Boris Johnson, Boston Ross and Beauty

I've been reading psychoanalysis and dissociating while looking at pictures of faces lately

The camera has changed the world. It has not ”changed the world”, as in, created a material state-of-affairs, or had a physical impact upon physical objects. It has changed the world (as observed), in that it has changed the observer. The camera has, ironically, revealed to a point that is beyond repression, certain things about how we perceive. This is how the camera changed the world. Not by showing us the world, not by changing the world, and not by changing “how” we view the world – but by revealing to us, beyond a pleasant level of reasonable doubt, how we always-already did.

Fantasy and the interactivity of desire

There is no such thing as an attractive woman. There is no such thing as a “beautiful” woman. “What do you mean, ‘no woman is beautiful’, that sounds like you are just gay lmao”, you might say, nervously sweating and pulling on the neck of your shirt. Well, I’ll show you. I’m glad you asked.

Woman she achieves status of beauty, attractive, insofar as she falls into man’s preestablished category or schema, of a sexual fantasy. In practical interaction with her, in conversation or socializing, or especially in sexual intercourse, the individual woman always falls short of the “sexual ideal”. This is “fantasy”. A normal healthy relationship is a gradual coming to terms – negotiation of terms between the man and the woman in question, over to which degree fantasy will be sustained, and what the other part will provide in return for this. A mutual negotiation and reconstruction of mutually sustainable fantasy-images.

As a man, growing into adulthood is, in terms of sexuality, a confrontation with one’s fantasy, being able to recognize it as-such, and differentiate between it and, actual, physical, woman. This is what mean “settling down”. Or more precisely, “not settling down”, is a refusal to acknowledge the fantasy as a fantasy, and insist on it’s superiority to the “real”, that the real must be the handmaiden to fantasy.

The notion of a “beautiful woman” cannot exist or make sense in stasis. In the very judgment of her as “beautiful”, there is an aspect of Will: desire is animated, not static. To classify her as “beautiful” is to classify her as desired, you have Will-towards-her. It is not possible to meaningfully, honestly imagine a “beautiful woman”, after ones own death. These two notions are incompatible, and anything you could say after invoking both, would be nonsense.

A judgement about a woman’s “attractiveness”, is an expression of the judge’s perceived relation to that woman. It is an implied action, and the man who fails to fulfil this implication, fails to live up to his promise, whichever form it might happen to take in his particular case, is a sexual failure.

Any beautiful woman can be “made ugly” if you see her in a context or environment or action that does counters your fantasy-image. “No matter how hot she is, someone is tired of fucking her” - which is, whoever is fucking her. This is important.

The most beautiful woman in the world can be turned hideous, I can turn her hideous for you if you ask me to. A vulgar example, is simply imagining her human biological processes, production of excrement, bodily waste, and so on. An even more vulgar example is, imagining her psychological process, and her internal production of fantasy – to see “what women want”.

Is this black pill? Is this a sad state of affairs? Does this mean that libido-desire must forever be unsatisfied and we’re stuck in this sort of Sisyphean relationship to the concept of sexual pleasure? Some kinda tragic Buddhist twist? Desire cannot be satisfied? Men and women incompatible?

If computer technology and pornography teaches us anything it’s that it is preferable to not have your “desire” “satisfied”. It is not the case that they cannot be, it is the case that they shouldn’t be. The Id is monstrous and demands monstrous things. The superego is perverse, there is always some level of “cruel and unusual” in all super-ego judgments. The ideal relationship to sexual fantasy is one of gradual negotiation of terms, with a practical partner in a practical, real, social environment. The “sexual fantasy” is not an “ideal” to be realized or approached in playacting for ultimate pleasure or whatever, but it is your “starting offer” in a negotiation.

The problems of desire, fantasy, the supposed incompatibility of men and women, and so on, appear only so long as we start from a premise of “individuality”, if we start in the “individual”; we try to solve for and explain the notion of “desire” with only half the equation, half of what makes up desire, desireé and desired. Theories of desire that account only for the ego, the self, can only be judged true or not in a solipsistic universe. In the very act of thinking about “your own desire”, artificially absent the “object” of your desire, you have begged the question.

In a world where you were the only human being to have ever lived, and you encountered a soulless doll without any sense of awareness or being, but simply just in the shape of a “beautiful woman” - would you “desire” it?

The practical purpose of the sexual fantasy is to be negotiated down. It is a social facet of life, not an “individual”. The “release” from anxiety and suffering and all that, that is available is sexual release, is not achieved by “getting what you want”, having your “ideal image” acted out in perfect representation. Getting this, ruins the image and you must construct a new one, that’s even worse, even more perverse.

Boris Johnson is an ugly man. He is short, fat, has a weird looking face and thin dishevelled hair. Whoever this Swedish politician or journalist or just some bitch on the right is, I don’t know, she is a “beautiful woman”. I choose this picture, because it happened to show up on my feed and I instantly felt something. This picture stands out to me, because I can recognize her as simultaneously being “a beautiful woman”, formally, technically speaking, while right at this moment, looking bad. I find that interesting.

You have just caught her at a bad angle, at a bad time, in a place and a scenario where she is not in control and able to guide your perception of her. She doesn’t know how to flirt with the camera, and fails to flirt with you. If you had seen her in a different environment where she was in control, she would seem beautiful to you, if she was aware of you.

In the picture she looks dull, distracted, indifferent. Bored. Unaware, un-self-aware. she is not “making herself pretty” - she is not consciously making herself “known” to me, the viewer, in a particular way. it is the same sensation as seeing your girlfriend relaxed, in private, at home, “in sweatpants” so to speak. Without Pretense. This is the moment where your primitive, childish “sexual fantasy” of vulgar rape and violence ends, transforms. This is where you grow up. Someone you have seen like that, you cannot have the same monkey rape fantasies about. Gradual negotiation. The reason the sam hyde skit about his unhealthy sexual relationship is funny and relatable, is because he shares the pain of having failed in this. He tried to live out the fantasy of anally raping her, after having been forced to account with the fact that she was weak and ugly and stupid. The pain in his voice that we connect with and empathise with, is knowing this sensation. “She RUINED it. FOREVER.”

The human shit, as it were, is merely a formality. Sam plays a sympathetic villain, because he is put in the crucial point of choice; the enactment of the sexual power fantasy is ruined, and he is humiliated, pulled “out” of the fantasy space and viewing himself in all his absurdity. This also happens during normal sex a lot. You’re suddenly self aware of your own body, absurd mechanical movement, etc, conscious of how you are naked and both looking and sounding silly. This is a moment of re-negotiation, and it is a moment in which you can grow intimate with another human being. it is a test. and the skit is funny and sympathetic, because Sam fails, and insists on the supremacy of the fantasy-image, rather than the woman, or even himself.

Women cannot be “objectively” beautiful, because aesthetic judgement is a woman. Human Judgement is feminine. The part of your soul that makes judgements is the anima. Subjectivity is The Feminine. Nietzsche calls himself the most feminine philosopher. It is not a “flaw” of women that they cannot be beautiful - it is a flaw of judgement.