Brief-Interviews-with-Hideous-Men

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

B.I. #59 04-98
HAROLD R. AND PHYLLIS N. ENGMAN INSTITUTE FOR CONTINUING CARE

EASTCHESTER NY

‘As a child, I watched a great deal of American television. No matter of where my father was being posted, it seemed always that American television was available, with its glorious and powerful women performers. Perhaps this was one more advantage of the importance of my father’s work to the defenses of the state, for we had privileges and lived comfortably. The television program I most preferred then was to watch Bewitched, featuring the American performer Elizabeth Montgomery. It was as a child, while watching this television program, that I experienced my first erotic sensations. It was not for several years, until late in my adolescence, that I was able, however, to trace my sensations and fantasies backward to these episodes of Bewitched and my experiences as the viewer when the protagonist, Elizabeth Montgomery, would perform a circular motion with her hand, accompanied by the sound of a zither or harp, and produce a supernatural effect in which all motion ceased and all the television program’s other characters suddenly were frozen in mid-gesture and were oblivious and rigid, lacking all animation. In these instances time itself appeared to cease, leaving Elizabeth Montgomery free alone to maneuver at her will. Elizabeth Montgomery employed this circular gesture within the program only as a desperate resort to help save her industrialist husband, Darion, from the political disasters which would come if she were exposed as a sorcerer, a frequent threat in the episodes. The program of Bewitched was poorly dubbed, and many details of the narratives I, at my age, did not understand. Yet my fascinations were attached to this great power to freeze the time of the program in its tracks, and to render all the other witnesses frozen and oblivious while she went about her rescue tactics among living statues whom she could again reanimate with the circular gesture when the circumstances called for this. Years later, I began, like many adolescent boys, to masturbate, creating erotic fantasies of my own construction in my imagination as I did so. I was a weak, unathletic, and somewhat sickly adolescent, a scholarly and dreamy youth more like my father, of nervous constitution and little confidence or social outgoingness in those years. It is little wonder that I sought compensation for these weaknesses in erotic fantasies in which I possessed supernatural powers over the women of my choosing in these fantasies. Linked heavily to this childhood program of Bewitched, these masturbation fantasies’ connection to this television program were unknown to me. I had forgotten this. Yet, I learned too well the insupportable responsibilities which come along with power, responsibilities whose awesomeness I have since learned to decline in my adult life since arriving here, which is a story for another time. These masturbation fantasies took their setting from the settings of our actual existences during these times, which were located at the many different military posts to which my father, a great mathematician, brought us, his family, along. My brother and I, separated in age by less than one year, were nevertheless dissimilar in most things. Often, my masturbation fantasies took their settings from the State Exercise Facilities which my mother, a former competitive athlete in youth, religiously attended, exercising enthusiastically each afternoon no matter of where my father’s duties brought us to live for that time. Willingly accompanying her to these facilities on most afternoons of our lives was my brother, an athletic and vigorous person, and often myself as well, at first with reluctance and direct force, and then, as my erotic reveries set there evolved and became more complex and powerful, with a willingness born of reasons of my own. By custom, I was permitted to bring my science books, and sat reading quietly upon a padded bench in a corner of the State Exercise Facility while my brother and mother performed their exercises. For purposes of envisioning, you may imagine these State Exercise Facilities as your nation’s health spa of today, although the equipment used there was less varied and maintained, and an air of heightened security and seriousness was due to the military posts to which the facilities were attached for the uses of personnel. And the athletic clothing of women at the State Exercise Facilities was very different from today, constituting full suits of canvas with belts and straps of leather not unlike this, which was far less revealing than today’s exercise clothing and leaving more to the mind’s eye. Now I will describe the fantasy which evolved at these facilities as a youth and became my masturbation fantasy of those years. You are not offended by this word, masturbate?
Q.
‘And this is an adequate pronunciation of it?’
Q.
‘In the fantasy which I am describing, I would envision myself on such an afternoon at the State Exercise Facilities, and, as I masturbated, I envision myself gazing out across the floor of vigorous exercises to let my gaze fall upon an attractive, sensual, but vigorous and athletic and so highly concentrated on her exercises as to appear unfriendly woman, often resembling many of the attractive, vigorous, humorless young women of the military or civilian atomic engineering services who possessed access to these facilities and exercised with the same forbidding seriousness and intensity as my mother and my brother, who spent long periods of their time often hurling a heavy leather medicine ball between them with extreme force. But in my masturbation fantasy, the supernatural power of my gaze would rattle the chosen woman’s attention, and she would look up from her piece of exercise equipment, gazing around the facility for the source of the irresistible erotic power which had penetrated her consciousness, finally her gaze locating me in my corner across the activity-filled room, such that the object of my gaze and I locked both eyes in a gaze of strong erotic attraction to which the remainder of the vigorously exercising personnel in the room were oblivious. For you see, in the masturbation fantasy I possess a supernatural power, a power of the mind, of which the origin and mechanics are never elaborated, remaining mysterious even to I who possess this secret power and can employ it at my will, a power through which a certain expressive, highly concentrated gaze on my part, directed at the woman who was the object of it, renders her irresistibly attracted toward me. The sexual component of the fantasy, as I masturbate, proceeds to depict this chosen woman and myself copulating in variations of sexual frenzy upon an exercise mat in the room’s center. There is little more to these components of this fantasy, which are sexual and adolescent and, in retrospect, somewhat average, I now realize. I have not yet explained the origins of the American program of Bewitched of my early youth for these fantasies of seduction. Nor of the great secondary power which I also possess in the masturbation fantasy, the supernatural power to halt time and magically to freeze all other of the room’s exercisers in their tracks with a covert circular motion of my hand, to cause all motion and activity in the State Exercise Facility to cease. You must envision these: heavily muscled missile officers held motionless beneath the barbell of a lift, wrestling navigators frozen complexly together, computer technicians’ whirling jump ropes frozen into parabolas of all angle, and the medicine ball hanging frozen between the outstretched arms of my brother and my mother. They and all other witnesses in the exercise room are rendered with but one gesture of my will petrified and insensate, such that the attractive, bewitched, overpowered woman of my choice and myself only remain animated and aware in this dim wooden room with its odors of liniment and unwashed sweating in which now all time has ceased—the seduction occurs outside of the time and movement of the most very basic physics—and as I beckon her to me with a powerful gaze and perhaps as well a slight circular motion of just one finger, and she, overpowered with erotic attraction, comes toward me, I also in turn arise from my bench in the corner and come also toward her as well, until, as in a formal minuet, the woman of the fantasy and I both meet together upon the exercise mat at the room’s exact center, she removing the straps of her heavy clothing with a frenzy of sexual mania while my schoolboy’s uniform is removed with a more controlled and amused deliberation, forcing her to wait in an agony of erotic need. To compress the matters, then there is copulation in varied indistinct positions and ways among the many other petrified, unseeing figures for whom I have stopped time with my hand’s great power. Of course, it is here you may observe this linkage with the program of Bewitched of my childhood sensations. For this additional power, within the fantasy, to freeze living bodies and halt time in the State Exercise Facility, which began merely as a logistical contrivance, became swiftly I think the primary fuel source of the entire masturbation fantasy, a masturbation fantasy which was, as any onlooker can easily be able to tell, a fantasy much more of power than merely of copulation. By this I am saying that envisioning my own great powers—over citizens’ wills and motion, over the flowing of time, the frozen obliviousness of witnesses, over whether my brother and my mother even may move the robust bodies of which they were so justly proud and vain—soon these formed the true nucleus of the fantasy’s power, and it was, unknown to me, to fantasies of this power that I was more truly masturbating. I understand this now. In my youth I did not. I knew, as an adolescent, only that the sustaining of this fantasy of overpowering seduction and copulation required some strict logical plausibility. I am saying in order to masturbate successfully, the scene required a rational logic by which copulation with this exercising woman is plausible in the public of the State Exercise Facility. I was responsible to this logic.’
Q.
‘This may appear so outlandish, of course, from the perspective of how little logic is in envisioning a sickly youth causing sexual desire with only a hand’s motion. I have really no answer for this. The hand’s supernatural power was perhaps the fantasy’s First Premise or aksioma, itself unquestioned, from which all else then must rationally derive and cohere. Here, you must say I think First Premise. And all must cohere from this, for I was the son of a great figure of state science, thus if once a logical inconsistency in the fantasy’s setting occurred to me, it demanded a resolution consistent with the enframing logic of the hand’s powers, and I was responsible for this. If not, I found myself distracted by nagging thoughts of the inconsistency, and was unable to masturbate. This is following for you? By this I am saying, what began only as a childish fantasy of unlimited power became a series of problems, complications, inconsistencies, and the responsibilities to erect working, internally consistent solutions to these. It was these responsibilities which swiftly expanded to become too insupportable even within fantasy to permit me ever to exercise again true power of any type, hence placing me in the circumstances which you see all too plainly here.’
Q.
‘The true problem begins for me in soon recognizing that the State Exercise Facility is in truth public, open to all those of the post’s personnel with proper documentation desiring to exercise; therefore, some person at any time could with ease stride into the facility in the midst of the hand’s seduction, witnessing this copulation amidst a surreal scene of frozen, insensate athletics. To me this was not acceptable.’
Q.
‘Not because of so much anxiety at being caught or exposed, which had been the concerns of Elizabeth Montgomery in the program, but for myself more because this represented a loose thread in the tapestry of power which the masturbation fantasy, of course, represented. It seemed ridiculous that I, whose circular hand’s gesture’s power over the facility’s physics and sexuality was so total, should suffer interruption at the hands of any random military person who wanders in from outside wishing to perform calisthenics. This was the first-stage indication that the metaphysical powers of my hand were, though supernatural, nevertheless too limited. A yet more serious inconsistency occurred to me soon in the fantasy, as well. For the immobile, oblivious personnel of the exercise room—when the woman of my choice under my power and myself had now satiated one another, and dressed, and returned to our two positions across the wide facility from one another, with she, her, recalling now of the interval now only a vague but powerful erotic attraction toward the pale boy reading across the room, which would permit the sexual relation to occur again at whatever future time I would choose, and I then performed the reversed second hand gesture which permitted time and conscious motion in the facility to again begin—the now resumed personnel in the midst of their exercises would, I realized, merely by glancing at their wristwatches, then they would be made aware that an inexplicable amount of time had passed. They would, therefore, be, in truth, not truly oblivious that something unusual had occurred. For instance, both my brother and our mother wore Pobyeda wristwatches. All witnesses were not truly oblivious. This inconsistency was unacceptable in the fantasy’s logic of total power, and soon made successful masturbation to envisioning it impossible. Here you must say distraction. But it was more, yes?’
Q.
‘Expanding the hand’s imagined powers to stop all clocks, timepieces, and wristwatches in this room was the initial solution, until the nagging realization occurred that, just at the moment the room’s personnel, afterward, left the State Exercise Facility and reentered the external flow of the military post outside, any first glance at some other clock—or, for example, the remonstrance of an appointment with a superior for which they were too late—this nevertheless would once again bring them to realize that something strange and inexplicable had taken place, which once again compromised the premise that all are oblivious. This, I naggingly concluded, was the fantasy’s more serious inconsistency. Despite my circular gesture and the brief harp which accompanied its power, I had not, as I had naively at the outset believed, caused time’s flow to cease and taken myself and the bewitched, athletic women out of time’s physics. Trying to masturbate, I was agitated that my fantasy’s power had in reality succeeded only in halting the superficial appearance of time, and then only within the limited arena of the fantasy’s State Exercise Facility. It was at this time that the imaginative labor of this fantasy of power became exponentially more difficult. For, within the enframing logic of the fantasy’s power, I now required this circular hand’s gesture to halt all time and freeze all personnel upon the entire military post of which the exercise facility was a part. The logic of this need was clear. But also it was incomplete.’
Q.
‘Excellent, yes. You see where this is now heading for, this logical problem whose circumference will continue expanding as each solution discloses further inconsistencies and further needs for the exercise of my fantasy’s powers. For, yes, because the posts to which my father’s duties to the computers brought us along were in strategic communication with the entire defense apparatus of the state, thus I soon was required to fantasize that only my one single hand’s gesture—taking place in only one bleak Siberian defense outpost, and for the sake of entrancing the will of merely one female programmer or clerical aide—nevertheless now must accomplish the instantaneous freezing of the entire state, to suspend in time and consciousness almost two hundred million citizens in the midst of whatever of their actions might happen to intrude upon my imaginations, actions as diverse as peeling an apple, traversing an intersection, mending a boot, interring a child’s casket, plotting a trajectory, copulating, removing new-milled steel from an industrial forge, and so forth, unending and numberless sep—’
Q.
‘Yes yes and because the state itself existed in close ideological and defensive alliance with many neighboring satellite states, and, of course, also was in communication and trade with countless other of the world’s nations, I all too quickly, as an adolescent, trying merely to masturbate in private, found out that my single fantasy of unknown seduction outside time required that the very world’s entire population itself must be frozen by the single hand’s gesture, all of the entire world’s timepieces and activities, from the activities of yam farming in Nigeria to those of affluent Westerners purchasing blue jeans and Rock and Roll, on, on… and you see of course yes not merely all human motion and time-measurings but of course the very movements of the earth’s clouds, oceans, and prevailing winds, for it is hardly consistent to reanimate the earth’s population to awareness at a resumed time of two o’clock with the tides and weathers, whose cycles have been scientifically catalogued to an exacting specificity, now in conditions corresponding to three o’clock or four. This is what I was meaning in referring to the responsibilities which come with such powers, responsibilities which the American program of Bewitched had wholly suppressed and neglected during my childish viewing. For this labor of freezing and holding suspended of each element of the natural world of earth which intruded to occur to me as I only am attempting to envision the attractive, athletic, uncontrollable cries of passion beneath me on the worn mat—these labors of imagination were exhausting to me. Episodes of masturbation fantasy which used to take up only fifteen brief minutes were now requiring many hours and enormous mental labors. My health, never good, declined in a dramatic fashion in this period, so much so so that I was often bedridden and absent from my schools and from the State Exercise Facilities which my brother attended with my mother after school period. Also, my brother began at this time to become a competitive power weight-lifter in the light divisions of his age and weight, competitions of lifting which our mother often attended, traveling along with him, while my father remained on duty with the targeting programs and I in bed in our empty quarters alone for whole days in a row. Most of my times alone in the bed in our room in their absence were increasingly devoted, not to masturbating, but in the labor of imagination of constructing a sufficiently motionless and atemporal planet earth to allow my fantasy merely to take place at all. I do not, in fact, remember now whether the American program’s implicit doctrine required the circular hand motion of Elizabeth Montgomery to deanimate the whole of humanity and the natural world outside the suburban home she shared with Darion. But I vividly do remember that a new, different television performer assumed the role of Darion late in my childhood, near the end of the American program’s availability from transmitters in the Aleutian, and my discomfiture, even as a child, at the inconsistency that Elizabeth Montgomery would fail to recognize that her industrialist mate and sexual partner was now altogether a different man. He did not look similar at all and she remained oblivious! This had caused me some great distress. Of course, also there was the sun.’
Q.
‘Our sun up above, overhead, whose seeming movement across the southern horizon was, of course, time’s first measure among man. This too must be suspended in its apparent movement, as well, by the logic of the fantasy, which, in reality, this entailed halting the very earth’s own spin. Very well I recall the moment this further inconsistency occurred to me, in the bed, and the labors and responsibility it implied within the fantasy. Well, too, do I remember this envy I felt of my brutish, unimaginative brother, upon whom the excellent scientific instruction of so many of the posts’ schools was sheerly wasted, and he would not be in the least overwhelmed by the consequences of realizing this further: that the earth’s rotation was but one part of its temporal movements, and that in order not to betray the fantasy’s First Premise through causing incongruities in the scientifically catalogued measurements of the Solar Day and the Synodic Period, the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun must itself be halted by my supernatural hand’s gesture, an orbit whose plane, I had to my misfortune learned in childhood, included a 23.53-degrees angle to the axis of the earth’s own spin, having as well variant equivalents in the measurement of the Synodic Period and Sidereal Period, which required then the rotational and orbital stopping of all other planets and their satellite bodies in the Solar System, each of which forced me to interrupt the masturbation fantasy to perform research and calculations based upon the varying planets’ different spins and angles with respect to the planes of their own orbits around the sun. This was laborious in that era of only very simple hand-held calculators… and beyond, for you see where this nightmare is heading for, since, yes, the sun itself is in many complex orbits relative to such nearby stars as Sirius and Arcturus, stars which must now be brought under the hegemony of the hand’s circular gesture’s power, as did the Milky Way Galaxy, upon whose edge the neighboring cluster of stars which includes our own sun both complexly spins and orbits the many other such clusters… and onward and onward, an ever-expanding nightmare of responsibilities and labor, because yes the Milky Way Galaxy of itself also orbits the Local Group of galaxies in counterpoint to the Andromeda Galaxy more than some 200 million light-years distant, an orbit whose halting entails also a halt in the Red Shift and thus the proven and measured flight of the now-known galaxies from one another in an expanding bloom of expansion of the Known Universe, with innumerable complications and factors to include in the nightly calculations which kept me from the sleep my exhaustion cried increasingly out for, such as, for example, the fact that such distant galaxies as 3C295 receded at rapid rates exceeding one-third the speed of light while far closer-in galaxies, including the troublesome NGC253 Galaxy at merely thirteen million light-years, appeared mathematically to actually be approaching our Milky Way Galaxy through its own momentums more rapidly than the larger expansions of the Red Shift could impel it to recede from us, so that now the bed is so awash with the piles of science volumes and journals and sheafs of my calculations that there would be no space for me to masturbate even if I had been able to do so. And it was when it then dawned upon me, amidst an agitated half-sleep in the littered bed, that all these many months’ datas and calculations had, so stupidly, been based upon published astronomic observations from an earth whose spin, orbits, and sidereal positions were in the naturally unfrozen, ever-changing mode of reality, and that all of it therefore must be recalculated from my fantasy’s gesture’s theoretical haltings of the earth and neighboring satellites if the seduction and copulation amidst the timeless obliviousness of all citizens were to avoid hopeless inconsistency—it was then I broke down from it. The fantasy’s single gesture of one adolescent hand had proven to entail an infinitely complex responsibility more befitting of a God than a mere boy. These broke me. It was at this moment I renounced, resigned, became again merely a sickly and unconfident youth. I abdicated at seventeen years and four months and 8.40344 days, reaching up high with now both of my hands to make the reversing gesture of linked circles which set all of it free once again in a bloom of renunciation that commenced at our bed and opened swiftly out to include all known bodies in motion. I think you have no idea what this cost for me. Delirium, confinement, my father’s disappointments—but these were as nothing compared to the price and rewards of what I underwent in this time. This American program of Bewitched was merely the spark behind this infinite explosion and contraction of creative energy. Deluded, broken or not broken—but how many other men have felt the power to become a God, then renounced it all? This is the theme of my power you say you wished to hear of: renunciation. How many know the true meaning of it? None of these persons here, I can assure you. Going through their oblivious motions outside of here, crossing streets and peeling apples and copulating thoughtlessly with women they believe they love. What do they know of love? I, who am by my choosing a celibate of all eternity, have alone seen love in all its horror and unbounded power. I alone have any rights to speak of it. All the rest is merely noise, radiations of a background which is even now retreating always further. It cannot be stopped.’
B.I. #72 08-98
NORTH MIAMI BEACH FL

‘I love women. I really do. I love them. Everything about them. I can’t even describe it. Short ones, tall ones, fat ones, thin. From drop-dead to plain. To me, hey: all women are beautiful. Can’t get enough of them. Some of my best friends are women. I love to watch them move. I love how different they all are. I love how you can never understand them. I love love love them. I love to hear them giggle, the different little sounds. The way you just can’t keep them from shopping no matter what you do. I love it when they bat their eyes or pout or give you that little look. The way they look in heels. Their voice, their smell. Those teeny red bumps from shaving their legs. Their little dainty unmentionables and special little womanly products at the store. Everything about them drives me wild. When it comes to women I’m helpless. All they have to do is come into a room and I’m a goner. What would the world be without women? It’d—oh no not again behind you look out!’
B.I. #28 02-97
YPSILANTI MI [SIMULTANEOUS]

K——:‘What does today’s woman want. That’s the big one.’
E——:‘I agree. It’s the big one all right. It’s the what-do-you-call….’
K——:‘Or put another way, what do today’s women think they want versus what do they really deep down want.’
E——:‘Or what do they think they’re supposed to want.’
Q.
K——:‘From a male.’
E——:‘From a guy.’
K——:‘Sexually.’
E——:‘In terms of the old mating dance.’
K——:‘Whether it sounds Neanderthal or not, I’m still going to argue it’s the big one. Because the whole question’s become such a mess.’
E——:‘You can say that again.’
K——:‘Because now the modern woman has an unprecedented amount of contradictory stuff laid on her about what it is she’s supposed to want and how she’s expected to conduct herself sexually.’
E——:‘The modern woman’s a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.’
K——:‘It’s what makes it so difficult to know what they want. Difficult but not impossible.’
E——:‘Like take your classic Madonna-versus-whore contradiction. Good girl versus slut. The girl you respect and take home to meet Mom versus the girl you just f*ck.’
K——:‘Yet let’s not forget that overlayed atop this is the new feminist-slash-postfeminist expectation that women are sexual agents, too, just as men are. That it’s OK to be sexual, that it’s OK to whistle at a man’s ass and be aggressive and go after what you want. That it’s OK to f*ck around. That for today’s woman it’s almost mandatory to f*ck around.’
E——:‘With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to f*ck around if you’re a feminist but it’s also not OK to f*ck around because most guys aren’t feminists and won’t respect you and won’t call you again if you f*ck around.’
K——:‘Do but don’t. A double bind.’
E——:‘A paradox. Damned either way. The media perpetuates it.’
K——:‘You can imagine the load of internal stress all this dumps on their psyches.’
E——:‘Come a long way baby my ass.’
K——:‘That’s why so many of them are nuts.’
E——:‘Out of their minds with internal stress.’
K——:‘It’s not even really their fault.’
E——:‘Who wouldn’t be nuts with that kind of mess of contradictions laid on them all the time in today’s media culture?’
K——:‘The point being that this is what makes it so difficult, when for example you’re sexually interested in one, to figure out what she really wants from a male.’
E——:‘It’s a total mess. You can go nuts trying to figure out what tack to take. She might go for it, she might not. Today’s woman’s a total crap-shoot. It’s like trying to figure out a Zen koan. Where what they want’s concerned, you pretty much have to just shut your eyes and leap.’
K——:‘I disagree.’
E——:‘I meant metaphorically.’
K——:‘I disagree that it’s impossible to determine what it is they really want.’
E——:‘I don’t think I said impossible.’
K——:‘Though I do agree that in today’s postfeminist era it’s unprecedentedly difficult and takes some serious deductive firepower and imagination.’
E——:‘I mean if it were really literally impossible then where would we be as a species?’
K——:‘And I do agree that you can’t necessarily go just by what they say they want.’
E——:‘Because are they only saying it because they think they’re supposed to?’
K——:‘My position is that actually most of the time you can figure out what they want, I mean almost logically deduce it, if you’re willing to make the effort to understand them and to understand the impossible situation they’re in.’
E——:‘But you can’t just go by what they say, is the big thing.’
K——:‘There I’d have to agree. What modern feminists-slash-postfeminists will say they want is mutuality and respect of their individual autonomy. If sex is going to happen, they’ll say, it has to be by mutual consensus and desire between two autonomous equals who are each equally responsible for their own sexuality and its expression.’
E——:‘That’s almost word for word what I’ve heard them say.’
K——:‘And it’s total horseshit.’
E——:‘They all sure have the empowerment-lingo down pat, that’s for sure.’
K——:‘You can easily see what horseshit it is as long as you remember to start by recognizing the impossible double bind we already discussed.’
E——:‘It’s not all that hard to see.’
Q.
K——:‘That she’s expected to be both sexually liberated and autonomous and assertive, and yet at the same time she’s still conscious of the old respectable-girl-versus-slut dichotomy, and knows that some girls still let themselves be used sexually out of a basic lack of self-respect, and she still recoils at the idea of ever being seen as this kind of pathetic roundheel sort of woman.’
E——:‘Plus remember the postfeminist girl now knows that the male sexual paradigm and the female’s are fundamentally different—’
K——:‘Mars and Venus.’
E——:‘Right, exactly, and she knows that as a woman she’s naturally programmed to be more highminded and long-term about sex and to be thinking more in relationship terms than just f*cking terms, so if she just immediately breaks down and f*cks you she’s on some level still getting taken advantage of, she thinks.’
K——:‘This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what’s really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we’re all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and informed.’
E——:‘While at the same time she’s still under this incredible sheer biological pressure to find a mate and settle down and nest and breed, for instance go read this thing The Rules and try to explain its popularity any other way.’
K——:‘The point being that women today are now expected to be responsible both to modernity and to history.’
E——:‘Not to mention sheer biology.’
K——:‘Biology’s already included in the range of what I mean by history.’
E——:‘So you’re using history more in a Foucaultvian sense.’
K——:‘I’m talking about history being a set of conscious intentional human responses to a whole range of forces of which biology and evolution are a part.’
E——:‘The point is it’s an intolerable burden on women.’
K——:‘The real point is that in fact they’re just logically incompatible, these two responsibilities.’
E——:‘Even if modernity itself is a historical phenomenon, Foucault would say.’
K——:‘I’m just pointing out that nobody can honor two logically incompatible sets of perceived responsibilities. This has nothing to do with history, this is pure logic.’
E——:‘Personally, I blame the media.’
K——:‘So what’s the solution.’
E——:‘Schizophrenic media discourse exemplified by like for example Cosmo—on one hand be liberated, on the other make sure you get a husband.’
K——:‘The solution is to realize that today’s women are in an impossible situation in terms of what their perceived sexual responsibilities are.’
E——:‘I can bring home the bacon mm mm mm mm fry it up in a pan mm mm mm mm.’
K——:‘And that, as such, they’re naturally going to want what any human being faced with two irresolvably conflicting sets of responsibilities is going to want. Meaning that what they’re really going to want is some way out of these responsibilities.’
E——:‘An escape hatch.’
K——:‘Psychologically speaking.’
E——:‘A back door.’
K——:‘Hence the timeless importance of: passion.’
E——:‘They want to be both responsible and passionate.’
K——:‘No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, over-whelming, powerful and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.’
E——:‘In other words what they want from a guy is passion.’
K——:‘They want to be swept off their feet. Blown away. Carried off on the wings of. The logical conflict between their responsibilities can’t be resolved, but their postmodern awareness of this conflict can be.’
E——:‘Escaped. Denied.’
K——:‘Meaning that, deep down, they want a man who’s going to be so overwhelmingly passionate and powerful that they’ll feel they have no choice, that this thing is bigger than both of them, that they can forget there’s even such a thing as postfeminist responsibilities.’
E——:‘Deep down, they want to be irresponsible.’
K——:‘I suppose in a way I agree, though I don’t think they can really be faulted for it, because I don’t think it’s conscious.’
E——:‘It dwells as a Lacanian cry in the infantile unconscious, the lingo would say.’
K——:‘I mean it’s understandable, isn’t it? The more these logically incompatible responsibilities are forced on today’s females, the stronger their unconscious desire for an overwhelmingly powerful, passionate male who can render the whole double bind irrelevant by so totally over-whelming them with passion that they can allow themselves to believe they couldn’t help it, that the sex wasn’t a matter of conscious choice that they can be held responsible for, that ultimately if anyone was responsible it was the male.’
E——: ‘Which explains why the bigger the so-called feminist, the more she’ll hang on you and follow you around after you sleep with her.’
K——:‘I’m not sure I’d go along with that.’
E——:‘But it follows that the bigger the feminist, the more grateful and dependent she’s going to be after you’ve ridden in on your white charger and relieved her of responsibility.’
K——:‘What I disagree with is the so-called. I don’t believe that today’s feminists are being consciously insincere in all their talk about autonomy. Just as I don’t believe they’re strictly to blame for the terrible bind they’ve found themselves in. Though deep down I suppose I do have to agree that women are historically ill-equipped for taking genuine responsibility for themselves.’
Q.
E——:‘I don’t suppose either of you saw where the Little Wranglers’ room was in this place.’
K——:‘I don’t mean that in any kind of just-another-Neanderthal-male-grad-student-putting-down-women-because-he’s-too-insecure-to-countenance-their-sexual-subjectivity way. And I’d go to the wall to defend them against scorn or culpability for a situation that is clearly not their fault.’
E——:‘Because it’s getting to be time to answer nature’s page if you know what I mean.’
K——:‘I mean, even simply looking at the evolutionary aspect, you have to agree that a certain lack of autonomy-slash-responsibility was an obvious genetic advantage as far as primitive human females went, since a weak sense of autonomy would drive a primitive female toward a primitive male to provide food and protection.’
E——:‘While your more autonomous, butch-type female would be out hunting on her own, actually competing with the males for food.’
K——:‘But the point is that it was the less self-sufficient less autonomous females who found mates and bred.’
E——:‘And raised offspring.’
K——:‘And thus perpetuated the species.’
E——:‘Natural selection favored the ones who found mates instead of going out hunting. I mean, how many cave-paintings of female hunters do you ever see?’
K——:‘Historically, we should probably note that once the quote-unquote weak female has mated and bred, she shows an often spectacular sense of responsibility where her offspring are concerned. It’s not that females have no capacity for responsibility. That’s not what I’m talking about.’
E——:‘They do make great moms.’
K——:‘What we’re talking about here is single adult preprimipara females, their genetic-slash-historical capacity for autonomy, for as it were self-responsibility, in their dealings with males.’
E——:‘Evolution has bred it out of them. Look at the magazines. Look at romance novels.’
K——:‘What today’s woman wants, in short, is a male with both the passionate sensitivity and the deductive firepower to discern that all her pronouncements about autonomy are actually desperate cries in the wilderness of the double bind.’
E——:‘They all want it. They just can’t say it.’
K——:‘Putting you, today’s interested male, in the paradoxical role of almost their therapist or priest.’
E——:‘They want absolution.’
K——:‘When they say “I am my own person,” “I do not need a man,” “I am responsible for my own sexuality,” they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.’
E——:‘They want to be rescued.’
K——:‘They want you on one level to wholeheartedly agree and respect what they’re saying and on another, deeper level to recognize that it’s total horseshit and to gallop in on your white charger and overwhelm them with passion, just as males have been doing since time immemorial.’
E——: ‘That’s why you can’t take what they say at face value or it’ll drive you nuts.’
K——:‘Basically it’s all still an elaborate semiotic code, with the new postmodern semions of autonomy and responsibility replacing the old premodern semions of chivalry and courtship.’
E——:‘I really do have to see a man about a prancing pony.’
K——:‘The only way not to get lost in the code is to approach the whole issue logically. What is she really saying?’
E——:‘No doesn’t mean yes, but it doesn’t mean no, either.’
K——:‘I mean, the capacity for logic is what distinguished us from animals to begin with.’
E——:‘Which, no offense, but logic’s not exactly a woman’s strong suit.’
K——:‘Although if the whole sexual situation is illogical, it hardly makes sense to blame today’s woman for being weak on logic or for giving off a constant barrage of paradoxical signals.’
E——:‘In other words, they’re not responsible for not being responsible, K——’s saying.’
K——:‘I’m saying it’s tricky and difficult but that if you use your head it’s not impossible.’
E——:‘Because think about it: if it was really impossible where would the whole species be?’
K——:‘Life always finds a way.’