And One After Another They Fall

Yesterday, Ian Welsh, a progressive blogger demonstrated that his fake Liberalism is based on a profoundly sexist worldview. Today, the Last Psychiatrist, one of the most intelligent bloggers I’m aware of, also came up with an extremely sexist statement:

Like a woman who squandered her youth on fun but disreputable men, she will find herself at 45 wanting to marry, but alone. “That is such a disgusting, sexist, archaic thing to say.” I feel your rage, and you are right. Alone nevertheless.

As much as the Last Psychiatrist wants to believe that the universe punishes women for spending their youth having sex with everybody except for the likes of him, this punishment never comes. Sexually fulfilled women are in extraordinarily high demand on the marriage market. As one of the women who don’t believe their youth was “squandered” on having fun, I can assure the Last Psychiatrist that he can stop worrying about us right now. All of the people I dated were chosen by me on the basis of their fun potential and not on their reputation, whatever that is supposed to mean. And in spite of never even wanting to get married, I am now a blissfully happy married woman.

The Last Psychiatrist should probably stop watching all those reruns of Sex and the City and meet some real women. I’m sure that many surprising revelations await him.

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29 responses to “And One After Another They Fall”

hkatz

November 15, 2012

Reminds me of a post I read a while ago about a misogynist and so-called “pick-up artist” who wrote a long rant on his blog about a bartender who turned him down years ago when he asked her out, and now, years later, he walked into the same bar and saw that she’d aged and become unattractive to him… From what I remember he spent the rest of the post cackling about the downfall of her youth (and how she’d wasted herself being too picky about who she’d date), but it didn’t seem to occur to him or to many of his readers that this bartender was just going about her business, living her life, and continuing to not notice this weird asshat who’s still obsessing about the time she turned him down.

They like to fantasize that the same woman who turned them down in her youth will now beg them to take her. It doesn’t occur to them that the universe doesn’t revolve around them… hence the universe doesn’t punish people for refusing to go out with them. But they really savor that prospect with joy.

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bloggerclarissa

November 15, 2012

“but it didn’t seem to occur to him or to many of his readers that this bartender was just going about her business, living her life, and continuing to not notice this weird asshat who’s still obsessing about the time she turned him down.”

– 🙂 🙂 Exactly. 🙂

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Anjasa

November 18, 2012

That’s too funny.

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musteryou

November 15, 2012

I find it interesting that he defines narcissism by virtue of its being against change. That is a very interesting and useful definition. One could retain that definition and at times accept a relatively less pathological view of narcissism than is the norm. For there are many people who have experienced too much change of a useless sort — change for its own sake — and who no longer trust anything, because the changes they’ve experienced have happened too fast. If one understands capitalism to be perpetual revolution, then no doubt many who live in its hub are shell-shocked by it. Hence they are narcissists by dint of material and historical circumstances. They’re trying to protect themselves, but the only options available are dangerous and/or pathological. Such is USA, in large part, and Australia, too.

Intellectual shamanism of course pursues the possibility of change in order to uncover intellectual wealth. That’s why it’s necessarily non-narcissistic, and why you won’t be able to pursue this path, or even begin to understand it, if you have a lot of narcissism in you. That would load you down, not to mention blind you.

If you don’t have anything inside you — which is what narcissism means — then you will not want to move a muscle, nor take any risk. It would be better to be stuck with one’s illusions and an environment that is at any rate familiar to one, than to risk total, physical annihilation.

George Bataille appeals to people to encounter such annihilation or in other words, to face up to nothingness. I realize this could be a double-edged sword. On the one hand this means “facing death”, which is fundamentally the death of the narcissistic self and one’s pathological tendency to choose safety over risk. On the other hand, “facing death” would also appeal to people’s death instinct — what Freud called Thanatos. Bataille’s form of shamanism makes its appeal to the desire for destruction.

In using his set of terms, Bataile is not being naive or random. Bataille reads Hegel and Nietzsche — and he reads Hegel through Marx and Nietzsche. Nietzsche said that Hegel’s concept of God was nothing, because it was the reduction of the physical into pure idea. Consequently, when one embarks on a religious journey, one is, in effect, seeking “nothing”. Nietzsche also said that when one is miserable one seeks excess rather than moderation. One of Bataille’s main motifs is “excess”, which he deems to be necessitated by the unhappiness that results from meaningless forms of wage slavery. Thus, he invokes Thanatos (destruction) through his appeal that one should not remain in moderation, but should go into behavioral modes of excess.

My interpretation of all this — and it may not be Bataille’s — is that for some people going into excess may be self-destructive, but for others it may be redemptive. I guess it would be down to what kind of person you are, whether this trial by fire ends up stripping you of your non-productive narcissism, or ends up simply destroying you entirely so that you meet your God and become “nothing”. Of course, this also applies to women and sexuality. Who you are to begin with might be the most determining factor as to outcome, should one experience with sexuality in one’s youth. Notably, Bataille also invokes the idea of Icarus, so one’s skill in flying — but not too close to danger — may be another determining factor.

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bloggerclarissa

November 15, 2012

My only engagement with narcissism is that of a long-time victim but I don’t see any connection between narcissism and resistance to change. A narcissist will gladly seek out new situations if they are likely to bring more adoration and attention.

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1. musteryou
  
  November 15, 2012
  
  Yes, but they will do so to avoid changing themselves. They will keep changing the external circumstances, but never their inward self.
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    November 15, 2012
    
    Right. OK, this makes a lot of sense. Narcissists are, indeed, incapable of changing. They believe the universe has to change to accommodate them.
    
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2. musteryou
  
  November 15, 2012
  
  I think narcissism is about taking pseudo-risks, so as not to take real ones. The difference here would be one of internal attitude. If I’m not really interested in learning from my experiences, but simply want to leave an impression, that is a pseudo-risk.
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    November 15, 2012
    
    I really like these comments of yours. They provide me with valuable insights.
    
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    1. musteryou
      
      November 15, 2012
      
      Thanks. It has taken me a long time to understand Bataille. Initially, I could understand him intuitively, but not in a way that I could articulate. Certainly, he cured me of any residual narcissism, although I don’t think I was ever a narcissist to begin with. My issues had to do with a very narrowly demarcated superego, that developed under the constraints of war and economic hardship — so, very different from the circumstances of most people in the contemporary Western world. That is why I often seem to speak a different language from the rest of them. I’ve never had any kind of permissiveness in my upbringing. The cultural issues raised by The Last Psychiatrist seem hard to understand, from that point of view.
      
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      1. bloggerclarissa
        
        November 15, 2012
        
        To be honest, I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about in this post. I usually love his posts but this one is incomprehensible.
        
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        musteryou
        
        November 15, 2012
        
        Haha. Then you and I are in the same boat– almost, regarding TLP.
        
        I think the assumption must be that getting an education is a means to inflate one’s self-worth. It’s not needed, in order to participate in society.
        
        I never felt that way, as to me, doing the PhD a way to try to figure out a lot of issues that had perplexed me to the point that I wasn’t able to function effectively in many respects.
        
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        bloggerclarissa
        
        November 15, 2012
        
        If this is his point, he must be much older than I thought. The jobs for people with only high school education are drying up and will soon disappear completely.
        
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        musteryou
        
        November 16, 2012
        
        A lot of people, globally, are out of touch with Generation Y.
        
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Inner change « muster you

November 15, 2012

[…] And One After Another They Fall | Clarissa’s Blog […]

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zinemin

November 16, 2012

How I hate this myth about women desperate about not finding a partner and thus being punished for turning down suitors when they were younger. Men love this myth so much!
But that is not how it works. Several female friends of my mother got divorced at the age of 40-60, and they all had no shortage of suitors afterwards, and these were nice men.
Why should this be different for an happy unmarried woman at the same age, who has not gone through a traumatic divorce? One of the closest male friends of my family fell in love like a teenager at the age of approximately 50, with a 55 year old woman. He was heartbroken after she left him after a few more years.
But oh, sure, that woman should probably have married the first interested guy that came along when she was 18 and “still pretty” instead of living her life and becoming the interesting person that she is!

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bloggerclarissa

November 16, 2012

According to every study, since 1980s, women of all ages have significantly less interest in marriage then men. This happens in all age groups but becomes more pronounced after women hit 40. So this vision of women desperate to get married but unable to is just a myth promoted by patriarchal shows like Sex and the City and men like TLP. The NYTimes also loves to peddle this myth.

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1. zinemin
  
  November 16, 2012
  
  This has been shown? Nice, this is well in line with my own observations, but indeed totally in contrast to these typical annoying articles about “selfish career women not finding a husband”. Unfortunately, many people buy into this myth. I have had many men recommending me I should marry my boyfriend else he might run off.
  
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the twisted spinster

November 16, 2012

Like a lot of men in the west, TLP has a lot of insight about certain things but one major stumbling block: they can’t accept that women are people.

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bloggerclarissa

November 16, 2012

This is exactly what I’m saying. And this happens to me all the time. I’d be reading or talking with a very reasonable, enlightened, progressive man only to see or hear him suddenly come out with a ridiculously sexist statement he wouldn’t even recognize as such.

Sexism is very resilient.

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Felonious Grammar

May 17, 2014

He’s a raging narcissist and misogynist. He throws around intellectual concepts from writers who confirm his 18th Century Cartesian view of emotion and reason being opposites, and having one’s own identity and values in the Superman vein, but listen to the music— he’s a grown man howling like an infant that he was never born from a woman and must, at all times, guard himself against the “feminine”.

Instead of being hyper-individual to separate himself from the divine rights of Kings, he does it to separate himself from his mother as if he were forever a teen-aged boy who refuses to see his mother and other women as anything but beneath him and his alpha-male facade. In order for the alpha and chronically self-centered man to play his silly little game, women have to do the shit work and carry all the social obligations that makes us the social animals we biologically are, while the little Supermen sit on their high-horses and judge everyone else according to their solipsistic and anti-social designs. He’s not biological, not soft, not fleshy, not feeling, not anything “feminine”— HE IS NOT A MAMMAL, DAMN IT! He’s a brain in a vat of alcohol.

His writing style is breathless and histrionic. He’s hardly coherent, I honestly don’t understand why so many people think he’s brilliant.

He is a man that knows jack-shit about any kind of feminism but habitually critiques feminists as if he had the real skinny on what feminists should say and do. He thinks that women who are affected by verbal abuse and rape threats on-line are weak and stupid. He assassinates characters routinely. He is small.

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November 17, 2012

Where has Ian Welsh done that? I read him too, sometimes, not closely.

I’ve recently made a similar discoverly about another blogger, whom I’ve recommended to you earlier.

May be you’ll even reply why you think it’s untrue, if you do.

Here is the post:

What’s the future of the family in America? How will that change our government?

The post seems to consist of many wrong ideas in my povs, but probably not only of them. One could ask relevant, intelligent questions about the topic of modern society.

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bloggerclarissa

November 17, 2012

Do you seriously expect me to read the ramblings of a male hysteric who can’t get laid for love or money and is going nuts as a result: “Sex can be an indifferent thing for men, but it really cannot quite be so for women. This is what might be called the female drama.”

Poor freakazoid. Maybe his readers should buy him a rubber doll and alleviate his suffering somewhat.

“One could ask relevant, intelligent questions about the topic of modern society.”

– In my opinion, it’s no use discussing anything with woman-haters.

Tell me instead how you are doing. I know things in Israel are very tense right now.

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1. el
  
  November 17, 2012
  
  Thank you for asking.
  
  I live near Tel Aviv, so yesterday & today (so far, once per day) we for the 1st time experienced hearing the warning of a rocket. From Gaza rockets were sent to Jerusalem & to Tel Aviv, my favorite city. Today in the morning we heard of the additional “Iron Dome” launcher put to protect the center of the country, and already today it suceeded in preventing a rocket from falling near / in (?) Tel Aviv.
  
  I am more worried about our soldiers, if there’ll be a land operation too. Looks as if it will be, so far.
  
  Citizens of the South have been getting those rockets for years, in “peaceful” times, so many, I guess, don’t want the operation to stop and them being again under fire. That’s also what somebody said on TV.
  
  Also, for some reason, Israeli channel showed Hamas propaganda movie in Hebrew, made specially for us. How we should wait for suicide bombers on our bus stops and in cafes. Why show it, instead of only saying “they encourage suicide bombing again”, as was said on TV (more than before, I guess) ?
  
  Wanted to add that I think very anti-Israeli people don’t understand how much of Israel lives (esp. south), that we are attacked too, not only attack ourselves. That it’s really a war over a house, so to speak.
  
  Now I’ll go to watch a great program “Israel Weekly” on RTVi. (Израиль за неделю) Have you ever watched it? I think it can be found on Internet too.
  
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  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    November 17, 2012
    
    I will put this comment up in a separate post because it’s impossible to find any reliable discussion of what is happening right now.
    
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Anjasa

November 18, 2012

There was a discussion last week on the GMP about polygamy and this one poster stated that while polygamy might work for a young, attractive woman that as you age women will not be able to find anyone their age to date. It was just so sad. This woman has obviously had problems with dating, and with men, and is assuming that it happens to everyone. It was just horribly depressing to read.

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bloggerclarissa

November 18, 2012

I know, it is always very sad to see people try to explain the world through the prism of their personal issues.

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1. Anjasa
  
  November 18, 2012
  
  Her looks obviously defined her a lot, and she felt undesired and unwanted. She thought that it happened to all women after a certain age, but it defined her relationships and made her unhappy. She’s terrified her partner will leave her and that she’ll never find someone to love her after that.
  
  It’s just a very harsh reality for her, and I can’t argue with her experiences or tell her that it will be better because for her, she doesn’t believe it will be.
  
  It just left me with this intense feeling of melancholy and empathy for the woman.
  
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2. Anjasa
  
  November 18, 2012
  
  Just to clarify, I didn’t mean ‘sad’ as to mean ‘pathetic’ but sad as in this person has obviously had troubles, and is still feeling upset about them, and it’s a perfectly valid response.
  
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