Tuesday, April 5, 2011

on the senseless ubiquity of sexual show

Its often said that human beings are the earth's units of consciousness. I find this slightly anthropocentric and would expand the definition to include plants and animals as well, particularly in light of what we're discovering of our limited definition of 'consciousness' and 'intelligence.' I've also always been fond of the maxim that to heal the environment we must first heal the environmentalist, for surely the problems which exist at the level of whole planet order can't be addressed at anything remotely akin to that level of organization. Part of the karma of existence, it would appear, is the voluntary/involuntary manner in which all of us, both in our present form, past lineage of ancestors, and future seed form offspring, have taken on the yoke of this soft animal body which mirrors in process and poesis the larger drama at work in the world.

As a woman I feel this at work in our eaten-out, commercialized breasts. We've fallen out of our alignment with the nurturing aspect and the living breathing import of our animus mundi circularity. Instead, we've participated, and lately even conspired with the fetishized eroticization of the tit, turning it from a subjective giving into an objectified, punitive consuming. We exaggerate its swollen, milk-filled readiness with bags of silicon, thinking we're mimicking a soft-porn blow-up doll ideal, when in truth we're emphasizing our alienation from and need to reconnect with core nurturance and plenty.

Perhaps even worse, women who have fallen into the madness of dopaminergic culture express an even more profound disconnect from the breast than the male eye who fetishizes it. Using the paltry refrain of feminist freedom, they bare the breast and desacralize it as a right of expression, forgetting that in so doing they depotentize and cheapen a living symbol, reducing it to a manipulation of the public for purely personal, egoic ends. The cleavage itself is not a thing to be restricted or demonized, but we have lost its power of appropriate use. The cleavage, after all, has a disarming influence, as the baring of a breast was once used in ancient warmaking to billboard capitulation to peaceful ends. Its role in seduction has been lost in tandem with its leeched mysteries.

To claim that somehow it's pedestrian sexualization is a feminist expression of rights and freedoms is to collaborate with the objectification of body parts and the subordination of individuals to group biological characteristics. We become waking tits, pieces of meat, haunches tottering and clacking down the streets in highheels that poignantly reflect our disconnect from the grounding earth. The irony's apparently lost on us that we're now favouring heels as we once favoured corsets for the way they biomechanically distort the skeleton, in this case giving the impression of gluteal development where sedentary laziness often makes for slack flatness, relying as well on the postural torque imposed on the pelvic basin during highheeled locomotion, for it serves to emphasize the lordotic arch, putting the ass and rear access openings into a presentational display empty of sentiment or integrated motivation.

While its just and righteous to take back the negative designations of slut, whore, harlot, hierodule and turn these on their heads in acts of living alchemy, we're sorely mistaken and collectively more than a bit dumb when we take the most narrow, costume-definition of these roles and trot them out as acts of rebellion. Its to take the self-image, flatten it into the two-dimensionality of magazine images and claim victory where only shackles of a different order exist. Bombarded and defiled by the commercialization of sex and self, modern woman mistakes self-esteem for the high-wire act of becoming a degraded advertising of her own empty commodity.

Burlesque, seduction and erotica have a place in the tango of life, but bereft of appropriate roleplay in the current, senseless ubiquity of sexual show, they only serve the mercantile agenda, fooling women into a false notion of emancipation. The femme fatale on the street with a skirt up her crotch and tits on show, giving her powers away in greed for male approbation, taking his degrading growls and desire for her as evidence of her worth, is the clearest picture yet of the stockholm syndrome.

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