Rule Girls

"Rule Girls’ are heterosexual women who follow precise rules as to how they let themselves be seduced (accept a date only if you are asked at least three days in advance etc). Although the rules correspond to customs which used to regulate the behaviour of old-fashioned women actively pursued by old-fashioned men, the Rule Girls phenomenon does not involve a return to conservative values: women now freely choose their own rules..."

Compreenderão, por certo, que isto é dos trechos mais excitantes que pode ser lido por alguém que padece de um romantismo anacrónico. Estou realmente excitado. Ando a pensar nestas cinco linhas desde que as li com a devida atenção no outro dia, apesar de o texto ser de 1999. Quer dizer que desde que pelo menos desde 1999 que as 'Rule Girls' andam por aí e eu não fazia ideia. O que me deixa triste - mas prefiro não pensar nisso.

Embora tudo me excite nestas linhas, confesso que adoro (e me identifico com) o pragmático twist do "does not involve a return to conservative values". Ou seja, tal como eu sempre sonhei, existe um ser feminino não pertencente a qualquer seita fanático-religiosa que pretende sexualizar com alguém do sexo oposto depois de respeitar um código deontológico de sedução antiquado, ao mesmo tempo que não abdica das vicissitudes hedonistas da alta modernidade (há quem chame promiscuidade a estas "vicissitudes hedonistas", mas é gente que não interessa nada - eu próprio apenas o faço quando estou severamente irritado e/ou depois de ver um videoclip da ana malhoa) (há também que chame era pós-moderna à alta modernidade, mas esses gajos são normalmente acusados de parvoíce - adjectivo com o qual me identifico bastante).

Pieter Hugo

"These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption 'The Streets of Lagos'. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me".

The Hyena and Other Men

J* Davey

the penitentiary of democracy

"Those who find democracy to be the most enduring and compeling component in late-modern identity may be drawn to supplement and challenge territorial democracy through nonterritorial democratization. For today democracy is the living ideal through which the territorial state receives its highest legitimation. But to confine the ethos of democracy to the state today is to convert the state into the penintentiary of democracy".

William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference, 1991.

why Hitchens isn't funny (or doesn't know the right people)

Eu quase que podia jurar que esta tinha sido a resposta da Sarah Silverman a isto. Pelos vistos ela achou por bem escrever mais qualquer coisa sobre o assunto.

Criticism

"A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought... It is something that is often hidden, but which always animates everyday behavior. There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult".

Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman.

federer

Queria apenas informar este senhor que, afinal, está tudo explicado. Não há razão para ter medo estado do mundo. O armagedão foi atrasado mais uns tempos.