The Case of Old Eguchi

Photo by Akif Hakan found on artclit.tumblr.com

Back - once more - in the House of the Sleeping Beauties and the case of old Eguchi ...

What is he hoping to find in bed with drugged and naked teenage girls and why do his fantasies invariably involve violence and a desire to physically abuse the young bodies that stimulate such sweet memories, rather than treat them with tenderness and affection?

Is it because male sexuality is inherently aggressive? Do all men dream of rape and incline towards tyranny as soon as they have a hard-on? I don't think so. Nor do I believe that Eguchi's anger towards the sleeping beauties is born of impotent frustration, or the ugly resentments of age (though he is acutely aware of his declining powers and his lust is doubtless driven to some degree by the approach of death).

Rather, I think we must look elsewhere for why it is Eguchi repeatedly thinks of strangling the girls, or placing his hand over their mouths and noses and so preventing them from breathing. He is aware that such acts constitute evil, but he can't help contemplating them; of sacrificing virgins, rather than merely deflowering them.

His thoughts, in other words, are atrocious rather than sensual; Eguchi wants to leave his mark on the girls and - above all - he wants to waken them and imagines that he might have a better chance of doing so were he to tear off a limb or stab with a knife, rather than place kisses on a breast or his flaccid penis between soft lips.  

Ultimately, it's not the astonishing beauty of the young women that drives Eguchi mad; it's their radical passivity. He cannot bear the fact that not only do the sleeping girls not speak, but they do not know his face or hear his voice either. In other words, the girls - who have volunteered to become perfect objects - negate his subjectivity so that not even the smallest part of his existence is acknowledged.   

It's the desire to still be recognised as a man and a living being in the eyes of the world that is uppermost in his heart - and this is precisely what is denied him. And so, even when sandwiched between the naked bodies of two women, Eguchi knows himself to be fatally isolate and alone - just like the rest of us at last.     



Note: 'House of the Sleeping Beauties', by Yasunari Kawabata, can be found in House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, trans. Edward Seidensticker, with an introduction by Yukio Mishima, (Kodansha International, 1980).     

The Case of Kristina Pimenova

Whether nine-year-old Kristina Pimenova is the most beautiful girl in the world is debatable, but I'm more than happy to concede she's a serious contender for the title. 

The young Russian is certainly very lovely to look at (if perhaps a little too angelic for my tastes) and has been modelling since the age of three; landing contracts with several of the big names in fashion and a cover of Vogue Bambini. She also has a large following on social media, which, unfortunately, exposes her to some unsavoury individuals and a raft of lurid comments and fantasies.  

But it's unfair and ludicrous to blame Miss Pimenova for this; or, indeed, her mother, Glikeriya Shirokova, who, despite successfully managing her daughter's career and profile with all due care and diligence, has recently found herself subject to criticism; accused not only of exploiting her child, but of wilfully turning Kristina into an object of illicit desire.

I think that Shirokova is justified in rejecting claims that she has prematurely sexualised her daughter and thus made her vulnerable to predators. I also think she is entitled to suggest that, just as equally damaging and dangerous ideals of innocence and purity are projected onto Kristina by enchanted strangers, obscenity too is in the mind of the beholder.

That is to say, in order to find pictures of children sexually arousing or provocative, you need, in Shirokova's words, to think like a paedophile and must therefore examine your own secret thoughts and desires. The problem, of course, is that we all live today in a profoundly pornified culture of images and so cannot help viewing (and judging) everyone and everything as a sex object. 

My Night in Raval with Ken and Barbie - A Guest Post by Katxu

El Raval is a notorious neighbourhood in the Ciutat Vella district of Barcelona. A place where - I'd been told - anything goes and gender is completely fluid. This, apparently, placed me under a compulsion to visit. And so, despite my doubts concerning the validity and, indeed, desirability of such a claim, I decided to venture forth one night and take a peek. 
 

The first liquid bodies I encountered were puddles of piss left by drunks and stray dogs. Sidestepping these and the unfortunate beings that made them, I made my way to a restaurant which boasted haute cuisine on the menu and low-life outside its doors. Wealth and poverty never really meet; they simply ignore one another even whilst living side-by-side (though sometimes the rich like to slum it and the poor like to riot). 
    

I watched the parade of people pass by: tourists from the UK; immigrants from South America and Asia; prostitutes from Eastern Europe; and a colourful assortment of home-grown queers. I suppose the latter best exemplified the fluidity of gender I'd been promised, but I couldn't help thinking that they seemed more fixated by - and fixed in - sexual rules and roles than the most conventional boy and girl next door.

I also thought of all the writers who have described such scenes and the painters who have depicted these very streets - the Carrer d'Avinyó is in the nearby Gothic quarter. Is it really so transgressive and so liberating to celebrate all that mushrooms beneath a red light and to unconditionally love everything that flows like Henry Miller?

Feeling a little tipsy, I went to powder my nose in order to clear my mind. When I got to the washrooms, I found that the doorknobs on the two doors facing had been replaced with dolls' heads; an ironic gesture of postmodern barbarism. One had long blonde hair and one had short dark hair - I'm not sure, but I think it was Barbie and Ken, both looking decidedly worse for wear. 

As I was in a hurry and in no mood to try to puzzle out which head to turn, I decided to reach for Barbie. But before I could place my hand on her poor battered head, a man shouted and said that the Barbie cubicle was reserved for cross-dressers and transgender individuals only; that I should wait for Ken's cubicle to become free.      

I was going to challenge the curious reasoning - I was going to ask about fluidity - but instead I just decided to turn on my heels and go home with my un-powdered nose in the air. 

Katxu is a keen observer of life in Barcelona. Originally from Burgos, she likes to read, to paint, to cook, and to enjoy the company of her plants on the balcony of her apartment overlooking Sants Estació and from where she can smile at the Sony sign.

Katxu appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind submission of a text written especially for this blog, and, indeed, for permission to use the photo taken of her last year in Sitges.  

Is Revisting the Past Ever Worth the Effort? - A Guest Post by Afiya S. Zia

In the beginning, it may even be flattering: emails from boys you hardly knew in fifth grade who seek you out on the web from across decades and oceans. It's sweet to have them recall their little crushes. 

And what about those comrades with whom you lost touch and who - now that their children have left and spouses are about to follow - seek out the comfort of old feminist networks ...?

Then there's the return to unfinished intellectual projects that invariably leads one back to academia; this time in the vain attempt to prove that citizenship in the real world affords more valuable lessons than all the theory churned out by those who remained as permanent residents within ivory towers. There's an undeniable sense of righteous joy in exposing those who like to pretend that they never sold out to the corporate world; in showing how they too are complicit with capitalism because knowledge is an expensive business after all.

But is revisiting the past ever really a good idea, or even worth the effort?    

Overeager ex-boyfriends from school showing all sorts of interest in your professional development and the intimate details of your personal life, quickly start to become a bit creepy; nostalgic curiosity ends in cyber-stalking. 

And old comrades are now often just old and troubled by the spectre of loneliness. They used to ask what could be done to overthrow patriarchy; now they simply want to know where all the good men have gone and how they might find one for themselves.  

Meanwhile, the path to redemption via further academic accomplishment leads nowhere; one is little different from all those others who scramble up career ladders and chase success. We all conform and play the same game at last.

Having said that, there remains, of course, the shining hope of revisiting the past; i.e. that one just might reconnect with someone whom one should never have let go in the first place.

Also, crucially, it affords one the opportunity not to put things right, but, rather, to repeat mistakes - only this time without regret. For one looks back and travels back not in order to correct the past with the benefit of hindsight, but to make an affirmation of all that's been and of one's own life to date, complete with all its many errors and multiple stupidities.

Afiya S. Zia is a feminist scholar, activist, and provocateur based in Karachi. She is the author of Sex Crime in the Islamic Context (1994) and has also published numerous essays and articles. She is currently completing a new work entitled Faith and Feminism in Pakistan, whilst studying for a Ph.D. at the Women and Gender Studies Institute (University of Toronto). 

Ms Zia appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind submission of a text written especially for this blog and, indeed, for the recent photo taken in Chelsea Market, NYC. 

And Winner, of the 2014 Torpedo the Ark Award, Is ...

... third-year journalism student, Vicky Chandler.

Vicky wins the award for her successful campaign to have a gig at her university by Dapper Laughs, the comic alter-ego of comedian Daniel O'Reilly, cancelled on the grounds that his act infringed upon the university's own policies concerning the right of students and staff to live and work in an environment free of all forms of discrimination and free from any form of violence or bullying - including incitement to hatred. 

O'Reilly first came to fame via social media by posting six-second videos in which he, amongst other things, ridiculed rape victims and glorified sexual abuse. He quickly built up a large (mostly male) following and, impressed by the numbers and his "risqué brand of humour", he was offered his own prime time dating show on ITV2 in September of this year entitled Dapper Laughs: On the Pull. The theme of the show was essentially how to fuck (and humiliate) women, all of whom, apparently, were gagging for it.

However, after Vicky's campaign against O'Reilly was picked up by the national news media, an online petition was launched urging ITV to pull the plug on his show. This they duly did in November, by which time the petition had gained almost 70,000 signatures. A forthcoming Dapper Laughs live tour was also cancelled.

To be fair to O'Reilly, he did go on Newsnight and apologise to Emily Maitlis for causing offence and being such a prick; indeed, he even announced his intention to immediately kill off the character of Dapper Laughs. This, however, hasn't stopped many of his fans and followers from continuing to direct vile and threatening abuse towards Ms Chandler. 

She, for her part, accepts that whilst O'Reilly has played a significant role in encouraging such behaviour, he too is basically just a symptom (one might even say a victim) of what is known as rape culture (i.e. a culture in which rape is pervasive and has been normalized or made in some manner acceptable, on the back of received ideas and socially reinforced attitudes about gender, sexuality, and power).

There can, I think, be saucy innuendo and affectionate teasing between the sexes; but sexism is never innocent and laddism, unfortunately, is never more than a couple of lagers away from something far more sinister. 

On the Three Ways to Care

Image from a KiddiKraft blog post dated 30 July 2014

http://kiddikraft.com/blog/5-ways-instill-compassion-children/

There are at least three important ways in which one might offer care to others: 

(i) with compassion -

(ii) with indifference -

(iii) with resentment -

To care with compassion, or with sympathy, is to actively share in the suffering of others whilst at the same time maintaining the integrity of one's own soul. It is not motivated by a will to merger and it is not merely a mechanical feeling of pity for those one deems deserving of such. Compassion is a noble virtue of the heart free from moral judgement. 

To care with indifference sounds, at first, somewhat paradoxical. But, for me, whilst indifference is certainly not a form compassion, it doesn't mean that one is completely uncaring. Rather, it means that one does so with an ironic perspective and a healthy degree of insouciance. Indifference is an instinctive reaction to the suffering which would otherwise overwhelm us and compel us to tears; a form of self-protection against the mortal danger of becoming over-concerned and eaten up with caring. Indifference is a noble quality of mind.

To care with resentment is to poison the very concept of care. It is a feeling against rather than with or even for others and it ultimately causes the person who experiences it to fall out of touch not only with those who have (rightly or wrongly) caused such bitterness, but with their own good nature; they become trapped inside a bubble of hostile emotion created by their own humiliated ego. When resentment is felt towards someone to whom one is closely related, such as a parent or child, then it is particularly intense and can lead to extraordinary acts of spite.

To conclude: take care - and be caring; for the former, as a practice of the self, depends on how we interact with others.  

We Are All Hunchbacks

One must inevitably clash with those individuals - such as my sister - who are beyond reason and kindness; those who are fatally burdened with history and round shouldered with memories of the past, allowing this to deform and define who they are.

To be crippled and subjectified in this manner - to literally have too much behind one - is to suffer cruelly. But, as Zarathustra says, if you take away the hump from a hunchback you take away their soul.

Besides, are we not all of us to a greater or lesser extent hunchbacks? That is to say, are we not all of us made a little monstrous by our parents and our upbringing? 

As Philip Larkin so memorably pointed out in verse, the misery and resentment that we feel and spend a lifetime trying to overcome is passed down the generations just as surely as certain genetic conditions, including debilitating forms of kyphosis: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.

If only my sister could be made to understand this, then she might learn not only to think a little more philosophically, but be a little happier - which, in turn, would make me a little happier and enable us to develop a connection of some kind.

Notes: 

For Zarathustra's encounter and discussion with a hunchback, see 'Of Redemption', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse', from which I quote, can be found in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003).

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.  

 

On the Poetry and Politics of the Mushroom

Mushrooms - Sylvia Plath, by petropicto on deviantart.com

http://petropicto.deviantart.com/art/Mushrooms-Sylvia-Plath-417454440  

Whether D. H. Lawrence might fairly be described as a mycophobe is debatable, but it's certainly the case that all things fungal - including the beastly bourgeois parasitically flourishing amid decay - cause a violently hostile reaction, as we see, for example, in the following lines of verse:

How beastly the bourgeois is

especially the male of the species -

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable -

and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

...

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

Contrast these lines in which Lawrence identifies male members of the English middle-class as members of the fungus family (a large group of eukaryotic organisms that include yeasts, moulds, and mushrooms and which are distinct from plants and animals, even though they often have a symbiotic relationship with these other life forms), with what Sylvia Plath writes in her very beautiful if slightly menacing poem 'Mushrooms':


Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.


What's immediately striking is how Plath has a much more positive view of fungus; she sees in it the revolutionary hope of the future and relates it not to a decadent ruling class, but, on the contrary, to a subversive underclass who will one day come to fruition and bear spores.

This image of a soft-body of people rising up, is said by feminist critics to refer to the emancipation and empowerment of women and I like this interpretation as it's one that offers great promise and is not merely threatening. There's also none of the hysteria that one finds in Lawrence's verse.  
        

References: 

D. H. Lawrence, 'How beastly the bourgeois is -', The Poems (Vol. I), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013). 
Sylvia Plath, 'Mushrooms', The Colossus and Other Poems, (William Heinemann, 1960).    

Screen Grab

Image from the award winning web series Perfect Girl by BananaMana Films (2014):

http://bananamanafilms.com/category/perfect-girl-series

The frozen image of a loved one at the termination of a video call, just before they vanish back into the void and the screen returns to the comforting neutrality of a homepage, is, for me at least, a moment of great digital poignancy. 

Hanging up a telephone was one thing; a quick goodbye and the simple click of a receiver. But there's something far-more heart-rending about disconnecting from a person one cannot only hear, but see, smiling and looking beautiful on a bed that one has perhaps shared with them (or dreamed of sharing). 

One cannot help putting fingers to the screen and trying to touch their face; to hold onto them for just a short while longer ...