What I'm starting to seriously wonder about is whether men, in general, do not feel guiltier about sex than women. I know this is an odd hypothesis ...But, this to me suggests the opposite of comfort. I mean, if I felt entitled to something that was good, why would I need to 1) pay for it and 2) make such a big point of having it publicly/anonymously, whatever ... Joanna Bujes
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Capitalism? Nah. That's too easy.
How far down do you want to take this? This hypothesis is not odd at all. I mean guilt hardly scratches the surface. I'll grant you any stereotypes about men and sex you wish. But let's take it a little further along.
What are we talking about here? Power as the capitalist commodification of pleasure and its mirror inversions? That is, the social instrumentalization of a biological capacity nuanced into expressions of power, manipulation, acquisition, and possession.
At this level I don't see much difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, nor much difference for that matter between genders, classes, the old and young, disabled or not.
If there ever was a polymorphic perversity, it is sexuality experienced under the full weight of bourgeois capitalism encoded as custom and law and its mirrors in transgression committed in all the musky throws of empire. Caligula and de Sade were toddlers pissing their bunny slippers when you compare them to the high powered sex games of bourgeois society doing battle in multiple tiers of deceit, duplicity and betrayal---scenes from a marriage. After all the Clinton sex trials were comedy, rendered even more hilarious by the absurd moralizing gravitas of the reactionary chorus.
Among the households (straight and queer) that I've known, loved and hated, a domestic argument is never finished until one of the principles is dead, and even then, their strident denouncements, lies, half-truths, and completely twisted fabrications live on in the silent imagination of their interlocutor lovers to continue the battle into eternity.
I have actually come to the conclusion from reflections on the above, and probably forgotten readings of Nietzsche that this was the origin of the Greek gods, as well as philosophical reason: domestic disputes raise into the metaphysical clouds of the Olympiad. Who are Zeus and Athena, father and daughter, lovers, fellow conspirators and an endlessly squabbling dysfunctional household with outlandish dimensions of memory and capacity to plot retribution coupled to an inexhaustible supply of reasonings and justifications, all to assuage their appetites for power, intrigue and guile---and all that, for the sake of their children. Ah, yes, the little dear ones. If the pantheon were not actually fucking, killing, or intriguing with their children at the moment, then they are having others do it for them, not for the pleasure of it but for the pure power of having it done; done as yet another move against their domestic partner of the moment, be they mortal or immortal man, woman, boy, girl, or animal.
I also suspect this is why Adorno wanted to trace the bourgeois myth of reason back to Odysseus.
Did you ever wonder why the Greeks elected Athena to preside over war, as well as the arts and philosophy, and arrayed her in the flayed skin of Pallas, baring a shield covered in the Gordian's head, whose hair formed the serpentine diadem of fear, strife, force, and pursuit?
I mean really, what are a few boyish guilty snickers compared to that kind of power?
Nothing. Guilt in men is just ritual self-abuse offered up in place of true atonement in blood, based on the obsequious and rather stingy pretense that mere contrition will excuse anything. In the temple of Athena, nothing is forgiven or forgotten, not ever---not then, not now. Just ask my ex-wife.
Chuck Grimes
PS. From Kelley: ``...wonder what that boy is up to these days.??? chuck?''
Kelley?
Well, I've been thinking too much about sex, Greeks, and empire. Of my three best friends, one is involved in a horrific divorce and custody battle; another is in the early stages of a serious affair in which both parties have been married for more than fifteen years; and the last is threading water and waiting for the kids to get old enough so he can move out.
At my place, there has been a lot of guilty gnashing of teeth before the altar of the goddess with gray eyes. Blood will flow, I am sure of it.