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Although few readers of this site would disagree that believing you were born in the wrong body is a sign of mental illness, what does it say about those of us who feel we were born in the wrong era? (more…)

Norman Rockwell, Doctor and Doll, 1942.

1,692 words

I’m a blond bimbo girl, in a fantasy world
Dress me up, make it tight, I’m your dolly!

We live in an era of apparently rampant transsexualism. The media insist upon spotlighting various gender-benders and forcing them down the throat of a captive audience, at which point vinegar-drinking moral guardians insist that the captive audience reiterates the lies (more…)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Dance, 1566.

5,603 words

Die single and thine image dies with thee.

— William Shakespeare, Sonnet III

Half of all millennials are single. They are the loneliest generation ever. (more…)

Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: a modern take on the motifs of the weird nineteenth century.

5,476 words

It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind;
Still we be the children of the heather and the wind.
Far away from home, O it’s still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie. [1]

Even below the Missouri-Compromise Line, the mornings now have a delicious coolness, faltering on the edge of a “chill,” and I found myself yearning for an old-fashioned, nineteenth-century ghost story. (more…)

Frédéric Delavier

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Frédéric Delavier is a French author of books on bodybuilding, who also became a philosopher. His book Guide to Bodybuilding Movements was first published in 1998 and was a worldwide bestseller, with over two million copies sold. It has been translated into more than thirty languages. He is also known as an educational and critical videographer on his YouTube channel. He recently published a treatise on philosophy, The Awakening of Consciousnesses (L’Éveil des Consciences), which is awaiting translation into English.

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2,898 words

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 here

Transhumanism — The Final Showdown

The West, in its essence, is neither a human nor a natural society. The current debate – is gender real? – is not directed at finding truth but is instead a program of action – “we will make it so that there is no such thing as gender.” Masculinity and femininity, their polarity, will be abolished. (more…)

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Part 1 of 2

Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler – “Martin Spengler” – these two 20th-century thinkers provide the main source of inspiration behind this project. Both sought to understand the times we live in, and to bring into view the deeper historical and philosophical significance underlying many of the political, economic, social, and cultural issues before us today. (more…)

The Painter's Honeymoon by Lord Frederick Leighton, 1864

2,355 words

Part 6 of 6. For the whole series, click here.

Now, some might respond to Lawrence’s description of marriage by asking, understandably, “Where is love in all of this? What has become of love between man and wife?” Yet Lawrence speaks again and again, especially in Women in Love, of love between man and wife as a means to wholeness, as a way to transcend the false, ego-centered self. In a 1914 letter he tells a male correspondent: (more…)

Icarus by Lord Frederick Leighton

1,970 words

Part 5 of 6. For the whole series, click here.

4. A New Relation Between Man and Woman

So what is to be done? How are we to repair the damage that has been done in the modern world to the relation between the sexes? How are we to make men into men again, and women into women?

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Astarte Syriaca by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1877

2,757 words

Part 4 of 6. For the whole series, click here.

3. The Nature of Woman

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “Women will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other’s game, but they will remain apart.” (more…)

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Part 3 of 6. For the whole series, click here.

2. The Nature of Man

As we have seen, Lawrence believes that men (most men) need to have a woman in their lives. Their relationship to a woman serves to ground their lives, and to provide the man not only with a respite from the woes of the world, but with energy and inspiration. (more…)

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Part 2 of 6. For the whole series, click here.

In a 1923 newspaper interview Lawrence is quoted as saying “If men were left to themselves, they would rush off . . . into destruction. But women keep life back at its own center. They pull the men back. Women have enormous passive strength, the strength of inertia.” Here Lawrence uses an image he was very fond of: women are at the center, the hub. This is because they are closer to “the source” than men are.

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Venus and Mars by Sidney Harold Meteyard

2,077 words

Part 1 of 6. For the whole series, click here.

1. Love and Strife

In a 1913 letter D. H. Lawrence writes that “it is the problem of to-day, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women.” (more…)

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To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

This past February 11 was the 20th anniversary of the suicide in London of the American poet and writer Sylvia Plath. Since her death a continuous stream of biographies, critical surveys, and memoirs — as well as earlier unpublished stories, letters, and journals by the poet herself — has issued from the publishers, finally allowing Sylvia Plath the fame and recognition she yearned for while alive. Her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982. (more…)

Cristofano Allori. "Judith with the Head of Holofernes," 1613

1,470 words

Each sex has the instincts, emotions and mental powers related to the kind of life that it will have to lead, and the corresponding limitation in selecting and rejecting. For instance, the male as the active par­ticipator in coition is the wooer and initiator; he has to awaken desire for himself in the female, and finds his pleasure in these roles. The fe­male finds pleasure in being captivated, in surrendering herself, in yielding to initiation, provided that she approves of the male.

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David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (New Line Cinema, 2005) is truly a superb movie, with a tight and economical script (the whole story is told in 96 minutes), a remarkably subtle and gripping performance by Viggo Mortensen (his best ever, in my opinion), excellent performances from the rest of the cast, and an unostentatiously elegant directorial style (unmarred by the middlebrow pretentiousness and penchant for the juvenile and repulsive that ruin most of Cronenberg’s movies).

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