Rachel Cusk and the Boobies Curse

Brief notes on a phenomenology of "boobs rock"

Started in on Rachel Cusk’s Parade—it’s very good, although it has some weird, specific preoccupations about womanness, possibly raising questions in my mind about Cusk the Writer that I'll maybe get into another time—anyway I was struck by this passage:

Inside a glass case, two headless knitted dolls were copulating: blindly driven by instinct and need, the body has no awareness of its own preposterousness.

I thought to myself YES, DUDE!! THAT'S IT!! because that's it, dude. We can get tiresomely sophomoric in a very 2009 internet kind of way and talk about how ultimately boobs are obviously just sacks of tissue, or how asses are just what you poop from,¹ hurr durr, so clever, so insightful, but nothing will ever erase the fact that boobs are sick. Try as we might to elevate ourselves above these baser instincts, those of us who are moved by sexual desire are still just fuck machines, bent by a desire for specific attributes to be found in another that would be as inconceivable to the instinct of a peacock as it is to us to want to fuck a peacock for the display of its colourful feathers (or um… so I hope for most of you). We are prisoners of humiliating programmed desires, driven by blind pursuit we have only the capacity to recognize to be ridiculous, and yet condemned to pursue it anyway, making it all the more humiliating.

It’s tempting to go for the easy pun and call it a “boobies trap” when more accurately it’s a “boobies curse”—it’s not so much that our lust for body parts is our hubris and that it brings us to be trapped as a result of our own volition, it is that we are condemned to lust for them whether we’d like to or not. Beckett said we are “condemned alike to groan,” but we are likewise condemned alike to moan (pls kill me), condemned to want for dick and tits and ass and whatever other body parts merge into marginal paraphilic fetish—feet and legs and arms and pits and I hear in Japan there’s a feverish lust for a very specific band of the thigh they call “absolute territory.”

Objectification? Sure, but objectification is also just a fundamental part of the nature of perception. Humanization is a projection that creates an overlay above this principle objectification, a lens, a social hermeneutic. We personify people in much the same way we personify animals and objects without equivalent human qualia; we consider the feelings of others the same way we attribute thoughts in human language to our cats. This isn’t to relativize and try to make it seem as if by extension this impulse is stupid or arbitrary, this impulse is good, this is an ethical necessity and a social necessity.² It helps to remind ourselves that some objects of our perception have feelings like we do, and it’s sometimes easy to forget, and it’s easiest to forget when the lust compulsion gets in the way.

Personality is socially-accepted to trump body, “shallow” desire vs. a more refined and humanistic desire, but this distinction is overstated and is effectively dualistic in its outlook. A desired extra-physical attribute is just as much dehumanization as it is to pine for a physical one, it is still a desire for some disembodied attribute, the attribute is still reduced to its pure function to the one with the desire, its ability to please or excite or amuse, its disembodiment implies an object that produces the desired function, a tool, a dispenser of [attribute] for our own satisfaction. We are most of us able to be turned on by disembodied attributes, by concepts bereft of individual beings. Simply because they may suggest a complex being (the idea of “intelligence,” for instance, as expressed by a hypothetical partner) does not mean that there is any being attached; the disembodied nonspecific desire preempts the actual being who may embody that desire that we may meet in the real world and be attracted to, meaning the being who embodies the desire often comes to fulfill the need which preempted knowledge of the being’s existence in the first place. We rightfully make fun of self-described “sapiosexuals” for being annoying dipshits, but in a sense their admission of attraction to “intelligence” (or at least the Reddit-tier bullshit that passes for “intelligence” to these morons) as base fetish, however unintentional, winds up being a more honest confession of what it is. But we can at least rationalize those desires. Or at least we can rationalize them with more dignity. Consider: “I want a partner with equivalent (or greater) intelligence so I can have cool conversations with them.” “I want a partner with nice [BODY PART] so I can [REDACTED].” Spot the difference.

1. I’m referencing an actual viral video that my younger readers prob won’t remember—it was some unbearable millennial shit about how “butts are for pooping,” but it was like a Nicki Minaj parody or something, but there was other shit in the same vein all over the place. For whatever reason it was also just really popular in the 2000s to point out how human beings are “just monkeys” as if this insight yielded something—not a new insight, but you had a lot of cultural products referencing this perspective in the new millennium ranging from various screwball comedies to terrible Ernest Cline slam poems to the entire premise of songs by Tool. Maybe it was because evolution was such a potent culture war topic at the time, idk.

2. Up until the point that it becomes deleterious, obviously; the over-reactive projection of social anxiety and neurosis. Like that Kafka “story” (ahem) where he imagines why a girl won’t talk to him, conducts a lengthy neurotic investigation, and then incels all over himself about it. It’s actually so short that I’m going to include the entire thing here for reference:

Rejection

When I meet a pretty girl and beg her: "Be so good as to come with me," and she walks past without a word, this is what she means to say:

"You are no Duke with a famous name, no broad American with a Red Indian figure, level, brooding eyes and a skin tempered by the air of the prairies and the rivers that flow through them, you have never journeyed to the seven seas and voyaged on them wherever they may be, I don't know where. So why, pray, should a pretty girl like myself go with you?"

"You forget that no automobile swings you through the street in long thrusts; I see no gentlemen escorting you in a close half-circle, pressing on your skirts from behind and murmuring blessings on your head; your breasts are well laced into your bodice, but your thighs and hips make up for that restraint; you are wearing a taffeta dress with a pleated skirt such as delighted all of us last autumn, and yet you smile — inviting mortal danger — from time to time."

"Yes, we're both in the right, and to keep us from being irrevocably aware of it, hadn't we better just go our separate ways home?"

We can see what maybe can be considered an example of an inverse of this neurosis in this poem of Baudelaire’s (so inspiring Benjamin in his appraisal of urban life), love at first “and last” sight, the instantaneous projection of life onto another, conjured entirely within the mind of the perceiver, and its affinity for that perceiver:

The deafening street was screaming all around me.
Tall, slender, in deep mourning—majestic grief—
A woman made her way, with fastidious hand Raising and swaying festoon and hem;
Agile and noble, with her statue's limbs.
And there was I, who drank, contorted like a madman,
Within her eyes—that livid sky where hurricane is born—
Gentleness that fascinates, pleasure that kills.
A lightning-flash ... then night!—O fleeting beauty
Whose glance all of a sudden gave me new birth,
Shall I see you again only in eternity?
Far, far from here! Too late! or maybe, never?
For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go,
O you I would have loved (o you who knew it too!)

“Empaths” likewise are able to take “humanization” and the assigning of depth and deeply warp it for their own designs, imagining with completely confident authority rich interiorities for others only insofar as they suit their own needs, ultimately just as dehumanizing as pretending the subject’s interiority doesn’t exist in the first place.