Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Sons don’t want their father’s “balls”

If we give credence to the research detailing the centrality of affection in father-son relations and the relative irrelevance of the father’s “masculinity,” it becomes clear that boys don’t hunger for fathers who will model traditional mores of masculinity. They hunger for fathers who will rescue them from it. They need fathers who have themselves emerged from the gauntlet of their own socialization with some degree of emotional intactness. Sons don’t want their father’s “balls”; they want their hearts. And, for many, the heart of a father is a difficult item to come by. Oftentimes, the lost boy the depressed son must recover is the one not he but his father has disavowed.

- Terrence Real, quoted by Allegro at the Rigorous Intuition discussion board.

16 comments:

  1. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/03/3_media_narratives_about_the_m.html#more

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  2. PS. I'm not linking him as an informed political commentator, more as someone trying to cut the bullshit on cheap emotional cues used by MSM.

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  3. Thanks qlip, sounds right to me.

    How are men brutalised?

    This fasho armouring is returning, for sure - all the values that had been disturbed by the social movements return.. down to the crudest mind/body or spirit/matter dualism, coded as gender etc.. It's ubiquitous - science swept it away but the prevalence of the virtual has given it a new life as "theory". One wonders if this unscientific genre of "theory" was created just to be where these unscientific ideological schemas got to live on.

    WKasper - the "youth" theme is so cloying and so obviously just taken right out of Empire and Multitude. Pictures are found to fit, and so the spectacle goes.

    It's so obvious, the manipulation and narration, the dramaturgy, but there is an audience that is very gullible about the spectacle now, and really doesn't see any difference between commenting on tv shows and practising sociology. And so when the top story of a news cycle is just like an action movie, they don't notice, because they have been dramatising their own lives imaginatively for so long. Chris Hedges was right about this. It's not though thet the audience has lost the ability to tell the difference between reality and tv, it's that a small portion have lost this ability: another larger portion (mainly uni students and culture workers) have been (cannily) sold some accessories which insist this distinction is unimportant and granting it significance is fuddy duddy and reactionary, and the margest portion fgeels simply powerless in the face of this spectacle's totalitarian imperviousness to response and its "recognition" and amplification of the portions of the audience most deeply affected.

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  4. 1988: If find V for Vendetta the comic well=crafted and highly entertaining, but facile and trite.

    2006: I find V for Vendetta the movie dull and badly made, and political commentators discuss it as though its a political event.

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  5. trend now - red riding hood, hansel and gretel witchhunters, snow white...teaching gender dogma and offering fantasies of whiteness...it's kiddie fascism. for infantilised fascists. look at the path to this stuff, it really is the attenuation of fantasy genre and narration, paring down to the videogame basics, the fashion photo scenes "feminine perfection", "masculinity", beautified spectacles of too-trivialized-even-to-count-as-glamorized "violence" substituting for "sex"...

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  6. quite a link... what is the qlipothian take on freemasonry and scientology?

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  7. gustave, it seems you are the qlip who actually posted this link, correct?

    what's your take?

    (I know quite a bit about freemasonry to the early 19th century, and nothing about scientology).

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  8. Molly, it wasn't Gustave who posted the link, it was moi - a largely-absent qlip in recent months. (Been busy in what is laughably known as the real world.)

    Gustave, the RI discussion board is the best, or one of the best, I know of. Jeff Wells, the former blogger who runs it, is a writer well worth reading.

    [Somewhat-full disclosure: I am the qlip previously known as warszawa & now mainly known as MacCruiskeen. Unfortunately, I share a real first name with a notorious mysoginistic screecher in these 'ere parts, so I can't use it.]

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  9. ach -

    misogynistic

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  10. Apologies if your name's "Patrick", Warszawa; but -

    Could you do me/us a favour and tell the babbling racist scum at - ahem - "cultural parody centre" that we're not the same person? Their afterbirth is making my laptop stink something rotten...

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  11. Can anyone find a cite for this? I'd love to read more from wherever it's from.

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  12. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5ByF_0HV5w

    david smail

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  13. Thanks for the bell hooks link. That looks like a book I should read. (Do you know Adrienne Rich's "Of Woman Born"? I read it last year and was very impressed by it.)

    This 12-page pamphlet is good too:

    "What About the Boys?"
    By Michael Kimmel, State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook

    http://www2.edc.org/WomensEquity/pdffiles/males.pdf

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  14. thanks w; yeah the hooks is very good. Also recently read her books on teaching - there are three, teaching transgression, teaching critical thinking, and one other - which are really Freiresque and engage the bad effects of our hierarchical exploitative violent social relations on men as well as women.

    thanks for that link too -

    adrienne rich, yes, i read it long ago, among the first "Feminist" capital F things I read and can't even guage how much it has seeped in - a lot I imagine.

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