David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

E—:‘The point is it’s an intolerable burden on women.’

K—:‘The real point is that in fact they’re just logically incompatible, these two responsibilities.’

E—:‘Even if modernity itself is a historical phenomenon, Foucault would say.’

K—:‘I’m just pointing out that nobody can honor two logically incompatible sets of perceived responsibilities. This has nothing to do with history, this is pure logic.’

E—:‘Personally, I blame the media.’

K—:‘So what’s the solution.’

E—:‘Schizophrenic media discourse exemplified by like for example Cosmo —on one hand be liberated, on the other make sure you get a husband.’

K—:‘The solution is to realize that today’s women are in an impossible situation in terms of what their perceived sexual responsibilities are.’

E—:‘I can bring home the bacon mm mm mm mm fry it up in a pan mm mm mm mm .’

K—:‘And that, as such, they’re naturally going to want what any human being faced with two irresolvably conflicting sets of responsibilities is going to want. Meaning that what they’re really going to want is some way out of these responsibilities.’

E—:‘An escape hatch.’

K—:‘Psychologically speaking.’

E—:‘A back door.’

K—:‘Hence the timeless importance of: passion .’

E—:‘They want to be both responsible and passionate.’

K—:‘No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, over-whelming, powerful and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.’

E—:‘In other words what they want from a guy is passion .’

K—:‘They want to be swept off their feet. Blown away. Carried off on the wings of. The logical conflict between their responsibilities can’t be resolved, but their postmodern awareness of this conflict can be.’

E—:‘Escaped. Denied.’

K—:‘Meaning that, deep down, they want a man who’s going to be so overwhelmingly passionate and powerful that they’ll feel they have no choice, that this thing is bigger than both of them, that they can forget there’s even such a thing as postfeminist responsibilities.’

E—:‘Deep down, they want to be irresponsible.’

K—:‘I suppose in a way I agree, though I don’t think they can really be faulted for it, because I don’t think it’s conscious.’

E—:‘It dwells as a Lacanian cry in the infantile unconscious, the lingo would say.’

K—:‘I mean it’s understandable, isn’t it? The more these logically incompatible responsibilities are forced on today’s females, the stronger their unconscious desire for an overwhelmingly powerful, passionate male who can render the whole double bind irrelevant by so totally over-whelming them with passion that they can allow themselves to believe they couldn’t help it, that the sex wasn’t a matter of conscious choice that they can be held responsible for, that ultimately if anyone was responsible it was the male .’

E—: ‘Which explains why the bigger the so-called feminist, the more she’ll hang on you and follow you around after you sleep with her.’

K—:‘I’m not sure I’d go along with that.’

E—:‘But it follows that the bigger the feminist, the more grateful and dependent she’s going to be after you’ve ridden in on your white charger and relieved her of responsibility.’

K—:‘What I disagree with is the so-called . I don’t believe that today’s feminists are being consciously insincere in all their talk about autonomy. Just as I don’t believe they’re strictly to blame for the terrible bind they’ve found themselves in. Though deep down I suppose I do have to agree that women are historically ill-equipped for taking genuine responsibility for themselves.’

Q.

E—:‘I don’t suppose either of you saw where the Little Wranglers’ room was in this place.’

K—:‘I don’t mean that in any kind of just-another-Neanderthal-male-grad-student-putting-down-women-because-he’s-too-insecure-to-countenance-their-sexual-subjectivity way. And I’d go to the wall to defend them against scorn or culpability for a situation that is clearly not their fault.’

E—:‘Because it’s getting to be time to answer nature’s page if you know what I mean.’

K—:‘I mean, even simply looking at the evolutionary aspect, you have to agree that a certain lack of autonomy-slash-responsibility was an obvious genetic advantage as far as primitive human females went, since a weak sense of autonomy would drive a primitive female toward a primitive male to provide food and protection.’

E—:‘While your more autonomous, butch-type female would be out hunting on her own, actually competing with the males for food.’

K—:‘But the point is that it was the less self-sufficient less autonomous females who found mates and bred.’

E—:‘And raised offspring.’

K—:‘And thus perpetuated the species.’

E—:‘Natural selection favored the ones who found mates instead of going out hunting. I mean, how many cave-paintings of female hunters do you ever see?’

K—:‘Historically, we should probably note that once the quote-unquote weak female has mated and bred, she shows an often spectacular sense of responsibility where her offspring are concerned. It’s not that females have no capacity for responsibility. That’s not what I’m talking about.’

E—:‘They do make great moms.’

K—:‘What we’re talking about here is single adult preprimipara females, their genetic-slash-historical capacity for autonomy, for as it were self -responsibility, in their dealings with males.’

E—:‘Evolution has bred it out of them. Look at the magazines. Look at romance novels.’

K—:‘What today’s woman wants, in short, is a male with both the passionate sensitivity and the deductive firepower to discern that all her pronouncements about autonomy are actually desperate cries in the wilderness of the double bind.’

E—:‘They all want it. They just can’t say it.’

K—:‘Putting you, today’s interested male, in the paradoxical role of almost their therapist or priest.’

E—:‘They want absolution.’

K—:‘When they say “ I am my own person, ” “ I do not need a man, ” “ I am responsible for my own sexuality, ” they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.’

E—:‘They want to be rescued.’

K—:‘They want you on one level to wholeheartedly agree and respect what they’re saying and on another, deeper level to recognize that it’s total horseshit and to gallop in on your white charger and overwhelm them with passion, just as males have been doing since time immemorial.’

E—: ‘That’s why you can’t take what they say at face value or it’ll drive you nuts.’

K—:‘Basically it’s all still an elaborate semiotic code, with the new postmodern semions of autonomy and responsibility replacing the old premodern semions of chivalry and courtship.’

E—:‘I really do have to see a man about a prancing pony.’

K—:‘The only way not to get lost in the code is to approach the whole issue logically. What is she really saying?’

E—:‘ No doesn’t mean yes, but it doesn’t mean no, either.’

K—:‘I mean, the capacity for logic is what distinguished us from animals to begin with.’

E—:‘Which, no offense, but logic’s not exactly a woman’s strong suit.’

K—:‘Although if the whole sexual situation is illogical, it hardly makes sense to blame today’s woman for being weak on logic or for giving off a constant barrage of paradoxical signals.’