Many Contingencies

Why is the presence of Arab- or Middle Eastern- themed porn so totally underrepresented in the larger U.S. internet porn market? Oh dear. I’m already treading in dangerous territory. Then again, when am I not treading in dangerous territory?

Let me clarify my question. The aims of the West in the Middle East at present are clearly imperialist, clearly have deep debts to the imperialist, Orientalist projects of the 19th century. In that earlier phase of Western intervention into the Middle East and its local cultures, the sexually fascinated (to the point of being predatory?) modus operandi of Europe was undeniable. 

European men like Flaubert and Sir Richard Burton were enabled by their countries’ political and economic involvement in “the Orient” to go on sexually-charged tours of Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Arabia – and let us not forget Turkey! Both the word and concept of odalisque arrive with us as a result of European fascination with (and a particular reading of) harem life in Turkey. The odalisque is a visual trope common in Western art of the 19th century from which, one could reasonably claim, derived later pornographic themes like the pin-up, or the Playboy centerfold, or indeed any pornographic format in which the body of a woman is arrayed before the viewer as a meal upon a table.

The theme of “the Lustful Turk” was a significant category within early modern written and visual pornography itself. A book of that title (circa roughly 182 either spawned or is the most notable entity within a whole European genre of pornographic fiction involving the region we now call the Middle East. I don’t particularly care to spell out a remedial lesson on Orientalism, here, or what is implicated by the coeval nature of European sexual and political agendas in the “Orient” during the height of French and British imperialism.

Sex, war, and power all travel merrily along with each other in a dizzying game of leapfrog. So – where is the equivalent today to “The Lustful Turk” of old? Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t spend a lot of time discussing my own personal life in my blogging. I’m not sure why that is. I guess I’m generally a somewhat guarded person. I also don’t want to presume that the details of my life are interesting to others. When I share certain intimacies, it’s often with a degree of bombast, as if to proclaim my invulnerability: “Look at what I’m telling you, when I could be silently embarassed or ashamed – how ironclad I must be!” Which is, of course, bullshit. I’m terribly vulnerable, sensitive, and soft-bellied after my own fashion, although the distribution of these chinks in the armor follow no predictable pattern.

Tonight I’m alone, reeling after a week spent in a perpetual state of manic anxiety: illogical crying spells, discreet hyperventillation. School is back in session. Having been officially accepted into “the Program,” I look out over the next fifteen months with some imbalanced quantity of determination and terror. I have a limited amount of time to accomplish an absurdly huge roster of goals, many (most?) of which are self-imposed.

I want to keep blogging. I think it’s important to my overall growth as a thinker. It also helps my sanity, and makes me feel connected to some kind of rather ambiguous audience. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally! Pulling together this analysis has been like pulling teeth. Up until a few days ago, when it was preempted by anticipation of Britney’s comeback and the oh-so-utterly-impossible-to-anticipate contents of the Petraeus report, the Larry Craig scandal was on everyone’s mind. And certainly, I’ve set a precedent in this blog for discussing sex crimes, sodomy and men’s bathrooms, among other related matters. It seems inevitable that I should have something to say on this new and still-relatively-topical issue. It’s just taken a while to figure out what precisely that commentary might be, but perhaps now I’m ready to engage in some productive analytical meandering.

I think of myself (perhaps self-indulgently) as being radically sex-positive in my outlook. Sex is not merely an enjoyable pastime, or potential source of fleeting happiness. At its best, it constitutes its own topos parallel to or overlapping the rest of the world, an odd borderland between public and private, spoken and unspoken, in which fertile potential exists for liberatory moments and subversive revelations. Just because sex has all of this radical potential (and I’m defining “sex” far more broadly than others might) doesn’t make it innocuous. In fact, if it is to maintain this potential, it cannot be purely innocuous.

There is strong socio-political pressure to promote and accept that non-married, un-sanctified sexual behavior may be worthwhile only if it is utterly toothless, banal “lovemaking” by a committed pair of near-aged adults. Preferably with the lights off. Fucking or being fucked by a potentially dangerous stranger in a public toilet, as Senator Craig was apparently wont to do, is clearly not in line with this model. Just as clear, however, is the fact that participation in this kind of encounter does not always stem from closeted-ness and the inability of participants to live openly gay lives. Plenty of openly gay individuals may participate in “cottaging” and other such practices, although in so doing they risk being admonished by those intent on mainstreaming gay culture. Read the rest of this entry »

Alyson’s recent installation at the mayor’s office is getting some some under-the-radar attention… here, go check out what snarky blogsters are saying about the work they’ve dubbed (to Alyson’s amused chagrin) Ku Klux Kondoms…

Okay… I know I’ve been somewhat lax in posting. I’m working on something about Larry Craig and right-wing homoerotics. It’s forthcoming, and soon. I promise.

In the meantime, haven’t you been thinking to yourselves, “Golly gee, if this is the sort of shit she writes for fun, I wonder what her actual term papers are like?” Perhaps in spite of my better judgement, I’m giving you a chance to find out. I completed the following paper for Prof. Jonathan Walker’s excellent Queer Theory class this past winter.

It has a weak ending, perhaps, and some egregious tendencies towards the tangential. But I actually think it’s pretty good. I might even say I’m proud of it. At about 4000 words, it will be the longest single piece of writing I’ve posted here. If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, dig in.

                                            *                    *                     *                      *

Falling into Obscurity: Lesbians, Nymphomaniacs, and Prostitutes and the Triangulation of the Transgressive Woman in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Women of a certain inclination know how much they have to hide. They know about boxes kept under their bed, and the importance of setting up passwords on their laptop. They know, on their internet browsers, how to erase the history and empty the cache. They know when to lower their voices, and when to keep their mouths shut. They know a great deal about volume, actually, and the muffling of sound. They know when to roll over and try to sleep, when asking for more is asking for too much. They know about catalogs that sell items to be delivered in plain brown paper wrapping, and stores at which the shopping bags are black, unmarked, and opaque. Perhaps they even know phone numbers to call. Or bars at which to linger. Or maybe they don’t know any of these things. Maybe they only know how to get in trouble.

It’s not a matter of being caught with one’s pants down, a matter of slipping self-control on display. What “natural female impulse” could, in excess, manifest itself in such a way? No, to transgress in these ways is to admit to one’s disease. A (heterosexual) man can proclaim, “I’ll do anything to anything.” And he may be classed as a bad man – immoral, or weak, or a pervert – but at least this badness is imaginable, is somehow in keeping with the irrepressibility of a free man in a free society. In fact, what seems more natural, and more imaginable, than a bad man? And what more natural than a good woman?

Read the rest of this entry »

What was it that occurred, precisely? 

It was simultaneously such a success and such a failure — it couldn’t have looked more like a successful, classic protest in the public square. So many people, so many thousands of people, seeping into the city from all corners of the state. We believed in our own power, we were reminded of our sheer mass and volume. And we repeated the experiment, month after month after month, until we wearied and lagged.

In spite of its many successes — the catalyzing of morale, the creation of an awareness of our collectivity, the viscerally-perceived demonstration through massed bodies of our very existence as a significant, motivated, dissenting population — we failed to do what we believed at first we could do. At the outset, we believed we might stop the war from beginning.

And it was our very success in manifesting such awe-inspiring demonstrations that made our utter failure to be visible in the larger national discourse all the more glaring and chilling. We failed to make an impact on the nation that was proportional to what we had achieved in the streets of our own cities.

“Chilling” is such an apt word for the sensation I felt; perhaps it might also be described as a “sinking feeling.” The very clear discrepancy between our success in the actual public square and our success in the virtual one – it set many of us back on our heels. The experience undermined any whisper of faith we may have had that we were living in the kind of democracy in which the will of the people could not be ignored.

I think many of us felt compelled to “go back to the drawing board,” or at least to back away from full engagement with something we realized at last had become alien to our knowledge. What kind of animal was this political society? We’d all been trained, through the rhetoric of k-12 civics lessons to believe that “it was our own.” But the training in “how it worked” had obviously been based on obsolete specs.

This was four and a half years ago, now. Have we rested up? Is it time for the dormancy to be over? Do we know, now, something we didn’t know then about how to sneak up on the monster?

Joking! Just joking. But we have been having a bit of an email exchange. Read the rest of this entry »

As much as I’ve tended to embrace the value of (post)feminist self-critique, there’s a problem with lamenting women’s collective inculcation in the rhetoric of our own vulnerability and endless, spiraling victimhood – specifically the danger of finding oneself ludicrously bemoaning how we’ve become victims of a culture of victimhood. Unfortunately, the language of woman-as-victim is the language that traditional Western feminism best knows how to speak.

A common line in self-defense or rape-prevention guidelines is the always-unsubstantiated claim that, when in public and under attack, it is better for a woman to shout “Fire!” than “Rape!” or “Help!” Here are the two most oft-replicated phrasings of this assertion, used in identical form in numerous university, and community-organization publications on the web, and undoubtedly in print as well:

(1) “If you shout ‘help,’ some people will tend not to want to be involved in someone else’s problem. ‘Fire’ concerns them, and they are more likely to respond.”

(2) “Shout ‘fire,’ as people are more likely to come help if you do that than if you shout, ‘help.’ Fire is something that effects everyone, where as if you yell, ‘help’ people may be hesitant to get involved.” 

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been doing a lot of walking late at night, usually intoxicated, but sometimes without the distraction of music plugged into my ears. I’m a woman, and my mind wanders occasionally towards the logistical problem of my own vulnerability. This in spite of having taken measures to undo effects of the fear-mongering that passes for “rape awareness” in schools and the media (the media being 1980s feminism’s ‘strange bedfellow’).

I’m rarely nervous anymore, but if I were to feel that old frisson of anxiety, I could remind myself that I am as large as most men. I give minimal outward impressions of vulnerability, and can speak some of the verbal and non-verbal language of domination that is supposedly “male,” and constitutes what rape is all about. Furthermore, I have a more capacious well of rage than most persons of any gender in Portland, which tends to be a mild, timid, temperate town. I would not go gently in such a fight. Read the rest of this entry »

A co-worker told me this account of one former Marine, now father to a two-year old. The two year old rather precociously enjoys privacy while pooping in his diaper. While the kid was ensconced in the bathroom, focusing on the task at hand, the father shook his head and said, “That kid would never make it in the Marines.”

He then went on to explain — when he was training in the Marines, they shit when they were told to shit. Or, at least, they were supposed to. They’d come to the end of whatever they were drilling, and the drill instructor would bellow, “Now: GO TAKE A SHIT!”

Read the rest of this entry »