Based on a true story.
Archive for the 'Art is my LIFE' Category
Also, am I the only one who compulsively watched that “Portlandia” marathon on IFC the other day even though the unrelenting, precious self-consciousness of it made me want to rip my own ex-hipster face off?
Hey, I finally wrote a sentence concise enough for Facebook! I’m gonna post it right away!
Fig. 7. The author snaps iPhone self-portrait in a truck stop can. Italy, Texas, 2008.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that without Steve Jobs I would not have achieved my brilliant success as either a spinster aunt, an Internet feminist, a text messagist, or a public restroom documentarist. I am curiously maudlin over the news of his death. It feels like there’s a weird new void in pop culture now.
Then again I’m typing this on an Apple keyboard made in China, so there’s that.
Radical feminist blog discussions can take some interesting turns, some of the interestingest of which arise from the wacky circumstance of Savage Death Island’s status as — and we don’t want this to be true, but true it is — a patriarchal subculture. We can’t exist outside or independently of the dominant culture — nothing can — so we’re stuck trying to invent a post-patriarchal world order from within patriarchy’s crapulent boundaries. Even as we’re relegated to the crapulent lunatic fringe, we’re enfoisted with the crapulent language of patriarchy, and its crapulent traditions and conventions, and its crapulent art. Every time we complain about some particularly crapulent aspect of all this crapulence, we get resisted, often by feminists themselves, because crappy though it may be, this is the only culture we’ve got. We’ve gotten kind of used to it. We forget, pretty often, to question its authority.
Take the other day, when the discussion turned to the crapulence of horndog author Vladimir Nabokov and his icky novel Lolita. I said something like “this is some crapulent kiddie porn shit, yo.”
Whereupon a reader, obviously experiencing one of those spontaneous liberal-dude fugue states that overtake us all from time to time, and careful not to “pick a side of the argument,” commented
But there is a greater issue at stake here: that of censorship.
You probably remember, couple of days ago, hearing the unmistakable roar of a lobe revving up to about 7800 SPM.* That was my lobe.
What follows is more or less how I responded to the idea that some tiresome dude-novel should be exempt from feminist critique on accounta censorship-is-bad. I had to add some stuff, of course, to prevent this post from being dangerously shortwinded.
1. There is (I said) no greater issue at stake than the liberation of women from patriarchal oppression.
The liberation of women from patriarchal oppression is more important than a man’s right to 24-hour access to poontang. It’s more important than a woman’s right to the performance of sexy empowering femininity. It’s more important than a scholarly analysis of a canonical work. It’s more important than censorship.
Censorship has meant this and that and the other thing over the years. The government won’t let you burn flags. The authorities herd you and your “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” protest sign into a “free speech” zone when Dubya shows up at a rally. The secret police throw you in prison for writing stuff unflattering stuff about your totalitarian government. Your library uses content-control software. The TV network bleeps out your (or Gordon Ramsay’s) F-bombs. The self-censoring Internet feminist uses the word F-bomb instead of the word fuck for no reason.
In the context of Internet feminist discourse, however, censorship seems to be something only feminist dissidents do, probably because we hate freedom! Censorship means “the practice of feminists voicing dissenting opinions on the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women.”
According to this interpretation, we Nazi feminists, with our intolerable idea that the fetishization of women’s oppression violates all women, are to be harassed, shouted down, and condemned by the liberal dudes found swinging from every rafter of the Internet, in an effort to suppress our dissent. Why? Apparently because saying “Lolita sucks” is tantamount to demanding a book-burning. Of a beloved, transgressive monument to lyric dudeliness.
Ironically, dudely suppression of feminist dissent is itself censorship, the very -ship that these free speech-lovin’ dudes purport to be against. Censorship is apparently bad only when it threatens to undermine DudeNation’s death-grip on its own sceptre of passion.
2. It is not censorship to advance feminist critiques of dudeliocentric art-porn.
In order to perform actual censorship, a censor must first occupy a position of authority over the censoree, and must be able to command minions sufficient for enforcement. The dudes and dudesses of DudeNation, for example, censor radical feminists all the time. Have you ever seen a radical feminist sitcom, fashion spread, toilet cleaner commercial, or New York Times bestseller?
It’s no secret that this very blog gets hit with DDoS attacks all the flippin’ time. Censorship!
Conversely, radical feminists, dangling by gnarled claws from our remote precipice out in Lunatic Fringe, are in no position to censor anything. We’re not in power. We have no authority. We enjoy little privilege. We command no minions. Even if we wanted to, which we don’t, we couldn’t prevent even one celebrated genius from writing child rape fantasies and calling it art.
About all we can do is advance feminist critiques and submit feminist analyses, both here on the Internet, and through the awesome power of those super-effective patriarchy-busting “THIS DEGRADES WOMEN” stickers hastily applied to American Apparel ads in bus stops. We can argue that the publication and artification of Lolita-esque child rape fantasies contributes to the fetishization of women’s oppression and is therefore antifeminist and inimical to all women generally.
We can also suggest remedies. Such as “if you make pornography you’re a misogynist rape apologist douche, so cut it the fuck out, you dumb fuck.” And also, “if you consume pornography you’re a misogynist rape apologist douche, so cut it the fuck out, you dumb fuck.” In fact, pretty much, “whenever you are anything but wildly enthusiastic about the repeal of male privilege, you’re a dumb fuck doing something you should be cutting the fuck out.”
3. The revolution will render all graphic representations of rape obsolete by smashing the domination/submission paradigm.
Once domination/submission bites the dust as the primary model upon which all human relationships are based, 99.9% of the beloved literary canon will start to look dated, corny, and bigoted, because it was all written in support of, from the point of view of, and under the auspices of patriarchal oppression. By bigots.
In other words, since oppression will cease to be fetishized by the enlightened survivors of the revolution, pornography will cease to exist, all on its own. The demand will evaporate. No censorship required! Just add common sense and simple human compassion!
4. The degree to which the idea of a world in which Shakespeare, Joyce and Nabokov are considered quaint relics of a barbaric age makes one uneasy, it is precisely to that degree that one is imbued with, invested in, and brainwashed by patriarchal mores.
Go ahead. Defend The Taming of the Shrew as a feminist bildungsroman all you want. You know you’re just pulling a bunch of English major bullshit outta your status quo-lovin’ ass.
To recap:
Is Lolita art? Sure, why not? It’s misogynist, barbaric art that degrades the whole species. Awesome.
Should Lolita be banned? Nah. Banning it, or any other pornographic “work,” would be like trying to treat 2,567,438 purulent boils with a single drop of Boil-Away.** Banning stuff never works. It just creates shadowy, subterranean subcultures who get off on the bannedness of their precious banned thing.
In any event, banning Lolita would do nothing to eradicate the underlying humanitarian crisis of which it is a symptom. Instead, I suggest a feminist response to pornography that advocates — persistently, and with salty language, ridicule, satire, and shaming — the eradication of any social order predicated on the existence and oppression of a sex class.
___________________
* SPM = Spinspulsations Per Minute
** By Ronco
When Kubrick was making the film “Lolita” he was crabbed out that the prudey production code wouldn’t allow him to enfilthen 13-year-old actress Sue Lyon with all the dude-pleasin “eroticism” in Nabokov’s icky novel. He intimated that the godbag-enforced lack of explicit child porn is what caused the film’s initial lukewarm reception and prevented it from soaring on wings of dudely prurience to the pinnacle of cinematic greatness for which Kubrick yearned. Naturally, because — thanks, Internet! — modern audiences know exactly what to fill in the blanks with, the film eventually became the iconic classic of noble ephebophilia we know and love today!
That’s right, I said ephebophilia. You know how when a practice becomes widespread and established, one of the first things its aficionados do is codify it and quantify it and describe it and assign its variations to categories and invent endless sub-categories for the more subtle variations that increasingly are meaningful only to the experts? Like with wine. Most people can just have a glass of wine, but oenophiles are deeply sensitive to nuancy variables, like the varietal, the region, the chemical composition of the vineyard’s dirt, the amount of rainfall during the spring of its production year, the color, which of 12,687 potential aromas it expresses, and, of course, the vintage.
It’s the same thing with raping children. Because raping children is such an established and widespread practice, PsychiatryNation has devised handy categories describing the various spins its practitioners can put on their “sexual preference”.
When a preference is based on a specific child vintage, it is called a chronophilia. One such chronophilia is crowd favorite pedophilia — raping prepubescent children. Then there’s hebephilia, which is a preference for raping pubescents. Ephebophilia describes a preference for raping post-pubescents. Girls must be 14-16, but for boys it’s 14-19. Spinster HQ concludes that this age disparity obtains because after 16, girls age out into common slutdom (the default state for all women). Once they’re sluts, the desire to screw them is no longer considered a special psychiatric disorder, but rather a normal dudely activity consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women (see Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and one of humanity’s finest hours: when the entire dudernet participated in that pervy countdown to the Olsen twins’ 18th birthday).
To explain male preoccupation with teen rape, I found this guy on the Internet. He is Frederick S. Berlin, M.D.,PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital; Director of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma; Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma; and Consultant to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse. This eminent upholder of dudelionormativity notes that ephebophilia is the default dudelionormative state.
“Most men can find adolescents attractive sexually, although, of course, that doesn’t mean they’re going to act on it. Some men who become involved with teenagers may not have a particular disorder. Opportunity and other factors may have contributed to their behaving in the way they do.”
Opportunity and other factors? Opportunity, such as when adolescent girls are permitted out in public? Other factors? Such as that fucking Lolita narrative, which has seeped into patriarchal consciousness, been transformed into internet porn and Thylane Blondeau’s fashion spreads, and tells everyone that female children are sexual cyphers just waiting for men to use them as toilets?
Nabokov apologists, do your worst, but this novel isn’t some kind of veiled anti-perv cautionary tale about what can happen when a dude thinks with his dick, or the consequences of acting on desire. Nabokov was totally a perv or he couldn’t have written this huge and convincing paean to pervy desire. He would have made Lolita a person rather than a voiceless toilet, and he would have skipped the gratuitous erotica. The novel is merely an attempt to make art out of kiddie porn. The hero is himself a child molester and murderer who kidnaps, drugs, imprisons, and serially rapes a 12 year old child for chrissake, and then writes a dreamy, poetical memoir about it. Check this shit out (but do it on an empty stomach):
“Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”
The scepter of his passion? Gag-a-mag, it makes your boob scars shrivel.
Even though Humbert Humbert may be tormented and an unreliable narrator, and even if Nabokov was himself a paragon who completely pulled this Humbert character and his criminal obsession with “nymphets” from thin air (hah!), Lolita is just an articulate excuse to dudelionormatize the same infatuation with female children that our sexpert Dr Berlin, above, asserts is common to most men.
Is it art? Sure, why not? But it stinks.
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Jilroy Silliphant. Me! 1963. Pixels on ectoplasm.
The inbox at Spinster HQ this morning contained several urgent communiqués from an entity calling itself “How do I remove my tampon without it hitting something?”.
Yeah, this is a little embarrassing, but whenever I try to remove my tampon, it either hits my fingers or the rim of the toilet. I’m trying to take it out slowly so that it doesn’t swing around, but it’s a huge ordeal. Any tips?
As I read these words — which seemed to me not like everyday, earthly words, but like diamantine droplets of sublime Internet perfection leaping from the screen to encrust my optic nerves in tiny, piercing embraces — a little tear of happiness (the sort of happiness that fills the void left by the pain of defeat after an arduous struggle) welled up in my jaundiced eye. Suddenly all those pent-up, anti-Internet feelings I’ve been having lately melted away into the aether. I gathered some rose petals in a basket the color of sunshine and went skipping down the lane, strewing the petals and singing my Number One Jam, “Top of the World” by the Carpenters. After I got done singing that, I started in on my other Number One Jam, Madonna’s seminal feminist anthem for social change, “Holiday.”
Upon my return to the bunkhouse it became apparent that a small point, lately arisen on the blog, required a clarification. As you know, a roiling controversy attends certain of my views regarding the practice of beginning arguments with the word “I.” My lobe — having recently been blown by the fact that the afore-referenced zenith of tamponish prosody and crystalline subsense had been achieved, by some miracle, without my vigilant intervention — now compels me to rethink my position.
Let me be perfectly clear.
Begin remarks however you like. Use whatever words you want, to convey whatever tone you desire, to express whatever thought pops into your head. If you manage to achieve even a fraction of the exquisite pithiness of “How do I remove my tampon without it hitting something?”, no greater contribution to human enlightenment could be expected of you.
Meanwhile, because I have shown myself to be incapable of explaining to anybody’s satisfaction why it is advantageous for women to disseminate their views on social and political issues as bona fide ideas rather than as qualified, localized, personal opinions, or of illustrating the ways in which this rhetorical style differs from “telling my story,” I am retiring from (but not conceding) the fight. I reckon I’m just too old and beat up.
But before I go, I urge the blametariat to consider this: an idea is infinite and infectious and evolving. Some ideas: Elvis, birth control, the Internet. An opinion, on the other hand, is small and finite and, ultimately, irrelevant. An opinion is “I like pie.”
Jilroy Silliphant. Franny with white chair. 1963.
On the other hand, here is a film script excerpted from our girl Yoko Ono’s 1964 arty book Grapefruit. In Grapefruit, Yoko writes poetical instructions for arty stuff, theoretically for the reader’s own lobes to complete. Like “go sit out in the sun and eat a tuna sandwich.”
What a lazy artist. Trying to oil out of making the tuna sandwich herself.
“Burn this book after you’ve read it!” Yoko writes in the overleaf. I suppose that seemed pretty subversive in 1964.
“The best book I’ve ever burned!” witty Beatle John Lennon adds in the 1970 edition.
But back to the script. Oops! Feminism Fail. To wit:
Film No. 5 (Rape, or Chase)
Rape with camera. One and a half hours, colour, synchronized sound.A cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera persistently until he corners her in an alley, and, if possible, until she is in a falling position.
The cameraman will be taking a risk of offending the girl as the girl is somebody he picks up arbitrarily on the street, but there is a way to get around this.
Depending on the budget, the chase should be made with girls of different age, etc. May chase boys and men as well.
As the film progresses, and as it goes towards the end, the chase and the running should become slower and slower like in a dream, using a high-speed camera.
I have a cameraman who’s prepared to do this successfully.*
Something’s just a tad awry with the scenario. Something churns just slightly the viscera of the Spinster Aunt of the New Millennium. It gives her auntly nostrils a wee enwrinklement. What could it be?
Gosh, I wonder if it’s that the script proposes a fucking snuff film? A dude hired by the artist to randomly select women on the street and run them to earth, filming them the whole time? And Ono thinks there’s a “risk” that the victims of this predation might be “offended” by what she has no problem calling “rape,” yet proposes there’s a “way around” it? What way would that be? After the terrified victims are cornered “in a falling position” in the alley, does the dude chirp “Smile! You’re on Candid Rape Camera!” and everybody has a good laugh? Or does Yoko simply pay her off with John’s dough?
I bet she’s got a cameraman who’s “prepared to do this successfully.” Pervy motherfuckers with cameras aimed at victimized women are never in short supply now, and I doubt it was any different in 1964. That she’s using footage of actual victims shot from the point of view of one of these predatory knobs puts this feminist statement pretty unequivocally in Bogus Town.
This film, now titled more succinctly “Rape”, actually got made in 1969, co-directed by good old John Lennon. Coincidence? I think not. It featured a young undocumented, non-English-speaking immigrant woman chased through the streets of London by Yoko’s willing camera dude. The apparent randomness of the victim’s selection by the camera dude was bogus; the woman’s own sister colluded with Yoko to set her up (nice). The 77-minute film ends, according to this essay, with the woman “curled up on the floor, shielding her face from the intruder.”
The aforementioned critique (written by a dude) excuses the Ono-Lennons from this pretty creepy ethical lapse by suggesting that the importance of the film as a fucking pomo “Truth-Event” supersedes the right of a woman not to be chased by a predator through London for the sake of an art fling or for anything else. The author alludes to the film “Rape” as a “feminist masterpiece.”
Check this fucking pomo violence-rationalizing shit out (I swear I didn’t get it from the PoMo Generator):
However, if we are to submit “Rape” to examination under Badiou’s framework of the Truth-Event, then questions of moral knowledge suddenly become less relevant (perhaps even completely irrelevant if we consider that the Truth-Event shatters the preceding positive ontological order of Being) [...] “Badiou calls the language that endeavours to name the Truth-Event the ’subject-language’. This language is meaningless from the standpoint of Knowledge, which judges propositions with regard to their referent within the domain of positive being.”
What’s one more woman sacrifice? Jesus in a jello mold, this fucking analysis is even more problematic than the film. For one thing, no “feminist masterpiece” can exist, pretty much by definition.
Furthermore, for a spot of art to be considered feminist, it should, at the very least, refrain from inflicting actual terror on actual women.
Iy yi yi.
______________________
* Excerpted from Art and Feminism by Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan. Yoko Ono, ‘Film No. 5 (Rape, or Chase)’, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964).
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