Cronenberg Lives

I'm getting anxious about HIV. I think I need an education fast, the reach of my awareness pales in the face of it's calculatedly occluded prevalence in this country. Also, do I have to reiterate for anyone in 2014 that a disease doesn't discriminate on the basis of gender or race etc, that it's certain practices involving prone bodies which elevate risk, and not sexual orientation? Moving on.

So I had a test, and have made the overdue decision to have them regularly, taking responsibility for my chosen lifestyle. It showed negative by the way, in case you were wondering. 

I don't know too much about it, but am tenuously aware of conspiracy theories (available for indulgent perusal, somewhere between Self-Help and New Age and no doubt rubbing spines with David Icke), in which HIV and AIDS are lab products, implements of a long term political agenda. I don't know how credible these arguments are, but definitely feel the stigmas of this virus like an icy counterpoint to my otherwise perpetual horniness. Just fuck off AIDS. 

If it is lab made, it demonstrates the insidious manoeuvres propelling technological advancement, and a supreme indifference to the value of human life inherent to the logic of capital. 

Someone with AIDS loses volitional rights to their body, appropriated by pharmaceutical companies as pure revenue thereafter. They become examples for the limits of pleasure, framed by arbitrary stigmas as 'fallen' from the only legitimate mode of being, heterosexual monogamy. Penance for erring from the path of reproduction. 

David Cronenberg's films do a pretty good job of graphically describing the bodily anxiety of infection. I know I keep referring to film, but as Zizek says the film screen is less a theatre-stage of desires than it is a factory, ranging broadly from wish fulfilment to sheer propaganda and never absent of agenda. I'm personally aware of how heavily influenced my erotic life is by cinema, but with dystopian media saturation such as we're living in the trick is rigorous criticality. Fuck there's even a Cronenberg film about that, VideoDrome.  

His films aren't merely about infection by pathogen, but also infection by power, how certain authorities literally write the human body and what can and can't be done with it. If your standard horror movie is in reality a puritan fear-monger denouncing pleasure for its own sake (discussed at length in an older post), a Cronenberg expounds on that instant before you swallow the pill, peeling back the awesome mystery of human sexuality and citing the gross violation of such impositions.

VideoDrome sees its protagonist warring with the reality he's fed by an insidious frequency (called VideoDrome). It's about the loss of identity through the erotic lure of cinema-as-voyeurism (because the channel VideoDrome shows real-time snuff), the loss of ownership over the body as pleasure responses are replaced with doctored fetishes (cinema as factory of desires and fetish-implants). 

An addiction to pornography is an example of the above.   

Anyway, I feel like AIDS is more visible to me now, and the world is a little scarier, if you'll pardon my ignorance.

Also, I fucked an eighteen year old uni student. Was awesome.