Runcible Rape

So, if you're a person, you're probably aware of the latest spasm of insane nonsense in Republicans' ongoing battle against women who have bodies: Todd Akin's assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape were rare enough to be a non-issue in outlawing abortion, because the wombs of women who were victims of "legitimate rape" had a mechanism by which they would "shut that whole thing down."  This fantasy must be a great comfort for anyone who is genuinely troubled by the idea of a woman suffering through an additional humiliating, expensive, life-threatening ordeal after a traumatic assault, yet who must still demand that such a woman be prevented at all costs from accessing safe abortion services.  Akin was at first roundly decried by all sane people everywhere, then right-wingers demanded that we shut up about how terrifying it is that this idiot is allowed to make laws on health care and science and that we ought to only talk about how bad the economy is.  After that, a number of defenders of the sanctity of life until birth emerged from their Morlock caves, and now we have a media "debate" about "legitimate rape" just as we had a "debate" about going to war in Iraq, torture, global warming, et al, ad nauseum.

I am, by nature, an internet feminist, and so in this case I want to discuss issues of language.  When Akin laid his giant head on the sympathetic lap of Mike Huckabee the day after his moronic remarks, he explained that he had misspoken, and that by "legitimate rape" he had of course meant "forcible rape", rather than something that was worth the little ladies getting all het up over.  This term, "forcible rape", has a long history in the anti-abortion fight, most recently when Paul Ryan and Todd Akin forcibly inserted the phrase into a bill which would have denied any federal funding for impoverished women's abortions unless they were victims of rape.  "Rape" not being rapey enough, the co-sponsors made sure the bill read "forcible rape."

Now, "forcible rape" is a bit of a poser, as a phrase something like "close proximity" or "unexpected surprise" or "personal friend."  It modifies a noun by placing before it an adjective which is a central defining characteristic of that noun.  "Rape" means sex which is forced, coerced, produced through threat or violence.  Now, I'm not against differentiating between different circumstances of rape via categorical adjectives, if it helps break the idea of stranger-rape being the typical case, which arguably phrases like "date rape" or "acquaintance rape" do.  But the very use of the words "forcible" and "rape" in conjunction suggests that people who use it believe that there are other species of rape which are important to distinguish from this type.

Indeed, the one which anti-abortion campaigners suggest as an example of non-forcible rape is statutory rape.  Now, I haven't thought much about statutory rape since I stopped wanting to have sex with teenagers, at around age 19, but I think I have a pretty good handle on the right-wing objection to statutory rapes being included in the category of "rape" for the purposes of judging victims' merit.  The idea is that that slutty teens (abetted by the satan-worshipping lesbians at Planned Parenthood) will be so keen to get free abortions that they will (falsely, it is assumed) accuse venerable older men of consensually raping them, so the state had better at least ask the teens to display some vaginal bruising to back up their accounts.  Again, this is a fantasy of female evil created by anti-abortionists to escape from the knowledge that they are hurting children, rape victims, and women in general with their stance against modern fertility control methods.  Statutory rape is not a perfect legal construct, but it codifies the idea that extreme power imbalances, such as those that exist between children and adults, create a coercive atmosphere in which the child's consent is not legally meaningful when compared to the adult's coercion.

Anyway, all this is to suggest that, when you see the phrase "forcible rape" used as though it were a serious concept, you might well want to substitute "runcible rape," because "runcible" is a delightful nonsense word created by Edward Lear, and "forcible rape" IS A NONSENSE TERM CREATED BY POWERFUL SOCIOPATHS.

On the 'ormones

I don't think I should be president.  My reasons for this are various, with the most important being my W-esque disregard for the work and knowledge that should go into holding down that particular job, but the one I expect to receive the most opprobrium for is that I believe I am hormonally unsuited.  For two days a month, I vacillate between full-body depression and self-righteous belligerence.  It's not that I have no moods at other times, but this pattern is undeniable, reproducible.  I could set my watch by it if my watch had a 27-day round.

Now, I take this feature of my corporeal existence into account in my life, such as determining if I am "really sad" or "really angry" by doing some quick sums on my fingers.  Moreover, I don't make a big stink if my partner does likewise, just as I don't decry him for using the word "cunt" to describe a maleficent person.  I consider these reasonable actions, and he grants me a like leniency to inquire solicitously as to whether his organ has strangled the flow of blood oxygen to his brain, or to describe a fatuous person as a total glans. 

But I suffer some guilt for not finding it inappropriate to allow others to consider my hormonal equilibrium, in case my own actions in my personal relationships cause all women everywhere to be perceived as unserious.  I don't even want to suggest the appearance of appearing to suggest that other women experience these symptoms, in case I seem to be saying women are basket cases. 

This is a style of guilt that my political sympathies have prepared me exquisitely for: combining "the personal is political" with the categorical imperative is a good way to have a lot of people regard you as a bit of a downer.  But let me tell you, the very second I hit menopause and get a real work ethic, I'm gonna put on some pearls, strip down to my sports bra because suddenly it's just really warm all the time, and run for president of whatever country I am currently in, or think I could feasibly run.  I don't care what one, really.  Namibia, Haiti, America, whatever.

It Is A Car Analogy

KUNGE!  and the car goes right into the ditch, the back wheels lifting off the ground entirely.  Sam, Barry, and Nate (in the driver's seat) groan and gingerly check their limbs.  Sam pipes up from the back seat.
SAM: Fuck you, Nate!  You said you were a good driver!
NATE: I am a good driver!  No one's hurt, are they? 
SAM: Fuck you, no one is hurt! My neck is fucked up!  You're an asshole!
Barry is riding shotgun.
BARRY: Let me drive for a while.
SAM: Yes!  THANK YOU.  God, Nate.
NATE: No!  I have to drive!
A brief scuffle ensues, with Barry ending up in the driver's seat.  Nate keeps trying to regain the wheel, but Barry uses one long leg to pin him against the door.  
Barry turns the key in the ignition.  The engine stalls.
NATE: You're terrible!  Let me drive!
SAM: Shut up!
Elle and Tee have been watching this exchange, and now come up to the car to offer advice.
ELLE: I've seen this before.  You need to get out and pull the car out of the ditch before you can drive on.  Just starting it up won't help, the back wheels are in the air. 
TEE: Boy, are you wrong.  That car's just a write-off.  You should get out ASAP and walk to town. 
ELLE: It's not even that dented, it's just tipped.  If everybody gets out and we all push--
TEE: NO!  We should all get as far away from the car as possible.  It could explode at any minute!
Nate hangs out the window to talk to Tee.  Barry continues trying the ignition. 
NATE: You're right, you know.  This car is dangerously unsafe.  Look at these spark plugs I took out, the tip's all weird and silvery. 
ELLE: HEY!
TEE: That's what I'm saying! 
Elle moves over to try to get Barry's attention.
ELLE: Did you see that?  He said he took out the spark plugs!  You need to--
BARRY: I really have a lot to concentrate on here.  Please don't distract me.
SAM: Come ON.  We don't have all fucking day.
Barry tries the engine again, and this time it turns over.  He puts the car in reverse and accelerates.  The back wheels spin. 
ELLE: You need to push it out of the ditch first!
TEE: It's fucking broken!
NATE: You broke the car!  Let me drive!
SAM: Fuck this, maybe Nate should be driving, you're obviously not taking us anywhere.  It's not like he could be doing worse. 
BARRY: Hey!  I got this engine started, you know!  You're not patient enough!  We're almost there!
NATE: Let me drive, let me drive!
BARRY: We're all together in this, I'm sure I can drive in a way that suits both of us.
NATE: You smell!
ELLE: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, he's a saboteur!  Why won't you listen to me!
TEE: You're all fools!  Fools who are about to explode!
Let us pull the curtain on this scene now, and drink until we can forget.

Instructive Failures

 I am something of an academic by nature, and it is to this I attribute my (apparently unusual) high tolerance for didactic cinema.  I'm not saying I could sit through Crash without yelling at the screen or anything, but I stuck with Studio 60 long after the show had dropped all pretense of being anything other than Aaron Sorkin's Chew On That Hour.  Sorkin is that entertainer who pulls a rabbit out of a hat in a novel and entertaining way, and then when the audience clamors "Amazing!  More tricks!" just pulls the same rabbit out of some slightly different hats over and over again until everyone has left.  It's not an uncommon mode for artists, and the first rabbit you see can be really something.

I never watched Sorkin's most beloved creation, The West Wing, but I feel like I understand the kind of catharsis it provided to progressives rendered catatonic by the actions of the Bush administration to have a shadow cabinet play out their Al Gore fantasies.  I'd seen Sports Night and enjoyed as much of it as I understood when it was first on, years before my partner told me he was really getting into Studio 60.   We watched almost all of the doomed first season together.  It's probably telling that I've seen the show up to the big nineleveny cliffhanger in which a main character's life hung in the balance, and have not yet felt a need to see whether she lives or dies.

What finally killed my willingness to indulge Studio 60's oratory, that I might learn something about how American topical sketch comedy shows are formed, was a dawning awareness of a certain tendency it had in common with a lot of modern screenwriting.  It was what instantly put me off Fringe and of course Heroes: a compulsive need to subvert audience expectations that turns pathological.  The fall of Heroes between its first and fourth season is...well, already this post is of extreme length, and I could go on essentially indefinitely about what went wrong there, breaking it down fractally, shot by shot.  But basically what killed Heroes was trying to surprise the fan community by refuting their expectations, especially when they expected a sensical, meaningful plot. 

For Fringe, the expectations it was subverting were those created by The X-Files, which in 1993 was itself subverting an audience expectation by creating a skeptical and science-minded female character (who was still always wrong) and an intuitive and credulous man who seemed to assemble his near-unfailingly correct interpretations of weird events by the same word-association method the Bat-Man uses to solve the Riddler's clues.  Fringe, then, seemed to be based on the assumption that audiences would find it daring to see a credulous and intuitive female investigator paired with a skeptical and science-minded man, and would not correctly identify their subverted subversion as a tired stereotype.

The subversion I remember best from Studio 60 is when Evangelical funnywoman Harriet is misquoted in an interview in a way that suggests she believes that homosexuality is uniquely sinful, after which she is violently attacked by some large angry gays.  You may recall this particular story--in which god-fearing men and women innocently expressing a nuanced version of their beliefs are physically threatened by the same depraved sex perverts who control the media and twist around their words to suggest that not wanting gays to marry is somehow an expression of hate or fear--from the recent Supreme Court case on whether petition signatures from Washington state's Referendum 71 would remain public record or become secret, in the interest of protecting people who feared that their public expression of bigotry might cost them something.  (The court ruled 8-1 that the plaintiffs' wish to keep their terrible opinions between themselves and their legislature did not override well-established laws promoting civic transparency. The plaintiffs continued plainting after this, wishing the court to note how unfair it was that they had no chance of proving how fellow co-signers of this, their attempt to protect the solemn gravity of marriage by keeping it safe from people who really really want to get married while reserving it for people who have been cooling on the whole idea for 40 years, might be targeted with a similar level of harassment to two men who want to hold hands.)  So I found that to be a somewhat irresponsible bit of writing, in that, like most of Harriet's character on the show, it felt intended to pander to and soothe the ruffled feathers of a moderate Christian audience I'm pretty sure was never watching.

The second notable subversion attempt I wanted to talk about is one I misremembered, which came up during a discussion with my partner of blogospheric rumblings on whether Olivia Munn's disastrous Daily Show appearances were yet another manifestation of The Daily Show's "woman problem".  The female problem in question is one that should be familiar to students of television: shows, but especially comedies, have trouble attracting and keeping female writers even when they are actively seeking them out, let alone when they aren't.  My partner mentioned that Studio 60 had had a subplot involving a lawsuit by a former writer, Karen, alleging that the writers' room on the show-within-a-show was no more than a boys' club and that she had been fired for being insufficiently like the chick in the men's mags who just, you know, likes totally normal, pudgy guys and wants to wear push-up bras and Daisy Dukes and get beaten at video games.  I recalled that the episode contained a sequence in which Karen's lawyer asks around the show to find out why people believe she was fired, and to a man, they answer "Because she wasn't funny."

This did indeed happen, but it's worth noting that none of the characters expressing this opinion were actually contemporaries of the fired writress.  Also, when I went to look at more detailed summaries of the episode, I noticed that the final word on the matter came from one of the executive producers reading out the actual text of the complaint, which begins to make Karen look like she might not be talking completely out of her ass.  The content of the scene is based on a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the producers of Friends by shitcanned stenographer Amaani Lyle, where besides discussion of David Schwimmer's orientation and Courtney Cox's fuckability, she alleges that the writers had collaboratively constructed a parallel Friends in which Joey was a serial rapist.  Regrettably, this is not the plot of Joey.  The complaint in Studio 60 relates an extensive public discussion of various ways the male writers would fain fuck Harriet--on an altar, with a crucifix, in Pat Robertson's mouth, etc.--which would itself constitute excellent grounds for a religious discrimination lawsuit.  The executive producer is of course deeply troubled by this, because Harriet is his woman.  So let's call Sorkin's opinion on the frivolity of high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits--because I think it is pretty safe to say that the words coming out of his characters' mouths are intended primarily to advance his opinion--ambiguous.

It sounds like I'm saying I disliked the show for not toeing my particular party line, and maybe that's the case, though I wouldn't be watching much TV if I couldn't put my politics to one side in the interest of entertaining myself.  I think it's more that I don't really believe Sorkin thinks that scary gays will bash Christians or that bitches be trippin', but that he is condescending to the imagined prejudices of his audience in order to feel he has leeway to make his point.  I'm not exactly bucking the conventional wisdom here: all reviews I've read of Studio 60 involve some variation on calling it condescending.  But, you know, it's not awful to be condescended to if you're genuinely ignorant on a subject and are interested in getting a quick grounding.  What Sorkin managed by talking down to me on subjects I know something about, and by not seeming to mind if he was getting them all wrong, is just to make me doubt his credibility on anything I thought I might be learning from him.  The only times I've ever minded a lecture are when I know I have a hell of a lot better handle on something than the guy who's trying to explain it to me in very small words.

not broken, just a baby

I finally got around to watching the video for Alejandro, Lady GaGa's  recent single (heretoafter referred to as Lady Gaga; I'm not made of capitals), after hearing a number of unenthusiastic reviews ("boring"; "totally derivative of Madonna").  I'm generally pro-Gaga, in the same way as I have been generally pro-Madonna: without being a big fan of her music. 

I'm rooting for Lady Gaga to produce challenging public portrayals of her sexuality, even as sinister Music Biz forces work to make these portrayals more consumable.  So in this regard Alejandro is something of a mixed bag.  While you won't see Ke$ha putting out a video in which she ties 3OH!3 to a bed and fucks their asses (if you read this over a year later, Ke$ha was a pop star who needed help finding men's genitals), there's a great deal of sexual violence in this video and almost all of it is visited upon Gaga's fragile-looking person. 

It's certainly tempting to just count up shots of Gaga being choked or bounced around by the musclemen in this video, compare it to the number of shots of her giving it to them in the ass, and render a score -- Music Videos 18 : Feminism 10 -- but this is terrible film crit practice.  Contextually, many interesting things are going on.  To bring out one example, the majority of the shots of what is delicately termed "rough sex" in porn reviews (rough on whom, exactly?) occur during a scene marked out as a wistful flashback of Gaga's late lamented love affair. 

Even if I really believed that the imagery of rape (not to mention bondage, crossdressing, blasphemy--I'm not scrutinizing these things because they just can't beat rape) that runs through this video was being allowed to pass uncritically as decontextualized aesthetic, it would be trite to attempt to insult director/photographer Steven Klein with something so bereft of the power to wound as accusations of misogyny.  No, I will attempt to insult him with accusations of unoriginality.  Sex and violence are done to death as avant-garde postures.  The power of an image to shock can only decrease as it is disseminated and consumed, and literally all of the images in this video are already available in Klein's back-catalog of photographs.

I'm also interested in being, as far as I can google, the first person to connect the video for Alejandro to the 1989 rape and torture of American nun Dianna Ortiz at the hands of the Guatemalan state military.  My evidence for this claim is slight (and I take Gaga at her word that the song itself is nothing more than a tribute to her love of gay men), but Klein has a history of referencing (and sexing up) culturally important rapes.  First, most obviously, the video depicts the gang rape of a nun by Hispanic soldiers.  The weird bowl-cut bobs worn by all the players (bar the commandant or generalissmo or whatever) resemble Ortiz' hairstyle, and the references to cigarettes in the chorus and facial burning in the final shots might be intended to call to mind the soldiers' burning Ortiz with hundreds of cigarettes.

Lastly, when an American CIA operative working with the Guatemalan military (allegedly!) while they were disappearing, raping, and murdering tens of thousands of political opponents--when this alleged operative found Ortiz, before he berated the soldiers for disappearing an American for whom there would be international outcry, before he took Ortiz from the prison where she was held and drove her to Guatemala City in his jeep, before he tried to make her promise to tell no one and to forgive her torturers because it had all been a case of mistaken identity, before she bolted from the car at a stoplight and made it to the American embassy--it was when Ortiz first heard the soldiers greeting a man with an American accent that she heard them call him by name-- "Hey, Alejandro, come and have some fun!"