BODYH!:

I have come to regard the body more highly than I used to, recently. There was a time five years ago when some Leo girl at the local café rejected me nonverbally; don’t think that I can’t read that sort of thing. Afterwards, I asked a girl by the name of Zalea to explain it to me, though perhaps I speak too soon in saying that; she really was just proficient at taking my emotional venting as solicitation for advice.

The way she said it really bugged me: apparently, the girl was justified in rejecting me on shallow grounds, since “I did it too”.

More specifically, Zalea’s meaning was general. It wasn’t that I was in the frequent habit of rejecting people, and I never did so on superficial grounds. It was rather that I was DRAWN TO people for bodily and “shallow” reasons, and they were averted for the same reasons.

You can already see some problems, I am sure.

In the first place: Zalea had no way of knowing what I saw in women, and neither did I. A feminist will presume upon her generalizations, and the World revolves around them a posteriori. (It’s quite contagious, no doubt.)

Furthermore, in Zalea’s envious worldview it’s apparently so that if a man affirms a woman for her body he necessarily rejects other women for theirs, barring the opportunity to fall in love for more, which is of course what the most fervent obsession starts with. Zalea might not [have] be[en] conventionally pretty, but that did not stop men from hitting on her, to her chagrin, so where this envy finds it foothold I can’t say; I can only infer it.

Yet the matter runs even deeper than just feminist projections. In the first place, what qualifies as conventionally attractive in men invariably differs from what is so in women. By some standard, I meet many of my own criteria for what attracted me to that Leo girl, though it’s far more becoming of a lady than a gentleman, and far less so is it symptomatic of an alpha male. The consistency in principle is this: that I may be drawn as much to femininity itself as I am to the woman who embodies it, and because I regard femininity more highly than I regard masculinity I embody it within myself. It’s only that the woman who embodies it rejects it outside of herself, especially in men who also lack masculinity. (Yet I should note that what was most repulsive to my fellows at the time no woman had, for it was rampant and unruly facial hair.)

Even beyond this level of conventional distinction lies the phenomenological question of the mind-body relationship, not merely as a dualistic split but rather as a symbiosis. Herein feminism finds its intellectual death, only because it so often rejects “objectification”.

There is, in fact, plenty of intellectual ground for the objectification and even the fetishization of physical human bodies. Sartre, whose lifelong partner was a feminist icon, wrote extensively about sex from a philosophical perspective, and it’s none too flattering. When I am drawn to someone physically, there is less of an illusory quality to this attraction than when I pretend to share a Mind with this person. If I should find my feelings to be “reciprocal”, I have succeeded in objectifying someone who objectifies ME, yet we can only carry such a relationship out healthily if each of us refuses to objectify his or herself. This is why gymnasiums are considered healthy places to “meet” people.

Now: is this process shallow? Technically, it is actually LESS superficial than it would be to RESIST it. Feminism presumes upon such an ascesis, though feminists often only pretend towards it. The dismissal of physical attraction in favour of intellectual attraction is a form of transcendental escapism. The human mind has a unique opportunity to combine rational intellect with animalistic emotion and human culture to create new forms of erotic experience. The objectification of the body, especially heterosexually, is an entire domain of phenomenological intrigue, and an intellectual who possesses the capacity for such an arousal (and who is effectively aroused BY it) ought not to ignore it. By contrast, if I resist this exploration of my own body and the body of the woman, then I have turned my focus back inwards on the Mind, which is invariably MY mind, for I can only TRULY see things from a perspective that, no matter how much it is informed by Others, is still formally “Mine”. By surrendering physical pursuits in favour of intellectual monogamy, so to speak, I have turned my OWN MIND INTO AN OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. This appears to be the existential decision we are faced with: what shall I objectify? Others’ bodies or my mind?

Clearly, a subject is of no real use unless it has an object to study, so it’s MORE superficial to dismiss worldly objects than it is to “intellectually masturbate”. That is not to say that Ideas have no intrinsic value; veritably, they are of the ULTIMATE value, though to arrive at such an ultimate position one must not forget the World entirely. People who refuse to be objectified, with self-entitlement, are simply insecure, so they internalize the gaze of others and therefore objectify themselves, losing the game, effectively. Seeking mates based upon physical traits is intellectually profound, for it’s an exploration of physical possibilities in the World. Conversely, seeking mates based upon intellectual traits is pseudointellectual and pretentious, since it amounts only to the execution of foregone ideals, devoid of curiosity. In other words: an intellectual does not need his partner to be intellectual, since his own mind is sufficiently stimulating, though if she should prove PRETTY, then his mind has something not only to experience but to analyze.

Yet here Zalea has a point: if I am unattractive physically, then all the ideas in the World cannot save me. So long as I seek out attractive partners on those grounds, I allow myself, by my example, to be rejected. I don’t need an intellectual partner, and neither does the other, so why ought she not to prefer someone handsome?

Be that as it may, it is extremely shallow to presume that any pretty woman would only want a handsome man; Sartre himself was considered rather ugly, while a young de Beauvoir was a hot French chick by even today’s standards. (Brains were a bonus.) While it would be perhaps the pinnacle of Sartrean “bad faith” to idealize their relationship and to expect it ever to happen again for anyone, it does stand as a testament to a possibility which the Medieval alchemical mythologists called the Alchemical Wedding: a sacred marriage of intellectual detachment, embodied in the male, and worldly beauty, embodied in the female, (though, in this case, the female in question had a notoriously rich inner life as well,) a story that’s been retold by both the likes of Salinger and J.K. Rowling.

In short: pretty girls aren’t shallow for being pretty, and plenty of them CAN find something attractive in a man beyond merely conventional handsomeness. Zalea hardly does women a favour by suggesting there’s no chance.

Yet, while I have all of this to contend with her, I must confess it haunts me for this reason: that I want to believe that, if I stop lusting, love will come by more noble means. My ideal is yet a pre-Sartrean, Romantic one. The truth is that I don’t want to seek only bodies; I want to encounter another mind with fresh ideas. Yet I cannot deny that by so doing I risk myself falling prey to a woman’s intellectual whims, ideas to which she might feel no lasting attachment even as I idolize them as ethical models.

There is a dream I had, almost seven years ago, wherein an attractive Korean girl from high school called herself and her friend “models”. I realize now what she meant by that: I had been modeling myself AFTER women. The dream was making a pun. The joke was told at my expense. I had become so obsessed with finding an intellectual woman that I had begun to turn every idea that women presented me with into an idol. This idolatry they found repulsive, for they were not goddesses to worship. I had simply thought that people would pursue that power.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]