Oscar Wilde
Article
Oscar Wilde is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 18, 2021 and August 05, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Oscar Wilde supposedly said”; “cf. Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.””; “The book has testimony from Oscar Wilde”. It most often appears alongside Freud, Abercrombie & Fitch, acedia.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: February 18, 2021
- Last seen: August 05, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Freud (2 shared issues)
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- Abercrombie & Fitch (1 shared issues)
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- acedia (1 shared issues)
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- Against Nature (1 shared issues)
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- American education (1 shared issues)
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- Anna Schaffner (1 shared issues)
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- Appalachian (1 shared issues)
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- Athenian democracy (1 shared issues)
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- Athenians (1 shared issues)
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- Athens (1 shared issues)
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- Ayn Rand (1 shared issues)
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- Baby Einstein (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.
Inline links: The Cult Of Smart
As far as I can tell, I enjoy relationships for their own sake - contra Teach, who says you only really enjoy sex because it gives you status, or because you’re depriving someone else of the use of your sexual partner, or because it’s otherwise a winning move in your mind game (cf. Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”) But - don’t laugh - a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about being the person who wrote the music, or playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me, or something like that. It seems that my enjoyment of music - maybe not quite as primal as sex, but still pretty primal - actually is at least assisted by status fantasies. Maybe for some reason I can admit this about music but I’m still defending against realizing it about sex. Or maybe I’m 100% completely honest when I say I don’t have a status motive for enjoying sex - which explains why I’m kind of on the ace spectrum and don’t really enjoy the sex act itself.
As Anna Schaffner explains it in Exhaustion: A History, you will find yourself in good company. The book has testimony from Charles Darwin, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann, amongst others, giving accounts of their chronic pathological exhaustion.