In Post-Neoliberalism Will We Be Fucking Or Being Fucked?

Douglas Lain (editor in chief)

May 5, 2025

Millennials and Zoomers are ill-prepared for this political moment. Gen Xers aren’t in a much better position, given that the historical epoch that is ending has defined their entire lives. Boomers, having helped build the system that solidified over the past 55 years, are not inclined to reflect and confess.

What is ending in 2025 is “Neoliberalism.” What is ending is the global order that was cobbled together after the Bretton Woods monetary framework failed, which is to say that “Neoliberalism” is what passed for a way of life, one that allowed what the late Marxist scholar Moishe Postone called a “treadmill dynamic” to continue into the later half of the 20th century and through to the quarter century mark of the 21st.

For Postone, the “capitalist treadmill” was an analogy that captured the pseudo-progressive character of our modern world, a world that consistently aims at freedom only to circle back into bondage. Postone’s treadmill does not merely keep us running in one place, however. Postone claims that this way of life, dominated by a “real abstraction,” is a life defined by both change and stasis. Further, because capital is the subject and we are mere objects, the treadmill changes us. Capital distorts our minds, our bodies, our relationships. . . it has its way with us, we do not have our way with it.

We can understand the treadmill on the economic level; it is the process where more and more commodities (iPhones, electric cars, vibrating beds, and all manner of other widgets) are produced at a faster and faster pace. It is also the process where bankruptcies, unemployment, wars, deficits, and fiat money are produced, leading to one economic crisis after another. But the economy is merely one aspect of capital. The treadmill can be understood from multiple perspectives and on many levels, including through the cycles and repetitions that arise at the level of appearance, even in culture.

For example, in terms of fashion, we can observe the repetition of modesty and exhibitionism as these trade places over time, coming in and out of style. Women’s skirts rise and fall at such a breakneck pace that the male gaze is confronted with a stop motion strip tease that never reaches a satisfactory or happy ending, but is left on edge. Likewise, men’s bodies are celebrated or derided for their strength, as chiseled muscles and square jaws are considered first ideal and then ugly.

We are asked to understand this series of images and judgments one moment at a time, to vote up or down on each given opposition, but we should attempt instead to consider these moments together and evaluate their movement by tracking the speed and orientation of the oscillation so that we can avoid being caught up in positions that will quickly be transformed into their opposites. The question isn’t whether we are opposed to too feminine men, despise too masculine women, or want to celebrate and elevate these types, but rather this: “Where are we going next?”

Or, to make what I’ve been implying explicit, so that we might really feel as well as think this dynamic, let’s consider how our alienation has deepened from one epoch to the next by juxtaposing sex acts, or their literary representations.

For example, Philip Roth arrived on the literary scene in the last decade of Fordist America, and in his story “Goodbye Columbus” from 1960, he presented readers with the following:

We moved together, clumsy at first, then finding a rhythm and it was like we were the only two people alive, defying everything her parents, Short Hills, the whole damn set-up.

Afterward, we lay there, tangled in the sheets, and Brendi laughed, saying, ‘We’re crazy, aren’t we?’ I didn’t answer because I was thinking this couldn’t last–not here, not with her family, not with me being who I am. The air conditioner kept humming, and I felt cold all of a sudden.

By 1972, at the outset of the Neoliberal period, Charles Bukowski wrote about sex a bit differently in his story about two very different sex dolls entitled “The Fuck Machine.”

then I flipped her over and put it back in, humped and humped, it was rather boring. I imagined male dogs screwing female cats. I imagined two people fucking through the air as they jumped from the Empire State Building. I imagined a pussy as large as an octopus, crawling towards me, wet and stinking and aching for an orgasm. I remember all the panties, knees, legs, tits, pussies I had ever seen. The rubber was sweating. I was sweating.

A Catholic critic might feign outrage and shock and point to the loss of dignity, the literal loss of humanity, that occurred between the first description and the next. A feminist might decry the intensifying misogyny that is notable in these passages. But these conservative responses miss what’s on display, miss the truth laid bare.

What Bukowski described in words is precisely what is offered up by the terabyte every second of every day as Neoliberalism collapses. Degrading sex acts have become the background pattern for today’s digitized celebrity culture, and we’ve become as bored and desperate as Bukowski was with his sex doll. The images and imagination of the fuck machine are, in this era of autofiction, 10 years after Marie Calloway’s question, “What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life?” commonplace, even viral.

Calloway wrote from the doll’s perspective in her exposé of her possibly apocryphal affair with Adrien Brody:

It hurt a lot. He was fucking me really hard and fast (later he would admit he was incredibly excited to be having sex with an 18 year old), but somehow I loved the feeling and thought things like, ‘It hurts, but it hurts so good…’ He went on fucking me for a while, me lying there out of my mind in this strange painful pleasure, moaning like a hurt kitten. But I was suddenly overcome with shame, stemming from feeling disconnected from him and his body. I felt this couldn’t have been good for him. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘...For what?’ There was a strong feeling of awkwardness.

Calloway’s matter-of-fact reportage on how she lost her virginity reads like a court transcription of witness testimony, but for the use of profanity and her half-hearted or dispassionate articulation of the masochist pleasure she took in the act. At her core, Calloway was an ambivalent writer who wrote defensively, claiming she wanted to be dominated and degraded in her book, while claiming to be sex negative in an interview for the Rumpus.

Ultimately, online culture embraced the sex negativity in her work, but what we should notice is that her ambivalence is in Bukowski’s work as well. And isn’t it the case that Bukowski’s complaint, his elaboration of his degradation and the degradation of the ‘fuck machine’ is identical with the complaints of today’s post-#metoo feminists? This should leave us ambivalent. After all, who is more confused? Who is closer to the truth? Charles Bukowski or the Zoomer girls rediscovering Andrea Dworkin?

Dworkin’s book “Intercourse” appeared as a reaction against and as an expression of Reagan’s America.

Dworkin wrote:

Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women. But that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men.

Being female in this world is having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us… Men cannot fuck equals and men must fuck: because one price of dominance is that one is impotent in the face of equality.

All of this is to say that the Neoliberal era was deranged and caused derangement. But the treadmill continues to grind. The engines of the night continue pumping their pistons, even as they sputter. You might even say that the engines run on complaints — on discontent. What we are tasked with is to recognize the appeal, the form of freedom, that is shoved in our faces.

Dworkin wrote:

Alienation from human freedom is deep and destructive; it destroys whatever it is in us as humans that is creative, that causes us to want to find meaning in experiences, even hard experiences.

Dworkin’s “Intercourse” was an attempt to overcome the degradation involved in unfree, nearly automated, heterosexual relations, relations determined by legal systems, market forces, wars, mass and permanent unemployment, but it was premised on the assumption that something that is historically determined and temporary is transhistorical and permanent.

The patriarchy, Dworkin claimed, was a political conspiracy that stretched back to well before the rise of the Enlightenment or the liberation of labor from feudal forms. By aiming her criticism at men as semi-conscious oppressors, by presuming that males are the caste that benefits from the operations of the treadmill, she failed to take up the task that this treadmill dynamic points to, namely, the task of breaking the repetition and reproduction of capital. Instead of seeking freedom, she objected to the periodic chaffing, to the various indignities that were the consequence of the grinding gears, as if the machine had been built for torture alone.

What we can see in all of these examples of escalating alienation, in these particular depictions of our estrangement after the world detached from the gold standard, is both the intensification of our disassociation from capital, and how even those who set out to transcribe the process are determined by it. Roth’s protagonist, Neil Klugman, sets out to break free from the limits of Short Hills, only to allow the mores of that community to define his feelings for his lover. Dworkin demands female freedom and independence only to insist that the alienation of men destroys all possible loves and meanings.

Bukowski comes closest to overcoming his degradation by fully embracing it. Still, at the end of the ‘fuck machine,’ he returns to a contemplation of the middle-class life that he is rejecting, one mis-recognized as both the cause of his distress and the remedy he needs.

And he gives up.

“I am trying to forget everything,” he tells the reader. “What would you do?”

The editors and writers at Sublation Magazine are committed to remembering. We want to recall how modern life promises more than degradation and alienation. While the 20th century delivered Philip Roth and Bukowski, and the 21st century delivered the depravity of Two Girls and One Cup, at the outset of the last century, E.M. Forster described sexual desire in terms of life-affirming freedom in his novel A Room With a View:

Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment, he contemplated her as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face. He saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called, ‘Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!’ The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view.

In Forster’s novel, passionate love is shown to be liberating, to be one of the better consequences of the collapse of the old aristocracy with its bloodless and controlled sexual arrangements.

We can remember this, but even as we do, the Trump era continues. This crude disruption of the old malfunction dominates the headlines, and we scroll by one atrocity exhibition after another, forced to face the fact that, despite everything we told ourselves over the years, we did nothing to stop or ameliorate the tragedy of being grabbed, jammed, and turned back again.

The first quarter of the 21st century has failed to generate a Left worthy of its name. The Millennials tried to take up socialism, to get off the treadmill, but remained confused and clung to the familiarity of the previous cycles, reaching back to Fordism and to critiques that presupposed the Neoliberal form of capitalist accumulation was permanent. Now we face Trump’s pseudo-progress, the arrival of what some are calling neo-feudalism, but what should be understood as post-Neoliberalism, as the Millennials are ushered off the stage.

At Sublation, we have to look forward to the next phase of capitalism, urge on Trump’s reinvention of American capital, because, as harrowing as the next round of fucking will be, and as inevitable the increase in alienation is, this pseudo-progress points beyond itself.

We are, once again, tasked with realizing our freedom.