(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Knut Kolnar comments the mention of the Male Beast.
Many people associate gender with something sweet and juicy. Not so for New Age book reviewer. For him, sex is something sour, bitter and hard to digest. Something one should preferably be without.
In October was The male animal – Desire in modern film, reviewed in Ny tid. This review is characterized by so much inadmissibility and contains so many factual errors that it should be commented on.
The reviewer begins with a statement that gender is not a legitimate approach to the study of the popular cultural field. He claims that my method is purely deductive and that male research should be a criticism of feminism. All these are private and separate points of view without any research support.
The reviewer's method can be characterized as a spontaneous dyslexic reading. In fact, he does not manage to see the specific places he criticizes in the text. For example, he disagrees with my criticism of the one-dimensional view of man in a film like Fight Club, and claim that I have not come to grips with the fact that the film is about the consumer community. Prior to this, I have two chapters on consumer society, identity and masculinity, IKEA boy og When things take over the body. THE Fight Club Consumption is the basic human project, more essential than sex, love and friendship. (p.113.) This is also true when he claims I equate a psychopathic mass murderer like Buffalo Bill with ordinary men. Then he shows that he has not been able to read what I write about my own approach. On page 51, I write, among other things: “Some of the processes that are going on in the contemporary world are reflected in art, often in distorted and enlarged versions. Cyclops are often placed on trends and trends so that they are cultivated and enlarged. And it is also the case that a society's monsters, its extreme growths, can show hidden and unexpected aspects of gender ”. It is simply a matter of not being able to see what is actually in a text, and then criticizing the author for not writing exactly what he has written.
This type of spontaneous dyslexia is pervasive throughout the reading. It is difficult to demand the emotional maturity of a reviewer, but one must be able to demand a certain ability to distinguish different levels from one another. When the theme becomes male sexuality, all levels run together, and he is unable to make elementary distinctions between sexology, cultural analysis and hedonism.
That I write badly, have not realized anything and that gender is something here and such things, to stand at the expense of the reviewer, but one must demand a serious intellectual craft. This is not the case here. Here it seems to be a personal agenda that continuously prevents the reviewer from seeing what is actually in the text. And what's just as bad, he reveals an almost total lack of expertise in the field. The time when a semester as an orange picker in Cuba was sufficient cultural capital to get a column space is over in most Norwegian newspapers. Here New Time should follow up.
Knut Kolnar is a philosopher and author of the book The male animal – Desire in modern film.
Kjetil Korslund's comment can be found here.
