Went on an impromptu museum visit with Mark Wednesday (11/15) night to look at 17th century tapestries. Mark usually likes art I usually am indifferent to, and it's always fun to hear him speak about technique, or a part that he likes. Also, this is 17th century art, so it's a little over the top, which means Theatrical Mark and John's Art Show moments.
Between Thanksgiving and fighting off some sort of illness, I did not manage to post much...
Went to the gym again Thursday (11/30/17). Back for a half-hour on the elliptical on my usual machine, and back to my usual odd 320 calories. Downstairs I did 3x15 Roman Chair curls, and skipped everything else.
On the writing front, I finally finished (11/28) a 4300 word short story. I'm OK with the ending, but it feels a little mechanical. I also got a short story rejection that was nice; it was a standard, "we've seen this sort of thing before" form rejection, but it had and admonition that it had taken a newly published new author 17 tries to break into this particular market and to "never surrender, never give up."
On the essay front, I recently read an opinion piece: Stephen Marche's "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido." In wild summary, the opinion piece goes something like this:
Men's libidos are out of control and their beliefs about sexual equality and cultural appropriateness have no impact on their sexual misbehavior. The nature of men is about their grotesque sexuality; men are pigs, with ugly and dangerous libidos. We should fear the male libido, which is unexamined in personal and intellectual circles. Men don't have a social network for examination of their sexuality, often defaulting to aspiring to be better feminists. Freud says men must repress their libidos. Sex is an impediment to any idealism. Social righteousness only takes us so far, and shame is on the rise as a sexual control. How can we have nice things if the mechanisms of male sexual desire are brutal? We must examine male sexuality -- and deal with the fact that men are monsters -- to find the answers.
I think the overall tone of the piece is anti-sex and that men are damaged goods--which makes me instantly suspicious that the author is selling self-help. However, I agree with his call to have men examine male sexuality. And I agree that sexual harassment is unacceptable. But he seems to be stuck in a hetero-normative-Freudian-Joseph-Campbell-"Brute-of-a-Thousand-FacesConcupiscent " world view when he complaims about getting into a world where there is sexual equality and men's sexual expression.
Folks like Harry Hay have explored subject-subject consciousness as an antidote to the sexually exploitative subject-object consciousness; and Starhawk has offered the concept of Power-With as an alternative to hierarchical Power-Over. But Marche seems to be unaware of these different approaches to people loving their partners, and focuses on men as monsters instead.
The piece relminds me a little of a passage from CS Lewis, wherein he opined that men have an animal nature and a devilish nature, leaving out their angelic or higher nature. I guess that's the danger of having a transcendent, body-mind-body-spirit theology instead of an immanent one.
And it also reminds me the Minotaur... and centaurs.. and fauns... and the comcuspant company of Pan. I think Marche is wrong to say that we have to suppress the male libido, so much as we have to link it to and direct it with -- like the charioteer in the tarot card "The Chariot" -- the rest of our drives and desires.
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