Thene,
What indeed baffles me about Jensen is that he spends a lot of time talking about straight men, and getting credited for being a rare man who “gets it”, yet he is actually gay. He talks about men fucking women, but he has no such natural urge in himself. I don’t see his social critique in sex in the society so much different from that of women themselves. He might be a great sociologist, but I don’t see why I should view him differently from other female sociologists. And I personally find his connection of physical sexual pleasure to violence of sorts, quite disappointing.

Well, it depends how you look at it. If you accept the argument that large scale warfare (with its attendant large scale raping and killing) is only possible when done by large scale states, then I think you’ve got a decent argument for anarchism. Not anarCHY, but anarCHISM– seeking to weaken large centralized power structures wherever you find them.

The raping and killing which smaller scale power structures can accomplish (say, the mafia wars of Prohibition era Chicago) will always be outstripped by whole orders of magnitude by the raping and killing which large scale power structures can accomplish (say, just about any officially declared war between nations in the twentieth century).

From Wikipedia:

“The story is set on Anarres and Urras, the twin inhabited worlds of Tau Ceti. Urras is presented as having much in common with cold-war era Earth. It is divided into several states which are dominated by the two largest ones, which are rivals. In a clear allusion to the United States and the Soviet Union, one has a capitalist economy and patriarchal system and the other is an authoritarian system that claims to rule in the name of the proletariat. The story takes place on the fictional planet Urras and its moon Anarres (since Anarres is massive enough to hold an atmosphere, this is often described as a double planet system). In order to forestall an anarcho-syndical workers’ rebellion, the major Urrasti states gave the revolutionaries the right to live on Anarres, along with a guarantee of non-interference, approximately two hundred years before the events of The Dispossessed. Before this, Anarres had had no permanent settlements apart from some mining.

The protagonist Shevek is a physicist attempting to develop a General Temporal Theory. Anarres is in theory a society without government or coercive authoritarian institutions. Yet in pursuing research that deviates from his society’s current consensus understanding, Shevek begins to come up against very real obstacles. Shevek gradually develops an understanding that the revolution which brought his world into being is stagnating, and power structures are beginning to exist where there were none before. He therefore embarks on the risky journey to the original planet, Urras, seeking to open dialog between the worlds and to spread his theories freely outside of Anarres. The novel details his struggles on both Urras and his homeworld of Anarres.”

Also:

http://www.amazon.com/Dispossessed-Novel-Perennial-Classics/dp/006051275X/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212597436&sr=1-22

Cool. You’ve become an Anarchist.

I can dig it. I’ve been thinking about it, too. Really, the biggest thing wrong with being an anarchist, as far as I can tell, is the same thing wrong with being a socialist, or an animal rights activist: namely, that due to decades of bad press from the powers-that-be, most people will dismiss you out of hand without listening to you due to your label.

(My own last blog post was mostly about this sort of ideal: idealising violent power and sexual success, but mysteriously insisting it is always packaged with whiteness, maleness, straightness and wealth. Why, why, why? Don’t ALL sorts of people lust after those things [if only as an imaginary want that you'd never take up IRL]?)

I also love Jensen’s assumption that all guys are hetero and that you can find out everything you need to know about all guys ever by only asking the heteros. Clearly gay men have nothing to add to the story of masculinity, because they’re not really masculine or something? Wtf is he smoking?