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?

I will quickly grant that there is a stock of images and concepts built into the Western sexual lexicon that relate to the Middle East and the Arab. The “Sexy Harem Chick” is still a viable Halloween option. Bellydance is still seductive. I Dream of Jeannie has lost almost all of it’s sexual cogency, but the echoes and filaments remain. The exotic, mysterious and vaguely “Eastern” woman is still an intelligible sexual archetype, but only just, while we seem to have completely forgotten the masculine seductive power of “The Sheik.”

Online pornography is another pop cultural realm, certainly, and only a fragment of American sexual thought/impulse/practice/desire can be said to be represented therein. However, the internet is the stage for vast amounts of themed sexual imagery and content being produced, sought, and made available to vast numbers of people. The question of what, precisely, the nature of pornographic culture of the internet can tell us about contemporary sexuality as a whole is completely unanswered as of this point. However, clearly there is a relationship between these two entities, neither mutually inclusive or exclusive.

When it comes down to online porn, the Middle East is not an overwhelmingly popular theme. If you search for “Middle Eastern” or “Arabic porn,” you’ll find it, of course. But you won’t find any such category represented should you visit the many sites serving as portals to online pornography’s vast and chaotic world – “adult directories” or “link listings” such as Persian Kitty or Richard’s Realm. These sites organize vast lists of links to web-based pornographic material using a fairly standardized, predictable and consistent set of genres or categories. These categories are to snippets of porn what “tags” are to blogposts.

The category or genre of a particular tidbit of online pornography (as many readers will know but perhaps some will not) may be derived from either the specific sexual activity represented or the kinds of people engaged in the represented activities. (“Voyeurism,” a fairly common category, is also kind of an odd-one-out, fitting precisely in neither of these two camps). The most common categories in the activity-based categories might be sketched out as follows: Hardcore, Oral, Anal, Group, Interracial, Gay, Lesbian, Fetish, Toys.

The most common categories in the sexual-actor-oriented group would be: Black, Asian, BBW (stands for “big beautiful women”), Mature, Young, Trans or ‘She-males,’ and Amateur.  As far as specifically ethnic categories are concerned, “Latina” has joined “Black” and “Asian” as a fairly standard category, with “Indian” (as in: the subcontinent) perhaps unexpectedly making a bid for fourth place in the most-commonly-invoked-ethnicities-for-purposes-of-pornographic-classification sweepstakes. The number of themes designated by the adult directories that are based on the readable ethnicities of participants are almost exclusively limited to these four general groupings.

I’ve spent more print-space than I had intended discussing the organizational methods of internet porn. Let me recap some earlier points, in the interest of returning to my original question. The word “interested” has two shades of meaning – one has to do with having curiosity or fascination, the other to do with making or having a claim or share in something. The West has long been “interested” in the Middle East in both of these senses. This interestedness continues today, bloody at its extremities.

In the 19th century, the Western fascination with the “Orient” was marked by a distinctly sexual dimension, the legacy of which remains in our sexual-representational lexicon in a less vital form. Cross-cultural sexual fascinations, as well as those that emphasize “Otherness,” remain powerful and viable. Particular, traceable pornographic tropes involving racial and ethnic markers continue to be a vital part of the way we organize our collective sexual imagination, particularly the branch of that imagination that comprises internet pornography. But the sexualization of the Middle East has largely lost its currency. Why?

Imagine asking the average American to describe a “typical Middle Eastern woman.” The image most likely to be rendered for you is of a silent, cowed, timid, completely veiled woman. This is not the same woman as the sexually confident, lasvicious, dark-eyed bellydancing seductress. These two archetypal images are in some ways fundamentally incompatible. Both images of the Middle Eastern woman have been a part of Western discourses since at least the 19th century, but have always existed in tension with each other.

By our own historical moment, the dominance of the image of the disempowered and asexual Middle Eastern woman has become fairly standard. We have 1980s Western feminism to thank for this. Western feminism in the late 70s through to the mid-80s (and on into today, in some circles of feminist thinking) attempted to unite women as a class globally by emphasizing the universality of female oppression at the hands of men and patriarchy. The flip-side of this benevolent, ironically “paternalistic” move on the part of Western feminism was its patronizing overtones and slightly nauseating self-congratulatory aspects.

In 1994, in an article entitled “Orientalism and Science Fiction,” author Hoda Zaki* wrote, “In many feminist circles, it is popular to view Middle Eastern women as being the most oppressed women in the world. Western feminists have ranked women’s oppression globally, and more often than not, western women emerge from this ranking as the most liberated…I resent the constant portrayal of Middle Eastern women as absolute victims.”

Although so-called-“Radical Feminists” have made their case for defining women who participate in pornography as “victims,” it can’t be denied that in general, pornography is not scripted around unwilling or timid women.

This begs the question: What stories are scripted around unwilling, timid women in distress? Somebody’s got to come rescue them! Who better than Captain America?

I’m going to have to end this inelegant, rambling essay in a more truncated way than I’d prefer. Images of Middle Eastern women as asexual victims of their own culture have triumphed in the popular American imagination over (equally flawed) images of exotic“Oriental” women as confident, mysterious sexual agents. “Good girls in distress,” damsels even, innocent madonnas-not-whores, they have become incompatible with the Western pornographic imagination.

The “we’re bringing them democracy” rhetoric,  cultural imperialism wrapped in the camouflage of reason and natural law, has been present in all attempts to defend our presence in Iraq. The most insidious rationale for wars on the Middle East is this urge to, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, “rescue brown women from brown men.”  

*Zaki, Hoda. “Orientalism and Science Fiction.” Food For Our Grandmothers. Ed. Kadi, Joanna. Boston: South End Press, 1994. 181-187.

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.

What else can I tell you? My dog shit on the carpet while I was indulging in some therapeutic shopping tonight. I hate wall-to-wall carpet, and would happily engage in a radical uprising constituted solely of the theft and incineration of all wall-to-wall carpeting in the greater PDX area. There is no adequate way to permanently and thoroughly clean liquid feces out of wall-to-wall carpeting. Let me just clarify that for curious bystanders. No. Adequate. Way.

I broke another wine glass while trying to bash open one of the turban squash from the volunteer vine growing out of the compost heap. (The most successful plant in my largely abandoned vegetable garden project was utterly unplanned. There’s a lesson there. Let me just tap my metaphorical finger to my metaphorical temple – a lesson.) I have managed to break all of the glasses that were actually constructed for the consumption of wine. Soon I will be drinking my favorite red beverage out of crude clay mugs and shot glasses, tea cups and salad bowls.

As you may have sussed, the lack of a truly appropriate vessel didn’t keep me from the grapes. I’m now going to attempt a trick, a flourish, a sleight-of-hand – I’m going to try to pull a less self-indulgent-and-pathetically-autobiographical blogpost out of my ass! Can I do it? That remains to be seen… It may not go up until tomorrow.

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.

Rendering unsanctified, traditionally unacceptable sex “non-threatening” to the mainstream has often involved a kind of community-enforced sexual self-censorship. There was an element of this in the Joy of Sex-style Sexual Revolution of the 1970s. The same phenomenon is very much at play in today’s mainstream gay-rights activism. Ultimately, the oppressiveness of constant exhortations to be always shiny, happy, healthy, loving and above-all public citizens has forced many folks of queer disposition to wonder precisely what kind of deal they are being offered by the activists who claim to be defending their interests.

Senator Craig has been left high and dry by Republican leadership. But he has also been noticeably left hanging by mainstream gay activism. Take a look at GLAAD’S “Recommendations for Media Covering Revelations about Senator Larry Craig,” and you’ll get a sense of where that neat-suited and sensibly-coiffed organization stands on the issue. From a queer-friendly, post-structuralist, Foucault-afficianado, Butler-reading perspective, I have found myself to be somewhat intrigued by left-wing and right-wing reactions to the plight of Senator Craig.

Of course, Craig is a Republican. In general, I strongly dislike Republicans, particularly Republican politicians, and am disinclined to feel or exhibit any sympathy for them. Racist, sexist, homophobic deathmongers, they cast votes against the poor to keep a class of workers desperate for paltry, unliveable wages, while spouting quasi-Christian hate/fear rhetoric in pandering to intolerant, ignorant voters. As several friends can attest, I’ve quite vocally proposed that Republicans not be allowed to have sex. For the most part, this stance derives from my simple belief that Republicans should not be allowed to be happy.  

My point here is that I’m not interested in defending Craig as a politician, or, really, as a human being. His racist statement that “fraud is in the culture of Iraqis” and suggestion that the people blasted by Hurricane Katrina had a similar cultural deficiency is plenty of evidence that this is not a man with whom I’d like to throw in my lot. But I must say that I’m much more comfortable accusing him of fraud, or, indeed, hypocrisy about fraudulent behavior, than I am accusing him of being a hypocrite about his own sex.

Republican politicians bank on (or perhaps truly buy into, occasionally) the sex-negative prudishness of a particular, modern, post-Enlightenment Christianity. And when the details of their own lives show them to be well-acquainted with the activities against which they preach – or vote – we rage at them for their inconsistency. Craig has been repeatedly lambasted for hypocrisy, but an accusation so worded suggests specifically that he “professes beliefs and opinions that he does not hold in order to conceal his real feelings or motives.” But to what extent is this really a valid accusation? What assumptions do such accusations of hypocrisy suggest, and how might alternate interpretations prove useful?

I’ve had no luck tracking down recorded incidents of Craig speaking against homosexuality (not to say they don’t exist). One thing we can be sure of, however, is that Craig has a record of voting against the protection of equal rights for people who are openly gay. He has clearly not supported protecting the civil rights of gay Americans who are out, and who do not wish to obsessively and excruciatingly subdivide their lives into a public civic life and private sexual life.

This issue of public vs. private is significant to the degree of being completely central – what is “the closet,” after all, but a metaphor for the movement between public and private? In gaining the privilege of being public, gay men and lesbians are called on to give up the privilege of being private. Of course, the “privilege” of being public is no minor thing. People are still being killed for their sexuality and sexual practice, still being beaten and harassed by civilians and ‘law enforcement’ alike. Individuals identifying as gay or lesbian have every right to demand a society in which their participation in the public sphere need not involve secrecy, shame, or fear.

However, while never wanting to undermine that fundamental premise, certain branches of queer theorizing have examined the other effects of the compulsory claiming and performance of a public gay identity. Before we name something, before we place it in a clear category, it has a breadth and indeterminacy and undecided quality that might feel a bit like actual freedom, a bit like real subjectivity. Before we round up someone’s sex and stamp it “Gay!” or “Straight!” doesn’t it seem possible that their sexuality could actually be…anything? A mystery? An unnamed thing, which the bearer gets to make up all on his or her own? In order to participate in the struggle for the right to be public, individuals must sacrifice some of their own indeterminacy and autonomy in their creation of self and sexuality. The notion of “queering” sometimes manifests itself as a reclaiming of indeterminacy, and a resistance to the modern mainstream’s obsession with inflexible binaries. 

One of the debates that surrounds the discourse on Craig’s circumstances involves the question of whether we should collectively roast him over a fire for his hypocrisy, or, alternately, have empathy for him, taking his participation in furtive sexual practices as a symptom of his fear and shame about his homosexuality. The idea that Craig is closeted in a sort of “classic” sense has been presented often in the discourse surrounding the scandal. In this model, he is “really gay,” but because of his age and the time and details of his upbringing he has never been able to come to terms with his “natural” sexuality. What makes him a hypocrite, to many, is Craig’s proactive pursuit of gay sex. Accepting a premise of a singular, binarized natural sexuality (straight or gay) to which one is born and with which one must come to terms, this active engagement indicates self-knowledge of himself as ‘gay,’ as defined within a binary model.

But what if Craig is merely resisting the choice between two impossible extremes of an inflexible binary? Craig’s political actions are only hypocritical if his “professed beliefs and opinions” don’t match up with his “concealed feelings and motives.” He is a hypocrite if he publicly denies a nature that he believes himself to have. But Craig has voted against protecting equal civil rights for individuals who do not conceal their sexuality, and make the nature of their sexual practice public, even as he himself has done his best to keep his sexual practices concealed, anonymous, and distinct from his civic life. (Granted, the ambiguous public-private nature of a “public toilet” as a venue for “private acts” does add a certain tension to this whole argument.)

In the past two years, six of the seven most notable sex scandals in U.S. politics have involved male Republicans caught out engaging in homosexual practices. Senator Craig is only the most recent in a list that includes Young Republican Glenn Murphy Jr., Bob Allen (R-FL), Mark Foley (R-FL), faux White House journalist Jeff Gannon, and Spokane’s late Republican mayor Jim West. Fascinating tales all, and not least because they suggest a great deal of territory in the nexus of sexuality, politics, and masculinity that we have yet to fully explore.

These men aren’t unaware of the sex they’re having. Nor are they likely to be unaware of their own power as individuals. They can’t all be unaware of their options, of the everpresent option to reinvent themselves in such a way as to live openly, and out, and gay. When their sexuality is forced into the media spotlight, these men have responded in different ways. And, in fact, the cases themselves are markedly different – ages, marital status, and the nature of the sexual practice under scrutiny. But all six men made the choice to engage in their homosexual practice in secrecy, in privacy, in a state of concealment. And all six men made political choices to reinforce a socio-political climate that requires, encourages – and perhaps most significantly enables and renders sensible – concealed, furtive, subculture-based sexual practice.

There are actually a few ways to interpret these facts. The standard interpretation might be that these men’s crippling horror at their own nature manifests itself in a double-life and a best-defense-equals-good-offense strategy of coverup in the political arena. Simply put, in this explanatory model, all actions of the gay right-winger stem from shame. Somehow, after reviewing details of, in particular, the cases of Foley, Gannon, and West, this explanation seems less compelling. Here’s another option: the culture and power-dynamics of furtive, secret, subcultural sex between men is gratifying for its participants. In preserving a social and political environment that requires, enables, and renders sensible such activity, what is actually preserved is a source of gratification.

Let me wind down my analysis by going far, far out on a limb. We rage at Senator Craig for hypocrisy because he confuses the hell out of us. We try to locate him within the victim vs. victimizer binary upon which old-school feminisms and the mainstream gay rights movement still heavily depend, and find it impossible to decide whether he is a poor, scared (thus implicitly ‘feminine’) victim of intolerant ideology, or a power-and-pleasure-taking (thus implicitly ‘masculine) patriarchal powermonger.

But perhaps Craig’s political actions don’t appear hypocritical at all if we view them as attempts, from a seat of great power, to privilege (or perhaps even preserve?) one set of homoerotics in relation to another. The homoerotics of the right-wing are perhaps easier to apprehend than we might first think. The left, generally, has been happy to imagine that all homosexual behavior amongst right-wingers is characterized by self-hatred and denial to peers, public, and self. But what if this is not so at all?

What if there is a whole, coherent culture out there of conservative men with wives and money, who fuck other men or are fucked by them? It would have something to do with military culture, of course. It would have to do with being a “real man,” being part of a male community, and with maintaining a clear line of dominance and hierarchy. Violence and sexual assault of-men-by-men would be treated as par-for-the-course, and consequences for such behavior would be minimized. But this kind of practice would also have to do with mentorship, and a paternal or brotherly sort of guidance, networking, and professional benefit. In some ways this particular kind of male homosexual culture would have a great deal in common with the oft-referenced patterns of homosexuality and homosociality in ancient Greek martial, political, and intellectual contexts.

Framing this as some sort of back room secret society is, of course, a little ridiculous, and not my intention at all. I said I was going out on a limb, and I’m quite conscious of being there. I suppose my aim is to redeploy, in the arena of contemporary socio-politics surrounding sexuality, an already very common perception of military culture and male cultures of power as being somewhat homoerotically charged. How might these fields interact? What may we do with this?

Larry Craig is merely a placeholder. On that level I do feel something approaching compassion for the man. Just a simple married rancher with too much money and a longstanding appetite for cock, he has become the blank center upon which a raging, embattled storm of cultural conflict is projected. Then again, he’s a total asshole when it comes to Iraq and Louisiana. So…fuck him.

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.

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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?

The transgression of being a sexually motivated participant-observer is different for women than it is for men. Gail Pheterson, in “The Whore Stigma, Female Dishonor and Male Unworthiness,” discusses the ways in which participation in prostitution is differently coded for men and women. As she puts it, “female dishonor is attached to whore identity, and male unworthiness is attached to trick behavior” (Pheterson  48). To extend this basic construction for our purposes, men with prostitutes or pornography are shamed for getting caught, for a lack of self-control, for moral slippage, while women participating in prostitution or pornography (particularly when they do so unrepentantly) are shamed as deviants, as unnatural, aberrant in their behavior, sick.

The currents of thought that led me to the questions I will ask in this paper started to take shape last spring while I was doing research for a paper on pornography. I was surprised at the frequency with which the audience for pornography was assumed to be, and often stated unproblematically to be exclusively male. (Or “almost exclusively male,” a self-defeating inclusive gesture with its built-in implications of female deviance.) This attitude manifested itself even within purportedly objective and not necessarily anti-porn academic work. In the post-internet era of pornography, such assumptions are rather easily punctured as problematic, although the good women at On Our Backs might have made a similar puncturing gesture as early as 1984.

What seemed more even more interesting than merely arguing that women do look at pornography was the idea that women have always looked, in spite of all the many prohibitions against such looking. And this “secret female gaze” needs to be considered, particularly in light of the prevalence of academic study of pornography that aims to prove a link between sexual representation and sexual violence by men against women.  I wrote the following (rather florid) passage last spring: “the idea of a secret female gaze unseats the construction of the pornographic as an aggressor-breeding aggressor, or as a radioactive toxin that impels men and women to their respective and apparently ahistorical sexual extremes – he who commits beastlike assault, and she who acquiesces to ruination.” The framing of the female socio-sexual role as “acquiescent object of male sexual attention,” whether she was further explained as victim, opportunist, or merely oblivious, seemed to deny the very existence or possibility of certain women, and certain practices.

Lesbian sexual activity has been met with the question, “But, what do you do with each other?” The unintelligibility of the act, for the outsider, has often been attributed to the lack of a penetrative logic – who is fucking whom, precisely? In the absence of a phallus, how do we even begin to make sense of this sex? I would argue that there is an extra dimension to this unintelligibility, even beyond the simple absence-of-cock. The lesbian sexual encounter must arise solely from female desire, must be driven in its initiation and follow-through solely by women’s impulse for sexual contact. No male sexual desire, no male coercion, force, or persuasion is driving the act. And thus it becomes “unthinkable,” to follow Judith Butler’s move. Something directly prohibited, as she explains it, is at least acknowledged to exist. Something so conceptually and ontologically challenging that it cannot even be directly prohibited inhabits a different space.

The word “triangulation” has multiple, occasionally quite divergent meanings. Often, though, it refers to processes by which hidden or unknown locations are determined by their relationship to what is known. One use of the word is to name the method for determining the location of an earthquake’s epicenter by drawing circles on a map around known points at which the impact has registered in a measurable way. The point at which all three circles intersect is the point from which the force emanated. While “locating” anything of a social nature with “scientific precision” is not a task for which I will claim any aptitude or inclination, the metaphor seemed a valuable one in imagining my task. Lesbianism, prostitution, and nymphomania (as-diagnosed, medically or socially), in the 19th and 20th centuries can be conceived of as locations at which women’s non-normative sexuality becomes visible, flares up out of obscurity, is surrounded by discourse the way nacre forms a pearl.

Foucault, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, discusses the way that after the turn of the 19th century, a “centrifugal” movement can be discerned with respect to sexuality – marriage, previously the site of most consistent scrutiny became a private, privileged, discrete center, around which peripheral-and-thus-deviant modes of sexuality were arrayed. These modes of sexuality (defined in opposition to the singular, sanctified, and presumably known “oyster” of holy matrimony) were to be interrogated, wrapped in a mediating discourse of science to protect the integrity and stability of middle class constructions of “normal sex.”

In the limited scope of this paper I want to lay the groundwork for, or try to map some of the ideas pertinent to, imagining a class of “desiring women,” formed by the social pressures and currents of modernity, who are invisible as a class. I have this notion of a figure, “the desiring woman,” or “the woman with transgressive desires,” who directly counters the prevalent figure of “woman as acquiescent object.” I want to imagine a place for this desiring woman in space and history, a community or continuum in which, perhaps, she made/makes sense. I want to examine the way she was and has been “present in her absence.” I want to look at the sexually-desiring-and-thus-transgressive woman, in Western society and culture post-Enlightenment, as a subaltern figure of sorts.

I will grant from the outset that there are troubling implications arising from such impulses as those I am claiming. Among them: why should the many real, diverse, and multi-dimensional women from which I would construct such a class be defined by the way they desire/d? Doesn’t such a formulation also merely serve to reinscribe, underscore, reify the very notion of difference and even aberrance upon which our exclusion from the dominant culture is based? And furthermore – if I am trying to find my forebears, trying to seek a historical and social sisterhood to make sense out of myself and defend myself against implications of deviance, is that not a problematic means of propping up my right to exist as I do? Why are trends with historical precedence any more right or valid than potentially newly minted human phenomena?

Sometimes the jangling voices of the post/feminist, post/Marxist, post-structuralist, postcolonial, queer and postmodernist theoretical strands trying to become coherent in my mind render me nearly paralytic before I even begin. But I must persist, there is a paper to be written. And even if I have no illusions that I necessarily can or ought to want to escape from those same “social pressures and currents of modernity” that have constituted my desires even as they deny them, it seemed that it might not be a valueless enterprise to shine a light on those pressures and currents by examining their social effects. There seem to be some things at stake in such a line of thought.

Reading Judith Butler’s and Eve Sedgewick’s ideas about ‘the closet,’ and about the troublesome politics of visibility, intelligibility, erasure/effacement, hiddenness, prohibition, and unthinkability added some theoretical dimensions to the ideas about subaltern history that I was already awkwardly wielding. If we “women of certain inclinations” as I have sketched us in my opening paragraph, must enact the compulsory heterosexuality that Adrienne Rich discusses, we must also adopt a compulsory attitude of lukewarmness to all things sexual.

How is this attitude enforced? Clearly, such a question is a complex one. Carol Groneman’s essay “Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality,” was a valuable resource for a variety of the angles I examined for this paper. One particularly chilling passage put into clear perspective the stakes involved in Victorian sexual discretion. In 1894 a medical doctor by the name of Block performed a “thorough physical examination” on a nine-year-old girl brought to his practice by her mother. Diagnosing from her response to his stimulation of her clitoris “masturbation tending towards nymphomania,” he performed a clitorodectomy (Groneman, p 357). This is a rather gross example (not merely in the colloquial sense), but it does show that, if the mechanisms compelling women to hide their sexual appetites exist on a continuum, one end of that continuum is firmly in touch with the materiality of the body.

We are compelled to leave as minute a trace as possible of our existence as such inappropriate, “unnatural” beings – what occurs in the historical record when this efacement occurs in real time? What kind of communities, continuums, and individuals can we imagine, retrospectively, when we are operating on different assumptions of women’s “natural” sexual inclinations, and then contextualizing that breadth of practice in the social strictures of the time? In Groneman’s words, “the behavior described in case studies of nymphomania – masturbation, lascivious dreams, lesbian relationships, sexual intercourse, putting objects in the vagina and urethra, clitoral orgasm – however mediated through the doctors’ presentations, permits us to glimpse a range of erotic activity of Victorian women that has generally been hidden” (Groneman, p 343). The sense Groneman presents of glimpsing that which is usually hidden speaks directly to the line of thought I’m trying to follow here, and to which I will return.

Rich’s idea of the lesbian continuum (once I was able to disengage it from the many aspects of her theorizing that I found odious), and Sedgewick’s concept of the homosocial added a dimension to my inquiry, inspiring an interest in the way that women’s sexuality has been alternately policed and validated by other women. What was the role of sexual communities in this effaced history? Can we talk about communities of sexually transgressive women, or a network? Is that, even, too simple a start? How has homosociality been regulated for sexually transgressive women? How have Western feminist movements since the Enlightenment, with repeating rhetorics of sisterhood, dealt with women’s transgressive sexuality? And what can be gained/lost from postulating a continuum between different groups of women with transgressive desires who can be located historically?

Perhaps I seem to be wheeling wildly away from my avowed theme, here. And yet, as I grapple with these ideas, and with the jangle of self-critique, it seems ever clearer that the story of women and sexuality after the Enlightenment is not merely coincidental to the larger social, political, and economic trends of the modern period. But before discussing this question, it would perhaps seem advisable to actually discuss lesbians, prostitutes, and nymphomaniacs as such.

What are some of the pragmatic questions involved in constructing a relationship between prostitutes, lesbians, and women diagnosed or otherwise classified as nymphomaniacs? First off, this is not precisely (forgive me) virgin territory. The history of feminism has been marked by the presence of debates on and analyses of women as sexual figures. Ellen Dubois and Linda Gordon, in “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought” discuss the ways in which feminist dealings with the sexual have always been defined by a tension between defending women’s rights to sexual pleasure and defending our rights to be free of or protected against sexual danger. Particularly since the “sex wars” of 80’s feminism, there has been much at stake in the active development of pro-sex feminist perspectives, and also with the development and voicing of lesbian and queer interests. Those two projects, pro-sex and queer, have tended to be mutually supportive and informative.

From that pragmatic mutual support have stemmed intellectual, historical, or academic projects that create connections between lesbian history and that of other women classified as sexually deviant. Joan Nestle’s “Lesbians and Prostitutes, a Shared History” is one example of this kind of work. Nestle in some ways reclaims or recuperates a problematic assertion of early “sexologists” that lesbians and prostitutes were somehow naturally linked. Nestle recasts this linkage as one of social context and subsumes her historical thesis within a call for sisterhood. The problematic projects which Nestle simultaneously draws from and rejects are discussed by Heather Miller in “Sexologists Examine Lesbians and Prostitutes in the United States, 1840-1940.” Groneman’s work about nymphomania elaborates the way that lesbianism was just one of many “deviant” sexual practices that could be folded into the medical category of nymphomania. These are just a few examples.

The way these categories – lesbians, prostitutes, nymphomania – interact is clearly worth looking at. Each category, each “sort of woman” is constructed by the matrix of society and language. But it might be said that of the three categories, lesbians and prostitutes are much more “ontologically secure.” While the state of being a lesbian or being a prostitute can be anchored to actual material practices in which women may engage (having sexual contact with women, having sex for money), the designation of nymphomania rests entirely on a qualitative call – women participating inappropriately in the sexual, women whose sex is not appropriate for women. Furthermore, the identity of lesbian, or of prostitute, can be claimed by the individual in question, whereas the designation “nymphomaniac” is not something that one can claim. It is a sort of status that must be conferred by the Foucaultian figure of doctor or criminalist.

Then again, in the very process of making such distinctions, trying to make a bid for the solidity of the first two terms in light of the slipperiness of the other, all manner of productive questions are raised. Those actual, material processes in which women engage, upon which I might so cavalierly hang my “ontological security” begin to waver like mirages. A woman may have sexual contact with women and not be a lesbian, is this not true? And she may never have sexual contact with women, and still be a lesbian, yes? What if she lives for years with a dear, dear, dear female friend, but never pushes to define the nature of the relationship beyond “friendship?” What if she trumpets disavowals of lesbianism, with much hellfire and brimstone, but masturbates to mental images of tits and cunts?

When it comes to the question of who, precisely, counts as a whore, things becomes similarly murky. The term has often been used interchangeably with “slut,” a term which, like “nymphomaniac” has no direct link to having sex for money. How many women marry men they don’t enjoy fucking, or love, or particularly like? They perform their conjugal duties with a professional, perhaps affectionate detachment, and receive, in turn, health insurance, subsidized car payments, perhaps alimony eventually, or a nice life insurance payout. In the 19th century, the economic aspects were even more clearly built into the institution of marriage. Who is having sex for money?

Also, there are multiple ways to barter with sexual favors outside of marriage that may never be called out as prostitution. If a two parties engage in a relationship that is largely defined by the exchange of sex and economically viable goods/services, but neither party acknowledges the similarities to prostitution – is prostitution occurring? What if the nature of the relationship is known within the community or social milieu, but still is not acknowledged as such? Is a woman in such circumstances a whore before an accusing finger is leveled to designate her, diagnose her as such? In the most present of present moments, we might call such an exchange an “intervention,” and perhaps stage it on a popular talk show.

The taking-on of identities as sex-workers and queer women, the claiming of a certain status and marker of self has for some been a source of strength and sisterhood, although Judith Butler recounts the moment of “going off to Yale to be a lesbian” with a sort of wry wistfulness. The action of claiming as a mantle what was once thrown at you as an epithet, or presented in medical jargon as your own personal pathology, has in these cases only manifested in the past thirty or forty years. Perhaps the “claiming of whore identity” was quite unimaginable several decades ago, much as the idea of “claiming nymphomaniac identity” seems rather improbable today.

There are political implications to claiming/defending the prostitute or lesbian. Irrespective of the unsettling experiment we have just conducted, the way the categories of prostitute/prostitution and lesbian/lesbianism have been mobilized is different from the way that ‘nymphomaniac’ has been mobilized. Perhaps it is fair to say that today two strands in Western feminism exist, with respect to sex, and that we can see this schism reflected in the ways these categories of sexual deviance have been utilized. Gordon and Dubois explain that feminists “inherit two conflicting traditions in their approach to sex” (Gordon and Dubois 7). One strand, they explain, has emphasized the dangers of sex, while another much less dominant strand encouraged women’s sexual experimentation and freedom.

Lesbian and prostitute stories never fit neatly into the story of women without agency, victims plain and simple, women over whom power is exercised. Lesbians and prostitutes have struggled with/in feminist discourses in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the mechanism of that struggle illuminates the limitations of feminist engagements with sexuality. Dominant feminism has repeatedly framed women as victims, claiming a sort of Nietzschean slave morality to undergird demands for clemency. Gordon and Dubois sketch the ways in whch feminist engagments with “sexual dangers” have transitioned from a primary concern with prostitution in the 19th century, to a primary concern with rape or sexual assault in the 20th (Gordon and Dubois 9). While 19th century feminists’ concern for their “fallen sisters” was a profound step in the development of a cross-class notion of progressive action, their actual engagement with prostitutes was always patronizing and their goodwill towards these women always hinged on the definition of prostitutes as victims of men, and on prostitutes claiming this victimization. This same “deal,” whereby feminists embrace and champion victims, but only as victims, is echoed in the Angelides essay “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality.”

Nymphomania before the 1920s was a phenomenon of the middle classes – so, incidentally, was white Western feminism, although efforts were made to “reach down” to the poor or otherwise “unfortunate.” The discrepancy in expectations of “natural” middle class female sex and “natural” lower-class or non-white female sex opens up an interesting dimension for analysis. The same traits that required diagnosis and treatment as pathological, deviant, or abnormal in middle class women were assumed to be natural in women of the working classes. Working class, poor, peasant, or non-European women were assumed to have more “animal” sexuality – more desire, less compunctions about fulfilling their desire, more diverse practices and partners. This articulated with ideas about cultural evolution and “civilization” as a pinnacle of human achievement to which all people were more or less successful at achieving. All humans might be equally human, but not all were equally “civilized.”

The notion of the hidden world, underworld if you will, of poor, animal sexuality in which prostitutes and lesbians exist and make space for themselves, and of the need to triangulate points to locate the coordinates of actual life in this shadow-zone are joined by a much more venerable image, that of the fallen woman. The figure of “the fallen woman” in Victorian literature and popular culture is still intuitively defined for us – any woman who has sex out of wedlock is a candidate for such an assessment. But, invoking our earlier discussion of the slipperiness of definitions and categories when it comes to women’s sex, it is clear that a moment of recognition must occur for this label to fall into place. If conducted in secrecy, in shadow, if traces are neatly efaced as one goes, if the actions one takes are not named or interrogated, it seems that avoiding fallenness (and the inevitable downward arc of social destiny attached to such a designation) was a distinct possibility.

“Fallen women” were linked to a social stratum that was an object of study for progressives and/or human sciences in the middle classes. The lower-classes, and nonwhite cultures were seen as  scientifically “discoverable,” but doesn’t this imply the extent to which they were not “known?” “Falling” could result in being expelled from the middle class, absorbed into the lower class, and thus absorbed into an invisible world. The Victorian middle class imagined that this absorption led inevitably to death. Tales of “fallen women” ended with the death of the ruined woman. But don’t representations of death sometimes simply suggest the limits of the imagination? What was really happening there, in the no-man’s-land, the here-be-dragon’s space between the closely guarded boundaries of middle class culture and the death-by-class imagined by that same middle class?

To what extent, we may wonder, was the anxiety surrounding nymphomania profoundly articulated to anxiety about the permeability of the boundaries between social classes, and the un-naturalness of social divisions? If a woman may be born into the middle class, white, of a “good family,” and because of her sexual behavior “fall” into a state of “ruination” – what does this construction suggest? The anxiety here is symptomatic of the tensions between paradigms of social evolution and universal suffrage. How do we reconcile ideas of fundamental equality and fundamental difference?

Before the late 18th century, it has been argued that women were generally understood to be as just as sexually desiring as men – just as lewd, with similar sexual agency. The transition that occurred was fundamentally linked to the shifting understanding of human nature, society, and law that accompanied the Enlightenment and concommitant period of political upheaval and reimagination. Women’s sexual, fundamental, “Natural,” biological difference from men was inscribed and reinscribed in part as a way to make universal male suffrage imaginable, thinkable. In short – “all men are created equal, and we are all defined as a class because we differ from women.”  Joan Scott, in her book Only Paradoxes to Offer, French Feminists and the Rights of Man,  has illuminated how this transition both creates the possibility/necessity for feminism, and mires it in paradox – women must simultaneously demand equality, premised on the absence of difference, while coalescing in a political class of women-as-women, organized around their status as discrete/different.

Constraints of time and space force me to draw to a close. I have only been able to partially cover my concerns, and have completely failed to address the issue of “subalternity” directly, although I think the concept informs the entire paper. Have we “located” our mysterious specter, the “desiring woman?” Not precisely. But I think that the value of placing the figures, concepts, histories, and categories of women designated by the terms “lesbian,” “prostitute,” and “nymphomaniac” in relation to each other is clear. The process of examining what it means to live within the category “woman” (or for that matter, the category “man”) in the modern era to the present, is enriched by doing so.

 References and Works Cited

Angelides, Steven. “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Seuxality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 10.2 (2004): 141-177.

Arondekar, Anjali. “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.1.2(2005):10-27.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991.13-31.

Dubois, Carol & Gordon, Linda. “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought.” Feminist Studies 9.1 (1983): 7-25.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Groneman, Carol. “Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality.” Signs 19.2 (1994): 337-367.

Miller, Heather Lee. “Sexologists Examine Lesbians and Prostitutes in the Unites States, 1840-1940.” NWSA Journal 12.3 (2000): 67-91.

Nestle, Joan. “Lesbians and Prostitutes, An Historical Sisterhood,” & “My Mother Liked to Fuck.” A Restricted Country. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1987.

Pheterson, Gail. “The Whore Stigma: Female Dishonor and Male Unworthiness.” Social Text 37, A Special Section Edited by Anne McClintock Explores the Sex Trade. (1993): 39-64.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Hetrosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4 (1980): 631-660.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Only Paradoxes to Offer, French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Sedgewick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1985.

_____________. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Soltan, Margaret. “The Lost Narrative of the Lost Woman.” Feminist Studies 15.3 (1989):563-572.

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.

[EVAN] This seems to be along the lines of some themes you’re exploring in your blog lately: 

Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war: “For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic… Accordingly, we state: …War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks.  War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body.  War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns.  War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.  War s beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others…Poets and artists of Futurism! …remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art…may be illumined by them!”…   

“*Fiat ars—pereat mundus*,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.  This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.”

  –Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Epilogue. 

[CHLOE] Yes, I’ve encountered that one before. And yes, it does provide food for thought, an interesting angle. But, of course, the question to which this line of thinking delivers me is — if war and violence have so much  potential for beauty (which they do), then what, really, is the value of ‘beauty’ (so narrowly defined) after all? Which is the question Benjamin is putting out there, I suppose, when he refers to this aesthetic move as “evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’”

I’ll easily grant the beauty potential of degradation, suffering, pure destruction (Dr. Strangelove, anyone?). But the way that this is used in any sort of defense of same seems to be just another indicator that the mind/body schism of modernity is a device that can get away from us, cease to be a tool for intellect and become a social virus.

[EVAN] I don’t know.  I sent you that quote because you keep getting on this kick of really trying to take those who glorify violence seriously, at least in a certain sense.  That’s probably good, I think there is some kind of value/beauty in mano-a-mano struggle, but I’m not sure that its not also the ugliest thing in the world.  What about the struggles in 13th century France, “Kill them all, god will know his own.”  This is the place where a whole village was (supposedly, accounts vary) taken, and everyone’s eyes were cut out, one by one, their lips and noses removed so that their living faces looked like skulls.  They were put into a line with one hand on the shoulder of the next man and the foremost left with one eye to guide the rest back to the next Cathar refuge.  Then think of all the catapults launching excrement  over city walls to destroy the other side with dysentery, of the kings and soldiers drawing all their people into the city walls and everybody desperate and scared, but mostly hungry and thirsty; wondering if in fact they weren’t going to wake up in the morning because the muscles which moved languidly, lethargically the night before just wouldn’t have the strength to move the following morning. And then think of mustard gas and people dying from excess vomiting and chemical warfare and perfect diseases killing everybody  indiscriminately and skin flaking off in charred powder and burnt out lungs and brittle vocal chords with people crying in a Mickey mouse voice “help me, help me…”. Because that shit is what war is really about. That plus the winning side desperately raping and pillaging to try and still their own sense of horror (it is worse to do these deeds than to have them done to you, worse to lose faith in others than to lose faith in yourself).

So yeah.  We shouldn’t lose sight of the value of life-or-death struggle, in the value of we-must-win-against-all-opposition.  But when someone has to choose to become a soldier (I mean really, not from the point of view of some sort of machismo illusion, viewing all war as an extension of greco-roman wrestling—though I doubt whether its often been done from any other point of view), its a really fucked up decision.  And every moment of beauty is probably punctuated 10-fold by moments of disgust.  And you’re probably sacrificing yourself on an altar whether you win or lose, live or die—you aren’t really going to be ok with the outcome and the circumstances.

But yeah, there are moments of beauty: all the moments, where a person gives up their safety of home, body, morals, etc. for the sake of a dream.  All the moments where a soldier throws himself hopelessly into the fray purely for the sake of others (”Move out and draw fire” is a phrase a Green Beret I knew used to say jokingly, but I knew that was “haha, only serious”).  Its beautiful because it’s already a defeat, and being broken is one of the most beautiful things that can happen to you.  I don’t know why that is, or what to make of it, other than that it has something to do with the kind of doubt you always are desperate for, something to do with the world presencing itself before you and you becoming just a part in it (”we are so small amongst the stars, so large against the sky”–Leonard Cohen).  Bleh.

Fuck, I hope that doesn’t bring too much negative imagery to the surface.  Sorry.

[CHLOE] Okay, first of all, as best I can tell, when you refer to this “kick I’m on”  you’re talking specifically about ONE PARAGRAPH of my recent writing, a coda in parentheses at the bottom of an essay, which I placed there specifically to counter such arguments that you now seem to suggest I’m making.

In part I put in that paragraph because of YOUR own defense of the honor in being a soldier, which you may or may not remember making. On some level, also, that one paragraph is an acknowledgement of Nietszche, and what Foucault proceeded to do with Nietszche.

If you’ll kindly review the rest of my many hundreds of recent words, you’ll be reminded that I don’t spend a lot of time glorifying war and violence. Duh. Incorrectly framing responses to my writings as arguments or corrective measures makes me peevish. As you can probably tell from my snippy tone. Sigh. I’ll stop that.

For the most part I take the horrors of war, that you are referring to here so explicitly, as obvious givens. Perhaps that is the trouble here — or troubles, plural. A flaw in my own self-presentation, perhaps, is to not make my baseline awareness of continuing atrocity explicit, for one thing. But in a much larger sense, I do think that the collective lack of a basic cognizance of the “shit [that] is what war is really about” is one of the reasons we as a society continue to let our government fight them.

The point I’m trying to make in writing about men, violence, and war is coming from a place of compassion for those who have had guns placed in their hands. Cannon fodder, is what they call them. I am fully aware of how “the winning side desperately raping and pillaging” does so “to try and still their own sense of horror.” While I wouldn’t quite say the following, as hyperbole it makes the point I’m trying to make perfectly: “it is worse to do these deeds than to have them done to you.”

Men who become soldiers are damaged by war, because war is horrific. But why do they keep throwing themselves into it? That has to do with who we are at home. It has to do with gender, it has to do with American society. If social change is going to occur, it is going to occur in many registers, through many different kinds of action and engagment. The register in which I most frequently operate is one in which I use language to make social critiques — but I like to try to point out the correspondence between my register of operation and others.

What does philosophy have to do with society? What does society have to do with politics? What does beauty or the sublime have to do with any of it? In this particular context I’m not using the word “beauty” in a way that can be neatly contrasted with “ugliness.” I’m using “beauty” as a gloss for “aesthetically valuable,” encompassing sublimity, which I think is actually more often applicable to the aesthetics of the horrors of war. Appropriately, the reference to Italian fascism in the early 20th century brings up a whole slough of interesting thought on the effects of modernity on conceptions of beauty and aesthetic value.

Again, what I was trying to accomplish in that one-paragraph coda was to acknowledge that, yes, perhaps there is beauty in the horrors of war and the masculine culture of violence, but that these nodes of aesthetic value are simply not enough to legitimate their continuing unexamined and unchecked.

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.” 

This reasoning always “clunked” somehow when I encountered it in the past. No support beyond these rather weak explanations is ever presented for this claim, although in other instances the writer may trot out, as a flourish of sorts, a vague reference to “statistics.” How, indeed, would one statistically sort out the relative effectiveness of shouting “Rape!” versus “Fire!” in a sexual assault scenario?  

The more troubling dimension is how this sort of prescription serves to reinscribe an impression of society as largely indifferent to incidents of sexual assault. The society wherein such guidelines make sense would be one in which men – and women who don’t self-identify as feminists – view rape and sexual assault as “someone else’s problem,” something that doesn’t “affect everyone.”  

Frankly, I don’t think this reflection of society is an accurate one, or a useful one. I think that the suggestion that the world is so very senselessly hostile simply reimpresses upon women a fundamental and unshifting status as victims. All feminist practices that lean so heavily on the Cult of Woman as Victim need to banished from the motherfucking temple, post-haste.

Certain strands of the Western feminist tradition have made a prominent place for adversarial social politics, for the carving out of “us” versus “them.” The creation of a “safe” ideological space requires a circling of the wagons. But sometimes in the process of creating this so-called safe space and casting it as absolutely necessary and legitimate (as well as radical and exciting), the overarching task of feminism as a transformation of society as a whole gets lost.

In formulating pragmatic guidelines from the starting point of an adversarial worldview, this particular wing of the feminist movement has effectively made a statement about normative “non-feminist” behavior. In the version of society implied by the recommendation to cry “fire” instead of “rape,” non-feminists are defined as non-victims, and as such they must necessarily be anti-victim, anti-feminist, and anti-woman. This rendering of society-at-large pitted against woman-as-victim is absurd and hyperbolic in itself. But it has a further side effect of lending some kind of credibility to an idea that callousness and lack of basic compassion are normal traits, merely conservative. This leaves us with little hope, little faith in the possibility of change – and that hope is what fundamentally enables change, is it not?

Those of us inheriting the women’s movement must contend is the fact that almost every sword in our collective armory is double-edged. Of course, the tension between (1) the pause inherent in moments of critique and (2) the forward momentum necessarily maintained for activism is not merely familiar to the feminists of the current wave, but to anyone who struggles with questions of social change.

Do I mean, in critiqueing the practices of the rape-prevention machine, to suggest that such action is fruitless, worthless, silly? Not precisely, no. Rape is an event surrounded by shame and injunctions to silence. The repeated recirculation of rape-prevention and rape-survival discourse prevents this silence from taking hold, and swallowing voices that need to be heard. It doesn’t really matter what’s being said, on some level, as long as the bubbles keep breaking the surface of this pond that tends to stagnate.

But activism at its most problematic is a bourgeois practice driven by self-congratulation, a device by which the privileged seek to undo the imbalance of their privilege by “giving back.” Their practice need not necessarily be effective for some activists, because the only important aspect of their work (to them) is that they do anything at all. From this self-congratulation there may follow complacency about methods and practice – or even wholesale rejection or foreclosure of new ways of thinking about the issues at hand. Complacency in this case ultimately means a shutting down, in practical circles if not theoretical ones, of further analysis of what rape is, what it means, how it functions with respect to gender and society, and what it really means to heal. A further schism between practical and analytical feminism fails to serve the best interests of all of society — women and victims, as two distinct categories, included.

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.

Beyond all of this moderately useful chest-puffing, I can remind myself that statistically men are more likely than women to be victims of violent crime, and are more likely to be randomly victimized. While they are reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to less often be victims of sexual violence, it is commonly suspected that men are far less likely to report or acknowledge sexual victimization. Also, I believe my earlier piece on sodomy, rape, and some of the statistical results of games of definition suggests other doubts we may have about such a blanket statement.

If they are indeed so vulnerable to random, violent attacks, why aren’t men and boys subjected to earnest (paranoid?) debriefings about the importance of never walking alone to their cars at night, or proper technique for poking hypothetical (mythical?) attackers in the eyeballs and crushing their nasal bones with the palm of one’s hand? Not to mention the ever popular grab-yank-and-twist maneuver (the girls know what I’m talking about).

There is a suggestion lurking here, and the suggestion is that men are somehow inherently violent. This is a very common premise, though profoundly flawed. The less commonplace, more implicit extension of this suggestion is that men’s supposed natural proclivities for violent behavior, in a universal moral sense, render them more deserving of violence. So goes the implicit reasoning: Men are much more likely to be beaten half to death by strangers, but such men are always already violent beings themselves and are thus somehow “in their element.” 

Is aggressive male behavior “natural” or “cultural,” inherent or contingent? Does an answer make that much difference? Well, yes. If men are somehow “naturally,” or “chemically” predisposed to violence, this particular discussion is pointless. But the supposed connection between testosterone and aggression has been thoroughly unsettled in medical and scientific study. No proof of a chemical root for male aggression or violence exists, and no accumulation of behavioral data can be used to defend an assessment of male violence as “natural.”  

But all males, goes a different argument, have had some cultural indoctrination into the physicality of aggression, are somehow “prepared” for random violence in a way that women are not. There is no need for official outreach sessions on knee-to-crotch technique for males, as they have already been through the unofficial (and more effective) training of masculine socialization which incorporates self-defense by necessity. And there’s some validity here, after all, if we wish to make a case for the differential manifestation of violent behavior along gender lines as a cultural phenomenon rather than a natural one.  

But how often does aggressive behavior truly become or translate into violent behavior? And how well does a fluency in the code of male posturing and dominance behavior actually prepare one for violent physical struggle? Perhaps I should reconsider deriving a sense of security from my knowledge of “the verbal and non-verbal language of domination” that I mentioned above. Understanding and a sense of ownership of the code of male dominance may result in experiences of male-on-male violence being more intelligible and perhaps thereby less traumatic for the victim. But are men as a class really any better prepared to actually defend themselves from random physical violence? I’m not convinced.

The idea of women as bearers of virtue and men as bearers of vice is an old trope in the West, one which Western feminism has been somewhat shameless about utilizing for its own purposes. But what are the further implications of framing men as being somehow “of violence?” The apex of masculinity becomes the soldier, as one whose nature has been modified to be most purely male. The soldier is the “distilled” male, gender impurities purged. The soldier’s task is to go abroad and kill, rape (traditionally, literally, or symbolically), and destroy. And then he must come back into the ‘bosom’ of his own society to be forgiven and healed, and reminded of all that is soft and kind and orderly and nurturing.

He is able to come back into the fold because he has turned his share of toxic violence outward, spent it outside of the community. He was a debtor to society because of his perceived inherent capacity for violence, this innate threat written on all male bodies. We demand of men that they sacrifice their lives and bodies for the collective sin of ‘male’ violence. But the culture of male violence is constructed to guarantee this continual sacrifice, this continual stream of bewildered guilty parties, seeking to make recompense for something they’ve been told they are.

(Is there beauty and honor in bloodshed, in the dance of posturing and dominance? In a revolver at ten paces, and the swift grunt of exhalation when kicked in the gut. The adrenalin and the hair standing on end, and the locked eyes, when a challenge has been leveled and the air is somewhat electric with possibility. Dogs’ blood on a cinderblock wall, or the beady eye of a fighting rooster. Raised chin, hands up, balls of the feet, readiness. Bombs falling, and gunfire, and your brothers and comrades in arms are living or dying and you have something to do with that.  Yes, of course its beautiful. But its never clean.)

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!”

The 28 men in the group would then all run to a bathroom on the second floor. Three stalls,  no doors. They had 15 minutes to collectively take care of business, and the process would be accompanied by vigorous harassment of whoever happened to be on the pot. When 28 men are trying to shit in 15 minutes, no one can really go fast enough.

If at all. When asked, the former Marine said that he “just couldn’t do it.” He’d hold it for days, then get up in the middle of the night. One wonders if he felt any shame for his inability to shit on command — something our society demands only of dogs and soldiers.

If this phenomenon was occurring anywhere else in society we’d call it abuse and pathology. If such exertions of biological self-deprivation and mortifications of the flesh are signs of honorable fortitude, we ought to be drafting anorexics, bullimics, and self-cutters.

Where is the line between having autonomy over one’s body, and being completely within a system of discipline? America sells the military to young men as a means of gaining autonomy, self-respect, some kind of self-mastery.  These are young men, perhaps, who feel themselves to be at the mercy of their circumstances, their future lives and choices dictated by class or race or past mistakes. It must take some particular kind of unease with oneself to want to be erased and rebuilt as some other kind of being.

The military will make a man out of you, so goes the wisdom. You’ll be all that (someone like) you can (ever hope to) be. You’ll be the master of your own destiny.

You will not, however, be the master of your own lower intestine. That privilege will be belong to the U.S. government until you are otherwise notified.