Chapter 11 Chapter 9 Dreams, Terror and Idolatry (Part 1)-2

Yet this is also woman's greatest deceitfulness, her greatest infidelity: that is to say, the greatest deceitfulness and infidelity of life itself--life, hidden under its most fertile forms, but always subject to the ferment of old age and death. intrusion.The use of a woman by a man destroys her most precious magic: she carries a heavy burden of motherhood and loses her sexual charm; even if she is sterile, it is only a matter of time before she loses her torque—once a woman becomes old Ugly enough, she would be intimidating.She is said to wither and wither like a plant.It is true that man's aging is also daunting, but usually, the man does not feel that the old man is a body, his union with these separate and strange bodies is abstract.It is in women, in the body that is destined to belong to him, that a man truly encounters physical degradation.Villon's "Beautiful Helmet Maker" examines the degradation of her body with the hostile gaze of a man.Older women, ugly women, are not only unattractive objects—they inspire hatred mingled with fear.In them, as soon as the former efforts of the wife disappear, the disturbing image of the mother reappears.

But even a wife is an unlucky prey.Venus appeared from the sea - fresh spray, golden crops - yes, Demeter was still alive.When a man possesses a woman through the pleasure he takes from her, he also induces elusive fertility: the very organ he penetrates is also the organ that causes procreation.This is why in all societies men are protected by many taboos against the dangers of the female iron organs.The reverse is not true, the woman is not afraid of anything that comes from the man; his sex organ is considered profane and sacred.Although the male genitalia can have the dignity of a god, there is no fear factor in its worship, and there is no need for women to be mysteriously protected from being victimized in daily life, and it is always auspicious.It is worth noting that in many matriarchal societies, sexual behavior is very liberal.But this statement is true only in a woman's childhood, in her early adolescence, that is, when sexual intercourse has nothing to do with the idea of ​​reproduction.Malinowski was a little surprised to say that young people who shared unrestrained co-sleeping in "single houses" were happy to make their infidelities public; Therefore, it is considered to be only a peaceful worldly pleasure.On the contrary, once a woman is married, the husband should never show her any affection in public, he must not touch her, and any involvement in their intimacy is sacred: so she gradually shares the mother's The dreaded nature of sex becoming a sacred act.Thereafter sexual intercourse is surrounded by prohibitions and precautions.Sexual intercourse is not permitted during plowing, sowing and harvesting.These are the seasons to avoid the wastage of personal intercourse of the fertility which is necessary for the abundance of the crops and therefore the public good.This is not the time to take seriously the magic that has to do with fertility.But abstinence also protected her husband's majestic physical strength to a large extent.This is necessary when the man is out fishing and hunting, especially when preparing for battle.The masculine principle is weakened in intercourse with a woman, so that a man must avoid intercourse as long as he needs to fully preserve his strength.

The question is whether men's fear of women is always sexually motivated.It is worth noting that, especially in Leviticus, nocturnal emission is considered a defilement, although women have nothing to do with it.In our modern society, masturbation is generally considered a danger and a sin: many children and young people who enjoy masturbating feel great fear and distress when doing so.It is due to the interference of society, especially of parents, that pleasure obtained alone becomes a crime.More than one teenage boy is instinctively terrified of ejaculation: anything that emanates from his own body, be it blood or semen, is, in his view, disturbing.What leaked out was his life, his supernatural power.However, even though subjectively a man can experience sexual arousal in the absence of a woman, objectively his sexual behavior still implies her presence: as Plato said in the myth of the hermaphrodites, the male The body takes the female body as a necessary condition.Man discovers woman at the same time as he discovers his gender, even if she is not in the form of a flesh-and-blood image.Conversely, it is precisely because woman is the embodiment of sex that she is terrible.We should never separate the inner aspect of lived experience from its transcendental aspect: what "I" fear and desire is always the embodiment of "I" own existence; Phenomenon.The not-self suggested by nocturnal emissions and erections is, if not explicitly in the form of a woman, at least an expression of nature and life: the individual feels that he is possessed by a magic that is not his own.

Indeed, his ambivalence towards women is reproduced in his attitude to his own genitals: he is proud of it, yet laughs at it, is ashamed of it.A young boy is both proud and terrified of his first erection during a penis contest with his buddies.An adult man regards his organ as a symbol of transcendence and power; like a voluntary muscle, it satisfies his vanity like a magical gift: it is a kind of freedom, full of established yet is all the contingency of arbitrary facts.Beneath this contradictory appearance, he indulged in it, yet suspected of being deceived.The organ by which he wishes to express himself does not obey him.With a desire far from satisfied, with sudden erections, which sometimes vent themselves in sleep, it expresses a dubious, capricious vitality.Man longs to overcome life with spirit, volatility with action: in spite of the distance of his consciousness from nature, in spite of his attempts to transform it, he finds himself troubled by life, nature, and volatility in his genitals.

Schopenhauer wrote: "The sex organ is the real foothold of the will, and its other pole is the brain." His so-called "will" is the attachment to life, suffering and death, and the "brain" is thought, which is in the When you imagine life, you get out of life.In his view, sexual shame is the surface we feel before being foolishly enamored with carnal desires.Even if we disagree with the pessimism of his views, he is still right to observe this opposition: the opposition of sex and brain is the expression of the duality of men.As subject, he shapes the world, and thus stands outside the world that is shaped, becoming its ruler.If he sees himself as flesh, as sex, he ceases to be a self-conscious and completely free being: he is caught in the world, a finite, perishable object.The act of reproduction undoubtedly transcends the limits of the body, but it also defines them.The penis, the father of this offspring, corresponds to the mother's womb; the man is the producer of, and himself the bearer of, the microbes that grow in the woman.By the life-giving seed, what is thrown away is his own life.Hegel said: "The birth of a child is the death of its parents." Ejaculation is a promise of death, and it insists on the opposition between species and individual.The existence of the sexual organs and their initiative negates the singularity on which the subject is proud.This struggle between life and spirit makes the sexual organs repulsive.When a man sees the penis as a symbol of transcendence and initiative, as a tool for possessing others, he is complacent about it; but when he sees it as a purely passive body, he When it became the plaything of dark powers, he was ashamed of it.This shame is easily disguised in ridicule.Another person's genitals can easily elicit a burst of laughter; erections often appear comical because they appear to be involuntary, but are involuntary;Malinowski said that to the savage among whom he lived, the mere mention of the name of that "shameful part" elicited laughter; Neither went beyond the scope of this low-level word game.Among some savages, women have the right to brutally ravage any stranger who dares to approach them.They attacked him in groups, often killing him half to death.The men of the tribe laughed it off; in this ravage the victim became passive, dependent flesh; he was possessed by the women and, through them, by their husbands.In normal intercourse, on the contrary, the man wishes to establish himself as the possessor.

But it was also at this point that he recognized with absolute certainty the ambiguity of his physical situation.He can take pride in his sexuality only if it is a means of possessing others—a dream of possession that can only end in shattering.In real possession, too, the other is annulled, consumed and destroyed: only the sultan in the book has the right to let his mistresses leave his bed at dawn and to cut off the head of each of them.A woman struggles to survive in a man's embrace, and it is precisely because of this that she wants to get rid of him.As soon as he let go of his arms, the prey became a stranger to him again.There she lay, new and whole, ready to be possessed by a new lover just as briefly.It is a man's dream to "brand" a woman so that she is his forever.But even the most vain man knows that he will leave her with nothing but memories, and the warmest recollections are nothing compared to the real existing feelings.There is an entire literature that details this frustration.A woman is targeted, said to be a flamboyant, a traitor, because her body can be dedicated to men in general and not to one man in particular.

However, her betrayal is indeed treacherous: she actually turns her lover into her prey.Only a body can be in contact with another body; a man can only be the master of the body he desires by making himself flesh.Eve was given to Adam so that he could transcend through her, but she drags him into the night of immanence.In dizzying ecstasy, his mistress shut him again in the opaque body of the dark womb; the opaque body the mother had built for her son, from which he wanted to escape.He possessed her in such a way, only to find that the one possessed was actually himself!Odors, sweat, weariness--numerous books have been written about such smoldering passions in a body made of consciousness.Desire certainly conceals aversion, but it also exposes greed in its gratification.Someone once said: "Sadness is the animal that is coitused." Others said: "The carnality is sad." But a man has not even found his final satisfaction in the arms of his lover.Desire soon germinated in him again, and this desire was not only for ordinary women, but also for specific women.She thus wields a particularly disturbing power.The man feels that the sexual desire of his body is only a general desire similar to hunger and thirst, a desire without a specific object, so the union that binds him to this specific female body is caused by the other.Not only is this union as mysterious as the unclean conception belly, but it has its roots in the belly, it is a passive force, it is magic.

Many novels depict women as witches and banshees, bewitching men with beauty and spells.This cliché is a reflection of a widely circulated myth from ancient times.Women are consecrated to magic.Magic, says Alain, is the languid spirit of all things; and an action is magical when it proceeds not from the active, but from the passive.It is for this reason that man always sees woman as the immanence of the given.Even if it caused harvesting and procreation, it was not an action she intended.She is not a subject, possessing transcendence and creativity, but an object full of liquid.In societies that worship these mysterious things, women are associated with religion because of their magical powers, and are revered as priests.But as soon as men try to bring society over nature, reason over life, and will over the degenerate nature of things, women are seen as witches.It is quite clear that the difference between a priest and a wizard is that the former controls and directs the forces at his disposal in the name of all members of the group, for the common good, according to the will of the gods and the law; The will of the gods and laws, manipulated only to his own taste.Therefore, it is impossible for women to be completely incorporated into the world of men.As the Other, she is opposed to them.Naturally, she uses her power not to allow this heroic feat of transcendence to permeate man's society and extend into the future, but to force him through separation and antagonism into the solitude of separation, into the darkness of immanence. among.The woman is a siren, who lures sailors to the rocks and perishes with her beautiful singing; she is Circe, who turns lovers into beasts;The man caught by her twist loses his willpower, his career, his future; he is no longer a citizen, but merely a slave to desire, cut off from society, subject to the moment, tormenting A body that oscillates passively between pleasure and pleasure.The evil witch pits lust against duty, the present against the future.She keeps the tourist away from home, gets him drunk with wine, and makes him forget everything.

To possess the other, man must remain himself.But frustrated by the impossibility of possession, he wants to be that other with whom he cannot unite.So he is alienated, he is lost, he drinks the aphrodisiac, becomes a stranger before himself, sinks into the depths of the fleeting, fatal pool.When the mother gave her son life, she also made him face the fate of death.The beloved seduces her lover to give up his life and indulge in one last bedtime.The union that unites love and death is well described in the legend of Tristan (Trist Llll), but it does have a greater truth.Born out of the flesh, man also realizes the flesh in making love, and this flesh is doomed to the grave.This further confirms the connection between women and death.The Harvest Goddess is the opposite of fertility that makes the crops plentiful.But she also seemed a terrible bride, with her skeleton bared beneath her sweet false flesh.

Therefore, what men like most and hate most is to present her animal fate in a fixed and vivid way in a woman (mistress or mother).Life was certainly necessary to his existence, but it also condemned him to limitation and death.Man dies from the day he is born: this is the truth embodied in the mother.He procreates for the species against himself: he learns this in the embrace of his wife.In excitement and pleasure, even before that, he forgot his only self.Though he had the right to distinguish between mother and wife, they proved only one thing: that he was mortal.He wishes to respect his mother and love his mistresses, but he also rebels against them with loathing and fear.

Men may have a variety of attitudes when it comes to emphasizing this or that aspect of physical drama.If a man does not think that life is difficult, if he is not very concerned with his particular fate, if he is not afraid of death, he will readily accept his animality.The status of the Muslim woman is inferior, because the feudal structure of society does not allow the appeal of the state against the family; because religion - which expresses the belligerent ideal of that civilization - deprives women of their magic by directly consecrating the man to death.What has a man to be afraid of, since he can always live in the luxurious and voluptuous debauchery of Muhammad's Paradise?In this case, a man can enjoy a woman in peace, without guarding against himself or her.The story of God shows that women are a source of comfort and pleasure, like fruit, candied fruit, savory cakes and sesame oil.We also find this beneficence of the senses today among the peoples of the Mediterranean Sea: the man in the South of France (who, through the bright sky and the clear sea, discovered the loveliness of being lovable) Nature beneath the surface), loves women with gourmand taste.His traditional contempt for them was enough to prevent him from taking them as human beings: he almost equated the pleasures of their bodies with those of the beach and the waves; Feel no fear, neither theirs nor his own.Vittorini said in his book "In Sicily" that he didn't make a fuss when he found a woman naked when he was 7 years old.Greek and Roman rationalist thought supported this safe attitude.The Greek philosophy of optimism surpassed the Pythagorean theory of good and evil.The inferior is subordinate to the superior and thus useful to him.These harmonious minds expressed no hostility to any physical body.The individual who sees himself as Spirit (Nas) or citizen, whether he is looking toward the Paradise of the Idea, or towards the city or state, thinks that he has transcended his animal nature: whether he indulges in pleasure or asceticism, combines Women in male society are of secondary importance.Of course, rationalism was not completely triumphant, and the experience of sexual drive remained ambivalent in these civilizations: etiquette, mythology, and literature all attest to this.But the allure and danger of women are only shown in a weakened form. Christianity re-empowers women with fearsome prestige: fear of the opposite sex is one of the manifestations of man's tormented conscience.The Christian itself is divided; body and soul, life and spirit are completely separated; original sin makes the body the enemy of the soul, and everything related to the body is evil.Only by being forgiven by Christ and led to heaven can man be saved.But he was just a fallen man by nature.His birth doomed him not only to die, but to be damned too.God's grace made heaven open to him, but in every form of his natural existence there was a bane.Evil is an absolute reality, the flesh is sin.Of course, since woman is always the other, men and women are not considered to be flesh to each other: for Christians, the flesh is the hostile other, which can only be woman.From her, Christians saw the temptation of the world, the embodiment of the flesh and the devil.The priests all insisted that she had led Adam to sin.We must quote Tertullian again: "Woman! You are the gate of the devil, you have convinced him that even the devil dared not attack him directly. Because of you the Son of God had to die. You will mourn forever and be in rags forever. "All Christian literature exalts the abhorrence that man can feel toward woman.Tertullian defines her as a "handpeumsngdoacaln" [a temple built on a sewer].St. Augustine, with horror, draws attention to the repulsive mixture of sexual and excretory organs: "IndrfN we are born between shit and urine." Christianity is so disgusted with the female body that although it is determined to let its God die , but forbade him to be defiled by birth: both the Ephesian Council of the Eastern Church and the Lateran Council of the Western Church claimed that Christ was born of a virgin.The early church fathers—Origen, Tertullian, and Jerome—conceived that the Virgin Mary, like other women, gave birth in blood.But the views of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine prevailed.The body of the Virgin Mary is closed.Since the Middle Ages, the fact of having a body has been considered a shame for a woman.Even science was long paralyzed by this abomination.In his treatise on nature, Lin Qin eschewed the "hateful" study of women's sexual organs.The French physician Lawrence posed a provocative question to himself: "How can this spiritual animal, which is so rational and judging, and which we call man, be allowed to be defiled by woman's bodily fluids, disgracefully located at the lowest point of the body?" Attracted by a lower, filthy pussy?" Today there are many other influences interfering with the influence of Christian thought, and this situation has some manifestations of its own.But, especially in the Puritan world, the abhorrence of the flesh persisted.For example, in Faulkner's "August Day" there is such a performance.The protagonist's initial sexual adventures are extremely traumatic.Depictions of young men feeling sick to the point of nausea after having intercourse for the first time are common in literature.If this reaction is rare in real life, it is no accident that it is described so frequently.Especially Anglo.In a Saxon country, heavily influenced by Puritanism, women arouse a more or less openly acknowledged fear in most adolescents and many men.This sentiment is quite strong in France.Michelle Leary wrote in "The Age of Man": "Now I tend to think of the female organ as some kind of unclean thing or wound, so it is not very attractive, just like bleeding, secretion Mucous is as dangerous as anything susceptible." The perception of STDs expresses this fear.A woman does not cause fear because she spreads disease.In fact, these diseases seem repulsive because they come from women: I was once told that young people believe that too much coitus can cause gonorrhea.It is also a common belief that as a result of intercourse a man loses his muscular strength and clear mind, that his phosphorus is depleted and his senses dulled.Indeed, masturbation carries these dangers too.Society even considers it more harmful than normal sexual function for moral reasons.Legal marriage and the desire to procreate act as a safeguard against the evil effects of the sexual drive.But I have said that the Other is involved in every sexual act, and that the Other appears everywhere as a woman.Through her, man is most clearly aware of the passivity of his own body.A woman is a vampire, she drinks him; her organs greedily feed on his.Some psychoanalysts have attempted to provide a scientific basis for this imagination, arguing that all the pleasure a woman derives from coitus may come from the fact that she symbolically castrates him and takes possession of his penis.But it would seem that these theories should be psychoanalyzed in their own right, and that the physicians who invented them were probably busy trying to visualize the fears of their ancestors. The reason for these fears lies in the fact that the otherness, the otherness, remains in the other completely beyond its capacity.In a patriarchal society, women still have many of the disturbing magic powers they possessed in primitive societies.That is why, instead of being handed over to nature, she was surrounded by taboos, held kosher, and put her in charge of the priesthood.Man swore not to approach her in her raw nudity, but through rites and sacraments he could separate her from earth and flesh and transform her into a human creation.Therefore, when the magic power she casts is guided, it will become the same as the lightning after the appearance of the lightning rod and the power plant.It is even possible to use her magic powers for general benefit; here we see a new development of that hesitation in man which characterizes his relation to his woman.He loves her, in the sense that she belongs to him; in the sense that she is still the other, he fears her.But it is precisely because she is the terrible other that he wants to possess her more completely—that is why he grants her human dignity and recognizes her as his companion. Feminine magic is thoroughly domesticated in the patriarchal home.Woman gives society an opportunity for cosmic forces to merge with her.Dimezil (forl) pointed out in his book "Misra. Varouna" (Misra. Varouna) that in India and Rome, male power has two ways of expression: the first is Varuna and Romulus (ROInlus).Gantw and the Priests of the Faun are represented; this power is aggression, rape, chaos, and brutal violence; at this time the woman is as if a person to be raped.The Sabine women who were raped, apparently sterile, were whipped and demanded more violence as they had often suffered.But the second, on the contrary, Mithras, Numa, Brahmins, and priests represented law and order in the city: in this case the woman was bound by her husband through marriage (elaborate rites were such marriages characteristics) and labor with him to secure his dominion over the forces of nature which men consider also to be female powers.In Rome, priests of Jupiter resigned when their wives died.So it is with Egypt; Isis, after losing the supremacy of the Madonna, is still generous, kind, benevolent, good, and still the most beautiful wife of Osiris.But if a woman is to be in this way a man's partner, his complement, his "wife," she must be given a conscious self, a soul.It is impossible for a man to cling to a man who is not human.As we have already mentioned, the Code of Manu promised the lawful wives the same heaven as their husbands.The more individuated the male is, the more he claims his individual sexual rights, the more definitely he recognizes his partner as an individual, a free being.The Oriental is indifferent to his own fate, and is content to make women the instruments of his enjoyment.But the ideal figure of the Westerner, as soon as he realizes his own uniqueness (unqp because of social occupation), may be noticed by another free man who is both strange and tame.The Greek didn't think of the harem woman at all as the kind he needed, so he gave love to his male companions, whose bodies were said to be as conscious and free as his own.Or he gave his love to high-class courtesans whose intellect, breeding, and wisdom were almost equal to his own.However, as long as the environment permits, it is still the wife who can satisfy the man's requirements to the greatest extent.The Roman citizen recognizes the matron as a person: through Cornelia, through Alia, he has his counterpart. Paradoxically, it was Christianity that somehow declared the equality of men and women.For woman, what Christianity abhors is her flesh.If woman renounces her body, she becomes a creature of God, forgiven by the Saviour, and becomes like man: she has her own place beside him, among those who are guaranteed the joy of heaven.Both men and women are servants of God, almost asexual like angels, and by grace resist the temptations of men.If woman consents to the denial of her animality, she—for she is in fact the embodiment of sin—is as much the most glorious embodiment of victory as the chosen people of God who have conquered sin.The savior who can redeem people's sins is of course a man.But man must co-operate in the salvation of his soul, and he must therefore prove his good will to obey in the most humiliating and perverse form.Christ is God, but it is a woman, the Virgin Mary, who rules over all mankind.Only the outlying sects, however, restored the privileges of woman and the magic of the great goddess—the church represented and served patriarchal civilization.In this kind of civilization, it is appropriate and justified for women to remain subordinate to men.It is by being man's tame servant that woman also becomes a saint.Thus appeared in the middle of the Middle Ages an extremely perfect image of a woman in favor of men: the face of the Mother of Christ surrounded by halos.She is the opposite of the sinner Eve, who trampled to death the snake under her feet; she is the mediator of salvation, but Eve deserves to be punished to hell.