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(Story via smally.)

Last month, in Irvine, California, Officer David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, was acquitted by a jury of eleven men and one woman. He was acquitted, not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence. He was acquitted because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club, and so the jury concluded that she made him do it, and besides, if she strips for a living, she must have been asking for it anyway.

You might think that I am exaggerating the defense’s position for polemical effect. No, I’m not. Here’s defense attorney Jim Stokke: She got what she wanted, … She’s an overtly sexual person. And in cross-examination of Lucy, the survivor: You do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do, … And the same thing happened out there on that highway [in Laguna Beach]. You wanted [Park] to take some sex!

Back in the real world, outside of Jim Stokke’s and Officer David Alex Park’s pornographic power-trip succubus fantasies, what actually happened is that a professional cop, while armed and on patrol, used the extensive arbitrary powers that the law grants to police in order to get personal records on several different women at the strip club, picked out the one he liked the best, followed her, waited for the first excuse to use his legally-backed coercive power against her, used the power of his badge and gun to force her to pull over, used that same power to bring her under his custody and keep her there against her will, threatened her with arrest and jail, and then forced her into sex against her will. He didn’t give a damn about what she wanted because she’s just a woman, and an overtly sexual one at that. And he could force what he wanted on her because he’s a cop—so he has the power to restrain and threaten her—and she’s a stripper—so he had every reason to believe that a jury would give him every possible (and some impossible) benefit of the doubt, while they treated her bodily integrity and her consent as worth less than nothing, and blamed her for anything that happened to her, anyway. As, in fact, they did.

As I said about a case with several male cops in San Antonio back in December:

What as at stake here has a lot to do with the individual crimes of three cops, and it’s good to know that the police department is taking that very seriously. But while excoriating these three cops for their personal wickedness, this kind of approach also marginalizes and dismisses any attempt at a serious discussion of the institutional context that made these crimes possible — the fact that each of these three men worked out of the same office on the same shift, the way that policing is organized, the internal culture of their own office and of the police department as a whole, and the way that the so-called criminal justice system gives cops immense power over, and minimal accountability towards, the people that they are professedly trying to protect. It strains belief to claim that when a rape gang is being run out of one shift at a single police station, there’s not something deeply and systematically wrong with that station. If it weren’t for the routine power of well-armed cops in uniform, it would have been much harder for Victor Gonzales, Anthony Munoz, or Raymond Ramos to force their victims into their custody or to credibly threaten them in order to extort sex. If it weren’t for the regime of State violence that late-night patrol officers exercise, as part and parcel of their legal duties, against women in prostitution, it would have been that much harder for Gonzales and Munoz to imagine that they could use their patrol as an opportunity to stalk young women, or to then try to make their victim complicit in the rape by forcing her to pretend that the rape was in fact consensual sex for money. And if it weren’t for the way in which they can all too often rely on buddies in the precinct or elsewhere in the force to back them up, no matter how egregiously violent they may be, it would have been much harder for any of them to believe that they were entitled to, or could get away with, sexually torturing women while on patrol, while in full uniform, using their coercive power as cops.

A serious effort to respond to these crimes doesn’t just require individual blame or personal accountability — although it certainly does require that. It also requires a demand for fundamental institutional and legal reform. If police serve a valuable social function, then they can serve it without paramilitary forms of organization, without special legal privileges to order peaceful people around and force innocent people into custody, and without government entitlements to use all kinds of violence without any accountability to their victims. What we have now is not civil policing, but rather a bunch of heavily armed, violently macho, institutionally privileged gangsters in blue.

—GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol

In Irvine, the same thing is happening all over again—just another Bad Apple causing Yet Another Isolated Incident. Except that in Irvine, the legal system has not even gone so far as to get to the part about individual blame and personal accountability. Overt misogyny against women who dare ever to be overtly sexual, combined with overt authoritarianism in favor of any controlling macho creep with a badge and a gun and a pocketful of wet dreams, have combined to get this admitted sexual predator completely off the hook, and leave all of his old buddies back at the department free to stalk, harass, extort and rape suspect women, with every expectation of more or less complete impunity for their actions.

Christ, but there are days when I hate being proven right about the things I write about.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol
• GT 2007-12-02: Men in uniform

Yesterday I wrote a long post about fragmentation in women’s lives, as magnified and, in some ways, healed through developing technologies. When I wanted to make an analogy concerning false assumptions that have been made about me based on some political and social justice work I’ve engaged in, I turned to the matter of sexual identity.

In retrospect, that section of the narrative would have fared better as a stand-alone post; in the post (where it was only intended as a reference for comparison) it gets a bit lost. And I realized earlier tonight it’s actually one of the clearer (and mercifully succinct) things I’ve written on the matter, addressing my irritation with people who:

assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

(This, in turn, had developed after articulating on Twitter last week, “It shouldn’t surprise me, but getting hit on via MySpace bc my profile says “bi” irritates the shit out of me. Do they not also see MARRIED?” - Which is one thing I appreciate about Twitter; through the articulation of what are, in themselves, mere fragments, one opens pathways to deeper considerations of the same material later.)

…And now, twenty-four hours later, I’m cleaning out the comment spam from the Askimet filter, and lo! There was the following item (relevant link removed)

As a member of LGBT, I always keep my eyes on the matter of gay and lesbian. “There is no difference between LBGT and straight people when it comes to true love. We know how to love and cherish a person.”It is what we all bisexual get after the discusssin at [STUPID SPAMMY SITE] . And all these words is what we would like to let others know for the bottom of our heart. We only hope don’t make it special for us LGBT. We do love others as you straight do.

Now I know that no one from the website that attempted to place the above spam on my blog didn’t actually read what I wrote (actually, the quality of their prose - and spelling - suggests that improved literacy could do much to improve their marketing prospects) - their processes, such as they are, are automated and rely on keywords in the text of the attacked site, but fuck all, y’all, this is exactly the kind of stupidity I was railing against in the first place. (I held my nose and briefly visited the site; it was, of course, not about the lofty ideas and community dialogue suggested in their scrambled spam-text; it’s a porn/dating site.)

Oh, but they did say it was from (oh wait, for - for?!) “the bottom of our heart.” Well I guess that makes it all just dandy, and I should allow their links to appear here out of dedication to “the matter of gay and lesbian.” “We all bisexual” “love others as you straight do.” Sheesh.

• Sad to learn some friends are going thru Marriage Bed Death. We’ve been married w/ kids for longer than any of ‘em & still fuck like bunnies #
• @acomputerpro Dude. I could twoosh about my navel lint, but I don’t. Desperate to retain that perch, are ya? Sorry, you’re an easy target… #
• @acomputerpro Okay, that had at least a modicum of Funny. I’d use my invented word here, but from my mobile, I can’t use special characters. #
• @mommystory Zounds! That was perfect. Hope it took some of the edge off your wholly appropriate rage. I’m angry on your behalf. Is that odd? #
• Mad props to @theberrygirl & @mommystory for rocking "rat bastard fuckwit" challenge. By comparison, @beanqueen’s haiku efforts totally suck #
• In belated reply to @theberrygirl’s query (http://xrl.us/bgeor), y’all can pudding-wrestle without me. I’ll stand by & narrate in 140 chars. #
• Child, afflicted with hiccups, burps (which hurts). I poke fun & she laughs - again mid-hiccup - & burps again (which hurts more). Poor kid. #
• Me to huz: "Dude, I gave up WOMEN for you. I’m not going to give up Twitter." (& I can give up Twooshing whenever I want, thankyouverymuch.) #
• @girlinblack Jesus. That’s really awful, I’m sorry. #
• @misc I do want to hope Clinton wasn’t behind this ridiculous effort. Any half-awake campaign staffer should have known this would backfire. #
• http://homegrownhawaii.com has the clear advantage over Classmates.com in being free & not sucking ass. Might actually go to Kapa’a reunion. #
• (Would be good if something similarly un-sucky existed for The Evergreen State College reunions. Though TESC experience WAS disillusioning.) #
• I doubt any old friends from Kauai are on Twitter, but have found some nice HNL strangers, & am enjoying the language & cadences I’ve missed #
• (Tweeted in event @hawaii, @sonecessary, or @waialuadakine notice I’ve followed and are wondering just who the hell is this Virginia woman.) #
• @sonecessary - No, only lived there 4 years (84-88) but at the time, it was the longest I’d ever lived anywhere; crazy nomadic upbringing #
• @sonecessary Have complex relationship with Kauai that won’t fit here… working on a blog post now. Partially inspired by Haunani-Kay Trask #
• Working on new blog post tentatively titled "The impossibility of this vision is paradoxically made more viable by its fragmentation." Ooof. #
• (Slightly clearer: It’s a shout-out to the mamas of Twitter, a testament to how we maintain and further develop connections despite it all.) #
• Of course, said post began percolating against my will; I was TRYING to write a post re: Kauai, once my home & missed, but with ambivalence. #
• @misc Yeah, that’s a bit surreal! #
• @QueenofSpain So you ARE going to Ohio! I’ve only been there for a prostitution conference & Ozzfest(!) Good luck-I’ll look fwd to yr tweets #
• @fncll I HIGHLY recommend Lore Sjöberg’s Alt Text (via Wired): http://www.wired.com/commentary/alttext. It’s hilarious, pithy, and succinct. #
• Finally going to bed - @ 4:44 AM. Can’t believe I finally finished the blog post re: Twitter, its asstd. merits, why it’s relevant to women. #
• I truly appreciate stories about Amtrak & terrorism being in the news the very day I’m planning my next train travel. Really, warms my heart #
• Hoping 8 y.o.’s drop-in after school care will have room for her today (she can only go when they aren’t at capacity). I’ve got stuff to do! #
• Someone on literary listserv I’ve been on for 6 years finally worked up the nerve to de-lurk and introduce himself; HE’s been there 7 years! #
• (Since this list is a lot like a large family, this is sort of like finding out I have a long-lost e-relative. Who is fascinating and sweet) #
• (So he knows our histories: who underwent cancer treatment, got married, had custody issues, published, returned to school, or changed jobs) #
• (And weirdly, from one brief intro, we know almost as much about him: PhD in Physics, "born in India to crazy commies," etc. It’s endearing) #
• WRIR (Richmond Indy Radio) is running an OLD news feed for Pacifica Headline News (unless the Potomac Primaries are being held again today!) #
• Twittermamas: My girl’s Algebra teacher moves between scolding kids for "not asking enough questions" & belittling them when they do. Ideas? #
• Thanks to @sarahgilbert and @GeekMommy for the ideas re: my daughter’s Algebra teacher; @MrsStranahan: if only I had the patience/fortitude! #
• @pratim - And we’re so glad you did! (Also FYI, two other Cafe Bluers on Twitter can be found at @fncll and @phaedral. Both wonderful guys.) #
• @blogdiva Because you’re awesome, that’s why. #
• Thx @pratim, @meontwitter 4 following & @divabat, @cyclothymia_ktk, @misc & @Amyloo 4 following back. I’ll try not to twoosh you to death #
• Emails w/ subject line: "You have no events scheduled today" make me sad. Google Calendar, why not come right out & say, "YOU HAVE NO LIFE!" #
• @misc Oh that’s terrible. Funny, but terrible! I did my part, FTR, & texted my one friend in Wisconsin 2 make sure she’d gotten to the polls #
• @Robguy All hail the magnificent Bean! No, seriously, I’d be up shit creek sans paddle w/out coffee. Aetna should be subsidizing my espresso #
• @Remiel Bwahahaha "vurbiew." You should Urban Dictionary that. No really, go. We need insane people like you to turn Language on its head… #
• @Remiel Just realized that last @ reply from me ended in dreaded ellipsis (per your earlier tweet: http://xrl.us/bgfv9); so sorry about that #
• Twitter peeps, please stop being clever, amusing, &/or relevant; I have stuff I was supposed to be doing. DH soon to return; MUST LOOK BUSY! #
• @sarahgilbert If you can’t find other option, I might be able to help. I live in Richmond (not too close, but not impossibly far) Good luck! #
• @acomputerpro CLUE: "Avoidance" & a "lack of any compelling motivation to engage" are not the same thing.Stop embarrassing yourself, please. #

From Jezebel (via FLP). Anecdotal, but they’re the same anecdotes I’ve heard from countless young women.

In a similar vein, after reading this post and thread at Feministing the penny dropped on what’s behind the “Yes Means Yes!” thing. Rape porn has become so ubiquitous that even normal regular everyday boys-next-door think that having sex with your girlfriend means raping her. These guys start whacking off to rape videos when they’re 11 and that’s what they think sex is, forcing it down her throat, calling her bitch, saying choke on it, just like in the porn flicks. Rape has become totally normalized.

Over on another board the college-age girls are commiserating with each other. All the guys they know talk about women’s pancake breasts and meat curtains and flappy lips. A neverending dissection. A coroner’s table. My boyfriend always just wanted me to act out whatever was in the video, he never even looked in my eyes and I have to stop reading.

Dear God in the Smoking Lounge, I’m so glad I’m old. I’m so glad my youth happened before porn ruined sex. I feel so sorry for the young women today, young women longing for love. My heart aches for them. They’ll never know, will they? Unless they hook up with a Samoan or an Inner Mongolian or maybe a Mosuo boy from Lake Lugu. They’ll never know how salty-sweet lovemaking can be. The tenderness of it, the radical intimacy, the surprise. The trust. A two-souled secret journey.

Yesterday I came across a comment by Sam Genderberg that was so arresting I asked her if I could quote it here. She was referring to this video, which (WARNING) is very disturbing:

Sam’s comment (just the first part):

Making the blog rounds this week is a video of a man verbally and physically abusing his wife. Feminists are unanimous in their opposition to the man saying to the woman before he physically assaults her:

“Look at me bitch”
“You little slut”
“You enjoy getting your ass whooped, yes you do”
“Stupid-ass heifer”

I watched the video and thought how different the feminist reaction would be if he was raping her while saying all that and worse stuff unacceptable for primetime tv. Then it would be pornography.

Feminists would no longer be unanimous that scenes of him saying all those hateful things to a woman while doing specifically sexual violence to her on film were abuse. Some would defend it as sexual freedom. Some would praise it as transgressive BDSM erotica and therefore pro-woman.

No feminist has expressed they believe it is that woman’s free choice to accept the non-sexual violence and verbal abuse he is throwing at her, so why do so many insist prostituted women in pornography make the choice to be physically assaulted and verbally harassed with:

“Look at me bitch”
“You little slut”
“You enjoy getting your ass whooped, yes you do”
“Stupid-ass heifer”

Most women in pornography are as cowed into submission as this woman was but unfortunately when men call them bitches, sluts and stupid-ass heifers then sexually abuse them on film it’s defended as the woman’s right to allow herself to be called such hateful terms, to accept men slapping her, to make the choice to be choked.

Some of you will read that and immediately say, oh but pornography is a willing performance, this video is a real-life record of a woman who wanted out, mis-matched fruit, etc. Never mind that for now.

Some others of you will read that and immediately say, oh but a lot of pro-porn feminists don’t approve of the really bad stuff, and they don’t approve of women being abused in the porn industry, red herrings circling strawmen, etc. Never mind that for now.

I want you to put those things aside for a moment so I can tell you why Sam’s comment affected me so powerfully.

What Sam’s comment captures for me is the cognitive dissonance I’ve been dealing with ever since I started educating myself about modern pornography. Until that time, my sole exposure to hetero porn was some Playboys and Penthouses from the 70s, and a few minutes of a strange little video called Crocodile Blondee that my gay roommates rented one night as a joke back in the 80s. I assumed that all porn movies were like the scene in Crocodile, with stilted actors engaging in basic coition and trying to look as if they were fond of each other.

Perhaps you can imagine how stunned I was to discover what modern pornography is like. And my reaction to it was, and is, pretty much the reaction the average porn consumer would probably have to a video of someone abusing a child or a dog. Not, I note, abusing a woman, because obviously people who watch modern porn are quite used to that. So I have to say “child” or “dog” to convey the sense of horror I feel, since only a porn-naive person like me could possibly still be horrified by images of women being abused.

Modern porn is shocking to me, in a way it probably cannot be to those of you who have grown up with it, who have been exposed to it throughout your lives — or throughout pornography’s evolution from Crocodile Blondee to BangBros. I’m reminded of boiling frogs.

When I read Sam’s comment, in my mind I substituted “people” for feminists. I was thinking of our entire culture, which has fetishized abuse in a way that boggles my mind. Any cruelty is acceptable now as long as sex is involved; the male orgasm legitimizes everything.

How can people look at videos of women being abused and insulted and humiliated and not see something wrong? When did this become acceptable? When did this become “sexy”? Did the water change from cold to hot so slowly that you just couldn’t see what was happening?

Do you still not see what’s happening?

---

I want to add one thing — not about pornography but about domestic violence. People always say, “why didn’t she just leave?” This comment at Feministe is the most eloquent answer I’ve ever seen.

Note to my readers: If, after reading this, you would like to support me in getting to the upcoming Prostitution, Sex Work, and the Commercial Sex Industry conference, please avail yourself of the “donate” button. More information on why I am seeking your support can be found here. Thanks.

__

Recently at Amber Rhea’s blog, I felt compelled to comment on what seemed to me a bizarre mischaracterization of anti-prostitution feminists. Citing a heartbreaking and enraging news item, Pakistan ‘prostitutes’ beheaded, she had provided this notation:

Militants did this to (and I quote) “end obscenity.” Mmm-hmm. Now see the problem with that kind of shit? Oh but I thought Patriarchy totally loved sex workers. Riiiiiight.

My response, in part:

I’m confounded that you would take the interpretation that anti-prostitution feminists have some notion that “Patriarchy totally loves sex workers.” All the anti-prostitution feminists I know are pretty blisteringly aware that women in the sex trade are utterly despised by patriarchy - that indeed, much of the sex trade is centered around/caters to that specifically patriarchal hatred...

Yes, there are indeed some who call themselves feminists and/or radical feminists who harbor notions that what women who identify as sex workers are doing is some intentional act of collusion with patriarchy, with said collusion somehow being engineered to specifically harm other women (e.g., those not impacted by and/or participating in the sex trade). When I hear that, I call bullshit really loudly. That’s utterly antithetical to feminism, and it’s offensive. (More about the “whorebaiting” problem among some self-described radical feminists some other time.)

Well, I guess today is ‘that other time.’

Recently, at Jill Brenneman’s blog, I read an interesting comment by Gregor, who describes himself as a “male second wave pro -radical feminist.” Here, he is quoting Renegade Evolution (who in turn, had been, from what I gather, extolling the virtues of gonzo porn):

“The human animal is not all happiness and shine, there is dark and savage there…thats what I see in it.” Yeah and you see it again and again and again, and you make sure others see it again and again and again too..

I replied thusly:

This is an unfortunate example of what I call “whorebaiting.” It’s wrong, and it’s anti-feminist. I understand and am utterly sympathetic to your antipathy toward the sex industry on the whole, but this is not helpful. There are more effective (and ethical) ways to get your points across, comrade.

He commented back:

I think my statement is *not* antifeminist. I don’t know where you get that from. I will forward it to 2 senior feminist women for verification. I am certain, but as a male pro-feminist I will do this to make sure.

(AHEM.)

Insert pregnant pause here, as I consider which “senior feminist women” to whom my criticisms may have been forwarded. Maybe Melissa Farley, who’s been pretty cool toward me ever since I told her about the grossly unethical circumstances in which Evelina Giobbe’s “research” on pimps was actually conducted*, questioning the ethics of her relying on that data**?

(NOW BACK TO JILL BRENNEMAN’S BLOG)

Enter now into this discourse Gretchen:

Why is Gregor’s statement “whorebaiting”? Ren is making a decision to film, watch and be paid to do dark and savage sexual acts that an audience consumes and debately*** the films may reinforce misogyny. Gregor has a right to point that out to her and frankly should.

I’m unclear though from your post if you are sympathetic to the porn industry or not?

To which, with much exasperation, I replied back:

You obviously don’t know me, and neither does Gregor, whom I called ‘comrade’ without any sense of irony.

If I have to explain to you why his comment was ‘whorebaiting,’ then, damn. It’s quite possible there would be no getting through to you. The cognitive dissonance between recognizing the harm that the sex industry, largely controlled by men, perpetuates against women and then choosing, more often than not (it seems to me, from what I’ve read here thus far), women in the sex industry as targets for your ridicule is pretty confounding.

Of course, no woman’s experience in the sex trade is going to be ‘equivalent’ to anyone else’s. I’ve written a great deal about the various stratifications among women in the sex trade, which are inexorably intertwined with systems of oppression. In terms of the women I’ve known in the industry, Ren is hardly representative. A comment from ’sojourner’ on this old thread at Feministing speaks my mind here: “Yes, there are women out there who choose sex work… But I also think that trafficked women, women beaten by their pimps or raped by their customers, heroin addicts, and women lying dead in ditches don’t get to write about their experiences on blogs.”

Nonetheless, as a survivor (and I should not fucking have to declare that), I can’t abide by the phenomenon of people who haven’t been in the sex trade (can I safely assume that? if not, tell me) directing their patriarchy-hating vitriol (of which I also have a great deal, btw) at those of us who have been there.

And calling out Ren’s comment as anti-feminist would be sort of like calling out the sky as blue. I expect better from the anti-prostitution and anti-pornography activists with whom I am tactically, personally, and politically allied.

So, are we clear on the concept of “whorebaiting” now?

If my allies in the anti-prostitution and anti-pornography movement would like to stop being slandered by the ’sex pozzes’ (or whatever we’re calling them these days), it would be damn helpful if they’d stop giving them such good ammunition****.

__

* At the time, Giobbe had a sixteen year old foster daughter, known to me a few years later as “Lee,” who had come into contact with her as a client of WHISPER (for Women Hurt In Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt, the erstwhile Minnesota nonprofit), when she was struggling to get away from her convicted murderer pimp. Giobbe essentially used Lee for PR purposes, showing off her charge at meetings of radical feminists who naturally cooed over what an awesome rescuer she was, while at home Giobbe was abusing her physically, sexually, and emotionally. (The fact that she sent Lee on her drug runs is barely the tip of that iceberg.) When she was doing her research for the “WHISPER Oral History Project,” she interviewed a number of pimps, and insisted on conducting at least some of those interviews in the home, while specifically introducing the pimps to Lee (against her stated wishes) and bragging about how she’d “gotten” her. This was part of a pattern Giobbe had of regularly threatening Lee that she could be turned back out on the streets at any time, which, of course, she ultimately did, on the night before Lee had final exams at the high school she’d finally been able to enroll in (about which Giobbe had said, “Education is a privilege - not a right“), which naturally resulted in her ending up back in prostitution. Giobbe, of course, would later lie to her colleagues about this, claiming that Lee had run away - “what else can you expect from these girls”?

** Note that I have no argument with the validity of Giobbe’s data. I just wish to God it could have been collected in a way that was not to the exhaustively demonstrated harm of one particularly endangered prostituted teenager. Every single member of WHISPER’s (long since defunct) board knows what Giobbe did, because I personally drafted the 33-page complaint on behalf of Lee and myself and distributed copies to each of them. Andrea Dworkin got a copy, too.

***This is obviously a misspelling (there were others in both her and Gregor’s comments, which I’ve corrected in this text), but I’m unclear on what she actually meant to convey, so I’m leaving it as is.

****I will not be particularly surprised if I am accused of being the one supplying such “ammunition.” It’s our movement’s dirty laundry, people: the kind that has caused many anti-prostitution survivors to essentially ‘defect’ from the cause, and you know you don’t want that - where else will you get your crunchy anecdotes for your grant applications and books? So, time to deal with it.

Now here’s a coincidence. It so happens that I’ve been kicking around the idea of taking on advertising again to cover the site costs, and just this morning I was complaining to the other spirits here in the Smoking Lounge about the problems with Google Adsense.

Me: The problem with Adsense is that it goes off keywords
Spirit of Adsense: High Paying Keywords. Get Millions of High Paying Adsense Keywords & Develop Adsense Pages.
Me: but it doesn’t do any other screening
Spirit of Adsense: Buy imported Oriental screens. Shoji Screens Starting at $69.00.
Me: so if you have a feminist blog with the word “feminism” in your posts or on your header
Spirit of Adsense: The Book Feminists Don’t Want You To Read. Women Who Make the World Worse, by Kate O’Beirne. Now at 34% off. $16.47 in hardcover.
Me: you get ads for anti-feminist things.
Spirit of Adsense: Discover the Truth about God’s Plan for Men and Women. Biblical Headship and Christian Submission.
Me: For example, you could write a post about those fake Crisis Pregnancy Centers
Spirit of Adsense: Pregnant? Scared? Alone?
Me: and lo and behold if Adsense doesn’t serve up an ad from a goddamn Crisis Pregnancy Center right there in your fucking sidebar!
Spirit of Adsense: Hot Sidebar Fucking Online. Watch Free XXX Videos.

It’s really annoying. This blog averages about 150,000 page views a month, a minuscule figure compared to blogs like Feministing, which I understand is actually visible from space. Still, it’s ten times the circulation of my local Auto Trader. I should at least be able to sell ad space for a 2000 TOYOTA CAMRY 4 Dr LE V6 Sedan, at, ac, pw, pdl, tilt, cc, CD, loaded, Exc Cond, MUST SEE.

But back to Victoria’s post. The porn-ad thing made her think of this guy, a conceptual artist who has created pollination porn for plants. Here’s the description from Reuters:

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats… filmed a six-minute long video of plants getting pollinated, then edited his uncensored footage into a gritty black-and-white porn video. The result was what he claims to be the world’s first plant porn movie, “Cinema Botanica.”

“It is very boring but that is part of the essence of pornography, that it is very repetitive,” he said.

During September his film will be projected onto an audience of 60 house plants lined in rows at the 1078 Gallery, an alternative arts space in Chico, California - a venue Keats has dubbed “the world’s first porn theater for house plants.”

It’s a sublime demonstration, isn’t it? A row of house plants lined up in front of a screen where grainy pollination footage is being projected. When I read that I thought this Jonathan Keats person was a good guy, the kind of artist who is able to deconstruct our cultural narratives and expose the absurdities.* I thought he was a feminist.

I was wrong.

Keats says he chose pornography because “it is so innately appealing.” What? Innate? And appealing to whom? He cheerfully cites early nickelodeons and refers to “humans,” as if pornography were as natural and innocuous as breathing, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea that pornography is a cultural artifact of our misogynistic society. Is it possible he’s deliberately playing the fool? That was my first guess, given his record as a performance artist.**

But it seems he really is a fool when it comes to everything connected to gender and sexuality. I dug around and discovered that not only is Keats a fool, he’s also an anti-feminist and a historical illiterate (a not unusual combination). In a book review at Salon — a serious book review, written apparently of his own free will and not under duress or in a state of extreme intoxication — he said, “What was once the argument of the gentleman misogynist is now the line taken by the academic feminist: The sexual body is a dangerous thing, best shrouded from sight.” He referred to “hetero-patriarchal dominance” as a self-evidently absurd phrase, and went on to claim that “the academic feminist orthodoxy [wants] to keep the feminine body hidden from view, and female sexuality under wraps.” And finally, “the corset has been an instrument of liberation.”

I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Performance art! Gotta be! Clearly he’s just committed to his form.” Because really, who could be that stupid? But there’s more where that came from, since Keats regularly stinks up various online venues with his puerile ruminations. In one column he argued breathlessly that American Psycho was a work of “genius.” His own first novel was so sexist that even the profoundly non-feminist Publisher’s Weekly felt compelled to comment.

It’s a shame, because if Keats weren’t a pornhound (which I’m betting five hundred gazillion dollars he is), he might be able to think about sexuality with the same transgressive humor he brings to religion. Instead he’s in thrall to the age, soaking in the effluvium of an obscene culture, unable to recognize that his frame of reference is, indeed, a frame and not Eternal Truth.

Of course it’s possible that everything he writes about sex and gender is a knowing joke; that his entire output, including his own novel, is intended as ironic commentary. But if so, his stance is so indistinguishable from the dominant cultural narrative that whatever irony he may have intended has vanished. With no space between subject and object, not even the tiniest crack, there is no commentary. The joke’s on him.

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*Remember the Kilgore Trout story about the planet where pornography consists of movies of people eating?

**From the SF Weekly story about Keats’ research into the genetic taxonomy of God, which included an experiment to breed God in a petri dish:

Keats believes that much of the debate about his approach would be unnecessary if field scientists (other than Keats, who doesn’t “like to go camping”) were to collect additional field notes on God. “At least footprints, so to speak, or droppings, so to speak,” he says. “I mean, I don’t want to be vulgar, but the more we can get a concrete picture of God, the better this research will be.”

I’ve been saying the same thing for years.

After reading and participating in a contentious discussion at Feministing about ethical issues concerning the funding of feminist blogs, I’m taking action to get my piece of the “controversial funding” pie*. So, I’m going to post some porn**.

Well, plant porn, that is.

Via Reuters:

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats… filmed a six-minute long video of plants getting pollinated then edited his uncensored footage into a gritty black-and-white porn video. The result was what he claims to be the world’s first plant porn movie, “Cinema Botanica.”

“It is very boring but that is part of the essence of pornography, that it is very repetitive,” he said.

During September his film will be projected onto an audience of 60 house plants lined in rows at the 1078 Gallery, an alternative arts space in Chico, California - a venue Keats has dubbed “the world’s first porn theater for house plants.”

No, really, this dude is serious. Or, as serious as someone who “copyrighted his mind and recently… exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork” and who is “best known for trying to genetically engineer God in a petri dish in collaboration with scientists at the University of California” can be assumed to be.

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* A follow-up comment, relevant to Elaine Vigneault’s recent proposal (to which I also responded), remains stuck in moderation. Things are getting hot over there. If it fails to post, I’ll make it available here.

**Actually, I probably won’t get any funding out of this.

I’ve discussed anal sex a number of times with guys my age (and I’m referring to lovers, not office mates), guys who grew up when I did, before the culture became pornified. For the men in my life, pornography was the Playboys they whacked off to as teenagers, which they outgrew when they began their adult lives and started having actual adult sexual relationships with other human beings. Unlike young men today, they did not spend 90% of their waking lives whacking off to internet XXXtreme porn from age 12 on.

At any rate, the anal sex conversation is always the same, and we always say the same things to each other: Why do men and women do that? Why would a man want to do that? (This is the guy wondering aloud to me.) It’s understandable for gay men, they don’t have anywhere else to put it, but geez, women have those nice warm soft vaginas…

I have never had a lover — and remember, my men are not of the porn-fed variety — who wanted anal sex. Instead they wrinkle their noses and go, “ew, that place is for pooping…”

But it’s a new world. Now every young American male is consumed with the yearning to fuck some woman up the butt, and today Twisty explains why in Anal is the new ‘third base’. Of course I knew this already, but the Twist has such a way with words.

First she quotes from an article in Details, “the essential men’s magazine for looking good and living well”:

“Once a guy has anal sex, he’s put on a pedestal by his peers,” [Philip] says. He claims he hasn’t had much trouble getting women to agree to it. “I only had to persuade two girls. [I asked] ‘Can I put it in your butt?’ At first they were like, ‘No, it will hurt.’ Then time after time of having sex with them they finally said okay. It hurt them the first time, but after that they always said they enjoyed it—if not a little, then a lot.”

And this:

“For most of my friends, it’s sort of a domination thing,” says John (not his real name), 30, a writer in New York. “[It’s] basically getting someone in a position where they’re most vulnerable. My friends enjoy that and they tell their friends they did it. But it’s not like girls are ready for it—it’s something they do when they’re really drunk.”

Or in Twisty’s words (with my emphasis):

It’s an escalation of porn culture. Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality — getting jizz in your wig is a big compliment! — too many women have been giving up the vagina too easily, and even blow jobs are hackneyed now that housewives are writing mundane marriage manuals on the subject. “Regular” het sex just isn’t brutal or insulting enough anymore. There’s no sport in it, no swaggering triumph, nothing to give men “a good story to tell over beers.”

I have no idea how many of the new breed of hetero butt pirates are actually motivated by a conscious desire to degrade women — thank god I’m not dating any of these clowns so I’m spared intimate knowledge of their fuckedupedness — but I’m quite sure that all of them are motivated by the desire to do whatever they’ve been whacking off to on the internet since they were 12. Monkey see, monkey do. Doo. And apparently anal sex is such a mainstay of the modern porn industry that you probably have to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Burma and get on a six-month waiting list for a video that doesn’t have anal.

Speaking of the escalation of porn culture, Zuzu’s new blog is up and one of her first posts is on Captivity, a mainstream Hollywood torture-porn flick. I’m sorry, I just had a brief out-of-body experience there after typing the words mainstream Hollywood torture-porn flick. I don’t know what happened, my soul just flew up to the ceiling and started batting frantically at the light fixture like a moth. Okay, I’m back now. Anyway, it is certainly… interesting, yes, I think I’ll stick with that, interesting, that torture porn is now acceptable enough that people make Hollywood movies out of it. I imagine within a few years there will be a torture-porn award category at the Oscars.

Sometimes I’m so glad I’m old.

I generally resist the enormous temptation to write about film in this blog, but I saw a film last night that I must mention because of its subject matter. The Notorious Bettie Page is a film I wanted to see when it came out last year, but I did not have the opportunity. It was on television last night, and I was enthralled by it. Many of us grew up hearing about the scandalous Page, though we