This series of newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”. It comprises three articles that explore his views on gender dynamics and societal changes. In "Brief History of Machismo", Olavo satirically recounts historical gender roles, portraying men as having exploited women throughout history, reversing traditional narratives to highlight the absurdity of some modern feminist claims. The second article, “The Era of Masturbators”, critiques contemporary sexual liberation movements, arguing that the rise of sex toys and internet pornography has led to a disconnection from meaningful sexual relationships and a reduction of sex to mere orgasmic sensation, which he believes undermines genuine human intimacy. Finally, in "The Technique of Seductive Oppression", Olavo discusses what he sees as the dangers of modern legal and social measures aimed at protecting women, suggesting that they often lead to greater injustices, such as unfair treatment of men in family law, and contribute to the broader destruction of traditional family structures.
Brief History of Machismo
Jornal da Tarde, August 16, 2001
Women have always been exploited by men. If there is one truth that no one doubts, it is this. From the solemn auditoriums of Oxford to Faustão’s show, from the Collège de France to the Banda de Ipanema, the world reaffirms this certainty, perhaps the most unquestioned one ever to pass through the human brain, if it really passed through there and didn’t come directly from the wombs to academic theses.
Not wishing to oppose such an august unanimity, I propose here to list some facts that may reinforce, for believers of all existing and yet-to-be-invented sexes, their hatred of the adult heterosexual male, that execrable type that no one who has had the misfortune of being born male wants to be when they grow up.
Our story begins at the dawn of time, at some indeterminate point between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. In those dark ages, the exploitation of women began. Those were hard times. Living in caves, human communities were constantly beset by attacks from wild beasts. The males, taking advantage of their dominant class prerogatives, quickly ensured for themselves the most comfortable and safe places in the social order: they stayed inside the caves, the scoundrels, cooking for the babies and combing their hair, while the poor females, armed only with clubs, went out to face lions and bears.
When the gathering economy was replaced by agriculture and livestock, again the men played smart, assigning the heaviest tasks to women, such as carrying stones, taming horses, and plowing the fields, while they, the lazy ones, stayed at home painting pots and playing with weaving. Outrageous.
When the great empires of Antiquity dissolved, giving way to perpetually warring fiefdoms, these soon constituted their private armies, entirely composed of women, while the men sheltered in the castles and enjoyed the poems the warriors composed between battles in praise of their manly charms.
When someone had the extravagant idea of Christianizing the world, making it necessary to send missionaries everywhere, risking being impaled by infidels, stabbed by highway robbers, or slaughtered by bored audiences, it was again on the women that the heavy burden fell, while the males diabolically made novenas before home altars.
The same exploitation befell the unfortunate women during the Crusades, where, armed with heavy armor, they crossed deserts only to be slain by the Moors (or rather, the Moorish women, since the machismo of Muhammad’s followers was no less than ours). And the great navigations! In search of gold and diamonds to adorn the idle males, brave navigators crossed the seven seas and fought fierce indigenous people who, when they ate them, did so — poor misery! — strictly in the gastronomic sense of the word.
Finally, when the modern state instituted mandatory military conscription, it was women who formed the state armies, under penalty of the guillotine for deserters and recalcitrants, all so that men could stay at home reading La Princesse de Clèves.
For millennia, in short, women have died on battlefields, carried stones, built buildings, fought beasts, crossed deserts, seas, and forests, sacrificing everything for us, the idle males, who face no more dangerous challenge than getting our hands dirty with our babies' diapers.
In exchange for the sacrifice of their lives, our heroic defenders have demanded nothing more from us than the right to speak loudly at home, to puncture a few tablecloths with cigarette butts, and occasionally to leave a pair of socks in the middle of the room for us to pick up.
The Era of Masturbators
Read on the True Outspeak program of October 24, 2012
Reporting on the success of a recent film about the invention of the electric vibrator, UOL informs its readers, with admirable candor, that the said utensil "contributed to women’s sexual independence."1
No one in their right mind would doubt that the solitary masturbator, of either sex, with or without devices, is physically independent of the presence of a partner. This is — how shall I say? — by definition.
What stands out in the text is that it gives this banal obviousness the positive connotation of a historic step towards women’s freedom, without noticing that, by the same reasoning, rubber vaginas and inflatable dolls must have exercised an identical liberating influence over the male portion of the human species. The perfection of freedom, in this perspective, will be achieved when men and women, separated and locked in their respective rooms or bathrooms, indulge in the delights of romantic intimacy with industrial objects purchased from sex shops. I see no reason why such a paradisiacal state of affairs should not extend to homosexuals as well, so that women, having freed themselves from men, also free themselves from other women, and men from other men. Romantic encounters will be arranged on the following basis: “I don’t look for you, you don’t call me, whoever wakes up first goes back to sleep, and whoever arrives first leaves.”
The UOL editor may swear it was just a lapsus linguae, an unfortunate phrase. Perhaps, but what Freudian slip led him to produce it? It was undoubtedly the confusion, nowadays endemic, between sex and orgasmic sensation. The sexual relationship, in the fullness of the term, is only completed in the contact between the mucosa of a penis and that of a vagina within the latter. Adding another link to a genetic chain that has existed since the beginning of time, this act transforms two human beings into creative agents in the history of the biological species and brings with it biochemical — and even alchemical — implications that give it, literally, a cosmic meaning. The deep emotions of the sexual act have their primary root there, and amputated from it, they reduce to nothing more than a mental theater, sometimes more, sometimes less sophisticated. Solitary orgasm is a subjective sensation, experienced in an isolated body, which at best can imitate in fantasy the glories of the full sexual relationship, without approaching them except in the sense that a sign indicates the thing signified. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to any sexual relationship that purposefully blocks the possibility of reproduction. I would be the last to wish to make a moralistic speech here against these variations, but, in the strict reality of facts, all of them are only “sex” in a figurative, subjective, and playful sense, artificially isolated from the cosmobiological reality that underpins it, just as the taste of a food can be perfectly imitated by a simulacrum without nutritional function.
It so happens that, in our time, most young people have only had intimate contact with the opposite sex through a latex film designed precisely to reduce the sexual act to its subjective sensation, isolating it from its biochemical and cosmic substrate. It is, so to speak, abstract sex, selectively cut so that its social and playful aspects prevail over the substantive reality of the sexed condition.
In sex thus experienced, the presence or absence of a partner becomes a mere convenience of the moment or, from UOL’s perspective, an irrelevant casuality. All sexual relations have ultimately been reduced to masturbation, and the advent of gadgets that facilitate it becomes more than sufficient compensation for the lack of partners. When Karl Kraus said that “sometimes a woman even becomes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation,” he didn’t imagine that in a few decades the joke would turn into universal reality.
But what are these gadgets compared to the internet? The bulk of traffic on the web consists of erotic-pornographic displays that dispense with the solitary masturbator from even any imaginative effort. Partners are no longer separated by a latex film, nor even by a postal district difference, but by transcontinental distances only bridged by electronic signals.
It is natural that, in this context, the sense of the concrete sexual relationship disappears and the word “sex” comes to mean anything that facilitates access to orgasmic sensations. That such a process is accompanied by the infantilization of the masses is no mere coincidence.
The origin of these confusions is evidently linked to the success of feminist, gayist2, and similar claims. Many of these claims are just. How do we know they are? We know it because we have universal principles of good and justice, which can be applied to particular cases, even rare and exceptional ones. But when these principles disappear from the cultural scene, and in their place, the demands of specific groups assume the role of universal commandments, the disorientation of consciences necessarily follows and establishes, in the name of partially just pretexts, general injustice, which ends up being indistinguishable from authentic justice. That is when people begin to think — and write — like the UOL editor.
The Technique of Seductive Oppression
Diário do Comércio, December 19, 2011
Nowadays, in the USA, a family man can be expelled from home, prohibited from seeing his children, and forced to pay almost his entire salary in alimony without any proof that he did or thought of doing anything wrong. It is enough for his wife to tell the police — without a single witness — that he threatened to beat her or abuse the children. When the unfortunate man is informed that he has 24 hours to leave and see his life disintegrate like smoke, he goes to the police chief and complains that it is not fair to be condemned without the slightest right of defense. And the authority, with the most reassuring air in the universe, responds: “My friend, there is no need for a defense, as you are not being accused of anything. It is just a precautionary measure — which can, indeed, be renewed indefinitely and last for the rest of your lousy life. You will only be arrested if you violate the order, trying to meet your children outside the prescribed hours (if there are any), passing near your former home within a radius of, say, 2 kilometers, or if you act up if your dignified wife, freed from your oppressive presence, goes to bed with one, two, or 15 men. Good day.”
Fifty percent of American children live without one of their parents — almost always the father. One of the direct consequences is the exponential increase in cases of domestic pedophilia, where statistics show that the culprit is almost invariably the mother’s boyfriend. In universities, the disciples of Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno rub their hands, very excited, seeing the Marxist project of family destruction, which their masters saw as an indispensable condition for the triumph of socialism, being fulfilled without major difficulties and with the touching support of Protestant and Catholic good-guyism.
All this started with the most harmless airs imaginable, like a campaign to protect women from “male oppression.” Who, in their right mind, would be against such a thing? Little by little, as it acquires the force of law, the humanitarian provision expands its scope until it becomes a nightmare, an instrument of oppression a thousand times worse than the evils that served as its pretext, because now it is official and is supported by the power of the police, the courts, the educational system, and the massive propaganda that demonizes the accused to the point that no one has the courage to say a word in their favor. And the catastrophic social results? They are explained as effects of other causes, which in turn give rise to new humanitarian measures, increasingly handing over the monopoly of moral authority to cynical activist groups and extending the power of state bureaucracy in private life. Is pedophilia the problem, for example? The Catholic education is blamed (even though the number of pedophiles among priests is lower than in any other group of educators) and, with a little persuasion, even the pope is prostrated before the vociferous media. Boys raised without a father are insecure, timid, weak? Great. With some smooth talk, they are led to believe they are latent transsexuals, misfits, poor things, in the macho social environment. Are they turbulent, antisocial? Even better. Here is proof that capitalist society is inherently violent, generating brutality. And so on. Each new harmful effect of the cultural war already has a prepared, ingenious theory that blames the family, religion, culture, capitalism — everything and everyone, except the authors of the effect, the activists paid with taxpayers' money to meticulously and systematically plan the destruction of society in universities.
The technique is always the same. First, a discontented social group is discovered and the culprits are designated, producing a storm of books, films, university theses, TV programs, newspaper articles, conferences, debates, the works. Publicly pointed out, looked at with suspicion by the neighborhood, the members of the accused group begin to think it prudent to distance themselves, changing vocabulary, attitudes, and finally joining their voice to the chorus of accusers, for greater plausibility of conversion. Immediately, laws and administrative measures are conceived to tie the hands of the wicked and then punish them. Victorious in the legislative battle, the decisive stage begins: “expanding democracy,” extending the application area of the “rights” conquered until they, dialectically, become means of state oppression against which nothing more can be said without, ipso facto, incurring suspicion of nostalgic reactionaryism of the old evils, already overcome, “incompatible with the high stage of civilization we have reached.”
The circuit is so repetitive that its victims only do not perceive it clearly because, during the process, they have consented to cut their own tongues and only speak in the language of their accusers, becoming, automatically, incapable of protecting themselves. In Brazil, the CNBB, emphasizing its horror of “all discrimination” while making a weak opposition to PL-122,3 is the clearest example at the moment.
Think about this when you feel tempted to believe that the “anti-homophobic” laws have something to do with the human rights of homosexuals or anyone else. They do, in fact, have to do with the suppression of freedom of conscience, including that of homosexuals themselves who wish to remain Christians and, sooner or later, defend their simple right to think — as Oscar Wilde, Julien Green, Octavio de Faria, Lúcio Cardoso, Cornélio Penna, and so many other illustrious homosexuals thought — that what they do in bed, although it seems irresistible and supremely delicious to them, is a sin.
-
http://cinema.uol.com.br/ultnot/afp/2011/09/16/filme-sobre-a-invencao-do-vibrador-rouba-a-cena-no-festival-de-toronto.jhtm.↩
-
Editor’s Note: About Gayism, see the homonymous chapter.↩
-
Editor’s Note: The Bill No. 122, of 2006, in progress in the Federal Congress, aims to criminalize homophobia. Its very comprehensive, extensive, and imprecise program mobilizes critics who identify risks to freedom of expression in the proposal.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment