There really is no way out of this vicious cycle now that the attainment of all sexual desires has become the “ne plus ultra” of life, substituting for all other meaning. A return to old fashioned repression, which actually worked for the vast majority of people with a certain amount of hypocrisy thrown in to accommodate the human nature that keeps creeping back, is the only answer I can think of, and it seems more unlikely than colonizing space. So much easier to break millennia of norms than to recreate them.
I find it so hard to understand how anyone could object to such an unselfish provision for an obvious need. Rowling’s act reminds me of the kind of charity we used to get from the ultra rich in the 19th century, when they opened soup kitchens, libraries, and schools, and filled actual needs rather than advancing their power through political agendas.
I am daily more convinced that trans activists are simply bullies. They are alpha males who have manipulated the media into casting them as victims so that they can access damaged women and girls, and even children, all while receiving the unlimited attention they crave. It all comes down to the allure of the taboo and of the unattainable as you say here. What do we do about it?
Interesting, as usual, article BUT please don't use the TRA's terms. It should be gender realist not gender critical; gender dysphoric man not transwoman.
Neither should there be any use of 'cis' or any pronouns that do not match the person's real/actual/biological sex.
I was a victim of rape in early 1970’s when rape was not acknowledged and rarely prosecuted. I spent years fighting for the rights of rape victims and for their healing. God bless our ability to say no- if not, we cannot say our yes. I love the nuns with assault rifles but believe their weapon of choice is their Rosary- 50 rounds baby!! Backed up by all the angels and saints..
When I was young in America child abduction became a huge public concern. My dad used to tell me that if anyone ever kidnapped me that I should fight them with all my might, even if they killed me, because death was better than whatever they might to do me (on this subject, he did not elaborate). I don’t know if that history has shaped my deep abhorrence toward violation or if it is a natural, instinctive abhorrence: but I now fully agree with him. I will say no, scream no, fight no and struggle no unto my death. I have submitted in the past, preferring my life to my sanctity, but what these men are taking is more precious than my individual life and much larger than me. What they are trying to access and plunder is sacred beyond my comprehension and description. We have lost the social recognition of the incomparably precious sacred feminine interior, but those men who sense it’s value and are willing to sacrifice the individual woman before them in order to access that sacred interior have not been “reasoned” out of their demonic compulsion to avail themselves of that sacred inner feminine. It is HORRIBLE and unfair that I have to live in a world where demonic forces empower individuals and groups to steal that precious essence from me and other women, and to use that sacred treasure to empower their own demonic agendas, but it is also what is real and what is happening. Sometimes life asks way more from us than what is fair and, while I dearly wish this cup could be taken from me, I also know in some ways that is the will of god that I learn how to say “no”, NO MATTER WHAT because I do not have the luxury of living in a world where something as precious and powerful as my feminine sacred will ever be safe from the hungry demons who want to take it and use it for harm. I echo you, Mary: Brave to The angel JKR for saying no to the demons that clamor for the holy, unforced, sacred, feminine inside.
Thank you for another brilliant piece! Someone in the comments asks, "but what do we do about it?" When we leave an intellectual and moral universe that must have a "utopian" vision that will make it all make sense, we enter reality, and reality includes ancient and often brutal patterns of human nature. The three laws of pornodynamics are about seeing aspects of reality clearly, not utopian dreams. Such clear perception of reality is not cynical, but necessary knowledge for survival and flourishing, especially female survival and flourishing. Much of feminism and the liberal consensus has been gaslighting us to cling to a utopian vision of humanity that simply is not true, and therefore not helpful and even dangerous. Your work has helped me see this. Some percentage of male humans follow us and threaten us and wish to violate our boundaries. So the only answer can be: Keep saying NO, individually and collectively. Keep using whatever power we have, including great wealth that angels like JK Rowling hold, to protect and empower women. Until there is a better solution to present itself, lock those men up who violate us. Keep teaching young males better patterns of behavior, so that less of them will be violent. Teach our daughters the truth and give them practical tools and ideas to protect themselves.
Please, clever Mary, stop using the words “trans woman”. These men are never, ever, any kind of woman despite the Cambridge dictionary. Collapsing the two into one “transwoman “ is also indefensible since many members of the public still think these men are in fact women identifying as men…… the politest term I would use is “trans identified male” otherwise the most accurate, in my opinion, is “ men who say they are women”!
What a strange and exotic species the chronically over-educated, Zoom enabled, laptop class City dweller is. Ironic that they're particular form of psychosis is made possible by the toxicly masculine willing to do violence on their behalf. The only real question is that when it all comes crashing down... as it must.. will they come to their senses or go down with the ship?
Ms. Harrington often says as much but "not all men" indeed (which I one of the reasons I respect her opinions and perspective so much)... This individual man applauds JKR in this effort and expressly does Not fetishize denial.
I believe this is a good time to revisit how but a few decades ago it was women, specifically feminists, who were fighting to enter traditionally male only spaces. There was a lot of stink in the late 80s and 90's about Men's only clubs and even male only gyms. This was women demanding access to male only spaces. While I don't believe trans people of either sex get to demand entrance into traditionally single sex spaces but I do find it somewhat poetic how the tactics the feminist used on men in the previous few decades are now being used by a small group of men against feminists. Feminist actions in the past paved the way for what the transactivists are doing today.
Your “Three Laws of Pornodynamics” inspired by the laws of thermodynamics are amazingly insightful with the possibly surprising conclusion that brutal repression represents the optimal policy. Chesterton’s Fence comes to mind - perhaps those prudish conservatives had some wisdom after all?
I think our modern "His Majesty the Baby" culture and discourse is also rooted in what most people think of when they hear about, or discuss, their "rights".
Now that we are all postnational post-citizens who look for the corporate state to sell us our brand of Soma (one that reflects "who I am!"), we seem to have unlimited "rights" w zero responsibilities. The machines badger you to vote, of course, and we have to pay our taxes, but outside of that we are all just needy greedy monads who exist in a permanently stimulated state of "I desire, therefore I am."
I guess what I'm trying to say is that "rights" have become equated with "appetites" and also with "self-esteem" and thus we find ourselves in a place where anyone excluded from any group or institution for any reason (you can't be in our writer's group, you're illiterate!) interprets it as a hate crime or an outrageous injustice that cannot stand.
Our modern sacred dogmas of "Equality" and "Rights" and "the sacred Self that must never be denied" mix in very volatile and destructive ways and make it much harder for any kind of stable placid community or polity to exist.
(I find the best writer on modern Therapeutic culture and the misery that comes with the abolishing tradition, religion and interdictions to be Philip Rieff, if anyone's interested.)
"The inaccessibility is precisely the source of the attraction"
Reminds me of the way nearly every film starts with a man pursuing a reluctant woman who rejects him in no uncertain terms, and ends with him winning her over. I call this trope "the grudgefuck romance."
<<The dichotomy between spiritual love and “carnal knowledge” is recreated in the persistent fantasy of transforming the virgin into a whore. She begins pure, innocent, fresh, even in a sense disembodied, and is degraded and defiled in sometimes imaginative and bizarre ways.
Transgression here is a marker of privilege, and the object of the transgression will often be degraded, humiliated, or destroyed.
Transgression is important here: Forbidden practices are being engaged in. The violation of the boundaries of society breaks its taboos. Yet the act of violating a taboo, of seeing or doing something forbidden, does not do away with its forbidden status. Indeed, in the ways women’s bodies are degraded and defiled in the transformation of virgin into whore, the boundaries between the forbidden and the permitted are simultaneously upheld and broken. Put another way, the obsessive transformation of virgin into whore simply crosses over and over again the boundary between them. Without the boundary, there could be no transformation. And without the boundary, the thrill of
transgression would disappear.>> (Nancy Hartsock, 'Money, Sex, and Power,' p 172, 1983.)
There really is no way out of this vicious cycle now that the attainment of all sexual desires has become the “ne plus ultra” of life, substituting for all other meaning. A return to old fashioned repression, which actually worked for the vast majority of people with a certain amount of hypocrisy thrown in to accommodate the human nature that keeps creeping back, is the only answer I can think of, and it seems more unlikely than colonizing space. So much easier to break millennia of norms than to recreate them.
I find it so hard to understand how anyone could object to such an unselfish provision for an obvious need. Rowling’s act reminds me of the kind of charity we used to get from the ultra rich in the 19th century, when they opened soup kitchens, libraries, and schools, and filled actual needs rather than advancing their power through political agendas.
I am daily more convinced that trans activists are simply bullies. They are alpha males who have manipulated the media into casting them as victims so that they can access damaged women and girls, and even children, all while receiving the unlimited attention they crave. It all comes down to the allure of the taboo and of the unattainable as you say here. What do we do about it?
Interesting, as usual, article BUT please don't use the TRA's terms. It should be gender realist not gender critical; gender dysphoric man not transwoman.
Neither should there be any use of 'cis' or any pronouns that do not match the person's real/actual/biological sex.
I was a victim of rape in early 1970’s when rape was not acknowledged and rarely prosecuted. I spent years fighting for the rights of rape victims and for their healing. God bless our ability to say no- if not, we cannot say our yes. I love the nuns with assault rifles but believe their weapon of choice is their Rosary- 50 rounds baby!! Backed up by all the angels and saints..
When I was young in America child abduction became a huge public concern. My dad used to tell me that if anyone ever kidnapped me that I should fight them with all my might, even if they killed me, because death was better than whatever they might to do me (on this subject, he did not elaborate). I don’t know if that history has shaped my deep abhorrence toward violation or if it is a natural, instinctive abhorrence: but I now fully agree with him. I will say no, scream no, fight no and struggle no unto my death. I have submitted in the past, preferring my life to my sanctity, but what these men are taking is more precious than my individual life and much larger than me. What they are trying to access and plunder is sacred beyond my comprehension and description. We have lost the social recognition of the incomparably precious sacred feminine interior, but those men who sense it’s value and are willing to sacrifice the individual woman before them in order to access that sacred interior have not been “reasoned” out of their demonic compulsion to avail themselves of that sacred inner feminine. It is HORRIBLE and unfair that I have to live in a world where demonic forces empower individuals and groups to steal that precious essence from me and other women, and to use that sacred treasure to empower their own demonic agendas, but it is also what is real and what is happening. Sometimes life asks way more from us than what is fair and, while I dearly wish this cup could be taken from me, I also know in some ways that is the will of god that I learn how to say “no”, NO MATTER WHAT because I do not have the luxury of living in a world where something as precious and powerful as my feminine sacred will ever be safe from the hungry demons who want to take it and use it for harm. I echo you, Mary: Brave to The angel JKR for saying no to the demons that clamor for the holy, unforced, sacred, feminine inside.
Thank you for another brilliant piece! Someone in the comments asks, "but what do we do about it?" When we leave an intellectual and moral universe that must have a "utopian" vision that will make it all make sense, we enter reality, and reality includes ancient and often brutal patterns of human nature. The three laws of pornodynamics are about seeing aspects of reality clearly, not utopian dreams. Such clear perception of reality is not cynical, but necessary knowledge for survival and flourishing, especially female survival and flourishing. Much of feminism and the liberal consensus has been gaslighting us to cling to a utopian vision of humanity that simply is not true, and therefore not helpful and even dangerous. Your work has helped me see this. Some percentage of male humans follow us and threaten us and wish to violate our boundaries. So the only answer can be: Keep saying NO, individually and collectively. Keep using whatever power we have, including great wealth that angels like JK Rowling hold, to protect and empower women. Until there is a better solution to present itself, lock those men up who violate us. Keep teaching young males better patterns of behavior, so that less of them will be violent. Teach our daughters the truth and give them practical tools and ideas to protect themselves.
Please, clever Mary, stop using the words “trans woman”. These men are never, ever, any kind of woman despite the Cambridge dictionary. Collapsing the two into one “transwoman “ is also indefensible since many members of the public still think these men are in fact women identifying as men…… the politest term I would use is “trans identified male” otherwise the most accurate, in my opinion, is “ men who say they are women”!
What a strange and exotic species the chronically over-educated, Zoom enabled, laptop class City dweller is. Ironic that they're particular form of psychosis is made possible by the toxicly masculine willing to do violence on their behalf. The only real question is that when it all comes crashing down... as it must.. will they come to their senses or go down with the ship?
Ms. Harrington often says as much but "not all men" indeed (which I one of the reasons I respect her opinions and perspective so much)... This individual man applauds JKR in this effort and expressly does Not fetishize denial.
No means No god dam it.
I believe this is a good time to revisit how but a few decades ago it was women, specifically feminists, who were fighting to enter traditionally male only spaces. There was a lot of stink in the late 80s and 90's about Men's only clubs and even male only gyms. This was women demanding access to male only spaces. While I don't believe trans people of either sex get to demand entrance into traditionally single sex spaces but I do find it somewhat poetic how the tactics the feminist used on men in the previous few decades are now being used by a small group of men against feminists. Feminist actions in the past paved the way for what the transactivists are doing today.
This stuff is so insane that I can't even read this article. Men who identify as lesbians? I just can't.
You mean the rape center is the Harem. And you know who protected those? Castrated men! And yes the innuendo is intended
Your “Three Laws of Pornodynamics” inspired by the laws of thermodynamics are amazingly insightful with the possibly surprising conclusion that brutal repression represents the optimal policy. Chesterton’s Fence comes to mind - perhaps those prudish conservatives had some wisdom after all?
I think our modern "His Majesty the Baby" culture and discourse is also rooted in what most people think of when they hear about, or discuss, their "rights".
Now that we are all postnational post-citizens who look for the corporate state to sell us our brand of Soma (one that reflects "who I am!"), we seem to have unlimited "rights" w zero responsibilities. The machines badger you to vote, of course, and we have to pay our taxes, but outside of that we are all just needy greedy monads who exist in a permanently stimulated state of "I desire, therefore I am."
I guess what I'm trying to say is that "rights" have become equated with "appetites" and also with "self-esteem" and thus we find ourselves in a place where anyone excluded from any group or institution for any reason (you can't be in our writer's group, you're illiterate!) interprets it as a hate crime or an outrageous injustice that cannot stand.
Our modern sacred dogmas of "Equality" and "Rights" and "the sacred Self that must never be denied" mix in very volatile and destructive ways and make it much harder for any kind of stable placid community or polity to exist.
(I find the best writer on modern Therapeutic culture and the misery that comes with the abolishing tradition, religion and interdictions to be Philip Rieff, if anyone's interested.)
"The inaccessibility is precisely the source of the attraction"
Reminds me of the way nearly every film starts with a man pursuing a reluctant woman who rejects him in no uncertain terms, and ends with him winning her over. I call this trope "the grudgefuck romance."
<<The dichotomy between spiritual love and “carnal knowledge” is recreated in the persistent fantasy of transforming the virgin into a whore. She begins pure, innocent, fresh, even in a sense disembodied, and is degraded and defiled in sometimes imaginative and bizarre ways.
Transgression here is a marker of privilege, and the object of the transgression will often be degraded, humiliated, or destroyed.
Transgression is important here: Forbidden practices are being engaged in. The violation of the boundaries of society breaks its taboos. Yet the act of violating a taboo, of seeing or doing something forbidden, does not do away with its forbidden status. Indeed, in the ways women’s bodies are degraded and defiled in the transformation of virgin into whore, the boundaries between the forbidden and the permitted are simultaneously upheld and broken. Put another way, the obsessive transformation of virgin into whore simply crosses over and over again the boundary between them. Without the boundary, there could be no transformation. And without the boundary, the thrill of
transgression would disappear.>> (Nancy Hartsock, 'Money, Sex, and Power,' p 172, 1983.)
Sexual degeneration final outcome can only be raping...