These days I realize that my personality is much closer to that of Carroll or Andersen—both of them writers of fairy-tales, both foppish and effeminate, both more at ease around women than men, both sexually timid bachelors who never dated and died virgins. Andersen was convinced from a young age that he had a God-given vocation to write fantasy stories. He had an intense sympathy for the Jewish people, who were still being persecuted in early nineteenth-century Denmark. He flirted with girls by telling them he was a faerie changeling who would one day own a castle. (If he were on twitter, people would accuse us of stealing each other’s tweets). He memorized whole scenes from Shakespeare and recited them to himself as he walked the snowy streets of his hometown. He held that imagination was more important than formal education, could be very aggressive in defense of imaginative literature and would burst into tears at the slightest criticism. He developed intense crushes that were never returned with the same intensity, often liked two people at the same time, yearned for companionship over sex, loved to stoke speculation about his infatuations while also denying that he liked anyone, relished the posture of the hopeless lover and was inevitably crushed when the objects of his affection chose to marry respectable middle-class men instead of quirky writers. Very rude of him to be dead because I suspect we would have a lot to chat about and, unlike Dickens, I would always write back. - Goodreads user Boze Herrington
We will have an end to images, the simpering virgin saints with their greensick faces, and Christ with the wound in his side gaping like a whore’s gash. - Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. https://meredithjones.wordpress.com/2020/03/22/hello-world/
"You say move a mountain, and I'll throw on my boots You say stop the river from runnin', I'll build a dam or two You say change religions, now I spend Sundays with you Somethin' 'bout those tears of yours How does it feel to be adored?" - Beyoncé, Alligator Tears
"You say move a mountain, and I'll throw on my boots." Yes Queen! "You say stop the river from runnin', I'll build a dam or two" 👏Women👏can👏build👏dams👏 "You say change religions, now I spend Sundays with you" wait, what? That sounds like the pathetic type of thing I'd do! What's Beyoncé doing? Changing religion because someone asks you to is about as submissive as one can get. It suddenly reframes the earlier lines and makes you ask who this person is and why they're demanding these mountains to be moved and rivers to be stopped. Is it just to see if the singer will do it? Is it just a power thing? The song ends: "Somethin' 'bout those tears of yours/How does it feel to be adored?" and here the tragedy of the lover is made clear: she never gets to know what it's like to be loved by this ice cold Venus.
Being the subject of romantic attraction turns around and bites you when you become the slave of your romantic object. This is the tension that Masoch describes; dostoyevsky; The assumption and the uncomfortability described is that the persuing lover isn't matched up with the dominant partner, roles that are both typically ascribed to the man in a heterosexual relationship.
Toxic masculinity is I think properly used here - when desire and ... are associated with manliness, but the vulnerability and dependency that naturally come with those feelings are seen as effeminate, the result is that the only available course for romantic ... are manipulation or force. The Red Pill spaces (that will soon become so irrelevant that I'll no longer have an excuse for constantly talking about them) are I think a good case study of trying to completely depart masculinity and femininity, and I think most people recognize the result as narcissistic, insecure, and unattractive from the female perspective (exactly because in it's insecurity, it leaves no room for female desire.) I'm probably not alone when I say that in comparision, a conservative christian guy seems more attractive than a conservative red-pill guy, because at least the religious man recognizes that submission is a necessary male virtue - I mean, they take the guy with a vagina wound as a king. This tension, by the way, is not escaped within red pill spaces - one bizarro side story of the Red Pill phenomenon involves the gang all converting to Islam, basically on the grand theological argument that the christian god is kind of gay.
And as a woman known to be attracted to other women (the rumors are true), this duality in attraction of submissiviness and aggression can turn into a dubble-edge sword of homophobia -- I feel inferior to other women in my attraction to them; at the same time I feel like an unwelcomed aggressor in that attraction. "Not only does the little mermaid face the prospect of dying — and, lest we forget, not living forever after death, because she has no soul — because she couldn't win the love of her idiotic prince, she has to dance on his wedding barge. That's just sadistic." https://www.bustle.com/articles/65813-9-ways-the-original-little-mermaid-by-hans-christian-andersen-is-actually-seriously-disturbing -- RELIGION As the story progresses, Andersen's emphasis on the obtainment of a soul comes to the forefront. In his mind, he did the little mermaid a favor: he allowed her the chance to have a soul even though she was rejected by her human love. Andersen was quite proud of this development, telling Ingemann: I have not, like de la Motte Fouqué in Undine, allowed the mermaid's acquiring of an immortal soul to depend upon an alien creature, upon the love of a human being. I'm sure that's wrong! It would depend rather much on chance, wouldn't it? I won't accept that sort of thing in this world. I have permitted my mermaid to follow a more natural, more divine path. No other writer, I believe, has indicated it yet, and that's why I am glad to have it in my tale. https://endicottstudio.typepad.com/articleslist/a-million-little-mermaids-by-virginia-borges.html So in a way, making the mermaid marry the prince almost undermines the purpose of the story, at least as it stood in the 1800s. -- It is true that she sacrifices her voice and fins for the love of a man, but it should be noted that this gesture can be read as an acceptance of the 'other,' an overcoming of xenophobia, a celebration of her curiosity. Though she marries a prince who has a similar background to hers, Eric is not a member of the merfolk, and Ariel goes against her father's wishes when she pursues him. In other words, we have a mixed marriage in the end, an acceptance of the 'other.' "Then his soul would flow into your body, and you too could share human happiness. He would give you a soul and still keep his own." I am not ashamed to admit that this is still what I want today, politically correct or no. Trans. But while the common transreading is that of longing for femininity, I think it's pretty clear that HC Andersens mermaid longs for masculinity. She slithers around a statue of a man; she longs for the physical world. I've always find it beautiful how the little mermaid statue in Copenhagen is this tiny girl looking out, distanced by the ocean, at a parade of structures, as if she's longing for this constructed, masculine world; she just can't find her way in there. The only way of salvation presented to her is that of literally gaining the soul of a man. In the man-made world, she's literally a fish out of water, yet she wants it so badly. The interesting thing in The Little Mermaid is that the mermaid wants to escape the fairytale world. This feminine fantasy isn't portrayed as worse, nothing is comparable in beauty, it's happy, it's whimsical. The question is still if it can ever be escaped, if the etheral creature trapped in fairy land can reach across the sea and touch those cranes, move in those buildings, talk to those people. It's often read as heroic, adventurous, (typically masculine virtues) that the mermaid wants to be part of that world, but that misses the way in which the longing represents a failure, and identifying oneself around the failure of what one is not - in the case of The Little Mermaid, the failure of being feminine, uncivilised, unsociable, different. Now we have to do what neither of us will like and talk about the vagina. This will get pretentious and stupid but I think it's fundamental to understanding the story. Sarte writes about the vagina: I'm not saying you have to like that, I'm just saying you need to understand the symbolism of a vagina to understand the Little Mermaid. Isn't a vagina a bit like a wound? Medieval mystics thought so. "Women shall be saved through childbirth."
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*fx5uLp6sUgj3UiQExrjhOQ.png The Church being birthed through Christ's side wound, Bible Moralisée Codex 1179, folio 3v, National Library of Austria, in Vienna "Of Christ’s five wounds, the one in his side was the focus of its own cult. After Christ’s death, this wound miraculously issued both water and blood when his body was pierced. Theologically, the Church was thought to have been born from this wound. The water had baptismal significance; the blood was, of course, the Eucharist (aka communion). Morgan Library https://juliamacyoffinger.com/2015/10/14/how-i-learned-to-love-jesus-through-his-vagina/
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:750/format:webp/1*TVfZ5uGrruHlrOkMa7rteg.png
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*R3U8NP6iBRjKqNRgFP47zg.png
https://juliamacyoffinger.com/2015/10/14/how-i-learned-to-love-jesus-through-his-vagina/
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2022/12/31/jesus-had-a-vagina-according-to-medieval-christian-mysticism/
https://www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/comments/qx54ug/jeanpaul_sartre_in_his_essay_titled_the_hole_in/ sarte vagina
--- argues this proves HC Andersen sees but too options for women; either marriage or self-sacrificing chastity. But allow me to be doubtful that the inteded morale of a guy who'd go to harlems, talk to girls and then go home and masturbate, in his self-insert story about mermaids, was the most asexual ending. I mean, the mermaids infactuation with the prince is a level of obsession that's deemed inappropriate today. It is so silly and dense to me to judge The Little Mermaid as a story of a woman giving up her voice for a man, not because they're wrong, but because yes, she gives up her voice for a man. She gives up her voice and gains a pussy. She's raft between freedom and sexuality, self-determinance and love, and she chooses the second, and then still fails miserably at achieving what she wants. It's a tragic story. And it's not that she doesn't want to have sex with him, it's that she can't. She's locked out of not only the love, but also the status, security, and ultimately the life and salvation associated with marriage. Imagine carving a hole in yourself for a person and then that person doesn't even want you. I ! ma ! gine !
The Little Mermaid urges salvation for the freaks, the loners, the mermaids; it's a radical reading of the verse "the first will be last and the last shall be first." It's the urge to gain a soul through someone else and the hope that there might be another way. It's pathetic, it's questionable, and because of that, just like H.C. Andersen's life, I think it's very reassuring.