Friday, October 4, 2013

aborted haraway analysis

            I would prefer to be a cyborg and a goddess and I couldn’t begin to conceive of choosing one over the other.

            I identify as female, which may seem bizarre, but I’m certainly not the first male that’s been stuck in that predicament, nor will I be the last; although the condition is being increasingly detected in young children, sparing them from dealing with it as they grow older, we are still a quantum leap away (in terms of taboos) from eradicating these kinds of issues from our gene pool. This is possible; Tayman-Sachs is nearly gone. The justification would be humane and not supremacist. I would have nothing but eternal gratitude for the doctor that flipped a gene or two for me before he fertilized one of my mother’s eggs with genetically engineered sperm, which is the model of conception that men are going to have to learn to deal with in the very short amount of time that they have left. If you want a legitimate analysis of the situation from a highly articulate and neurotically rigorous mind, in case you’ve ever been curious, as a group we tend to simultaneously be well-read, independent minded, male hating lipstick lesbians and emotionally stalled teenage girls, the latter for obvious reasons of endocrinology. This is really the driving force behind the desire to manipulate what most of us would argue are entirely meaningless physical appearances; the mind can only develop separate from the body for so long before it can no longer develop, in certain ways, at all. I’m not a virgin, but I’m at the emotional level of one, stuck here until death ends the monotony as even if my glands finally miraculously figure out that they’ve actually got it all backwards this does not solve the psycho-sexual difficulties around the absence of virginity being an impossible to attain goal.

            Nonetheless, I don’t feel out of place discussing feminist philosophy, despite the maniacal objections of the tyrannical vagina-only fascists who would callously denigrate all those who suffer from genetic mutations and hormonal imbalances, as though they are inhuman monsters that are incapable of thought or emotion. Perhaps I should be brushed off as the naïve young woman that I hormonally am, lacking in post-menopausal wisdom, but to deny me of my female identity is so amazingly ironically exclusionist and cruel that I can harbour nothing but the most deep seated resentment possible towards those that would cast me aside as sub-female, sub-vaginal and sub-human. I will neither heed nor recognize the objections, criticisms and arguments that stem from that lobby. To them, I say, simply: Go mutilate another carrot.

            The goddess is far from dead; she is the fundamental anchor that our increasingly matriarchal society is rooted upon. The goddess sells us everything from tampons to condoms, from lingerie to sports cars, from folk tunes to dark techno, from art films to pornography; she is ubiquitous and appeals equally directly to both genders.  She transcends race, colour and political affiliation by shifting, chameleon-like, and assuming uncounted characteristics as she travels amongst us between the membranes of the eleventh dimension; she is an ideal that is as old as ideals itself, quite probably our earliest abstraction and quite certainly our most basest, primitive and universal relation. She is our collective conscience, our guiding moral principle; she is peace, harmony, love, justice and compassion. Even the most dystopian future conceivable could not eliminate the Goddess as the dour and painful existence that would result from her death is so ghastly that it is beyond human imagination. A world without love, not even at the base level between a mother and a child or a monk and his plants; a world where all life is as worthless as an annoying mosquito…this is a Goddess-less reality.

            An atheist would speak like this! The Goddess is not and never has been a deity to be grovelled to, she is not a master to serve or an overlord to appease; she is our most pure abstraction of perfection and our most powerful symbol of euphoria, something to behold in glory and to celebrate the beauty of. She reminds us that as terrible as reality is, as humiliating as our roles all may be, there is still hope because she still exists, even if she exists only as an abstraction.  She is karmic release, she is the second coming of Christ, she is the appearance of the messiah; she is the end of war, the end of tyranny, the end of history…the end of humanity. Yes, the end of humanity.

            It’s become increasingly clear over the last few decades that men are becoming increasingly superfluous. It is a biological fact throughout the animal kingdom that, excluding situations where sexual dimorphism demands otherwise, the female of the species always has sole command over their choice of mates. She guides evolution at every level, weeding out the strong from the weak and actually deducing, based on everything from colour to aroma to conversation, which sperm is likely to be the most valuable in creating the most fit offspring. The female of our own species are far from immune to these base instincts and far from capable of transcending or discarding them. As such, once the option is conceivable, the industrial use of semen will revolutionize our society; it will be placed upon the shelf beside the low-fat frozen yoghourt and sold to us by Goddesses. It is best to acknowledge the best-before date, of course. At first, there will be various flavours: blonde female, Somali model, linebacker male, etc but in time the females will be selected as once sperm is easily obtainable for a few dollars there will no longer be any need or desire to create men.
           
            So, we will have Godesses who will demand Goddesses; our political and business institutions will become sterilized playboy mansions.

            The most visible implementation of our current cyborg reality is in the increasing normality of cosmetic surgery. For women, a career in business, politics or media today is virtually impossible without first becoming a cyborg goddess. The lofty and previously unrealistic conceptions of the perfect female form are no longer thought of as idealizations or as the luck of a selected few, it is now recognized that it is a pragmatic necessity to conform to a certain plastic and constructed image if any success whatsoever is desired.

            When Haraway speaks of a cosmetic science,

summer, 2009

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/thoughts/trolls/essayharaway.html