season of the bitch

It’s a mouthful, but it’s also important.

Millions of women around the world make their living through sex work. Some do it by choice, some do it because they have no choice, and some are forced into it.

In any case, supporting laws that allow more harm to come to women whether they be trafficked or willing participants, does no good. A policy of harm reduction, outlined by Renegade Evolution at Feministe a while back, is a far better way to make sure that women are safe and supported.

I want for sex workers what I want for every woman and man on the planet–safe working conditions, fair wages, and the ability to choose what kind of work they will do to support themselves and their family. I don’t believe that sex work is fundamentally dirty, wrong, or exploitative, but that just like working at Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant or waiting tables, it damn well can be.

Whatever your stance, though, on sex work, I hope we can all agree that allowing violence against sex workers to continue, that a sentence of one day for murdering a “hooker” (yes, that’s from an actual headline) and allowing the rape of sex workers to be written off as “theft of services” has to end.

Check Bound, Not Gagged for much more today. And thanks to Amber Rhea for reminding me to write about this.

I’m too caffeinated yet tired to write a full review, so I’m just going to throw my feminist critique out there. (Is it still a critique if I’m going to say something good?)

Yay for a movie about teenage hookups that focused on the FEMALE orgasm for once. Granted, one girl used it as a weapon to hurt the other, but let’s hear it for some focus on the girl getting off for once.

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else, so I’m not going to say any more than that.

Oh, but Kat Dennings is so damn cute.

(I found this in draft, realized it was pretty much complete the way it was, and so I’m posting it the way it was written, sometime this summer.)

Ahem.

It has come to my attention that the practice of being tattooed is, in some circles, considered “unfeminist.” Something to do with penetration, or self-mutilation?

I’m already a bad girl in the Jewish community and in the eyes of most of America for having tattoos, though most of mine are still in acceptable places (lower back, ankle, foot). When I crossed the line to the big one on my upper back, the one you can see in normal clothes some of the time, that’s when I really became transgressive.

Transgressions are at the very root of my feminism, though. They disrupt and disturb the order of things much more than any form of separatism, which just allows the other order to go on unquestioned.

Many things I do hurt. Exercise hurts. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning to ride a bus two hours to go to work for free hurts. Getting my heart broken hurts. And yes, tattoos hurt. Just physically, though. And there’s a corresponding rush, and then I’m left with something beautiful. The opposite of a relationship.

When I wrote about tattoos before, I said,

We are a generation reclaiming its skin with tattoos and piercings and experiments, making choices about who we are and how we identify and crossing lines, borders, rules, at every juncture. We are reclaiming ourselves and our power, slowly but a bit more each day, and we are waking up to the larger world around us in strange and wonderful ways…

I reclaim my skin inch by inch with tattooed words and pictures, wings, hearts (myheartforyou), a skull and roses, a leaf–each bit is a little bit more definition of who I am, where I come from, what I do and what I will do, another reminder of what I want to keep close to me always.

It’s my own statement of control over my body. My right to it, and no one else’s. I didn’t get tattoos for anyone else. I didn’t do it for attention, though of course I know it draws it. So do the clothes I choose to wear, my hair and eye makeup, even the books I choose to read in public (guy reading Lolita at the dog park, I’m looking at you). But it ain’t your business.

Getting tattooed was to me a feminist act despite it being a man with the tool in his hand putting ink under my skin. Despite the words on my skin coming from a book a man wrote or a song a man sang. It’s my choice, my reclamation, and it is my body.

» Read the rest of this entry «

We’ve all been over the whole virgin-whore dichotomy, and how it’s bad, and unfeminist, etc. It’s been hashed over about a million times, right?

Well, we have a new entry into it.

It’s the “I’m just sexual enough, so I get points! I have sex and blog about it but I’m still not used up.”

Guess what? It’s still a hierarchy that you’re imposing. You’re still implying that there’s a line women can cross that makes them “too sexual,” that there’s some quantifiable amount of sex a woman can have that drives her over a line and somehow makes her “used pussy.” (Disgusting words, yes, were quoted from someone else who was discussing his sexual preferences, and while I didn’t like reading them there either, at least when he used them there was an implication that he enjoyed sexual women.)

Because it’s not a binary opposition doesn’t make it less hierarchical. And when we think about it, isn’t the hierarchy what we dislike in the first place? Dividing things into binaries both posits that they are opposed to one another, and also that they can be ranked. Adding a third element, a “middle ground” doesn’t make the hierarchy less fucked up.

A good friend in college and I joked that we should make T-shirts that read “Abolish Virginity.” We liked the double entendre of it, and it went in line with our feminist belief that the concept of virginity was an outdated one that assigned value to a woman based on her sexuality.

Just because the line you’re drawing isn’t virginity doesn’t mean it’s any less a line in the sand after which you feel free to judge women.

Women don’t get “used” up by having lots of sex. There is no physical difference between having lots of sex with one person, maybe even the only person you’ve ever had sex with, and having lots of sex with lots of different people. Do I have to get into biological details here, people?

I think the writer here was trying to express that she didn’t want to be valued for the amount of sex she’d had, but there are far better ways to say that. I agree with that sentiment. I don’t want to have any sort of line in the sand where people will consider me damaged goods or not experienced enough. I don’t want to be fetishized for any amount of sex I’ve had.

It’s possible to discuss things that bother us without laying blanket judgments about, oh, say, most women.

Marie Antoinette, as Sofia Coppola imagined it, is all about beauty, ‘sparkle’ and femininity as the only pleasures available to a woman in a society where she is just a bargaining chip to be bought and sold—even by her mother, a political force in her own right.

Coppola gives us Kirsten Dunst, a star we are familiar with precisely for her lack of uber-glamness, her waifish build and glowing skin with little makeup, and transforms her before our eyes into the Queen, powdered white and perfect, hair not just styled but turned into a living sculpture on her head, seizing her pleasures where she can.

Marie Antoinette is, after all, denied even the freedom to dress herself in the mornings, and her husband is incapable of sexual performance, so she is denied not only pleasure in sex, but her very identity. It must be her fault, after all, that he cannot perform.

Beauty is both a millstone round her neck and the thing that saves her, at least for a time. She is dressed in the clothing of her new country—the forcible public removal of her clothing happens more than once in this film—and presented to her new husband as a cake upon a platter. The same as the cakes she so gleefully crams into her mouth later, and like the one she is mistakenly accused of telling the people to eat when they have no bread.

The aunts are jealous of her beauty, and they turn her against the one woman who might have helped her gain any freedom and happiness, Madame Du Barry, the old king’s mistress, played lushly by Asia Argento, all blacks and reds to Marie’s pastels and blonde. Du Barry is of course the ‘whore,’ yet she wants nothing more than to be friends with Marie, and is only angered when she is spurned. The simple pleasure on her face when Marie speaks to her is telling—and leads directly into a scene contrasting her lively sex life with the aging King and Marie and Louis’s bedtime conversation.

Later, of course, Marie takes up with another woman of questionable virtue, and it is then when she starts to have her own life.
» Read the rest of this entry «

Flight Papers has a quite thoughtful post on it. And a quite good blog, if you haven’t read it already.

Infidelity, cheating, whatever you call it, is incredibly common. I’ve cheated. I’ve been cheated on. I’ve been the person someone cheated with. I’m not going to go into details here (and judgmental comments on this WILL be deleted) but I think this is one of those very common cases where people feel the need to draw the line between “good” people (who don’t cheat) and “bad” people (who do, or who hook up with people who are taken).

So while I’m not saying I approve of John Edwards, or that he gets a pass (especially for running for president knowing this could very well come out…not terribly bright, that). But, well, glass houses and stones.

Read her post.

One of my favorite ladies in all of bloglandia has been getting far more than her fair share of shit these days. So here’s something to cheer her up: pretty boys and talk of porn! (below jump, because there are a lot of pictures) » Read the rest of this entry «

I go away for a few days, and look what you kids get into.

Ren has a response to some drama that, well, I should know better than to get into, really. I’ve got actual work to do.

But it’s so close to the subject we’ve been dealing with recently, that, well, I have to go there.

She links to a cartoon that the “Real Feminist” types seem to find really funny. (Belle posted it here.) See, a blonde woman who’s a stripper! She’s so deluded, she thinks she’s exploiting herself! Look at all those men drooling and giving her creepy looks!
Then look at the skin tone and hair color of all the men. Look at the exaggerated facial features.

The cartoon’s been defended by saying that the men are in the dark and that’s why they’re all darker-skinned. Sure, and that famous Obama ad where the skin tone was darkened was just an accident.

If you wanted to show a “range of ethnicities” you’d have made the skin tones different colors.

If you wanted to make the men look extra creepy without really thinking about the racial indicators (which honestly is what I think the cartoon was getting at) you’d make them darker than the woman.

The blonde, white woman is the victim as always. Check out the news when there’s a missing girl story. (oooh, thesis reference) She’s almost always blonde, very pretty, and absolutely always white. This goes at least two ways–the white woman is the victim we care about, because she’s pretty and we like to look at her. This cartoon gives visual pleasure in that way, too–the girl in the cartoon is quite pretty. But there’s also the fact that blonde, pretty, young girl signifies sex and sexuality, and quite often in the missing white girl narrative there’s the hint that the girl transgressed sexual boundaries and thus deserved what she got.

Remember Natalee Holloway, who went to Aruba and hung out with local men and then disappeared? See any similarities?

This, of course, is the narrative that this cartoon is going for. Even a single-panel comic tells a narrative story that goes in a sequence, and here we clearly see the girl and read her thoughts first, and then we read the men’s thoughts.

The narrative clearly asks us to believe that the girl is wrong and the men are right (So feminist!), that the girl is obviously deluded and the men are in power.

But beyond that, it taps into a deep-seated cultural myth of the pretty white woman as under attack by the dark-skinned male Other. The ‘feminists’ who are gleefully distributing this picture are on the one side of the narrative–they think the girl is getting what she deserves by being stupid enough to perform for men. Others may have the more altruistic of the two motives–the desire to help the girl and to feel bad for her.

Like the missing white girl stories on the news, though, this cartoon ignores the view of the girl. Though she gets to speak in a way that a missing girl can’t, her point of view is clearly ridiculed here. She’s deluded, right?

Ok, enough theory and such. What do I really think of this cartoon? Well, it’s hardly original. The artist is certainly talented, but she ain’t saying anything any deeper and more thought-provoking than, say, that New Yorker cover. I don’t think she did it intentionally, but I think she absolutely tapped into deep-seated race biases and fears and to pretend otherwise because you like the message of the cartoon is, well, blind.

And let’s call this what it is, shall we? Another example of the same kind of appearance-bashing that I’ve been blathering on about for over a week now. Blonde pretty woman HAS to be stupid and deluded, right? Especially if she’s a stripper.

(Just in case y’all come here and read this: Most stripper’s minds are not full of how empowered they are, just like most waitresses or CEO’s or freelance writers’. Mostly they’re thinking about getting through the shift, getting the work done, and maybe having a little fun while they’re at it, if they’re lucky. Why don’t you spend some time writing about how abused waitresses are for a change, you know, if you’re so concerned with women who get exploited?)

The tendency is often to see men as inherently privileged by patriarchy, as every position they are in as automatically better, and every position women are in as automatically worse.

What if we looked at beauty and exhibitionist sexual tendencies as something that men are denied by patriarchal culture, and women are allowed? After all, we know men are denied many things by patriarchal culture, so what if taking pleasure in our own beauty (and we are all beautiful) and taking pleasure in being looked-at is not a submissive position at all, but a freedom, like the freedom to cry and to express emotions, that women claimed for themselves and men have not?

Thoughts?

“But what is displaced in this explanation of displacement is the notion that there might be pleasure, desire, and love that is not solely determined by what it repudiates.”

-Judith Butler, “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion”