>>19
I'm sure most of you have known Camel a lot longer, and understand her a lot better, than I have and do. In the three years I've been hanging around here I've mostly just stumbled again and again on testimonies to the fascination of the 15-year-old Camel, the 14-year-old Camel, the 13-year-old Camel - and, in her case, I'm not even inclined to condemn all that as pedophilia; I can well believe she's been something to make a grown man weep since the very onset of puberty, whether the grown man has been inclined to admit to that or not.

At seventeen going on eighteen, though, I think she can be considered according to the principles that generally apply to womanhood and, for all my decades of involvement with Culture, I would strongly urge against ascribing too much weight to it - I mean to such sociological factors as "rebelling against society" and psychological factors as "rebelling against her own identification with Olivia" - and not enough weight to Nature.

I feel strongly inclined, personally, to go along with a certain possible variation on the nutso Nation of Islam "recessive gene" theory: genuine human masculinity is barely present in the civilized and industrialized world of today EXCEPT in the form of the negro male. Really, there are three sexes: females; males (who are almost invariably black); and a class (which probably includes all of the non-female users of this board) of beings who are neither anatomically female nor properly male. Really, the "sexual relationship" "kath'auton" or "akribestaton" - to speak the language of Plato - is ALWAYS a relationship between a white woman and a black man. Everything else is perversion or periphery.

What would really be called for, then, is not an explanation of WHY Camel has become intensely involved with a black boyfriend, but rather an explanation of why any girl or woman would ever choose to do OTHERWISE.

Potentially and "by rights", all of the girls in the Cracky community could and should have gone in this direction. If some of them didn't, it was only because special circumstances applied: Dolores, I've gleaned from vague hints dropped here and there, suffered genuine trauma during childhood, to such a point that she's unlikely ever to become a woman at all and will probably remain all her life that insipid but comforting substitute for a woman, the "human being capable of a loving relationship with another person simply AS a person"; RavRav possibly has the "right stuff" in her to follow the path of Nature and become a nigger's bit, but she happens, God bless her, to be a fanatical and irreconcilable racist (possibly the two or three lynchings and burnings she was fortunate enough to witness during her Georgian childhood marked her with such searing exhilaration that the joy of racial hatred will override, for years or decades yet, the hunger of her Amazonian vagina for a penis "commensurate" - to speak the language of F. Scott Fitzgerald - "with its capacity for wonder.")

In Camel's case, however, no such special circumstances happened to obtain and - were she only to allow us to witness it - we would witness in her the terrible and beautiful spectacle of "Woman Following Her Nature and Her Destiny".