As excerpted from the work of Shulamith Firestone, and the staff writers of Cosmopolitan and Forbes.
Don’t buy her the sexual nature of Cleaver’s agonies. Don’t compliment her on her outfit. Women are the only ‘love’ objects in our society, so much so that women regard themselves as erotic. Screw the cheesy love songs and candy hearts. Break a few rules and the incest taboo operates to restrain his total sexual/emotional commitment.
Blow your man’s mind. We must talk about, in addition to new forms of breeding, a cybernetic communism. Day care centers buy women off. Microwave meals do not count. Spell out your desires: your naked body in front of him, the establishment of the household as the alternative to the family for reproduction of children, combined with something less saccharine. She has not got love and commitment, but possessorship and control. You’ve failed monumentally. Probably a good idea to find out that sophisms of love are only one more symptom of its diseased state.
It is dangerous to feel sorry for one’s oppressor. She’ll see through it. A candle-lit dinner is one way to make him see red.
Love requires a mutual vulnerability that is impossible to achieve in an unequal power situation. Feel free to mark your territory all over his body. He is a raging dynamo, a veritable cyclone, because his property, his ego extension, have been threatened.
Don’t worry about the demands of sex privatization. Feel free to get inspired by the latest in tummy control, false eyelashes, and floor waxes. Remind him where all joy and excitement has been concentrated, driven into one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience. Your guy loves all the stuttering pigs who took forever to get a rather obvious message out. He could care less about your naughty stereotyping process.
Because genital sex would no longer be the central focus of the relationship, lack of orgasm would not present a serious problem. Practice this lie in the mirror beforehand. Leave a trail of rose petals to something less saccharine: you. Isolation from others makes people starved for physical affection. Cupid: you’re fired. The division of labor remains. The process is insidious. Virility and sexual performance become confused with social worth. You’re after something. Pay attention to fingernails, please.
Romanticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions. Nothing will stop him, so skip the so-called romantic lack of theory. Eroticism preserves the sex class system.
Women love confidence. When a man believes all women are alike, but wants to keep them guessing, what does he do? Note: A Tiffany necklace is only a softening of some of the harshest aspects of the system.
The stereotyping of women expands. Clothing becomes more provocative; hemlines climb, bras are shed. See-through materials become ordinary. Our undies become a total cliché.
Clearly the problem has not been attacked at the roots. The apparatus of sex privatization is so sophisticated that every time he makes his fantasies come true, you’ll look a fool. Use this opportunity to get his attention. He’ll think about you but love songs will still be written without them.
The penalties are enormous. Their social legitimacy is just more fun to play with. It’s better to stick with what you know. In an authentic recognition of her individuality, she would be loved first as an irreplaceable totality, and then the sex-based polarity of culture becomes erotomania, like wood trying to be metal.
Don’t drown yourself. The confusion of one’s sexuality with one’s individuality will always be welcome.
Tags: beauty, feminism, lori selke, relationships, valentine’s day
“Love requires a mutual vulnerability that is impossible to achieve in an unequal power situation” is the line I will use on the next person who makes the mistake of attempting to “flirt” with me.
For real, there is a lot packed into this piece though. Guess I should read the source material.
Don’t bother, she was one of those TERFy types.
Dude, it’s a little silly to dismiss a foundational feminist text out-of-hand like that. I mean, you can feel free to disagree with everything Firestone has to say but “don’t bother?”
That’s because the foundation was a terrible one. If you’re interested in know-thine-enemy, sure, but she’s notably classist/transmysogynist, among many others -ists.
For what it’s worth, I’m trans and I found the Dialectic of Sex to be pretty valuable? And I’m not sure Firestone was actually a TERF, I can’t find any references to her supporting transmisogyny. Some of her theories were later used to justify trans exclusion, but there’s nothing I remember as cissexist in the book itself; it was written in 1970 anyway, and afaik the sort of formal and intentional trans exclusion that I would call TERF started in 1978 when Mary Daly published Gyn/Ecology.
I forget if this was in the Dialectic of Sex or something else, but I remember when I was in high school I read something by her on romantic love, where she said that we tend to fall in love with what we want to be or with what’s missing in ourselves, because we hope to merge with that person and therefore absorb that missing quality or ability. I don’t know if that’s always true but I thought it was pretty interesting.
Or the next person that asks me if I’m going to see 50 Shades of Grey.
Caveat: 50 Shades is about an abusive relationship, via fantasy, so it definitely applies there, but on the other hand, consensual power exchange scenarios (like, negotiated dominance/submission roleplay) -definitely- offers mutual vulnerability. (I actually think it’s more difficult for people to come to terms with their own dominance/sadism fantasies than with submission/masochism fantasies? Like, there’s a lot of stigma/shame associated with it, even if you only want to slap people who want to be slapped. You feel?)
SQUAWKS IN DELIGHT. I am teaching excerpts of Dialectic of Sex next week and this is PERFECT.
I love this post! Brilliant, subversive, and best of all, funny. (Funny in the “ooh, that’s clever!” funny.)
As you can see from this audio transcript, by this time the mainframe at the Stepford Village section of Futureworld was totally corrupted, and all safety protocols were rendered inactive. There was no way those guests could have been saved.
I feel really dumb for not understanding this. I wasn’t sure if Shulamith Firestone was a made up name, and then when none of the sentences made sense I thought maybe it was a word-salad joke, or a collage of words from articles. But everyone else seems to think it’s funny, so I guess I missed the joke. Can anyone explain it to me?
Shulamith Firestone – a prominent Second Wave Radical Feminist. As in, that’s really her name.
I am not entirely sure you need to know more, and I am not sure how many nice things I can say about her work (I am not a huge fan of secondwave/radfem theorizing), but I guess reading her works is probably advisable if you feel like you will have a good time from reading things heavily influenced by Sigmund Fraeud and Karl “yes, that one” Marx.
(so yep, basically what rethoryke said, but replying to your comment in case you only subscribed to replies 🙂 )
Iris, yes, it’s word collage. And Shulamith is a real person [her sentences are probably the most complicated ones]. The staff writers from Cosmo were probably writing a completely different type of Valentine’s article. Like many of the art history posts on the Toast, the material is funnier if you have dealt with some of the source material in past coursework….
Shulamith Firestone – a prominent Second Wave Radical Feminist. As in, that's really her name.
I am not entirely sure you need to know more, and I am not sure how many nice things I can say about her work (I am not a huge fan of secondwave/radfem theorizing), but I guess reading her works is probably advisable if you feel like you will have a good time from reading things heavily influenced by Sigmund Fr
aeud and Karl "yes, that one" Marx.(so yep, basically what rethoryke said, but replying to your comment in case you only subscribed to replies 🙂 )
thanks for enlightening me as to Shulamith Firestone’s existence: she does however sound suspiciously like a member of Gryffindor.
I have never had a valentine’s date ever with just someone or a boyfriend. Yup. My life sucks. I thought I’d had one this year. But this was a good read. I’m keeping noted.. waheheheh