In order to enter the convent, the monk swears a vow of eternal enslavement. Humility is the foremost virtue to be cultivated, to put ones life aside wholly for another. This is symbolized in every way - work must be done in dour silence, for the sake of the church, possessions must be forgone, stark robes and an ugly tonsure, eternal chastity. This state of permanent bondage, wherein one fully yokes their being to being married within a feminine system such as The Church (the bride of Christ in the orthodox reading of the Song of Songs), shows the nature of the church’s effective bondage. Individuals are captured with an efficiency never seen elsewhere, their whole being diverted and channeled through the organs and pathways prescribed by the Church.
It’s a breaking away from this world that is the tragedy of novels such as Lewis’ The Monk, wherein the titular monk breaks away, diverting his being and energies on lines of flight, which end in his permanent exile - left to starve in the deathly silence of animal decay in the wilderness, forsaken by the enclosure of God’s light.
This capture of a human forms the basis of all successful economic systems, a process of systematic working that was refined in the transition Foucault identified from monarchical to disciplinary power. The phase of this first follows the corrective then the using, where the individual is remade into the image of the self desired (ie, the monk), the monad of a being the machine has preconfigured as its ideal subject. This was first taken up by the military and prison systems, where young men had the animal within colonized out of them, in order to be remade in an image of pseudo-monastic vows towards the end of properly slotting into the system of entrapment they had been Shanghai’d into.
The first test of this, beyond the ecclesiastical, was in the invention of the colonial plantation. Many commenters have made the point that the concepts of race as we know them are the genesis of the ideologies we hold for granted as the nature of races and not motivated by anything pre-existing in the European mind. This process took place through this formation, where the kidnapped slaves had to have their personhood reconstructed into a new form that slotted as a monad into the system they were brought to, they had to be rebuilt as the subjects already invented with the system’s authorship. Such was the origin of racism, a process of affixing peoples into various categories by their relationship to colonial economics.
This formation, that of capturing the soul, is often limited to men for a specific reason - it only works within a gendered dynamic, as shown by the language of the church as the Bride of Christ, the female in the relationship between clergy and their institutional owners. The feminine power is a negative space, a system of hollows where male energy is sublimated into. No shock then, that oftentimes these systems of reforming the individual into the desired subject are masculinizing, from the all-male monasteries, to the military.
That this reformation process takes place in order to make a subject amenable to the desires of a female system, puts the blame of male monad-creation on a process ruled by female desire. It’s here that the potential for sex magic comes in. For female-focused sex-rituals, the desire of the woman comes foremost in recreating the man to fit the image of her desires. Even when the man is supposedly uplifted, he is always reforming himself to suit her. This can be seen elegantly in raceplay, the white or black man has to be recreated in order to fit the female desires intended for him, turned into a new being of her creation, akin to the recruit being trained into being a soldier.
Female desire works at its highest in this way, as a form of systemic seduction that fully entraps the man into recreating himself as a being for her consumption. In effect, she provides the webbing and the fly wraps himself in it, supplicating before her web. His supposed dominance, taking a physical or emotional lead during sex, provides the cover for his own submission, wherein the very mechanism of his entrapment is in his belief of conquest, all psychological needs he can comprehend provided for him, for the small price of his soul sacrificed for her.
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