"The Mechanical bride"

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  • evola_as_he_is
    I am forwarding a message by M. van den Heide in which he « [has] pragmatically excerpted a few paragraphs from a feminist essay on M. McLuhan s book The
    Message 1 of 3 , Jan 3, 2018

      I am forwarding a message by M. van den Heide in which he « [has] pragmatically excerpted a few paragraphs from a "feminist" essay on M. McLuhan's book "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man" in order to give an impression of McLuhan's arguments regarding feminisation. Clarifications have been added in brackets. » Once again, they are to be read against the background of the considerations developped by Evola on sex and woman in the first pages of 'Metaphysics of Sex' ("Nowadays sex has, to quite an extent, permeated the psychic field and caused a constant, insistent gravitation toward woman and love. Thus we have sensualism as a basic influence on this mental level with two outstanding characteristics: First is a widespread and chronic excitement, almost independent of every concrete, physical satisfaction because it persists as psychic  excitement; and second, partly as an outcome of the first  characteristic, this sensualism can even coexist with apparent  chastity").


      ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. », M. McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man (1964).

      « The Internet is the modern form of knitting. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it — a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning. », T. Wolfe, American Spectator interview (2005).


      [...]

      « Media theorist Marshall McLuhan evaluates the stories contemporary advertisements tell about technology in his 1951 collection of short essays, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man. He argues that the industrialist mindset has infiltrated every aspect of American culture, creating an “industrial folklore” that “centers and organizes a variety of thoughts and feelings born of the relations between man and the machines he has made” (18). This folklore reveals itself in the narratives born of mass culture, in advertisements, newspaper articles, films, and other popular texts.

      McLuhan observes that some of this folklore forms a “dominant pattern composed of sex and technology” (McLuhan 98) where women are encouraged to redefine themselves within an industrial framework for the purposes of attracting men. »

      « [McLuhan] remarks that “in a specialist world it is natural that we should select some single part of the body for attention” (McLuhan 98), but women in particular are encouraged to focus on improving miniscule aspects of their appearance by companies selling them beauty products. In a nylon ad, legs, for instance, will float alone on a pedestal, standing alone as an object of desire. These legs, like the features of Mary’s face, are “not intimately associated with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car” (McLuhan 98).

      Under McLuhan’s technological determinism, this specialization lends the body parts, and by extension the woman, a certain autonomy and pervasive influence. Women’s legs have such independent functionality “they are self-conscious. They speak. They have huge audiences. They are taken on dates. And to varying degrees the ad agencies have extended this specialist treatment to every other segment of the feminine anatomy” (McLuhan 98). Every body part is granted an extraordinary new agency through industrialism and consumerism, i.e: legs can win dates instead of the whole woman. In this way, entire body parts are granted the same power that McLuhan attributes to the technology that can transform cultures. »

      « For McLuhan, the depersonalized pursuit of body parts alone is an enthusiastic activity of the male gaze that women encourage by engaging in consumerist behaviors. Though McLuhan argues that women’s skill over improving their appearance part-by-part awards them an imbalanced sexual power over men, he does note that the reductionism has something to do with some mass cultural desire “to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way” (McLuhan 99). Women are not “users” of machines, they are machines: tuned to serve functions particular to the needs of patriarchal structures. »

      « Both Fitting Faces [an educational movie] and McLuhan address the same definition of feminine “success”: enhancing their body’s appeal to the male gaze to win a date (and the material boons that come along with it). To McLuhan, this skill is most effectively accomplished by the kind of modern girl who “swings her legs from the hips with masculine drive and confidence” (McLuhan 98). Maleness is power, whether it comes from emulating masculinity or manipulating it. Success is not obtainable in an entirely feminized sphere. »

      « Marshall McLuhan notes that “the smartly turned-out girl walks and behaves like a being who sees herself as a slick object rather than is aware of herself as a person” (McLuhan 99), because she is effectively rendering herself within the mindset of the male gaze, from which she can better manipulate the men who will grant her sexual and material power.

      McLuhan demonstrates anxiety over this perceived influence. Not only will these fine-tuned ladybots be haunted by their “mannequin pasts” (McLuhan 99) once they enter an emotional relationship with men, they demand “an impossible virility of assertion” (McLuhan 99). Both the gender binary and patriarchal power structures are threatened by the new “masculine” agency of the cyborg female. »

      « McLuhan was particularly anxious about blurring the gender binary: he complained of “homosexual influence in the publishing world that was horrified by the masculine vigor of his prose and trying to castrate his text” (Marchand 109) and in The Mechanical Bride expressed distress over homosexuality (McLuhan 99), women who walk with “masculine drive and confidence” (98), and “the powerful pressures of a machine economy to abolish sex differentiation along with the rest of human tradition and experience” (72). To McLuhan, the permeation of industrial ideologies is dangerous because the culture of machines can completely reconstruct reality into an androgynous, corporate, and synthetic culture that is ultimately less fulfilling. »

      « McLuhan argues that the “fear of the human touch and hatred of the human smell” in the culture of science and industry-driven hygiene is not that far removed from a reproductively barren landscape where “sex pleasure would be entirely auto-erotic,” artificial insemination is more common than traditional pregnancy, and all “excretion from the cradle to the grave would be presided over by a special caste of robots” (62). The fear of human contact grows from an environment of extreme emotional distance, made possible by the proliferation of hygiene products and other related mechanical “fixes” for industrial man’s problems.

      « McLuhan discusses the cultural presentation of women as tools, arguing that the reductionist approach to the female body in advertisements like “Fitting Faces” dehumanizes women. He does not view this dehumanizing from a feminist perspective, instead claiming that these industrialized behaviors grant women agency, their new power and masculinity serving a temporary purpose that ultimately confuses them both emotionally and sexually. A woman’s “empowerment” through the fashion and beauty industries both fundamentally changes the nature of her relationships with men and warps overarching sex roles.

      McLuhan suggests that the industrialization of female sexual power allows culture to easily imagine an electronic sex dispenser. ”In the era of thinking machines,” he writes about women’s calculated approach to sex, “it would be surprising, indeed, if the love-machine were not thought of as well” (99). »

      « The new ideal, according to McLuhan, is a “frigid woman” (99), who cooly oversees her self cultivation, optimizing each of her body parts with a practiced efficiency. The sentimental, along with traditionally feminine displays of sincerity, is now foreign to the woman preoccupied with her own “competitive display.” She competes to appease the male gaze with other sleekly altered femme bots; if they succeed they will be rewarded with male attention and its subsequent material comfort.

      McLuhan claims that this calculated approach to sex is disorienting for women once they achieve their goals. “When sex later becomes a personal actuality,” he argues, “the established feminine pattern of sex as an instrument of power, in an industrial and consumer context, is a liability” (99). She finds affection difficult to display because “her mannequin past is in the way” (99); she was taught to be so efficient as a machine that she no longer has the ability to foster a rich inner life. »

      « McLuhan remarks that author Samuel Butler noticed “as early as 1872” that machines were “coming to resemble organisms… more than matched by the speed with which people who minded them were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless behaviorism of the machine” (99). »

      « This conclusion [of a Science Fiction novel's narrative] resonates with McLuhan’s argument that male anxiety rises from the commercial cycle beginning with women’s obsessive approach to material appearance and construction. Perfectly engineered “parts” cultivate sexual power over men, who are expected to respond in kind with material successes of his own. Men’s new burden to prove the potency of their masculinity through a capacity to provide luxury is stressful because it requires an “impossible virility of assertion” (99). McLuhan, in other words, claims that women are the catalyst that compel men to acquire a similarly distant, ultimately fulfilling approach to sex and relationships.

      This frames women as the driving force behind sex norms, their behaviors setting standards for reproductive culture. McLuhan claims that the machination of the newly electronified workforce results in “sex weariness and sex sluggishness,” where “ glamour campaigns” whittle down the human experience of sex to a “view of the human body as a sort of love-machine capable merely of specific thrills” (99). »
      [...] »


      See, for further reference, on top of those that were provided in my previous message on McLuhan,
      Steven Dillon, Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies: Female Desire in 1940s US Culture, p. 10-11


    • G. H.
      Find below quotations and excerpts from « The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man » (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2002). « [The] vision of
      Message 2 of 3 , Jan 5, 2018

        Find below quotations and excerpts from « The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man » (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2002).

        « [The] vision of human integrity based on a non-commercial way of life remains the core of the American dream. As such, it haunted Henry Ford. As such, it is constantly tapped by the advertising agencies and the movie industry in order to sell products. »
         
        « As the industrial market extends its power and control over thoughts and earnings alike, it swathes itself increasingly in the archaic garments of pre-industrial man. »

        « The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines., listening much of the waking day to canned music, wratching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods. Society begins to take on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission and luxurious passivity. Each day brings in addition of silks, trinkets, and shine gadgets, new pleasure techniques and new pills for pep and painlessness. »

        « Freedom to Listen » (p. 21).

        « Concentration on technique and abstract system began for the Western world, says Werner Sombart in his Quintessence of Capitalism, with the rise of scholastic method in theology in the twelfth century. The monks were also the first begetters of methods of abstract finance, and the clockwork order of their communal lives gave to the tradesmen of the growing towns the great example of systemic time economy. The puritan bot hretained the scholastic method in theology and gave it expression in the precision and austerity of his secular existence. So that it is scarcely fantastic to say that a great modern business is a secular adaptation of some of the most striking features of medieval scholastic culture. Confronted with the clockwork precision of scholastic method, Lewis Mumford could think only of the mechanical parallel of a smoothly working textile plant. The object of this systematic process is now production and finance rather than God. And evangelical zeal is now centered in the department of sales and distribution rather than in preaching. But the scientific structure and moral patterns of the monastic discipline are still intact, so that anybody seeking to understand or modify the religious intensity of modern technology and business has to look closely into these antecedents. »

        « Know-How » (p. 33).

        « [...] the more equality there is in the race for inequality, the more intense the race and the less the inequality which results from the consequent rewards. That means less and less distinction for more and more men of distinction. »

        « Executive Ability » (p. 37)

        « A century ago the socialists began their attack on the family unit and Proudhon pointed out that their arguments really came to one, namely, that the family cost too much. By the end of the nineteenth century, industrialists and businessmen had already adopted this argument in practice by offering jobs to women.. Why should half the population exist in a semi-leisured when it might be put to work and thereby bring down the scale of men's wages ? That, we can now see, was the economic logic in feminism. The woman of leisure might wear long skirts, but the working woman was put into adolescent short skirts and told in big press campaigns that the age-old tyranny of men was at an end. Today she is told every few months to shorten or lengthen her dresses in accordance with market exigencies, and she obediently does so. And by this type of operation all superfluous cash is removed from people who might otherwise find means to provide for their later years without analagraphing [*] their future. »

        « Heading for Failure » (p. 40)

        [*] "a scientific device that lets you chart the family and its retirement needs.", http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/dont_guess_about_your_future..._analagraph_it.

        « Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies. Whereas the older concept of eloquence linked it to public responsibility and ceremony and a unified program for enlisting the passions on the side of reason and virtue, the new school eloquence is virtually demagogic in its headlong exploitation of words and emotions for the flattery of the consumer. »

        « Plain Talk » (p. 42)

        « It would seem that he very first thing that would occur to an educator today is the fact that for the first time in history there exists an unofficial program of public instruction carried on by commerce through the press, radio, movies. Carried on by the state, the upshot would be no different. This public instruction is paid for by a tax of billions of dollars levied on the public via advertising and entertainment. It has mainly neutralized the much smaller program of official education with its much smaller budget and much less well-paid brain power. »

        « The Great Books » (p. 43)

        « To a large degree opinion polls function as educational rather than fact-finding agencies. This is illustrated in Professor Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Male when he says on page 681 that many who are perturbed by their own sexual habits or histories "may be put at ease when they learn what the patterns of the rest of the population are." Most people are terribly ill at ease unless they are "in line" with their fellow men. The polls are a graphic means of showing people where that line is. »

        « In his Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann analyzed the fallacies inherent in our notion of government as a sort of automatic mechanism geared to the ballot box. This analysis is also confirmed by the close connection between opinion polls and consumer surveys. Both kinds of investigation are carried on by interested parties to reduce the gamble in their activities. A political machine wants to have exact knowledge of how to weight its electoral program. A big business will alter its product and its advertising only in order to reach a specific market. So both of them call in the social statistician. The statistician employs the method of laboratory analysis of small samples of a sample of social blood or tissue. While it is difficult to obtain a sample of social blood or tissue, it is no exaggeration to say that the pollsters with their questionnaires are out for blood. When they get their sample, they analyze it and turn the result over to their masters, who then decide what sort of shot in the arm the public needs. » 

        « Galluputians » (p. 46, 47)

        « As market research takes on the character of social engineering and education, it draws attention to the fact that an industrial society must have exceptional awareness of its processes. A small mechanical miscalculation always costs money and often costs lives. We have long been familiar with the need for exactitude and awareness in mechanical, commercial and military operations. But we are just beginning to learn how all these operations themselves have been affecting the quality of individual and social life for the past century and a half. » 

        « Market Research » (p. 50)

        « Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter. Technology needs not people or minds but "hands." Unobservant of the automatic leveling process exercised by applied science, we have let it carry us along to the point where the same curriculum and the same room serve to prepare boys and girls alike for the neuter and impersonal routines of production and distribution. » 

        « Preoccupied with the problems and functions of sexual differentiation, Dr. Mead in Male and Female has no good to report of co-education. Sex competition among the very young she rightly sees to be a means of sterilizing sex. And after surveying the child-rearing patterns of several societies, she concludes that the greatest harmony and the "most specifically sexual" relation between adults is achieved in those societies where the "most conspicuous division is found between groups of small boys and girls." There is a good deal of uproarious comedy in a situation in which this exponent of anthropology and sociology warns the earnest students of the new science that for more for in bed you've got to love that chaperone and avoid that co-educational classroom. When advanced science proclaims that "great-grandmother was so right," then the whirligig of time maybe expected to bring in a great many more revenges. Broadway will soon be ripe for a Rodgers and Hammerstein musicale on the subject of Male and Female. »

        « Co-Education » (p. 53)

        « Noteworthy as a basic principle for the understanding of the imagery spawned by the modern imagination is Baudelaire's observation that "Intoxication is a number." And numbers, in statistical science, appear as curves. The public is a number which is not only expressed in curves but which is bombarded with curves.. When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves. » 

        « Eye Appeal » (p. 79)

        « The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists. »

        « The Voice of the Lab » (p. 93)

        « [the interfusion of sex and technology] is not a feature created by the ad men, but it seems rather to be born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on one hand, and, on the other, to possess machinesin a sexually gratifying way. »

        « The method of "glorifying the American girl," associated with Ziegfeld, was to assemble them in a line that was then regularly broken up into a dynamic floral vortex. The basic reason for breaking the line was, and is, to form a giant flower, which is choreographed to open and close in a seductive way. But the "line" itself, with its smooth, clicking routines, is even more basic than the sex symbol of the flower. There is nothing very human about twenty painted dolls rehearsing a series of clockwork taps, kicks, and swings. When this very frigid aspect of the beauty chorus was being discussed, Ring Lardner is reported to have made the famous remark : "Some like 'em cold." »
        « There is intoxication in numbers and also release from personal responsibility. Crowds are intoxicating. Statistics and production charts are part of the dithyrambic poetry of industrial man Telephone number of girls who are good numbers, smooth numbers, hot numbers, slick numbers. Maxfactorized, streamlined, synthetic blondes - these are at once abstract and exciting. Girls become intoxicating "dates" when they are recognizable parts of a vast machine. To be seen in public with these numbers is a sure sign that you are clicking on cylinders. Any interest that they have in themselves is incidental. »

        « [...] Hollywood is like the ad agencies in constantly striving to enter and control the unconscious minds of a vast public, not in order to understand or to present these minds, as the serious novelist does, but in order to exploit them for profit. The novelist tries to get inside his characters in order to tell you what is happening on the invisible stage of their minds. The ad agencies and Hollywood, in their different ways, are always trying to get inside the public mind in order to impose their collective dream on that inner stage. And in the pursuit of this goal both Hollywood and the advertising agencies themselves give major exhibitions of unconscious behavior. One dream opens into another until reality and fantasy are made interchangeable. The ad agencies flood the daytime world of conscious purpose and control with erotic imagery from the night world in order to drown, by suggestion, all sale resistance.. Hollywood floods the night world with daytime imagery in which synthetic gods and goddesses (stars) appear to assume the roles of our wakeaday existence in order to flatter and console us for the failures of our daily lives. The ad agencies hold out for each of us the dream of a spot on Olympus where we quaff and loll forever amid well-known brands. The movies reverse this procedure by showing us the stars - who, we are assured, dwell on "beds of amaranth and moly" - descending to our level. »

        « [...] had the Hollywood tycoons better understood the function of their own star system, they would not have undermined the system by overcrowding. Floods of new stars and starlets coming off the assembly lines have unconsciously sabotaged the illusion of their being gods and goddesses. Attention is too widely dispersed. The magic is weakening, and many of the dreamers are stirring discontentedly. » 

        « Love-Goddess Assembly Line » (94, 96, 97)

        « To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts are power points which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hips with masculine drive and confidence. She knows that "a long-legged gal can go places." As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car.. They are date-baited power levers for the management of the male audience. »

        « Legs today have been indoctrinated. They are self-conscious. They speak. They have huge audiences. They are taken on dates. And in varying degrees the ad agencies have extended this specialist treatment to every other segment of the female anatomy. A car plus a well-filled pair of nylons is a recognized formula for both feminine and male success and happiness. Ads like these not only express but also encourage that strange dissociation of sex not only from the human person but even from unity of the body. This visual and not particularly voluptuous character of commercially sponsored glamour is perhaps what gives it so heavy a narcissistic quality. The brittle, self-conscious pose of the mannequin suggests the activities of competitive display rather than spontaneous sensuality. And the smartly turned-out girl walks and behaves like a being who sees  herself as a slick object rather than is aware of herself as a person. » 

        « The Mechanical Bride » (p. 98, 99)

        « Great physical and industrial power rests on a multitude of powerless individuals, many of whom are deeply resentful of their condition. The smaller and meaner the man, the more he craves to possess not limited human powers, with all the effort of cultivation and all the resposibility that implies, but superhuman power. [...] The sadistic craving for enormous physical powers to revenge or compensate for human futility will always drive such people to link themselves to vast impersonal enterprises. They will follow automatically any road which promises to bring them to that goal. So that to be a switch thrower in a big plant looks better to them than any lonely task, however human. Such is also the attraction of bureaucratic jobs, whether in great corporations or in government. It is by a fantasy identification with the very big power unit that very small man obtains his self-realization as a superman. The key to Superman is Clark Kent the useless. Therefore the more we create and centralize physical power, the more we suppress our human nature ; and then that human nature queues up all the more to support the big physical power that crushes it. » 

        « Education » (p. 128)

        Lastly, a photocopy of the title essay of the book can be found at https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/01/05/20180105145529/.


        Van: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
        Verzonden: woensdag 3 januari 2018 12:03
        Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
        Onderwerp: [evola_as_he_is] "The Mechanical bride"
         
         

        I am forwarding a message by M. van den Heide in which he « [has] pragmatically excerpted a few paragraphs from a "feminist" essay on M. McLuhan's book "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man" in order to give an impression of McLuhan's arguments regarding feminisation. Clarifications have been added in brackets. » Once again, they are to be read against the background of the considerations developped by Evola on sex and woman in the first pages of 'Metaphysics of Sex' ("Nowadays sex has, to quite an extent, permeated the psychic field and caused a constant, insistent gravitation toward woman and love. Thus we have sensualism as a basic influence on this mental level with two outstanding characteristics: First is a widespread and chronic excitement, almost independent of every concrete, physical satisfaction because it persists as psychic  excitement; and second, partly as an outcome of the first  characteristic, this sensualism can even coexist with apparent  chastity").


        ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. », M. McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man (1964).

        « The Internet is the modern form of knitting.. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it — a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning. », T. Wolfe, American Spectator interview (2005).


        [...]

        « Media theorist Marshall McLuhan evaluates the stories contemporary advertisements tell about technology in his 1951 collection of short essays, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man. He argues that the industrialist mindset has infiltrated every aspect of American culture, creating an “industrial folklore” that “centers and organizes a variety of thoughts and feelings born of the relations between man and the machines he has made” (18). This folklore reveals itself in the narratives born of mass culture, in advertisements, newspaper articles, films, and other popular texts.

        McLuhan observes that some of this folklore forms a “dominant pattern composed of sex and technology” (McLuhan 98) where women are encouraged to redefine themselves within an industrial framework for the purposes of attracting men. »

        « [McLuhan] remarks that “in a specialist world it is natural that we should select some single part of the body for attention” (McLuhan 98), but women in particular are encouraged to focus on improving miniscule aspects of their appearance by companies selling them beauty products. In a nylon ad, legs, for instance, will float alone on a pedestal, standing alone as an object of desire. These legs, like the features of Mary’s face, are “not intimately associated with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car” (McLuhan 98).

        Under McLuhan’s technological determinism, this specialization lends the body parts, and by extension the woman, a certain autonomy and pervasive influence. Women’s legs have such independent functionality “they are self-conscious. They speak. They have huge audiences. They are taken on dates. And to varying degrees the ad agencies have extended this specialist treatment to every other segment of the feminine anatomy” (McLuhan 98). Every body part is granted an extraordinary new agency through industrialism and consumerism, i.e: legs can win dates instead of the whole woman. In this way, entire body parts are granted the same power that McLuhan attributes to the technology that can transform cultures. »

        « For McLuhan, the depersonalized pursuit of body parts alone is an enthusiastic activity of the male gaze that women encourage by engaging in consumerist behaviors. Though McLuhan argues that women’s skill over improving their appearance part-by-part awards them an imbalanced sexual power over men, he does note that the reductionism has something to do with some mass cultural desire “to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way” (McLuhan 99). Women are not “users” of machines, they are machines: tuned to serve functions particular to the needs of patriarchal structures. »

        « Both Fitting Faces [an educational movie] and McLuhan address the same definition of feminine “success”: enhancing their body’s appeal to the male gaze to win a date (and the material boons that come along with it). To McLuhan, this skill is most effectively accomplished by the kind of modern girl who “swings her legs from the hips with masculine drive and confidence” (McLuhan 98). Maleness is power, whether it comes from emulating masculinity or manipulating it. Success is not obtainable in an entirely feminized sphere. »

        « Marshall McLuhan notes that “the smartly turned-out girl walks and behaves like a being who sees herself as a slick object rather than is aware of herself as a person” (McLuhan 99), because she is effectively rendering herself within the mindset of the male gaze, from which she can better manipulate the men who will grant her sexual and material power.

        McLuhan demonstrates anxiety over this perceived influence. Not only will these fine-tuned ladybots be haunted by their “mannequin pasts” (McLuhan 99) once they enter an emotional relationship with men, they demand “an impossible virility of assertion” (McLuhan 99). Both the gender binary and patriarchal power structures are threatened by the new “masculine” agency of the cyborg female. »

        « McLuhan was particularly anxious about blurring the gender binary: he complained of “homosexual influence in the publishing world that was horrified by the masculine vigor of his prose and trying to castrate his text” (Marchand 109) and in The Mechanical Bride expressed distress over homosexuality (McLuhan 99), women who walk with “masculine drive and confidence” (98), and “the powerful pressures of a machine economy to abolish sex differentiation along with the rest of human tradition and experience” (72). To McLuhan, the permeation of industrial ideologies is dangerous because the culture of machines can completely reconstruct reality into an androgynous, corporate, and synthetic culture that is ultimately less fulfilling. »

        « McLuhan argues that the “fear of the human touch and hatred of the human smell” in the culture of science and industry-driven hygiene is not that far removed from a reproductively barren landscape where “sex pleasure would be entirely auto-erotic,” artificial insemination is more common than traditional pregnancy, and all “excretion from the cradle to the grave would be presided over by a special caste of robots” (62). The fear of human contact grows from an environment of extreme emotional distance, made possible by the proliferation of hygiene products and other related mechanical “fixes” for industrial man’s problems.

        « McLuhan discusses the cultural presentation of women as tools, arguing that the reductionist approach to the female body in advertisements like “Fitting Faces” dehumanizes women. He does not view this dehumanizing from a feminist perspective, instead claiming that these industrialized behaviors grant women agency, their new power and masculinity serving a temporary purpose that ultimately confuses them both emotionally and sexually. A woman’s “empowerment” through the fashion and beauty industries both fundamentally changes the nature of her relationships with men and warps overarching sex roles.

        McLuhan suggests that the industrialization of female sexual power allows culture to easily imagine an electronic sex dispenser. ”In the era of thinking machines,” he writes about women’s calculated approach to sex, “it would be surprising, indeed, if the love-machine were not thought of as well” (99). »

        « The new ideal, according to McLuhan, is a “frigid woman” (99), who cooly oversees her self cultivation, optimizing each of her body parts with a practiced efficiency. The sentimental, along with traditionally feminine displays of sincerity, is now foreign to the woman preoccupied with her own “competitive display.” She competes to appease the male gaze with other sleekly altered femme bots; if they succeed they will be rewarded with male attention and its subsequent material comfort.

        McLuhan claims that this calculated approach to sex is disorienting for women once they achieve their goals. “When sex later becomes a personal actuality,” he argues, “the established feminine pattern of sex as an instrument of power, in an industrial and consumer context, is a liability” (99). She finds affection difficult to display because “her mannequin past is in the way” (99); she was taught to be so efficient as a machine that she no longer has the ability to foster a rich inner life. »

        « McLuhan remarks that author Samuel Butler noticed “as early as 1872” that machines were “coming to resemble organisms… more than matched by the speed with which people who minded them were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless behaviorism of the machine” (99). »

        « This conclusion [of a Science Fiction novel's narrative] resonates with McLuhan’s argument that male anxiety rises from the commercial cycle beginning with women’s obsessive approach to material appearance and construction. Perfectly engineered “parts” cultivate sexual power over men, who are expected to respond in kind with material successes of his own. Men’s new burden to prove the potency of their masculinity through a capacity to provide luxury is stressful because it requires an “impossible virility of assertion” (99). McLuhan, in other words, claims that women are the catalyst that compel men to acquire a similarly distant, ultimately fulfilling approach to sex and relationships.

        This frames women as the driving force behind sex norms, their behaviors setting standards for reproductive culture. McLuhan claims that the machination of the newly electronified workforce results in “sex weariness and sex sluggishness,” where “ glamour campaigns” whittle down the human experience of sex to a “view of the human body as a sort of love-machine capable merely of specific thrills” (99). »
        [....] »


        See, for further reference, on top of those that were provided in my previous message on McLuhan,
        Steven Dillon, Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies: Female Desire in 1940s US Culture, p. 10-11


      • G. H.
        Additionally, here are some more distinctive quotes from the work of M. McLuhan that were collected in a specially designed book edition, known as « The book
        Message 3 of 3 , Mar 31, 2018
          Additionally, here are some more distinctive quotes from the work of M. McLuhan that were collected in a specially designed book edition, known as « The book of probes » (McLuhan, M., & Carson, D. (2003). The book of probes. Corte Madera, Ca: Gingko Press).


          « The Negro response to the auditory and acoustic space created by radio was to give a new art form to every country in the world. Jazz is slowed down speech and speeded up motion. Syncopation or ragtime is the discontinuous space that characterizes sound as much as it does electric current. Only visual space is a continuum … The real Negro integration took place in the 1920's when the whole world was assimilated to Negro culture. » p. 527.

          « Money as such has become a pseudo-event, information only. » p. 494.

          « Money is the poor man's credit card. » p. 494.

          « Even in the old sense of a business, moving information far outranks “heavy” industry. » p. 472.

          « Culture is not civilization. Every day we get more cultured and less civilized. » p. 471.

          « Conformity is an intense form of individualism. The more intense the competition, the more individuals you have, the more people resemble each other. » p. 470.

          « By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and going-ons, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange. » p. 468.

          « At instant speeds all reaction and adjustment are inevitable, but too late to be relevant. » p. 464

          « At instant speeds, the world market, invoked by industrial activities, becomes a software service, yielding only software images and satisfactions. » p. 464.

          « As the new media unfold their powers, the entertainment industries swallow more and more of the old business culture. » p. 462.

          « Ads are like the weird faces or masks used by witch doctors to control the powers of nature. If one is merged in the tribal horde, that mask will look good to him. » 455

          « Advertising is anonymous, like any folk art, and is the product of all the public skills of the community. » p. 455

          « We are swiftly moving at present from an era when business was our culture, into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries. » p. 384.

          « By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. Today man's nerves surround us – they have gone outside as electrical environment. » p. 375.

          « The specialist one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. » p. 372.

          « The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable … to his colleagues. » p. 370, 371.

          « The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. » p. 366.

          « The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary FAME and the habit of considering INTELLECTUAL EFFORT as private property. » p. 348.

          « The images of mankind have become the basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. » p. 346.

          « The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer. » p. 344.

          « The coverage is the war.. If there were no coverage... there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore. » p. 342.

          « The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became TYPOGRAPHY. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. » p. 338.

          « Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion ; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture. » p. 336.

          « Privacy invasion is now one of our biggest knowledge industries. » p. 334.

          « Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or at leisure. » p. 322, 323.

          « Men in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering. » p. 320.

          « Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. » p. 319.

          « For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient. » p. 306.

          « By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth. » p. 294.

          « At the speed of light, political policies and PARTIES yield place to charismatic images. » p. 292.

          « The greatest propaganda in the world is our MOTHER TONGUE, THAT WHAT we learn as children, and which learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. » p. 264.

          « Only puny secrets need protection. BIG SECRETS are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumors, not by coverage » p. 206.
           
          « Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous system, so it is ridiculous to talk of what the public wants played over its own nerves. » p. 150, 151.

          « School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is. » p. 147.

          « The metropolis today is a classroom, the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is AN OBSOLETE DETENTION HOME, a feudal dungeon. » p. 126, 127.


          Van: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens 'G. H.' g.vdheide@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
          Verzonden: vrijdag 5 januari 2018 16:10:53
          Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
          Onderwerp: Re: [evola_as_he_is] "The Mechanical bride"
           
           

          Find below quotations and excerpts from « The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man » (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2002).

          « [The] vision of human integrity based on a non-commercial way of life remains the core of the American dream. As such, it haunted Henry Ford. As such, it is constantly tapped by the advertising agencies and the movie industry in order to sell products. »
           
          « As the industrial market extends its power and control over thoughts and earnings alike, it swathes itself increasingly in the archaic garments of pre-industrial man. »

          « The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines., listening much of the waking day to canned music, wratching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods. Society begins to take on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission and luxurious passivity. Each day brings in addition of silks, trinkets, and shine gadgets, new pleasure techniques and new pills for pep and painlessness. »

          « Freedom to Listen » (p. 21).

          « Concentration on technique and abstract system began for the Western world, says Werner Sombart in his Quintessence of Capitalism, with the rise of scholastic method in theology in the twelfth century. The monks were also the first begetters of methods of abstract finance, and the clockwork order of their communal lives gave to the tradesmen of the growing towns the great example of systemic time economy. The puritan bot hretained the scholastic method in theology and gave it expression in the precision and austerity of his secular existence. So that it is scarcely fantastic to say that a great modern business is a secular adaptation of some of the most striking features of medieval scholastic culture. Confronted with the clockwork precision of scholastic method, Lewis Mumford could think only of the mechanical parallel of a smoothly working textile plant. The object of this systematic process is now production and finance rather than God. And evangelical zeal is now centered in the department of sales and distribution rather than in preaching. But the scientific structure and moral patterns of the monastic discipline are still intact, so that anybody seeking to understand or modify the religious intensity of modern technology and business has to look closely into these antecedents. »

          « Know-How » (p.. 33).

          « [...] the more equality there is in the race for inequality, the more intense the race and the less the inequality which results from the consequent rewards. That means less and less distinction for more and more men of distinction. »

          « Executive Ability » (p. 37)

          « A century ago the socialists began their attack on the family unit and Proudhon pointed out that their arguments really came to one, namely, that the family cost too much. By the end of the nineteenth century, industrialists and businessmen had already adopted this argument in practice by offering jobs to women.. Why should half the population exist in a semi-leisured when it might be put to work and thereby bring down the scale of men's wages ? That, we can now see, was the economic logic in feminism. The woman of leisure might wear long skirts, but the working woman was put into adolescent short skirts and told in big press campaigns that the age-old tyranny of men was at an end. Today she is told every few months to shorten or lengthen her dresses in accordance with market exigencies, and she obediently does so. And by this type of operation all superfluous cash is removed from people who might otherwise find means to provide for their later years without analagraphing [*] their future. »

          « Heading for Failure » (p. 40)

          [*] "a scientific device that lets you chart the family and its retirement needs.", http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/dont_guess_about_your_future..._analagraph_it.

          « Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies. Whereas the older concept of eloquence linked it to public responsibility and ceremony and a unified program for enlisting the passions on the side of reason and virtue, the new school eloquence is virtually demagogic in its headlong exploitation of words and emotions for the flattery of the consumer. »

          « Plain Talk » (p. 42)

          « It would seem that he very first thing that would occur to an educator today is the fact that for the first time in history there exists an unofficial program of public instruction carried on by commerce through the press, radio, movies. Carried on by the state, the upshot would be no different. This public instruction is paid for by a tax of billions of dollars levied on the public via advertising and entertainment. It has mainly neutralized the much smaller program of official education with its much smaller budget and much less well-paid brain power. »

          « The Great Books » (p. 43)

          « To a large degree opinion polls function as educational rather than fact-finding agencies. This is illustrated in Professor Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Male when he says on page 681 that many who are perturbed by their own sexual habits or histories "may be put at ease when they learn what the patterns of the rest of the population are." Most people are terribly ill at ease unless they are "in line" with their fellow men. The polls are a graphic means of showing people where that line is. »

          « In his Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann analyzed the fallacies inherent in our notion of government as a sort of automatic mechanism geared to the ballot box. This analysis is also confirmed by the close connection between opinion polls and consumer surveys. Both kinds of investigation are carried on by interested parties to reduce the gamble in their activities. A political machine wants to have exact knowledge of how to weight its electoral program. A big business will alter its product and its advertising only in order to reach a specific market. So both of them call in the social statistician. The statistician employs the method of laboratory analysis of small samples of a sample of social blood or tissue. While it is difficult to obtain a sample of social blood or tissue, it is no exaggeration to say that the pollsters with their questionnaires are out for blood.. When they get their sample, they analyze it and turn the result over to their masters, who then decide what sort of shot in the arm the public needs.. » 

          « Galluputians » (p. 46, 47)

          « As market research takes on the character of social engineering and education, it draws attention to the fact that an industrial society must have exceptional awareness of its processes. A small mechanical miscalculation always costs money and often costs lives. We have long been familiar with the need for exactitude and awareness in mechanical, commercial and military operations. But we are just beginning to learn how all these operations themselves have been affecting the quality of individual and social life for the past century and a half. » 

          « Market Research » (p. 50)

          « Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter. Technology needs not people or minds but "hands." Unobservant of the automatic leveling process exercised by applied science, we have let it carry us along to the point where the same curriculum and the same room serve to prepare boys and girls alike for the neuter and impersonal routines of production and distribution. » 

          « Preoccupied with the problems and functions of sexual differentiation, Dr. Mead in Male and Female has no good to report of co-education. Sex competition among the very young she rightly sees to be a means of sterilizing sex. And after surveying the child-rearing patterns of several societies, she concludes that the greatest harmony and the "most specifically sexual" relation between adults is achieved in those societies where the "most conspicuous division is found between groups of small boys and girls." There is a good deal of uproarious comedy in a situation in which this exponent of anthropology and sociology warns the earnest students of the new science that for more for in bed you've got to love that chaperone and avoid that co-educational classroom. When advanced science proclaims that "great-grandmother was so right," then the whirligig of time maybe expected to bring in a great many more revenges. Broadway will soon be ripe for a Rodgers and Hammerstein musicale on the subject of Male and Female. »

          « Co-Education » (p. 53)

          « Noteworthy as a basic principle for the understanding of the imagery spawned by the modern imagination is Baudelaire's observation that "Intoxication is a number." And numbers, in statistical science, appear as curves. The public is a number which is not only expressed in curves but which is bombarded with curves.. When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves. » 

          « Eye Appeal » (p. 79)

          « The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists. »

          « The Voice of the Lab » (p. 93)

          « [the interfusion of sex and technology] is not a feature created by the ad men, but it seems rather to be born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. »

          « The method of "glorifying the American girl," associated with Ziegfeld, was to assemble them in a line that was then regularly broken up into a dynamic floral vortex. The basic reason for breaking the line was, and is, to form a giant flower, which is choreographed to open and close in a seductive way. But the "line" itself, with its smooth, clicking routines, is even more basic than the sex symbol of the flower. There is nothing very human about twenty painted dolls rehearsing a series of clockwork taps, kicks, and swings. When this very frigid aspect of the beauty chorus was being discussed, Ring Lardner is reported to have made the famous remark : "Some like 'em cold." »
          « There is intoxication in numbers and also release from personal responsibility. Crowds are intoxicating. Statistics and production charts are part of the dithyrambic poetry of industrial man Telephone number of girls who are good numbers, smooth numbers, hot numbers, slick numbers. Maxfactorized, streamlined, synthetic blondes - these are at once abstract and exciting. Girls become intoxicating "dates" when they are recognizable parts of a vast machine. To be seen in public with these numbers is a sure sign that you are clicking on cylinders. Any interest that they have in themselves is incidental. »

          « [...] Hollywood is like the ad agencies in constantly striving to enter and control the unconscious minds of a vast public, not in order to understand or to present these minds, as the serious novelist does, but in order to exploit them for profit. The novelist tries to get inside his characters in order to tell you what is happening on the invisible stage of their minds. The ad agencies and Hollywood, in their different ways, are always trying to get inside the public mind in order to impose their collective dream on that inner stage. And in the pursuit of this goal both Hollywood and the advertising agencies themselves give major exhibitions of unconscious behavior. One dream opens into another until reality and fantasy are made interchangeable. The ad agencies flood the daytime world of conscious purpose and control with erotic imagery from the night world in order to drown, by suggestion, all sale resistance.. Hollywood floods the night world with daytime imagery in which synthetic gods and goddesses (stars) appear to assume the roles of our wakeaday existence in order to flatter and console us for the failures of our daily lives. The ad agencies hold out for each of us the dream of a spot on Olympus where we quaff and loll forever amid well-known brands. The movies reverse this procedure by showing us the stars - who, we are assured, dwell on "beds of amaranth and moly" - descending to our level. »

          « [...] had the Hollywood tycoons better understood the function of their own star system, they would not have undermined the system by overcrowding. Floods of new stars and starlets coming off the assembly lines have unconsciously sabotaged the illusion of their being gods and goddesses. Attention is too widely dispersed. The magic is weakening, and many of the dreamers are stirring discontentedly. » 

          « Love-Goddess Assembly Line » (94, 96, 97)

          « To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts are power points which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hips with masculine drive and confidence. She knows that "a long-legged gal can go places." As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car.. They are date-baited power levers for the management of the male audience. »

          « Legs today have been indoctrinated. They are self-conscious. They speak. They have huge audiences. They are taken on dates. And in varying degrees the ad agencies have extended this specialist treatment to every other segment of the female anatomy. A car plus a well-filled pair of nylons is a recognized formula for both feminine and male success and happiness. Ads like these not only express but also encourage that strange dissociation of sex not only from the human person but even from unity of the body. This visual and not particularly voluptuous character of commercially sponsored glamour is perhaps what gives it so heavy a narcissistic quality. The brittle, self-conscious pose of the mannequin suggests the activities of competitive display rather than spontaneous sensuality. And the smartly turned-out girl walks and behaves like a being who sees  herself as a slick object rather than is aware of herself as a person. » 

          « The Mechanical Bride » (p. 98, 99)

          « Great physical and industrial power rests on a multitude of powerless individuals, many of whom are deeply resentful of their condition. The smaller and meaner the man, the more he craves to possess not limited human powers, with all the effort of cultivation and all the resposibility that implies, but superhuman power. [...] The sadistic craving for enormous physical powers to revenge or compensate for human futility will always drive such people to link themselves to vast impersonal enterprises.. They will follow automatically any road which promises to bring them to that goal. So that to be a switch thrower in a big plant looks better to them than any lonely task, however human. Such is also the attraction of bureaucratic jobs, whether in great corporations or in government. It is by a fantasy identification with the very big power unit that very small man obtains his self-realization as a superman. The key to Superman is Clark Kent the useless. Therefore the more we create and centralize physical power, the more we suppress our human nature ; and then that human nature queues up all the more to support the big physical power that crushes it. » 

          « Education » (p. 128)

          Lastly, a photocopy of the title essay of the book can be found at https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/01/05/20180105145529/.


          Van: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
          Verzonden: woensdag 3 januari 2018 12:03
          Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
          Onderwerp: [evola_as_he_is] "The Mechanical bride"
           
           

          I am forwarding a message by M. van den Heide in which he « [has] pragmatically excerpted a few paragraphs from a "feminist" essay on M. McLuhan's book "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man" in order to give an impression of McLuhan's arguments regarding feminisation. Clarifications have been added in brackets. » Once again, they are to be read against the background of the considerations developped by Evola on sex and woman in the first pages of 'Metaphysics of Sex' ("Nowadays sex has, to quite an extent, permeated the psychic field and caused a constant, insistent gravitation toward woman and love. Thus we have sensualism as a basic influence on this mental level with two outstanding characteristics: First is a widespread and chronic excitement, almost independent of every concrete, physical satisfaction because it persists as psychic  excitement; and second, partly as an outcome of the first  characteristic, this sensualism can even coexist with apparent  chastity").


          ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. », M. McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man (1964).

          « The Internet is the modern form of knitting.. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it — a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning. », T. Wolfe, American Spectator interview (2005).


          [...]

          « Media theorist Marshall McLuhan evaluates the stories contemporary advertisements tell about technology in his 1951 collection of short essays, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man. He argues that the industrialist mindset has infiltrated every aspect of American culture, creating an “industrial folklore” that “centers and organizes a variety of thoughts and feelings born of the relations between man and the machines he has made” (18). This folklore reveals itself in the narratives born of mass culture, in advertisements, newspaper articles, films, and other popular texts.

          McLuhan observes that some of this folklore forms a “dominant pattern composed of sex and technology” (McLuhan 98) where women are encouraged to redefine themselves within an industrial framework for the purposes of attracting men. »

          « [McLuhan] remarks that “in a specialist world it is natural that we should select some single part of the body for attention” (McLuhan 98), but women in particular are encouraged to focus on improving miniscule aspects of their appearance by companies selling them beauty products. In a nylon ad, legs, for instance, will float alone on a pedestal, standing alone as an object of desire. These legs, like the features of Mary’s face, are “not intimately associated with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car” (McLuhan 98).

          Under McLuhan’s technological determinism, this specialization lends the body parts, and by extension the woman, a certain autonomy and pervasive influence. Women’s legs have such independent functionality “they are self-conscious. They speak.. They have huge audiences. They are taken on dates. And to varying degrees the ad agencies have extended this specialist treatment to every other segment of the feminine anatomy” (McLuhan 98). Every body part is granted an extraordinary new agency through industrialism and consumerism, i.e: legs can win dates instead of the whole woman. In this way, entire body parts are granted the same power that McLuhan attributes to the technology that can transform cultures. »

          « For McLuhan, the depersonalized pursuit of body parts alone is an enthusiastic activity of the male gaze that women encourage by engaging in consumerist behaviors. Though McLuhan argues that women’s skill over improving their appearance part-by-part awards them an imbalanced sexual power over men, he does note that the reductionism has something to do with some mass cultural desire “to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way” (McLuhan 99). Women are not “users” of machines, they are machines: tuned to serve functions particular to the needs of patriarchal structures. »

          « Both Fitting Faces [an educational movie] and McLuhan address the same definition of feminine “success”: enhancing their body’s appeal to the male gaze to win a date (and the material boons that come along with it). To McLuhan, this skill is most effectively accomplished by the kind of modern girl who “swings her legs from the hips with masculine drive and confidence” (McLuhan 98). Maleness is power, whether it comes from emulating masculinity or manipulating it. Success is not obtainable in an entirely feminized sphere. »

          « Marshall McLuhan notes that “the smartly turned-out girl walks and behaves like a being who sees herself as a slick object rather than is aware of herself as a person” (McLuhan 99), because she is effectively rendering herself within the mindset of the male gaze, from which she can better manipulate the men who will grant her sexual and material power.

          McLuhan demonstrates anxiety over this perceived influence. Not only will these fine-tuned ladybots be haunted by their “mannequin pasts” (McLuhan 99) once they enter an emotional relationship with men, they demand “an impossible virility of assertion” (McLuhan 99). Both the gender binary and patriarchal power structures are threatened by the new “masculine” agency of the cyborg female. »

          « McLuhan was particularly anxious about blurring the gender binary: he complained of “homosexual influence in the publishing world that was horrified by the masculine vigor of his prose and trying to castrate his text” (Marchand 109) and in The Mechanical Bride expressed distress over homosexuality (McLuhan 99), women who walk with “masculine drive and confidence” (98), and “the powerful pressures of a machine economy to abolish sex differentiation along with the rest of human tradition and experience” (72). To McLuhan, the permeation of industrial ideologies is dangerous because the culture of machines can completely reconstruct reality into an androgynous, corporate, and synthetic culture that is ultimately less fulfilling. »

          « McLuhan argues that the “fear of the human touch and hatred of the human smell” in the culture of science and industry-driven hygiene is not that far removed from a reproductively barren landscape where “sex pleasure would be entirely auto-erotic,” artificial insemination is more common than traditional pregnancy, and all “excretion from the cradle to the grave would be presided over by a special caste of robots” (62). The fear of human contact grows from an environment of extreme emotional distance, made possible by the proliferation of hygiene products and other related mechanical “fixes” for industrial man’s problems.

          « McLuhan discusses the cultural presentation of women as tools, arguing that the reductionist approach to the female body in advertisements like “Fitting Faces” dehumanizes women. He does not view this dehumanizing from a feminist perspective, instead claiming that these industrialized behaviors grant women agency, their new power and masculinity serving a temporary purpose that ultimately confuses them both emotionally and sexually. A woman’s “empowerment” through the fashion and beauty industries both fundamentally changes the nature of her relationships with men and warps overarching sex roles.

          McLuhan suggests that the industrialization of female sexual power allows culture to easily imagine an electronic sex dispenser. ”In the era of thinking machines,” he writes about women’s calculated approach to sex, “it would be surprising, indeed, if the love-machine were not thought of as well” (99). »

          « The new ideal, according to McLuhan, is a “frigid woman” (99), who cooly oversees her self cultivation, optimizing each of her body parts with a practiced efficiency. The sentimental, along with traditionally feminine displays of sincerity, is now foreign to the woman preoccupied with her own “competitive display...” She competes to appease the male gaze with other sleekly altered femme bots; if they succeed they will be rewarded with male attention and its subsequent material comfort.

          McLuhan claims that this calculated approach to sex is disorienting for women once they achieve their goals. “When sex later becomes a personal actuality,” he argues, “the established feminine pattern of sex as an instrument of power, in an industrial and consumer context, is a liability” (99). She finds affection difficult to display because “her mannequin past is in the way” (99); she was taught to be so efficient as a machine that she no longer has the ability to foster a rich inner life. »

          « McLuhan remarks that author Samuel Butler noticed “as early as 1872” that machines were “coming to resemble organisms… more than matched by the speed with which people who minded them were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless behaviorism of the machine” (99). »

          « This conclusion [of a Science Fiction novel's narrative] resonates with McLuhan’s argument that male anxiety rises from the commercial cycle beginning with women’s obsessive approach to material appearance and construction. Perfectly engineered “parts” cultivate sexual power over men, who are expected to respond in kind with material successes of his own. Men’s new burden to prove the potency of their masculinity through a capacity to provide luxury is stressful because it requires an “impossible virility of assertion” (99). McLuhan, in other words, claims that women are the catalyst that compel men to acquire a similarly distant, ultimately fulfilling approach to sex and relationships.

          This frames women as the driving force behind sex norms, their behaviors setting standards for reproductive culture. McLuhan claims that the machination of the newly electronified workforce results in “sex weariness and sex sluggishness,” where “ glamour campaigns” whittle down the human experience of sex to a “view of the human body as a sort of love-machine capable merely of specific thrills” (99). »
          [....] »


          See, for further reference, on top of those that were provided in my previous message on McLuhan,
          Steven Dillon, Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies: Female Desire in 1940s US Culture, p. 10-11


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