Read this in Harper's yesterday morning, an excerpt from Jean-Baptiste Botul's satire The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant (1999) regarding Kant's repressive views on the preservation of, as Base Commander Gen. Jack D. Ripper would put it, our "bodily fluids":
"One must guard one's saliva. To spit is a waste of resources. For example, one may use his saliva to make digestion easier: says Kant, 'One ancillary advantage of this habit of breathing with the lips always closed is that the saliva secreted is constantly wetting the throat, and at the same time the saliva aids the process of stomachal digestion.' It may also act, when swallowed, as a laxative. One can also use saliva against a cough to end the tickle of the larynx. One must, then, according to a technique invented by Kant, 'turn one's attention entirely from this stimulation by forcing oneself to focus attention on a distant object.'"
On the subject of masturbation Kant offers us this gem:
"One must forcefully show him [the teenager] what makes [masturbation] so repugnant, one must show him that by committing this act he makes himself an enemy of the propagation of our species, he should be warned that it will sap him of his physical forces and that he is turning himself prematurely into an old man."
Well I guess that's all there is. I've been drawing up some cartoons, pretty nerdy and pertaining to the life of an English student, which I will definitely post, but most likely not anytime soon. Once (if ever) my internet is returned to me, I'm going to move over to WordPress, so I'll probably put them up there keep a look out.
1 comment:
i thought you were dead,
which, without an internet connection, one more-or-less is.
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