Beth > Recent Status Updates

Like this bit that’s about the invisible labour of women 😎

I understand it’s metaphorical, but I can’t help thinking that some of the blanket statements made about blindness in this book must be quite offensive to the blind…

'In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face-to-face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting.'

Very interesting things being done with the ‘accountant’ too. He is being invoked almost like an aid worker, but someone even less wholesome in their intentions. He kind of personifies the idea of charity itself, or maybe those who make large donations to charity. Responsible for much of the hardship and emiseration they’re ostensibly trying to reduce.

Some of it reminds me of the Panopticon. You can’t be sure if you’re blind that no one is aiming a gun at you, so you may as well act as though they always could be.

The third chapter of this really is chef's kiss, it all comes together so beautifully, like poetry... I particularly like Fourier's crisis of plethora.

Already there is a preoccupation with lawfulness, or maybe it’s better to say order, and what it is that motivates people to adhere to the norms of their society versus what motivates them to transgress them. I haven’t read much about the book before diving in, I actually bought it ages ago, but it must be something like this

'He proves ... that civilization moves “in a vicious circle”, in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, e.g., “under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself”.' (Fourier)

'To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories.'

Re-reading with notes.

Re-reading this, but making notes this time.

‘They had to work and they wanted to work; yet no one else wanted them to, neither the employers they had to deal with nor the male workers they had to work beside nor the men whose beds they shared. If they kept working, they were humiliated at the office, assailed in the shower stalls, and beaten at home; if they tried to obey the social signals and go home, they would starve.’

Reading and working on the essay, "The Marxist Doctrine".

All psychology and psychiatry students should have to read chapter twelve of this book about how their profession was used against women in the ‘80s…

Hoping to finish this in the next few days.

Discusses how many female New Right activists were not models of feminine passivity themselves. I’ve often thought their reliance on feminists and increased opportunities for women was a revealing paradox.

Really interesting part about how the New Right saw the importance in trying to control language as a means of managing debate/succeeding over their enemies (feminists). Trying to control the accepted definition of words such as ‘equality’ and ‘opportunity’ were important to them.

Really good parts in here on the cosmetics industry, but especially about how a focus on quasi-medicinal skincare products were just as corrosive to women’s self-image.

I suppose the Fatal Attraction phenomenon was the Gone Girl of its time, in that a fictional story was used to try and smear 'real' (made-up) women in the press.