Sorry, Jaye. I'm totally swamped at work this week. Heh. I seriously thought nobody would notice. I'll make it up, I promise.
Love,
CJ
Topic of the Week: Excerpt Discussion
Moderators: KimberlyS, CathyAnn
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CJ
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3562
- Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2003 11:12 pm
- Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Hi all,
This time, a classic. And echoes of RuPaul?
October 2nd, 2008
Self Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation. Diane Ravitch, ed.; Perennial Harper-Collins, New York, 2000. pp. 108-109.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? My friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways...
This short excerpt is dedicated to the members here who have not refrained from "speaking the rude truth in all ways." (Jeannie, honey, this is your cue!
)
Love,
CJ
This time, a classic. And echoes of RuPaul?
October 2nd, 2008
Self Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation. Diane Ravitch, ed.; Perennial Harper-Collins, New York, 2000. pp. 108-109.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? My friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways...
This short excerpt is dedicated to the members here who have not refrained from "speaking the rude truth in all ways." (Jeannie, honey, this is your cue!
)Love,
CJ
Last edited by CJ on Mon Oct 06, 2008 10:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
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Sylvia H
- Miss Emerald Goddess
- Posts: 201
- Joined: Thu Dec 07, 2006 4:21 am
- Location: Colorado
Here it is ...Take it or leave it
(paraphrase)......However one thinks in their heart, so shall they be.......
.........I decide!!....... (Julia Roberst in Pretty Woman)
A nice sounding philosophy. It is quite apparent that some percentage of the population will never get there.But we have to live with them anyway.
We all are born taking cues from everyone around us. Some never stop doing that and consequently allow others to to decide for us many things. Others seem to have enough momentum to decide and go forth in confidence.
All I get out of this at the moment is that the more you let others decide what is right / wrong for you, the less one is able to be independent. It has been said independence is freedom. It has also been said you cant have stability and freedom at the same time. If that is the case then going along with everyone else creates a sense of stability. However that stability tends to go away on occasions when everyone happens to be wrong. In that case, the stability turns to chaos and drama, because there is no independence to fall back on.
One need look no further than the recent financial collapse brought on by the sub prime lending issue and all the drama around that. Everyone who colluded with that knew there was something "wrong" about it, but since everyone was doing it, it somehow made it ok. It will be left to the independent thinkers to come up with a way out. IMHO
Thank you and good night:)
xox
Sylvia
(paraphrase)......However one thinks in their heart, so shall they be.......
.........I decide!!....... (Julia Roberst in Pretty Woman)
A nice sounding philosophy. It is quite apparent that some percentage of the population will never get there.But we have to live with them anyway.
We all are born taking cues from everyone around us. Some never stop doing that and consequently allow others to to decide for us many things. Others seem to have enough momentum to decide and go forth in confidence.
All I get out of this at the moment is that the more you let others decide what is right / wrong for you, the less one is able to be independent. It has been said independence is freedom. It has also been said you cant have stability and freedom at the same time. If that is the case then going along with everyone else creates a sense of stability. However that stability tends to go away on occasions when everyone happens to be wrong. In that case, the stability turns to chaos and drama, because there is no independence to fall back on.
One need look no further than the recent financial collapse brought on by the sub prime lending issue and all the drama around that. Everyone who colluded with that knew there was something "wrong" about it, but since everyone was doing it, it somehow made it ok. It will be left to the independent thinkers to come up with a way out. IMHO
Thank you and good night:)
xox
Sylvia
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Jennifer M
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 361
- Joined: Thu Jun 14, 2007 9:04 pm
- Location: Upstate New York
I take this excerpt to mean that each of us must look inside of ourself and be truthful to the person we find.This has been said by many here on the forum and I am very glad it is finally starting to make sense to me.If I cant be truthful to myself,how can I be truthful to others. 
Understand the voice within
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CJ
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3562
- Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2003 11:12 pm
- Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Hi all,
Jennifer,
I think that's exactly what it means. Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act I, Scene III (Polonius to his son Laertes):
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
I've often quoted this bit of speech on the forum just because it bears repeating. If you live by your own lights, and are true to those lights, not much will shake you and you will be a beacon to others.
Love,
CJ
Jennifer,
I think that's exactly what it means. Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act I, Scene III (Polonius to his son Laertes):
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
I've often quoted this bit of speech on the forum just because it bears repeating. If you live by your own lights, and are true to those lights, not much will shake you and you will be a beacon to others.
Love,
CJ
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Lydia
- We Will Never Forget You - Rest in Peace
- Posts: 859
- Joined: Sat Aug 28, 2004 11:43 am
- Location: Sarasota, Florida
Hi CJ,
You might have included the lines just before your Polonius advice quote. It seems applicable to today's events:
Lydia
You might have included the lines just before your Polonius advice quote. It seems applicable to today's events:
Hugs,Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
Lydia
"There comes a time ... when you must grasp the bull by the tail and face the situation."
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CJ
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3562
- Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2003 11:12 pm
- Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Hi all,
Good point, Lydia. I wish I'd thought of that!
I laugh but the economic troubles down there are really no laughing matter--wherever one happens to be in the world.
On to this week's excerpt.
October 6th 2008
Girlfriend: Men, Women, and Drag
H. Brubach, M.J. O'Brien. Random House; New York, NY; 1999. pp. 148-149
As for drag's capacity to unsettle the viewer, it could be argued that the more complete the transformation in a man's case, the less threatening it is. The man who closely approximates a woman challenges our thinking only when we finally realize that she is a man, and even then the chances are that we will find her not offensive or off-putting but disarming. By demonstrating that a man can "become" a woman, he confirms the message our culture sends via advertisements, magazines, movies: that femininity is predicated on artifice and therefore can be acquired. Being a woman--or being the kind of woman considered attractive and desirable--requires an effort. (RuPaul, the New York drag queen, made a brief, unsuccessful bid for pop stardom with a song called "You'd Better Work.") It's the drag queen who attempts and fails (or refuses) to conceal her identity as a man who is far more likely to make us uncomfortable, by confronting us with an image of compromised masculinity.
When it comes to women in drag, however, the situation is reversed: it's the partial transformation--the "butch" woman--that's easier to take in stride, while the woman who seems completely plausible as a man calls into question our standards of masculinity. Unlike femininity, which relies on makeup, on clothes that contort and exaggerate the shape of the body, masculinity has been construed as "natural," inimitable, indomitable--strictly the province of men. If a woman can convincingly simulate a man, then there must be something wrong with masculinity: it has failed to hold its ground; it has been proven impotent in the face of a woman's raid on its demeanor and appearance. While a man in drag may in fact uphold the ideology of femininity, a woman in drag is liable to undermine the ideology of masculinity.
(...)
The changes in women's lives that have come about over the course of the twentieth century have pretty much rendered obsolete the old incentives to dress in drag. In America, in Europe, in many other parts of the world, women can get an education and a job; they can travel alone, without the armor that a man's suit once provided; they can go to war or go to sea. For that matter, the impact of a woman dressed in drag now is nowhere near what it once was, in the days when pants and short hair were taboo. From where men stand, femininity--with all its accoutrements--is still a long way off, at a safe distance and then some, with a great divide separating them and it. But masculinity, or, at any rate, the access to its trappings, is for most women within hailing distance; women are already halfway there.
In our time the sight of a woman wearing a mustache and a man's suit is not as resonant as the sight of a man in a dress; if women in drag are somehow lacking in the zeal that animates their male counterparts, perhaps it's for lack of a mission. When they dress as Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot, drag queens take it upon themselves to perpetuate certain female types, many of which--among women, at least--have died a natural death. Seen in the aftermath of the feminist revolt, male drag can be interpreted as an act of mourning for a variety of womankind soon to be extinct. Women, however, appear to have no such nostalgia for the time-honored male stereotypes: the Cowboy, say, or the Army General or the Football Hero. Many, if not most, women, in fact, would just as soon see these monolithic roles abolished, to make way for a new masculinity, one that is subtler and more nuanced.
Yes, and I think that's part of the problem, this desire "many, if not most, women" have for a "subtler and more nuanced" masculinity; they will tell us this is what they'd like without telling us what form(s) such a masculinity is apt to take. We (men) are left with the task of "birthing" a new masculinity in a rather hodge-podge and hit-or-miss fashion; is it this? is it that? is it some other thing pending women's approval? Am I still too rugged? too stoic? or, conversely, too "feminine"? Or how about this? No? Okay, what about this? Damn! This is hard!
Men are searching for new masculinities, true. But not all men are. While it may be true that some men--certainly the gender-variant ones, as Brubach suggests--are nostalgic for "a variety of womankind soon to be extinct," it appears to me to be as true, if not more so, that most men are also nostalgic for a variety of "man-kind" (i.e., of masculinity) soon to be extinct. Well, most men I know, at any rate. Maybe this "surge" of male-to-female crossdressing we've been seeing in our culture over the past generation is but one type of attempt to accommodate women's desire to see the flourishing of a new masculinity--one that is caring, sensitive, compassionate, emotionally grounded, without sacrificing what is ineluctably masculine about males (i.e., their bodies, all "artifice" aside). Who knows? I just work here.
While it may also be true that women are "halfway there" when it comes to more relaxed standards of femininity, I think that, largely due to the work and courage of people such as the members on this board, men might not have as far to go as Ms. Brubach thinks in order to achieve the same kind of supple gender boundaries she believes are within hailing distance of most women. At least, this is devoutly to be wished for.
Now, let me shut the hell up!
Love,
CJ
Good point, Lydia. I wish I'd thought of that!
I laugh but the economic troubles down there are really no laughing matter--wherever one happens to be in the world.On to this week's excerpt.
October 6th 2008
Girlfriend: Men, Women, and Drag
H. Brubach, M.J. O'Brien. Random House; New York, NY; 1999. pp. 148-149
As for drag's capacity to unsettle the viewer, it could be argued that the more complete the transformation in a man's case, the less threatening it is. The man who closely approximates a woman challenges our thinking only when we finally realize that she is a man, and even then the chances are that we will find her not offensive or off-putting but disarming. By demonstrating that a man can "become" a woman, he confirms the message our culture sends via advertisements, magazines, movies: that femininity is predicated on artifice and therefore can be acquired. Being a woman--or being the kind of woman considered attractive and desirable--requires an effort. (RuPaul, the New York drag queen, made a brief, unsuccessful bid for pop stardom with a song called "You'd Better Work.") It's the drag queen who attempts and fails (or refuses) to conceal her identity as a man who is far more likely to make us uncomfortable, by confronting us with an image of compromised masculinity.
When it comes to women in drag, however, the situation is reversed: it's the partial transformation--the "butch" woman--that's easier to take in stride, while the woman who seems completely plausible as a man calls into question our standards of masculinity. Unlike femininity, which relies on makeup, on clothes that contort and exaggerate the shape of the body, masculinity has been construed as "natural," inimitable, indomitable--strictly the province of men. If a woman can convincingly simulate a man, then there must be something wrong with masculinity: it has failed to hold its ground; it has been proven impotent in the face of a woman's raid on its demeanor and appearance. While a man in drag may in fact uphold the ideology of femininity, a woman in drag is liable to undermine the ideology of masculinity.
(...)
The changes in women's lives that have come about over the course of the twentieth century have pretty much rendered obsolete the old incentives to dress in drag. In America, in Europe, in many other parts of the world, women can get an education and a job; they can travel alone, without the armor that a man's suit once provided; they can go to war or go to sea. For that matter, the impact of a woman dressed in drag now is nowhere near what it once was, in the days when pants and short hair were taboo. From where men stand, femininity--with all its accoutrements--is still a long way off, at a safe distance and then some, with a great divide separating them and it. But masculinity, or, at any rate, the access to its trappings, is for most women within hailing distance; women are already halfway there.
In our time the sight of a woman wearing a mustache and a man's suit is not as resonant as the sight of a man in a dress; if women in drag are somehow lacking in the zeal that animates their male counterparts, perhaps it's for lack of a mission. When they dress as Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot, drag queens take it upon themselves to perpetuate certain female types, many of which--among women, at least--have died a natural death. Seen in the aftermath of the feminist revolt, male drag can be interpreted as an act of mourning for a variety of womankind soon to be extinct. Women, however, appear to have no such nostalgia for the time-honored male stereotypes: the Cowboy, say, or the Army General or the Football Hero. Many, if not most, women, in fact, would just as soon see these monolithic roles abolished, to make way for a new masculinity, one that is subtler and more nuanced.
Yes, and I think that's part of the problem, this desire "many, if not most, women" have for a "subtler and more nuanced" masculinity; they will tell us this is what they'd like without telling us what form(s) such a masculinity is apt to take. We (men) are left with the task of "birthing" a new masculinity in a rather hodge-podge and hit-or-miss fashion; is it this? is it that? is it some other thing pending women's approval? Am I still too rugged? too stoic? or, conversely, too "feminine"? Or how about this? No? Okay, what about this? Damn! This is hard!
Men are searching for new masculinities, true. But not all men are. While it may be true that some men--certainly the gender-variant ones, as Brubach suggests--are nostalgic for "a variety of womankind soon to be extinct," it appears to me to be as true, if not more so, that most men are also nostalgic for a variety of "man-kind" (i.e., of masculinity) soon to be extinct. Well, most men I know, at any rate. Maybe this "surge" of male-to-female crossdressing we've been seeing in our culture over the past generation is but one type of attempt to accommodate women's desire to see the flourishing of a new masculinity--one that is caring, sensitive, compassionate, emotionally grounded, without sacrificing what is ineluctably masculine about males (i.e., their bodies, all "artifice" aside). Who knows? I just work here.
While it may also be true that women are "halfway there" when it comes to more relaxed standards of femininity, I think that, largely due to the work and courage of people such as the members on this board, men might not have as far to go as Ms. Brubach thinks in order to achieve the same kind of supple gender boundaries she believes are within hailing distance of most women. At least, this is devoutly to be wished for.
Now, let me shut the hell up!
Love,
CJ
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Anita
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3068
- Joined: Mon Jan 05, 2004 2:55 pm
- Location: Burlingame, CA (San Francisco Bay area)
That's alright, CJ, you can speak again just as soon as I'M through.
Trying to create a new masculinity just left me puzzled and angry. I didn't care for the old model of being masculine, and I didn't see any new ones that really appealed to me much, either. I didn't know about the alternatives that are represented on this forum.
Trying to create a new masculinity just left me puzzled and angry. I didn't care for the old model of being masculine, and I didn't see any new ones that really appealed to me much, either. I didn't know about the alternatives that are represented on this forum.