Girls who are ‘trying to expand their personal brands’ are usually ‘annoying’ and ‘jappy’ or possibly ‘desperate’ and ’sad.’ Feel like it is always a combo that is ‘terrible’, and then they end up with some inauthentic bro, and the enable some sort of ‘weirdo reality.’Women suspend their aspirations, or reformulate them in light of what seems possible and what might secure social approval. Hence Carles imagines women conceiving this: "Might feel ’sexie’ if they went home and ‘jerked off’ to thinking about touching me, though."
The story of the insidiousness of patriarchal oppression masquerading as a love relationship is all too depressingly familiar. What is less obvious is what drives men to so vehemently deny female subjectivity, to hoist women above them (as in the photo) so as to put them at one remove from direct experience, on a pedestal where they made be worshiped, only the gospel takes the form of "a lot of guys" groping their "'goods.’" The solution that Carles presents, derived from evolutionary psychology, is a bit of a red herring: "Feel like bros just want ‘2 cum’ on as many girls as possible. Feel like broads just want ‘to be special’ and ‘different’ in ways that might be difficult 2 fulfill." From this perspective, men are able to solve existential dilemmas by spreading seed, by embracing quantity over quality, while women are doomed to the "difficult 2 fulfill" quest for transcendental meaning.
This seems inadequate (and the pun is fully intended). To answer the question of misogyny, one must radically move beyond the looming threat of impotence and consider the overriding fear of castration that is formative and then thereby dominates male subjectivity. As Carles notes, it is "sad that ‘we’re all insignificant’," an awareness that we struggle to mask from ourselves with the labile tool of language, which permits the illusion of permanent expression, an ersatz eternal. But the entry into language comes with a recognition of our nonidentity with the world in its totality -- it announces are acceptance of lack, our surrender of the phallus as a death foretold. According to Lacan, the "clinical facts" show that "the relation of the subject to the phallus is set up regardless of the anatomical difference between the sexes," though he dwells on the analytical conundrums this creates for women. Carles makes passing reference to the inauthenticty that plagues female speech acts when he writes, "I feel like HRO would not have any readers if I blogged as ‘Carla’ or ‘Cynthia’ or ‘Jessica’ or some other female name." Phallologocentrism governs Carles even as he tries to expose its multifarious consequences.
Nevertheless, men are also afflicted with urges to evade the necessary symbolic ordering that castration commands. Carles mentions one when he entertains the notion of homosexuality: "I feel like being a ‘homosexual’ might make relationships easier. Not sure, though." But that is exactly the problem -- castration renders precise what otherwise remains always epistemologically uncertain. The fantasy of a monosexual race of humans doesn't eradicate the threat of castration -- even without another sex into which to transmogrify, castration remains structurally necessary.
And jouissance remains elusive to either gender, as Carles final question suggests: "If u were able to ’switch genders’, would u masturbate more or less than u do now?" Of course, no gender has preferential access to pleasure, despite the fact that men do have preferential access to everything else social life has to offer.
brilliant.
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