Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

FAINTING IS A FORM OF aggressive sleep and Null Heart attainment that has wrongly been seen as a weakness in women. Historical images of the fainting figure in the American landscape, the cinema, and literature seem to imply that the world is too strong to be tolerated, thus the woman swoons to the floor in escape, requiring a comforting rescue and sharp salts to return her to her senses.

On the contrary, fainting will be considered here as a strategic exit from consciousness, a willful blackout approach to the removal or prevention of the major emotions. In the Marcus Family Enterprise, fainting is a heroic pastime toward self-control. By fainting, we insert a curtain against the onslaught of life, and thus structure and silence the awful drama that would otherwise never cease. Fainting, for us, is a way to author our own lives and insert intermissions, the most underrated portion of any entertainment. By not fainting, we surrender our identities to the mundane chaos of time, the relentless needs of so-called people, and the assault of an American wind that possibly only gusts on people who are awake to receive it (sleeping is the only real way to avoid the wind).

Although I am obviously not a member of the 5,000 Falls Club, the elite corps of female behavior changers who have intentionally fainted or blacked out more than five thousand times, I have followed a rigid swoon program since my youth, and still rely on rapid fainting exits from life when I am otherwise too sad to eat my silencing grain, scared of my father’s wood shop, or unreasonably pleased when a person touches my head. Fainting, for me, is particularly effective as a killer of guilt and a dread suppressant, though it has unfortunately proved ineffective with shame, a rather more stubborn condition.

The strategic, short blackouts achieved through willful fainting usually offer an easy antidote to the problem of recently acquired feelings. Fainting closes off the offending world; upon resuscitation with salts or girls’ water or women’s-frequency injections, including radio-wave body baths, most emotions have been reduced appreciably, or at least temporarily forgotten. What this suggests to the Marcus Women’s Team and to the Jane Marcus Emotion Prevention Society is that the entire accessible level of feelings — what we think we feel throughout the day, our supposed personalities — is gratuitous and fleeting, given its lack of reoccurrence after fainting and revival. If these were true feelings — indeed, if there were such a thing as true feelings — they would not be so easily removed.

Ways to Faint

The Fainting Chair employs an ejection seat that launches the woman into flight, but not before depriving her of oxygen (snarfing) until dizziness sets in. Usually the Fainting Chair is of a burled walnut design, outfitted with a Lucite head-gag harness to assist with snarfing before the spring-loaded jettison is triggered. Once the woman’s body is fired into the air, the sudden elevation causes a predictable blood shift from her head (diaspora), creating a dry-brain faint that can last until her heart is quiet. The dangers of the Fainting Chair involve unpredictable flight paths, bodies lost in orbit, snuffed ignitions. Nets and crash pads must be judiciously placed throughout the fainting site, and the Smelling Salts Team should be ready to dispense hardened Ohio Salt to the woman’s upper lip (winterizing) in the event of a misfire. The fainting site should be high-ceilinged, with unadorned white walls, in order to track the woman’s flight into her blackout. To avoid permanent loss of the woman, she should be tethered with a Sleep Leash.

Many women will not have access to professional equipment, but they can easily produce a faint through means other than a special chair. Easiest among these is the spinning, whirling action known as the Candy Cane, or the Barber’s Pole. The woman raises her arms to a T shape, then spins in place until the full 360-degree horizon wobbles, tilts, and flattens onto a single plane and a faint ensues. If she is wearing the requisite red ribbon, a lovely spiral is created as she twirls into dizziness, an effect much appreciated by any Blackout Witnesses that may have gathered. A resuscitation team here is not required.

Holding the breath and rising quickly from a regular chair is a cheap, homemade simulation of the ejection seat, and nearly as effective, though flight cannot be achieved. It can be supplemented with a straining action in the face, or a full-body expulsion mime, also known as “bearing down” or “shortstopping,” though this straining can burst vessels of blood in the head, which will certainly bring on one or more resistant emotions, usually a pernicious dose of ambivalence.

The False Promise of Animal Fear

A chief use of the wild animal in emotion removal is to create a sense of vulnerability in the woman or girl, to literally spook the liquid from her until she blacks out. An extreme surge of fear can swiftly produce a faint in such persons — the body anticipates the death event and swoons away from the conflict, voiding its consciousness, rather than keeping alert to the last moments of life. Yet the temptation to hire an animal assistant to regularly threaten the woman or girl, often by startling her in her bedroom or bathroom, is misguided and must here be cautioned against, not least because it exploits the animal as a fear chemical. When an emotion-cleansing faint is produced through a surge of fright — that is, the wolf leaps through an open window and corners its prey, baring its bloody teeth and hissing — the fear response is sealed into the fainting state, and thus preserved in the woman or girl beyond any useful duration. Animal fear and other forms of predator anxiety, including the fear of fathers, are the only causes of fainting that could feasibly do more harm than good.

Blanketing the Fainter

Throwing a blanket over a fainted person (Morris) can enhance the emotion flush, or trap the feeling and keep it from escaping. Often an oil-soaked blanket, whose blaze can be easily contained by a Blackout Manager, is best suited for a quick heat extraction of panic and regret, although blanketing a Morris tends to be ineffective against happiness.

What About Dehydration?

A carefully pursued water minus will increase the occurrence of fainting throughout the regular events of a day; it does so by withering the muscle of wakefulness in the head. But dehydration can easily lead to unexpected fainting (visiting the hole), which may be dangerous. A woman or girl should stay close to the emotion-removal site during a water fast, and she should alert her Blackout Manager if she is abstaining from fluids entirely (Moses). The Manager in these cases will most likely affix the woman with a fainting pager or brown beacon, which detects a blackout, or sudden alteration of body position, and emits a shrill siren into the vicinity, bringing on the resuscitation team, who can home in on the noise until they find their downed woman.

The Primary Equipment of Fainting

I am most inclined to wear a stiff, unwashed flesh-colored turtleneck when I practice a fainting style of the antisadness or passion-dampening variety. The turtleneck limits blood flow just enough to deepen the faint, creating feelings of “dry head,” or “birch body.” While a beige neck corset can also be worn to tourniquet the head — it blends in like a scarf — the danger is that too much blood will be restricted and the faint will deepen and mature into coma. Although coma is interesting, with real potential in future behavior-changing styles, given that it dilutes emotional life in a woman, coma-resuscitation strategies like the Burp and the Bear Hug are still too jarring, tending to result in emotion surges, which lead to dizzying back drafts of envy and regret that create nearly untreatable emotional surpluses, a kind of hysteria of gratitude, elation, and fear.