[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in
yesmeansyes' InsaneJournal:
| Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013 | |
| 9:04 pm | Paglia: If You Can’t Stand Her, Come Sit By Me.* First, h/t Clarisse Thorn, who brought this to my attention. Camille Paglia, the ur-concern troll of academic feminism, is apparently still writing for publication. I suppose I had assumed as much, since concern trolls of a certain kind are never really out of a job. What she purports to do here is review three books. That’s not fair. She actually reviews three books. Then she departs from reviewing and begins pontificating, ending in the sort of embarrassing faceplant that Pee Wee Herman had the comic timing to pull off with a snarky “I meant to do that.” The books she reviews are: Dr. Staci Newmahr’s Playing On The Edge; Dr. Margot D. Weiss’s Techniques of Pleasure; and Dr. Danielle Lindemann’s Dominatrix. I’m familiar with some of this material. I read Newmahr’s book and I’ve had a few conversations with the author (I could be called biased; while we’re not buddies, I’m a supporter of her work and we have friends in common.) Weiss’s book is an adaptation of her dissertation; I have not read the book version but I tracked down the dissertation online after reading something else she wrote for academic publication. I relied heavily on both of their ethnographic accounts in writing my Domism post, one of the more linked and discussed things I’ve written specific to kinky communities. Lindemann’s book differs from the other two, as Weiss and Newmahr do participant ethnographies, while Lindemann’s observation of prodommes is as a more detached observer. I have not read it, though I might at some point. What does Paglia think? First, she thinks that all three books try to hard too fit a certain theoretical mold to the observations, and it takes some of the life out of the writing. Second, she thinks everything to come out of Foucault, especially Butler, is awful. Third, she thinks that She Knows Better, in fact, she knows what It’s All About. It’s tempting to dismiss everything Paglia says because she’s such a shit sandwich as a person and a scholar, with a side salad of sour grapes and green envy dressing. But she’s quite bright. I think it’s her curse to be able to see bullshit clearly because it’s all she is capable of. Her critiques, that these books try to cram their observations into an ideological framework necessary to get academic credit but that doesn’t either fit well or do justice to the descriptive integrity the subjects deserve, is not wrong — while I think that’s less true of Newmahr, there are places where the attempt to fit sadomasochism into an academic model of serious leisure seemed … constraining? Certainly only part of the story. With Weiss, I felt this was even more a good criticism. To be fair to Weiss, I read it in dissertation form, where grounding the observations in the theory can be expected to take precedence, and the book version might be a bit different. I can’t speak to Lindemann’s. Of course Paglia hates Butler and Foucault and post-structuralist thinking blah blah they wouldn’t let her sit at their lunch table. She acknowledges herself that she’s been grinding that axe so long she’s running out of metal.
Emphasis mine. Those are her opening lines. So, she’s telling us right away that she does not have a grasp of the basic terminology. She goes on to make far more interesting incorrect assertions. For example, she describes what she wrote in Sexual Personae, her first book:
Again, emphasis mine. This contains an actual idea. If one were to immerse one’s self among actual BDSMers, and observe or participate in their actual play, and make cross-cultural comparisons and come to this conclusion — well, I might or might not agree with it, but it certainly would be an interesting idea. How does Paglia come to this conclusion? Not, she insists, by starting with a bunch of deliberately obscure shit written by frogs like Lacan and Derrida, which is her persistent critique of academic feminism and her problem with the three books she reviews. She says:
So where did she play, and with whom? (I mean, details, people! I know some of these folks. Tell me enough that I can put a face to the pseudonyms by shaking the gossip tree!) Seriously, folks, communities and the kinksters in them differ, certain venues and organizations have a culture and reputation of their own, and lots of us — a large majority — do what we do only in private. Are her informants bedroom players or the public club scenesters? Older and hetish or younger and queerish? Older and queerish? East Coast or West Coast? Old guard influenced or not? “I speak simply as a student of sexuality: I have had no direct contact of any kind with sadomasochism”. Come again, Camille? Am I to understand that everything you’ve concluded about us … no, let me personalize it. Everything you’ve concluded about ME and how I practice MY sexuality and what it means to ME, you’ve concluded without actually talking to any of us, or watching us do what it is that we do? Can I possibly have that right? Yes, that’s what she says. And she goes on for five paragraphs — interesting paragraphs — about cultural representations of BDSM from the 1700s to the recent past. Let me use an analogy here. I loved the Gary Oldman version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (some LeCarre fans did not). I like spy fiction as a genre well enough. I also have more than a passing familiarity with the journalistic and historical writing on the subject. Now, one can look at some of the fiction and say, “that’s pretty accurate.” The Good Shepherd is almost a biography of James Jesus Angleton, and from what I know about Angleton (a good working familiarity), gets the sense of it. Some of the fiction is accurate in many respects (LeCarre), some of the fiction is wildly fanciful (the Bond subgenre), but none of it is a substitute for the real thing. If you want to learn about spying in the Cold War, you read Trento’s book CIA: A Secret History, from Angleton’s actual papers, and Legacy of Ashes, which is all from internal histories, and maybe Peter Wright’s controversial MI-5 memoir Spycatcher. Because they are not fiction. Because they report the actual things done by the actual spies. But these books are not perfect! They are biased (especially Wright, who accuses a former head of MI-5 of working for the Soviets). They are controversial. They are only pieces of the puzzle and can’t hope to represent the whole of the intelligence community through the whole of the period! And that”s life. Nonfiction is imperfect. But it’s nonfiction. Fiction is fiction. Art is an interesting mirror through with to view the human condition. The possibilities for mining it are endless. But it can only tell us so much. And the farther the artist from the subject, the more it tells us about the artist and the viewer and the human condition; and the less about the subject. In the art and literature of BDSM, our cultural footprint, the problem of representation is huge! These people whose work symbolizes us, supposedly, are they even a member of the group they purport to represent? To be fair, some are. Love them or hate them, Madonna and Mapplethorpe were clear that their representations were internal. But others like Anne Rice and E.L. James present us without saying that they are presenting themselves (or possibly while saying they are not and lying like rugs). When we look past the individual artist to the more directly commercial work, like, say, advertising, the vision presented is meant to serve a particular goal, which skews the presentation hopelessly. So how does a world of symbols allow someone to understand my sexuality without fitting me into an a priori construct? It doesn’t. It just doesn’t. In that sense, Paglia has a lot in common with Evolutionary Psychology. She postulates an underlying truth, that we don’t have access to, but which she asserts she can access through “rigorous” analysis of the phenomena that it supposedly gives rise to. She ends by asserting (though she’s an atheist herself) the importance of the religous or spiritual quest. Well, the project of divining the meaning of a sexual practice solely from how it is presented, often by people who don’t engage in it, that sounds like a religious quest to me. It’s an act of misplaced faith. The substance of Paglia’s analysis is that what we do … let me personalize it again, for added dudgeon: that what I do is the reassertion of some older tribal norm. If so, then what one would expect is that the ways it expressed itself would be widely varied, but the things we look for in it would be fairly uniform. Instead, my observation is that the opposite is true. We are not a monolith.*** We have people bringing a panoply of wants and needs to the table, trying to extract different things from BDSM, and if anything, the thing that is contrained is the superficial aspect: that we have social norms within a subculture about how people look a certain way and how they symbolize these practices, a common universe of imagery that brings us together when we are in fact very diverse in how we structure our relationships, which kinds of the whole universe of BDSM practices appeal to us and move us, and what we seek to get out of it. Now, there’s a lot of theorizing to be done about why that is, but Paglia can’t do it because she’s just as attached to smooshing the observations into a model (Biological! But also, religious! And pre-industrial and tribal! Like alternative spiritual beliefs for people who are ostensibly materialist in metaphysics!) as the people she decries. Look, both “blah blah late capitalist form of leisure consumerism purchasing quasi marginal edgy hobby” and “spiritual experience vision quest search for meaning woo” is a valid observation of some of us, sometimes. Neither is THE explanation, and people who think it is, have missed a lot. I’m in part indebted to the estimable sex work writer Calico Lane for helping me fill out my thinking on this in a facebook thread. *Steel Magnolia reference. I am not ashamed of that. **I am borrowing this phrase from both disability and sex work activists. While I don’t think it’s a complete analysis and it’s hard to accept it as a rule, it is IMO a powerful lens through which to review outside critique. ***Again, I’m indebted to sex worker activists for the phrase. Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: BDSM, Theory   |
| Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 | |
| 3:46 pm | On Mr. Fox’s Application For A Security Position At The Poultry Facility So a US Army NCO in charge of a sexual assault prevention program has been suspended and is being investigated for sexually abusive conduct. No name has been released, but the conduct is being investigated as a criminal matter, and involves “pandering” and abuse of a subordinate. This comes just days after the Air Force officer in charge of the entire branch’s sexual assault prevention program, Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, was arrested for sexually assaulting a woman in a parking lot. There are several ways to read this. One, of course, is that since the US armed forces have such pervasive problems with rape, rape reporting and rape prosecution, it isn’t particularly noteworthy. If you assume that the armed forces are basically a pack of rapists and rape-apologists, then it even a completely random selection of people to staff anti-rape positions would end up with a lot of rapists and rape apologists. Weighing against that is that psychologist Stephanie McWhorter, studying US Navy entrants in 2009, found rates of undetected rapists and repeat rapists not too different from a similar study of a civilian population. (As an aside, I hope someone on Senator Gillibrand’s staff has a well-thumbed copy of this. It would seem to me to be an indispensable piece of information in dealing with sexual assault in the armed forces.) Another way to read this is that the people in sexual assault prevention positions get there because many commanders are rape apologists and they want to put people who share their attitudes in positions to control antirape work within the armed forces. That is supported somewhat by the history of commanders reversing jury convictions for sexual assault (see the end of the first linked article, which recounts in brief the stories both about Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin in Aviano, Italy, and Lt. Gen. Susan Helms, whose appointment to Space Command is being held up by Sen. McCaskill for just this reason.) There’s a third way to read this, and perhaps I’m being uncharacteristically charitable to the brass by saying it’s plausible, but it’s a real problem. Anyone who has read a spy novel knows that the safest place for a mole is to be tasked with finding the mole. This isn’t just in fiction. Remember Robert Hanssen? In the 1980s, he gave the KGB the names of three of its agents that the FBI had flipped; two were executed. He was then tasked with figuring out where the leak came from; he was supposed to find himself. His spy career lasted 22 years. To bring this from the realm of spy versus spy back to sexual assault, one thing that those of us who write about and work on sexual assault issues in kinky communities discuss is that some of the predators seek to clothe themselves in as much “social proof” as possible. Some of this is just the prosaic stuff of being a joiner and a presenter and having lots of friends. As M. Lunas at Disrupting Dinner Parties recently wrote, looking at data from one anonymous database of allegations of consent violations among Fetlife accountholders (the tool I wrote about here, all caveats apply), that paid supporters appeared to be significantly overrepresented among those with complaints against them. This is itself evidence that can mean a lot of things; but it is a piece of the overall puzzle. I’ve talked at some length about scene reputation and social proof and the predators’ use of it in the There’s A War On series, particularly Part 3. But more than just general social proof, the folks who have a pattern and practice of various kinds of predatory conduct might specifically seek to portray themselves as the biggest opponents of the predators. We’ve seen that before. See also the long cautionary tale epitomized by this person. It’s a grim and mistrustful thing to say, but when someone says, “I really want to guard the henhouse,” it is necessary to evaluate whether they’re the fox. To the extent that’s what is at work, I can’t particularly fault the armed forces, because it’s a social reality that catches us unaware in so many aspects of human life. Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: rape, sexual assault   |
| Tuesday, May 14th, 2013 | |
| 10:32 pm | The Scarlet D: The Accusation of Deviance There’s a lot to say about this. Interviewer Chris Cuomo basically says he’s about to be a creep, and then does it anyway, knowing it’s creepy. This isn’t just because he’s a nasty guy. If it were, I probably wouldn’t write a post about it. It’s a larger social phenomenon. Actually, like so many things, it’s several, and they intersect. The Scarlet A If we’re looking for stories about women whose sexual behavior violated social strictures and who paid a terrible price for it, we could probably go back forever. Certainly, there’s no shortage of cultural tentpoles. Think about the “great books” of the 19th century — Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter. (Hawthorne particularly pushed back, making Prynne essentially a paragon, but that’s a longer conversation …) Since these are fictional, the label is always at least factually accurate. In reality, people tend to have incomplete and misleading information about each other’s sexual behavior. As such, we don’t really sanction violation of sexual norms. There’s sort of two ways a culture can go when it has sanctions for a thing that it has only an indirect ability to observe. One is to try to find a way to investigate, estimate, screen – to figure it out. When working as they should, which never seems to be the case for whole sections of their populations, that’s what criminal justice systems are supposed to do. The other thing, though, is to turn the causation around: to decide when to apply the label, and then simply presume that the underlying facts are true. Like an old Stalinist show-trial, the accusations are not based on fact, the tail wags the dog, the function of the accusation is social instruction and reaffirmation of a community condemnation. (I’m cribbing Tony Judt’s Postwar here, which I recommend.) There are a few books out there that examine the social construct of slut as it exists in US adolescent life. Among the better known are Leora Tenenbaum’s Slut! Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation, and Emily White’s Fast Girls. I have read reviews and discussions of a lot of this stuff, though both of those books are still on my to-read list. This review of Fast Girls gives a sense of the point I need it for here. As I understand it, the anthropological and sociological work that has been done, though mostly qualitative, shows that the label “slut” isn’t really related to actual sexual behavior, i.e. it isn’t applied to the most sexually active girl or the one with the most partners, but rather is based on a lot of other things: came into a school system late and therefore lacked an existing base of support, physically matured early, spoke up often, refused to recognize the primacy of a popular clique, etc. So basically, it’s what gender theorist Judith Butler and others would call an “abject identity.” I’ve written about sluthood as an abject identity , along with the male adolescent abject identity “fag”, before:
(Bold italics above are new emphasis for this post.) Since “slut” is an abject identity, it is immune from factual refutation. It is not meant to label actual behavior. It is meant to make an example, pour encourager les autres. Some of this theory is dense, and I’m neither really a scholar of Foucault nor Butler. However, Butler, consciously applying Foucault, talks in Gender Trouble about the “abject” as a process by which a whole is divided, tenuously so and in need of constant policing; that by a process of first “expulsion” and then “repulsion,” some are made the “other.” This idea is typically called the “constitutive other” – that the identity of what is inside is constituted by what isn’t, by the “other.” What Butler means by an “abject” identity is one that is part of the “constitutive other,” not just outside the mainstream but rather a failed identity, one the avoidance of which is definitional to the hegemonic norm. See generally Gender Trouble at pp. 77-78, 133-34. In reading Pascoe’s take on this and in thinking about how these identities work in talking about abject identities and applying them, I keep coming back to this idea of abject identity as threatening specter; that its boundaries are not inherently stable, but are just a bunch of social conventions that have stability only through constant policing that involves pinning labels to people to send a terrifying message. That’s how I think we should understand the allegation, apparently supported thinly or not at all, that Amanda Knox was in some sense promiscuous or slutty: not even as untrue (in the sense that mathematicians will sometimes call something “so bad it’s not even wrong”), but as having no bearing on the underlying facts, an allegation leveled at a woman because there is a desire to take her down for some reason, and having no connection to actual sexual behavior. The imagined construct of the sexual promiscuity is applied because of the label, by the label, rather than the label applying to the behavior. D is for Deviant There’s another aspect of this, and it’s easiest viewed through the lens of “abject identity.” That’s the construct of the “sexual deviant.” Deviance itself is a perfectly useful term. In math and engineering it has technical meaning and generally describes measures of distribution. In sociology the meaning is inherently more political, but it’s a broad concept and not an epithet. “Sexual deviance” however, doesn’t really exist as a means to describe the distribution of human sexual behavior, more and less common. It exists to proscribe and to discipline. Let’s start with this: sexual normality and sexual deviancy are not assertions about what people do. They are political claims about what people “should” do. Homosexuality was characterized as a mental illness in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual until 1973, at which point the governing body that issues it, the American Psychiatric Association, decided they were wrong about that, but hung onto an escape clause, “ego-dystonic homosexuality,” which meant it was still a mental illness if you were not happy about it. Let’s contrast this with diagnoses in physical illness. “Normal” in the physical body isn’t completely objective and apolitical either as anyone who deals with disability or trans or aging issues will usually concede. But there isn’t this kind of blank slate. We knew in the 1940s that a lot of people had same sex partners, but people — learned professionals! — continued to be guided by their preferences rather than the facts on the ground in determining what was “normal” for decades, until after Stonewall when this became untenable within the political environment of the profession. Physical normality is not completely, but is much more, moored to objectively determinable physical standards. Whether someone has an infection is a hypothesis testable by, for example, temperature and white blood cell count. In turn, while there may be some variation in “normal”, these baselines are real baselines, and not simply “what we think they should be.” Doctors are pretty unlikely to just agree that people with Type AB blood don’t exist because it becomes politically desirable to hold that view. So “normal” is what the people with the power to define “normal” say it is. This boundary is maintained only by constant policing. In the clip, Chris Cuomo accuses Amanda Knox of being a “sexual deviant.” He doesn’t say he’s accusing her. But she says she’s not, and he says, basically, that it must come from somewhere. And she clarifies that it doesn’t come from witnesses or evidence in the record, just the prosecution’s unsupported theory. And he keeps asking if she really is a sexual deviant who just can’t admit it. That’s accusing. And that’s what you’d expect from an abject identity: it gets attached to someone who the accusers are out to get for some other reason, not derived inductively from the available information. Once it’s said, the labeling conveys a kind of “truth” such that those who want the label to attach view it as applying even when no support is available. It cannot be refuted, in their minds, by evidence. That’s how “slut” works, too. This idea of the “sexual deviant” interacts extensively with but isn’t coextensive with gender and the construct of the “slut”. “Sexual deviant” as an abject identity for “sexual minorities”, to the extent the latter term has utility as an umbrella, which I think it does. I think that one of the principal ways that “sexual deviant” interacts with social position in gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, race and class is that being on the disempowered end of any of these axes makes the label much more likely to apply. An educated, affluent het married white middle-aged male who also does BDSM (I know this for sure) is in a position to make statements about his sexual practice and sexual identity, and still enforce boundaries, and he faces risks of labeling, but only so far. The queerer, the less gender-conforming, the less educated and less affluent, the less white one is, the more likely labels and social sanctions are to follow, or even anticipate, any disclosure. The Injunction To Speak And for those of us who are kinky, we live with a Foucaultian injunction not to remain silent but to speak. There is a sense of mainstream entitlement that sexuality is not private but public: but unequally so; for the mainstream, the demand is only to declare one’s self conforming, as religious dissenters have been required to do in some times and places, whatever the underlying facts. However, for the nonconforming, sexuality is a matter of public concern, the be brought into discussion so that it may then be scrutinized and subject to discipline. Once they learn of our status, whether voluntarily or not — and whether true or not — the mere specter of it gives them the right to examine all the details. The way Cuomo doubles and triples down on the demand for details is precisely the product of the demand that the alleged deviants offer themselves up for examination and public judgment. It reminds me not long ago of a poll where CNN actually asked a mock jury if now-convicted murdered Jody Arias was a “sexual deviant.” In fact, the mock jury was pretty emphatic that she was not — a good thing, since the “evidence” for that proposition amounted to things as banal as the purchase of lubricant. But this only underscores how divorced from any objective understanding of “deviant” the abject identity of the “sexual deviant” is. CNN asks, in all seriousness, if a person — a woman, not to put too fine a point on it — can be labelled a sexual deviant for purchasing a product so widely used that it can be found in just about every pharmacy in America. The label does not derive its meaning from evidence of conduct. The label is attached for reasons having to do with the exercise of social power, and then looks for or invents justification, whether in facts, or “facts.” In a way, this isn’t Chris Cuomo’s fault – though it god damned sure isn’t Knox’s either. Cuomo knows the questions are creepy, he knows he’s being a jerk, and that is his fault. I don’t know whether he thought he had to ask because the viewers demand answers, or if he thought it would draw eyeballs and sell ads, or if he even distinguishes between those two things. But I do believe he at least thought he was asking a question. He was even wrong about that, and that isn’t his fault. The way “sexual deviant” works, there is no question. Merely to apply the term to someone, however qualified, is to apply a label; either to point the finger, or to brandish it as a threat. Gabba gabba We accept you We accept you One Of Us They say sticks and stones can break your bones but words can break your spirit. Abject identities have power, and they are hard to deal with because they have power in more than one way. They have power in the way that they get inside their target’s head and, even when consciously rejected, graft themselves onto self-definition. In that sense, they are a “free your mind …” problem. But they have the other kind of power, too — the kind where a high school full or jerks, or a hiring committee full of jerks, or a break room full of jerks, or a holiday gathering full of jerks, can take action based on them. Freeing your mind won’t keep you from getting fired or beaten up. And this crossfire of power makes any way to deal with the labeling highly imperfect. To reduce the power of the labels to damage the self, adopting it is a valid and sometimes a brilliant strategy. Take Slutwalk. Many have said, but I’ll attribute it to Jaclyn Friedman because I think she was first, that Slutwalk is “I Am Spartacus,” that by volunteering to take on the label, the participants are dividing it and conquering it, refusing to let it be focused on anyone who gets singled out. But the powerful critique of Slutwalk is the one mounted by women of color. The best expression of it I’ve seen is from the letter to the Toronto Slutwalk from a lengthy and impressive list of folks, which I’ll quote briefly but which I recommend reading in full:
That’s not the only critique in that letter, and I can’t say it’s a representative example of all critiques, but one point that it powerfully illustrates is that pushing back at an abject identity by reclaiming it isn’t a cost-free tactic — and often, it isn’t a tactic where the costs are shared equally. Often, it looks like a good idea to those with the most space for resistance, and a terribly risky one to people with less. In my generation, some het guys pushed back against the abject identity “fag” by more or less openly inviting questions about our sexual orientation. And as callow teenagers, we probably thought we were all so witty and fucking brave. And as a middle-aged man, it looks a lot messier. Did I really make space for other guys who were easier targets? Or did the bigots I deliberately pissed off just make life that much harder for some other kid who had fewer tools to fight back? I’m not trying to answer that question, just noting how different things can look from different positions. When Kathleen Hanna performed with “slut” written on her body, did she make things better or worse? Probably both, by turns. I don’t know how to wrap this up neatly. The abject identity of the “sexual deviant” hurts a lot of people, and because of my social position on a lot of axes, me just about least. There are times when I use the position I’m in to push back in ways that I think will make room for others who can’t easily do so. And there are ways of pushing back that I think may feel good for me but won’t work out well for others. Amanda Knox, who isn’t even one of us, may be one of those people who has to live in the crossfire of a fight over terms. So when I talk about who I am, regular readers may have noticed that unlike some kinky people I tend not to use “pervert” and “deviant”. That’s why. Filed under: fight the power, media matters, Uncategorized Tagged: BDSM, Sex Negativity   |