Missed the homework? See the original reading list post.
References
Nietzsche and the murder of God. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?” (God is Dead: Nietzsche’s Most Famous Statement Explained)
Illich on the “rupture” caused by the loss of gender (source, emphasis ours):
Historians, even those who focus on the history of economic ideas, have not yet noted that the loss of gender creates the subject of formal economics. Marcel Mauss was the first to recognize that “only recently have our Western societies made man into an economic animal” (1909). Westernized man is Homo oeconomicus. We call a society “Western” when its institutions are reshaped for the disembedded production of commodities that meet this being’s basic needs… The novel definition of man as the subject and client of a “disembedded” economy has a history… The perception of ego as a human, and the demand that social institutions fit the ego’s egalitarian human needs, represent a break with all pre-modern forms of consciousness. But to define the precise character of this radical discontinuity in consciousness remains very much a controversial issue… [T]here is a profound discontinuity between all past forms of existence and Western individualism; and this change constitutes a fundamental rupture. It consists primarily in the loss of gender. And this loss of social gender has not yet been treated adequately in the history of individualism.
The family and the week (as in, the 7-day week, defined by the Sabbath, during which work is forbidden)
Professor John Vervaeke’s mind-blowing series, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”
From George’s latest wormhole, Abarim Publications:
In the field of engineering, the term “backlash”, or “play”, describes the crucially important space between a machine's components: the space that allows one component to move independently from the next component it's connected to. This spatial tolerance, or play, is important because all work generates heat, but heat is always generated locally, which means that components expand at different rates within the machine. Without backlash, a machine would begin to seize as soon as it started to work. But with too much play, the machine would rattle apart under too much load. This means that the performance of a machine, and specifically its efficiency, is intimately linked to the relative freedom of its components, which can't be too much but also not too little… Humans are like atoms but a society is like a machine, and the whole quest for the green lantern on Daisy's dock [that’s a reference to The Great Gatsby] is about the quest for the perfect backlash between society's elements: the perfect combination of (a) dependency and cooperation, and (b) independence and freedom of its members.
The Latin word virtus (George gives the Italian equivalent, virtù, which comes from the Latin) means “manliness,” and comes from the word for man (vir). In the Roman cultural context, “virtue” was obviously gendered. But as we keep trying to emphasize, gender is local: the equivalent word in Greek, aretḗ (ἀρετή), is feminine and has a completely different cultural emphasis.
The secret to desire in a long-term relationship | Esther Perel
Pub owner allows lesbians to hold speed-dating events that exclude men
A woman getting divorced and having lots of sex is not news
Custody battle that could have been avoided with a virtue screening
Quotes (all from Self-Made Man)
Norah Vincent knows gender is a category, not an identity
I have always been and remain fascinated, puzzled and even disturbed at times by gender, both as a cultural and a psychological phenomenon whose boundaries are both mysteriously fluid and rigid. Culturally speaking, I have always lived as my truest self somewhere on the boundary between masculine and feminine, and living there has made this project more immediate and meaningful to me…
I began my journey with a fairly naive idea about what to expect. I thought that passing was going to be the hardest part. But it wasn't at all. I did that far more easily than I thought I would. The difficulty lay in the consequences of passing, and that I had not even considered. As I lived snippets of a male life, one part of my brain was duly taking notes and making observations, intellectualizing the raw material of Ned's experience, but another part of my brain, the subconscious part, was taking blows to the head, and eventually those injuries caught up with me. (15-19)
Norah Vincent knows the category of male is real, as in, it comes from reality, not from social convention or cultural imagination
Even at my burliest, next to [these men in the bowling alley] I felt like a petunia strapped to a Popsicle stick. I was surrounded by men who had cement dust in their hair and sawdust under their fingernails. They had nicotine-sallowed faces that looked like ritual masks, and their hands were as tough and scarred as falcon gloves. These were men who, as one of them told me later, had been shoveling shit their whole lives.
Looking at them I thought: it’s at times like these when the term "real man" really hits home with you, and you understand in some elemental way that the male animal is definitely not a social construct. (24)
Norah Vincent understands how modernity has complicated gender relations
[The women I dated] wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space, and at times it made me feel quite small in my costume, like a young man must feel when he's just coming of age and he's suddenly expected to carry the world under his arm like a football…They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, “someone who can drive the bus.”…
Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time, they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colors and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it, but feeling the pressure to be that other world-bestriding colossus at the same time made me feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men, not only because living up to Caesar is an immensely heavy burden to bear, but because trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What's more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up the check. (110-112)
Norah Vincent realizes that the gender boundary is powerful in part because of sexual attraction across it
But the truth was that for all the anger I felt flowing in my direction, anger directed at the abstraction called men, I was most surprised to find nestled inside the confines of female heterosexuality a deep love and genuine attraction for real men. Not for women in men's bodies, as the prejudicial me had thought. Not even just for the metrosexual, though he has his audience, but for brawny, hairy, smelly, stalwart, manly men; bald men, men with bellies, men who can fix things and, yes, men who like sports and pound away in the bedroom. Men whom women loved for being men with all the qualities that testosterone and the patriarchy had given them, and whom I have come to appreciate for those very same qualities, however infuriating at times I still find them…. (128-129)
Norah Vincent experiences an insight about the roots of misogyny: the unfulfilled promise of gender
Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a finger-tip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.
Sex is most powerful in the mind, and to men, in the mind, women have a lot of power, not only to arouse, but to give worth, self-worth, meaning, initiation, sustenance, everything… I thought I saw how rejection might get twisted beyond recognition in the mind of a discarded male where misogyny and ultimately rape may be a vicious attempt to take what cannot be taken because it has not been bestowed. (127)
Norah Vincent realized there were social downsides to being a man
[The monks’] needs for affection and touch and companionship and compassion were making themselves felt…But they were socialized men and they didn't know how to talk to each other about much of anything at all let alone their feelings. And who could blame them? That, in our culture, has traditionally been the feminine role and it has not yet been entirely bred out of us. Women are still often the communicators, the interlocutors between men and themselves, men and their children and even men and each other. Observing the monks I couldn't help thinking that without the connective tissue, without the feminizing influence, these guys were like bumper cars trying to merge. (153)
Norah Vincent knows that gender is taken for granted — and thus it’s dangerous to muddy the waters
In all my experience passing back and forth between male and female — often going out in public as both a man and a woman in one day — I rarely if ever interacted in any significant way with anyone (even store clerks) who didn't treat me and the people around me in a gender-coded way, or freeze uncomfortably when they were uncertain whether I was a man or a woman.
It was the freezing that always struck me most. People will literally stand paralyzed for a moment, sometimes in mild, sometimes in utter panic when they don't know what sex you are. You saw the confusion registering, or with polite people being surprised, and then you began to see the adjustment being made either for male or female or for an extremely uncomfortable and robotic neutral ground between the two. If they don't know what sex you are, they literally don't know how to treat you. They don't know which code to opt for, which language to speak, which specific words and gestures to use, how close they can come to you physically, whether or not they should smile and how. In this we are no different than dogs — with the notable exception, of course, that no dog has ever been mistaken about anyone's sex.
So prevalent was this gender-coded behavior that I came to ask myself whether it isn't almost as impossible for any of us to treat each other gender neutrally as it is to conceptualize language without grammar. Linguist Noam Chomsky is famous for positing that all languages share certain grammatical principles in common, and that children are born with a knowledge of those grammatical principles intact. This inborn knowledge, he argued, explains the success and speed with which children learn language. In Chomsky's terms, then, the human brain is hard-wired to think grammatically, or, more generally, to slot information and stimuli into certain categories of thought. That is how it functions and how we, in turn, are able to think. In this sense, I wonder, could there be a preprogrammed and possibly inescapable grammar of gender burned on our brains? And is every encounter pre-scripted as a result? (223-24)
Norah Vincent comes to agree with Illich!
I believe we [men and and women] are that different in agenda, in expression, in out-look, in nature, so much so that I can't help almost believing, after having been Ned, that we live in parallel worlds, that there is at bottom really no such thing as that mystical unifying creature we call a human being, but only male human beings and female human beings, as separate as sects. (281-82)
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