Infiltrating Hollywood: The Spook Who Sat By the Door.

Excellent documentary on the making of the epic 1973 film The Spook Who Sat By the Door. Trailer here. Showing now at the Siskel Theatre in Chicago.

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How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)

Here are couple of quotes from the excellent How to Eat Your Watermelon, a documentary about the life and work of Melvin Van Peebles (filmmaker, actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, etc.):

"I was sick and tired of always seeing black people walking into a lynch mob with a hymn and a bible. I wanted to make a movie that black people could walk out of standing tall."

"I read an article about how blacks could move into the mainstream, if they'd only remember their manners, etc... So I wrote an article, guy wouldn't publish it, called "How to eat your watermelon in the company of white people (and enjoy it)"... that sort of Judo was one of the major elements of Sweetback. I took every stereotype and stood it on its head."

"All my life I had seen X-rated movies, if X-rated means damaging to young minds. Well, there was Tarzan, there was King-Kong, there was Mantan Moreland, etc. etc. and I couldn't find in my mind, anything more devastating to the psyche of a young African-American than those things. If you don't call those things X, then I think you've lost your credibility to judge."

I highly recommend the documentary. Trailer below.

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Nostalgia Film as Ideology

"...Nostalgia art gives us the image of various generations of the past as fashion-plate images that entertain no determinable ideological relationship to other moments of time: they are not the outcome of anything, nor are they the antecedents of our present; they are simply images. This is the sense in which I describe them as substitutes for any genuine historical consciousness rather than specific new forms of the latter." - Fredric Jameson, Interview (1986) in Flash Art.

"Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation. The inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse, George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), set out to recapture as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era; and one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire- not merely the stability and prosperity of pax Americana but also the first naive innocence of the counter-cultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs. With this initial breakthrough, other generational periods open up for aesthetic colonization (e.g. Polanski's Chinatown, Bertolucci's Il Conformista)... [Nostalgia film] approaches the "past" through stylistic connotation, conveying "pastness" by the glossy qualities of the image, and "1930s-ness" or "1950s-ness" by the attributes of fashion, as for example, some Disney-EPCOT "concept" of China."

"Every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today." -Jameson (1984), "Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", in New Left Review

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I must confess that I had an early (ages 8-12) fascination with nostalgia films about the 1950s before I had any inkling that they were, in the sense described above, nostalgia films. The Sandlot (1993) was a film that my family owned growing up, which I watched more times than I can count. Grease (1978) and Stand By Me (1986) were staples as well. Or, take Back to the Future (1985): think of the contrast between downtown Hill Valley in the 1980s (run down, with homeless people lying about) versus the 1950s. My thinking at the time was that the 1950s and early 60s was an era of "cleanliness", tight-knit communities, small neighborhood shops, block parties, stability, innocence and all the rest of it. I recall often wishing that I'd grown up "then".

It is striking, then, how much films of this sort shape contemporary consciousness of what we take to be the past. I'm not sure, but I wager that schools didn't have "decade day" before the 1980s. Would it have been possible, or even made sense, in the 1920s to hold a "decade dress-up day"? Could there have been intelligible, ostensibly distinct, stereotypes corresponding to "1910s-ness" or "1890s-ness"? My guess is that the answer is no. So what is it about the present state of affairs that makes possible the reification of decades into "glossy images" that track shifts in fashion? It seems to me that any answer we give must take seriously the third Jameson quote above.

There is, to be sure, a serious question here about how to critically understand the post-war era (e.g. as arising out of the reconfiguration of global capitalism and power relations after WWII, the emergence of a "consumer society", changes in the forces of production, a decline in class struggle, ruthless repression of the Left, violently enforced conformity, elimination of the memory of the 1930s, etc.). But critically understanding nostalgia film requires that we ask a different question: what was it about the ideological/political pressures of the early 1970s (and, to some extent, the decade and a half that followed) that cultivated this need to retrieve a "lost past"? Moreover, in what ways can we understand the objects of desire in nostalgia film as a projection of such pressures and needs?

Succinctly put, the question cannot simply be: were the 1950s/early60s really like that? Neither should it be: should we want to return to it? Our question must be: what is it about contemporary societies such that this nostalgic image, whatever its historical veracity, is the American "privileged lost object of desire"?

There are a couple of obvious things to say. The global economic landslide of the early 1970s marked the decisive end of the "long boom" of the postwar era. It marked a rupture, a tectonic shift in the conditions that grounded the social formations and cultural configurations of the 1950s and early 60s. If the active, conscious revolt of the late 1960s was a determinate negation, the early 1970s represented a structural, subterranean shift in the basic center of gravity. Suddenly the arrangements upon which postwar prosperity had been built no longer created the conditions for continued profit accumulation. Stagflation set in, and unemployment skyrocketed. The 1973 oil crisis struck at the heart of the manufactured obsession with ostentatious automobiles.

Unsurprisingly, this shift in the global conjuncture meant that the old ideological repertoire of postwar American capitalism went into crisis. The old ideological stabilizers were being undermined by new events; the old legitimating devices weren't able to do their work when faced with the landslide of the early 1970s.

But as Marxists are aware, ideological shifts don't immediately, mechanically accompany shifts in the economic structure of society. As Zizek noted after the 9/11 attacks, "On September 11th, the USA was given the opportunity to realize what kind of world it was part of. It might have taken this opportunity -but it did not; instead it opted to reassert its traditional ideological commitments: out with feelings of responsibility and guilt towards the impoverished Third World, we are the victims now!" Something similar accompanied the erosion of the postwar era (although I would want a less univocal and more internally conflicted analysis of "America" than Zizek offers). Rather than question the very ideological coordinates of the postwar era in light of counter-veiling evidence; the temptation was to cling hopelessly to the manufactured objects of desire appropriate to that anachronistic ideology.

But, and this is where the Jameson bit above is particularly interesting, the mode of interaction with this "past" is one in which the "image of various generations of the past as fashion-plate images... entertain no determinable ideological relationship to other moments of time: they are not the outcome of anything, nor are they the antecedents of our present; they are simply images". Here, Marx's analysis of the fetishism of commodities is operative in the background. Rather than encountering the past in all of its material complexity, we see only various objects on a shelf, shorn of history or ties to social relations. This is only more perverse when we note that the objects in questions are ostensibly about the past.

Another interesting question for me here is how race fits into this picture. It's clear that there is something deeply racist about the entire ideology of nostalgia here, insofar as it wears its white-exclusiveness on its sleeve. That is, the ideology simply couldn't be a fantasy for black people- it isn't even aimed at convincing black people to want such a return to this "idyllic past". The result is that the ideology doesn't even see black people as subjects in need of convincing here; they are non-persons who are best blotted out of this fantasy entirely. Seeing them as subjects to whom white American must justify themselves would be to accept the gains of the struggles of the 1960s; but this nostalgic ideology, of course, in part seeks to forget such struggles entirely. So, it's not that the ideology has an active anti-black theme per se, the ideology entirely erases and blots out blackness.

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What is middle class, really?

Like its fetishism of "small business", American political culture is enamored with the so-called "middle class". Everyone, we're incessantly told, is middle class. With the exception of the destitute on the one hand, and the mega-rich on the other, everybody in the US is part of the glorious middle class.

But like many features of our manufactured political culture, the idea that "we're all middle class" is a myth which serves only to obscure social and economic reality. Buying into this illusion that"we're all middle class" leaves us without the language to discuss very real divisions and inequalities of power in our society. This effect is not unintended: in order to legitimize unequal power relations, the ruling class must speak the language of universality and rationality, not the language of petty interests.

Although we're encouraged to think of class in terms of a person's consumer preferences, in reality, it refers to economic power relations. Economic power is not a function of how much money someone earns exactly. Economic power is a function of how it is that someone earns their living: Do they employ other people? Do they collect interest from investments of various kinds? Or are they the ones being hired by others who do the employing? What kind of authority does someone have in the workplace, and why do they have it? In short, when we inquire about a person's class, we want to know the extent of a person's control and ownership of productive assets.

Importantly, then, we're now in a position to see that income level is something that the idea of class helps to explain. It is thus not a part of how class itself is defined. That is, if you have a great deal of economic power in a certain kind of society, it is likely that you are in a position to extract a large portion of the social surplus produced by society for yourself. If you are dis-empowered by the economic order, it is not likely that you will be in a position to appropriate such a large portion of socially produced wealth for yourself. Class, understood in terms of power relations, is something that helps explain why income stratification exists in the way that it does.

Think of it in this way. Suppose you were examining a feudal society. You wouldn't get very far in understanding power in that society if you only knew that Lords happened to have a large amount of resources at their disposal whereas Serfs had much less. What a political theory that takes power seriously would have to show is why Lords had a lot whereas Serfs had very little. Class is an analytical tool that draws our attention to just that kind of power, with the result we being to understand how inequality comes about.

Here's how class breaks down in the contemporary US.

If you own and control substantial amounts of capital or productive assets that could be invested to make a profit, you are a member of the capitalist class, the ruling class in capitalist societies.

If you have no substantial ownership or control over means of production (the vast majority of us fall into this category), it's likely that you only have one productive thing to sell in order to earn a living: your ability to work. If this is the case, you are working-class. You don't have to be a factory worker to on a production line to be working class. You could be doing very skilled labor indeed. Teachers are working class. Although it has been sullied and spat upon, if not completely forgotten in the US, working-class should not be a term of abuse. It is, in fact, the class that the majority of us fall into.

Now, if you own a small business but also do some work in it yourself, you are neither capitalist nor working-class. You are classic middle-class ("petty bourgeoisie"). If you are a professional, you are likely also middle class (e.g. a lawyer who owns a small practice, or a doctor of a similar sort, etc.).

There are, to be sure, some difficult cases where people are on the boarder lines of each class. There's also the question of those who are excluded from economy entirely and sub-proletarianized. The perverse paradox in such cases of exclusion, of course, is that "the only thing worse than being exploited by capital, is not being exploited at all". But that there are hard cases doesn't vitiate the utility of this understanding of class in the least. The vast majority of us are working class, a substantially smaller portion are middle-class, and a very small percentage of us are ruling class.

So that's it. The "glorious middle class" is basically just professionals and small business owners. They do pretty well by the system and earn decent livings. They enjoy a standard of living and an amount of security that most of don't have access to. But, at the end of the day, the middle class doesn't control the commanding heights of the economy and their economic power is nothing compared to the power of the capitalist class. Though they do well by the system, capitalism is not set up to specifically service the interests of the middle class. This is seen specifically in the fact that the middle class is far more vulnerable to effects of economic crisis than are capitalists.

But for all this, we need to be clear and resolute in stating that middle class folks are neither the most oppressed nor the majority of our society.

So there you have it. A fraction of our society, constituting no more than maybe 15-20% at most, is substituted for the entire thing. Why do we put up with it?

Because we're trained from an early age to think that "average" means a massive, 6 bedroom single-family home in the suburbs (if you're white, of course). Think of every "family" movie you watched as a kid from Family Vacation, Home Alone, Poltergeist, to Beethoven, etc. etc. Think of most sitcoms. And, importantly, if you don't meet this conception of "average" then you've clearly done something wrong (e.g. you didn't work hard enough or you aren't smart enough, etc.)

When politicians speak blithely of the glorious "middle class", they aren't creating this fantasy out of whole cloth. They are drawing on existing illusions fashioned by capitalist social and cultural institutions. Those on the Marxist Left know better than to accept and reproduce this fantasy.

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"All you see is... crime in the city"

Unlike previous generations of Americans, the vast majority of the children of baby-boomers have come of age in a social environment outside of urban centers. We must, however, be more specific here: the vast majority of white Americans (particularly middle class and wealthier) born in the postwar era have been socialized and formed by the Suburban social and political landscape. There are of course a handful of small exceptions (e.g. the Upper East Side, etc.).

By and large, however, the majority of Americans under the age of 40 are products not of urban life, but of a suburban social environment which itself only emerged and congealed in the 1950s.

There are, of course, millions of interesting insights to be gleamed from this fact, but I'll just focus on one here: large numbers of Americans are afraid of cities as such.

This fear manifests itself in many different ways, but it typically assumes a form something like the following. Cities are dark, crowded, dangerous places where one must always be on the lookout for the inevitable attack. The people there (most of whom, it is imagined, are criminals and of color) are mean, resentful and certainly not to be trusted. Moreover, city-dwellers are looking just for people like you, that is, people who are not from the city and fear its squalor and iniquity. They're looking for you, of course, in order to rob and ruffle your suburban purity. Watch out.

This phobia is homologous to (and deeply bound up with) common views about black people in the contemporary US. As political philosopher Tommie Shelby describes it, "in the present post-industrial phase of capitalist development, blacks are often viewed as parasitic, angry, ungrateful, and dangerous" (whereas they'd been characterized as "docile, superstitious, easily satisfied, and servile" under the conditions of plantation slavery). Witness, also, the way in which the term "urban" itself has become racialized and devalued on that basis.

There are countless examples. A good starting place for analyzing this phenomenon is film. From my armchair, it seems as though the depiction of urban areas and so-called "inner cities" in particular, takes an increasingly negative turn from the 1950s/60s onwards (whereas the positive evaluation of the single-family home, the automobile, etc. seems to soar). Things seemed to have changed a bit in the 1990s with the return of many affluent white people to urban centers. But films from the late 1970s and 80s especially (when major US cities were at rock bottom all across the board) depict the city as a dirty, crime-infested den of violence and darkness. This is typically contrasted with the (apparently) idyllic, whitewashed landscape of suburbia. Such a gaze is always from the outside (suburbia) looking in (toward urban areas). Blue Velvet plays off of this phenomenon in really interesting ways, but I can't go into that right now. (Nor can I go into the political economy of why suburbs emerged and why cities went into severe decline in the middle of the 20th century in the US).

One cinematic example from my childhood stands out: the 1983 Tom Cruise film Risky Business. (Or also from 1983, see this). The entire film is an expression of the gaze of the adolescent, white male child of the suburban well-to-do on the North Shore. The film creates clear demarcations between a suburban land of paternal law, purity, cleanliness, conventionally-defined success, norms of chivalry, etc. on the one hand, and an urban landscape characterized by raw sexual "deviance", iniquity, and crime on the other. "Home" is a massive single-family house in Glencoe whereas the problems Joel faces are all to be found in the land of pimps, drugs, and violence: Chicago.

Film and TV, of course, are only two "ideological state apparatuses" involved in socialization and the creation of people for whom the city is a place unfit for those with "family values". There are doubtless many other examples.

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SW Review of "Precious"

Read it here.

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excellent A.O. Scott review of "Bruno"

here.

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The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)

"There is no way that the United States can police the world and keep us on our ass too... unless we cooperate."- Dan Freeman (the film's protagonist)

This 1973 low-budget film, despite selling out theatres in LA, New York, Chicago and Oakland for all of the three weeks it was showing, was subsequently pulled from circulation by United Artists (who put the film out). The film's producers contend it was due to FBI pressure on the UA, which would hardly be an unprecedented tactic for the Bureau in the days of its COINTELPRO program. Despite a shoe-string budget and technical drawbacks (cinematography as well as the screenplay and acting), the film is powerful and uncompromising. Perhaps that's why it was pulled from production.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door deals with black militancy and revolutionary struggle in the post-CRM America of the early 70s. The title of the film plays on the double meaning of "spook" (i.e. both as a racial slur, as well as slang for spy) and derives from the practice, quite common in the mid/late 60s, of hiring a token black person (in accordance with Civil Rights legislation) to keep close to the door so that white customers, etc. could marvel at the 'progressive' practices of the business in question.

It appears that UA thought they were getting a typical blaxploitation flick, but were caught off guard by the finished product and the amount of press the film was getting in the three weeks it was showing. Whether or not the FBI got involved, what's clear is that the business owners of UA didn't want to have anything to do with the continued circulation of The Spook or its powerful, uncompromising and controversial political edge.

From 1973 until its very recent re-release on DVD (which Netflix has, btw), apparently there were only bootlegs and an extremely sparse supply of copies around.

The Spook is soooo Seventies. From the orange shag-rugs, the clothes, and excellent Herbie Hancock soundtrack, the film is an interesting sort of snapshot of black culture in the early 70s. The slang and language are likewise extremely intriguing artifacts of the place and time the film emerged from. To be sure, there are some of the usual tropes and distortions characteristic of what had by then crystallized into the genre of "blaxpoitation". But there is still, I think, an important sense in which something outside the grips of commercial interests, something genuinely critical, left its mark on the film.

The plot begins with a scene in which a cynical White senator (seeking increased black support) undertakes half-hearted attempt to integrate the CIA (which was all-white at the time). The imperative to integrate isn't well received by the white higher-ups in the CIA: of the 10 potential black finalists for jobs in the agency, 9 are eliminated by white officers determined to find ways to ensure their failure. The only man to survive the vetting process is the unshakable, calmly confident Dan Freeman, the film's protagonist.

Despite the intense vetting process that Freeman is forced to endure, his job with the CIA consists in nothing more than menial desk tasks. After 5 years of being stuck running copy machines and giving tours of the facilities (i.e. "sitting by the door"), Freeman quits the CIA and moves back to his hometown Chicago to do social work. But after 5 years at the CIA, Freeman has acquired a host of skills and technical knowledge that he now plans to put into action. Although the CIA thinks they got the better end of the deal, it quickly becomes clear that Freeman had ulterior motives all along. Using his social-work as a cover, Freeman begins to transform, train and organize a street-gang in a rough neighborhood of South Side Chicago into a black liberation insurgency, in the style of the Black Panther Party (although, interestingly, the BPP is never explicitly mentioned in the entire film). The remainder of the film chronicles the formation and undertakings of these "Freedom Fighters" Freeman intends to lead in aggressively resisting black oppression.

Aside from a couple of iconic scenes filmed in Chicago on north-side El stops (some in Uptown (at the Wilson stop?) and in the Loop... woot!), most of the film was shot in Gary, Indiana because then-Mayor Richard J. Daley opposed the film's politics and resisted allowing the City of Chicago to have any part in its production.

In an excellent recent review, Cynthia Fuchs notes that:

Unlike the white vigilante movie heroes so popular at the time of this film's release (Dirty Harry, Buford Pusser, Death Wish's Paul Kersey), Freeman's (the film's protagonist) cause is not personal (or not completely personal, anyway). On leaving the CIA, he spends time in his Chicago neighborhood, observing childhood friends running numbers, pimping, and pushing drugs. Freeman sees a clear and present opponent: confronting one of these locals, Freeman demands that he see beyond his limited horizon. "White folks control your neighborhood through drugs," he grumbles, "And you dealing?"

Right. Because who among the ruling classes are afraid of an apolitical cynical loner like Dirty Harry coming to bring vigilante justice to the reigning racist-capitalist order? Its not due to the violence, illegality or militancy featured in this film that there were so many raised eyebrows and ruffled White feathers. It was frightening (for mainstream Whites) because the film dealt with confident, radical, politically conscious and organized black people joining together to aggressively resist oppression inflicted by White America. We also cannot forget that there were, at that time, on-the-ground social movements (despite their violent supression by the government and the murders of their leaders) trying to fight for black liberation. This was put out in the wake of assassinations of MLK, Malcom X and numerous BPP leaders. Somebody was scared of what black people seeing it might think.

Watching this left me totally unable to understand how a film with such an uncompromising and blunt portrayal of black revolutionary action could not only get made, but shown all across the country in major theaters (if only for a short period). It seems to me completely unfathomable that a film like this could be produced today. My arm-chair theory to explain how it got made, which has already been broached above, is that it piggy-backed on the "blaxploitation" genre which did often feature elements of Black Power and political uprisings against White oppression. But The Spook pushed the envelope in genre-defying ways, eschewing the pulp character and comedic quality that had come to define the genre by 1973. Instead of a comedy-driven, sexy action film (a la Shaft or Foxy Brown), The Spook was powerfully serious for a quasi-blaxploitation film. While there are light moments (mostly wry jabs at the hypocrisy of white-liberal attempts at 'integration'), the majority of the film is no joke. Apparently the capitalists (and possibly the FBI) involved in the distribution and circulation of the film didn't think so either.

(It appears that, for now, you can watch the whole thing here.)

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Che

I tend to hate biopics (except this one maybe). But maybe as a minimum, more people will know who the hell it is they are wearing on their t-shirts.

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Slumdog Millionaire: Mixing raw reality and fantastic fiction

Today I had the chance to a see a new movie in an actual movie theater, the first one in a long time. My indie loving family and I deliberated between Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, before finally deciding Milk might be too tortured to watch on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Well, that might be true, but the first 30 seconds of Slumdog Millionaire let us know we'd made a mistake if we'd been hoping for something light and nice.

While I'd heard a lot of hype about the movie, I hadn't heard any detail about the plot other than it centered around a poor Indian man trying to win a million dollars on the Hindi equivalent of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Jamal, our "slumdog," tells us the story of his life, with all its violence and disappointment, as he grew up in the slums of post-colonial Mumbai.

The soundtrack is wonderful, the acting superb, the romance lovely and endearing. The poverty is raw and (for the most part) inescapable, the injustices of modern India obvious. But I think it's the general premise of the movie, the skeletons of the plot, that left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction. For 100 minutes or more, this movie illustrates in a most heartbreaking and gritty way, the slums. The poverty, the violence, the broken system of India feels so raw, and then suddenly the wordly angst of the first-world viewer is distracted, when something completely fantastic happens: (SPOILER ALERT) Jamal wins the million dollars, and the girl, mostly because he got lucky, because as Jamal himself says, his destiny was simply written this way. After the money and the girl are safe in his arms, the end credits literally roll amid scenes from a Bollywood-inspired finale, complete with Jamal, his lady, and a train station full of celebrating slumdogs dancing and singing.

The fact that Jamal's success, after all his pain and loss, is one in a billion (one in a billion in India alone, let's not even try to consider the entire globe here), is a moot point. So where does the movie leave us? We feel really good for Jamal. He's beaten the odds. He has found happiness even though the world around him is chaos. But what about the world? They're left singing and dancing like in some of the most feel-good fictions we can create for ourselves. The directors (Trainspotting's Danny Boyle and Monsoon Wedding's Loveleen Tandan) make no apologies for this resignation to unreality to tie up the all too real loose ends of the movie. Are we really supposed to buy it? Can't art do any better than that? Is it a matter of deciding on a ridiculously unrealistic conclusion that makes us happy or a realistic, depressing, frustrating ending? Is there no in-between? I'm honestly not sure right now. It may be that question that has left me so restless and not the movie itself.

Trailer, if you're interested:

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Jewels of the blogosphere?: The Anarchist Submissive

This weekend, at my suggestion, T and I watched Secretary. I'd been meaning to check out the film since its release a few years ago. After all, it's indie-actress Maggie Gyllenhaal's breakout role, and a rare critic-pleasing cinematic foray into BDSM (er, that's bondage, domination, and sado-masochism ... right?).

I was a little apprehensive about watching the film. Y'know. Because it features a submissive young woman with a self-mutilation problem who becomes meek secretary/sexual partner to her dominant, ass hole boss (James Spader).

The film raises giant, screaming red flags for feminists concerned about everything from workplace sexual harassment to pay equity, from violent pornography to domestic violence. Some of the scenes of eroticized verbal abuse could certainly be triggering for those who've lived in homes with a nonconsensual brand of abuse. Indeed, I suspect some of the more humorless (!) among us just won't enjoy the film. (Interestingly, Gyllenhaal said in an interview that she expected she would have to fight "old-school feminists" about the movie's content.)

Secretary was truly thought-provoking. It left me craving some feminist response to the film itself, and BDSM culture in general. So I googled "dominant-submissive feminism" and, of course, struck gold.

Meet Subversive Submissive. Her tagline is "just another vegan, anarchist, feminism BDSM weblog." She seems like an intelligent, articulate voice, interested in creating alternative communities and creating understanding of what BDSM is. It's interesting, because her discussions of anarchism and BDSM (and how those identifications sometimes come into conflict) read a LOT like discussions of being both a socialist and a feminist, or a feminist and an anti-racist, or an anti-racist and an environmentalist. But the biggest head-spinner in the blog so far: "Currently, I’m stuck on the idea of my partner strapping a dildo to his boot and fucking me with it."

Just to be clear, I don't know what the hell to think about it all. But my interest is officially piqued, so I'll keep Pink Scare posted as I gingerly explore this world.

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