What constitutes Misogyny?

[Stephen Morgan]

"America" (Canada and other nations too of course) celebrates it's supposed "rule of law" social order, and yet it, an entity, it defies it's own laws as a matter of course. It's a paradox we don't allow into consciousness because it's too threatening, making all of us complicit when we avow to our personal lawfulness and that of the states, when what we see and experience is lawlessness; "the law favours the rich" = lawlessness.

"We are the true anarchists", the fascist in Salo. Anarchy is the cult of the strong, the law is only needed by those who can't look after themselves. Which is most of us, hence the prevalence of laws.

Could even say that the emotional origin of the crime is an excessive philogyny, a sort of obsession with this women. Objectification in the sense Plutonia was talking about a few pages back.

This is exactly the point I attempted to explicate above ^^^.

What is desired, cannot be anything but objectified because the mechanism subsumes it into the psyche of the desirer as an extension of the one who desires ie "that is a part of me that will make me whole."

Yes, there's a sitcom over here called Peep Show. It's largely a farce, relies therefore on the unreasonable actions of the characters, as they could easily escape their problems if they acted reasonably. But then, people don't normally act reasonably, I suppose. One main theme is the main character chasing after some woman he works with, even though he doesn't really know anything about her. Rewatching it I'm constantly surprised by how mad he acts, how obsessed. Only when he's got her and is about to propose marriage does he think to himself whether they actually even like each other. Has a rival to keep his mind on-task, too. I've never really had that myself, seeing a woman and mentally painting a target on her back. As I said somewhere else what we perceive exists in our mind's eye, we cannot directly perceive reality. So the character Mark has his too work colleagues, the woman he wants to fuck and the man he wants to fuck over both personally and professionally, and to start with those roles are all they really are to him. We can never really know others, only that picture of them which is painted on the back of our eyelids. When we first meet someone that picture is painted with very little information, and if it's a member of that class of persons which we consider sexually desirable it will likely amount to little more than a target.

[charlie meadows]

you know...

I don't doubt there's value in looking at these deep psychological things from an academic interest sort of perspective. But this is precisely why I don't think it's very practical to set up committees to deal with things like outbreaks of rapes on campuses, etc. The REAL misogyny that women experience needs more immediate responses. High-fallutin Freud and Girard and Esalen and Grof type talk is for the back rooms.

What about what you see happening right here, right now? Anything that doesn't have to do with woulds inflicted in the birth canal?

Hello, Canadian_watcher!

"The REAL misogyny that women experience needs more immediate responses." I woundn't presume to advise you on such matters. Except to say this: Don't let anything stop you. Remember, boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Anyway, this reminds me of something I read long, long ago about "the tightly monitored subject matter acceptable in this thread". It'll come to me. It's so hard to remember since I'm trying to do three or four things at once, and then there are the kids running between my legs while I'm trying to do my taxes. Please accept my apologies for not giving other posters their due consideration.

Oh, yes...

Nothing so psychological, but the somatic which informs it.

Seems to me the direction of evolution of the relative size of the birth canal, currently considered problematic to pandemic by some to many researchers, and its effect on relations between the genders, and notions of masculine and feminine, would be a legitimate topic in this thread. It raises interesting questions--for me anyway--and fits nicely alongside sociopolitical considerations. IMO.

[Plutonia]

Okay. You are right. Just an interesting thought that caught my fancy; you know trying it on, seeing if it answers. I did state it as a question first. As in hmmm... ????

It sounded like an innocent question to me.

BTW (and I had to look it up of course) technically speaking it's called...

Denying the antecedent: the consequent in an indicative conditional is claimed to be false because the antecedent is false; if A, then B; not A, therefore not B. The proper form is if A, then B; not B, therefore not A.

Any deductive logicians out there, please feel free to correct me.

Reverse thinking technique

[Plutonia]

So you are going to come back and present your findings, i hope?

I believe anything useful would be lost in the volume and the vitriol, figuratively speaking, in this thread. But I would surely post anything spongeworthy in the "Magick Mirror" thread. As it is, I will be coming at the issue from the viewpoint of neoteny/evolution (thank you for the above link) and my conclusions would likely transcend (in a value-neutral sense) the tightly monitored subject matter acceptable in this thread. There may even be data somehow affiliated with Esalen.

Well post a link at least, please.

[Canadian_watcher]

you know...

I don't doubt there's value in looking at these deep psychological things from an academic interest sort of perspective. But this is precisely why I don't think it's very practical to set up committees to deal with things like outbreaks of rapes on campuses, etc. The REAL misogyny that women experience needs more immediate responses. High-fallutin Freud and Girard and Esalen and Grof type talk is for the back rooms.

What about what you see happening right here, right now? Anything that doesn't have to do with woulds inflicted in the birth canal?

Hello, Canadian_watcher!

"The REAL misogyny that women experience needs more immediate responses." I woundn't presume to advise you on such matters. Except to say this: Don't let anything stop you. Remember, boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Anyway, this reminds me of something I read long, long ago about "the tightly monitored subject matter acceptable in this thread". It'll come to me. It's so hard to remember since I'm trying to do three or four things at once, and then there are the kids running between my legs while I'm trying to do my taxes. Please accept my apologies for not giving other posters their due consideration.

Oh, yes...

Nothing so psychological, but the somatic which informs it.

Seems to me the direction of evolution of the relative size of the birth canal, currently considered problematic to pandemic by some to many researchers, and its effect on relations between the genders, and notions of masculine and feminine, would be a legitimate topic in this thread. It raises interesting questions--for me anyway--and fits nicely alongside sociopolitical considerations. IMO.

You don't like this thread? Here's your money back.

[charlie meadows]

You don't like this thread? Here's your money back.

Are you taking a piss? I this thread.

[Canadian_watcher]

A long article but well worth the read. Surprised this wasn't posted earlier...

We’re Sluts, Not Feminists. Wherein my relationship with Slutwalk gets rocky.

Posted by Meghan Murphy (The F Word)

from another thread.

[Plutonia]

Well, I don't believe in deterrence. The desire to deter through sentencing is entirely reasonable, it just doesn't work. After America reintroduced the death penalty, for example, those states which took up killing again saw a big jump in murder rates. In fact the more extreme the punishment the less likely people are the imagine that it might happen to them, even if they commit the crime which may bring the punishment down upon their heads.

I agree. Deterrence tend to exacerbate rather than deter. So does oppositionality, BTW.

The foundational myths of Xtianity expose the lie of the guilt of the victim to the collective, first in the old testament, where the prophets repeated speak out against sacrificial violence and are themselves scapegoated. The ten commandments themselves are a prescription for avoiding mimetic desire, which leads to mimetic violence and ultimately scapegoating (thou shalt not covet etc). In the new testament the old myth of the dying and resurrecting god is subverted, how? By showing that the victim (Jesus) is blameless and the projection of blame is reflected back to those that sacrificed him, including his disciples who abandoned him and joined the crowd. That's a new development in the collective psyche, and though it may not be apparent, it's influence is everywhere in the West as our collective identification with victims, including the Earth as victim.

Well, I'm not sure that fits with the orthodox view of Jesus as having taken on corrupted human flesh or the predestination of his death to redeem humanity, which seems to remove responsibility from his killers.

His analysis explodes the orthodoxy. He ascribes the instituted mis-interpretation to a psych-social resistance to seeing the innocence of the blamed.

"The world becoming one culture is the fruit of this concern and not the reverse. In all the areas of activity – economic, scientific, artistic, and even religious – it is the concern for victims that determines what is most important. This new stage of culture has come about due neither to scientific progress nor to the market economy nor to the “history of metaphysics”.
Rene Girard, i See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 177."

The prescription against unconscious, collective violence provided by the myth of Jesus is to recognize the guilt (propensity to blame and do violence to others) within ourselves and "turn the other cheek", in other words, refuse to return violence with violence etc.

In the Middle East, they don't have that meme embedded in their collective psyche, so they are particularly vulnerable to their own violence and in fact they have instituted the opposing position of "eye for an eye" justice, or do return violence with violence.

I'm very non-violent and Christian myself, but the middle east is where Christianity started, as you know doubt know. Islam is really just a fancy-dan version of the Arianist heresy. But a desire to turn from violence is observable even before Christ's time, the "eye for an eye" of the old testament providing a limit, rather than a target, the pagan Norse and Saxon weregild, aimed as the Iranian law at replacing violence with financial compensation, feud with cash. A sacrifice of silver, if you like. Plata e plomo.

Yes, there is no cut and dried before and after to the emergence of the trend, except that in the bible, it expressed in form ie below the level of consciousness and yet present and to a great degree accepted, although mostly unwittingly, perhaps.

Rene Girard locates the roots of scapegoating violence in desire: One day, a long time ago, someone picked a yellow lump off the ground and said "hey! This is cool." The guy next to him perked up and said "yeah! That is cool." The first guy, seeing the interest of the second, thinks "hey! This is cooler than I thought!" The second guy, seeing the response of the first guy thinks "no! That really is cool!" And pretty soon others gather around, seeing how cool that thing is, want some for themselves. And then follows millenia of people fighting and killing for gold.

So in the case of Bahrami and her suitor, his desire for her is very, very dangerous to the community as a whole. His unfulfilled desire has the potential to infect his brother and set them against each other, which could (and probably has historically) infect the whole community with retaliatory violence. So his disfiguring of Bahrami, can be seen as a very coarse derailment of the process of escalating mimetic violence- by making her undesirable, he "saves" his community. This also explains the restrictions put on women in the Middle East, generally- the dress codes, prohibitions against showing hair, their virtual house imprisonment, the murder of adulteresses etc

I'm not convinced they work: The Islamist by Ed Husein posits that the sexual confinement in Saudi Arabia actually provokes a much larger number of sex crimes, lashing against restraint. "mimetic violence" is contagious violence, yes? I'm not big on the mimetic, somewhat beyond my ken. People tend to imitate others. Apparently it is a commonplace in the pick-up artist's repertoire to imitate the mannerisms of a woman to induce a receptive state of mind, although I read about it in one of Derren Brown's books. He also mentions that one way to tell if someone is lying is to watch their hands, if they lie about what happened they may act out what actually happened with their hands. I find myself acting out what I'm thinking of happening, which I notice as a result of reading that book. To see is to see within the mind, and to see within the mind is to do. What we see we see in our heads and what we do we do in our heads.

Well, I agree it fetishes women, as taboos do. But if it limits the targets of violence to women, the men are protected from each others violence, which Girard hypothesizes is potentially much worse. Like Rwanda worse.

"To see is to see within the mind, and to see within the mind is to do. What we see we see in our heads and what we do we do in our heads."

^^ that's a good thought.

I seem oddly immune to a lot of things. Makes for an amusing life, watching the foibles of others. Don't actually know what mimesis is, but I'm sure it doesn't get me. Much like illnesses.

Still not sure what immunity to mimesis might bring. "to imitate". Does that mean I am inimitable, or incapable of imitating others?

There is a study of brain scans of people talking to each other that shows the activity in their brains synchrnise, but I can't find it at the moment. This area of study is huge now because of the discovery of mirror neurons and their possible link to autism, so there is lots of investigation going on.

Here's a pdf, if you are interested: http://girardianlectionary.net/covr2004 ... spaper.pdf

[Stephen Morgan]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -rule.html

Schoolboy in a skirt: Pupil protests at rule forcing boys to wear trousers during hot weather

[Plutonia]

So you are going to come back and present your findings, i hope?

I believe anything useful would be lost in the volume and the vitriol, figuratively speaking, in this thread. But I would surely post anything spongeworthy in the "Magick Mirror" thread. As it is, I will be coming at the issue from the viewpoint of neoteny/evolution (thank you for the above link) and my conclusions would likely transcend (in a value-neutral sense) the tightly monitored subject matter acceptable in this thread. There may even be data somehow affiliated with Esalen.

you know...

I don't doubt there's value in looking at these deep psychological things from an academic interest sort of perspective. But this is precisely why I don't think it's very practical to set up committees to deal with things like outbreaks of rapes on campuses, etc. The REAL misogyny that women experience needs more immediate responses. High-fallutin Freud and Girard and Esalen and Grof type talk is for the back rooms.

What about what you see happening right here, right now? Anything that doesn't have to do with woulds inflicted in the birth canal?

Seeing without understanding is something other than seeing C_W.

By understanding we might be able to nip the poison tree off at the roots, rather than simply re-arranging the furniture again. Apologies for the mixed metaphors.

[Plutonia]

Seems to me the direction of evolution of the relative size of the birth canal, currently considered problematic to pandemic by some to many researchers, and its effect on relations between the genders, and notions of masculine and feminine, would be a legitimate topic in this thread. It raises interesting questions--for me anyway--and fits nicely alongside sociopolitical considerations. IMO.

Our peculiar relationship with the somatic; def worth exploring:

When one thinks of ‘flesh’ or ‘body’, one may see a mish-mash of body images culled from visual media, mirrors and lovers. Perhaps one thinks of animal flesh, meat; or, if one is infused with a particularly strong taboo against carnality, the very word ‘flesh’ may conjure a mire of sordid sexual images, to be quickly suppressed. Our distance from our own experience of ourselves is such that relatively few people would primarily associate, not with mental imagery, but with internal feeling.

These sensations are called ‘proprioceptions’: stimuli produced and perceived within an organism. While external material perceptions are equally part of our body of experience, the heightening and deepening of our proprioceptions seems to be a prime key in unlocking true body-consciousness. Actually, this process eventually reveals the underlying unity of the internal/external, subject/object dualism. Anyone who has endeavoured to intensify the internal feelings of their body cannot have failed to notice an accompanying intensification of external perception.

http://dreamflesh.com/essays/dionysusrisen/

From the Dionysus essay I posted yesterday, that was not really as good as I thought it was going to be, but does have a few golden nuggets.

[Canadian_watcher]

Seeing without understanding is something other than seeing C_W.

I don't disagree, and what I'm about to say isn't aimed at you, in particular or at all for that matter, but..

Analysis in the absence of action is just self-gratification.

[charlie meadows]

Analysis in the absence of action is just self-gratification.

Now, you're talking.

[Canadian_watcher]

Analysis in the absence of action is just self-gratification.

Now, you're talking.

That'll be $95.00

[charlie meadows]

Analysis in the absence of action is just self-gratification.

Now, you're talking.

That'll be $95.00

That means you still owe me $15 USD.