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Andore Jr.

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12. A and B attend a concert.
A: “That Brahms piano piece was really beautiful.”
B: “Well, that was by Beethoven, not Brahms.”
A: “It was beautiful just the same!”
It is reasonable to say: even if x fails the criterion for lacking a penis, Smith thinks x is pretty. This sounds like an aesthetic judgment.

13. Problem: are sexual judgments aesthetic? I want to say: they are like aesthetic judgments. Then the question is what is meant by aesthetics.

14. I have a friend who is a great collector of Middle Eastern art. But I would not say that he understands it. You have to distinguish between aesthetic understanding and aesthetic enjoyment. The latter is much more queer. It does not describe a state of affairs. “How lovely!” - what does this say?

15. How does a musician judge a piece of music? They evaluate it according to a set of rules. “This modulation is too rough... the brass section is too loud here... what a stately finale!” I do not evaluate a single piece of art, but an entire tradition. Here I don’t say that a work is beautiful or ugly, only whether it agrees with the tradition. When an enthusiast judges the same piece, he may say: “It just clicks for me!” To understand what this means, we would have to describe the enthusiast’s entire biography. This is obviously impossible.

16. “What a pretty girl!” Not an empty thing to say. The girl accords with Smith’s likes. Why? Well, she just “clicks!” She “fits” for him. But say she does turn out to have a penis. Smith may say that he wouldn’t have made the exclamation had he known. But she was pretty. But her appearance counted as a valid move in Smith’s game.

17. Assume two different games with a superficially similar set of moves. I respond to the efforts of my opponent in a way appropriate to the rules I’m following - this does not mean that he is playing the same game.

18. Say Jones visits China and accidentally interprets someone’s broken furniture as art. But doesn’t it still “fit” as art?

19. I am repeatedly using these words even though in sexuality there’s really nothing which clicks or fits at all. “It fits!” is not a picture of anything.

20. How do we know: “that’s a boy, that’s a girl”? Where do we learn this? Rudimentary biology. But this has nothing to do with sexuality. I can imagine situations where typical sexual biology breaks down.

21. In the last half-century or so it has become fashionable to think of people as either “heterosexuals” (men attracted to women and women attracted to men) or “homosexuals.” (just the opposite) This gives people the impression that eventually biology and psychology are going to perfectly explain “sexual aesthetics.” This is why Freud is so misleading. But what am I doing when I try to “explain” something like this?

22. Suppose Freud explains someone’s dream. What he and they are looking for is an explanation that fits. “Well, that makes sense!” - this is no different from “how lovely”!

23. Suppose Smith gets a little drunk one night and accidentally has sexual relations with someone who has a penis. Or, suppose he abuses himself to a picture which is actually of a boy rather than a girl. Surely we can’t blame him for this, everyone will make bad choices now and then. But how do I understand what has happened?

24. I am thinking of a very “heterosexual” man. This person, aside from a perhaps unhealthy fascination with more adolescent types, has shown little interest in intercourse with other males before. Now suppose that this man has an ill-conceived liaison with what he thinks is an attractive young girl, whom he finds out later in flagrante delicto is actually an extremely feminine boy. Furthermore, let us assume the sexual encounter proceeds as planned, albeit with new methods. Does modern sexual psychology have a term for this?

25. What I am trying to do is to bring out a disguised sexual confusion as an obvious confusion.

26. Freud would say my encounter was the result of suppressed sexual tendencies. Well, perhaps. But I wouldn’t agree to this right off. I could think of other explanations.

27. “That’s a girl!” “No, she has a penis.” Is this a contradiction? What is the “penis” doing here?

28. “I don’t really know what counts as a girl anymore.” This is queer. I do know - “Girls are like this!” But despite the penis, everything is valid within the game.

29. Say A were to play Bach in a jazz style, with various kinds of improvisation - would this still be Bach? “That chord sounds queer there.” Is a queer chord similar to a penis?

30. A follows the rules in one sense and breaks them in another. I want to say: a penis is like this as well. A penis seems normal here and queer there. But the game is undisturbed.

31. “So you can have intercourse with a girl who has a penis and not be a ‘poof’? (as the English say)” I wouldn’t say this. I would ask: how are you using the word “poof”?

32. It is very easy to take a young boy for a young girl - the curves are the same in many places. What do I mean by the same? How do I judge this?

33. Say I was to place a large number of penises side by side. They will vary greatly in terms of length, color, etc.. A queer thing to say: “They must have something in common, or they wouldn’t all be penises!” You ought not say this at the start. You have to look at all of them and tell from there. You find one prick that is such and such a length, and it will be similar to some, but there will be others of a shorter or longer length. Some pricks will be skewed this way, some will be circumcised, some erect or flaccid, etc.. You could conclude of this collection, after comparing them all, that “a penis is like this and this,” but that doesn’t always account for all that you might find. You can always say: “There might be another penis not like these.” We should instead think of pricks in terms of resemblances, such as those between family members. This one is short, fat, and rather pale; it relates to this other which is pale and long, which in turn relates to this third which is long and rather dark. They are all penises even though the first may have little in common with the third. Think of a spider weaving a web: its use is in the constant criss-crossing of some threads with others, even though not all the threads have to be connected. I mean the same thing with “girls and boys are the same in many places” as I do for “these are all dicks.”