blablablaandgabbler

“Feminism is going to make it possible for the first time for men to be free.”

Posted on March 29, 2019March 29, 2019 by blablablaandgabbler

“Feminism is going to make it possible for the first time for men to be free.

At present the ordinary man has the choice between being a slave and being a scoundrel.

For the ordinary man is prone to fall in love and marry and have children…He wants to see them all taken care of, since they are unable to care for themselves.

Yet, if he has them to think about, he is not free… The bravest things will not be done in the world until women do not have to look to men for support…[But] men don’t want the freedom that women are thrusting on them. They don’t want a chance to be brave…They want to give food and clothes and a little home with lace curtains to some woman.

Men want the sense of power more than they want the sense of freedom… They want someone dependent on them more than they want a comrade. As long as they can be lords in a thirty-dollar flat, they are willing enough to be slaves in the great world outside…

In short, they are afraid that they will cease to be sultans in little monogamic harems. But the world doesn’t want sultans. It wants men who call their souls their own. And that is what feminism is going to do for men – give them back their souls, so that they can risk them fearlessly in the adventure of life.”

-Floyd Dell, “Feminism for Men,” 1914.

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: The OA: Part II

Posted on March 28, 2019 by blablablaandgabbler

“It’s not surprising that The OA: Part II ends by making another new beginning. What is shocking is that it does so by referencing its own existence as a work of art. It’s a move that seems a little cynical and earthbound within the context of The OA’s earnest sensibility and fantastical yet sincere world-building. But if, as Eliot’s poem suggests, the end of The OA: Part II is meant to “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time,” I have to think the series, which Marling and Batmanglij say they’ve mapped out for five seasons, may eventually take us back to an altered version of the dimension where things began in season one.

That meta twist seems like an important step on that circular path. Based on what little we see of the TV show at the end of the finale — the fictional TV show in the third universe, that is — it’s completely unclear what story is being told, how it syncs with the actual series we’re watching, how many other characters will appear in this metafictional dimension.”

[Via Vulture ]

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: On the Cult of Originality: What Byzantine Literary Culture Can Tell Us About Fanfiction by Arkady Martine

Posted on March 24, 2019 by blablablaandgabbler

“And yet: we are surrounded by literature which is not original and which is successful, enjoyed, and persistent.

This literature is described as flawed, insufficient, not morally improving nor useful to the scholar; self-indulgent, archaizing, written by un-scholarly or un-imaginative persons, or worse yet, by members of marginalized groups; literature which is full of tropes, of expected emotional beats, of Happy-For-Ever endings; literature written using someone else’s characters, for no monetary gain, merely social pleasure and social currency. Literature which insists on being unavoidably present: produced by both the most-educated and the least-privileged—and unequivocally enjoyed (and reproduced, traded, invoked) by both these groups?

You think I’m talking about transformative fanwork here. And I am. But I’m also talking about Byzantine literature from the 9th-12th centuries. What’s interesting is how similar the problems are in evaluating whether some piece of writing is good if we use the criteria of originality to make that determination … both for Byzantine literature and for modern transformative works.”