I keep thinking I’ve hit bottom with this book series, but it keeps on surprising me.
Nov 052012
Peter Tupper
Nov 042012
From Žižek’s “Organs without Bodies – Gilles Deleuze”:
And one finds a similar obscene subtext even where one would not expect it – in some texts which are commonly perceived as feminist. In order to confront this obscene “plague of fantasies” which persists at the level of “subliminal reality” at its most radical, suffice it to (re)read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the distopia about the “Republic of Gilead,” a new state on the East Coast of the US which emerged when the Moral Majority took over. The ambiguity of the novel is radical: its “official” aim is, of course, to present as actually realized the darkest conservative tendencies in order to warn us about the threats of Christian fundamentalism – the evoked vision is expected to give rise to horror in us. However, what strikes the eye is the utter fascination with this imagined universe and its invented rules. Fertile woman are allocated to those privileged members of the new nomenklatura whose wives cannot bear children – forbidden to read, deprived of their names (they are called after the man to whom they belong: the heroine is Offred – “of Fred”), they serve as receptacles of insemination. The more we read the novel, the more it becomes clear that the fantasy we are reading is not that of the Moral Majority, but that of feminist liberalism itself: an exact mirror-image of the fantasies about the sexual degeneration in our megalopolises which haunts members of the Moral Majority. So, what the novel displays is desire – not of the Moral Majority, but the hidden desire of feminist liberalism itself.
So, it’s not just fantasies that reflect reality, but fantasies that reflect each other. Moral Majority types have their dystopian fantasies of women stolen away by dark Others, and fantasize utopias of patriarchal order. Liberal feminists have their dystopian fantasies of the world the Moral Majority would create, a masochistic fantasy of defeat and vindication.
Nov 022012
Reading this chapter brought me to a whole new level of hatred and loathing for these characters, and this book.
Oct 302012
At long last, Leila shows up with a gun, confronting Ana in her apartment.
As I argued before, Leila functions as Ana’s doppelganger, the reflection of her fears and hatreds. Specifically, she represents Ana’s fear that Christian will abandon her: she keeps saying, “Alone.” Ana assumes that it’s either lifetime monogamy with Christian, or a life of being a crazy cat lady.
Oct 282012
Ana doesn’t step out when Elena visits Christian. Instead she sticks around so she can passive-aggressively seethe at Elena. Elena tells Christian that someone is blackmailing her. Does this book really need another subplot?
Oct 272012
Christian is acting in a dom-y sort of way, which is fine. The problem is that Ana isn’t really into the Scene.
When he turns and gazes at me, his eyes are burning. I stand paralyzed like a complete zombie, my heart pounding, my blood pumping, not actually able to move a muscle. In my mind, all I can think is— this is for him—the thought repeating like a mantra over and over again.
Doing it “for him” is the problem. Ana is unaware of her own desires, or at least unable to express them. Again, she’s still thinking of this interactions in terms of “if I do what he wants, he will be nice to me”, instead of “what can he and I do that we will both enjoy?” It’s a recipe for slowly building up a reservoir of resentment.
Oct 272012
Leila is really slacking off on this whole jealous deranged stalker/champion of class warfare thing. No sign of her in this chapter either, as Ana and the Expander finish their boat ride and have lunch. This makes me want to watch Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct again. Somebody really needs to boil Ana and Christian’s bunny, unless you count Leila trashing Ana’s car.
I should also mention that Ana has not asked Christian anything about Leila. That a former submissive has gone rogue and is stalking a dominant’s current squeeze isn’t necessarily his fault, but it does raise questions.
Oct 272012
Ten months ago, I made a pledge to have a draft of my BDSM history book done, even if it was a rough draft, and start sending it to publishers, by my 40th birthday, on October 27th.
I have not completed that. In fact, I am about where I was when I made that pledge.
Various excuses/reasons:
- Prolonged unemployment, with a lot of my time and energy going to job search.
- Concern about the health of certain members of my family.
- Depression, related to the above issues.
- Another large scale writing project, which seems to have stalled out.
- The interest from an editor, who prompted me to seriously rethink this project from the ground up and hopefully recreate it in a new, more commercially viable form.
- Learning that the aforementioned editor has just lost her job, part of a major disruption in the entire publishing industry.
On the upside, I have transitioned this blog to a new and better website, with vastly increased traffic (over 13,000 unique visitors in September, mostly from Reddit).
Where does this leave the future of this project? I will continue blogging. However, getting a steady income from one source or another has to come first. I would like to say that once that is in place, I can devote some energy to the book.
I’m also considering self-publishing some of my material as ebooks via Amazon/Smashwords/et al, mainly for publicity, not revenue. I’m actually somewhat discouraged by the thought of having to go through all the struggle with agents and publishers and maybe not getting anything for it.
Nonetheless, I still believe in this project. I believe this is a story that no one has told before, and needs to be told. If you think of all the things human beings do as a tree, this is one twisted little branch of it, but to me it is an interesting and even beautiful little branch.
Oct 262012
From Tanos’ blog:
…Lush, the high street retailer of bath bombs etc, ran a campaign in many of their shop windows involving people in cages or dressed as animals to highlight animal testing of cosmetics. In their Regent Street shop they put on a performance lasting several hours in which a body-stocking naked actress was tortured by a man in a white coat. Not surprisingly, the coverage of this got some BDSM attention.
Oct 242012
(I’ve been ragging pretty hard on the Fifty Shades trilogy and related phenomenon. At more than a few social events for kinky people, I’ve gone on rants about my opinion of it to anyone who will listen, and a few who won’t. One friend called me on this and made a spirited defence of the series. I asked her if she wanted to do a guest post on the subject, and she obliged.)
So being a kinky person myself, enjoying and learning in my own journey of BDSM, I of course heard all kinds of negative comments about the 50 Shades books. I heard so much negativity in fact that I had no intention of reading the books. A friend of mine though had bought the books and so I decided to borrow at least the first one and see what I thought.
