A few days ago, my local paper ran an entertainment section feature on "Breakup Songs." It also included a "send us your ideas for the best breakup song" thing (the best suggestion was "Heartbreak Hotel"), and, while I don't do that, I do have this here blog and I can hook onto YouTube as well as anybody.
The only really good breakup song in the original article came from noting that Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" isn't a very good breakup song, but "Graceland" is. Moreover, that gives me an excuse to indulge my fancy for world music:
Elvis Costello has some truly fine venom in a lot of songs, but he's sorely underrepresented on YouTube. Here's an EC tribute band doing "One of These Days" and then, the real long ball, "I'm Not Angry (Anymore):"
Another one that I'd like to include was "Dim" by Dada, but the versions by Dada itself on YouTube are all from live shows, and the sound sucks. But someone did do an amateur vid using the album version of the song, which really digs into the heart of the breakup beast:
No one told me the trouble I was in
before my life went dim.
But my real find was when I was checking on songs from the Low Millions album "Ex-Girlfriends," which has some fine, fine breakup songs (and one non-breakup song "Nikki Don't Stop" that is hot enough to melt your headphones, so there are no videos of that one). The one that caught my attention, well, the why of it should be obvious. Here is "100 Blouses," illustrating the relationship between Mal and Inara (Firefly, Serenity). Very, very well done.
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Snakes on a Dame
I can't believe it took me so long to think up this title. Not that it's all that original, mind you. And, yes, this photo only contains one snake.
But there was this one other photo of Lisa Lyon with a snake, and I'm a completist about some things.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Objectification
One problem with language is that so many words have more than one meaning that it’s easy to get confused. Of course confusion about one’s assumptions and intuitive models, and the degree to which such things don’t correspond to others’ thinking can occur even when the words supposedly have only the one meaning. The weasel word here is “supposedly.”
When you get down to the nitty gritty, a common word like “object” can be a real poser (or should that be poseur?). Thus do I charge headlong into the sexual politics of the phrase “objectification of women.”
One very common interpretation of this phrase can be encapsulated in a similar utterance: “treating her as a piece of meat.” That, of course, also alludes to the phrase “piece of ass,” or just abbreviated to “piece.” Carried further, a woman becomes a collection of piece parts, breasts, legs, ass, abs, or sternocleidomastoids (to use an anatomical part that I find particularly pleasing).
The attachment of sexual desire to inanimate or impersonal objects is actually a fetish, though I’ll agree that “objectification” is easier to pronounce than “fetishization.” Both Freudian and Behavioral psychology have a lot to say about the role of the fetish in sex, with Freudians holding it as an example of the projection of sexual desire, while behaviorists suggest that operant conditioning is the key to understanding. I have no quarrel with either mechanism and I’m willing to believe that both apply.
The psychologist Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s lover/collaborator (before their nasty breakup) told a story of one of his patients, a full-fledged Lothario complex, who would speak of his conquests as “mere receptacles.” Branden suggested that he conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that one could construct a perfect female replica; this was pre-Stepford Wives, but that was the clear intent. Make a simulacrum of a woman out of plastic and rubber, totally lifelike, down to the genitalia, animated by motors and actuators. Would the Lothario find such a construct a desirable partner for sex?
“God, no!” was the reply.
Despite novelty “blowup dolls” (sold more often as gag gifts than as real sexual objects, I suspect), and other mechanisms, I believe that Branden’s patient’s response is typical. What is called “objectification” isn’t about reducing women to mere material objects; it is about using women as objects of fantasy, which is not the same thing at all.
In Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise books, Modesty’s response to rape (and her history includes a number of such incidents) was to separate her consciousness from the event, thereby depriving the rapist of anything other than her physical presence. She refuses emotional connection, depriving the rapist of real domination. Within the context of the Blaise books, it is yet another indication of the primacy of the heroine’s will, her power over self. It also illustrates a thwarting of rape, and what that implies. Fetishization and the preference for a fantasy object is certainly depersonalizing insofar as it ignores the reality of the Other. In a sense, it denies the objective reality of someone else’s subjective experience. It is another pathological adherence to an internal model, a fixed idea about the external world.
Recognizing that we are dealing with the elevation of fantasy over reality in such cases also allows the realization that this is not a problem confined to men alone. Women crave the fantasy ideal as surely as do men; their fantasies tend to differ, however. It’s an open question as to what degree these differences are learned or innate. What is indisputable is that 1) they vary from individual to individual and 2) they are malleable.
The late comedian Richard Jeni had a bit where he suggested that the standard porn film is most men’s idea of a romantic film with all the boring parts left out. Compare and contrast that with the notion of the “chick flick,” which supposedly is nothing but the (for men) boring bits.
The clear implication is that romance is collaboration, and collaboration is hard, no matter what the circumstances. It’s hard to tell whether the fantasies of men and women are converging or diverging at this time; that’s a project that’s well beyond my own capabilities, and, for that matter, my interests. But simple observation and personal experience suggests that success is possible at the level of individuals, and that’s where my sympathies lie, in this as in so many other things.
When you get down to the nitty gritty, a common word like “object” can be a real poser (or should that be poseur?). Thus do I charge headlong into the sexual politics of the phrase “objectification of women.”
One very common interpretation of this phrase can be encapsulated in a similar utterance: “treating her as a piece of meat.” That, of course, also alludes to the phrase “piece of ass,” or just abbreviated to “piece.” Carried further, a woman becomes a collection of piece parts, breasts, legs, ass, abs, or sternocleidomastoids (to use an anatomical part that I find particularly pleasing).
The attachment of sexual desire to inanimate or impersonal objects is actually a fetish, though I’ll agree that “objectification” is easier to pronounce than “fetishization.” Both Freudian and Behavioral psychology have a lot to say about the role of the fetish in sex, with Freudians holding it as an example of the projection of sexual desire, while behaviorists suggest that operant conditioning is the key to understanding. I have no quarrel with either mechanism and I’m willing to believe that both apply.
The psychologist Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s lover/collaborator (before their nasty breakup) told a story of one of his patients, a full-fledged Lothario complex, who would speak of his conquests as “mere receptacles.” Branden suggested that he conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that one could construct a perfect female replica; this was pre-Stepford Wives, but that was the clear intent. Make a simulacrum of a woman out of plastic and rubber, totally lifelike, down to the genitalia, animated by motors and actuators. Would the Lothario find such a construct a desirable partner for sex?
“God, no!” was the reply.
Despite novelty “blowup dolls” (sold more often as gag gifts than as real sexual objects, I suspect), and other mechanisms, I believe that Branden’s patient’s response is typical. What is called “objectification” isn’t about reducing women to mere material objects; it is about using women as objects of fantasy, which is not the same thing at all.
In Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise books, Modesty’s response to rape (and her history includes a number of such incidents) was to separate her consciousness from the event, thereby depriving the rapist of anything other than her physical presence. She refuses emotional connection, depriving the rapist of real domination. Within the context of the Blaise books, it is yet another indication of the primacy of the heroine’s will, her power over self. It also illustrates a thwarting of rape, and what that implies. Fetishization and the preference for a fantasy object is certainly depersonalizing insofar as it ignores the reality of the Other. In a sense, it denies the objective reality of someone else’s subjective experience. It is another pathological adherence to an internal model, a fixed idea about the external world.
Recognizing that we are dealing with the elevation of fantasy over reality in such cases also allows the realization that this is not a problem confined to men alone. Women crave the fantasy ideal as surely as do men; their fantasies tend to differ, however. It’s an open question as to what degree these differences are learned or innate. What is indisputable is that 1) they vary from individual to individual and 2) they are malleable.
The late comedian Richard Jeni had a bit where he suggested that the standard porn film is most men’s idea of a romantic film with all the boring parts left out. Compare and contrast that with the notion of the “chick flick,” which supposedly is nothing but the (for men) boring bits.
The clear implication is that romance is collaboration, and collaboration is hard, no matter what the circumstances. It’s hard to tell whether the fantasies of men and women are converging or diverging at this time; that’s a project that’s well beyond my own capabilities, and, for that matter, my interests. But simple observation and personal experience suggests that success is possible at the level of individuals, and that’s where my sympathies lie, in this as in so many other things.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Poly
The story goes that a spinster inherited a farm and she wanted to raise chickens and sell the eggs. So she put in an order for thirty chickens and thirty roosters to the local broker. “Ma’am,” the dealer told her. You really only need one rooster for that many chickens.”
“Well!” said the woman in a huff. “Isn’t that just the way a man would think!”
________________________
Strictly speaking, polygamy is divided into two categories, polygyny and polyandry, the former being one male with multiple mates and the other being one female with multiple mates. In practice, polygyny is so seldom used as a label that it doesn’t even show up in my spell checker, and polygamy is generally taken to mean the multiple wives thing.
The predominance of polygyny over polyandry is pretty typical of mammals where there is substantial sexual dimorphism, i.e. where males are larger than females. In species where it’s the other way around (large females and small males), things aren’t quite so phalocentric, with the extreme cases being those insectoid suicide matings (bees, black widow spiders, etc.), that have served as the basis of many horror stories (or, contrariwise, female revenge fantasies, point-of-view being a factor in nomenclature).
Sociobiology and ethnology offer a lot of speculative theories on the nature of polygamy, most of them controversial, (well duh). It’s pretty easy to see how a shortage of males can lead to polygyny. Indeed, one hard fact in population demographics is that the birth rate in any given region depends on the number of women of child bearing age—period. It’s almost impossible to reduce the number of men to a level where it affects the number of children being born.
In the state of perpetual warfare that sometimes exists in some societies, a shortage of men is almost inevitable, and some sort of polygyny often results. Given long enough, this becomes institutionalized. It’s not necessary to invoke perpetual warfare, either; hunting large game is dangerous, and hunter/gatherer societies can easily develop male shortages and the whole “alpha male” structure, almost by accident.
A suggested countervailing influence in stone age societies is female infanticide. This is the dark underbelly of Eden, the crude population control measure that allowed the human population to remain stable for millennia. Some anthropologists have suggested that this sometimes led to polyandry, due to a shortage of females. It’s interesting to speculate about the future outcome of the gender imbalances that are being set up in some Asian countries as a result of pre-natal screening and selective abortion.
Female infanticide as a population control measure has been suggested as the origin of the form of institutionalized polyandry that exists in Tibet. One difficulty with this argument is that the custom is confined to a property owning class (which suggests that privation isn’t the primary origin), and that the woman’s spouses are fraternal, i.e. she marries the “family” as it were, and one brother is dominant, with the rest merely enjoying spousal privileges. That suggests that in this case, the custom is more akin to primogeniture, with the multiple husbands simply as insurance against infertility in the primary “alpha” male. It may be noted that this looks similar to the commonly noted phenomenon of infidelity on the part of the mates of the alpha males in various primate societies.
Substantial gender imbalances were the norm in the expansion of Europeans into the Americas, and history and folklore abounds in unconventional modes of co-habitation in the Old West. The Mormons dealt with their substantial gender imbalance in the early church with a “revelation” of God’s blessing for polygyny. By contrast, Wyoming Territory, responded to an extreme shortage of women by giving them voting rights in 1869, as an attempt to get more women to move to the territory.
A careful examination of social behavior in the Old West suggests that there is a form of polyandry that is seldom noted as such: prostitution. The legal system does its best to deny that the prostitute/client relationship is legitimate, as do practically all religious doctrines. But on any honest analysis suggests otherwise. What does a polyandrous relationship have that does not appear in prostitution? Certainly emotional relationships form; the client who wants to “make an honest woman of her” is so common as to be a stereotype. Children? Frequently children are the reason why women turn to prostitution. While it’s true that the anonymous sex of a street hooker doesn’t much look like marriage, it’s easy to find more domesticated arrangements upscale in the sex trade, while contrariwise, it’s not that difficult to find legal marriages that make a street hooker and her john look positively loving and healthy.
There’s no doubt that human relationships rapidly increase in complexity as the number of players increases. Same-sex monogamy will inevitably be even less complicated than the sort of opposite sex serial monogamy that has become normal in the modern world. By the same token, divorces in same sex marriages will certainly be at least as complicated as opposite sex divorces. Having both spouses “cheat” with the same individual is relatively uncommon in opposite sex couples, though it does happen, and, yes that’s yet another kind of gossip that will probably never appear in these essays.
But group arrangements, even when the group is so small as three, becomes so very complicated so very quickly that I doubt that they will ever be common enough for the law and mores to take much note of them. It should go without saying that such “outlaw” behavior is just the sort of thing that young people do as a way of testing limits, their own and others, just another set of behaviors that Seem Like a Good Idea At the Time.
“Well!” said the woman in a huff. “Isn’t that just the way a man would think!”
________________________
Strictly speaking, polygamy is divided into two categories, polygyny and polyandry, the former being one male with multiple mates and the other being one female with multiple mates. In practice, polygyny is so seldom used as a label that it doesn’t even show up in my spell checker, and polygamy is generally taken to mean the multiple wives thing.
The predominance of polygyny over polyandry is pretty typical of mammals where there is substantial sexual dimorphism, i.e. where males are larger than females. In species where it’s the other way around (large females and small males), things aren’t quite so phalocentric, with the extreme cases being those insectoid suicide matings (bees, black widow spiders, etc.), that have served as the basis of many horror stories (or, contrariwise, female revenge fantasies, point-of-view being a factor in nomenclature).
Sociobiology and ethnology offer a lot of speculative theories on the nature of polygamy, most of them controversial, (well duh). It’s pretty easy to see how a shortage of males can lead to polygyny. Indeed, one hard fact in population demographics is that the birth rate in any given region depends on the number of women of child bearing age—period. It’s almost impossible to reduce the number of men to a level where it affects the number of children being born.
In the state of perpetual warfare that sometimes exists in some societies, a shortage of men is almost inevitable, and some sort of polygyny often results. Given long enough, this becomes institutionalized. It’s not necessary to invoke perpetual warfare, either; hunting large game is dangerous, and hunter/gatherer societies can easily develop male shortages and the whole “alpha male” structure, almost by accident.
A suggested countervailing influence in stone age societies is female infanticide. This is the dark underbelly of Eden, the crude population control measure that allowed the human population to remain stable for millennia. Some anthropologists have suggested that this sometimes led to polyandry, due to a shortage of females. It’s interesting to speculate about the future outcome of the gender imbalances that are being set up in some Asian countries as a result of pre-natal screening and selective abortion.
Female infanticide as a population control measure has been suggested as the origin of the form of institutionalized polyandry that exists in Tibet. One difficulty with this argument is that the custom is confined to a property owning class (which suggests that privation isn’t the primary origin), and that the woman’s spouses are fraternal, i.e. she marries the “family” as it were, and one brother is dominant, with the rest merely enjoying spousal privileges. That suggests that in this case, the custom is more akin to primogeniture, with the multiple husbands simply as insurance against infertility in the primary “alpha” male. It may be noted that this looks similar to the commonly noted phenomenon of infidelity on the part of the mates of the alpha males in various primate societies.
Substantial gender imbalances were the norm in the expansion of Europeans into the Americas, and history and folklore abounds in unconventional modes of co-habitation in the Old West. The Mormons dealt with their substantial gender imbalance in the early church with a “revelation” of God’s blessing for polygyny. By contrast, Wyoming Territory, responded to an extreme shortage of women by giving them voting rights in 1869, as an attempt to get more women to move to the territory.
A careful examination of social behavior in the Old West suggests that there is a form of polyandry that is seldom noted as such: prostitution. The legal system does its best to deny that the prostitute/client relationship is legitimate, as do practically all religious doctrines. But on any honest analysis suggests otherwise. What does a polyandrous relationship have that does not appear in prostitution? Certainly emotional relationships form; the client who wants to “make an honest woman of her” is so common as to be a stereotype. Children? Frequently children are the reason why women turn to prostitution. While it’s true that the anonymous sex of a street hooker doesn’t much look like marriage, it’s easy to find more domesticated arrangements upscale in the sex trade, while contrariwise, it’s not that difficult to find legal marriages that make a street hooker and her john look positively loving and healthy.
There’s no doubt that human relationships rapidly increase in complexity as the number of players increases. Same-sex monogamy will inevitably be even less complicated than the sort of opposite sex serial monogamy that has become normal in the modern world. By the same token, divorces in same sex marriages will certainly be at least as complicated as opposite sex divorces. Having both spouses “cheat” with the same individual is relatively uncommon in opposite sex couples, though it does happen, and, yes that’s yet another kind of gossip that will probably never appear in these essays.
But group arrangements, even when the group is so small as three, becomes so very complicated so very quickly that I doubt that they will ever be common enough for the law and mores to take much note of them. It should go without saying that such “outlaw” behavior is just the sort of thing that young people do as a way of testing limits, their own and others, just another set of behaviors that Seem Like a Good Idea At the Time.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Hefner
“I’m not a doctor; I play one on television.” –Robert Young (Marcus Welby)
I sometimes find myself feeling a little sorry for Hugh Hefner. Not much, of course. He’s rich, famous, successful, powerful, and he has a situation that enables, hell, it positively encourages him to have sex with many young, attractive women. He’s old, of course, but we’re all going to be old if we’re lucky, and he’s lived a long and interesting life. So he surely doesn’t need any of my sympathy.
Still, there it is. He’s in a polygamous situation, with multiple women attending to his various needs and desires, and yet he chooses to surround himself with what are virtually clones, all blonde, all with similar body types (augmented if necessary), with similar backgrounds, education, etc. As a confirmed xenophile, my inner adolescent wants to say, “What’s the point?” Or possibly, “Where’s the red-headed Asian ballet dancer?”
It’s probably the case that Hef’s girls do individuate if you get to know them well, and a good many of his past girlfriends have demonstrated brains, talent, and personality to burn (I’m thinking of you, Shannon Tweed). Moreover, it’s a really, really, bad idea to base one’s opinion of anyone on what is seen on television, especially reality television, which is the part of the entertainment universe that “The Girls Next Door” inhabits.
I read an exchange a while back on how Paris Hilton had become the poster girl for those against the estate tax. One commenter basically stipulated that their assessment of Hilton was based on “The Simple Life,” believing that to be an accurate portrayal of Hilton. Frankly, I think that’s only one step away from cornering Hugh Laurie at a party and asking Gregory House to diagnose the pain in your side. The important word in “Reality Television” isn’t “Reality.”
Paris Hilton: “I’m not a dumb blonde; I just play one on television.”
In any case, Hugh Hefner has been a bete noir to many feminists at least since Gloria Steinem’s famous article about being an undercover Bunny. It’s hard to get an analytical, rational handle on the reasons for this (and analyzing emotional arguments is dangerous). I mean, Hefner has been busted at least a couple of times in his life, but never, to the best of my knowledge, for being an agent of the patriarchy. As nearly as I can tell, Playboy itself has always been pro-choice, in every possible meaning of the term, and has supported progressive politics throughout its history, including progressive issues that favor women.
Then there is the matter of equal job opportunities for women. Christie Hefner has been a major success story in the demanding world of magazine publishing, yet I’ve seen scant credit given to her for all of that. The fact that she’s Hugh’s daughter may have made it easier to get the job, but it didn’t make the job easier to do, except possibly in negating stories about her fucking her way to the top.
There may be a little bit of a halo effect in my admiration for Christie Hefner. I paid some attention to her when she was just getting her feet wet in the Playboy empire, specifically as a features writer for the adjunct magazine Oui. There she was, the boss’s daughter, so she could write her own ticket, or so I figured. And her first project was an interview with Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a good interview.
In any case, Hugh Hefner does seem to have a privileged private/public life, and he does appear to have some old-fashioned, double-standard views in his relationships with women. Yes, and Playboy publishes pictures of naked women that are sometimes used by adolescent boys (of all ages) to assist in masturbation. It also glorifies youth, a certain circumscribed ideal of beauty, and sex. Like practically every other element of modern popular culture.
But I imagine that the existence of Playboy does make some women feel bad, in some not-quite-expressible way, and the magazine does serve as a symbol of, well, something or other. Adolescent male fantasies? The objectification of women? The primacy of superficial appearance? A lot of projected anger, in other words.
Joanna Russ in her two critical books, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts and What Are We Fighting For? noted some of the authoritarian threads that wove through the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s. The Women’s Movement was one of the fracture planes of the “New Left” (there were so many), and progressive politics in the U.S. basically foundered on the sclerotic nature of the Old Left, and the fractious behavior of the New Left. A good many of the authoritarians in both camps jumped ship and formed the nucleus of what are now called “Neo-cons.” “Authoritarian” is a personality type before it is a political philosophy.
I had a friend in college who said that whenever he found himself agreeing with a John W. Campbell editorial, he knew it was time for some soul searching, because that meant that there was still some establishment pig left in him. Leaving aside the rhetoric of “establishment pig,” and the specifics of who he was using as his negation template, the principle remains. When you find yourself agreeing with James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, it might be time to engage in some self-analysis. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a photo of a naked woman is just a photo of a naked woman.
I sometimes find myself feeling a little sorry for Hugh Hefner. Not much, of course. He’s rich, famous, successful, powerful, and he has a situation that enables, hell, it positively encourages him to have sex with many young, attractive women. He’s old, of course, but we’re all going to be old if we’re lucky, and he’s lived a long and interesting life. So he surely doesn’t need any of my sympathy.
Still, there it is. He’s in a polygamous situation, with multiple women attending to his various needs and desires, and yet he chooses to surround himself with what are virtually clones, all blonde, all with similar body types (augmented if necessary), with similar backgrounds, education, etc. As a confirmed xenophile, my inner adolescent wants to say, “What’s the point?” Or possibly, “Where’s the red-headed Asian ballet dancer?”
It’s probably the case that Hef’s girls do individuate if you get to know them well, and a good many of his past girlfriends have demonstrated brains, talent, and personality to burn (I’m thinking of you, Shannon Tweed). Moreover, it’s a really, really, bad idea to base one’s opinion of anyone on what is seen on television, especially reality television, which is the part of the entertainment universe that “The Girls Next Door” inhabits.
I read an exchange a while back on how Paris Hilton had become the poster girl for those against the estate tax. One commenter basically stipulated that their assessment of Hilton was based on “The Simple Life,” believing that to be an accurate portrayal of Hilton. Frankly, I think that’s only one step away from cornering Hugh Laurie at a party and asking Gregory House to diagnose the pain in your side. The important word in “Reality Television” isn’t “Reality.”
Paris Hilton: “I’m not a dumb blonde; I just play one on television.”
In any case, Hugh Hefner has been a bete noir to many feminists at least since Gloria Steinem’s famous article about being an undercover Bunny. It’s hard to get an analytical, rational handle on the reasons for this (and analyzing emotional arguments is dangerous). I mean, Hefner has been busted at least a couple of times in his life, but never, to the best of my knowledge, for being an agent of the patriarchy. As nearly as I can tell, Playboy itself has always been pro-choice, in every possible meaning of the term, and has supported progressive politics throughout its history, including progressive issues that favor women.
Then there is the matter of equal job opportunities for women. Christie Hefner has been a major success story in the demanding world of magazine publishing, yet I’ve seen scant credit given to her for all of that. The fact that she’s Hugh’s daughter may have made it easier to get the job, but it didn’t make the job easier to do, except possibly in negating stories about her fucking her way to the top.
There may be a little bit of a halo effect in my admiration for Christie Hefner. I paid some attention to her when she was just getting her feet wet in the Playboy empire, specifically as a features writer for the adjunct magazine Oui. There she was, the boss’s daughter, so she could write her own ticket, or so I figured. And her first project was an interview with Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a good interview.
In any case, Hugh Hefner does seem to have a privileged private/public life, and he does appear to have some old-fashioned, double-standard views in his relationships with women. Yes, and Playboy publishes pictures of naked women that are sometimes used by adolescent boys (of all ages) to assist in masturbation. It also glorifies youth, a certain circumscribed ideal of beauty, and sex. Like practically every other element of modern popular culture.
But I imagine that the existence of Playboy does make some women feel bad, in some not-quite-expressible way, and the magazine does serve as a symbol of, well, something or other. Adolescent male fantasies? The objectification of women? The primacy of superficial appearance? A lot of projected anger, in other words.
Joanna Russ in her two critical books, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts and What Are We Fighting For? noted some of the authoritarian threads that wove through the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s. The Women’s Movement was one of the fracture planes of the “New Left” (there were so many), and progressive politics in the U.S. basically foundered on the sclerotic nature of the Old Left, and the fractious behavior of the New Left. A good many of the authoritarians in both camps jumped ship and formed the nucleus of what are now called “Neo-cons.” “Authoritarian” is a personality type before it is a political philosophy.
I had a friend in college who said that whenever he found himself agreeing with a John W. Campbell editorial, he knew it was time for some soul searching, because that meant that there was still some establishment pig left in him. Leaving aside the rhetoric of “establishment pig,” and the specifics of who he was using as his negation template, the principle remains. When you find yourself agreeing with James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, it might be time to engage in some self-analysis. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a photo of a naked woman is just a photo of a naked woman.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Lyon-ess
(Left, photo from Bodybuilding Fanatic)(Right, photo © Copyright 2003 Chris Gulker)
Mystery solved.
I was baffled at first. I have Google Analytics installed on this blog, and it was telling me that no less than a third of the hits I was getting was on the essay on Robert Mapplethorpe. Okay, fair enough. If you want a lot of traffic on your blog, put up a photo of a gorgeous woman wearing only a snake.
But what really got me was that if I went to Google Images and put in "Lisa Lyons," my essay came up right at the top of the list, despite the fact that I was hot-linking the image from another web site.
Well, to my acute embarrassment, it seems that it's a good idea to spell the name right. It's "Lisa Lyon" not "Lisa Lyons." I am chagrined and apologetic to Ms. Lyon, and will try to do right by her forthwith.The histories I can find on the Lady give the story that she took up weightlifting and bodybuilding in order to assist in her practice of kendo, then won the first World Women's Bodybuilding Championship in Los Angeles in 1979. That, plus guest posing at a number of other bodybuilding competitions that year, put her on the pop culture map. She appeared on talk shows, describing herself as a performance artist and body sculptor. Was this the first use of the phrase, or was it first applied to the likes of Schwarzenegger et al.?
In any case, Lyon sponsored a bodybuilding competition in 1980, Lisa Lyon's United States Bodybuilding Championships, which was won by Rachel McLish (photo at right), who also won the first Miss Olympia competition, which was part of the more established network that organized men's bodybuilding competitions.
There's an interview with Doris Barrilleaux, another of the pioneers in women's bodybuilding that fails to mention Lyon at all, which is interesting, and probably revealing, but I can think of too many different explanations for the omission, and I'm going to leave all speculation to my readers on this one.
Lyon connected with Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1980s, and Lady was published in 1983. It was quite a revelation, to both the art world and the world of popular culture, including bodybuilding. Lyon was clearly exactly what she claimed to be: a performance artist, who could project a hundred different moods through the photographer's lens.The story then gets stranger still. Lyon met John C. Lilly, the counter-culture hero, talker-to-dolphins, and inventor of the sensory deprivation tank. She wound up on the board of advisors to Lilly's Association for Cultural Evolution, and more than that, she became one of his four adopted children (if that is the right phrase; all four were adopted as adults).
Ah, doesn't the imagination runs riot here? Lilly wrote extensively about altered consciousness, and regularly used both LSD and ketamine to achieve some of those altered states. (Quick aside: the movie Altered States was inspired by Lilly, as was Day of the Dolphin).
When drugs enter the narrative, the narrative becomes all about the drugs. With Lisa Lyon, sex was already front and center in the narrative (woman wearing snake, remember?), so the narrative hits a pretty turbulent air pocket, right about here, doesn't it? Nor does it help matters that one finds references to Lyon being just out of a psychiatric institution at about the time of Mapplethorpe's death in 1989.Maybe this all amounts to some sort of flameout, but I'm not buying into it. Lilly entitled his autobiography, Center of the Cyclone. I'm thinking that Lyon was more like a cyclone all by herself. When there is a zeitgeist, there is bound to be a lot of geist during the zeit.
Lisa Lyon and Patti Smith
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Another Essay Starting from the Same Place
In 1784, a special Royal Commission of the King of France conducted a series of tests to determine the therapeutic utility of the use of "animal magnetism" also called "Mesmerism" on human health. The study itself is generally credited as being the first placebo controlled blind clinical trials. The Commissioners concluded that Mesmer's animal magnetism had no existence and that imagination, imitation, and touch were the true causes of the observed effects in the Mesmeric salon.
One infrequently cited (partly because it was secret and never published) addendum to the study expanded on the "touch" part of the Mesmeric protocol. Specifically, Mesmer was in the habit of stroking certain sensitive areas of many of his female patients, who then subsequently found themselves feeling much better. This was, as it happens, a centuries old technique for dealing with female "hysteria."
About one hundred years after the Royal Commission, the mechanical vibrator was invented, more or less as a medical labor saving device, because physicians were finding the manual stimulation of their patients very tiring. What the Commission wrote in 1784, "The more modest the women, the less likely they are to understand the reasons for these effects," applied even more strongly in Victorian times. Those who advocated "lie on your back and think of England" attempted to de-eroticize sex to the point of making an orgasm a medical procedure.
While it's tempting to ascribe all of this to simple misogyny, it's worth noting that male sexuality wasn't immune to pathological categorization. I have an old book (published in 1872) that I found in one of those weird bookstores that can sometimes be found in college towns (Troy, NY in this case), entitled The Transmission of Life, The Nature and Hygiene of the Masculine Function by one George H. Naphys, M.D. which has an entire chapter on the dread disease, spermatorhea, "the excessive and involuntary loss of the secretion peculiar to the male."
Dr. Naphys notes that this is actually a rare condition, and should not be confused with the occasional nocturnal emission or loss of the secretion "while straining at stool," He then goes on to use it in yet another warning against masturbation, of which there are many in the book.
Dr. Naphys was, in his own way, a modern, enlightened sort of fellow; elsewhere in the book he argues for co-education, for example. In writing about spermatorhea, he also warns against "itinerant practitioners" (quacks, in other words), who take advantage of the ignorance of some young men to sell them all sorts of treatments that basically are against having nocturnal emissions. One of the "cures" that is warned against is cauterization.
Damn, but I'm glad I was born in the latter half of the 20th Century.
One infrequently cited (partly because it was secret and never published) addendum to the study expanded on the "touch" part of the Mesmeric protocol. Specifically, Mesmer was in the habit of stroking certain sensitive areas of many of his female patients, who then subsequently found themselves feeling much better. This was, as it happens, a centuries old technique for dealing with female "hysteria."
About one hundred years after the Royal Commission, the mechanical vibrator was invented, more or less as a medical labor saving device, because physicians were finding the manual stimulation of their patients very tiring. What the Commission wrote in 1784, "The more modest the women, the less likely they are to understand the reasons for these effects," applied even more strongly in Victorian times. Those who advocated "lie on your back and think of England" attempted to de-eroticize sex to the point of making an orgasm a medical procedure.
While it's tempting to ascribe all of this to simple misogyny, it's worth noting that male sexuality wasn't immune to pathological categorization. I have an old book (published in 1872) that I found in one of those weird bookstores that can sometimes be found in college towns (Troy, NY in this case), entitled The Transmission of Life, The Nature and Hygiene of the Masculine Function by one George H. Naphys, M.D. which has an entire chapter on the dread disease, spermatorhea, "the excessive and involuntary loss of the secretion peculiar to the male."
Dr. Naphys notes that this is actually a rare condition, and should not be confused with the occasional nocturnal emission or loss of the secretion "while straining at stool," He then goes on to use it in yet another warning against masturbation, of which there are many in the book.
Dr. Naphys was, in his own way, a modern, enlightened sort of fellow; elsewhere in the book he argues for co-education, for example. In writing about spermatorhea, he also warns against "itinerant practitioners" (quacks, in other words), who take advantage of the ignorance of some young men to sell them all sorts of treatments that basically are against having nocturnal emissions. One of the "cures" that is warned against is cauterization.
Damn, but I'm glad I was born in the latter half of the 20th Century.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was a major figure in 20th Century photography, in the same league as Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, and others who transformed photography from a bastard child into an acknowledged venue for fine art. That Mapplethorpe’s lover, Sam Wagstaff was also a major patron and advocate of photography as fine art helped to accelerate the speed of the transition, and amplified Mapplethorpe’s influence, as did his friendship with such icons as Patti Smith.
Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe came of age during the first flowering of “gay culture” as a publicly acknowledged and accepted part of American society and the arts. Prior to the late sixties, and seventies, it was generally understood that some areas of the arts and culture had a substantial homosexual representation (fashion, theater, and dance especially, plus those parts of pop culture that were called “camp”) but since homosexuality was usually illegal, and generally frowned upon as such, pretense and appearances were maintained and closet doors remained closed.
But after such things as the infamous “Stonewall Riots,” in New York, and a general softening of strictures about sex generally, part and parcel of “The Sixties” and “The Counterculture,” the “love that dare not speak its name” took to shouting its name into bullhorns for a while, at least in certain safe venues such as New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Castro District.
Some of Mapplethorpe’s most famous (perhaps notorious would be a better word) photographs, was his “X, Y, and Z Portfolios”, quasi-documentary records of the time and its practices, the most infamous probably being the self-portrait with a bull whip in his anus. Other photos of the time are less shocking, but still charged with homoeroticism.
Then came Lady, Mapplethorpe’s photographic study of the body builder Lisa Lyons. This work may have single handedly created a new cultural image of feminine beauty. Previously, two female body types dominated the public imagination, the “never too rich or too thin” ideal of the fashion model, and the soft curvaceousness of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, or Bridget Bardot.
Lisa Lyons
Lyons fit neither of those patterns; she was neither thin nor soft. Suddenly, the “hard bodied” female burned itself into the public eye. And with Mapplethorpe’s eye for light and shadow, that body became Hellenic, even Olympian. The Battle Babe was finally given the body whose form fit the function: that of challenging men physically as well as in other areas of endeavor. Lyons’ legs looked strong enough to kick a door down, and her arms looked like they could throw you across the room. The only question was how much you’d enjoy it.
I saw the traveling Mapplethorpe show when it came to the U.C. Art Museum some years back. This was the show that wound up being tried for obscenity in Ohio in 1990 as another battle in the Culture Wars. It also came just a year after Mapplethorpe himself died of AIDS. One of the most striking photographs in the show was another self portrait, Mapplethorpe facing the camera holding tightly to a cane with a death’s head skull at its top.
Self Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe
But there was another aspect of the show that I found quite ironic. Between the sex of the earlier period and the death images taken when he knew he was dying, there was a period when he seemed to have photographed flowers almost obsessively. The irony is multi-layered. Those who brought the obscenity charges against the show confined themselves to just five photographs, no doubt because they knew that the rest of the exhibit was uncontroversial; even the nude photos of Lisa Lyons, well dang, she’s a woman, and naked women are part of what art galleries are supposed to be about. The flowers would have just confused everything.
But within the chronology of the Mapplethorpe’s life’s work, it seemed as if he became tired of the obvious and the raw, just as adolescents and young adults (most of us anyway) eventually become tired of the hunt and the frenzy and eventually settle down to a quieter existence. The Amish even plan for it, with Rumspringa, the time for sowing the wild oats. Contrariwise, the strictest upbringings produce the wildest breakouts; Mapplethorpe himself was raised Catholic, and observed that he turned every still life into an altar. Even a dolt of a preacher could use the example of Mapplethorpe as a metaphor for trying to return to grace through the natural beauty of the flower portraits.
Or maybe not, because it’s equally easy to see through that ruse. Mapplethorpe’s flowers were voluptuous and erotic, their beauty fleeting, captured in the single eternal moment of the camera click. Like all Romantics, Mapplethorpe’s work was always about sex and death, from beginning to its premature end, with even the flowers serving both bower and wake.
Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe came of age during the first flowering of “gay culture” as a publicly acknowledged and accepted part of American society and the arts. Prior to the late sixties, and seventies, it was generally understood that some areas of the arts and culture had a substantial homosexual representation (fashion, theater, and dance especially, plus those parts of pop culture that were called “camp”) but since homosexuality was usually illegal, and generally frowned upon as such, pretense and appearances were maintained and closet doors remained closed.
But after such things as the infamous “Stonewall Riots,” in New York, and a general softening of strictures about sex generally, part and parcel of “The Sixties” and “The Counterculture,” the “love that dare not speak its name” took to shouting its name into bullhorns for a while, at least in certain safe venues such as New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Castro District.
Some of Mapplethorpe’s most famous (perhaps notorious would be a better word) photographs, was his “X, Y, and Z Portfolios”, quasi-documentary records of the time and its practices, the most infamous probably being the self-portrait with a bull whip in his anus. Other photos of the time are less shocking, but still charged with homoeroticism.
Then came Lady, Mapplethorpe’s photographic study of the body builder Lisa Lyons. This work may have single handedly created a new cultural image of feminine beauty. Previously, two female body types dominated the public imagination, the “never too rich or too thin” ideal of the fashion model, and the soft curvaceousness of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, or Bridget Bardot.
Lisa Lyons
Lyons fit neither of those patterns; she was neither thin nor soft. Suddenly, the “hard bodied” female burned itself into the public eye. And with Mapplethorpe’s eye for light and shadow, that body became Hellenic, even Olympian. The Battle Babe was finally given the body whose form fit the function: that of challenging men physically as well as in other areas of endeavor. Lyons’ legs looked strong enough to kick a door down, and her arms looked like they could throw you across the room. The only question was how much you’d enjoy it.
I saw the traveling Mapplethorpe show when it came to the U.C. Art Museum some years back. This was the show that wound up being tried for obscenity in Ohio in 1990 as another battle in the Culture Wars. It also came just a year after Mapplethorpe himself died of AIDS. One of the most striking photographs in the show was another self portrait, Mapplethorpe facing the camera holding tightly to a cane with a death’s head skull at its top.
Self Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe
But there was another aspect of the show that I found quite ironic. Between the sex of the earlier period and the death images taken when he knew he was dying, there was a period when he seemed to have photographed flowers almost obsessively. The irony is multi-layered. Those who brought the obscenity charges against the show confined themselves to just five photographs, no doubt because they knew that the rest of the exhibit was uncontroversial; even the nude photos of Lisa Lyons, well dang, she’s a woman, and naked women are part of what art galleries are supposed to be about. The flowers would have just confused everything.
But within the chronology of the Mapplethorpe’s life’s work, it seemed as if he became tired of the obvious and the raw, just as adolescents and young adults (most of us anyway) eventually become tired of the hunt and the frenzy and eventually settle down to a quieter existence. The Amish even plan for it, with Rumspringa, the time for sowing the wild oats. Contrariwise, the strictest upbringings produce the wildest breakouts; Mapplethorpe himself was raised Catholic, and observed that he turned every still life into an altar. Even a dolt of a preacher could use the example of Mapplethorpe as a metaphor for trying to return to grace through the natural beauty of the flower portraits.
Or maybe not, because it’s equally easy to see through that ruse. Mapplethorpe’s flowers were voluptuous and erotic, their beauty fleeting, captured in the single eternal moment of the camera click. Like all Romantics, Mapplethorpe’s work was always about sex and death, from beginning to its premature end, with even the flowers serving both bower and wake.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Dragon Blood
[Crossposted from WAAGNFP]
OK, there was this time in college, I was dating a girl named Rhoda, and she invited me home for a weekend, and so I thought … no way am I telling that one.
–Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle
There are some stories that I can’t just change the names and get away with it. Probably the most important part of that is that the individuals involved would still recognize themselves, and it would, despite all attempts at anonymity, still be an invasion of privacy. Some stories are just too intrinsically personal.
Moreover, there are some bits of personal history, that, no matter how much I might try to take all the blame for whatever bad things happen, it wouldn’t be enough, and other people would be shown in a bad light. I’m not always against that, mind you, but sometimes I am, especially when I had too great a hand in the unfortunate events.
Sometimes, making a story more generic removes all its flavor. At that point, there’s no reason to tell the thing in the first place. That’s one of the places where you opt for out-and-out fiction, keeping the flavor, but creating new characters for all the events, and distancing the events by wrapping them in the outlandish, putting them in the future, for example, or having them occur while there is a serial killer on the rampage. Even that is a risk, of course. Sometime people still recognize themselves in your fiction; sometimes they do so before the writer does. Tough. That’s the biz, baby.
The one I’m about to tell takes generification to some sort of limit, I think, but there are some philosophical points that I’ll get at, probably not the most important things in the real story, but the only nuggets that I can pull from this stream at this time.
In the early 1980s, I had my heart broken by a woman who had no idea at the time that she was doing it. That can happen when you carry a torch in sufficient secrecy for long enough.
It was hardly the first time I’d had my heart broken. If you’re still single in your thirties and haven’t had your heart broken a few times, you’re really not trying very hard at life. Still, this particular one felt different. It didn’t have the feeling of failed infatuation, for one thing. It didn’t damage my self-confidence that way a humiliating heartbreak does. Rather, there was a deep sense of loss that I couldn’t fully plumb, and a feeling that my future had somehow changed. It was some combination of freedom and being adrift.
Maybe it’s only hindsight, but I also had the feeling that I was in for some trouble. Or maybe that I was about to go looking for trouble.
When you really want to get into trouble, (and by “you” I mean “me”), the best enabler is usually a woman. That’s my drug of choice anyway. It only took me a few months to find the right one. I’ll call her June, which is obviously not her name at all; I’ve never dated a June.
Okay, here, massive generic evasion. I am not going to give any specific details about why June was trouble. I’ll note that, between the first time I met her, and the time we’d agreed to have lunch, something really bad happened to her, so she missed our first lunch date. I’ll also stipulate that you aren’t likely to figure out what that “really bad something” was, so don’t bother trying to guess. Just realize that, when I heard about it, I knew that the danger content of knowing her had just gone up by several orders of magnitude, and that we were going to become lovers, and that it would end badly.
There is an absolutely brilliant sequence in Alan Moore’s groundbreaking comic Watchmen, concerning Dr. Manhattan, who is the only character in the book with truly superhuman powers. Okay, Ozymandias can catch bullets as a bit of a trick, but Dr. Manhattan can teleport, transmute elements, and be in several places at once. He also experiences time, his own personal history, all at once, so he can foretell the future. At one point, he takes his girlfriend to Mars, and makes a reference to a time, several minutes in the future, when she surprises him with the information that she’s having an affair with another hero.
Then, several minutes in the future, she mentions the affair, and Dr. Manhattan is surprised. He knew what was coming, but he was still surprised when it happened.
He has to be surprised sometime, and that was the time, even if he knew about it in advance.
So I knew it was temporary and that June was going to dump me at some point; I even told that to a close friend when she asked me about the relationship (out of concern for my well-being, bless her). Furthermore, I’ll even suggest that whatever attempts I’d made to cushion that eventual blow, made the breakup even worse, because it added to the degree to which I was culpable, and it meant that I’d not been as good a person as my own ego ideal would like to believe. Some of the attraction had been that I was playing white knight, and instead I seemed to have a bit of dragon blood in me, as it were.
And it hurt. It really, really hurt. All the pain and humiliation that I hadn’t felt with the original heartbreak, well, I made up for it when June dumped me. And, just as an indication of the original, obvious danger content, it wasn’t a clean break, and couldn’t be, because circumstances meant that I still saw her on a regular basis.
Pretty good job of it, eh?
Okay now, the bit of philosophical payoff that I referred to earlier.
I’ve been following various feminist discussions on the net for quite a while, from even before what is now called teh blogosphere. And one of the issues that comes up frequently is the “nice guys don’t get laid,” discussion, also known as “Why do good girls like bad boys?” (from the song by Angel and the Reruns, in the Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party). There are plenty of snarky things said about guys who say this, and rightfully so. The gist of the rightful snark is that being shy and insecure is not the same as being a “nice guy” and exactly why is being “nice” supposed to be rewarded by sex? That expectation, in fact, sounds like something other than “nice,” doesn’t it?
As a critique of male hypocrisy, the argument is spot on. I’ll stipulate that I agree with it.
However, after the episode with June, after the initial acute pain and humiliation wore off, I found myself in a state that combined pain and anger. Neither of those was intense, and I was raised well, and I’m a polite fellow. But there’s plenty of psychic energy in both pain and anger, and the mix is potent.
And I was catnip to women. They sat down next to me at lunch counters and struck up conversations. They latched onto me at parties and invited me home. They asked me to walk them to their cars from bars and they gave me their phone numbers. They invited me up to their rooms at conventions.
Okay, I was also in my early thirties, employed at a good, high status job, and I’d been practicing Aikido and doing weight training, so I’d filled out an astonishingly thin (in college I was just over 6 feet tall and weighed 130 lbs) with an extra 15-20 lbs of muscle. I was blond with dark black eyebrows and dark beard (since gone to gray) and had a sardonic look. So it wasn’t as if I’d somehow gone to sleep one night as a pimply geek and woke up the next as some sort of hunk. I’d never been unattractive physically, and I’d been complimented on my appearance before, and I wasn’t anything approaching a “30 year old virgin.”
But this was new, and I found it very easy to take advantage. Moreover, there were at least a couple of occasions where I was, by my lights anyway, something of a bastard. And it was expected of me, as nearly as I can tell. The women expected it, and, for all I know, would have been disappointed if I hadn’t acted that way.
It wore off after a while. The pain and anger faded, and I’m not very good at the bastard part anyway. But I can’t say that I didn’t have fun, because I did. And I hope that the women involved enjoyed it half as much as I did, because then it was worth their while as well. They got to play with what was, when all is said and done, a pretty tame monster, to no lasting damage. I suspect that’s the purpose, in fact. We all like to think that we can tame the monster, and there’s really only the one door. It leads to both the Lady and the Tiger, and they are one and the same.
OK, there was this time in college, I was dating a girl named Rhoda, and she invited me home for a weekend, and so I thought … no way am I telling that one.
–Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle
There are some stories that I can’t just change the names and get away with it. Probably the most important part of that is that the individuals involved would still recognize themselves, and it would, despite all attempts at anonymity, still be an invasion of privacy. Some stories are just too intrinsically personal.
Moreover, there are some bits of personal history, that, no matter how much I might try to take all the blame for whatever bad things happen, it wouldn’t be enough, and other people would be shown in a bad light. I’m not always against that, mind you, but sometimes I am, especially when I had too great a hand in the unfortunate events.
Sometimes, making a story more generic removes all its flavor. At that point, there’s no reason to tell the thing in the first place. That’s one of the places where you opt for out-and-out fiction, keeping the flavor, but creating new characters for all the events, and distancing the events by wrapping them in the outlandish, putting them in the future, for example, or having them occur while there is a serial killer on the rampage. Even that is a risk, of course. Sometime people still recognize themselves in your fiction; sometimes they do so before the writer does. Tough. That’s the biz, baby.
The one I’m about to tell takes generification to some sort of limit, I think, but there are some philosophical points that I’ll get at, probably not the most important things in the real story, but the only nuggets that I can pull from this stream at this time.
In the early 1980s, I had my heart broken by a woman who had no idea at the time that she was doing it. That can happen when you carry a torch in sufficient secrecy for long enough.
It was hardly the first time I’d had my heart broken. If you’re still single in your thirties and haven’t had your heart broken a few times, you’re really not trying very hard at life. Still, this particular one felt different. It didn’t have the feeling of failed infatuation, for one thing. It didn’t damage my self-confidence that way a humiliating heartbreak does. Rather, there was a deep sense of loss that I couldn’t fully plumb, and a feeling that my future had somehow changed. It was some combination of freedom and being adrift.
Maybe it’s only hindsight, but I also had the feeling that I was in for some trouble. Or maybe that I was about to go looking for trouble.
When you really want to get into trouble, (and by “you” I mean “me”), the best enabler is usually a woman. That’s my drug of choice anyway. It only took me a few months to find the right one. I’ll call her June, which is obviously not her name at all; I’ve never dated a June.
Okay, here, massive generic evasion. I am not going to give any specific details about why June was trouble. I’ll note that, between the first time I met her, and the time we’d agreed to have lunch, something really bad happened to her, so she missed our first lunch date. I’ll also stipulate that you aren’t likely to figure out what that “really bad something” was, so don’t bother trying to guess. Just realize that, when I heard about it, I knew that the danger content of knowing her had just gone up by several orders of magnitude, and that we were going to become lovers, and that it would end badly.
There is an absolutely brilliant sequence in Alan Moore’s groundbreaking comic Watchmen, concerning Dr. Manhattan, who is the only character in the book with truly superhuman powers. Okay, Ozymandias can catch bullets as a bit of a trick, but Dr. Manhattan can teleport, transmute elements, and be in several places at once. He also experiences time, his own personal history, all at once, so he can foretell the future. At one point, he takes his girlfriend to Mars, and makes a reference to a time, several minutes in the future, when she surprises him with the information that she’s having an affair with another hero.
Then, several minutes in the future, she mentions the affair, and Dr. Manhattan is surprised. He knew what was coming, but he was still surprised when it happened.
He has to be surprised sometime, and that was the time, even if he knew about it in advance.
So I knew it was temporary and that June was going to dump me at some point; I even told that to a close friend when she asked me about the relationship (out of concern for my well-being, bless her). Furthermore, I’ll even suggest that whatever attempts I’d made to cushion that eventual blow, made the breakup even worse, because it added to the degree to which I was culpable, and it meant that I’d not been as good a person as my own ego ideal would like to believe. Some of the attraction had been that I was playing white knight, and instead I seemed to have a bit of dragon blood in me, as it were.
And it hurt. It really, really hurt. All the pain and humiliation that I hadn’t felt with the original heartbreak, well, I made up for it when June dumped me. And, just as an indication of the original, obvious danger content, it wasn’t a clean break, and couldn’t be, because circumstances meant that I still saw her on a regular basis.
Pretty good job of it, eh?
Okay now, the bit of philosophical payoff that I referred to earlier.
I’ve been following various feminist discussions on the net for quite a while, from even before what is now called teh blogosphere. And one of the issues that comes up frequently is the “nice guys don’t get laid,” discussion, also known as “Why do good girls like bad boys?” (from the song by Angel and the Reruns, in the Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party). There are plenty of snarky things said about guys who say this, and rightfully so. The gist of the rightful snark is that being shy and insecure is not the same as being a “nice guy” and exactly why is being “nice” supposed to be rewarded by sex? That expectation, in fact, sounds like something other than “nice,” doesn’t it?
As a critique of male hypocrisy, the argument is spot on. I’ll stipulate that I agree with it.
However, after the episode with June, after the initial acute pain and humiliation wore off, I found myself in a state that combined pain and anger. Neither of those was intense, and I was raised well, and I’m a polite fellow. But there’s plenty of psychic energy in both pain and anger, and the mix is potent.
And I was catnip to women. They sat down next to me at lunch counters and struck up conversations. They latched onto me at parties and invited me home. They asked me to walk them to their cars from bars and they gave me their phone numbers. They invited me up to their rooms at conventions.
Okay, I was also in my early thirties, employed at a good, high status job, and I’d been practicing Aikido and doing weight training, so I’d filled out an astonishingly thin (in college I was just over 6 feet tall and weighed 130 lbs) with an extra 15-20 lbs of muscle. I was blond with dark black eyebrows and dark beard (since gone to gray) and had a sardonic look. So it wasn’t as if I’d somehow gone to sleep one night as a pimply geek and woke up the next as some sort of hunk. I’d never been unattractive physically, and I’d been complimented on my appearance before, and I wasn’t anything approaching a “30 year old virgin.”
But this was new, and I found it very easy to take advantage. Moreover, there were at least a couple of occasions where I was, by my lights anyway, something of a bastard. And it was expected of me, as nearly as I can tell. The women expected it, and, for all I know, would have been disappointed if I hadn’t acted that way.
It wore off after a while. The pain and anger faded, and I’m not very good at the bastard part anyway. But I can’t say that I didn’t have fun, because I did. And I hope that the women involved enjoyed it half as much as I did, because then it was worth their while as well. They got to play with what was, when all is said and done, a pretty tame monster, to no lasting damage. I suspect that’s the purpose, in fact. We all like to think that we can tame the monster, and there’s really only the one door. It leads to both the Lady and the Tiger, and they are one and the same.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Getting Rauchenberg’s Goat
I don’t always know what I like, but I do know art.
A few years ago, Amy and I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). I forget exactly which exhibit we went to see. Maybe it was Paul Klee illos; maybe it was the Fluxus display. Maybe it was just a collection of “modern masters.”
Whatever. One of the pieces on display was Robert Rauchenberg’s Monogram.
Monogram is a “mixed media” piece; that's a stuffed goat halfway through an old rubber tire. In the exhibit I saw, I think the tire had a rope on it going to the ceiling, like an old tire swing. I rounded the corner into the room where it was displayed—it was right in the middle of the room—and I just cracked up. I mean, the thing is just hilarious, the silliest sexual visual pun I’ve ever seen in a museum, I’m pretty sure.
So after looking at it for a while, walking around it, checking out the collage-y thing the goat is standing on, appreciating just how apt the expression on the goat’s painted face, I began to notice the reactions of other people who came into the room.
Or, more accurately, the lack of reaction. I don’t think I saw a single other museum goer even crack a smile. Certainly no one laughed out loud. And I thought, what a pity that is. I’m sure Rauschenberg had humor in mind when he created the piece, and it’s fairly easy to find critics (oh, those much maligned critics) who reacted with amusement. But the folks trudging through SFMOMA weren’t going to give in to such an easy thing as laughter.
I understand that we’re taught to “behave” in museums, and museums, like libraries are supposed to be places where you whisper. But it’s not like the museum guards are going to kick you out for a snicker, or even a good guffaw.
Well, I think I’ve already written most of what I have in mind here in the the final paragraph from my essay, “On Non-representational Art”:
This isn't a test. There is no right answer in the back of the book. It doesn't have to be "about" anything, or about any one thing. If it looks like something, if it reminds you of something else, well and good. If not, maybe it just looks good. If you don't like the looks of any given work of art, move on to the next piece. There's plenty of all sorts of art around, enough for everyone, really.
You can laugh at it, too. Sometimes that’s what the artist had in mind. And if it wasn't, so what? What is he or she going to do, kick you out of the museum?
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Conjectures
The plural of anecdote is conjecture. --B. Sano
Whenever sex enters the narrative, the narrative becomes all about sex. That’s true even when things seem to go in another direction, like in slasher films where the teens have sex, and are then gory murdered. The deaths are all about how they shouldn’t have had sex.
Back in the day, a friend of mine told me about a discussion he’d heard. I’m unsure about the context, but it was some sort of group discussion, and it was about communes. There was one woman in attendance who was living in one, and the first thing she said was, “Don’t ask about sex. It’s all very confused and I don’t want to talk about it.”
A lot of people lost interest after that, apparently. The hows and whys of dividing up household chores, composting, and geodesic domes just didn’t have the, uh, sex appeal.
Abstinence education was always a doomed idea. If you don’t want kids to have sex, you don’t spend a lot of time talking about them not having sex. Talking about not having sex is still talking about sex; it betrays the fundamental obsession. Try sublimation. Teach them chess, only you’d better redesign the pieces and make sure they never see “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
I’ve occasionally wondered how much of the damage done by pedophilia is from the acts themselves, and how much of it by all the fuss about it. Realize, I’m not saying that raping a ten year old is innocuous, but I noticed on the “Inner Child” episode of Raines that everyone was behaving as if the rape of the child made the murder much worse. I confess to thinking that “dead child” trumps “rape,” but I know there are those who seem to disagree. Certainly the dramatic “my life is over/ruined” etc.” often appears in the public discourse.
After I went away to college there was a scandal involving a Nashville disk jockey and a number of teenage girls, one of whom was a neighbor of ours. There were supposedly things like nude photographs, etc., and the DJ in question was fired and fled town. I’m not sure how illegal it was, nor even the age of consent in Tennessee at the time. For that matter, I have no information as to whether or not actual intercourse ever took place, though one wouldn’t be surprised, would one?
Our neighbor committed suicide, ostensibly because no one asked her to the Senior Prom.
It’s a fair cop, but society’s to blame. – Monty Python’s Flying Circus
A friend of mine has a son who once did some adolescent “horsing around” with a buddy of his on a camping trip. Some would classify it as an adolescent homosexual experience. Still, my friend’s son, as an adult, is by pretty much any measure, both stable and heterosexual, at least judging by his lovers. He never had any particular problem with the episode.
His friend, however, was somewhat bent out of shape by it, or so I heard. He was very upset, broke off the friendship etc. I don’t know the final disposition. I do wonder what the result would have been if conventional wisdom had opined, “No big deal.”
Which brings me around to Michael Jackson, a tragic case, no doubt. An abused child, worked harder than most histories describe sweatshops, (but all too common in show business), robbed of a childhood, so most theories of arrested development apply. Yet a bona fide pop genius.
That's how much we love Michael. We love Michael so much we let the first kid slide... –Chris Rock
No moral here. I know how much some people hate Jackson. Some people seem to love him just as much. But I don’t want to go out on such a bummer, so I’m going to change the subject, while still talking about Michael Jackson.
Jackson was married for a while to Lisa Marie Presley. Elvis’ daughter, so what does that make her? The Kingette? No, that’s disrespectful, and I do respect Lisa Marie; far too much to think she deserves tabloid treatment, though obviously I’m not above the occasional joke at the expense of her fame.
But here’s the thing: she has her father’s features, eyes, lips, cheekbones, you can see Elvis in his daughter. But it looks good; she’s pretty, and exotic too. I like exotic.
Besides, Elvis was not “ruggedly handsome.” He was good looking, but he looked almost pretty, a little feminine perhaps. Full lips, soft eyes. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Then there’s Michael Jackson, who seems to be suffering from surgical addiction, at the very least. The story goes that he’s been trying to make himself look like Diana Ross.
Nothing wrong with Diana Ross, either. But she’s not a girly-girl. I’d even let it slide if someone were to suggest she looked a little bit mannish.
So you’re probably ‘way ahead of me here, to the conclusion of a shaggy dog essay: The Michael Jackson/Lisa Marie Presley marriage can be said to have involved a man who has been trying to look like a woman who looks a bit like a man to a woman who looks a lot like a man who looks a bit like a woman.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Whenever sex enters the narrative, the narrative becomes all about sex. That’s true even when things seem to go in another direction, like in slasher films where the teens have sex, and are then gory murdered. The deaths are all about how they shouldn’t have had sex.
Back in the day, a friend of mine told me about a discussion he’d heard. I’m unsure about the context, but it was some sort of group discussion, and it was about communes. There was one woman in attendance who was living in one, and the first thing she said was, “Don’t ask about sex. It’s all very confused and I don’t want to talk about it.”
A lot of people lost interest after that, apparently. The hows and whys of dividing up household chores, composting, and geodesic domes just didn’t have the, uh, sex appeal.
Abstinence education was always a doomed idea. If you don’t want kids to have sex, you don’t spend a lot of time talking about them not having sex. Talking about not having sex is still talking about sex; it betrays the fundamental obsession. Try sublimation. Teach them chess, only you’d better redesign the pieces and make sure they never see “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
I’ve occasionally wondered how much of the damage done by pedophilia is from the acts themselves, and how much of it by all the fuss about it. Realize, I’m not saying that raping a ten year old is innocuous, but I noticed on the “Inner Child” episode of Raines that everyone was behaving as if the rape of the child made the murder much worse. I confess to thinking that “dead child” trumps “rape,” but I know there are those who seem to disagree. Certainly the dramatic “my life is over/ruined” etc.” often appears in the public discourse.
After I went away to college there was a scandal involving a Nashville disk jockey and a number of teenage girls, one of whom was a neighbor of ours. There were supposedly things like nude photographs, etc., and the DJ in question was fired and fled town. I’m not sure how illegal it was, nor even the age of consent in Tennessee at the time. For that matter, I have no information as to whether or not actual intercourse ever took place, though one wouldn’t be surprised, would one?
Our neighbor committed suicide, ostensibly because no one asked her to the Senior Prom.
It’s a fair cop, but society’s to blame. – Monty Python’s Flying Circus
A friend of mine has a son who once did some adolescent “horsing around” with a buddy of his on a camping trip. Some would classify it as an adolescent homosexual experience. Still, my friend’s son, as an adult, is by pretty much any measure, both stable and heterosexual, at least judging by his lovers. He never had any particular problem with the episode.
His friend, however, was somewhat bent out of shape by it, or so I heard. He was very upset, broke off the friendship etc. I don’t know the final disposition. I do wonder what the result would have been if conventional wisdom had opined, “No big deal.”
Which brings me around to Michael Jackson, a tragic case, no doubt. An abused child, worked harder than most histories describe sweatshops, (but all too common in show business), robbed of a childhood, so most theories of arrested development apply. Yet a bona fide pop genius.
That's how much we love Michael. We love Michael so much we let the first kid slide... –Chris Rock
No moral here. I know how much some people hate Jackson. Some people seem to love him just as much. But I don’t want to go out on such a bummer, so I’m going to change the subject, while still talking about Michael Jackson.
Jackson was married for a while to Lisa Marie Presley. Elvis’ daughter, so what does that make her? The Kingette? No, that’s disrespectful, and I do respect Lisa Marie; far too much to think she deserves tabloid treatment, though obviously I’m not above the occasional joke at the expense of her fame.
But here’s the thing: she has her father’s features, eyes, lips, cheekbones, you can see Elvis in his daughter. But it looks good; she’s pretty, and exotic too. I like exotic.
Besides, Elvis was not “ruggedly handsome.” He was good looking, but he looked almost pretty, a little feminine perhaps. Full lips, soft eyes. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Then there’s Michael Jackson, who seems to be suffering from surgical addiction, at the very least. The story goes that he’s been trying to make himself look like Diana Ross.
Nothing wrong with Diana Ross, either. But she’s not a girly-girl. I’d even let it slide if someone were to suggest she looked a little bit mannish.
So you’re probably ‘way ahead of me here, to the conclusion of a shaggy dog essay: The Michael Jackson/Lisa Marie Presley marriage can be said to have involved a man who has been trying to look like a woman who looks a bit like a man to a woman who looks a lot like a man who looks a bit like a woman.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Mika
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
-- H. L. Mencken.
Mika Tan bills herself as “The Nice Girl with the Naughty Job.” I ran across her MySpace page a few weeks ago, and I was struck by her self –description:
-- H. L. Mencken.
Mika Tan bills herself as “The Nice Girl with the Naughty Job.” I ran across her MySpace page a few weeks ago, and I was struck by her self –description: I am a Taiwanese/Okinawan (mom) and Japanese/Samoan (dad) mutt who grew up in Oahu, Daly City, San Diego, and Guam, in that order. My dad was in the military, so went to 14 schools by the time I graduated high school. I have been described as a free-spirit, goofy and down-to-earth. I have only a few good friends and I treat them like gold; I am one of those kind of friends who will actually show up on moving day with a U-Haul.
The “only a few good friends and I treat them like gold” might have been copied out of Jung’s Psychological Types. It’s one of the descriptors of an introverted thinking type.
It might seem strange to consider that a performer, any performer, much less a performer in erotic films, aka “porn star,” might be introverted. The “thinking type” goes just as strongly against stereotype, doesn’t it? In fact, it easily, almost inevitably, fits into Jungian theory. The performing persona becomes an expression of “the shadow self,” and why do you think actors love playing villains, madmen, and the outlandish?
My wife Amy used to be a librarian. She’s always been bookish, shy, and ill-at-ease in social situation—as herself, at any rate. But she has a performing persona, “Madame Ovary, The Lady with the Flaubert-ghasting Name,” and when she in character, she is extroversion personified. She is outgoing, magnetic, flamboyant, and, above all, she takes energy from the audience. After a show she practically vibrates and it sometimes takes days for her to come down. A bit bi-polar? Only in the theatrical sense, not the clinical.
I am jolly and effervescent most of the time (whoa…but when I am tired, I totally crash). – Mika Tan
The stereotype of the porn star is a sexually abused, drug addicted, exploited prostitute. I’m sure there is some exploitation involved; this is show business we’re talking about here. But a friend of mine once observed that the adult film industry is the only area of show business where the actresses routinely make more money than the actors. They also form their own production companies and move on to themselves direct films at a rate that I daresay exceeds that in “regular Hollywood.”
I once read an interview of Georgina Spelvin, the star of The Devil in Miss Jones where she said that she’d encountered “the casting couch” (the exchange of sex for a stage or motion picture role) much less often in adult films than in the theater or regular motion picures. Again, exploitation is a relative term.
One of the chasms in “The Great Divide,” the gap between both sides of The Culture War, is the attitude toward pornography and those who make it, especially the performers. Realize that it’s not the actual consumption of pornography where the differences lie. One of the exquisite ironies of the “community standards” court interpretations came when those accused of possessing or manufacturing pornography could point to the internet traffic to porn sites from the communities where they lived. It turned out that porn consumption in those small towns in Utah, Iowa, and Georgia was as high as anywhere.
But the puritanical smut hounds hate themselves for it, and they hate those who provide it to them. In practice, that comes down to hating women. It finds expression in all sorts of ways, from the demeaning stereotypes to outright stalking.
I REQUEST THAT YOU DO NOT POST ANY PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOUSELF, ME, OR MY FAMILY. THIS BUSINESS IS FUN, BUT IT ATTRACTS SOME ODDBALLS, WHO HAVE PROVEN TO BE VERY DANGEROUS AND I DO NOT WANT TO MOVE AGAIN. – from Mika Tan’s MySpace page.
On the other side of the Culture Divide there is respect, even admiration for the performers. I remember an article describing how the Saturday Night Live cast treated Seka, another adult film star, when she appeared briefly on the show hosted by Sam Kinison. The word “reverence” was used.
In mainstream discourse “hard core” is a superlative and a compliment, except when it’s hard core pornography, which, of course, was the origin of the term. But to those who have actually colonized the other side of the cultural divide, the hard core performers are heroic. They’ve broken chains that the rest of us lack the strength to break.
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