The MOST IMPORTANT FACT about the Psychology of Men

Abstract of  a Research Article--published by (1) Thomas Paul, Michael Forsting, and Elke R. Gizewski, of the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology and Neurobiology, University Hospital Essen Germany; (2) Boris Schiffer and Thomas Zwarg, of the Department of Medical Psychology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany; (3) Tillman H.C. Krüger and Manfred Schedlowski, of the Institute of Psychology and Behavioral Immunobiology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH, Zurich, Switzweland; and (4) Sherif Karama, of the Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, Canada--entitled:

Brain Response to Visual Sexual Stimuli in Heterosexual and Homosexual Males

"Although heterosexual and homosexual individuals clearly show differences in subjective response to heterosexual and homosexual stimuli, the neurobiological processes underlying sexual orientation are largely unknown.  We addressed the question whether the expected differences in subjective response to visual heterosexual and homosexual stimuli may be reflected in differences in brain activation pattern.  Twenty-four healthy male volunteers, 12 heterosexuals and 12 homosexuals, were included in the study.  BOLD signal was measured while subjects were viewing erotic videos of heterosexual and homosexual content.  SPMO2 was used for data analysis. Individual sexual arousal was assessed by subjective rating.  As compared to viewing sexually neutral videos, viewing erotic videos led to brain activation pattern characteristic for sexual arousal in both groups only when subjects were viewing videos of their respective sexual orientation. Particularly, activation in the hypothalamus, a key brain area in sexual function, was correlated with sexual arousal.  Conversely, when viewing videos opposite to their sexual orientation both groups showed absent hypothalamic activation. Moreover, the activation pattern found in both groups suggests that stimuli of opposite sexual orientation triggered intense autonomic response and may be perceived, at least to some extent, as aversive."

Being scientists with their professional reputations to think of, our researchers are not about to tell us that stimuli of opposite sexual orientation triggered intense autonomic response--which they clearly did--but only that "the activation pattern found in both groups suggests" that they did. Neither are they at all eager to explain what, exactly, an "intense autonomic response" is, or, quite, what is meant by "aversive." So I googled the phrase "intense autonomic response" and the word "aversive" and here are a few of the working definitions of these words that I found online:

intense autonomic response

       "Marked tachycardia [rapid heart rate], tachypnea [rapid breathing], diaphoresis [heavy sweating], mydriasis [excessive dilation of the pupil of the eye], incomprehensible vocalisations...."

aversive

            "avoiding noxious or punishing stimuli."

          "of or pertaining to aversion; i.e., a strong feeling of dislike, opposition, repugnance, or antipathy."

In other words:  Ick!   Not just "I am not turned on by that," but "For Christ's sakes get that shit away from me!"  This, you see, is how men are.  Amant et odiunt.  If you are a man and you love cock, you really, really hate cunt.  And, of course, vice versa. There is no middle ground with men. Here we confront the essential core of masculine identity, of men's "pudeur d'homme...toujours plus délicate et plus sincère que [celle des femmes]," which women, and effeminate men, having neither modesty nor a sense of identity, both fear and scoff at.  

Nietzschean hyperbole?  Consider the following which I quote from Sheila Jeffreys' Beauty and Misogyny--Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (page 104):  [Having gratuitously and without substantiation pathologized "the troubled and uncomfortable relationship of gay men to femininity and to women themselves" as signifying "the subordinate position into which (gay men) are cast in relation to heterosexual men," Madam Jeffreys goes on to say,]

"One result can be a clear misogyny as expressed in what has been called the 'ick factor.'  This term is employed in gay male writings to describe the extreme revulsion experienced by some gay men at the thought or sight of women's naked bodies.

"The US queer theorist and activist Eric Rofes, for instance, explains that though he is very Lesbian and feminist identified he experiences the 'ick factor' which consists of 'a visceral response ranging from dislike to disgust when confronted with Lesbian sex and bodies' and is greatly troubled by it. He estimates that one-third of gay men suffer [!] from the 'ick factor' and offers in evidence what he has witnessed over 25 years in the gay male culture.  He has heard 'many men express their revulsion at Lesbian sex and women's bodies' and countless "tuna" jokes' which arise from the habit among some gay men of calling women 'fish' after what they consider to be the repulsive smell of their genitals.  He has seen 'men's faces turn sour when Lesbian sex appears in movies, and watched gay men huddle together in small groups voicing disgust at topless women in political demonstrations.'  Rofes quotes one man as saying he could not become physically close to Lesbians 'because of the odors he believed their bodies emitted.'"  It is disingenuous of Ms. Jeffreys [to say the least] to suggest that the man quoted said that he believed that Lesbians' bodies emitted noxious odors, and that he could never therefore get physically close to them.  Obviously, what he said was that Lesbians' bodies stink. It's Ms. Jeffreys who believes that he believes that they stink; thus discounting the very possibility that Lesbians might stink, or that men could smell them if they did. 

Nonetheless, palpable and rather pitiful liars as Sheila Jeffreys and the late Eric Rofes [he died suddenly of a heart attack, a few years ago at the untimely age of 53] are, yet through their respective ideological distortions [Feminism and Queer Theory--which have aspects, depending on which way you turn them, both of dark Pauline glass and funhouse mirrors] grins out devilishly, pitilessly, the sardonic male ick!  And a beautiful thing it is.

           

It's not about you

In this image of the Brazilian Speazze triplets, in the flesh, in the persons, in the joyful, virile, mutual/self-sufficiency of those three beautiful, identical young men, is everything that superfluous and irrelevant female (and effeminate) nature pines for, hates, fears, and would destroy if it could--what "she" can never possess, understand, belong to, influence, be desired by, touch, interest, or have the least importance for:  the very triple essence of exclusive male homosexuality.

La Queue du Loup--Discerning Alien Intervention

Where you detect it first, of course, is in obvious things like the exquisitely exact disabling of the Hubble Telescope, and the grindingly stage-managed, NSA "investigation" (the Allen Report) which followed--very like, in its palpable, plain-as-day obfuscation and prevarication, the Warren Commission and the 9/11 Commission reports.  When one is habitually truthful, unused to and normally unsuspicious of determined mendacity, it first creeps upon the senses with a kind of carrion stench, a sort of "whoa" that both repels and to a degree stupefies.  Then is when a practised liar gets busy, quickly and alertly pouring forth a ready stream of half-truths and dubious plausibilities to forestall reflection or objection. The Allen Report is a classic example of the technique. 

Then you think: "What are all these people being so painstakingly untruthful about?" With the Hubble Telescope it's pretty clear that its light-gathering capacity at relatively close-range--say, 4.37 light years--was the object of its disabling.  Then "Why?"  In itself, direct evidence of terrestrial-type planets in orbit around Alpha Centauri A and B could hardly be all that threatening, even to power-mad, violently psychotic Haters of Light and Lovers of Darkness like the "Security Agencies" of the United States, or to the putative inhabitants of those planets.  The history of the Holy Office of the Inquisition is prima facie evidence, of course, that psychotic governances will expend great amounts of energy and resources to ensure that nothing outside their definition of Terra Cognita is known, or if it is known, talked about.  But still, what does the FBI/CIA/NSA/DEA/BATF/Secret Service care?

Something bigger, something nearer at hand, is the likely source of all this amazing effort to conceal, to deny otherness.  Could it be: Advances in virology, which would make the AIDS epidemic obsolete? Advances in theoretical physics, which would make a "warp drive" feasible? Advances in "sub-etheric" communication that would impart knowledge of the foregoing, and much else besides, to ordinary citizens without the intermediacy of sanctioned, state-controlled institutions? And how could any or all of this be inferred from images of the Hubble Telescope operating at full light-gathering capacity?  

Favorite Composers in a Galactic Perspective

I think I'm most partial to the ones nobody but me knows about: Giambattista Viotti, Antoine Dauvergne, William Boyce, Pietro Locatelli, Saari (compositore napolitano nel Settecento), fake Pergolesi. Of course it would be folly even to try to get along without Rameau, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, or either of the Scarlattis.   But anyway, thinking in terms of Congenial Closeness, I'd say probably the closest to me are Boyce and Dauvergne, with some preference for the latter ('s Concerts à 4 en Symphonie).  That is to say:  

     When I'm recruited and re-constituted by Space Aliens, or re-incarnated--whichever comes first--and, as a candidate for a degree in Ancient Terrestrial Music, I'm aboard the Galactic Starship-Cruiseliner Arion, en route to the Imperial College of Arts and Music in the Sagittarian Sector, with a Subjective Travel Time ahead of me of 60 Earth-Day's, and I'm preparing my Entrance Thesis-Composition: Then, with the time that is left me from the study of Xenobiology and long walks on the Observation Deck, I'll knuckle down and write a six-movement, twelve-part, Boycean Concerto Grosso, redolent of my own personal charm (naturally), but with sweet-sweet Dauvergnean melody and suave, conservative counterpoint. The effect, I imagine, will be somewhat more Purcellian than Mozartean. Mozart--the re-creation of whose quintets, symphonies and concertos that were lost to us by his untimely demise I envisage to be the work of many future lifetimes--I will reserve for later voyages and post-graduate theses.

Postmodern Poo

One of those arm's-length reads: Frank Browning's A Queer Geography. A pervading nastiness, a stinky, indefinable something, the olfactory presence of which lingers and assails--then ¡ploop! on page 159, a whole turdlet of a quote from Michel Foucault:


"We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it's a possibility for creative life."


And what follows--what flows--after, is the rankest and ickiest stream of narrative discourse that I have ever encountered: beginning with a long "appreciation" of Foucault and continuing with a short biography of a "successful" black male prostitute who died, rich, of AIDS; containing the author's reverent, admiring apologia for those for whom money is an aphrodisiac. What strikes one immediately about postmodernists, besides the stink of them, is how utterly it does not concern them that Foucault was a pretentious, ill-educated and dull poseur with no historical, or any other real insight, and no understanding of the things he wrote at such monstrous length about; while at the same time he was so much the Enemy of Mankind that, when he began to suspect he'd contracted the HIV virus, he spent as much time as he could in gay bathhouses for the purpose of spreading his infection: Browning can, therefore, say, "Whatever his faults as an 'amateur' and idiosyncratic historian, however much his inquiries were a cover for an exploration of his own life," and go on without a blush to assever, "Foucault synthesized what is for me the crucial conundrum of queer life: How do I make of my homosexuality a bridge of engagement with other people, other experiences, other imaginations, other ways of living." ¡phhrrtt!


But as for that carefully crafted [and prolix--It sounds like hard work, being careful not to let your meaning become too disgustingly obvious--I've excised a lot of it] Whore's Credo: [Dismissing "the presumption that romance and attraction are only authentic if they are unadulterated by power, ambition, and need," as being the "...fables...of secure men of the middle class,]...Women...have always understood the pragmatic parameters [ho, ho, ho--my italics] of love. Generally precluded from holding positions of independence and security, women have known that love and romance are not neatly separated from primal longings for a secure place in the world. From the elegiac essays of Virginia Woolf to the Pop-Tart potboilers of Danielle Steele, women have told us that passion is never pure...blah, blah, blah...pheromones must be measured by a mate's ability to help provide a secure place in the world...." And so, naturally, being in every significant way, at least from a Neo-Marxist Feminist perspective, just the same as a woman, a black male homosexual whore puts it this way:


"I've had lots of lovers," Brandy [Sic! He 'borrowed' the name from a local call-girl] went on, "and the moment I understand that their vision and their knowledge about themselves do not allow them to provide me the safety and security I need, living in a racist society, I drop those boys. I do not hang around."


Need I say more? Actually, I suppose it's not all that clear that what our 'Brandy' means is: As soon as it begins to dawn on him (What must it take?) that the white boys he's been tricking with are not about to pay him money, or let him crash for free, he's on to fresh woods and pastures new.

La Pauvre Brigitte!

Jeez. She said no more than what most French people--and most Francophiles--have been thinking for quite a while now: Muslims have been the scourge of Europe since the Eighth Century:

"che furo al tempo che passaro i Mori

"d'Africa il mare, e in Francia nocquer tanto, &c."

There's an anti-Islamophobia website which acknowledges as much, saying that the many struggles between the Habsburg/Holy Roman and the Ottoman Empires since then--clear up to the defeat of Suleiman II at Szalankemen in 1691, and at Zenta in 1697--tend to get conflated by modern Europeans in Holland, Germany and France primarily, who wish the savage, riotous analphabetics would just go home.

My perspective is somewhat more nuanced. I lived in France for six months in the early 1960's: What time the Pieds Noirs were flooding in from Algeria--or had flooded--and were greatly and impotently resented by les Français de souche. I didn't know then (Did anyone?) what horrors la Douce France had perpetrated against the Algerian people in its ridiculous, ferocious attempt to retain the French Colonial Empire; but I sensed, quite correctly, that the Pieds Noirs had every right to be there, to claim French citizenship, and to be as "plus français que les Français" as they wanted to be. And I quite liked them. Their studliness and their ebullience made going to the cheap, French-dubbed Italian movies that they favored, and eating in the miserably cheap restaurants where they were the principal clientele, a joyous experience.

So I say, "Let Beurs be Beurs!" I think Mme. Bardot is wrong to say that they are unassimilable. Have a little faith in la Culture Française. Already, for all their defiant car burning and scarf wearing, they are changing: They speak a rude argotic French as their first language now. They have a, perfectly correct, sense of their own personal, physical beauty--disdained they may be, but they are admired. And, thanks to the intransigeant humanism of French doctors, they have foreskins, every man jack of them. Say what you will about the accidence, irrelevance, and inconsequence of circumcision--being mutilated binds you to your culture, and not being mutilated frees you from it.

Headed for one of the North Shore Beaches

I pause, on my way out, to look at the news on the Internet:  (item) Yves-St. Laurent est mort.  D'une façon indéfinissable ceci me touche personnellement.  J'avais toujours le sens nébuleux pendant nos vies contemporaines d'avoir quelque chose de commun avec lui:  son génie peut-être, qui en face du grand jour de la haute couture qui semblait toujours l'éblouir, avait une intériorité nette et sèche, tout à fait à lui--et tout pareille au mien.

(item) With scarcely any acknowledgement at all from the world press--the headline on BBC News is brutally pejorative [Whose interests are we defending here?]:  "Bolivia Grabs Control [like a band of Pirates? or Gangsters?] of Gas Firm:  The Bolivian government has continued its nationalisation of key industries--taking full control of a key gas pipeline company.  President Evo Morales [my hero!] said Transredes had been seized after the foreign firms which owned half of it failed to agree [to] a share buy-back.  Transredes transports Bolivia's natural gas to clients [?] in Brazil and Argentina....Ashmore Energy International and Royal Dutch Shell [!], which held stakes, have yet to comment on the move...."  Indeed.  And what if they should "comment"?