Transference

Transference is a term of art in psychology (if you're willing to grant that discipline art status, which may well be a dubious claim) introduced by Freud and hence redefined variously by pretty much everyone. It behooves me to try too, then, doesn't it ?

Take "archaic" societyⁱ, that thing derided as "anarcho-paternalism" oops I misspoke. Anarchodash is a good thing now, it's all hip and in with the right crowds. Therefore it couldn't have been anarcho-paternalism, I must have meant something like phallocentrism, or at any rate Victorian society. Let's quote and in quoting let's remember (on the pretense that we're not the same age as Imbecilitarians who aren't privy to a time on Earth that doesn't include lolcats) :

Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some of our own sex who are shocked at the “unscrupulousness,” meaning the utter disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race. Is there anything meaner than to throw necessary work upon other people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact that he’s a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction.

Shaw to Walkley, 1903.

The quote carries quite well, I think. At the time women weren't exactly property in the sense niggersⁱⁱ had just been property one generation before. They weren't quite people, either, but a sort of dependents on their male owners, fathers or husbands. A sort of permanent children, if you will. A generation later women still couldn't open a bank account without "their" men signing off on it, and there you have the first hint of transference at work : "their" husbands ?! No, the husbands weren't in any way theirs. It was they who were their husband's.

And so it goes with society at large, then and since. Men are fully aware of the rather harsh and unabashed reality of both women's situation and inclination, as they are fully aware of their own wimpy natureⁱⁱⁱ. Their response is to create this imaginary, fictitious and lalalandesque^iv representation wherein "true" and "womanly" women are delicate when proper and real women are anything but ; they pretend women be shy when anyone keeping dogs knows full well you take the bitch to the hound and not the other way around because males are shy and you don't want to compound this by exposing them to the horror of new surroundings. Transference.

The average Imbecilitarian female, Jouralism grad student or not, inhabits this entirely fantastic world where she's either a rape victim, could be assimilated to a rape victim^v or has been somehow raped "metaphorically", maybe by "phallocentric society" as a whole, through their evil and mischevious ways.

Her problem, quite plainly, is that the pseudo-philosophic demagoguery she subscribes to, one of the many flavours of Imbecilitarianism, can't bring itself to retire the old "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" and for this reason rape is a central tenet of Imbecilitarianism. If indeed from all according to ability, well... women have the ability to satisfy sexually. If indeed to all according to their need, well... men do perceive and declare a need to be satisfied sexually. Rape is then the very core of any Imbecilitarianism, and no, a line can't really be drawn between the ownership of one's cattle and the ownership of one's cunt. (The argument could be brought in reverse, too, if men weren't so ridiculously ill equipped to satisfy sexually.)

And so then, transference. Is she the proponent of the Holy Rape of Everything disguised as progress, betterment and ideal ? Well therefore that antiquated social structure which wholeheartedly dedicated itself to preventing any and all sexual congress is really raping her! A bunch of rapists.

It works the same for conspiracy theorists of all stripes ; that secret society machinating to take over the world from behind the scenes is simply the speaker trying to come to terms with the basement of his own mind. Whenever the speaker identifies manifest evil vaguely just beyond the line of the horizon, whenever the speaker identifies the Devil (for this is exactly what all goes on here) the speaker's always speaking from experience. His own, his very own experience. His own, his very own Devil.

Le diable c'est l'autres thus becomes "The good lord are the others". In truth it takes a lot of work and a lot of training to gain the ability of speaking to objects external. For the vast majority of speakers, including the absolute totality of Journalism grad students, any speech is of the self, whether it purports to describe the Moon or hushpuppies.

On the other hand this is what makes any democracy such an amusing state of affairs.

1. Very improper, since archaic is also a term of art, this time in the serious arts, and references that from before writing was used by mankind, or more generally that from before any recollection other than myth. [↩]
2. I mean black people, and if calling them niggers weren't such an issue I wouldn't even bother. As it is however, I'll call black people niggers until nobody cares anymore. [↩]
3. If you're much inclined to dispute this otherwise obvious assertion, why don't you take one man and one woman picked off the street to the dentist's, and instruct the good man to fix all their teeth and use no anesthetic. [↩]
4. Ahh, what a word! [↩]
5. "That one time in the subway that guy totally shoved his finger into my asscrack from behind. Or it might have been his umbrella." [↩]