(Wine, pleasure from another time)
Under normal circumstances I wouldn't let my undocumented workers drink this stuff, unless maybe they were hiding in the basement from the latest in ICE raids. However, I found this bottle to be pleasantly intoxicating. It tastes of the many changing wonders of romance.
Well, that was last night. I started a wine review of sorts... This morning, there are other concerns to address. Playboy needs me!
CS sent this op-ed article this morning. It details one of the many ways in which men can pretend to be feminists, garnering imaginary self-praise for their upright positions. I believe the term is exploitative.
The writer, Captain Ahab, doesn't seem to understand the meaning of his own words, nor the purpose of his mission.
I know the curse well, I catch myself in it all of the time. I become so excited while writing - transfixed with the obsession of my obsessions - particularly when I am pursuing or attacking a subject, that I forget that when doing so I am revealing more about myself than I am addressing the subject. Each sentence a harpoon aimed at the only object worthy of the piercing. The quest of expression can act as lasting nepenthe on the faculties, while the polarity of moralism creates mythical phantoms in reflection.
Male feminists in particular just love to use words like exploitative. It removes responsibility from the object they pretend to be treating as an individual. That adult women making adult decisions compete to participate in the Playboy enterprise never seems to sink in to the mind of the true feminist. They've read the literature, they know that these women are incapable of independent thought. Treating them as something other than child victims destroys their own capacity for heroism. No true feminist of this kind would ever hold a victim accountable - I mean, how could you? That would require granting them the power of choice and responsibility, far too little room for liberation involved there.
He seems to have no waking thoughts in this failed reach of a closing passage:
That this should be the case, that only prudish Christians and spoilsport feminists are willing to say that the man was obviously wicked and destructive, is itself a reminder that the rot Hugh Hefner spread goes very, very deep.
A swing and a miss...
Never questioning for himself, only answering for us, that the writer happens to be both a prudish Christian and a spoilsport feminist - very, very deeply. Exhibiting excessive loyalty to a cause, itself being the very definition of the term chauvinism, is lost here. Perhaps he is so accustomed to placing the word "male" in front of the term he has forgotten its actual meaning, and that it can be used to describe something other than maleness.
The term he might be searching to confuse next would be hack. Or, perhaps he can explore conflating vile and virile. He hints at it, but never quite arrives. The likelihood of him ever examining his own disdain of male aging and the possibility of pleasure, also seems remote.
In addition to his overall tone of prudery - evidenced best in his use of the words "refuge" and "scoundrel" earlier in the piece, presumably when referring vaguely to the Playboy Philosophy - he assumes without proving that most or all of the changes of the past 60 years were the result of the magazine's outsized influence on American thought. Then, wondering aloud why others are not now ascribing to the publication all of the attendant guilt it seems to deserve.
Well Ahab, I just don't know why that would be...
I hope his wife, daughters, and neighbor's daughters are pleased with his position on this and other matters. The ethical decline he describes, brought on by Playboy and the changing times, seems very dangerous. Yet never once suggesting how things might have unfolded differently, or any better, for the many victims he know protects with his valiant feminist journalism.
I can picture the Captain wearing a pink "pussy power" hat while writing this piece, blissfully unaware of what that or anything else might possibly mean. Having deleted his repeated use of the phrase "Filth, in broad daylight...." before going to publication.
His mention of unread Updike stories is useful.
Bye, Felicia. Have another cherry...
The feigned moral hysteria is predictably in line with many of the op-ed pieces from the NYT lately. But the tone of surrogate morality - that he is having to attack for us something we are too blind or rotten to attack for ourselves - would be shocking if it were not in alignment with the neoliberal attitudes towards all things now morally bankrupt and corrupt. We encouraged people to say something if they see something and only the new liberals decided to act on the absurd request. They are out there now in all directions, burning the witches of your mind for you.
That more journalists like himself aren't willing to stand up for these righteous puritanical positions only seems to indicate that Hugh Hefner must be to blame. What other possible explanation could there be? Hugh ruined everything about America, and that one lone journalist is willing to finally take on the sultan of smut is the clearest indication imaginable that every mind in America was warped rotten by the many velvet curves of sultry sensationalism.
Or maybe the explanation is much, much worse than that.... people are merely guilty of the sin of liberal apathy, not willing to take up battles to defend the sanctity of monogamy, nor any other imaginary casualty in the liberal reformation.
Will no one rid Ahab of his turbulent priests?
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