post iv: mad and maddening

So why are we (women) often so insufferable?
There is a portion of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, in which two youngish male characters are having a weighty conversation about women, and why they are the way that they are. While each of them is aiming to be entirely understanding and absolutely anything but chauvinistic, they both end up doing so and then realizing that they are doing so, find problem with doing so, and then continue to do it again, realizing that there is an unbreakable cycle. That they are a part of it. But that women are too. And that both of them, K, and E, still really just want to get laid.

"K - '...What modern feminists-slash-postfeminists will say they want is mutuality and respect of their individual autonomy. If sex is going to happen, they say, is has to be by mutual consensus and desire between two autonomous equal who are each equally responsible for their own sexuality and its expression'
E - 'That's almost word for word what I've heard them say.'
K - 'And it's total horseshit.'
E - 'They all sure have the empowerment-lingo down pat, that's for sure.'
K - 'You can easily see what horseshit it is as long as you remember to start by recognizing the impossible double bind we already discussed.'"



then later...

"K - '....today's postfeminist era is also today's postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody know knows everything about what's really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions. and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we're all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality since everything we do now is unprecedentedly conscious and informed...The point being that women today are now expected to be responsible to modernity and to history.'
E - 'Not to mention sheer biology.'
K - 'Biology's already included in the range of what I mean by history.'
E - 'So you're using history in a more Foucaultvian sense.'
K - 'I'm talking about history being a set of conscious intentional human responses to a whole range of forces of which biology and evolution are a part.
E - 'The point is it's an intolerable burden on women.'" (Wallace 228-230)

So what the fuck do any of us do? The only answer I can come up with right at this minute is to act like little boys (minus bugs and boogers) and take Jello shots. Admittedly, this book kind of made me want to shag David Foster Wallace for getting it, but then I was like...oh wait....shit.



Sugar-free Jello, of-fucking-course. Because, despite my own awareness and how liberated I should be, I'm not. I am a specimen of modernity, and if it weren't for academic perspective, this would make me very sad. Instead, I am delighted at examining myself philosophically, and am glad that I have so much tangled material to work with. So, shots. Slurp slurp slurp.