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girardian 's review for:
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
by Becca Rothfeld
- I continue to enjoy Rothfeld's very decisive writing style even when I'm not entirely persuaded by her conclusions, which makes it more interesting to think about.
- Only Mercy: Sex After Consent was one of the more interesting essays, in particular found this claim interesting: "To regard lust as a truly social product is to accept that an inculcated desire is an authentic desire, as indomitable as any other."
- In the same essay I enjoyed her (inventive!) conclusion of an ideal of sex as carnivalesque.
- In Two Lives, Simultaneous and Perfect:
"In Erotism, published in 1957, the philosopher Georges Bataille suggests that eroticism is a question of the violation of social prohibitions. If everything is permitted, then nothing is perverted. Advocates of free love, the seeming allies of pleasure, are in fact its most dangerous adversaries: when bohemians “ceased to believe in Evil,” Bataille writes, they precipitated “a state of affairs in which, since eroticism was no longer a sin and since they could no longer be certain of doing wrong, eroticism was fast disappearing.” Without violation, there is no rapture; without taboo, there is no violation; and without restriction, there is no taboo. In Bataille’s terms, “the sacred”—the erotic, with all its attendant dishevelments and divestments of self—requires “the profane,” the mundane mores constraining our everyday behavior. The profane is less exalted than the sacred, but it is equally necessary: each perfects the other. A curious consequence of this view is that the more repressive and puritanical a culture, the more considerable its erotic potential."
- The final essay Our True Entertainment Was Arguing which is about romantic equality explored through Mating, Pride and Prejudice and His Girl Friday was easily the most joyful and fun to read.
- Only Mercy: Sex After Consent was one of the more interesting essays, in particular found this claim interesting: "To regard lust as a truly social product is to accept that an inculcated desire is an authentic desire, as indomitable as any other."
- In the same essay I enjoyed her (inventive!) conclusion of an ideal of sex as carnivalesque.
- In Two Lives, Simultaneous and Perfect:
"In Erotism, published in 1957, the philosopher Georges Bataille suggests that eroticism is a question of the violation of social prohibitions. If everything is permitted, then nothing is perverted. Advocates of free love, the seeming allies of pleasure, are in fact its most dangerous adversaries: when bohemians “ceased to believe in Evil,” Bataille writes, they precipitated “a state of affairs in which, since eroticism was no longer a sin and since they could no longer be certain of doing wrong, eroticism was fast disappearing.” Without violation, there is no rapture; without taboo, there is no violation; and without restriction, there is no taboo. In Bataille’s terms, “the sacred”—the erotic, with all its attendant dishevelments and divestments of self—requires “the profane,” the mundane mores constraining our everyday behavior. The profane is less exalted than the sacred, but it is equally necessary: each perfects the other. A curious consequence of this view is that the more repressive and puritanical a culture, the more considerable its erotic potential."
- The final essay Our True Entertainment Was Arguing which is about romantic equality explored through Mating, Pride and Prejudice and His Girl Friday was easily the most joyful and fun to read.