“Some guys’ll do anything to redeem their lonely, frustrated lives. And so they endow their experience with a certain self-aggrandizing pathos, by entertaining reactive, resentful fantasies of masculinity under siege. It feels so good to be a victim, because then you’ve got the perfect excuse to demand recompense, to make others pay like you’ve had to pay, to lash out at the bitch who started it all.
A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You imagine your ‘manhood’ as something both strong and fragile, hard and tough and yet continually in peril. Like a penis that might go limp, or a mind weighted down with a body. But why even bother, why hold back? Why not just let yourself go? Why cling to this rigid exterior armor, why nurture this aggrieved inner self?”
Steven Shaviro, 1997.
Éliphas Lévi, 1896.
Éliphas Lévi, 1896.
August Strindberg, 1913.