camille paglia on prettyboys

[Deleted member 18582]

what camille paglia has to say about prettyboys is relatable, tbh:

"The beautiful boy is without motive force or deed; hence he is not a hero. Because of his emotional detachment, he is not a heroine. He occupies an ideal space between male and female, effect and affect. . . . He is, I suggested, a secular saint." - SP, p121

- I have never found the "beautiful boy" to be either beautiful or saintly - but then I have never been terribly "secular". Paglia also says that the beautiful boy is "dreamy, remote, autistic, lost in a world of androgynous self-completion." (SP, p121). I personally hold that the beautiful boy, this "secular saint", is in fact a symbol of what every ordinary man would like to become - a nothing - and which he seeks to become through marriage, which is a blending of masculine and feminine, an androgynizing suicide. The beautiful boy is as repulsive to me as is the husband.

Of marriage Kierkegaard says:

"Man is not originally an egotist; not until he is lucky enough to be united with a woman does he become that, and then completely. In contrast to a loose-jointed framework egotism, this union, commonly known as marriage, could be called a stone-wall egotism, egotism's proper enterprise." (Journals & Papers)

This "stone-wall egotism" is exactly the stone-autism of the stone and marble beautiful boys, lost in androgynous self-completion and annihilation.