Lewis Vs Palahniuk Pt 2： Food Porn and Making Love
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
127.5943
Summary
In this episode, I discuss the similarities between C.S. Lewis and Chuck Palaniuk, and how they are similar in many ways, including their love of food and obsession with sex. I also discuss how the two writers bounce off each other, the Christian and the nihilist.
Transcript
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So, I think you folks will find this interesting.
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This video actually started out as a conversation between a co-worker and myself.
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And it wasn't until the end of the conversation that I noticed the connection between C.S. Lewis and Palaniuk.
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So, this video is actually going to be the reverse of that conversation,
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starting where it concluded and going through the steps that led to that conclusion.
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It's just interesting how well these two writers bounce off each other, the Christian and the nihilist.
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So, first, C.S. Lewis. The passage I'm thinking of is, I believe in the book, Mere Christianity by him,
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which is a great book if you want to understand what Christianity is really all about.
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And C.S. Lewis asks the reader to imagine a society where people line up and pay for tickets to go to a theater,
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where the curtain is drawn open and a tray is wheeled out, and a hand reaches to lift up the cover on it,
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and there's a steaming roast turkey on the tray there.
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And people just applaud and cheer and just think it's absolutely amazing.
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So, Lewis says, you'd assume that this society, in your mind, you'd think that people were starving there.
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If they'd get so excited about seeing a roast turkey, they'd pay to go see it.
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But then you do a bit more investigating, and you actually find quite the opposite.
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People in the society aren't starving, they're actually overweight and overfed.
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And of course he was using this metaphor to talk about strip clubs, about sex in our culture,
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We're constantly paying to, you know, you pay to see a stripper, a naked woman take her clothes off in the internet era.
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You'll pay $8 a beer to go watch that while she dances to Britney Spears or something horrible.
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You have movies, where there was recently a picture going around the internet of the Avengers movie,
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where they had all the male characters pose in the Scarlett Johansson pose,
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showing off their butts at the camera and how ridiculous that looked.
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But that's the thing, all of these movies always have to have a chick showing off her butt on the movie poster.
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It's just ridiculous, the level of sexualization we have.
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And yet at the same time, our society is absolutely obsessed with sex.
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We're having tons of it. There is sex everywhere, constantly.
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But meanwhile, C.S. Lewis was bringing up this food porn as a reductio ad absurdum.
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Not quite that, but he was using it as an example, an extreme, silly example.
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Well, I can't speak to what's going on in the United States.
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But here in Canada, if you go into a Tim Hortons, that's our Dunkin' Donuts,
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they have food porn playing on the bloody televisions.
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Seriously, they have just these disgusting images.
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They'll have a honey cruller and just this thick pouring of sugar water onto it, coating the whole thing as it rotates erotically.
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Or the spinning about of their fruit smoothies.
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All this extremely erotic marketing material for their sweetest and most unhealthy things.
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I'm sure you have something like that in the United States.
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And just this looping video that's always playing.
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And to go with C.S. Lewis again, we have a massive obesity epidemic here.
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The people aren't starving, but they're just obsessed with food.
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The co-worker and I, we've been listening to the audio book of Haunted, I believe is the novel.
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Now there's one particular instance in Haunted that I'm going to focus on, but I'd like to rewind a bit and just discuss Palaniuk for a moment.
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Now I certainly don't know him personally and I'm not trying to malign his character.
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But he almost seems, it seems like the narrators of his stories, because he himself is a homosexual, that he's a self-hating homosexual.
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That his characters are all so broken as individuals.
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They're all failed uber mentions, particularly in this book Haunted.
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The premise is that all of these people get together to try and lock themselves away.
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Trying to imitate Lord Byron and Shelley in that, if you haven't heard about it, it's kind of cool.
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They lock themselves up in a nice French home somewhere and wrote a bunch of stories.
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So that's what all these people in the novel are trying to do.
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They try and lock themselves up in this place with each other to write the great novel.
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But they're all broken degenerates on the inside.
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One phrase that keeps being repeated throughout is the desire to become the camera behind the camera behind the camera.
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And you have the person controlling the camera that decides which pictures it shows.
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And you have the person behind that deciding what stories are going to be reported and how they're going to be reported.
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To try and get to this meta-narrative level of reality.
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I mentioned this before about the breakdown of the self when you reject the material world.
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When you pretend that you can create your own fantasy to live in.
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And just becomes absolutely vile, morality-free human beings.
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But there's one story in particular that stood out.
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I'm not going to go into too much detail about it.
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It's basically a bunch of short stories, this book, from each of these degenerates' perspectives.
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The story in question involves a police unit that investigates child sex crimes.
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And the secretary accidentally orders a couple of real dolls rather than the stuffed, anatomically correct dolls that the child victims use to explain what happened to them.
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And the police officers become vile degenerates.
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But the phrase that keeps being repeated during that story is,
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They turn people into objects, and objects into people.
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And see, that's what's underlying this whole degenerate sexuality.
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The greasy, sugary, fills an immediate urge, but leaves you feeling hollow and empty inside.
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Look at how delicious our McDonald's burger is, or our sugary treats.
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Now compare that to a good family dinner, a Thanksgiving dinner.
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Your mum spends all day slaving away in the kitchen, and your sister's making something at home that she brings over.
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And your whole family gets together, and you over consume a little bit.
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You gain a little bit of weight from eating a little bit too much.
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But the focus of the evening is on the people you're sharing it with.
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The food is great, but it's not just the belly you're focusing on.
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It's about sharing this food with people you love.
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While the quick, cheap, fast food porn is just an immediate satisfaction of your base urges.
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That girl with her ass taking up half the billboard is nothing but this objectified human being.
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You yourself looking at this billboard are objectified yourself.
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You're just a pulse and a bunch of hormones going to an inevitable release.
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The response to this society that only fucks and doesn't know how to make love is to try and hammer down on the fucking aspect.
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But whenever they do that, it starts coming out in really weird ways.
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That males are the aggressive pursuers of women.
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And women initiate the sexual behavior with their flirting.
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With their push, pull, push, pull, run away but not fast enough that you can't catch me.
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Hammered down on that because of the date rapes and all those evil men out there.
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And so now we have a generation of men that are pussified, that don't arouse women.
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And women who, A, don't know how to arouse men by the push-pull game because they've been taught it was wrong.
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And B, go to the other extreme to try and get that dominance.
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Because they can't get the regular dose of dominance in their day-to-day lives.
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They go to the extreme and they go and have a gangbang orgy.
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Or they go to a glory hole or they do whatever.
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And believe me, this stuff is more common than you might think.
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We're hammering down on normal sexual dominance and it's coming out into fucked up STD spreading orgies.
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Suddenly, finding a 16-year-old attractive makes you a pervert.
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Even though she's been menstruating for several years.
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She would have been married at 14 during any other era.
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You're a pervert for finding a 16-year-old attractive.
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It's even creepy for a 30-year-old man to find a 20-year-old attractive.
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Almost like his genes want to find a fertile womb to put the seed in or something.
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So it's an absolute obsession to catch a predator.
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That creep Chris Hansen thinking he's some sort of hero for catching these kind of dumb guys
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that are a little bit down on their luck or sexually frustrated.
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I don't know if you've ever seen one of these things.
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And I used to do security at a college where we had this.
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And of course we were right across the street from a sanitarium.
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Every single time we had these little girls dressed like fucking prostitutes.
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We'd have some crazy guy, some retard from across the street wander in.
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As a normal man, seeing a little girl painted up to look like a mature woman?
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And all of their mothers, these mothers, these trophy wife sort of just haggard souls.
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All of them skinny with leathery skin and just this constant sour look of disapproval
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because their little girls are never dancing quite well enough.
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They need to get their girls to win the competition.
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They need to relive their youth vicariously through their daughters who they're turning into little harlots.
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Any of the poisonous, sick, sex-infested children's entertainment that's being pushed onto children nowadays.
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We hammer down on the fact that men find younger women attractive.
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And it comes out that we have this very sick sexualization of children going on all over the place nowadays.
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And the third big one that I notice, violence between the sexes.
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Now this will probably be the most controversial one, but there is a subset of women that enjoy being beaten by their partners.
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Quite frankly, it's a universal trait of womanhood that women, they like a little bit of pain with their pleasure.
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The two biggest bonding experiences of a woman's life are losing her virginity and giving birth.
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Both of which are painful and yet incredibly pleasurable.
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Women appreciate men that tease them, that know how to neg them, that know how to be masculine.
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They like the push-pull of just a hint of cruelty.
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And with some women, it goes so far that they will actively provoke their partners to try and get their partners to hit them.
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A lot of them are borderline, but it's a personal lifestyle choice.
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Except then what happened is some little princess that was rebelling against Daddy made a stupid decision to date a bad boy biker.
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Hagar, from that, I believe that's her name, marries a loser and I believe he beats her.
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So some little princess made a really stupid decision to go after the bad boy because it pissed off Daddy.
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And she got beaten without realizing she was going to get beaten.
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And so all of a sudden we have domestic violence as this huge, huge crime.
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When it almost never happens the way that you're imagining it.
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The guy and the wife beat her home from work drunk.
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The vast majority of it is women that want it to happen to them.
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No, I'm not going to give you money to buy something you don't need.
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That's a form of controlling, manipulative behavior.
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And so what do we have instead of wife beating?
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Which in some women went as far as provoking their husband to slap them.
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And instead we have the extremities of the BDSM community.
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And on top of that we have the state coming down.
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Telling us what's healthy based upon pseudo-science.
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They're telling us that normal male-female interactions.
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Normal healthy male-female sex with brains involved is unhealthy.
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But their degenerate form of high fructose corn syrup sexuality is perfectly okay.
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Interesting how, uh, Palaniuk and Lewis play so well off each other.