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Please note that this talk is
being sponsored by YOPS and FARC
The Yale Organization for the
Promotion of Sexism and
The Federal Association of
Racism against Chinese People.
It is also dedicated to
George W. Bush, my model and mentor, and the only person in the world
who is able to produce more discursive rubbish in a single minute
than myself.
Time
and again during our weekly gathering, the women question, as I would
like to call it, has darkened the clouds in the sky of our table
talk. The atmosphere, though destined to be friendly in the light of
the bountifulness of the food courts of the Yale Dining Halls, has
been clouded and filled with rage and fury, caused, paradoxically, by
the existence of those delicate creatures, one of whom we have the
extraordinary pleasure of sharing our table with, those delicate
blossoms of nature's flower, which look, in the most favorable cases
at least, as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. Hence, several
amongst us have, justifiably so, meseems, asked the question: Do we
need women?
To answer this question, however, we first have to ask – and
answer in the affirmative – the more fundamental question: Is
there such thing as "woman"?
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, has remarked: One is not born
a woman [add: rather, one is made a woman]. And French-Canadian
Lesbian Activist Monique Wittig has even claimed during a talk given
in Paris: I am not a woman.
Indeed,
Feminist Theory has long attempted – without success, by the
way - to destabilize the fundamental category of woman, and to
replace it by the cultural or discursive construct "gender."
Rightly so, you might say – just have a look at a picture of
the Yale Women's Rugby team, just go to Payne Whitney and have a look
at the bitch who has been blocking the biceps trainer – as if
women had or needed a biceps – for the past thirty minutes,
just go to Dunham cluster and have a look at Dongdong and Kim Fung
Toi or whatever their names are – or rather don't, lest you
should end up as a pillar of salt.
Are
these women? Would you like them to be called women?
Yet,
however, it is an undeniable fact that there are fundamental
differences between one half of the world and the other. Watching
football vs. reading romances, doing politics vs. knitting (a
difference that the German Green Party has tried to annihilate, as I
will claim in my forthcoming book Florian explains it all),
washing the children vs. washing the car, doing the dishes vs. doing
the women. Seen from a certain socially and biologically essentialist
perspective, there is indeed a number of human beings one might
subsume under the overarching term of "woman."
Our first initial doubt cleared away, let us now return to the main topic
of this talk: yes, there are women, but what do we need them for?
With the invention of
throw-away-dishes, internet purchasing and test-tube-children,
American society in the twentieth century has worked hard to replace
women in some of their most important functions. We are then, at
least in the Western World of the twentieth and the twenty-first
century, I think, left with the core function of women within
society: pleasure.
As some of us might know,
women can indeed be a source of pleasure for men. It is a pleasure to
look at their naturally inherent beauty from a distance as to adore
their most feminine characteristics – looks, smell, gracious
movements from close-up, and their delicate charms bring an
undeniable magic to every conversation, even the most hurried and
superficial chat.
It is these pleasures, it
seems to me,….
Oh yeah, and I forgot,
fucking them is not bad, either.
Ok, so our first
preliminary answer to our question "why do we need women?"
would be: "we need women for pleasure" I follows then that
what we need are women with the characteristics and the ability to
give us pleasure, pleasurable women, so to speak, and what we do not
need are women who don't have these characteristics or abilities.
It seems to me that there
are two subgroups of women which fall under these category: Chinese
women and lesbian women. One might certainly object that there are
numerous other women, - none of whom is fortunately present today.
Or, well, no, not as far as I can see, that there numerous other
women, who do not fulfill our requirements. These women, however, can
be helped. Again, it has been the America of the 20th and
21st century whose inventions – most notably weight
watchers, Stairmasters and plastic surgery, which has helped us to
solve these problems.
God bless America!
But let us now focus on
those women, who – despite these laudable inventions -, will
never be able to serve as a source of pleasure: Chinese women,
because they can't, and Lesbian women, because they don't want to.
(of course, remembering our encounters at Payne Whitney, Mr. Heuser
and Mr. Wallraff will certainly argue with me that to a certain
extent, lesbian women cannot, either).
Astonishingly, given the
initial complexity of our question, the solution, then, seems to be
fairly simple: we don't need Chinese women and Lesbians.
Chinese women, one might
say, however, are, for reasons that are not easy for us to
understand, and which would certainly serve as a topic for another
talk, able to give pleasure to Chinese men. It seems then that the
existence of Chinese men and women may be compared to a perpetuum
mobile, a self-serving and self-maintaining principle that nature has
installed out of self-irony, comparable to the basic structure of
GESO.
The
same might be said, of course, of Lesbian women. The redundancy of
Lesbian women, however, opens up another seemingly difficult problem:
if we do not need lesbian women, then why should we need gay men:
To answer a question with a question:
Question:
why do we need gay men?
Answer:
who else would give us our haircuts?
However, both Chinese
women and Lesbians exist, and, therefore, have a right to exist. But
notice that that is like rain and tax….it is inevitable.
It
seems to me that this is the real, the basic, the fundamental problem
of our self-definition as heterosexual men, the lesson that nature
teaches us: we live in a world which we believe we have shaped
according to our preferences. What the existence of Chinese women and
Lesbians forces us to accept, however, is the existence of a primary
power, namely, nature, or God, which we cannot control.
This then would form the theoretical and discursive bridge between
essentialism, sexism, and racism against Chinese people.
Thank you very much.
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;)
