…and for my friend, we just don’t have enough facts to make a decision on whether or not to leave Iraq. And our leaders of course have more facts.

And did I mention, there are also Manly Expletives involved. And lots of capitalized words with exclanation points (I think the Manly Expletives might be necessary to offset the somewhat fem cachet exuded by the exclamation points).

May 9, 2006

Put a stake through Freud’s heart
By Spengler

The psychiatric profession observed the 150th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth on May 6. My modest proposal for the event is to exhume his body and put a stake through his heart. Freud’s Viennese contemporary Karl Kraus quipped that psychoanalysis was “a disease posing as a cure”. Kraus was closer to the truth than he could have imagined.

No one did more than Freud to reduce women to sexual objects, a condition against which women rebel by seeking to destroy the objectified body. Epidemic self-destructiveness has reached proportions that are difficult to grasp. Eating disorders reportedly threaten the lives of 10 million American women. [1] “Anorexia or bulimia

in florid or sub-clinical form now afflicts 40% of women at some time in their college career,” wrote the journal Psychology Today. [2]

Self-harm often accompanies self-starvation, and millions of these women also mutilate themselves. One study claims that up to one in seven British adolescents self-harms, but up to half of those enmeshed in the “Goth” subculture do so. In the US, a recent survey of 1,000 pupils at one secondary school found that one-quarter had deliberately harmed themselves. [3] Some British hospitals dispense “self-harm kits”, including razors and antiseptics.

What impels so many young people in Anglo-Saxon countries toward slow-motion suicide? It is easy to blame the undernourished wraiths who haunt the runways of the fashion industry for disseminating a twisted ideal of beauty that lures young women into anorexia. But that cannot be a complete explanation, because anorexics starve themselves into extreme ugliness, and in many cases mutilate themselves as well. These women are not enhancing their bodies, but rejecting them altogether.

Freud claimed to have discovered the source of all neurosis in the repression of the sexual impulse, or libido. In fairness, Freud did not think repression was a bad thing, for without it society would disintegrate. The object of psychoanalysis was not to spread universal joy, but to proceed “from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness”. He did not count on the adolescent narcissism of the 1960s, when the complacent and affluent youth of the industrial world demanded something better than ordinary unhappiness. Freud provided the ideological foundation for the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, and popularized versions of his theory dominated popular culture.

All the major religions of the world attempt to sanctify the family; Freud sought to expose it as a hypocritical viper’s nest of neurosis. Religion, he taught, totemized power relations; God was the projected form of the castrating father. The mother provides sexual pleasure to the infant she nurses, whose initial polymorphous perverse sexuality focuses upon the mother; the authority of the father then represses the son’s sexual fixation on the mother through the threat of castration, while little sister laments the lack of a penis. Such a chamber of horrors cannot be entrusted with the upbringing of children, the left interpreted Freud. Sexuality must be severed from reproduction, through abortion, equal status for homosexuality, and so forth.

Few psychiatrists today defend Freud’s sexual derivation of neurosis, but the damage was done. Sexual liberation remains the core of the social agenda of the left. In US politics, the most embittered battles are fought over gay marriage and abortion, not war and taxes. For adolescents in the industrial world, however, the battle was lost a generation ago. Seeking a sexual outlet in the companionship of one’s peers now is more common than the search for romantic attachments among American adolescents. New York Times journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis reported in a 2004 feature:
Over the course of several months spent hanging out and communicating online with nearly 100 high-school students (mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class suburban and exurban teenagers from the northeast and Midwest), I heard the same thing: hooking up is more common than dating …

A 2001 survey conducted by Bowling Green State University in Ohio found that of the 55% of local 11th-graders who engaged in intercourse, 60% said they’d had sex with a partner who was no more than a friend. That number would perhaps be higher if the study asked about oral sex. While the teen intercourse rate has declined – from 54% in 1991 to 47% in 2003 – this may be partly because teenagers have simply replaced intercourse with oral sex. To a generation raised on MTV, AIDS, Britney Spears, Internet porn, Monica Lewinsky and Sex and the City, oral sex is definitely not sex (it’s just ”oral”), and hooking up is definitely not a big deal. [4]
Women enter adolescence with the expectation that they will be used but not loved. Men no longer need to feign affection to receive sexual favors; they merely need ask. It is no surprise that young women have come to despise their bodies, some to the point of destroying them. Women can expect only a brief flowering of beauty before age and child-bearing attenuate their sexual attraction. The love of a life partner, the shared love of their children, the honor of the community and the knowledge that the human life cycle is linked to something eternal are the consolations to women for the loss of their beauty.

Sexual objectification, I wrote elsewhere (Women as priests? Women never forgive anything!, April 27, 2005), makes women paranoid:
Whether this is a cultural quirk subject to eventual remedy or a characteristic of humankind since the Fall is a different matter. Adolescent girls suffer the most. The therapists talk of “low self-esteem”, but this amounts to uncertainty as to what features of a developing form will attract the opposite sex. If a woman succeeds in manipulating a man on the strength of her value as a sexual object, she never can be sure that another woman will not (or has not already done) the same thing with greater success. The most attractive woman in the world is a miserable creature, as Giuseppe Verdi’s Princess Eboli lamented, because her physical presence will overwhelm any other perception of her in the eyes of men. When age eventually destroys her beauty, she will be left with nothing at all.
Having cured society of repression by making sexual pleasure a commodity, enlightened opinion is shocked, shocked to discover an epidemic of depression. In consequence some 70 million Americans have taken anti-depressants. Psychotropic drugs, I hasten to add, work miracles for many who suffer from imbalances of brain chemistry, and I mean no criticism of psychopharmacology in general. But the vast numbers involved suggest that a spiritual ailment is epidemic for which anti-depressants cannot be the solution.

To whom do families turn when a child starves or mutilates herself? There is nowhere to turn but to the psychiatric profession, the “disease posing as a cure”. That is not only an exaggeration, but thoroughly unfair: thousands of well-meaning therapists, including many with strong religious convictions, seek daily to keep children from destroying themselves, and I do not mean to diminish their contributions. But the prevalent notion that self-destructive behavior stems from a malfunction in adolescent brain chemistry, or an idiosyncratic neurotic disorder, does not square with the epidemic manifestation of symptoms.

The therapeutic community has perfectly valid explanations for anorexia and self-harm at the individual level. But it reminds me of a doctor who explains with great precision how a metal object has passed through your body wreaking damage on various organs without also mentioning that the city in which you live is subject to aerial bombardment. Without addressing the cultural catastrophe, the therapeutic profession will be hard put to save many of the individuals.

If Freud were allowed a rejoinder, doubtless he would remind us of the “death drive” that he purported to discover in the human psyche in the aftermath of World War I. Perhaps he would blame the “death drive” for the morbid refusal to reproduce that condemns most of the industrial world to depopulation and eventual extinction, not to mention the epidemic of suicide attacks in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. The trouble with the “death drive” is that some people seem to have one and others don’t. With a sexual “life force” and a “death drive” (which Freud attributed to a desire to return to mother’s womb), you can explain everything and nothing.

Human beings are not beasts content with daily fodder and rutting in season. To be sentient is to be sentient of one’s mortality. The status of wife and mother in a family within a community offers women an honored position and a link to the eternal. Sexual objectification leaves women with a foretaste of death, and it should be no surprise that Freud’s program drives women into deadly behavior.

It will take long and painful efforts to repair the damage, but putting a stake through the old reprobate’s heart is not a bad way to begin.

Notes
1. Statistics: Eating Disorders and their Precursors, National Eating Disorders Association.
2. Psychology Today, November/December 2004, p 62.
3. Self-harm study takes top prize, Knoxville News Sentinel, April 26.
4. Friends, friends with benefits and the benefits of the local mall, New York Times Magazine, May 30, 2004.

of course another description of “steely eyed” might be “a fixed psychotic stare characteristic of those who clamber up water towers toting rifles in order to take pot shots at passing citizens.”

or the vacant, fixed and dissociated gaze of male patrons in strip clubs.

or the unwavering confident expression of the professional card sharp…

but yes, there’s a lot of gendered rank-pulling in those tropes.

interesting that you should put nuclear tech at the far end of a continuum including murder/rape/war… I’d have put them fairly close together… or is it the “dryness” and technocratic quality of the discourse that makes the continuum, from physical acts of rape and murder and skullf*cking to a similar mentality of domination and control “civilised” and hiding behind that neutral (it isn’t really) “scientific” prose style?

Something in the main essay and the ensuing discussion made a light bulb go off over my head about the linkage between what had been two seemingly disparate but supposedly related topics: On the one hand, there is violence against women and patriarchal violence in general (whether or not specifically directed against women); on the other hand, there is the existence of formal, logical, scientific, “neutral” activity and discourse which is also a part of patriarchy.

I have a friend with whom I maintain occasional discussions via email about the Iraq war. He is best described as a “centrist democrat” politically, meaning he has instrumental objections (ie as to how it’s handled) to the Bush admin’s conduct of the war — but the idea of just killing innocent people (never with malicious intent, of course) is not in itself a bad thought for him. In our discussions, he had characteristically waxed a bit bombastic (“so you say X’s position is useless dreck, huh” and so on) and I was replying in kind (“well, yes, it’s dreck, and worse than useless…”) — but at a certain point I decided to get a bit less dramatic in my language, while at the same time not conceding an emotional stake in what we were discussing. I then noticed that a lot of his language was in subtle ways “feminizing” my discourse. For instance, in an effort to pre-empt my reaction to something rather outrageous he had quoted (about how European fascists make a lot of sense on immigration problems) he characterized my imagined reponse as a “hissy fit.” He also chided me for not getting sufficiently exercised about “steely-eyed realists’” assessment of the possibility of a suitcase bomb. I then realized that a lot of his discourse was an attempt to construct his positions as the “adult” or “grownup” positions and to place those of us who might think otherwise amongst the “dewy-eyed idealist” crowd (read, “weepy girls”).

Now, with this discussion about the various levels of consciousness and intention in patriarchal discourse, I feel (at least intuitively) that I can fit the type of discourse I just mentioned in the previous paragraph into its place on a continuum that stretches from murder, rape, war on the one end all the way to say nuclear technology on the other.

I wasn’t sure which place to post this (either on the elections discussions on this site or on gender discussions) because it is at the intersection of the topics. Anyway, the question is: what will feminists do in 2008 if for example the Dems nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton (very possible) or the Reps nominate Condoleeza Rice (not very probable)?

What if one is either on tactical considerations organizing for HRC or on principle organizing against Rice or even both of them?

I ask this because so much (if not most) of the anti-HRC stuff is, as we all know, really just a bunch of woman-baiting without any real content other than being prime examples of classic phallolalia. I haven’t noticed a lot of what leftyboys are saying about CR so I don’t know what is going on there, but I assume there are similar issues there — or does her racial status make this a kapu topic for leftyboys?

And let’s say one does for tactical reasons decide to work for Dems to win the presidency (a la Stan Goff 2006) and that

1) HRC is the Dem nominee and some guy is the Rep nominee

OR

2) some guy is the DEM nominee and CR is the Rep nominee

OR

3) HRC is the Dem nominee and CR is the Rep nominee

It would seem to me that in the latter two cases, one’s opposition to the Reps could be conflated in others’ mind as misogynist (case 2) and/or racist (cases 2 and 3) — and the Reps would be sure to play it as such, hoping to peel away hitherto impossible support from women and people of color.

In the case where both major parties nominate women and the Reps nominate a woman of color (case 3), we shall see a test of the idea mentioned by DeNander that racist (public of course) discourse is at this juncture in our society kapu while misogynist language is more acceptable. I bet Rove or whoever his successor is, is working on this one.

Could the most useful thing that feminists do in 2008 be to call those on whichever “side” (Red or Blue) in this ritual combat on their boysh**t? Might it even be more important than who wins the presidency that year?

Aha. That explains it. John, you need help. Read this

Antisocial Personality Disorder
Diagnostic Criteria
There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:
failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest
deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure
impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults
reckless disregard for safety of self or others
consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations
lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

***********

I think the rest of us should just ignore this guy. Or better yet, politely escort him out the door.

Dostoevskey, Dos Passos, Faulkner and Fitzgerald certainly never shied from presenting the sexist and/or racist content of public opinion. The words they used never fit in a lexicon of the “correct”.

Their greatness stems, instead, from framing language and syntax such that the loneliness, the oppression, and the permanent feeling of the worlds they evoke becomes palpable for other times, other witnesses, and other perspectives.

Writers use words to make the feeling of a feeling transcend time. And sometimes the ugliest word might just do.

So it will not not do to impugn language, or to ban word X or word Y.

A ‘clusterfuck’ is a failed attempt to conjugate an arrangement (cluster), to conjugate a verb (or action/fuck). Given the infinitely malleable semantics of ‘fuck’ itself, let’s not not trip about the word’s possible usage.

Instead, let’s recognize that as prisoners of language and empire, it’s up to us to refine words until they begin to speak for us, and not against us.

In which case, it’s much less a matter of denunciation, than it is a matter of enunciation. Not what should or shouldn’t be said, but what can we say?

From this perspective, the pattern of Billmon’s faux pas are less a matter for critique than they are a matter for contemplation.

How can we formulate a language of resistance that is as compelling as the language of reaction?

Something tells me he won’t be allying himself with local feminists to confront the trafficking of women in papers like the Westword.

Imagine my shock.

Do men like this always bail when cornered by their own hypocrisy?