‘Spornosexuality’, the cut and shut love child of Sport and Porno, is the latest fad in male beauty. It is Narcissism on steroids, but the bodies beautiful are strangely asexual; more metro than macho and absorbed with themselves rather than each other or the opposite sex.
‘‘Capitalism has transformed our bodies into accessories. By toning and perfuming and recording every ripple with Facebook selfies, they’ve converted their bodies into their own masturbatory aids.’, Tim Stanley.
The Spornosexual icon is Adonis; gorgeous, hench and aloof. Different versions of the Greek myth, from Ovid to Shakespeare, agree that his relationship with Venus was characterized by indifference.
She does her best to point out, as politely as possible, that he has an issue with his mother..
‘‘Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel, Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth? Art thou a woman’s son, and canst not feel what ’tis to love? How want of love tormenteth? ‘ W. Shakespeare
Of course it was his perfect right to refuse her but he does so on the basis of boredom rather than the healthy fear of divine retaliation for so bold an aspiration or making an informed choice.
So Venus gets aggrieved ..
‘Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone, well-painted idol, image dun and dead, statue contenting but the eye alone..ibid
and withdraws her protection from him.
Adonis then comes to a swift death. Supposedly, he dies from an injury to the ‘knee’, gored by a boar while hunting. My guess, given that no-one ever died of a mortal knee wound, is it’s a euphemism for having his groin torn out. Even the usually bawdy Shakespeare demurs, referring to the wound in his ‘soft thigh’.
This polite double entendre is the least complicated aspect of Adonis’ death, a demise well worth a bit of detective work given the prevalence of this archetype in the Collective Psyche and its shortlisting among Hansard’s top ten gruesome ways to die.
Adonis’ death is not an accident. In fact, the more the story unfolds the more it seems like an episode from the Sopranos. The boar has been sent by Artemis, Goddess of the Forest and the Hunt in revenge for the killing of one Hippolytus, a faithful and chaste devotee.
Artemis holds Venus responsible for Hippolytus’ death since it was the madness of love and lust that led to his murder. So she takes Venus’ favorite down in vengeful retaliation. Poor Hippolytus had certainly not deserved his fate. His step-mother Phaedra tried to seduce him and when he refused her advances she accused him of rape, persuading her husband Theseus to use a wish given him by Poseidon to destroy the boy. When Hippolytus is next out riding his chariot on the beach, Poseidon sends sea monsters to terrify the horses which then drag him to his death.
Adonis is killed because of what happened to Hippolytus. Their fates are linked. So are their pasts. Both are sons of incest and have their destinies came at them in violent, monstrous forms.
The symbolism of incest has to do with having your destiny hijacked by someone else. Adonis’ parents are father and daughter, Theias and Myrrha. He comes from a world where people’s stars are inappropriately mingled, so he can’t tell his feelings from other people’s, which makes it way too scary to have any at all. They have to be packed away, along with the carefree uncomplicated spontaneity and belonging-in-Nature personified by Hippolytus, whose wish to have his own destiny gets him killed.
Hippoltus’ fate represents..
‘the terror of dissolution which a baby experiences when, for lack of good enough maternal care, he cannot separate out from the mother and feel that he exists in his own right.” R Ledermann.
Psychoanalyst Masud Kahn’s concept of Symbiotic Omnipotence further amplifies why it is that increasing numbers of lads feel emasculated and attacked by the world, swallowed up by Poseidon’s monsters, or dragged to their death by their own instincts.
Symbiotic Omnipotence is a scenario whereby a frustrated and suppressed mother lives out her unmet needs and unexpressed passions through her child, compensating for absent preoccupation with shared specialness that kills off the boy’s instinctual life. Any efforts to escape this otherwise pristine arrangement are exemplified by Hippolytus’ terrible end, psychopathic gaslighting , the paranoia of being swallowed up or pulled apart.
On the surface everything is ideal. The pair are awash in mutual admiration and overstated affection, exaggerated gestures and shared secrets..
Gradually it emerges just how exclusive this ideal situation is..
”It excluded other phase adequate relationships and actively discouraged, through collusion and indulgence, cathexis of other objects as valuable or nourishing.” M Khan.
Google translate..”The child is deliberately isolated, then forced to collude with such deprivation by joining mother in her scorn of the world.”
Her own destiny having been denied, mother’s unfulfilled potential spills over into the unwitting child who then takes it for his own….
This has severe consequences for the boy. He can never live up to the archetypal expectations placed on his young shoulders. Moreover, the secret shame of wanting to lead his own life, the suppressed desire for love and affection, the feeling of having betrayed some sacred pact by daring to become his own man, all this can then make intimacy seem overwhelming.
‘I know not love,’ quoth Adonis, ‘nor will not know it, unless it be a boar, and then I chase it. ‘Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it;My love to love is love but to disgrace it; ibid
In other words..
“I don’t know anything about love,” he said, “and I never want to. All I care about is hunting boars. Love sounds like a lot of work that I’m not willing to put in. All I can say about love is that I love to reject it.”https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/venus-and-adonis
Venus points out this checks all the boxes in the DSM5 under Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
‘‘Is thine own heart to thine own face affected? Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left?Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected, Steal thine own freedom and complain on theft.”
But Adonis is impervious to the last. It has all been too much. He strolls off in contempt, oblivious of the fate about to overtake him. He says to himself that he just didn’t fancy her but if truth be told he couldn’t cope. It felt too much like mother’s..
”over cathexis of the child (being in his face, which leads to..) an early bias that they are special and cannot be understood, so communication is futile.” M Khan.
This leads to the blanket objectification of others and ultimately, of himself. His secret porn addiction is not about misdirected lust or desire, nor even the objectification of women. Its the ‘booby’ prize, given the pointlessness of actual relationships.
This capacity to despair over relationships whilst contemptuously dismissing them is a fancy piece of dissociation which carries quite a price tag. It costs him the healthy aggression which wants to make its own way in the world. He has had to split it off in order to maintain the omnipotence promised to him in the symbiotic small print of his contract with mother…
….split off aggression that has now grown tusks and wants nothing more than to tear into his ‘knee’.. for want of an autonomous life.
Its easy to judge Adonis for being a self destructive jerk, but he hasn’t been able to separate from a mother who was never ‘there’ enough to separate from. Myrrha was depersonalized by the Patriarchy to begin with and turned into a tree just before Adonis was born, so not a lot of ante-natal care for him, except as a fruit that must not fall too far from the bough..
The secretly feared consequences of becoming his own man, exemplified by Hippolytus’ dreadful betrayal and summary assault by maternally invoked sea monsters, seems way too great a price to pay. He’s better off taking his chances with the boar, locked in eternal conflict with that which would feed him, if only he would feed it.