21 September 2010: "SCIENTIFIC STUDY finds that women prefer chill bros"

This post is about the dividual. Always alert and attendant to the vagaries of postfeminism and the problematic of gender generally, Carles begins by exploding the myth that the women's liberation efforts in Western societies in the late 20th century had any lasting effect on reorienting the dreams and desires inculcated by centuries of patriarchal rule. "Now women are more independent, and are seeking a chill ass life partner. Women are ‘more independent’, and that basically means that they are ‘stressed and crazy’ so they need a chill ass bro who metaphorically danks them out in their down time." The modes of patriarchal control, as Carles acutely points out here, have changed their guise but have not disappeared -- in a shift akin to that of the society of discipline to one of control and biopower that Deleuze hypothesized in his much-remarked-upon essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control."

The nature of the feminine enclosure has changed, as has her gaoler. No longer an ogre, the oppressing male figure is a "chill ass bro" who "danks them out" -- that is, makes women experience their oppression as a kind of blank pleasure, an annihilation of the stress associated with personal responsibility and true autonomy. A kind of pseudo independence for women takes hold, a shell within which women can enact a subjective freedom that is always already contained by patriarchal forces. The telling indicator is that women use their liberation to find a male "life partner" -- that is the smiling face for the oppressor that she can use to mask the true nature of her condition. Their only desire is for a man to administer their lives from the shadows. "Women just want to chill out, and have some1 plant a seed in them," Carles notes ironically. The biological roots of male domination are so often casually invoked in society as to become uncontroversial expressions of "common sense." Of course reproductive imperatives dictate social mechanisms of containtment. A theoretically neutral biological distinction thus becomes the kernal for elaborating the limitless postponements of equality in the name of species being.

Men, on the obverse face of this structure, are ideologically conditioned to serve as guards for the patriarchal order by being taught the following about female "nature": "women only value 3 things in a man: money, huge peens, and physical attractiveness." Men learn that women are essentially sentient programs, easily managed by manipulating the male-controlled and -dominated "inputs" into their consciousness, as it were.

But the entire structure of gender subservience and control is ideologically laundered under the aegis of medical science -- in this case the analysis of levels of cortisol, which is held by scientists to govern the relations between men and women within these culturally embedded structures of dominance. Carles will have none of it:

The study is based around some sort of imaginary concept called ‘cortisol’, which is some sort of ‘magic mojo’ or something like that

Though Carles postulates a radical solution to the problem of the perpetuation of patriarchy -- "Should all women ‘stop dealing with men’ and just be crazy lesbians 2gether?" -- he seems unwilling to commit to a praxis of de facto gender separation, knowing that such an arrangement can only foster an apartheid of the sexes. Instead he challenges men to question their own affective labor: "Can a bro be ‘too chill’?" Can men be fooling themselves with their own conceit of female indulgence? Carles reminds us that the controlling strategies of patriarchy also control the would-be controllers, but he leaves us to wonder who that leaves behind the curtain, pulling all of our strings, chilling all of us out.