Pink Madness

Excerpt on Aphrodite - James Hillman

On Aphrodite

"So, I, ruler of beauty and desire, how do I bring my cosmos into the actual world where the gestures I provoke are called sexual harassment, the lust I instigate called date rape, the body I make concupiscible called a mere sex-object, and the images that pullulate from my teeming greenhouse of erotic imagination called pornography? What shall I do? Well, she said, I have my method: I shall make men crazy; I shall afflict them with pink madness.

By crazy I do not mean insane, violent, deluded, paranoid. I mean crazy as cracked: crack the veneer, crack containment in correct frameworks. Breakdown as breakthrough. And by pink madness I mean putting on rose-tinted glasses to see allure in the flesh, aurora in the vulva, hortus inclusus, rosa vulva, fons et origo, cunnus mystica, fons et puteus, rosa mystica. Pornography shall be my path – the path of libidinal forbidden fantasy.

I shall invade every nook of the contemporary world that has so refused me for so long with a pink madness. I shall pornographize your cars and food, your ads and vacations, your books and films, your schools and your families. I shall be unstoppable. I’ll get into your T-shirts and underwear, even into your diapers, into teenie boppers, their slogans and songs, and into the old ladies and gents in retirement colonies, on walkers in San Diego and Miami Beach.

I’ll show you – by showing, until your minds are fuzzed pink with romantic desires, with longings to get away – trysts, nests, sweets. That is, the civilization will be crazed to get into my preserve, my secret garden. I will excite your entire culture so that even those attempting to cure their neuroses, as well as their sober psychoanalysts, will have nothing better to talk about than desire, jouissance, seductions, incest, molestations and the gaze into the mirror. Remember: what you call advertising, I call fantasy."