Man against Being (Body Horror and the Death of Life)

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. Linnea 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. 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 is a homecoming to our truest nature.