Letters to the Editor
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re: here are gay assholes and straight assholes
nothing to say, just thought that was funny...
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the only INSTINCTIVE EMOTIONAL reason why men care about their accomplshments etc etc
being recgonized is so that women will view them the same way women complain about being veiwd by men i.e someone who they want to have sex with. In other words men have to work to bring themselves up to the level that women are born at and can't stop complaining about. I know that this isn't how most people choose to discuss the issue but this is the real reason it is so hot (not in a good way).
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Sisterhood's Still Powerful
Ange, you suggest supporting women no matter what they do. I understand. When I slowly recognized, in my 20s, that we are all inheritors of the same soul-crushing class and discrimination realities, all over the globe, that tore it. We're sisters, and that's just it. Likewise, I also came through the fiery times with a far deeper compassion for the inculcated wounds of men.
The distinction I've come to is similar to the Christian adage, "Hate the sin but love the sinner." The raw empathy I feel for women is permanent. I love my sisters and I know the only thing wrong with me and them in terms of our relationship to our bodies is a type of mental illness triggered by the incessant sound of a cultural drumbeat that has not only never hushed but has gotten louder. It can drown out confidence and moral sense just as poisoned rhetoric can drive a country into war.
So, I don't support women's decisions to have their breasts cut open and plastic bags of water stuffed in them. I think it's mentally unhealthy and, beyond that, tragic.
High-heeled shoes are super if you are a goat, prefer your spine to beome arthritic decades sooner than is normal, do not want the ability to be firmly and confidently connected to the ground as you stand and walk, and believe that when you look like a Barbie doll there would never, ever, be reason to run.
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"femininity"
"Given that men will do ANYTHING for a hot woman, they may be sort of right."
Here's the rub.
If desire (let's leave "nature" out of this, shall we?) is an economy, women have the lion's market-share, at least in our culture.
It is perhaps too easy to contend that the extent to which women actively play into male fantasies, and play up the "femininity" that men don't seem to understand, has so little to do with the biological reality of women. In fact, it would to be just a way (maybe the only way) of accessing the very power from which something like "phallogocentrism" would have them cut-off.
If Baudrillard is right, and, as he says in earlier work, "femininity" is nothing other than the hysterical projection of the femininity men experience in themselves onto women (in such a way as to thereby exorcise it), a sort of uncertainty principle, it seems yet another reason to feel how especially ridiculous it is that our culture continues to appeal to a biological basis for gender. The secret women aren't telling is that they don't believe in their own femininity. It is not hard to imagine why someone like poor fin-de-siecle Victorian Dora was hysterical. What is "femininity" but hysteria? (With no room for sublimation, what is there for the overly libidinous/repressed women but the performance of femininity for surplus discharge?)
In my experience, it is men who need monogamy, and exert more psychological effort to codify and guard its cultural significance. It is men who can't bear the thought of "their" woman with another man's hands on her. If men weren't jealous, women would happily accept whichsoever male seemed like he had a shot at fulfilling her so-confusingly-polymorphous needs. It is men who mythologize motherhood so that abortion is a sin.
Freud understood this so many years ago. Kipnis really does push psychoanalysis (from what I can tell) to the limits, in this new books. I'd read it.
P.S. For the literalists with no sense of humor: This is obviously meant to be fast and loose. Duh.
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Fire fight
Thank you to all that understood what I was trying to share when I wrote about an incident that occured Friday night. It was pretty shocking to see the anger and venom spouted back at me. I didn't expect it. I wonder where it's coming from? It's pretty clear I touched or scratched a very primal nerve. We are in murky waters here, sex is difficult and dangerous and potent stuff. It makes people mad and it makes us all crazy.
But, what the story was for me wasn't really about sex. It was presented that way, and the language surrounding it was sexual certainly, but for me what it was really about was that I was demeaned as being sexual. You understand the difference I'm trying to make? That my worth was nothing other than that. I could have never been a pal, or a business contact, or anything else. I was reduced down to basic fuckability and nothing more.
And to add some clarity which I didn't include in the first post, I told the person (who insulted me) that I was having a screenplay reading of an optioned work this week and he told me he worked for a movie producer that was looking for content. Hence I invited him, and hence my card actually was an attempt to network. So the insult was deeply felt, because in all honesty it wasn't a sexual play. And Hell, we all get rejected, not a big deal. It happens out in the world. I have made plays and they have fallen flat. I'm a big girl, I get over it. No big deal. This was really about respect. He never would have dissed a male collegue he had just met like that to a group of people, including the person I came with. Do you understand the frustration in that? It's as if I was a black person and he used a horrible term when I left the room. The fact that this behaviour happens so often, and I've been so attacked here for my spelling (please) for my grammar (oh miss priss!) for my identifying my friend as gay (oh terror!) for all the things I tried to explain as a set up, suggest to me that empathy and compassion is truly in short supply in a quickly falling Rome. Bless the men and women who have written and shared their own stories and support. It's a tough world we live in and it appears to be getting tougher all the time. Keep the faith.