In Memory of Tara Fares (Notes on Fanaticism)

Tara Fares on Instagram / Photo by Omar Moner

Tara Fares, the Iraqi beauty queen and outspoken social media star, has been shot dead in Baghdad by unknown assailants, after receiving a series of vile threats on her life. She was 22. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior promises an investigation - but we all know why she was murdered and by whom.  

Her death comes just days after the murder of Suad al-Ali, an Iraqi human rights activist who was shot and killed in the southern city of Basra. Again, whilst the gunman has so far been unidentified, one doesn't have to be Columbo to crack this case.  

When men enthusiastically put their most cherished ideals and beliefs into action, the result is all too often bloody; history is nothing but this violent trajectory. As Cioran says: "Once a man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable."    

Cries of religious ecstasy and shouts of devotion are echoed in the moans of victims. And blood always flows when epileptics and ideologues - primed with explosive conviction - insist their way is the way; "firm resolve draws the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter".

To live peacefully and happily requires learning how to curb enthusiasm and counter all certitudes, absolutes and convictions with irony and a smiling insouciance. For if the former ideals are allowed to contaminate the soul, the result is fanaticism: that fundamental human defect which instills in us the desire for truth and terror.

To quote Cioran once more:

"Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they [...] undermine fanaticism's purpose, analyse its frenzy. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. [...] What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man ..."

He concludes:

"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster."

And that's why I prefer Instagram over Islam, fashion over faith ...

See: E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). Lines quoted are from the section entitled 'Genealogy of Fanaticism' in chapter 1, 'Directions for Decomposition'.

Le Visqueux: Notes on Existential Slime and Ontological Sexism

I've never been a great fan of Jean-Paul Sartre and fully endorse Heidegger's repudiation of the Frenchman's attempt to characterize existentialism as a humanism. Mostly though, my dislike of Sartre is an irrational one. Simply put, I've always found him physically repulsive; one wouldn't want to cruise his body, as Barthes would say.

To me, there's something slimy about him - which is ironic, since Sartre offers a controversial account of slime and the danger of all things gooey (including women) towards the end of his most famous and sustained work of philosophy, Being and Nothingness (1943).

Le visqueux, says Sartre, compromises the masculine, non-sticky, sugar-free nature of consciousness or being-for-itself and threatens to submerge the latter in what Camille Paglia memorably describes as "the fleshy muck of the generative matrix" - just like a wasp drowning in the jam.

Slime, in all its base viscosity, affords us neither the reassuring inertia of the solid, nor the liquid dynamism of a fluid. It sticks to us and it sucks us in: it is the feminine revenge of non-conscious being that exists in itself beyond our knowledge of it.

The gynephobic character of this language - and let's not even get started on what he says about holes and the nature of the obscene - would be shocking, were it not so ludicrous and dated. But one can't help wondering what, privately, Simone made of it ...?

In her own writings, she happily adopted Sartre's ontology and seemed to turn a blind eye to his sexism. But what about in the bedroom? One likes to think she might have had a word in his ear about the nature of embodiment and how, whilst a dry soul is best, a moist cunt is the bestest thing of all.   

See:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Routledge, 1969), pp. 610-12.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 93.

See also Margery Collins and Christine Pierce, 'Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis', in Philosophical Forum, (vol. V, 1973), pp. 112-27.

On Mini-Skirts and Morality in Africa

A young woman modelling a mini-skirt 
with an African print: what's not to love? 
laviye.com

Someone wrote to ask why it is I often return to the topic of fashion which, in their view, is both besides the point and after the fact and thus, ultimately, an irrelevance. Surely, they say, there are far more important things to write about than shoes, mini-skirts and stocking tops.

Obviously, as a passionate exponent of a philosophy on the catwalk which is primarily concerned with a politics of style and the interplay between art and popular culture that fashion exemplifies, I don't agree with this. And so, here's another post that demonstrates how and why clothes are a crucial concern and the body - particularly the female body - remains a battleground around the world ...

Back in the sixties, the question of hemlines and morality in wake of the mini-skirt was an issue that exercised many minds. Nowhere more so than in Africa, where those newly in positions of authority saw Mary Quant's creations as fundamentally un-African and believed them to be yet another example of the West's corrupting influence, particularly on young, urban, independent women who were susceptible not only to fashion, but to feminism.     

Such women, who felt liberated by wearing mini-skirts and earning their own income, were branded as prostitutes and as witches who drained phallocratic society of its vital energy. They were subject not only to verbal abuse, but often serious physical violence.

In Tanzania, for example, the ruling party launched a campaign targeting what it regarded as indecent clothing. Gangs of youths patrolled the streets on the lookout for girls they deemed to be inappropriately dressed. Similar attacks on women wearing mini-skirts also took place in Ethiopia, one of which resulted in a riot that caused at least fifty people to be injured.     

In Malawi, meanwhile, president Kamuzu Banda, described mini-skirts as a fashion that was diabolic in origin and which he intended to completely eradicate from his homeland. Kenneth Kaunda, president of Zambia, agreed; citing the mini-skirt and apartheid as the two great evils.

One might have hoped that things would be different in Africa today. But, alas, with the increase and spread of religious stupidity - both Christian and Islamic in origin - things have, if anything, only got worse for those women who would otherwise love to show off their legs. Early this century, for example, idiots in Uganda called for a ban on mini-skirts worn in public, claiming that they were a dangerous distraction to (male) drivers. (To be fair, this is at least conceivable.)

More seriously, cases of women being stripped and beaten by gangs of men acting as both morality police and fashion critics continue to be reported in numerous countries including Kenya, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happily, groups of astonishingly courageous women have staged defiant mini-skirt protests in which they demand the right to dress as they please and to be afforded legal protection from violence.      

The irony, of course, is that the notions of deceny that are being defended are arguably more un-African than the alien fashions and other cultural expressions that are so feared. I would suggest that those gripped by a post-colonial determination to be free of foreign influence might want to conduct a genealogy of morals, rather than just dabble with dress codes ...     

Note: those interested in an alternative take on the politics of the mini-skirt in Africa might like to see an article from 2014 by the Kenyan blogger Owaahh: click here.

Bootylicious

Oh my gosh! Look at her butt!

Nicki Minaj sleeve photo for her smash hit single 'Anaconda' 

taken from the album The Pinkprint (2014)  

Curb Your Enthusiasm has taught me that for a man to comment on a woman's ass is always to invite trouble and misunderstanding. For as Cheryl points out to Larry, a woman's ass is very personal and it's simply inappropriate to make even a lighthearted reference to it. This is perhaps particularly the case when the ass in question belongs to a woman of colour.

However, at the risk of being mistaken not only for an ass man - and I'm not an ass man - but also for a middle-aged white man with a fetish for young black girls, I would like to defend and celebrate the bootyliciousness of women such as Beyoncé Knowles and Nicki Minaj, particularly in the faces of those who denigrate and seek to body shame such women in a manner that often betrays underlying misogyny and racism. 

For example, I read a piece recently by a (white male) music critic in which he laments the passing of truly gifted black female singers including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Gloria Gaynor, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross, Nina Simone, and Dinah Washington. Which is fine, if a somewhat predictable and uncontroversial list of names that no one with ears is going to seriously dispute or raise objection to. 

Unfortunately, however, he can't resist taking a dig at today's performers, including Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj, whom, he says, have helped pornify popular culture and become famous "not for their soulful voices or beautiful faces, but for endlessly twerking and firing lasers from their grotesquely over-inflated behinds". These women, he says, "have none of the talent, none of the charm, and none of the sophisticated intelligence" of their predecessors.            

This may, perhaps, have some element of truth in it. But, it seems also to display a puritanical fear of the flesh; particularly female flesh and particularly the black female bottom. One wonders if the writer is simply scared he'll not be able to handle all that jelly or what we might term corporeal excess - the too-muchness of nature, that Camille Paglia writes of in relation to the Venus of Willendorf.   

In a sense, then, the critic is right - the performers of today are earthy in every sense of the word and they drag us down and drag us back with their crude, uninhibited, anally-fixated sexuality. Whereas the great artists mentioned earlier elevate the human spirit with their soulful voices and beautiful faces and represent "the triumph of Apollonian image over the humpiness and horror of mother earth".

In the end, you pays your money and you takes your choice ...


Notes

To watch the scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm (S2/E2) in which Cheryl confronts Larry about his ass fetish, click here. 

To listen to the track 'Bootytlicious', by Destiny's Child, taken from the album Survivor (2001), click here. 

This song popularised the term bootylicious as an approving neologism and it has now entered mainstream English, as has a greater appreciation for women with larger hips, thighs and buttocks (i.e., a body type culturally associated with black and Latina women, though there are plenty of European women who also pride themselves on a fuller, more Rubenesque figure). 

See: Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), Ch. 2, 'The Birth of the Western Eye'.

On the Peacock and the Gamekeeper

Peacock by go-bananas on deviantart.com

The literary imagination of the nineteenth-century was fascinated by the symbol of the peacock. Indeed, even the young D. H. Lawrence, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, can't resist having one of these ornamental birds come screeching its way into his first novel  ...

The narrator, Cyril Beardsall, is sat one evening in an abandoned churchyard, chatting with his new acquaintance, Annable, the misanthropic (and misogynistic) local gamekeeper.

Although Annable is despised by the villagers and regarded as something of a devil, Cyril can't help confessing the erotic attraction he feels towards him; "his magnificent physique, his great vigour and vitality, and his swarthy, gloomy face drew me in". Cyril also likes the way that the older man treats him "as an affectionate father treats a delicate son", touching him on his shoulder or knee, as they sit discussing "the decline of the human race" into folly and corruption.        
 
Suddenly, a peacock came flapping out from behind the church and flew onto the marble figure of an angel that continued to guard a grave, even if it had long ceased caring for the poor parishioner buried therein:   

"The bird bent its voluptuous neck and peered about. Then it lifted up its head and yelled. The sound tore the dark sanctuary of twilight. ... Again the bird lifted its crested head and gave a cry, at the same time turning awkwardly on its ugly legs, so that it showed us the full wealth of its tail glimmering like a stream of coloured stars over the sunken face of the angel."

At first, Annable was silent and simply watched the peacock moving uneasily in the twilight. But then he exploded with unexpected and somewhat absurd misogynistic rage - especially considering the exuberant maleness that the large bird displayed: 

"'The proud fool! - look at it! Perched on an angel, too, as if it were a pedestal for vanity. That's the soul of a woman ... the very, very soul. Damn the thing, to perch on that old angel. I should like to wring its neck.'"

The peacock gave another loud cry; it seemed to Cyril to be stretching its beak at them in derision. Annable picked up a piece of earth and flung it at the bird, saying: "'Get out, you screeching devil!'" The peacock flew away, over the tombs and down the terraces.

"'Just look!'" said Annable, "'the miserable brute has dirtied that angel. A woman to the end, I tell you, all vanity and screech and defilement.'"

Now, it transpires that this contemptuous view of women is the result of a bad marriage experience; according to Annable, his wife manipulated him from the beginning and quickly turned him into an objectified plaything. Then she got bored and fell in love with a poet. Feeling he'd been shit upon and humiliated, he left and allowed the world to think him dead.

That doesn't sound very nice. But, ultimately, his ugly and resentful remarks on women - like those of Lawrence's other famous gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, - are unpleasant, unfair, and unforgivable, whatever the unfortunate circumstances that gave rise to them.
 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Executing Elephants Part II: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution)

Thirteen years prior to the macabre public execution of poor Mary discussed in part one of this post, was the equally gruesome murder of Topsy at an amusement park in Coney Island, New York by a combination of methods, including electrocution.    

Topsy was a female elephant born in SE Asia around 1875, smuggled into the United States in order to become part of a herd of performing circus animals. Like many others of her kind, however, Topsy didn't enjoy a showbiz lifestyle and rebelled against it, gaining the reputation as a troublesome beast. 

In 1902, after killing an idiot spectator who thought it would be amusing to stub out a cigar on her trunk, she was sold to Luna Park where she again became involved in several well-publicised incidents. Not wishing to tolerate a bolshie elephant, the owners of the park decided to hang Topsy in a pay-to-view, end-of-season public spectacular. This plan was abandoned, however, following objections from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

Nevertheless, a new event was quickly arranged; one for invited guests and members of the press only. It was also agreed to use a more certain - and thus arguably more humane - method of strangulation; Topsy was to have large, heavy ropes tied to a steam-powered winch put round her neck. She was also to be given poisoned carrots to consume and electrocuted for good measure.  

On January 4, 1903, in front of a small audience, poor Topsy was duly killed; the 6,600 volts of electricity providing a sizzling coup de grâce. Among those present was a film crew and the resulting snuff movie was released under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. This was available to view via coin-operated kinetoscopes at the time and can still be watched today on YouTube by those with a ghoulish disposition [click here]. 

Doubtless because of the existence of this film, Topsy the elephant has secured her place within the popular cultural imagination.

Finally, it is interesting and I think significant to note that the name, Topsy, was taken from that of a female slave character in Uncle Tom's Cabin - demonstrating how racism and speciesism, as well as violent misogyny, belong to the same matrix of fear and loathing: niggers, women, and dumb animals are all regarded within the white male psyche as dirty and dangerous; creatures in need of taming with a whip and being shown who's boss.  


Note

Part I of Executing Elephants: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging), can be read by clicking here. 
And Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad), can be read by clicking here. 

Klittra: On Sexual Politics in Sweden

Stieg Larsson's best-selling crime novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), was originally published three years earlier under the much more provocative title Män som hatar kvinnor - Men Who Hate Women; one that indicates the misogyny and violence at the heart of the book and, it seems, Swedish society (despite its reputation for social and sexual equality).

As critics have noted, the work brutally examines this disjunction between image and reality. Where many imagine Sweden to be a kind of achieved utopia, Larsson finds political, financial, and moral corruption - not to mention a form of fascism that is both historically present and rooted in the everyday behaviour (the speech acts, the pleasures, the dreams and fantasies) of those who would like to see an Ikea world triumphant.        

I have to admit, Swedish neo-Nazism and corporate greed doesn't really surprise me. But I was shocked to learn from an EU report last year on sexual violence against women, that, whilst there is an extensive problem across the Continent, it's the Scandinavian countries, where the problem is at its most acute: 46% of Swedish women interviewed, for example, report being the victim of some form of physical or sexual abuse at the hands of men. 

Without wanting to sound flippant, it's perhaps no wonder that so many Swedish women have chosen to make their home in Chako Paul City, a female-only town established in 1820 on the edge of the forests to the north. Better to be in a healthy, happy lesbian world than an unhealthy, unhappy heterosexual one where misogyny and rape are common and normalized. 

Better even just to keep to yourself and make your own fun; which, apparently, a lot of Swedish women do with great enthusiasm. In fact, they even have a new word for it, thanks to the Swedish Association for Sexual Education (RFSU): klittra - a portmanteau of clitoris and glitter. This neologism might not be ideal, but it's better I suppose than other options that included pulla and runka. 

However, whilst I have no objections to Amazonian lesbians living in their own communities, or masturbating women who like to grind their own coffee, as Oliver Mellors would describe it, one can't help but hope for the establishment of better - non-violent, non-sexist - male/female relationships in the future. For I suspect that separatism and sexual solipsism are only partial and short-term solutions (though this suspicion itself might be one full of heteronormative prejudice).

Afterthought: perhaps it will be a young Swedish woman - with or without a dragoon tattoo - who will show us a way forward. And who knows, she might already be living in Malmö; obedient of heart and golden of skin ...     

OMG! I Finally Agree With Julie Burchill

Julie Burchill by Phil Disley (2013)

I know that times of conflict and violent upheaval can lead to strange alliances and the sharing of space with some rather dubious bedfellows, but who would have guessed I'd finally want to cuddle up to Julie Burchill?

At the very least, I'm sympathetic to her recent piece in The Spectator in which she argues that, for some men, the misogyny of the Islamic State is a crucial part of their appeal; i.e. far from being problematic, the abominable manner in which they treat women and young girls is the perverse factor that makes otherwise impotent losers hard with sexual excitement. 

And this, shamefully, includes those far-left apologists in the West who defend the actions of the jihadis and fail to condemn their gynocidal gender politics. Self-hatred goes some way - perhaps a long way - towards explaining this. But so too does a suppressed feeling of resentment towards women and their emancipation in what was doubtless the most significant and successful of all modern revolutions. 

I think Burchill is right to touch on this and entirely justified to think about holy war within a wider context of desire. She's right also to link the violent abuse of women and the negation of their rights by Islamists to nice, middle-class white youths masturbating to misogynistic rap music and sharing rape jokes online. 

For feminists, there is therefore a far wider and far more disturbing problem to address here than one to do with beards and veils; one that is as much about pornographic models of masculinity within contemporary popular culture as it is religious fundamentalism.

    

Note: the Julie Burchill article to which I refer first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 22 November 2014. It can be found in the online edition by clicking here.  

 

The Case of Ghoncheh Ghavami

As profoundly ridiculous as the recent case of the seven young people tried in Tehran for singing and dancing to a pop song was (see the post entitled On the Will to Happiness), the case of Ghoncheh Ghavami is even more absurd and depressing.

For here we find a women's rights activist from Shepherd's Bush with a law degree from SOAS, languishing in an Iranian prison for over a hundred days and presently on hunger strike, for the "crime" of attending - or rather attempting to attend - a men's volley ball match at the Azadi stadium. 

In Tehran primarily to visit family and friends and to work with a charity that teaches street urchins to read, 25-year-old Ms Ghavami fell victim to a law passed in 2012 which bans women from attending all major sporting events - not just volleyball - in order to protect them from the lewd behaviour of male spectators caught up in the excitement of the moment. 

Although formally she has been charged with spreading propaganda against the Iranian regime (a charge that potentially carries a jail term of several years), Amnesty International is right to insist that what Ghoncheh is really being punished for is her peaceful attempt to highlight discrimination against women in Iran.

I wish there was something clever I could say here - a way to give the story a neat philosophical twist - but, as is increasingly the case, my heart's not in it. I simply want this young woman freed and allowed to come home as soon as possible. That, and the end of all forms of sexism, misogyny, and violence against women (particularly when institutionalized at state level and justified by religion).

Love, Hate and Intercourse

Intercourse: The Life and Work of Andrea Dworkin, 
dir. Pratibha Parmar.
Presently being filmed in San Francisco and 
scheduled for release in January 2015

According to Rawdon Lilly, the Lawrentian persona in Aaron's Rod (1922), hate is a form of love on the recoil which invariably results in destructive violence, be it on a personal-individual or an impersonal-collective level: It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.

I've long accepted the logic of this and still think it's a crucial insight. But might we not turn it around and suggest that rather than hate being an extreme reversal of love, love is actually a sublimated and disguised form of hate? That, essentially, even the highest and most celebrated expressions of love are coercive forms of spiritual and/or sexual abuse based upon the threat of violence.

This rather more disconcerting and pessimistic view is perhaps where Andrea Dworkin was coming from in her radical feminist study Intercourse (1987).

Although Dworkin doesn't actually write that all heterosexual intercourse is rape (this oft-quoted line was invented by her critics in an attempt to disparage her sophisticated argument by reducing it to a crass slogan), she does suggest that the male lover is more often than not in a position of power over the female object of his desire and that penetrative sex therefore invariably involves some degree of violation and all the flowers or boxes of chocolates in the world don't alter this fact, even if they serve to mask it and somewhat sweeten the deal.

Extending her own analysis developed in earlier works, Dworkin argues in Intercourse that the eroticized subordination, exploitation, and abuse of women within a phallocratic society is central and determines the behaviour and beliefs of both sexes.

This is increasingly apparent within a pornified culture, although the hatred, contempt and revulsion for women is reinforced by and throughout the arts, media, law, politics, science and religion (i.e. all of those discursive practices which between them produce the truth of our engendered human condition). You can read many classic works of literature or watch almost all films to see this; pornography is by no means exclusively to blame and is ultimately just another symptom of a far more serious disease: misogyny.     

And this is why what we need is not more censorship or attempts to outlaw extreme pornography, but what Nietzsche terms a revaluation of all values.


Note: this post is dedicated to KM and all those like her sensitive to the issue of invasive male penetration and the internal occupation of their bodies; those women who, like Dworkin, realise that the question of intercourse is fundamental to feminism and women's freedom. 

Do You Scroll and Stroll? A Reply to David Sexton

Illustration by Paul Dallimore: Evening Standard (05-11-13)

In an opinion piece entitled 'Do You Scroll and Stroll?' in yesterday's London Evening Standard, a writer by the name of David Sexton argues that due to an increased use of smart devices in public spaces a large number of people have become zombies or phone-drones and scroller trolls. 

Such individuals, he says, are no longer aware of others and only semi-conscious of their surroundings. They have become "little more than human obstacles" that "get in your way" and "collide with you without apology". This, he says, is both insulting and enraging. A form of digital solipsism that has rendered the "sense of shared purpose, of mutual respect in negotiating the daily friction of the city" null and void.

Such individuals, he says, are in "surrogate social worlds, at the expense of the real one."   

Now, all of this, is of course hysterical nonsense and ultimately a form of cheap and lazy journalism, written in an attempt, I suppose, to be amusing and provocative. Philosophically, clinging as it does to the fantasy of a real world, it's embarrassingly naive. But the cheapness, the laziness, the crassness and the naivety pale into insignificance before what follows: a misogynistic incitement to violence. 

For it turns out that Sexton's phone zombies are, "if the truth be told", mostly young women. And, because they are mostly young women caught up in their own "bubble world" of gossip, gaming and googling he is happy to fantasize their deaths beneath the wheels of tube trains and to encourage his readers to yell at girls who dare to use technology in public, or perhaps clap hands in their faces, click fingers, or hold arms out "as if directing idiot traffic". 

Indeed, due to the fact that the capital is such a busy place and - by implication - his is such a busy life - Mr Sexton goes still further and delights in the fact that you can see some men "choosing just not to get out of the way but to make sure they bump hard into the phone addicts walking into them". Indeed, some men "even deliberately try to knock the phones out of their users' hands". 

He admits that such verbal aggression and violent physical assault isn't "nice". But he justifies it on the grounds that a city such as London, full of busy men on important business like himself, "works only when there is mutual tolerance and respect between people sharing a packed public realm" and female phone zombies just don't understand this or give such. And thus these women had "better mind out" - !

Now, I know that the Evening Standard is a paper of such high quality that the publishers have literally to give it away, but, even so ... surely such a shameful article as this can't be acceptable, can it? Free speech is one thing: hate speech is another. 

And so, like Miss Zena McKeown who brought this piece to my attention, I can only call upon the Editor of the Standard, Sarah Sands, to issue some form of apology to all her female readers who have the audacity to carry smartphones and use other devices in Dave Sexton's world.