Guest post: Women, Floods, Bodies
Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.
A little while ago, thinking of Jordan Peterson, I flashed on a book I read thirty years ago or so: Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies.
Theweleit, a German sociologist with a Freudian bent, wrote about the men of the Freikorps, paramilitary bands of anti-Communists active in Germany between the World Wars. Many of them went on to be committed Nazis.
The Freikorps had their own subculture, including pulp fiction. Theweleit examined their novels, along with their letters and other documents, and found–brace yourselves for a surprise here–a profound fear of women and sexuality. The subtitle of the first volume of Mannerphantasien is “Women, Floods, Bodies.”
The Freikorps associated women with sex and sex with water and dirt. Rather, “bad” women, sexually liberated women, Red women, were associated with these things–the good German girl, the White Woman, was pure and sexless, Madonna to the Red Woman’s whore.
Theweleit saw in these men’s fantasies a desperate need to keep themselves under control, to fend off the personal dissolution they feared should they succumb to sexual ecstasy. (Via their diaries he found that many of them were sexually anhedonic.)
Jordan Peterson’s proto-fascism has striking similarities to that of the Freikorps men:
Obsession with Communism (Peterson’s house is decorated with Soviet propaganda) – Check
Association of women with chaos – Check
Fear of unregulated, nonmonogamous sex – Check
Preoccupation with Order: Clean your room. Get your life in order. Be CIVILIZED. – Check
And keep in mind these important facts kids:
Hierarchies are basic.
Ultimately, force is how MEN settle things.
“Women, Floods, Bodies” makes me wonder where Lakoff’s title for “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things” came from.
The work probably has stuck in my brain more than others as I spent a quarter wrestling with it in a course called “Computability and Cognition”, IIRC.
If anyone knows the work, Lakoff’s idea of framing is the only thing that makes any sense out of the “General Conservative Principles” to my poor brain.
Lakoff believes that it really is possible to talk to those ‘on the other side’ and find common ground.
Don’t think my brain can do it, though, somewhere along the conversation it feels like a seizure coming on.
Blood and Soil thinking; conspiracy theories to rationalize away unpleasant facts; corrupt notions of ‘masculinity’ derived from military subculture; enthusiastic irrationality (Jung, Welteislehre, Homeopathy, fake paganism etc.); forming boy’s clubs cut off from actual family and social interaction.
And perhaps, above all, the hijacking of simple sexual desire into the service of the agendas of vicious elites.
“Theweleit saw in these men’s fantasies a desperate need to keep themselves under control, to fend off the personal dissolution they feared should they succumb to sexual ecstasy.”
Reading that brought this to mind:
“You know when fluoridation began?…1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works. I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love… Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I — I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.”
Heh.