Iamcuriousblue

9 Thermidor, Motherfucker

2011-12-28T23:37:00.000-08:00

I'm sure many people are aware that Hugo Schwyzer rubs me the wrong way. I've been biting my tongue about this for a while, considering how many people on the "sex positive" end of things think he's just bloody wonderful. However, since 1) I've grown to have a great dislike for some of the politicking and mutual backscratching between the "sex-positive" blogosphere* and the feminist "big blogs", and blogosphere personality politics in general, and need to get it off of my chest, and 2) since "Hugogate" is topical, why not? More importantly, this brings up issues with the "feminist blogosphere" that are a lot bigger than Hugo Schwyzer.

Of course, the irony is, I'm not one of the people who's quick to write Schwyzer off as a would-be "murderer" or "rapist". I don't know the full stories behind his "suicide pact" or the students he slept with to say for sure that any of this was coerced. On the other hand, if one of these women came forward and said that the actual situation was far worse than Schwyzer makes it out to be, that wouldn't surprise me either. I do know this though – Schwyzer is somebody who's very quick to condemn other men in order to curry favor with women, and if it was another man who had been accused of these things he had done, I think Schwyzer would be out at the head of the mob.

One of Hugo Schwyzer's last missives to The Good Men Project has just gone up. It is basically a blanket denial that feminists engage in bullying tactics. Sorry, but I know otherwise, first hand. While I of course am not going to say that anger on the part of women or feminists isn't often justified, I think it is quite obvious to the outside observer that the feminist blogosphere is in permanent attack mode, and that bullying, both in intra-feminist conflicts and conflicts with non-feminists, is endemic.

My response to his post:

I find it highly ironic that while Hugo is in full denial mode about feminist bullying, in the “feminist blogosphere” he's under full attack by the mob. Check out Feministe or do a Google Blogs search for “Hugo Schwyzer” and you'll see what I mean. So, more than a little bit of denial here.

And while, yes, angry words in the blogosphere rarely add up to physical attack (something that's true in general, not just vis a vis feminists), blogswarming and generalized campaigns against one's reputation can be damaging. And while sometimes some people's reputation deserves to be damaged, you can hardly blame the targets of such attacks for being defensive, merited or not. I've seen plenty of cases where blogswarming campaigns were quite intended to intimidate or silence people, and at least partly succeeded.

I also find it quite rich that this “Words are not fists” post comes just a month after #mencallmethings (an event amplified, predictably, by The Guardian), which consisted of a string of feminist bloggers claiming outright victimization over angry words, often justifiably, but often over angry words that don't amount to nearly the intensity of some of the campaigns these same bloggers dish out on others.

And believe me, I have seen a few cases where the line from angry words and blogswarming has escalated, and yes, including from feminists. A certain particularly nasty clique of radical feminists centered around Radfem Hub and the fringes of the YouTube ultraleft are notorious for this. The worst incident I remember is when one of these charmers decided to drive home her opposition to an advocate of the decriminalization of prostitution by making the “argument” that if he believed prostitution was a regular job, why doesn't he start grooming his infant daughter for it by fucking her in the ass. And to drive the point home, one of these charming radfems made an OK Cupid “dating” webpage with the infant's picture and the same language about fucking her in the ass. Of course, the web page was soon taken down and the police were called, but it was a vicious, outright criminal attack nevertheless. So don't try and tell me feminists are automatically pure as the driven snow in this regard.

I will also note with some irony that another member of the above clique called Hugo a “rapist” in a YouTube video, and Hugo threatened a lawsuit. The combination of Hugo's blanket defense of feminist bully tactics when they're not directed at him, and his behavior over the video about him sends a clear message. Hugo is special and his feelings are to be respected and taken seriously. The rest of us little people just have to sit back and take it. That kind of hypocrisy leaves a very bad taste in my mouth, and in many others as well, which is why I think he's getting it from several different sides of the gender politics spectrum simultaneously. I'm amazed at how many people with otherwise very different perspectives are seeing so many of the same things.

Ultimately, this isn't all about Hugo, or at least, it shouldn't be. This is about mob rule, demagoguery, and some seriously problematic cults of personality that have arisen in the feminist blogosphere. And about over-privileged “experts” and “leaders” talking all over everybody else's voices. And that, of course, is not a good thing for men, women, or anybody else.

* (Note that my dislike of some of what passes for "sex-positive feminism" these days does not mean that I am any less strongly pro-sex worker and pro the sex worker's movement, nor does this mean I think any less of anybody who I've been on good terms with. If anything, it was actually some of the waffling of the "sex positive" milieu on the topics of sex work, porn, and general free speech issues that have played a role in making me identify less with "sex-positive feminism" than I once did. Of course, my views haven't changed, and I remain as committed to these issues as ever, and of course, have the highest opinion of early sex positive feminism and writers such as Ellen Willis, Gayle Rubin, and Susie Bright, even if I'm a bit disappointed with the direction the current sex-poz movement has gone in.)

A response to some ill-informed rhetoric

2011-05-07T22:47:00.000-07:00

Well, surprise, surprise. It looks like CEHBeach, aka, HeavyTrafficAhead has decided to chime in after I tweeted this message:

AIM Clinic shut down: http://is.gd/aimclo. Now there's no comprehensive screening in the porn industry. Thanks #antiporn movement! #proporn

CEHBeach responds:

@iamcuriousblue #ScouseCaspaXS Let's get both sides of the story, shall we? While anti porn activist may cheer, they'd be mistaken (as you are) if they believe that this is about 'getting' the porn industry. It's about public health Also seems that this industry supported venture was guilty of half stepping and bullshittin about the services they were providing and illegally releasing patients medical records. What I want to ask is why is it that some people think that workers in porn don't deserve the same level of protection under OSHA that someone working at Home Depot gets? Worker Safety+Public Health > 'body autonomy'

My response:

Beach, as usual, you step into a debate without being in possession of the facts. Have you done any background reading on this, other than the Aids Healthcare Foundation press release? Seriously.

First, you trash the AIM Clinic as an "industry-supported venture". As if that automatically invalidates their work. AIM was a non-profit, supported in no small part by industry charity. If I had my way, "the industry" would have supported it more heavily than they did. They offered good-quality sexual health care and counseling in addition to HIV testing. The for-profit competition, Talent Testing Services, offers only the latter. Other testing services, including AHF, do not offer the kind PCR-DNA testing necessary to check whether somebody is infected with HIV *right now*, instead relying on run-of-the-mill ELISA antibody testing with a three- to six-month window.

Additionally, the press release goes as far as to blame AIM for having their database hacked by so-called PornWikiLeaks, blaming AIM rather than the website that violated performer privacy by stealing and publishing the information. In fact, I've got to say, seeing their database hacked like that, then seeing them sued for it by their critics sure reeks of "dirty tricks" to me.

AIM had an excellent track record since 2004 of catching HIV+ infections before they could be spread to others in the industry. (Oh, and the more recent so-called "outbreaks" in the porn industry? In each case, that was somebody who was infected outside of the porn industry and who's HIV status was picked up before they went and had sex on a porn set. "Outbreak" indeed.) AIM was not perfect, but it was a good institution in need of further improvement. Instead, AHC chose to destroy AIM through a relentless series of groundless lawsuits. Even for those who believe in mandatory condom use, I have to ask, how does destroying AIM improve anything? This is the same kind of broken "we've got to make things worse before they get better" logic used by "prostitution abolitionists" who attack existing harm-reduction measures.

You bring up the specter of Cal-OSHA regulations. Of course, if you had been following this issue, you'd know that there is no regulation specific to the sex industry, hence, they are falling back on unworkable regulations made for medical workers. Which means gloves and goggles in all porn, not just condoms. The lack of any industry-specific regulation is a big part of the problem.

And as for the larger political battle, I really don't think that AHF is coming from a "workers rights" standpoint. If this were the case, why have they systematically tried to exclude working performers from decision-making around rules governing the porn industry? Why is it that their main "representative" for straight female porn workers is the odious Shelley Lubben? A Religious Right crusader with no connection whatsoever to working performers, and who is quite explicit about it being her goal to use this battle to shut down the porn industry, not improve the lot of working performers. Much of this as well is about the grandstanding of Michael Weinstein, the head of AHF, who's previous claim to fame before his relentless campaign against the porn industry was an attempt to get Viagra classed as a Schedule I drug of abuse. I don't trust either part of this alliance, and I don't think their goal is meaningful worker protection.

It seems to me that if this was about supporting the industry workers against the industry bosses, there should be a hell of a lot more input from those workers than there is right now. But then given your demeaning rhetoric toward sex workers rights issues, I guess the entire idea of "Nothing About Us Without Us" has ever sunk in with you. And that's too bad, in my estimation, because that pretty much nullifies whatever might be progressive about your perspective.

Who's being intolerant here?

2011-04-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

[Note: I may update this post a bit or add more links over the next week, but I've decided to publish it now rather than sit on it. I really hope to turn it into a YouTube video soon, but in my experience, making a video takes far longer than making a blog post, and I'm very stressed for time at the moment. Note that even though this is posted off of YT, it is inspired by some arguments there, making for a bit of a disconnect between the subject of the argument and the response here. However, see any argument where blatant authoritarians rail against "the status quo", not uncommon these days, and you basically have the same argument.]

An argument I see beaten into the ground by “the usual suspects” in the YouTube radfem crowd is that the large number of people who oppose them constitute a “herd” and a “hivemind”. That we are being “intolerant” of a “different opinion”. And that, by implication, radical feminists are some sort of dissidents, bravely standing up to "the status quo". And while I think this is so much name-calling and ongoing melodramatics on the part of these people, which largely deserves to be ignored, this drum is beaten so heavily addressing this nonsense head on is in order.

This “herd” rhetoric rings extremely hollow. To begin with, it is simply a kind of logical fallacy called the “Galileo gambit”, a kind of inverse of the appeal to authority, holding that vilification of one’s ideas provides evidence that one is right. This rhetoric makes heavy use of the language of tolerance and ideological diversity to promote ideas that are at their very core illiberal and intolerant. One only need only look at some of the specific things these people have done or advocated for to see this. When Diana Boston uses hateful language against “trannies”, this is a direct appeal to devalue trans people for their very identity. Or when “Bonedancerff” attempts to call for police intervention to stop something as simple as somebody getting a tattoo on her ass? How about when antiporn feminists call for support of the goals of PornHarms, who’s direct goal is to have hardcore pornography censored through zealous enforcement of obscenity laws? How about when people like Diana Boston have openly said that individual rights should be take a back seat to the “collective”? How is that not an appeal to the “herd” beating down the individual?

All of these are direct appeals to intolerance of speech, ideas, and even personal identities that fail to agree with the strictures of radical feminism. And yet when their ideas are subject to even the mildest rejection, the radical feminists scream “intolerance”, and make an appeal to tolerance that they are wholly unprepared to practice themselves. Apparently they feel that they are so completely special that their ideas deserve some kind of special treatment.

In fact, I think that radical feminism presents a very similar conundrum to a liberal society that racial supremacist or theocratic ideas do. How does a tolerant society deal with fundamentally intolerant ideas? How does a marketplace of ideas deal with those ideas that wish to eliminate that entire marketplace? I am a strong believer that a healthy democratic society legally tolerates the expression of illiberal ideas, and I strongly differ from the European and Canadian approach to censor hate speech. (Which I will point out has acted as a slippery slope into censoring speech that is critical of religion.) I fully agree with broad free speech protections exemplified by the US Supreme Court decision to allow neo-Nazis to march through Skokie. It is only when hate speech rises to the level of a clear and direct incitement to directly harm individuals or property that there is any justification for the state stepping in.

However, that does not mean that I think all ideas deserve equal treatment on an informal level. I think it is the mark of a healthy society that blatant racism and appeals to racial superiority are shunned. I’m pleased that blatant hatred toward gay and trans people, or the idea of the superiority of men over women, or vice versa, are increasingly looked down upon. And I think it is a very good thing that calls for the legal curtailment or stigmatization of explicit sexual images, attacks on sex workers’ rights, and the demonization of male sexuality are also increasingly unpopular on some of the forums I frequent and that people there largely see through the pseudo-progressive justifications for such ideas. (Note that I am not invoking some kind of Marcusean notion of so-called "liberating tolerance", which is actually entails an illiberal rejection of formal protections of free speech. What I am talking about are informal methods of sanctioning bad ideas.) As I pointed out in a previous video, free speech does not mean that anybody owes it to you to believe in your ideas, nor are your ideas owed any kind of popularity.

I also question the idea that there is anything terribly progressive or dissenting about the various causes espoused by radical feminism. The idea that pornography should be suppressed, that casual sex is wrong and particularly harmful to women, and that sex should only be practiced within a narrow range of what are deemed to be committed relationships (and yes, antiporn and abolitionist feminism definitely goes there – one only need a little ways into Gail Dines or Robert Jensen, for example, to find such rhetoric), that the state should step in suppress certain “dangerous” forms of expression, or that trans people are “freaks” and “frankenstein’s monsters”, all are very old and reactionary ideas that are not redeemed or made any less reactionary by reverse engineering them with a new set of politically correct-sounding justifications. That Catherine MacKinnon and Morality in Media work toward many of the same ends, or that somebody like Melinda Tankard Reist was able to go from being one of Australia’s leading antiabortion activists to being one that countries main antiporn feminists without changing a thing about her ideas, says a lot more about what antiporn feminism is about than any nitpicky details of the various ideological justifications from each group.

I’m sure one of the main responses I will get from the usual gang of idiots, if they can even muster a coherent response at all, is that I am a “liberal” and therefore fall short of their “radical” greatness. To this I say, what’s wrong with being liberal? What’s wrong with pushing a set of politics based on putting people before profit, and before ideology, basic respect for human and individual rights, free expression, social equality, and a role for the state in promoting social good, while nevertheless placing meaningful limits on its power? And in spite of claims by detractors, liberalism does not inherently entail bland status quo solutions to social problems, nor does it exclude radical solutions to social ills that need to be gotten “to the root of”. It does, however, preclude totalitarianism, riding roughshod over individual rights in pursuit of social goals (however noble) and generally putting ideology or abstract goals before real people.

So go ahead and call me personally intolerant of your authoritarianism and intolerance and call me (gasp!) a liberal. To that I simply say "Yes" and “Thank you”.

5 Years On: The Passing of Her Holiness, Andrea Dworkin

2010-08-02T21:33:00.000-07:00

I came across this while looking through some of my old writings. This was written right after Andrea Dworkin's death, and I wish I had found it a few months earlier so I could have posted it for the 5th aniversary. Anyway, better late than never.

I think the post is interesting, because at the time I was seeing the stirrings of a major backlash against sex-positive feminism and unfortunately, the last 5 years have proven me right. At the same time, I think I had some good insights as to why this was happening, and where the sex-positive movement needs to take the thunder out of the radfem/abolitionist critique of sexual exploitation.

----

This entry is kind of belated, but then I found out about it kind of late. Andrea Dworkin died last week. Blogland is filled with discussions about her, and interestingly, a lot of the commentary is positive. (Even on the Suicide Girls message board, several SG models were vociferously sticking up for Dworkin and were ready to tear a new asshole on the (male) poster who dared to trash her. The fact that girls who quite openly and proudly doing softcore nude modeling have such a soft spot for AD speaks volumes about the weird charisma and reality distortion field that woman had.) Perhaps this can be chalked up to not wanting to speak badly of the dead, and of the feeling that Dworkin took a lot of shit for her ideas and actions and that too much insult had been thrown her way already.

I'm not sure I'm so inclined to be quite so charitable, though I'm past the age where I'd get any great pleasure dancing on somebody's grave, either. There's much talk about what a maligned figure Dworkin was, but the fact is, when it came to attacks, she certainly gave as good as she got.

Many of us remember all-too-well the laws that Dworkin and MacKinnon tried to enact back in the '80s. These broadly-written ordinances would have opened to crippling lawsuits anybody who produced any work of sexual expression that fell short of MacKinnon and Dworkin's narrow ideas on politically correct sexuality. And that's not to mention the frequent bitter attacks and even death threats toward other feminists who dared disagree with the idea that sexuality wasn't 100% male-dominated evil.

Dworkin's protestations about her supposed victimization was just so much posturing – she lost vicious fights that she clearly started and then complained when she took some hits. What's left out is that if her side had won, they would have beat down their opponents at least as severely. Its all too easy to posit Dworkin as a victim – if you totally ignore the way she treated others.

There's a lot of commentary about how Dworkin really didn't hate men, but this really seems to be disingenuous. In practice, the only men she didn't seem to positively loath were men like her partner, John Stoltenberg, who were really little more than a loyal poodles. She deeply hated male sexuality in any form that actually existed. If the situation had been altered – if a straight man said that he didn't hate all women, just the ones that weren't deferent to him and didn't hate gays, just gay sex, he'd rightly be seen as clearly sexist and homophobic. Dworkin's says the same things about men and she gets treated like she was some great egalitarian! Gotta' love double standards.

It's kind of ironic how her death followed just a week after Il Papa JPII. In some ways, Dworkin was kind of the Pope of a certain brand of radical feminism. Her writings on sexuality were quoted as dogma by some, much the way some Catholics treat Humanae Vitae as the last word on sex. Dworkinistas may or may not treat her writings as infallible, but they certainly treat it as holy writ that's not to be trifled with by the uninitiated, commonly complaining that unless you've read her entire body of work "with an open mind", you have no business criticizing her ideas at all. Never mind that these people want everybody to be subject to laws inspired by Dworkin's ideas, whether we've actually read them or not.

On another note, though, one thing I've been impressed by from several blog commentaries is that Dworkin isn't taught much in Womens' Studies courses, which surprises the hell out of me, since anti-porn authors pretty much monopolized feminist scholarship around sexuality up through the early '90s. It seems there was a backlash within feminism against that perspective just as there was in much of the rest of society. Womens' Studies can be very cliquish and exclusive and when the next generation of sex-positive/queer/pomo/third-wave types made their way up in that discipline, I guess many of them turned the tables and excluded Dworkin and company. This is unfortunate in that Dworkin is now getting a reputation as this great suppressed feminist thinker and sex-positive feminism is increasingly being seen as a sell-out status-quo.

If feminist and left blogs are any indication, there's a real backlash brewing against sex-positive ideas. Perhaps this is because sex-positive feminists are seen, wrongly in my opinion, of offering a blanket apology for the entire porn industry no matter how badly all-too-many pornographers treat their talent. This gets back to one of the more lucid points I've seen raised by Camille Paglia concerning political correctness, that if leftists or liberals shut down discussion of certain ideas, those ideas will be taken up and used by the Right. If we take anti-porn feminism to be a kind of right-wing within the feminist movement, we can certainly see this – progressive sex-positive feminists don't deal effectively with some of the more problematic aspects of the sex industry, so anti-porn feminists come out looking to some like only ones offering an effective solution.

Violet Blue's "Ourporn" Group Censored by Antis

2010-07-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

Violet Blue's pro-porn Facebook group, "Our Porn, Ourselves" was hit by censors the other day. This was a page that contained no pornography or adult material, but simply was a political campaign against the censorship of pornography and stigmatization of porn viewers. The group has for the last several months been getting false flags for non-sexual photos on the group, and yesterday was taken down completely by Facebook.

As you can guess, it appears the usual suspects in the anti-porn movement were behind this. PornHarms has been crowing about it in their own Facebook group and on their Twitter feed. PornHarms claims the page was "inappropriate" and should not be allowed on any site that could be seen by children. This merely because it advocates a pro-porn political opinion. And in spite of the fact that anti-porn sites are often quite graphic about what they oppose. Once again, these people have proven that to be anti-porn is to be pro-censorship, and for the suppression not just of pornography, but of political speech on sexuality and sexual expression.

There is a good chance Porn Harms or somebody close to them is behind the false flagging campaign. At the very least, they are openly treating this act of censorship as a victory for their side.

Who is this "PornHarms"? Its main site, PornHarms.org is registered to Patrick Trueman, a right-wing anti-porn crusader with some long history. He was once chief obscenity prosecutor in the Bush I administration. Since then, he has been active with religious right groups like the Family Research Council and Alliance Defense Fund, tirelessly campaigning for increased obscenity prosecutions. This met with some success during the Bush II years. He has been quite visible recently campaigning alongside other anti-porn activists to have the Obama administration renew these prosecutions. Notably, feminist anti-porngraphy campaigners like Gail Dines, who claim to be against censorship, have joined him in this call.

Porn Harms maintains a considerable presence in social networking sites, including YouTube. It appears that these sites are maintained and designed by the same person who runs AntiPornographyBlog. Although this person has generally maintained a behind-the-scenes presence on the net, mainly acting as a clearinghouse for anti-porn information and a place for activists to network, I think that given their rhetoric toward, and possible involvement with, the false flagging of the Ourporn Facebook group, they have some explaining to do.

Even though this did not take place on YouTube, I think that this should be taken as seriously as any act of false flagging here. I say, treat PornHarms as you would any other YouTuber who was openly reveling in the flagging down of another channel. Let them know how you feel about this in their channel comments. If you're on Facebook, let them know about it there, too. Let's also call out AntiPornography Blog for this, since they have a close connection to Porn Harms. Ask them how their alliance with a group that flags down political speech and calls for increased obscenity prosecutions squares with their claims to be "anti-censorship and anti-banning".

These people, whoever they are, need to be held accountable for their actions and the censorship they are advocating.

Pro-Porn: An Apologia

2010-06-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

There's been an interesting discussion over at Melinda Tankard Reist's blog, where she posted about the Stop Porn Culture conference, including Gail Dines keynote. (For those not familiar, MTR is one of the anti-porn folks mainly coming at it from the standpoint of "sexualization" of young women and girls. She is kind of an Australian equivalent to Diane E. Levin ("So Sexy So Soon").)

I will give one word of praise to Ms. Reist: unlike many others in the anti-porn movement, she seems to have open commentary at her blog, so there has been some interesting back and forth there. Whether this is her clear moderation policy or she's simply overlooking comments, I'm less clear about.

I had a chance to respond to one of the condemnations of pornography and porn culture made by another commentator, and I think my response was strong enough that its worth posting here.

First, the post I responded to, followed by my defense of a sex-positive and pro-porn position:

I’m also confused by the idea that if you oppose porn you’re ‘anti-sex’ while if you support it you’re all about ’sexual freedom’ and ’sex positivism’. Pornography is a commercial product that desensitises and deadens the senses, that promotes masturbation and isolation as opposed to sex with another human being, that favours sensation over sensuality, that dictates what ‘good sex’ and sex acts supposedly are, that dictates what ’sexiness’ is and that turns many people, particularly women off of sex a lot of the time. I’m mystified as to what any of that has to do with the positive expression of human sexuality. Pornography is a commercial product, it’s not sex. Pornographers are not interested in our sexuality, they’re interested in our wallets and their bank balances, end of story.

From another perspective, I was exploited in ‘the sex industry’ when I was a teenager. My sexuality and ability to have intimate relationships has been seriously impacted by my experiences during that time. To say that ‘the sex industry’ is all about our ‘right’ to sexual freedom is ludicrous to me. Not from my perspective. It’s about sexual exploitation for profit. That is it’s purpose. Whether that exploitation is consensual is neither here nor there. We’re talking about the ethics of the industry itself and what it means for everybody, especially the women who are most effected by it.

I think it’s very sad and indicative of how pervasive ‘the sex industry’ has become that so many people fail to differentiate between a commercial product designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to maximise profit, and real sex. And even worse that they’re happy to do the pornographer’s dirty work for them and defend porn in the name of ’sexual freedom’, ultimately to their own detriment (not to mention the detriment of those who are less privileged than they are).

Well, even though you probably don't want to hear a response from one of us horribly misguided sex-positives, I'll give one anyway, because I think debate abhors an echo chamber.

In my opinion, the freedom to express sexuality through media, in other words porn (note that I view the porn/erotica distinction as basically meaningless), is part and parcel of sexual freedom. The idea that "you can do it, but broadcast it and its morally wrong" (or even a crime) just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

The statement "whether exploitation is consensual is nether here nor there" is absolutely mind-boggling. It makes me wonder how you even define "exploitation" if the party ostensibly being exploited is not even allowed to define that for themselves. I think the Stop Porn Culture session that referred to homemade porn as "self-exploitation" was very telling. Is personal autonomy as an ethical value even on the radar of the anti-porn movement? Statements like this make me doubtful.

In my opinion, the fact that pornography is "commercial" is kind of a red herring. All mass media in a modern capitalist society is more or less commercial. There is a publishing industry, a newspaper industry, a movie industry, a music industry, and an art industry. To simply hold that these are no longer the subjects of free expression because these are often large for-profit industries would be ludicrous. I don't think this magically should change just because sex enters the picture. And, yes, the fact that its an industry that is dependent on the labor of its workers means that paying attention to the rights and needs of sex workers in that industry is vital. But I think approaching it from a sex workers rights perspective rather than a paternalistic "abolition" one is far better.

It is also important to point out that to speak of the porn industry as a monolith is ludicrous. The "porn industry" is everything from multi-million dollar companies like Playboy Enterprises to somebody who has a for-pay webcam set up in their bedroom. Do you really think all of these people are either exploiters or victims?

There's lots to unpack in your ideas about "real sex". Evidently, you're very down on masturbation, and against non-relationship sex. You seem to think pornography "imposes" this on the society, rather than being a reflection of how sexuality has been going since the sexual revolution. I think open, democratic societies are ones that can allow pluralistic values about sexuality to coexist. To have the state or a powerful social movement step in and impose a "return to order" in the name of a narrow relationship-only view of sexuality and "stopping porn culture" is moral authoritarianism of the highest order.

It is likely that you'll probably see these words as my simply doing the "dirty work" of "the pornographers" and dismiss it out of hand. But perhaps you need to at least understand where we pointy-headed "sex positive" and "sexual freedom" folks are coming from, and why we so vehemently oppose much of what your movement is trying to accomplish.

We're not trying to step on your sexuality. Please don't step all over ours.

Time to tell....

2009-02-04T20:46:00.000-08:00

I made an initial response at the Pro-Porn Activism blog to the defamatory statements about my activities on Wikipedia made by Ann Bartow on Feminist Law professors. I encourage readers to have a look at both the initial post on PPA and the subsequent commentary, because I think its a good introduction to Ann Bartow's agenda and some of the fucked-up things she's done to other bloggers (feminist women bloggers, I might add) over the past several years.

(Addendum: here is a link to a blog post about her threats of outing several years back toward Zuzu, one of the bloggers at Feministe. This person actually stopped blogging temporarily because of it. Another target was Bitch|Lab (who later re-emerged as Shag Carpet Bomb of Wear Clean Drawers) who was targeted with outing and intimations of a lawsuit for making unfavorable comments about Catherine MacKinnon. B|L is now a dead blog, so this has gone down the memory hole. Also, Eugene Volokh writes here about Bartow's wonderfully professional discourse in legal circles.)

Due to the proliferation of Bartow's post over several other blogs (none of whom seem to ever question Bartow's agenda), I think its high time I wrote about my Wikipedia activities and set the record straight.

As Bartow make's a big to-do about, yes, I am a Wikipedia editor, and have contributed quite a bit to that project. I contribute both under my real name and the name I use here. Under the former, I contribute articles mostly scientific articles (notably, I am the proud founder of WikiProject Fungi), as well as articles on food, wine, art, and San Francisco Bay Area history and culture. As Iamcuriousblue, I contribute to articles on sexuality, sex work, pornography, and erotic art. As an all around geek and somebody with a great deal of knowledge and no small amount of education on obscure topics, this suits me well.

Contrary to what Bartow has to say about me, it is actually not my goal on Wikipedia to push a particular slant or agenda. I have no problems writing about a point of view that is totally opposed to mine and attempting to do so fairly. Nonethless, when I see somebody pushing an agenda, particularly the all-too-common sex-phobic and anti-sex-work agendas, I have no qualms about making corrections to the article and calling other editors on it. Since I and most other editors on Wikipedia respect rules about editing toward a neutral point of view, there's usually very little problem negotiating the shape of an article, even with somebody who's actual views are the very opposite of mine.

The problem comes when a Wikipedia editor has no respect for this rule or Wikipedia's process for consensus building. And this is where the "heavy edits" to the Melissa Farely article that Bartow refers to come from.

The actual situation is a great deal more nuanced than Ann Bartow lets on. There series of arguments is long and complicated and I don't have time to go into a blow-by-blow here, but I think its quite clear that the main argument was between myself and two other editors, both of whom are what might be called, using the turgid prose of Bartow's post, rabid proponents of Melissa Farley's views. (And I'll also point out that Ann Bartow is pretty far from non-partisn on the subject of Melissa Farley, or pornography, which doesn't exactly make her the most trustworthy source.)

The first conflict was Nikki Craft, the text of which can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Melissa_Farley/Archive_1

She had written a clearly biased article and had the additional problem of being Melissa Farley's political mentor, and therefore clearly in violation of some of Wikipedia's guidelines about conflict of interest. Nikki Craft eventually left Wikipedia, unable to put up with Wikipedia's rules about editing toward a neutral point of view, as well as a conflict of interest battle of her own that started when she wrote her own biography on Wikipedia, in express violation of Wikipedia's rules against autobiography.

Some months after this died down, another editor going by the name of Axiomatica got involved with the Melissa Farley article. This conflict is long and involved, and the text of it can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Melissa_Farley/Archive_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Melissa_Farley/Archive_3

If one reads far enough through the above-linked archives, it is quite clear that Axiomatica had a similar agenda to Nikki Craft and was not about to tolerate an article reporting critical views of Farley's work, nor any description of her history of anti-pornography and radical feminist activism prior to becoming an "expert" on prostitution. For my part, I wasn't about to back down.

I maintain, and continue to maintain, that my only goal was to maintain a balanced article on the subject and struggle for over a year to do precisely that. If you read through the archives, you'll also note my continuing attempts to bring the larger Wikipedia community into this controversy so that it would not simply remain a pissing contest between myself and Axiomatica. I also repeatedly and in good faith tried to enter into the Wikipedia mediation process with the other editor, a process that was continually sabotaged by Axiomatica, who on two occasions simply walked out on the entire process and restarted the edit war from scractch some months later when the mediation processes had closed. The larger Wikipedia community did not step in, unfortunately, and that, to my mind, represents the real failure of Wikipedia's process. Contrary to the portrait painted by Bartow, I wanted other people to get involved and help edit the article, since having a large number of people editing would have been the best antidote to one-sidedness and agendas on either side.

Finally, I want to point to one of my most recent edits that involved reverting another editors writing. It can be found here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Melissa_Farley
(in the section titled "Removed section per WP:SYN")

This was removal of a couple sentences that were critical of Farley's research, but represented novel ides on the part of that editor (what, in Wikipedia terms, is called "original research") and was therefore in violation of one of Wikipedia's core rules. This was written by somebody on my side of the issue and was a statement I more or less agreed with, by the way of my own opinion. I nevertheless removed it in good faith because I recognized this as pushing a point of view in violation of Wikipedia's rules. How does this square with portrait painted of me by Ann Bartow? And what, then, does such a shoddy and inaccurate hit piece say about Feminist Law Professors as a blog and Bartow as a scholar?

(Addendum, May 25, 2010: Oh look, Ms. Bartow has both outed and libeled me in no less a highfalutin academic source than the Michigan Law Review! (See p. 1093 of the PDF linked to.) I guess I even get doc-dropped in better places than most bloggers. :)

In the moderation que

2008-12-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

Another case of a blogger being too thin-skinned to brook disagreement with their opinions. In this case I called out Rachel Cervantes claim that Neil Malmuth's 2000 meta-analysis paper on porn and violence studies constituted any kind of overall "proof" that porn caused men to be violent toward women. In fact, I see it as evidence for the very opposite.

After a go-around about this, my response was dropped. I believe it deserves to see the light of day:

Well, I am familiar with the paper you quoted, along with several other metastudies on the topic, and I absolutely can't believe that you see it as compelling evidence for a link between porn use and violence against women. Did you even bother to read the authors' conclusions, starting here?

Particularly this part:

"The current findings do suggest that for the majority of American men, pornography exposure (even at the highest levels assessed here) is not associated with high levels of sexual aggression (although aggressive tendencies may be expressed in other behavioral manifestations than in actual aggressive behavior when there is not the full confluence of factors that elicits actual aggression [e.g., Malamuth & Thornhill, 1994])."

Malmuth's claim is that the most violent subset of pornography may have triggering effects on the most sexually violent subset of men, and even this is disputed in meta-analysis carried out by other authors (see, for example, Fisher and Grenier 1994, cited in the bibliography of the above paper). And even Malmuth, as stated above, has said that there's no clear evidence that porn has any negative effect on psychologically normal individuals.

That to me does not seem to be overwhelming evidence of the harmful effects of porn viewing, and certainly nothing that remotely rises to the level of evidence that would be required to start the presumption of free speech protection from porn. (Or even makes a good case for shaming porn viewers, which you posit as an alternative to censorship.)

Ms Cervantes claims my lack of "civility" was cause for her dropping the post, and, yep, I agree that online communication in general doesn't exactly promote it. Perhaps – my tone in this post is rather short, though I'll add that I've been on the receiving end of far worse (including by several individuals on her blog roll), including direct insults, nasty statements about what they imagine my sexuality to be like, rounds of questioning that read more like a police interrogation, and at least one threat of a lawsuit. In comparison to this, I think the phrase "did you even bother" is pretty mild stuff, but the feminist bloggers is notoriously thin-skinned in this regard, and have an unfortunate tendency to dish it out in spades without being able to take it in the least.

Ultimately, I'm stating that she's got her "facts" wrong and her interpretation is sloppy, and I'm not really sure how much that can be sugar-coated. However, I also think this is a case where somebody really did not like being called wrong by somebody who had the facts to back it up, and was simply using incivility as an excuse to bury that challenge.

And more to the point of the original post, I see this as, once again, feminists misusing and misinterpreting media effects studies as a way of legitimizing censorship. This is fundamentally wrong and absolutely should be called out.

Added 12/19:

From the comments section:

RC: "Finally, supposing the Malamuth conclusion could be regarded that simplistically: porn only increases violence against women in that population predisposed to it. What is an “acceptable” level of rape? How many rapes? How many murders?"

IACB: "Well, I don’t care if this sees the light of day or not, but the counter to this is obvious. Do you also support alcohol prohibition? Because there is a small subset of alcohol users who are prone toward addiction, violent behavior, drunk driving, etc.

Similarly, there are people who are motivated by religious belief to commit all manner of violence, from setting women on fire, to flying planes into buildings, to “spare the rod and spoil the child”? And I’ll note that religiously-motivated violence is far more common than crimes supposedly triggered by porn. By the reasoning you’ve given above, the Bible and Quran really should be banned.

I think the answer is obvious – you don’t impose censorship or micromanage everybody’s behavior based on the behavior of society’s most messed-up individuals."

RC: "The religion argument is a straw man. Religion has not been mentioned. However, you are desperately searching for a stereotype to levy.

Alcohol is also a straw man. We are talking about pornography and violence against women. The bottom line is that you don’t give a flying fuck about violence against women? Hey, let women be beaten, raped, murdered…as long has you have your jerk off mags, huh?

Ren Ev made reasonable points. You? You’ve just embarrassed yourself."

OK, so lets see what we have here - 1) basic inability to understand a simple analogy (hint: religion wasn't mentioned to paint RC as a religious conservative); 2) ritualistic invocation of the phrase "straw man" (without even beginning to demonstrate that the argument in question actually is a straw man argument) actually constitutes a counter-argument; and 3) use of stock insults like "let women be beaten, raped, murdered…as long has you have your jerk off mags" (that's almost as original as "you must be a man"). All of which adds up to a knee-jerk argument trifecta.

Many feminists go on about how they are marginalized and negatively stereotyped, and how feminism is not taken seriously. Which may be true, but with reactive, piss-and-vinegar types like the above representing feminism, is it any wonder?

Speaking of dehumanizing work....

2008-08-04T23:06:00.000-07:00

Demeaning treatment – an addiction to fast money at the beginning, only to be followed by severe burnout – 20% of the customer base described as "psychopaths". An expose of the harsh realities of stripping or prostitution? No, try the harsh realities of waiting tables.

The blog (and upcoming book) which lays this on the line is called Waiter Rant, which I hadn't heard of before today. There's a good interview with the author on a recent Leonard Lopate Show, and another public radio interview here. I'd always been aware that waiters were not always happy with their work, but put up with it because the money is sometimes good (my mom used to be a waitress when I was a kid), but I wasn't really aware of the extent of it, or other behind-the-scenes stuff, until coming across this. Obviously there isn't 100% analogy with sex work, which, of course, requires a level of customer interaction that's in another league, but its certainly the case that a lot of the issues that sex work gets called on are actually issues that are as much about service-industry work in general than sex work in particular.

For all of its anger, Waiter Rant is actually more or less a "dining-positive" critique. There actually is a radical "abolitionist" version of this in the form of the anarchist tract Abolish Restaurants. If you haven't heard of that one, you're probably not alone. You'd think the folks in the Ultimate Radical camp of the feminist blogosphere might mention it more often, considering it sounds pretty much up their ally – then again, if it isn't about teh sexay its probably not on their radar.

I think I like the original better

2008-07-29T01:25:00.001-07:00

Racist? Slut-shaming? How about not even original?

Contrast this radfem-favorite cartoon by Elena Steier with Charles Crumb's infamous "Famous Artists Talent Test" entry (background here (forward to 1:35:45)):

Seven Songs for Summer

2008-06-16T02:22:00.000-07:00

Tagged by God-Emperor of Rome, Renegade Evolution.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring and summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

Probably leaning more toward pop and rock than usual, but as always, an eclectic mix:

Deeper and Deeper – Madonna:

(Had to feature the video on this one. Have I ever mentioned I really want to be Udo Kier when I grow up?)

Babooshka – Kate Bush

Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey – Paul McCartney

Life Begins at the Hop – XTC

Call of the West – Wall of Voodoo

iNight – The Units

Well, All Right – Buddy Holly

Its late and I can't immediately thing of a full list of seven people who haven't been tagged already. I'll add this tomorrow.

But what about the johns? Some thoughts on a non-argument

2008-05-06T17:05:00.000-07:00

Figleaf wrote a post earlier this week about the feminist debate on the ethics of sex work. While I'm sure he was trying to carve out some kind of feminist middle ground, I really think his argument here falls flat in a couple of places. The first, which is what I want to address here, is that he frames the ethics about commercial sex in terms of attitudes toward women that men who buy sex may or may not have. The second is that I think he comes up with a very clumsy "middle ground" feminism, which just doesn't hold together in terms of real world politics or logical consistency – that's worth another post in itself, and I'll address it separately.

First, I want to point to Snowdrop Explodes response to the "what about the johns?" argument at play in Figleaf's argument. I strongly agree with the points that SE makes, and, in fact this post started out as a reply I was going to post there. I found that I had enough to say about the topic that I wanted to post about it on my own blog.

First, in response to Figleaf's point about those of us on the pro sex-worker/sex positive side ignoring the argument made by the other side – actually, I recognize that the anti-"pornstitution" side centers a lot of their argument against prostitution and, especially, pornography around the theme of, "this is what it makes men think/do". I also happen to think its the most foolish set of arguments in the radfem arsenal and a big reason why I happen to disagree with that side of the aisle, and not a point I would wish to casually concede in the name of a false "moderation".

I think that the primary argument about whether or not its ethical to purchase sex is directly related to the agency of the seller. If the person selling whatever sexual service (anything from direct prostitution to acting in porn) is doing so of their own free will, and is fully conscious and able to consent to what they're doing, then I don't see any problem with buying sex (or sexual images) of that person. If that person is coerced in some way, or is otherwise in a situation where they're not able to give consent to what they're doing, then buying sex from them is definitely not OK. And obviously, this being the real world, there are some real grey areas between these two poles. Its really just a subset of the larger ethics of sexual consent, with the caveat that the consent given in a commercial sex transaction is conditional on monetary or other payment. (And actually, that hardly makes it any different from other situations of sexual consent, which usually is in some sense conditional, for example, preconditioned on truthful disclosure of one's STD status, whether one is sexually active with another party, future relationship intentions with that person, etc. Which is why many legal codes make it a crime to lie about STD status or commit outright fraud in order to gain sexual consent.)

Where Figleaf takes a wrong turn is with this argument:

Whereas some of the clients she scheduled escorts for may have been paragons of progressive pro-feminist enlightenment... the ones who've been outed, anyway, have been utter, thuggish, women-hating, woman-denigrating, woman-punishing, woman-curtailing, woman-as-commodity-purchasing, anti-feminist, skin to bone bastards who depended on the discretion of Palfrey and her employees to maintain their public positions as virtuous paragons advocating policies of chastity before marriage, fidelity within marriage, home-binding of wives, lower pay for women so they'd be obliged to *become* bound as wives, anti-choice, anti-contraception, anti-HIV-treatment, and abstinence-only-promotion as the cure for all social and medical ills. So *if* one was inclined to be sympathetic towards the anti-prostitution position Palfrey's agency would be a pretty good argument for that position.

So some (maybe even many or most) clients/johns/porn viewers are outright hypocrites, and probably most fall pretty far short of what might be considered good pro-feminist allies. So what! How does this change anything about the overall ethics of sex work? Did buying sex turn Randall Tobias and the like into assholes, or were they that way already? I think the latter, quite clearly. (I also might also point out here that back before they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Randall Tobias and Elliot Spitzer were political allies of the prostitution abolitionist movement, something I see precious little acknowledgement of, for all the finger-pointing that's coming from that side of the aisle.)

What are men's motivations for going to prostitutes? There are a lot of reasons. Probably a big one is the chance to have sex with someone "out of your league", basically, someone younger and/or prettier than you might be able to hook up with otherwise in the non-commercial "sexual marketplace" (this was clearly Elliot Spitzer's motivation), or otherwise be able to hook up with a "type" of partner that might not travel in your social circles. Related to this, the desire to have a sexual experience that's outside one's regular orientation, such as a same-sex or BDSM experience. Other motivations would be to have truly anonymous sex, one where there's no relationship implicit after the paid encounter is over, or the desire to have sex right now, without even dealing with the rituals of finding a partner for casual sex. There's probably a bunch of other things I could add that I'm not thinking of at the moment (and I certainly could add a bunch more if I wanted to go into why men watch porn).

I do think that motivations like I've mentioned are a great deal more common than the one hypothesized by many feminists – that men buy sex simply to have absolute power over a woman and do things that no non-sex worker would reasonably consent to. (This being backed up by the basically laughable assertion that, apparently, any man can get casual sex easily if they treat women halfway decently, hence only really fucked-up men pay for sex.) There is a subset of sadistic johns who's motivation is to be able to treat a woman badly, and in some cases even do outright violence. Unlike many feminists, I do not think these psychopaths are anywhere near a majority of men who buy sex.

So, generally speaking, men who buy sex do so for reasons that aren't exactly noble, but aren't exactly harmful, either. And this is precisely why the issue about men's motivations are so secondary – if a woman is freely consenting to sell sex, why is that consent in any sense negated just because the buyer has less-than-noble motives? Conversely, if a sex worker isn't freely consenting, I don't think there's anything so redeeming about being able to buy sex one normally wouldn't have access to that would justify that lack of consent. This seems to me to be basic and I can't believe how much ink can be spilled on this topic and for this point to be missed so completely.

Figleaf further argues:

Unlike too many other people, though, I *also* have a problem with participation in a system that so directly reinforces the "no-sex" class paradigm that says *all* heterosexual sex is asymmetrical: women want only money, men want only sex, and everything else is just haggling over the price. Which is bullshit, of course, which is why the dominant paradigm itself is bullshit.

This, to me, is not that far off of the standard anti-porn argument that porn is harmful because it reinforces a harmful paradigm about gender, and may actually predispose men to sexual violence as a result. And, certainly, there are many radical feminists and prostitution abolitionists who extend that argument to say that the mere existence of prostitution does the same thing.

Now coming from Figleaf, this argument is a bit contradictory, since he's been known to argue, vehemently and often, that men are smarter than a horny squirrel, and are responsible for their behavior toward women. The above statement comes damn close to a "blame the sex industry" argument for men's bad behavior, responsibility for which should thoroughly be laid at the feet of the individual men exhibiting that behavior. Any man with half a brain who's not an outright sociopath should be able to figure out that just because there are women who are selling their charms, or giving it away, does not mean that one automatically can "get" sex from Random Woman X. If somebody thinks that, that's their own bullshit that they need to be called on, not the fault of some evil hidden message implicit in commercial sex. (And I say this even as somebody who thinks that humans are pretty animalistic when it comes to many things, sex especially.)

If there's any point I would concede to the anti-sex work side of the argument, it is that certainly there is a dark side to sex work, that sex work is not inherently "empowering" (whatever that means), and that abuse and coercion exist in that incredibly broad and non-monolithic entity known as "the sex industry". But what am I conceding by that argument? The idea that just because one supports consensual sex work, one therefore supports or excuses coercion is simply a straw argument. I can't think of any sex-poz writer who says everything in the sex industry is just rosy or that abuse or coercion in the sex industry is in any way acceptable.

But any point to concede on the utterly stupid "what does this do to men's attitudes toward women?!" line of argument – I don't think there's any "point" there to concede to.

Well, as a matter of fact, there is a such thing as "sex negative"

2008-03-31T00:19:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to thank Lina for putting together this blog carnival and for inviting me to be part of it. On the general theme of sex positivity and its relationship to feminism, I have several, hopefully not-too-disconnected thoughts on the theme.

The term "sex-positive" itself has been the source of some rather unproductive debates lately. Overall, I like the fact that Lina chose the title "Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy", as its much more inclusive and speaks more to core values than "Carnival of Sex-Positive Feminists". At the same time, rejection of the phrase "sex-positive" because it "gets a lot of people's backs up" kind of gets my back up a bit. Not because I want everybody to embrace that label, or embrace labels at all, but because I really think that any movement has an inherent right to define its terms and present itself in whatever way its members wish to. Whether other people accept that framing is up to them.

The general argument against the term is that "sex-positive" and "pro-sex" axiomatically means the opposite of "sex-negative" and "anti-sex", and hence those who use such terms are being really big meanies by implying that the other party in the debate, most typically radical feminists, are anti-sex or sex-negative. Well, true, the term does frame the debate that way. However, this is true of many other political movements – in the abortion debate, the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" also have connotations about the other side and also manage to get people's backs up, but generally speaking, I don't see a lot of ink being spilled by either side of the abortion debate demanding that the other side cease and desist in using its self-designation because the other side is offended by it. Both self-designations are generally accepted by now and a more substantive (if still intractable) debate moves on.

The thing is, I don't feel that this is a particularly good reason to drop the term "sex positive", because there really is a such thing as sex-negativity. It is something that has deep roots in Western culture, and quite a few non-Western cultures as well, and continues to manifest itself in religious systems, political ideologies, and in other dominant institutions like law and medicine. And, yes, one of the places sex-negativity comes up is in feminism.

Natalia Antonova posted a rather interesting example of this, showing some rather similar-sounding sex-negative rhetoric from radfem blogger Twisty Faster and Russian Orthodox fundamentalist Dmitri Artemyev. The point is not, as some have taken Natalia's post, that there's some kind of weird collusion between radical feminist bloggers and the Russian far right, but rather that there are some deep-seated memes in the larger culture that express themselves in some decidedly different milieus.

While Twisty calls herself a "sex neutral feminist" who describes the sexual act as "on par with sneezing", there are some decidedly far more sex-negative strains out there. Foremost, of course, is Sheila Jeffreys, who really does seem to embody what many feminists dismiss as a non-existent caricature – she is unmitigatingly against any heterosexual sex as an "eroticization of power differences", but also has an extremely low opinion of lesbianism, autoeroticism, and orgasm itself, if such pleasure is derived from anything that remotely resembles heterosexual or power roles, or even the fantasy of such. In her book, The Spinster and her Enemies, Jeffreys proudly traces her intellectual heritage to the Victorian social purity movements of the first wave feminism. Lest you think Jeffreys is just obscure some bitter crank, she's actually a rather popular radical feminist author, not just in the radical feminist blogosphere, but in the mainstream press.

I could cite numerous other examples from the feminist blogosphere showing this mentality (well, OK, this one is pretty glaring), but I think the above will suffice. And while I think Jeffreys and her followers are an extreme and glaring example, I do think that there's more than a hint of this kind of sex-negativity even among liberal and "moderate" feminist bloggers who go into full-bore moralism mode when it comes to issues around prostitution and pornography.

My point here is not to pick on feminism as being a worse example of sex-negativity than the larger society. For all of the much-vaunted "permissiveness" of modern society, there is also a strong streak of sex-negativity still very much permeating it – its in the air we breathe, figuratively speaking, and its not terribly surprising that it emerges full force in some strains of feminism. A favorite theme of radical feminists is that we must "examine" how the larger society has influenced us. But, then, why should feminism itself be exempt from such examination and critique?

This, to me, is the reason why sex positivity, sexual freedom, sexual autonomy, or whatever you want to label it or not label it is so terribly necessary.

A Political Correctness FAQ

2007-08-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

There's been a few debates that have come up in the feminist blogosphere lately that have come down to offense over the terminology that's being used and about knee-jerk reactions to that terminology. The two big offenders seem to be "politically correct" and, more, surprisingly, "sex-positive". Apparently, use of these terms in feminist discourse marks is a marker that one is anti-feminist or at least insufficiently respectful of the more easily-offended branches of feminism. (Although it should be pointed out that these easily-offended radfems are themselves merely setting up "strawsexpozzes" to knock down.)

I've been finding it useful to go back to the early literature to see what the debate was originally all about. This comes up in my discussion over on Trinity's blog in response to a very good post she made about sex-positivity.

On the topic of political correctness, I found a really great little essay in the 1984 sex-positive anthology Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality called "Politically Correct? Politically Incorrect?" by Muriel Dimen. The essay starts contains a Q/A about political correctness (what these days would be called a FAQ) that really gets to the root of the matter, without the accumulated baggage that later started piling up around the term. I think its a very useful read.

Question 1: How do you define politically correct?

Answer: Politically correct is an idea that emerges from the well-meaning attempt in social movements to bring the unsatisfactory present into line with the utopian future, in fact, to make the "revolution" happen. Although ideas about what is acceptable behavior develop in any political organization, left or right, the express phrase, politically correct, seems to be associated with the left. The phrase is charged, because the left, in its conception of itself, stands for freedom, yet finds itself in a contradictory situation: in order to realize its goal, it finds itself telling people how to behave and therefore interfering with their freedom.

Politically correct behavior, including invisible language and ideas as well as observable action, is that which adheres to a movement's morality and hastens its goals. The idea of politically correct grows naturally from moral judgments (which any political ideology or philosophy contains) that deem certain aspects of the present way of living bad. It is this moral evaluation that fuels visions of better ways of living and energizes attempts to realize them. In the light of the resulting politico-moral principles, certain behaviors and attitudes can come to seem not only "bad," because they are harmful to society or to people, but "wrong," because they hinder social transformation.

Question 2: What is politically correct?

Answer: I don't know: anything, including seeming opposites, can be correct in different groups, movements, or societies. The Talmud requires intercourse; the Shakers prohibited sexual activity; Marx, Engels and Freud celebrated (but did not practice) monogamy; Bohemianism advocates promiscuity and multiple sexualities, but disdains fidelity.

The ideology of political correctness emerges in all sorts of movements, applying to behavior, social institutions, and systems of thought and value. For example, various socialist and utopian movements have identified the nuclear family as a breeding ground for a socially destructive individualism, and propose communal living because it would promote a collectivist spirit. At various periods in Western history, then, social movements have instituted communes as a desirable first step in creating the good society they envisioned for the future. In the 1960s (which spilled into the 1970s), certain sectors of the left found the nuclear family and its bedrock, monogamous heterosexual marriage, to be both bad and wrong, i.e., politically incorrect, while communes and non-monogamy (for which no positive term ever developed) came to seem good and right, that is, "left," in other words, politically correct.

The appearance of political correctness in feminism creates a contradiction. One of feminism's tenets is an individualism (sometimes bourgeois, sometimes anarchistic) that proclaims self-determination for women, translating into "every woman for herself." However, feminism is also a mass movement based on collective struggles against the state in such areas as reproductive rights and the workplace. Such a political movement can be successful only if it is founded on shared moral and political principles. In some sense, it is this movement that constitutes the social context which makes feminism's individualistic principles possible. It is not feasible, however, for both these tendencies, one towards the individual, the other towards the social web, to be simultaneous guides to politically correct behavior.

Feminists have made judgments about political correctness particularly in the area of sexual behavior. This is because of the special cultural tension between sexuality and feminism: desire, of which sexuality is one very privileged instance, pushes and pulls at all people. Yet because it is in the domain of the subjective, desire tends to be associated with things female in the patriarchy of the twentieth-century nation-state where women, subjectivity, and sexuality share the same symbolic space. This shared symbolic space creates a second contradiction for feminists. On the one hand, since women have been traditionally defined as sex objects, feminism demands that society no longer focus on their erotic attributes, which, in turn, feminism downplays. In this way it becomes politically correct not to engage in any stereotypically feminine behavior, such as putting on make-up, wearing high heels, shaving legs and arms, or coming on to men. On the other hand, because women have been traditionally defined as being uninterested in sex, they have been deprived of pleasure and a sense of autonomous at-one-ness, both of which are necessary to self-esteem. Feminism therefore demands sexual freedom for women. In this way it becomes politically correct for women to be sexual explorers, visiting, if not settling down in, homosexuality or polysexuality; experimenting with cock-sucking or anal intercourse or tantric sex; trying out orgies or, perhaps, even celibacy. In consequence, these judgments about the correct path are as contradictory as the situation which gave rise to the feminist critique in the first place.

Question 3: Why do people want to say and do politically correct things?

Answer: Politically correct ideology and behavior are attractive, because they proceed from acute and visionary perceptions of political oppression. If people create visions of what is good, it seems sensible and self-respectful to try to live them out. Politically correct ideology and behavior attempt to escape the manifestly harmful, and to avoid things that damage, even if they feel good. In addition to these rational reasons, there are irrational forces which motivate political correctness, springing, for example, from the fear of separateness that makes conformity compelling. Conformism, present in any social group, can have an important role in making members of out-groups feel self-righteously stronger.

Question 4: What is good about politically correct ideology and behavior?

Answer: It is empowering; by psychological and ideological means, it creates the space for people to organize politically. It becomes a basis for organization and communication between people so that political structure may thrive. It also disrupts the identification with the aggressor, dispelling an individual and collective sense of victimization and providing a shared vision that guides behavior. Finally, it taps into a deeply rooted wish to belong to a collectivity in which what one desires to be is also moral to be.

Question 5: What is bad about politically correct ideology and behavior?

Answer: When the radical becomes correct, it becomes conservative. The politically correct comes to resemble what it tries to change. For it plays on the seductiveness of accustomed ways of living, the attractiveness of orthodoxy. Its social armoring can lead the person away from self-knowing authenticity and the group towards totalitarian control. It makes a misleadingly clean cut between personal experience and old, but still powerful, social practices, and draws a misleadingly neat circle around experience and a new set of supposedly completely acceptable practices.

The application of politically correct ideology and behavior to sexuality therefore founders on a double contradiction, the first in the relation between person and society, and the second in the relation between conscious and unconscious forces. The discovery/creation of sexual pleasure is very much an individual journey, even as your craft pushes off from received notions of gender, and is sped on or becalmed by concurrently developing notions of what is possible and permissible. No matter how carefully charted by conscious intentionality, the journey's course is determined finally by a complex mix of conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational currents that represent a swirling together of personal desire and cultural force.

Fanmail from a flounder

2007-08-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

Ah, nothing like being the target of a smear campaign.

Still, can't help but get a laugh out of some of the sentiments:

"And he's a consort of sex pozes."

A new title!

"He's a pro porn, prostitute using john with an Asian fetish and God only knows what else."

Hey, at least get my fetishes right.

Because I'm feeling snarky....

2007-07-28T23:53:00.000-07:00

(From Anarchy Comics #2, a primary work in my political education.)

Update

2007-07-25T15:56:00.000-07:00

I'm now one of the co-bloggers at the newly established Blog of Pro-Porn Activism. I've been directing my blogging efforts there lately and will probably reserve this blog for occasional stuff that's less directly topical there.

BPPA has turned out to be a very worthwhile project and has been the subject of some controversy in the feminist blogosphere. But, hey, any publicity is good publicity.

Random Facts Meme

2007-06-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

Renegade Evolution tagged me with this meme:

1. All right, here are the rules.
2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
4. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

OK, some odd/random facts about me:

I call the San Francisco Bay Area home. The farthest points I've ever traveled to are New York City, Los Angeles, Kona, Hawaii, and Vancouver, BC. The latter is the only time I've ever left the United States.

I have been to the gravesite of Stan Laurel.

I am a terrible housekeeper (a fact I'm less than proud of).

In 1969, my mom took me to Altamont.

In the early 80s, I was a punk, in the late 80s, I considered myself a "goth". Now I consider myself too old for subcultures.

I am now a graduate student and was once high school dropout.

I learned how to operate a scanning electron microscope before I learned how to drive a car.

I wrote this five years ago. I can no longer understand it.

And on to –

Trinity
Omar (of Bellezza Video) (board requires registration)
Audacia Ray
Jill Brenneman
Antiprincess
Anthony Kennerson
Pretty Lady
And (being ambitious here, but why not) – Susie Bright

Kink.com: "A Disciplined Business"

2007-04-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

There was a good article about Kink.com in today's New York Times Magazine called "A Disciplined Business". In case you haven't been following the issue for the past several months, Kink.com is a San Francisco-based internet porn company and one of the major players in the BDSM porn world. They've gotten a lot of attention recently, since about six months back, they purchased the historic San Francisco Armory, leading to minor political kafuffle here in SF. (Full disclosure: the Wikipedia article on that I've just linked to is largely written by me.) The issues involved are more complex than I have time to go into here (hopefully, I'll have time to post on it in more depth soon), but basically it has to do with the fact that the San Francisco Armory has been a political football in the larger issue of gentrification and development of San Francisco's Mission District. Combine that with a lot of misunderstanding about both BDSM and porn production, add some utterly inflammatory and stupid rhetoric from Melissa Farley, and you've got the latest manifestation of politics-as-theater San Francisco-style.

Today's NYT Magazine article has some really good in-depth coverage of the issue, and the article has some interesting things to say about the mainstreaming of both SM and porn. The Times covered the issue a few months back during the height of the controversy, and as Violet Blue so well points out, their coverage was a hell of a lot better than our hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle. Exhibit #1000 of the Chronicle's inadequacy for its role as newspaper-of-record for a major metropolitan area, I guess.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy

2007-04-10T21:25:00.000-07:00

One more thing before stepping away from my blog. I haven't seen anything about this on the porn or feminist blogosphere, but apparantly, Girls Gone Wild boss and certified asshole Joe Francis has just been arrested. Can't say he didn't have it coming:

Stories here:

Francis awaits Thursday hearing, Panama City Herald, April 10, 2007.
'Girls Gone Wild' founder surrenders to Feds, LA Times, April 10, 2007.
'Girls Gone Wild' founder Francis ordered to jail, LA Times, April 6, 2007.

Background here:

Joe Francis: 'Baby, give me a kiss' by Claire Hoffman, LA Times, August 6, 2006
Wikipedia: Joe Francis

Hopefully, he'll stay out of circulation for awhile.

Update, July 2010: Looks like GGW is up to the same old shit, and actually won a court case against a woman who said she did not consent to have her bared breasts in one of their videos. And, ironically, the very same week, Joe Francis' lawyers were in court slapping a lawsuit against a former employee who wrote a tell-all book about him. (We wouldn't want to violate Francis' privacy, now would we?) The whole thing, like the manufactured outrage about "sexting", cries out for better laws concerning intellectual property rights around one's body and one's image. But that will be the subject of a longer post.

Hello again

2007-04-10T15:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while. I haven't been actively blogging as of late, because I've been busy attempting to do what I'm supposed to be doing with my time, namely, actively trying to complete my Master's Thesis this semester. Which means by this summer, hopefully leaving my eternal grad student status behind and actually getting on with my life. I hope to actively start blogging again this summer, though I may bring my blog back on Wordpress. I'll announce the move here, in any event.

I'm still on the post-punk kick I was on as of my last blog entry. I found a totally excellent book on the subject Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 by Simon Reynolds. Its the definitive source for this often-overlooked and profoundly innovative period of pop music history. And with that, I'll leave you with some videos of PIL, doing some of my favorite pieces of early-80s art damage:

Something old and different

2006-12-24T02:36:00.000-08:00

I took part in a discussion last week on Antiprincess' blog about the musical legacy of Yoko Ono and the different roots and strands of avant-garde music since the 1960s.

It got me reading about some post-punk and No Wave music I hadn't listened to in over 20 years, especially some of the "girl" bands of the time. It turns out a lot of this obscure, long out-of-print stuff is now circulating around on MP3 and some of it is quite excellent.

Some highlights – the Bush Tetras, who's "Snake's Crawl" and "Too Many Creeps" are sheer angsty avant-funk excellence. Or the lovely pop minimalism of the Young Marble Giants.

And of course, there's the almost-forgotten Inflatable Boy Clams, best known for "I'm Sorry". Not a song exactly, but one of the best comic dialogues ever:

MP3: I'm Sorry

Another silly meme, but what the hell....

2006-12-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

I've seen this book meme going around recently, notably on Anthony Kennerson and Belledame's site. Using a series of Google Blog searches, the meme seems to have arisen on Livejournal about 2 years ago. Anyway, here goes, with some tweaks of my own:

1) Pick up the book that you are nearest to with 123 or more pages. (According to early versions: Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.)
2) Turn to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth full sentence in that page.
4) Copy that and the next two sentences that follow.
5) Tag three more bloggers to do the same.

I get:

Gills usually adnate but sometimes adnexed or slightly decurrent, close to crowded (120-150 reaching the stalk), soft, slightly waxy; white at first but soon flushed pink and developing purple-red to vinaceous stains in age. Stalk 3-10 cm long, 1.5-3.5 cm thick, usually rather stout; solid, dry, smooth, equal or tapered below; white, soon stained or streaked pink to reddish or vinaceous. Veil absent.

(Description of Hygrophorus russula from "Mushrooms Demystified" by David Arora.)

OK, so not very elegant. I'll cheat and throw in the book right underneath:

It was all tiny houses, miniture chapels over each grave. Sabina could not understand why the dead would want to have imitation palaces built over them. The cemetary was vanity transmogrified into stone.

(From "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. Which reminds me that I need to take it back to the library.)

For my three tags, I pick Audacia Ray, Amber Rhea, and Greta Christina. But consider the tagging "open", just leave a link in the comments box if you've self-tagged after reading this.

Ellen Willis "Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life"

2006-12-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

With the unfortunate and hopefully temporary demise of Bitch|Lab's blog, I figure I'll take one of her blogging traditions, namely posting pieces of important theoretical works for perusal and discussion. I'm posting Ellen Willis' 1979 essay "Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life". I reread this after Susie Bright read an excerpt on a recent episode of her Audible podcast memorializing Ellen Willis. The essay is written half in jest, but nonetheless really gets to the heart of what so much of what is at issue in the "Sex Wars" (both conservative vs liberal/radical and sex-poz vs radfem). Its not so much an issue of pro-sex vs anti-sex (though there are some extremist conservatives and radfems who could earn the latter tag), but a conflict over different modes of sexuality. More on this in later posts; in the meantime, Ellen Willis at her finest:

There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation's sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relationship ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration). Lovemaking cannot be totally classical unless it is also totally baroque, since you can't abandon all restraints without being willing to try anything. Similarly, it is impossible to be truly baroque without allowing oneself to abandon all restraints and so attain a classical intensity. In practice, however, most people are more inclined to one mode than to the other. A very classical person will be incompatible with a very baroque person unless each can bring out the other's latent opposite side. Two people who are very one-sided in the same direction can be extremely compatible but risk missing a whole dimension of experience unless they get so deeply into one mode that it becomes the other.

Freud, the father of the sexual revolution, was a committed classicist who regarded most baroque impulses as infantile and perverse. Nevertheless, the sexual revolution, as it is usually defined, has been almost exclusively concerned with liberating those impulses from the confines of an exaggeratedly classical puritanism. The result, to my mind, has been an equally distorting cultural obsession with the baroque. Consider, for example, that quintessential expression of baroque angst (a contradiction in terms, the product of Jewish guilt; Christian guilt is classical all the way), Lenny Bruce's notorious monologue about fucking a chicken. Or, come to think of it (puns are baroque), Portnoy's adventures with liver. I mean seriously (classically, that is), is fucking chickens and livers what sex is all about?

Curiously, contemporary sexual "experts" never mention this crucial polarity. This is because they have a vested interest in what might be called establishment or middlebrow baroque-really an attempt to compromise with proclassical traditionalists who insist that sex should be somehow worthwhile, not just fun. Thus the basic axiom of establishment baroque is that consensual sex in any form is wholesome and good for you; a subsidiary premise is that good sex depends on technical skill and is therefore an achievement. Kinsey, with his matter-of-fact statistical approach to his subject, was a pioneer of establishment baroque. Masters and Johnson belong in this category, as do all behavior therapists. The apotheosis of multiple orgasm is an establishment baroque substitute for the old-fashioned classical ideal of coming together, Real baroque sex has no ideals. Much as I hate to admit it, what I have in mind here is a sort of middlebrow baroque projectto report on the two kinds of sex in everyday life.

Time: Night is classical; so are sunrise and sunset. High noon and half an hour before dinner (or during dinner) are baroque.

Location: Outdoors is classical, except for crowded nude beaches. The back seat of a car is classical if you're a teenager, baroque otherwise. The shower is classical; the bathtub is baroque.

Number: Two is classical. One or three or more is baroque.

Lighting: Total darkness is ultraclassical except when it's a baroque variation. Dim lights and candlelight are classical. Floodlights and fluorescent lights are definitely baroque.

Clothing: The only truly classical outfit is nothing. Clothing evokes fantasy and fantasies are baroque. Black lace underwear is of course the classic baroque outfit. Red is baroque, as is anything see-through. Frilly white nightgowns are a baroque impulse with classical content.

Food: Eating in bed is baroque, although artichoke hearts and sour cream are more classical than potato chips and pizza. Tongues, tastes, and flavors are inherently baroque. Comparing sex with food is usually middlebrow baroque, except when a classicist, quarreling with the baroque idea that getting off is getting off no matter how you do it, points out that "Steak and hamburger may both be protein but they still taste different." Putting food anywhere but in your mouth is superbaroque.

Drugs: Wine and marijuana are classical. Cocaine and quaaludes are baroque.

Music: Comparisons between sex and music are classical even if the music itself is baroque. Rock-and-roll is a good mixture of both sensibilities. My favorite classical sex song is Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night"; my favorite baroque sex song is "Starfucker." Rock-and-roll is usually more classical than disco.

Pornography: Porn is basically a baroque phenomenon. Much of it (Hustler, most X-rated movies) is belligerently anticlassical and therefore a form of inverted puritanism. Some of it (Playboy) is pure middlebrow baroque. Many porn classics (like Fanny Hill) have a fairly large classical element. The larger the classical element, the likelier that a piece of pornography will be judged to have redeeming social value. If it is classical enough, it stops being porn altogether and becomes art, but this is a very subjective and relative matter. Lady Chatterley's Lover was once considered pornographic because it used certain baroque words, but by contemporary standards it is cornball classical. (Actually, Lawrence seems to have intended a classical celebration of the joy of the baroque, and he might have pulled it off if it weren't for all that solemn phallic worship and particularly those ridiculous flowers. One thing he did accomplish, though: he made "fuck" into a classical word without sacrificing its baroque connotations.) Pornography also becomes art when it is so baroque it is classical, like The Story of O.

Sex manuals: Love Without Fear is echt-classical. The Kama Sutra is baroque with classical trappings (all that religious overlay). The Joy of Sex, with its sections headed "Starters," "Main Courses," and "Sauces and Pickles," is middlebrow baroque except for its rather classical illustrations.

Devices: All technology is baroque, including contraceptives, vibrators, and air conditioning.

Sexism: Classical sexism is the mystique of yin and yang, masculine strength, feminine surrender, noble savage and earth mother, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer. Baroque sexism is the objectification of women, black garter belts and six-inch heels, Larry Flynt, Helmut Newton.

Feminism: Classical feminism is a vision of total equality, the transcendence of artificial social roles, love and respect for one's partner as an individual. Baroque feminism asserts women's right to be baroque, traditionally a male prerogative; rejects preconceptions about what is natural and moral; insists that anything goes for either sex so long as it feels good.

National characters: The Italians are classical. So are the French, though they pretend otherwise. The Communist countries and Sweden are middlebrow baroque. As a rule, wildly baroque countries exist only in their conquerors' imagination. Americans have classical leanings, but the world headquarters of baroque is New York City. In Manhattan you can eat a chicken and the waiter won't even notice.

Sex Wars: The latest dispatches from the front

2006-11-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

Yet more battles in the feminist blogosphere over whether particular sexual acts are inherently degrading to women or not. A few months back, there were the so-called "blowjob wars". More recently, there's been a "double penetration war" going on in several threads on Renegade Evolution's blog.

This started when RE criticized male radfem author Robert Jensen for his implication that no woman enjoys double penetration. (This was in the context of an argument that men specifically desire porn which feature sexual acts that men "know" women find degrading.) RE countered that this is just one more example of a man making some rather large assumptions about what women do and don't desire, this time in the guise of "feminism". (Something male radfems like John Stoltenberg and Dim Undercellar have been criticized for before.) In other words, whatever their concern for women's welfare, these guys are essentially paternalistic.

Much debate followed about whether the fact that some women enjoy DP validated it in feminist terms, and the argument was raised that no matter whether some women enjoyed it or not, men always saw it as degrading toward women and enjoyed it on that level.

That last argument makes some rather large and rather nasty assumptions about male sexuality that to me point out some of the problems with radical feminism. Many radfems (female and male) seem to think themselves experts on how men in general think and feel about sex. (Much the way Jensen can so blithely declare how women in general feel about DP.) From where I'm sitting, as a man with a pretty typical heteronormative male sexuality, their criticisms bear no resemblance to how I think or feel about sex, women, dominance and power, etc. Maybe radfems know my sexuality better than I do? Somehow, I doubt it.

Similarly, there have been a few mini-wars around various topics, like the one between me and LK in the comments of this thread on whether girl-girl porn is specifically anti-woman or not, or a recent discussion on Witchy-Woo's blog on whether dirty talk between partners is OK. And this is not to mention the "wars" going back decades on PIV intercourse, BDSM, etc.

This obsessive focus on specific sexual acts seems to be missing the point, IMO. What matters in issues of sexual exploitation, violence, etc. is whether or not the act is consensual – a gang-bang can perfectly consensual and a kiss on the cheek can be a sexual assault, all depending on the context. It has little to do with the specific act and everything to do with whether two or more partners freely consent to what they're doing. This is simply Sexual Ethics 101.

This brings up the old "Are radical feminists just a bunch of prudes?" argument, which apparently respectful sex-pozzes aren't supposed to go nowhere near. I'm not going to speculate on the sex lives of individual radfems, but I will say, the obsessive focus on which sexual acts are OK and which are "degrading" seems pretty prudish to me, speaking more to a sense of moral panic than a serious consideration of real issues around sexual power and consent.

Ellen Willis, 1941-2006

2006-11-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

I just found out over on Bitch|Lab's blog that Ellen Willis has died of lung cancer. BL has several posts about Willis running currently on her blog.

A New York Times obit can be found here. The Wikipedia page about her (largely written by me) gives the basics about her ideas and includes a bibliography and a fairly thorough list of links to Willis' essays that are available online.

Ellen Willis was a huge influence on me politically, and not just on feminist/sex-positive topics, but on ideas about culture (and its relationship to politics), media, consumerism, free speech, war, and Israel/”The Jewish Question” as well. I think her instincts were some of the most consistently anti-authoritarian I’ve seen in any political writer – moreso than many anarchists, in fact. (About the only place I part company with her was in her devotion to Freudianism and Reichianism, which don’t disagree with on a philosophical level so much as I think scientifically they’re dated ideas about how the mind works.)

It could be pointed out that the sex-positive movement has a lot of good writers, but very few theorists. Willis was one of the few who did "theory", and did some in-depth essays on exactly why things sexual freedom and free speech are so important, and indeed, why they are (or at least should be) important radical values.

Its unfortunate that an untimely death (she was only 64) robbed the world of such an incisive and insightful thinker. She'll certainly be missed by me.

Addendum:

There's also a good obit on The Nation website titled "Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday". Very right-on quote:

Writing about feminist anti-porn crusades, she urged women not to "accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power."

Nina Hartley speaks

2006-11-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

I just heard about a Nina Hartley book tour. Most of the dates are already passed, but there are a few dates listed in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, in case any local readers are interested.

I also came across a flier at my uni, San Francisco State, for an appearance at SFSU that's not listed on Nina's website. ~~Tuesday, November 14th at 2PM, in HSS 124~~. Not sure if that appearance is part of the book tour or something else, but I'll definitely be checking that out.

Interestingly the flyer for the SFSU even list Nina Hartley as "adult actress, sex educator, SFSU alumnus, radical feminist". I never thought of Nina as a "radical feminist", but if she wants to reclaim that label, more power to her. "Radical feminist" wasn't always synonymous with "anti-sex work", after all.

Addendum

I hope nobody actually went all the way over there based on this post. (I have no idea if I have local readership.) I was basing it on the fliers I saw last week and was wondering why the fliers were all taken down – they had the wrong date and room that's why. Anyway, Friday, November 17th at 2-4 PM, in HSS 154.

1st PornfilmfestivalBerlin

2006-10-24T12:55:00.000-07:00

Over on Eon McKai's site, I just came across news about the 1st PornfilmfestivalBerlin that had just wrapped up. From looking at the schedule, they seem to be showing a range of films from Richard Kern's "Cinema of Transgression" work, to the more explicit end of queer cinema (by directors like Todd Verow and Maria Beatty), to straight-ahead alt-porn by Eon McKai, Benny Profane, and Octavio Winkytiki (including the premiere of McKai's "Kill Girl Kill").

The film festival is scheduled to follow a related Conference on Post-Porn Politics, as well as coinciding with a photo exhibit, "Achtung! FSK 18", featuring work by Nan Goldin, Charles Gatewood, and Richard Kern, among others.

There seems to be a definite theme at work about breaking down barriers between art and pornography, even adopting the logo "What is the difference between art and pornography? Art is more expensive!" My sentiments exactly.

There have been scholarly pro-porn conferences before, most notably the 1998 World Pornography Congress (which generated more than its fair share of bad press). Those conferences were more about academic discussion of porn, whereas the Berlin conference seems to balance the academic commentary with presentation of porn itself.

Its hard to say whether such a festival could have been pulled off on the US right now, in spite of our "pornified" culture. Even barring the inevitable political backlash, taking porn seriously generates all kinds of snarky commentary, and not just from the tabloid press.

"The Lusty Lady loses its innocence"

2006-10-01T15:08:00.000-07:00

There was a really interesting article in this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian titled "The Lusty Lady loses its innocence". Its about the ongoing struggle of the Lusty Lady, a collectively-owned peep show business here in San Francisco, to try to live up to a sex-positive, but still strongly feminist ideal and still make a buck in the sex business. It seems like they haven't been doing too well, mainly because they've tried to implement the idea of non-discrimination based on appearance, only to find that customers aren't exactly coming in droves. (ha, ha) As a result, they're barely getting by financially.

Its also an object lesson in the kind of wars that sometimes take place within co-operative businesses, especially when you have one faction that's very idealistic and one that's more entrepreneurial. (And it somehow doesn't surprise me that one of the male support staff wrote such a less-than-diplomatic memo that started all of this, considering what surly bicycle messenger-type dudes they hire as support staff.) Its also a lesson in trying to do something different with the sex business, yet running up against the reality of the free market, issues that are touched on in Audacia Ray's recent post on the realities of shooting a porn movie.

The issues with the Lusty Lady are something I know very well, since I was a frequent customer of the LL when I lived in Seattle and am an occasional customer of the collectively-owned San Francisco one. (The two businesses used to be under the same ownership until the SF location was bought out by its union.) I used to go the Seattle one quite a bit and often spend more money there than my better judgment should allow for. Their stage show has the same kind of dynamic that drives SuicideGirls – super-cute somewhat alt-looking college-age girls (and some older dancers as well) getting naked, and often doing pseudo-lesbian stuff as well. Basically, something that's inherently hot for 95% of the straight male population and something that they'll part with their money in order to see.

Without picking on SF Lusty Lady too much, basically, the above description is not what you'll see there, and quite a few of their dancers are not exactly what you'd call attractive in the conventional sense. Hence, even though I think its great that they've collectivized and gotten control of their own business, I'm not a regular customer there (they did have a dancer there for a while I really liked, but she quit recently). Its the same reason I'm not a member of the website NoFauxx – its all very nice and idealistic, but there's nobody there who makes me want to part with my hard-earned money just to see them naked. (And being a brick-and-morter operation with a local customer base, the Lusty Lady is inherently more limited than an internet site in being able to make money catering to fringe tastes.)

Its an open question whether the SF Lusty Lady is ever going to find its niche and be able to make money in ways that the dancers find acceptable, or whether it will simply go under. Time will tell.

Update (October 2):

The Matier and Ross column in the San Francisco Chronicle has another take on the story, this time with details that weren't mentioned in the Bay Guardian story. It seems like the impetus for this was a 'Big Beautiful Women' strip night, that sounds like it might have been unannounced. This resulted in a mass customer walkout. It really sounds like some of the dancer/owners from the Lusty Lady feel that if they can beat people over the head with decidedly non-standard ideas about beauty, viewers will rethink their ideas about beauty. Instead, it just resulted in a bad scene for the customers, staff, and the big women on stage.

Also, a couple of discussions (link, link) about this are up at SFRedbook, the San Francisco "johns" board.

On objectification and objections to it

2006-09-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

There's some interesting discussion in the blogosphere recently on the problematic concept of sexual objectification.

Renegade Evolution ventures into the fray with some thoughts on just what "objectification" means to her, when its problematic, and when it isn't. Also, what kinds of stereotypes (another form of objectification, really) both feminists and men who patronize sex workers have as a result of the objectification of "whores".

Also notable about this discussion is the participation of an anonymous radfem, saying to RE, based on the how she dresses and the fact that she's a stripper – yes, in fact, you are the enemy. Her childish denunciation of RE for being conventionally attractive and therefore in some way hurting other women sums up in a nutshell why radical feminism sucks so badly.

Anthony Kennerson follows up by reposting some of Nina Hartley's writing on objectification.

RE's post on her own blog is a followup to a post she made on one of the Livejournal feminist communities about the demonization of conventionally attractive women. Unfortunately, many of the responses that followed were simply variations on "skinny white women have it coming because they're privileged / you're just defensive about the challenge to your undue privilege". Which seems to be the standard refrain for any criticism of any kind of pettiness that emerges out of identity politics.

Amber Rhea has a post similarly critiquing the new meme of "real women" and how conventionally attractive women are in some way are not "real women".

A few months back, Belledame wrote a series of posts that were an in-depth analysis of the concept of objectification, both in feminism and in broader philosophy. (And it is important to remember that sexual objectification is a subset of the larger phenomenon of objectification.) She leaves many of the basic feminist assumptions on sexual objectification unchallenged and personally, I find many of these assumptions questionable. However, her analysis is nonetheless very good.

For my part, it bugs me more than a little that so little effort is made in feminist philosophy to differentiate between the social phenomenon of sexual objectification and the interpersonal phenomenon of sexual attraction. (Even if the two are in some ways related.) While I think it may very well be the intention of many radical feminists to moralistically censure the very idea of sexual attraction based on visual/physical cues, but that's hardly the view of all feminists. Also, there seems to be an underlying assumption on the part of many feminists that male sexual objectification by necessity denies female sexual subjectivity, which seems to me to be giving men way too much power.

Discussion of objectification also raises other questions – Is all objectification negative? If so, what do you do with not just pornography, but most artwork? (Since most works of art say more about the artist's view of the artistic subject than the subject's subjectivity – got that?) Is a completely non-objectifying art or a non-objectifying sexuality even possible or desirable?

Obviously, "sexual objectification" and "the objectification of women" are concepts in serious need of clarification, and hopefully, these discussions will go some way towards that end.

Oh yeah, and I can't post about this without throwing in one of my favorite quotes from Lisa "Suckdog" Carver: "On The Ricki Lake Show, audience members are always standing up to shriek self-righteously that old cliche, as if they had just invented it: 'ITS WHAT'S ON THE INSIDE THAT COUNTS!' Well, what about the outside, doesn't it get any credit?"

Addendum:

I almost forgot to include Petitpoussin. She recently posted on the topic of "Youth and Beauty" and problems associated with the links between the two concepts. (I argue in the discussion that I'm not sure the topics can be unlinked.) She also has an earlier post on "Sex Blogs" in which the discussion turns to social standards of beauty.

A comic interlude

2006-09-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

A cute take on interpersonal sexual politics by Sophie Crumb, from Belly Button #1. (More here and here.) Sex roles aren't always what you'd expect, and Sophie points this out better than I can.

(Click on the picture to enlarge.)

911X5

2006-09-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

"9/11 changed everything" – George W. Bush (?)

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." – Alphonse Karr

Perhaps more coherent thoughts later.

In the meantime Belledame and Anthony Kennerson have a good posts on the subject.

Utne "Porn Culture" articles

2006-09-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

I was browsing over the magazine rack again recently and came across the latest issue of Utne. I don't usually have a very high opinion of this "best of the alternative press" magazine, but I'll usually thumb through it when I see it. This issue had a "Porn Culture" section that looked interesting. I was going to go to a library and copy the whole thing, but later found that the whole issue is online.

The articles are kind of disappointing and I don't find that most of them get beyond the "Porn Debate 101" level of analysis. An article by Julie Hanus points out that porn is now more available than ever and has influenced the larger culture in all kinds of ways. (Yes, and?) An article from Dissent against censorship more or less holds that "rough sex" videos like Forced Entry are the price we pay to be able to read works like Lolita. (True enough, but not exactly a defense of pornography.) The antiporn side is covered in an article by Charles Foran called "Damage on Parade" that essentially rehashes the recent books by Ariel Levy and [gag] Pamela Paul to come to the conclusion that porn is BAD BAD BAD. Foran cites the usual litany of accusations about the supposed effect of porn on relationships, apparently believing that viewers of porn are inherently incapable of maintaining any kind of sane, healthy perspective about their sexuality or that of women.

I also noted this passage:

Paul cites a 1998 study that concludes that two-thirds of prostitutes suffer from symptoms identical to those of posttraumatic stress disorder-twice the percentage that was found among American soldiers returning from the war in Vietnam. "There is something twisted about using a predominantly sexually traumatized group of people as our erotic role models," she writes. "It's like using a bunch of shark attack victims as our lifeguards."

The above-mentioned study, of course, is one of Melissa Farley's studies, and like so many of her studies, surveyed San Francisco street prostitutes. The above statement from Pamela Paul shows how much Farley's studies of the most marginalized and disempowered sex workers are generalized as being typical of all sex workers under all circumstances.

The issue also has an interview with feminist porn filmmaker Candida Royalle. I found a lot of what she had to somewhat problematic and raising enough issues of its own that I'll post about it separately.

An actual post about something other than sex

2006-09-06T18:08:00.000-07:00

Greta Christina has been on kind of a roll lately, with a very good post taking on the subject of new-agey science-bashing. Its a good defense of science and reason from somebody who's had her share of psychedelic experiences and been profoundly affected by them, but refuses to give way to the kind of New Age irrationalism that many "experienced" (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) people unfortunately give in to. (She also has an earlier post on the same topic that's worth reading.)

Like me, Christina lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. While the Bay Area is one of the most progressive (and sex-positive) places in North America, there is a certain smug mentality that one encounters here that can be very frustrating. We think of ourselves as more enlightened than xtian fundamentalist hotspots like Kansas or South Dakota, but the Bay Area has its share of New Age irrationalists and political fundamentalists who can be just as wacky as any six-day creationist. (Berkeley is a notorious hot spot for this, though at least a few people have a sense of humor about it.)

(Don't even get me started on class issues in the SF Bay Area – for all the professed left/liberalism and rhetoric about "diversity" around here, this is probably one of the hardest places in the US to live if you're at all poorer than upper middle class – economically speaking, the SF Bay Area is up there with New York City as one of America's worst gated communities.)

In the responses to Greta's column, I wrote about some of my experiences with New Age types and my thoughts on this kind of irrationalism:

I haven't read any of Morford above and beyond the columns you've presented, so I don't know what he normally writes about, but his mentality toward science is highly frustrating.

As a scientist (studying the taxonomy of Psilocybe mushrooms, no less) living in the Bay Area, I run into this "New Age" mentality a lot.

I remember talking to somebody a year back about medicinal and toxic plants – she expressed quite matter-of-factly that for any poisonous plant or mushroom, there will be another plant growing nearby that is its specific antidote. When I said I thought this idea was nonsense and could think of plenty of examples to the contrary, she seemed a bit offended. She defended the idea not on its merits, but on the fact that she'd learned it from a medicinal plant guru (forgot his name) who was supposed to be incredibly knowledgeable. When I come across this kind of "fashionable nonsense" among apparently educated people here, I think that perhaps the "progressive" parts of the country like the Bay Area really aren't that far ahead of supposed bastions of ignorance like Kansas. People here just pick different anti-intellectual poisons.

They seem to think that somehow science, and reason and logic in general, are in some way detrimental to an appreciation of the wonder of the universe or some kind of sense of holism. These people really seems to want shortcuts to knowledge, and seem to think there can be an understanding of the whole without understanding of the parts. In fact, they dismiss understanding of the parts as "reductionism", without understanding that both reductionism and holism are vital parts of science.

Daniel Dennett calls this a "skyhook" mentality, a kind of "greedy holism" that demands a grand understanding of the whole without building on an understanding of the parts. Admittedly, its opposite, "greedy reductionism", the idea that you completely understand a phenomenon when you really only understand a small part of it, is a real problem with some scientists. The "gay gene" hypothesis and much of evolutionary psychology are examples of this.

Of course the error that "new age" types make is that they reduce all of science to the caricature of greedy reductionism and use this straw man to defend their own deeply problematic greedy holism.

A long post on sexual vanguardism

2006-08-26T16:29:00.000-07:00

Wow, this turned into a long one:

A couple weeks ago, Greta Christina had a particularly nice blog entry about Girls Gone Wild. Specifically, it was not about Joe Francis (now regarded as a scumbag by practically everyone); rather, it was about the girls of Girls Gone Wild, and taking on the idea of whether what they're doing is inherently degrading and exploitative. (She also links to a longer "think piece" she wrote for the "Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong" anthology about the content of GGW, and finds some of their XXX-rated stuff surprisingly sexy.)

Even though I like porn, particularly girl/girl porn, I have always disliked GGW, even before the recent Joe Francis scandal. Christina seems to dislike many of the same things I do about GGW (the whole retarded screaming frat-boy aspect of it is pretty repulsive), but seems to find the idea of regular girls doing stuff they wouldn't normally do to have a high erotic charge.

She's a bit overly dismissive of the exploitation and consent issues around the videos – the girls may not be so drunk that they can't consent to sex, sure, but the fact that they're not only drunk, but also ambushed and pressured is a problem. I've been internet pen pals with indie pornographers before, and I've heard the horror stories of having one of your top models suddenly decide it was a mistake to do porn to begin with (an issue typically brought on by a revelation to a new boyfriend who proceeds to freak out about it) and demands that you withdraw the videos from circulation immediately. (Never mind that people have been buying the videos for the last year and that the proverbial horse is already far from the proverbial open barn door.) Given that possibility, ambushing drunk girls and having them appear in porn, even pretty soft porn, is the very opposite of "best practices" when it comes to hiring models. And the fact that they don't even pay the girls they make so much money from speaks for itself.

She has some excellent stuff about whether or not what the girls are doing is inherently degrading. She finds such criticism elitist:

Which brings me to my second point: the "they're squandering their feminist heritage" argument.

This is the one that really bugs me. It's as if sexual liberation is only for those of us with the right sex-positive feminist credentials -- not for yahoo sorority girls who want to pull their shirts up on camera. Like they don't deserve to have sexual choices, because they'll make the wrong ones.

But we all deserve sexual liberation. We all deserve the freedom to make sexual choices -- even dumb ones or crass ones. As someone whose name I can't remember once said, not all censorship battles can be about Ulysses. (Does anyone know the source for that quote, btw? I couldn't find it.) And the battle for sexual liberation and the right to sexual expression can't always be about brilliant sex-themed performance art, or beautiful ecstatic lovemaking in loving long-term relationships. Sometimes it's about college girls at big drunken parties pulling their shirts off for the video cameras. That's the whole point of feminist sexual liberation -- we don't get to go around scolding other women for their consenting sexual choices. (Not on moral or political grounds, anyway. On aesthetic grounds... that's another story.)

I've seen arguments that the problem with GGW isn't the girls whipping their tops off for the camera -- it's the people behind the camera, the crassness of the videos and the company and the grotesqueness of the main man behind them. It's not liberated or empowering if you're whipping your top off for exploitative assholes, or so goes the argument. But while I'm certainly not going to defend the motives of the GGW empire (especially not now), I still think we should support the sexual agency of the wild girls themselves. Do you think every single porn movie that Annie Sprinkle or Nina Hartley ever made was a delicate work of artistic beauty and profound insight, made by sensitive feminists, with the profits going to rape crisis centers and saving the rainforest? I sure don't. I'm sure that at least some of their movies were silly and dumb, and that the profits from at least some of them went to pay for the sports cars and coke habits of nitwit Silicone Valley porn producers. That doesn't negate Nina and Annie's sexual agency and power.

Its a pretty spot-on critique and addresses an issue that's been bugging me even about sex-positive writing. Namely, the condemnation of porn where the sex acts or appearance of the models is too "mainstream" or not "transgressive" enough. For example, this from a recent post on Susie Bright's blog:

They ask sexually-oriented bloggers each week to nominate, among themselves, the best posts of the week: be it erotica, "porn," or sexual politics/philosophy/confessions of all kinds.

[...]I found some new personal sex bloggers I really like.

Other links didn't do much for me, or were more conservative than my taste. And by conservative, I mean "not changing the dominant paradigm of porn-cliches and gender roles" kind of conservative. As for as explicitness or kink goes, they are not at all conservative!

(Disclaimer: I'm normally a big fan of Susie Bright.)

Or this from Bay Guardian piece on SIR Video by Michelle Tea from a few years back:

Made by dykes, for dykes, the video features real, local dykes fucking the way real dykes fuck – these are not career porn actors with skinny, unadorned bodies and silicone tits. The only silicone in Hard Love/High Heels is the stuff strapped between the girls' legs, and even in this Hard Love/High Heels differs from the mainstream. Big-budget porno's generally employ low-budget sex toys, the plasticky, weird stuff found in porn stores throughout the USA, not the quality sex accessories found in women-centric shops like Good Vibrations and used in most dykes' bedrooms.

If you used mainstream porn as a guide to real lesbian sex, you'd think that women enjoyed being sloppily stabbed in the cunt by a jabbing tongue, spent hours in the ridiculous 69 position, or had long, gently sensuous make-out sessions that ended with lots of showy tongue-touching. The girls in S.I.R.'s video fuck hard. Like real dykes, they have embarrassing process sessions with their exes; then they have conflicted, complicated, and raw fuck sessions.

But probably the most important and obvious difference between Hard Love/High Heels and any other "girl-girl" video on the market is that Hard Love/High Heels shows butch dykes – a lesbian reality the man-made flicks unsurprisingly ignore. For Rednour and Strano – a femme-butch couple who have been involved in the specifically Bay Area sex-radical and sex-education scene that brought us Susie Bright, the San Francisco Sex Information hotline, and Good Vibrations – showing butch dykes having hot sex was both essentially authentic and politically crucial.

I can say right out that I share a few of their criticisms. Porn, generally speaking, isn't diverse enough, it often doesn't seem to cater to anybody outside of a presumed audience of middle-aged "NASCAR dudes" who want to see nothing more than an army of Pam Anderson knock-offs submit to the cock. Often it seems like they're just shooting basically the same sex scenes over and over again over thousands of videos per year. I'm kind of a snob about the porn I buy, and I'm really only interested in the small percentage that's both well-produced and plays into my sexual tastes. And I'm glad that other people are producing porn that caters their non-mainstream or otherwise marginalized sexual tastes. So far, we're on the same page.

The problem with the kind of dismissive attitude in the Bright and Tea pieces is not in their dislike of mainstream porn – to each their own after all. The bigger problem is that they seem to enshrine their tastes into a kind of sexual vanguardism and dismiss the sexual tastes of something like 75% of the population as hopelessly cliche. Apparently, if you're not queer, or not into seeing guys fucked with a strap-on, or are a lesbian who doesn't find the 69 position "ridiculous", or like women who are, horror of horrors, conventionally attractive, the implication is that there's something wrong and regressive about your sexuality.

It seems to be related to a kind of lifestyle elitism that came out the 1960s and still inhabits much of the cultural left. Ellen Willis wrote about it last year in a very good essay on utopianism:

A milder form of authoritarianism, which owed less to Marxism than to a peculiarly American quasi-religious moralism, disfigured the counterculture and the women's movement. If the original point of these movements was to promote the pursuit of happiness, too often the emphasis shifted to proclaiming one's own superior enlightenment and contempt for those who refused to be liberated; indeed, liberation had a tendency to become prescriptive, so that freedom to reject the trappings of middle-class consumerism, or not to marry, or to be a lesbian was repackaged as a moral obligation and a litmus test of one's radicalism or feminism. Just as communism discredited utopianism for several generations of Europeans, the antics of countercultural moralists fed America's conservative reaction.

(Note: a few days ago, Bitch|Lab discussed the implications of a similar sentiment about "lifestylism" Willis expressed some 35 years ago.)

Christina is right to call bullshit on this kind of sexual elitism – sexual liberation shouldn't be merely be reserved for self-proclaimed queers and other people with non-mainstream sexual tastes. If sexual liberation doesn't apply to everybody – queer and straight, kinky and vanilla, male and female, monogamous and slutty – then it ultimately doesn't apply to anybody. And sex-positivity, an idea that really needs greater currency in our culture, isn't going to win over anybody outside of the usual lifestyle ghettos if you start excluding most peoples sexual tastes as "conservative".

Strawfeminists vs Strawsexpozes

2006-08-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

God, I don't know why I bother to continue to post to the Punkassblog prostitution thread. Must. Resist. Temptation...

I hear much complaint on that end about arguments against "strawfeminists", eg, the unfair and stereotypical view that feminists are a bunch of hairy-legged, man-hating, sex-hating bitches, etc, etc. Obviously, its best not to argue against a stereotyped position, though harder in the case of radfems, since some of the stereotypical attitudes of feminists come a bit closer to the truth in the case of hardcore radical feminists.

There is a corollary to this, though, which I've been calling "strawsexpoz". A caricature of the sex positive position, putting words in our mouths and claiming we do some pretty terrible things.

A strawsexpoz:

Is always entirely uncritical of the sex industry – trafficking, pimping, the antics of Joe Francis – strawsexpozes are fine with anything that brings them more porn and whores.

Sees all sex work as inherently positive and liberating.

Views any criticisms of porn as inherently censorship.

Claims to favor absolute free speech, but really just endeavors to silence and censor radical feminists at every opportunity. (Nobody really believes in that free speech shit, after all, do they?)

If male, is probably a john and a rapist, and a fan of "cheesy-ass boring as all fuck porn" to boot.

If female, is probably one of the "tiny minority" of basically happy whores, and only cares about keeping her johns spending money at the expense of all other women, or alternately, is just trying to make her boyfriend happy, or, if a lesbian, just wants to be a man.

Some of the above are exaggerations – eg, there are some "whores", porn enthusiasts, and even johns in the sex-positive camp, but that's far from everybody on the sex-positive side. Most of the above are just distortions, caricatures, or outright lies.

A new low in journalistic ethics

2006-08-20T13:59:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting post over on SugarBank on the "outing" of popular UK sex blogger and bestselling author, Girl With a One-Track Mind by the Sunday Times. Its a good example of the kind of sexual shaming that often masquerades as journalism.

Further dispatches from the Melissa Farley Wars

2006-08-19T22:27:00.000-07:00

By odd coincidence, just a couple days after the dust-up on Punkassblog after I posted a link to Ronald Weitzer's critique of Melissa Farely's methodology, anti-porn blast-from-the-past Nikki Craft turns up on Wikipedia, specifically on the Melissa Farley article, to demand an end to "unsubstatiated and false accusations against Melissa Farley", which is odd, because an article on her barely exists. Craft gets into a debate with me (posting under my real name) and another user, Craft strangly gets downright pissy with the other user (who describes herself as an "a nice older LGBT female"), but oddly not with me. Craft then floods the page with a huge list of quotes from Farley and a list of articles that read like her entire CV, but strangely adds nothing to the actual article. I take a standoffish approach, as I'm losing my taste for hot-and-heavy edit wars. Other user again attempts to build bridges with Nikki Craft.

Very little of any substance actually added to the article after all of this.

Gotta love Wikipedia process!

Some porn clips

2006-08-19T13:54:00.001-07:00

I came across a couple of porn trailers recently, representing two very different ends of the emerging altporn hardcore video scene. (Note, if you have issues about young-looking actresses, you'll probably be really offended by the Girls Lie clip, even though its not all that graphic. It should go without saying that neither is "work safe".):

Girls Lie clip
Psychocandy 4 clip

Girls Lie is a relatively big-budget video directed by Eon McKai. Its produced by VividAlt, which is a new imprint by Vivid, the General Motors of porn, and basically their attempt to cash in on the altporn phenomena (and also to breathe some new life into the DVD porn industry, which has taken a hit in the last few years from the growth of web porn). Obviously, I'm kind of wary about that, but as with indie rock and independent film, it obviously had to happen sometime – the avant-garde to mainstream path is pretty much built into capitalism, after all.

On the plus side, Girls Lie doesn't look anything like a typical Vivid video (thank God!), and it looks to be one of the few porn videos out there where the filmmakers looks like they understand even basic cinematography. (It also makes me think of this scene from Boogie Nights: [RealAudio clip])

Benny Profane's Psychocandy 4 is a lower-budget video coming from the still-independent side of altporn (and featuring America's favorite intellectual porn star, Audacia Ray, who's plugging it over on her blog). Its definitely rawer and less glamourous-looking. I have to admit, I like the more glamorized stuff better, but at the same time, I'm glad that there are still people shooting their own porn in their basements and tiny apartments as well.

Bitching with $pread (part 3)

2006-08-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

Here's the second of some excerpts from the Bitch interview. This covers the "exploitation or empowerment" debate and whether its too simplistic. Its timely, because there's been a debate raging on Punkassblog about sex work, and as of today, the inevitable "exploitation or empowerment" question has come up. From the interview:

It's frustrating that debates about sex workers' rights too often get reduced to the "is it exploitation or empowerment?" question. How can we move people beyond that?

Rachel Aimee: There's a misconception about the sex workers' rights movement that it's all about how sex work is empowering, whereas in fact many sex worker activists find that an annoying or at least mostly irrelevant argument. If sex work is empowering, it's generally in that it allows people to make more money than they would otherwise be able to make and therefore raise their living standards. I don't think many sex workers find the act of sex work empowering in itself. $pread is trying to move beyond the simplistic debate by presenting a whole range of sex workers' experiences, from the positive to the negative and everything in between. I think the most useful way to frame the debate is in terms of choice: Do you believe people should be able to choose what they do with their own bodies?

Audacia Ray: I think that the empowerment-vs.-exploitation debate is a good one to keep having. Polarizing those issues is not so helpful, but it's a useful framework, because it's the way that people get introduced to these concepts. But what's really important is to listen to the variety of experiences that sex workers have – it doesn't make for good soundbites, but it's important to see the various perspectives. It's okay to be muddled about it, to not be able to say "It's definitely a good thing" or "It's definitely a bad thing." For myself, I have different opinions on different days. [Laughs.]

Sex workers can have a difficult time voicing their opinions because generally [other] people come at this issue with their minds made up, and that can be really threatening when it's your life. It's tough to have people shake their finger at you and tell you what you're feeling.

I've always identified as a feminist, and to deal with feminism from the perspective of being a sex worker has been really jarring to me. Right when I started working on $pread, the Village Voice had a piece about me and someone else, about our lives as sex workers, and it got picked up by the blog Feministing. The comments that people left about us almost made me cry. It was awful because I read that site religiously – I mean, these are my people. And getting these reactions made me realize these are not my people; they hate me.

[Note: Bitch|Lab also blogged today about the above mentioned Feministing debate, including links to several responses Audacia Ray posted in her own blog. – IACB]

Sex – whether commercial or not – is an emotional issue. It's a really challenging thing to talk about. When you talk about sex, people assume that you're talking about them, or that you're talking about sex for all women. And it's just not the case. But those reactions come from it being such a personal thing.

Quite simply, framing sex work as either inherently degrading or inherently empowering is utterly simplistic. (I posted several days ago about the huge range of situations that come under the heading of "sex work".) Certainly, there are many situations that are clearly exploitative, most notable anything that involves coercion or taking advantage of extreme social marginalization – trafficking, pimping, and so on. On the other hand there are some kinds of sex work that could actually be called "empowering" – for example, somebody producing their own porn that is an authentic expression of their own sexuality and that gives them pleasure from showing off their sexuality. The majority of sex work falls at various places in between those two points. Debating whether the whole of sex work is exploitative or empowering is a simplistic Feminism 101 level of debate that doesn't even begin to address the real issues.

(To be fair, I don't know of many people in the sex-positive camp, or at least the sex-positive feminist camp, who are arguing that all sex work is inherently empowering. The owners of SuicideGirls worked the "empowerment" angle for a while before receiving lots of negative publicity to the effect that it wasn't exactly the warm and fuzzy feminist porn site it claimed to be. Ariel Levy also claims that many of the women she writes about refer to their "female chauvinist pig" activities as "empowering", but I'm not sure if that isn't just Levy putting words in their mouth.)

Bitching with $pread (part 2)

2006-08-13T23:19:00.000-07:00

The first of a few excerpts from the Bitch interview with the editors of $pread. There's some interesting comments here on the difficulty of unionizing, because 1) the work itself is often illegal, 2) sex workers themselves aren't always interested in unionization – they often like the unregulated nature of the sex industry for reasons of their own, and 3) the existing organized labor movement doesn't exactly reach out to sex workers.

So, to lay it out: What are the primary labor issues affecting sex workers?

Rachel Lynn: The primary issue for prostitutes (including private call girls, streetwalkers, agency escorts, etc.) is the fact that prostitution is illegal in this country: The fear of being arrested makes everything more dangerous. If your job is illegal in the first place, you cant call the police if you get beaten up or raped by a client. For strippers, there's the issue of exploitation by managers, because it's now become the norm for strip clubs to charge strippers a house fee in order to work. Strippers often end up paying out over half their tips to the house, or even going home in debt, because in some places the house fees are so high.

Sex-industry workplaces tend to be more exploitative than most workplaces, mainly because even the legal industries are still usually run in a somewhat under-the-table manner, with workers getting paid in cash and many workers not having legal work permits. The managers can get away with more because they're not regulated. Most sex workers don't have contracts, so they can be fired anytime; they don't get sick pay, paid vacation time, health insurance, etc. But this is a very tricky issue, because many sex workers would prefer to take their chances in a semi-legal, unregulated, exploitative business environment where they can make money off the books, not have to pay taxes, have a flexible schedule, take vacation time whenever they want, etc., rather than be tied down in a 9-to-5 job, even if it means forfeiting the benefits. So when people talk about wanting to unionize and regulate the sex industry, that's not necessarily what the majority of sex workers want. There are even some prostitutes who don't want their work to be decriminalized because they're concerned about what the change would mean.

[….]

Is sex work considered a legitimate locus of organizing within the labor movement? Do existing labor unions want to be aligned with the sex industry?

Eliyanna Kaiser: The U.S. labor movement isn't working to unionize sex workers; that's just the reality. And it's not because union leaders or staff aren't progressive enough, although that might also be true in some cases. $pread editors are split on this, but it's my belief that there is no [organized] sex workers' rights movement in the United States. And until sex workers have achieved a minimum of self-organization, there is no reason why the mainstream labor movement should be expected to lift a finger to do that work for us.

[…]

When I interviewed [labor movement veteran] Bill Fletcher Jr. for $pread, the main issue that he raised was morality. And there's no point in underemphasizing the role that morality plays in how sex workers are able to work with other movements. Until sex workers can achieve a broad consensus for our rights – at least in the progressive left – it's silly to think we will be able to do anything significant to achieve real change. Movements are not comprised of their constituents. They are dynamic coalitions that require that the affected constituency is talking to others who have found common cause in struggle. Workers in the labor movement don't look at sex workers right now and see their mirror image. This is our challenge, and it starts with organizing ourselves to talk.

An attempt to put a tiresome debate to rest

2006-08-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

Since I'm feeling a bit lazy, I figured I'd repost something I posted to the Usenet newsgroup soc.feminism back in 1997 on the "porn vs. erotica" debate:

...the whole pornography/erotica distinction is a subjective and rather useless one. IMO, “erotic” and “pornographic” are just adjectives for describing different qualities of sexually-oriented materials; the degree that something is pornographic has to do with the physicality and amount of explicitness of the presentation, while eroticism has to do with the mental and emotional aspects of sex. Good sex is stimulating to both the body and the mind and good sexual materials should do likewise; unfortunately, by creating the ossified categories of “pornography” and “erotica”, we end up with material that only focuses on one side of sex. Hence, there’s plenty of erotica which is all about feelings and metaphors, but steers clear of the actual physical act (and often steers clear of the body entirely) and plenty of pornography that shows the act in copious detail, but the sex has a very fake unfeeling quality to it. In both cases, what you end up with is pretty boring. Pornography, erotica, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t have to be this way, but that’s what were stuck with as long as we take “erotica” and “pornography” to be two mutually exclusive categories, and Steinem, Russell, etc. are doing a real disservice in trying to keep this division going.

This idea of "erotica" (vaguely defined) as the acceptable alternative to pornography used to come up a lot in feminist porn debates. It seems to come up less today, probably because so much of the debate now focuses on women in "pornstitution" and less on the merits (or lack thereof) of the final product. I still see this debate come up a lot in other areas, though, like in discussions of erotic comics or photography (often cast in the language of "porn vs. art") and it still strikes me as just as wrongheaded.

Since I posted this in 1997, there thankfully have been some good directors and photographers popping up on the porn end who are pretty knowledgeable about their technique and actually have a good sense about what's erotic. Richard Kern, for example, who wins my "high art/low art" award for being probably the only person I know of to have their work appear in both Artforum and Barely Legal. Bellezza Video, Little Mutt, Abby Winters, and Tom Hunscher are others come to mind as examples of pornographers with a good artistic or erotic sensibility.

On the "straight" film end, there have been a bunch of "art" films over the last 5 or 10 years that have been incorporating explicit sex. 9 Songs, in my opinion, was clearly the most successful from an erotic point of view, mainly because it was pretty unapologetic about showing explicit sex in a joyful, arousing way. Unfortunately, many of the other explicit arthouse films of the last few years have been absolute depression-fests which seem to want to "legitimize" the use of explicit sex by putting it in a punishing, anti-erotic context. Baise Moi and Anatomy of Hell come to mind immediately in this regard. (Both French films, actually, which brings to mind a quote I heard to the effect of "Americans behave badly when the don't think about what they do, while the French behave badly when they think about it too much.")

There's some interesting stuff on indie pornographer Tony Comstock's blog about what makes a sexy film and what makes good porno. This is another blog I highly highly recommend, BTW.

Bitch bitches with $pread

2006-08-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

I was browsing through the magazine rack over at Green Apple Books the other day. (Print magazines – how 20^th century, right?) I came across the new issue of Bitch, which had a really good interview with the editors of $pread, a magazine for sex workers that's been coming out for the past year. (I looked around for it on the same magazine rack, but didn't see a copy, so I have yet to see it first-hand.) The interview was very interesting and gave an insightful take on many of the issues that myself and other sex-positive bloggers have been discussing. From the intro:

The term "sex worker" means different things to different people, but it often means something extreme – glamorous high-priced escort at one end, desperate crack-addicted streetwalker at the other. Among feminists, perceptions are no less polarized – sex workers are either fully empowered agents using their sexuality in unassailably positive ways, or victims of a job that degrades them by its very nature. Most feminist dialogues about sex work sound more like monologues; defensiveness, mischaracterizations, and willful ignorance abound, making casualties of complexity and nuance. Until recently, few publications – feminist or otherwise – have tried to grapple with these issues and move the debate forward. Enter $pread, which published its first issue in the spring of 2005 with the subtitle – "illuminating the sex industry."

The $pread editors have some very interesting things to say about the complicated relationship between the sex-worker rights movement and sex-positive feminism (and feminism in general) and why they don't label their magazine "feminist", about trying to get the rest of the organized labor movement to get past their moralism and take sex worker issues seriously, and about how limiting the old "is it exploitative or empowering" debate gets when dealing with real issues around sex work.

The website for $pread can be found here (no articles to be found on their site, unfortunately). I also noticed that one of their editors is Audacia Ray, a name I recognize from the blogosphere, but had almost forgotten about, since for some reason, few sex-poz blogs link to her. Her blog is called Waking Vixen, and it’s a site that all sex-positive readers should follow. (Actually, its also a site that anti-pornstitution folks should read as well – you might actually learn something.)

I'll post more excerpts in later postings. In the meantime, have a look at the article if you get a chance.

Not a Monolith

2006-08-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

Renegade Evolution had a thoughtful post the other day comparing the supposed "harm" caused by the sex industry with the harms caused by other industries who's products many of us regularly consume, wondering why people didn't get nearly so up in arms about consumption of these products.

It reminded me about how much people are able to draw fine distinctions about all other aspects of consumption, and yet view the entire sex industry as one big monolith – "pornstitution" as anti-porn feminists have come to call it over the last couple of years. I also hear a great deal of rhetoric that the sex-industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that escapes criticism from otherwise-progressives supposedly blinded by a sex-positive ideology.

The problem with this line of thinking comes when we look at a range of concrete examples of what makes up "pornstitution". The production end of the sex industry might include:

Companies like Larry Flynt Publications who make annual profits in the tens of millions.

A self-employed model like "SilkyKitty", who's set up her own porn site and webcam that she operates out of her home. Still has her day job, working as a bookstore clerk.

FataleMedia, a small adult video production company run by a lesbian couple, making videos primarily for a lesbian audience.

The Lusty Lady, a worker-owned San Francisco peep show.

Tom Hunscher, a Portland-based photographer. Shoots explicit nudes of freelance models for his own websites and as stock adult content.

Jet Set Productions, a gay porn production company, best known for an online porno soap opera, Wet Palms.

Abby Winters, an Australian "independent porn" producer, highly regarded for girl/girl videos that are considerably more erotic than the typical "hetlez" formula.

Feck, a company that operates sites like IShotMyself and BeautifulAgony featuring content shot and submitted by the models themselves.

Girls Gone Wild a company that's made a small fortune selling videos of drunk women publicly flashing and making out, and occasionally going back to a hotel for paid sex. Owner Joe Francis has recently received a great deal of negative publicity as a bully and alleged rapist.

Workers in the sex industry (past and present) might include:

The above-mentioned "Renegade Evolution", a stripper and fetish model. In her spare time runs a blog defending, among other things, her choice of profession.

"Markedformetal", also a stripper and blogger. Sometimes writes about how much she hates her chosen profession

Jenna Jameson, who became rich and famous as a porn star. Appeared in 120 videos over the course of 12 years, but yet claims she dislikes watching her own sex scenes.

The late Linda Lovelace, the first "porn star", who entered the industry while under the control of a severely abusive husband. (Whether she loved, hated, or was ambivalent about porn in general depends on which of her five often-contradictory authorized biographies you choose to believe.)

Nina Hartley, who's still working in porn after 22 years and 717 films. Still a major name at an age (47) when the "Porno Valley" studios she often works with don't exactly encourage actresses to stick around. (No need to recount her history of sex education and activism yet again.)

SilkyKitty (see under producers, above)

The worker-owners of the Lusty Lady (see above).

A woman illegally held captive and trafficked from China to the United States and forced to work off her "debt" in a massage parlour.

Kira Milan, a Portland-based freelance porn model active several years back under several any of several names. Did solo and girl/girl porn for a handful of porn sites and adult videos, but soon dropped it in favor of nude art photography modeling. Still a cult favorite on the internet several years later.

Eve Angel, a Hungarian freelance model working in Prague and Budapest (the present centers of the Eastern European porn industry). Appears on scores of videos and websites under any of a half-dozen names.

A woman who prostitutes to feed a drug habit, working the stroll in places like San Francisco's Polk Gulch, generally between 2AM (when the bars let out) and dawn.

A young woman I met once who worked as a porn model and sometimes escort (primarily answering Craigslist ads from men offering sex for money). When not taking a semester off to earn money this way, is a Women's Studies major at one of the "Seven Sisters" women's colleges.

Wanda, a Stockholm-based escort who's website quite openly advertises what services she provides and for how much. (Yes Virgina, there is still prostitution in Sweden – it just moved indoors.)

Goddess Athena, a San Francisco dominatrix who started the "dominatrix collective", Sirens.

(I'll note here that Dim Undercellar of the Biting Beaver blog has written a post claiming most of the "First World" sex work of the kind I've mainly discussed above is done by trafficked women from poor countries. This contention, however, is based on little evidence and much supposition on his part and on the part of the anti-prostitution organizations from which he gets his "facts".)

Clearly there are some people on this list who clearly fall into the categories of exploiters and victims to varying degrees. There's also a large number of people who don't fall into either category. What's quite clear is that the above list, on both the producer and worker ends, includes some very different people under very different circumstances. Trying to get justice for the most downtrodden sex workers by wiping out "pornstitution" is a bit like trying to obtain justice for exploited farm workers by wiping out not only agribusiness, but small organic farms, farmworkers' unions, and restaurants all together. Yes, this would be the "radical" solution, but only in its sheer overkill.

At this point I should mention another anti-porn contention – that if anybody is hurt at any time under any circumstances in what can be broadly called sex work, then its best to uproot the whole thing. If there's the slightest demand, the argument goes, someone will inevitably be exploited to fill it. (See Dim Undercellar again on his ideas about the supposed "acceptable losses" of the sex industry for a fuller exposition of this idea.) To me, this is simply an argument for blanket repression, for not looking at context, and for a rather extreme application of the precautionary principle. Its a bit like banning clothing in order to get rid of sweatshops or uprooting all religion to deal with any manner of religious abuse.

To the protest that "porn liberals" don't treat the sex industry like any other industry, I say its the "anti-pornstitution" crowd who fail to treat it as such. The proper way to deal with the sex industry is to oppose those manifestations of it that victimize or exploit people while encouraging those parts that meet peoples needs, both as consumers and as workers. The same way we treat issues around the production of food, the production of media, or the production of anything.

By Way of Explanation

2006-08-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

I've decided to launch this blog, since I've found myself rather interested in the latest manifestation of the "Sex Wars" as they've been playing out on the blogosphere. By way of introduction, I've been interested in issues around pornography and sex work for a long time. To be rather "confessional", I like sex, I like pornography, I like visual art in general (particularly film, photography, and comics), and I've long held very strongly anti-authoritarian political beliefs. The politics of sex and porn is kind of an intersection of all of those issues, and I keep coming back to.

I'm old enough to remember the 1980s "Feminist Sex Wars" and have seen the sex-positive position go from despised minority to conventional wisdom. After many years, the Sex Wars seem to be back in a big way on the blogosphere. (What cultural and political trends this new "Sex War" represents and whether it will play out beyond the blogosphere is a subject for another post.) I've been contributing to articles on Wikipedia on these topics and occasionally contributing comments to sex-poz blogs. I finally broke down and decided to start a blog of my own. (I'm not sure how often I'm going to be able to update it – I'm going to shoot for at least a few posts a month and see if I can eventually go more frequently.)

The main topic of this blog will be the politics of sex and porn, however, I don't only want to discuss pornography in the abstract – as I said, I actually watch a fair amount of porn and am a fan/critic of it as much as any other art form I'm into. Some trends I find interesting right now are the rise of altporn, and the trend in toward sexual explicitness on otherwise "straight" narrative films, like 9 Songs. In other words, this blog will try and cover actual porn as much as "the issue" of pornography – I'm thinking a kind of cross between SmackDog Chronicles and Fleshbot.

So far I've referred to this as "sex-positive" blog. I haven't referred to it as a "sex-positive feminist" blog. I have my own issues around feminism. Its not that I'm actually anti-feminist per se (though there are some specific feminisms that I find pretty loathsome, and I think you can guess what those are). However, I do have issues with using the label myself – I'm male and I don't think I'd want to wear any label that inherently privileges the feminine above the masculine. Also, self-described "male feminists" I've come across rub me the wrong way – mostly they seem to anti-porn types with either a noticeable mean streak, like John Stoltenberg (Andrea Dworkin's other half) or blogger Dim Undercellar, or are annoyingly good-boyish like Hugo Schwyzer. I don't want any part of that. More generally, I have a hard time with "isms" and ideological straight-jackets in general. I like to refer to myself as broadly left libertarian, but beyond that, I'm pretty eclectic. I'm really more interested in ideas and actions than grand ideologies and movements.

Since the issues covered by this blog are contentious and prone to inspire flaming, I'll mention my rules around comments. I'm pretty loose and more inclined to make this a "free speech zone" rather than a "safe space" for my way of thinking. I'm not afraid of opposition or criticism. That said, this blog is my forum, and I reserve the right to block anybody if their behavior gets out of hand, at my discretion. Of course, I also reserve the right to hand you enough rope to hang yourself. ;-)