about we: we have been together 14+ years; we are both in our mid30s and going strong. this is a place where we share what we have been thinking about, discussing, reading, looking at, what we enjoy. these are our meditations, a kind of journal of a limited but special kind. come in and enjoy. [see also the solo-spin-off blog, http://revoltinthedesert.blogspot.com ]
Paul Cézanne, "The Eternal Feminine" (c.1877)
Since I set eyes on him – The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modeled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in women its own corrective, and shows itself through this limitation implacably the master. The feminine character is a negative imprint of domination. But therefore equally bad. Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation. If the psychoanalytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration, their neurosis gives them an inkling of the truth. The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a flower because that suits her husband. The lie consists not only in the claim that nature exists where it has been tolerated and adapted, but what passes for nature in civilization is by its very substance furthest from all nature, its own self-chosen object. The femininity, which appeals to instinct, is always exactly what every woman has to force herself by violence – masculine violence – to be: a she-man. One need only have perceived, as a jealous male, how such feminine women have their femininity at their finger-tips – deploying it just where needed, flashing their eyes, using their impulsiveness – to know how things stand with the sheltered unconscious, unmarred by intellect. Just this unscathed purity is the product of the ego, of censorship, of intellect, which is why it submits so unresistingly to the reality principle of the rational order. Without a single exception feminine natures are conformist. The fact that Nietzsche’s scrutiny stopped short of them, that he took over a second-hand and unverified image of feminine nature from Christian civilization that he otherwise so thoroughly mistrusted, finally brought his thought under the sway, after all, of bourgeois society. He fell for the fraud of saying ‘the feminine’ when talking of women. Hence the perfidious advice to forget the whip: femininity itself is already the effect of the whip. The liberation of nature would be to abolish its self-fabrication. Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who bear it.
Theodor Adorno, _Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life_ (1951)
the butter melts out of habit
the toast isn't even warm
the waitress and the man in the plaid shirt
play out a scene they've played
so many times before
I am watching the sun stumble home in the morning
from a bar on the east side of town
and the coffee is just water dressed in brown
beautiful but boring
he visited me yesterday
he noticed my fingers
and asked me if I would play
I didn't really care a lot
but I couldn't think of a reason why not
I said if you don't come any closer I don't mind if you stay
my thighs have been involved in many accidents
and now I can't get insured
and I don't need to be lured by you
my cunt is built like a wound that won't heal
and now you don't have to ask
because you know how I feel
yea, you know how I feel
art is why I get up in the morning
but my definition ends there
and it doesn't seem fair
that I'm living for something I can't even define
there you are right there
in the meantime
I don't want to play for you anymore
show me what you can do
tell me what are you here for
I want my old friends
I want my old face
I want my old mind
fuck this time and place
the butter melts out of habit
you know, the toast isn't even warm
ani difranco, "out of habit" (1990)
Antonio Canova, "Venus and Mars" (1822)
POTENT
1. powerful, commanding authority, capable of achieving and possessing, forceful;
2. the ability to perform sexually, said of a male
n.b., these are not two different definitions
-the Lady of Shalott
theodor adorno
Tough Baby – There is a certain gesture of virility, be it one’s own or someone elses, that calls for suspicion. It expresses independence, sureness of the power to command, the tacit complicity of all males. Earlier, this was called, with awed respect, the whim of the master; today it has been democratized, and film heroes show the most insignificant bank clerk how it is done. Its archetype is the handsome dinner-jacketed figure returning late to his bachelor flat, switching on the indirect lighting and mixing himself a whiskey and soda: the carefully recorded hissing of the mineral water says what the arrogant mouth keeps to itself: that he despises anything that does not smell of smoke, leather and shaving cream, particularly women, which is why they, precisely, find him irresistible. For him, the ideal form of human relations is the club, that arena of respect founded on scrupulous unscrupulousness. The pleasures of such men, or rather their models, which are rarely equaled in reality, for people are even now better than their culture, all have about them a latent violence. This violence seems a threat directed against others, of whom such a one, sprawling in his easy chair, has ceased to have need. In fact, it is past violence against itself. If all pleasure has, preserved in it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whiskey, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become accustomed to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure. He-men are thus, in their own constitution, what film plots usually present them to be: masochists. Their sadism is a lie, and only as liars do they truly become sadists, agents of repression. This lie, however, is nothing other than repressed homosexuality presenting itself as the only approved form of heterosexuality. In Oxford, two sorts of student are distinguished: the tough guys and the intellectuals; the latter, through this contrast alone are almost automatically equated with the effeminate. There is much reason to believe that the ruling stratum, on its way to dictatorship, becomes polarized between these two extremes. Such disintegration is the joy of its integration, the joy of its being united in the lack of joy. In the end, the tough guys are the truly effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them. Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together. In its downfall the subject negates everything that is not of its own kind. The opposites of the strong man and the compliant youth merge in an order which asserts unalloyed the male principle of domination. In making all without exception, even supposed subjects, into its objects, this principle becomes totally passive, virtually feminine.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951)
Solomon Joseph Solomon, "Ajax and Cassandra" (1886)
