I almost put this in the Humor section


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I almost put this in the Humor section

Do you want to see a totally goofball misrepresentation of Rand's ideas without any perceivable organizing idea?

The following article on a Catholic site, Patheos, is one of the weirdest I have ever read. What's worse, I can't figure out what this person is trying to say other than he is confused about Rand and personal values, conflicted about Rand's appeal to him, and likes to write about sex while trying to sound intellectual.

Ayn Rand, Fairy Godmother of Sexual Orientation
by Marc
July 9, 2015
Patheos

Here are some gems from the article:

... Ayn Rand gave me so much more than the economic ideology one expects of motorcycle-riding men in Viagra commercials, thinly disguised as John Grisham novel from hell — though, sweet baby Moses, did she give me that. She also gave me an explanation of human sexuality to rival the hippest of queer theorists.

. . .

Atlas Shrugged has been rightly criticized as rape-y. Sex is described as bruising, angry, and loveless.

. . .

Traditionally, sexual desire has been characterized as being called forth by the other, a motion of love and desire that wells up in us as a response to a value perceived in another human being. Sexual attraction, in this view, is other-orientated. Rand reverses this order, arguing that “sex is an expression of self-esteem” and “the most profoundly selfish of all acts.” A man “will always be attracted to the woman who reflects the deepest vision of himself.” Man — considered as an individual, without any reference to another person — has a set of values. The woman he is attracted to is not attractive insofar as she presents something “new” or “other.” Rather she presents something “old” and “the same” — the embodiment of a value-set he already has. For Rand, all sex is masturbation, sex with oneself.

. . .

A sapiosexual sees his valuation of intelligence embodied in a particular person, and desires. The particular person is a secondary object of attraction. That is, he does not desire her and subsequently value her sapio, no, he is a sapiosexual, a type of being sexually orientated towards intelligence, and only subsequently does he desire her — a fulfillment of the kind of being he is. An androsexual does not desire a particular person. He is orientated towards “masculinity”, and is only attracted to a particular man insofar as that man serves as an embodiment of “masculinity”, that general, impersonal object that serves as the guiding principle of modern sexuality alongside homo, hetero, gyno, pan, poly, skolio — values of the ego, held as an identity long before any contact with another person, so that our attraction to an actual, living, breathing human being can only be masturbatory, a relation that affirms the values we already hold, stroking our ego, clicking with our pre-set view towards the world (which is thought to be good and meaningful and worthy of affirmation for the mere fact of being ours).

. . .

Rape is a reasonable conclusion of the perverse premises of a sexology of self-fulfillment. Indeed, no one is more self-fulfilled, in the most horrible sense possible, than the rapist, who takes Randian rhetoric to its logical ends, and see in the other person no life outside of the values and desires which he already holds.


If you read the whole article, you might get the same impression I do. I think this person is trying to say he doesn't like homosexuals. And all this verbiage and misrepresentation of Rand is an attempt to say her ideas justify homosexuality so they come from Satan.

Seriously.

The only thing weirder I have read about Rand is The Floating Head of Ayn Rand.

Come to think of it, maybe The Horror File Cabinet is a good place for this thread. But I'll keep it here in Objectivism in Dark Places.

Michael

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Lol Michael.

I have been a subscriber of their emails for a few months because I try to stay tuned to the opposing fields of thought and they have not disappointed me.

There are so many errors of fact and reasoning that I will have to go back to the Ayn article later.

A...

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Lol Michael.

I have been a subscriber of their emails for a few months because I try to stay tuned to the opposing fields of thought and they have not disappointed me.

There are so many errors of fact and reasoning that I will have to go back to the Ayn article later.

A...

There are two kinds of experts: (1) the expert, real-world, knows of what he speaks. (2) The expert who makes up the "facts" he works with for the sake of a story. In many ways Rand and this guy are much the same this way (2), but she's an incomparably better story teller with many more real facts and he completely misses her boat--he only pretends to grapple and board.

--Brant

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This is my current favorite misrepresentation/smear of Rand:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSk-C7W0L28

Not just the vid, but the comments. It's all so hilariously angry, willfully ignorant, and opposed to giving Rand a fair reading or an honest attempt to understand what she believed and advocated.

It's very much like reading Rand and her followers' misrepresentations/smears of Kant, so I experience it as being something like Karma, but, in this case, not as schadenfreude.

The sad thing is seeing, in the comments section, how impotent Rand's defenders have become.

J

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sex as self-fulfillment is rape-y?

I had always thought it was non-fulfilling sex that is rape-y.

I picture some man telling a woman she should thank him for so brutally ravishing her. "It was for your own good!"

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  • 5 years later...

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