can't buy me love? really? lemme tell you about a website...

Ok, I'm about to go off script and off the rails here. Usually my snarky comments are in reply to some news article or possibly book I've just read. But this time imma turn the camera on me and talk about the ways my assumptions about the world color my view.

I'm no fan of mail order brides or those international "matchmaking" services that connect Western men with women from Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, or Latin America who are "eager to meet them." I also find the sex tourism that turns into "love" with a native girl less than nice as the way to start a relationship. To a lesser extent, I'm also deeply troubled by marriages emerging out of US soldiers stationed abroad who "fall in love" and decide to marry a local girl.

All 3 of these scenarios emerge, in my opinion, at the intersection of economic exploitation and exotic eroticism. The Other, bound up in notions of Eastern mysticism cum sexuality and feminine subservience, is made more readily available because of, well, brute necessity. Poverty drives many young women into relationships with Western men whom they perceive to offer them a way out of need. (The same factor also drives many young women wittingly or un- into sex work.) In a sense, they exchange their youth and beauty for financial stability. Often, it is older gentlemen who seek out mail order brides or turn a sex holiday into a committed relationship. For some, it may be a way to have a family or find someone to take care of them as they age. Military brides are probably less prone to the latter.

Remember that thesis I never finished? Well, one of the themes that emerged in a number of stories was this notion that Asian women were more feminine than their Western (American, white and sometimes black) counterparts. Many expressed a downright hostility to modern Western feminism (described as "bitchiness" and "uppity") and praised the fetishized object of the narrative for not being "corrupted" by Western ideas of the role of women. Such praises accompanied physical and socio-cultural descriptions emphasizing radical alterity.

However, how much of my repulsion against these types of relationships stems from their economic and racial exploitation and how much it comes from the simple fact that it challenges modern Western ideals of romantic love as the basis of a relationship and marriage? For much of the world's population, the idea of the individual choosing his or her mate based on emotion or an intimate bond is not the norm. It wasn't the norm for much of the history of the West, either. Cementing bonds between two families, healthy offspring, politics, business, and other factors caused parents (or a matchmaker) to pair off two individuals regardless of their preferences. Love would come after the marriage or, if it did not, it wasn't a failure because love wasn't the point of marriage, It was a kinship bond, a blood relation, a way to perpetuate the species and the genetic line.

Romantic love as a notion emerged during the Crusades, as men left behind pitched woo at the wives of men away fighting in the Levant.[1] But it didn't really take hold broadly until the end of the 19th century. Now it's firmly rooted in the narrative of our books and movies and tv sitcoms (ahem, How I Met Your Mother). We even implant the idea into our children at an early age through fairytales and Disney. But it's just that: an idea. It's historically constructed, contingent.

The problem is in disentangling opposition to economic and racial exploitation from the distaste for non-romantic marriages when critiquing mail order brides, sex tourism marriages, and military brides. The latter is simply a value judgment, a preference. Just because a marriage is very much rooted in economic exchange (youth and beauty, devotion for financial support) doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad marriage, contrary to our recent gossip magazine disdain for perceived "gold diggers" of the Anna Nicole Smith / Hef's girlfriends / Trump's revolving door of wives variety. If anything, the coincidence of romantic love and marriage is a recent fiction. Don Draper might even take credit for inventig it as a way to sell nylons and toaster ovens.

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[1] Seriously? You expected there to an actual footnote here? Shame on you. This isn't academic writing.

"Is buying sex a better way to help Cambodian women than buying a T-shirt?"

While the tagline of Ken Silverstein's recent article in Slate is quite inflammatory and some of his comments thoughtless, the overall gist is that, given two awful alternatives, sex work in Cambodian seems to many young women the lesser of two evils. The reasons lie with both the horrible conditions that textile workers endure, and although Ken mentions a bilateral agreement between the US and Cambodia that was supposed to improve the conditions of workers in exchange for privileged access to American markets, he spills more ink arguing that conditions of the women working as prostitutes, bar girls, masseuses, and in other branches of the sex trade aren't that bad.

He takes to task Nicholas Kristof in a 2008 New York Times article for describing textile work as an "escalator out of poverty." Unfortunately, he doesn't seem concerned to scrutinize his own assumptions about sex work catering to sex tourists, once predominantly middle aged Western men but increasingly drawing from the booming corners of Asia, or reflect more deeply on the continuing colonial economic exploitation that creates this diabolic binary.

He dismisses as overblown the numbers of women trafficked for sex as the "hyperbolic, fundraising claims of anti-trafficking" groups and puts the number of trafficked women at 10 percent. From what orifice did he extract that estimate? Also, telling, he comments on the percentage of women trafficked for sex work but not for the also inhumane textile industry.

He plays a game all too familiar to audiences familiar with the debate with the arguments about porn in the United States. One of the oft-sung refrains against Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon's criticism of porn is that the women who perform in porn (or are prostitutes, strippers, escorts, and such) are not the hapless, abused victims of the radical feminist perspective. Rather, most are happy, healthy women with high sex drives who enjoy making money doing something they really enjoy. Unfortunately hard numbers are hard to come by. Both sides marshall a handful of examples (see Linda Boreman aka Linda Lovelace contra Nina Hartley) but do no statistical analysis.

Silverstein falls prey to the same fallacy, detailing prolifically his various encounters with sex work throughout the brief article. But rather than serving as a confession (see Foucault contra Albert Camus, _The Fall_), he recounts a self-serving trope narrative of white men saving brown women from brown men (and other white men) a la Spivak's _Can the Subaltern Speak?_ He asks to be dropped off at a corner but the driver takes him to the front door of an infamous sex club on the same block. Or how he went into a bar not looking for sex but was offered it proactively by the club owner. That she was attractive but not interested deflated his desire whereas less sensitive men might not have acted the same. Or how he bought off a young woman's bar fine so that she could go home early to rest. And he, being the noble white protector, declined her half-hearted invitation to company.

His few interactions with a limited number of women, none of who openly admits to being trafficked but shows more candor in answering "is this a good job?" (their answer? no), isn't enough to speak to the problem of human trafficking for sex work or otherwise in Cambodia. It also lacks any sound basis to discuss the problem of sex trafficking in other countries. While few women are probably trafficked into the Philippines, a substantial number are trafficked out of that island nation to stock the military brothels of Okinawa and the anything's a go-go sex district of Thailand. Or the problem of human trafficking out of former Soviet states like the Ukraine. Amsterdam decided not to continue to "let the good times roll" in it's internationally infamous Red Light district in part because of the problem of trafficking to fill the wild and woolly streets with young flesh.

Silverstein also makes much of the fact that, when asked, many girls say they aren't forced or pressured to have sex with clients, at least by anything more than poverty, desperation, and premium exchange rates. But the point isn't that all young women who work in the sex industry are trafficked or that all of them are beaten or abused to perform sex acts. It's not that there are no women in the sex industry who enjoy their work. Silverstein saves the harder question for last, quoting labor-rights activist Tola Moeun of Community Legal Education Center.

A lot of women no longer want apparel jobs... When prostitution offers a better life, our factory owners need to think about more than their profit margins.

The fight, really, is about changing the changing consumption patterns in the Western world. Nike, Aeropostale, JC Penney and others treat Cambodian garment workers the way they do to keep prices low and maximize profits by providing cheap goods to eager markets. He points out that the typical garment worker makes .3% of the total value of her labor to Western companies ($750 yearly in wages including overtime on already long, difficult hours in unsafe conditions to the estimated $195,000 in profit off the garments made by her).

But the pattern of consuming sex also has to be changed and there are many factors at work here. Economic and racial theories filtered through colonial views and a global sense of entitlement. The nearly universal disparity in men and women's wages and value of their work. Family planning, family responsibilities, child care... the list goes on.

Faced with unpleasant situations with no easy solutions, it's not uncommon to find people downplaying the seriousness of the harm to cope. Others try to spin the negative into a positive with selective use of facts (see the aforementioned Kristof article). But retreat and ignorance don't make the problems go away. They just make go away out of sight.

No, buying sex is not a better way to help Cambodian women than buying a t-shirt. The solution can't be easily compacted into clever phrases. It requires real work; the kind of work that can't be outsourced overseas to increase profit margins and keep product costs low. It requires sacrifice and restraint, putting what's right above what feels good, whether that by affordable jeans that fit or a comely young Cambodian woman draping herself around your neck and offering you a massage and boom boom for less than the cost of a fast food meal. Cheaper is not always better and that's true of jeans and human life & dignity.

ladies cast on true blood must love innies and outies

Evan Rachel Wood just recently announced that she's bisexual to Esquire magazine. Evan plays vampire queen Sophie-Ann Leclerq on HBO's True Blood.

Friends of Charlaine Harris' by way of Alan Ball vampire series may remember that it was about this time last year that Anna Paquin (Sookie Stackhouse) also came out as bisexual. What is it about that show that makes it's female stars feel compelled to confess their sexual desire for both men and women? Am I the only person who's wondering if bisexual Evan and bisexual Anna have gotten together? And did Stephen Moyer, Anna's vampire paramour Bill Compton on the show and now real life husband, join in?

But seriously, the reason I mention this story isn't because I have any fondness for Hollywood gossip. Rather, it's because Ms. Wood's announcement is very much a non-story. It's as if she announced she's a vegetarian. Or prefers panties to thongs. And the question is: why?

Immediately she was suspect as unpersuasive for any rom-com leads because no one would buy her on-screen chemistry with a man knowing her off screen sexual preferences. (Though this criticism applies more to Anne Heche, Ellen's former love interest, than to Ellen herself who never really courted rom-com leading lady status.) But Ellen kept at it with poise and dignity and now has one of the most popular daytime talk shows on television. Since then, Rosie O'Donnell, Wanda Sykes, Portia di Rossi (Ellen's current love interest), and others have come out as openly lesbian.

On the one hand, we might say this trail has already been blazed when Ellen DeGeneres became the first widely-recognized actress to come out as a lesbian. Yes, she initially endured a rather savage backlash. Ellen Degenerate, anyone? Besides homophobia, the other major question is how would it effect her career.

So perhaps Ellen's bravery in helping to start a national conversation that resulted in major shifts in America's sexual mores. After all, now Bravo, HGTV, TLC and other cable channels are dominated by obviously gay men giving style advice to both women and straight men. I mean, there's a show called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for heaven's sake. And I did mention that Ms. Wood's True Blood co-star revealed her own bisexuality about a year ago.

But I think there's another force at work here. In loosest terms, bisexual females do not threaten to disrupt the logic of heteronormative phallocentrism. Accordingly, the female body might be the site at which sex happens but sex itself is defined as the penetrative act. The phallus must be present / present itself to institute the order of a sexual encounter. The lack of the phallus in girl-girl encounters relegates those acts as something other than sex since genital stimulation, pleasure, orgasm, while possible in the phallologic encounter, are merely ancillary to the sexual act.

Bisexual females, in other words, don't upset the norm of penis-with-vagina. Dildos, vibrators, fingers, fruits & vegetables, etc. merely imitate the phallus; they cannot displace it. Note here that the penis does not actually need to be inserted into the vagina for the encounter to constitute sex. Oral stimulation of the penis and anal sex between a woman and man suffice when the penis is present.

Not to go too far down a detour, but because the phallus itself is an abstraction, real penises cannot partake of the order of the ideal. They are deficient, not completely present. Men cannot live up to the ideality of the phallus. Such a view has implications for representations of the masculine and theories of porn.

The penis, then, is not merely a sign of the male; the phallus is virility, the masculine, maleness. Sex requires both this presence and the lack, the absence that is the order of the feminine. The presence presents itself into / among / amidst this absence.

Girl-girl is simply the "encounter" between two absences. Quite literally nothing comes from their meeting. On the other hand, the encounter of the duplicated phallus, presence against presence, explains the revulsion at male homosexuality. The presence of the phallus must be ignored, even partially and temporarily, in the encounter. I guess the point is that the problem with homosexual male sex isn't that it's "not sex" but that it's unnatural; it deforms the "natural order" with dual presences instead of presence presenting itself by erupting out of or thrusting into / through absence.

Getting back on track, bisexual women are not an "issue" for heteronormative phallocentrism because nothing, literally no thing, is at stake in girl-girl play. As she still desires the phallus, she does not attempt to displace the centrality of the phallus to the sexual encounter. There may be temporary substitutes but they are admitted to be only poor imitations and lack the present presence of the penis.

These are just theories, ideas that I've been tinkering with for years now. I struggle against the quasi-Freudian implications, essentialism, and ahistorical assumptions of that kind of description. But I've also been studying Foucault's notions of sexuality as a historical construct of discursive practice, a power-effect and not a thing upon which power acts. And just recently I've been working through Victoria Grace's _Baudrilliard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading_ about the overlooked value of Baudrilliard's social theories for feminist critique.

Lastly, some observations about the place of bisexual women in sexual society.

The MFF threesome has been elevated to the status of "every heterosexual man's fantasy." We could explore possible why's of this particular combination of bodies with the above analysis of the presence/absence dyad of the phallologocentric order. A girl who doesn't mind playing with other girls seems more amenable to the "desired" multi-partner play than a girl who doesn't have any physical interest in other girls.

Dan Savage speaks a lot in his podcast about the hostility some self-identified lesbians have towards self-identified bisexual women. The view is that these bisexual women are trawling lesbian bars in search of another woman to bring into the bedroom to entertain their male partners. The hostility seems to emanate from two places. First, that lesbians would not mind playing with a man if there is also a woman present. Second, that girl-girl play doesn't constitute a relationship. The so-called bisexual women treat lesbians as a means to attain their heterosexual sexual satisfaction rather than treating them as an end in themselves.

Final thought. I read somewhere a theory that vampires are a symbol of the vagina. The empty space of the mouths, parted lips, the bloody wound left on the neck. But I don't remember what said theory had to say about the fact that the most popular instantiation of the vampire mythology in the Western imagination is Count Dracula, Bram Stoker's mesmerizing blood-sucking lothario.

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what do you mean i should READ before i write a book on the subject?!

NOTE: Never got around to finishing the book. I was getting too frustrated while reading it and it was supposed to be "fun reading" away from my law casebooks. Perhaps I'll take it up again during the summer. But then again, William Gibson's newest is still sitting uncracked on my bookshelf. Here we go.

Only 15 pages in and I already have major problems with Richard Bernstein's methodology in "The East, the West, and Sex." These may be generally filed under the umbrellas of "lack of localizing and historicizing" and "shying away from confrontation with Orientalist concepts." It reads more like a travelogue still touring the "exotic" Other rather than a serious attempt at unpacking the representations undergirding the frisson between Asian and Western.

The first chapter revolves around ChinaBounder and his notorious...

The Whorient

Here we go. This is the inauguration of an ongoing series of blog posts discussing the ideas, arguments, conundrums, etc. of my proposed but ultimately uncompleted Plan II thesis.

::applause::

Thank you. First, a procedural detail. All of the blog entries dealing with this topic will be conveniently labeled with the tag "(porn)" so you can easily search for them in the sidebar. If you read them from oldest to newest, a line of argumentation might even manifest. No promises of coherency.

Without further ado about nothing...

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Let's start at the beginning and address the topic itself. Now stick with me because I know it may seem a little absurd at first. My proposed (and mind you, approved) thesis would explore the representations of Asian women in porn literature. Not all Asian women, actually, because that scope would have been too broad. I planned to focus on East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands (e.g. the Philippines) because, well, that's who American men like to talk about fucking even if they can't keep all the details straight about what signifier belongs to which collected signified.

The academic legwork consisted of two parts. First, an analysis of the literature about porn, both the anti-porn and the sex-positive / pro-porn camps. Second, an attempt to "color in" the blindness of the critique of porn through an interpolation of the works of black feminist such as Elizabeth Spelman and post-colonial authors including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. The final third of the thesis would apply these elements in a bricolage "methodolgy" for examining actual porn texts involving Asian women.

My argument boiled down to this: the anti-porn critcisms were incomplete and inadequate when applied to women of color. They treated race / ethnicity / cultural difference like, as Spelman described it, merely an "ampersand" to the primary category of woman. This "woman plus" analysis failed to adequately capture the unique forms of oppression spawned at the intersections of race and gender. What's intended to get you off about an Asian woman in porn isn't that she's a woman primarily who also "happens to be" Asian; her Asian-ness and female-ness are intertwined in a unique identity whose representation differs not marginally but fundamentally from the representations of other (white) women. The attending signifiers of "Asian" aren't merely accessories to "spice up" the ordinariness / blandness / repetitiveness / scripted structure of the typical porn narrative. They are intended to evoke specific sets of ideologies about the woman or women who are its sexual objects.

One of the first questions posed to me after people stop looking at me like I'm a perv is why I chose to read dirty stories instead of look at dirty pictures or watch dirty movies. Like all good answers, mine is three-fold:

1) I didn't go through a film crit or art /photo crit program as an undergraduate. Interpreting pics or movies seemed to require a critical language which I didn't possess and couldn't rapidly acquire in a short period of time. On the other hand, as a philosophy major interested in social theory, adopting that already-at-hand framework of critical text analysis seemed a lot easier. Also, text seem to "state" what they mean in a much more straight-forward way than unpacking the visual vocabulary of pics or movies.

2) My goal was to examine the representations of Asian women in porn. The problem with pics and movies is that, well, they involve actual Asian women at the level of their production. Although the reality of women's lives involved in porn is an important issue, I didn't want my thesis sidetracked by whether most or every woman involved in porn is abused and unhappy (as some in the anti-porn allege) or if most porn workers are happy, well-adjusted individuals from backgrounds not involving sexual abuse who are capable of forming healthy relationships (as sex-positive women such as Nina Hartley claim).

By working with written narratives, I managed to side-step the controversy of women's bodies at the level of production and focus instead on the representation of those bodies in the act.

3) It's a lot easier and cheaper to cut excerpts from a written story and insert them into your written thesis as evidence than it is to provide pictures or stills from a movie. Text also looks less like you're a naughty boy trying to pass off looking at naked women as rigorous academic work.

As time passed and I read more, I found I had more problems with the anti-porn feminist critique of porn than just its color-blindness. Several re-reads of Michel Foucault's seminal work The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction, Rachel Maines' history of the pathologizing of female sexual pleasure and its medical treatment, and an extended meditation on the subject of my authorial position vis-a-vis the topic of female represenation yielded a position that was critical of porn's representations of racial-gendered bodies and the Freudian / Lacanian theory of masculine displacement embodied in anti-porn literature.

To be continued...

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In the next installment I will try to start presenting the anti-porn position and my critique of the Freudian / Lacanian theory relied upon by its proponents such as Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, et al.

Status Report

Ugh, the twitter update feed for the sidebar is broke. Since the messages streaming through haven't been approved by my mullet or Chuck Norris, I've disabled the timeline until such time as the issue has been resolved. So if you want to follow my tweets, I'm @katosmullet.

Writing my personal statement for law school is hard. Really hard. Harder than pretending I care about Leibniz's ontological proof of God even. I don't find it easy to talk about myself and, what's worse, I don't have any great stories to tell about designing some nanotube thingy that circumvents a rival's patents or working on a major case resulting in big penalties for a global finance group's financial malfeasance. I'm smart, didn't graduate on time, and hate my job. Why wouldn't every law school want me ;)

You may have noticed I like to complain about stuff in this blog. Stupid bigots, what were you thinking moments in racism, famous rapists, crappy songs... Well, I plan to continue exploring such "vital" topics. Maybe some stuff about movies, too. And music I like. And other stuff. But I'd like to take a minute to introduce a new, ongoing future feature to That Texas Drawl.

I never finished my Plan II Honors Thesis. It's not because I didn't have anything to say on my topic; far from it. I had way too much to say and had too many troubles trying to pare it down to a coherent argument. Well, 8 years after the fact, I put this one little blight on my otherwise flawless academic record behind me, took my last philosophy class (and wrote the aforementioned paper about Leibniz), and finally obtained my B.A. (yay me). But I don't want to let all that thesis research go to waste, especially given the importance of my subject. So I would like to inaugurate a discussion of porn on my humble blog.

No, I'm not going to show you porn. Rather, I plan on critiquing it. And anyway, I focused on textual porn, not the visual kind so no dirty pics anyway. But over the next weeks, months, and possibly years I'd like to submit to the wide world of the interwebs the issues, arguments, and such that interested, confounded, upset, and amused me. I'll try to spell out in greater detail the goal of my project as well as introducing my reasons for rejecting the standard Freudian / Lacanian line of criticism advanced by anti-porn feminists. Party party stuff, I know.