#banbossy | Clarissa's Blog
I can’t speak to anything American as it has a whole different dynamic from anything that would make any sense, but as you point out, a lot of contemporary feminism has the tendency to hedge women in, rather than to give the the range they ought to have to explore the world. I have hypothesised that many times Western types have had too much freedom and therefore welcome any caging or unfreedom. Moreover, the lack of freedom gives a limit to the ego, which produces a sensation of safety, albeit at a great cost. (I think to some extent we all rest easy in the lazy assurance that we “have limits.) So Americans, having been given too much freedom to “be themselves” seek re-entry into a defining box.
Now, me, I’ve had to move in the opposite direction, out of the box. At a later stage in development — as an adult — that is MUCH harder to do than if you do so as a child. For instance, in my original society, men had access to knowledge of violence but women did not. Women may have been victims of psychological violence, and often were, but they had no direct knowledge about the mechanisms of violence. This was precisely what I had to learn about to stop being such a child-woman (the natural default state of my upbringing — you witness my right-wing female peers, who are still like this in middle-age).
I sought knowledge of violence everywhere, to better understand it and its relationship to myself. Obviously if your character structure has formed so that there is a great deal of the mature range of experience and emotions that you have not been permitted to know about, you have already been the victim of strong cultural violence. Also, you are going into forbidden “male” territory.
Bataille terms this expansion of self-awareness “transgression”. It is very fraught.
But Americans, who have rarely been the victims of cultural repression have the opposite drives. In fact, I am totally unintelligible to them. My wants are the opposite of their wants. I want to understand how violence formed me so that I can master those forces of violence, whereas they desire more violence (repressive measures on their psyches) so as to be finally formed by these measures of repression.
I suppose it is okay to desire repression on one’s own behalf — but never on my behalf.
American feminism really has the opposite goals to my sort of feminism, which would make men and women more similar. My method for increasing similarity (and a psychical balance within myself) has been to increase my knowledge of violence to the greatest extent. Bataille was useful for this, as his project seems not dissimilar from mine. Andrea Dworkin and other feminists, however, cannot see any value in this sort of method. This already shows their extreme limitations in terms of self-knowledge, in my view, since they expect the limits against violence to be drawn arbitrarily, by some repressive social force, instead of by their own minds after having encountered their own natural limits. In other words, they show they prefer an externally imposed system of order rather than the option to adventure, find out what one needs, and then impose a personal limit, based on furthered knowledge abot their own individual nature and its needs.
But what I have described here is very intellectually complex and sophisticated — therefore, also hard to communicate, especially to people who have the opposite goals and ambitions to mine. You would really have to be of the same type to be able to resonate. And then, too, there are my female peers, who are of my type, but have no desire to be anything other than they already are, although they may express unhappiness with their lot on occasion.
I can’t speak to anything American as it has a whole different dynamic from anything that would make any sense, but as you point out, a lot of contemporary feminism has the tendency to hedge women in, rather than to give the the range they ought to have to explore the world. I have hypothesised that many times Western types have had too much freedom and therefore welcome any caging or unfreedom. Moreover, the lack of freedom gives a limit to the ego, which produces a sensation of safety, albeit at a great cost. (I think to some extent we all rest easy in the lazy assurance that we “have limits.) So Americans, having been given too much freedom to “be themselves” seek re-entry into a defining box.
Now, me, I’ve had to move in the opposite direction, out of the box. At a later stage in development — as an adult — that is MUCH harder to do than if you do so as a child. For instance, in my original society, men had access to knowledge of violence but women did not. Women may have been victims of psychological violence, and often were, but they had no direct knowledge about the mechanisms of violence. This was precisely what I had to learn about to stop being such a child-woman (the natural default state of my upbringing — you witness my right-wing female peers, who are still like this in middle-age).
I sought knowledge of violence everywhere, to better understand it and its relationship to myself. Obviously if your character structure has formed so that there is a great deal of the mature range of experience and emotions that you have not been permitted to know about, you have already been the victim of strong cultural violence. Also, you are going into forbidden “male” territory.
Bataille terms this expansion of self-awareness “transgression”. It is very fraught.
But Americans, who have rarely been the victims of cultural repression have the opposite drives. In fact, I am totally unintelligible to them. My wants are the opposite of their wants. I want to understand how violence formed me so that I can master those forces of violence, whereas they desire more violence (repressive measures on their psyches) so as to be finally formed by these measures of repression.
I suppose it is okay to desire repression on one’s own behalf — but never on my behalf.
American feminism really has the opposite goals to my sort of feminism, which would make men and women more similar. My method for increasing similarity (and a psychical balance within myself) has been to increase my knowledge of violence to the greatest extent. Bataille was useful for this, as his project seems not dissimilar from mine. Andrea Dworkin and other feminists, however, cannot see any value in this sort of method. This already shows their extreme limitations in terms of self-knowledge, in my view, since they expect the limits against violence to be drawn arbitrarily, by some repressive social force, instead of by their own minds after having encountered their own natural limits. In other words, they show they prefer an externally imposed system of order rather than the option to adventure, find out what one needs, and then impose a personal limit, based on furthered knowledge abot their own individual nature and its needs.
But what I have described here is very intellectually complex and sophisticated — therefore, also hard to communicate, especially to people who have the opposite goals and ambitions to mine. You would really have to be of the same type to be able to resonate. And then, too, there are my female peers, who are of my type, but have no desire to be anything other than they already are, although they may express unhappiness with their lot on occasion.
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