Male gaze refuelling station, Bourbon St. last Tuesday
Inevitably the cycle of destruction that begins with male aggression and culminates in mass murder returns, as doth a dog to its own vomit, to the regularly scheduled misogyny. Death and pussy: two great taints that taste great together.
I allude to a couple of garish swatches of news dumped in my mailbox this morning. Both describe situations where porn is administered as a reward for "heroes" who endure–or wreak their own—horror while participating in government-sponsored carnage.*
From MSNBC, this story begins thusly: "In a sign that things may be returning to normal in New Orleans, strip shows are back in the city’s famous French Quarter." And what a relief it is to the city’s only occupants, cops and military personnel, some of whom have gone as long as two weeks without having an oppressed sex worker rub her tits in their faces.
There’s no drinking water or electricity and the air is crawling with disease, but they’ve got the sexbots back online, and that’s what really matters. Yay for that good old unsinkable New Orleans spirit! As a "public service," lap dances are going for the special disaster discount rate of a buck a pop at the Déjà Vu.
Women, apparently, are not considered part of the "public" who needs "servicing"; according to the article, some women soldiers who looked in at the Deja Vu "for respite from their duties patrolling the city" were entreated by the sterling examples of male heroism in the audience to join the strippers onstage. They declined and scrammed.
The second story, via Salon via Andrew Sullivan, is even more disturbing: a website for novice "wife and girlfriend" pornographers called Now That’s Fucked Up (I won’t link to it) is offering US troops "free access to amateur porn in exchange for soldiers’ photos from the war." In other words, they’re trading pussy for killing. Apparently (I have not looked personally) the offer has precipitated an avalanche of gratuitous gory deathporn. Quoth Salon:
NTFU offers a picture depicting what’s left of the head of a man shot with a .50-caliber weapon next to the words "I’m just here to masturbate" and above an ad for a Web site offering video of a mother and her daughter in a three-way sex act.
After you get all humped up looking at grisly snapshots of "sand Nazi" body parts, you can click over to pictures of some sick fuck’s wan girlfriend taking it up the ass. It’s your one-stop fucktard shop!
______________________________
*Note: I’m gonna go ahead and lump the Katrina disaster under the
government-sponsored carnage heading; sure, the hurricane itself was a
meteorological event and obviously unrelated to male aggression, but it
has been well established by now that patriarchally-motivated racist
assholes bear a large responsibility for the resultant human suffering.
There are those who will take issue with my suggestion that the cops
and firefighters in New Orleans are actually participating in the
carnage, and call it a bum rap, since these dudes are obviously there
to clean shit up. The contingency of these public officials’ clear
enjoyment and shared buddy experience of misogynist entertainments, I
suggest, would not be possible without the precipitating
patriarchally-motivated calamity.
Oh gods, this one I have to get back to after a few Advil and a cup of Mocha coffee, it’s just too damn much. Twisty, you’re stronger than me.
Twisty, I just don’t know what I would do without my daily dose(s) of boat-rocking, mind-sharpening, patriarchy-blaming.
Thanks.
(Now to quell the fiery rage within…)
(Now to quell the fiery rage within…)
This is why I got a puppy.
Are you kidding me??? All the suffering in that city and these “public servants” are going to strip clubs??? How is that “getting back to normal”? Is MSNBC suggesting that the exploitation of women is normal? Oh wait…in a patriarchy, it is! Silly me, what was I thinking? It boggles the mind.
I find myself wondering about these women. Where are they staying? The electricity is back on at the clubs, but what about in the neighborhoods they live in? I’m having a hard time viewing the whole thing as pathetic, but I don’t know which is more pathetic - the circumstances the strippers must be in to feel obliged to “return to work” so soon, or the men who are so unimaginative that they can’t come up with any other ways to relax.
Nice to know they have such high regards for their female coworkers, too.
Yeah, that’s the REALLY incredible part. I can imagine the men deluding themselves, as many seem to do, into thinking that the strippers enjoy their work - but pressuring their female coworkers, who quite *obviously* haven’t gone into that line of work, to do the same? One despairs, even more than usual.
The other thing - I’m not even gonna touch that. It’s refusing to sink into my brain, it’s just sitting there like water on hardpan…I’ll probably start ranting once it finally absorbs.
I’m glad you can still blog coherently. I barely bother anymore. Every time I hear or see some news item that I might have blogged about, I just feel like yelling instead. But you can’t really post blog entries that are just like “AGGHHHHH!!AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGG!!!!” Well, I guess you could, but no one would read it. Point is, I try to write, and it just comes out all gibberish-y and even more irrational than usual. I think George W. Bush has driven me insane.
Now we know that there is even more evil and sickness in the world than anyone would have dared to guess. I blame the Patriarchy. Let’s hope we don’t get any porn-defending posts about this one.
Fellas, if you’re thinking about posting something defending the male gaze and acting incredulous about how this is all good clean fun, please, spare me.
IS free speech meant to defend what is basically speech pollution? Toxic speech? Speech that teaches hate?
speechless. well, except the web site title sums things up nicely: that’s fucked up.
Nice to see everyone has their priorities straight. Fuck.
And it teaches a lot about military socialization. I bet the Red Cross and Salvation Army aren’t rewarding their workers with trips to strip clubs.
As for the death for porn site…words fail me.
Porn is like a kind of death, really. Look at all the women in porn - they usually have the kind of blank stares that a corpse does. The woman, in porn, is reduced to a body, which is then reduced to an object, which is then labeled as a toy. Mainstream porn is a sophisticated, tarted up version of necrophilia.
I generally approve of porn where everyone involved is just sort of fucking the way they want and decide to videotape it and sell it, however, since it rarely ends up making me want to try to scrub away the badness.
On a second note, WTF is up with that new summer’s eve commercial? The best part of being a woman is … douche???
I was intrigued by the previous reference to the Summer’s Eve commercial, so I googled, and got the following puzzling article on “genital self-image”:
http://www.chicagosuntimes.com/output/berman/cst-ftr-berman19.html
Weird.
In defense of the patriarchy, let me say . . .
Shit. I got nothin. Less than nothin.
twisty and everyone - what I’m about to relate is a true story. a woman I know, a matriarch of the gay community and being herself gay, was a registered lobbyist for women working at strip clubs. I asked her if that was a contradiction somehow - why wouldn’t she be working to shut down these clubs. she told me that most of the women liked what they were doing and REALLY liked the pay.
they liked thinking they were pulling on over on the men, she told me. I’m not sure they were actually but, for argument’s sake, I accepted the theory thinking that if she’s representing them, then she has an inside track and insight into the industry.
but basically, I was gobsmacked. still am, even now, years later.
anyone care to weigh in on this, one way or another?
Well, it seems to me that the only way for an individual woman to put one over on guys who like watching strippers is to not be a stripper.
indeed. and imagine what the world would be like, if all the women in the sex industry would check out …
A nice fantasy, but the actual problem with patriarchy is not that women work in the sex industry, but that the beneficiaries of patriarchy require a sex industry.
“the actual problem with patriarchy is not that women work in the sex industry, but that the beneficiaries of patriarchy require a sex industry.”
Yeah - require it. They NEEEEED those strippers and porn stars to do things that become ever-more transgressive and evil as their jaded fantasies become ever more byzantine and complex to satisfy. The older the men get, the more difficult it becomes to achieve orgasm - and Viagra might help with the erection, but the orgasm becomes even more elusive. And god knows these men need more orgasms, and forbids that they settle for less of them.
Men develop an obsessive need for sexual satisfaction through a culture that thrives on exploiting the titllation of men. The Patriarchy, if you will. And men, being oblivious and stupid, blindly follow wherever their pathetic dicks lead them, unaware that they are being manipulated by other men.
This is the flip side of the evil of an ever-more sexualized world that bothers me: I don’t think men really benefit from all this manipulation, I think it creates false expectations and leads to frustration and anger and hosility towards women.
The feminist who manipulates men does so to the detriment of many more women than the individual man she might briefly fleece.
Too often these discussions surround women’s “choices” to become prostitutes in a patriarchy because pointing a reproving finger at women is megatrendy, but there’s no arguing to be done over 100% of the demand making the choice to use prostitutes. This seems to me the more important place to focus attention on who’s making what choices and, most importantly, why.
Peacebug:
The answer you seek is Power. The women do it for Power. They think they have power over men, the one being that has always, always, proved their Power over her,when they strip.
I actually got into this a bit the other day and I’ll direct you to my website (above) for the full explanation…It’s titled “The Sword of Power” and it goes into depth about my theory on it.
I stripped for awhile (when I was younger and hadn’t passed 3 children through my body, leaving it scarred with stretch marks that look far too much like a bear attack) when I was younger. At the time I FELT, for all the world, like I had finally found ‘real’ Power. That sense is addicting, of course, it’s not real power, only the men posess that and they don’t like to give it up.
I’d like to go ahead and blame the hurricane on the patriarchy, actually. Because I’ve noticed something lately. Every year, it’s the worst hurricane season on record. And if we can’t blame the patriarchy for fucking the global climate by oil mongering out their patriarchical wazoos since the industrial revolution, what kind of patriarchy-blamers are we?
Agent Em is right. It is patently irresponsible not to blame the patriarchy for these hurricanes. Nice work, Agent!
Thanks to Snopes, we now know that Hurricane Rita is a tool of the Patriarchy.
Seriously, Twisty, stay safe from rain and from jam bands.