[color="#FF0000"]WARNING: This is not a pleasant post
It contains stuff of a sexually unpleasant nature[/color]
Not the sort of stuff I ever wanted to write on (or be remembered for writing), but the muck is unavoidable now.
In an item linked from the rajeev2004 blog some time back, there was the following comment
indiafacts.co.in/wendy-donigers-fake-victimhood/
I came across the highlighted title again more recently, when one of the English-language songs that I actually like had been covered by some modern emo-band, and which had then been included by some crazy person as somehow belonging in their chosen soundtrack for an upcoming movie called "50 shades of grey". Piqued (big mistake - but I keep making them), and remembering that I had seen its name mentioned earlier in the above comment, I looked up what this movie was about. Turns out it is based on some book trilogy. Further:
- it's written by some middle-aged British woman
- apparently it started out as a fan-fiction for the "Twilight" series of crappy teen 'sparkly vampire' 'romances' that seemed to have really appealed to middle-aged western females (and not just teeny western females)
- the initially unclear summary came across like a typical trashy romance novel
- further reviews and comments reveal it's actually S&M* literature
[* When I was a teen, the females in my class used to (deliberately) equate S&M with "SM" which in NL stands for Seksuele Misbruik = Sexual Abuse.
I'm not very familiar with modern Indians and not sure what they know or don't. E.g. I recall one IF member for instance didn't know what basic words like "hitched" meant - getting hitched means getting married, btw. So for any who may not know, then, S&M stands for sado-masochism. And if you don't know what that means, well, Lucky You: trust me, you don't want to know, and you want to stop reading this thread.]
I read a couple of scathing reviews right at the top of amazon's review page.
These two reviews were fun to read, but they curiously pointed out what (in their opinion) was better "erotica" literature, and referred to Anne "Interview with a Vampire" Rice's "Beauty trilogy". Curious as to what constituted a better class of literature for them, I looked up this "Beauty trilogy" in amazon. Also S&M literature, going by the reviews.
Amazon provided a Look Inside the book. The entire introduction by the author was available. As well as the first 1.5 chapters or so.
- author Anne Rice, wrote the trilogy under a pseudonym to keep it from family (esp. dad) and friends, and later asked her dad not to read it. So clearly she doesn't feel entirely comfortable about it
- she felt it expressed her sexuality/her need for stories of this kind, and that the appeal to wider audiences was apparent from how well the books sold, despite the following:
[color="#0000FF"]- intriguingly she stated that her trilogy was BANNED, and not available in libraries generally[/color], which is interesting to note in the context of Doniger's torture porn
- as an aside, the story uses Sleeping Beauty as a launchpad for its background: Rice declared in great ignorance that since Sleeping Beauty was woken with a kiss, that Rice started considering - what she no doubt thought was greatly 'innovative' of her - that Sleeping Beauty was actually awakened by the Prince copulating with her.
Now, for someone like Rice - who pretends to be so literate - Rice is obviously not well-read: even in early NL high school (when we were 13), the "real meanings" of fairy tales was part of our "philosophy" curriculum. Sleeping Beauty - the teachers repeatedly hammered into our pained brains - should be read as being woken by the prince's "magic wand", which the teachers then felt compelled to expand on and say it was a reference to his reproductive organ.
[My class - as that of my sister's before me - became uncomfortable and reeled: "can ya please stop raping us, teachers" complained several of my classmates. I understand them better now.]
I think that because it was a catholic school the teachers perhaps were deliberately (or forced by their own more restrictive upbringings?) trying to debilitate the students and any budding sexuality by talking only of perverseness.
Similarly, we were told the 'real' version of Red Riding Hood: she was warned off by her mum from talking to strange aka dangerous men ("wolves") and since Little Red Riding Hood didn't listen, she was raped by one who lured her from the path and ambushed her (aka the "wolf", i.e. the negative male stereotype in male-female interaction) whereas the hunter was to represent the positive male stereotype.
Other fairy tales got the same treatment - all were turned into stories about awkward male-female dynamics and warning women of men. There's a lot of literature "analysing" and "explaining" fairy tales from Freudian perspectives in mainland Europe. I have repeatedly noticed that whenever American or even British reviewers speak of the "darkness" of European fairy tales, they don't mean to allude to this at all: they exclusively refer to the more explicit cruelty or dark/dreary endings (such as how the evil queen in Snow White was punished in the end, and the actual treatment the evil queen meted out to Snow White throughout: the Disney version IIRC only covered the apple and not the poisonous comb and suffocating belt etc). In reality, this just underscores that Americans and Brits don't have a clue about the modern mainland-European sordid psycho-analytical readings of their fairy tales.
[BTW: Based on various significant indicators (but which are not the point of this post), I don't think these are the "original" readings of said fairy tales - at least, not in the case of all European fairy tales. But once they teach/force you to start seeing/reading them that way, it becomes hard for some people to not continue doing so, and hard to unlearn it. Sort of like how Doniger's effects - and that of other 'less offensive' aliens - influences native parrots and other subvertibles on how to "read/view" Hindu religion/narratives.]
Another of the interesting statements in Anne Rice's intro was that she wanted to write erotica literature that appealed to her, and that existing erotica literature by men (she's a feminist) had S&M too excessively violent and harmful. Disturbing, these "degrees" of "harmful" (and that she draws a line that must be acceptable since she has approved it, but which others feel they *can* cross). Especially disturbing, when she kept on going about how her own work celebrated humiliation and a "not-so-painful" form of torture (let's call it torture-porn lite, then, shall we?) as a pleasant "civilised" form of "enlightened sexual pleasure".
And let's not notice that Rice had her Sleeping Beauty - a 15 year old girl - repeatedly raped (euphemised with that historical word, "ravished") by the prince, before being physically hurt - which he seemed to get some sordid pleasure out of, and the victim too at the level of a typical abusee - and subjected to constant humiliation and was made a "sexual slave" of all the courtiers in the prince's kingdom where she and others like her were repeatedly and publicly gangraped, as per the intro and reviews. (Although the reviewers did not use the words rape or gang-rape.) Worse still, we're to believe that sleeping beauty and the other slaves derived a secret pleasure from this sexual torture, because the author and the adulating fans tell us so. This may well be - since these are just characters in a book after all - but that blurs the dangerous line for rape victims does it not? I mean, in reality rape can as a side-effect result in sexual release "pleasure" in some male and female victims - a very difficult topic - but nevertheless does not mean acquiescence to the rape. And I notice that 15 year old victims of child abuse who grow up into similar abusers (naturally) don't get as much "understanding" from "enlightened" reviewers as the very similar characters in Rice's work.
The stark hypocrisy becomes more apparent when similar crimes - sexual violence against women - is (understandably) condemned in practice: like the Comfort Women of WWII Japan.
I want to look into the mentality of such fiction authors as Anne Rice (and the many allegedly "non-fiction" authors like Donigers too, since there is obviously a connection to be made). I want to expose their hypocrisy.
You notice all these middle-aged women (and men) pen these rape fantasies/torture porn (gang-rape, S&M, bondage, humiliation, torture) that goes under the name of "Erotica" in the west.
Note that in contrast, what's called "Romance" novels already contain graphic scenes of sex - often a milder form of rape fantasy by the worrisome authors, but usually a rape fantasy nevertheless - and these have contained graphic stuff since at least the 70s. (I know this because my friend used to borrow a lot of old trashy "romance" novels from her library and I read some of the back covers and inner flaps which contained direct extracts.)
The difference between "Erotica" and "Romance" novels is generally - perhaps until the 50 Shades of Grey type trash came along? - that Romance novels don't include S&M.
Can't help but note that sexual violence against women when penned by female "feminist" authors suddenly makes it all OK. And that "No" suddenly does mean "Yes" when women "romance" authors - and worse still when fe/male authors of torture porn I mean "Erotica" - write their rape fantasies. And Anne Rice's is apparently a gangrape fantasy (bisexual, of course <- seems to be used by the author to 'alleviate' the rape-crime-nature of such things).
Distressing to see a female author - declares feminism in the intro - debase her female character. I suppose the 'gender equality' comes from the fact that the author's male characters are promised to be similarly debased, as per the reviews.
To harp on the middle-aged fe/male authors of torture porn: one notices that their "protagonists" (victims?) are frequently *young*, very young. 15 to 18 years old in this example.
The middle-aged/elderly authors project their own late and weird sexual desires onto a much younger population, one I know from my own high school case to never have harboured such views on S&M/bondage/humiliation/torture/sexual violence etc. (It's why my teen classmates had kept calling S&M as Seksuele Misbruik/Sexual Abuse instead.)
Female feminists are always an interesting case, and older ones more so. I have known/know lots of feminists and have read some articles by them too. On IF I once mentioned a famous 90s Danish movie that featured a female feminist in IIRC a communist conclave who decided to make her life align with the hardcore feminist ideology she spouted: she intellectually decided she would be a lesbian since this was the only rational choice (though presumably not her natural tendency otherwise). This was an exaggerated look at the degree of alienation, fear and loathing feminists in general have for men (I won't bother differentiating between Indian/Asian feminists and alien feminists, it's all a christianism to me). But there is something that was always obvious to me but which seems to have been missed by many - and which feminists don't admit in words, but do in actions: most feminists tend to have a love-hate relationship with men (same as misogynistic men do concerning women, BTW). They badly want men - more desperately than healthy females, I notice - but at a rational level they don't want men/they hate men.
So there is this constant and longterm battle that fembots - especially feminists as old as Doniger (don't know that Doniger is a feminist) - have had with their desires, with men, and reconciling their feminism with their sexuality/desires. Often - and this is obvious not just in Anne Rice - this is projected into rape fantasies, the only way these women get to be with men while it still does not sacrifice their unwillingness. They're quite disturbed.
Of course middle-aged married western women who aren't feminists also write rape fantasies - and the author of 50 Shades of Grey seems to be of this kind - and often involving protagonists half their age (a recurring motif among middle-aged people) who have feelings and desires attributed to them that only older, more sexually-bored/sexually-tolerant* people have (*'tolerance' used in the alcoholism/addiction sense). But the non-feminist kind project the unequality of their characters' relationships - i.e. the braindead 'unwilling-willing' female 'heroine' getting overpowered by the brutish aggressive alpha male 'hero' - as some ideal, as the status-quo of masculinity and feminity. This is the opposite from how feminists on one hand object to this alleged status-quo of male-female dynamic (which is entirely theoretical btw, real-life wo/men don't interact like that) and yet privately want this. (Not all feminists perhaps, but many.) They're simply unable to reconcile their rational side and their biological side, making many into simply walking contrarians.
(Misogynistic men are the same, btw. I don't mean to pick on exclusively a familiar strain of feminists.)
Ugh, what a topic.
IIRC Rice remarked in her intro how it's often men in positions of power who gravitate toward S&M and that this too applies to women, since nowadays many women are in high "career" positions like "CEOs" (and successful authors, one may add to that list) and also gravitate toward the same. But I note these are all old men and women, who've focused way too much of their years/spent away their youth in becoming successful and making moolah. It is in their middle-aged Euro sensibilities that you see them churning out increasingly extreme sexual fantasies featuring youngsters through whom they vicariously live out their increasingly-weird desires.
BTW, there's two reasons I avoid and seriously dislike the word "erotic[a]" for Hindoo (sacred) romantic literature (often concerning the Gods) despite such texts frequently featuring else culminating - as is natural - in scenes of poignant and wondrous intimacy:
- the genre of erotica in the western sense certainly does include S&M. [And it has long followed the "decadence" trend that Wilde et al outlined.]
- not to mention that "Erotiek" in NL was reserved for the Porn genre in video stores: hardcore porn movies - and not just softporn, note - were marked "Erotiek". (Movies that simply feature explicit sex scenes - and NL is famous for them - are simply marked drama: there's not a single NL non-children's movie I've ever watched that didn't feature sex scenes. And I'm talking about the utterly awkward/unsexy kind that Paul Verhoeven is still familiar for, as also seen in his recent Zwartboek/Black Book war drama. NL directors usually negate silly voyeurism by deliberately making it uncomfortable viewing, as this discomfort is part of the plot/part of the psychology of the characters.) And I'm sure the meaning of Erotiek for Porn movies is the same in Belgium where Jacob The Robber I mean Jakob De Rover is from: he kept threatening a "beautiful eroticism" in Hindoo sacred stuff. But European minds understand something very different under the term - so hardcore porn is always an extension of that definition, incl. for Roover. Their views are not Hindoos' views. And I would know this, because I know western minds: I grew up in alien climes, unlike most Indians who merely moved there in their late teens/in tertiary (and who - it has become repeatedly clear - really don't know the western mind at all, beyond superficial analysis). But being born and for a brief space raised in India, and being of a heathen family, I do know the traditional heathen [Hindoo] mind somewhat too.
It's strange how there's no backlash against the following now slowly institutionalised constructions in the west:
- torture porn-like literature dubbed "erotica" (don't know about 50 Shades of Grey, but the viewable chapters of Rice's Beauty trilogy involved not just rape but further *promised* 'public gangrape to come')
- the western film genre literally called Torture Porn and which is a combination of hardcore porn and horror-torture/gore movies: where innocent attractive females are set upon by sociopaths and where the sociopath has sex with his victim as well as brutally torturing her by sawing parts of her body off etc, as in a typical horror movie. (Even before Torture Porn emerged standalone on the horror scene, in American horror/gore movies the trend had been to have young attractive women scream and get hacked to pieces. Now they just toss sadistic "sex" with the mass-murderer in there, and apparently this vomit sells in the west.) It sounds to me like these stories are inspired by real life sociopaths/rapists. Yet they get glorified in movies that - usually - young male western audiences watch.
Meanwhile christoislamic rape crimes in India - projected as "all-Indian" and hence as "equally Hindu" therefore "Hindu" - are the sole focus of international "women's rights" activists (all while these so-called activists continue to hide the heathen identity of the victims and the christoislamaniac identity of the perpetrators in attempting to pass the crimes off as "all-Indian" or even "Hindu"). It's *disturbing*. And in the interrim, global complacency towards the sorts of western "cultural" trends that fuel rape and sociopathic crimes of sexual violence against women or children or men are utterly ignored.
Further, the whole crucial dialogue of why "No means No and Not Yes" is utterly undermined - and with it rape victims are too - by even the old "mills-and-boons" type romances that featured rape fantasies, not to mention the more sadistic kind in Rice and similar writers' works dubbed "erotica". But No, Rape was *never* sexy. It's these kinds of books and movies that not just blur the lines but keep sending out the conflicting message.
(BTW, I hope that that "Chitra Raman" - the one who mentioned "50 Shades of grey" in her comment at indiafacts.co.in - didn't actually like/wouldn't recommend books like that. Actually I don't want to know the answer to that: modern Indians are creeping me out, in how they are moulding their minds after the west: teaching themselves to "like" what the west likes.)
The west has this strange smug attitude towards heathen sexuality, despite this being neither prudish nor so extreme as the western kind of middle-aged "successful" authors/feminists/etc. Not only do Hindus get clubbed over the head by the likes of alleged "sympathisers" like Balagangaadhara's unwanted alien student De Roover - who wanted Hindus to realise the "beautiful erotiek" that he saw in Hindoo religion (but what could *he* see? Hindoo religion of course has some of the most romantic stuff I've ever come across, but it's utterly delightful, and appeals on so many levels: it's intensely romantic and attractive, and I would have no trouble for kids to read this. And IMO the very real romance between the Divine Couples - as seen even in brief hints in sacred works like the MPS - is the source for traditional Hindoos' deep sense of romance to this day. I think Hindoos get it from their Gods). But other heathens and non-western populations also regularly get beaten over the head by aliens: e.g. Elst had a piece on how a former Belgian beauty queen became a sexpert or something and was "shocked" to find that Chinese married couples weren't as into public displays of affection (="PDA") as the Belgian beauty queen thought was necessary in underpinning a good sex affair. Further, the Chinese appeared too reticent - in Belgian beauty queen's learned opinion - in declaring that sex was Da Best Thing Ever invented (actually, internal fertilisation that IIRC was to have started with our reptile ancestors was indeed an evolutionary breakthrough, but that's not what the Belgian was alluding to) and that Chinese were not so centred on sex as the Belgian felt humans ought to be. IIRC the Belgian beauty queen decided that the Chinese needed to be taught to "appreciate sex" (or was it that she thought that Chinese women needed sexual liberation - can't remember). She concluded this was all undeniable evidence for how Chinese men didn't love their wives. Obviously. [Because of The Usual Rules: only aliens/oryans are capable of love. And civilisation. And humanity. And anything worthwhile.]
More recently, the west took great delight in repeatedly bringing up in the news how Chinese people had found what they - and the Chinese journalist interviewing them included - thought was a strange mushroom or something, but which the west instantly recognised as being "obviously" a "sex toy". The entire west was laughing at the expense of the "sexually" "innocent/infantile/backward" Chinese. What nonsense. Maybe the real answer is that Chinese already have a happy romantic life and don't need "sex toys" or viagra or whatever to compensate, and consequently didn't recognise whatever device it was.
I wish heathen women from India, China and everywhere would set up sociology fields to psychoanalyse the likes of Doniger etc and western "erotica" and draw conclusions about the state of the western psyche based on that. And also the effect western "erotica" may be having on perpetuating or at least excusing the ongoing sexual violence against women. Note that midddle-aged western people esp. including middle-aged western women are not just projecting their own weird middle-aged sexual needs/desires onto heathen religions as Donigers do - or finding heathens like say the Chinese lacking in "PDA" (oh what a crime
arcasm
- but they are also condoning sexual violence via constructed theoretical/fantasy spaces wherein authors set their rape fantasies. (And they *are* rape fantasies.) And it is heathen *women* who need to expose this, because heathen men will - as always - get attacked for critiquing the alien moronisms concerning sex.
I can't believe that S&M is now being romanticised by people writing for the mainstream, assuming the amazon rank that Chitra Raman mentioned for "50 Shades of Grey" gives any indication about mainstream appeal. Perhaps worse than that is that rape fantasies are romanticised and even eroticised/declared to be sexy. Ugh. Humans.
You can't both denounce rape/sexual violence against women and secretly peruse romanticised rape fiction. Because that just makes you a hypocrite. The west betrays a deeply sexually-repressed mind, IMO. And also, the older these minds get, the more perversions they seem to come out with.
I'm not recommending these things for reading, but: as supporting data for various claims, can look up the author's introduction/preface to Anne Rice's "Beauty Trilogy" visible on Amazon. (The first 1.5 chapters that are also visible make more sickening reading.) There's also the first couple of reviews for the '50 shades of grey' books at amazon, which lampoon the work admirably, which I do recommend that people read.
I know that I may well regret writing this post. But it had to be said. Someone had to say it. (And there's actually more unpleasantness to be pointed out.)
The only consolation is that no one is likely to read this (not counting web search engine crawlers).
Disclaimers: I'm not actually a "prude" and neither are other heathens - though no doubt that accusation would make aliens feel better.
There are some deeply troubling questions about the human psyche - especially about the modern western psyche (although Japan also showcases bondage and sexual violence against women in fictional settings, such as in 'hentai' productions, something that the west criticises in the Japanese but not in their own torture porn) - questions that need to be asked and which I just can't bring myself to ask in an Indian forum (perhaps because I'd like the innocent to retain what innocence they have; I'd certainly have preferred to, because the muck doesn't wash off, you know).
There are questions not just of (modern) human sexuality, but questions on the psyche of modern male and female sexuality, on strange/worrisome trends of what's considered erotic/sexy (increased tolerance?), questions on when sexual violence is sexual violence, why is condoning sexual violence in constructed theoretical scenarios - like in rape novels - okay?, how much of this flows over into real life and blurs lines, what is the proportion of wo/men who are attracted to these kinds of scenarios and perhaps why (and crucially: how can the rest of us develop a means to detect such people in order to avoid them).
And then the unspeakable questions.
In my opinion, western "erotica" - and its (evolving) notions of what constitutes 'erotiek' - show the west's hypocrisy (not just in its males but also its females, note) as concerns "erotica's" regard for humans including perhaps most noticeably women.
I get this feeling that the western male and female psyches just don't have a healthy relationship and are deeply disconnected/dis-attuned (if there is such a word) at some level. Individual western people are just fine and in normal relationships, there are many examples. I'm talking about the general culture of weirdness that these novels and films and notions are a part of, and in which they find life, and which culture they keep re-inforcing from one generation to the next, with increased intensity/further regressions.
[color="#FF0000"]WARNING: This is not a pleasant post[/color] (to say the least)
[color="#FF0000"]It contains stuff of a sexually unpleasant nature[/color]
It contains stuff of a sexually unpleasant nature[/color]
Not the sort of stuff I ever wanted to write on (or be remembered for writing), but the muck is unavoidable now.
In an item linked from the rajeev2004 blog some time back, there was the following comment
indiafacts.co.in/wendy-donigers-fake-victimhood/
Quote:Chitra Raman February 14, 2014 9:48 am Reply
Very nicely done, thank you. I believe there is some excitement and crowing in the Doniger camp that this controversy has catapulted her book to No.30 in Amazonââ¬â¢s bestseller rankings. Imagine, her book sales have whizzed past the 50 Shades of Grey Trilogy that follows at a distant 79th! Doniger can sell books for sure. She just canââ¬â¢t sell her ââ¬Åscholarshipââ¬Â to anyone whose lights are still on upstairs.
I came across the highlighted title again more recently, when one of the English-language songs that I actually like had been covered by some modern emo-band, and which had then been included by some crazy person as somehow belonging in their chosen soundtrack for an upcoming movie called "50 shades of grey". Piqued (big mistake - but I keep making them), and remembering that I had seen its name mentioned earlier in the above comment, I looked up what this movie was about. Turns out it is based on some book trilogy. Further:
- it's written by some middle-aged British woman
- apparently it started out as a fan-fiction for the "Twilight" series of crappy teen 'sparkly vampire' 'romances' that seemed to have really appealed to middle-aged western females (and not just teeny western females)
- the initially unclear summary came across like a typical trashy romance novel
- further reviews and comments reveal it's actually S&M* literature
[* When I was a teen, the females in my class used to (deliberately) equate S&M with "SM" which in NL stands for Seksuele Misbruik = Sexual Abuse.
I'm not very familiar with modern Indians and not sure what they know or don't. E.g. I recall one IF member for instance didn't know what basic words like "hitched" meant - getting hitched means getting married, btw. So for any who may not know, then, S&M stands for sado-masochism. And if you don't know what that means, well, Lucky You: trust me, you don't want to know, and you want to stop reading this thread.]
I read a couple of scathing reviews right at the top of amazon's review page.
These two reviews were fun to read, but they curiously pointed out what (in their opinion) was better "erotica" literature, and referred to Anne "Interview with a Vampire" Rice's "Beauty trilogy". Curious as to what constituted a better class of literature for them, I looked up this "Beauty trilogy" in amazon. Also S&M literature, going by the reviews.
Amazon provided a Look Inside the book. The entire introduction by the author was available. As well as the first 1.5 chapters or so.
- author Anne Rice, wrote the trilogy under a pseudonym to keep it from family (esp. dad) and friends, and later asked her dad not to read it. So clearly she doesn't feel entirely comfortable about it
- she felt it expressed her sexuality/her need for stories of this kind, and that the appeal to wider audiences was apparent from how well the books sold, despite the following:
[color="#0000FF"]- intriguingly she stated that her trilogy was BANNED, and not available in libraries generally[/color], which is interesting to note in the context of Doniger's torture porn
- as an aside, the story uses Sleeping Beauty as a launchpad for its background: Rice declared in great ignorance that since Sleeping Beauty was woken with a kiss, that Rice started considering - what she no doubt thought was greatly 'innovative' of her - that Sleeping Beauty was actually awakened by the Prince copulating with her.
Now, for someone like Rice - who pretends to be so literate - Rice is obviously not well-read: even in early NL high school (when we were 13), the "real meanings" of fairy tales was part of our "philosophy" curriculum. Sleeping Beauty - the teachers repeatedly hammered into our pained brains - should be read as being woken by the prince's "magic wand", which the teachers then felt compelled to expand on and say it was a reference to his reproductive organ.
[My class - as that of my sister's before me - became uncomfortable and reeled: "can ya please stop raping us, teachers" complained several of my classmates. I understand them better now.]
I think that because it was a catholic school the teachers perhaps were deliberately (or forced by their own more restrictive upbringings?) trying to debilitate the students and any budding sexuality by talking only of perverseness.
Similarly, we were told the 'real' version of Red Riding Hood: she was warned off by her mum from talking to strange aka dangerous men ("wolves") and since Little Red Riding Hood didn't listen, she was raped by one who lured her from the path and ambushed her (aka the "wolf", i.e. the negative male stereotype in male-female interaction) whereas the hunter was to represent the positive male stereotype.
Other fairy tales got the same treatment - all were turned into stories about awkward male-female dynamics and warning women of men. There's a lot of literature "analysing" and "explaining" fairy tales from Freudian perspectives in mainland Europe. I have repeatedly noticed that whenever American or even British reviewers speak of the "darkness" of European fairy tales, they don't mean to allude to this at all: they exclusively refer to the more explicit cruelty or dark/dreary endings (such as how the evil queen in Snow White was punished in the end, and the actual treatment the evil queen meted out to Snow White throughout: the Disney version IIRC only covered the apple and not the poisonous comb and suffocating belt etc). In reality, this just underscores that Americans and Brits don't have a clue about the modern mainland-European sordid psycho-analytical readings of their fairy tales.
[BTW: Based on various significant indicators (but which are not the point of this post), I don't think these are the "original" readings of said fairy tales - at least, not in the case of all European fairy tales. But once they teach/force you to start seeing/reading them that way, it becomes hard for some people to not continue doing so, and hard to unlearn it. Sort of like how Doniger's effects - and that of other 'less offensive' aliens - influences native parrots and other subvertibles on how to "read/view" Hindu religion/narratives.]
Another of the interesting statements in Anne Rice's intro was that she wanted to write erotica literature that appealed to her, and that existing erotica literature by men (she's a feminist) had S&M too excessively violent and harmful. Disturbing, these "degrees" of "harmful" (and that she draws a line that must be acceptable since she has approved it, but which others feel they *can* cross). Especially disturbing, when she kept on going about how her own work celebrated humiliation and a "not-so-painful" form of torture (let's call it torture-porn lite, then, shall we?) as a pleasant "civilised" form of "enlightened sexual pleasure".
And let's not notice that Rice had her Sleeping Beauty - a 15 year old girl - repeatedly raped (euphemised with that historical word, "ravished") by the prince, before being physically hurt - which he seemed to get some sordid pleasure out of, and the victim too at the level of a typical abusee - and subjected to constant humiliation and was made a "sexual slave" of all the courtiers in the prince's kingdom where she and others like her were repeatedly and publicly gangraped, as per the intro and reviews. (Although the reviewers did not use the words rape or gang-rape.) Worse still, we're to believe that sleeping beauty and the other slaves derived a secret pleasure from this sexual torture, because the author and the adulating fans tell us so. This may well be - since these are just characters in a book after all - but that blurs the dangerous line for rape victims does it not? I mean, in reality rape can as a side-effect result in sexual release "pleasure" in some male and female victims - a very difficult topic - but nevertheless does not mean acquiescence to the rape. And I notice that 15 year old victims of child abuse who grow up into similar abusers (naturally) don't get as much "understanding" from "enlightened" reviewers as the very similar characters in Rice's work.
The stark hypocrisy becomes more apparent when similar crimes - sexual violence against women - is (understandably) condemned in practice: like the Comfort Women of WWII Japan.
I want to look into the mentality of such fiction authors as Anne Rice (and the many allegedly "non-fiction" authors like Donigers too, since there is obviously a connection to be made). I want to expose their hypocrisy.
You notice all these middle-aged women (and men) pen these rape fantasies/torture porn (gang-rape, S&M, bondage, humiliation, torture) that goes under the name of "Erotica" in the west.
Note that in contrast, what's called "Romance" novels already contain graphic scenes of sex - often a milder form of rape fantasy by the worrisome authors, but usually a rape fantasy nevertheless - and these have contained graphic stuff since at least the 70s. (I know this because my friend used to borrow a lot of old trashy "romance" novels from her library and I read some of the back covers and inner flaps which contained direct extracts.)
The difference between "Erotica" and "Romance" novels is generally - perhaps until the 50 Shades of Grey type trash came along? - that Romance novels don't include S&M.
Can't help but note that sexual violence against women when penned by female "feminist" authors suddenly makes it all OK. And that "No" suddenly does mean "Yes" when women "romance" authors - and worse still when fe/male authors of torture porn I mean "Erotica" - write their rape fantasies. And Anne Rice's is apparently a gangrape fantasy (bisexual, of course <- seems to be used by the author to 'alleviate' the rape-crime-nature of such things).
Distressing to see a female author - declares feminism in the intro - debase her female character. I suppose the 'gender equality' comes from the fact that the author's male characters are promised to be similarly debased, as per the reviews.
To harp on the middle-aged fe/male authors of torture porn: one notices that their "protagonists" (victims?) are frequently *young*, very young. 15 to 18 years old in this example.
The middle-aged/elderly authors project their own late and weird sexual desires onto a much younger population, one I know from my own high school case to never have harboured such views on S&M/bondage/humiliation/torture/sexual violence etc. (It's why my teen classmates had kept calling S&M as Seksuele Misbruik/Sexual Abuse instead.)
Female feminists are always an interesting case, and older ones more so. I have known/know lots of feminists and have read some articles by them too. On IF I once mentioned a famous 90s Danish movie that featured a female feminist in IIRC a communist conclave who decided to make her life align with the hardcore feminist ideology she spouted: she intellectually decided she would be a lesbian since this was the only rational choice (though presumably not her natural tendency otherwise). This was an exaggerated look at the degree of alienation, fear and loathing feminists in general have for men (I won't bother differentiating between Indian/Asian feminists and alien feminists, it's all a christianism to me). But there is something that was always obvious to me but which seems to have been missed by many - and which feminists don't admit in words, but do in actions: most feminists tend to have a love-hate relationship with men (same as misogynistic men do concerning women, BTW). They badly want men - more desperately than healthy females, I notice - but at a rational level they don't want men/they hate men.
So there is this constant and longterm battle that fembots - especially feminists as old as Doniger (don't know that Doniger is a feminist) - have had with their desires, with men, and reconciling their feminism with their sexuality/desires. Often - and this is obvious not just in Anne Rice - this is projected into rape fantasies, the only way these women get to be with men while it still does not sacrifice their unwillingness. They're quite disturbed.
Of course middle-aged married western women who aren't feminists also write rape fantasies - and the author of 50 Shades of Grey seems to be of this kind - and often involving protagonists half their age (a recurring motif among middle-aged people) who have feelings and desires attributed to them that only older, more sexually-bored/sexually-tolerant* people have (*'tolerance' used in the alcoholism/addiction sense). But the non-feminist kind project the unequality of their characters' relationships - i.e. the braindead 'unwilling-willing' female 'heroine' getting overpowered by the brutish aggressive alpha male 'hero' - as some ideal, as the status-quo of masculinity and feminity. This is the opposite from how feminists on one hand object to this alleged status-quo of male-female dynamic (which is entirely theoretical btw, real-life wo/men don't interact like that) and yet privately want this. (Not all feminists perhaps, but many.) They're simply unable to reconcile their rational side and their biological side, making many into simply walking contrarians.
(Misogynistic men are the same, btw. I don't mean to pick on exclusively a familiar strain of feminists.)
Ugh, what a topic.
IIRC Rice remarked in her intro how it's often men in positions of power who gravitate toward S&M and that this too applies to women, since nowadays many women are in high "career" positions like "CEOs" (and successful authors, one may add to that list) and also gravitate toward the same. But I note these are all old men and women, who've focused way too much of their years/spent away their youth in becoming successful and making moolah. It is in their middle-aged Euro sensibilities that you see them churning out increasingly extreme sexual fantasies featuring youngsters through whom they vicariously live out their increasingly-weird desires.
BTW, there's two reasons I avoid and seriously dislike the word "erotic[a]" for Hindoo (sacred) romantic literature (often concerning the Gods) despite such texts frequently featuring else culminating - as is natural - in scenes of poignant and wondrous intimacy:
- the genre of erotica in the western sense certainly does include S&M. [And it has long followed the "decadence" trend that Wilde et al outlined.]
- not to mention that "Erotiek" in NL was reserved for the Porn genre in video stores: hardcore porn movies - and not just softporn, note - were marked "Erotiek". (Movies that simply feature explicit sex scenes - and NL is famous for them - are simply marked drama: there's not a single NL non-children's movie I've ever watched that didn't feature sex scenes. And I'm talking about the utterly awkward/unsexy kind that Paul Verhoeven is still familiar for, as also seen in his recent Zwartboek/Black Book war drama. NL directors usually negate silly voyeurism by deliberately making it uncomfortable viewing, as this discomfort is part of the plot/part of the psychology of the characters.) And I'm sure the meaning of Erotiek for Porn movies is the same in Belgium where Jacob The Robber I mean Jakob De Rover is from: he kept threatening a "beautiful eroticism" in Hindoo sacred stuff. But European minds understand something very different under the term - so hardcore porn is always an extension of that definition, incl. for Roover. Their views are not Hindoos' views. And I would know this, because I know western minds: I grew up in alien climes, unlike most Indians who merely moved there in their late teens/in tertiary (and who - it has become repeatedly clear - really don't know the western mind at all, beyond superficial analysis). But being born and for a brief space raised in India, and being of a heathen family, I do know the traditional heathen [Hindoo] mind somewhat too.
It's strange how there's no backlash against the following now slowly institutionalised constructions in the west:
- torture porn-like literature dubbed "erotica" (don't know about 50 Shades of Grey, but the viewable chapters of Rice's Beauty trilogy involved not just rape but further *promised* 'public gangrape to come')
- the western film genre literally called Torture Porn and which is a combination of hardcore porn and horror-torture/gore movies: where innocent attractive females are set upon by sociopaths and where the sociopath has sex with his victim as well as brutally torturing her by sawing parts of her body off etc, as in a typical horror movie. (Even before Torture Porn emerged standalone on the horror scene, in American horror/gore movies the trend had been to have young attractive women scream and get hacked to pieces. Now they just toss sadistic "sex" with the mass-murderer in there, and apparently this vomit sells in the west.) It sounds to me like these stories are inspired by real life sociopaths/rapists. Yet they get glorified in movies that - usually - young male western audiences watch.
Meanwhile christoislamic rape crimes in India - projected as "all-Indian" and hence as "equally Hindu" therefore "Hindu" - are the sole focus of international "women's rights" activists (all while these so-called activists continue to hide the heathen identity of the victims and the christoislamaniac identity of the perpetrators in attempting to pass the crimes off as "all-Indian" or even "Hindu"). It's *disturbing*. And in the interrim, global complacency towards the sorts of western "cultural" trends that fuel rape and sociopathic crimes of sexual violence against women or children or men are utterly ignored.
Further, the whole crucial dialogue of why "No means No and Not Yes" is utterly undermined - and with it rape victims are too - by even the old "mills-and-boons" type romances that featured rape fantasies, not to mention the more sadistic kind in Rice and similar writers' works dubbed "erotica". But No, Rape was *never* sexy. It's these kinds of books and movies that not just blur the lines but keep sending out the conflicting message.
(BTW, I hope that that "Chitra Raman" - the one who mentioned "50 Shades of grey" in her comment at indiafacts.co.in - didn't actually like/wouldn't recommend books like that. Actually I don't want to know the answer to that: modern Indians are creeping me out, in how they are moulding their minds after the west: teaching themselves to "like" what the west likes.)
The west has this strange smug attitude towards heathen sexuality, despite this being neither prudish nor so extreme as the western kind of middle-aged "successful" authors/feminists/etc. Not only do Hindus get clubbed over the head by the likes of alleged "sympathisers" like Balagangaadhara's unwanted alien student De Roover - who wanted Hindus to realise the "beautiful erotiek" that he saw in Hindoo religion (but what could *he* see? Hindoo religion of course has some of the most romantic stuff I've ever come across, but it's utterly delightful, and appeals on so many levels: it's intensely romantic and attractive, and I would have no trouble for kids to read this. And IMO the very real romance between the Divine Couples - as seen even in brief hints in sacred works like the MPS - is the source for traditional Hindoos' deep sense of romance to this day. I think Hindoos get it from their Gods). But other heathens and non-western populations also regularly get beaten over the head by aliens: e.g. Elst had a piece on how a former Belgian beauty queen became a sexpert or something and was "shocked" to find that Chinese married couples weren't as into public displays of affection (="PDA") as the Belgian beauty queen thought was necessary in underpinning a good sex affair. Further, the Chinese appeared too reticent - in Belgian beauty queen's learned opinion - in declaring that sex was Da Best Thing Ever invented (actually, internal fertilisation that IIRC was to have started with our reptile ancestors was indeed an evolutionary breakthrough, but that's not what the Belgian was alluding to) and that Chinese were not so centred on sex as the Belgian felt humans ought to be. IIRC the Belgian beauty queen decided that the Chinese needed to be taught to "appreciate sex" (or was it that she thought that Chinese women needed sexual liberation - can't remember). She concluded this was all undeniable evidence for how Chinese men didn't love their wives. Obviously. [Because of The Usual Rules: only aliens/oryans are capable of love. And civilisation. And humanity. And anything worthwhile.]
More recently, the west took great delight in repeatedly bringing up in the news how Chinese people had found what they - and the Chinese journalist interviewing them included - thought was a strange mushroom or something, but which the west instantly recognised as being "obviously" a "sex toy". The entire west was laughing at the expense of the "sexually" "innocent/infantile/backward" Chinese. What nonsense. Maybe the real answer is that Chinese already have a happy romantic life and don't need "sex toys" or viagra or whatever to compensate, and consequently didn't recognise whatever device it was.
I wish heathen women from India, China and everywhere would set up sociology fields to psychoanalyse the likes of Doniger etc and western "erotica" and draw conclusions about the state of the western psyche based on that. And also the effect western "erotica" may be having on perpetuating or at least excusing the ongoing sexual violence against women. Note that midddle-aged western people esp. including middle-aged western women are not just projecting their own weird middle-aged sexual needs/desires onto heathen religions as Donigers do - or finding heathens like say the Chinese lacking in "PDA" (oh what a crime
arcasm - but they are also condoning sexual violence via constructed theoretical/fantasy spaces wherein authors set their rape fantasies. (And they *are* rape fantasies.) And it is heathen *women* who need to expose this, because heathen men will - as always - get attacked for critiquing the alien moronisms concerning sex.I can't believe that S&M is now being romanticised by people writing for the mainstream, assuming the amazon rank that Chitra Raman mentioned for "50 Shades of Grey" gives any indication about mainstream appeal. Perhaps worse than that is that rape fantasies are romanticised and even eroticised/declared to be sexy. Ugh. Humans.
You can't both denounce rape/sexual violence against women and secretly peruse romanticised rape fiction. Because that just makes you a hypocrite. The west betrays a deeply sexually-repressed mind, IMO. And also, the older these minds get, the more perversions they seem to come out with.
I'm not recommending these things for reading, but: as supporting data for various claims, can look up the author's introduction/preface to Anne Rice's "Beauty Trilogy" visible on Amazon. (The first 1.5 chapters that are also visible make more sickening reading.) There's also the first couple of reviews for the '50 shades of grey' books at amazon, which lampoon the work admirably, which I do recommend that people read.
I know that I may well regret writing this post. But it had to be said. Someone had to say it. (And there's actually more unpleasantness to be pointed out.)
The only consolation is that no one is likely to read this (not counting web search engine crawlers).
Disclaimers: I'm not actually a "prude" and neither are other heathens - though no doubt that accusation would make aliens feel better.
There are some deeply troubling questions about the human psyche - especially about the modern western psyche (although Japan also showcases bondage and sexual violence against women in fictional settings, such as in 'hentai' productions, something that the west criticises in the Japanese but not in their own torture porn) - questions that need to be asked and which I just can't bring myself to ask in an Indian forum (perhaps because I'd like the innocent to retain what innocence they have; I'd certainly have preferred to, because the muck doesn't wash off, you know).
There are questions not just of (modern) human sexuality, but questions on the psyche of modern male and female sexuality, on strange/worrisome trends of what's considered erotic/sexy (increased tolerance?), questions on when sexual violence is sexual violence, why is condoning sexual violence in constructed theoretical scenarios - like in rape novels - okay?, how much of this flows over into real life and blurs lines, what is the proportion of wo/men who are attracted to these kinds of scenarios and perhaps why (and crucially: how can the rest of us develop a means to detect such people in order to avoid them).
And then the unspeakable questions.
In my opinion, western "erotica" - and its (evolving) notions of what constitutes 'erotiek' - show the west's hypocrisy (not just in its males but also its females, note) as concerns "erotica's" regard for humans including perhaps most noticeably women.
I get this feeling that the western male and female psyches just don't have a healthy relationship and are deeply disconnected/dis-attuned (if there is such a word) at some level. Individual western people are just fine and in normal relationships, there are many examples. I'm talking about the general culture of weirdness that these novels and films and notions are a part of, and in which they find life, and which culture they keep re-inforcing from one generation to the next, with increased intensity/further regressions.
[color="#FF0000"]WARNING: This is not a pleasant post[/color] (to say the least)
[color="#FF0000"]It contains stuff of a sexually unpleasant nature[/color]