Sexual perversion has traditionally been defined as any aberrant sexual practice that is preferred to normal intercourse. This is a very limited definition and relies on defining "aberrant", a difficult task given the "anything goes" ethos of our dominant culture. I would suggest that perversion has a much deeper meaning and is very germane to the information war we are involved in as well as the undermining of our culture from the inside that is so worrisome. I would define a perversion as any sexual act that involves a negation of the object of desire by virtue of an over-investment in a part of the object. That may sound confusing but I will try to clarify.
Last week, Pedro, at The Quietest, put up a post which triggered a wide ranging discussion among a number of very smart bloggers. He was impressed by the ability and need of the radical pro-choice commenters at the daily kos to re-define a fetus in creative ways which served to deny any life or humanity to the parasitic resident of a woman's body. It is an illuminating read.
Yesterday, Pedro continued the discussion with I like vaginas as much as the next guy, but... and mentioned that he had seen The Vagina Monologues. He thought the play was boring and failed to shock, though it surely tried:
What a waste of time. I had never heard of them before, but I went because my friend was performing one of the roles. (She was the one who talked about her "coochie-snorcher.") The play was 100% boring. What's so cool about talking about your vagina? Guys do it all the time, talking about their dicks, cocks, nutz, balls, skin flutes, trouser snakes, Beaver Cleavers, and one-eyed warriors. Is that something women should want to emulate? Is feminism about acting like men? If so, why is it called "feminism?" Shouldn't it be called "male mimesis" or "female agentive en-masculinization" or something smart and academic-sounding like that?
The Vagina Monologues may just be the most triumphant example of Political Correctness that has ever been produced. Maxed Out Mama offered her perspective:
If you've never had to endure the glassy-eyed mass hysteria of the Vagina Monologues/scissors crowd you can't understand how many women feel about it. Several times my brother has called me after reading this blog and said solemnly "You seem really offended by the Vagina Monologues". Well, I'm tired of being told to worship the feminine mystique of my vagina. I'm tired of being told that the most important parts of me are my genitals. As far as I'm concerned, not having to worship my vagina is one of the best things about being a woman. That is a guy problem. Women naturally have more sense - or they should.
My vagina, dang it, does not need a community and a culture of other vaginas. I am not a walking, talking vagina! I flipping refuse to be in awe of my vagina! And don't - just don't - get me started on alternate Episcopalian liturgies. Don't. Your eyes would pop out of your skull and bang around the room.
The Anchoress brought body (part) pre-occupations into the political arena; she first quotes from Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues, who has now written a new play, The Good Body, in which she moves the locus of her distress from her vagina to her stomach (an "upward displacement"):
Maybe because for most of my life I have felt wrong, dirty, guilty, and bad, and my stomach is the carrier, the pouch for all that self-hatred.
I grant you that women and their unhealthy fixation on their body images (and the society that reinforces those fixations) are worth addressing…but not when you attach it to this weird globalist mindset of Enslers and suggest, as she seems to be suggesting, that if this one issue is cleared up, the rest of the world’s problems will fall into place. She worries about body images, but seems not to care that for millions of women, the burqua is the problem, not the belly.
I read the preface to Ensler's play and it is an incomprehensible mix of non-sense and intellectualization. The Anchoress recommends a good therapist for Ensler, but the problem runs deeper. Ensler's comments, from the preface to her play, are almost bizarre in their narcissistic over-investment in her body's parts. She starts off by attempting to prove the old adage that "90% of all statistics are made up on the spot", and goes down hill from there. Reading her preface, which seems tailor made for a spoof, it is hard to realize that she is speaking to people who take this seriously:
This journey has been different from the one I undertook in The Vagina Monologues. I was worried about vaginas when I began that play. I was worried about the shame associated with vaginas and I was worried about what was happening to vaginas, in the dark. As I talked about vaginas and to vaginas, I became even more worried about the onslaught of violence done to women and their vaginas around the world.
There was, of course, the great celebration of vaginas as well. Pleasure, discovery, sex, moans, power. I suppose I had this fantasy that after finally coming home into my vagina, I could relax, get on with life. This was not the case. The deadly self-hatred simply moved into another part of my body. [Emphasis mine-SW]
A perversion subverts a relationship by substituting a body part for a person. For example, some men who treat women like "sex objects" are relating to them as vaginas surrounded by the rest of the body; they relate to her body and her body parts but crucially, do not relate to the person. (Please keep in mind this is rarely absolute; it is more common for a man to have a mild impairment in his relationship based on his emotional investment in body parts rather than fully invested in a relationship.) For such men, women are interchangeable, one being as good as any other who has the requisite body part. Within such a perverse character, there is a fundamental denial of the importance and significance of the personal relationship. In the Vagina Monologues we see often highly intelligent women offering paeans to their body parts, as if they are the equivalent of their selves.
[There are women and men who likewise relate to men as "part objects", ie a penis with a man attached; the perverse dynamics work in a very similar fashion.]
But there is something even more destructive of rationality involved in this kind of body part aggrandizement. Notice again what Ensler describes as her "great celebration of vaginas": Pleasure, discovery, sex, moans, power. What is missing? The most fundamental significance for human beings of the vagina is its role in procreation. To deny that the primary power of the vagina is the power to create a new life, is to deny reality in its most basic form. The inability of so many to recognize the perversion at the core of their thinking is troubling, especially since so many of the people who have imbibed the Politically Correct non-sense are teaching our children.
In the Utopian PC world, there are only dependent victims, who need to rely on the goodness and bounty of the state to protect them from the predations of the evil oppressors, white males and their equivalents. In such a world there are no grown, adult women in relationships with grown adult men. There are only children, non reproducing beings who can have all manner of recreational sex with no responsibility and no expectations, while denigrating those "breeders" who raise children and families. When our young people try to build a knowledge base that stands on non-sense, the knowledge base cannot have much concordance with reality.
Pedro offers perspective:
Or perhaps I simply don't understand the appeal of the Vagina Monologues. Perhaps they really do make young women feel "empowered," whatever that means. But tell me this: for all its talk about violence against women, did it ever stop a rape? (No, but some cops have.) Did it end the oppression of women in Afghanistan? (No, but American GIs did.) Did it win the vote for women in Saudi Arabia, or help teenaged girls do better in math and science classes? The answer is, of course, no.
Believing that your vagina will make you strong and safe is the equivalent of basing math education on 1 + 1 = 3. To quote Wolfgang Pauli, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." It is truly non-sense.
Perversion reduces the individual human being to a representative of a class. In so doing, it destroys the complexity that inheres in all individuals. It springs from the same font that gives us Identity Politics.
America, as an idea, has always symbolized the possibility of the individual. We have not done this perfectly in our history and still have a ways to go, yet the alternative, tribalism and collectivism, are inimical to all that this great nation stands for. Where do such ideas arise? It is tempting to see in such thinking the hand of the Memetic warriors:
... Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading dissident of the Soviet era whom was invited to testify at the Russian government’s inquiry into whether the Soviet Communist Party had been a criminal institution. got to see more of the KGB’s secret reports to its masters than perhaps anyone else since the old Soviet Union fell.
... These documents show very clearly that the whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project […] the structures of the European Union were initially built with the purpose of fitting into the Soviet structure.
That’s right. The European Left cooperated with a Soviet project to make Europe amenable to totalitarian control from Moscow, and not way back in the 1950s, either; the key agreements were made around 1985! Read the whole article; I can’t do justice to Bukovsky’s report in a summary.
To anyone who read my essay on Gramscian Damage and scoffed at the idea that the western Left operated as instruments of Soviet ideological subversion intended to wreck the West, wake up! This is not a phenomenon of the far past. Bukovsky draws a straight line from Western “political correctness” back to the Soviet meme war.
Political Correctness must no longer be considered a silly affectation of left-wing college professors and the MSM. There is no more powerful weapon aimed at the heart of the West. It not only perverts rational thought but actively prevents its victims from thinking "forbidden" thoughts.
It is imperative that the true "reality based" community (and isn't that how PC thought works on the left? When they call themselves the "reality based" community, they are substituting words for their opposites) reassert the prerogatives of reality at every turn. S, C & A shows one way to fight back, in his own inimitable fashion. Take a look at his response to The Anchoress and Maxed Out Mama . He writes about a woman who empowered herself, in reality, rather than feminist fantasy. In Bitches, Ho's And The Freeing Of Mary Todd Lincoln, he tells us about this remarkable woman:
Compare todays feminists with the real thing- Myra Bradwell.
Do you know who Myra Bradwell was? Well, she was America's first woman lawyer and a true blue feminist- the real deal. She also won Mary Todd Lincoln's release from an unjust confinement in 1875.
These two seminal events in the history of our nation and in the march towards women's rights were accomplished without Ms Bradwell referring to her self as a bitch, ho or any other diminutive. Further she did not refer to or make reference to her vagina, or any other part of her anatomy.
So many bright men and women have had their cognitive faculties high-jacked by the non-sense of Political Correctness that it is frightening.
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