Danny

“And in a way, we were just watching television through the fall and rise of civilizations, as many other people do. We watched The Men while North and South Korea were unified, while the first female cardinals chose the first female pope. The day Evangelyne first drew ahead of the Republican in a three-way poll, we were watching The Men, and we were watching when she made the “For the Children” speech that cemented her position in second place. There were wildfires in Canada and drought in South America; refugees fled from cities where infrastructure had failed without male workers; and we watched men running through the dead land. Power plants and oil refineries closed worldwide from lack of skilled workers and diminished demand, and a climate agreement was reached that reflected these new, more permissive realities. Fish populations rebounded in the Atlantic and moose appeared in the streets of Moscow. People talked unironically about Gaea, Themyscira, Eden. We five watched our screen. Spring turned into summer, and now our ComPA guards ranged freely throughout the house. They cooked elaborate feasts in the kitchen, fucked in the beds, spoiled the dog with treats. Laughter rose outside as they splashed in the pool and ran through sprinklers, young and cloudless. It was as if a new, pure generation had arisen in the months since we’d started watching. And we were watching when an objectively different generation was born, the first human beings conceived without sperm, without sin.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“In that moment, I was struck by how profoundly a scene was changed by the removal of a masculine element. It felt very sweet and fantastical: a world of lambs with no wolves. At the same time, it was oddly reminiscent of a rebel encampment on the eve of a raid.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“And what is the value of this sexual object to men, since it is they who form her, use her, and give her what value she has? The pioneering male masochist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who spent most of his life bullying bewildered women into wearing furs and halfheartedly whipping him, candidly wrote in his diary that “my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself.” The nature of the act does not change the nature of the act: the female is the instrument; the male is the center of sensibility and power. Roland Barthes, with himself as the lover, essentially endorses the same view of the object’s value and purpose: “Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“The brilliance of objectification as a strategy of dominance is that it gets the woman to take the initiative in her own degradation (having less freedom is degrading). The woman herself takes one kind of responsibility absolutely and thus commits herself to her own continuing inferiority: she polices her own body; she internalizes the demands of the dominant class and, in order to be fucked, she constructs her life around meeting those demands. It is the best system of colonialization on earth: she takes on the burden, the responsibility, of her own submission, her own objectification.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse