There are two things at the center of male intelligence: the influence of female beauty on the male orgasm—the intensity of which correlates with its brevity.
If you ask me for a study, or data, to support this, I have none. I don’t experiment. I unfurl ideas, like Freud or Marx, which are labor enough. Let others prove or experiment with those ideas.
Ideas come first and belong to the young.
Experiments follow and belong to the old.
There are three types of writers.
Edgar Poe, who subordinates everything to an idea.
Henry James, who has no ideas.
Harold Bloom, who belongs to the idea that one is erased by one’s predecessors.
In the real world, thanks to his ego, Bloom attempted to erase Poe.
Experimentation needs ideas. This is why the avant-garde go so wrong uncannily and consistently; they belong foremost to experiment and their ideas come later—but ideas must come first. First comes the pain, the sour resistance—only then comes the manifesto: the order is all wrong; this defeats these homeless professors, the avants. Inevitably avants are old, hating beautiful youth in the form of Keats, the prodigy.
Today, safety has replaced beauty as our highest ideal.
Go into any supermarket and what do we find? Non-fat yogurt everywhere.
Fat, which comes from animals, and therefore butter, cream, the fat in yogurt, is necessary for a healthy diet. Creamy yogurt is far more enjoyable than yogurt in which the natural creaminess has been removed.
There is not a single reason, then, for the manufacture of non- or low-fat yogurt.
How many times shall we say it?
Now walk through the supermarket today and wonder.
Beauty was once the ideal. Now it is safety.
Therefore, the title of this essay: “The Safety Myth,” based on the book by Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth. As a student at Yale in the 1980s, it was Wolf’s fate to find herself alone with the Poe-erasing Harold Bloom—and a bottle of Amontillado. She reported the deeply uncomfortable incident years after she left Yale and became famous.
Wolf’s feminist work, The Beauty Myth, was accused by those like the Ayn Rand-ish, anti-feminist, Camille Paglia, of distorting data—exaggerating the actual number of women, in thrall to unreachable ideals of beauty, who died from starving themselves to death.
What of this non-fat yogurt?
Non-fat yogurt is for our safety.
But safety from what?
Beauty?
Eating naturally creamy, whole fat yogurt is good for you. Health and beauty, any reasonable person would say, are absolutely related.
Ideal beauty—standards people find sexy, for instance—does not belong, necessarily, to core values of health, or real beauty. Only an idiot would confuse the miserable fashion model with the happy, beautiful-in-all-sorts-of-ways, person enjoying a healthy, balanced, tasty, meal (and good conversation).
The truth of diet and fat is that eating fat makes one less fat.
Vaccines are also counter-intuitive: give us the virus to cure us of the virus.
Get sick to be well.
Eat fat to be thin.
Naomi Wolf, who assaulted the “beauty myth” 30 years ago, is now targeting the “safety myth.”
She is against vaccine mandates.
I don’t wish to get into the vaccine debate. I understand the fear that “vaccine hesitancy” rips society’s fabric. I also understand the debate is complicated. Mandates and vaccines are…different.
I liked the old days when we fought over beauty.
A fight over safety is naturally going to be more nasty.
Poe was about beauty. That was his safety.
Henry James was about doubting beauty. That was his safety.
Harold Bloom’s safety was doubting Poe. But more than that, Bloom was about predecessors Poe and James making us doubt ourselves. Bloom, then, had no safety. I actually scolded Bloom to his face for desecrating Poe. He looked at me weakly, and agreed. “I was intolerant,” he said.
The late Harold Bloom belongs to our contemporary anxiety.
There is a great war raging today over safety.
We feel more and more that safety measures don’t make us safe.
Go into a supermarket.
Look at all that non-fat yogurt.