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There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake . . . -- Maurice Blanchot
About Me
- Monica
- Studio City, California, United States
- I am a writer, storyteller, and former professor (UCLA, Pepperdine, LMU, Purdue) with expertise in representations of trauma, multi-ethnic literatures, Christianity and Judaism, immigrant narratives, and Critical Theory (I'm a graduate of the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory). I love to create stories. I adore books, wine, traveling, and shoes. I wrote a book called THE MIDRASHIC IMPULSE AND THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY RESPONSE TO TRAUMA and have published pieces in Newsweek, The New Republic, The Jewish Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Forward, and other places.
Places I Visit
- Monica Osborne at The Jewish Journal
- StrangledSleep on TWITTER
- Jewcy
- A Novel Blog
- Both Wearing Black Masks
- Hebrew Language Detective
- Postcards from Bedlam
- EV Comics
- Fido the Yak
- Fractal Ontology
- Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic
- Jewish and Other Media Links
- Jewschool
- Luke Ford
- Mxrk
- North American Levinas Society
- On Being Impermissible
- Rhetoricat.Com
- Side-effects
- Perverse Egalitarianism
- A Chair and Two Apples
- SOMA
- That Celestial Thought
- Third Guy Ducks
- Trauma and Philosophy
- Wishydig
- Perverse Egalitarianism
Posts
3 comments:
Have we really become this immune these days that we can't see why this is wrong? I mean sex is harmless no doubt, but the internet is open to our kids, of which I have two. This is just plain irresposible, but maybe plain ignorant. Sex and profit in the name of Jesus, real nice.
The internet these days is no different then an open market back in the days of Christ. Would we (would christians) allow a dildo vendor to sit on a corner with his products all layed out on a table for passers by to look?
Although the bible doesn't say:
“Verily I say unto you, thou shalt not stimulate thy wives nether regions with moldings of plastic, nor of rubber, nor of the carvings of wood. Neither shalt one profit from the sale of such debaucherus assemblies in the name of the lord thy God.”
I liked your article over at Jewcy, I also heard about it via NPR. Anyway, I posted it over at Perverse Egalitarianism, but for you know, convenience I've just pasted it here:
The at the end of the article, whether or not this is a creative attempt to proselytize, is a good one. This sounds very similar to (oh so creepy best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life/pastor) Rick Warren, whose is always telling anyone who will listen that God wants us to be wealthy. So, by extension, I guess God wants us to have the best and loudest orgasms we can. Now, I’ve read enough of Zizek to understand that we subjects of capitalism find ourselves compelled to enjoy, whether that means a purpose driven life or why not, orgasms. Hey, you want all this, no problem, buy some Christian sex toys! You too can do it like porn stars (well, married Christian porn stars)! Now, the problem of this, once again to cite Slovenian hero Slavoj Zizek, is that the “injunction to enjoy” is actually the best way to prevent us from enjoying. When possibility is an open sea, e.g. when we can do anything we want and have anything we desire, to be able to determine what will make us happy and provide us with the most fulfilling orgasm becomes terrifying. What if I didn’t buy the right sex toy? What if this sex toy isn’t even Christian? The “Purpose Driven Life”and other such quasi-Aristotlean Dr. Phil types of books promise that we can change our life when we accept the specific rules of conduct they lay out. In this case, uncovering and accepting God’s purpose as laid out by Rick Warren, who tells us that hey, follow my plan and you can enjoy all sort of things (although his schtick seems to be “Hey, good wants you to prosper, God wants you to live in a 5 bedroom house, drive two $40,000 SUVs,” to which I would like to ask, “Does God want my home to be foreclosed?” But Warren is too clever, just stick with me, God has a plan, God wants you to succeed, he says, put the money in the coffers and you can get anything you want. You just have to be patient and hold firm to my plan during the storm.
Perhaps I’m being too cynical, whether or not this is a type of proselytization (one can only imagine missionaries with a dildo in one hand and the bible in the other!) or not, as the author points out it’s win-win for married Christians . Yet, if we take the Slovenian hero’s tack, it seems to me to be yet another form of regulating our relationship to enjoyment. Or, maybe a little repression is good, I’ve seen Dirty Dancing, I’ve watched Lambada, I’ve seen Flashdance, we all know that the Hollywood version of the lambada is such a great dance only because its the forbidden dance! Or, perhaps we all should have all just listened to the diminutive Dr. Ruth, who reminded us (in a Mikhail-like accent), “If it feels good, it is good, so screw it.”
Thanks, Shahar. I just checked our blog, too, and you have some great posts--I've added a link to my blogroll. I hadn't thought about this whole idea in the context of Zizek, but you do make a good point. I do, though, think there is something to the idea of repression being, well, not "good" but something . . .
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Anonymous--
I love your non-bible scripture...too funny. You do make a good point about the internet being open to children. However (and this is ongoing debate over at Jewcy right now, regarding the whole "Lizzy the Lezzy" cartoon), there are all sorts of things on the Internet that might be perfectly acceptable for adults, but not for children, and so it's up to parents to monitor their children's web-surfing. I will say, though, that at least this "Christian" sex toy site doesn't include pornographic pictures--I think that would be more traumatizing to children than the actual devices.
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