On Women and Fish in The 39 Steps

Lucie Mannheim as Annabella Smith and Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret

in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935)

Starring a very dashing Robert Donat as Richard Hannay and an ice-cold and elegant Madeleine Carroll as Pamela, Hitchcock's The 39 Steps is a masterclass in how to construct a compelling cinematic narrative in which melodrama seamlessly combines with screwball comedy.

Obviously, the most memorable of all scenes is that in which Pamela - whilst still handcuffed to Hannay and unsure whether he’s an innocent man desperate to clear his name, or a sadistic murderer on the run - awkwardly removes her wet stockings. It remains an unsurpassed moment of kinky delight that lovers of film and fetish have cherished for over 80 years.

However, there are two other scenes and two supporting performances that I’m also very fond of, each involving a vulnerable woman - and a fish.

The first takes place in Hannay’s London flat when he cooks a haddock for Annabella, the mysterious spy played by Lucie Mannheim, a Jewish actress forced into exile from her native Germany by the Nazis. As one who knows what it is to genuinely fear for her future and have to flee and to hide, she plays the part with real conviction and makes Hannay's ironic remark about persecution mania cruelly apt.

The second scene, which parallels and reverses elements of the above, unfolds in the crofter’s cottage. Hannay charms the young wife, Margaret, played by Peggy Ashcroft, who asks him if it’s true that all the ladies in London paint their toenails, before cooking him a fish for supper and then helping him escape from the police in the middle of the night, thus vicariously fulfilling her own desire to flee the loveless existence to which she's been doomed by marriage to an older man (played by John Laurie).

Both these women seek out and desperately require Hannay's help. They are, in a sense, as caught up in circumstances beyond their control as he is. And yet Hannay is unable to save either of them; Annabella is murdered and Margaret abandoned to a life of rural misery and domestic violence.

Only Pamela refuses to be bullied or victimised by any man. She may be dragged all over the Scottish moors by Hannay, but she never loses her sangfroid. Say what you like about Hitchcock blondes, but they're never going to allow themselves to be done up like kippers ...  

Tickets Please (On the Buses with D. H. Lawrence)

Pat Ashton as überclippie in the ITV comedy On the Buses  

Literary scholar Brian Finney cleverly identifies a loose classical parallel between Lawrence’s short story ‘Tickets Please’ and Euripides’s play, The Bacchae. But as one who wasn’t reared on ancient Greek tragedy but, rather, on 1970s British sitcoms, I have to admit that, when recently re-reading the tale, the thing that immediately came to my mind was On the Buses.

It’s not only that inspector John Thomas (or Coddy) resembles a cross between Stephen Lewis’s Blakey (sporting the same toothbrush moustache and peaked cap) and the sex-mad driver, Jack, played by Bob Grant; it’s that the girl conductors as described by Lawrence sound just like the buxom blonde clippies personified by Pat Ashton: sharp-tongued, fearless young hussies in ugly blue uniforms, with skirts up to their knees (and beyond).*

However, whereas On the Buses was often crude and vulgar, it doesn’t really belong to the pornographic imagination; it lacks the perverse aesthetic and sadomasochistic elements that crucially define the latter. Lawrence, of course, understands these elements all too well; understands them, and gleefully exploits them in his fiction.

Thus, ‘Tickets Please’ doesn’t end in bawdy farce, but eroticised violence. In a scene that Eric Stanton might have sketched, Lawrence has John Thomas get his comeuppance at the hands of half-dozen girls whom he’s recently fucked round with: Annie, Cissy, Laura, Muriel, Polly and last, but by no means least, the rather pale, but well-built and vindictive Nora.

Having lured the crumpet-loving Coddy into their staff room at the depot, the clippies give him some tea served with bread and dripping. They tease him, gently at first, then more aggressively; demanding that he choose one of them – and only one – to walk home with. He tries to laugh things off, but he’s rightly uneasy and mistrustful as they make him stand with his face to a wall, tittering excitedly behind his back:

“And suddenly, with a movement like a swift cat, Annie went forward and fetched him a box on the side of the head that sent his cap flying and himself staggering. He started round.
      But at Annie’s signal they all flew at him, slapping him, pinching him, pulling his hair, though more in fun than in spite or anger. He however saw red. His blue eyes flamed with strange fear as well as fury, and he butted through the girls to the door. It was locked. He wrenched at it. Roused, alert, the girls stood round and looked at him. He faced them, at bay. At that moment they were rather horrifying to him, as they stood in their short uniforms. He was distinctly afraid.”

John Thomas demands that they unlock the door and let him go. But things turn nastier when Annie takes off her belt and, swinging it, fetches him a “sharp blow over the head, with the buckle end”. He grabs her to try and prevent another blow, but “immediately the other girls rushed upon him, pulling and tearing and beating him” like strange, wild creatures determined to have their sport and their revenge:

“Nora had hold at the back of his collar, and was actually strangling him. Luckily the button burst. He struggled in a wild frenzy of fury and terror, almost mad terror. His tunic was simply torn off his back, his shirt-sleeves were torn away, his arms were naked.”

Finally, they get him down and then they kneel on him, with flushed faces and wild hair; their eyes glittering strangely. John Thomas lies still, beaten and at the mercy of the young women. His face was scratched and bleeding. The sight of his white, bare arms excited the girls. Polly is part hysterical, part ecstatic; when not laughing, she gives long groans and sighs. Annie slaps John Thomas and again commands him to choose one of them. And so, finally, he chooses her.

This brings the attack and the story to a close, if something of a ruined climax; for nothing is consummated. The girls let him up and then stand about uneasily, “flushed, panting, tidying their hair and their dress unconsciously”, as the bruised and battered Coddy picks up his torn clothes and absurdly puts his cap back on in a vain attempt to regain his lost authority.

‘Tickets Please’ is then a classic piece of Lawrentian kinkiness, involving explicit elements of dominance, submission, and fetishistic fantasy wherein a previously powerful and cocksure male is assaulted, stripped and humiliated by fully-clothed – indeed uniformed – young women filled with supernatural strength and sexual malice.

As the song says: There's always gay life on the buses / You'll find it thrilling when you ride / And you can get it on the buses / Upstairs or down inside.**


Notes and References

D. H. Lawrence, 'Tickets Please', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 34-45. All lines are quoted from this version of the text.

* I'm aware of course that Lawrence's story concerns a group of East Midlands tram girls, not London bus conductresses.

** Lyrics for the theme song to the film, On the Buses (dir. Harry Booth, 1971), were written by Roger Ferris. For those interested in hearing this charming ditty in full, please click here.

Dancing Barefoot (with Reference to the Case of Alice Howells)

From Zarathustra to Patti Smith, there has long been a perverse fascination with the thought of young women dancing barefoot and defying the Spirit of Gravity. One evening, for example, when the former was walking through the forest with his disciples, he came upon a group of girls dancing together in a meadow. When, upon realising that they have been discovered, they cease their movements, Zarathustra approaches them in a friendly manner and implores them to continue:

'Please, I beg you, do not stop, you nimble creatures! I'm no killjoy who looks upon you with an evil eye; no enemy to divine dancing, or to girls' feet with fair ankles.'

I've no doubt, therefore, that had he lived and retained his sanity, Nietzsche would have enthusiastically supported the barefoot dance movement of the early twentieth century, which not only challenged received ideas of what constitutes classical dance, but also wider notions of social decorum. For bare feet had long been regarded as obscene within Western culture, no matter how passionately the advocates for such made reference to the ancient world or the enlightened practices of the Far East.

Indeed, for many Edwardians any form of public nakedness remained profoundly shocking and when Maud Allan performed her barefoot Dance of the Seven Veils in 1908, it scandalised London theatre goers. Critics regarded her as the embodiment of uninhibited sexuality and, as such, a threat to public decency. But it would take another dancer, Isadora Duncan, to really shake things up, however. Duncan, a feminist and self-declared communist, revolutionized dance and liberated the naked female foot; divorcing the latter from perceptions of obscenity and linking it instead to ideas of freedom, innocence, and natural harmony.

Finally, we come to the (fictional) case of Alice Howells, a young widow in D. H. Lawrence's short story, 'The Blue Moccasins' (1928), who seduces a married man, Percy Barlow, by dancing barefoot before him on stage in a play entitled The Shoes of Shagpat.

In the play, writes Lawrence:

"Alice was the wife of the grey-bearded old Caliph, but she captured the love of the young Ali, otherwise Percy, and the whole business was the attempt of these two to evade Caliph and negro-eunuchs and ancient crones, and get into each other's arms."

In her role as Leila, Alice wears white gauze Turkish trousers and a silver veil. She also wears a pair of blue moccasins that belong to Mrs Barlow (and which have been borrowed without permission): "The blue shoes were very important: for while the sweet Leila wore them, the gallant Ali was to know there was danger. But when she took them off, he might approach her."           

Seeing Mrs Barlow sitting in the front row, so calmly superior, suddenly let loose a devil in Alice Howells: "All her limbs went suave and molten, as her young sex, long pent up, flooded even to her finger-tips Her voice was strange, even to herself, with its long, plaintive notes. She felt all her movements soft and fluid, she felt herself like living liquid. And it was lovely."

Lawrence continues:

"Alice's business, as the lovely Leila , was to be seductive to the rather heavy Percy. And seductive she was. In two minutes, she had him spell-bound. He saw nothing of the audience. A faint, fascinated grin came on to his face, as he acted up to the young woman in the Turkish trousers. ... And when, at the end of Act I, the lovely Leila kicked off the blue moccasins, saying: 'Away, shoes of bondage, shoes of sorrow!' - and danced a little dance all alone, barefoot, in her Turkish trousers, in front of her fascinated hero, his smile was so spell-bound that everybody else was spell-bound too."

Apart from the outraged wife, obviously, whose indignation knew no bounds. Unfortunately, she has to sit throughout Act II, as the imaginary love scenes between Percy and Alice become ever more nakedly shameful. As the second Act comes to its climax, Leila again kicks off her shoes of bondage and flies barefoot into the arms of Ali: "And if ever a man was gone in sheer desire, it was Percy, as he pressed the woman's lithe form against his body ..."       

Not surprisingly, Mrs Barlow doesn't stay for the third Act. By then, however, it is too late: her husband's podophilia has got the better of him and he's crucially transferred his allegiance to Alice. Leaning down, backstage during the interval, "he drew off one of the grey shoes she had on, caressing her foot with the slip of his hand over its slim, bare shape".


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blue Moccasins', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 165-79. All lines quoted are from this edition. 

Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), see 'The Dance Song' in Part Two of this work. Note that the line spoken by Zarathustra as it appears here is a paraphrase rather than an accurate quotation. 

Identity is the Crisis Can't You See

Cover of the English translation by David Schreiber 

(Arktos, London, 2013) 

Markus Willinger's Die identitäre Generation is not so much a book as a pamphlet, to paraphrase Larry David discussing Jason Alexander's equally flimsy (but doubtless more profound and challenging) text, Acting Without Acting. 

Either way - book or pamphlet - it's probably one of the most badly written works ever published; certainly the worst I've had the misfortune to read in a long, long time. If this is the best that a graduate student of history and politics from the University of Stuttgart and darling of the alternative Right can muster, then (a) the German education system is in trouble and (b) the identitarian movement is even more ideologically vacuous than one might have imagined.  

Willinger disingenuously claims his work is not a manifesto, but this is precisely what it is; a succinct and clear declaration of his views on what's wrong in Europe today, who's to blame - the soixante-huitards - and what future changes should be made. What the work doesn't do - despite what it says on the back-cover blurb - is move seamlessly between radical politics and existential philosophy. Nor does it set out its arguments (such as they are) in a poetic fashion.

Rather, it remains stuck in a reactionary rut and relies upon the ugly, prosaic and völkisch-organic language of fascism, or what Victor Klemperer characterized as the lingua tertii imperii. A standardized and stereotypical language which lacks all nuance and loveliness, all subtlety or sophistication; a language that forever speaks with one tone: loud, monotonous, and threatening - like the barking of an Alsatian dog.         

It's certainly not the German used by Goethe, Heine, or Rilke. It makes a noise, yes, and it continues to pass the word along along, but it creates no sense of communion as George Steiner would say. Willinger gives us dead metaphors and ready-made slogans in place of ideas; his writing lacks vitality, style, and, above all, humour. It does, however, successfully mix common vulgarity and prejudice with high flights of romantic twaddle and fatal amounts of saccharine pathos.

The pamphlet-manifesto is divided into forty-one chapters and a brief Preface in which Willinger writes of a (prepare to yawn) crisis of the European spirit, which he blames on the post-War generation and their corrupt theories that have "determined the social discourse ... and dominated all the dialogues"[80] for the last fifty years or so.

Speaking on behalf of his own generation, born shortly before the Millennium, Willinger demands a return to fixed identities, real values, and traditional family life; a return which will, apparently, mean an end to boredom and loneliness - as well as to the twin evils of multiculturalism and feminism. For the "perpetual, deep resentment" [25] that Willinger openly admits to feeling and which shapes his thinking, expresses itself not only in the form of  racism, but also misogyny and homophobia.

And thus, it's not only the artists and intellectuals associated with May 1968 (the month and year of my own birth) who are to blame for making poor Markus feel so bad about himself and his life, it's also the immigrants (particularly the Muslims), the abortionists, the queers, the perverts and the scowling feminists ... Oh, and it's also the Americans and the big corporations who have "inflicted countless and terrible wounds on our planet" [74] with their irresponsible greed (like every good Nazi, Willing is a romantic anti-capitalist at heart who adores Nature and values every tree and every mountain as sacred).

Not that he wants to "damn and demonize" [46] anybody of course. He just wants the above to learn how to be a little bit more like him; that is to say, someone ready to die for the one great thing that provides a final refuge ...LOVE! In this world of pain and sorrow, writes Willinger, the highest goal and greatest happiness is to find true love.

But of course, as much as Willinger may talk of love and want to receive such, like all men of ressentiment he doesn't know how to give love. And so he quickly recoils back into hate and the language of violence, fantasizing about life not in the bedroom, but the barracks: "If there is any masculinity, honour, and camaraderie today, the credit is due, above all, to the hard training that men received in the army." [85]

Not surprisingly, therefore, Willinger wants a return to compulsory military service, so that all young men might be taught how to obey orders, how to fight, and how to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Perhaps they'll also be taught how to recognise real beauty: for although Willinger concedes that "there is no accounting for taste and every attempt at defining a definitive aesthetic standard is inherently impossible" [93], he knows good art when he sees it - "the sort that stands in unity with the natural world, the sort that radiates pride and glory, that represents something real and in which we can find meaning" [94].

Not modern art, obviously, which is formless and fragmented. And stomach turning.   

Finally, bringing his manifesto to a close, Willinger calls for brave, passionate action. And weapons. He promises that a final verdict will shortly be passed upon people like me who are responsible for the downfall of mankind and the ruin of the world; nihilists who knowingly destroy everything holy and fight against everything natural; queers for whom the concept of identity is a crisis in and of itself.

To be honest, one rather hopes it'll be a death sentence, if only so one never has to read any more of his appalling books ...  

Barefoot in Bloomsbury (The Case of Virginia Bodoin)

Agnes Ayres: the American actress best known for 

her role in The Sheik (1921) alongside Valentino 

I have to confess that I rather like the sound of Virginia Bodoin, a character in one of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories.

And what I like most about this woman of thirty is not just that she is a bit odd and elvish with a very slight squint in one of her brown eyes, or that her hair was a natural tangle of curls – though for me these traits are attractive enough in themselves – but more, it’s that she carelessly undermines her own attempts at appearing prim and proper due to a quality which Lawrence describes as sluttishness.

And this quality is nowhere more apparent than in her feet: true, they were elegant; it wasn’t that. Rather it was the fact that she simply couldn’t resist kicking her shoes off at every opportunity, be it indoors or outdoors, even if this meant going barefoot, or displaying a hole in her expensive stockings.

There was, writes Lawrence, “a touch of gamine in her very feet, a certain sluttishness that wouldn’t let them stay properly in nice proper shoes”. This was the fetishistic secret of her charm and helped make her popular with men, two of whom, Henry and Adrian, fall madly in love with her. She was so stylish and had such a lovely, rather low but whimsical voice that enchanted the male soul. And yet she was ever so slightly queer and just a tiny bit sluttish.

How disappointing, therefore, that Lawrence sees fit to marry this intelligent, independent, thoroughly modern woman off to the Turkish Delight; an Armenian not only twice her age, but a fat patriarchal figure who, although happy to trade in the West and adapt himself to the commercial world therein, retains a traditional and tribal mentality.

Arnault loves Virginia, but he essentially thinks her a lost child who needs protecting; to be caressed and cared for – and fattened up! He also recognises her as someone who can help smooth his way into English society and provide him with a swanky London apartment. Thus, for multifarious reasons, he didn’t want merely to fuck Virginia: he wanted also to marry her and to “make himself master of her”.

Again, it seems to me a real shame that Lawrence should suggest that the only way for a girl to escape from a wilful mother - and from becoming a wilful woman in turn - is to give way to destiny and submit to male power and authority; to become, as Mrs Bodoin contemptuously puts it, the harem type ready to take up the veil once more and no longer be burdened with freedom.

One is almost tempted to regard this as a Lawrentian form of slut shaming ...  

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Mother and Daughter', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. by Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Lines quoted on pp. 105 and 118.

Luis Quiles and the Transparency of Evil

Louis Quiles: self portrait and Twitter profile picture

twitter.com/perterpunk 

The work of Spanish artist Luis Quiles brilliantly reveals what Baudrillard describes as evil.

That is to say, that which belongs to the order not of morality, but of invisibility; that which is usually concealed and circulates in secret; that which, despite the best efforts of our society to deny its existence, eventually shines through (thus Baudrillard's notion of the transpiring of evil).

We like to think that our idealism has triumphed in a world unified by technology and illuminated by the light of reason; that the good, the true, and the beautiful are now the supreme values and we should therefore all be wearing a permanently happy face.

Un/fortunately, however, evil remains within our society and, indeed, it continues to provide the indispensable energy needed to drive it forward. 18th-century Anglo-Dutch philosopher and political economist, Bernard Mandeville, was right when he asserted, scandalously at the time, that society operates and advances on the basis of its vices, not its virtues or positive qualities.

Quiles, I think, recognizes this - recognizes, that is to say, that corruption has a vital function within the world - even if, as a liberal humanist, he finds it difficult to countenance greed, violence, exploitation, and hatred. Thus the terrible tension and ambiguity within his images. They clearly satirize the pornographic character of contemporary culture and consumer capitalism, yet nevertheless they are complicit with it.

A friend of mine compared the images to those of English graffiti-artist Banksy. But, at their best, the comic-book style pictures by this young, Barcelona-based artist are almost as unbearable to look at - their content as profoundly troubling - as the so-called Black Paintings produced by Goya during the final period of his life. They're that good; they're that appalling.


Note: the above picture, as well as many other works, can be found on Luis Quiles's Facebook page by clicking here.
 

Deborah de Robertis: The Naked Truth

Deborah de Robertis (self-portrait, 2014)

Deborah de Robertis is someone I'm very fond of. For not only does she have a lovely face, but she provocatively blurs the lines between art, performance, criticism and flagrant self-promotion. Of course, she’s not unique in this by any means, but she does it with rather more style and chutzpah than most.

In May 2014, for example, wearing a beautiful gold sequin dress, she entered the Musée d’Orsay and posed in front of Courbet’s obscene masterpiece, L’Origine du monde, displaying her own sex and silently challenging passersby to gaze into what the artist does not dare to reveal in his painting; the concealed eye or black hole of the vagina that lies beyond the fleshy lips of the labia; the sticky abyss which stares into those who foolishly stare into it; the zero point where philosophers and insects lose their way.

De Robertis thus seductively turns the tables upon those who would not only objectify the female body, but render it passive via its representation. She seems to say: ‘You want to see a cunt? Here’s a cunt!’ knowing full well that the museum authorities will rush to cover it up just as the news media will censor their own images in their coverage of the story (whilst nevertheless hypocritically reproducing Courbet’s 1866 oil painting of Joanna Hiffernan’s nether regions).

Then, in January of this year, de Robertis repeated her stunt; though this time she stripped naked in front of Manet’s celebrated (but equally controversial) Olympia and ended up in a police cell for two days (held for indecent exposure), as well as the in the international press once more. Stretched out on the museum floor, she adopted the same confident and unabashed pose as the reclining nude in the 1865 portrait.

Unlike the latter, however, she had a miniature camera strapped to her head in order to record those who came to voyeuristically gaze at her. In interviews afterwards, de Robertis explained that her aim was to bring Olympia to life and reverse the usual relationship between model and viewing public; to extract what Baudrillard famously described as the revenge of the object.

For these twin operations of vulva activism (or what the brave women of Femen term sextremism), I salute her. Torpedophiles who are interested in seeing footage of the events should click here (Origin of the World) and here (Olympia).

Lady Chatterley's Daughter

Cover of Lady Chatterley's Daughter, ed. Lawrence Lariar, 

(Popular Library, 1960)

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Connie is carrying a child of unknown sex. But, of course, within the pornographic imagination, it has to be a girl; a daughter who will inherit her mother's desire for unlicensed pleasure and sexual freedom; a Lawrentian nymphet who would make Nabokov smile.

For the pornographic imagination unfolds within a universe in which, as Susan Sontag points out, everything is conceived as an opportunity to fuck and everyone is allowed (and encouraged) to screw everyone else. This is what makes it a total universe; one with "the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative".

The dream, ultimately, is of a pornotopia in which there are no fixed distinctions between the sexes and no inhibitions can be allowed to endure. Gender, for example, is fluid; something to be performed and perverted. And taboos surrounding things such as incest are simply another means to intensify pleasure and multiply the possibilities of sexual exchange.

Whether the incestuous fantasy of the hot milf and her even hotter daughter was one of Lawrence's, I don't know. Probably not: for Lawrence relates incest to idealism and he is keen to reject and overcome the latter. For Lawrence, incest is just another example of what he terms sex-in-the-head. He writes:

"Finding himself in a sort of emotional cul-de-sac, man proceeds to deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract, ideal."

Thus, incest is a logical deduction of human reason, filtered through the pornographic imagination. If at first it rouses deep instinctive opposition, this can soon be eroded or persuaded away. But this motivizing of the passional sphere by idealism is, for Lawrence, the great danger facing us today; "the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle".

However, Lawrence also says that we have no choice but to fulfil these ideals in their extremity. In other words, the pornographic nihilism of our culture cannot be ignored, reversed, or transcended; it can only be consummated.

But note, this doesn't mean spending all day surfing internet porn; it means, rather, rediscovering something of the pristine unconscious - and for this we still need our really great artists and poets.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 2, 'The Incest Motive and Idealism'. 

Susan Sontag, 'The Pornographic Imagination', essay in Styles of Radical Will, (Penguin Books, 2009).
 

On Loving Enemies and Hating Friends

The poet and translator Simon Solomon

(mon meilleur ami et meilleur adversaire)

The philosopher, says Zarathustra, must not only be able to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

The first part of this proposition obviously echoes the Christian imperative, but Nietzsche doesn’t mean by it what Jesus meant. For he’s not thinking in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace on earth. Rather, he wants the lover of wisdom to recognise the vital need for enmity.

Unlike Hegel, therefore, he’s not positing difference only so he might then dream of synthesis. Dionysus versus the Crucified is not a dialectical opposition; the pathos of distance between terms is real and needs, if anything, to be furthered - not closed or even bridged.

But across this gulf that separates, antagonists should respect and even revere one another and know that they find their best strength in the struggle between them; to desire the extermination of one’s enemies, to think of them in vicious moral terms as evil, is profoundly mistaken and a sign of ressentiment. The noble human being always finds in their adversary something to honour (and to love), not despise and fear.

As for the second part of this proposition, Nietzsche is simply alerting us to the danger of those who love us for who we are, rather than for what we might become; for those who follow us on social media and like what we do and say, rather than challenge it; those who want the best for us, rather than wish us a life of hardship, conflict and worthy enemies.

In sum, for Nietzsche, one’s best friend and one’s greatest opponent is often one and the same person. (Oh, Simon, what would I do without you?)

Pussy (A Post for International Women's Day)

The term pussy has several meanings and can be used in a variety of ways; some innocent, some insulting, some vulgar. But what most interests is why this word should have become such a popular euphemism for female genitalia, thereby establishing an erotico-symbolic relationship between cats and cunts; small, soft, furry, carnivorous creatures on the one hand – and domestic pets that like to be stroked on the other.

The etymological origin of the word is uncertain; it may simply have derived from a sound used to attract a cat: Here puss, puss, puss! But, by the 17th century, pussy was commonly being used to refer to young women as well as moggies and by the following century it specifically directed us towards their sex organs.

Unsurprisingly, many women now regard pussy as derogatory, demeaning and dehumanising, rather than an affectionate term of endearment. But there are other women who use it quite happily and in preference to any of the other slang terms for vagina. Indeed, some even wear knickers with kittens printed on.

Personally, it’s not a word I’m entirely comfortable with. Not only is it a little too coy for my tastes, but it also lends itself too readily to double entendre and I don’t much like sexual innuendo (whilst conceding that it's long been a crucial component of bawdy humour, from the Barrison Sisters to Mrs. Slocombe). Nor do I see any need to disguise or apologise for biology; there’s nothing shameful about female bodies and the word cunt seems to me much more honest.

Having said that, feminist punk collective Pussy Riot have managed to cleverly invest the word with a new dynamism and militancy, rightly realising that this provocative combination of terms creates a powerful ambiguity and tension. Iggy Azalea’s inspired rap anthem, Pussy, has also helped to revalue the term.

Ultimately, however it’s referred to, we should all learn to love the vagina, celebrate labia pride, and support vulva activism. For where would we be - male or female - without that which Courbet rightly recognised as the Origin of the World ...?

Thanks to Kiranjit Kaur for supplying the image for this post and for her insight on the topic.