The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer
two paintings and an outdated excerpt of 'guerilla scholarship' for you to mark the moment between Scorpio and Sagittarius seasons
Hi, all: time for another excerpt! What follows is a few pages from the first book of a very (and perhaps very rightly) “cancelled” academic author. The taboo-horny and outrageous claims that saturate her 1992 book Sexual Personae are heretical and perverse, at best; at worst, you may freely deem me #problematic and morally weak or ignorant for undergoing insufficient interrogation of my desire to share an excerpt of such a person/text in 2024, or at all.
Sexual Personae is an obscene, presumptuous, flippant fuck-you-very-much of a book. For various reasons (its temperament and attitude, my circumstances and capricious style of reading), it’s taken me over six years to get about 85% of the way done with it. Over this time, the book has changed the way I thought about the constructs of “Western civilization,” the (provincial-af) history of the humanities, and the limits of the academy. It was and remains a very important book for me. I can’t really say more at this point, but I suspect I’ll be reflecting on why and how this came to be the case for a long time.
Today seemed like as appropriate a day as any to share from Sexual Personae: the sun is moving out of taboo-horny, perverse Scorpio and into outrageous, offensive Sagittarius. These happen to be two of my most beloved archetypes; a suspicious majority of my friends fall under these signs, and significant natal placements of my own (particularly Midheaven, speaking to one’s career and trajectory in the public eye) probably contextualize my morbid fascination with Paglia and this reckless first book of hers.
Destruction and beauty are two recklessnesses that Scorpio and Sagittarius know a bit and talk a lot about. Oscar Wilde, of course, was a Libra… but with Mercury in Scorpio and Mars in Sagittarius, he was himself deeply perverse and aggressively ostentatious despite such a demure, socially-conscious sun sign. Shock as value…
And as for Jacob wrestling the Angel? Hard to say. Something about that story rhymes for me with the way patriarchy-pilled people set themselves up in fruitless struggle against the beautiful and destructive chthonic forces of divinity. I invite you to see and consider for yourself.
Happy hallowed haunting, ho’ing, hunting, harping on and on... the time is ripe for ripping shit up by the roots. We are after harvest, maybe into gleaning, hard up for novelty and sensationalism. May we back off of fighting forces whose sources we can’t appreciate; and may we wield our desires well.