From The Guardian:
Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing? One would think not. There is no more direct link to suicide bombing than there is to blindness or schizophrenia. But there may be a connection between sexual inadequacy or frustration and the pull towards violent extremism. This is the theme of an engaging novella, Seventeen, by the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1994. The story is set in the 1960s, when it was written.
The main character is a 17-year-old boy who can’t stop jacking off, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, in the bushes, even in the schoolroom. He is ashamed of his habit, just as he is ashamed of almost everything else. No good at games, a failure with girls and a bully at home, he can’t really stand anyone – not his wishy-washy liberal father, or his mother and sister, or his teachers, and least of all himself. Conscious at all times of being an ugly failure, all he can do is masturbate, while living in terror that the whole world is aware of his practice just by looking at him.
But a kind of salvation is at hand. The boy is introduced by a friend to a band of extreme rightwing youths, dressed in uniforms, following a leader who rants about communists and socialist traitors, and the glories of the Japanese empire. Soon the great masturbator, too, is issued with a uniform and boots, and accepted as a warrior for the imperial cause against foreigners and leftwing traitors. He even gets into a few violent scrapes. And he has his first satisfying orgasm, in a massage parlour, in his new uniform, dreaming of total power, of killing his enemies, of raping their wives and daughters, and of dying for the glorious emperor.It is not Oe’s most subtle piece of fiction. The narrator often sounds too much like a literary tool for expressing the politics most abhorrent to his creator. But the sexual swamp in which extremism can grow is well described, and worth exploration.
I guess. Although I don’t remember Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, who suffered from a similar, er, affliction, veering toward violent extremism, unless one counts his insatiable desire for non-Jewish women as a form of violence. God knows his mother probably did.
Apples and oranges? Or simply the vagaries of context and opportunity?
Me, I tend not to ascribe quite so much power to psychosexual problems. But then, that’s also a school of thought from which I was an early dropout.
****
(h/t Tom Pechinski)
I’m reminded of Ignatious from A Confederacy of Dunces. The outcome was a wee bit different though. I wonder if they’ll touch on that aspect of things in the movie treatment. Will Will Farrel flog his dog bone on the big screen? Enquiring minds want to know.
I wrote something about that over two years ago–teach teenage kids to hate their bodies and abhor sex, then offer them free reign over 72 virgins in the afterlife. Is it any wonder some will take the Imams up on the offer?
Well, I suppose being frustrated at everything in the entire world, much like Oe’s character seems to be, would lead to extremism. And I suppose sexual frustration would fall into the category of ‘everything’ here. But I think the logic is flawed in the basic sense that although all extremists might be sexually frustrated, not all those who are sexually frustrated will become extremists. I mean, if you’re so completely frustrated with the world that you become an extremist, who’s to say it was the monkey-spanking sessions in 3rd period that sent you over the edge?
Tune in next week for “When Onanists Attack!”
Be sure to wash your hands first.
So if you blow yourself up, but you’re so fucking incompetent that you don’t manage to take any innocent Jewish children with you, does that mean that there’s 72 boxes of Kleenex waiting for you when you get to eternity?
Masturbation and “the pull towards violent extremism.”
Maybe less violent pulling would help?
*Now* you’re venturing into a topic suited for more Glenn Greenwald seminal ejaculations. Expositions.
Whatever.
Cordially…
The article makes no sense, psychosexually, but never mind that. That shit’s boring.
Buruma’s reading of Seventeen is baffling. There is no shame in its narrator. He doesn’t like being “a Seventeen,” has some awkwardness with his family etc, but it’s not “inadequacy” talking. The book opens with pages and pages of him admiring himself and his own masturbation technique in the shower. His massage-orgasm satori is the moment when he decides that the world’s modern vulgarity vs. his own classical perfection justifies any violence he decides to take up against it. No resentment, no guilt, no shame. Zero. (Subtext, you could argue. Text, no.)
It’s a shitty book that’s not worth readingâ€â€I only have it because the old edition came bound together with another Oe book I likeâ€â€but that’s no excuse for pretending you’ve read it and getting it all wrong. I hate reporters.
Anyway Oe’s narcissism-becomes-fascist story fits better with the Hari (who’s actually kind of interesting) quotes in the article than with Buruma’s borrowed “loser” angleâ€â€which whole idea is nonsense anyway. As anti-“root-causers” keep reminding us, the London bombers and the 9/11 hijackers were all well-off, “upstanding,” West-educated and all that, Osama’s a freakin’ billion-heir, etc, etc. Actual, acting radical Muslimsâ€â€beyond mere banner-carriersâ€â€come almost entirely from the Guardian demographic.
I guess their readers need an excuse to finally turn against suicide bombers, and to them gaucherie and brown ambition are greater sins than mass murder.
Perhaps we need to start airdropping Jergins into the Middle East
Thanks to the single-birth policy and a lot of gender-based infanticide, the next generation in China will have 1.3 boys for every girl. China may be planning to conquer the world with an army of sexually frustrated chronic wankers. Either that or, as Mark Steyn suggested, the first gay army since Sparta.
It would be quite an irony if the US and China fought some 21st century version of the Opium Wars, with a humiliated, decadent America yielding up major port cities like San Francisco, Key West, and P-town….
T/W: “mind.” If there’s a connection between mental masturbation and “protein wisdom”–well, I for one don’t want to hear about it.
That’s it. I’m going to get a Nobel Prize. How tough can it be? One 180 page book.
Let’s see I’m a young, fatherless young man with dreams of being an artist (concrete sculpture?). I run away from home, get abused by a Catholic priest, meet a world-weary art agent who sells me to a group of female painters who use me sexually for their art, until the day that I fall hopelessly in love with the shy girl with the hairlip who delivers the mail.
I escape from my sexual slavery and run to the Post office in town, only to find that the girl of my dreams has run off to the coast to join a celibate cult of Marxist nuns.
I steal a 1962 Lincoln and drive across country, at every stop meeting hilariously over-the-top caricatures of the backward men who live in middle America. All of them are latent homosexuals and I manage to draft them to the other team.
When I reach my true beloved at the convent on the coast, I find out that she has three hours to live. The funeral, where her body is driven off of a cliff into the Pacific in my flaming ‘62 Lincoln turns into a 60 page hypersexualized tone poem symbolizing the subjugation of the natural socialist spirit of the true feminine by the evil agression of the competitive American male.
I’ll write it in Spanish. And sell the rights to Vince Gallo. I’m a fucking shoo-in.
~INSCH ONAN!!~
KABLOOEY
tw: I’m TRYING, but it’s so sore…
– So lets see if I have this straight, so to speak. Then the future in major publishing has switched from “bitch books” to “cock works”….Just checkin’
– Hmmmm…. does this mean maybe there’ll be a lot of unused virgins, in need of a home?
So an acclaimed writer tells the story of sexual frustration (narcissism, according to BoZ) leading to violent extremism? It sounds like the another crappy Guardian article trying to add a little contemporary punch to an otherwise obscure book review.
Totally ignoring any underlying problems that manifest in the rampant masturbation? Totally ignoring how certain people are easily caught up in radical groups?
Dog bites man. And then the newsies make a cock joke of it.
Let’s be fair, I made a cock joke out of it too. And a Catholic priest joke, gotta be topical.
TW: serious. You can’t be.
That article certainly explains the legions of rabid suicide bombers that are Tibetan and Hindu monks, Catholic priests, Amish, Hasidic Jews and those sexually deprived Seventh Dat Adventists and Bahai.
And this guy gets paid to write this drivel.
Eh, I’m not impressed by this Freudian stuff—it’s more or less exactly like saying “Democrats are all fags” or “Republicans didn’t get enough love from their mothers” or something equally inane. It’s not a theory, it’s an excuse to feel good about yourself for not being on the other side.
What is kind of neat, though, is that I remember reading that an identical argument was raised about the Zulus in a history of the Zulu War. Amusingly, the author argued that the phrase “celibate man-slaying gladiators” described British officers better than Zulus.