Making a Fantasy out of Thinness

The French government is closer than ever to passing a law banning the idealization of thinness. Pending the bill's approval in the French senate, one may be imprisoned for up to three years and fined $70,000 for having "incited excessive thinness." The authors of the bill, which directly targets pro-Ana and pro-Mia websites, also hope for it to have a spillover effect on the fashion industry, who have often taken the brunt of criticism for idealizing improbable and unrealistic images.

The problem however, is how does one define "incited excessive thinness?" Pro-Mia/Ana networks come under obvious condemnation, as their prescriptions for a healthy body and contented life drift into medical malpractice, however to charr the industry of beauty as a whole - from advertising to fashion to cosmetics - for pushing an improbable and at times impossible aesthetic-world-order seems somewhat absurd.

To what extent can the public legally condemn the individual's will to aspire to an ideal such as beauty? Granted, this ideal - beauty - is tempered by shifting cultural and societal norms and is therefore relative, however, its relativity is by virtue what makes beauty relevant.

In the recent past, the ideal Western woman was more robust, voluptuous, with a lot of time on her hands in between debutante balls and tea parties. Now she's been liberated from her heavy garments and thrown into the chaotic frenzy of bourgeois economics, where she must be more capable - mentally and physically - to take on the challenges of the world. At the same time as delimiting the bounds of the pleasure principle (more sex, more fun), society has rerouted the asceticism of monotheistic religion (no sex, no fun) and sublimated it into our five day work week. We forbid ourselves to eat carbs and instead consume our partners' bodies.

And so today, everywhere we look, a slim bodice - two-dimensional - eyes us from all perspectives of the urban landscape; threatening you with their body, their face. It is a body and a face that does not consume, perhaps nourishment, nor is consumed by you, but however, which consumes you in its very ideological nature. That is, the image of the body totalizes you - the audience (the socio-economic consumer) - it envelops your whole being and casts you back out into the world, somewhat more existentially fulfilled - if not actually physically - than before the rendezvous.

At some point or another we decided that God was the "idea" of "impossibility". That to put faith in God was to aspire to the unattainable impossibility. And at some point Kant equated the ideal of beauty with God; unattainable beauty, the presence of which aspires towards great things impossible or not.

Images of the impossible have always haunted human nature. They are the logical images springing forth from our ids and superegos, as we fantasize ourselves and each other. Why not be caught up in that wave of a dream which sweeps you out to the heavenly bodies and places you inside your the depths of fantasy?

However, the media is consistently called upon to return to Earth; to ground their messages in reality and portray believable images. One affirming response came from Nivea who, for one campaign, sought everyday-women to market their brand. It was heralded as a brave and pioneering move by a veteran beauty corporation. However, noticeably, since their gallant effort, everyday-women models have seemingly dried up.

But who wants to aspire to everydayness, to blandness. To mediocrity. What kind of bland escapist offers up reality as an ideal? This is why consumerism has done so well to learn from religion. One must put hope in the unattainable, so that the ever grinding process of perfectionism can continue. The slow grind of which deters us from death; if not, then at least for a moment.

Gastro-Religion and Why Salmonella is Not My Friend

Apologies for my recent lapse in Spooning. I have been in the midst of one rather phantasmagoric salmonella plunge, as well as a bliss binge (though I expect only a handful to comprehend that reference).

Some thoughts. Why are food poisoning dreams so certifiably deranged? Do neurotoxins trigger some primordial partition of the brain, causing my otherwise insignificant memories to spill over into my sheets? Several times I woke up in a sweat last night, thinking, "God, what ever happened to that guy?" Individuals I hadn't thought of in well over a decade suddenly ascended to the surface of my cavernous mind pool attempting to feign some greater meaning. Yet there is none. Believe me, I tried to psychoanalyze this one out. But even in my withered, debilitated and ripe-for-bullshit state, I could not find any associative significance.

So it got me thinking more about food poisoning, as well as religion, which of course, I am consistently trying to debunk.

Long before civilization's understanding of hygienic food preparation practices, food-borne illnesses must have been as common as "divine inspirations". As an analytical species, we have, I think, attributed too much signification to the delusional fucked-up states that we've at times found ourselves in after gulping down a half-a-dozen Sydney Rock oysters?

"Ah... Guys. God said that if we want to stop defecating from every orifice, we Jews gotta stop eating shellfish!" Mix that in with a couple of fancy hallucinations, add some historical Hebrew references et voila, you have yourself a sermon. When the mechanics of the body don't work the way they're supposed to, we question the material world and answer with transcendental explanations.

So, perhaps we can compound monotheistic religion to a series of gastro-medico-fantastical trial and errors. After all, if something's bad for you, then God purported it to be so. He made the sky blue, the Earth round and the cows look like our grandmothers. "Mooo, don't eat me. I'm your cousin."

We could go further to suggest even, that a culture which has refined its culinary practices to the point of being able to cook and consume anything and everything, is far superior than a culture that, say, has a nonsensical taboo on specific ingredients, such as pork or beef.

And so, enter the Chinese! Bird's nest, turtle blood, whale sperm, yam... an all-encompassing diet for an all encompassing economy. As China rises, the rest of the world will go hungry.

The Effeminate Tyranny

During the fall of the tyrannical Taliban regime in 2002, photographer Thomas Dworak discovered a cache of portraits depicting Taliban men in curiously effeminate pictorials. Magnum Photo has produced a 7-minute audio slideshow on these fantastic images.



What I find fascinating about this phenomenon - besides an anecdote involving a particularly paedophilic warlord - is the relationship between the Taliban’s prohibition of female effeminacy and the apparent externalisation of male effeminacy.

Prior to the American intervention in Afghanistan, strict shariah laws based on a patriarchal religious dogma, virtually forbid any public display of effeminacy: women must cover up all flesh (including their faces), mothers are subjugated by their sons as wells as their husbands and public displays of affection are completely outlawed.

Logically, with such a strict doctrine enforcing the day-to-day practices of public life, femininity would then manifest itself in the private domain, away from the judging eyes of other men. Though, with the all-seeing eye of Allah ever-present and the most meagre of infractions punishable by death, what little privacy there is, is hijacked by dogmatic fear.

Thus Ironically, women are removed from the libidinal economy, burkha and all. Ironically, because in this context, the sexual suppression of women equates to their annihilation as an object of sexual desire, whereas, here in the West, we subjugate women for the very purpose of making them objects of desire. We objectify, the burkha annihilates.

Veiling the woman and making her a sexual non-entity transfers femininity to the man. Hence, men, who are superficially the only players in the Islamo-fascist libidinal economy, become the logical targets for any effeminate manifestations and objectifications.

The portraits act as playful marker of this transference, of a welcome affection amongst men. Their cheeks blushing, hand-in-hand, they flaunt guns and present flowers in front of radiant pastel pastoral backgrounds. They are reminiscent of the early age of technicolour: saturated hues and picturesque flowerbeds.

“It’s a very feminine culture,” Dworak says. “They’re very effeminate with their black eyeliner and their little guns and flowers and holding hands and everything.”

Though not all the photographs display incidents of pederasty, the slideshow outlines a particular tradition whereby an older man will adopt a young boy and become not just his lover, but also his guardian and teacher; a custom practiced by many a culture, from the ancient Greeks to the Persians to the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts of America.

Of course, the Taliban outlawed homosexuality, as have various Christian dioceses. However, there is a particular sexual-idealization of the flesh of male youth in cults that demonise the female body. Think of the carvings of naked cherubs that adorn so many Renaissance alcoves. Could all the cherubs in the world account for the significantly large proportion of paedophilic male clergy?

I think, perhaps. After all, it is the Father who shows care, who will listen to your inner most feelings, navigate your sins and offer you forgiveness and salvation – all effeminate traits. I believe that some Christian-feminists even ordain the God of the New Testament as made in the image of woman, given her predisposition towards things like forgiveness and such. Or is that the plot to The Da Vinci Code?

However, this is not to suggest that effeminacy directly leads to homosexuality, which then leads to pederasty. But, that there is an integral place in the human condition for what Occidental thought refers to as femininity, and that femininity is not necessarily exclusive to the female sex.

The traits of femininity, such as care and love, are not so much the effects of a distorted cultural system, but are in fact ontologically prior to culture. They will manifest in all cultures and all gender structures.

On the other hand, paedophilia and pederasty are bastardisations of these traits, blurring and blending care and love into domination and control. It is culture that screws up, not human beings.

To paraphrase the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, when you get down to it, human beings are essentially all about care.

Electric Prayers

A current and constant theme of tension between the Abrahamic religions has been the apparent Disneyfication and modernization of Christianity compared to the raw and unapologetically antediluvian nature of contemporary Islam.

Now with electroluminescent phosphor printing technology, Islam can participate in the aesthetics of the 21st century without giving into the religious watering-down associated with sects such as Hillsong.

This piece of holy technology comes all the way from BrIslam. English-based Turkish designer Soner Özenç has merged the evanescence of divinity with the effervescence of modernity with an illuminating sajjadah (prayer rug) – the Sajjadah 1426.

Those in performance of the Muslim prayer – the namaz – are in for an atmospheric treat that makes practicing the prayer all the more electrifying. What’s more is that the luminosity of the Sajjadah 1426 strengthens as the rug points closer towards the holy land Mecca, sending charges of electrifying God current up your spine and in the general direction of paradise.

Godliness has never been so savvy. This is almost better than virtual praying in Second Life.

Watashi wa Jezutsu desu

Japanese Manga artist and Anglican priest wannabe Ajinbayo Akinsiku has transformed the bible, from Genesis to Revelations, into a Japanese Manga comic; interpreting the Son of God as a hard-edged Samurai with a big sword and a demeanor to use it.

Christ as the existential misanthropic hero? Sounds like Kurosawa meets Clint Eastwood on a bad day. After all, he does die for all our sins. That could make one slightly irritable.

In this attempt to make the bible more accessible to nerds, in true Manga style, they’ve got to make the Virgin Mary - aka Sailor Moon – a hot MILF, circa 1980 Catholic school girl: rolled up Harajuku socks, pink cotton undies and poses that, well… hey if you’re hanging it out like that, how could you not get preggas?

Mary's baby shower?



Moses and the burning bush?