>>38
>>39
Good taste is male tase for a reason , How many rock songs echo the attitude of Dion, they have been the control behind almost all of cultural creation. They set the standards of experience by which art is measured, Justified, and creations that fall outside of this experiential window have their designers “put down and misunderstood named by the (male) cultural establishment ‘lady artist’, i.e. trivial, inferior. And even when it must be (grudgingly) admitted she is ‘good’ it is fashionable… to insinuate that she is good bu irrelevant.”P.143 (Firestone 2003) spoilers mine and for this reason should be unsurprising “... that they are seldom as skilled as men at the game of culture”p.143 (Firestone 2003) because they have to compete as men in a male game where “...it is not just a question of being as competent, but of being authentic.”p.143 (Firestone 2003) and when the outright denial of their experience doesn't push them onto the psychologists couch to receive treatment that has “...proven worse than useless…”p.64 (Firestone 2003) for it is “... the operation of institutions only within the given value system, thus promoting acceptance of the status quo.”p.63 (Firestone 2003) is is not just men that are placed into a state of emotional repression then, women are barred from expressing any array that could be seen as negative, ruining their sweet character, from Reiks couch “I am afraid to show these emotions because if I did; it would be like opening a Pandora's box … I am afraid my aggression would destroy all.”p.61 (Firestone 2003) this has lead more than a few to simply try to adapt to into a persona of male psychology, subjecting themselves in a loveless detachment, to a drying up of the emotions, a shallowing sickness which couldn’t even approach liberation from the trade; all to avoid the perception that their side of things happens to be “... one long protestant complaint rather than a portrayal of a full and substantive existence…”p.143 (Firestone 2003). We inhabit an unfortunate case where culture is so saturated with bias that neither can give a comprehensive view of experience, though certainly the supply of one is lacking in quantity compared to the other, And so in Firestone’s opinion “It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce even a true ‘female’ art.”p.143 (Firestone 2003) an emergence which “... may signify the beginnings of a new consciousness,...”p.151 (Firestone 2003) for blossoms of the mind bear their fruits in reality, or what might be left of it.
What then is love? To Firestone it is the height of selfishness. A process by which “... the self attempts to enrich itself through the absorption of another being. Love is being psychically wide-open to another. It is a situation of total emotional vulnerability. Therefore it must be not only the incorporation of the other, but an exchange of selves. Anything short of a mutual exchange will hurt the other party.”p.115 (Firestone 2003)³ This exchange of selves is rarely what happens today. The successful process is blocked, “often resulting in … an emotional cynicism that makes it difficult if not impossible to ever love again.”p.115 (Firestone 2003) But the system which causes the blockage, a disparity of power dynamic most recently resultant from the Oedipus Complex, whose structures are proclaimed as healthy and re-enforced through the extrapolated authority of freudian psychoanalysis, needn't be the case. Where Firestone notes the roots of psychoanalysis and feminism being the same with the criteria for selection of one over the other being that “Fruedianism subsumed the place of feminism as the lesser of two’’ evils”p.56 (Firestone 2003) Feminism riding on the difference that it “... does not accept the social context in which repression (and the resulting neurosis) must develop as immutable. If we dismantle the family, the subjection of “pleasure’ to ‘reality’, i.e. sexual repression, has lost its function; and is no longer necessary.”p.56 (Firestone 2003)
One of the weapons Shulie identifies as a means of re-enforcing male culture, here the idea of a woman to be agrandized rather than understood, is erotism. Choosing an example written by herbert Gold What’s Become of Your Creature, floundering in his attempt to “...describe the whole spectrum of male/female experience”p.145 (Firestone 2003) in that he can't even attempt to see beyond the “male” angle. The story follows the philandering protagonist, Frank, whose failing marriage, unsurprisingly, ... for he needs her anxiety as a steady reminder that he is still “free””p.122 (Firestone 2003) begins to improve as he enters an affair with a young pretty girl by the name of Lenka. It progresses through all the expected stages. Frank, a college professor, begins his relationship with a student, and when it is broken off she confronts his wife with a letter ruining his marriage. Unable to undergo the mental effort to understand her reasoning, he remains baffled as to the cause. Years later, with a new young foreigner on his arm, he encounters Lenka again. Drug addicted and prostituting herself to make ends meet, when she makes a pass at him he having called her on the phone to meet recently (which she declined), he is overcome by an aversion to her uncleanliness, her disease, and “Because he could not bear her sorrows,...”p.147 (Firestone 2003) flees into the street. His story’ closing; happily embracing a wife, newly with child, wondering what could have happened to Lenka.
Frank, and by extension Herbert, expose their emotional shallowness. Unable to understand Lenka’s motivations; her heartbreak, her motivations for seeing him in the first place, her abysmal disappointment that he would leave her for someone he was cheating on “You cared more about a cold bitch than you cared for me just because you had a child.”p.146 (Firestone 2003) Defanging her efforts by granting her “full points for cruelty and sweetness”, he is incapable of relating to her as a person with her own plans and goals. Finally he abandons her in disgust, finding her used by other men as a means to keep the lights on.
Another example of this ‘male angle’ stunting erotism, of which are the majority, is the character Catherine in Trufants film Jules and Jim where “She kills the man who dared escape her, along with herself” “such vamps and femmes fatales... [are] in reality nothing more than women who refuse to accept their powerlessness.” P.151 (Firestone 2003) And though the art is accurate the feminine mystique exhibited by Catherine goes purposefully unprobed by Trufant, the feminine perspective purposefully ignored as a means of achieving erotism. However, “Erotism is exciting. Noone wants to get rid of it. Life would be a drab and routine affair without at least that spark.”p.139 (Firestone 2003) It is then worth looking at an example where erotism id done right. “Only a few artists have overcome this division in their work… if not through physical expression, then in some other way the greatest artists became mentally androgynous.”p.148 (Firestone 2003) Of which The story of the Eye by Georges Bataille proves a “...most accomplished…” study. Rather than relinquishing the female protagonist's perspective as the means of cultivating a mystery to induce erotism, Bataille makes the narrator's investigation of her perspective the main aspect of erotism for the first half of the book. An intimate search for a meeting and a realization in communication. Almost immediately after their first meeting she becomes split between two characters, Simone and Marcelle. Marcelle being the face she must present to the world to meet its standards, restrictions, and expectations in addition to the protective layer of the dance women must partake in. Simone, what lies underneath, the true meeting and communication with whom the narrator is after, and whom the split protagonist feels she must keep hidden. Three aspects are of exceptional import when entering the middle of tale; first is Marcelle’s retention in and escape from the mental hospital, next marcelle’s mention of marriage after escape, -just before her death- and third is Marcelle’s death occurring during the first copulation of Simone and the narrator. The notable line being “We were so calm, all three of us, and that was the most hopeless part of it.” This trifecta is the realization of the acquired commitment, dropping the act, relinquishing and the resultant lul in excitement when each party finally meets in the representative carnal act. But what distinguishes Bataille's story is the “X-ray vision… Increased sensitivity to the real, if hidden, values of the other…” the narrator displays in his pursuit of Simone, not Marcelle, who is only ever there under Simone’s insistence. For while Firestone criticizes “...’blindness or ‘idealization’...” she specifies “...if we could eliminate the political context of love between the sexes, would we not have some degree of idealization remaining in the love process itself? I think so.”p.118 (Firestone 2003) The spark that ignites the erotism in this story is the interest in meeting Simone, she who lies beyond the illusory Marcelle. Further, it should not be read that the political conditions are rendered moot in this story. Rather, following their meeting it is the narrator who becomes split, after a symbolic crossing of a river, between Sir Edmond, an economic provider who is emotionally distanced, and himself prior.
What Bataille displays is an attempt at an errotic and comprehensive picture of the split reality “... art which is guilty of only reflecting the human price of a sex-divided really, great care would have to be taken that criticism be directed, not at the artists for their (accurate) portrayal of the imperfect reality, but at the grotesqueness of that reality itself as revealed by the art.”p.152 (Firestone 2003)