What Was I Thinking? (2 June)

Images used for posts published on this date 

in 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2023

 

 

Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I'm still busy working on an 8000-word essay, the structuring and now even the style and content of which is giving me a real headache, it's convenient to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by, rather than produce all-new material.

 

And so, let's time travel and reminisce ...

 

 

The Museum of Failed Products 

 

I always thought this post published in 2014 concerning the fact that the vast majority of new consumer products - just like the vast majority of species - are destined to fail, was an amusing if somewhat poignant post, concluding as it does that just as the marketplace can do without yoghurt shampoo or breakfast cola, so too can the universe do without us. 

 

 

Breast Ironing 

 

In June 2015, I wrote about the attempt to suppress the growth of healthy breast tissue in pubescent girls by using hard and often heated objects to literally flatten any signs of such development. Usually, this moral shaping of the flesh is carried out in the name of Love; i.e., it's a bad act performed with good intentions - just like the equally disgusting practice of FGM. 

 

Unfortunately, thanks to mass immigration and multiculturalism we now have both these things in the UK.  

 

 

Cabaret: Divine Decadence and Fascinating Fascism

 

Skip a couple of years forward, to 2017, and I was back in Berlin of the 1920s and early '30s ...

 

For many people, Cabaret (1972) - dir. Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli and Sally Bowles - is a near-perfect film musical; one that appears to starkly contrast the divine decadence of Berlin during the Weimar Republic with the fascinating fascism of Hitler's Third Reich, but which actually demonstrates how the two share the same cultural foundations and possess similar aesthetico-sexual concerns to do with questions of gender, style and performativity. 

 

For ultimately, if life is a cabaret old chum, then politics is just another form of show business and - as Jean Genet once wrote - even fascism can be considered theatre. 

 

Or, as Susan Sontag writes in her famous 1975 essay, there's a disturbing (almost symbiotic) relationship between the world of the cabaret and that of the concentration camp; the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death.  

In Praise of Denial

 

Skip forward another 24 months to 2019, and I discussed my favourite line from Shakespeare - I know thee not, old man ... (Henry IV Part 2, Act 5 scene 5) - arguing that the need to deny our elders, our loved ones, our teachers, our leaders, and, ultimately, ourselves, is an absolutely crucial requirement in the process of becoming what one is.

 

Why? Because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused. 

 

We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.

 

 

Schopenhauer and the Sea Turtles

 

 

2 June 2020: what was I thinking? 

 

Apparently, about German philosophers and marine reptiles ...

 

For Schopenhauer, life is a manifestation of a hungry will; concerned only with its own continuation. Thus, we witness innumerable species - including sea turtles, wild dogs, and tigers - caught up in an endless feeding frenzy in order to survive and reproduce others of their kind. 

 

Life is thus not only absurd, it is often atrociously cruel and grotesquely violent. And those who imagine that the earth would be some kind of peaceful paradise if only mankind were to stop interfering or vanish altogether, are very much mistaken. 

Sometimes, Better a Dead Mountain Lion Than a Live Dog 

Finally, last year, a post about German born, New York based artist and Wunderfrau Heide Hatry and her latest muse and family member; a stuffed puma called Luna - proving that the author of Ecclesiastes who insisted better a living dog than a dead lion was not always right. 

 

For sometimes, as Ms. Hatry knows, it is the deceased who have something vital to teach us. Which is why her long fascination with corpses has often resulted in work of great insight and macabre beauty. 

 

 

Breast Ironing

Just as the Western world finds the courage and strength of conviction to confront the disgusting practice of female genital mutilation, news emerges of an almost equally horrific form of cultural cruelty originating in the Central African Republic of Cameroon.

Breast ironing is the attempt to suppress the development of breast tissue in pubescent girls by using hard and often heated objects to literally flatten any signs of such development. Usually, this is carried out by the girl's mother who does so in the belief that it will protect her child from sexual harassment, rape, and early pregnancy that would tarnish the family name and prevent the girl from completing her education. 

Thus, as so often with the moral stylization of the flesh, breast ironing is a bad act carried out with good intentions; i.e., a form of violent physical abuse inflicted in the name of love.

The most commonly used implement for breast ironing is a wooden pestle, normally reserved for the pounding of tubers. Sometimes, however, other tools are used, including coconut shells, grinding stones, and hammers that have first been heated over coals. It is widely practiced throughout Cameroon and is also found in neighbouring countries and millions of girls have had to endure this extremely painful torture which can have serious and lasting physical and psychological effects.

And now, thanks to mass immigration and multiculturalism, breast ironing is here in Europe too, imported by the Cameroonian diaspora keen to retain their native traditions. 

Ultimately, there's very little to be said - even though there is clearly an urgent need for something to be done. One might suggest that those parents who are so concerned about protecting the honour of their female offspring that they are prepared to crush budding breasts and/or mutilate genitalia shouldn't be allowed to have baby girls in their care. But this might only lead some to mistakenly think I'm condoning female infanticide, which is a whole other (if clearly related) problem.

It shouldn't be, but, unfortunately, the words It's a girl are often heard in many parts of the world as a license not only to maim, but to kill.