Infatuation is one part sexual desire, one part restlessness, and one part misdirected love of the Good.
Category: Sex, Love, Lust
Clinton Redux
Here:
In the past few days a number of notable liberals have decided to take allegations of sexual assault against former president Bill Clinton seriously. Let’s just say that discarding the Clintons when they’re no longer politically useful to retroactively grab the higher moral ground isn’t exactly an act of heroism. But if we’re going to re-litigate history, let’s get it right.
Hugh Hefner’s Legacy
Here:
Divorce, broken homes, bankruptcy, generations of children raised by a single parent, sexually-transmitted diseases, addiction, AIDs, early death, loneliness, despair, guilt, spiritual ruin, and 58 million innocent children butchered in the one place they should be safest, in their own mother’s womb.
Read it all. I am not clear, however, how the libertarian opening coheres with the sequel.
Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner
Here:
Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.
Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.
Camille Paglia does not merit the plenary MavPhil endorsement, but C. P. is a good partial antidote to P. C. , and she never fails to entertain.
You may enjoy this critical piece: Camille Paglia on Philosophy and Women in Philosophy.
Was Hefner a Condition of the Possibility of Post-’60s Feminism?
By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex objects for use (and sometimes abuse) in the satisfaction of the insatiable (and now unconstrained) male libido.
If Linker's claim is that no sort of post-1960s feminism could have arisen without Hef's mainstreaming of pornography, valorization of male hedonism, and overthrow of received sexual norms, then I doubt it. A sort of equity feminism could have arisen without the Hefnerian excesses and without women aping the basest elements in men. I'd be interested in hearing what Christina Hoff Sommers would have to say about this.
That Playboy was a necessary condition of the possibilility of Playgirl is a more credible claim than that the Playboy lifestyle was a necessary condition of the possibility of the rise of any sort of worthwhile post-1960s feminism.
Hugh Hefner Dead at 91
There is so much to say.
For now, just this: If you have devoted your whole soul to the enjoyment and promotion of the pleasures of the flesh, then you had better hope that the soul dissolves with the dissolution of the body. Contemporaries will think that of course it does, but it is not quite obvious, is it?
Hef thought of himself as a liberator and good person. But then I think of all the abortions, all the betrayals, all the marriages and families destroyed by the sexual revolution to which Hef was a major contributor.
Guardian article here.
David French, Hugh Hefner's Legacy of Despair
Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Here:
"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it's dawned on me that he was right.
What Do Women Want?
"They want dangerous men who are civilized." (Jordan Peterson)
Like it or not, it's true.
The Role of Reich in the Widening Gyre
Wilhelm that is. I read his The Function of the Orgasm many moons ago, not long after I read a reference to him and his orgone accumulators in Kerouac's On the Road, which made it onto the Amazon 100 list. The Orgasm book did not. Neither did Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, also in my library.
The Relativity of Lived Time
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939:
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long.
A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight. It is mostly self-therapy, a working though of his misery and maladjustment and self-loathing. For example,
And one can understand the innate, ravening loneliness in every man, seeing how the thought of another man consummating the act with a woman — any woman — becomes a nightmare, a disturbing awareness of a foul obscenity, an urge to stop him, or if possible destroy him. Can one really endure that another man — any man — should commit with any woman the act of shame? Noooo. Yet this is the central activity of life, beyond question. . . . However saintly we may be, it disgusts and offends us to know that another man is screwing. (p.64)
Has the poet come too much under the influence of Stile Nuovo? There is the tendency of romantics, and Italians are romantics, to put women on pedestals and make 'angels' of them. The thought of sexual intercourse, were it possible, with an angel or with a woman one has angelicized is admittedly repulsive.
Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes.
Related: Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners
Summer of Love, Winter of Decline
The down side of the 'sixties.
The counter-culture validated styles of living once considered coarse, delinquent, tragic, or mad. It was said to be about Love. Was that eros, or philia, or agape? One cannot be sure, but the gross hypersexualization of entertainment and culture since suggests eros, down and dirty.
The point is essentially correct, but I would add needed nuance by making a tetrapartite distinction among eros, philia, agape, and sexus. It is true that the word eros puts most in mind of sex, raw and raunchy, down and dirty. And it is true that eros, the love of the lower for the higher, is often mixed with purely sexual desire and sometimes perverted by it. But the love of the spiritually empty for that which might fulfill them is erotic, even when freed of the sexual. The longing love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the love of Wisdom, the love of God are not examples of philia or agape. Philia is friendship, and friendship is between equals. But I am not the equal of Wisdom or Justice or the Good; I merely aspire to be wise, just, and good.
This aspiration for the higher is erotic. But it may be best to introduce a different word to ward off confusion: the aspiration is erothetic. In a decadent, corrupt, sex-saturated society any talk of eros and the erotic is bound to be misunderstood. Erothetic love is love that aspires and seeks to acquire. It is rooted in need and lack, spiritual need and lack.
As for agape, it is the love of the higher for the lower. It is a love that bestows, grants, helps. To put the point in a way that exploits the ambiguity of the genitive construction, the love of God (objective genitive) is erothetic; the love of God (subjective genitive) is agapic. The same goes for the love of Christ. God does not lack anything; nor does he aspire or seek to acquire. The divine plenitude does not allow for aspiration or acquisition.
My point, then, is that eros is not to be condemned; it is not inherently "down and dirty." The love of the Good and the desire to be good, the desire to imitate the Good and participate in it are noble aspirations. (The Christian and Platonic allusions will not be missed by the well-educated, e.g., imitatio Christi, methexis.)
What ought to be condemned is not eros, but sex when it is divorced from such ennobling adjuncts as the erothetic, the philiatic, and the agapic. What ought to be condemned is sex reduced to the 'hydraulic,' to the exchange of bodily fluids for the sake of mere sensuous gratification.1 This perversion is well-conveyed by the contemporary phrase 'hook-up.' I hook up a hose to a tank to fill it. But we live in a sick society getting sicker with each passing day and I am something of a vox clamantis in deserto. So I don't expect many even to understand what I am saying, let alone agree with it.
These topics are deep and rich. If you want to gain some insight into them you need to begin at the beginning, or at least at the 'Athenian' beginning, as opposed to the 'Hierosolymic' beginning, with the 'divine' Plato and his Symposium. Then work your way through the history of thought, philosophical and theological. One good guide in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros.
But to have the time and energy for this you will have limit your consumption of media dreck, not to mention your tweeting, facebooking, and what all else.
NOTES
1 Of course, sexual intercourse involving one or more humans is never a mere exchange of bodily fluids. Even among sub-human animals, sexual intercourse is never purely hydraulic in nature: sentience is involved and various emotions. Filling my gas tank in the usual manner would be an example of a purely hydraulic exchange. Insofar as humans approach the hydraulic in their 'love'-making, humans degrade themselves. This degradation is a free act possible only because humans are spiritual animals. An animal consumed by lust cannot degrade himself, but a man can. We could say that when a man tries to become less than an animal he proves that he is more than one.
Plain Talk About Transgenderism
Sometimes the cure for P. C. is C.P. , Camille Paglia, that is:
It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.
The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.
And a fortiori for transracialism.
Marital Fidelity and Masturbation
He who marries himself and intends to remain faithful to his partner has only one form of sexual expression open to him, namely, masturbation.
Polyamory
A reader sends us to an article on polyamory by Carrie Jenkins. The last time we had occasion to mention Professor Jenkins was when she was the recipient of a very sweet Christmas present from a certain proprietor of a philosophy gossip site.
About polyamory I will say only the following at the moment. Decide what the purpose of your life is and then decide whether polyamory fits with that purpose.
A Game I Play
I flip on a sit-com. Then I count the seconds before the onset of sexual innuendo, allusions, and the like.
We are concupiscent from the ground up. And this by (fallen) nature. Our natural condition is exacerbated by the sex saturation of contemporary society.
I played my game most recently the other night when I watched the beginning of "Hot in Cleveland." 'Hot' says it all. But what's hot today will be stone-cold tomorrow.