Man against Being

Man Against Being diagnoses the manmade world with a terminal case of somatophobia: fear of the body. Horrified by the facts of the flesh, men have spent the last several millennia on the run from, and at war with, the mortal material reality of the human 'meatsack'. This deep-rooted antagonism towards biological being has given rise to cultures defined by denial and dread, and societies doomed to self-annihilation. Because life on earth is incarnate, men's fantasies of transcendent escape from bodiliness are today proving themselves not only hopeless, but deadly. Tracing the history of somatophobia from Plato's derision of the body as the soul's prison and tomb to the post-embodiment exit strategies of Silicon Valley transhumanists, aurora linnea examines how patriarchal civilization has been shaped from its inception by a morbid disavowal of matter, physicality, and the natural world. She weaves together such disparate sources as monster movies, medieval literature, science fiction, and social psychology to expose body horror as the common thread and theme that creeps darkly along the underside of manmade cultures, the basic pathology that has poisoned men against life itself. And the pains of this pathology are not simply ideological: at the center of the systems of oppression and world-devouring violence men have engineered, the rejected body festers. Seeking an antidote to patriarchal civilization's apocalyptic flight from corporeal, biological reality, Man Against Being charts a return to the flesh and blood of the matter, a vital reintegration of body and mind and living earth. For the path forward out of male dominion, linnea argues, is in fact a homecoming to our truest nature.