Thread #1916

Daily reminder:
Women are not actually attracted to men. There is a vague idea of what a man is physically, and some are better than others aesthetically speaking, but the purely physical appearance of a man is almost inconsequential unless he is horribly ugly or outrageously attractive.

Women are attracted to status, money, how much a man smiles and laughs, how many friends and resources a man has, how full a man's life is--how many "cool," "exciting" and prestigious things he is doing or connected to.

They are interested in how other people view him--how many people want to be around him, how other people interact with him and whether their interactions convey that he is special and amazing. They want him to be extremely outgoing and aggressive; they want him to demonstrate his status over other people by dominating them in various non-violent ways.

A woman's attraction to a man is a function of her jealousy at the thought of another woman having that man. She doesn't care who he actually is or EXACTLY what he looks like physically, she only cares about the VALUE of the life he has constructed around himself.

>>1917
I think this is very perspicuous and substantially entirely correct. And if it really merits a drawing of Cracky being posted next to it, maybe I should have been a Crackyfag after all. It will perhaps, though, surprise a few people that I am strongly of the view that these important truths by no means necessarily have to be given the particular misogynistic "spin" that is given to them here. We've talked about these matters before, on the fringes of the chat - because they are, of course, germane and even crucial to the tensions and conflicts that have emerged in the chat over the months and years - and, despite my reputation as a woman-hater, those with a conscience and the memory that goes with conscience, will recall that I prefer to conceive of these matters not in terms of "male thinking" and "female thinking" but in terms of a worldview oriented to "morality" and a worldview oriented to "ethics". The "morality"-based Weltanschauung proposes that right action and the "good life for the human being" consists in holding true to certain strict and absolute principles that really have no essential connection to the material and social constitution of the world as it really exists. Indeed, insofar as these principles ARE strict and absolute, they CANNOT have any connection with the world as it actually exists. They are "extra-mundane" and carry whomever holds to them "outside the world" too. The person who does choose to hold to them will at best have few, and will most likely have absolutely no, friends, nor any family. Like Gustave Flaubert, he will construe the often-heard platitude that "the number of a man's friends is a measure of his worth as a human being" in the opposite way from which it is normally construed; i.e. he will believe that the more hated and despised by the world around him a man is, the better a man he is likely to be. The "ethics"-based worldview, on the other hand, repudiates the very possibility of there existing a moral truth and

>>1918
moral rightness that does NOT extend and expand itself through the really existing world and therefore depend, in the end, radically and fundamentally on this really existing world. Hegel's is the most famous expression of this idea : "the rational is the real" (das Vernünftige ist das Wirkliche" i.e. is that which WIRKT, which actualizes itself and has an effect in the real world, in whatever shabby and sordid and less than perfectly morally satisfying a state this real world may happen to be. To this extent, and on these his or her own terms, the believer in the "good life" as a life of "ethics", is being entirely consistent and rational in looking upon someone's having friends, enjoying material and social success, being perceived as a good and valuable person in others' eyes etc as the sole and definitive criteria of personal and moral worth, and therefore of desirability and loveability.
The distribution of these two opposing understandings of what makes a person "worth something" across the human race is very far from coinciding exactly, though, with the distribution of sex or gender. Both of the most articulate and thorough expostulators of these opposing sets of ideas were male: Hegel is the great propounder of the "female", "ethics"-focussed worldview and Kant of the "male", "morality"-centred one. Or - to shift things even further away from a simple female-male dichotomy - if there is any single philosophical writer who out-Kanted Kant in this respect, it was surely a woman: Simone Weil, who believed that there were two forces in the universe and two forces alone : "gravity" and "grace". The realm of "gravity", she believed, was populated in part, indeed, by wretched and defeated creatures - but it was also the realm (the only possible realm) of the beautiful, the successful. the popular, the humanly loved. The human being possessed of "grace" was, for Weil, ALWAYS and NECESSARILY a beaten, rejected, ugly, spat-upon and in every sphere and area of

>>1919
experience thoroughly defeated and beaten wretch. Christ on the cross was this "graced" being's purest incarnation.

I'm not going to say a word about Hegel, Kant or Weil.

Just >>1917

Yes, it is a totally well known fact that man has only 3 aspects:
1. His appearance, which may be rated on a scale of 5 through 10 (remember guys, we don't ever rate under 5).
2. His VALUE, which may be measured by a few simple socioeconomic factors.
3. What exactly he is. This not actually being taken into account by women chosing a mate.

So basically you should buy a BMW, wear nice clothes, your sunglasses should cost at least $300. You must be magnificent, in fact. That never goes wrong, and you'll never see girls choosing to hang around with "some slob" instead.

Now obviously if you follow all of the rules and the girls choose the wrong people and do actually hang around with slobs all of the time then that is the sign that the world is playing a huge joke on you because the rules are true and measurable and the girls are punishing you by refusing to submit to them. It's only natural to be homicidally frustrated if it doesn't work out for you.

>>1921
I'll make two assumptions here:
(i) that this last post was by a woman who considers herself a feminist, or by a man (it matters little) who considers himself one.
and
(ii) that I am going to be called a "woman-hater" or an "anti-feminist" for what I am about to write.
But honestly guys/girls, what is the point of simply ironizing heavily on the post that began this thread while accepting its basic terms as valid, just "back to front"?
OK, maybe your life-experience teaches you that the idea that women are attracted to social status and so on is a patently ridiculous prejudice and misconception that only has to be repeated in an arch tone for everybody to fall about laughing at how silly and untrue it is.
But I assure you that many many people's life-experience confirms this very "absurdity".
If all you are going to do is giggle at it and smirk at your friends and repeat "oh come ON...." then this discussion will degenerate into the "querelle de sourds" that it always degenerates into, with one

>>1925
imputing bad faith to the other and dismissing a world-experience that is deeply felt and sincerely believed in by them as "just ideology" or some such nonsense.
The only way to move forward here is to broaden and alter the terms of the problem.
Otherwise all we are going to have, over and over, is (male and female) feminists tittering away at the very idea that women tend (perhaps for good philosophical reasons) to social and therefore sexual conformity and (at least potentially anti-feminist males insisting (as, I think, is only their right) on the verity of their own lived experience and repeating: "But they do..."
To which the feminist camp will reply ; "Oh don't be silly" (titter)
And so on and so on...

>>1921
It occurs to me, a little too late, that I may have once again proven myself in this thread to "not speak Internet" and to have missed the implicit references, in the post above, to the recent Elliott Rodgers killing-spree. It can hardly be denied that a psychopath like Rodgers throws a very ugly light on any and all protest, however calm and carefully reasoned, about the sexual order and hierarchy that women, very definitely, contribute quite as much as men do to keeping in place. And of course, if I were a woman I would feel as angry about having to look over my shoulder for people like Rodgers, who want to shoot me down as a proxy for my gender, as I would if I were American and had to keep looking over my shoulder for people who want to kill me as a proxy for my nation or its political leaders.
But if I am honest I have to admit that, when I read snatches of his "public" pronouncements in the recent news reports, and when I look at the language of the commentaries on him and his ideas that appear in "highbrow", "progressive" daily newspapers like the Guardian, I can't help feeling that the poor crazy little shit has drowned in innocent blood certain truths that I would prefer not to have been drowned, for everybody's sake.
Jessica Valenti, writing in the Guardian today, says that Rodgers "like most young American men, was taught that he was entitled to sex and female attention". Something about the tone in which Valenti writes this disturbs me almost as much as Rodgers's killing spree. I hear the same icy coldness and the same utter refusal of empathy in the editorial as in Rodger's announcements of his intention to murder. Is it really so patently and inarguably obvious that human beings are NOT "entitled" to sex and to the "attention" of those whom their souls and bodies reach out to day and night? Valenti writes that sentence in the same tone as someone might have written, in the heyday of Marxism and the culture of the "class struggle": "(So-and-so)

>>1931
like most young men of his class, was taught that he was entitled to a life of leisure and luxury." The implication is that sex and sensual/emotional interaction with the object of one's desire is a luxury and a superfluity for human beings, something that one can easily get by without, without one's essential core humanity being wounded, crippled, or stunted thereby.
But I'm really not so sure that that is the case. Sexual attention and affection is obviously not something that can be demanded at the point of a gun - but I think that it is at least as strongly arguably a "basic human right" as is any of the ten dozen other things that are being claimed these days to be such "basic human rights" (housing, education, access to water, freedom of expression, whatever). In this respect, I think Rodgers's "manifestos" are - albeit with all the necessary qualifications and without trying to excuse the insane savagery of his acts - as usefully to be considered as taking their place in the descendancy of what Marxism, and feminism after it, attempted to reveal and defend rather than what these movements attempted to condemn.
One very fruitful way of characterizing what both Marxism and feminism did is: they made visible AND LEGITIMATE hitherto entirely unperceived forms of human suffering. And by that I mean, of course - sorry, Ely's posting system makes clarity of expression difficult - they made these forms of suffering visible and thereby made legitimate REVOLT AND RESISTANCE against them. The real strength of the systems that Marxism and feminism fought against lay in the fact that the people oppressed by them and suffering under them weren't even able to perceive their condition s as conditions of oppression and suffering. In the 1950s, a woman living in the maddening, dehumanizing, crippling straitjacket of a traditional patriarchal marriage was generally entirely lacking in the conceptual vocabulary required to characterize and articulate the fury she felt

>>1932
as "fury" at all. Almost every woman in that situation in immediate post-war America sincerely experienced her own absolutely rational anger as "moodiness" or "pre-menstrual tension" or whatever. The really revolutionary achievement of second-wave feminism, building on the more historically diffuse "first wave", was its getting across to women that housework, motherhood, traditional patriarchal forms of sexual intercourse - all things that were women were perceiving at the time as "just parts of reality" - were THINGS THAT ONE HAD A RIGHT TO GET

>>1933
ANGRY about. One can see from a viewing of an excellent Brechtian/Maoist piece of 60s agitprop theater like William Hinton's "FanShen" that the really revolutionary achievement of Marxism was just about the same: not so much actually organizing rebellion or revolution as getting people to take the absolutely crucial step of coming to see how "to rebel is justified" and how their accepted, everyday lives contained much that there was reason to be absolutely furious about.
Horrible as it may seem in the light or under the shadow of Rodgers's brutal acts, I can't help feeling that what journalists like Jessica Valenti mock and revile as Rodgers's "assumption of privilege" resembles in several key respects this "coming to consciousness" that occurred among proletarians and women in the 19th and 20th centuries. We might well be argued to be still struggling today to endow with actual perceptible REALITY - and thereby to endow with political legitimacy resistance against the reality - the "rotting in loneliness" that Rodgers testified - truly, I am sure - to having suffered all through his college years, just as Marxists had to struggle to endow with perceptible reality the fact of exploitation and expropriation.
But enough for now....to be continued...

alex come back to tinychat you left as soon as I went in

>>1934
You should send this piece to Guardian , or maybe some other website that accepts guest articles.

>>1936
It's hardly an "article", a thing like this improvised under the restrictions of this board's hellish posting system. And anyway, my stamina ran out before I could really make the point I wanted to make - which is, I suppose, related to my beloved Michel Houellebecq, whose few good early novels achieved this thing that I was talking about: making first PERCEPTIBLE a previously hardly perceptible form of human suffering and then making LEGITIMATE the moral and practical revolt against it. The kind of sneering, contemptuous dismissals that these early novels of Houellebecq's received above all in the Anglo-American world - a rival "cult author" like Will Self smirking "Houellebecq? Oh, isn't he the little man who can't get laid?" - demonstrate how hard we STILL have

>>1937
struggle to get the "rotting in loneliness" that Rodgers spoke about as a real and legitimate form of human suffering at all and to get taken seriously the idea that "amputating" someone's sensuality and channels of sensual self-expression is really hardly less brutal and inhuman an act than the amputation of a criminal's hand under Shar'ia law. An anger like Rodgers's is still so often and so easily dismissed as callous, childish self-indulgence - but that dismissal is placed very seriously in question, for me, by the fact that the people who dismiss this anger - the Jessica Valentis and the Will Selfs of this world - have very plainly never themselves experienced anything like that "rotting in loneliness", that amputation of a whole swathe or sector of ESSENTIAL AND CONSTITUTIVE (in my view, at least) human experience that is at the root of that anger.
Houllebecq's early writings really did carry political and ethical culture an important step forward by suggesting to us that sexual self-fulfillment is something which is just as tied up and determined by a system of hierarchy and power as is economic success. Of course, those who have argued against Houellebecq here do have one very strong argument on their side: the "goods" access to which is blocked, for many, by the dominant economic and political system are simply and entirely OBJECTIVE - i.e. material, soulless and volitionless - goods; the "goods" access to which is blocked, for many, by the dominant sexual/emotional system, however, consist in "goods" which are at the same time objective AND SUBJECTIVE. In other words, the "things" desired and needed here are themselves desring and needing "things": other human beings. I would strongly argue - in contradiction to what is implied by people like Valenti or Self - that BOTH sorts of goods are pretty much equally indispensable to human life, if it is to be a real and full human life. But there is no denying that the fact of the indispensable "good" in

http://youtu.be/d-N9daqANcw?t=7m48s

Modern feminism has the primary purpose of objectifying women as wholly lacking agency and therefore needing society to look after them.

>>1938
the latter case's being a needing feeling human subject does complicate the issue considerably - to the point. perhaps, of making the problem and the conflict here insoluble.

>>1940
I don't see that this sort of thing takes the discussion anywhere useful

>>1941

>complicated to the point of being insoluble
>entitled little prick

these things are true

>>1943
I don't know who you are...but this is pretty typical Internet behaviour. Don't pretend you are interested in debate or discussion. You are interested in "pwning" and so on. Good luck to you. Goodnight.

>>1931
>a psychopath like Rodgers throws a very ugly light on any and all protest, however calm and carefully reasoned, about the sexual order

That does not follow. Anyone who would impute meaning to the actions of an insane person would make a severe mistake.

>>1945
The article I am taking issue with, published in the Guardian today, does exactly that. It is entitled "Elliot Rodger's California Shooting Spree: Proof That Misogyny Kills" and its whole argument consists in the claim that Rodgers's speech and action, although insane, are directly determined by, and very revealing of, wider attitudes in "sane" society. Please....take your infantile "point-scoring" somewhere else.

>Interested in "pwning" and so on
Slavoj.jpeg

>>1931
> if I were a woman I would feel as angry about having to look over my shoulder for people like Rodgers, who want to shoot me down as a proxy for my gender, as I would if I were American and had to keep looking over my shoulder for people who want to kill me as a proxy for my nation or its political leaders.

It's almost as silly for women to be paranoid about psychotic killers as for Americans to be paranoid about terrorists. And in both cases certain people are encouraging such fear to the greatest extent possible for political gain with the goal of making people vote against their own real best interests.

>>1946
That part I do take issue with. Tumblr-sphere seems to be involved in an argument as to whether it was the misogyny that did the killing, or the mental illness or whatever else (gun control?), and I totally understand how any self-respecting misogynist is horrified by the idea that they're suddenly going to be demonised and accused of murderousness. This is the same reason people were horrified by project Yewtree and various other witch-hunts against things that are widely believed to be causing undue social harm. All that doesn't stop Rodgers from having been a shitcock long before he was a murderer.

>>1949
Exactly. People are "involved in an argument" about it. So both positions then - that meaning can be imputed to Rodgers's actions and that meaning can't be imputed to them - must be at least arguable. You seem to me to be the kind of person who carries on a narciissistic monologue under the guise of a dialogue. That is to say, you simply dismiss by Diktat whole swathes of actually existing opinion. This is NOT a simple, univocal, undialectical question. Getting up on an Internet soapbox and spewing ready-made pronouncements about what falls within the boundaries of sense and reason and what doesn'r doesn't get anyone anywhere - except you yourself, of course, if where you are aiming to "get to" is a place where you can luxuriate in the smell of your own intellectual farts.

>>1931
>Jessica Valenti, writing in the Guardian today, says that Rodgers "like most young American men, was taught that he was entitled to sex and female attention". Something about the tone in which Valenti writes this disturbs me almost as much as Rodgers's killing spree.

I'm as disturbed as you are (not that I read the article, I'm taking it on faith that you're quoting accurately and in the spirit of the piece) but for a different reason. The act of an entitled person is not to try to earn something. And the idea that men (as a general term used to repute something to every male over the age of 18) feel entitled in that way is pure bullshit, and sexist as hell.

>>1931
>Is it really so patently and inarguably obvious that human beings are NOT "entitled" to sex and to the "attention" of those whom their souls and bodies reach out to day and night?

Wait: seriously? No. No one is entitled to anything involuntarily extracted. I have to be misunderstanding your point here... I agree that a society that lies to its people to create incomplete social contracts is a broken one. It's preposterous to then say, however, that the misunderstanding should be met by fulfilling the inaccurately understood social contract.

>>1952

I don't really understand this conflation of "rights" such as education and housing, and then the "right" to be loved, or touched to human kindness. I guess it is a moral libertarianism, that those things you have to go out and get for yourself, whereas everything else is a given.

>>1953
I would say, yes, you are missing my point, or just failing to grasp the simple application of logic it involves. Can you specify how exactly a "right to having one's sexual desires reciprocated" would differ in essence from the other "rights" you mention and which - since you do mention them - I assume you recognize and acknowledge as legitimate human rights.
>>1957
>>1957
>>1957
>>1956
>>1956

Point of order: There are at least three different people arguing in this thread. Try not to impute any one comment to the same person who made a different one.

>>1954
I can't specify, and I think that particular point is the fulcrum of a large part of this argument. Somewhere further up it is chalked up to experience, that some people have a genuine opinion that they've formed about it. Would love to know where that comes from.

>>1932
>Sexual attention and affection is obviously not something that can be demanded at the point of a gun - but I think that it is at least as strongly arguably a "basic human right" as is any of the ten dozen other...

Need and right are two entirely different concepts, and rights can oonly be that which can be rightfully demended at the point of a gun in practice. Whether the gun is being pointed at a figure of authority or a citizen or a slave is immaterial here.

>>1957]
In that case I take issue with the word "rightful". What is demanded rightfully as opposed to being taken by force?

>>1956
The fact is that the way the word "right" and "human right" is used today does tend to comprise many goods that are indeed "involuntarily extracted". One constantly hears talk of a "basic right to housing" or a "basic right to education" and these things are very largely "involuntarily extracted" by the people who come to enjoy them because they are created and sustained by taxation, or by the ENFORCED social solidarity of people who happen to occupy the same geographic or political space.
My question is simply: given that this is the case, is there any really significant and essential line to be drawn between these "enforced solidarities" on the educational or social-housing planes and the - admittedly still rather shocking, unfamiliar and (to women certainly) even repellent idea of an ENFORCED reciprocation of affection and sexual desire?

>>1958
It would be silly to claim that affection can be rightfully demanded at the point of a gun by any definition of the word. History tells us that "rights" are only given as governments or citizens demand by force. So to argue that affection can be a social right just doesn't make sense.

>>1960
I don't disagree that the silliness lies in the idea that the response cannot be demanded because it is neccessarily voluntary. But I hesitate to agree that man only has rights insofar as he has taken them by force, and that in a state of nature he would have none.

>>1961
May I ask for three rights guarenteed by your country's constitution?

>>1962
I suppose at this point I show my hand and suggest that your insistence on a constitution shows your experience of living in a particular sort of country that has either been 'founded' (and the natives cast out) or warred over for far too long and then had it's 'constitution' drawn up in an afternoon by a foreigner.

>>1963
My background is immaterial to the strength of my arguments. I used the word "constitution" as a convenient and uncontroversial way to talk about "rights" as you probably see them. So let me rephrase: May I ask three rights you believe yourself to have?

>>1964
I doubt if you are addressing me - but just as a point of information - my argumernt does not turn at all on what rights I personally might or might not believe myself to have but rather on the way that the term "rights" is GENERALLY tending to be used in the society that produced Elliott Rodgers and in a greater and greater number of societies around the globe today

>>1965
In other words, the key question I raised was: was Rodgers's articulation of the idea that he had a positive RIGHT to be desired back by those he desired really so grotesque / disingenuous / disharmonious with the very ideas and principles that the people who revile and condemn him (such as Jessica Valenti) themselves hold to and believe in?

>>1965

> practise a religion
> speak my mind
> free assembly

Seems to be that these rights must be taken from me before I would have to give them back.

>>1966
Yes?

If the question is that simple, then it's easy enough to answer. The 'dialectic' would be in the deciding why. Somehow murder on a grand scale is justified in order to attain the right to some things, but certainly not others.

>>1968
I don't see that you are answering it, though. The key question is: if you accept, for example, that "amputating" someone of an education or a roof over their head is striking at their very inalienable essence as a human being - and I would bet a hundred dollars that Jessica Valenti DOES believe that and accept that - then how can you legitimately refuse to accept the possibility that "amputating" them of a fulfilled and fulfilling sex-life is not ALSO striking at their very human essence? And if you accept THAT, then are you not morally obliged to support and promote measures that will COERCIVELY ensure that this aspect of someone like Rodgers's being is fulfilled, just as human "rights" to education and housing are fulfilled by means of coercive social redistribution of wealth and resources?

>>1967
Each of these rights can be taken from you at the pooint of a gun or demanded from your government at the point of a gun.

>>1970
Agreed - they can be taken. If you're talking about having my rights 'guaranteed' for some price, then sure. But they exist naturally, and I don't need to have taken them back in order to have them in the first place.

>>1971
The only way these righhts exist naturally is by social convention backed by force.

>>1972
The only way these rights exist in sad old contemporary human societies is by social convention backed by force.

>>1969
His problem was never not having a right fulfilled -- it was being misinformed about how to receive soemthign he needed. To define affection as a right is to define it as something that can rightfully be demanded by force.

>>1974
I still don't see that you are addressing the point I am making. The whole issue here is how something can, in the course of history and changing attitudes to what is "real" and "natural" be lifted out of the category of "what CANNOT legitimately be demanded by force" and placed into the category of what CAN. A thousand years ago the idea of a vigorously claimable "right" to education or to housing or to the fulfilment of basic biological needs in the sense that lies at the basis of modern "welfare rights" would have been utter nonsenses, ridiculous misuses of language. Today, these things CAN be vigorously and even legitimately "violently" claimed.
My question is: might we not be seeing the first beginnings of the transfer of the "right to affection and to sexual fulfilment" from the sphere of what CANNOT be legitimately violently demanded into the sphere of what CAN?

>>1974
>problem was being misinformed about how to receive something he needed
agreed, with caveats for "need"

>to define affecction as a right is to define it as something that can rightfully be demanded by force
I follow the logic, which works out correctly, but I still disagree that that's how I should define the other sorts of rights to which we've previously alluded to.

Aside: It seems to me that Rodger's problem is partially that he barely even knew what specifically he needed. He talks constantly about women, all the women (and specifically the blonde ones) but he never says "she" or "her", he doesn't have any ideal that he's even going after. He's got some symbol of women in his head, but never the universal woman, or the single object of desire. And that's where I begin to get close to agreeing with the PUAs about choice, about choosing, seeking out and presenting yourself, not just by your innate value but by what you communicate explicitly to the object of desire.

>>1975
the "right" to be given something, anything, is entirely different from the right to be left free to obtain it. That is as true today as it was two thousand years ago. "right" shouldn't have come to mean "that which should be given"

If affection were to become a right how could it be granted without enslaving others?

>>1977
By that, Rodgers certainly does NOT have a right to affection. Also, some other rights.

>>1978
So I guess we have to be super-careful about how we decide what things are functionally slavery.

>>1977
The last word
>>>/watch?v=Au02p8huOuU

>>1978
Exactly. And that is exactly the "fly in the ointment" point I raised in one of my posts above. This is the key and very important respect in which the new system of suffering and legitimate revolt against suffering sketched out by Houellebecq in his important work of the 1990s is discontinuous after all with the otherwise similar discourses on suffering and legitimate revolt against suffering that one finds in Marx, second-wave feminism etc. In these earlier systems, the issue was winning access to things that were OBJECTS of need without at the same time being SUBJECTS with needs of their own. In Houllebecq's moral problematic, the "needed thing" is itself a (needing) human being. The equation here, as I say, may be eternally insoluble and eternally torturous and tragic. But the point I was making was that, just because it may be eternally insoluble, it should not be dismissed as a "non-problem". Awkward and even tragic as the fact may be, subjects do VISCERALLY DESIRE other subjects - who, yes, happen to be inconveniently endowed with a soul and a mind and therefore frankly UNABLE to reciprocate.

Now I'm picturing thousands of government cuddlebunnies...

>>1981
I hope I speak for the majority of the posters here when I say that I certainly understand the suffering, legitimate revolt and tragedy of asymmetrical desire; but somehow Rodgers doesn't seem to cause that kind of empathic reaction. It's hard to believe he ever felt desire for an object who he knew also to be a subject with their own needs. I do want to read some Houllebecq, regardless, he's on my list, and I'm sure I'd have more empathy for him.

>>1982
Houellebecq speaks simply of an "ethics of good will" - a certain empathic persistence in TRYING to be the comforting and fulfilling "object" that the desiring "other" viscerally needs you to be, even if you know that in the end you will never really be able to be.
And the concomitant of this, of course, is a refraining from simply brushing the feelings of the desiring "other" - Rodgers's "rotting in loneliness" - brusquely aside with an "oh just grow up and fucking deal with it! Life without sex isnt going to kill you!"

>>1983
Yes, Houellebecq certainly SHOULD inspire more empathy than Rodgers with his articulation of basically a very similar sentiment. What gives me sympathy for Rodgers after all is that, interestingly enough, even the gentle, well-meaning Houellebecq has inspired spitting, snarling fury and contempt in many many "right-thinking" circles for saying what he says about sexuality as a hierarchical system.
Look at this incredible piece of shit, for example

>>>/watch?v=t97G3gRH_Rg

>>1984
Affection and sex are different needs. Do try not to conflate them.

>>1985
Yeah, I watched that last night. Snarky and entertaining as hell. I've seen people with the same reaction to Foucault, who I do love. I think the odds maybe a little stacked against me loving Huollebecq but I'm pretty sure he's at least an adult with a POV worth taking the time for.

>>1986
Don't try to separate them either. They can't be. That is the agony and the tragedy.

Having read the entirety of this thread, I have come to the conclusion that Alex Reynolds is a faggot.

This thread (or what it has become) is all a massive trap.

Alex wants affection to have affection declared a right, and then to be denied it. Because that's what he likes (>>1989 other than a good bumming)

He lives in this filthy modern world that gives man everything but denies HIM [Saintly Alex] what he needs most (>>1989 other than a good bumming).

I understand the social conditions that lead you to denegrate Alex but he at least makes reasonably well-supported arguments and keeps this board interesting and active. For shame. Try to be better than monkeys.

>you're oppressing me by not fucking me
>reasonable
toplel.jpg

>>>/watch?v=EO9tIVooNa0

somewhat
relevant song

Whoever has created An abiding friendship, Or has won A true and loving wife, All who can call at least one soul theirs, Join our song of praise; But those who cannot must creep tearfully Away from our circle.

>i cry evrytim

>>>/watch?v=oybAUKZhaMA

>>1994
Yes, but the perspective that I was trying to open up in my contributions to this thread was one that goes beyond tears and points toward actual active ethical resistance to the vision evoked by Schiller's "Ode to Joy" which - for over 200 years now - people have been so smugly and unthinkingly enthusiastic about, particularly in Beethoven's orgiastic musical setting of it.
In a way, this brings us back to the issue of whether an experience like Rodgers's - the experience of "rotting in loneliness" amidst a world where everyone else, apparently at least, is whirling joyously around in a great round-dance of mutual affirmation and acceptance - needs to be construed and presented in terms of a "pro-woman" / "anti-woman" antagonism at all. As I said above, it is really a much wider dichotomy: an "anthropological" dichotomy in the 18th Century sense of the term, when "anthropology" meant the "logos" of the human being per se - i.e. contending philosophical conceptions of what it is to be a human being.
In the late eighteenth century, the writer who best articulated the sensibility and experience of the potential Columbine / Elliott Rodgers nutcase was Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. Jean Paul was an infinitely gentle soul whom the extremely liberal gun laws of Saxony in the 1780s failed to tempt into any high-school or shopping-mall massacres. But he stands out among the literati of his nation and generation in being a decided "emo" among a group consisting predominantly of hard-partying "quarterback" types with girlfriends, hordes of drinking buddies etc.
His remarks on Schiller's "Ode to Joy", quoted by the poster above, cut to the very heart of this issue:
"Were I to hear an alliance of individuals toasting each other and raising their glasses to the vile and repellent dictum: 'Let he who cannot do these things (i.e. create an abiding friendship etc.) creep tearfully away from our circle', my choice would be to quit, together with this unloved and unlovable

>>1996
outsider, an alliance and a company so hard and wretched as this, and to turn my own back too on it, forever."
The dichotomy and antagonism that I called, above, an antagonism between "Hegelianism" and "Kantianism" - although Jean Paul is a stricter and better Kantian than Kant, in this case - is one that seems to have persisted through and survived more than two centuries of social progress, Marxism, feminism etc. The world is still today characterized by two antagonistic sensibilities: the sensibility that lets itself willingly be caught up into the orgiastic dance of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" and the sensibility that flinches back from it, sensing all the animality, brutality and icy coldness that there necessarily is in "brotherhood" - and probably even more in "sisterhood". I am not saying that "those who can" do not have a right to dislike and feel utterly alienated from "those who cannot". I am not even saying that they do not have reason to fear them, as Rodgers's case shows. All that disturbs me is the way that this "other" experience seems to be blotted out and annihilated entirely by discourses like the Valenti woman's that I referred to.

hey alex go in the tinychat

>>2004
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/feminism/solanis.pdf

>>2005
I see no talk of killing men, putting them into concentration camps, and ruling the world as supreme dictator with a

>>2006
... fanatical army. Just an angry radfem. I'm glad she shot Warhol, though. Guy was a prick.

Doesn't Elliot kind of look like Alex (the brother one)?

>>2011
I don't think so. Clearly Alex is too into BMX to be corrupted by women.

Alex looks like Cracky.

Remember when you ran away
And I got on my knees
And begged you not to leave
Because I'd go beserk

Well you left me anyhow
And then the days got worse and worse
And now you see I've gone
Completely out of my mind

And they're coming to take me away ha-haaa
They're coming to take me away ho ho hee hee ha haaa
To the funny farm
Where life is beautiful all the time
And I'll be happy to see those nice young men
In their clean white coats
And they're coming to take me away ha haaa

You thought it was a joke
And so you laughed
You laughed when I said
That losing you would make me flip my lid

Right? You know you laughed
I heard you laugh. You laughed
You laughed and laughed and then you left
But now you know I'm utterly mad

And they're coming to take me away ha haaa