Brain Porn

Female Chauvinist Pigs : Ariel Levy

2005-10-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

"Female Chauvinist Pigs" is a big, messy, troublesome, exciting book. It doesn't take up much space on a bookshelf - it's only 212 pages long, including the notes - but in terms of its impact, it can be compared to the other Big Books of feminism, including Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae" and Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch." Like Paglia and Greer, Levy talks back to feminism, addressing its perceived failures and asking for more. Unfortunately, along with Paglia and Greer, Levy often delivers old stereotypes in shiny new packages. Many of her would-be "radical" statements are just re-phrased puritan cliches.

Levy argues that the images of hetero pornography -- blonde, skinny/curvy, ultrafemme women performing for the male hard on -- have become mainstream. She also argues that, whereas straight pornography used to be an imitation of sex, straight sex now tends to imitate pornography. She cites women who perform pornographic tropes for men or present their bodies in a porn-o-riffic way (bleached hair, long nails, high heels, skimpy clothes, bodies exercised or altered to meet stereotypes of "hotness") without bothering to figure out what feels sexy or beautiful to them, women who are "sexy, but not sexual." And she blames women - women who, she says, watch "The Man Show" or go to strip clubs or consume mainstream porn in order to be "one of the guys," and to prove that they're not "prissy little women." Women who aren't performing the porn-femme are embracing a frat-boy aesthetic in order to win male approval; in either case, we're doing it for the boys, for a taste of their money or their power or their freedom. Rather than being a personalized, fluid expression of identity, gender is increasingly being locked into a mutually repressive, male-supremacist binary.

That portion of her argument is right on. But it's buried in messed-up generalizations, obviously skewed reportage, and heterosexism. She cites only the porn that fits her argument, and ignores the radical queer, feminist, and amateur pornographers who make porn that challenges conventional power dynamics and beauty standards. She devotes one chapter to young queer women, but she only acknowledges genderfucking and genderqueer people by claiming that bois are misogynist and femme-phobic and that many transgender men are "confused lesbians." (In a book filled with fairly offensive and inaccurate generalizations, this one ranks at the top of my list.) The rest of her book is devoted to the power dynamics of heterosexuality. It's also mostly about white people. Her book would have been much stronger, in my opinion, if she had consistently drawn correlations across the lines of race, gender, and sexuality. But for the most part she treats white, heterosexual culture as the only reality that exists, as if it were the only culture that could indicate anything important about gender relations. She says very little about straight men who feel oppressed by the need to "be men" or to embrace conventional "manliness." And despite her fixation on pole dancers - she mentions them obsessively, once every few pages - she interviews not a one. She has plenty to say about their motivations, about their looks, about their victimization, but she doesn't have much to say to the actual people who work the pole. For an author so obsessed with sexual performance and sex work, Levy doesn't engage with many sexual performers. She quotes sporadically from Jenna Jameson's memoir, holds a brief interview with feminist porn director Candida Royalle, and talks to a few of the performers at a "Girls Gone Wild" video shoot. The rest of the book, for the most part, is representation without interaction. This points to one of the key flaws of the book: Levy seems to feel that the sex industry is inherently, irredeemably dirty, and that anyone who participates in it or enjoys it is a woman-hater or a victim. Rather than wanting it to change, she wants it to go away. She does make some fairly compelling statements about women owning their bodies and their sexualities, rather than imitating a commercial brand of "hotness," but too much of her book seems to echo the words of Andrea Dworkin: "If pornography is a part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality." Instead of offering alternatives, she corrals sexuality into a retro moralism that feminism has always sought to escape.

2005-10-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

God damn. I know I said that I didn't like to post about major news items, but right now there is no topic more interesting than crazy-ass Bill Bennett. First he says this:

The former U.S. education secretary-turned-talk show host said Wednesday that "if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Bennett quickly added that such an idea would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do." But, he said, "your crime rate would go down."

Evil. But it's the apology that kills me:

Bennett's statement went on to say that "the whole issue of crime and race" has been on people's minds in light of the situation in New Orleans, and is aired frequently in academic settings. Given that, he called his comments barely noteworthy.

"Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialogue I engaged in this week," his statement said.

I cannot think of a more spectacular instance of someone missing the point. The assumption underlying his statement (that black people = criminals) is the real problem here, and it's the one thing that he doesn't address or apologize for. Not that an apology would be worth much.

John & Roe

2005-09-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

John Roberts was confirmed today as the new Head Justice of the Supreme Court.

In other news, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, look forward to a lot more of this:

Today: September 30, 2005 at 9:46:0 PDT

Boyfriend Gets Probation for Beating
ASSOCIATED PRESS

MOUNT CLEMENS, Mich. (AP) - A teenager accused of hitting his pregnant girlfriend in the belly with a baseball bat and causing her to miscarry has been placed on probation and ordered to perform community service at a pregnancy crisis center over his lawyer's objections.

The 17-year-old pleaded no contest Aug. 31 to a charge of intentional conduct against a pregnant woman that results in a miscarriage or stillbirth.

Authorities said the girl wanted to end the pregnancy and consented to the beatings. She was not charged with a crime. Under the 1999 Michigan law used against the boyfriend, only the person acting against the pregnant woman can be prosecuted.

The boyfriend, whose name was withheld because was prosecuted as a juvenile, was put on probation Thursday until he turns 19. Juvenile Judge Matthew Switalski also ordered him to perform 200 hours of community service at the Compassion Pregnancy Center.

His attorney, Miranda Massie, complained that the center is overtly anti-abortion and works religious themes into its counseling. But the judge said: "If the message is `What can we do to help save the pregnancy?' I'm not going to take issue with that message."

The girl was 16 when the boy struck her over a two-week period, causing a miscarriage in October 2004 six months into her pregnancy, authorities said.

Police learned about the matter after the girl spoke about it while at a high school leadership conference. An adult contacted authorities, and the fetus was found buried at the boyfriend's home.

This is the part that kills me: pro-choice advocates don't want to make abortion possible, they want to make it safe. It's always going to be possible, and it's always going to happen, but if people don't have access to sophisticated medical technology (which is still pretty crude and painful, according to many of the people who have used it), they're going to use baseball bats and coat hangers.

Corruption In The Republican Party? Surely You Jest!

2005-09-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

Why is it that, when everybody and her dog starts to posting about a specific topic, it almost invariably leaves me cold?

Tom DeLay is in trouble. It's going to be a big deal and people are going to get fired and it will change everything forever and ever. Yeah, like that Karl Rove thing. That turned out to be a big deal, too.

France Isn't Cool Any More

2005-09-28T15:21:00.000-07:00

France has an eloquent, experienced, viable left-wing presidential candidate, and politicians on both the right and the left wing are throwing a fit, because she's a woman. The Independent Online has an article chock full of quotes to make you boot:

Jacques Lang, the obsessively politically correct, sixty-something former culture and education minister, said the presidency "should not be a beauty contest". Laurent Fabius, the former prime minister, mocked François Hollande, the Socialist party's first secretary, Mme Royal's "husband", and father of her four children.

M. Fabius sneered: "Maybe we should have a rotating [husband and wife] presidency. But who would look after the children?"

2005-09-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

I'm fairly certain that I could not possibly be more excited about "Serenity," Joss Whedon's upcoming "Firefly" movie. Joss Whedon is one of the few people in the entertainment industry who has been consistently and openly feminist. He's also been reliably witty, innovative and concerned with character, and has infused various dork-tastic genres with personality and warmth. Now, he's taking on the big-budget science-fiction action movie. It's hard to imagine a form that has been more thoroughly corrupted by cheap commercial misogyny and soulless plot gimmicks. (In fact, the only form that's more problematic is the horror movie, which he re-invented for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer.") I find it hard to believe that his message has not been at least a little bit blunted or corrupted by the big studio process, but according to fan buzz, the Whedon vibe has been left intact on the big screen. And he's working from "Firefly," a cancelled series that may have been his finest work to date. It has nine fully fleshed-out and original characters, including one of the most positive representations of a sex worker that I've ever seen. It revises the traditional sci-fi futurescape to include the eternal facts of poverty, political corruption, and prejudice, without going all Death Star, good-vs-evil: in Whedon's work, there are always shades of gray. And it has a space ship, and it has fight scenes, and you can watch it without feeling dirty. So, no: I could not possibly be more excited.

Noah's Ark: CocoRosie

2005-09-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

I find it entirely unlikely that two sisters from New York should spontaneously develop Icelandic accents, but this is only one of the many oddities that you have to accept in order to appreciate CocoRosie. They’re terminally quirky, aggressively cute; on the title track, not only does Bianca Cassady sing “Noah’s Ark came to my house one day with all of his animals,” she pronounces the last word “animaws,” like a four-year-old. She does this over, and over, and over, until you want to put her into speech therapy. But the delicate, dreamy lo-fi sound is so seductive that somehow, when I came to the final song of “Noah’s Ark,” all I wanted to do was listen to it again.

For more of this review, visit Girlysounds

Segregation In America

2005-09-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

"It's a lot easier for white folks of good conscience to acquiesce in the immiseration of thousands of black and Latino children if we keep them at a distance. To me, segregation is not simply a demographic dilemma or some kind of a bureaucratic mistake -- it is a conscious, deliberate and morally intolerable form of social policy."

Check out the rest of this excellent interview at Salon: "Apartheid America."

Storms Come & Go; Stripping Is Eternal

2005-09-22T08:33:00.000-07:00

A follow-up: according to Reuters, strip clubs are the first businesses to re-open in New Orleans. Bless their hearts.

Sex As A Weapon: Von Iva

2005-09-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

VON IVA
Live at Cake Shop, NYC, 14th September 2005

Some people still think that rock and roll is a boys’ game. Women have always made rock music, but they’re often stereotyped, trivialized, or badly marketed while they’re doing their best work, and quickly forgotten when they leave the public eye. There are a few moments that stand out in this history, however, moments when women have created songs or performances so transcendently rock that they can’t be forgotten. My personal list includes Joan Jett singing “You Don’t Own Me,” Patti Smith singing “Gloria,” Tori Amos grinding on her piano bench while snapping, “So you can make me cum, it doesn’t make you Jesus,” and Kathleen Hanna working the stage topless, with “slut” scrawled across her chest. Last Thursday, I saw Von Iva at Cake Shop. They made the list.

Von Iva’s music is like the beautiful love child of Le Tigre and PJ Harvey: vintage synth noises and raw, soulful vocals wrapped around a fierce punk rock rhythm section. “Sorry, we left our penises at home, with the guitars,” crooned lead singer Jillian Iva, just before throwing herself into a song so ferocious and hot that it proved both tools irrelevant to their sound. Bassist Elizabeth Davis (of Tribe 8) and drummer Kelly von Guthler carry most of the weight, instrumentally, and they do it well: I defy you to stand still at a Von Iva show. They work like a force of nature, and you have to move with them. Bex Kupersmith provides shimmering disco synth chords and analog riffs, which keep the sound rough and fun. The bare, stripped-down approach leaves room for Iva’s searing voice.

For the rest of my article, check out Culturecatch.

Theater Ridiculous: The Caucasian Chalk Circle

2005-09-16T05:59:00.000-07:00

Last Friday night, beset by boredom, I decided to attend a production of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in which most of the characters were played by life-sized puppets. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t get it. What I got instead was a spectacularly odd experience: puppets singing, dancing, and spouting Marxist dogma. The cumulative effect was hallucinatory and disturbing. It was like watching an unaired episode of Sesame Street in which Elmo is brutally executed by guerilla soldiers.

Brecht’s plays balance a studied anti-realism with a cruel insight into human nature and social injustice. In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a peasant girl named Grusha decides to care for an abandoned baby whose noble family has been targeted for execution by a revolutionary army. She’s chased through the Caucasus Mountains, terrorized, starved, sold into marriage, and nearly killed. (At the end of the show, the puppets do a happy dance.) The fairytale simplicity of the plot is undermined by the very real cruelty and terror that it contains. Stolid citizens disintegrate into cowards at the sight of armed guards. Decent people gouge and starve each other in order to survive. War claims lives and leaves scars. The play doesn’t have any clear heroes, except for Grusha, and she isn’t always bright enough to make good decisions. This is not children’s theater.

For the rest of this article, check out my column at Culturecatch.

The Lost City: Rocket Queen #2

2005-09-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, cultural tragedies hit home in odd ways. We're so used to seeing well-edited, sensational accounts of human misery on the news that we can't really comprehend what's happening until we encounter a small, personal detail, one which has escaped the eye of the media. My friend Steve C., for example, was in London during the recent bombings. He told me later that he found it hard to really experience the loss until the next morning, when he was trying to figure out how to get to work; his regular train station had been hit, a few hours after he left it, but he didn't fully realize what that meant until he was faced with the fact that he couldn't go there any more. That kind of numbness is common in a media-saturated culture. I've heard several stories from New Yorkers who saw the Twin Towers go down, and whose first thought was, "that looks like a movie." We have to move through our store of common cultural images and cliches, discarding them as we go, in order to recover the unique truths of history and experience.

This evening, I really experienced the flooding of New Orleans in a way that I never had before. It happened while I was reading Rocket Queen, a personal zine by a feminist sex worker. The zine itself was beautiful - thoughtful, witty, and raw without once faltering into sentimentality or the dogmatic reiteration of a party line. Sex workers' literature has come out of the closet in a big way over the course of the last few years, as porn and its attendant industries have become more mainstream, but too much of the writing falls into an easy "pro" or "con" stance, which doesn't accurately portray the real moral ambiguity of the work. Either the writer holds to a second-wave stance, in which sex work is always and only wrong, or s/he falls into the equally dangerous cliches of the "sex-positive" movement, in which sex work is portrayed in bright colors and superlatives: so liberating, so radical, so sexy, so fun! Janet, the author of Rocket Queen is an artist, which is to say that she tells the truth as she sees it, without bowing to the agenda of any particular wave or sect of feminism. Nevertheless, she delineates the politics of selling sex with sharp insight and an unwavering eye. In this passage, she describes the way that young women idealize stripping, and look to her to validate their choices:

"I get a lot of mail from young girls who are interested in dancing. They're already considering it and then they read my zine. I seem pretty together and grounded. I come off as together because I spend a lot of time digesting my experiences and have many good friends who help me recover from the damage... I am fucked up. Don't think that just because I can speak intelligently about sex work that it's all good. I have nightmares about it. And sometimes, out of nowhere, I'll think of something I've seen, heard, or done, and shudder... If you think you can exploit the machine, save some money, and get out relatively unscathed, go for it. I wouldn't have land if I wasn't a stripper. I don't regret this path. But... I've been lucky and I still feel scarred."

This is tough, smart, exquisite writing: truth forged in trauma, marginalization, and the pain inflicted by culture which would like its sex workers to be seen and not heard. However, for me, the real killer is the fact that the latest issue of the zine is explicitly about New Orleans: the culture, history, and politics of stripping and whoring in that particular city. She describes the districts; she names the clubs; she explains why customers are different in New Orleans than they are anywhere else. By focusing on work in one particular city, she gives a unique and human perspective on the city itself. I found myself wondering how many of the clubs that she described had been washed away, how many of her clients and coworkers had been killed or nearly killed by the flooding, what happened when the women who worked at the clubs found themselves sleeping in cots at sports stadiums along with the men that had hired them for a bachelor party or a drunken boys' night. I found myself wondering, especially, about the author. Her voice was so vital and so beautiful, and it seemed entirely possible that it had been lost forever in the storm. The sense of loss that I felt as I read Rocket Queen was something that no Fox news graphic could ever convey.

Rocket Queen is available at Bluestockings in NYC; you can also order it by sending $1.50 ppd. to Rocket Queen, P.O. Box 64, Asheville, NC, 28802. Get it if you can.

The Devil's BJ : The Dresden Dolls LP

2005-09-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

Whether you know it or not, you've already met someone like Amanda Palmer. She's on Livejournal, or Myspace, or both, and her blog rocks a picture of a pale little cartoon baby slitting its wrists and crying blood, with a title like "see my beautiful innards," or some damn thing. Those girls are a dime a dozen, and they deserve to be laughed back into their suburban bedrooms, where they can shed bitter tears, surrounded by their Trent Reznor posters, their leather-bound journals, and their massive collections of Jhonen Vasquez comics.

Like a recovering alcoholic who can't stand to see people drink, I have a very low tolerance for people who haven't given up on Goth. (Especially since everyone knows that the music peaked in the late 80s. No band will ever surpass The Cure. I mean, duh.) When Marilyn Manson released a decent series of metal albums, inappropriately marketed as "Goth rock," the subculture became glutted with high school students. We're all grown up now, and most of us have moved on, but those that haven't have started their own bands. Palmer's Dresden Dolls are the latest and most famous example.

When I decided to review the Dresden Dolls' LP, I intended to listen to the album in its entirety. I succeeded, but it was painful. By the time I hit the halfway point, I was frantically checking the track list, sure that I had to be near the end. Every song seems to stretch into infinity, offering nothing but Palmer's two-note vocal range and her equally limited emotional palette. (Over the course of the album, the Dolls manage to sound both mad and really mad. You can tell when they switch from one mood to another because Palmer starts yelling. Truly, there is no end to the lack of innovation.) The Dresden Dolls crank out anger-management show tunes with monotonous glee; all of their best moments are stolen from Tori Amos or Tom Waits. There's nothing on The Dresden Dolls that you can't find in a better version on Boys for Pele or Rain Dogs.

At the center of it all is Palmer, camping it up with squeaks, bellows, and shrieks, which, by trying to be both cathartic and ironic, manage to be neither. In her frantic bid for attention, she does everything but fart into the microphone. Her lyrics showcase an unappealing persona: lines like "I want to do more than survive, I want to rub it in your face" mark her as a particularly annoying brand of histrionic depressive, one who believes that her pain gives her license to lash out at others. Her occasional efforts at humor fall flat because the album is oversaturated with self-pity and melodrama; Palmer can't manage to laugh at herself while licking her wounds. One line, however, does stand out: "I want to give myself a B.J." It seems remarkably apropos, in light of the fact that the whole album sounds like a painful, twisted form of masturbation.

For more reviews by Sady O, check out Girlysounds and Culturecatch