rex pemberton

…my horror at the idea of legalized prostitution is not that it doesn’t work as a rape deterrent, but that it institutionalizes the concept that it is man’s monetary right, if not his divine right, to gain access to the female body, and that sex is a female service that should not be denied the civilized male. Perpetuation of the concept that the ‘powerful male impulse’ must be satisfied with immediacy by a cooperative class of women, set aside and expressly licensed for this purpose, is part and parcel of the mass psychology of rape. Indeed, until the day is reached when prostitution is totally eliminated (a millennium that will not arrive until men, who create the demand, and not women who supply it, are fully prosecuted under the law), the false perception of sexual access as an adjunct of male power and privilege will continue to fuel the rapist mentality.

…what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind. Lacking that, what is writing but ridiculous self-indulgence? I get frightened sometimes at the idea that the itch to write is cured.

Isn’t it awful? I am going down the drain. How can I write about the great problems of mankind when I have no part in them, when I sit on my ass like a Virginia Woolf lady most of the year, and have a horizon as wide as half a silver dollar?

The thoughts that used to kindle my soul and heart have lost their glow and ardency: or else my heart is numbed, or else…I am afraid to go on with that sentence.

People. People. Endless noise. And I am so tired. And I would like to sleep under trees; red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones.

yonderly

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

It would be revealing to study the analogies between the sexual organs and the tools which men have invented in different historical epochs and for different modes of production. It is not accidental that in our time men call their penis a ‘screwdriver’ (they ‘screw’ a woman), a ‘hammer’, a ‘file’, a ‘gun’, etc. In the harbour of Rotterdam, a trading port, male sexual organs are called ‘the trade’. This terminology tells us a great deal about how men define their relationship to nature, but also to women and to their own bodies. It is an indication of the close link in the minds of men between their work instruments and their labour process and the self-conception of their own bodies.