Month: August 2013

I am taking a brief blog hiatus.

“On The Importance Of Larry Flynt”  (probably three parts) will return, soon.  It’s an important entry, but I am working on a couple of things that prevent me from lucidly flushing out the ideas.

I am also setting an intention: to juggle multiple projects at one time, including writing blog entries while hacking away at other projects.  Not this week, however.

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Plato’s Symposium comes to mind this morning, so I offer the following.

It differs from most of Plato’s works, as it’s not a study in the Socratic method.  In the dialogues, Socrates usually engages a question and answer dialectic; in the Symposium, Plato credits a woman for Socrates’ ideas of love.  Not just a woman, but a priestess.  Not just a priestess, but a teacher of mysteries, i.e., a mystic.  What’s presented is essentially revelatory and authoritative.

In this all male gathering pontificating on love, desire, and eroticism, Plato introduces a woman mystic to give the final word on love — she is the teacher’s teacher.  Though Plato transcribes his teacher’s teaching to Athens’ most honorable citizens throughout his dialogues, in the Symposium, Socrates appears merely as Diotema’s student in love’s mysteries.

There’s an interesting tension in the work — the piece of literature that inspired me to major in philosophy.  I use the word “inspire,” deliberately, because it’s anathema in a discipline rife with logic and reason, and dialectical inquiry.  Yet, in this dialogue, Socrates learns from a woman priestess, who teaches him with a comic tenor that Plato usually casts  between Socrates and his students.  In the Symposium, Socrates emerges as the dumb and  fumbling student, and it’s Diotema who is given authoritative center stage.

This tension is huge for an Athenian audience.  By most accounts, Athenian democracy was much harsher on women than in other Greek states: women did not own property or vote.  That Plato vis-à-vis Socrates hands over this topic to a woman speaks volumes. Arguably, and I believe this is the work’s most important subtext, surreptitiously introduced, love’s nature and responsibilities are the most important questions that we’ll grapple with while we live: it’s from our understanding of love that our other personal and public inquires — intimate relations, normative values, ethics, morality, justice, social governing — issue from, and within which they must find their resolution.

The dialogue lays out the soul’s progression into love’s mysteries.  More important, it lays out Plato’s theory of forms, a cornerstone of Platonic philosophy.

Diotema, not Socrates, is the origin of origins for this theory.

In overly simple terms, the soul’s desire towards the beautiful proceeds as follows:

Physical beauty:  love of bodies as ends, pleasure, sex, marriage, domestic comfort, and material acquisition are portrayed as the most vulgar, these souls are living on the material plane.

Next, beauty of body and soul:  love of the spiritual, brings civilization into being, transcends carnality.  (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 comes to mind, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments, love is not love which alters when it alteration finds . . .”.)  This love still differentiates within knowledge, culture, society’s formal structures, however.

Finally, love of the beautiful and the good:  the love of wisdom.  True immortality through possession of the Forms, beyond all material considerations.  The ground of being, beyond being, “in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible-you only want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty-the divine beauty, I mean, pure and dear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life-thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities . . .” (Jowett translation).

This reality, or realities, exist beyond time and space, and, therefore, beyond opinions, ideas, judgements.  It’s beautiful and good in itself, not because we judge it so, but because it is.

The “I Am” behind appearances.

Centuries later, Nietzsche took Plato’s (i.e., Diotema’s) idea to task, and rightfully so.  Via Platonism and ad hoc political appropriation, the bifurcation of the spiritual and the material profoundly influenced Christianity and its correlative doctrinal morality.  Dogma in ideology, in religion, in thought becomes a waste product when one projects one’s own learned ideas of the good onto the world.  However, I would argue that the ground of being described by Diotema is beyond good and evil, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase.

Precisely because it’s been freed of materiality, it’s beyond judgement.  Diotema’s soliloquy doesn’t resonate with the Christian morality that Nietzsche took issue with, but with the visions characterizing the quintessential mystical experience, for example, Meister Eckhart , St. Teresa of Ávila, Rumi, Hafiz, and on and on.

Our best mystics are frequently branded as heretics by orthodoxy for precisely this reason: they see beyond learned ideas of sacred and profane, good and evil, moral and immoral.

Diotema’s revelation possesses none of the dogma that Nietzsche takes issue with; rather, she describes that beyond time and space, beyond our restrictive limited imaginings. Here’s a twist:  despite Nietzsche’s objections, Diotema gives no answers.  Logic, reason, dialectic, have nothing to do with  life’s most pressing intellectual inquiries; it’s love’s vision that governs our undefined and uncertain course, while we experience this life, as we too briefly live it.

So I offer an alternative reading:  while Athens’ leaders sit around bantering about the basis of life and civilization, Plato simply describes Diotema telling Socrates “there are no answers, for those who see the beauty behind everything, in the moment that it presents itself.  Only love is real, all else is illusion.”

 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.  

There is a field.  I’ll meet you there.”  

—  Rumi  

 

I exploit women like McDonald’s exploits hamburger.

— Larry Flynt

 

One term, before settling in to write my thesis, I took two women’s studies courses, “Feminist Ethics,” and “Women and Religion.”

Only one man registered for the “Feminist Ethics” course.  He was a teacher at an all girls school.  His undergraduate major was in philosophy.  He had a law degree, had been an attorney, left corporate law to teach, and was working on a Master of Theological Studies; he also wrote.  The short version — he was no longer career fast tracking, so he had the luxury of taking a “girl’s class.”  A young man who was a graduate student in philosophy also attended the course.  He audited.  Registering wasn’t a priority.

No men registered for the “Women and Religion” course.  When the prof went over the syllabus, the young men who were shopping during the first class walked out, one shook his head and mumbled something as he left.

Two “women’s studies” courses, two males in one class.

Yet I have been in “men’s studies” courses for most of my adult life.  Philosophy.  Literature.  The Study of Religion.  Art History.

Written by men, professionally studied and taught, mostly by men.  Yes, the status quo has shifted.  Still, my adult life has been intellectually dominated by what I’d like to call “men’s studies,” because it’s his-story writ in the intellectual disciplines, where one by necessity gains her cultural literacy and professional lexicon.  A woman professor in literature once told me that universities assume the “ghettoization of women’s studies” — the department is considered a polite dead end within the system.

I told friends, mostly men, during the throes of my graduate career, “I am so sick of being in men’s minds, I could scream.”  I was drowning, feeling as though I was literally living in men’s heads:  reading men’s writings, reading men writing about men (a.k.a. “scholarship”), writing about men’s writing, then writing about the men who write about men and their writing.  Then earning my living by listening to men’s stories, and subsequently getting into their heads.  No pun intended.

One of the requisite graduate seminars for Comparative Literature scholars was an intensive survey course in criticism.  Mostly European, white, and, of course, male.  About 35 or more critical perspectives that we were required to metabolize in order better understand theory, or some such thing.  Two women, two Americans, who were also the women, no African-Americans, no Latino/as, no Asians, no diversity.  When I pointed out the skew to my beloved and trusted mentor, who happened to be teaching the seminar that term, he gave me a blank stare, followed by a “probably not something you should bring up too often,” and a weak apology for the curriculum’s anachronisms.

This was the same trusted advisor who told me not to mention that I was an “erotic artist” on my Ph.D. applications.  He was the [male] professor.  I lacked courage.  I listened.  The failures were guaranteed.

The ironies are so loud, they deafen.  More on this, in time.

If you will, let’s return to my “women’s studies” course.

During a class discussion in “Women and Religion,” the subject of “female circumcision” came up.

“Female circumcision” seems to me a grievous misnomer.  One may persuasively argue that removing a male child’s foreskin is an undesirable and arcane practice.  But there’s a world of difference between hacking off a girl’s clitoris with a knife, a machete, a piece of sharpened stone, whatever might be available, and the surgical removal of the foreskin on an infant male.

The equivalent of “female circumcision” would be hacking off the underside of the glans, if not the glans itself.  The glans’ underside and the clitoris share the same nerve density and pleasure receptor function.  When a female is “circumcised” it’s rarely only the removal of her clitoral hood; usually, the entire clitoris is removed, often violently, and without sanitation.

I unapologetically prefer the term, “genital mutilation.”  Describe reality as it is.  “Circumcise” comes from the Latin circumcidere, “to cut around.”  Rarely is the clitoral hood cut around; rather, the practice exists to annihilate female pleasure, and protect the woman’s family from future shame.  To call it anything other than “genital mutilation” is sloppy, a disgusting if comforting politically correct nod.

So the topic of “female circumcision” and religious practices in nonwestern cultures came up.  To my astonishment, and I do mean astonishment, I heard sexually liberated and self-identified “feminists” support a [male] culture’s right to systemic violence.  Without blinking, I saw them build a consensus defending “female circumcision,” in deference to cultural respect and cooperative international relations.  There were a few hold outs, but most agreed it was imprudent and shameful for the economically privileged [read: western white male class system] to tell others what to think, what to do, and how to behave.  “It’s really arrogant of us,” one explained.

“Truth” is a trap for the confident.  I consider it slippery at best, but I recognize that the idea holds a permanent, meaningful location on most people’s mattering maps.

Meaning, that’s what matters.

The “truths” of these women eluded me.  They were simply living in reflexive socialized mores, established mental networks of right and wrong created by family and culture, Harvard’s so-called liberalism notwithstanding, while bantering an empty notion of respect, however meaningful.  To them.

But their truths and realities held little meaning for my life.  When one mentioned to me after class that she was training with her father to run a half-marathon, my mind flashed to a client, who had told me that he was training with his college aged daughter to run a half-marathon. I froze.

No, I didn’t believe my classmate was his daughter; but in that moment the insidious if subtle machinations and sweeping ramifications of socialization, sexual politics, and class, and how these invisible realities play day-in-day-out in our lives were epiphanic.  She could have been his daughter, and, in a perverse synchronicity, I could have been having a conversation with the child of a client who the week before revealed his marriage’s many intimate failings, before entertaining a fantasy with extraordinarily violent underpinnings.

Accident?  I think not.  Correlation may not be causation, but socialization usually hides behind truth’s intellectual respectability.  For this reason, the moral awareness diplomat argues against intervention for the lives and bodies of other women, because society’s truths keep her safe.  Her father, meanwhile, confesses to his phone whore his need to humiliate several types of women, mitigating the pain of his safe guarded domestic life.  The systemic violence lurks, in the father’s fantasy, in the daughter’s diplomacy.

If you will indulge the strained analogy, privileged father and surrogate daughter suggest the wholesale socialization of men and women, in a comprehensive system that is economic, not moral.

For this reason, male career fast trackers don’t enroll in annexed women studies courses; most professional capital is still achieved in the study of intellectual his-story; burgeoning women scholars defer to gendered political norms, e.g., “we can’t tell those [men] how to behave, it’s wrong.”

And I kissed my Ph.D. good-bye.

Not because I believe that sex for sale is wrong.  Far from it; I possess hubris because I believe that I  see behind other people’s “truths.”  I kissed my Ph.D. good-bye because in my own moral lapse, I accepted advice that the system couldn’t handle the vocation that has given my life meaning.  I understood the system’s hypocrisy, and I acknowledged that if I were to get a shot at its benefits, I needed to heed a man’s counsel.

Economics not morality dictated my decision.

What does all of this have to do with Larry Flynt?  I hope you’ll check back.