Skip to main content

Recent posts at Salon.com (July 14 2016). I'm Emporium

Jayne Cullen Algernon2 The war on pornography that is going on right now though is perhaps best understood as a war against pleasure. It is the emerging prudish attitude of the 1930s condemning Jazz Age fun as civilization-destroying. It really just isn't the time to be with those who argue that porn dehumanizes. Such times might have once existed. Not now. Best to go with Marcotte's people just having a bit of me time on occasions.
frigmous The guy walking into the nightclub and killing 49 people was walking into a "pleasure-house." The key problem of our age is that increasing numbers of people feel suddenly pure, loyal and good when they kill other people's happiness. They target people who represent the parts of themselves they are trying to gain distance from. Projection. Poison containers. Elimination: all suddenly feels pure and light, as the sin that was once part of you is gone from the world. 
Minnesotan "but I wonder if widespread access to porn hasn't actually been beneficial to society. Young people are having sex ... at historically low rates"
Young people having less sex is beneficial to society? What does society want? People who barely explore? Or those who come to know want they want through sexual adventure?
"On the contrary, this is yet another example of Trump's strategy for winning over the Christian right, by giving them all the power they demand..."
No, I don't think this is strategy. If strategy, then you know Trump thinks there is considerable amount of hokum in the idea that porn ruins civilization, but it's expedient to pretend to be a true believer. I think we'll miss understanding the psychology of our times (like how the Jazz Age 1920s changed into the grey 1930s) if we don't understand that a lot of Americans -- including Trump, and including perhaps a good number of liberals -- who previously were all aboard the idea that life ought to be about consumerism and pleasure, are doing a turn-about as sudden as if the "Marilyn Monroe" they'd fantasized in their heads had morphed into a punitive grandma... or the old naked lady in the Shining, or the old naked witch in Game of Thrones, threatening them with a stick if they masturbate or have fun at all. And that their brains decide that the best way to absolve themselves of all guilt --- Trumpy has been very bad! --  is not to heed their inner grandmas, give way to them, but to in a sense become them.
Osama bin laden was a playboy before he chose to live in holes with barely any drinking water and not a single source of fun. Not just all conservatives but unfortunately many liberals were not raised with allowance-tolerating, well-enough loved parents to endlessly tolerate the idea that life can be about fun, without at the end feeling the need to turn on the idea.
Between_The_Wheels I look at things in terms of narrative.
If I was teleported into the near future and was told that the presiding president was one who held that women were systematically discriminated against; that they still faced scepticism and dismissal, even as they evidently changed the world for the better; I would know that the liberal society I was familiar with had continued. 
If however I was told that the presiding president held that there were many groups that faced discrimination...  but that the most pronounced were evidently the working class, I wouldn't be so sure. More than likely, actually, I'd know I had teleported into a society where the gains by feminists were about to be withdrawn as the "staid and true" -- real Americans -- began to speak their mind. 
I find it a bit disconnected from the fact that evidently the nature of one's social class right now matters a whole lot more than one's sex, but still, given that the age ahead is probably not going to be a time a hippie time where everyone everywhere is considered beautiful but a time of 1930s parochialism, we'd better hope that the narrative that one's sex matters most, is the one we remain living amongst. 
"No wonder so many women suffer from imposter syndrome. When the whole world is telling you women -- including women like Hillary Clinton -- only win by cheating, it's hard not to suffer unnecessary doubts about yourself"
This is true... but it's also true that if I was a white working class male who succeeded, I wouldn't feel so comfortable that the professional class whose arena I breached, didn't think me an imposter barbarian. Someone whom in terms of actual virtue, was probably no better than your average internet troll, and should go back where he came from. 
I wish the left -- the professional class -- didn't encourage its own imposter syndrome upon others; wasn't insouciant concerning how they might be cruelly withering the self-worth and self-esteem of others. But it has not evolved beyond the psychic need for out-groups.  

I'm not sure if Sanders, Clinton or Trump deserve credit for their success. This isn't to say that if we take a good look at what they did, how they performed, they weren't objectively skilled in a way that is hard to duplicate -- they might each BE that. But that each one might mostly represent something to the American populace, and served mostly as a kind of emblem of that. Who wins might just mostly represent what kind of society we want over the next while -- what impulse, mostly, to follow upon. 
If I'm Hillary, and I win, I don't think the truth of this necessarily besmirches my accomplishments. I know I worked hard. I know I was resilient. I know I had in mind, mostly, what I might do to assist the U.S. become better (some egoism: first female president!), as much as it might not have mattered if I had not actually been all that. The nature of my sex is part of a package that the establishment, or the established -- not menacingly defined, as it means a hell of a lot of us -- was going to offer, just like Obama's race was: keep the country from falling apart; incremental change that symbolically is very telling and wonderful but sort of as part of the ongoing roll of our evolving, increasingly global, post-industrial society (without knowing it and just living, the world becomes better, and better yet). 
In this instance, it isn't a strike against "me," my sex, something to be overcome, but the next extension upon which the animus moving the world for the last several decades, implements itself -- that is, a help ... we didn't have to configure something. There is a feel-goodism about it; how wonderful we are to be part of this special moment where another of the disadvantaged makes the incredible breach! It satisfies the ego and makes us exult. 
But the push against the collective regression we might all at some level be experiencing, was going to require finding some kind of refuge in unimpregnable  virtue to keep going. And we need things to keep going. It's a dark precipice, the other way. 



Tom_Collins Sweden, Norway and Finland are also examples of profound individualism and personal freedom. The collective empowers each individual so their relationship to their businesses and their families is not a servile, dependent one. You can leave your place of work, and not find oneself without health care. You can disappoint your parents, do your own thing, and not worry that your parents would retaliate by not taking care of you if you're desperate. 
If Indigenous people's background ends up being more like this  
or as Steven Pinker accounts in "Better Angels of Our Nature," 
then I'm fairly sure the author would learn to settle for bastardized accounts. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...
3 comments
Read more

The Conjuring

The Conjuring 
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...
2 comments
Read more