Archive | The Wide World of Porn RSS feed for this section

An open letter to Creative Loafing Atlanta on the occasion of the inauguration of Are You Shaved

21 Dec

Dear Creative Loafing,

The cover story for your December 15-21 issue, sporting the title, “Melysa Martinez, our new sex columnist, asks, ‘Is Atlanta uptight?‘” has forced me, at last, to write the letter I’ve been meaning to write ever since I read your embarrassment of a “college guide” issue a few months ago (of which I re-purposed fifteen copies to protect my hardwood floors from cat piss while training my cat to use his litter box).

The title led me to a few related assumptions before I had even opened the paper. First, since Creative Loafing had hired a woman to write its sex column, I figured I could look forward to a little less of the doltism – and, often, brazen misogyny — exhibited by the dude who preceded her. But second, I worried, as I am wont to do whenever a faux-progressive media outlet hires a woman to talk about sex, that once again I’d be seeing consumerist, destructive, male-centric ideas about sexuality insidiously smuggled into the minds of the unthoughtful under the guise of being woman-approved. It was worse than I thought. It appears that not only will CL be selling hackneyed rehashings of bro-ish sex fantasies in boxes stamped with the woman-approved seal, but the (empty) “punk rock” imprimatur will also help ensure that no one analyzes or criticizes those fantasies lest they be deemed uncool.

There are things I like about Atlanta, but Atlanta’s take on counter-culture is not one of them. I understand that many of the people who live here have come here to escape reactionary, conformist realities of which most people may never be able to apprehend the depths. Still, I expect that anyone claiming to occupy a socially transgressive role actually do so, and that is simply not the case with many people in this town. It’s 2011. Getting tattoos, advertising one’s love for tits/tacos/booze by means of wacky novelty t-shirts (vintage or not), or involving oneself in the local horror movie lovers’ scene does not make one a revolutionary, but rather a consumer of one or more commercially conceived and marketed lifestyles. The fact that the bulk of the counter-cultural activity in town revolves around Clothing Warehouse and people getting wasted in one of eight or so bars can be blamed in part, I’m sure, on the gentrification of the city in recent years, as well as on the corporate media concentration which began in the late 90s and saw all of the avenues for rebellious expression bought up, repackaged, and sold to kids who would never be the wiser. But Creative Loafing is also complicit in the devolution of the city’s cultural life. There are smaller cities in this country with far more interesting music, art, and political environments. What they all have in common is a thriving, responsible alternative media presence, not a choice between a weekly headed by a Republican asshole and a weekly that exists to advertise the fact that some dude partied with some shitty band, that yet another new junk food chic restaurant is trying to sell $18 burgers with sous-vide dog turds on them while no one knows where to buy dumplings on Buford Highway, and that there is a chick in town with tattoos who drinks whiskey and likes to fuck (you don’t say!). In the text of the article, Martinez makes reference to playing tug-of-war with her “four-legged daughter,” mentions a thwarted desire to move to New York City, and recounts a conversation with a male friend from San Francisco in which she bemoans the fact that men don’t ask her out, concluding that men are intimidated by her. Where have I heard this before?

I don’t expect much from Atlantans anymore when it comes to thoughtfulness, especially when it comes to discussions of human sexuality, but I suppose I’ll scream into the void anyway and voice my grievances with the article itself.

A sex column called Are You Shaved? Really, now. Martinez claims in comments to the online version of the article that she chose the name after hearing the question posed to the title character in the movie Amelie. I’ve (unfortunately) seen the movie, but I forgot that line. So did everyone else. Leaving aside the juvenile asininity of such a title, is there a female human being under thirty (surely, Creative Loafing imagines its audience, roughly, to be 18-30-year-olds) who isn’t? I was under the impression that the porn industry had ensured by this point that there are only nine heterosexual men alive in America who don’t pressure their female partners to remove their pubes regularly, to the point that women, when surveyed on the subject, have come to feel such shame over the natural state of their bodies that they claim to remove their pubes in toto because they think they are “dirty” or “unsanitary.” Martinez says that she likes “to see the question as a metaphor for whether or not we can be stripped of what makes us insecure, leaving us naked and vulnerable.” So, shaving one’s pubes metaphorically equates to shedding decades of social conditioning that has resulted in epidemic proportions of women (and men) feeling ashamed of their bodies because they don’t measure up to an ever-changing – and always impossible – standard created by an industry that exists to make a profit by manipulating and exacerbating human insecurity and sexual shame? War is peace, I guess.

Martinez claims there is no such thing as a pervert. What the fuck are we supposed to do as a society when there is no such thing as a pervert? I’m pretty comfortable with labeling anyone who pursues non-consensual activity a pervert (e.g., rapists, pedophiles, etc.) In fact, I’m cool with labeling anyone who finds the dehumanization of a human being orgasmic a pervert, because that’s what the definition of sexual perversion is: a warping of human sexuality such that one finds something other than sex – such as power – more orgasmic than sex itself.

The term “pervert” has been used as a tool for shaming and dehumanizing sexual minorities, which is unacceptable, but it still has uses. The problem with people like Martinez is that they can only see two options with regard to sexuality: reactionary sexuality and sexual (lower-case L) libertarianism. Reactionaries deploy the concept of the pervert — and other forms of psychological and physical violence — in order to shame women, homosexuals, and anyone else who doesn’t follow the patriarchal sexual script into either getting on board or disappearing themselves from public view. Sexual libertarians have taken things too far in the other direction, beginning from the assumption that any criticism of any form of sexuality ought to be verboten. That would be a great thing, were it not for the fact that we still live in a straight white male supremacist society in which the range of sexual expression for those who are not straight white men is limited by what straight white men can deal with. It would be nice to see some sexual liberationists take things a step further by taking it as a given that people ought to be free to explore their sexuality, but questioning the bases of the social construction of sexual desires and how they might affect our social and political realities. With freedom comes responsibility and shit.

The general thrust of Martinez’s monologue is that she’s devoutly anti-shame, but there’s a decided “get with it” tone present throughout the discussion. She ham-fistedly insinuates that Atlantans are uptight because we don’t all act like rockabilly teenagers and aren’t keen to shout our most private fantasies over the first PBR. She assures us that there’s “nothing wrong with [our] likes and dislikes” but then tells men whose girlfriends “won’t give in” and submit to some “backdoor action” to find someone who will. Shaming people for wanting to do something consensual might not be cool, but shaming people who don’t want to do something – which amounts to pressure, which is a form of social and interpersonal coercion — is downright fucked.

Martinez asks men what kind of porn they watch and what their fetishes are, she writes, quite early in the getting-to-know-you phase. It’s the fear and hostility people feel with regard to sexuality that underlie many of the most destructive forces in human psychology, and thus creating space for frank and realistic sexual discussions is necessary to a healthy sexual existence and to a functioning society. But is the goal really to reduce every potential relationship to whether or not the two people involved like to have the same kinds of props in the room when they fuck? No one ought to be ashamed to engage in a sexual discussion, no matter what the content of that discussion, provided that the time for the conversation is appropriate. But if a dude were to go straight from asking me whether I’m into the Black Lips to asking me whether I do anal, I’d sneak out before he got the chance to stick his dick in my face unannounced. A woman broaching the subject of fetishes with a near stranger doesn’t carry the implicit threat that a man doing so does, but it’s still creepy. Boundaries matter, as any sex columnist who gives a shit about the concept of consent ought to know.

Still, let’s say the context isn’t creepy, and that Martinez is simply bemoaning the fact that men can’t seem to deal appropriately with a woman who discusses sex openly. She writes that, when she does so, men either “retreat into their good-boy shells,” or that they “assume [that her questions about sex mean] they get a straight pass to the bedroom.” Maybe these men aren’t uptight. Maybe the explanation is that the men she hangs out with — as most men do — suffer from a virgin/whore complex and have learned to deal with sexually open women by shunning them as “whores” or attempting to take advantage of them, deeming them good for nothing else. Where is the suggestion that men learn to view women as human beings rather than as caricatures who exist solely as extensions of men’s egos?

It’s fairly disheartening – though by no means surprising — that porn use is a given, and that all that’s left to discuss is which version of commodified sexuality one consumes, how degrading it is, and whether one partner can emotionally withstand knowing what forms of dehumanization the other finds orgasmic. We can simply no longer imagine a sexuality, apparently, that transcends scripts dictated to us by an industry that banks on fulfilling (and manipulating) male desires to the detriment of women’s humanity. But let’s not discuss that and what it might mean for our sex lives and our emotional development as human beings. That shit wouldn’t give anyone a boner.

This might be hard to believe, but one can tire of constant exposure to banal, unreflective, heteronormative/heterosexist discussions of fucking, and there are people in the world – Atlanta included — who might like to read and think about something a little more complex.

Martinez and Creative Loafing have both got it wrong. The problem with Atlanta is not that its people are uptight, but that they’ve somehow gotten the mistaken idea that being pro-porn, pro-microbrew, and pro-Rob Zombie is the opposite of uptight. Probably at least in part from Creative Loafing.

Please try a little harder. This is embarrassing.

Love,

ND

There is more than one dick implicated in the Weiner scandal.

11 Jun

Having generally avoided paying attention to Democratic-Republican politics for the last few years due to my complete disillusionment with the liberal political machine, I had only a vague idea of who Anthony Weiner was last week when I sat down with Davetavius to watch the Dylan Ratigan Show and witnessed his whiny admission that he’d been sending pictures of his wang to women over the Internet and that he’d been having “inappropriate” conversations with several women on Facebook and Twitter.

The speech itself was pretty boring, save for the snicker Weiner managed to elicit from us when he claimed not to have been drinking when he elected to send pictures of his dick to someone he knew nothing about save that she hates “those damn repubs” and that she wants him to come to Las Vegas and “fuck the shit out of” her (yes, as hard as it might be to accept, there is a woman who says “fuck the shit out of”).  Far more interesting was the commentary Ratigan and his guests offered before the speech on the absurdity of contemporary political culture and the news media’s complicity in allowing politicians to waste every single opportunity they are given to interact with the public on nonsensical grandstanding and offering trite and insulting opinions on whatever the scandal of the week happens to be. Ratigan cleverly refers to Democratic-Republican politics as “professional wrestling,” and also rightly opts to ignore it in favor of drawing attention to the problem that politicians from both parties get paid to avoid tackling: the capture of the entire US government apparatus by the  banking, finance, medical, war, and prison industries. Unfortunately, Weiner elected to hold his press conference just after 4 PM on Monday, which is when Ratigan’s show starts, thus interrupting a worthwhile conversation with his submission to the already immense aggregated collection of histrionic and phony displays of contrition by public figures admitting to having used their penises in a non-approved manner.

What I did not discover until the end of the press conference was that Weiner was prompted to cop to sending the photo by Andrew Breitbart, who posted one photo on his website that Weiner had sent to a woman and claimed to have more. Andrew Breitbart, for those lucky enough to be unaware, is a conservative “journalist” — if one can refer to people who write for The Washington Times as “journalists” — who has recently published a book with the worst title I’ve ever heard: Righteous Indignation. The cover jacket lends the title an even headier air of stupidity, as the “right” in “righteous” and the “nation” in “indignation” are red, giving the book the secondary subtitle of “Right Nation” and indicating via use of color that Breitbart is both angry and sees the red states as the real American nation. The book’s actual subtitle, “Excuse Me While I Save the World!,” might display more unwarranted egotism and self-importance than “Right Nation,” but I can’t decide which one is dumber, and thus a better indicator of where the contemporary conservative movement is headed.

What an asshole.

I wouldn’t know who Breitbart was had I not seen Dylan Ratigan interview him — and even then I could scarcely pay attention because I lost the ability to be amused by conservative commentators years ago — but apparently he makes the claim that objectivity is a falsehood propagated by the “liberal media” in order to cloak its agenda in an air of factual empiricism, when in reality they approach current events with just as much bias as Rush Limbaugh or any other right-wing demagogue. The debate over whether there is such a thing as a “liberal media” is beyond hackneyed and boring at this point, but it is rather amusing to hear a conservative public “intellectual” question the existence of true objectivity. It sounds oddly reminiscent of, oh, I don’t know, let’s say post-modern liberal academics. That isn’t an accident. It’s a part of what Davetavius sees as a new trend among conservative commentators (which I’m sure he’ll write a post about sometime before 2013), which is to jettison the Glenn Beck-esque hysteria that has characterized conservative media since Obama’s election and replace it with a faux-intellectualism that will allow even the borderline-illiterate to feel like top shelf political analysts. Attacking the existence of objectivity may seem like a dangerous thing for a conservative to engage in, being that the insistence on the existence of objective truth is likely the most important epistemological tool at the disposal of those who benefit from the current global power structure, but it’s probably not. Anyone who would pick up, let alone purchase, a book called Righteous Indignation with a picture of a guy abortively attempting to affect skepticism on the front and pretending to yell on the back probably doesn’t possess the intellectual skills to process anything related to that idea. Breitbart knows that. He’s a cynical, self-aggrandizing asshole. Nothing to see here, move along.

But I had no idea. Later on Monday night, I saw video from the press conference taken before Weiner had arrived, in which Breitbart attempts to paint himself as a responsible journalist fighting for the cause of truth rather than a dishonest clown in a mad grab for attention that will help him to further his career.  He essentially blackmailed Weiner into admitting to having sent out pictures of his dick to women on the Internet by threatening to release photos he only had in his possession in the first place because he sits around trolling progressives’ social media pages in the hopes that he’ll catch someone slipping and get hold of just such a piece of evidence that he can use to increase the number of seconds during which television viewers will have to endure his smug presence. He then demanded an apology from Weiner, thereby obliterating the possibility of anyone believing there was even an atom of truth in his claim to care about anything in relation to this story other than how famous it can make him. And that was before he went ahead and released the photos anyway, which amounts to sexual assault in my book. Breitbart, clearly, is a cretinous dick.

One can’t blame Republicans for so aggressively and ruthlessly exploiting Democratic politicians’ sex scandals. They’ve had so many of their own in the last few years that they jump at the chance to show that conservatives don’t hold perversion, sex abuse, and generally assholish sexual behavior in monopoly. And they’re right. Neither party holds an absolute monopoly on immoral or unethical sexual behavior, but one group does seem to have the market 99% or so cornered, at least in the world of politics: powerful men. Not that proof was lacking, but this incident is yet another piece of evidence that no matter how “liberal” men get, the last thing they will relinquish is their sexual doltism. Weiner was no radical, but he is one of an infinitesimal number of American politicians willing to take positions that are easily identifiable as socialistic and worry less about bipartisanship than rationality. Which is why this story, though it isn’t a surprise, does bum my party out.

Anthony Weiner, beloved by the kinds of people who have yet to realize that Bill Maher isn’t leading a revolution, supported extending Medicare to everyone rather than passing a health care bill that did no one but the insurance industry any good. His voting record indicates that he is a strong supporter of abortion rights. Add that to his penchant for publicly chiding Republicans,  his friendship with Jon Stewart — who, though he may not be the most egregious promoter of Liberal Dudism, probably performs a more insidious role in its propagation than anyone else — and the fact that he represents a district that just happens to be the national epicenter of Urban Outfitters liberalism and it’s no wonder Weiner enjoyed a position at the top of the list of coolest Democrats among Tosh.0 viewers (an important category in my most recent scientific poll).

Lisa Weiss definitely loves Tosh 2.0. And is yet another dick in this already huge circus of dicks. Weiss, in a conversation with Weiner on the subject of Sharon Angle (R – NV):

if this wacko wins my state i swear i will have to move! she may be dumber than plain! and that is tough to find!

idiots i work with love this stupid b**ch!

Great. Another woman who shits on women in order to ingratiate herself with men. It may be incumbent upon me as a feminist to empathize with the ways in which women are forced to cope with the pressures we face living in a patriarchy, but I don’t think that ought to extend to condoning misogyny, even if it is directed at sellouts like Sarah Palin and Sharon Angle. And another thing: Weiner claimed at the press conference that all of his interactions with women online were consensual and took place between adults, but this woman sure expresses herself like an adolescent:

let’s kick some gop ass! i hate them!

when r you coming to vegas to help me beat up the right wing
crazies?

They begin talking about sex within one page of their recorded conversations. A month does elapse between the time she first contacted him in August and the September message in which he broaches the idea that they watch The Daily Show while having intercourse with him behind her (that’s right), so there might have been other IM conversations in the interim, but it’s clear that they went almost instantaneously from a cursory and shallow discussion of political party allegiance and Comedy Central programming to material explicit, unsubtle, and stupid enough to stand in for anything Chris Hansen has read back to a shame-faced redneck on To Catch a Predator. It’s “cock” this and “cum” that (probably the two least classy sexual terms of all time) from just about the second page on, with little else in between. Weiss’s behavior doesn’t even approach the nefariousness, dishonesty, and outright piggishness of Weiner’s, but she’s still a dick. In addition to calling other women stupid bitches, she also participated in sexual conversations with a married dude on the Internet, aggressively pushed for a real-life sexual encounter, and sent him a vaguely threatening message when the scandal began and she did not receive a response to her attempts to make contact with him:

u owe me big time for keeping this all quiet…i am defending u to the death on every blog and
to everyone….telling everyone u would never send dirty messages to women

And, of course, she went ahead and released their private conversations despite the fact that they make both of them look like crass, juvenile, oversexed idiots, which is proof that there is no limit to the humiliation people are willing to subject themselves to in order to get their name in the paper or their face on television (and, surely, a check).

Obviously, Wiener is the main dick in this scenario, in both senses. The exact circumstances surrounding the transmission of the wang shot elude me, but I gather from posts on the subject by other feminists that the dick photo Weiner sent to a woman named Gennette Cordova that begat this controversy in the first place was unsolicited and a total non sequitur. The mainstream media haven’t seemed to take note of that fact, but it’s a pretty big deal. It’s nearly impossible to avoid exposure to photos of wangs on Craigslist and dating sites, but even without visiting such sites and interacting with the men on them, most women have been duped into confronting an unsolicited dick photo at least a few times. You know what they used to call that before the Internet? Indecent exposure. Flashing. Men who exposed their genitals to women and girls who had not asked to see them were called perverts,  people avoided men in trench coats, and the police arrested men who ran around sticking their dicks in everyone’s face. But the Internet has made flashing so easy for men that no one even takes notice of it anymore; it’s now such a common behavior that a US congressperson thinks it reasonable to send a photo of his penis to someone with whom he had not had previous sexual conversations. Unsolicited dick shots are not the only means by which Weiner displayed a lack of respect for the emotional and sexual boundaries of the women he has been communicating with, however, as evidenced by these excerpts from his messages to Weiss:

you will gag on me before you c** with me in you

baby you’d be crawling for the door to prevent me from f***ing you silly

<= thinking about gagging your hot mouth with my c***

What kind of person wants their sex partner to gag while they’re being intimate? The proper human response to hearing one’s partner gag during sex — at least if one empathizes with their partner and considers them to be a human being — is to STOP DOING WHATEVER IS CAUSING THE GAGGING and concern oneself with making sure they are OK. The proper human response to seeing one’s partner “crawling for the door” is not to fuck them silly, it’s to have a word with oneself and ask what the fuck one might be doing to cause someone to attempt to escape. If someone is trying to escape from you and you continue to pursue sexual contact with that person, you are a rapist.

He also evinces a complete lack of understanding with regard to female anatomy and a total lack of concern for what the women he’s talking to might find arousing and pleasurable, probably because he can’t be torn away from worshiping his own dick long enough to think about it:

think of my rock hard c***. practice saying, ‘god, anthony, I’m c****ing again

you will gag on me before you c** with me in you

I want to feel you c** with my fat c*** in you

this thing is ready to do damage

it won’t go away, and now I’m taking pics of it, making me ha**er still.

What you have just read, my dear readers, is a set of conversations that could never have occurred before the rise of porn culture and rape culture. Weiner takes almost no interest in Weiss, her (admittedly trite and poorly expressed) political views, her job as a card dealer, her friends, or anything else other than the orifices he wants to penetrate. He makes small talk, begins to flirt with the skill of a sixteen-year-old, and then moves right on to where he’s going to put his penis. He never asks her what might turn her on, but rather inundates her with information about the state of his penis, informing her of exactly what physical and emotional response she will have to it.  That, the insipidness and lack of imagination that characterize his sexual fantasies, and his lack of consideration for Cordova’s boundaries or Weiss’s feelings about whether or not she’d like to be “gagged” during a sexual encounter hint to me that Mr. Weiner might just be a porn user. In porn, dicks reign supreme, and women pretend to fall all over themselves for the purported pleasure of gagging on and being aggressively penetrated by them. They aren’t interested in intimacy, whether emotional or physical, and they have no desires of their own that don’t align perfectly with those of men who are enthralled by nothing more than their own wangs. They’re perfectly happy to chat nonchalantly about the cable or a pizza, then begin blowing the cable or pizza delivery guy in the blink of an eye. Or they’re ready to go from expressing approval for the comedy of Stephen Colbert to hearing all about how they’re going to gag on someone’s penis. Weiss played along it seems, likely swayed by the foolish idea that being desired sexually (or, rather, used as the Internet equivalent of an uncompensated phone sex operator) by a congressperson is a big deal, but that clearly matters little as Weiner displayed the same behavior toward Cordova even though she didn’t engage in sexual conversations with him.

Were the mainstream media to miraculously up and decide to cover this issue responsibly and expend a modicum of effort analyzing what Weiner’s behavior says about our society and culture, this story might warrant some airtime. As it stands, it’s just another opportunity for the 24-hour news networks to flesh out their programming schedules and attempt to attract prurient viewership in order to sell shit and enrich their parent companies, and it’s just another opportunity for the two sides to engage in a bit of professional wrestling while everyone holds to the tacit agreement to deflect attention from economic and social reality, the devolution of which both parties perpetuate in between getting on television to pretend to care about whatever issues they think their constituents want them to care about.

Any shred of hope I might have had that someone in the media might decide to approach this scandal responsibly probably died as Weiner walked off stage after fielding questions and a reporter yelled one last question for him: “Were you fully erect in the photo?!” Because what we really need to know is how big this guy’s dick is, not why we live in a society where he could consider sending a stranger a picture of it in the first place.

Pussy the Restaurant opens in LA. No one surprised.

25 Apr

The period from 1997 to 2002 was definitely the nadir of American culture, and there was no worse place to witness the depths of stupidity the entertainment industry was able to inculcate in the public than Los Angeles. I lived there from late 1998 to 2004, a period that saw half the city’s population face the dilemma of whether to set oneself up at one of the infinite points along the Swingers-to-rockabilly continuum or to shoot all the way past rockabilly, buy a stupid hat and an early model convertible sedan, and get down with the Rob Zombie/Sunset Boulevard Guitar Center/Dave Navarro scene. The other half had to decide between house music and trance. It was real  fucked up.

Don't do an image search for "Swingers." Trust me.

It's just like the 50s, only, like, more "punk"!

"Man, we owe everything to Rob Zombie and Nikki Sixx."

For god's sake.

The music scene in town consisted of geriatric swaggarts like the members of Velvet Revolver in leopard printed rayon shirts and flavor savors attempting to resurrect the late-80s hair metal scene for audiences with excessive tattoos who were there the first time and were having just as hard a time as the bands were letting it go, bands made up of other geriatric swaggarts attempting to latch onto the rap rock fad in order to try (and fail) to avoid irrelevance, dance clubs that made the ones in Night at the Roxbury seem sophisticated, and a few bands attempting to create an LA “indie sound” out of the derivative dregs of other cities’ dead garage rock scenes.

Tommy Lee with Methods of Mayhem, best known for the 2000 track "Get Naked." If you can find a picture of someone looking like a bigger asshole, I'll give you a million dollars.

I suppose it could have been worse. I could have lived in a suburb somewhere outside of California where people were paying money to see the Barenaked Ladies and the Fun Lovin’ Criminals. I could have been aware that the movie The Big Hit existed. Instead, LA afforded me the chance to avoid knowing anyone who talked about attending Woodstock ’99 or thought the Deftones were the most countercultural shit out, but at a fairly high price: living at the center of the production of the means for national befuddlement, a center to which women and men flocked from all over the country to humiliate themselves in order to participate in that befuddlement.

The late 90s and early 00s witnessed the rise of totally pointless and absolutely thoughtless raunch in nearly every realm of popular culture, as evidenced even in movies like Election that (Davetavius claims — and I doubt) had the potential to be clever but were ruined by disappointing, demoralizing sexual references that were neither necessary nor clever, and were more often than not cruel (and I can’t think of a single other movie released in those years that anyone could even claim had the potential to be clever). Everywhere one looked, there was a video of Fred Durst telling someone to touch his balls and touch his ass, there was a clip of Tommy Lee porking Pamela Anderson, there was a Hustler mega-store opening up next door to Tower Records, there was a guy coming up with a novel way to make himself rich off of the misguided desires of young women for attention in a world in which celebrity was morphing into the only worthwhile pursuit in life and something that one gained by any humiliating means necessary.

The tsunami of degrading stupidity that we now find ourselves drowned in started in LA, and I was there, man. I totally saw it all happen. I wish I could say that about something other than the beginning of the era of  the contemporary wave of cultural pornography saturation, but alas…

Like I said, it was real fucked up. Fucked up to the extent that even the efflorescence of hipsterism from 2002 until the time I left town was a relief. I’ve been back here and there since, including for a bit of an extended stay last summer, and it has changed some. The exuberant embrace of Larry Flynt as the city’s mayor of edginess has given way to a general acceptance among everyone in town of the fact that porn is everywhere and that even most of those who balked at the vulgarity of the Hollywood scene ten years ago have given up trying to beat anyone and joined. Few people still have the tolerance for the brazen idiocy of the Durst Era, which has caused the city to settle down a bit, but porn culture is insidious and has made itself at home in LA as a whole — rather than just Hollywood and the valley, as was the case before the mid 90s and the Internet porn boom — to such an extent that one can now treat one’s entire family to a fine dining experience at Pussy the Restaurant in the Century City Mall.

The Century City Mall, despite sitting at the center of the ugliest set of buildings below the Cahuenga Pass, is a fairly high end and comprehensive shopping and entertainment complex, but it was lacking an overpriced Porn Chic/Mexican fusion establishment. No more. Now there’s Pink Taco, a cutting edge LA Chicano culture-themed food studio miles in LA traffic away from both the Hustler “boutique” and the Seventh Veil, where one can indulge in drinks such as the Pink Panties and the Pinche Boboso (fucking creep) for only about ten dollars and score a taco platter in a city awash in excellent $1 tacos for merely $25, all while immersed in the Chicano-as-fuck ambiance created by lowrider bicycles, sad clown airbrush paintings, and (probably) waiters dressed as vatos.

No one has ever accused any joint at the Century City Mall of sitting at the apex of sophistication (rather than tastelessly ostentatious wastefulness), but a restaurant named after a juvenile vagina reference doing so well there as to expand to the far more expensive real estate on the Sunset Strip ought to convince just about anyone that porn culture is, indeed, a reality.

But don’t worry. Pink Taco loves women. (Sorry, I meant tits.)

Get on the fucking ball, janitors.

20 Dec

I was hanging out here at Chez Deuce with Pisaquari the other night when we decided to do a little Google experimentin’. You see, despite having issued challenges in the past to my many porn-apologist readers requesting that they produce an example of “feminist” (or at least non-misogynistic) porn, I have yet to see one of these unicorns myself. I don’t particularly care whether I ever do see one, being as I don’t need other people to tell me what to think about in order to jack off, but I would like to see some evidence if people are going to keep making the claim that not all porn is necessarily laden with woman hatred. I also don’t really understand why people — especially feminists — spend so much time and energy discussing three feminist outliers that may or may not exist while ignoring the three billion or so misogynistic porn images that definitely do exist.

So we googled “feminist porn” to see what we’d find. What we got was 322,000 results, most of which were discussions by feminists of whether such a thing as feminist porn can or does exist, along with a very, very small number of sites claiming to offer “woman friendly” porn. On the first page of results, there were only two that contained any porn or links thereto, and there wasn’t another one until the fifth page of results. From there on out, I didn’t see any at all and eventually got tired of seeing the same summary results over and over: rehashings of the ol’ “is feminist porn an oxymoron” debate and interviews with women who claim to be both feminists and porn stars. Interesting.

We weren’t exactly shocked at the results, though I think we were both a bit surprised that there were only three sites within five pages professing to offer feminist porn. I mean, I know that most self-proclaimed feminist porn fails comically to live up to its name, but I still figured there’d be more than three sites in five pages claiming to make the grade. We decided to compare those results with other search terms for niche varieties of porn we assumed would garner a similar number of hits.

TRIGGER WARNING

We googled “rape porn.” We got 1,860,000 results, and the entire first page, a link to the Wikipedia article on tentacle rape porn notwithstanding, was made up of links to sites offering rape porn. On the first five pages, every single result save three was a rape porn site. Some quotes: “Crying young teen bitches in violent rape porn movies!,” “Weeping chicks getting their holes probed by countless men in a row or even at once – all without their approval, all at inimitable Gang Rape Videos!,” “Rape these bitches so hard they bleed from torn ass holes and abused pussies.”

We googled “brutal porn.” We got 2,810,000 results, and every single result in the first five pages except for one news story about a brutal child porn ring was a site offering things like “Brutal sex, throatfuck mixed up with brutal face fucking” and “some of the scariest porn on the net.”

We googled “dog porn.” We got 47,600,000 results, and aside from a few articles about a porn actor who killed a dog and some dumbass asking what would happen if his dog watched porn on Yahoo! Answers, the entirety of the first five pages were made up of sites offering things like “Dog fucks wet pussy. Huge horsecock in teen pussy” and “dog fucking girls, woman drink animal cum, beast cumshot.”

Sigh. For god’s sake. Can we face the fucking facts, PLEASE? There are nearly six times more hits for “rape porn” than there are for “feminist porn,” nearly nine times more results for “brutal porn,” and nearly one hundred forty-eight times as many results for “dog porn.” In all three instances, the top results were all for sites offering images of women being brutalized, raped, or fucked by animals, with nary a news article, blog post, or interview with anyone who might take issue with the existence of propaganda that teaches men and boys that women and girls are subhuman and available for raping. I know how search engine optimization works, but I also know that the number of times people click on a certain site in relation to a given search term plays a role in that site’s position in the results for future searches for that term.

Do you know what that means? No one clicks on sites that claim to offer feminist porn. Lots of people click on sites that offer rape porn. Were feminist porn to actually exist, it wouldn’t matter, because no one is looking for feminist porn and no one cares to see what it might look like because people don’t watch porn to see two equals going at it. While we waste our time arguing about whether feminist porn exists, whether a feminist can be into mainstream porn without getting kicked out of the club, whether women can participate in the production of mainstream porn and still claim to be feminists, etc., men are producing and consuming enough brutal porn to drown us all in a purulent swamp of misogyny. It ain’t men these sites are claiming we’ll get to see fucked by donkeys, anally gang raped, brutally throat fucked, and covered in jizz. It’s women, and it’s women who have to live in a world saturated with images of women being degraded, debased, dehumanized, and despised. Who gives a shit, in this context, if a couple of tattooed, 115 IQ havin’, zombie lovin’ drama club geeks think they’ve found a way to make a video of two people fucking that doesn’t involve the woman being called a whore?

We had to try to find something even more recherche than feminist porn. We tried “pizza porn” (3,190,000 results) and got a combo of photos foodies had taken of pizzas with ridiculous shit on them and sites about introducing “sluts” to “big sausages.” We tried “rodeo porn” (748,000 results) and were treated to sites featuring topless women riding bulls and being porked by rednecks. So, of course, we tried “redneck porn” (725,000 results) and found out there are thousands of sites that amalgamate cousin incest and deer hunting into one rompin’ good time. We checked out “homeless porn” (1,050,000 results), “cop porn” (2,730,000 results), “emo porn” (2,920,000 results), “fart porn” (1,680,000 results), “shit porn” (6,490,000 results), “fraternity porn” (387,000 results), and “puke porn” (1,620,000 results). It seemed we’d never find a porn genre that had generated less interest than feminist porn when at last we stumbled upon it. Janitor porn! Only 239,000 hits! But to be fair to janitors and lovers of janitor porn, there were quite a few actual porn sites with clips like “Janitor Pretends he Rich give SLUTS fake Vodka for Group Sex” within the first five pages of results, so even though “janitor porn” might generate fewer results than “feminist porn,” there might actually be more janitor porn than there is feminist porn (really, I’m sure there is, since I’ve now seen janitor porn and have yet to see feminist porn).

Let’s get some perspective here, huh? When someone spends 99% of their time defending .0000001% of an industry while avoiding confronting the 99.9999999% of the industry that has real effects on women’s lives, that person looks a bit delusional/defensive/dishonest. Let it go, dude. Admit that you know porn is bad for women and you use it, participate in it, or profit from it anyway. You aren’t fooling anyone here, and I doubt that you’re even fooling yourself.

I like it when people talk about breast cancer without trying to make it “sexy.” On the kitchen counter.

7 Oct

I was bewildered yesterday when several women I know began posting updates about where they “like it.” As in, “I like it on the floor,” or “I like it on the coat rack.” Wait, I thought, is it possible that all of my female friends have lost their senses of decorum and dignity on the same day? Then I saw an update from a dude that said, “I like it with her own money in it.” I asked him what he was talking about and he told me he was making fun of “some chick thing.”

Exactly.

I was still bewildered and decided to figure it out by making use of my stellar Google skills, and it turns out that it’s an attempt to raise breast cancer awareness by means of a boring, annoying internet meme: women post Facebook updates about where they like “it” — “it” being their purse — which is supposed to pique men’s interest and get them to think about donating money to breast cancer research.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I see a few holes in this plan. First off, that train of thought skips an awful lot of stations. We’re banking on the general Facebooking public being far smarter and far less lazy than I am, and that seems like a bad bet to me (I am a highly motivated genius, after all). Second, every single one of the updates I saw on Facebook yesterday was followed with about ten lascivious comments from dudes who had neither made any effort to figure out on their own why so many women were all of a sudden posting suggestive updates on Facebook nor bothered to ask those women why they were doing so. Instead, they responded with shit like “Me too!” or “Can I come over?” You know, because they’re men, and men tend to be oversexed, clueless jags, especially when confronted with women who appear to be inviting sexual attention. I have yet to see a single discussion erupt in which breast cancer is mentioned at all. Way to raise awareness.

But let’s pretend for a second that it was working, that men all over the country were donating money they could otherwise spend on micro-brews and new Xbox controllers to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Why weren’t they doing so last week? Why isn’t the existence of breast cancer awareness month enough to get them to part with $5? Why isn’t the thought of protecting their mothers, sisters, wives, or friends from breast cancer motivation enough to get these guys in the donatin’ spirit? Why, ONCE AGAIN, do women have to flatter men’s ridiculously swollen egos with weak, nonsensical innuendo in order to cajole them into acting like human beings? Sorry, but I fail to see how breast cancer is sexy, or why we need to use sex to sell men on the idea that breast cancer matters.

Has anyone else noticed the direction that campaigns to raise money for breast cancer research are moving in? I’ve seen at least ten “Save the Tatas” bumper stickers this week, and every time I do I consider keying the car it’s affixed to. I mean, really. Are we seriously incapable of conceiving of breasts as anything but sex objects even when discussing a potentially fatal disease? And what does “Save the Tatas” even mean? I have one guess, and here’s my translation: “Men, if you love tits, donate money to breast cancer research so there will be less mastectomies and hence more tits around for you to ogle.” That’d be great and all, but what we need to save is women’s lives, not their tits.

Just to make sure, I’m going to apply the ol’ switcheroo here. Let’s say that the Red Cross decided they needed to step up their effort to encourage people to donate to relief efforts in Haiti and decided to sex the campaign up by asking us to donate money to Haitian women’s breasts or Haitian men’s penises, complete with photos of breasts and penises (or at least photos suggestive of breasts and penises). Yep, that’s completely insane. One more try: how about we raise awareness of the prevalence of prostate cancer with a “Save the Boners” sticker campaign? Or by asking men to post cryptic Facebook ads about where they like to leave their wallets, as in “I like it in the back pocket of my pants until the morning, when I like it in my other pants”? Also insane, if only because no one pays attention when men post seemingly sexual Facebook updates because they do it all fucking day anyway.

If men don’t give a shit about breast cancer, we can’t make them, even if we hold a topless awareness rally. First because they’re already aware that breast cancer exists (who isn’t?), and second because all they’ll see is a bunch of tits, not the human beings they’re attached to, which might be where the root of the problem lies anyway, know what I’m saying?

Apparently some porn agent in Atlanta really wants me to get back to blogging.

9 Jun

Or else why would I have received this e-mail from one Delicious Freak?

MANDI KANE/ADULT MODEL AVAILABLE FOR IMMEDIATE WORK:

Real Name: _________ *
Stage Name: Mandi Kane
Current Location: _____ *
Age: 22
Race: White
Height: 5’3″
Weight: 115lbs.
Stats: 36B- 26- 36
Hair: Brunette
Eyes: Green
Skin: Fair
Dress: 3-5
Shoe: 7
Piercings: None
Tattoos: 4 (2 Front, 2 Back)
Available for website/film/photos including Solo, Toy, G/G, B/G, G/G/B, B/B/G, Light Bondage, School Girl, Submissive, Spanking (Receiving).
Fetish, Multiple partners,Interracial negotiable.
EROTIC DYMES INC.
adult models, performers and entertainers
Booking:Info & Rates
Email: eroticdymesinc@gmail.com
706-300-9356

“Perception is reality.”

I’d include the accompanying photos, but then, you know, you’d all be as bummed as I am right now, and I don’t wish that upon any of my lovely readers.

Where to start? Let’s think first about the name of the company, Erotic Dymes. One could interpret that name in one of two ways, and I can’t decide which one is more offensive. On the one hand, they could be referring to the women they represent as dimes, as in tens, as in reducing human beings to numbers on a scale that measures exactly how interested the average porndog would be in using them for the one purpose he (and pretty much everyone else) thinks they were born for. On the other hand, they might just idolize Ludacris, in which case they’d be referring to the women they represent as dime pieces, as in a dime a dozen, as in completely valueless as human beings once they’ve served their extremely limited purpose. Something tells me it’s a little of both, even if they aren’t copping to the latter view.

Then there’s the detailed physical description. Is it just me, or does that shit read like something out of a shopping catalog? And what are catalogs for? To sell objects for people to use until they tire of them and throw them away. I know more about this woman’s physique than I do about my best friend’s, and she’s a complete stranger. I do not, however, know anything else about her at all, because she’s not a real human being, she’s an object for sale by men to men to be used for whatever purpose men who hate her for no reason want to put her to so that they can make a profit selling images of men using her body to other men who hate her for no reason so that they can jack off more efficiently. Delicious Freak, it seems, wants to sell me a human being.

In fact, it would seem that the only thing that separates this electronic epistle from your average product description is the fact that this product gets a say in whether she fucks black guys. Now, there’s no fucking way I’m going to make the argument that this woman is somehow morally reprehensible for putting limits on what she will and will not allow to be done to her for money, but something about that “interracial negotiable” thing has just given me the kind of heebie-jeebies one only gets when confronted with an absolutely elephantine pile of tangled intersectional oppression and exploitation.

And finally, I can never resist ripping on people who break out quotations in inappropriate contexts (and there is no appropriate context for breaking out quotations). “Perception is reality.”  Delicious Freak, it appears, is a philosophy major. Despite the incongruous and dorky nature of that quote, I’ll go ahead and put it to the test: my perception is that everyone involved in selling women’s bodies — if there’s any justice in the world — ought to have a skydiving accident this weekend, that everyone on Earth hates women, and that the author of this e-mail couldn’t possibly have barked up any wronger tree even if he were a representative from La Raza hitting Lou Dobbs up for a platinum circle donation. Well, would you look at that.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more posts than you can shake a vegan corndog at.

* I’m not publishing this woman’s real name or location in relation to this abominable bullshit in case she should some day decide she’d like to get out of the porn business.

Bookmark and Share

Mainstream Media to Women: Lost your job? Get naked!

8 Mar

I don’t normally expect penetrating feminist analysis from the mainstream media, nor even that they’ll pay any serious attention to issues that affect women, but an article from last year (I really get on shit as it happens because I’m living in the age of the Information Superhighway and everything I do is in real time, dude) on MSNBC’s website highlights just how far off the mark the media can get when it comes to reporting on women’s lives. The AP article, entitled “More women going from jobless to topless,” explains that with the recent economic downturn, more and more women are turning to stripping, posing for pornographic magazines, or performing in pornographic films.

One would expect that such a trend would be considered worrisome, that the reporter responsible for writing the story might touch upon what it means that the economic crisis has resulted in such a reduction in options for women that many have resorted to stripping or pornography. Instead, the tone of the article borders on celebratory, and the author elides discussing the gender, class, and race issues that saturate every facet of the story in favor of presenting jobs in the sex industry as an opportunity for enterprising women facing hard economic times, claiming that these women are “attracted by the promise of flexible schedules and fast cash” and that “[m]any have college degrees and held white-collar jobs until the economy soured.”

That rosy view rests upon interviews with two strippers, Eva Stone and Rebecca Brown, both of whom work at the Pink Monkey in Chicago. Stone considers her foray into the world of stripping a temporary one and plans to enter a master’s program as soon as she pays off her student loans, whereas Brown plans to stick with stripping as she makes more money at it than she did as a bartender. This could just be a case of lazy reporting; both women featured in the article work at the same club, and both were willing to discuss their motivations with the reporter. However, careless journalistic method or not, the lack of analysis in articles like this one is incredibly irresponsible, as well as indicative of some pretty wack cultural assumptions.

A casual reader is likely to walk away after reading this article with several grave misconceptions. The foremost of those misconceptions is that all women who participate in the sex industry are doing so by choice. Sure, the article starts out by blaming the larger numbers of women turning to stripping and porn on the sour economy, but it presents stripping as some kind of opportunity that women are lucky to have. No mention is made of the women who resort to stripping or porn out of desperation. In the world of AP reporters, apparently, there’s no such thing as a stripper or porn performer who turns to the industry when she finds herself broke with kids to feed but lacking viable job skills, or who resorts to stripping or porn to support a drug habit. They’re all supposedly there because, presented with a wide variety of attractive options, they’ve decided the sex industry has the most to offer.

The reporter, in a hurry to convince us that strippers and porn performers are nearly all “empowered” middle class cubicle escapees, misses some of the very obvious implications of this story. First, economic downturns hit women harder than men because women are usually among the last people hired and the first fired. And as such, porn producers and strip club managers are able to take advantage of women’s economic oppression during times of economic crisis to an even greater extent than they normally do. Second, and related, the most vulnerable women in our society are hit the hardest by economic crises, and that means that poor women, poor women of color, and women with few job skills are more likely to find themselves in situations in which stripping or working in porn are their only options than women with college degrees or white collar jobs are. Third, the author, in explaining that strip club managers and porn producers are getting a bevy of responses to their want ads, makes no attempt at analyzing what that might mean for the women who come to these places seeking employment, and makes no mention of the exploitive working conditions and the obvious potentials for abuse. The article even goes so far as to quote Brown preempting those who might question the desirability of stripping for a living, saying, “I have job security.” What kind of job security does she really have when the second she gets too old or stops resembling the customers’ idea of fuckable she’ll be out of a job with no resume and no real skills? And since when is having to endure constant sexual harassment from one’s customers and, quite often, one’s employer a good trade-off for job security?

Which leads to my final point, that the author failed to ask the most important question of all: why do we even have a “sex” industry? Why are women’s bodies and sexuality being so aggressively commodified and exploited? Why is there a demand for a never-ceasing parade of women willing to take their clothes off and allow men to use them sexually? Could there possibly be a fundamental problem in a system in which this phenomenon can occur?

It appears that the aggressive marketing of women’s sexual exploitation and the cultural mainstreaming of pornography and the other sectors of the “sex” industry in recent years have reached the point at which the news media now feel it appropriate to present women’s economic and sexual exploitation as innocuous, unavoidable, and fun as fuck. Critical thinking, when it might stand in the way of the carefree use and abuse of women, gets jettisoned once again.

Bookmark and Share

Burger King to Customers: Eat a Dick

9 Dec

This is so unbelievable that I had to take a break from my blogging hiatus to comment on it.

Not that you need one, but here’s another reason not to eat at Burger King:

What in the hell is this ad even trying to say? Our hamburger is so awesome you’ll want to fellate it? Our hamburger is so big you’ll feel like your wang is inadequate by comparison? Our new Whopper is so big that chicks — even though their first instinct might be to fellate it (I mean, it is really awesome) — will be terrified of its girth once they approach it to do the fellating?

This ad is so fucking stupid that I almost can’t believe it. First of all, there’s absolutely no way to forge a connection between Whoppers and fellatio without jumping through about six tired, adolescent, Judd Apatow-esque mental hoops. Second, because that connection is impossible to make via sane means, the ad guys have had to resort to the advertising equivalent of a baseball bat to the crotch to get their point across. You’ve got a woman about to blow a cheeseburger, an absurd amount of mayo/semen, and two completely idiotic dick-related puns, all in one blisteringly dumb ad. And finally, the goddamn cliche in the ad copy isn’t even correct! It’s “it’ll blow your mind” not “it’ll blow your mind away,” assholes.

Imagine the meeting at which the creative team at the ad agency came up with this bit of marketorial genius.

Ad guy Dave: It’s a seven-inch burger.

Ad guy Todd: That’s almost as big as my dick, bro.

Ad guy Dave: Yeah, right, motherfucker. But whoa, we should totally call it the seven-incher. And then we could make all kinds of dick jokes!

Ad guy Todd: Yeah!

Ad guy Dave: But who wants to be told to eat a dick?

Ad guy Todd: Uh… whatever. It’ll be funny. We’ll show a chick about to blow the burger.

Ad guy Dave: Won’t that offend female customers?

Ad guy Todd: Dude, haven’t you seen that Durex ad? Chicks are too stupid to notice they’re being insulted. Besides, chicks only eat salad. We’re selling this burger to men, and men like the idea of eating something related to blowjobs.

Ad guy Dave: So we’re saying to men that this burger is like a big dick, and chicks want to suck it, so men should eat it? That sounds kinda weird, dude.

Ad guy Todd: You’re over thinking this, bro. We’re just relating big dicks, burgers, and blowjobs. People [and by "people" I mean "men"] like dick jokes, they like blowjob puns, they like burgers, they like porn. It’ll work, trust me.

Ad guy Dave: You’re the genius. I’m out of here. Dane Cook’s doing a show tonight at the sports arena. I got loge tickets for only $100!

Ad guy Todd: Bonus!

I mean, really. I’m surprised it doesn’t say anything about them putting their meat in our mouths. If I were you — even if you’re a dude — I’d take this as Burger King giving me the finger and calling me a retard.

Burger King has clearly decided to give up on selling anything to women or anyone with a brain and to bet the wad (ha, get it? I should work for their ad department) on the 13-35 porn-saturated idiot male demographic — the 4chan set, if you will.  And what do those assholes love more than burgers and the idea of seeing women penetrated by objects large enough to cause them pain? The woman pictured in the ad looks, quite frankly, like she’s terrified of what’s about to happen to her, and I have a hard time believing that was an accident, first because this ad is only slightly less subtle than having someone throw a burger at your face while yelling, “Suck my dick!” and second because… well, because these days the entire male target demographic is wanking to images of giant dongs and frightened women every other day or so.

Here we have a fairly crystalline distillation of what’s wrong with American culture. We’ve found the most corrupt, revolting, violent, unnatural, and unsatisfying ways possible to sate each of our separate natural biological desires, and now we’ve blundered onto a way to incorporate two of them into one big, stupid, disgusting experience. Combine shitty, chemical-laden “food” with nearly no nutritional value with empty, insulting, dehumanizing facsimiles of sex and you have the zenith of American capitalism, my dear readers.

Pretty soon you’re going to read a news story about some guy choking to death on a nine-patty burger while masturbating to video of a woman fucking a dog because his 64-ounce Mountain Dew Baja Blast was too far away from the toilet for him to reach it without upturning his laptop. I promise.

* Word up to the Esquire for the photo.

Bookmark and Share

I don’t feel like humping! Call 911!

17 Nov

We knew it was coming. The industry that has brought us a drug to treat weak stream, three different boner pills, fifteen or so baldness drugs, Latisse, and Botox (and so on ad nauseum/infinitum) has finally developed a pill to cure the world of the plague that is female sexuality.

Apparently, we didn’t already have a wide enough variety of anti-depressants (pshaw, as if) and someone was trying to develop yet another one. While the new drug, fibanserin, turned out to be bunk as an anti-depressant, it had a strange side effect: it caused an increase in libido. The researchers, suspecting they’d accidentally come across the holy grail of pharmaceuticals, started trials of the drug as a libido enhancer right away. The trials, led by Professor John Thorp of the University of North Carolina, included 2,000 women. Those women who took the largest dose reported that they experienced “more frequent and more satisfying sex and greater desire. They were also less distressed about their previous sexual problems.” Thorp, pleased with the results, described the drug as “essentially a Viagra-like drug for women in that diminished desire or libido is the most common feminine sexual problem, like erectile sexual dysfunction is in men.” I’ve got a few problems with this story.

First of all, how is not wanting to hump a medical problem? Why are women required to take medicine in order to make sure that their desire to get busy matches that of men? There are several seriously problematic assumptions sitting right underneath the idea that we need a drug to enhance women’s libidos. The first of these is that human sexuality is male sexuality, and that female sexuality is thus a variation on “human” sexuality. The line of thinking is that men are easily aroused, and women are not, so women need to get with the program even if that requires taking medicines that might (really, definitely will — it was supposed to be an anti-depressant, and how many of those don’t have fucked up side effects?) have side effects that are yet to be discovered. There is also the assumption that when women are involved in sexual relationships with men (I suppose this study could have included lesbians, but no mention was made and I seriously doubt it), they ought to be sexually available whenever their male partners should happen to have the urge. Our culture, media, and social norms tell us that when women don’t make themselves sexually available, they are failing as partners, they’re “frigid,” they deserve to be cheated on.

Why is male sexuality the yardstick by which female sexuality is measured? Why is female sexuality that does not conform to men’s desires pathologized? Let’s pretend we live on another planet for a minute, a planet on which male sexuality as it commonly manifests in modern American culture is not normative, but rather open to analysis and judgement. Men are overstimulated. The world presents them with a ceaseless parade of images of objectified and sexualized women intended to excite and arouse, from Hennessey billboards to the cover of Stuff to Manswers to the wide world of internet porn. A constant state of arousal has to be disruptive. Maybe it’s male sexuality that’s dysfunctional, no?

But let’s be serious here, male sexuality is not a monolith, nor is female sexuality, and it’s absurd that we’re pretending either exists as an identifiable entity outside of the socially constructed gender and sexual roles thrust upon us. There is no such thing as a “normal” libido. There is no threshold above which we are having too much sex and below which we are blowing it as human beings. Not humping much, just like humping a lot, ought not elicit opprobrium or constitute a source of shame. If a woman doesn’t feel like getting bizzical, she doesn’t need medicine, she needs to have her wishes and bodily sovereignty respected. If a woman isn’t interested in getting naked, she doesn’t need to go to her doctor, she needs to know that it’s OK that she feels that way and not be bullied into risking her health by taking a pill to counteract something that isn’t dysfunctional.

I think men might be surprised at the “improvement” we’d likely see in women’s libidos in the absence of slut shaming, accusations of frigidity, the virgin/whore complex, and emotional blackmail, an “improvement” that wouldn’t require dangerous medication that disrupts the way our bodies operate. You see — and I know this will sound crazy — my libido seems to be connected to the behavior of my partner. If he respects my humanity, if he allows me to make decisions regarding sex freely and without passive-aggressive bullshit, if I feel like sex is a means to express affection rather than a bargaining chip, if I feel an intellectual and emotional connection with him, my libido miraculously increases. If he were to act like an entitled asshole and pressure me for sex, if he were to display piggish attitudes about women’s sexuality, if he were to treat my sexual needs or desires as if they were of secondary concern, or if I just were to happen to not be that into him (not that I’d hang out with anyone these hypotheticals apply to), I imagine that I’d suddenly transform into Morrissey.  Bizarre, I know. Should I be taking a pill?

Who knows how hosey women would be if it weren’t for the aggressive and hostile sexual objectification of women and the concomitant slut-shaming so rampant in our society? If women’s sexuality were to go unrestricted and were even encouraged the way men’s is, if women were allowed to develop their own sexual preferences without being forced to conform their desires to men’s, things might be a lot different and we might not be looking for pills to artificially increase women’s libidos, because women’s libidos wouldn’t be suppressed by a society that sublimates their sexuality. I’m just saying, dude.

* Word up to the Esquire for the link.

Bookmark and Share

Huffing dong not only won’t win you the war, but it won’t even win you the battle.

23 Oct

Since I’ve been thinking about porn titling and copy conventions lately, I found myself ruminating this afternoon on a very strange phenomenon that I have often come across in my perusals of the porn section of the Internet: the practice of advertising which porn “actors” star in a particular video by listing the man’s name vs. the woman’s name, as in “Bruce Bigdick vs. Tanya Titanictits.” What the fuck? That alone tells me that the “sex” in porn is more about power and degradation than lust (not that I needed more evidence of such), but it’s a pretty striking practice, is it not?

Think about it for a second. If it weren’t so terrifying it’d almost be funny. I keep hearing the voice of an MMA announcer saying, “Tonight, in the octagon, Will Whalewang and Brenda Brobdingnagianboobs are going to fuck to the death! Rage in the cage!” Seriously, when was the last time you heard about someone taking on a foe via dick sucking? I’ve only heard of it once in my entire life, in an autobiographical essay I will excerpt for your reading pleasure (warning — offensive shit ahead):

I [once] lived in a house with five guys all trying to become famous for drinking, smoking pot, and playing video games.  A lot of socially abnormal behavior occurred in this house during this period of my life.  One such instance was that my friend Mr. X (a very naturally gorgeous man) began to be naked constantly.  He walked around the house naked, he played video games naked, he did crosswords naked, he even partied naked.  What at first was quite shocking became mildly amusing, then somewhat passe, then quite irritating.

One day after some  moderate beer drinking, I started playing Crash Bandicoot Warped (an underrated platform classic) on the Playstation.  Mr. X emerged from his room naked with a Penguin Classic selection I can’t specifically recall and took his place next to me naked on the floor, prepared to engage non-chalantly in some naked, drunk, casual Wordsworth or something.  After a few minutes I became seriously annoyed and asked Mr. X, “Dude, what the fuck are you doing, trying to out-gay everyone?  It’s fucking retarded, put your clothes back on!”  Mr. X sprawled out and instructed, “Dude, don’t be afraid of my beauty.”  In a split second, I became vigilantly determined to out-gay Mr. X. I would show him that his air of passe/faux-free sexuality was nothing against my will to maintain a non-retarded living environment.  “I’ll fucking suck your dick and show you who’s afraid!” I threatened while perking up as if I were about to attack his dick.  “Bring it on,” said Mr. X, laying down as if he were ready to receive all the oral sex I could give him in a thousand lifetimes.

At this point I suppose we were engaging in a gay game of chicken.  I approached the floor where Mr. X way lying, expecting him to recoil instinctively.  Mr. X did not recoil.  “When I touch him he’ll recoil,” I thought to myself as I touched Mr. X’s inner thigh in an attempt to get him to recoil without touching his penis. Mr. X did not recoil.  “When I touch his penis he’ll be so shocked, he’ll recoil and I’ll be the all-time Gay Chicken Champion of the Universe,” I thought right before I touched Mr. X’s penis with my hand without him recoiling.  There was only one thing left to do.  I would not lose.   As I lowered my head to begin sucking I rationalized that it would be just like accidentally licking his arm,  that his body was essentially the same as mine,  and that I would engage in a social taboo for perhaps a millisecond in the name of Gay Chicken pride.  I locked myself into an almost Zen state of mind as I wrapped my mouth around Mr. X’s penis and began sucking, attempting to empty my mind of all things accept what was necessary for this most important of personal victories.  After about five seconds I began to wonder what the fuck was going on.  After about eight seconds I began to incredulously feel Mr. X’s penis enlarge in my mouth.  After about twelve seconds I began to feel the rock hard dick in my mouth that I recognized from my own experiences as “I’m not too far from ejaculating.” Overcome with the terror of Mr. X coming in my mouth, I  jumped up, terrified, and asked, “Dude… what the fuck?!” Mr. X, with an air of complete relaxation, replied, ” Dude, why’d you stop? I was about to come.”    I looked at Mr. X, amazed, and said, “Well, fuck me.  You’re definitely the gayest.”

The next day I  gleefully told everyone I knew about the experience because I thought it was fucking hilarious.  This,  surprisingly, did not make Mr. X or my girlfriend very happy.  It also created even more doubt in my community as to the nature of my sexuality.  Oh well, as experiences go it was one of my more memorable.

Clearly, it is not possible to best one’s opponent by fellating that opponent. But enough joking.

What is up with this so-and-so vs. so-and-so business in the porn industry? Isn’t it kinda… wack to turn sex into combat, into a struggle for dominance? Should we be getting aroused by the thought of two people using and abusing each other sexually until one becomes so degraded that the other (or others) appears to have vanquished her? Such a practice belies the disingenuous claims often made by porn producers and porn fans that porn is all about celebrating sexuality, that anti-porn feminists are just anti-sex, that the real harm to women lies in the purported desire of fifteen radical feminists or so to “limit women’s sexual expression” by objecting to men wanking to images of women being treated like subhumans.

It’s bullshit. Porn is not about sex, it’s about sexualized power. Porn, a few outliers notwithstanding, is about men fucking women into submission, often violently. If it weren’t, there’d be no choking, no puking, no bukkake, no gang bangs, no double (or quadruple) penetration, no ATM, no slapping, no name-calling, no images of multiple men high-fiving each other while they use and abuse one woman’s body, no porn copy containing phrases like “until she cries” or “watch this little whore get ____” or “Interchangeable Female Body vs. Fearsome Violent Penis.”  The porn industry, if it were just all about sex rather than about sexualized hate, wouldn’t be in a race to the bottom with itself to create ever more absurd configurations of bodies, the sole aim of which seems to be to subject women to the most heinous abuse possible.

Don’t bother telling me that the porn you watch isn’t quite that gnarly. Check out the behavior of the men in comparison to that of the women, look at the positions of the bodies, think about the camera angle, listen to what is being said, think about whose pleasure seems paramount, then come back and tell me the porn you watch isn’t just as much (if not more) about dominance and submission as it is about sex.

The “versus” phenomenon illuminates exactly what porn is. It’s a battle that women can’t win, because it’s designed for men who get off on seeing us subjugated, trampled, and powerless.

Bookmark and Share

← Older Entries

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 164 other followers