The Woman I Want/To Be :: Essays On Attention Paid
> I have read more than a few books written by women about the experience of being woman. Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici; Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo; Catcalling by Soho Lee; Girlhood by Melissa Febos; The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir; Down Girl, by Kate Manne; Radical Homemakers, by Shannon Hayes.
The Woman I Want/To Be :: Essays On Attention Paid
> I have been photographing women’s clothing displays in shop widows for years. I am in love with womanhood. I am in love with womanhood in two ways. First, and dominantly, I am in love with womanhood in the way you would expect my male lizard brain to be. I am in love with womanhood as a receptive place where my sexual longings can come to repose.
I’ve had some time to contemplate the situation and to realize that yes, my story actually is a male fantasy trope. What else could it be? It was grounded in a moment that was of the stuff that heterosexual male fantasy is made of. A beautiful young woman walks up to a past-his-young-women-days man and asks, in a beguiling, slightly flirtatious way, for a light. My god, centuries of capitalist psychosexual conditioning came screaming at me in that one brief moment.
About Heteronormative Male Sexual Fantasy Tropes Essays On Attention Paid
After the event, I stewed in my juices a bit. I was disappointed in the reaction I got, and disappointed that nobody commented on my French braid, either.
About Heteronormative Male Sexual Fantasy Tropes Essays On Attention Paid
She asked what my story was about. I told her it was about two women having a one-night stand, explained the scenario, and mentioned I had read it to my wife. “And what did your wife say?” she asked, “that it was male sexual fantasy writing,” I said, whereupon she said, “I love your wife.” She had the same “oh brother” reaction my wife did.
About Heteronormative Male Sexual Fantasy Tropes Essays On Attention Paid
Eventually, I asked my wife if the scene I painted was implausible. She said, as far as she knew, it wasn’t. I asked her if I had been disrespectful to women in the way I wrote it. She said I had not. So then, I suggested, the problem is that because a man wrote it, it can’t escape the male fantasy trope critique? She said maybe.
About Heteronormative Male Sexual Fantasy Tropes Essays On Attention Paid
The prose flowed out of me and within an hour or two I had the bones and a lot of the flesh of Lila, as I had named her. I knew I was writing something that could be perceived as a male fantasy trope, but I earnestly wanted to lift the story beyond that.
About Heteronormative Male Sexual Fantasy Tropes Essays On Attention Paid
I am not a fan of smoking, so in my conscious mind I thought, “you shouldn’t smoke,” but this young woman was an astonishing vision. Producing a lighter and lighting her cigarette would have absolutely made my day, or rather, it would have prolonged for a few seconds longer this commune with feminine beauty and sexuality the universe had chosen to send my way.
About Heteronormative Male Sexual Fantasy Tropes Essays On Attention Paid
October 07, 2022
Heather Cox Richardson, October 06, 2022
Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.
“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.
… the next two elections will be determinative about which way the country is going… democracy or authoritarianism… conservatives, don’t believe in democracy, haven’t believed in democracy for some time now… why?… because conservatism in this country is presently focused on the preservation of the power of the mostly white patriarchy and they can’t preserve their power if elections are free and fair… they are in desperate survival mode where any means justifies the end… thus, scandals like those of Herschel Walker, which would have taken down any politician just 10 years ago are no longer disqualifying… there is an absolute abasement in this desperation… the trouble is, it may prevail…
Want Lipstick That Actually Lasts? Rouge Dior Forever is the Answer
… i have a deep love of the feminine and what is more feminine than lipstick, or more important to lipstick than it be lasting?…
- Who should use it? Anyone who wants intense, pigment-rich matte lipstick that actually stays where it’s supposed to – there are no smears, smudges or fading here
They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.
Viruses Are More Like Cone Snails Than Hijackers
… as i read this article, there is this growing sense of interconnectedness… that all things are connected to all other things and that the universe can only be understood as an incredibly wondrous tapestry of matter and energy and a byproduct, life… we can’t understand the parts without some comprehension of the whole… and we can never think that anything can be understood in isolation…
Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance.
Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow.
Immersing Yourself in the Works of Gustav Klimt #art #gustav-klimt #exhibitions
In the unlikely setting of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in Manhattan, seeping into the ceilings, floors, walls, and recesses of the hall, projections of Gustav Klimt’s paintings are now set on an hour-long loop. Built between 1909 and 1912, the bank’s interior retains many of its original decorative elements, which include elegant glass panels, patterned limestone carvings, and brass detailing. Contrary to what its facade seems to convey about what happens inside — mysterious and important affairs of the economy and the state — people inside are huddled and seated in clusters on the ground and on chairs in darkness, hushed and sedated by a carousing Johann Strauss waltz.
Wrightwood 659 Hosts Exhibitions on the “First Homosexuals” and Michiko Itatani
Roberto Montenegro, “Retrato de un anticuario o Retrato de Chucho Reyes y autorretrato” (detail) (1926), oil on canvas, 102.5 x 102.5 cm, Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico
The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930 starts with the year 1869, when the word “homosexual” was first coined in Europe, inaugurating the idea of same-sex desire as the basis for a new identity category. More than 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and film clips from public and private collections around the world are on view, including works that have never before been allowed to travel outside their respective countries. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first multi-medium survey of early, determinedly queer art that explored what the “first homosexuals” understood themselves to be — and how the dominant culture, in turn, understood them. This is part one of a two-part exhibition (the second is planned for 2025 and will feature 250 masterworks) developed by a team of 23 international scholars led by distinguished art historian Jonathan D. Katz with associate curator Johnny Willis.
French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature
Annie Ernaux is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the Prix Renaudot for _A Man’s Place_, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work, and recently the winner of the International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years.
Annie Ernaux on the “Infinite Lack” in Our Search for Love
Anyway, what does this sign really mean, the phone call from the Latin Quarter? That he’s thinking of me? But in what way? There’s nothing more impossible to imagine than the desire, the emotion, of the Other. And yet, only that is beautiful. All I dream of is this perfection, without yet being sure of attaining it—of being the “last woman,” the one who erases all the others, with her attentiveness, her skilled knowledge of his body: the “sublime affair.”
10-04-2022
… HCR this morning mostly about the mounting trouble for various actors on the far right and the challenge to democracy… the noose closing around 45’s neck and the violence he seeks to sponsor to distract and prevent… it is a race to see if he becomes president before he is jailed, in which case he would never be jailed… the Oath Keepers go on trial… Moore v Harper was heard by SCOTUS… the conservative judges are flirting with giving states absolute rights to determine elections… the so called “independent state legislature” doctrine is being determined… 45 has been definitively tied to withholding documents from the government by a witness… Herschel Walker continues to melt down…
In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”
… read with interest Zeba Blay’s review of Blonde… her main complaint is that it fetishize Monroe’s pain to no good purpose and that the movie was boring… H agreed with that assessment… i did not… i thought it effectively showed the appalling behavior of patriarchal males while not pandering to that behavior with highly erotic (to most people) scenes… to the extent that nudity and sex were in the film, and there was lots of both, it wasn’t very titillating, at least not to me… still, one needs to pay attention to women on the subject because they know things men will never know about being a woman in a patriarchal society…
… Sidelined No More: Reading List of Fiercely Political Women… so many books one could read… so little time… the article makes an extensive argument that women still are not taken seriously when they write about politics seriously and offers up a selection of books by women authors past and present…
Among the Washington Post’s columnists, who mostly cover politics, 57 are men and 26 are women. In the last two months, the New York Times’s opinion pages published 77 political analyses by men and only 29 by women. Half of those women-authored pieces had a male co-author.
Male domination of writing on politics in America is most extreme in the conservative press. In the National Review, 90% of the recent political analyses were by men, and the quarterly Claremont Review of Books—which prides itself on being the intellectual heart of the American right—has gone two and a half entire years without publishing a single feature essay written by a woman.
The problem isn’t, or isn’t only, a moral one. Readers are denied something by this exclusion. Sometimes women have an especially intimate way of writing about politics that’s both close-up—examining the psychology and the erotics of power—and carries an interesting objectivity and distance, thanks, perhaps, to their own history of being distanced from the political sphere.
… relative to HCR’s post above is J. Michael Luttig’s piece in The Atlantic arguing that the “Independent State Legislature” theory is bunk…
If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it would confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states. It would mean that the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures would not be reviewable by the state courts—including the states’ highest court—under their state constitutions.
That as many as six justices on the Supreme Court have flirted with the independent-state-legislature theory over the past 20 years is baffling. There is literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.
The state supreme court’s decision under the North Carolina constitution is conclusive under that constitution, and it is only reviewable by the federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States thereafter for a determination of whether that decision violates the federal Constitution.
All of which goes to confirm that the Constitution neither contemplates nor permits federal constitutional commandeering of the states’ constitutions and their judicial processes. Rather, it contemplates and provides only for federal judicial review of the state supreme courts’ state constitutional decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court for consistency with the United States Constitution.
… we will know next summer how bad the current iteration of SCOTUS is… there is, unfortunately, reason to be concerned…
The Beastliness of Bacon, Michael Glover, Hyperallergic
Francis Bacon, “Man with Dog” (1953), oil on canvas, 152 x 117 cm. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1955. K1955:3 (© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd)
… i had intended to share an image of a later work that seemed more visually compelling, but then i looked at Man with Dog and… after a moment… um, wow!… something really dark about the painting as, apparently, there was with Bacon himself…
… the idea that darkness of the soul is a frequent walking companion of genius is one that came up a day or two ago as H and i watched a news segment on the four part mini series We Need to Talk About Cosby, in which…
Writer/director W. Kamau Bell’s exploration of Bill Cosby’s descent from “America’s Dad” to alleged sexual predator. Comedians, journalists and survivors have a candid, first of its kind conversation about the man, his career and crimes.
… when a great creator turns out to have a parallel self that is a horrible self, what do we do with the creative legacy?… in Bacon’s case there were “sadomasochistic excesses” though there was no suggestion in the article that any of it was non-consensual… still, by most of our standards, there were demons in his psyche and those demons flowed out onto the canvas… psyche and creative output walked hand in hand… in the case of the alleged sex crimes of Cosby, one has the sense that psyche and creative are split, with the dark self a presence lurking outside a comfortable suburban home, peeping through windows, stalking its next victim…
20220213-03
What i read today…
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
… i read the review in AnOther magazine which i have been avoiding for days, largely because it was primal me that was interested in looking at it and i was trying to resist primal me… it surprised (disappointed?) me that it was not about the porn industry and was instead about societal attitudes towards sex and woman and largely about the polarization we are experiencing around the globe… i now want to watch it though with subtitles and it’s subject matter it will be a more difficult sell to H… a link to the trailer…
… on to Feedbin…
… Jonathan Blaustein wrote about his trip to Chicago this morning… i learn about Weedmaps.com, for the weed dispensary near you… i look up what might be near me and find that it’s all medical marijuana in NY… weed was recently legalized for recreational use too, but i imagine the state is still working out the regulations and how to enforce them…
… overall, JB reported on numerous pizza restaurants which seemed to be the only food they ate while in Chicago… i mean, who eats pizza all weekend long and doesn’t gain a few pounds doing it?… not me… not at this point in my life… i try to eat healthier than that…
… i review the work of Leonardo Magrelli, published on Aint-Bad, and think, ok, but not compelling… all black and white, city environment…
… i look over, read, Proud, Provocative Portraits That Celebrate Feminine Authenticity… a woman photographer and stylist pursuing a project called Girls… an area of interest as anyone reading this blog will know… yes, interested because of primal programming, but also interested in the subject of how women are presented in photoland… i am especially interested in cases where women photograph women in ways that will, whether intended or not, provoke the male gaze… this set of photographs provokes the male gaze and seems intended to…
Albertine Photography Guen Fiore, styling Rubina Vita Marchiori
_ A new series by photographer Guen Fiore and stylist Rubina Vita Marchiori celebrates the fearless authenticity of Gen-Z women_1
… the article tells us the women are photographed in their own homes (a safe environment)… the broad message, i will present myself as sexy if i want to, i am in control of that… a legitimate question to ask, does this promote women as much beyond being sex objects?… my answer, i am not sure… apparently there are photo sessions with each woman, that, presumably, lead to multiple images… are they all laced with sensuality?, showing the women in states of partial undress?… are they presented in any other way?… the artist’s instagram account suggests otherwise…
… i look at some of the comments on one post… that the women are “hot” is appreciated… the photographer has 34.5k followers… did they build that following with these images?… yes, almost all the images are attractive young women displaying their bodies in sensual, sexual ways… the following has been built on the fact that “sex sells,”…
… it think what bothers me is not that the women are presenting themselves sensually, sexually, but that it is a celebration of “fearless authenticity of Gen-Z women… only if women are to be defined by their sexuality… so the project tries to be high minded, but isn’t at all…
Bruno, Gilda, Proud, Provocative Portraits That Celebrate Feminine Authenticity ↩︎
… i am up at 3:30 AM… the effects of the daylight savings change… it will settle out, but i again ask why do we do this to ourselves?… an article on whether DST saves energy is inconclusive… it saves electricity consumed for lights, but may increase electricity and other fuels consumed to heat and cool… is it worth the disruption of sleep cycles?… can’t we find another way to adjust ourselves?… like start work an hour earlier and stop an hour earlier?… don’t most of us work 24/7 anyway?… aren’t more of us working from home now?…
… i read an article that suggests 45 is the odds-on favorite to win the presidency in 2024… dear god how is it possible?… bookmakers, please check your calculations again… i really don’t know what i will do if that happens…
… are we really being pushed to authoritarianism because it is more efficient?… were the Middle Ages really efficient for humankind?…
… an article discussing Texas law SB8… something about judicial immunity from law suits hampering the clear cut argument that the vigilante provisions of the law are a dangerous precedent that has the potential to undermine constitutional rights in a variety of ways… something about enjoining their clerks from working on enforcement of the law rather than judges… i didn’t completely understand…
… all of this on top of not feeling well… kind of tired… maybe it’s alcohol, though i don’t believe i overindulged last night… it does seem to sap me… just doesn’t agree with my system anymore?…
… started watching Rake, an Australian series featuring a rakish lawyer surrounded by a complex of beautiful, smart and accomplished women who frequently bare their breasts (along with the men in the show, but a man’s bare breast is way less interesting than a woman’s to me)…
… if i am honest, i am in it for the beautiful women characters who bare their breasts first, the story telling second… did i mention that the women characters are also smart and accomplished?…
… the story lines are interesting, the main characters all have redeeming virtues to balance their flaws, and there is a gamut of reasonably well rendered human complexity offered up… but denying i am powerfully attracted by the titillation is the same as saying one buys Playboy for the articles (does anyone still say that? Does Playboy still exist in any meaningful way?)… yes, there may be good articles, but really, it’s the tits and ass that matters…
… i come up against this uncomfortable truth over and over and over again… to the point where i throw up my hands in frustration at what to do… i know that society’s continued emphasis on women’s bodies is a mess of objectification that does women general harm in their efforts to be taken seriously as smart and accomplished individuals… but there is this primal thing… i am hardwired to be sexually attracted to women i think are beautiful… the mechanics of it are different for the two sexes (and i will leave aside for the moment all the gender fluid nuances that exist), but the bottom line is primal attraction is primal and it is not possible to eradicate it from my being…
… i can try not to be drawn into programming and imagery that gets my libido going, but why?… i enjoy having my libido engaged… it feels good… as long as it involves adults portrayed consensually and in consensual engagement, and as long as i am able to separate fantasy from reality, i set myself free to be titillated without guilt…
… i am coming to the conclusion that it is best not to try to ban libidinous reactions from my mind (not that i have ever really tried)… nor do i think i should be embarrassed by it (which i sometimes am)… instead, i need to acknowledge to myself how powerful they are, take note of when and how they are activated, then let them move through like clouds in the sky, enjoyed simply for what they are…
… what matters to me is how i treat women (all human beings really, but women are the focus here)… acknowledging my initial primal reaction (to myself) and then letting it pass through is, as far as i can see, my best strategy for moving on to a more respectful and satisfying relationship with the women i share the planet with…
** Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex**
… a book about the politics of sex?… from a philosopher no less… sounds interesting… might want to get…
Tschabalala Self
Tschabalala Self, “Love to Saarjtie” (2015)
… yesterday i posted about Vanessa Beecroft and two local-to-me artists, Debbie Masters and Judy Sigunick…
… today, Tschabalala Self comes to my attention as painting in a related primitive vein, with the subject matter being woman… i find [the sexual frankness of some of this work](https://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Tschabalala-Self_Rainbow-Bronze-1_2021_70x48x22in.jpg “Tschabalala Self, “Rainbow Bronze I” (2021)") interesting in that women are addressing their genitals openly and frankly which is new to me… a new trend or have i not looked at enough contemporary art beyond photography?…1
… i am also finding it interesting that i am frequently seeing work by woman rendered in a Venus-Earth-Mother-Goddess way… is this a sign that the matriarchal spirit is trying to reclaim it’s place…
… these are just reactions… much more study needed to accurately identify a trend and the meaning of it as well as discuss the ins and outs of the representation of women in art…
… there is a similar trend in photography where women are photographing other woman in the nude, though not usually revealing their genitals… it raises the question of whether it is objectification if a woman is the photographer… the conclusion i have come to is that yes, it can be objectifying and that objectification is not always and forever a bad thing… it can take its place gracefully in an enlightened culture that does not automatically devalue women to mere sex objects… unfortunately, we have a long way to go in the United States on that score… ↩︎
… an article on the sensual photography of men and sculptures of men by Magnum photographer Herbert List… i am not into the depiction of the male body sexually, so i view the images with a certain detachment that i don’t have when viewing depictions of female bodies, where viewing is always sexually charged… List photographed during the Second World War… he had little opportunity to exhibit or publish during his lifetime… looking at the images, i imagines him traveling through the Greek Isles and surrounding himself with youthful, heavenly bodies wherever he went…
… as much as i try to be an enlightened man, the sexual lead in image hooks me most of the time… hoping being conscious of it will be good for something… i scanned the article for further sexual eye candy, found little, moved on…
Kristina Shakht, To Be Or To Become
… an article, This Zine Celebrates the Female Body in its “Raw and Authentic” form… the artist is a survivor of sexual assault i am told… she has made a zine representing how women see themselves i am told… the photographs are various, women, some flowers, some landscapes, the women in various states of undress and exposure… the lead-in photograph is of a young woman, naked, crawling across gravel, she is thin, angular, almost childlike… one feels the pain of gravel on knees… i suppose it is raw and authentic if one thinks that nudity is raw and authentic… i find it mostly engages my male gaze… that is, it is mostly sexual… the images are well made, artistic…
_ “(The zine explores the) modern-day female experience: the way we feel ourselves, the way we move, think, and live that’s beyond sexuality and being sexual. I wanted to show that naked body doesn’t mean sexual, that it can be just body._1
… i would like to see the Zine itself, but i discover it is being issued in a very limited and very expensive format… book formats and zines in particular are not generally meant to be so pricey, a larger audience is being courted, usually…
… i am left with the images in the article, which mostly seem to objectify the women… that is my older white male take…
… another example of sex selling, it almost always works on me… i wish i could say that was not true, but it is, and perhaps i shouldn’t feel so bad about it because it works on the majority of us and maybe we should have less prurient idea of sex and the naked body… though, its her nakedness that sells, he’s just a prop… the male gaze sought and secured…
… it turns out that the film still is from a movie that will be discussed in the pilot episode of the podcast series reported on in the article…
_The season’s pilot episode will dissect Paul Verhoeven’s second feature Turkish Delight (1973) – an intensely violent and erotic film charting the fallout of a stormy love affair. Although unsung on an international stage, it has been named the greatest Dutch film of the 20th century by critics in its native Netherlands, and played a significant role in the country’s countercultural history.1
