Polymorphous perversity and genital maturity

Everybody a baby because maturity is so normative mmmkay?

In Freud’s theory of narcissism. babies, cats and yes women are appealing to us, I think he means men because they project a narcissistic sense of completeness.

I think Freud was talking about beautiful women in the fantasies of men, but we can still use this theory to think about the interactive image that is eminently responsive to the digital user, transfixed by screens. So we as desiring subjects are experience our own lack of completeness in relationship to the already completed.

We are all born into a state of non-differentiated corporeal polymorphous perversity. All our orifices are eroticized and all our needs can be met through cries (and clicks). This state of infantile narcissistic hedonism is difficult to renounce, but civilization and physiology tells us that we can’t play with our poop, sleep with our mothers, cancel — I mean kill things/others that irritate our sense of completeness, or pretend that the outside world is designed to satisfy our needs.

We live in an age of generalized, digitally promoted infantilization. On Instagram, I just saw photo of a grown ass thirty something woman posed as a four month old swaddled in a onesie and cap, shot from above like those baby pictures.

Modernization and the rise of the bourgeoisie extended the time of childhood from 11 - 21. Neofeudalism gave us literal nepo-babies as ego ideals. But so much of liberal life subjectivity is also built on honoring “the child within” and allowing the most extreme forms of 2010s Tumblr polymorphous perversity to dominate political spaces.

No liberal wants to grow up, but Trump, a more hedonistic, more aggressive baby beat them at their own game.

Questions? Read Freud’s “On Narcissism.” Ask me anything.

I might do an extra reading group session on this topic. Onward and upward!