Author: Douglas Galbi

the Great Society has been demolished along with monuments to Johnson

Great Society of Lyndon Johnson

The Great Society that Lyndon Johnson began to build has been demolished. Johnson was a towering leader in the U.S. Senate and then President of the U.S. He was proud of the size of his penis, which he nicknamed “Jumbo.” Johnson would manipulate his genitals during meetings and urinate in front of female and male subordinates in the parking lot of the U.S. Capitol. Holding his penis and turning to a male colleague in the bathroom, Johnson said, “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?” That colleague never complained of Johnson sexually harassing him. Women and men will never again see a Johnson like that Johnson.

Power is the problem. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” Henry Kissinger knowingly explained. When President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky engaged in non-heteronormative sex in the Oval Office complex, the power imbalance between the two undoubtedly helped to make the cigar more thrilling. The powers that rule have ruled that a power imbalance makes sex illicit. Ordinary persons can do nothing against that powerful ruling. Men are now impotent; women, distraught.

Hollywood and other fantasy producers no longer offer an escape. Long ago, a young actress from Algeria went to study in Paris:

She got to know a French producer as old as her father. Very rich and very influential. Married and with children older than she was. He fell in love with her. Her skin was brown and smooth and she was passionate. He went crazy over her. She drove him insane. He promised he would produce a blockbuster with her as the heroine, and he kept his word. You know what this generation’s like, everything all in a hurry. She wanted to be a famous actress, and he was obsessed with her youth. He would follow her to Tunis whenever she went there to visit her family.

Their relationship ended, not like some prominent men’s careers have ended recently, but in a more humane way:

He died. They were together. He was making love to her. He died on top of her. Someone asked if he’d died before he’d come or after. No one knew the answer.

Natural death is no longer a fitting end. Survivor women who suffered sex with men must be made into heroines. Their lovers must be public flayed. Then they must be killed in ritual sacrifice to the idol of gender power equality and the structural injustice of top and bottom. Men must be wary to remain alive and sane.

The Thinker has been exiled from respected public discourse. Some still longingly remember his presence:

I was confident that the Thinker would appear before me one day at a sudden turning, and he would say, like the first time, “It grabs me by the throat.” He would ask me about my honey, as though he had left me the day before, and I would reply that he should look for the answer for himself; that it was up to him to stretch out his hand and put it between my thighs and taste. “The proof of the sweetness of the honey is the honey itself,” says Ibn Arabi. I used to say it in front of him, and then he became the one who would repeat it, to teach me what I already knew.

Now anyone who says that some women might want certain men to reach out and grab the honey between their thighs is publicly classed as a sexual predator in authoritative news reports. Honey has turned to sorrel.

The Great Society has been demolished. Yet few dare speak or write of what’s happening. American society isn’t headed toward being made great again.

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Notes:

On Johnson calling his penis “Jumbo,” urinating in the Capitol Hill parking lot, manipulating his genitals, and proudly displaying the size of his penis, Caro (2003) p. 121.

Henry Kissinger stated with respect to his sexual affairs, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Quoted in the The New York Times, 28 October 1973.

The most authoritative source for documentation on Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton’s relationship is the Starr Report. Here’s a review of reporting on the Lewinsky / Clinton story.

The account of the actress’s affair is from Nu’aymī (2009) p. 66. On the woman encouraging a man to reach out and put his hand onto her vagina, id. p. 140. Ibn Arabi was a twelfth-century Islamic scholar, Sufi mystic, philosopher, and poet. Ibn Arabi was educated in Seville. He traveled and lived throughout the Islamic world of the twelfth century.

[image] Photo (slightly cropped) of President Lyndon B. Johnson socializing with Abe Fortas a day after nominating him to the Supreme Court. Photo made on July 29, 1965. Johnson’s body language shows his capabilities for providing the “Johnson treatment.” LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto. Photo serial number A966-16. Thanks to the LBJ Library for preserving this photo in the public domain.

References:

Caro, Robert A. 2003. Master of the Senate: the years of Lyndon Johnson. New York: Vintage Books.

Nu’aymī, Salwá (Salwa al Neimi), from Arabic trans. Carol Perkins. 2009. The proof of the honey. New York: Europa Editions.

aetas Ovidiana: friar labored to ensure boy equipped with Naso

Ovid Naso

Medieval Latin literature highly valued the classical poetry of Naso, also known as Ovid. In fact, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have become known among medieval scholars as “the Ovidian Age {Aetas Ovidiana}.”[1] Learned men in the Middle Ages recognized that studying Ovid was vital for intellectually preparing a boy for manhood. Not surprisingly, a Franciscan friar filled with love for neighbor vigorously engaged in erection labor to ensure that a boy became equipped with a nose.

The friar loved a lovely young woman recently married to one of his neighbors. The young woman soon became pregnant. Meeting with her and her husband, the friar prophesied that the child would bring them great unhappiness. The couple pressed to know more, but the friar refused to speak further. Anxious to know the nature of the impending calamity, the woman secretly summoned the friar and begged him to speak. After impressing upon her the necessity of maintaining secrecy, he declared that she would bear a son, but he would be born “without a nose {absque naso}.” According to the friar, not having a nose is “the foulest mark of all on a human face {turpissima omnium in facie hominis nota}.” That indicates how highly Naso was valued in the Middle Ages.

Terrified at the news that her son wouldn’t be equipped with Naso, the lovely young woman begged the friar for a remedy. He consented and explained:

it was necessary to set a certain day for a work of God when he would have sex with her and supplement her husband’s deficiency and add a nose to the child.

{ certa die opus esse, ut cum ea concumberet, et se suppleturum viri defectum, et puero additurum nasum. } [2]

Not wanting her infant to be born deformed, the woman reluctantly agreed. She submitted to the friar on the appointed day. That wasn’t enough:

Saying that he needed to perfect the nose, he came back and had sex with her many times. She, from a sense of modest, was lying still, but the friar ordered her to gyrate, since with friction the nose would better adhere.

{ cum ille nondum nasum perfectum esse diceret, saepius cum muliere concubuit. Illa, prae verecundia, cum staret immobilis, Frater moveri eam jubebat, ut ex confricatione magis nasus cohaereret. }

The young woman subsequently gave birth to a boy with a very prominent nose. She herself told her husband how their son had been equipped with a nose. He responded magnanimously, as husbands are prone to do:

he praised his wife, and didn’t disparage the work of his fellow-father.

{ maritus laudavit, et operam compatris non est aspernatus. }

Ovid would have been delighted with all of them.

We are no longer in an Aetas Ovidiana. In the Middle Ages, husbands were thought to preserve wives’ health through sex. Now a large share of husbands are disparaged as rapists. Moreover, the criminalization of men seducing women explicitly includes men having sex with women under the pretense of providing medical treatment.[3] What will be the result of this calamitous lack of appreciation for Ovid, no one knows.

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Notes:

[1] Early in the twentieth century, the Latin scholar Ludwig Traube described an aetas Virgiliana (seventh and eight centuries), an aetas Horatiana (tenth and eleventh centuries), and then an aetas Ovidiana (twelfth and thirteenth centuries). In fact, aetas Ovidiana characterizes well most of the European Middle Ages. Monastic readers in Benedictine missions from the ninth century gave Ovid central importance in the surviving classical tradition. Clark (2011) p. 177. Interest in Ovid rapidly grew:

In the centuries of greatest monastic expansion — c. 950 to c. 1150 — Ovid emerged as the pre-eminent Latin master of the cloister, the companion of the schoolboys, novices and juniors, and also the corruption of their senior colleagues

Id. p. 178. Late medieval English monastic readers remained keenly interested in Ovid. In fact, most learned persons throughout the Middle Ages were interested in Ovid:

he {Ovid} belonged not only to the aetas Ovidiana — the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — or to Benedictine monks alone, but was shared among Christian readers of various religious affiliations until the end of the Middle Ages and beyond.

Wenzel (2011) p. 160. Preachers transmitted Ovid to the whole of medieval society. Among 2,500 sermons from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, over one hundred refer to Ovid. Id. Ovid was used in sermons much more often than either Virgil or Horace were. Id. p. 175.

On the reception of Ovid generally, Newlands & Miller (2014).

[2] Poggio, Facetiae 223, “A Minorite friar who made a child’s nose {De fratre minorum qui fecit nasum puero},” Latin text from Poggoi (1879) vol. 2, pp. 150-3. Here and subsequent quotes include my English translation, drawing upon that of id., but tracking the Latin more closely. All subsequent quotes above are similarly from id.

The Franciscans were originally called the Ordo Fratrum Minorum (“The Order of the Minor Brothers”), also known as Minorites.

[3] See, e.g., Boyett v. State (1964), 8 Div. 907, Court of Appeals of Alabama. 159 So.2d 628 (1964). Women deceiving men into having sex isn’t criminalized. For example, a woman who has breast enlargement implants and doesn’t inform a man of that reality before having sex with him isn’t subject to a criminal charge of sex by deception. Here’s more on the historical criminalization of men seeking sex with women.

[image] Portrait in profile of Ovid. This portrait (and its reflection about a vertical axis) is widely disseminated on the web, but not convincingly sourced. It appears to be a print from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

References:

Clark, James G., Frank Thomas Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley, eds. 2011. Ovid in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, James G. 2011. “Ovid in the monasteries: the evidence from late medieval England.” Ch. 9 (pp. 177-196) in Clark, Coulson & McKinley (2011).

Newlands, Carole Elizabeth, and John F. Miller, eds. 2014. A handbook to the reception of Ovid. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Poggio. 1879. Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini. The facetiae or jocose tales of Poggio, now first translated into English with the Latin text. Paris: Isidore Liseux (vol. 1, vol. 2).

Wenzel, Siegfried. 2011. “Ovid from the pulpit.” Ch. 8 (pp. 160-176) in Clark, Coulson & McKinley (2011).

it’s always men’s fault: Jacques de Vitry blamed men for castration culture

medallion depicting Jacques de Vitry, 1518

In early thirteenth-century Europe, church leader Jacques de Vitry recognized the harm that castration culture was inflicting. Castration culture has roots in gynocentric society and Hesiod’s influential Theogony. It’s entangled within the intimate, mundane relations of ordinary women. Nonetheless, consistent with social bias toward blaming and punishing men, Jacques de Vitry blamed men for castration culture.

In medieval Europe, priests were understood to be figures of Christ married to the church, the bride of Christ. This figure required ordinary Christian men to understand themselves to be part of the “female” church. The female gender of the church tended to support gynocentrism and devalue masculinity. However, Paul of Tarsus, with heroic commitment to Jesus, unequivocally turned against husband’s subordination to their wives in the dominant Roman culture. He taught:

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

{ αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὡς τῷ κυρίῳ ὅτι ἀνήρ ἐστιν κεφαλὴ τῆς γυναικὸς ὡς καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς κεφαλὴ τῆς ἐκκλησίας αὐτὸς σωτὴρ τοῦ σώματος ἀλλὰ ὡς ἡ ἐκκλησία ὑποτάσσεται τῷ Χριστῷ οὕτως καὶ αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἀνδράσιν ἐν παντί οἱ ἄνδρες ἀγαπᾶτε τὰς γυναῖκας καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς ἠγάπησεν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν καὶ ἑαυτὸν παρέδωκεν ὑπὲρ αὐτῆς ἵνα αὐτὴν ἁγιάσῃ καθαρίσας τῷ λουτρῷ τοῦ ὕδατος ἐν ῥήματι ἵνα παραστήσῃ αὐτὸς ἑαυτῷ ἔνδοξον τὴν ἐκκλησίαν μὴ ἔχουσαν σπίλον ἢ ῥυτίδα ἤ τι τῶν τοιούτων ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα ᾖ ἁγία καὶ ἄμωμος οὕτως ὀφείλουσιν καὶ οἱ ἄνδρες ἀγαπᾶν τὰς ἑαυτῶν γυναῖκας ὡς τὰ ἑαυτῶν σώματα ὁ ἀγαπῶν τὴν ἑαυτοῦ γυναῖκα ἑαυτὸν ἀγαπᾷ οὐδεὶς γάρ ποτε τὴν ἑαυτοῦ σάρκα ἐμίσησεν ἀλλὰ ἐκτρέφει καὶ θάλπει αὐτήν καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ὅτι μέλη ἐσμὲν τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ ἀντὶ τούτου καταλείψει ἄνθρωπος τὸν πατέρα καὶ τὴν μητέρα καὶ προσκολληθήσεται πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ καὶ ἔσονται οἱ δύο εἰς σάρκα μίαν }[1]

Some have misinterpreted this passage to support and encourage wives to crucify their husbands, just as Christ was crucified. That’s wrong. Jesus commanded his followers, “love one another {ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους}.”[2] There’s no exception to that commandment for women in relation to men, or wives in relation to their husbands. Paul, who transformed Thecla into a saint, apparently didn’t think it was necessary to remind wives to love their husbands. While reminding husbands to love their wives, Paul respected wives enough to believe that they would love their husbands even without being told to do so. Whether such confidence in wives’ love for their husbands is warranted today isn’t clear.

In a sophisticated parable drawing upon the figure of Christ married to the church, Jacques de Vitry blamed hateful and malicious men for castration culture. Jacques de Vitry declared:

If any bishop because of hatred or anger deprives his people of preaching, he is like the foolish and malicious man who, in hatred for his wife, cut off his genitals and thus harmed himself more than others. The bishop who abandons the people in their sins will be punished more than all others, because the blood of all is taken from his hand.

{ Si enim propter odium vel indignationem subtrahat populo predicationem, similis est cuidam stulto et malicioso homini qui, in odio uxoris sue, genitalia sibi abscidit et ita prius sibi quam aliis nocuit, et prelatus, qui populum in errore relinquit, plus omnibus aliis punietur, quia sanguis omnium de manu ejus requiretur. } [3]

In the European Middle Ages, a husband’s sexual obligation to his wife was a matter of utmost seriousness — a matter of life and death. A husband who castrated himself may have harmed himself more than others, but he also seriously harmed his wife’s body. In this parable, castration culture is literally enacted as a result of a husband’s hatred toward his wife. At the same time, hatred toward men obviously nourishes castration culture. Castration culture is rightly associated with hatred toward both men and women. Yet from men’s lifespan shortfall, to the vastly gender-disproportionate incarceration of men, to men’s reluctance to withdraw from the paid workforce to spend more time with their children at home, men are readily blamed for castration culture and more generally for all harm to themselves as well as all harm to others.[4]

In depriving the people of preaching, the bishop metaphorically castrates himself. The bishop acts in the person of Christ with respect to his local church. In celebrating the Eucharist, the bishop distributes with his hands the blood of Christ under the form of the communion wine and bread. He thus helps his people to cast off their sins and become new creations in Christ. Just as a castrated man cannot procreate, the bishop who deprives his people of preaching cannot lead his local church to the new creation of Christ.

The deeply rooted social bias toward punishing men is deeply embedded in Jacques de Vitry’s parable. According to Christian understanding, Christ, who was a man, took on the sins of all, including the sins of women. According to this parable, the bishop depriving his people of preaching will be punished for the sins of all. Like the husband charged to ensure that his wife is forever “holy and without blemish,” the bishop has a heavy responsibility and heavy punishment for failure. The pattern is clear: put the sins of women on men.

Castration culture expresses social devaluation of men’s sexuality. That harms everyone. Women as well as men are responsible for castration culture and for each other’s salvation. Men and women must join together, vigorously reject castration culture, and thrust themselves into a brighter, more fruitful future.

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Notes:

[1] Ephesians 5:22-31, Greek text from Blue Letter Bible.

[2] John 13:34, Greek text from Blue Letter Bible.

[3] Jacques de Vitry, Exempla 22 in Crane (1890) pp. 7-8, 142. Id. supplies the Latin text. I adapted the English translation from that in id. to follow the Latin more closely. On Jacques de Vitry, Bolton (1998).

[4] Men suffer from structural inequality in parental knowledge. For example, before the advent of DNA paternity testing, husbands necessarily struggled with uncertainty about whether their wives had cuckolding them in producing their children. Drawing upon castration culture, one husband devised a horrible test:

he castrated himself, with his thinking that, if his wife subsequently became pregnant, he would surely know that she had committed adultery.

{ se ipsum castravit, eo consilio ut, si uxor postmodum concepisset, in adulterio fuisse convinceretur. }

Poggio, Facetiae 225, “A jealous man castrated himself so that he would know his wife’s uprightness {Zelotypus quidam se castravit ut uxoris probitatem cognosceret},” Latin text from Poggio (1879) vol. 2, pp. 154-5, my English translation adapted from that in id. to follow the Latin more closely.

[image] Medallion depicting Jacques de Vitry. Dated 1518. Thanks to sailko and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Bolton, Brenda. 1998. “Faithful to whom? Jacques de Vitry and the French Bishops.” Revue Mabillon. 09: 53-72.

Crane, Thomas Frederick. 1890. The exampla or illustrative stories from the Sermones vulgares of Jacques de Vitry. London: David Nutt.

Poggio. 1879. Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini. The facetiae or jocose tales of Poggio, now first translated into English with the Latin text. Paris: Isidore Liseux (vol. 1, vol. 2).