Why I don't watch French films

"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble." - Samuel Johnson

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"Aural jouissance has been associated with the feminine in Christian cultures since the Annunciation, when the angel’s words penetrated the Virgin Mary’s ear. (This sexualization of the recessed and largely invisible organ of hearing was supposedly the reason why in the Middle Ages it was customary for respectable women at least to wear wimples)...

Thai drive is most clearly expressed when the narrator says: ‘J’étais très excite quand je faisais ça, mais je ne suis pas sûr que je bandais par exemple. Je devrais plutôt dire, comme une femme, que je mouillais’. He does, of course, ‘get wet’ in a literal and uncomplicatedly abject way, kneeling down on a urine-soaked floor in pursuit of his goal, which may even stimulate fantasies of wetness of another kind, unattainable to the male. But the intransitive use of ‘mouiller’ suggests an envious usurpation of female sexual arousal, and thus a refusal of male sexual possession analogous to that diagnosed by Amengual. The abjection here is multiple: in the activity described, in the manner and context of its description and most strikingly in its dephallicized quality. The public toilet or rest-room has traditionally, as a result of legal repression, been regarded as a sexual space almost exclusively by male homosexuals (the French ‘tasse,’ corresponding to the English ‘cottage’), so to find it sexualized in what turns out to be a doubly female manner, via the feminization of the voyeur, suggests a disconcerting rejection of the penis/phallus and all its works...

When they rush into a service station in order to use the (non-segregated) toilets, Carmen pisses in the urinal, not standing up (which would have been as close as she could come to a performative denial of difference and/or to an admission of penis envy) but squatting, as though to suggest that while sexual difference undoubtedly exists she is capable of transcending it — of becoming, in other words, the ‘real male’ in their inexorably doomed couple. The scene is watched by a bystander, played by the chubby Jacques Villeret who is best known for his comic roles for more popular directors such as Claude Lelouch and Jean Becker. Villeret shows no sign of sexual arousal, but continues, in childlike pre-sexual fashion, to wolf down jam from a jar with his fingers...

Here Joseph, still in agony after Carmen has rejected him, masturbates in the shower — clearly what Boujut is referring to when he writes ‘on s’y branle.’ However, perhaps like the Roland Amstutz character in Sauve qui petit, Joseph does not get an erection. His at once frenzied and distracted tugging at his own unresponsive flesh, worthy of a Houellebecquian hero, signais the calamitous collapse of the desire that a few minutes before had him all but crucified across the television...

Bataille's well-deserved reputation for debauchery and excess might make him appear an unlikely candidate for such an approach, but we have seen that in his work vomiting and erotic exhaustion are commonplace and that penetrative sex tends to be the exception rather than the rule. It is in Bataille too that we come across the most explicit eroticization of the mother’ s body, more shocking perhaps in Tropmann’ s masturbation beside her dead body in Le Bleu du ciel than in the more ‘conventionally’ incestuous denouement of Ma mère"

--- The abject object: avatars of the phallus in contemporary French theory, literature and film / Keith Reader


On the upside, I now know that mouiller is the equivalent of bander!