Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) by Walter Benjamin explores how mass production and technological advances, such as photography and film, have transformed the nature and value of art. Benjamin argues that these technologies detach art from its traditional contexts and rituals, leading to a loss of its "aura" — the unique presence and authenticity tied to its originality. The essay also delves into the political implications of this shift, considering how mass-reproduced art can influence society and culture in new, often disorienting ways.
This book was written in 1935 but remains to be increasingly relevant with the rise of AI tech and the conversations surrounding the ethics of AI art. It’s very short, it’s about 50 pages, so even though the material is a little more dense, especially if you’re not used to reading theory or slightly older texts, it feels digestible and not overwhelming.
“Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film.”
Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism by Laurie Penny
Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011) by Laurie Penny critiques the commercialization of women's bodies in a capitalist society. Penny explores how the media, consumer culture, and patriarchy commodify women’s appearance and sexuality, creating unrealistic beauty standards while stripping away personal autonomy. The book is a sharp feminist commentary on body image, exploitation, and the intersection of gender and capitalism.See Alsox3TheAran59 - Blockbuster: Heroes of Maple
This book is also short, about 100 pages. This is another digestible book if you’re newer to reading this type of material as Penny hits a lot of interesting and potent points though isn’t referencing a bunch of older texts like a lot of these types of books do. It’s a fantastic starter book for connecting anti-capitalist and feminist thought and it’s a book I return to often for quotes and ideas to pull for my own essays.
“Late capitalism quite literally brands the bodies of women. It sears its seal painfully into our flesh, cauterizing growth and sterilizing dissent. Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditized identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings. From the moment we become old enough to want to own ourselves, the corporate cast of womanhood is stamped into our subconscious, burnt into our brains, reminding us that we are cattle, that we are chattel, that we must strive for conformity, that we can never be free.”
Theory of the Young Girl by Tiqqun Theory of the Young Girl (2001), by Tiqqun, is a radical philosophical text that critiques the commodification and infantilization of women in contemporary society. The book explores how the figure of the "young girl" has become a symbol of innocence and consumption, representing a form of control within capitalism, where women are reduced to objects of desire, manipulation, and alienation. Through its sharp theoretical lens, the work challenges conventional understandings of gender, power, and cultural identity.
I have talked about this book to death, and I will most likely never stop talking about this book. This was a re-read because I re-read this once a year, and this year I even read it twice. It is a seminal text for my own personal work. I quote this book too often, but I don’t think I am capable of stopping. I recommend reading a physical copy of this book because the way it is printed is so unique and adds to the reading experience and is contextually relevant to the subject matter. It’s also very short, so it’s also the type of book where you can spend a lot of time dissecting the text without feeling so overwhelmed. I feel like everytime I read this book I am moved by different quotes as my outlook on the world continues to change. I’m sure eventually my copy of the book will just be entirely underlined.
“"Beauty" is the mode of unveiling proper to the Young-Girl in the Spectacle. This is why she is also a generic product, containing all of the abstraction of that which is forced to address itself to a certain segment of the sexual market-place, inside of which everything looks alike.
Capitalism has truly created wealth, because it discovered it where it had formerly been invisible.
This is how, for example, capitalism created beauty, health, or youth as wealth, that is, as qualities that possess you.
The Young-Girl is never satisfied with her submission to consumer metaphysics, with the docility of her entire being, and obviously of her entire body, to the norms of the Spectacle. This is why she displays the need to exhibit it.
"They have offended the thing hold most dear: my image" (Silvio Berlusconi).
The Young-Girl always-already lives as a couple, that is, she lives with her image.”
Come as You Are by Emily NagoskiCome as You Are (2015) by Emily Nagoski is a groundbreaking exploration of female sexuality, offering a science-backed, holistic perspective on how women experience desire, pleasure, and arousal. Drawing on research from psychology, neuroscience, and sexology, Nagoski emphasizes the importance of understanding personal and cultural factors in shaping sexual well-being, encouraging women to embrace their bodies and sexual identities without shame. The book serves as both an informative guide and a supportive resource for women seeking a deeper connection with their own sexuality.
This book is such a fantastic book for understanding one's own sexuality. Nagoski does an incredible job of dispelling cultural myths surrounding sexuality, especially female sexuality. As someone who has struggled with a lot of fear, trauma, and shame surrounding sex and intimacy I found this book incredibly healing and beneficial. I found the section discussing “the dual arousal model” which is described by Nagoski as a framework used to understand and explain sexual response, desire, and arousal in a comprehensive and holistic manner. It offers valuable insights into the complex interplay of sexual inhibition and sexual excitation in individuals. The Dual Arousal Model is the idea that sexual response is influenced by two main temperaments/systems: Sexual Excitation (SES) and Sexual Inhibition (SIS). I scored a high SIS which Nagoski describes as “You’re pretty sensitive to all the reasons not to be sexually aroused. You need a setting of trust and relaxation in order to be aroused, and it’s best if you don’t feel rushed or pressured in any way. You might be easily distracted from sex. High SIS, regardless of SES, is the most strongly correlated factor with sexual problems. About a quarter of the women I’ve asked fall into this range.”
“I had my own unique version of the Media Message in my head. I believed that the Ideal Sexual Woman was an adventurous, noisy female whom men lusted after for her skill and her enthusiasm. She was—of course!—easily orgasmic from penetration, she experienced spontaneous desire, and her vagina got so wet. Any woman who didn’t want to try new things was a prude, hopelessly hung up and neurotic.
Notice that the Ideal Sexual Woman does not necessarily enjoy a great deal of pleasure; she just appears to experience pleasure. That’s what a sexual woman should be, as far as my culture had taught me, and so that’s what I performed. By the time I started my first sexual relationship, I was a sexual product, processed and packaged for the pleasure of others.”
Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin Right-Wing Women (1983) by Andrea Dworkin examines the psychological and social dynamics that drive some women to align with right-wing politics, despite these ideologies often reinforcing patriarchy and oppression. Dworkin explores how factors such as insecurity, the desire for protection, and internalized misogyny can lead women to support conservative movements that ultimately undermine their own rights and autonomy. The book is a provocative feminist analysis of women’s role in maintaining systems of power that harm them.
This is definitely my favourite of Dworkin’s material. From the first chapter it is packed with so many sobering quotes and ideas about women’s place within culture as defined by patriarchy. This is probably the Dworkin book I’d recommend the most, especially because it’s not such an early work of hers and therefore I find the ideas to be more finalized than in some of her earlier material.
“Only women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman. Only women die one by one, polished to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately ashamed to cry out. Only women die one by one, still believing that if only they had been perfect—perfect wife, mother, or whore—they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it so strangely difficult and empty, themselves so hopelessly confused and despairing. Women die, mourning not the loss of their own lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal, by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the male in his scheme of things. This monstrous female quest for male-defined perfection, so intrinsically hostile to freedom and integrity, leads inevitably to bitterness, paralysis, or death, but like the mirage in the desert, the life-giving oasis that is not there, survival is promised in this conformity and nowhere else.”
Lolita in the Afterlife Lolita in the Afterlife (2021), edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, is a collection of essays that critically examine Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita. Contributions from contemporary writers explore themes such as art, politics, race, gender, and sexual trauma, reflecting on the novel's enduring impact and its relevance in modern discourse. The anthology features essays by notable authors including Roxane Gay, Laura Lippman, and Alexander Chee, offering diverse perspectives on the complex issues raised by Nabokov's work. This compilation provides readers with a multifaceted understanding of Lolita, encouraging critical engagement with its themes and the broader societal conversations it continues to inspire.
This is an incredible book especially for those who have any type of preliminary experience with the book, or film Lolita. I found reading these essays to be healing in a way as I reflected on growing up on Tumblr during the Lolita-LDR-Nymphet blog era. I think any girl who also grew up in the online space on Tumblr in the 2010s would have a similar reading experience. This was a very useful text when making my video “Why Lolita is Impossible to Adapt into Film” as I quote many of the essays in the book.
Delectatio Morosa Lauren Groff
“I was shocked by Lolita at first; and soon I began to be disturbed deep in my flesh by it. By the time I had finished it, the book had turned sex squarely in my direction and attached it to my body.
And when I looked around, I discovered that all around me, the bodies of my little friends, these girls who rode their bikes in their Umbro shorts, who did ballet in pointe shoes, who secretly tried on their aunts’ sparkle lip gloss, who cried when they watched The Princess Bride during sleepovers—these half-grown girls—had become in my vision unexploded bombs waiting for male desire to light their fuses.
I want to emphasize from the safety of my middle age that there was no real power in our tentative newfound status; but feeling oneself an object of attention can create the illusion of power. After all, there is a currency of attention, as well as a currency of attraction. Perhaps men had looked at us with lust before this, but I hadn’t noticed or felt the attention in my body. Now I did. Now I felt strange riding alone in cars with the fathers of the children I babysat, or being out of the water in my bathing suit, though all my life I’d been a competitive swimmer. I felt the eyes of men on me. I was cowed by the heat and weight of this attention. In truth, there was a part of me that also loved it, craved their eyes, their heat, their intake of breath.
Perhaps more troublesomely, as my body awoke to sex through Lolita, I felt no reciprocal heat for the boys of my age around me who shyly showed their interest. Rather I turned in my uncertain hunger toward older men in the generation between me and my parents: actors, models, Ernest Hemingway in a passport photograph taken when he was twenty-four and ripped out of The New York Times Book Review.” (pg 150)
Maison NymphetteKate Elizabeth Russell“Girls on the internet are usually presented to us as a cautionary tale. Naive yet drawn toward risky behavior, vulnerable yet unabashed in their desire for attention, girls on the internet make mistakes and suffer accordingly. They reveal too much of themselves; they trust too easily. They post sexy selfies and confessional poetry. They send naked photos of themselves to boys who forward the photos to friends and classmates until the photos have spread around the whole school, and while it’s understood what the boys did was wrong, really the girls should have known better. What did they expect was going to happen?
Girls on the internet give into loneliness, their incessant need to feel special, and they develop online relationships with strange men. They let themselves be talked into meeting these men in isolated locations. They get into pickup trucks; they’re driven over state lines. They’re spotted on Walmart security cam footage halfway across the country; they’re never heard from again.” (pg 383)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) by Joan Didion is a collection of essays that offers a poignant and critical look at American life in the 1960s. Through her sharp, introspective writing, Didion explores subjects such as California counterculture, Hollywood, political unrest, and personal identity, capturing a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation in a rapidly changing society. The title essay, in particular, reflects on the tumultuous landscape of the time, blending cultural criticism with vivid personal observations.
I finally did it, I finally read a Joan Didion book. Joan Didion is an author I have obviously been aware of for a very long time, but every time I would pick up one of her books I found myself unable to get past the first few chapters and chalked it up to it just not being the right time. This year as I readied myself to move to LA I told myself it’s now or never, and I have to read a Didion book. I started this book in my hometown in Canada and finished it in my apartment just outside of Hollywood. Funnily enough the book starts out talking about a Canadian girl living in LA. Likely somewhat due to my vanity I liked this essay. In my notes from this past summer I wrote “Today I decided to pick up a Joan Didion book for the first time. That’s not true, I tried to read a book of hers last summer but didn’t make it past the first page. It wasn’t the right time. I seem like the type of girl who has read Joan Didion, and in all honesty I should be. But for some reason or another, it’s never been the right time. I think this may be the third time I’ve restarted Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and it’s the first time I finished the first chapter. The first chapter follows a woman convicted of murdering her husband, though the chapter starts out a little more romantic than that. Musing on those who move from wherever and find solace in California. As I read on Didion seems to describe me “Of course she came from somewhere else, came off the prairie in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio, for this is a Southern California story.”
Unfortunately however beyond this chapter I find myself disappointingly unimpressed by the material. I proceeded to read The White Album after Slouching Towards Bethlehem trying to convince myself that it was just a fluke, but I found myself sharing a similar experience with The White Album and have deduced that Didion might just not be for me unfortunately.
America by Jean Baudrillard America (1986) by Jean Baudrillard is a philosophical exploration of American culture, politics, and society through the lens of postmodern theory. Drawing on his experiences traveling across the United States, Baudrillard reflects on the country's obsession with spectacle, excess, and hyperreality, where image and consumption have supplanted deeper meanings. The book critiques America's self-image as a land of freedom and opportunity, suggesting instead that it is a place defined by its superficiality, contradictions, and the constant pursuit of novelty.
This was by far my favourite book I read this year, and one of my new favourite books. I am in a big Baudrillard phase right now as many might have been able to tell by my recent spike in quotes by Baudrillard. I read this book at exactly the right time. I bought this book in NYC this year after spending a couple months in LA. This was my first time in the states and Baudrillard’s America is his own musings on his first impression of the states, primarily focusing on LA and NYC. I wasn’t anticipating this to be such a poetic reflection on America but Baudrillard brilliantly blends personal anecdotes and cultural criticism to paint a very beautiful, thoughtful, and provoking portrait of America and its relation to the idea of Simulacra.
“The obsessive fear of the Americans is that the lights might go out. Lights are left on all night in the houses. In the tower blocks the empty offices remain lit. On the freeways, in broad daylight, the cars keep all their headlights on. In Palms Ave., Venice, California, a little grocery store that sells beer in a part of town where no one is on the streets after 7 p.m. leaves its orange and green neon sign flashing all night, into the void. And this is not to mention the television, with its twenty-four-hour schedules, often to be seen functioning like an hallucination in the empty rooms of houses or vacant hotel rooms - as in the Porterville hotel where the curtains were torn, the water cut off, and the doors swinging in the wind, but on the fluorescent screen in each of the rooms a TV commentator was describing the take-off of the space shut-tle. There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared) In short, in America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man's artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles (the seasons, day and night, heat and cold) has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd (deep down, there is the same refusal of the intermittent nature of true and false: everything is true; and of good and evil: everything is good). You may seek to explain this in terms of fear, perhaps obsessional fear, or say that this unproductive expenditure is an act of mourning. But what is absurd is also admirable. The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. There is some truth in all of this. But what is striking is the fascination with artifice, with energy and space. And not only natural space: space is spacious in their heads as well.”