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What women might think about these prohibitions (and his wife had many loudly voiced ideas of her own) did not interest Tolstoy. He insists that women are “pure.” Even “as pure as doves.” The sane Tolstoy knows this is rubbish, but he has to insist that women all hate sex, which is vile, shameful, and even unnatural—these are only some of his epithets. A pure maiden will always hate sex.
Lessig: Tolstoy's thought on maidens and sex.
This cycle of sex and quarreling has always fascinated me. Anybody who has enjoyed passionate sex will recall as well passionate quarrels, but surely it is not surprising, when sex is such a promoter of strong emotions of all kinds, that antagonism should sometimes be one of them.
Lessig.
The Kreutzer Sonata was written after hearing the music played, which affected him strongly: he was white and suffering, and arranged to have it played again. As a result of the first hearing he made love to Sonya—if that is the word for it—and as a result of that, she got pregnant with the little boy Ivan, who died seven years later and caused Tolstoy to insist: There is no death.
Lessig: Tolstoy and Kreutzers Sonata.
“The aims of art are incommensurable with the aims of socialism. An artist’s mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.”
“Yes, but that is true only in novels, never in real life. In real life this preference for one person may occasionally last a year, but more often it is measured by months, or even by weeks or days or hours,”
"You need to believe in things that aren't real, how else can they become?" - Sir Terry Prattchet (Hogfather)
And to be a libertine is to be in a physical condition like that of a drug addict, a drunkard, or a smoker. As any one of these is no longer a normal man, so a man who uses women for his own pleasure is no longer normal; he is a man forever spoiled—a libertine.
Don Juanism to capitalism:
To see people as objects, as numbers, that is the way of capitalism. Capitalists take pleasure in enduljing in material goodness - Objects mean to them more than people and people mean more to them only when they can be more object than man.
So is a capitalist a man forever spoiled. Their relation to fellow man (or rather the absence of it in favor of callous cash payment) is not much different than the breath of a drunkard in your face.
“Just think what ought to be and what is! It ought to be that when such a gentleman comes into the society of my sister or my daughter, I, knowing about his life, should draw him quietly to one side and say in a confidential whisper, ‘I know exactly how you are living, how you spend your nights and with whom. This is no place for you. These are pure, innocent women and girls. Please go.’ “So it ought to be. But in reality, when such a man makes his appearance or when he dances with my sister or my daughter in his arms, we rejoice if he is rich and well connected.
So does capitalism break the thought that is moral and good, all in favor of personal gain and wealth accumulation.
“It is a remarkable thing how full of illusion is the notion that beauty is an advantage. A beautiful woman says all sorts of foolishness; you listen and do not hear any foolishness—what you hear seems to you wisdom itself. She says and does common things; to you it seems lovely. Even when she does not say stupid or common things but is simply beautiful, you are convinced that she is miraculously wise and moral.
Physical beauty is an illusion. Close your eyes. Eyes lie, they watch but do not see. Hear the words. The words carry the truth.
Sometimes blindmen see far better than most.
If we should once forget this indecency which has become second nature and look at the life of our upper classes as it really is, in all its shamelessness, it would appear like one luxurious brothel.
In regard of relationshipbetween men and women, the capitalist society is nothing more than a luxurious brothel.
As Marx once put it, it is no surprise that women too are treated as objects of pleasure and reproduction to the Capitalist, for he lives in a society where people are expandable numbers like the turning wheels of a machinde.
You see, there is no scoundrel who cannot—if he searches hard enough—find a scoundrel in some respects worse than himself, and so he finds an excuse for pride and self-satisfaction.
I was a swine, but I saw myself as an angel!
But among us, when nine out of ten men who go to the altar do not believe in the sacrament and do not even believe that what they are doing is binding; when out of a hundred men there is scarcely one who has not been married before, and out of fifty not more than one who is not ready to deceive his wife on any convenient pretext; when the majority regard going to church as merely a special condition for possession of a certain woman—think what a terrible significance, in view of all this, all these details must have! It comes to be something in the nature of a sale. They sell the innocent girl
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Marriage: a sale dozed with formalities (there is nothing holy on it).
“Vice? What do you mean?” I asked. “Why, you are talking about one of the most natural human functions!” “Natural?” he exclaimed. “Natural? No! I have come to the conviction that it is not natural. In fact, it is utterly unnatural. Ask children! Ask an innocent young girl!” “Unnatural?” “It is natural to eat. It is agreeable, easy, pleasant, not at all shameful to eat; but this is vile and shameful and painful. No, it is not natural. And the pure maiden, I am convinced, will always hate it.” “But how,” I asked, “would the human race be perpetuated?”
Sex is a part of nature, it is in our nature. But it does not feel natural.. Sex is what makes animals of men.
If there is a purpose in life, it is clear that life ought to end when that purpose is attained.
Our passionate love had worn itself out in the satisfaction of the senses, and we now remained facing each other as we really were—two egotists, alien to each other and desirous of getting the greatest possible pleasure out of the other!
Sex kills pure love. It materializes love. Perhaps people are hard to except something such as "true love" in a world of facts, numbers and material possession. (Love for a capitalist means nothing if the other person is not an object that can be possessed)
this animosity was nothing else than the protest of human nature against the animal which was crushing it!
The need for sex. (man = animal)
All he cares for is to have the greatest possible pleasure. And who is he? He is the ruler of nature! He is man! “Notice this: that animals enjoy intercourse only when there is to be progeny, but the vile ruler of nature does it only for pleasure’s sake, and at any time. Moreover, he idealizes this monkeylike business, and calls it the pearl of creation, love!
There is nothing natural with sex, vice of man. Sex is called love, but only a capitalist would call it so, for the very root of capitalist mentality is pursuing greatest pleasure for one self.
woman is still the instrument of enjoyment and her body is the means of enjoyment. And she knows all that! It is just the same as slavery.
Treating a woman as a vassel for pleasure is making a non living object of a person, destruction of character and slavery (personal wealth).
In order for slavery to come to an end, people must stop wanting to take advantage of the compulsory labor of others. They must consider it sinful or shameful. But while they abolish the external form of slavery, while they make it no longer possible to buy and sell slaves in the market—and they persuade themselves fully that slavery is abolished—they do not see and they do not wish to see that slavery still exists, because people, just the same as ever, like to profit by the labors of others, and they consider it fair and honorable to do so.
Capitalism = slavery (definition)
“They emancipate woman in the colleges and in the law courts, but they still look on her as an object of enjoyment! Train her, as she is trained among us, to regard herself in this light, and she will always remain a lower creature.
We live in a world where slavery still exists, only that it is coated in shugar and spice and everything nice. (to bo dovolj za laično večino).
But all these crimes are nothing compared to the moral corruption of materialism which they introduce into the world, especially through women.
The hen has no fear of what may befall her chick;
Humans as animals have the instinct to nurse, fondle and protect their young. But humans also possess imagination that animals do not.
Music makes me forget myself, my real situation. It transports me into a state that is not my natural one. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not really understand, that I can do what I can’t do.
That is to say, they organize a whole class of women who have to perish body and soul to satisfy the alleged needs of men.
Women are made objects to be used. This is the way of the capitalist society.
It cannot be necessary to destroy some people, body and soul, for the health of others, any more than it can be necessary for some people to drink the blood of others in order to be healthy.
When the capitalist exploits a fellow man for cash profit or a woman as an object for pleasure it is no different than drinking the blood of another.
