Altman's prose is lively and polished. Perhaps to reinforce the scholarly nature of the work, he has gone well beyond the call of duty by providing voluminous quotations. But sometimes he provides too much of a good thing; the quotations occasionally get in the way of the argument, and one wishes that the author had resorted...