misogyny in the western canon

i’ve been going through the penguin great ideas series at the pace of one a week, wanting a better grasp of the breadth of the great conversation outside my little bubble. overall it’s been an extremely rewarding experience: the curation work has already been done by someone who seems like a very thoughtful editor, llms now exist to help me interpret extremely difficult passages and trace intellectual lineages, and a wonderful and insightful friend has generously agreed to go on this journey with me, thus ensuring that i always finish a book before our standing wednesday meeting.

i have many thoughts on what i have read! stay tuned for when i pass judgement on the validity of the entire western canon in 2027, which is when this survey will conclude, inshallah.

one thing i’ll say for now, half a dozen books in, is that i really, seriously didn’t expect the misogyny to be as bad as it has been. i thought i’d be in for some paternalistic bullshit that i’d be able to handle fine. these were civilized men i was reading, after all.

i thought that the women who loudly proclaimed their disgust at these dead white guys because of their supposed rank misogyny were being a little too precious. maybe even using that as a convenient excuse?

well, mea culpa. i’m sorry, women.

i’ve now been exposed to so many entirely brand new arguments about the inadequacies of the female sex. they’re so lurid i literally don’t think any formulation of contemporary sexism can ever hurt me ever again. (please dont test this theory.)

the most gutting part of all this is that the thinkers i’m reading are, by and large, good! i like the way they think and write (or are translated), they’re clearly making a good faith effort at following good epistemic norms, and they have interesting and provocative takes that are worth pondering. i keep finding myself thinking “oh this guy would totally be a rationalist (complimentary)”, multiple guys in a row, until the figure ground inversion came for me. (like, montaigne prescribed a set of epistemic habits that gets you 75% of the way to rationalist ones literally 500 years ago!)

and then, like clockwork, all that careful reason seems to go right out the window the moment they start talking about women.

i thought i was getting the hang of it, somewhat. im developing new and ludicrously lower standards for what is acceptable and not acceptable to say about women. im learning a posture of detached ironic curiousity,”alright, lets see what weirdass allegations about womankind this next guy’s gonna punch me in the face with.” i actively have positive affect for orwell because he studiously did not talk about us at all, that is how low the bar is.

im developing the requisite emotional callouses, is what im saying. i am somewhat resentful that i have to do so in order to engage with the canon, but it is what it is! and no one can accuse me of being unwilling to get my hands dirty for the sake of intellectual development.

then i got to schopenhauer, and despite all this bracing, he still kind of broke me? his essay on women was the first essay in this project that genuinely hurt my feelings. (here it is for posterity but i want no discussion of it where i can see it, please.)

i liked the schopenhauer essays that were before this one so much! i thought he had a wonderfully bleak sense of humour and was good at updating all the way, to conclusions that felt just taboo enough to be thrilling. and i thought he was maybe secretly a bit of a softie – the trick he plays on you at the end of On the Suffering of the World is actually quite adorable. then, unceremoniously, i had ice water dunked on me in the form of his hatred for my gender. and this just. sucks so bad?

it sucked so much that i started flailing around for… meaning? a reason? and developing almost like, a sense of betrayal at the curator of these volumes. like, okay, sometimes the book is just one long essay, and the misogyny inside can’t be helped. in those cases, there’s really nothing i can do except try to enjoy the occasional insane claim embedded in these genuinely fascinating theses to the best of my ability:

oh, it’s remarkable to you, mister sigmund freud?

but in other cases, the editors handpicked 4-6 essays from oevres that spanned dozens if not over a hundred pieces of writing. and in that case, why waste the precious space inside to include one on their extremely outdated and noxious ideas about women?

well, once i calmed down from my womanly hysterics, i realized that perhaps this was actually a useful question to ask. what were the publishers trying to convey?

occams razor: these essays demonstrate an essential part of their worldview and philosophy, and/or were influential at the time, and so they should be presented without comment or judgement.

perhaps something a little more sophisticated: “look how these otherwise brilliant thinkers systematically abandon their epistemic standards when it comes to women. patriarchy is the mind-killer!”

that seems plausible as a thing a progressive-minded classicist reprinter might have thought worthwhile to communicate, in 2005.

a too cute theory that i like anyways: perhaps the editors were trying to gesture at the limitations of even really good epistemic norms. if women were deliberately and forcefully kept intellectually stunted by their society, even the most rigorous thinker would have had very little counterevidence to really work with. the inferiority of women would have been baked right into the observable reality they were trying to analyze. and our current discourse norms are likely just as helpless against whatever blindnesses our own culture has engineered.

i would like to believe that! except it lets these guys off the hook too much. schopenhauer’s mother was an intellectual in her own right, and his philosophical idol, goethe, vastly preferred her company to his. wollstonecraft had also already published a vindication of the rights of woman more than half a century before, and hes clearly living in a culture where this is a live question. so there’s motivated reasoning or willful ignorance at play here.

in any case, i do kind of wish he would stop trying to hammer this point home, or whatever point he’s trying to make. because the diatribes are still pretty unpleasant to read, and there are 114 books left in the series (of which only eleven are written by women).

anyways, i’ll keep reading, and ill try to… somehow… contend with and minimize the amount of misogyny i pick up along the way. perhaps i’ll go on a two year survey of feminist writing afterwards as a corrective. i shall start with the scum manifesto.

Interesting ACX 2024 Book Review Entries

I have finally got around to updating codex cc with all the book reviews from 2024!

Here are some interesting books/reviews that I’ve found that did not make the shortlist.

A Thousand Ways to Please A Husband (1917) (Goodreads, Review)

No, you cannot live on kisses,
Though the honeymoon is sweet,
Harken, brides, a true word this is —
Even lovers have to eat.
This charming vintage cookbook, with its innocently suggestive title, reads like a novel as it follows the fictional lives of a pair of newlyweds. Join Bettina and Bob as they eat their way through their first year of marriage, from the bride’s first real dinner and a Sunday evening tea to baking day, a rainy night meal, and Thanksgiving festivities. Menus for all occasions are seasoned with anecdotes about family life, friendships, household hints, and budgetary concerns.
Originally published in 1917, this volume offers a delightful look at homemaking before the advent of sophisticated appliances and fast food as well as the modern reality of women’s work outside the home. Unintentionally funny and historically revealing, the whimsically illustrated narrative abounds in simple and surprisingly relevant recipes.

Choosing Elites (1985) (Goodreads, Review)

A former special assistant to Harvard’s president analyzes how top universities handle admissions, suggests criteria for evaluating the success of those policies and discusses issues such as the use and misuse of standardized tests and the costs and benefits of affirmative action

Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy (1934) (Goodreads, Review)

All my homies love Cavafy! I feel like I’m hearing about him a lot in rat-adj circles recently. Unsurprised because his poems are great, kinda surprised bc rats dont generally read poetry.

Don’t Make No Waves…Don’t Back No Losers: An Insiders’ Analysis of the Daley Machine (1975) (Goodreads, Review)

This is simply the best book that has been written about politics in Chicago. In the words of Andrew M. Greeley, “It is a very astute and dispassionate analysis of Chicago political life — far and away the best I have ever seen. Rakove is without illusions about either the right or the left.” Rakove brings to his study an intimate knowledge of Chicago and the Daley machine, a practitioner’s understanding of street-level politics, and a scholar’s background in political theory. Blending anecdote with theory and description in a lively style, Rakove has bridged the gap between scholar and layman in a work that will appeal to both.

Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (1960) (Goodreads, Review)

From the jacket of the first edition: “This book provides the most complete and authoritative account yet published of the theory and practice of world Communism. It presents a lucid summary of the fundamental ideas of Marxism, applying and developing them in relation to the present world situation. Its scope is indicated by the five parts into which it is divided – the philosophical foundations of Marxism, the materialist conception of history, the economics of capitalism, the transition from capitalism to socialism, and the problems of building socialism and communism. Written by a group of Soviet authors and edited by well-known ‘Old Bolshevik’ Otto Kuusinen, it was first published in the U.S.S.R. in 1960. The English translation follows exactly the text of the original Russian edition.”

Making the Corps (1997) (Goodreads, Review)

The bestselling, compelling insider’s account of the Marine Corps from the lives of the men of Platoon 3086—their training at Parris Island, their fierce camaraderie, and the unique code of honor that defines them.

The United States Marine Corps, with its proud tradition of excellence in combat, its hallowed rituals, and its unbending code of honor, is part of the fabric of American myth. Making the Corps visits the front lines of boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina. Here, old values are stripped away and new Marine Corps values are forged. Bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks follows these men from their hometowns, through boot camp, and into their first year as Marines. As three fierce drill instructors fight a battle for the hearts and minds of this unforgettable group of young men, a larger picture emerges, brilliantly painted, of the growing gulf that divides the military from the rest of America.

Metamorphosis (2013) (Goodreads, Review)

Metamorphosis has fan fiction. Metamorphosis has fan art. Metamorphosis has a fan-made 10 page fully-illustrated alternative ending, “I’m Gonna Fix That Girl”, with it’s own 6 digit code, 265918.

But, I think most tellingly, Metamorphosis has cosplay. It’s common these days for fans to dress up as characters from their favorite comics or TV shows. It is rather less common for fans to dress up as characters from their favorite pornographic work.

Metamorphosis is the only hentai I’m aware of with multiple fans cosplaying as the main character.

As implausible as this sounds, I think Metamorphosis is culturally significant. Beyond the explicit illustrations and shocking story content, it captures a deep fear present in the modern world. Stumble off the socially accepted path of high school to college to gainful employment, and it’s easy to be targeted by a predator and/or turn to drugs to try to escape. Metamorphosis may be “a tragic and preachy story”4, but the elements of the story are all too real.

Road of the King (2016) (Goodreads, Review)

Computer, generate a book that will teach me how to maximize my chances of winning tournaments for the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game. The contents must be written by one of the most prolific players of all time. Disable safety protocols.

Road of The King by Patrick Hoban is a fascinating read that promises to improve your performance in competitive games but at the risk of becoming a villain in the process.

Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (1997) (Goodreads, Review)

This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.

Ethongraphic studies on various types of white guys my beloved

Review of The Divine Comedy

I’m Italian. I’ve translated for fun about one sixth of the Divine Comedy into English (not my first language, so there might be the kind of weird mistakes second language speakers make).I’ll shamelessly quote my own translation throughout this review. Some of it is in tercets, some of it is in couplets.It’s not online, and very, very few people have seen it, so I might as well have written it specifically for this review.

I just think this is very cool and I liked the rambly nature of the review. Relatedly, the most high-effort book review I’ve found in this contest so far is a 2022 review of Very Important People by Ashley Mears, also available on her Substack. Mears wrote an ethnography of the high-end NYC clubbing scene in the 2010s, the reviewer went clubbing a bunch to figure out what’s changed now that it’s the 2020s.

Obligate Dramatic Irony

The thing about sci-fi is that there’s stuff we can’t write anymore, and not in the culture wars sense.

In the 50s, before we reached a local maximum on robotics, we had stories about smart houses and ambulatory robot assistants.

In the 60s and 70s when we had no clue what the conditions were like on other planets, we had stories about sirens on Titan and planets that were ripe for human colonization because the atmosphere on them are by default earth-like.

In the 80s and 90s, when we had no fucking idea what this internet thing would be capable of, we had stories about metaverses and uber-powerful hackers.

Of course we can still write stuff about, like, civilizations on Jupiter or whatever, but when we do, we must do so through a filter/layer/film of something that we can call “obligate dramatic irony”. We now know for certain that the other planets in our solar system are devoid of intelligent humanoid life, so it gets that much harder to suspend your disbelief (a thing that takes work), and so the threshold for how cool a premise needs to be to use the scenario gets elevated. 1

Sci-fi pushes at the frontiers of current science for inspiration, and I think this is rad! This lessens the work needed to suspend your disbelief, increases the wonder and delight because of a thrumming background sense of plausibility, and it’s not like our current understandings of science is not conducive to a wealth of new and fucking awesome premises in SF 2.

The flip-side is just that previous frontiers are now largely blocked, and unblocked only through a self-consciously retro aesthetic (or something more clever), if writing, and a layer of obligate dramatic irony, if reading.

Anyways, this is probably something that’s already been talked about by McLuhan or DFW or the assholes who talk about hauntology/disenchantment or whatever. Please email me the key phrase to google if you know.

  1. Jupiter Ascending is elevated and cool. stfu[]
  2. not to mention the movies!!![]

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