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mutilation for career developmentDaniel A. Foss (U17043@UICVM.BITNET)Thu, 4 Jul 1996 19:33:10 CDT
/* public anthroevent featuring an address by Adrienne Dearmas on The */ /* Male Eunuch (not suggested in any way by Germaine Groor, Elsewise */ /* there's Royal Royalties To Pay). With great gnashing of teeth, A. */ /* has prepared the lecture notwithstanding the Literature being, uh, */ /* excuse my French, *FUNCTIONALIST*. The audience attending this */ /* Gauloise event, reflecting a donation by the Republic of France */ /* Tobacco Authority, consists of members of the Washington DC NOW */ /* Chapter and Gun Club. There is a real explanation for this, which */ /* Adrienne Dearmas will be happy to provide you with if you ask her */ /* politely via offline e-mail. */ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Adrienne - You've *no idea* how highly I respect your judgment, at least compared to X, as of Wednesday evening, who persisted in delusional thinking as to my Career Development Prospects notwithstanding (a) official Social Security Administra- tion Cripplehood for purposes of Criteria for Miscellaneous Unemployability Not Otherwise Classified; and (b) my solemn declaration that, under the Prevailing Institutional Forms, what she was suggesting I induce in her the Direct Experience of having induced in her the wholly Subjectively speaking spuriousness of the Initiative, allowable solely, under other circumstances, given her five eleven to my five nine and a silly milimeter taller, yet was, more germanely, the strongest taboo in this realm of human(?) behaviour known to this culture [note: please don't annoy me about what culture is just right here & now], incest running a close second due to surveillance impracticalities whereto must be added the incompatibility between Child Sexual Abuse and False Memory Sydney, New South Wales. Both of these are formidable growth industries; both proudly sport hickeys, where not the odd discreet tatoo, in honour of the Direct Experience undergone by each, where, as previously noted, the usage Direct Experience is Truth to New Agery; [barnyard epithet], real or faked, to yours oh so truly. While Pregnancy endures nine months, the Expectancy Effect in the human female lasts so many minutes only, depending on the severity and complexity of e-hallucinations as well as the more commonplace cyberdelusions. [*NOT TILL THEN* did X, as all the others had, groan, nonverbally, olordwhat've I goneanddone?! with the mathematically predictable consequent pursuance there- to, that the Full Astrological Workup, initially free, donated to the cause of love, was charged to my account, inclusive of couch rental per hour (roomie's got bedroom), less overstuffedness for two, $30, leftovers my parting gift, Mykonos Diner. I am barred from even the local railroad station for the rest of my life, natural or Elsewise.] We return you to e-hallucinations and the notuncommonly-associated-therewith cyberdelusions, already in progress over many of these same stations. $ TO PBS! ......... Whereof, for both, I've generated more than my share in the human female. What I meant to write, so thus correcting myself, is The Normal Human Female. What is meant by the Normal [ie, herewith the Unmarked [and Unmutilated for the most part]] is operationalizable, for brevity's sake, not you, Adrienne: selfdepict- ed as a bit short as you may be/have been, as a SOMETHING LOOKING UNLIKE ME. Normal, to this writer, is a race-ish Thingie. Amongst my multiply-told tales is the one where Richard Williams, the *brilliant* African-American of the Stony Brook SocDept (of B.H., the other one, who claimed, ie, lied, to the effect that he invented the word Multicultural, the most-exposed, if understa- tedly, the better, as he went to his Last Reward, Dean of African-Armenian Studies, at double his former salary, in a school honestly convinced of its own stinginess! yet which cannot be identified here for reasons too oblivi- ous...) published his highlytheoretical thin volume expert-comprehensible howbeit nonuserfiendish short volume on Race and Ethnicity, contrasts of, 'twixt and 'tween. Literaturereviewed; all alas torntoshreds, New Departure made VERY SOON, stay tuned. Oh, yes! Lest We Forget! R. Williams, Hierarchical Structure and Social Value, Cambridge, 1992. The part on Race, def. of, I read aloud. Somethng to do with "socially significant body parts." I stared long and hard at the mirror. It returned the favour. "Skin colour, for example, is a socially significant body part; (p 15)." "Foot size, in contrast, is *not* a socially significant body part; (p 16) [-emph.in.orig.]" PURELY BY CHANCE, mind you, nothing *staged*, like the Stuff I usually pull, at this Precise Nanosecond, four gentlemen from Beijing, discussing, very mathematically, something of a physical, if inorganic, nature. The cite from p 16 having fallen on open ears, there were guffaws, a textual emendation suggesting itself as an urgent necessity, as reifications often do. On the morrow, I presented myself at Prof Williams' office, ostensibly for Deep and Far Ranging Discussion of "Just what might turn out to be a socially significant body part?" Yet of course, you know me, with a HIDDEN AGENDA. For our Jewish subscribership, think of the HIDDEN AGENDA as some Thingie like the *afikomen*. What I was there for was for Prof Williams to take a good long hard look at me. Which he very discreetly did. Mind racing through all possibilities and a few un-possibilities, he shook his head, no. Be it noted, I had not ASKED FOR IT. There were many considerations, too many for me to grasp. Like the vast majority of the Real People in the Stony Brook SocDept, RW regarded me as at best Mentally Retarded and at times much worse, viz, DRUGDERANGED PSYCHO OF DIMINISHED CAPACITY. Thus&thereby I was consigned to the residuum-detritus of the white Degenera- tes, to find resting place in the New Jersey Jukes & Kallikaks Museum, that is, should the corpse not get overriddled by hot lead fired at the behest of Commander Schwartzkopf, absolute ruler of the NJSP; since then known as Father of General Normal Schwartzkopf, author of It Doesn't Take A Media Maven (Drell Books, paperish); and to this very day the radio voice of THE FBI IN PEACE AND WAR. Long Island is best regarded as a piece of New Jersey which floated too far, so far not even The Little Engine That Could could. I wanted you to know, Adrienne, how digressive even so wretched a specimen as I, that is, me, in Spoken English, may get in aversion to discussing the removal of the male organ.... "PRICK!" "[You sexist asshole], PENIS!" "Iz in altkontri *schlong*." "Iz f'r unfucked biddies like you, MAIDEN AUNT! By me'r, iz *schvontz*!" "<gasp>. Und you kolly'rself Joosh!" "PUTZ, PUTZ, dammit, PUTZ!" "Excuse me, sir, but are you a member of the NOW Chapter?" "Hudafogiz YOU?!" "I'm terribly sorry sir, but you will simply have to leave." "Twerp, 'I'm terribly sorry sir' is Carol Gilligan's Island. Difference Feminism. Don't go no more, lamesister. Let me shake your hand, it's a Thingie of mine before theoretical arguments." "OW OW OW OW!" "Hurts like a real man done it, don't it. That, you poor effeminate sap, is Katha Pollitt Feminism, ie, 'taint no diff'runts twixta two'." Now, our featured speaker, Adrienne Dormouse, uh, excuseme, that's Alix, or wuz it, Anastasia, in Wonderkind, on her topic tonight, *Cut it off, cut it all off: Unless a simple gelding will do*. From earliest times....Shuddafogup, willya, I hate to get outta character like this, but, fuckman, SHUT UP, and your seductee of the evening, i'm making wildly stereotypical inferences from her AIRHEAD SLUT look, as advertised in Xi'an Yellow, China's premier, or is that premiere, fleshmag, winner gets her shot at Finalist from Sha'anxi Province AIRHEAD SLUT league competition, winner for beheading by Commander Chong according to techniques developed by himself on Fourth Century High Society Noblewomen & Aristocrats, onnacounta he's a Certified, by the Ministry of Cults and Popular Religous Affairs, as a Daoist Immortal, #5 Seeded among alltime top forty Illuminated Masters. My point here is, sooner will your ladybug, I mean, fiend, give up her crowning glory than you, buster, will part with the dangling ugliness down there.... "<uh>...." "There is no truth to the alleged & socalled Naturalness of this stupid crap. Surgical removal of the penis, or the less-invasive castration-gelding, is *consistent with reproductive success*, in the sense of gene-proliferation, weedlike, as some sick, uh, some sociobiologists would have us construe the *telos* of the gene, as defined by itself. I repeat. TAKING THIS BASURA AT ITS WORD, IN ITS OWN TERMS, you do vastly better, genewise, or shall I say jeans- stupid, as a Court Eunuch than as your basic *nung* transplanting rice seed- lings...." "....?...." "Well, look it the fuck up, don't bother me." "If, I mean, they can't, that is, you know what I'm trying t'say, that is, if it's cut off, how...." "Relatives. Lots and lots more where those came from, crying of lots forty- nine lots, f'r crying out loud, they are, believe me, *lousy* with your genes. Not each one's got every last one'a'them. Mixemup is Nature's way." "SERUTAN!" "You, buddy boy, gonna die. You got no idea who I work for." "Nyah nyah." "BLAMMO...BLAMMO...BLAMMO....ah, that wuz gooood, hey Adrienne, you gotta coupdegrace'im. Blowabackofisheadoff, got that?" "Mon plaisir." <bang>. <cough...cough>. "WherewuzI. The manifest rationale of eunuchism is the safeguarding of the monopolistic right of claiming paternity of each and every infantile organism born to the denizens of a human zoo of women as found at the apex of society in Imperial China, in Marathi or Rajput warrior castes in Rajasthan and the Deccan of the South Asian subcontinent, in what to Western prurience is the Lasciviousness, Indolence, and Sensuality of the southern tip of India, Kerala, Karnataka. Southeast Asia, the fabled fleshpots of the Orient personified, were nothing of the kind except for certain men and their male relatives. Yet this was pretextual. As was the delusion--it was far too persistent historically to allow us to accord its endless reitreration any seriousness, that as the eunuch might have no descendants, he was secure, proofpositivefordamnsure, against the temptation to acquire, be the acquisition that of luxurious finery or that of control of the very ruler and state. "The Ming, a most notoriously euchuchificated political regime, which ruled, mainly nominally, from 1368 to 1644, not merely saw the proliferation of salaried eunuch-staffed posts to the awesome figure of seventy or seventy-five thousand, the comparison is with the posts in the regular civil service whose total staffing, not counting permanent local clerks regarded as beneath scum, never exceeded twenty thousand, declining relative to population since the Song or even the Tang in Medieval times. "The Ming Founder, Ming The Merciless, 1368-1398, whose rivalry with the late Mao Zedong for the muchcoveted sobriquet (I use sobriquets for my barbecue pit all the time, try 'em!), "The Most Bloodthirsty Tyrant In Chinese History," did indeed post a notice in his Palace to the effect that the eunuch caught even in the slightest meddling in politics shall Surely Die, though he was himself illiterate, found his eunuchry paying not the slightest heed; and if, perchance, he asked a meddler of the sort prohibited, 'Wuzzamatta, cant'cha read, asshole,' what might be more appropriate, yet this being *tianxia*, less likely, than the accused sneering back, 'Nomore'nyou, *wansui* an' allatshity'- know." "By the midfifteenth century, the first eunuch dictator had taken power, leading his hapless sovereign into captivity along with the half million soldiers of the rapidly crumbling armed forces; the *wei so* system devised by Ming The Merciless, to be sure, had been designed to Cost No Money, in accordance with Confucian Thrift and White Lotus Asceticism. Which might have worked, had Chinese been Mongols, the *wei so* having been a copy of the Mongol armed forces. One major difference appeared early. Chinese did work, and could not imagine not doing it, even if just the endless toil of ordering serfs what to do at the crack of dawn. Mongols conquered China for the explicit purpose of watching someone else do the work, a most commonplace motive to practice the high and noble art of the Conqueror. Ask your local Spaniard for details. They had a few other quirks, like loathing footbinding, not cheating on their wives: one per customer, most unChinese (counting the Official and Legal Wife, the concubines, the serving maids, and the rest of the <ahem> Inner Quarters), and getting what we call *heavy into* faddish ideas. Like giving cushy jobs to Italians who couldn't do a goddamn thing except Count Money, can y'imagine? Nothing like the jobs Arabs got; they Counted Money lots faster. We've got a word for Mongol "tyranny" today, *glasnost*. Why the Russians were afraid to make it up, I mean, like, it's the Middle Ages, even, who knows." "...an' the eunuchs?" "Not much work, azzisaid. But comes the revolution, and it was your basic Eat The Rich type revolution, subversive chiliastic-type religious-conspira- torial syncretism, bit of this, bit of that, anything that Saves, like, with Flaming Sword, you know, including Great Mother of the West, tough lady. They had, get this, Red Armies. One Thingie everyone agreed on, all that came from the West was Evil, which is why China is still catching up. With...." "The eunuchs!" "Oh, yeah, business was slow for the whole Mongol dynasty, and there was lotsa catching up to do, which they did. You gave your eunuchs jobs which would look morally, uh, dubious on regulation organizational charts. You know, like Secret Police. Called Brocade Uniform Guard. Why you want garish looking secret police is part of the Inscrutability of the Orient. The obesity of these people was...truly off the wall. During one riot at the National University, a student protester *whacked off a hunk* of a guardbeing's blubber, and *ate* it! Do I hear an <ugh> out there? Yer all asleep, now I can relax. "The eunuchs were charged with uprooting, without mercy, all known and yet unknown political heterodoxy, like, from Cheng-Xi Confucianism, which was on the test for the PhD. Fortunately, not on mine. They had special torture- prisons, Eastern Pavilion and Western Pavilion. Anyoneatall, no matter how [nominally] important, of the highest rank, you know, could be *desaparecido*. You heard about the Singapore caning? They beat the victim on same part of the anatomy, he rarely lived. Fifty strokes of the heavy bamboo, that's death; a hundred was doubledeath. "Fourth and worst of the eunuch dictators was Wei Zhongqian, who'd built his own lavish tomb, rivalling that of the Son of Heaven. Alas, the Son of Heaven died first, and this architectural treasure was dyscompleted in time to squander the stolen billion-dollar fortune inside in a vain effort to save the country from the Manchu, pronounce that <choo>, sneeze. Gotcher Kleenex handy, good. Now, let's here it for the barbarous tribes we've gotta deal with after 1644, Man<CHOO>! You're more heavy into the Mystic East than I figured on, Else there is a flu goin' round something awful. "Now, if all the manifest, selfevident reasons for eunuchification are so much crap, really, why *is* the eunuch. For real and actual. The functionalist explanation, which faute de mieux is the system default at this time, though we all know, deep down, functionalism sucks. Not that I have anything against sucking; and there's not even five people here who will admit to not sucking, it's the semantic field is among the pardon my French, screwiest in the Anglo tongue. "I was saying. The cause of the eunuch, fondamentallement, is the establish- ment as social convention of our notion of Paranoia. When there can be no doubt on the part of the sanest of all that anyone equally sane is busily plotting against themselves, whence the imperative for preemptive plotting countering, in principle, the plotting plotted against you by inimical plotters who, as they see it, are engaging in the Prudent, Conservative course of action, and given that All Power is by common agreement if not by empirical verification in the hands of the ruler of *tianxia*, minions are needed, not leastofall by *YOU*, to whom they owe *EVERYTHING*. In return, you turn a blind eye to certain living arrangements whereby Palace Ladies are put up in eunuchs' mansions, given that a man's mouth is so much used in eating, there's no prospect of its surgical removal. "We turn, for a refreshing contrast, to the Empire of the Gross Moguls of Holly...I mean, the Great Mughals of India. Here, the women's quarters were guarded by ferocious female warriors, fertile and desirous of fleshly pursuits as women usually are, barring with bare if armed to teeth bodies against intruders. The sight of these women, under Islamic law, was so Sinful to the observant Muslims who prided themselves as Stricly Keeping of the Sha'aria that, should rougue males rush the harem, they would be overcome by their sense of Sin, and perhaps suffer debilitating, ah, functionalist theory." "<LOUD CHEERS>." "Good grief, is the hall packed with marxistfeminists, freudofeminomarxists, adherents of Phyllis Cheslerism, and the gathering of all the Fringes of the Elementary Garment Center?" "<Thunderous Cheers!>." "I've always said, if we've done one single thing for the women of this country, it's In Theory. And Purely In Theory. Collected in *Signs*. Which is, after all, something. What, don't ask. Now, here's your chance for... RHETORIC, I allude to the *** QUESTION PERIOD ***. Question? "Whuddabout Dahomey." "Whddaboutitis, I can give you a Referral to an Africanist. Also another Africanist, if you wanna get a Second Opinion. Does your HMO cover it? Reason's that everything African is controversial, and if you wanna get all the conflicted mess involved, it costs you for the insurance. Or, you can look up in your Yellow Pages under General Practitioners and Qi Gong Masters." "You. Make it quick." "Adrienne, you told me to never darken your mailbox again when I told you I wuz a Degenerate, irremediably unemployable. Now, here I have got inna US snailmail a JOB OFFER from United Arab Emirates, Incorporated, and they want a eunuch with a doctorate in sociology. All I gotta do is prove I got no Jewish ancestry for 'bout a thousand years. A snap, anyone can fake crapola like that. Adrienne, I'd do it for love of you. Would you, if I took the job, THINK MORE OF ME AS A MAN, FULLY GAINFULLY EMPLOYED, if I gave up what, really, I never had use for inna first place. What I only had to work on to coerce into the semblance of, uh, lesserdegreeofsoftness onnacounta, like, it was the Job of a Man. It was, it was explained, a man's WOIK. You follow so far that, I'm afraid to say this at a NOW Chapter & Gun Club meeting, but I'd like you to think that, even in *your* gender there's Dregs. And, given the strict con- struction of the hypergamy rule, the Dregs of yours gotta be even Inferiorer to the Dregs of mine for me to be worthy of them and them to be just right for me at going market prices. And I hate it! I hate it and always did. I wanna do this for you, Adrienne! Whatcha say?" "Cut it off. Cut it *all* off!" <THUNDEROUS CHEERS>. Daniel A. Foss
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