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The respondents to the personal ad I mentioned in the first post fell into three rough categories, which overlap and share some common features (don’t read these bullet points if you’re upset by the kinds of shit these cretins fantasize about, which would be completely understandable):

• The dudes in the first group were the least overtly terrifying of the bunch, but they were creepy and offensive in their own way. Most of them wrote what could best be described as novellas and used the word “art” in their comical and terribly written blatherings about their BDSM “philosophies.” Their descriptions of their sexual fantasies were like letters to Penthouse Forum written by dudes who wear eyeliner, with a lot of “trembling,” “aching,” and “quivering” in between the generous helpings of “pussy” and “cock.” They all described the mental and physical sensations they would cause our poster to experience down to the last detail with the kind of confidence that only men who are terrible in bed possess. Nearly all of them explained that their ultimate purpose was to help their submissives grow as human beings and that they understood that feminism had caused emotional conflicts for women who felt the “natural” “feminine” urge to submit to a (much older and wiser, naturally) man/dad/teacher (for a bunch of purportedly countercultural motherfuckers, these guys sounded an awful lot like Promise Keepers). Many of them addressed our poster as “little one.” Honestly, I thought I was reading the lyrics to a George Michael song half the time. Retch is right. These guys may have even fooled themselves into believing that their particular sexual fetishes are the kinds of things that women “crave deep within their souls,” but they’re kidding themselves with all their talk of transgression. 
• Then there were the dudes who didn’t bother to pretend there was any kind of philosophical basis for their desire to dominate and humiliate (their words, not mine) women. Their responses were all detailed descriptions of the kinds of sex acts they’d be carrying out on her, with nary a question about what she might fancy. They got very specific about the kinds of tools they were bringing to the table (literally and figuratively) and exactly how they would restrain our poster so they could “rape” her “asshole” and whip her “tits” and “cunt” with whatever instrument their shockingly uncreative minds could come up with (usually a belt). They too described the sensations this would cause for the poster, because they were just positive that they could make her “cum over and over” by hitting her and calling her a “filthy little slut,” a “cum slut,” or a “little whore.” These dudes made no attempt to disguise the fact that they get off on humiliating and hurting women, though they did dress that up a little with candle wax, leather, and various bizarre implements. (A lot of them were really into shibari, a — surprise! — Japanese bondage technique involving rope. Seriously, fuck Japan.)
• The third group was by far the most frightening. They read the word “submissive” and creamed their shorts at the idea that there was a woman out there who’d let them act out Max Hardcore vignettes on her. None of them had anything to say about the “art” of BDSM or the sensations our poster would experience, but rather just told her which hole they’d like to rape her in (guess which one came in at number one) before they ejaculated on her face. Her wishes did come up a few times, always in the form of the insatiable desire to lick semen up after being raped. That’s about all I can say about that lest I break something or kill myself. 

I told you that shit was gnarly. Sorry. 

I suppose a lot of people will claim these last guys aren’t a part of the BDSM scene, and that’s true, but what’s the difference between them and the guys in group two? That they’re less fruity about their rape fantasies? That they don’t pretend to be a part of some revolutionary sexual counterculture movement? Please. All of these dudes share one thing in common: they derive sexual pleasure from dominating and humiliating (and in many cases hurting) women, and they’re all foaming at the mouth at the idea that there are women who will eagerly submit to the worst humiliations they can come up with. That they want the woman to be into it too doesn’t make them cool guys, it just means they don’t want to have to feel guilty. These motherfuckers at worst hate women and consider them to be subhumans, and at best think of women as mental children that they want to fuck in between teaching them life lessons. 

The serious analysis is still to come (and I’ve got some more results of my research to report), but I’m tired if this shit for tonight.

To be continued…

Posted in General Haterism, Girls Are Pink, Boys Are Blue, Rape and Rapists, Sex-positive Feminism Is Neither, What the Fuck?   Tagged: bdsm, feminism   

BDSM is two parts hilarious, three parts terrifying.

It’s hilarious for a lot of reasons, chief among which is the theatrical aspect of it. It might be a result of my being unlikely to respond positively to orders, but I really can’t imagine doing aught but snickering at someone handing out orders to me with the expectation that I’d get all excited by it. I realize that role-playing gets some people all hot and bothered, but that shit is lost on me. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings here, but until someone really smart tells me they’re into role-playing, I’m going to assume it’s the domain of idiots with no sense of the absurd and people who go to Medieval Times and call each other “sire” all night without the excuse of being wasted. I mean really, who besides people who can’t let go of their high school theater days can prance around in those stupid costumes and deploy all of that ridiculous Renaissance faire lingo without laughing too hard to maintain a boner? 

Sex therapists can often be heard advising couples to try role play to “spice up” their sex lives. What a fucking bizarre idea, right? Apparently, in our warped culture, sex is not sexy enough anymore. You’ve got to throw in some power exchange, some foreign objects, some corny outfits, or some absurdly trite verbal exchange in order to make sex sexy. Seriously? How fucking silly. Kink, in general, is about as embarrassing as this.  

But there’s more to it than that. That kink is seen as the remedy for a lack of sexual contentment says a lot about where we’re at culturally with regard to sex; kink, at its core, represents an attempt to derive as much excitement and titillation out of sex as possible while avoiding real intimacy. It’s a lame substitute for what sex can be, an attempt to substitute adrenaline for intimacy, because real intimacy can be quite a frightening concept for people who’ve absorbed the idea that sex is about power and satisfying base urges. Sex may not be sacred, but it’s got the potential to be a bigger deal than using the toilet. It’s a unique way for people to bond and it’s kind of sad that so many people are missing out on that in the quest for ever more absurd couplings of adrenaline and orgasm. 

A lot of people will make the claim that kink will create a bond between the two people engaging in it, but that’s a bit of a red herring. Sure, experiencing fear with someone will tend to create a sense of shared experience (and thus an attachment) between two people, but is that the kind of bond a relationship should be based on? People who have been held hostage together tend to form bonds, too, but no one’s throwing a party about that shit. Sexual adventurousness can be a healthy thing, provided that it’s not being used as a substitute for the bond that ought to exist before it begins. Unfortunately, we’ve all bought into the idea that sex with the same person over a long period of time will necessarily grow boring and that a long-term couple will need to do it outside, pretend they’re doing it with other people, bring new people/objects into the mix, or otherwise alloy the experience with extraneous mental or physical sensations. We’re told that without these additions to the sex mix (that sounds like a Chex mix with pretzels that are shaped like boobs and wieners, which you can consider patented as of now), we can assume that one or both partners will cheat.  

Well, maybe they will. Not because it’s true that sex with the same person must necessarily become boring, but because physical and emotional brinkmanship have become an integral part of modern sexuality to the ouster of intimacy. We’ve gotten the idea that sex is boring if it isn’t coupled with adrenaline, and that only happens when you’re with someone new or when you’re doing something emotionally or physically frightening. Ideally, that adrenaline that comes with getting busy with someone new will be replaced by the kinds of excitement and exploration that real intimacy can make possible, but when it isn’t people often turn to kink rather than considering the idea that they might be with the wrong person. Kink is the solution to the problem that compulsory marriage creates: couples who don’t belong together feeling like failures because their relationships suck. And kink nearly always involves a power differential. Think about a few examples of kink, from the most pedestrian role-playing to the most extreme forms of BDSM and see for yourself whether that’s true.  

It’s true. And because we live in an oppressively misogynistic culture, that power differential usually expresses itself in male dominance and female submission. Mainstream sex and pornography (the line between which I fear is rapidly disappearing) reflect that dynamic in very clear ways: in general, men are aroused by female pliancy, and women are aroused by their ability to arouse men. Women are objects, men are subjects. 

And here’s where BDSM comes in. As funny as my hazy Hot Topic-esque tableaux of the average BDSM interchange might be (at least to me), it ain’t no joke. BDSM, all of the corny posturing aside, is nothing but a highly-concentrated and more obvious remix of the mainstream conception of sex as something men do to women. If misogynistic mainstream sex is meth, BDSM is ice. 

Now I promise I’ll get to the data…

Posted in General Haterism, Girls Are Pink, Boys Are Blue, Rape and Rapists, Sex-positive Feminism Is Neither, The Wide World of Porn   Tagged: bdsm, feminism, porn   

I fancied myself a real iconoclast when I was a teenager. I had pink hair, lots of holes in my ears and various other places, and a penchant for Keystone Light, cigarettes, Black Flag, and responding to nearly all queries with, “Fuck that.” Being involved in one brand of counterculturalism predisposes one to sympathizing with members of other rebellious subcultures, so I naturally had a few goth friends (I mean goth in the 90s sense, not the current sense – goths are supposed to be maudlin and listen to The Smiths, they’re not supposed to be angry and listen to Avenged Sevenfold). The mixture of teen hormones, Siouxie and the Banshees records, and the bad influence of a few of these goths led me to a fleeting fascination with the world of BDSM. It sounded transgressive as fuck, which I was definitely down with, but I really had no idea at the time what went on in the BDSM scene. The internet was still the domain of adults who wore braces back then, and I had no idea of the existence of scene magazines or anything of the sort. My vision of the BDSM scene was a shadowy mélange of brocade corsets, Soft Cell songs, and the kind of sexual histrionics only teenagers and idiots are capable of imagining without laughing. You could say, I suppose, that I had a Hot Topic-esque understanding of BDSM.

I am loathe to admit this in a public forum, but I worked at a Hot Topic store when I was 18 and 19. Actually (ugh), I was the manager of a Hot Topic. Don’t worry – I knew it was a bunch of poser bullshit, and I made sure my employees and customers also knew it, but I worked there. This was the mid-90s, the era that saw the rise of shopping mall counterculturalism and era in which incense, plastic pants, and band t-shirts made the jump from the bong shop to the shop next door to Wet Seal. It was the worst era in the history of music, youth culture, and fashion the world had yet seen, and I think a cultural sewer spill started then that has created the cesspool of uncreativity we now live in.  It was the era that gave us The Crow, Marilyn Manson, and Nine Inch Nails, three cultural phenomena that would eventually make the world into the kind of place where Marines could call themselves goth and people who couldn’t get enough of Adam Sandler could get into S&M and buy each other leopard-print fur handcuffs as bridal shower gifts.

But that hadn’t happened yet, so I was curious rather than derisive… for a few days. I lived in San Diego at the time, and the gay part of town, Hillcrest, in addition to having one of the best record stores in the 619 area code, also had a BDSM gear store called Whiplash. One day on an outing to that record store I convinced a friend to go into Whiplash with me. I’d like to say I got a thorough education on what BDSM was all about that day, but all I left the store knowing was that there were people in the world who wore head-to-toe latex catsuits with tassels on the crown and pre-installed butt plugs and that there were more varieties of whips than there were bands I thought were “gay.”

I picked up a magazine that day that would provide me with plenty of fodder for thought and snickering over the following few weeks. It was basically a collection of ads for dommes who charged for their services, and my friends and I spent many a drunken night prank calling the phone numbers and coming up with explanations for what kinds of sex acts the euphemisms in the ads really referred to (dude, what the fuck is “flying with champagne and caviar”?). We decided to take our “research” a step further in internet chat rooms (hey, we were teenagers, and what else did teenagers do with the internet in the mid-90s but irritate people in chat rooms?). Half fascinated and half delirious with mirth, we told strangers we wanted to get into S&M and asked them what they thought. Of course we were immediately inundated with private messages from old men, which we shrugged off. It got really boring. No one wanted to tell us about the parties where everyone listened to Joy Division in libraries with Gothic architectural flourishes while wearing corsets and blindfolds and lightly spanking each other with riding crops, so we forgot all about it. We had no idea, obviously, that we had stumbled onto the real world of BDSM and that our vision of the whole thing only existed in Anne Rice novels.

I didn’t think much about BDSM after that episode until recently, and I’ve only thought about it lately because it’s come up in a few random conversations I’ve had about whether there’s such a thing as an inherently degrading sex act (see Porn Part 9, forthcoming).  I’ve always left BDSM alone because I thought of it as a private sexual preference (I still do) and I’m not really into discussing people’s private sexual behaviors. I talk about sex a lot, but it’s usually in the context of discussing larger cultural forces and how they tend to play out in people’s personal lives. I don’t condemn specific behaviors (unless they’re patently fucked up, which you’ll see some of in the third post), but rather prefer to discuss the ways in which our desires to perform certain acts might reflect the influence of oppressive cultural ideas about gender, power, and sexuality. (I want everyone to re-read that last sentence before they even consider commenting on this post or any others in the forthcoming series. I’m discussing the dynamics involved in BDSM, not telling anyone who practices BDSM that they suck or should be ashamed of themselves. I’m not going to approve comments from people who want to pretend there’s no difference between the two.)

I read other radical feminist blogs. I know what the prevailing opinion on BDSM is. But I wasn’t ready to just dismiss the whole thing without doing some research of my own. I had a long conversation about the topic with the Esquire, and we figured one approach would be to put a personal ad on a website that will remain unnamed in four markets (New York, LA, San Francisco, and San Diego) to see what kinds of responses we’d get and to see what we could glean about BDSM therefrom. The ad was for a woman in her 20s interested in exploring submission (and that’s about all the ad said). In four days we got over 400 responses, and I read them all very carefully. I then wandered around the internet looking at various BDSM info sites, reading up on the various BDSM societies in cities around the world, and looking at BDSM porn. That’s right, I took about nine for the team (it wasn’t cool, so I expect any of you I happen to run across to buy me at least four beers to repay me for suffering the trauma).

I’m anticipating several objections to this approach. First, I suppose people will argue that it’s uncool of me to post a fake personal ad. I don’t care. Bots do it all the time. Second, people might argue that by presenting myself as a female submissive, I’m seeking out the kinds of responses that will confirm my suspicions that BDSM is all about men dominating women. Wrong.  I also posted an ad for a submissive male and got almost no responses from women. Third, I’m sure I’m going to hear about how empowering dominating a man can be for a woman, and that I’m focusing on female submission to confirm my own conclusions. Wrong again, but I’ll get to that later. Fourth, I’m sure plenty of people will bring up BDSM among lesbians and gay men. I’ll get to that later, too, but for now I’ll just say that the point here is that mixing sex with power is a problem, and that in the vast, large, wide, ample, immense, huge majority of cases, men wield the power and exercise it on women. 

Basically, all of the objections people are going to raise are going to be attempts to poke holes in the claim that BDSM is nothing but a distilled and adorned manifestation of our culture’s sick gender dynamic of man as subject, woman as (hated) object. The fact of the matter is that the bulk of BDSM practices center around female submission, or one partner taking on a “feminine” and submissive role. I’ll admit that there are infinite variations in human sexual desire, and that there might be three people on this planet who practice BDSM in ways that fall outside of that dynamic (though I doubt that), but I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the vast majority of cases, which is what we’re going to talk about here. From here on out, unless I say otherwise, I’m using the term BDSM to refer to what goes on in the vast majority of cases. So, if you plan to comment, I’ll ask that you keep in mind the fact that you can’t refute an argument that is true in most cases with a single counterexample, even if it is your own personal experience. Your experience matters and will be acknowledged, but not to the erasure of everyone else’s. I don’t want to tell you to closet yourself or to be ashamed of your desires, I want to examine some of the assumptions involved in the BDSM lifestyle. I’ll suffer no accusations otherwise. Be warned.

With that bullshit out of the way, on to the results of my “research”… 

Posted in General Haterism, Girls Are Pink, Boys Are Blue, Rape and Rapists, Sex-positive Feminism Is Neither, The Wide World of Porn   Tagged: bdsm, feminism   

… but I have the flu and I have to avoid thinking about things that might make me puke even more than I already have been. Rest assured, though, a post on BDSM is on its way, as is Porn Part 9.

Posted in Stuff and Things      

It’s over at pisaquari’s place, Buried Alive. She’s got a ton of awesome content (and I’m not just saying that because she included me), including some really interesting interviews with well-known radical feminist bloggers. Don’t fuck this up. Go read it.

Posted in Stuff and Things      

There is a lot of confusion in the world today as to what constitutes a “right.” Seriously, if you think about it, the idea of a “right” that inheres in a human being but transcends the will of human beings is pretty weird. That’s why there are very few cultures outside of those that inherited the idea from ancient Rome that even have a linguistic equivalent for the word “right.” For example, the Chinese translation of “right” is the word quanli, which also means “privilege.” If you take the two characters quan and li on their own, they mean “power” and “benefit,” so the Chinese equivalent for the word “right” could be translated as “the benefits that derive from power.” The “right” as it is conceived of in the western legal and social traditions is not an easy concept to grasp in its entirety, even for those of us who have grown up with the concept. Even in western countries in which the definition of the word “right” is more or less agreed upon, we can’t seem to come to a consensus on what should be considered a right for every human being.

Let me tell you about a rather stupid situation I found myself in a few weeks ago. I’m going to Kauai in January and have a reservation for a rental car, and I need to have a driver’s license to pick that car up. I realized a few weeks ago that my California license was expired and that it had been for just over a year. I don’t drive in New York because I’m neither rich nor stupid, so I hadn’t given the status of my license much thought since I moved here. I called the New York DMV and told them I needed to come down and trade in my expired California license for a New York one, and they told me to piss off since it had been expired for over a year. In an attempt to weasel my way out of dealing with the tests and driving lessons involved in getting a New York License, I called the California DMV and tried to get them to send me a renewal. They also told me to piss off and that I had to come back to California if I wanted a California license. I made up some sob story and told them I couldn’t live without a driver’s license, and the DMV agent repeated the line I first heard in License to Drive and would come to hear on a daily basis as I made my way through driver’s ed: “A driver’s license is a privilege, not a right.”

Whatever your thoughts are on whether the government has any place deciding who can and can’t drive a car, you have to admit that in the grand scheme of things my “right” to drive legally is really not that important when one compares it to other phenomena to which rights normally attach; I’m a little more concerned with my right to not get killed, raped, or detained by government officials for no reason. Arguing with the woman at the DMV that I have a “right” to rent a car and drive it around does, on final analysis, seem pretty stupid and whiny, does it not? Eh, fuck her. The DMV and its employees are all assholes.

Still, it got me to thinking. People seem seriously confused about the difference between a right and a privilege these days. Deciding what falls under the rubric of “rights” is a difficult task, and gaining any kind of universal consensus (even on the most basic of human rights) is nearly impossible because the discussion is landmined with the participants’ conflicting cultural and religious values. Fuck, we haven’t even reached the point where we can agree that we all have the right to not be murdered. “Culture” gives everyone who wants one a handy excuse for barbarous behavior, and the weenies who come from places where rights have come to include the right to act like an asshole if one’s “culture” says it’s OK don’t seem to want to raise any kind of serious objections to people in Afghanistan stoning women to death for having the temerity to have been raped, to gangs of soldiers raping women and children left and right in Darfur, to the international sex trade in which women and children are held against their will and raped repeatedly not just in filthy dens of iniquity in Asia, but even in American and European cities. 

It’s a little odd to think that we don’t seem to see many people taking a serious stand in their daily lives to secure and protect basic human rights for these people, but that we have dumbasses like Lars Larsen harping on the radio every day about the government’s having violated his “rights” by forcing him to wear a seat belt when he doesn’t feel like it. Or people like [insert local Libertarian idiot radio talk show "personality" here] whining about the fact that inheritance taxes infringe upon the “rights” of people like Chuck Bass. Or Larry Flynt crying over a perceived threat to his “right” to free speech coming from feminists/human beings with morals who don’t think he ought to be allowed to profit from hate speech and disseminate anti-woman propaganda with impunity. 

What we are seeing in each of these examples is classic rights inflation coupled with willful myopia. These over-privileged, whiny little assholes who’ve never had to deal with any sort of serious infringement upon their rights (even if we conceive of the term “rights” broadly to include life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, a big house, a pure-bred Labrador, unlimited micro-brews, a big-ass truck, a higher salary than their talent and skills warrant, more social prestige than their worth as human beings can account for, and the freedom to act like Larry the Cable guy and then ask people to take their points of view seriously) have come to see their privileges as rights, and to use language that ought to be reserved for decrying the most egregious of abominations to defend those privileges. They think they have a “right” to say/publish/broadcast whatever hateful, demagogic bullshit comes into their Coors Light-saturated cortexes, but are totally unwilling to take the rights of those affected by what they’ve said/published/broadcast into account. They have a “right” to drive around with no seat belt on, but want to reserve the “right” to sue someone who hits them for causing injuries the seat belt could have prevented. They claim a “right” to keep every cent of money they receive in an inheritance, despite the fact that it’s a windfall that they didn’t even earn, ignoring their debt to the social and economic structures (which can’t exist without government intervention) that allowed that wealth to accumulate.

And don’t even get me started on MRAs. Those motherfuckers think that their “rights” are in danger every time someone sneezes. 

And this is where porn comes in. Men have come to assume that using porn is a right. How many of my readers have been in a relationship with a dude who thinks he’s entitled to use porn and that it’s your responsibility to “get over it”? How many of my male readers have used porn while in a relationship, knowing that it made your partner uncomfortable (or worse)? How many of my readers know someone who is struggling with the feelings of anger, betrayal, and inadequacy that a partner’s porn use has created? Why, might I ask my male porn-using readers, do you feel entitled to do something that hurts someone you (purportedly) care about? 

I have a suggestion for women who are dealing with a porn-using partner: start making out with other men until he stops. Tell him it isn’t cheating because there’s no penetration — and because you don’t feel anything for the other men — and that he’s lucky because you’re coming home to him. Tell him that, since it isn’t technically cheating, he has no right to try to tell you what to do. And then tell him he’s being a hysterical, whiny little bitch if he doesn’t just get over it, that he’s just jealous. I know, yeah right.

I know men don’t want to give up using porn. Why should they when they know they don’t have to? It’s there, it’s often free, it does the job they want it to do, and they’ve already convinced everyone that they’re entitled to do so. Maybe because it hurts the people involved in its production, it hurts the women who have to deal with men who use it, and because it hurts the women they are in relationships with. A man who uses porn while he’s in a relationship is basically saying to his partner, “I care more about the fact that I want jerking off to be quicker and easier than I do about the fact that someone I’m jerking off to might be being raped, about the fact that it hurts you and damages your self esteem and security in our relationship, about the fact that it is detrimental to our sex life.” He’s also quite plainly telling her that he sees women as objects, herself included (unless he’s a “separater,” in which case he sees some women as objects and others as Snow White). 

I’ve said this before, but let me make myself perfectly clear: using pornography in a relationship amounts to emotional abuse. It is not a woman’s responsibility to “get over” the damage that her partner’s porn use causes. It is his responsibility to stop causing the damage. Despite what our ever more porn-addled culture wants to tell us, men do not have a right to use pornography. Pornography exists because men run shit in a patriarchy, and because the use of women’s bodies is one of the chief privileges mean reap from a patriarchy. Sure, almost everyone may do it, but what the fuck does that mean? Just because a privilege is a norm does not make it a right. 

Men might not come out and say they conceive of using porn as a right, but their arguments in the face of their partners’ objections make it fairly clear that they see it that way. The men who take issue with my analysis of the porn industry consider using porn to be a right, or else they wouldn’t bother arguing that they ought to be able to continue doing something that has been proved to be detrimental to women’s lives. Dudes in general feel entitled to unfettered access to women’s bodies, and to unfettered access to footage of any pervy thing they can dream up being done to women’s bodies. They’ve gotten so used to privileged access to women’s bodies that they’ve come to see it as their right as men. That, my dear readers, is complete fucking bullshit. 

Heterosexual women have three choices when it comes to this: avoid men (if only it were possible to will oneself into lesbianism), find a dude who will respect our emotional boundaries, or tolerate being abused emotionally. Only one of those options is acceptable, and when more of us start making that clear, more of them will have to come to grips with the fact that they are not, in fact, entitled to shit, and that having sexual access to women is a privilege, not a right (think of it like driving). 

Posted in Corporate Assholery, General Haterism, The Dudes Who Run Everything, The Misogyny Show, The Wide World of Porn   Tagged: feminism, porn, rights   

I thought I was done with this series, but I guess I’ll never be. It’s kind of like the New Kids on the Block that way. OK, not really. 

In part five of this series, I tried to explain the ways in which porn use affects all women. My point was that — as study after study has shown — men’s porn use has a net negative effect on women’s lives because men who use porn are affected by it. Men who use pornography are less likely to take women’s claims of sexual harassment and rape seriously, they are more likely to assume that a rape victim was “asking for it,” and they are more likely to disregard women’s physical and emotional boundaries. It’s not as if it takes a rocket scientist (or a radical feminist blogging ninja) to figure out that frequent exposure to media in which women are transformed from human beings into hyper-available sex objects will tend to color a dude’s perceptions, especially when that frequent exposure is tied to orgasm. Pavlov’s dogs and shit. 

Men apparently find my saying that offensive for some reason. I suppose being told that you aren’t in complete control of your attitudes and feelings is pretty unsettling, especially to dudes (who usually manage to make it through life without being told they’re hysterical every time they get upset). Nonetheless, it’s a fact. Each and every one of us suffers under the heavy load of bullshit that advertisers, entertainers, government officials, news media, pornographers, our parents, our friends, and geeks off the street have heaped on us since we were born. I mean, yeah, some of us try to exercise a little critical thinking here and there, but no one has completely escaped social and commercial influence to attain some ultimate state mental autonomy. Sheeit, I’ve been complaining about the beauty industry since I was, like, twelve years old and I still shave my legs, so what hope is there for the average unthoughtful, unquestioning, Red Bull-drinking porndog? (Thanks, Laurel, it’s in the mail tomorrow.)

Porn has an impact on the way men see and interact with the women in their lives. It’s a fact (one I’m sure 30 Helens would even agree upon). But that isn’t what I want to talk about here.

What I want to talk about is how very odd it is that men who use porn will often make the argument that they can separate porn from real life. Is it just me, or is that a tacit admission that what is going on in porn is objectionable? And also, are these men not admitting that they have virgin/whore complexes? (Seems that way to me, but it might just be hysteria. Or maybe jealousy.) How can a dude say that he can separate porn from real life without admitting that he is a misogynist?

Porn is the first exposure most men have to sex in this day and age, and is usually their only source of information as to what women want and like in bed until they get together with real women (who are still not likely to set them straight). As such, to hear a dude argue that porn doesn’t have an effect on how they end up behaving toward real women is almost funny (or would be, were it not for the tragic results of their incredible cluelessness). Any woman who has slept with a dude who has used porn repeatedly knows the impact of porn on male sexuality: men who are really into porn are generally thoughtless, rude, insensitive, fumbling, and boring to sleep with. They also tend to display a fairly pronounced inability to relate to women emotionally, because they’ve lost the ability to see women as full and complex human beings (which also makes them shitty sex partners).

But let’s pretend for a minute that tying orgasm to images of women being dehumanized doesn’t introduce any problems into the sexual and emotional relationships men have with real women (har har). Let’s say that a man can wank all day to the most egregiously degrading and emotionally and physically violent porn on the internet and then turn around and treat his partner like an equal in every sense of the word (snicker). Is there not still a problem? How about the fact that the fluff-from-reality-separating porndog needs two kinds of women, one that he can respect and love, the other that he can use like a toilet? That he needs the world to provide him with both good girls and whores in order to be satisfied? Uh, doesn’t that mean he doesn’t see women as complete human beings but rather simplistic caricatures of sex roles? That, to me, doesn’t sound much like any kind of equality I’ve ever heard of, nor does it sound like there’s much separating going on besides the sorting of human beings into the limiting, dehumanizing, and wildly misrepresentative categories of “virgin” and “whore.” 

And even if I wanted to let these “separaters” off of the misogyny hook (I don’t), I’d still have a pretty rough time not noticing that they are totally down with class exploitation, that they don’t mind taking advantage of the fact that a woman’s social, political, educational, and financial opportunities have been limited by her having been born poor and female in order to supply themselves with cheap tossing fodder. 

The sense of entitlement bewilders almost as much as how much the new episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia suck does. More on that sense of entitlement to come. 

To be continued…

Posted in Corrupting the Children, General Haterism, Girls Are Pink, Boys Are Blue, The Wide World of Porn   Tagged: feminism, porn   

Awesome. 

There’ll be a post soon, I promise.

Posted in Stuff and Things      

In fact, we’re sushi plates. I bet you didn’t know. 

Despite my lack of cable and my lack of interest in television, I’ve somehow managed to see two separate reality television show episodes in which the renobs on the show sit around a table and eat sushi off of the naked body of an Asian woman. The first was on the first season of The Surreal Life, in which viewers got to watch Vince Neil drink copious amounts of Miller Lite and try to bang everyone in the house while Corey Feldman whined about the fact that no one understood his veganism or whatever. The second was on the seventh episode of From G’s to Gents, a Jamie Foxx production on MTV in which some guy named Fonzworth Bentley (riiight) — who acts as a consultant to rappers who want to start acting like they’re into Lacoste sweaters and Scotch instead of Starter jackets and sizzurp — teaches 14 clowns pretending to be gangsters how to pretend to have manners and class.

(I won’t get too deep into my views on From G’s to Gents here except to say that it might be the greatest show ever made. The contestants display the highest stupid asshole quotient per episode of any show I’ve ever seen, which is my main criterion for evaluating entertainment. I won’t get too deep into my views on The Surreal Life either, except to say that it sucked. I don’t want to watch famous people act like assholes because all famous people are assholes. It’s only good when the person acting like the asshole is absolutely clueless and unwarranted in doing it.)

I remember back in 2003 when I witnessed a live human being being used as a plate for the first time thinking to myself, “Wow. That’s really fucking offensive. And it’s also really gross.” But it had been a busy week, I didn’t have a blog yet, and I lived in LA at the time, so it didn’t seem all that egregious in comparison to, like, everything about daily life. I would have forgotten about it had I not seen it again while watching an episode of From G’s to Gents with a friend, who deemed it “the most offensive thing” he’d ever seen. (Guess he’s never seen a Max Hardcore video.)

The Wikipedia entry on the practice, known as nyotaimori  (にょたいもり - I’m learning Japanese), has some interesting things to say:

Before becoming a living sushi platter, the person is trained to lie down for hours without moving. She or he must also be able to withstand the prolonged exposure to the cold food. Body hair, including pubic hair, would also be shaved, as a display of pubic hair may be seen as a sexual act.

Before service, the individual would take a bath using a special fragrance-free soap and then finish off with a splash of cold water to cool the body down somewhat for the sushi.

In some parts of the world, in order to comply with sanitation laws, there must be a layer of plastic or other material between the sushi and the body of the woman or man. Wrapping a naked person in cling film may also be regarded as a form of fetishism.

Another variation of the human platter is the ”bondage sushi bar”, which can be found in some BDSM conventions and play parties in Britain and in Europe. In this variation, the individual acting as a living sushi plate is tied up to hinder movement or prevent it altogether. Nyotaimori could be considered a form of erotic humiliation.

Well, well, well. As interesting as all that is, I think whoever wrote the Wikipedia article on nyotaimori has missed part of the point. I don’t doubt that there is some kind of sexual fetish that involves eating fish off a naked person. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s a sexual fetish that revolves around riding a unicycle while selling cotton candy and juggling tacos. But that isn’t what’s going on on these reality TV shows. It’s something much less sensational, much more mainstream, and thus much more frightening. 

Here’s how the whole thing went down on From G’s to Gents: contestants Creepa, Shotta, Cee, E6, D Boy and T-Jones (that’s right) had recently been given a lesson on table etiquette by Ted Allen (the food guy from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, because apparently only gay guys know how to behave like anything but troglodytes at the dinner table) and were sent to dinner with a few of Mr. Bentley’s “business associates” to put what they’d learned into practice. The “business associates” consisted of three Japanese guys who Bentley described as being real sticklers when it came to manners at the dinner table. In reality, they were just three Japanese dudes in suits who were willing to humiliate themselves by histrionically emphasizing accents they may not have even had and by caricaturing themselves with overly stern behavior reminiscent of a bad stand-up comedian’s impression of Hirohito.

Once the “G’s” entered the room where they’d be eating, the Japanese dudes instructed them to sit down cross-legged around a table upon which a naked woman covered in sushi was lying prone. (I can’t find a clip of it, but you can watch the episode here.)

 

The “G’s” looked a little confused when they saw the woman, but the Japanese dudes put them at ease by telling them that eating sushi off of naked women is, like, traditional as fuck in Japan and that they should just ignore her and git ta eatin’. Obligingly, the “G’s” sat down and ate, spending what might have been hours with these men jabbering away and slobbering all over their sushi rolls without once looking down at the human being they were using as a plate or making a single gesture in recognition of her humanity.

Needless to say, I noticed a few problems:

1. The woman wasn’t Japanese. If eating sushi off of a naked woman is some kind of tradition in Japan, something that we ought not to balk at because “it’s part of their culture” (retch), then why did they have to hire a Southeast Asian woman to fill the role of the Japanese woman who, because it’s a part of her culture, should naturally be all about getting naked so a bunch of strangers could eat cold fish off of her body? Could it be that Japanese women in Los Angeles are generally better off financially than female Southeast Asian immigrants, and hence don’t have to allow themselves to be used as tableware (by men too stupid to tell the difference between a Japanese and a Thai woman) in order to make a living? Or maybe the men don’t give a shit about the fact that they’re enjoying a “traditional Japanese meal.” Maybe they don’t care what color the woman is as long as they get to use her naked body like a Dixie plate. (Could it also be that Asian women don’t actually have an irresistible innate craving for rice and mistreatment? I know that might come as a shock to white men everywhere, but it’s nonetheless a fact.)
2. As an advanced Japan hater, I make it my business to keep abreast of all the weirdest Japanese trends and traditions. I know what hentai is, I know what bukkake means, I know about the predilection of Japanese men for schoolgirls and vending machines that dispense soiled panties, but I’d never heard of any Japanese “tradition” that included using women as tableware. I had to look into it to make sure I was right, and it turns out I was (surprise). Apparently yakuza dudes — in addition to being into tattoos and perms – started the practice, but now it’s spread and the kinds of people who idolize gangsters and dudes with perms and a lot of tattoos. However, not only is eating sushi off of naked women not a Japanese tradition outside of the realm of the yakuza, but regular Japanese people apparently think it’s a European trend. 
3. It isn’t cool to use human beings as tableware. Using the bodies of human beings like objects as a means for expressing power and status makes you a horrible human being. I don’t know what else can be said about that. 
4. Sitting around a table with a naked person lying on it requires one to be constantly conscious of where one places one’s gaze. It should have occurred to these dudes, if only because of their own discomfort, that if you have to avoid looking someone in the eyes, you’re doing something wrong.
5. It’s gross. Someone call whatever department it is in LA that gives restaurants A, B, and C ratings and give these motherfuckers a Z. 

I suppose the idea that MTV and VH1 are promoting absurd racial stereotypes and the most obscene forms of misogyny ought not to surprise me, but I can’t help wondering why I Googled nyotaimori and didn’t find a single blog entry or media article with a tone that could be characterized as anything but amused. Are we still human beings, or have we really been reduced to a bunch of robots fueled by porn, stupid rap songs, and Mountain Dew? I don’t know what the answer is, but the fact that anyone has the ability to ignore the eyes of a naked human being lying right in front of his face while he tells stories and tosses back sake and California rolls is a fucking outrage, and the fact that we’ve reached the cultural nadir at which no one takes notice of something as egregious as women being used as tableware on national television during primetime is terrifying.

This place is fucked. Anyone wanna move to the Nicobar Islands with me?

Posted in Corporate Assholery, Corrupting the Children, General Haterism, Girls Are Pink, Boys Are Blue, Sociopathic Marketing, The Misogyny Show, The Wide World of Porn, What the Fuck?   Tagged: feminism, fetishism, from g's to gents, mtv, nyotaimori, sushi   

Plagiarism is pretty uncool isn’t it? (See this if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

Posted in Stuff and Things