Category Archives: media

placeholder post: hugh masekela’s "ooo, baby baby"

19 Thursday Jul 2012

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This summer has brought back a lot of memories from the summer before my little sister was born (1987). The summer I learned to swim because we spent — at least in my child’s memory — virtually every day at the “big lake” (Lake Michigan) trying to stay cool by staying wet. The summer we had bonfires and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows on what seemed like a weekly basis, carrying coolers and beach towels up over the dunes in tatty tennis shoes to avoid burning the soles of our feet in the scorching hot sand.

My dad — who in another life must have been a DJ — was the one who provided the boom box and mix tapes (yes: tapes) for these long afternoons at the water’s edge, and this album is one that I will always associate with summertime, heat, sand, and the smell of food cooking on the grill.

Here’s one of my favorite songs from said album.

The latest heat wave broke last night and we’re supposed to have a more manageable weekend ahead of us — hopefully I’ll have enough brain cells left to complete all the half-finished book reviews I’ve got in my queue. Stay tuned!

What are your favorite songs of summer?

movienotes: brave

17 Tuesday Jul 2012

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Teenage Merida and her mother Elinor (via)

To escape the heat on Saturday, Hanna and I went to the movies and saw Brave (Disney and Pixar, 2012) which most of you have probably heard much of a muchness about since it was released back in June. There’s been tons of insightful, critical analysis of Brave and what it does and doesn’t do to advance our cultural narratives about girls and women. I’m not going to try and reproduce or summarize the conversation here — but a few of my favorite reviews/reflections come from Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman, Heida, and Lili Loofbourow.

What follows are some heat-and-humidity-infused reflections on what moved me about Brave and thoughts about some of the non-Disney cultural narratives the movie may be drawing its inspiration from.

Spoilers below. Also massive rambling.

First and foremost, the most striking thing about Brave — and I’m far from the first person to point this out — is that the story centers on a mother-daughter relationship. Let me say this again: The story centers on a mother-daughter relationship. Just last week, my friend Molly tweeted about how her six-year-old son Noah has just started noticing all of the dead and absent mothers (thanks Freud and Jung!) in children’s literature. When parents aren’t dead, they’re most often either out-of-touch with their children’s lives or actively malicious. Often, for women, there’s a twofer with the dead-mother-evil-stepmother theme.

The lesson in these stories is, so often, that parents and children (and the generations they represent) are inherently in conflict, and that women are naturally rivals with one another — usually for power as represented by male attention/alliances).

In Brave, Merida and her mother are in conflict to begin with: Merida is a rebellious teenager (very much a modern American construct) and Elinor is a mother trying to do what she thinks is best for her daughter and letting her fear muddle her ability to see clearly what is best for her daughter. The narrative tension of Brave revolves around mother and daughter finding their way back to the quality of relationship they have lost, while incorporating into that relationship a greater — more adult — knowledge about themselves and one another.

I think the radical audacity of this storyline finally hit home to me in last act when Merida defends her mother (temporarily turned into a bear) against the clan leaders who believe they’re avenging Elinor’s death. And then when Elinor-as-bear comes to the defense of her daughter who is nearly killed by the real beast, Mordu. It’s a powerful thing to see, on screen, a princess defend her living mother from death rather than speaking in her absent/dead mother’s name. And an equally powerful thing to see a living mother, a fierce mother bear, coming to the defense of her girlchild — not only rescuing her from Mordu, but ultimately listening to Merida’s wish to delay any marriage plot until some nebulous future.

Let’s just say that when Merida says to her father and his soldiers, “I will not let you kill my mother!” I could feel the tears spring into my eyes. How often does a girlchild get a chance to say this in our Western fairy tale canon?

This reworking of the mother-daughter relationship speaks not only to our own interpersonal relationships, but also to the broader social narratives of generational tensions. I’m thinking especially here about feminist “waves” and the way we’re so often encouraged to think of feminist activism in generational terms, with overbearing, bitter, jealous mothers pitted against bratty, sexually-potent, ungrateful daughters. Brave points out that division between mothers and daughters — the failure to listen on both sides — obscures the true villain of the piece: adherence to (patriarchal) tradition borne of fear.* I’d argue that such a message is one we truly can’t get enough of in this world obsessed with generational rebellion and rupture. By seeing each generation as a threat to the one that preceded it, we’re hobbling our chances for deep, progressive change.

A few more (briefer) observations.

Merida owes much of her adolescent truth-telling, I suspect, to fictional fore-sisters such as Jane Eyre and Psyche. As Carol Gilligan argues in The Birth of Pleasure and more recently in Joining the Resistance, children — she would argue particularly girl children on the cusp of adolescence — are bellweathers and truth-tellers, pointing out the deceptions we practice on ourselves and one another, and demanding honesty from themselves and those around them. I’d also suggest that Brave‘s narrative lineage owes debts to Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, and to virtually every film produced by Miyazaki. Particularly Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and (Hanna tells me, since I haven’t yet seen it) Nausicaa.

As with Into the Woods, we have themes of parents having to let their children grow up and forge their own path (see: Bernadette Peters’ brilliant witch) while not abandoning them wholesale (see: “You Are Not Alone”). The message in Brave as in Into the Woods is that heroes — regardless of gender — are strongest when working in cooperation with others, and that this message of community isn’t incompatible with forging a new path.

As in Miyazaki’s films, the protagonist(s) Merida and Elinor must learn values such as respect for others, harmony with the community, and a balance between the qualities identified as “masculine” and “feminine” in our culture. Merida is fierce and physically fearless, yet needs to learn the art of political persuasion and empathy for others. There is a subtler morality at play in Brave that shares closer kinship with Eastern folk traditions (in my admittedly limited experience) than it does with the fairy tales Disney usually draws on for inspiration.

And, of course, there’s the brilliant freedom of watching a film about a teenage girl that is decidedly not a marriage plot. Merida’s age is indeterminate, though her body is that of a young woman gone through puberty. She isn’t anti-sex, or anti-marriage even — she’s simply not ready to make the choice. As others before me have pointed out, to have a teenage girl in a mainstream film whose sexuality is indeterminate — meaning she could swing straight, gay, bi, fluid, or something else entirely: We don’t know. And, for once, it’s immaterial to the plot! — is a breath of fresh air.

This is the exact opposite of pretty much every princess movie — and even most YA novels! — out there on the market, because romance is a driving force in stories about adolescents. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but when coupled with heteronormative plots it means that girls look at the narratives about young adulthood and they see that they’re expected to be boy-crazy, or at least boy-interested. They could be boy-interested in the most kick-ass, gender-bending guy on the planet — but boys it almost always is expected to be. And if not boys, then girls (or girls and boys), and it’s always, always, always meant to be an all-consuming preoccupation.

Teenagers are expected, in our culture, to be preoccupied — for better or worse — with sex and relationships. And as a teenager who wasn’t personally driven to explore these things (except in a fictional, future-looking sort of way), I often felt really out of step with stories that depicted my concerns in that way. Merida’s maybe someday but certainly not now attitude toward romantic relationships, coupled with her deep, passionate involvement in her familial relationships, show how teenage girls (and, I’d argue, teenagers more generally) are more complex persons than our media so often portrays them to be.

My one frustration with Brave (and then I promise to stop rambling!) was the one-dimensional portrayal of the male characters, particularly Fergus (Elinor’s husband, Merida’s father). It’s understandable in a 90-minute film that some characters get short-shrift, but the buffoonish character of Fergus, coupled with Elinor’s  level-headed political thinking and parental role can all too easily be read according to the “smart woman married to a boorish man” trope of situation comedy fame (Simpsons and Family Guy anyone?). While the teenage boys put forward to compete for Merida’s hand eventually speak up for their own independent choice of spouse** they are also caricatures clearly meant to communicate “brawn but no brains,” “brash, vain hottie,” and “sensitive weakling.” Since Merida’s protests regarding marriage are valid regardless of the merit of her suitors, it seems like a poor choice to recapitulate harmful stereotypes about men in a film that is otherwise quite smart about women and gender.

I suspect that this shortcoming has less to do with Brave in particular than it has to do with the fact that our culture has still not answered the questions of masculinity posed by feminist thinkers and activists. We haven’t figured out how to tell a story about fully-dimensional, human women, that also includes fully-dimensional human men. In order to tell a story in which a mother and daughter are the central relationship, Elinor’s husband, her (much younger) sons, and Merida’s would-be suitors, cannot be taken seriously — must provide, in fact, the comic relief to an otherwise revolutionary plot. Which leaves open the question, of course, what place fathers, sons, and male lovers might have in this brave new world which Merida and her mother are building for the clans?

Some anti-feminists would argue there isn’t a place for men in the world Elinor and Merida seek to build. I’d argue it will be up to the men — and women alongside them — to discover and create that place for themselves.

*As an aside, the historian and feminist in me would really love to know the details of Elinor’s back-story. She and her husband seem to have a loving relationship, yet she clearly sees marriage to some extent as a political alliance. I yearned for a glimpse inside her head, so that we could understand some of the reasons for her fear, and the reasons for the decisions she made — both in pushing Merida toward a betrothal of political expedience, and then later in choosing to support her daughter’s desire to forge her own path.

**And seen through slash goggles, Hanna and I agree that in the final scene it’s clear at least two of them have found each other as potential mates!

quick hit: the haunted legs!

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

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Hanna and I spent the weekend in Maine at her parents’ house, which was a blessed break from the heat of an urban summer and also a two-day stretch of time away from the Internet. Since we were spending time with family, I didn’t get any writing done — so I don’t have the review of Love the Sin for you which I hoped to post today.

Instead, I’m going to give a signal boost to my brother Brian’s wacky month-long art project “Haunted Legs”:

click here for more

Each day will bring a new frame in the … story? web comic? we’ll see as it unfolds! Here is yesterday’s installment:

Ever since I saw the early sketches for this project, I’ve been thinking of the Dr. Seuss story about the pale green pants with nobody inside them; it was one of our favorite stories to read a Grandma’s house growing up — and I bet the resemblance is more than pure coincidence! Click here to check out the page and follow along. Happy reading!

girl talk 2011 [web video]

19 Thursday Apr 2012

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I meant to get a book review up today, but it’s been one of those weeks. So here, instead, is a six minute introduction to Girl Talk 2011, the spoken word event that seeks to bring together queer cis and trans women in dialogue (via Whipping Girl).

In their own words:

Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Girl Talk is a spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships.

You can check out the full playlist at YouTube.

I (heart) dahlia lithwick (again) + rant re: healthcare oral arguments

28 Wednesday Mar 2012

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via @eskenosen

On the way to work this morning, Hanna and I were discussing how utterly nonsensical and frustrating the anti-healthcare folks are. First they didn’t want government-supported, single-payer healthcare. So the Obama administration patched together something using private insurers. And now they’re pissed about that. Dahlia Lithwick, as usual, highlights the inanity:

It’s always a bit strange to hear people with government-funded single-payer health plans describe the need for other Americans to be free from health insurance. But after the aggressive battery of questions from the court’s conservatives this morning, it’s clear that we can only be truly free when the young are released from the obligation to subsidize the old and the ailing. Justice Samuel Alito appears to be particularly concerned about the young, healthy person who “on average consumes about $854 in health services each year” being saddled with helping pay for the sick or infirm—even though, one day that will describe all of us. Or as Justice Antonin Scalia later puts it: “These people are not stupid. They’re going to buy insurance later. They’re young and need the money now.” (Does this mean that if you are young and you pay for insurance, Scalia finds you “stupid”?)

Read the whole thing over at Slate. Emphasis mine.

Apart from everything else that’s angry-making about the healthcare “debate,” I’m particularly appalled by the endemic ageism and ableism embedded in these arguments about how we shouldn’t have to pay for what other people need. As if those “others” (the sick, the infirm) aren’t actually us. And will never be us. Or, once we become the other we’ll be left out in the cold to cope with our ill-health all on our own.

Say what?

The argument that young people don’t need healthcare services implies that youth per se = healthy. This is an idealization of youth that runs rampant in our culture, and it’s poisoning our collective consciousness by encouraging us to imagine that to be young is in itself a protection against ill-health. This is nonsense. I know plenty of young people, myself and my partner included, who need not only preventative care (so we hopefully won’t need more expensive care later), but also actual expensive care. Being young doesn’t protect you from physical infirmity, both organic and accidental. Young people get cancer. Young people have thyroid disorders. Young people get infections. Young people break bones, are involved in traffic accidents, must cope with sports injuries. Young people need dental work done, require eye care, need regular reproductive health check-ups (I just made my annual pelvic exam appointment last week).

This Friday I’ll be celebrating my 31st birthday. I know very few of my peers who haven’t already, in their relatively youthful lives, had need of medical services for all of these things. And who haven’t avoided desperately-needed medical care because they were temporarily un- or under-insured and couldn’t afford to pay out of pocket for that care.

As Lithwick points out, even if we experience a relatively healthful youth, we will all one day age and become infirm of body. There is a stunning arrogance and lack of self-awareness to the suggestion that those “others” who get sick and need medical care are the ones who much bear the burden of procuring those services. Seriously: Do certain Supreme Court Justices / conservative lawmakers actually believe they will never become ill/sustain an injury/need end-of-life care?

Once again, I am reminded of historian Gerda Lerner’s observation that “All of us, ultimately, will join one of the most despised and abused groups in our society–the old and the sick.”

There’s a conversation to be had about the financial burden of healthcare services, and whether the cost should be as high as it is. But that conversation should be separate from the conversation about individual healthcare needs, because when it comes to health, like our environment, we’re all in this together. There is no way to escape sickness, there is no way to prevent death. We will all experience physical suffering. We will all need medical care. And there is absolutely no way to reliably predict who will need what services and when.

It frightens me that the supposedly wise persons on the Supreme Court seem to have forgotten their own mortality.

quick hit: celebrating 100 issues of "feminist review"!

14 Wednesday Mar 2012

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Yesterday, co-worker Liz brought me an announcement from the College & Research Library News advertising the fact that the feminist review has just published its 100th issue! In celebration, the fr has made a selection of twenty articles representing a wide range of topics and eras available for free on their home page. You can also access the current (March 2012) issue for free through the journal’s main page by clicking on the “Current Issue” tab on the left-hand side bar.

For the month of March, Palgrave (the publisher) is also running an “Access All Areas 2012” campaign for librarians to gain access to their full online database on a trial basis — but you have to go through a registration process to take advantage of the offer, and it seems set up for librarians with institutional affiliations. Bah.

Still, I think the articles they do have available without registration shenanigans look promising! Here’s the list of the twenty selected pieces:

  1. rethinking the interplay of feminism and secularism in a neo-secular age FREE

    Niamh Reilly
    Full Text | PDF

  2. The Scent of Memory: Strangers, Our Own, and Others FREE

    Avtar Brah
    Full Text | PDF

  3. beautiful dead bodies: gender, migration and representation in anti-trafficking campaigns FREE

    Rutvica Andrijasevic
    Full Text | PDF

  4. birth, belonging and migrant mothers: narratives of reproduction in feminist migration studies FREE

    Irene Gedalof
    Full Text | PDF

  5. not-/unveiling as an ethical practice FREE

    Nadia Fadil
    Full Text | PDF

  6. maids, machines and morality in Brazilian homes FREE

    Elizabeth Silva
    Full Text | PDF

  7. mothers who make things public FREE

    Lisa Baraitser
    Full Text | PDF

  8. the new woman and ‘the dusky strand’: the place of feminism and women’s literature in early Jamaican nationalism FREE

    Leah Rosenberg
    Full Text | PDF

  9. ‘door bitches of club feminism’?: academia and feminist competency FREE

    Zora Simic
    Full Text | PDF

  10. why queer diaspora? FREE

    Meg Wesling
    Full Text | PDF

  11. Celling black bodies: black women in the global prison industrial complex FREE

    Julia Sudbury, FR 70
    Abstract | PDF

  12. Will the real sex slave please stand up? FREE

    Julia O’Connell Davidson, FR 83
    Full Text | PDF

  13. Discursive and political deployments by/of the 2002 Palestinian women suicide bombers/martyrs FREE

    Frances S Hasso, FR 81
    Full Text | PDF

  14. Challenging Imperial Feminism FREE

    Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, FR 17
    Abstract | PDF

  15. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses FREE

    Chandra Talpade Mohanty, FR 30
    Abstract | PDF

  16. The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order FREE

    Donna Haraway, FR 55
    Full Text | PDF

  17. Sex and Race in the Labour Market FREE

    Irene Breugel, FR 32
    Abstract | Full Text

  18. Feminism and class politics: a round-table discussion FREE

    Feminist review talks with Michèle Barrett, Beatrix Campbell, Anne Phillips, Angela Weir, and Elizabeth Wilson, FR 23
    Abstract | PDF

  19. The Material of Male Power FREE

    Cynthia Cockburn, FR 9
    Abstract | PDF

  20. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Muli-National Reception FREE

    Lata Mani, FR 35
    Abstract | PDF

Head on over to feminist review and read away!

movienotes: the price of pleasure

16 Thursday Feb 2012

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Note: This is part two of my series of posts related to a screening of The Price of Pleasure and discussion about pornography that took place at the Boston University School of Public Health on Friday, 10 February 2012. Part one can be found here and my discussion of the post-screening debate can be found here.

The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality, and Relationships (2008) is a documentary with a message. Although it can’t quite decide what that message is. The many-tentacled porn industry is fucking with our minds and our sexuality? Men who watch porn are more likely to be misogynist racists and sexual predators? All women are victims of porn, both in its production and its consumption? One way or another, pornography — we gather from the film — is bad. The Price of Pleasure tells the following story: In the hands of unscrupulous corporations run by men, the “porn industry” exploits female performers and relentlessly pushes a commercialized version of (heterosexual) sex that is, in turn, consumed by (heterosexual) men. The sexuality of male consumers is shaped by the narratives of “porn” — narratives which are sexist, racist, and violent, in short about different types of domination and control. Then these men turn around and bring pornography’s poisonous narratives into their own (heterosexual) sex lives. Individuals in the world of Pleasure — both porn-watching men and the women these men are in relationship with — are figured as populations almost totally lacking in self-determination and agency. And the documentary clearly wants us to get upset about this state of affairs — and I would, if I thought it were true! What the film’s audience might do to resist the porn industry’s grip on human sexuality is much less clear.

How did The Price of Pleasure make its argument for pornography as harmful to our sexuality? In part through interviews. Women interviewed in Pleasure describe feeling subjected to watching porn with their male partners (or sometimes abusers), or feeling pressure to conform to the hypersexualized imagery of womanhood peddled in consumer culture. Men describe sexual behavior that is shame-ridden, secretive, obsessive. The men and women interviewed about their consumption of pornography were all young Those in the porn industry, interviewed largely at an industry expo in Las Vegas, come across as product pushers, while the anti-pornography talking heads (interviewed against a black backdrop, in professional dress) come across as measured, authoritative experts. The talking heads are, for anyone who follows the discussion of pornography and culture, a cast of usual suspects: Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, Pamela Paul, Ariel Levy. While I’ve read some of these authors’ work, and find much to admire there, I also depart from their final analysis about what porn is and how it works as a cultural medium. So I definitely felt cranky, while watching the film, about how these authors were positioned relative to those in the porn industry — about the lack of any dissenting voices who were similarly situated as credentialed researchers. I might disagree that an individual with a doctorate and a long list of publications is a more authoritative source than the owner of a porn production company — but there’s no way that the industry insider is going to carry the same weight of someone positioned as an objective researcher.

I found myself noticing the visual choices being made in the film, and how these visual choices worked to support the documentary’s main porn-is-a-threat argument. The visuals we got of both the porn itself and of porn producers were rapid out of context clips. As a viewer, I felt visually assaulted by the rapid change of images that lacked any explanation, other than the understanding that these were typical images in porn. The scary voice man hired to narrate the film (if you’ve wondered what he does between election cycles, now you know) describes what you’re seeing — i.e. a female porn actress sucking off a group of men before the ejaculate on her face. But documentary context is very different from pornographic film context. “Porn” in The Price of Pleasure is synonymous with exploitative working conditions that, in turn, produce visual images and narratives that encourage men (and always men) to replicate those exploitative scenes in their own lives. We’re shown what does, much of the time, look like a violent, non-consensual sexual assault or torture scene. And as viewers we’re not given the information needed to evaluate the particular example of pornography in any meaningful way.

For example: Was everyone on the set consenting, in a meaningful, non-coerced way, to being there and engaging in the activities depicted? Were the activities specifically negotiated prior to shooting the scene by everyone, and were the activities and conditions agreed to in that negotiation adhered to? Were all of the individuals hired for the production paid a working wage? Were health and safety concerns addressed and ensured throughout production? In terms of the depiction of sex the film conveys, is it clear to the viewer of the film that these activities are consented to and negotiated, that adequate safety measures are being taken? These things matter. Does the woman (or subordinate partner) in the scene enjoy being bound and gagged, in the context of a role-playing scenario, or not? Power play doesn’t have to be exploitative as long as it’s play, and clearly demarcated as such. But The Price of Pleasure never acknowledges these distinctions, instead choosing to use shocking, non-contextualized imagery in support of its argument about how pornography is, in and of itself, an assault on our sexual selves.

The other, most glaringly obvious, problem with The Price of Pleasure was that the film-makers never defined their terms. What did they mean by “porn”? From the examples shown in the documentary, it was clear that “porn” meant very specific types of pornography videos, usually produced with an archetypal heterosexual male consumer in mind. In the world of Pleasure only men willingly produce pornographic films, only men who desire women consume pornographic films, and any other type of producing/consuming demographic and/or genre of sexually explicit materials is rendered invisible — because (I would argue) it fails to fit within the scope of the film-maker’s argument — namely, that “the porn industry” is destroying our sexual self-determination and ability to find sexual pleasure in non-destructive, equitable ways. Their argument thus becomes somewhat circular: limiting the discussion of porn to porn which appears, as presented, grounded in narratives of sexual dominance, abuse, and inequality, then it seems self-evident that pornography equals these things. And from there, it is but a small leap of logic to argue that consuming these messages about gender, race, and sexuality inform how we approach race-, gender- and sexual relations in our real lives (though the film makes this seem like a very simple causal relationship, when in fact I would argue the dialogue between fantasy and reality is much, much more complicated!).

Where, in the narrative this film is constructing, are the many genres of gay male and m/m erotica (film, textual, photographic, and otherwise?) Where is the feminist porn, the lesbian porn, the porn created within and for the many sexual identity communities — from swinging couples to polyamorous lovers to trans-identified queer folk to asexy kink lovers? Where, in this film, is there space to talk about amateur porn, whether in the form of the home videos once circulated via mail-order catalogs or xtube porn videos made by couples of all persuasions who have fun getting it on in front of the camera? What about amateur and professional erotica writers? Textual erotica is the pornographic medium I’m the most personally familiar with, and I can tell you that the variety of flavors is pretty much endless. And while “non-con” and “dub-con” erotica exists, the volume of fiction produced in which people consensually and joyfully get it on attests to our overwhelming desire, as a readership/authorship, to construct sexual worlds in which sexual intimacy most often means a surfeit of needs being met rather than alienation or social control.

There is a very interesting documentary to be made — or even more than one! — comparing and contrasting the various pornographic mediums, porn creators, and porn consumers. There are, to my mind, endlessly fascinating questions to be asked about how erotic materials figure into our sexual lives — whether we’re talking about our individual sexual selves or those selves in sexual relationship. Instead, by depicting both pornography and the creators of pornography in a monochromatic, sinister light — and by depicting male consumers (and all women) as victims of “porn” — this film closes the door on any conversation about the productive intersection of sexually explicit, erotic materials with human sexual expression. In Pleasure, pornography is constructed in opposition to authentic human sexuality, as the producer of false sexual selves. These false selves then serve to obscure, rather than open a pathway for, our (authentic) desires and the realm of possibility for acting on those desires. I was disappointed (though not surprised) that alternate narratives of pornography as a more positive force in society were absent.

I concur with the film, and with porn’s many critics, that there is a serious and urgently important conversation to be had about the economics and politics of sex work, and the exploitation of individuals through the making of pornography. Just like with any other industry, worker exploitation should not be countenanced, and employers should be held accountable by law for ensuring workplace safety and respect for workers rights. However, I don’t believe these conversations are at all advanced by positioning all men as the aggressors, all women as the victims, and pornography as the medium through which patriarchal oppression is produced and reproduced in culture. People of all sex, gender, and sexual orientations and identities work in pornographic production, and we should be supporting those workers on a community level to articulate their needs and goals for improvement to their lives. But although The Price of Pleasure makes clear its belief that workers (women particularly) in the porn industry are, as a class, badly done to, there are no solutions put forward in the film about how to go about supporting porn actors who want to change their (individual or collective) situations.

This is perhaps the final problem with The Price of Pleasure: that they fail to offer any sense of direction for change. If the problem, as the documentary film-makers see it, is the strangle-hold of “the porn industry” on our means of sexual expression, as a viewer I would have appreciated more explicit suggestions offered as to what the solution to this problem might be. As it is, The Price of Pleasure leaves us with an ominous sense of pervasive subjection, of helplessness, and no explicit pathways to liberating ourselves. I have my own suggestions, of course, for alternatives to non-consensual, unsafe, and exploitative sexual narratives — but I suspect the makers of Pleasure would not appreciate them. Thus, this film, in the end, simply reinforces the very sense of victimization the film purports to document.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

movienotes: orgasm, inc

02 Thursday Feb 2012

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During the winter holiday, I finally had a chance to screen Liz Canner’s Orgasm, Inc., a documentary which examines the development of “female sexual dysfunction” (FSD) as a disease in need of medical intervention, and the pharmacological and surgical remedies being marketed to the public in often unethical ways.

The full documentary is available via Netflix streaming.

I thought Canner’s documentary was engaging, thoroughly researched, and managed to be harshly critical of unethical medical practices while not dismissing women’s desire for sexual satisfaction. I realize that the issue of medical intervention for women unsatisfied with their sexual response is a highly contentious issue within feminist circles, and I want to say up-front that I am not against medication or surgery per se if it is proven to be effective, responsibly marketed and prescribed, and offered not as a magical fix but as one of a wide array of possible solutions.

The problem with medication and surgery to heighten women’s sexual pleasure is that sexual response is complicated and variable (in human beings generally, not just women) and the medical “fixes” so far on offer are high on risk while potential benefits remain unknown. In addition, patients are often seeking medical treatment for something they perceive as broken or wrong with their bodies which, in fact, are well within the range of human variation — and the doctors treating these patients are (I would argue unethically) using medicine to treat a non-disease. For example, one woman whom Canner follows in the documentary signs up to be part of a clinical trial for an electrical implant in her spine that is supposed to help her achieve orgasm. Let me be clear: invasive spinal surgery.* The potential side-effects and risks are numerous. The woman is physically healthy, not suffering from any sort of nerve or spinal column damage that would cause a loss of feeling in her genitals. In fact, Canner interviews the woman and discovers that she is perfectly capable of reaching orgasm just not during intercourse. Which is a “dysfunction” that roughly 70% of people with clits share. In other words, this woman was accepted as a participant in a clinical trial to a physical deficiency that wasn’t actually there.

Canner’s perspective as a film-maker is clearly sympathetic to the anti-medicalization camp, whether it’s authors skeptical of Big Pharma advertising or activists fighting against the over-medicalization of women’s sexuality and elective genital surgery. Her visual technique highlights the production not only of the film but of the medical industry’s media message concerning women’s sexuality. The company spokespeople, medical talking head “experts” pushing pharmacological and surgical solutions, and other advocates of medical intervention are consistently shown off-balance, evasive, unable to answer critical questions, and glib about women’s “choices,” even as they admit to uncertain outcomes. In contrast, the sex educators and activists who advocate a more comprehensive approach to sexual pleasure — one that takes into account emotional well-being, trauma history, relationship health, and sexual knowledge — come across as trustworthy, knowledgeable and comfortable with the variety of human sexual experience. As the founder of Good Vibrations observes in an interview, many of the women who visit Good Vibes store are so unfamiliar with their own bodies that they can’t locate their own clitoris. “Is a drug going to help them?” She asks rhetorically, “Maybe if it has a sex map of the clitoris on the box!” Before we resort to medical intervention — particularly unproven medical intervention — Canner’s film argues, we might do better to explore non-medical ways of improving our sexual well-being.

On the downside, I feel like this film in some ways perpetuated the widespread belief that Women’s Sexuality Is Confusing, in contrast to men’s sexuality which can be reduced to erection/orgasm. This framing is somewhat inevitable given that the drug companies developing medical solutions to “female sexual dysfunction” have Viagra as their model for success. And Viagra is marketable precisely because our culture views the ability to reach and maintain an erection as the be-all and end-all of satisfying men’s sexual desire. In contrast to this measurable goal of sustaining erections, women’s bodies have culturally legible markers of sexual satisfaction. When it comes to women we’re going for the much muddier category of “higher sexual satisfaction” rather than “stronger pelvic contractions” or “more vaginal secretions” or “engorged labia.” The research surrounding sexual satisfaction is highly subjective, recalling the medical discourse around what is to be considered “normal looking” genitalia. The so-called experts Canner interviews are evasive about their standards of measurement, and when pushed often fall back on the language of proprietary trade secrets. In other words, women are being told they’re “normal” or “not normal” based on tests developed by an industry invested in providing (expensive) treatment for women who fall outside the “normal” range.

I would also have been interested in information about the population of women seeking treatment for “female sexual dysfunction.” While several individual women are profiled, there is little discussion of the demographic as a whole. I found myself wondering, as I watched, if one would find differences based on age, sexual orientation and/or sexual relationships, and the other usual markers such as race/ethnicity and class background. Obviously the people able to afford medical treatment for sexual difficulties are likely to be economically secure-to-well-off.  But I wonder if women in same-sex relationships, for example, are less likely to seek medical solutions to perceived abnormality, then women in heterosexual relationships — and if so, what we could discover by exploring that difference. I was also disappointed in the invisibility of trans* women from the narrative, though I understand that this adds a whole different level of complication to the story of women’s sexuality. At one point, when an ob/gyn is interviewed about elective genital surgery she says, “I can’t think of any rational reason for it,” a statement which either puts gender confirmation surgery in the non-elective/medically necessary category or dismisses trans* women’s particular needs as “irrational.” Likewise, I feel like the discussion of pharmacological treatment might have benefited from a discussion of hormone treatment for trans* folks and their experience of evolving desires as they transition. It seemed, from the documentary itself, that the doctors and companies involved in treating women’s sexual dissatisfaction were highly un-interested in gender, sex, or sexual variance of any kind — and therefore would probably resist learning from the trans* community. On the other hand, I imagine trans* folks might represent a potential market for the medical entrepreneurs, and I found myself wondering if there was any overlap in treatment of women diagnosed with FSD and trans* people. And, if so, what that overlap looks like.

Overall, at a brief 78 minutes I found this a highly watchable documentary that would be a really good jumping-off point for further discussion in a classroom, discussion group, or other discursive setting.

live-blog: caitlin flanagan on WBUR

20 Friday Jan 2012

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I got home from one of those days in which I was dashing hither and yon doing work-related stuff and found what I really wanted to do was listen to Caitlin Flanagan fulminate in front of Tom Ashbrook and the ever-articulate Irin Carmon on On Point (WBUR). Basically, I listened to the episode so you don’t have to. Here’s are my “live blog” responses to the conversation.

For more considered reviews of Flanagan’s Girl Land see here and here, and while you’re at it read Amanda Marcotte’s reflections on this same interview over at Pandagon.

Update: Irin’s own reflections on the interview, and Caitlin Flanagan’s concern trolling of Irin’s girlhood, can be found here.

1:57 – Caitlin Flanagan (CF): “Across time and culture there are certain things about [female adolescence] that are constant.” Wait, what? People making claims about anything being “constant” across time and culture is a huge red flag in my book. Especially when it’s something as historically situated as “adolescence” which, as historians of the family will tell you, is an invention of modernity.

2:48 – CF: “[Adolescence is an] emotionally exquisite experience.” For all girls? Fess up to the fact that you’re talking about yourself, not everyone. At least, I think she was talking about herself? It was confusing. The rose colored glasses were coming out big time here. And I speak as someone who was pretty happy with my life between the ages of twelve and twenty.

3:32 – But then she acknowledges that teenage/adolescent period is a twentieth century phenomenon. So she’s already contradicting her argument about things being constant “across time and culture.”

4:25 – CF is wishing to bring back “protective” mechanisms for girls. She keeps saying “girls” when she’s actually talking about teenagers. Children are not being discussed here.

4:48 – CF talks about how teenagers today are “steeped in pornography,” “sexting” and “hook-up” culture. She’s using the language of moral panic here, which is particularly interesting given the recent data which suggest that the people doing the most “sexting” aren’t teenagers, but adults.

5:46 – CF presents princess culture as innate girlhood, rather than culturally shaped. She should do her homework and read Peggy Orenstein’s book Cinderella Ate My Daughter (or listen to this 40 minute interview) about how princesses are being relentlessly marketed to girls.

6:29 – Tom Ashbrook (TA) uses the phrase “time immemorial.” Oh, Tom, please. She doesn’t need help universalizing this supposed phenomenon.

6:52 – Only six minutes in and I’m already hating the erasure of boys. What about boys who are “drawn to romance”? I knew boys who loved Austen novels and who were sweet and nurturing and interested in sustaining meaningful relationships (of sexual and non-sexual kinds) throughout adolescence. It makes me sick that the only way CF can picture cross-gender relationships is to sexualize them, and the only way she can contain those scary sexualized relationships is to require them to be “dating” relationships.

7:25 – CF: “All she’s thinking about is attracting the attention of other boys that she knows.” So … when teenage girls experiment with gender presentation and dressing up and sexuality, it’s all about male attention? What year is it again, and what rock have you been hiding under?

7:40 – CF: “She’s opened up to a world of sexual threat” … but not joy also? Developing sexuality is going to be entirely framed by fear and threat? “It’s almost not politically correct to admit that it is [threatening].” Oh kill me now. Seriously? The “politically correct” card is such a lame disclaimer to play. Way to make me stop taking anything you say after said disclaimer seriously.

8:05 – CF: “It has been through the ages” again with the universalizing. SO WRONG.

8:30 – TA asks what would be an ideal world [for “girls”] in CF’s eyes, and uses nice qualifiers. Specifically asks for her opinion, not as if she’s an expert. CF looking for “protection.”

9:20 – She keeps circling back to the Internet. Seriously. Like it’s this totally overwhelming thing we as human beings don’t mediate as users.

9:45 – Are girls not capable of making their own rooms a protected space? She keeps talking about how adults have to force their daughters into using their rooms as retreats, when shouldn’t the daughters themselves be making that call? My parents weren’t forcing me to spend hours and hours in my room reading novels and exchanging (totally private, emotionally intense) letters (and later emails) with my closest friends. Why do parents need to enforce this, if it’s what girls want? She doesn’t explain this disconnect.

10:08 – CF: “The school day is so intense for them” – girls specifically? And again, if adults are able to make this space for themselves, why can’t teenagers, if they need it. If CF walks away from “the Internet” when she’s overwhelmed, can’t she just model good self-care to her children?

10:48 – CF [about college students having mementos of childhood in their dorm rooms]: “Men in college don’t have that”? On what basis do you make this assertion?? Have you looked at any young man’s life recently? It makes me wonder how much you know about your own sons, because the men in my life are all over the treasured memories of their childhood. It’s equal-opportunity nostalgia in my own social circle.

11:13 – CF: “There’s no more dating as we knew it” and therefore girls are totally at risk. Again, I wonder where is the trust that young women will make the world the way they want it? Where is the agency? Dating was somehow this magical land of unicorns and rainbows, and this new land of (allegedly) no dating is a nightmare that is being forced on girls? I think straight women might have had something to do with the evolution of hetero courtship?

11:57 – TA acknowledges “pushback” from feminists (thanks TA!), asks is this “just life” that you’re protecting girls from? Good question!

12:27 – CF talks like there’s only “two schools” for raising girls/children — either you’re totally controlling or totally permissive. Her language is one of moderation, as if she’s offering an alternative to all-or-nothing, as if she wants the gains of the feminist movement without the … well, it’s unclear what, but whatever it is, it’s BAD THINGS … but her word choices are all those of moral panic over SEX and girls and SEX.

12:41 – CF talks about “imperatives of male sexuality” which is such a total red flag to me. It’s gender essentialism and it’s bioreductive bullshit. As an example of the loaded language: girls are now “servicing boys”?! TA pushes back on her equation of “freedom” with “oral sex” (and oral sex that is about “servicing,” making it sound like sex is something girls do to comply with manly sexual urges when they’re forced to do so by this awful new freedom thing).

13:50 – I find myself wondering why CF things “support” for girls and young women equals “protection” and control?

15:00 – Again, she’s promulgating a very extreme duality here, despite her tone of moderation: either parents “protect” their girls by limiting their girls’ access to avenues of exploration, or they’re pushing their (unwilling?) daughters into having wild, meaningless sex with bestial boys.

15:39 – A call-in listener introduced as Vica observes that a “dichotomy has been set up” by Flanagan, and that as an Armenian immigrant who’s done cross-cultural research on women, she questions whether freedom is a bad thing. “I’ve had the freedom to explore,” she says, observing that her mother gave her the “same sorts of freedom that she now gives my little brothers.” She points to the risk of socializing women into fear, inferiority.

18:02 – Another listener, Caroline, starts out on a good note: “I’ve found it impossible to actually shield her… you have to talk to them about it.” She argues it’s important to find “talking opportunit[ies] with your daughter” … “you have to equip them” for going out into the world. Then, she describes going through her daughter’s computer history to check for porn access. What. The. Fuck. Invasion of privacy. Not okay.

20:41 – CF: “I think everything that Caroline said is fantastic” … says all parents should be asking their daughters “what are you going to require in a boy?” (God she’s so relentlessly heteronormative) … “[Boys will do whatever it takes to get access to female companionship and ultimately female sexuality.” UM WHAT? FUCK YOU. If girls don’t hold high expectations, “that’s what you’ll end up with.” Basically, if partner mistreats you, it’s all your fault for not demanding better treatment. Places girls in the role of the gatekeeper. She totally needs to hook up with got on a date with Iris Krasnow.

[Irin Carmon joins the program]

23:44 – Irin Carmon (IC): “We need to talk more about how we’re raising our boys and not have such a low opinion of them” … “there’s only so much you can protect girls” and so it’s important to model critiquing the culture, for both girls and boys.

25:04 – IC: “I don’t recognize the girl land CF describes” … Irin’s teenage years were a “fertile time” for her, recognizing that she was lucky to be in safe, supportive community of people. It was okay to talk about sex, to have Instant Messager in her room, etc.

26:17 – IC argues that the real question is “how do you create a dialogue around sexuality that’s about knowledge and not shame” — and how do we bring boys into that dialogue. I love her talking point here, and how it relentlessly calls attention to the fact that CF is relentlessly focused on policing girls’ lives, even as she places the main threat for girls on the shoulders of over-sexed boys.

26: 56 – CF: “I’m the last person to demonize boys” (you smarmy snake-oil saleswoman). Yet she goes right on to say that boys will “follow cues” that girls give them (what are they, pets?).  “Boys will be thrilled with hook up culture,” with “pornified culture.” Like, all boys? All boys are totally interested in sex the way it’s depicted in mainstream, mass-marketed porn? Why exactly do you think boys are “thrilled” with hook-up culture? Because they’re led by their dicks? And what their dicks want is access to pussy 24/7? Please check your research, listen to some actual boys and men (and the researchers who listen to those boys and men) and then we’ll talk. ‘Cause that’s not what I’m hearing. I happen to think men and boys are just as varied in their sexual desires as women, and that it’s irresponsible to start any sentence with “Boys will …” if it’s going to end with a generalization about sex or relationship desires.

28:04 – IC: “I feel like you’re conflating pornified culture with safe sex education.” AMEN.

29:40 – TA questions CF about her argument that the shift from boy/girl dating (in her idealized past) to group activities (which makes it sound like group sex, but I think she means, like, people hanging out together in friendly ways?) hurts girls. What I’m struck by is that back in the very period she’s idealizing (the 50s!), adults were concerned about the very opposite trend. The worry back in the 50s and 60s was that  teenagers were doing too much pairing off, when really they should be hanging out in groups and dating around before “going steady.” Really, I wish she’d done some basic research. Like, any research. At all. Into this period she’s supposedly harkening back to.

29:46 – CF on IC’s adolescent boyfriends: “They didn’t really treat her very well…” Oh. My. God. is she concern trolling!! Poor Irin apprently needs to be “treated nicely,” to “find a way that boys would treat her kindly.” It’s like we’re supposed to train boys like circus animals or something. Jesus H. Christ.

31:42 – IC (kicking ass, as usual): “Frankly, my adolescence was fine and so were some of the growing-up boys that I dated” … “I feel really okay … I feel fine about it because I was in a community of really supportive parents” … We’re not doing girls any favors “if we lock them up in their rooms without an internet connection.”

33:05 TA asks CF point-blank: “Is that really the measure of a good adolescence, if you had a boyfriend in high school?” THANK YOU TA.

33:25 – IC: our job is to help teenagers to be “resilient in the face of humans hurting each other.” Because sometimes people are shit even when we do everything right. Newsflash Ms. Flanagan! Women and girls (some of whom aren’t that kindly themselves) can’t domesticate the entire world and make sure no one ever, ever gets hurt by exuding perfect femininity. Or something.

34:55 – CF: “Talking about date rape is almost useless now because kids don’t go on conventional dates”??

35:20 – IC likes TA’s question about what makes a good adolescence: “I emerged feeling happy and connected and with healthy relationships” … and while she says “date rape” as a term is problematic, it’s because (duh) the qualifier makes it seem like there’s gradations of rate. “What we should be talking about is sexual violence” full stop.

36:32 – IC: “My job to actively critique and push back on” the assault on women’s rights. To ask “how do we send girls and boys out into the world … with the resilience to respond” to corrosive messages about what it means to be masculine and feminine, and to be in relationship with one another?

Again, I find myself wondering where, in Flanagan’s view of the world, is the trust that young people will know their own limits? Will grow and learn about themselves? Will say “no, I’ve had enough,” or “that’s not for me”? Why are parents depicted as the enforcers?

38:58 – CF: “If you’re in a marriage and you’re raising children that is the model they will follow.” Um … what about abusive families? What about kids who don’t want their parents’ marriage? What if a girl likes her dad, but actually wants a different sort of man as a sexual partner or … gasp! … a woman? Or both?

39: 35 – TA pushes back against CF’s characterization of IC’s childhood (THANK YOU). Again, CF uses loaded language like “unfettered” and “untrammeled” when talking about access to the Interwebs. “Parenting a teenager [is hard] … now we need to be as vigilant and hardworking as when they were toddlers.”

41:31 – CF: girls are asking “am I capable of being loving and loved by an adult man.” … um. hello? queer women? TA pushes back on the privilege bleeding all over this portrait of family life and CF places responsibility on the wife to keep marriage intact (I’m telling you: Flanagan needs to shack up with Krasnow and they can totally get off one one anothers’ view of wifely responsibility).

42:08 – IC: CF has “nostalgic ideas about family” … while she had a great two-parent home growing up, what “if one of my parents had happened to be abusive,” or “incarcerated”? “You’re setting up a value ‘what do nice girls do'” as if they can create that whole world around themselves. Yet often things happen to us that are beyond our direct control.

43:48 – CF is pretty clearly blaming women for marrying jerks, arguing that we engage in “magical thinking” about how easy marriage is, and become “self-defeating” (I’m telling you: Krasnow/Flanagan is all I can see now, and I totally wish I could erase that from my brain).

44:28 – TA: “I don’t know who’s describing [marriage] as a crap shoot …”. I love how he’s trying to be impartial, but is so clearly skeptical of Flanagan’s hyperbole.

45:06 – CF: “It’s a hardship to be raised without a father.” And … we’re out.

Yeah, I know. It was a little like shooting fish in a barrel. But I had a glass of wine and needed to unwind for an hour. No need to thank me :).

Thankfully, no actual adolescent girls were harmed in the making of this blog post. Or boys either. Or folks who haven’t decided what their gender is. I hope Flanagan’s sons find their own way in the world, and learn to make up their own minds about what it means to be a guy. ‘Cause frankly, their mother’s picture of manhood is depressing as hell.