what i think about harry & hermione ending up together

The digital world is a-twitter thanks to a recent interview with J.K. Rowling in Wonderland magazine conducted by Emma Watson. In the interview, Rowling claims putting Hermione and Ron together romantically was a mistake. She describes the choice of "the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment,” and wrong because it

was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility.

Of course Buzzfeed immediately jumped in with a listicle supporting this position. That's what Buzzfeed does. But then came the push back. Slate assistant editor L.V. Anderson laid out the reasons why Hermione's know-it-all personality meshes so well with Ron's take-it-with-a-laugh philosophy. She also pushes back against the underlying assumption that "an intelligent, type-A woman" should end up with a traditionally successful guy like Harry Potter (he's "athletic, rich, famous") instead of a "kind, charismatic, supportive, but penniless guy" like Ron.

Anderson makes a good point. My reason for resisting the "naturalness" or "credibility" of a Harry and Hermione pairing, however, is simpler: it's sexist. Harry, a naturally and supremely gifted wizard, and Hermione, probably the brightest wizard of the age, apparently can't just be friends because one has an outie and the other an innie. It's the erroneous "logic" of this (admittedly hilarious) Chris Rock bit. Heterosexual men and women aren't capable of respecting each other, cherishing the other's company, depending on the other for counsel and guidance, or leaning on one another for support without the spectre of sexual attraction haunting their relationship.

Harry and Hermione defy that assumption. Even though others at Hogwarts presume they are a couple because of their intimacy, Harry and Hermione don't waver in their "just friends" position. Hermione might put Harry in his place from time to time, but it's only to check his ego, not to remind him that his place is in her bed. Harry exhorts Hermione repeatedly to bend and break the rules but never to cross the boundaries of their friendship. They make each other better by pushing and prodding and encouraging. You know, like (same sex) friends do.

That physical attraction or romantic thoughts must follow from their mutual respect and capacities, in Rowling's and other people's minds, is sexist. When Rowling backs away from her literary decision to put Harry's technical advisor and his emotional advisor (admiringly gender swapped from expectations) together, she casts aspersions on a model of gender equality for this generation. She denies that compatibility borne of complementing talents and friendship can be valued in another person without heterosexual anatomical "compatibility" therefore becoming destiny if those two people are not the same sex.

Men and women can just be friends. Even (especially) when they are equals. This is one of the most progressive and enduring of themes in Rowling's stories of the Golden Trio. It's a shame six years after publishing the last book of their adventures she now wants to fall back on old prejudices about match-making.

lego my 1x8 brick

Ahead of the 7 February 2014 release of The Lego Movie, porn actress Christy Mack has dipped into the same murky publicity well as Bobbi Eden and the rest of the Vette Nation with a salacious offer via twitter. She will provide a "blow job" [sic] to the person that builds her the "best Lego creation to put in [her] house". For those who don't remember, during the 2010 World Cup, Bobbi Eden offered each of her 50 thousand plus twitter followers a blowjob if her native Netherlands beat Spain in the world cup, thus overturning the predictions of the psychic octopus.

Christy Mack denies this is self-promotion, instead claiming via twitter to be "just a whore that likes Legos." But given the recent obsession with Lego set releases (Simpsons) and some Batman levels of willpower to painstakingly recreate Hogwarts and the Battle of Helm's Deep from Lord of the Rings, perhaps this is just a moment of seizing the geek-chic zeitgeist?

But what does it say about the current state of men, masculine, sexuality, and so called "geek culture" that such an offer could be made, and, it seems, so many men are lining up the bricks for a chance to have a porn actress perform oral sex on them?

assault! jack the ripper

Director: Yasuharu Hasebe
Starring: Tamaki Katsura, Yutaka Hayashi

Assault! Jack the Ripper is a Japanese horror film from Nikkatsu studios in their Violent Pink line. Pink films (also called "eroduction" or "Roman porno") are a genre of Japanese films that has no exact analog in the West.[1] Per studio guidelines, pink films contain a certain quota of sex scenes spaced at required intervals, making them similar to the softcore porn of Cinemax and Showtime ilk. But the stories are generally more complex and subtly psychological and quite often feature nuanced female characters unlike softcore porn.

Violent Pink (also called Pinky Violence) is a subgenre of Pink that involves violence, very often graphic in nature.

Much ink has been spilt breaking down the Western horror genre, including exploration of the representation of gender in horror. I'm intentionally not going to approach Assault! Jack the Ripper from that angle because of differences not only between American and Japanese culture but also because of the differences in the history of cinema and visual language in the two countries. Although a discussion of the abject or the targeting by the killer of sexually active women in horror films could potentially be fruitful in this case, I leave them aside. I will instead just discuss two major themes in the movie.

Wikipedia summarizes the plot of Assault! Jack the Ripper as: "A young couple engage in a rampage of murder, rape and mayhem in order to stimulate their sexual appetites." Succinct, it fails to describe the two major themes of the story. First, the victims are increasingly targeted as women as such. Second, the sexual charge that initially propels the murder spree eventually transforms into the eroticization of violence itself for the Cake Man (the male lead).

The film begins with Afro Perm[2] (the female lead) goads the Cake Man into driving her home in a rainstorm from the restaurant where they both work. They stop to pick up a female Hitchhiker who seems to be garbed in hospital clothing. The Hitchhiker stabs herself in the arm with a cake knife, horrifying the Cake Man and Afro Perm, and then reveals a collection of razor blades she intends to use to continue her self-mutilation. She is likely an escaped mental patient.

The Cake Man ejects her from the car but she won't let go as he speeds away. Eventually, she falls and dies. Scared because of their role in her death, Cake Man and Afro Perm drag the Hitchhiker's body into an old scrap yard. Afro Perm strips the Hitchhiker's body for some reason and ditches her clothes. Cake Man then drags her body deeper into the junk yard. Unfortunately, her corpse snags at the crotch on a bit of metal and the Cake Man tears the Hitchhiker in half.

Back at Afro Perm's apartment, the pair deal with the unintentional killing with varying levels of ease. The Cake Man is shaken and disturbed while Afro Perm seems nonplussed. She strips out of her wet clothes, revealing a plump body that's quite a bit curvier in the bosom and bottom than most of the rest of the women in this movie. Eventually, Cake Man and Afro Perm cap off the night with some very intense and passionate sex.

The next day, Afro Perm approaches Cake Man at work but he ignores her. To make him pay attention, Afro Perm leaves with a male customer whose lecherous advances she had spurned yesterday. Cake Man follows the pair and watches as they perform oral sex on each other inside the car. Having made her point and firmly seizing Cake Man's attention, Afro Perm gets out of the car and walks over to Cake Man's car fully naked.

The duo try to have sex again back at her place but it's just missing a certain spark. That spark, they decide, is murder. And so begins a killing spree initially driven by the couple's libido.

The pair first stalk a high school girl who had previously come into the restaurant. They hit her with their car and then quickly snatch her up. Instead of an abandoned junk yard, this time they take their victim, still very much alive, to an abandoned bowling alley. Afro Perm is committed to the murder right off but Cake Man has reservations. All hesitation is shed, however, when the young girl slips her gag and begins to scream. Cake Man charges her with a knife, the same knife that the Hitchhiker had used to cut her arms. He stabs her but we cannot see where the knife pierces her body because of the framing of the shot. We only know that it hits somewhere below her chest.

The couple go at it hot and heavy on a nearby bench. Murder is just the aphrodisiac their sex life needs. But while Afro Perm rides him, Cake Man stares at the bleeding body of the young girl. Once they have finished up, the couple ditch the body in an elevator shaft.

Their next target is the girlfriend of the restaurant patron Afro Perm messed around with. They follow the pair to the airport, and after the man boards his flight to America, the couple abducts the woman and takes her to a graveyard. The woman pleads with Afro Perm as a woman to spare her life. Afro Perm orders her to perform oral sex on Cake Man, which she does. Then Afro Perm commands Cake Man to perform oral sex on the woman. He lies down on the ground and she lies on top of him. She continues to perform. He, on the other hand, brutally stabs her in the groin using the same knife as before. The couple then hides the woman's body beneath a grave stone before having sex in the car.

This scene is pivotal to the film in three ways. First, it's the first explicit scene of the Cake Man's m.o.; we have the reuse of the knife and also his preferred target: the groin. Remember, he accidentally tore the Hitchhiker apart at the groin in the junk yard. We can also speculate that he stabbed the high school girl in the groin, too, even though the camera wasn't positioned for us to see it. Second, it is the zenith of the conjunction between sexual intercourse and violence. Not only do the couple have sex after the killing, but the killing itself involves rape of the victim. As the killings continue, we see a growing divorce between explicit sexual satisfaction and the act of murder as the stabbings themselves look increasingly sexual. Third, post-coitus, Afro Perm says to Cake Man "We're just like a husband and wife. I'm going to look after you. Like a real wife." The couple take up residence at Afro Perm's apartment. She attempts to move their relationship into the domestic sphere, cooking and cleaning for Cake Man. She even refers to their relationship as a "marriage" of sorts. But as we will see, Cake Man's intentions become very different.

Cake Man's next kill comes without Afro Perm. It is also the first stranger; someone that the couple is not connected to. He leaves their apartment to go wandering around a downtown area at night. While walking, Cake Man finds an invitation to a prostitute's place of work. The prostitute appears to be an older woman, probably in her late 30s or early 40s, likely older than any of the victims so far and also Afro Perm. She strips and dangles her breasts in Cake Man's face but he lies perfectly still, seemingly uninterested. Suddenly, he flips her over, pins her to the bed, and may or may not have sex with her. We do not see him remove his underwear but she does moan.

Cake Man gets up, puts on his pants, and retrieves the knife he's used in the other killings. The prostitute thinks that he just wants to play a little rough and offers to let him tie her up for a little more money. Instead, Cake Man stabs her in the hand. He then drags her into the bathroom where he binds her hands with the shower line before stabbing her fatally in the groin. We also see him drive the knife upwards, attempting to cut her in half. This splitting action is much more explicit than the previous kill. The camera zooms in on the knife and follows it as he forces it from the groin to the stomach, lingering on the action. When he returns home, he sharpens the knife. He does not have sex with Afro Perm.

At this point, while the murders are still tied explicitly to sexual satisfaction for Cake Man, we see that his appetite for murder and sexual satisfaction have been segregated from Afro Perm. She initially urged him into the murder for turn-on game but now he doesn't need her to (1) pick the targets, (2) goad him to kill, (3) have sex with post-kill. However, with the nudity and touching of the prostitute, he still links the act of murder and sex.

The next kill, however, does not contain any explicit sexual overtones. Cake Man targets a young mother who he encountered earlier in the alley outside the restaurant with her child. She works at a wedding reception hall. He goes to her work and asks her to speak in the garden. There, he stabs her in her ceremonial clothing. He stabs her in the groin and then lifts, again attempting to cut his victim in half. He has to flee before he can finish the job but we are shown a still shot of her body lying on the ground, a bloody mess staining her white clothes over her groin area.

The film next cuts to Cake Man and Afro Perm entering her apartment. News of his attack plays on the television and she confronts him, accusing him of "cheating" on her by killing without her. She also mentions that it's been 10 days since they have last had sex, confirming that Cake Man didn't sleep with her after killing the prostitute. Afro Perm demands that he take her with him but he strikes her and then leaves the apartment.

Cake Man attacks a woman working alone at night across the street in a dress shop. Neither Cake Man nor Afro Perm have been shown to have any interaction with her; she is his second stranger kill. It also seems to be the first time he has set out with the purpose of killing a stranger. Initially, she is about to escape but Perm Girl enters to help him. Cake Man then starts slashing the dress maker with the knife, cutting her across the back and several times on her breasts. They struggle over the knife and the blade cuts into her hand as Cake Man forces it lower down her body. He spins her around and stabs the knife into her groin. Her head tosses back in imitation of the moment of penetration in sexual intercourse before he lets her fall to the ground. Cake Man then flees, leaving her body there. Afro Perm follows him.

These two kills sever completely the connection between explicit sexual intercourse and Cake Man's desire for murder. However, the murders themselves have taken on more overt sexual characteristics. The mother is shown with red blood staining the white clothes directly over her groin after he stabs her from his own groin area. The dressmaker's positioning with Cake Man and her body language both imitate sexual intercourse at the moment the knife pierces her groin. Rather than his penis entering Afro Perm's body to metonymically repeat the fatal stabbings that are his m.o., the murder and the sex have now collapsed into a single act.

At this point in the film, with barely 8 minutes left, the director introduces a new element: food. After murdering the dressmaker, the film cuts back to Afro Perm's apartment. Cake Man spoons overly generous amounts of jelly into his croissant, which has been split along the edge and spread open in such a way as to resemble a vulva.[3] While he eats, Afro Perm performs oral sex on him but Cake Man doesn't seem to be paying attention. Afro Perm suggests they go on a picnic on their next day off.

Cut to the graveyard (yes, the same graveyard where they earlier raped, murdered, and stashed the body of a victim). Afro Perm performs oral sex on Cake Man while he lies on his back eating. She then strips and mounts him while he continues to eat, seemingly unmoved by her actions. He continues to eat while she moans, proclaims how happy she is, and tells him never to leave her.

I'm not quite sure what this conjunction of food and sex with Cake Man being distant is supposed to mean. Does his eating of the food Afro Perm prepares and thoroughly un-passionate reaction to sex represent the domestic sphere and his resistance to settling down? Or does his gluttonous consumption reveal that now he is out of control (i.e. can't sate his appetite for food or murder)? Is the pairing of food and un-emotional sex supposed to contrast with the earlier pairing of murder and passionate sex? If so, to what end?

After the picnic, we cut back to the apartment where Afro Perm is doing laundry while Cake Man sits at the table drinking a coke. But then Cake Man slips out to stalk a nurse on her way home from work. He shoves her into a dorm room where three other women are getting ready for bed. He stabs the first in the chest and the next one in the groin before tying the third standing with her arms over her head to the bed. The camera pans to a shot of a woman on the ground with her legs open towards the camera, focused on her white underwear. He stabs this woman, the first roommate, in the groin and smears her blood on the nurse's face with the knife. Next, he cuts along the bound woman's chest beneath her breasts, slashes her throat, then cuts an X on her chest before stabbing her in the groin. When the nurse screams, he lashes out at her with the knife, cutting an X across her chest and then horizontally and vertically.

This final murder scene of four strangers includes several face close-ups of the women with expressions that hover somewhere between fear and ecstasy. Their gasps at times sound like sexual moans. This ambivalence reinforces the transition that has happened between the overt and subterranean sexual pleasures of killing for the Cake Man.

As he is leaving, Afro Perm shows up. She clutches him and calls him "husband" as he stabs her. She falls to the floor and the camera zooms on her face and rotates as blood pools beneath her head. Cake Man is then shown in silhouette walking against the morning sky along a spillover. He takes off his shirt, washes the knife in the water, and then examines it as he continues walking along.

The end.

Although Cake Man is at first a reluctant murderer, his constant m.o. of stabbing women in the groin, supplemented by slashing at their breasts, betrays an underlying sexual element of the crimes even without the post-killing intercourse with Afro Perm. Possession of sexual knowledge does not seem to motivate the murders as the high school girl is presumptively "innocent" and there is no indication that the nurses are impure either. Given the attack on the young mother who worked at the wedding hall, it doesn't necessarily seem to be "motivated" to restore a more traditional social order.

Over time, the sex that initially motivated the murders becomes folded into the act of murdering itself. Cake Man and Afro Perm began their murder spree in order to spark the flames of passionate sex. They would kill, they would have sex. Sexual play with the victims was also included. They had sex in the presence of the body of the teenage girl. The restaurant patron's girlfriend was made to perform oral sex on Cake Man. There is sexual touching with the third victim, the prostitute, even if there was no sexual intercourse. But as sexual activity during or after the murders ceases, the murders themselves come to look more and more like intercourse.

Taken together, what do these two themes mean? I'm still trying to work that out. Any guesses?

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[1] You can read up on Pink films here.
[2] Really, you have to see it. According to Wikipedia, the director asked Tamaki Katsura to style her hair in this way for the film.
[3] The jelly he is spooning into the croissant may be red but I can't tell. I'm colorblind. If so, that image would repeat the imagery of the bloody woman's parts Cake Man has been carving.

"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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The Myth of Monogamy

So I have obviously failed at keeping up a regular work product. I've also set aside "The East, West, and Sex" because when I have time to read for fun, I don't want to read that book. However, I wish to address this topic of the myth of human monogamy, recently in vogue with the researcher-storyteller community (I refuse to call this kind of nonsense "science") and pushed by sex positive activists like Dan Savage.

The basic premise of this argument, for those unfamiliar, is that monogamy in humans, like the animal kingdom at large, is not "natural." People with Ph.D.'s are getting grants to mythologize about prehistoric human sexual behaviors with reasoning that would be, quite frankly, dismissed as specious and laughable if not stamped with the imprimatur of the university and science. Long ago, in a place far far removed from "civilization," human women copulated freely and often with a variety of men without jealousy or conflict. Sperm competition and not direct or social competition was the paradigm of survival of the fittest. Paternity was never a social question, only one addressed by unconscious drives and natural selection. Then nasty ol' civilization in the form of patriarchy came along and ended this happy time by imposing pair bonding while not holding males accountable for monogamy. Traditional science, a mere outgrowth of patriarchy, then imposed the myth that monogamy was natural and has been with humans throughout our evolution. Only a handful of brave, crusading modern scientists are capable of freeing us from this myth of monogamy and its oppressive presence in our lives.

I honestly have no idea how long ago monogamy was introduced into human history. In fact, I don't even care. It's meaningless, speculative, but worst of all, dangerous, to root around in history and especially prehistory for the "origins" of "human nature." Here's a snapshot of the reasons to reject this kind of mythmaking.

1. Plunger penis and reasoning from morphology.

Where to start... The premise of this argument is that the human penis evolved to have a larger glans to shaft ratio in order to "plunge" semen out of the vaginal canal from previous sexual partners to decrease sperm competition. This kind of mythic retrojection is about as scientific and reliable as Ariel's theories about the surface world based on her conjectures for the uses of the "artifacts" she discovers. Don't get me wrong; I'm a firm believer in evolution. What I don't subscribe to is the notion that the reasonable stories we tell ourselves about why peacocks got crazy tails and elephants have trunks accurately describe the selective processes which allowed those traits to be passed along. Punctuated equilibria and the devastation of a population, such as the theorized Toba catastrophe, create the possibility that certain morphologies didn't contribute directly to competition but were only incidentally inherited. A similar analysis applies to other examples of reasoning from morphology back to our natural state.

2. The origins of modern behavior in prehistory.

Functionally equivalent to the above critique but focused on behavior instead of anatomy, the search for the origins of modern human sexual behavior behind the foggy veil of prehistory isn't particularly helpful. This is true both for those who uphold monogamy as natural and those whose oppose it. One such example, again based on sperm competition theory, is that males who suspect an extra pair mating will, allegedly, initiate sex immediately and thrust deeper and harder in attempts to displace rival male deposits and place his sperm in better position to fertilize the egg. Rape of one's spouse is supposedly reducible in large part to this suspicion. Beyond the questions of (1) is this even true now and (2) how can we know if prehistoric humans actually behaved this way, the latter a wholly untestable hypothesis, this reasoning cannot eliminate socialization as an alternate cause of the behavior. Besides a socialized sperm competition theory, such thrusting may be due to the excitement of the reunion with the partner or have origins in other emotions (as opposed to an inherent, natural human response).

The researcher-storytellers depend on observations of modern "primitive" peoples who are essentially the same, in their view, as our prehistoric ancestors and also essentially "natural" rather than socialized. The reductionist and essentialist premises, as well as problematic methodology, of this assumption require, I think, little explanation. Simply asking why the researcher-storytellers assume these groups to be natural rather collected around cultural forces will collapse the whole house of cards that is their understanding of the unconditioned nature of prehistoric humans.

3. Nature vs. Culture.

Such a heady topic is way too involved to be handled by the informality of a blog. Suffice it to say, these are rough outlines of the debate. Hit me up in the comments if you want pointers towards additional reading.

The myth of monogamy argument is basically that human monogamy is unnatural, it has been imposed upon us by culture. In our natural, prehistoric state, humans did not pair bond. Rather, a female copulated with many males without inciting incidents of jealousy, conflict, or breaking group cohesion. The factors proposed by traditional science for pair bonding, such as female vulnerability while carrying the child, the need for protection, the need for help raising a child, etc. are dismissed as cultural impositions post hoc to justify the unnatural state of monogamy.

The problems with this argument are manifold. First, the very notion of a human nature is debatable, not to mention the problems of actually knowing it AND reconstructing it from before any records were kept. Second, the characterization that non pair bonding in humans, if it was true, was not in fact cultural / social but rather "natural" is questionable at best. Just because it happened prior to the cave paintings at Lascaux doesn't mean it wasn't the product of cultural forces.

4. Immutable human characteristics.

The drive behind the myth of monogamy position, and the one taken up by sex positive activists such as Dan Savage, is that monogamy is not natural for humans. In effect, we are at odds with our very nature when we pair bond. I have more to say about the dangers of "human nature" below, but here I simply want to make the point that even if non pair bonding was a feature of prehistoric human groups doesn't mean this was in fact part of a human "nature" that couldn't change over time.

5. The dangers of "human nature."

The concept of a "human nature" is a dangerous one. What is "natural" and "unnatural" has been the basis of human oppression for centuries. The weaker nature of women was deployed to justify denial of all opportunities beyond the domestic sphere. At the core, the racial sciences used nature to distinguish between the superior (whites) and inferior (Negroids, Mongoloids, etc.) specimens. And the lack of procreative possibility, among others, has long been used in the condemnation of homosexuality as aberrant and unnatural. It wasn't until 1986 that the DSM finally eliminated homosexuality completely from its register of mental illness.

So when somebody like Dan Savage uses "human nature" as a starting point for discussing modern human sexuality, I cringe. Given its historical and continued use for oppressing Others, including gay men such as he, it should be rejected as a liberatory concept. The fight should not be, as he and the many researcher-storytellers currently working in this area contend, about clearing away the untruth from the truth about our prehistoric sexual behaviors, our human nature. Liberation requires us to explode and then abandon the concept of nature itself.

I wish to reiterate. I am a firm believer in evolution. However, I reject the validity of these kinds of studies that seek to draw conclusions about modern human sex from half-baked conjectures about prehistoric human behaviors, modern anatomical structures, and an appeal to human nature and counsel against the dangers of the discursive regimes in which they participate. Liberation won't come from laying siege to and occupying the construct of human nature for the boundaries of the recently seized concept will simply be used to deny others. We must instead continuously break down those walls which delineate the "natural" from "unnatural" to truly be free.

World Cup Sucks

Perhaps you haven't heard, but Dutch porn star Bobbi Eden in an odd nationalist bid has offered all of her twitter (@BobbiEden) followers free blowjobs if her beloved Netherlands wins the World Cup tomorrow. This promise managed to penetrate the recent news cycle, even usurping air time from the LeBron James goes where non-story.

Bobbi's vow skyrocketed her to the most followed porn star on twitter, moving well past icon Jenna Jameson. But the world's largest suck off seems to be nothing more than a dirty publicity stunt. Bobbi Eden announced she has joined the Vicki Vette (@vickyvette) porn network today. Aiding Bobbi & Norwegian porn star Vicki in this football tomfoolery are @gabbyquinteros and @misshybrid. Together, they are trying to make #TeamBJ, what they are calling this shameless self promotion, a trending topic.

When did the global face of soccer change from hooligan to harlot? This year it started with the so-called "Paraguay Girl," Larissa Riquelme, also known as the "Cell Phone Boob Girl."

I have a sneaking suspicion that if the Netherlands wins, followers of #TeamBJ will have to fly to Holland and agree to be filmed receiving their "prize" as part of spectacle porn, a sub-genre which stages egregious sex acts, often in pursuit of "record breaking" proportions. The infamous Annabel Chong "World's Largest Gangbang" is the preeminent example of spectacle porn.

And yes, I did sign up to follow Bobbi Eden and Vicki Vette just to watch this bizarre sexing of sport unfold :)

UPDATE: Spain wins the World Cup so no porn star blowjobs for Bobbi Eden's 50k plus twitter followers. I'm a little disappointed not to see if my prediction played out but I guess that's what you get for betting against a psychic octopus. Bobbi & Vicki are promising to team up for some form of "thank you" to their twitter followers for the success of the promo.

The Good, the Bad, and the Mind-blowing

The good:

The Dirty Projectors released their 7" Ascending Melody for free via download this week. 20 people who download it will also be randomly selected to receive the vinyl. These tracks were laid down during the Bitte Orca sessions but didn't make the final cut.

http://www.dirtyprojectors.net/

The bad:

Pat Robertson is a horse's ass. The man can't help but insert his foot into his mouth whenever he flaps his lips to speak about tragedy. It's like he's got steel toes and a magnet in his palate. This week the radical evangelical cleric blamed the earthquake in Haiti on an apocryphal pact supposedly entered into over 200 years ago with Satan in a voodoo ceremony, freeing the island of French control in return for 200 years of servitude to the prince of darkness. He is referencing the Boukman ceremony that Dutty Boukman is alleged to have held at Bois Caiman in 1791 which sparked the revolt that culminated in Haiti's independence, (By the way, said lease would have expired in 1991, Pat.) Fault lines have nothing to do with it, just God grinding an axe with women, children, and men wholly unresponsible for an act that happened long before they were born and many scholars doubt even really took place. Congratulations 700 Club, it only took you 14 days to prove you're still a bunch of jerks in 2010.

Robertson is well known for his laughable predictions that always, always, always turn out false. The man's clearly not a prophet. Maybe God's telling you to shut your trap, Pat. Obviously embarrassment and chagrin should've had stilled your cruel tongue long ago. WWJD? I'm pretty sure he'd cancel the 700 Club.

Not one to let the jerk spotlight shine anywhere but on his jerk-itude, right-wing propagandha meister and blatant racist (remembe he got canned for declaring Donovan McNabb a no-talent hack bolstered by affirmative action) Rush Limbaugh described Haiti as a "made to order" disaster for Obama. He said the relief effort would be used to "burnish" the Obama image among the "light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country." What, you mean not waiting and watching people drown and "loot" and suffer after a major natural disaster before you send in the emergency relief workers might be a popular move? Who'da thunk it? Well...

You know what? I think people of all colors worldwide are applauding Obama's no-hesitation response to the tragedy in Haiti. The viral efforts to raise money through twitter and facebook have been outstanding. But you know what jolly ol' Dittohead says about giving to charity? DON'T. He encouraged his listeners not to contribute a dime to relief efforts in Haiti because American "tax dollars" fully fund our relief efforts.

Gotta hand it to you, Limbaugh. I didn't think anybody could be more insensitive about the Haitian earthquake than Pat Robertson but you took the cake. So much so that professional conservative meanie Pat Buchanan, no big fan of all things liberal and progressive, publicy chastised your comments as "cynical" and "insensitive." When Buchanan calls you out for being heartless, you know you're a stone-cold bastard.

The Mind-blowing:

A couple of U.K. scientists sent out about 4,000 surveys to British women age 22-83 (average age 55) and got back about 1,800 responses concerning their self-reported sexual experiences. Upon analysing the women's answer to the question if they believe they have "the" g spot and report of achieveing orgasm through intercourse, these scientists declared the g spot a "myth" in the pages of the Journal of Sexual Medicine this month.

Setting aside the methodoligal problems (surveys versus anatomical analysis? really?), I've got to applaud this team for continuing unabatedly and enthusiastically the 2000+ year tradition of murky (male) science which obscures, covers up, distorts, stigmatizes and pathologizes female sexual pleasure and female desire. Pick up Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction for an excellent history of this tradition.

Here's my take away. Ultrasounds, heat imaging scans, "hands on" lab tests (that's a joke; really, read the Maines' book) can only reveal so much about female sexuality with their scientific and anatomy-centric approaches. The question we as a soceity should ask ourselves is why do we care if there's "really" a g spot or not? What difference does it make? If you or a lover can press a spot one-third of the way up the front of your vaginal wall and induce cataclysmic, volcanic, earth-shattering, mind-blowing, leg-shaking, sheet-shredding, screaming-at-the-top-of-your-lungs pleasure, does it really matter whether a bunch of research scientists in a London lab think there's a unique anatomical structure to which this "response" can be reduced? I think the answer is pretty clear. And if you're not built with an ecstasy button in said place, does that mean the g spot is just a myth? Who really cares? I think Petra Boynton's advice is particularly salient on this topic.

But for women, how much does it matter whether the G-spot exists? While I’m usually keen to advocate that we follow what science has to tell us, in this case the presence or absence of a G-spot has caused confusion and anxiety, and perhaps we might be better served by exploring what feels good.

It’s generally accepted that some women enjoy vaginal stimulation by finger, penis, or sex toy. Just as it’s understood that some women are turned on by clitoral, anal, breast, or other stimulation. We’re often encouraged by women’s magazines and self-help markets to focus on specific areas (G-spots, clitoris, or anal penetration), so we miss the excitement that can be experienced from exploring the whole body and combinations of erogenous zones—for example, enjoying vaginal penetration alongside clitoral stimulation. Rather than arguing over G-spots, perhaps the best thing science can responsibly do is remind women to explore all opportunities for pleasure.

30 Days of Write, 5 April

First, a few confessions about saving the world in 4 minutes.

One, I never heard this song until our good mistress posted the link. I was only barely cognizant that JT and Madonna had even collaborated. But you can certainly ask me my opinion on the Bon Iver EP. Bother me again in 16 days and I'll let you know how the full "My Maudlin Career" record sounds.

Two, I'm glad I'm not the only one with a dirty mind. My thoughts immediately lept to that classic Steve Martin bit on SNL about his "one christmas wish" when I read today's topic. For those of you unaware of the skit, here's a link. Watch it now and remember when SNL used to make you laugh. Ah, those were the good ol' days.

Then I watched the clip tipsy posted and realized JT and Madonna were making the same juvenile sex joke I was, just with better bodies, in better clothes, with better dance moves, and making a hell of a lot more money at it than little old me. But at least our minds pay rent for the same gutter, and that's got to count for something, right?

Three, I'm willing to share that extended 31 day orgasm wish with everybody in the world if there are any beneficent imaginary wish-granters listening. Hell, I'd settle for 4 minutes a day every day for the entire year. (See how I connected it back to the topic? Clever, huh?) That's giving up 43 180 minutes of fun time per year, but I'm not a selfish lover.

So let's recap. Haven't listened to Madonna since SNL was funny. Famous people are perverts just like you and me, they just look better when getting their freak on. And spontaneous, 4 minutes orgasms every day would grind wars across the globe to a halt since we know men roll right over and fall asleep after they come.

And that's how I would save the world in 4 minutes.

PS Did you know Milo Ventimiglia and Hayden Panettiere hooked up? Does this on screen uncle-niece, off screen romantic couple thing creep anybody else out? Who do the Petrellis think they are, a super powered Brady Bunch? I don't think that's what Hiro meant when he told you to save the cheerleader, save the world, Peter.

(If you don't get that joke, either you're too young or I'm too old. I concede that I watch waaaay too much TV.)