Quoted By:
>But I think his story speaks to many others, who didn’t turn into ghey, but who have nevertheless been disfigured in some other way… by the same force. Now, Paglia’s restatement of Freud is correct, but she misses an important element of the story, which is why such a boy turns away from the masculinity of his peers in the first place. It is not horseplay or the roughness of male competition as such that makes him turn away, but the utterly fake or artificial character of such displays, usually, in our time. Such boy perceives what his peers don’t, the conditional and entirely dependent character of life in our age. It is not the masculinity, the competition for status among men, the physical roughness, that makes him turn away… but the fact that all such play is happening in already owned space. It is this aspect of our time that is crucial to understand. When I speak of something like owned space, it must not remain mere word. When you understand something: I mean you must see and feel it like you would a landscape you know from youth, how to navigate all its nooks, the different heights of earth, the banks of streams, where the trees are and how it feels inside them, how long it takes walking from this or that group of beech to the abandoned factory, so that the map is already in your body. This is only way to really understand something. I believe boy like this is one of the types that sees through the charade the lords of lies have dangled in front, the shadow-play to dazzle the many, and he is turned off, maybe not by manliness, but the buffoonish, deluded character of modern masculinity. The defeated male that is turned into a peon and a neutered beast for women and hidden masters is a terrible thing to see. The jockeying for status, the physical fights, the adventures boys are supposed to have in a state of nature…all of this is in nature meant as preparation for life, for a life of conquest and expansion.
