Upheaval

Am moving tomorrow to embark upon life as a 'serious' student. Will be offline until next week sometime.

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Sex & Glamasochism

I find myself disagreeing with k-punk's post on sex/glamasochism for a number of reasons so I thought that I would write something about it as it is interesting and fraught with a number of questions/problems that I feel need to be thought about.

The first thing is the quote from Infinite Thought that 'sex is boring' (thought I don't think this is meant to be taken entirely literally on N.'s part). Sex is not boring' I can say that with absolute certainty (one of the few things that I am certain about). Sex can be boring, especially teenage fumbling that never knows quite what goes where, embarrassed giggles and the occasional painful penetration. But age definitely lends an amount of experience and sex becomes far more interesting and pleasurable. I am loath to use the word sex, I find it an incredibly banal word, 'making love' makes it sound like something sweet (which it isn't either)... I prefer fucking... it's a good word, it has connotations of passion and violence. Anyway, sex/fucking/whatever, does not necessarily have to include the actual act of penetration, there are a lot of sexual acts and there's few that I find boring. I find it hard to find intense experiences of pleasure boring. If someone were to say ask me what I thought of a wonderful meal I wouldn't say 'that was boring,' I would say, 'that was lush, I enjoyed it... give me more please ,' the same goes for sex.

So, first point out of the way. Sex is not boring and just because someone, anyone writes that it is doesn't mean that the physical act is. However, discourse on sex is boring and this is perhaps where the tension arises. Discourse on Eroticism is incredibly interesting (who doesn't enjoy reading Bataille, Masoch or Deleuze's 'Coldness and Cruelty?') The two need to be separated and yet one often implicates the other. Teenage fumblings are not erotic' they are experimentation, curiousity' something that needs to be developed. Sex is not necessarily erotic, and yet it can be erotic; that depends on what one finds erotic. To say that all people find the same things erotic is a gross exaggeration. This was quite amusingly demonstrated to me once by a lecturer who was giving a class on eroticism and who had built it up by saying that it was going to be incredibly exciting. When we walked into the classroom he had an ohp of a woman in a snorkel and mask on the wall. 'What is this?' We exclaimed, 'this is not exciting, this is definitely not sexual.' But for certain people it would be incredibly erotic, it would be their fetish, something that banal and seemingly boring can arouse intense erotic feelings in a person. The erotic can be found anywhere; feet, snorkels, the female form, a certain smell or taste but for a lot of people an erotic moment is found in the build up, or the act of sex. Perhaps the sexual act is as banal as the snorkel and mask (just as the snorkel and mask don't need discourse, neither does the sexual act) but the erotic moment that is possible in relation to that act is interesting, and can be written about.

Okay... where am I now? Sex is not boring, it is an intensely pleasurable experience that we should be allowed to enjoy; discourse on sex is boring; discourse on eroticism is interesting. Onto 'glamasochism,' I have some serious problems with this idea, I'll try to write something about it first of all in relation to Masoch and to Deleuze's 'Coldness and Cruelty' (though I haven't finished it and a lusty wench has my copy so I'm unable to quote) and then what I think about it all.

The valorisation / fetishization of the female form has a number of problems. Of course I am a great advocate of women using their bodies for whatever they wish ('it is my body, if I want to sell it it's my own business') but this is entirely different from allowing a cult of the female form to come about. I find in Masoch that it is not Severin but Wanda who becomes more trapped by the confines of their contract. Severin projects a vision of the perfect female onto her and it is up to her to live up to it, to push herself into a creation that just is not reasonable for any woman. She must be Venus in Furs because it was what he wants her to be, he is the instructor, the manipulator, the sculptor of a living woman into the statue that he sees in the garden. Wanda becomes his tool in the pursuit of his idealist fantasy. As Deleuze points out (correct me if I'm wrong as it's been a while since I've read it), masochism is about suspension. Therefore it was Wanda who becomes suspended by Severin, unable to become-other and it is Severin who is the true Master of the relationship, despite his crying about being her eternal slave. And Wanda, as Wanda, can never live up to his ideal because it is his ideal, not hers. It is not surprising that she eventually leaves for someone else for who can ever live up to someone else's ideal? Especially when it remains unchanging and stifling.

The problem with 'glamasochism' then is that it places an ideal onto the female which really is not there. I am happy enough for men to look at women, I agree that the female form can be beautiful, but to look at women as this masochistic ideal places them within a contract that cannot be conformed to and which can eventually create intense neuroses by creating an unrealistic image of woman. As Mark says, The profound and inherent perversity of glamasochism, by contrast, lies in its departure from sexuality in the direction of a wholly artificialized or synthetic eroticism . And that is exactly the problem with it. It as an artificial ideal of woman that we cannot, nor do we want to, live up to. It is a rare woman who would want to be Venus in Furs, to fit into that category, but if we propound this image, this idealized female, we will create as many problems for the woman who can not be Venus as for the man who feels incomplete because he does not have enough sex. And when it comes down to it, the woman who is placed upon that pedestal and idealised will eventually fall because every person is flawed and no one can ever live up to another's ideal (as Wanda proved). Fine, has your fantasies about women but do not expect any woman to live up to them because in the end they are only fantasies. We aren't really erogenous zones, or zones of intensities or anything else like that. We are people who are as flawed as men, with as many issues and problems and we don't need any more by being told that we are something which we really are not.

It seems that all glamasochism does is exchange the neuroses that are generated in men and attempts to create new ones for woman. This is obviously not the intention but that is what would happen because I, nor any other female, can not be that woman . What is needed instead is an acceptance that sex is not everything, that it does not shape our lives and that we cannot place are own unrealistic ideals upon other people. This is difficult within a capitalist society which places so much emphasis upon sex and image and even if we do do it, if we attempt to live outside the enforced body image and what it means to be a sexual being, it does not mean that we have to completely damn sex, discount it as boring because 'I,' the rational entity, do not need it. If you find sex boring, fine. But Foucault can write about it in a book, or anyone else for that matter, and that does not mean that it is true (what does sex have to do with truth anyway?)

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bellus nusquam

I was listening to my internal dialogue a few nights back and it was babbling away as usual and suddenly I came to an awareness that at some point the endless chattering would come to an end, that I would not be there anymore and that I wouldn't have to listen to myself thinking nonsense. It is a very strange feeling to in a moment become aware of your finite nature. I thought about this for a while, and enjoyed the strangeness of it; it's not a feeling that it is possible to put into words so I'll just say that it was disconcerting but pleasurable in an uncomfortable way.

That line of thinking lead me to think that it didn't really matter what I did when I was actually alive since inevitably I'm going to die and after a number of years no one will remember who I was and it won't have mattered in the grander scheme of things. But what grander scheme of things? At some point the sun will explode and then the earth and even the solar system won't exist anymore, like they had never been there. And then everything that anyone ever did will just be wiped out (who cares about minor-becomings or Dasein now?) What is the point of doing anything that you don't want to do when eventually it won't matter, not even to the human species as it won't exist?

But more than that... I thought, what if the Universe implodes? This is a far off thought, a time scale that I can't even think about but it confirmed to me even more how finite I really am. Not only will I die and decay, not only will our solar system be annihilated, but I cannot possibly conceive of an existence beyond our own universe. It is completely impossible to think it. I remember my cosmology lecturer telling me that there could be anything out there, even crazy dragons or monsters, we will never know. I remember thinking when I was young that the edge of the Universe was like when Bugs Bunny would run off the edge of the screen and onto a white background... maybe that is what it is like but the only thing I can be sure about is that I can never know. This brought me even more before my finite nature and confirmed to me that there are things that I can never know. I can study forever but I will never know what exists after the Universe!!!

Now I can read philosophy because I want to and whether it's useful or not doesn't matter. My mum asks me why I want to do my MA over 2 years, I tell her because I want to make the most of it. She asks me then what, I reply probably travel a bit and then a PhD. She and my Dad want me to get a career and make some money, I ask them why I need money.. they want me to be secure, to have a future... I think that it doesn't matter, I don't have a future... I can save money my whole life and in the end I don't actually need it.

An acceptance of death, of finiteness and the shortfallings of our little brains is not a terrible thing as one might expect. I find it liberating to know that I really can do whatever I want because all there is in the end is nothingness; no one to judge, no one to care, nothing except the blank screen that only Bugs Bunny et al can get to. It makes life more of an affirmation really... a short space of time in which one can do what one wants, certain of the fact that the sun will gobble up this shite piece of rock and incinerate whatever remains of the human race.

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novus populus

Yet again have updated my linklist... it continues to grow and sooner or later it's going to have to be trimmed. Rhizomes are well and good but sometimes it's fun to chop away a tuber or two.

First is Unhalfbricking, another branch of the Old Rottenhat collective. I'm enjoying Unhalfbricking's dive into autonomy and, of course, I'm always partial to interesting people from my own country.

Another welcome addition is johneffay's sweet effay over at cinestatic. Johneffay... serial commentator now blogger, perhaps the only bonus to the removal of K-punk's comment boxes is that john has been moved to carve out his own space on the internet.


Pas Au-dela (sorry, don't know how to do the accent on the a :( ). Matt is another philosophy type blog which I'm always glad to see and he writes very nicely on people like Agamben, Tarkovsky and Blanchot.

Paul meme @ Shard, Fragments and Totems who unfortunately likes the new song Babycakes and thinks that I'm a miserablist but diversity is good and he's had a beautiful baby boy, congratulations!

I've been talking to Philip from It's all in your mind for a while on yahoo (Me = boot_of_glue) so it's about time that I put him on my list, not least because he makes some very good points about the trash that is Girls Aloud.

Also added are Loki @ An Idiots Guide to Dreaming (who likes Preacher too :) ) whom I stole from Johneffay and bat stolen from Infinite Though who I haven't had much of a chance to read yet but who looks interesting.

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Back in the South

Well... I'm back in London and have come to the conclusion that Newcastle is a better city than London. The air is clean, the taxi drivers are good craic and the streets aren't full of crazies. Anyway, I'm only in this stinky city for another 5 days before I'm off to Uni to sleep in a place where old people have died.

I have posts to make but am recovering from serious abuses over the weekend so they may be shite.

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Calling all parents

According to the TV you must buy the Daily Mail this Saturday in order to get their encyclopedia. For those of you who aren't quite convinced on the matter due to the generally disturbing nature of the publication (though I must say I am totally convinced and plan on buying it on the small chance there might be a future generation of miniboots), the TV reminds us 'Go on! You owe it to your kids!!'

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fisticuffs

I am wondering if anyone knows of any decent kick-boxing/martial arts/boxing (not boxercise) classes in the Warwick area. This is for two reasons: 1) We are about to enter the yearly fitboot period which consists of giving up smoking and frantic exercise for about 2 months, 2) I like to hit people. I don't mean hitting just anyone, but there is definitely something satisfying about having a fight. It has been quite a few years (though not that many considering my youthful age) since I have been in a really bitter, out and out cat fight. The first time I fought, indeed all the times I have fought, was in Belfast. I must have been about 13 and I got pounced by two local millies (N. Ireland female derivative of chav/spide etc) who decided they didn't like me. That was more of a taking a kicking really, seeing as there was two on one and they were both about 3 years older than me. In this particular period of my life fighting was intermittent and vicious as it tends to be in such ghettoized areas of the country.

My most memorable scuffle was with a girl who slept with my best friend's boyfriend. This was not just because she was a girl who had slept with a friend's boyfriend but because she had been a close friend of ours and fucked us over. In that situation I was literally incandescent with rage and it wasn't long before she was lain out and I had to be dragged off to calm down (but my my, isn't she uncouth?). The backlash was immense however when her 14stone friend attacked my little 7st self and I felt the weight of a modern day behemoth atop me.

Anyway... I digress as per usual. Nowadays I'm far too liberal and civilised (perhaps one might say bourgeois?) to become embroiled in thrashing or taking a thrashing, but I still enjoy it. I attempted boxing for a while with a personal trainer friend of mine. In his foolishness he decided not to wear head protection so I cracked him in the face and the blood gushed from his nose (ha ha). There is something incredibly satisfying about violent outbursts and physical rushes of rage. There's no one who really sees me angry anymore, not because I contain my anger but because I find little to be angry about... too disinterested and distant to care about anyone else. I mean, really, the world is too crap too waste that much energy on. But I can't wait for the day when someone makes me so furious that I completely blow up... it has been a long time, too long probably. Until then I will probably just rationally argue away any upsets and fight in controlled environments. Battles, they say, should be fought with words, but I think that if words are not enough that it's perfectly logical to use your fists.

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Insomnia

I can't sleep. I was lying in bed, thinking pre-sleep thoughts and realised that I had bored myself. Is this a common occurance? Do people often bore themselves with their own thoughts? I don't tend to. But tonight I thought 'Why are you thinking about that again? That's fucking boring.' This is different from my normal state of boredom which usually involves a switching off of mind state, strict lethargy and staring at walls. I usually enjoy my pre-sleep thinktime. Tonight I bored myself as if another person had bored me. Now I can't sleep because it is bothering me, and I can't read because I'm too tired to focus on the page, and I can't watch TV because it's shite but I can't go to bed because my thoughts are so dull!

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What when?

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Note: My email address has changed. It can be found on the links bar on the right. I'm now with gmail and have a ridiculous amounts of space so people can send me silly pictures and I won't have to delete them.

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