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.

You're Doing Gender Wrong

I enjoy watching pop videos, I guess.  I'll certainly watch them for hours until I've had my fill.  Sometimes I even like the songs.  But mainly I enjoy watching brief linguistic and visual spectacles on the Semiotics Channel.  Take Mike Posner--if you listen to his lyrics, he just sounds like a classically-trained date rapist.  Classically-trained in date rape, I mean, not music.  But the videos for his odious songs are great!  "Cooler Than Me" has him stealing sunglasses off hipsters and looking into different film universes through them, and in "Please Don't Go" the emotional pain of a breakup causes the world to fragment and artifact around Posner like a badly-streamed video.  And every week produces a new guilded turd of similar caliber. 

Generally these days UK pop videos are fashion shows whose central themes alternate between a kind of Babestation Lite and personal affirmations that you are, in fact, okay to just be yourself, even if maybe you don't look and/or fuck like the video people.  So basically music television has become women's magazines, with all the conflicting messages about women's roles that that implies.  I'm open to the idea that young women may be in need of someone to tell them that becoming the world's most lifelike Realdoll is only one of the many things they can aspire to, of course.  I'm just not sure that message is best delivered by a writhing professional dancer with no skirt or trousers.

One style of video I have come to find especially grating is the specific claim, made over and over again, that women are in fact just as good as men and can achieve anything they want.  This was a brave sentiment in 1961; the fact that it's still in heavy rotation in 2011 would seem to imply that it hasn't really soaked in, despite the very different material conditions of first-world women these days.  These songs--Jessie J's "Do It Like A Dude" is the one in current rotation, but previously we had Alexandra Burke's "Broken Heels", a couple entries in the genre from Beyonce, and basically Pink's entire oeuvre--they appear to stem from a sense of inadequacy at not being male, a kind of "penis envy", if I may coin a phrase.  And the answer in the videoverse is to do what men do, but sexier. 

This approach misses out one of the major conceptual gains of the feminist movement, aside from how it got pretty much everyone to agree that there was some historical point at which women were getting a raw deal (currently debates tend to rage about whether we should be locating this point in the past or the present).  The gain I'm referring to is the capacity to question the gender binary.  Rather than attempting to slavishly duplicate men's lives, only with killer heels and bouncing a baby on the hip, we could use feminist intellectual tools to stand back and ask whether the mass of men have it so good today that women ought to expend their energy on catching up. 

Also of note: I am apparently so straight these days, or Jessie J's hoodie-playsuit and wacky gurning antics are so terrible, that I didn't notice that the backing dancers for her number are largely delicious-looking Afro-Carribbean butches.  J, much like Lady Gaga or myself, identifies as bisexual, so I guess I'm meant to feel some kind of solidarity.  I don't.  Also they keep mentioning that she has a heart condition.  The phrase "save your breath" springs to mind.

My beloved, let's get down to business

Can it really be so?  Have I actually decided I have something to add to a discussion of that hyperinflated term, empowerment?  Well, yes, I'm afraid that time has come.  Strap in. 

What put me over the edge this time was watching Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys--which I dearly hope will have the distinction of being the only show produced by the BBC to feature a presenter asking a sexual assault victim to explain how her clothes influence rapists and jurors.  What happens in the show is, one of the women (who refer to themselves as 'video girls') gets quite bubbly and animated when she puts on revealing clothing, so the presenter concludes that, far from feeling exploited and unhappy and used while performing sexually, some women find it empowering. 

Then the presenter discovers that most women performing in videos don't get paid, and that they have shockingly unrealistic expectations that they are about to be 'discovered' while gyrating, and that being so discovered would make them super-rich.  She concludes that, while some video girls may feel empowered, the power actually rests with the people making all the decisions that affect their lives, and that this power relationship is not substantially affected by their gyration. 

That seems to cover the ways I generally see "empowerment" used in discussion.  So what I want is to tease out some of the meanings and assumptions when different people talk about empowerment.  I made a chart. 

As Twisty classically pointed out, the term has been co-opted by advertisers, tied firmly into the ideals of consumption.  At some point, "empowerment" was decoupled from the actual substance of power in capitalist society, namely the ownership of money and property, which is handy because open discussions of wealth do not benefit capital.  So the main way empowerment's used today is to describe feelings. 

Now, I am sick to death of empowerment discourse which is about personal feelings and not substantive measures of social power (i.e. money, i.e. redistributing money more evenly among existing humans, i.e. people pissing and moaning about the status quo but if you try and change it suddenly you're a communist).  Personal feelings pay for jack shit. 

Moreover, it seems that people who want to talk about feelings of empowerment are happy to imply that individual empowerment is simply collective empowerment at a smaller scale.  Individual empowerment is plainly not the secret to collective empowerment: I may gain a great deal of personal power by marrying a billionaire, but that does fuck-all for the rights of any group I purport to belong to.

What also tends to happen, as is very much the case in Hip Hop Honeys and in Twisty's worldview, is that empowerment then becomes the disempowered individual's responsibility, neatly removing oppression from the equation.  Anyone who comes to the table pre-empowered--whether by an accident of birth, lucrative work, or bald calumny--will be treated as though power is their birthright, while anyone trying to get somebody's boot off his face will have to prove both faultless and meritorious to be granted the right to occupy the ground he's being crushed into.

Mostly, though, "empowerment" is used to talk about women and sex.  What kind of sex would empower women?  What kinds of acts would sexually empowered women get up to?  What positions would be most empowering for them?  Would it be more or less empowering if the women were very attractive and young?  Would adding additional young attractive women to a sex act make it more empowering?  These questions and so many more like them have been discussed in tedious detail in the media for some reason. 

The position of third-wave feminists, if I may generalize, has tended to be that THEY are deeply afraid of a woman's pleasure, and as such every orgasm amounts to sticking it to The Man, even when you obtain it quite the other way around.  But this association of pleasure with power is problematic.

One of the themes of this blog is that pleasure is, at best, limited in its capacity to change power relationships: there's a lot of pleasure and peace in complying with society's plans for your ilk.  And unlike Homo Economicus, we often do things to get along, or to impress a lady, or to be sociable, or to have self-respect, which may not garner us or our identity-politics group greater social clout.  Making empowerment a stand-alone measure of whether an action is morally positive collapses a bunch of relevant factors into a black-and-white caricature of human lives, emotions, and social relationships, which I guess explains why it's so widely used.  

Hindsight

There is an idea for a series of brief films I had some time ago, at a time when I was driving regularly, that is so simple and easy to pull off that I cannot (and, indeed, do not) believe it has never been used as station idents, ads, or simply for youtube.  I'd prefer, though, to describe what I pictured before...let's say polluting my vision, by seeing how others have pulled it off.

Just this: a shot from the perspective of the front seat of a car, of the car behind in the rearview mirror.  A little slice of life is playing out back there: two people arguing, or headbanging, or talking animatedly, or wearing a Tudor costume and a Gorilla costume and staring out opposite windows.  There's no sound from that car, but only the diagetic sound in the perspective car, which would be used (subtly, please!) to overlay thematically the action in the mirror.  It could also be possible to see out of the windshield of the perspective car, depending on depth of focus and how it's framed, so that could open up more possibilities.  The duration of each--only the length of a stoplight.

dreams and the Internet are similar

I didn't know Satoshi Kon.  I suppose that's obvious, but all the same it makes me uncomfortable to eulogize someone based only on his public face.  I've seen nearly all of what he made, though (with the exception of Paranoia Agent and Tokyo Godfathers, which in such a small filmography is a fairly big gap), from Magnetic Rose to Paprika.  I'll tell you this.  The impression he left with every film I saw was of an upward trajectory.  Is it ghoulish to say I wanted to see his very best, to see when he would naturally stop improving his art and exploring his visions, before he died?  I just don't think the body of anime will be as good as it would have been if he'd gotten to become an old granddaddy like Miyazaki. 

As my friend whom I’ll call Sam says, “I’ve dated women with everything from an A-cup to a D"

Every day or so I spend on the internet, I come across one of the five to six hundred iterations of this article, on what women can stop doing to attract men.  It's always written from the perspective of someone whose sole claim to authority on the subject is that they are a guy, which mystifies me: can there really be women who have no male friends or acquaintances that would bloviate rapturously on what they believe would most please a man?  In any case, all these articles boil down to a variation on the sentiment, "It's important that you be well-groomed, but I want you to stop spending time on grooming so that we can have more time to do things I like, such as touching a boob."  There is some kind of disconnect in these men's brains between cause (grooming) and effect (groomed) that probably also makes them Libertarians. 

Anyway, if men would like to take my big-ass gametes as qualification to tell them what all women think, and if they would like to stop doing something which completely fails to impress me, they could stop pretending to give a shit about sports.  I know, some women may claim to enjoy sports or like the company of men who do, but because they disagree with me, they're unrepresentative.  I suspicion that all the women who say they like sports don't really but are just pretending in order to attract men.  I am myself constitutionally incapable of enjoying sports and generally distrust the motives of anyone who does, but that shouldn't affect how totally right I am about this. 

Men, I think, only profess to like sports because if they don't other men will relentlessly hound them with accusations of homosexuality.  In men, I judge liking a thing which is inherently unlikeable to impress men to be understandable, and pitiable in a sympathetic way.  In women, I judge liking that unlikeable thing to impress men to be a contemptible betrayal of one's authentic self.  This double standard is my stake in the ground, now let's pretend it's the Daily Show and go to the part of the tape where I contradict myself utterly. 

So, video games.  I am strongly attracted to video games because for the past twenty years they've had the exciting, disreputable sheen of The Next New Media, with regularly-scheduled moral panics providing a rebellious charge to liking them.  And, if I'm honest, because the boys I always liked always like gaming--the weird boys, the boys with the D&D books and the graph paper and anime porn.  Though they could stop with the anime porn, frankly.

Now, I am fucking shit at video games.  I have terrible reaction time and I am emotionally devastated if I can't beat a level on the third or fourth try.  I can't play against people because I get upset if they win too much and worried about what they think of me if I win too much, and if I have any difficulty at all I'll be fighting the urge to wander off and never finish. 

It's clear to me that games, even more than films or books (but maybe not as much as music), serve as mile markers in the lives of the people who love them, bound up in memories of where and who they were when they played Metal Gear Solid or Bioshock or Chuckie Egg.  Nostalgia is such a powerful force in the industry because gaming is so experiential: when you play something that touches you, you're really stitching it into your life in the strongest way possible without actually parachuting into the jungle and fighting Russians while feeding on tree frogs.  And my favorite thing is to hear people articulating their memories, to know what they love and why it animates them.  But ideally without reference to the infield fly rule.

I got arms that long to hold you

Where I'm going I'm pretty sure I'll still need eyes to see, but--sadly? I don't know--I doubt I'll need a lot of the other body parts I collected over the years. A number of the more portable ones are already packed away, but those pictured here must remain in my room or, in the case of the torso, be stealthily abandoned in a distant public area after dark.

I decorated these when I was younger and worse and had fewer
Sharpies, so, you know, sorry you had to look at them.

Glass head appears courtesy of Pier 1.

Barbie leg at left for scale.

A keychain and...not sure why that has a safety pin. Punk rock!

Some human hair.

My closet.

Okay, so why do I have these? I'm more into skulls these days, but I think it had to do with wanting to seem dangerous, yet clever and sexy, like a serial killer. I never felt like other people regarded middle-class pacifists as sufficiently dangerous for my taste. But I also surmise that my motivations had something to do with the suggestion in Killing Us Softly that women are often depicted as disembodied parts rather than full people.

I saw Killing Us Softly 3: Son of Softly once in a college sociology class, and once in a college feminism class, and once before that in a context I don't remember.  It begins with Jean Kilbourne relating how she, a simple young woman working in the advertising department of a medical journal, happened to invent the idea of "taking ads seriously" in the 1970s when she started pinning sexist ads up on a big board in her home and then asking her friends to assist her in rendering a critical reading.  I can't really fault her for promoting a DIY approach to forming a personal philosophy, but I can't help but be irritated by anyone advancing the intuitive, anecdotal I-just-know approach to scholarship that is her stock and trade.  Anyway, she goes on to claim that violence against women is "widespread and increasing", which would have been quite a bold thing to say in 1999 since it would have so drastically contradicted so many reports and studies discussing the dropping crime rates at the time.  I imagine it's just a consequence of not updating your slideshow that often. 

Kilbourne argues, over clips of leggy women voguing as cameras follow them at a low angle, that "over and over again, just one part of the body is used to sell products, which is of course the most dehumanizing thing you can do to someone. Not only is she a thing, but just one part of that thing is focused on." Leaving aside a whole bunch of begging the question there, to what extent is this true, and to what extent does it matter? I guess after giving the whole thing around ten years' thought, I'll go with a) to some degree and b) somewhat. Close-up framing is basically an inevitability in image creation since, oh, ever, but at the very least since Birth of a Nation. And the way advertising works--the constant, increasingly sophisticated attempts to create, shape, and respond to consumer demands while always showing them something memorable--any part of the body that's fair game to show is going to be continually refigured and repurposed to make it new. That would probably be well and good if making a display of the perfected aspects of women's bodies weren't of such special interest to this society at the same historical moment when we seem to have reached the maximum tolerable level of equality and autonomy for the distaff and have started trying to shout back the tide.

But to what extent does this sort of compartmentalization and objectification affect women's self-conception, thereby insidiously undermining efforts at equality? When asking a question like this--essentially "is this a cultural construction or are women just like that?"--it's useful to be able to look to men. Sure enough, men are reported to experience great distress when the value of their bodies is abstracted to the dimensions of a single appendage. That level of distress, however, doesn't seem to have greatly affected their overall performance as a gender. It really seems to have more to do with, you know, choice and opportunity and all that, than whether they're humiliated in advertisements.  Because boy, are they ever.

The control of images and words is overly weighted as a tool for equality, I think, because words and pictures are fun to blether about. Controlling them seems quite easy compared to enacting policies to lessen the gulf between rich and poor, which would probably do the most good for everyone involved. But it isn't easy. Words and pictures are always going to break out of restrictions, because that's just the way people do. And I daresay, if political energy is indeed a finite resource (who knows, right? But I bet I wouldn't be so interested in the study of images if it weren't for Kilbourne) that it could be better spent studying to organize than studying to adbust. I understand, however, that my opinion may lose some of its authority when you see that I bought human hair.

Lain will be accompanying me to grad school if I can just
figure out a way to remove her head.

Blood & Salt

The things that managed to interest me about Salt (a largely unremarkable entry into what, to me, will henceforth always be the Jack Bauer genre) are, unsurprisingly, gender issues, courtesy of Angelina Jolie.  By the IMDB's account, Tom Cruise was originally attached to play the part of Evelyn Salt, but backed out when he discovered the film would portray him married to the Marxist from The Counterfeiters.  The part was subsequently rewritten for Angelina Jolie, which seems to have mainly involved changing the pronouns.  I approve!  Jolie is a fine actor and high in essential charisma, though I always wish she'd get back up to her Gia weight because right now the way her robust head is set on that tiny, ropey neck makes her look like a spoon.* 

But imagining each scene as it would play with a man of equal height also allowed me to imagine I might be observing something about the culture, something I could later use as a jumping off point for gassing about gender equality in a blog entry.  So: I believe that Tom Cruise's torture scene would have been longer, and I believe the discussion I had in the car driving home wouldn't have been about whether crashing a van into a police car would have snapped Cruise neatly in twain.  I believe, too, that I can back up my belief with comparisons to pretty much all the other 24-style action thrillers, which depict with loving detail the suffering of their leads.  To keep this fairly brief let's just take it as read. 

It would be usual to follow this line down a regular feminist argument: women are presented in media as weaker than men in their ability to withstand pain, when in fact blah blah childbirth, oorah.  I feel that, besides being the kind of bullshit that social conservatives use to argue that men and women may have their separate spheres, but each is of equal importance and equally fulfilling, this argument is just missing something.  I can't truly blame anyone for missing it, because, pardon me for getting all Morpheus here, we're soaking in it.   What we've become blind to by its constant naturalization in basically all media is violence against men, aka "violence". 

Men are constantly situated in media as the ideal subjects of violence.  I'm not saying there's not also an agenda running in some Hollywood films of punish-the-feminine; that would be a silly claim.  But we perceive depicted violence against women as particularly brutal against a backdrop of near-constant violence against men.  Salt, for example, kills somewhere between twenty and a hundred men in her film and I think kicks a lady cop in the chest, but the villain is unforgivably evil because he shoots a female attaché after shooting a dozen equally defenseless dudes. 

A conversation about how men have it kind of rough is uncommon in feminist circles, though I know so many women with interests in genders outside their own.  Primarily, if one brings up the fact that men are more likely to be the victims of violence than women and that this is normalized and celebrated in media, it is viewed as an attempt to undercut and equate violent victimization of men with dehumanization and control of women, drawing attention away from this important subject.  Fair enough, but who's going to stand against systematic, socially-approved gender-based violence if not feminists? 

Now, I enjoy very much the privilege of being considered unhittable.  I've only been punched once, in the fourth grade, and I doubt there are many men who can say the same.  But it seems to me that the protection I enjoy from being considered an appropriate target for violence isn't based on a recognition of my human dignity, but rather on a societal calculation of the value of protecting me as a resource.  Men's value is calculated differently, and so they are naturalized as the targets and perpetrators of violence.  While they are overrepresented as CEOs and politicians, so too are they overrepresented as the homeless, prisoners, and soldiers.  The Expendables, as opposed to Precious.

So one of the things we could do to increase gender equity in the affluent West is increase assaults, robberies, and carjackings against women, and of course by women.  We could get comfortable with the idea of more women being homeless and more women being exploded and shot fighting for us.  We could accept that whatever men are experiencing is the gold standard for what should be considered human, and strive always toward getting women to experience the same shit.  Or we could acknowledge that men are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, stop viewing and portraying that as perfectly reasonable, and try to, you know, decrease violence, particularly state-sponsored violence, against them, just like we campaign and rail against violence toward women.  That's the option I like. 

* It is wrong to focus on women's appearances in this manner.  Terribly, terribly wrong.

It's Just Noise

One thing that makes my eyes bulge in their sockets--though please bear in mind I did not go to school in the hippest part of the US, but rather the hippiest--is seeing college-age kids, who were at the time I attended college about four years younger than me, all wearing t-shirts proclaiming their love of musical artists of the 60s and 70s who are for the most part dead. 

I feel like I understand why a Boulder resident would choose strategically to wear a Bob Marley or Grateful Dead shirt.  I suppose Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin have their own rebellious, binge-drinky appeal, and professing reverence for Jimi Hendrix would certainly help justify one's decision to irritate other Native Americans with a hipster headdress.  It is a bit more opaque to me why someone would want to broadcast their love of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (who no longer benefit from the cachet of not being the Beatles, as no one seems to remember that they once had a Blur/Oasis-style rivalry [though of course it is deeply insulting to the Rolling Stones to allow them to be compared even momentarily to Oasis]).  It strikes me as sort of like wearing a shirt announcing your enjoyment of inhaling air and exhaling somewhat more carbonated air; it's not like it's avoidable.  I'm sure even the Black Sabbath and Sex Pistols kids (who, again, may feel free to choose a band whose collective ages total under two centuries) love Helter Skelter or Happiness Is A Warm Gun or Savoy Truffle or something. 

Dead artists and the canonized living are safe to like because their meanings have become fixed; they'll never again produce anything which will be subject to critical scrutiny.  And god knows there's a broad enough range that could be expressed by a Beatles shirt to be the stiking-up point of a conversation with a stranger: so which is your favorite Beatle?  What was their best album?  What's your favorite of their songs featuring beating up women?  Would you like to experiment with some drugs with me, in case it makes us creative? 

But this is the music of our parents and grandparents.  They weren't burning up the dance floors with ragtime and the Charleston in the sixties, they were out seeing contemporary bands and screenprinting their names on really thin cotton t-shirts and wondering when the sexual revolution would reach them.  I wish keenly for a popular culture not controlled by Baby Boomers and their sensibilities, but more and more I think that we are not built for populism the way they were, and are doomed to narrowcast all the deeper parts of ourselves while our video of a cat falling off a chair gets seventy million views.

On The Perils Of Representation

 I borrowed this PSA poster--yes, let's say borrowed, I am definitely one day going to return to that university and replace that poster--from a bathroom stall at a university, because I think it is a poetic bit of propaganda.  It allows for a fair depth of deconstruction, which I like in an image.  Before reading on, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the ideas of literary and film criticism, particularly the concept of a "reading" of a text.  I don't want to have to delete a bunch of comments going "you're wrong because that's not what the creators meant" like I did when I said Disney's The Little Mermaid was about interracial relationships. 

So: what are our elements?  Black hand, money, white hand, disease.  I say that this will extend to metaphors about black people, white people, commerce, and all varieties of malady.  So: White imperialists come to black nations with the promise of enriching commerce, but instead blight them with poverty and disease.  Or a corruption affects all commerce, poisoning black and white alike.  Or the green bugs are not pathologies, but the "germ" of new life, created by the flow of currency.  Or money is germy.  Or black people are germy.  Note that this last (and maybe the first if we're being picky) is racist.  Indeed, there are several racist readings of the text of this image, even without getting into the positioning with respect to the viewer and who is accepting what and so on. 

Let us consider two hypothetical images like this, one with two black hands, and one with two white hands.  Because race, like most human categories, has a marked and an unmarked (or default) status, only one will appear to the casual observer (particularly a casual observer from a default category) to be dealing directly with race.  This problem is a Known Issue with race.  What are some of the proposed solutions (i.e. ways to avoid being called racist while portraying non-whites in media) and what are the possible drawbacks to each one?

• Always ignore race
Maybe a noble thought, but the problem is that people can't actually do this.  Largely it boils down to ignoring the fact that everyone in your portrayal is white due to the consequences of some unstated assumptions.

• Harp on race constantly
Annoying and exhausting for anti-racists, racists, and people who feel that not much caring puts them more in the former group than the latter.  Leads to films like Crash. 

 • Be black
Wait, hear me out.  In media contexts, people from marginalized groups tend to be granted more latitude to express opinions only on the matter of their specific group's relation to the mainstream, on the grounds that people from marked categories are likelier to be expert on these subjects than people from default categories.   More comprehensibly, on tv, black people get to talk shit about black and white people and no one except racists or academics or racist academics will really take exception.  Of course, there is a firmly-established political culture dedicated to catering to upset racists, so this is still a bit dicey.  Other possible drawbacks: society won't just let you become black for some bullshit reason.  And, I don't know if this is true, but I heard somewhere that there are disadvantages to being black in America that outweigh the notional pleasure of knowing that you could still potentially be on tv if you use the word "nigger" extensively. 

 • Tokenism/Diversity Checklist casting
Regardless of their level of racial savvy, pretty much everyone can tell if you're doing this.  The impulses that drive this style of character creation (a bid for universal appeal) usually also preclude fully humanizing any characters, and because the desire to have "one of each kind" of cast member need not spring from any actual political awareness, it's easy for it to be accompanied by a bunch of racial stereotypes or for Ma-Ti to not really have any good powers. 

 • Use only white people
Don't...don't actually do this, as a strategy or otherwise.  Besides being patently inhumane, people do eventually notice, and then you either have to justify it (questionable) or change (difficult).   

 • Stop depicting humans
This can backfire pretty easily.  Certain suites of characteristics you might wish to portray with a non-human character, George Lucas, are already associated with poisonous racial stereotypes and whether or not you meant them that way everyone will assume the worst.  Also, people generally need to be involved at some stage, whether in voice, character design, general aesthetic, writing, or premise, and any of these people can have unexamined racial biases or ignorance that make their way into the final product. 

 • Alien casting method
Maybe you know the story, but the scriptwriters for Alien supposedly specified that all the characters were "unisex", and encouraged the casting of actors of whatever gender to play any of them, except Ripley, who was definitely going to be a dude.  While a favored technique of mine, this can only work in situations where race and gender are genuinely interchangeable, and as such is limited in its capacity to tell stories in which these are meaningful dynamics. 

 • God, this is tricky.  What would Solomon do?  

 Oh goddamit it Solomon.

Today in unintended reactions to pharmacy promotional material

Keep your beak out of my birth control pills, Denny, you creepy leering ghoul.

In Every Color And Flavor Too

While I bear men no particular ill will, I do have a reflexive dislike of movies about them.  That is to say, not films in which a character is subject to a central premise or situation, and because there's no compelling reason for that character to be female, he's been defaulted to male.  I'm talking about films where the lead is presented in the preview as a captivatingly, intoxicatingly normal-man male regular-shmoe guy fellow and the film centers around the delightful and meaningful quirks of his precious character.  Usually he is either recently single or becomes so in the opening scenes, so that what little plot there is can center around him getting some girl.  I've seen a ton of these, of course: it's a major genre.  Another one comes down the pike every six hours or so, and it annoys me the same way the latest "His DAUGHTER...is KIDNAPPED by BAD MANS.  now HE...has to BREAK...ALL the LAWS...and EVERYONE'S FACE...TO GET HER BACK" film does.

Let's see if we can get a list going here.

Young guys:
  • The Graduate
  • Youth In Revolt
  • Adventureland
  • Garden State
  • Superbad (though many Judd Apatow films have this "behold, Man!" quality, constantly remarked on by lazy pundits writing on the theme of What's Wrong With The Youth, they often also have interesting premises)

Middle-aged guys (the largest section! this is the age and gender of hollywood screenwriters! "Write what you know", after all!):
  • Punch Drunk Love
  • Lost In Translation (unusual for spending a great deal of time on the inner life of gorgeous uggo Scarlett Johansson, but compensating for this slight originality by being utterly wretched)
  • Greenburg
  • Funny People
  • Sideways
  • Manhattan
  • Annie Hall
  • Marty
  • American Splendor
  • American Beauty
  • Downfall
  • Stranger Than Fiction (A meta example! In this film, which you are to see if you read this, the mancharacter is a creation (?) of female novelist Emma Thompson, which puts a spin on the whole genre that I think necessitates me rewatching it for a new reading)

Old guys:
  • The Wrestler (Debatable. This one has a premise: the dude used to be a wrestler.  If I include it, shouldn't I include Rocky, and Taxi Driver, and Bad Lieutenant, and The Machinist, and The Pianist, and The Professional, and The Driver, and The Horse Whisperer, &c; &c;)
  • As Good As It Gets
  • About Schmidt

These movies vary wildly in quality, like films in any genre, and my initial suspicion is often easily overcome.  My skepticism is based on an idea I have that films dealing with men's personal crises, their "journeys" to use the term of bullshit art, are widely viewed as more serious and more innately worthy than the same films would be if they had female leads and female-specific crises.

I'm sure such films are kicking around somewhere...let's see...oh, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, that's a good example...Waitress and the whole raft of cute preganancy movies that came up with it, Juno, Knocked Up...Sherrybaby, if anyone's heard of that.  I'm sure a variety of Meryl Streep movies must focus on how she is aging and what that must be like.  And of course romantic comedies often play as "normal lady with issues that mean she can't land a man" films.  And there's Lifetime. 

Come to think of it, I reflexively dislike Manproblem Cinema more when it centers around women.  It just doesn't come up as often.  Man-films, with their seriousness, can attract a lot more talent and money and subtlety at every stage of production, and it shows.  Moreover, for myself the idea of being older, and male, and somewhat more free, is at the very least escapist.  Women's pictures are more like psychological horror.

I AM POD, THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE

Being, I guess, somewhat dumb, I'm a big watcher of BBC3, though not if there's anything on BBC4.  So it was that, around 2 AM, I would come across Snog Marry Avoid, a makeover show whose title is loosely based on the playground/road trip exercise Fuck Marry Kill.  The premise of the show, as introduced by former Atomic Kitten and increasingly tan person Jenny Frost, is that British women are over-fond of makeup and under-fond of clothing, and with the help of a sassy computer -- bear with me here -- she will reintroduce them to their "natural beauty."  The phrase "natural beauty" is constantly repeated on the show, but poorly defined.  Removing a quarter-inch thick layer of tarry foundation is arguably moving towards natural, but putting a thinner layer on afterward is contradictory; "natural" seems to be synonymous with "brunette" regardless of the color of hair growing from someone's head; and many of these (mostly very young) women come to the show already in a state of unusual naturalness with regards to dress. 

The course of each makeover runs just so: A test subject / victim / contestant / FUTURE TV STAR is introduced with a 360° turn-around of her body in the clothes and makeup she selected to go on the show, angled from about knee-high.  I don't think I've seen a subject not wearing nosebleed-inducing platform stilettos.  There follows a montage showing her ludicrous fashion sense, intercut with shots of her drinking and dancing at clubs and the hours-long process of applying fake tan, false eyelashes, and hair extensions.  Hours-long processes not stressed as contemptible include hair removal, skincare, salon visits, and plastic surgery--at least half of the subjects have breast implants.  I would applaud the show for its lack of commitment to "natural beauty" when that would mean re-cutting up young women to prise out their silicone, if shows like The Swan and Extreme Makeover hadn't made the decision about whether to slice up women seem more like a matter of production costs than morality. 

After the introduction, the subject meets Jenny Frost, who displays her blinding teeth in an attempt to appear friendly.  Frost makes some neutral-to-positive comments about the subject's appearance, before asking if she is "ready to meet POD."  The subject assents, and the scene cuts to her walking into a darkened room.  With a click, a brilliant light floods the stage, lighting the entire background Frost-tooth white.  The subject looks disoriented as her pupils contract, and a sarcastically posh female voice addresses her.  "I AM POD.  WHO ARE YOU?"  The only reason to watch the show is the conceit that this voice comes from a 70s-sized sentient supercomputer whose primary directive is the promotion of "natural beauty" and whose secondary purpose is to self-righteously slag off these subjects without the distraction of possessing her / its own critiqueable body or style.  Gok Wan, take note!  Deny your humanity and embrace metal gender! 

There's two real flavors of subject on the show: women who have bought into every media-disseminated notion of what makes a woman sexually attractive to men to an outlandish degree (my temptation is to, for the sake of brevity, refer to members of this category as "whores", but this seems like a poor idea for several reasons, the most pertinent being that it strikes me as dismissive of the stylistic choices of actual sex workers); and people who I don't think will be particularly offended if I call them freaks.  Both styles of subject play their role on the show like an audition tape, either flirting and pouting at the computer or acting contemptuously too-cool for its machinations to work on them (respectively, obv.). 

POD is openly hostile and confrontational to subjects about their style of dress and makeup, using an incredulous, personally-affronted tone to berate them about their "fakery".  The show gets away with a great deal here due to its non-human host, including directly asking women if their breasts are "real" (a digression here about this question and its expected response probably deserves to be expanded into its own entry), calling them dirty, stupid, and low-class, and generally treating as stomach-churning the idea that they are making an overt public display of their sexual availability.  And that's before the hard-sell tactics start. 

Everyone is put on the back foot when a computer starts yelling at them, but the freaks tend to be slightly better versed in defending their stylistic choices than the cartoon sexpots.  I always watch in the hope that someone will offer a critique of the idea of "natural beauty", and some do, but I find them all to be pretty inarticulate about it, and to deliver their responses with the arrogance of a snotty teenager who believes she is the first one to have figured out that it's all phony, maaan.  Mostly it comes off as dull people who don't have writers spluttering vainly to come up with a way to own an opponent who has no momma.  Nonetheless, most are deeply protective of their styles. 

The theme of adding a garnish of scientific gravitas to the proceedings continues here with a survey of an undisclosed number of "members of the public"-- a public which appears to consist entirely of moderately attractive men ages 20-35, often the same six or seven men whom I expect are interns on the show -- about whether, seeing a picture of "this girl", they would choose to Snog, Marry, or Avoid her.  Typically there is also a secondary survey asking whether they think she looks like a) a sophisticated lady b) a punny joke answer or c) a filthy whore.  The subject is asked to pick what she thinks the men selected in each case, by pressing a touchscreen button which is also the inside of your television screen.  She views a selection of these men opining about her looks to a camera; they refer to her in the third person and are apparently not privy to her responses.  We the viewer, however, are privy to every emotion that flickers across her face during this time, as the show does not cut away but instead displays the men speaking in a picture-in-picture box. 

The percentages of "avoid" and "filthy whore" responses are obviously higher than the subject would like (that is the premise of the show), and it is at this low point in her estimation of herself that POD asks if she is ready to experience a jocularly and typically also insultingly named "make-under" (e.g. "spunky junkie to middle-class lass").  The subject assents and with a small fanfare is instantly transformed by means of a photocopier-style horizontal bar scanning down her body, replacing the old clothes, hair, and makeup with the new.  I don't have much to say about the content of the makeovers except that they tend to feature minidresses worn with black tights, and that all of the subjects are still wearing stripper platforms with stiletto heels, though occasionally not the ones they hobbled in on.  Another 360° turn-around, and then POD asks the subject if she is pleased.  Subjects express surprise and admiration in a manner that, if I were POD, I would instantly dismiss as utter fakery.  The eponymous survey is re-administered, men say they like the looks of this one, and "avoid" responses decrease to zero.

All the subjects possess a familiar air of arrogant desperation: the attitude of those whose foremost ambition is to be on television, and who to that end have worked and strained and struggled every day of their lives to cultivate a talent for applying to be on reality television shows.  In a highly valid survey I conducted with actual members of the public, 100% of them find viewing youths who cop this attitude to bias them towards thinking that these obvious fame-hounds deserve every bit of the humiliation they volunteer for, as well as making me, I mean them, more likely to cut the show slack for treating its contestants with cruelty.  In the interest of creating sympathy for other human beings even when they are televised, I suggest the overzealous medicalization of an ambition for fame, and the treatment of this dubious pathology with the oversubscribed addiction model. 

The subject bids POD goodbye and turns off the light before walking out and reappearing on the street, where they are met by friends, a partner, or their mother, who usually express a more sincere degree of shock and delight at the new look.  Partners, for probably obvious reasons, tend to be the least expressive of any pleasure they may experience, noting that the subject "looks good whatever you wear", but also averring that they hope she will now spend less time on her makeup.  Often a follow-up interview is conduced by Jenny Frost one month later, where she comes upon the subject during the day in a coffee shop and draws conclusions about whether the televised makeover has made a long-term difference to her clubwear.  There is a high relapse rate, probably because unlike some makeover shows, this one does not take the step of destroying the remainder of the subject's wardrobe. 

The show can knock out three of these sequences in 30 minutes, usually pairing two sexpots with one freak.  It's also puffed up with some interstitial segments in which Jenny Frost tests out DIY beauty aids.  In one frankly gobsmacking scene, Frost uses some old pressed-powder bronzer and lotion to concoct a fake tan solution, then puts her finger to her lips and says "Shh!  Don't tell POD!"  I suppose the show's overall message is something along the lines of "don't overdo it, just be genuine", but that is hard to take from a programme with a magic computer for a host. 

Snog Marry Avoid is one of that new breed of cultural products that are crafted to work on numerous levels: as serious advice for women whose beautification routines have become overwhelming; as a freakshow; as a cynical and frankly sinister co-opting of feminist messages to love the body you have; as dystopic post-industrial sci-fi; and as a parade of slim, barely dressed young women in high heels who get justly punished before they are rewarded for wanting to be good girls.  It's sickly fascinating to me for all these reasons, but after watching a dozen or so youngsters be highly defensive of their off-the-rack streetwalker costumes, I think there's an appeal of this fashion that the steamroller approach to making them "natural beauties" ignores entirely. 

There's a lot of reasons for a young person to feel frightened, anxious, and conflicted about their sexuality today, and slipping into a pre-made persona with preset responses from the alternate sex can provide some feelings of security, of being protected by your mask.  More than that, though, if you make yourself into a panto character, and someone slags you off, it becomes easier to dissociate your private, personal self from their put-downs.  It's not you they're insulting; they don't even know you.  Honestly, how could they?

What the hell is the point of this

Look, just tell me--are most other women straight, or not?

where does this even figure in to their sexuality I don't know

Or you could just watch Aladdin again

Saw Prince of Persia yesterday, one of approximately seven people in the theater, all women.  I thought I'd make a quick attempt at one of the looks from the film, as worn by sole-named-female-speaking-role character Princess Tamina.  It's on the occasion when she's about to be presented to the King of Persia as the spoils of war, and is characterized by a sort of double-lining effect where kohl is used to rim the inner lid, and then a horizontal line is drawn below the eye, which is washed with gold. 

I'd use a less yellowy gold than Medusa's Makeup Golden Boy if I tried this again, and also I'd try much harder to make sure both my under-eye lines were ruler-straight.  The foiling I did with plain water, and as such the metallic effect lasted exactly as long as it took to dry.  Next time, perhaps some Pixie Epoxy. 

Now, I'm white, and Gemma Arterton is white, and Jake Gyllenhaal is white, and Ben Kingsley is white, and Richard Coyle is white, and Toby Kebbell is white, and Donald Pickup is white, and Gísli Örn Garðarsson is Icelandic, and Alfred Molina is Spanish-Italian but born in England, and Steve Toussaint is English but has a French name and in the movie he plays a the only member of a fictional tribe of super-accurate knife-throwers called the "Mmmbaca", and director Mike Newell is famously white and English, but the settings and several of the extras and soldiers in this film are Iranian or Arab.  Should I be concerned about any kind of cultural appropriation here by wearing this possibly authentic and culturally significant makeup?  I'm very troubled!

Incidentally, I spilled a bunch of eye dust while doing this, and not only on my face.  And now I can't reverse time.

Rape Jokes I Have Laughed At

It is NEVER, EVER FUNNY

The Onion
Hilarity Comics
The Aristocrats
Peter Serafinowicz 
I haven't laughed at Richard Herring, but for some reason I still listen to his podcast every week

alone, dancing

What I find most interesting about porn parodies right now is that the ratio of male characters to female characters in mainstream movies tends to be reversed in porn, necessitating gender swaps and the addition of, in this case, cheerleaders. Sadly, I do not find anything else about them interesting.

Dual Pickup

While researching unpleasant bands for a minor joke in yesterday's entry, I was struck by the neat complementarity of Ke$ha's unconscionable "Blah Blah Blah" and 3OH!3's despicable "Don't Trust Me".  Taken together, the songs can be seen to circumscribe both sides of a near-anonymous heterosexual relationship characterized by mutual disrespect and loathing.

"Don't Trust Me" (which I consistently mistype as "Don't Trust Men"; oh feminism!) takes the form of an account of the damage on the meat popsicle the narrator is about to intubate, imbued with equal parts nausea and pity. "Blah Blah Blah" consists of a set of instructions addressed to the listener/fuckee.  The central exhortation of each song, the demand each character makes of their partner, is to shut up.

For 3OH!3's narrator, listening to the bruised head-case he is focused on spit-roasting would bring to the surface distressing thoughts that circulate beneath the surface of this song--of whether taking advantage of a fucked-up girl after taking pains to dehumanize her makes him an untrustworthy, terrible person.  Ke$ha's narrator seems, well, simpler: she doesn't want to hear from her interlocutor because she is aware any respect he displays for her is feigned, part of a ploy to trick her into doing what she's intent on doing anyway [him]. 

Because these atrocious songs and the horrible sentiments they express are quite popular, my natural next move should be to bemoan the breakdown of social mores they represent, and perhaps to long for a simpler time before the invention of casual sex or young people.  But this would ignore context, both social and musical.  I'm going to just assert that relations between the sexes are better than they were in the past and leave it there; if necessary I'll defend it in some forum that isn't a blog post about disposable alterna-pop. Musically, these songs exist in a rather long tradition of opposition to love songs expressing admiration--think of "I Just Want To Make Love To You" in 1954 or "You're All I've Got Tonight" in 1978.  Moreover, they aren't popular because of how acceptable it currently is to treat a sexual partner like they were Clippy the Microsoft Office Paperclip, but rather because in an atmosphere of increased respect and communication, being an asshole becomes subversive. 

Personally, I find it heartening that neither of these acts is allowed to go on tv alone anymore: each has to feat. other artists in their videos to lend credibility to the notion that another person could stand to be around them for three minutes.

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!"