harassment and forced sexual encounters a problem? most certainly.
a problem that can be solved through punishing and isolating certain individuals for their transgressions of another's 'right to be left alone', 'right to not be harassed or cornered'?
A problem that can be solved by setting new boundaries of conduct on those who are already seemingly desperate (and perhaps because they are entitled, aggressive and unashamed)?
certainly as all impositions on behavioural, cultural conduct at the surface prove that this kind of strategy - though at this point seemingly unavoidable - will ultimately prove disastrous. When one patches up the surface of a cracking dam - they only postpone and perhaps amplify the extent of the disaster to come. Instead one has to drain the dam,analyse its structure and failures and only then perhaps build another and dismantle it. Alternatively, we might decide that a new life without dams would avoid the problem of impending dam-break disaster in the first place.
instead of spotlighting the individual or a malignant 'culture' (of individuals) - it would be necessary to visit the deepest structural issues that sit beneath the 'problem' which is not at its base or fundamentally a problem of natural male sexual aggression and domination but is entangled with the total subsumption of all life - emotions, identity, purpose - into the carnivals of late capitalist society. A society whose mythologies and value systems cast the greatest actors (Hollywood as a paradigm is clearly at the forefront of this discussion) - whether they be in fact actors, or producers, or directors - as the heros and role models.
Regardless of which role they play - the cop, the great liberator or the pedophile - they are always acting. They are always producing an excess of gossip and chatter revered as a rich cultural abundance but instead can only be equated, in cultural terms, to something like the gases rising from Frankenstein's corpse. Here is the catch: they know that they are always acting - just as well as we know we are always acting. In a world where one is always acting, always on display, always open to the contingent and the blows of pure chance, pure danger of being in the world. A world where nothing is real and all is acting and yet boundaries persist and accumulate concentrations of power until now unfathomable in their magnitude. Where by now it has become clear that your acting games have been simply a means to enslave you to a game (as Lanthimos' 2018 film The Favourite explores). In this world, one cannot expect anyone to behave in a way that is both selfishly and unselfishly concerned with establishing any harmony with those with whom they share this planet.
One must face the groundlessness of our games - political, constitutional, legal, cultural, economic, identitarian. There we will encounter the total horror at the emptiness of the world that we have been opening up behind the flurry of our desiring destruction of history and nature. There are no contents back there behind the games. Immersing ones whole self in the horror of being subsumed by that black emptiness, and realising that there is only nothing to fear, nothing to control, nothing to want in nothingness - reveals the beauty of the cosmos and puts one in touch with an ultimate power, out of reach of games and semblances. This is the will to power over nature. But we shouldn't misunderstand, the nature to be overcome here is an animal impulse to fight or flight, to play games for refuge in the face of fear, to become violent and dangerous (or financially support violence as we all currently do) in order to protect a fake idea of the self.
Forcing a person into a sexual act from this space would mean nothing nor bring any satisfaction to anyone, it would be an act of suicide. Morality is an instrument of division from experience. Division from experience perpetuates fear and violence.
a problem that can be solved through punishing and isolating certain individuals for their transgressions of another's 'right to be left alone', 'right to not be harassed or cornered'?
A problem that can be solved by setting new boundaries of conduct on those who are already seemingly desperate (and perhaps because they are entitled, aggressive and unashamed)?
certainly as all impositions on behavioural, cultural conduct at the surface prove that this kind of strategy - though at this point seemingly unavoidable - will ultimately prove disastrous. When one patches up the surface of a cracking dam - they only postpone and perhaps amplify the extent of the disaster to come. Instead one has to drain the dam,
instead of spotlighting the individual or a malignant 'culture' (of individuals) - it would be necessary to visit the deepest structural issues that sit beneath the 'problem' which is not at its base or fundamentally a problem of natural male sexual aggression and domination but is entangled with the total subsumption of all life - emotions, identity, purpose - into the carnivals of late capitalist society. A society whose mythologies and value systems cast the greatest actors (Hollywood as a paradigm is clearly at the forefront of this discussion) - whether they be in fact actors, or producers, or directors - as the heros and role models.
Regardless of which role they play - the cop, the great liberator or the pedophile - they are always acting. They are always producing an excess of gossip and chatter revered as a rich cultural abundance but instead can only be equated, in cultural terms, to something like the gases rising from Frankenstein's corpse. Here is the catch: they know that they are always acting - just as well as we know we are always acting. In a world where one is always acting, always on display, always open to the contingent and the blows of pure chance, pure danger of being in the world. A world where nothing is real and all is acting and yet boundaries persist and accumulate concentrations of power until now unfathomable in their magnitude. Where by now it has become clear that your acting games have been simply a means to enslave you to a game (as Lanthimos' 2018 film The Favourite explores). In this world, one cannot expect anyone to behave in a way that is both selfishly and unselfishly concerned with establishing any harmony with those with whom they share this planet.
One must face the groundlessness of our games - political, constitutional, legal, cultural, economic, identitarian. There we will encounter the total horror at the emptiness of the world that we have been opening up behind the flurry of our desiring destruction of history and nature. There are no contents back there behind the games. Immersing ones whole self in the horror of being subsumed by that black emptiness, and realising that there is only nothing to fear, nothing to control, nothing to want in nothingness - reveals the beauty of the cosmos and puts one in touch with an ultimate power, out of reach of games and semblances. This is the will to power over nature. But we shouldn't misunderstand, the nature to be overcome here is an animal impulse to fight or flight, to play games for refuge in the face of fear, to become violent and dangerous (or financially support violence as we all currently do) in order to protect a fake idea of the self.
Forcing a person into a sexual act from this space would mean nothing nor bring any satisfaction to anyone, it would be an act of suicide. Morality is an instrument of division from experience. Division from experience perpetuates fear and violence.
