Language makes us voyeurs of our own feelings.

Some areas of our live leave us speechless; and supposedly takes us beyond words.

Yet in a few domains of experience language can play a cathartic and tyrannical role in the constitution of feeling.  One of those areas is sex.  Which is highly scripted.

And partners can’t begin to change the scripts of their intimacy unless they do realise that the play is is scripted,
'How was that for you?" etc
and they, male and female, have not written their own lines.

So who has written the script? To unravel that we have to enter into the worlds of discourse.

For someone like Foucault it is inherited discourse that constitutes experience itself.
Discourse creates sensation and constitutes desire  if we are to follow this argument
words don't get us closer to the X but
words (discourses) have made us voyeurs of our own feelings, alien to our own senses.
"Was that good?"  Was it OK?" is about as far away from 'it' as is possible. Here words
are clumsy intrusive tools.  We are eternally
loquacious on such matters as to what the body has just experienced but inevitably way off the mark

 What is at stake here is a plausible account in Foucaultian terms of the observable recalcitrance of individual subjectivity to social discourse, in all spheres of moral life;
Are we recalcitrant or, are we the passive players out of discourses which are discursive and all embracing?

Claims to what are the correct moral behaviours cannot be verified for they must be placed against the
infinite dynamism and plasticity of human need.

What we might accept in slightly post human way is that the truth is quite grim for some. – there is no true essential self, no uncontestable agenda of true erotic needs to which we can make appeal in our judgments against those who say they choose either to inflict or to submit to sexual humiliation.

What we choose to value in sexual conduct is not inscribed in our natures, but is a thing we must choose and fight for with reason. But there again what is reasonable about reason and where does unreason come into play?

.The true difficulty of it all is suggested in the words themselves – ‘reason’, ‘will’, ‘choice’, ‘discipline’. If they sound archaically severe and stoic, that is the measure of the problem.

Is our self-determination within the grip of the social and the discursive in regard to current sexual ethics?
Can the  ethics say of sexual behaviour ever be grounded in empirical claims as to the naturalness and unnaturalness of sexual choice.  Well, if we accept we are prey to discourses, the answer is, no.
And this makes all the more stark the difficulty of grounding responsible behaviour towards sexual partners in anything more than high-sounding moralism with the resultant feet of clay.

So are we the 'do anything' heirs to de Sade? For de Sade in his inimitable and interminable demonstrations that the mind can conceive of insatiable sexual consumption and destruction of other beings, he waged war against the idea that the erotic was naturally bounded by the physical limits of the body. He did not substitute a naturalism of his own – i.e. that sadism was innate. In this he was a faithful disciple of the materialist counter-attack against Descartes, insisting on the simple scandal that humans, unlike animals, were capable of anything. It is scarcely accidental that the old lecher has been such a bête noire of recent feminist writing, which deems eros as the victor over 'pornography'

It is honourable to wish to enlist the ‘true needs’ of the body against the ‘false needs’ of a culture of sexual violence, but like all such distinctions, this one makes a universal empirical claim about human nature which history, in its account of the infinite dynamism and plasticity of human need, simply cannot verify

Many of us have an obstinately uncooperative attitude toward authority. Yet it might be supposed that in a liberal society, such as ours professes to be, the attitude of the state towards obscenity, or the function of the public censor, should not give rise to problems of any great difficulty – details apart – and that there is a widely accepted model to which thinking on these issues would try to conform. The model is that provided by John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, and the doctrine that it endorses runs something like this: 1. Some people like obscenity, and some don’t, and those who don’t tend to find it filthy, horrible, revolting, and, probably, immoral. 2. But even if obscenity is filthy, horrible, revolting, even immoral, those who want it should be allowed to have it unless their doing so causes harm and this harm outweighs any good that it might also cause. T 3.That something is immoral does not, as such, justify intervention at law: what is additionally required is that it should on balance bring about harm, and, if it does, this suffices for legal intervention whether or not there is immorality. The Williams Commission accepts what it calls ‘the harm condition’, and goes on to ask what kinds of harm there are, which of those is likely to attach to obscenity. Its report distinguishes five kinds of harm. If we take them chronologically, or in the order in which they might arise, there is, 1, first, the harm that might be occasioned in the making of some piece of pornography – what the report calls ‘participant harm’. 2. Secondly, there is the harm that someone might cause himself by reading or looking at some obscene material. If a natural way of thinking of such harm is as harm that stops at the person himself – except in exceptional circumstances, where the person has entered into undertakings with others which he now can’t carry out – the discussion about obscenity as it has developed over the years has focused on a rather special case, which may be seen as a distinct or 3.  third form of harm. This is where the harm doesn’t stop at the person himself, but involves others, just because it consists in a tendency, either new or moulded out of existing traits, to harm others. An example would be where reading pornography leads to a sexual assault, and this kind of harm might be called ‘transitive harm’. 4. Fourthly, there is the kind of harm that someone who doesn’t want pornography suffers from coming across or seeing it. If there is some doubt whether this kind of harm is harm suffered on balance, there is little doubt that it is suffered, and the explanation lies in the attitudes towards pornography already mentioned of those who don’t want it. The Commission’s term for this is ‘offence’, and they think of it as relative to norms and expectations, and as admitting of differences of dimension. 5. Finally, there is a fifth kind of harm, which, unlike the others, is suffered not by individuals but by society itself. Call it social harm The exaggeration is contained in two identities to which he subscribed: the identity of a society itself with the set of moral rules that the ordinary citizen of that society acknowledges, and the identity of a contravention of any one of these rules with a threat to the survival of that rule. Put these two identities together, and the conclusion appears to follow that an isolated act of fellatio performed in the dim light of a suburban bedroom is tantamount to an act of treason. Outdoes most in absurdity. Living as we do in a plural society, we cannot identify the fabric of society as easily as it could be identified in the Ayatollah’s Iran, or even in Periclean Athens, some acts commited in the privacy of a suburban bedroom might be considered by the State as being acts of treason, whereas in Periclean Athen they would be regarded as the height of nobility.. We live in a society whose ideology combines a heavy emphasis upon sexual excitement and provocation with an ever harsher intolerance of what this is likely to excite or provoke to The fundamental reason is that the work of pornography can engage with some of our most potent sexual fantasies: those which are fantasies about our sexuality – instructing us whether it is dangerous, whether it is enjoyable, whether it is permitted, whether indeed it is ours, or ours only by proxy. One important consequence: that pornography can take its place amongst other factors in society to which its citizens turn, knowingly, unknowingly, to test their fantasies, and which therefore have, for better or for worse, a formative influence upon their characters What also follows from the view of pornography is a greater similarity than is usually conceded between the addicted consumers of pornography and the crusaders against pornography, between those who want it and those who cannot tolerate it. A passing tribute is often paid to depth psychology by observing that the strength of the crusader’s hostility to pornography is a measure of his desire for it. This may be true, but it is trivial. The point that I would make is that both groups are wedded to the task of rigidly controlling their sexuality and their aggression through some external aid, and the difference between them lies largely in the very different systems they look to. . But just because the support systems are so different for the two groups and just because the dependence on each system is so heavy, animosity, suspicion, fear must be the emotions that the two groups experience towards each other. Each move that either makes in favour of its own chosen mode of policing its internal forces – puritanism or pornography – is bound to seem a total threat to the fragile security of the other. The middle terrain of reasonableness in these disputes appear distant. As to the future, socially-accepted views of what it is reasonable to be offended by may in the coming years become more stringent, rather than progressively relaxed, But the crucial consideration would be that in an 'enlightened' (and that is a word that could be contested) society what the law should ignore or discount, when it weighs the permissibility of something, is not fringe or eccentric reactions to it, which may be highly valuable, but pathological, reactions. But how do you identify pathological reactions?  Well, that requires a theory of human nature. . However, a  theory of human nature is already required to justify treating something like flower arranging' any differently from 'ice hockey'.