Asylum For Blood-Feuds-Affected Person -- Lawyer Recommandation

[Yes Virginia]

It is interesting to observe the contrasting attitudes of our left-liberal culture to the two kinds of crime, organized versus unorganized. Organized crime is essentially anarcho-capitalist, a productive industry struggling to govern itself; apart from attempts to monopolize and injure competitors, it is productive and non-aggressive. Unorganized, or street, crime, in contrast, is random, punkish, viciously aggressive against the innocent, and has no redeeming social feature. Wouldn't you know, then, that our leftist culture hates and reviles the Mafia and organized crime, while it lovingly excuses, and apologizes for, chaotic and random street punksviolence which amounts to "anarchy" in the bad, or common meaning. In a sense, street violence embodies the ideal of left-anarchism: since it constitutes an assault on the rights of person and property, and on the rule of law that codifies such rights.

Anarchy is Order. The A is for anarchy and the circle is represents the order.

Anarchy and anarchism mean "system and management without ruler(s), i.e. co-operation without repression, tyranny and slavery". The words anarchy and anarchism are a bit problematic. Anglophone languages are very much twisted in an Orwellian "1984" "newspeak" way, to fool the people via the education to worship authority.

The word "anarchy" origins from Greek. The original meaning, that everybody should stick to, is the following: The prefix "an" means "negation of", without what is mentioned in the suffix, but keeping what is essential in the matter. The suffix "archy" means "rule (not rules or law), ruler, rulers, superior in contrast to subordinates, etc. Anarchy is management, coordination and administration etc. without ruling and thus without rulers.

And thus anarchy means a) coordination, without rule from the bureaucracy broadly defined, the economical and/or political/administrative superiors in private and public sectors (in contrast to the people), downwards to the bottom, i.e. in a coercive manner. b) Thus, anarchy is higher forms of economical and political/administrative democracy; 1. ideally, i.e. 100% anarchy; meaning 100% coordination on equal footing, without superiors and subordinates, horizontal organization, and co-operation without coercion, or 2. practically, significant i.e. more than 50% degree of anarchy, i.e. more horizontally than vertically organized, i.e. more influence on the societal management  from the "bottom upwards", than from the bureaucracy,  from "the top downwards to the bottom".

The bureaucracy organized as a ruling management , i.e. significant downards to the people and the grassroots - and not just an insignificant tendency in this direction, is also called authority or authorities, the State as a social concept or in a societal perspective - as well as government. Thus anarchy is a way of organizing society where there is management and coordination without ruling and rulers, tyranny and slavery, i.e. the tendencies towards State, authority, authorities, government, bureaucracy and similar are insignificant or zero. The opposite of anarchy is different types of archies, i.e. ruling and rulers, authority, authorities, State in a societal perspective, government - economical and/or political/administrative. Archies may be mainly monarchy, oligarchy, polyarchy, ochlarchy (mob rule) and/or plutarchy.

Thus, the State, administration of State, government, authority/ies, must not be mixed up with public sector, services and utilities, central/confederal/federal or municipal included, 'res publica', as the negation of the private sector and sphere, because State, goverment etc in this context are about special forms of organization (or disorganization), i.e. all systems where the influence on the societal management and coordination goes mainly from the top towards the bottom, slavery and tyranny - chaotic included. Thus public sector, services and utilities, central/confederal/federal or municipal included, organized significant horizontally, are anarchist - and thus not the State, authority/ies etc. or a part of it. The concept of 'central' is here referring mainly to general matters, things concerning the whole country or all of the citizens, and must not be mixed up with centralist, centralism or centralization, the negation of decentralist, decentralism and decentralization.

Anarchism is political systems and organizations coordinated as anarchy in the above meaning and manner, but also the political tendency advocating anarchy understood this way, and the scientifical knowledge about anarchy and the ways to reduce non-anarchist tendencies.
Briefly defined anarchy and anarchism are coordination on equal footing, without superiors and subordinates, i.e. horizontal organization and co-operation without coercion. This means practically or ideally, i.e. ordinary vs. perfect horizontal organization respectively. Thus, anarchy and anarchism mean real democracy, economical and political/administrative, in private and public sector. And thus, anarchy means coordination without government, in the meaning of different forms of vertically organized, i.e. chaotic included, economic and/or political-administrative relations among people, (and thus not without public sector). "Coercion" is defined as restraint, hindrance, compulsion and government by force, ruling, i.e. repression, etc.

Never thought I would read this post in a law students forum..

[after hours]

So basically the nuclear family, as the base unit of consensus society, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy has to be abolished? I've read some authors advocate the more primal and more radical model -- the band.

The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance -- and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open -- not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc.

In fact in our society many forces are working -- largely invisibly -- to phase out the nuclear family and bring back the band. Breakdowns in the structure of Work resonate in the shattered "stability" of the unit-home and unit-family. One's "band" nowadays includes friends, ex-spouses and lovers, people met at different jobs and pow-wows, affinity groups, special interest networks, mail networks, etc. The nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret implosion of split atoms -- and the obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band.

According to Dallas Kenmare's strong words in "The Philosophy of Love," "It would be safe to say that all our troubles originate in a misunderstanding of sex and it is not an exaggeration to assert that, traced to its source, almost every human tragedy is a tragedy of love." Simply stated, the evils of ancient and modern civilization have been caused by our frustration about and failure to understand the meaning of sex. In "The Art of Loving," Erich Fromm proposes that "love" in the modern world is a highly individualist, marginal phenomenon, and not the social force it is meant to be, since love is the only power which can solve the global problems.

The Metaphysics of Sex

A global vision of the reproduction of the planet is called for. Such reproduction requires us to engage in philosophical eros. In planetary reproduction, biology and morality, sex and love, nature and idealization, must unite since there can be no creation without union. Through sexual union we understand the great mysteries of life, the renewal and fertility of the animal and plant kingdoms.

Lynn White, in his famous essay "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," firmly teaches us that traditional Christian dogma and its transcendental God, who has the power of virgin human conception, is responsible for the ecological breakdown our technology and science has caused. He writes, "More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one." Creating a new religious myth of creation requires the utter destruction of the existing structures of thought which means, first of all, destroying the concept of the sexless virgin birth. Joseph Campbell thought that the scientific cosmology in the Bible was scientifically outdated even before the text was put together in the last centuries B.C. and first A.D. He writes, "To be effective, a mythology must be up to date scientifically, based on a concept of the universe that is current, accepted, and convincing. In this sense, the myth of the Virgin Birth is the most dangerous scientific lie!


http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/4106/gaiareligion.gif

In the Judeo-Christian story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Eve disobeys God's command not to pick the fruit off the Tree of Life, which curses the first woman and man on Earth with the knowledge of good and evil. The Serpent Goddess is seen as Satan, who is responsible for their demise. Whitmont writes, "Good becomes what is practical and collectively approved. Bad is what brings about visible harm or damage and is not in keeping with custom." Consequently, sex-knowledge is associated with evil. Blaming woman for the fall of man from paradise made Eve, Adam's spiritual twin, his first enemy. Since sex-knowledge was considered evil, the possibility of mutual ecstasy of erotic union is no longer permissible. Their love for each other became a crime of disobedience, and their children were later believed to be afflicted with their "original sin." Their paradisiacal bliss and supernatural powers were taken from them as they became ashamed of their own bodies. Work then dominated over pleasure. "Her desire became his dominion" as she became his submissive, unhappy wife. Lost was the inner, spiritual, and poetic connection they once had. She was now his external possession. In God's kingdom, "eros was superseded by agape ["brotherly" love]." Spontaneous attraction was replaced by orthodox laws. Human and animal sacrifices were performed to vent man's violent, destructive, and sadomasochistic urges, and to "renew" his hatred of the sin and his guilt for taking part in "evil" acts. Those who found themselves outside the dominant group became scapegoats: animals, slaves, non-conformists, dissenters, prisoners of war, lawbreakers, and anyone outside the group or offenders against the group. In a word, outsiders were considered enemies.

Yahweh was a jealous God who demanded Eve to love Him with all her heart, mind, and soul; before the Fall, Eros was inclusive, but after the Fall Eros was repressed. "The love between the two welcomes the love and companionship of many." Consequently, after the Fall, love became a sterile commandment enforced by His will. Ever since, Eve has tried to convince Him that using physical force, electric shock treatments, or psychological drugs on her was not going to stop her from longing for the time when her Word was sacred. While the Greeks believed the ideal of the beautiful defined the highest communal good, the Hebrew God commanded one to love Him above all else. Following His commandments was the way to the good world. But it was impossible for Eve to love a world where men ruled over her. God had prevented sexuality and destroyed equality between the sexes. Consequently, the war between the sexes began.


http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/3150/denialoferoticlove.gif

To return to the childlike, beautiful state of the Garden is possible only with proper understanding of love and of the sacramental sex act. The new Eve, if we but chose to embrace her, dares Adam to become "consciously aware of one's depth and of life as an undivided whole." She uses the serpent power of the Word to convince him that the survival of the planet depends on the construction of her Neutopian vision and that the greatest social need of the epoch is for him to sow the seed. In order to work her miracle, she uses dialectical progression rather than dualism. She points out to man that the apostles of true love had neither wealth, military armies, communication networks, nor any other means of worldly influence, but still their creative love made the world more conscious of its human potential. Their power came not from appealing to envy, greed, selfishness, or lust, but by becoming examples of living spirits in the flesh. She asks him to recall the fact that the greatest conquerors and revolutionary leaders do not compare with these apostles of love in the magnitude and durability of the change brought about by their activities. Through their love, they could redirect destructive energies into a creative direction of building the ecocities of eroticism. As Phyllis Trible asserts in "God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality," all nature extols the love of female and male. All animals serve love. And the way to achieve this remarkable harmony is for his desire to become her delight. As spiritual equals no one tries to dominate the other or treat the other as a possession. She is no longer called his wife and the bearer of his offspring, but their "sexual play intertwines with work."

A strict sexual division of labor is nowdays no longer socially necessary, in fact its perpetuation presents a fetter even to the continued viability and continued profitability of capitalism. The decline of traditional patriarchal family, the massive movement of women into full-time paid labor force, the development and dissemination of modern birth control and the liberation od sexuality from necessary association with reproduction -- all these contribute towards enabling the emergence of a greatly expanded sexual culture, one focused directly upon the fulfillment of sexual desire and enrichment of sexual interaction. Such creates the precondition for the beginning of the development of a truly human sexuality: a sexuality founded upon the genuinely free, equal and voluntary sexual association of human beings.

[after hours]

The gender system we have instituted in our society dominated by the sexist culture involves the domination of men over women and institutionalized heterosexuality. It is by means of the abolition of this gender system and class that human beings really can change, really overcome the competition and struggle to dominate, the survival of the fittest, that reactionaries have always proclaimed is an eternal part of the human condition. Love is to be seen as a relationship between equals, rather than between dominant and subordinate.

What happens is that the biological category of "sex" gets transformed into the cultural category of "gender." The creation of "gender" is the construction of social identities of "man" and "woman" based upon a supposed parallel with the biological sex differences of "male" and "female," and this construction always operates to create a rigid binary division of these social identities and a hierarchically unequal relation between those assigned to the dominant, masculine position and those assigned to the subordinate, feminine position. Gender is socially constructed and not naturally predetermined. In fact, the new human being will be of a kind that would seem to us as intrinsically both masculine and feminine, as both a man and a woman, and because of this, really neither masculine nor feminine, neither man or woman, but instead something new, something of a character that will have superseded the usefulness and meaningfulness of such divisions and demarcations. Not only would this future human being seem to be what we would describe as "bisexual," but also this new human being would likely seem to us to be far more gay than straight (especially in the way this new human being engages in relations of intimacy and affection, friendship and love).

[please log in]

The gender system we have instituted in our society dominated by the sexist culture involves the domination of men over women and institutionalized heterosexuality. It is by means of the abolition of this gender system and class that human beings really can change, really overcome the competition and struggle to dominate, the survival of the fittest, that reactionaries have always proclaimed is an eternal part of the human condition. Love is to be seen as a relationship between equals, rather than between dominant and subordinate.

What happens is that the biological category of "sex" gets transformed into the cultural category of "gender." The creation of "gender" is the construction of social identities of "man" and "woman" based upon a supposed parallel with the biological sex differences of "male" and "female," and this construction always operates to create a rigid binary division of these social identities and a hierarchically unequal relation between those assigned to the dominant, masculine position and those assigned to the subordinate, feminine position. Gender is socially constructed and not naturally predetermined. In fact, the new human being will be of a kind that would seem to us as intrinsically both masculine and feminine, as both a man and a woman, and because of this, really neither masculine nor feminine, neither man or woman, but instead something new, something of a character that will have superseded the usefulness and meaningfulness of such divisions and demarcations. Not only would this future human being seem to be what we would describe as "bisexual," but also this new human being would likely seem to us to be far more gay than straight (especially in the way this new human being engages in relations of intimacy and affection, friendship and love).

I'd like to add that, as things are, nowadays it is gay people that are engaged in the freest and most equal relationships. They are already outside of the family and they have already, at least in part, rejected the "masculine" and "feminine" roles that society has designed for them. For straight men and women it is impossible to escape their rigid gender roles and those of oppressor and oppressed. Gay men and lesbian women don't need to oppress women in order to fulfill their own psychosexual needs, and lesbian women don't have to relate sexuality to the male oppressor. Homosexuality, love between people who are alike, is decisively distinct from heterosexuality in its structural feature that two people who are lovers of a third can themselves also, in principle, be lovers. Such provides an absolute precondition if rivalry and hate are to be ended.

I do believe gay men have a great deal to teach straight men about initiation and mourning the loss of power in the culture. Gay community is the story of what men gain by sacrificing the power conferred by gender when they come out of the closet. This is the pivotal real-life experience of every out gay man -- a usually terrifying sacrifice of conventional values and power. It is this that threatens most straight men (and the institutions they control), although it usually gets expressed simplistically in statements about envy or contempt of the gay people's sexual freedoms. The so-called straight man says he has no model for going "beyond the hero" and the conventional male warrior, forgetting or repressing the model right under his nose, represented for him in the gay community -- the man who has renounced, by whatever process and for various reasons, the "patriarchal dividend," i.e., the payoff for being part of the patriarchy. Straight men have much to learn from their homosexual counterparts about handling, containing, and transforming the pain that results from their "falling out" of unconscious identity with the patriarchy.

The breaking down of divisions between gay and straight is not going to happen by gay and straight meeting half-way. Because straight, by definition, is consonant with the gender system, the ground on which gays shall gradually converge with their straight brothers is on their side of the fence. If straights are serious about undermining masculinity, then they must accept the fact of their own deviance as defined by the existing order, and as long as they resist the idea and the reality of homosexuality, we can only see this as a deep-seated allegiance to the masculine gender that belies their professions of anti-sexism. Gays for their part refuse to accept that they are permanently set apart as the minority. This is a static view of the situation - viewed dynamically, they are the thin end of a wedge. Gayness is the wedge that splits open the gender system, in which feminine and masculine men fit together in the sexual division of labor: a double wedge in fact, as the rejection of heterosexuality and all it implies proceeds in parallel among both women and men. As more and more people follow gay people's lead and the gender system crumbles, they shall have to redefine themselves, no longer as a deviant minority but as the new majority, having only pity for the stubborn minority who still cling for a while to the traditional path.

Even when straight men are allied by common work, kinship or belief, they are still underneath it all enemy brothers; it is legendary how competition over women turns brotherhood into hate. Even when not immediately realized, this potential always lurks just beneath the surface, dividing men from one another and thus helping perpetuate the law of violence -- indeed it is the first precondition for masculine hierarchy. If men are to love one another, it must be possible for them to love one another in the full, sexual sense; as long as this is tabooed, inter-male competition can never be dissolved. What perpetuates this vicious competition, of course, is not the practice of heterosexuality, but the non-practice of homosexuality. It would disappear if the gender system were abolished, and human beings could relate to one another irrespective of biological sex, i.e., both homo and heterosexually, with the family accordingly replaced by a form of commune. But in this case, the resultant 'bisexuality' would be clearly established on the terms of homosexuality, or rather gayness. It would be a sexuality between essentially similar individuals, rather than essentially dissimilar, thus 'homosexual' rather than 'heterosexual.'

[ooo]

[...]

I do believe gay men have a great deal to teach straight men about initiation and mourning the loss of power in the culture. Gay community is the story of what men gain by sacrificing the power conferred by gender when they come out of the closet. This is the pivotal real-life experience of every out gay man -- a usually terrifying sacrifice of conventional values and power. It is this that threatens most straight men (and the institutions they control), although it usually gets expressed simplistically in statements about envy or contempt of the gay people's sexual freedoms. The so-called straight man says he has no model for going "beyond the hero" and the conventional male warrior, forgetting or repressing the model right under his nose, represented for him in the gay community -- the man who has renounced, by whatever process and for various reasons, the "patriarchal dividend," i.e., the payoff for being part of the patriarchy. Straight men have much to learn from their homosexual counterparts about handling, containing, and transforming the pain that results from their "falling out" of unconscious identity with the patriarchy.

[...]

Even when straight men are allied by common work, kinship or belief, they are still underneath it all enemy brothers; it is legendary how competition over women turns brotherhood into hate. Even when not immediately realized, this potential always lurks just beneath the surface, dividing men from one another and thus helping perpetuate the law of violence -- indeed it is the first precondition for masculine hierarchy. If men are to love one another, it must be possible for them to love one another in the full, sexual sense; as long as this is tabooed, inter-male competition can never be dissolved. What perpetuates this vicious competition, of course, is not the practice of heterosexuality, but the non-practice of homosexuality. It would disappear if the gender system were abolished, and human beings could relate to one another irrespective of biological sex, i.e., both homo and heterosexually, with the family accordingly replaced by a form of commune. But in this case, the resultant 'bisexuality' would be clearly established on the terms of homosexuality, or rather gayness. It would be a sexuality between essentially similar individuals, rather than essentially dissimilar, thus 'homosexual' rather than 'heterosexual.'

For one Freud has pointed to the sexual, and indeed the homoerotic, origins of political authority. He studied totemism and sought to locate the origins of the group, publishing "Totem and Taboo" in 1913. Although this is a very debatable work on his part, he did maintain in his later works that paternal proscription of sexual relations with the women of the clan passes to exogamy through homoerotic bonding. Freud locates the origins of the sons' collective organization, their ability to challenge the father's sexual monopoly, in "the homosexual feelings and activities which probably manifested themselves during the time of their banishment." The father's imposition of heterosexual austerities on his sons pushes them into mutual erotic identification, "into group psychology." After killing the primal father, the sons agree that all the clan's women would be denied them. In "Totem and Taboo" Freud made homoerotics into a substitution for heteroerotics, one standing at the origin of the first social contract, the sons' renunciation of the women of the clan as sensuous objects, and their conversion into sexual property to be exhanged exogamously. If exogamous heterosexuality is an original consequence of social organization, endogamous homosexuality is its original source. He never wavered on this foundational basis of modern social organization. Indeed in "Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego" Freud makes heterosexual desire into an enemy of social organization, whereas "desexualized, sublimated homosexual love for other, which springs from work in common" is a "civilizing factor." There is no room for woman as a sexual object, he writes, in the great artificial groups of society. The implication is, of course, that there is a place for men as sexual objects. "It seems certain," he writes, "that homosexual love is far more compatible with group ties, even when it takes the shape of uninhibited sexual impulsion..." If in his mythico-history he makes the homoerotics of the rother clan the mediation between the primal horde and exogamous patriarchy, in his clinical studies he makes homoerotics integral to the formation of the male individual ego, to masculine identification, and to the psychic operation of authority more generally.

Paternal identification also transmutes a homosexual object-choice, one that is at the heart of sociality. Just like the totemic clan the individual subject is formed through bodily representation. In "Ego and Id," he argues that the self - the ego - is first figured through an imagined body, a sexed morphological imaginary. The imagined body in whose bounded image ego formation takes place during the "mirror stage" has a sex. The male self is both formed and sexed as a resolution of an inhabitation of the bodily form of paternal authority, an outside which is in us, but not of us, but the condition for our being. This homoerotic loss initiates the ego as a perceptual object, as a container for reflexively turned, unavowable erotic desire and sadistic rage at its loss and unhabitatibility. That desire is both refused and retained in a melancholic gender identification, an ungrievable loss. Men want to have the femininity they can never be and want to be the masculinity they can never have. The habitable space of gender is grounded in an uninhabitable space of sex. Paternal identification solves not one, but two problems in this sexual economy. Group formation likewise operates through paternal identification, which, like his murder, is enabled through homoerotic solidarity among the sons. Immediately after explaining in "Group Psychology" that the introjected paternal object is a substitute for the libidinal object tie with the woman, Freud launches into the genesis of male homosexuality, the boy's failure to give up the mother as a cathected object, the "negative" Oedipal complex, the transformation of the male ego on the model of the female. Boy becomes girl mirroring the way in which he has the man, through the matrilineal totem, becoming woman. Group formation is a quintessentially masculine, yet involves men being womanly.

Freud makes homosocial energy the basis of solidarity in complex groups and locates the origin of the social in a renunciation of heterosexual desire. He derives the experience of consubstantiality of totem and man from a fleshy family, from the mother-child bond and the son's deferred identification with the father. Durkheim, in contrast, derives consubstantiality from the experience of a wider social, a representation of embodied oneness with other men. Freud's is an imaginary resolution to a scarce heterosexual economy, while Durkheim's is an imaginary expression of a fulfilled homosocial congress. In point of fact, Freud's clinical theory of individual development is more consistent with Durkheim's account of totemism than is his own historical mythology. In turn, Durkheim, points to the truth, and indeed a liberatory aspect, of Freud's homoerotic theory. For what in Freud is a feminizing, violent subordination to masculine hierarchy, is, in Durkheim, a masculinizing, non-violent, non-hierarchical assimilation. Freud eroticizes power; Durkheim does not. Both Durkheim and Freud make somatics into a constituent of semiosis, an immanent relation between individual and collective bodies, as metaphor, mechanics, and energitics of collective representation. Is it possible that the establishment of the state is itself a sexual act, a double separation of two sexes, woman and man, heterosexual and homosexual, that the state not only has a sex, but is a sex?

[Laudate omnes gentes]

I find it interesting to make a comment with respect to the two diametrically opposed kinds of homosexuality talked about in the last few posts - maybe I am being redundant, but the kind of homosexuality "ooo" talks about, normal homosexuality, is sanctioned by the society, while the kind that "please log in" talks about, gay homosexuality, stand in clear contradistinction to the former, in that it is frawned upon, repressed and called subversive.

To define yourself as gay... even in the minimal sense of accepting the judgement of the environing society that there is something different about you, is to recognize that your homosexuality has something different about it that is radically incompatible with the prevalent normality — that you are 'bent', 'queer' i.e. in no way a 'proper' man. In fact, gay men...really are effeminate. Gayness is a function of a deviance from the gendered system that is anchored in our personalities in the course of childhood experience, and the choice to build our lives around the homosexual preference that this induces. Even those gay men that seem to be quite masculine, and cultivate seemingly very "macho" forms of expression and communication of their homosexuality are still, by and large, more "effeminate" — more feminine — than most straight men. Even such a "masculine gay man" is unprepared for the inter-male struggle for dominance that accepting and conforming to the conventional heterosexual norm requires, and he is especially unable ever to view women first and last as simply "objects to @ # ! *." Moreover, even the masculine gay man "reduces himself" to the status of a woman in his readiness to fall in love with his peers among his fellow men — and it is important, moreover, to recognize that he is ready to fall totally in love; ready to seek out a total, and especially physical, expression and communication of attraction and desire; and ready to make himself dependent upon and vulnerable to the other, an extremely "un-masculine" position, and an extremely difficult and precarious position for anyone who is produced to be a "man" in a patriarchal sexist and heterosexist culture.

[b r e a c h]

[...] Even such a "masculine gay man" is unprepared for the inter-male struggle for dominance that accepting and conforming to the conventional heterosexual norm requires, and he is especially unable ever to view women first and last as simply "objects to @ # ! *." [...]

I doubt it that all straight men consider women, at least their wives, simply as "whores."

[Laura s]

I'd like to add that, as things are, nowadays it is gay people that are engaged in the freest and most equal relationships. They are already outside of the family and they have already, at least in part, rejected the "masculine" and "feminine" roles that society has designed for them. For straight men and women it is impossible to escape their rigid gender roles and those of oppressor and oppressed. Gay men and lesbian women don't need to oppress women in order to fulfill their own psychosexual needs, and lesbian women don't have to relate sexuality to the male oppressor. Homosexuality, love between people who are alike, is decisively distinct from heterosexuality in its structural feature that two people who are lovers of a third can themselves also, in principle, be lovers. Such provides an absolute precondition if rivalry and hate are to be ended.

I do believe gay men have a great deal to teach straight men about initiation and mourning the loss of power in the culture. Gay community is the story of what men gain by sacrificing the power conferred by gender when they come out of the closet. This is the pivotal real-life experience of every out gay man -- a usually terrifying sacrifice of conventional values and power. It is this that threatens most straight men (and the institutions they control), although it usually gets expressed simplistically in statements about envy or contempt of the gay people's sexual freedoms. The so-called straight man says he has no model for going "beyond the hero" and the conventional male warrior, forgetting or repressing the model right under his nose, represented for him in the gay community -- the man who has renounced, by whatever process and for various reasons, the "patriarchal dividend," i.e., the payoff for being part of the patriarchy. Straight men have much to learn from their homosexual counterparts about handling, containing, and transforming the pain that results from their "falling out" of unconscious identity with the patriarchy.

The breaking down of divisions between gay and straight is not going to happen by gay and straight meeting half-way. Because straight, by definition, is consonant with the gender system, the ground on which gays shall gradually converge with their straight brothers is on their side of the fence. If straights are serious about undermining masculinity, then they must accept the fact of their own deviance as defined by the existing order, and as long as they resist the idea and the reality of homosexuality, we can only see this as a deep-seated allegiance to the masculine gender that belies their professions of anti-sexism. Gays for their part refuse to accept that they are permanently set apart as the minority. This is a static view of the situation - viewed dynamically, they are the thin end of a wedge. Gayness is the wedge that splits open the gender system, in which feminine and masculine men fit together in the sexual division of labor: a double wedge in fact, as the rejection of heterosexuality and all it implies proceeds in parallel among both women and men. As more and more people follow gay people's lead and the gender system crumbles, they shall have to redefine themselves, no longer as a deviant minority but as the new majority, having only pity for the stubborn minority who still cling for a while to the traditional path.

Even when straight men are allied by common work, kinship or belief, they are still underneath it all enemy brothers; it is legendary how competition over women turns brotherhood into hate. Even when not immediately realized, this potential always lurks just beneath the surface, dividing men from one another and thus helping perpetuate the law of violence -- indeed it is the first precondition for masculine hierarchy. If men are to love one another, it must be possible for them to love one another in the full, sexual sense; as long as this is tabooed, inter-male competition can never be dissolved. What perpetuates this vicious competition, of course, is not the practice of heterosexuality, but the non-practice of homosexuality. It would disappear if the gender system were abolished, and human beings could relate to one another irrespective of biological sex, i.e., both homo and heterosexually, with the family accordingly replaced by a form of commune. But in this case, the resultant 'bisexuality' would be clearly established on the terms of homosexuality, or rather gayness. It would be a sexuality between essentially similar individuals, rather than essentially dissimilar, thus 'homosexual' rather than 'heterosexual.'

I find this post quite interesting (to say the least) - I was reading the other day smth along the same lines. I am quoting the whole thing as I found it:

ANONYMOUS SEX WITH MULTIPLE PARTNERS, WHILE HAVING AS MUCH AS SEX AS POSSIBLE, AND AS PUBLICLY AS POSSIBLE IS THE CORNERSTONE OF REAL GAY LIBERATION.

LOTS OF ANONYMOUS GAY SEX IS THE ANSWER TO THE 'TYRANNY OF THE NORMAL' TO BUTTRESS ANTI-GAY ARGUMENTS THAT HOMOSEXUALS ARE OUT TO SUBVERT THE MORAL ORDER.

[countryman]

I find this post quite interesting (to say the least) - I was reading the other day smth along the same lines. I am quoting the whole thing as I found it:

ANONYMOUS SEX WITH MULTIPLE PARTNERS, WHILE HAVING AS MUCH AS SEX AS POSSIBLE, AND AS PUBLICLY AS POSSIBLE IS THE CORNERSTONE OF REAL GAY LIBERATION.

LOTS OF ANONYMOUS GAY SEX IS THE ANSWER TO THE 'TYRANNY OF THE NORMAL' TO BUTTRESS ANTI-GAY ARGUMENTS THAT HOMOSEXUALS ARE OUT TO SUBVERT THE MORAL ORDER.

I am not sure in what sense you use the phrase "to subvert the moral order," but you (person you quote) are certainly not the first to use and actually practice it .. take for instance, Roger Baldwin, who aligned himself with Lenin's totalitarian regime in Russia. Baldwin described it as ''the greatest and most daring experiment yet undertaken to recreate society in terms of human values.'' He lauded the Soviet state for the liberty of anti-religion.

During World War II, Baldwin sought to legitimize the work of civil liberties in the eyes of the establishment. He focused on the courts as the best and surest path to radical reform. Instead of subverting the moral order of the nation and its institutions openly through revolution, he draped his subterfuge in the rhetoric and aura of constitutionalism, liberty and patriotism.
   
The ACLU is all about achieving socialist humanism in America, which denies God and moral absolutes. Former USA Communist Party Chief Gus Hall stated, ''Our battle will be won not when freedom of speech is finally taken away, but when Americans become so adjusted and conditioned to getting along with the group that when they finally see the threat, they say, 'I can't afford to be controversial.''' Our freedoms require us to be controversial.

[bystander]

ANONYMOUS SEX WITH MULTIPLE PARTNERS, WHILE HAVING AS MUCH AS SEX AS POSSIBLE, AND AS PUBLICLY AS POSSIBLE IS THE CORNERSTONE OF REAL GAY LIBERATION.

LOTS OF ANONYMOUS GAY SEX IS THE ANSWER TO THE 'TYRANNY OF THE NORMAL' TO BUTTRESS ANTI-GAY ARGUMENTS THAT HOMOSEXUALS ARE OUT TO SUBVERT THE MORAL ORDER.

I just do not get it why one wants to do a revolution to become a whore, you can be a whore without having to do any revolution at all!