Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…Since we were talking about some of the all… Although rationalized some strange sexual partnerships that their engagement in, I have to ask about The Fountainhead and the, quote, unquote, “Rape scene.” In the Fountainhead. Was she intending to add that there to be controversial? How we’re supposed to read into it? Is it a glimpse into Ayn Rand’s sexuality? Maybe broadly we can say, “Well, what was her view on sexuality, on sex, on power dynamics in relationships?” Yeah, there’s also an objectivist theory of sexuality in that probably the least convincing of all the parts of objectivism. And it goes something like, “Your sexual desires express your highest values.” And they are related in some ways to your rationality, right? Which is also related to your highest values. So for her that explained her attraction to Nathaniel Branden and Nathaniel Branden’s attraction to her was a function of their highest values. And, in fact, Branden imbibed this so deeply that the fact that he was later drawn sexually to a woman who was not particularly accomplished, but was beautiful, caused him deep anguish and guilt for being non-objectivist. This is the objectivist theory. Then the gender politics are just crazy. We have to back up and think, “Okay, who is Ayn Rand.” She’s born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia. She is someone who stands out from the crowd from the beginning. She never really fits in. She’s not conventionally beautiful by any stretch of the imagination. She struggles with her weight and she doesn’t consider herself to have a beautiful face. She’s very independent. She meets none of the metrics of traditional femininity at all. She finds love with a man who is very handsome but very passive. Yet she writes in all her fiction about strong manly heroes. There seems to be like a projection. The man she’s actually with is not a strong manly hero. The hero she writes about, she probably wouldn’t be able to be in the same room with them for more than one minute before they got in a raging argument, right? Then she develops this theory about women and men in that a woman should worship her man, and a woman finds her true expression in worshiping the man she’s with. Again, this is not at all how Ayn Rand lives her life. This is like this. I would say compensatory theory for her lack of ability to conform to the gender norms of her day. She then articulates them in a very strong and almost distorted and exaggerated way to compensate for the fact that she doesn’t actually meet them, can’t actually enact them. The rape scene to some degree embodies that idea that to some degree that the woman should worship the man. I tend to read it more in terms of literary genre. Rand is a screenwriter, a consumer of movies, and that rape scene is paradigmatic for the romance genre. In other words, these are like pulpy romance novels. The hero rapes the heroine and then they fall in love. That’s just the trope of how it works. hat rape scene is paradigmatic for the romance genre. In other words, these are like pulpy romance novels. The hero rapes the heroine and then they fall in love. That’s just the trope of how it works. It’s crazy when you read it, but if you were reading a bunch of novels in this genre, you would find this is very standard. But that is a huge part of this appeal at the time. There’s this feminist who hates Rand, Susan Brownmiller, and she wants to write an angry denunciation of the rape scene. So she goes to get The fountainhead and she’s wondering how is she ever going to find the scene in this 800 page book? It’s a library copy because she doesn’t want to buy it, and it just falls open to the rape scene because everybody’s gone and read it because it’s very racy and explicit for that time. I’m almost positive she also knew that like, “If I put in this kind of taboo-breaking sex scene, that’s also going to probably be why people tell their friends about it.” I think it’s a mess. I think all of the gender and sexuality stuff that she states is just a total mess.…

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