Strange Bedfellows: How feminism and porn get it on at the Feminist Porn Awards
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
An interview with Chanelle Gallant, founder of the Feminist Porn Awards
When I first learned of the Feminist Porn Awards, I wasn’t surprised to discover that Good For Her was behind them. An independently owned and operated sex shop in Toronto, Good For Her’s feminism is as explicit as its inventory, so it seemed fitting that they were the ones to spearhead an annual awards ceremony celebrating filmmakers intent on subverting mainstream pornography.
But, I kept wondering, what on earth is feminist porn, anyway? In an effort to answer that question, I tracked down Chanelle Gallant, the former manager of Good For Her and founder of the Feminist Porn Awards. A past sex columnist for Chatelaine and an unapologetic pro-sex and pro-sex-worker feminist, Chanelle is currently in Southeast Asia writing about issues facing sex workers internationally. Before she left, I called her up to discuss what, if anything, allows feminism and porn to coexist.
Nikko Snyder: So what makes a film worthy of a Feminist Porn Award?
Chanelle Gallant: There are three criteria for the Feminist Porn Awards. The first is that a woman was substantially involved with the making of the film as a director, writer, or producer. The second is that the film depicts genuine female pleasure and that women get their fair share of pleasure in the film. And the third is that it expands the range of sexual expression for women by telling us something new about female sexuality, as opposed to showing us stereotyped representations.
How did the awards come to be?
They actually started out as a response to the racism in the pornography industry. I was talking to a colleague of mine at Good For Her, and we were complaining about how we had to send back all these DVDs because they had the most egregious racial stereotyping in them. We kept telling our distributors that we wanted porn that showed people of colour, and so, in their complete cluelessness, they would send us this stuff that had these really offensive exoticizing stereotypes.
I said, “It’s really too bad that nobody recognizes the filmmakers who are making an effort to do something better”-because there are porn makers who are doing something different, whose approach to race and gender isn’t conservative and offensive. You don’t see them celebrated because people don’t take sex seriously and so they don’t take representations of sex seriously, but I think culture is very important, and that it matters when porn shows women and people of colour in situations that aren’t based on offensive stereotypes.
I realized that we should celebrate the people who are doing it well. And voila! The Feminist Porn Awards were born.
How do your own politics inform your involvement with the Feminist Porn Awards?
I come at it from an anti-racist feminist perspective. It’s so important to me to change the representation of feminism, and to add in those voices that until now have been really marginalized, like pro-sex feminists.
You know, I’ve done a million interviews about the awards, and you’re probably the first interviewer who didn’t start with the question, “Aren’t feminism and porn oxymorons?” I am part of a wave of feminists who insist that sex is part of my feminism, and insist on blending anti-racism, anti-oppression, feminism and a hot sex life together. And I do that shamelessly.
How do you respond to the people who feel that porn and feminism are mutually exclusive?
I don’t at all resent feminists who have a problem with the awards. I actually welcome it. I’ve been a feminist since I knew what the word meant. When I was a teenager I was reading Catharine MacKinnon. When I was in university I cut my teeth on Andrea Dworkin. I used to be an anti-porn feminist. So I’m really happy to engage in those dialogues.
I respectfully disagree with people who think porn can’t be feminist, but I’m really happy to be creating a dialogue around feminist representations of sexuality. I think it’s really important.
How contentious is the concept of feminist pornography at this point?
I would say it’s still not just contentious, but incomprehensible to most people-especially people who aren’t feminist-because they don’t necessarily know about the lesser-heard voices within feminism that have always been speaking from a pro-sex, pro-sex-worker position.
Not incidentally, what the Feminist Porn Awards do is celebrate sex workers. Some people may or may not notice that, but it’s important to me. I think they’ve affected the way feminists think about porn. And they’ve affected the way folks who don’t identify as feminists think about feminism.
Not that I’m the first one to suggest the idea. There have been feminist pornographers for more than two decades now, starting with Candida Royalle, who was awarded our lifetime achievement award in the first year of the Feminist Porn Awards.
I understand that the first awards were conceived as a one-time event. How did they become an annual tradition?
For me, one of the most moving things about the first awards was the way they affected the filmmakers. That’s the reason I did another one. The filmmakers were so moved that somebody was finally recognizing them, so I thought, we have to do this for the filmmakers and we have to do this for the audiences who absolutely flock to us.
Good For Her’s porn sales more than tripled after the first awards. People-women and men-want to find porn that they can enjoy guilt-free. We’ve had really positive feedback, and folks always flood into the store in the days and weeks after the awards looking for films that have won. And I’m so happy that we can provide that.
When I’ve talked to filmmakers who are making feminist porn, they say that what qualifies it as “feminist” for them is often largely or exclusively the production-for example, if a film is produced ethically, if the performers are treated fairly and empowered through the process. How important is the production end of things for the Feminist Porn Awards?
What I’m interested in is content, because that’s the only thing I know about. I don’t know about the working conditions. The directors do, and I applaud them for using their feminist principles to make films that are respectful of the people involved. But as a consumer, I don’t necessarily have access to that information, so what I look for is the other side of the equation, which is the content.
Sure, but the content becomes very subjective, and there seems to be a debate over whether any specific content can be deemed feminist or non-feminist.
Subjective as opposed to what? I don’t believe there is anything objective about anything. From the Good For Her standpoint, feminist content is what we see as feminist content. And that’s just the best we can do.
But content seems like the most contentious thing when it comes to defining feminist porn. For example, there are some feminist filmmakers who won’t use certain dominant images like facials in their films because they feel it crosses a line.
That’s correct. It’s totally subjective, but I think everything is. I mean, we’re talking about politics-there are no hard and fast rules. I think it’s okay for us to have varying ideas about what constitutes feminist porn.
Feminist porn resists easy categorization. Everyone assumes, for instance, that feminist porn has a specific genre. Some of the media coverage of the awards gave the impression that feminist porn had to be soft, that it had to be storyline based, and that it had to be lesbian. But none of that is true. Feminism does not have a genre. Feminism exceeds genre.
Certainly it does. But now that we’re labelling things “feminist porn,” what does that actually mean?
Don’t try to make it objective, Nikko. I mean, why try to have the final word on what’s feminist? God, why would we want to do that? It’s just a label that, for myself as someone who’s pro-sex and who is sex-worker-positive, I’m just going to demand, the same way I’m going to march right into feminism and demand a space for myself and other women like me.
It certainly is a needed space. But you can’t deny that pornography is one of the most divisive issues in the history of feminism.
It is one of the most divisive issues. And I think that’s really screwed up. That doesn’t reflect well on feminism. I can’t believe that feminism wasted a whole decade fighting about porn instead of fighting about things like child care and reproductive justice. I mean, really?
It’s interesting to know that racism in porn was a driving force behind the Feminist Porn Awards.
It was. The race politics in mainstream porn are unbelievably bad. Not that you can’t have stereotypes in porn, because actually, you need to have stereotypes in porn. For most of us, our eroticism is intrinsically tied up in stereotypes. But I really want to challenge some of those destructive stereotypes so common to mainstream porn.
I went to my local sex shop and asked for some of the titles that have won Feminist Porn Awards, but no luck. I guess they still really aren’t the norm when it comes to pornography.
That’s why we do so many online sales, because everyone who’s outside a major urban centre doesn’t have access to these titles, and they have a right to! You have a right to porn. And if you’re going to watch some, why not watch some that makes you feel awesome about yourself, your body, sex? Porn’s okay, so how about we just get access to some good stuff?
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Yeah! Go make your own. Ladies, take over the means of production! And I use the word ladies ironically. (Laughs.)
The third annual Feminist Porn Awards will take place on April 4, 2008, in Toronto. Check out www.goodforher.com for more information.
Nikko Snyder makes her home in Regina, where she has recently founded the Saskatchewan Feminist Erotic Lending Library with the press sampler DVDs she acquired during her recent research into feminist pornography.
posted by LeBlues @ 12:14 PM,
,
has us all wearing the same damned underwear
Thursday, December 13, 2007
The mass appeal and accessibility of America's largest lingerie brand has us all wearing the same damned underwear. Sue us if we want a little bit of originality down under.
Victoria's Secret has a monopoly on our private parts, and we get it. It's accessible, relatively affordable (so we tell ourselves), full of options—and synonymous with some of the hottest models on earth (Heidi! Giselle! Naomi!). Who doesn't want to think of herself as an Angel or Very Sexy woman who enjoys a Secret Embrace? But while these styles are flattering and fashionable (some of us around here have yet to find a better strapless bra than any of the VS numbers), they're not the only unmentionables around. Sirens' recurring nightmare: New guy sees skivvies for the first time, thinks, “Hey, my ex wore those last New Year’s when we did that one thing on the hotel balcony …”
So we set out to find some awesome lingerie that has nothing to do with Vicki, but still fits, keeps its shape, supports what needs supporting, and looks damned cute. (And some of which is absurdly affordable to boot.) Here are our faves:
Gap Body
Stretchy cotton, lace, and satin that fits like second skin and is almost always on sale. We recently bought three bras for $50 (yes, three!) and five pairs of supercute hip-hugger lacy panties for $20. Even at retail price, you're walking out with something fab for under $40.
Elle MacPherson Intimates
Why not trust a Victoria's Secret model to make some awesome lingerie alternatives? The prices are on par with VS, and sometimes higher, but worth what you're getting: Handmade-looking lace and satin sets, bustier bras, garder-belt sets that aren't even close to Frederick’s of Hollywood skanky, and curve-flattering boy shots that are so pretty you'll run around the house in them just asking for a surprise visitor. (Available at Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, and online at BareNecessities.com.)
Felina
Speaking of gorgeous, original intimates, you’ll love yourself in these nature-inspired creations so much you won’t want to take them off, even for him. The LA-based company makes everything from practical seamless and padded push-up bras to the cami-and-panty sets that we are total suckers for. And hey, if they’re good enough to be featured on Oprah, they’re good enough for us. (Available at boutiques around the country and online at DesinerIntimates.com.)
Hanky Panky
You'll want to live in these stretchy, lacy numbers, including the “world’s most comfortable thong” (which we’re taking their word on, as we are decidedly anti-thong) and some awfully scrumptuous boyshorts. And don’t even get us started on the babydoll nighties, chemises, and pajamas that make us wish we still had sleepover parties to go to. The bridal collection, incidentally, also has us hoping for a shower invitation, and we really don't normally do that. (Available at Bloomingdales.com, Nordstrom.com, and FreshPair.com, and at boutiques around the country.)
American Eagle Outfitters
The casual-basics retailer’s Aerie line offers an overwhelming variety of adorable cotton underwear at ultra-affordable prices—and cute bras perfect for gals on the small side. Teens and college girls, after all, are the target demo here, but if you brave the loud music and giggling customers, you get flirty pieces for a bargain. Plus you can pick up some great T-shirts and denim minis while you’re there.
Mary Green
When we first spotted Mary Green’s sheer, lacy boyshorts and matching camisoles in a random Hawaii boutique, we stocked up for fear of never seeing such comfort, beauty, and affordability in one place again. (Not to mention sweetly surprising color combos, like bright red and pink, turquoise and celadon.) And yet we were oddly distressed when we found the line a year later at our local Urban Outfitters, kinda like when our favorite indie bands hit it big. But that hasn’t stopped us from going back for more Mary Green satin, cotton, and lace boyshorts and briefs in all kinds of colors, perfectly fitted camis to match, and even a few of their triangle bras (of the cute-but-pointless variety). (Available for purchase at MaryGreen.com or at Urban Outfitters.)
posted by LeBlues @ 12:40 PM,
,
Six Reasons to Have Sex Every Week
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Studies show that regular sex (with all due precautions taken) provides a host of surprising health benefits.
Sex is good for adults. Indulging on a regular basis—at least once a week—is even better. Research links sex (with all safer-sex precautions taken) to an astonishing array of physiological benefits, from longevity to pain relief. Many studies don't address whether the health bonus comes from the act itself or from the corresponding emotional intimacy, but the bottom line is that getting physical has some great side effects—especially for women. Here are six ways that sex boosts your health:
1. It Fights Colds and Flu. Sexual intercourse once or twice a week raises the body's level of the immune-boosting antibody immunoglobin A by a third, according to research at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.
2. It's a Beauty Treatment. In a study at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland, a panel of judges viewed participants through a one-way mirror and guessed their ages. Those who looked seven to 12 years younger than their age (labeled "superyoung") were also enjoying lots of sex—four times a week, on average. OK, maybe they were having so much fun because they looked young. But it's likely the sex was helping, researchers say. One reason is that it raises a woman's estrogen level, which helps make hair shiny and skin supple.
3. It Burns Calories. A little over four calories a minute, or the equivalent of four Hershey's kisses in a half hour of love. Think of it as part of your weekly exercise regime, and burn, baby, burn.
4. Yes, Honey, I Have a Headache. For a woman a migraine might actually be a reason for making love rather than avoiding intercourse: the increase in endorphins and corticosteroids during arousal and orgasm is analgesic.
5. It Promotes Regular Menstrual Cycles. A series of studies by behavioral endocrinologist Winnifred Cutler and colleagues at Columbia and Stanford universities found that women who have intercourse at least weekly (except during their period) cycle more regularly than abstainers or the sporadically active. (Related research found that lesbian lovemaking also smoothes out menstrual cycles.) Cutler argues that intimacy is essential, not orgasms: "Regular exposure to a loving partner has extraordinary effects on health and well-being."
posted by LeBlues @ 12:46 PM,
,
The original political vision: sex, art and transformation
Friday, December 7, 2007
'Everything as it is, infinite' ... detail from The Good and Evil AngelsDissent and emancipation were holy for William Blake. He could teach our prime minister so much about how to be radical
One reason Gordon Brown gave for not holding an election was to have time to roll out his vision. It is not a meaning of the word that Britain's greatest revolutionary poet would have recognised; William Blake, born 250 years ago today, had what George Bush Sr called "the vision thing" in the way other people have headaches or fits of laughter. At four he glimpsed God's head at the window, at eight a tree shimmering with angels. For Blake, being a visionary meant seeing beyond a version of politics centred chiefly on parliament. "House of Commons and House of Lords seem to me to be fools," he wrote. "They seem to me to be something other than human life."
Like Brown, Blake grew up in a lower-middle-class Christian milieu. But the culture from which Blake sprang was one of the most precious Britain has produced, in which Jacobin artisans and Republican booksellers rubbed shoulders with Dissenting preachers and occult philosophers; the country was effectively a police state, ridden with spies and hunger rioters. Brown's Britain is not yet a police state, but its technologies of spying and surveillance surpass the wildest dreams of the autocrats of Blake's day. Blake himself was tried for sedition and acquitted, having allegedly cried in public: "Damn the king and his country!" Today whole sectors of the labour movement bow the knee to monarchy, or at least tolerate it as a minor irritant. The history of labour from Blake to Brown is, among other things, how dissent became domesticated.
Blake's politics were not just a matter of wishful thinking, as so many radical schemes are today. Across the Atlantic one great anti-colonial revolution had held out the promise of liberty, and to the poet's delight another had broken out in the streets of Paris. Together they promised to bring an end to the rule of state and church - "the Beast and the Whore", as Blake knew them. Most of our own writers, however, seem to know little of politics beyond the value of individual liberties.
In this, they are faithful to the libertarian lineage of John Milton; but Milton knew rather more about politics than freedom of expression. In his greatest poem, he mourned the paradise that radical Puritans had hoped to witness on earth. As mythologer-in-chief of the English 17th-century revolution, he urged the cutting off of the king's head, and was lucky to escape with his own. It is hard to imagine Craig Raine or Ian McEwan posing a threat to the state.
In his own mighty epic - Milton - Blake turned back to his great Protestant forebear from a Britain now scarred by industrial capitalism. He raided Milton's work to foster his own visions of liberation, passing on the revolutionary torch to WB Yeats. This self-appointed mythmaker to the Irish war of independence was inspired by Blake's notion of the poet as prophet and public activist.
Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud's. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity. "If the doors of perception were cleansed," he claims, "everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations.
They do so, too, by persuading us to be "moderate"; Blake, however, was not enamoured of the third way. The New Testament that Gordon Brown reads in his Presbyterian fashion as a model of prudence, conscience and sobriety, Blake read as a hymn to creative recklessness. He sees that Jesus's ethics are extravagant, hostile to the calculative spirit of the utilitarians. If they ask for your coat, give them your cloak; if they ask you to walk one mile, walk two. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and those who restrain their desires do so because their desires are feeble enough to be restrained.
The energy captured in Blake's watercolours and engravings is his riposte to mechanistic thought. In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: "To generalise is to be an Idiot," Blake writes. And again: "The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common." The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future.
Brothels, Blake wrote, are built with bricks of religion. Today, hardly a single Christian politician believes with Blake that any form of Christian faith that is not an affront to the state is worthless. Blake was no dewy-eyed radical, convinced as he was of the reality of the Fall. He had a radical Protestant sense of human corruption. His vision of humankind was darker than that of the Panglossian progressives of our own time, with their vacuous talk of "moving on". Yet it was more hopeful as well. London had lapsed into Babylon; but it remained true that "everything that lives is holy", and it might still prove possible to transform the city into the New Jerusalem.
posted by LeBlues @ 12:46 PM,
,
Facials, manicures, emotional outbursts... Is Metrosexual Man more of a woman than you?
Friday, May 4, 2007
"What women couldn't have anticipated was that these guys would start springing up, straight as anything, but nicking our skin plumpers, opining on soft furnishings, and generally invading Girl Turf"
Women who prefer their men rugged may be dismayed to learn that Metrosexual Man will not die. Literally. A new scientific study has concluded that guys in touch with their feminine sides are generally much healthier and likely to live longer than their macho counterparts. Not that Metrosexual Man will have it all his own way. Presumably there will always be stress-fuelled moments when exfoliating scrubs are a tad harsh, or the Heal's sofa fails to arrive. The Metrosexual Man might even dice with death, forgetting to take his B-vitamins because he's so busy empathising with his girlfriend, all the time noticing that (tut tut) it's high time she booked in for a little dermabrasion.
All in all, though, it's no surprise that Metrosexual Man is in such good nick: he's a smart cookie, a creature of the modern world, who knows how to look after himself. And that's why all you women out there are full of admiration for him. And, ironically, why you're still slipping the slobs your phone numbers.
First of all, no one is suggesting that women like macho pigs. This is a total myth. No sane female wants to go back to the dark days of soul-sapping machismo, when for most men, being in touch with their feminine side meant copping off with 'birds' by pretending to dig Carly Simon, or, circa New Lad, Alanis Morissette. Still, these pathetic historical attempts at inter-gender 'empathy' illustrate how keen men are to be what women want, or at least an approximation of it, in order to get what they want (sex, of course, or at least an approximation of it). It also displays how, against all evidence, men do listen to women, perhaps a bit too literally. And so it came to pass that the female gender asked for, nay demanded, Metrosexual Man.
Not literally, of course. Women just wanted a new breed of guy, so we made him up in our heads - putting him together, a bit like a psychosexual Mr Potato Man. We wanted something still identifiably male, but well groomed; sexy, but in touch with his emotions, and not forever poring over lady-bits; a true mate, but high earning, and house-trained. What women couldn't have anticipated was that these guys would start springing up, straight as anything, but nicking our skin plumpers, opining on soft furnishings, and generally invading Girl Turf. Things have calmed down a bit now, but a few years back it was like Attack of the Jude Laws (still the ultimate metrosexual). Worse, this Ideal Evolved Male we'd dreamt up - well, we didn't fancy him much.
Could it be that post-feminism has created its own Frankenstein's monster? The man who is so like a woman he's unfanciable? After all, it isn't only the obvious MMs we're talking about - metrosexuality has spread like a virus through other, more innocent, men, who probably never dreamt that one day they would evolve into nearly girls. Only this week, the papers reported how a man dialled 999 in tears because his wife wouldn't have sex. I'm no scientist but this appears to be a hybrid of 'macho' and 'metro', leading to a whole new term, 'Machosexual'.
Another 'machosexual' incident occurred when Amy Winehouse's ex, a street-wise rocker himself, tearfully emoted on MySpace about how, when he saw Winehouse with her new beau, he was 'shaking like a leaf'. Adding that he'd stopped writing songs about her 'because I've covered all the emotions'. Meanwhile, Winehouse is swaggering around town, pissed, epic, glorious - wholly female, but also like the worst (best) kind of dick-swinging man you could imagine.
Maybe this is the point. It's very nice for Metrosexual Man that he is destined to live longer. But with women like Winehouse around, will he want to? For just as men have evolved - to suit women, it seems - females have also evolved, to suit women, too. And this new breed of women are not going to take kindly to Metrosexual Man, or even Machosexual Man, gently insisting they put down their whisky tumbler, stop vomiting on the coffee table and get a good night's sleep. It may even come to pass that men begin daydreaming wistfully of a new breed of woman, who is sexy but house trained, sensitive, and not forever ogling man-bits and so on. However, as any woman could tell these men - just in case we're listening, be careful what you wish for.
posted by LeBlues @ 2:33 PM,
,
In a four-letter word, a panoply of meaning
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The evolution of the `s' word illuminates some thorny truths
As with so many fraught or politically tricky words, context is everything when it comes to "slut."
These days the word is often used as an affectionate tease among friends, especially adolescent girls. Or it has metaphorical meaning – you're a slut for something you can't resist.
At first it might seem that feminism and the sexual revolution have dulled the word's power to demean: how can anyone be a slut – "a promiscuous woman," as The Canadian Oxford Dictionary puts it – if females are free to be as sexual as men?
The word has become so benign that there's at least one "Slut" line of clothing, not to mention lip balm and bubble bath bearing the word.
You could argue that the "slutification" of female fashion has further demolished the barrier between what used to be considered "good" and "bad" girls.
But "slut" can still pack a knockout punch of contempt, even when it's aimed at someone who isn't being, well, slutty. For people lashing out against a girl or woman, the four-letter word is – like "bitch" – one of those reflex insults that leap from the tongue.
Why does it pop up so readily? Because it can still hurt.
Witness Barbara Amiel Black's meltdown last week in a Chicago courthouse, in which she called a female Canadian TV producer a "slut." Apparently, Black was upset by the journalist's assertiveness in trying to get into the same elevator – not exactly sluttiness in the traditional sense.
The word first emerged in Middle English as "slutte," which denoted a dirty, untidy woman, a meaning it still bears in the U.K. By the middle of the 15th century, it had acquired its taint of sexual licentiousness.
Until recently in North America, that was the only sense in which it was used. (In fact, "slut" is one of the few judgmental terms from pre-sexual revolution days that still has currency. "Loose," "floozy," "easy" and "has a reputation" now seem awfully quaint.)
The funniest bit of pop culture to remove some of the sting from "slut" was the Saturday Night Live "Weekend Update" skit in which Dan Aykroyd routinely addressed co-anchor Jane Curtin as "Jane, you ignorant slut."
Marcel Danesi, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who teaches semiotics and youth culture, observes that "slut" is now an ambiguous word whose various meanings include – in hip-hop – "my woman." Yet he was taken aback when a colleague called him a "slut" recently. "I was complaining about the inane bureaucracy at the University of Toronto, and he said, `You're a typical slut ...' It was kind of friendly – he was saying that I break the rules."
To him, "slut" still reverberates with negative connotations linked to sexual promiscuity. "I would never, absolutely never, present my wife in this way."
Among younger people, though, the friendly use of "slut" is common. Mimi Hagiepetros, a 13-year-old Toronto student, says her schoolmates mostly use it "lovingly" and "as a joke."
Grown-up women will good-naturedly call each other "slut," employing the word with all its sexual connotations in subtle, ironic rebellion against a double standard that refuses to go away.
Yet the word hasn't been completely defanged. A battery-operated Little Mermaid Shimmering Lights Ariel doll that supposedly says the words "You're a slut" made it to the ABC news website last December after a "shocked" mother contacted the media. Visitors can watch a 48-second video clip of the doll "speaking" to try to hear the offending words themselves (Mattel denied the accusation, and this writer was unable to detect any Exorcist-like language).
Another cartoon creature, Paris Hilton, vigorously defended herself in a July interview with the celebrity gossip website TMZ.com against readers' assertions that she was a "stupid, ugly slut" and "an overused human condom."
"I am not a slut at all," she declared. "I've only had a few boyfriends, and I don't even do anything with them any more ... I'm far less promiscuous than any of my friends."
The best defence against being relegated to slut-dom, it seems, is to point a finger at women who are sluttier.
Amiel herself stoked controversy in a 2003 column for London's Telegraph in which she discussed the word provocatively. "A woman can look and behave like a slut – it's her right – and there will be no consequences," Amiel wrote. "She may consent to intercourse on Thursday night, but if the chap is discourteous on Friday morning, the previous evening's sizzling sex will cool into rape."
Whatever one makes of Amiel's argument, it's clear that, for all our jocularity about the "s" word, it can still shock.
Toronto filmmaker Andrea Dorfman completed a documentary called Slut a year ago in which 10 females talk about having been labelled the slut of their class. "Literally, the 15-year-old had the same story as the 85-year-old," says Dorfman. The film's older subjects, "carried (the insult) around with them their whole lives. It affected their self-confidence, their careers, their self-esteem."
Dorfman, 38, says a girl who's branded a "slut" in gossip – and she adds it's usually females who use the word against other females, competing for the attention of the still-more-powerful male – "is the receptacle of everybody's anxiety about sex."
posted by LeBlues @ 12:33 PM,
,
One of the Guys
Friday, March 16, 2007
The distraction of 'sexual orientation' and the lost world of the American male
On Saturday afternoon at the Cineplex you can see them: adolescent boys, there to watch one of the action films that Hollywood makes with an audience of young males in mind. What’s distinctive is where the boys sit in the theater. Though they might’ve come to the movie together and might even be close friends, they’ll leave an empty seat between them.
Just where the empty physical, as well as emotional, space between men comes from has been the essential subject of my research as a scholar of American culture. My work has culminated in a recent book, Picturing Men: A Century Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography
What accounts for that space? A short answer, something academics like me are notoriously reticent to provide, is that countless American boys and the men that they become are afraid of intimacy with each other, fearful of how intimacy might be construed––of what others and maybe even they themselves might decide that the closeness suggests. What I’m alluding to, of course, is homophobia.
I have examined the shifting history of intimacy among American males, charting the role that homophobia has played in the shifts that men’s intimacy has experienced over the last century and a half. What are the implications that my historical work might have for two matters prominent in contemporary public debate: first, the so-called “boy problem” in the United States, and secondly, whether persons of the same sex should be permitted to marry?
At Cal State Fullerton, I teach courses called The American Male and Sexual Orientations in American Culture. In some ways these classes occasionally overlap, as my students and I discuss the differences and the similarities between men who consider themselves gay or bisexual and those who think of themselves as straight. Though of course widely accepted today in the United States, the idea that one’s own identity is grounded in the sex of those whom one desires sexually, that the sex of the object of yearning identifies the yearner, rather than simply defining his desires, is a comparatively recent cultural notion.
But it isn’t a universal way of thinking about human sexuality. Scholars too rarely ask if what we know as “sexual orientation” is a fundamental distinction between human beings, or instead is less significant, perhaps much less significant, than gender distinctions.
My students and I often consider whether various kinds of fuss over sexual orientation actually are indirect ways of addressing more basic issues of gender, the ways that a particular society defines the appropriate behavior of males and of females. We examine the ways that negative stereotypes of gay men, for example, not only stigmatize those males considered gay, but also coerce all men to stay within the boundaries of culturally prescribed “male behavior,” lest they be thought queer. It’s common in our culture for a gay male to be thought “unmanly,” but it’s not inevitable that this equation be in force, or even that sexuality be viewed as a simple question of one or the other, gay or straight, with bisexuality in the middle ground.
Such, however, has been our society’s obsession with sexual orientation—and with “appropriate” manliness—that an association with gayness came to include certain occupations, words, gestures, and items of apparel, as well as one male’s willingness to express intimacy with another. The greater the scorn heaped upon gay males, the more that all males have been discouraged from displaying behavior associated with gayness––with anything resembling intimacy heading the list of taboos.
Reflecting the powerful significance of gender in our society is the fact that lesbianism functions quite differently in the culture than does male homosexuality. Though lesbians and gay men are subjected in common to certain forms of discrimination, lesbianism is both stigmatized in some segments of “straight” society and powerfully eroticized in some “straight” quarters as well, a largely unknown occurrence with male homosexuality.
One hardly need suggest that life is easy for lesbians to observe that gay men seem to trouble straight people more, to observe that gay men are more associated with “perversion” than lesbians have been. A tomboy, revealingly enough, is often thought appealing or amusing, qualities never attributed to sissies.
This situation, rather than suggesting that lesbians (often stereotyped as the ultimate tomboys) have it easier, probably attests instead to the fact that the doings of men are simply paid more attention in our society. With male behavior mattering more, those who deviate from the strictures of manhood, then, are singularly bothersome. For those who believe in traditional gender distinctions, females whose behavior is thought to mirror that of males would be considerably less annoying, disgusting, laughable, or even noteworthy than that of “effeminate” men. Whatever the reason, a dislike of lesbianism did not bring about severe restrictions on displays of intimacy among all women in any way analogous to how homophobia prompted distancing between all American men.
For many centuries, various societies in various ways have differentiated between same-sex and different-sex activity. But the word “gay” and, according to many historians, even the very notion of sexual orientation on which it’s based, are of comparatively recent vintage. “Heterosexual” and homosexual” were coined, initially in German, less than a century and a half ago, a simple fact that should give pause to those who speak as if everyone everywhere has always been subject to inborn biological imperatives directing their sexual attention.
Societies may vary in terms of how sexual activities between persons of the same sex are scorned, ignored, or endorsed, but about the existence of oriented sexuality––even the existence, some suspect, of a gay gene––there is rarely any doubt. Those who expect to discover a “gay gene” may be just as wrong-headed as those who believe that they have discovered a Biblical injunction against homosexuality.
My own belief, by contrast, is that sexual meanings do not travel well across time and space, that history suggests that “sexual orientation” may be more of a recent human contrivance than a timeless biological phenomenon. Yet one doesn’t have to solve or even directly address the nature versus nurture riddle to simply observe that belief in an oriented sexuality brought with it a fear of male intimacy.
In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, as Americans increasingly came to believe that “homosexual” was both an adjective and a noun, and that the word referred to something highly undesirable, men became much more hesitant to express, and even perhaps to feel, intimacy toward one another. In what might aptly be called a lost world of American men, it once was different. Other scholars, notably E. Anthony Rotundo in his 1993 book American Manhood, have shown that intimacy between men was once so encouraged and so widespread in our society that we may accurately speak of “romantic friendships” between males of the nineteenth century.
Picturing Men
While others have relied on traditional historians’ sources, letters and diary entries, to document nineteenth-century comfort with male intimacy (elaborate terms of endearment and unselfconscious physical closeness, for example), my own documentation of the lost world has been with everyday photographs of two or more American men together. With these photographs we can literally see the lost world as it existed, as it later began to disappear, and as it then reappeared with revealing intensity in a particular moment and setting, only to disappear yet again with stark finality.
Just where the empty physical, as well as emotional, space between men comes from has been the essential subject of my research as a scholar of American culture. My work has culminated in a recent book, Picturing Men: A Century Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography
What accounts for that space? A short answer, something academics like me are notoriously reticent to provide, is that countless American boys and the men that they become are afraid of intimacy with each other, fearful of how intimacy might be construed––of what others and maybe even they themselves might decide that the closeness suggests. What I’m alluding to, of course, is homophobia.
I have examined the shifting history of intimacy among American males, charting the role that homophobia has played in the shifts that men’s intimacy has experienced over the last century and a half. What are the implications that my historical work might have for two matters prominent in contemporary public debate: first, the so-called “boy problem” in the United States, and secondly, whether persons of the same sex should be permitted to marry?
At Cal State Fullerton, I teach courses called The American Male and Sexual Orientations in American Culture. In some ways these classes occasionally overlap, as my students and I discuss the differences and the similarities between men who consider themselves gay or bisexual and those who think of themselves as straight. Though of course widely accepted today in the United States, the idea that one’s own identity is grounded in the sex of those whom one desires sexually, that the sex of the object of yearning identifies the yearner, rather than simply defining his desires, is a comparatively recent cultural notion.
But it isn’t a universal way of thinking about human sexuality. Scholars too rarely ask if what we know as “sexual orientation” is a fundamental distinction between human beings, or instead is less significant, perhaps much less significant, than gender distinctions.
My students and I often consider whether various kinds of fuss over sexual orientation actually are indirect ways of addressing more basic issues of gender, the ways that a particular society defines the appropriate behavior of males and of females. We examine the ways that negative stereotypes of gay men, for example, not only stigmatize those males considered gay, but also coerce all men to stay within the boundaries of culturally prescribed “male behavior,” lest they be thought queer. It’s common in our culture for a gay male to be thought “unmanly,” but it’s not inevitable that this equation be in force, or even that sexuality be viewed as a simple question of one or the other, gay or straight, with bisexuality in the middle ground.
Such, however, has been our society’s obsession with sexual orientation—and with “appropriate” manliness—that an association with gayness came to include certain occupations, words, gestures, and items of apparel, as well as one male’s willingness to express intimacy with another. The greater the scorn heaped upon gay males, the more that all males have been discouraged from displaying behavior associated with gayness––with anything resembling intimacy heading the list of taboos.
Reflecting the powerful significance of gender in our society is the fact that lesbianism functions quite differently in the culture than does male homosexuality. Though lesbians and gay men are subjected in common to certain forms of discrimination, lesbianism is both stigmatized in some segments of “straight” society and powerfully eroticized in some “straight” quarters as well, a largely unknown occurrence with male homosexuality.
One hardly need suggest that life is easy for lesbians to observe that gay men seem to trouble straight people more, to observe that gay men are more associated with “perversion” than lesbians have been. A tomboy, revealingly enough, is often thought appealing or amusing, qualities never attributed to sissies.
This situation, rather than suggesting that lesbians (often stereotyped as the ultimate tomboys) have it easier, probably attests instead to the fact that the doings of men are simply paid more attention in our society. With male behavior mattering more, those who deviate from the strictures of manhood, then, are singularly bothersome. For those who believe in traditional gender distinctions, females whose behavior is thought to mirror that of males would be considerably less annoying, disgusting, laughable, or even noteworthy than that of “effeminate” men. Whatever the reason, a dislike of lesbianism did not bring about severe restrictions on displays of intimacy among all women in any way analogous to how homophobia prompted distancing between all American men.
For many centuries, various societies in various ways have differentiated between same-sex and different-sex activity. But the word “gay” and, according to many historians, even the very notion of sexual orientation on which it’s based, are of comparatively recent vintage. “Heterosexual” and homosexual” were coined, initially in German, less than a century and a half ago, a simple fact that should give pause to those who speak as if everyone everywhere has always been subject to inborn biological imperatives directing their sexual attention.
Societies may vary in terms of how sexual activities between persons of the same sex are scorned, ignored, or endorsed, but about the existence of oriented sexuality––even the existence, some suspect, of a gay gene––there is rarely any doubt. Those who expect to discover a “gay gene” may be just as wrong-headed as those who believe that they have discovered a Biblical injunction against homosexuality.
My own belief, by contrast, is that sexual meanings do not travel well across time and space, that history suggests that “sexual orientation” may be more of a recent human contrivance than a timeless biological phenomenon. Yet one doesn’t have to solve or even directly address the nature versus nurture riddle to simply observe that belief in an oriented sexuality brought with it a fear of male intimacy.
In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, as Americans increasingly came to believe that “homosexual” was both an adjective and a noun, and that the word referred to something highly undesirable, men became much more hesitant to express, and even perhaps to feel, intimacy toward one another. In what might aptly be called a lost world of American men, it once was different. Other scholars, notably E. Anthony Rotundo in his 1993 book American Manhood, have shown that intimacy between men was once so encouraged and so widespread in our society that we may accurately speak of “romantic friendships” between males of the nineteenth century.
Picturing Men
While others have relied on traditional historians’ sources, letters and diary entries, to document nineteenth-century comfort with male intimacy (elaborate terms of endearment and unselfconscious physical closeness, for example), my own documentation of the lost world has been with everyday photographs of two or more American men together. With these photographs we can literally see the lost world as it existed, as it later began to disappear, and as it then reappeared with revealing intensity in a particular moment and setting, only to disappear yet again with stark finality.
After systematically reviewing many thousands of images, as well as more conventional sources, I write in Picturing Men that American males, together in pairs and larger groups, once had professional portraits of themselves taken with a revealing frequency, in dramatic contrast to the virtual lack of the practice today. The poses they once commonly struck were even more revealing than the fact that the portrait was taken. With notable nonchalance, they might hold hands, sit on a companion’s lap, share a chair, drape their arms around each other, or perform for the camera what I’ve termed a “pageant of masculinity,” perhaps dressing up as cowboys or striking a frivolous pose that often included a “token of manhood” such as a cigar, liquor bottle, or firearm. Official athletic team portraits were once especially common scenes of closeness among males, with teammates sometimes lying atop each other. When George Eastman’s introduction of roll film in 1888 made it easier for amateurs to take pictures, the earliest snapshots also often showed males, boys and men alike, posing very close together, obviously delighting in one another’s company.
With a distancing and stiffness of pose in team portraits, the first widespread signal of a change, males began slowly but quite surely to move apart in photographs as the twentieth century progressed. If there was to be any more hand-holding, lap-sitting, or chair-sharing, there would usually be an exaggerated facial expression or some other gesture, reassurance to the observer and the observed alike that this was all purely in fun, with no genuine intimacy involved. The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s.
The closeness of old, and even studio portraits of men together, survived, however, even thrived, in the military, particularly in wartime. So common were poses of obviously tender affection between servicemen during the Second World War, and so extensive was men’s participation in that war, that one can speak of no less than a widespread revival during those years of romantic friendships among men.
Some of the wartime photos displayed in Picturing Men may well be of those who discovered other men with same-sex yearnings during the War, a development analyzed well in Allan Berube’s 1990 book, Coming Out under Fire. But the everyday photos that I have studied, unless there is some explicit inscription on an image, cannot document a sexual relationship between the subjects. The presence or absence of intimacy is another matter, and is something to which an everyday photo can sometimes eloquently attest.
Revealingly enough, the ubiquitous intimacy of wartime was conspicuously absent among male civilians in photographs taken during the early postwar years. Even young boys, who, in contrast to older males, had shown more closeness in everyday photos before the War, posed in the 1950s with a formality and lack of closeness that mirrored the poses older males had been striking for decades. The fear of intimacy that would account for the empty theater seat had triumphed, commonly inhibiting the relationships of American males of all ages. Though Picturing Men ends with the 1950s, I believe that the distancing and fear of intimacy that was intensified and became so widespread during those years continues to vex American males in our own time.
The price paid for the fear of men’s intimacy is high––for all males, not just those who yearn for each other sexually. William Pollack, Jr., in his Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, in their Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have been foremost among those contemporary analysts looking at how lonely and emotionally inhibited the world of boys can be. They have shown how an intense fear of being thought gay can lead to various forms of overcompensation with cruel consequences. For many American men, this overcompensation does not cease with the end of boyhood.
Because men’s doings have been given more weight, deviations from the culture’s prescriptions for men are particularly troubling for many Americans, with displays of intimacy between men arousing much more scorn than similar displays among women. For example, with a tiresome, utterly predictable, yet highly revealing frequency, the lead actors in Brokeback Mountain were asked what in the world it was like—implicitly how they could possibly have endured—kissing another guy. You’d have thought that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal had climbed Everest. Culturally speaking, for male leads in a major American film, apparently that’s just what they’d done.
It seems plausible, therefore, to propose that some of today’s opponents of same-sex marriage are more bothered by men marrying than by weddings for women. My argument for a gendered approach to sexual orientation does not imply that lesbians have it better. If this must be made a contest, it might be said that, as women, with their doings trivialized, lesbians actually have it worse. What I am suggesting is that some opposition to “gay marriage” is animated by tremendous discomfort with the love, tenderness, and intimacy between men that their marrying each other implies. Notions of men having furtive sex with multiple male partners with whom they are not in love or lastingly involved might be considerably less disagreeable.
Apparently thanks to the cynical design of Bush partisans, debates over same-sex marriage, usually focused on proposals to ban the practice, have in recent years aroused the Bush political base, sending the president’s supporters to the polls in numbers larger than might have been the case without a “gay marriage” controversy. However, the recent Democratic electoral successes suggest that many voters weren’t as distracted by the sexual orientation of their fellow citizens as they had been in 2004. This allowed attention to be turned to more pressing concerns.
It might be well if sexual orientation were less of a distraction––for us all––in other aspects of American life beyond politics. We would be a considerably healthier society were we to see sexuality as a matter of much more nuance than a simple gay-straight dichotomy implies. And American men, whoever their sexual partners, would surely have a better time of it if they were able to restore some of that world lost to homophobia. At its heart, history teaches us that little in life is inevitable or immutable, that things surely don’t have to stay the way they currently are. In looking at the quite different way that things once were, Picturing Men reinforces that lesson.
With a distancing and stiffness of pose in team portraits, the first widespread signal of a change, males began slowly but quite surely to move apart in photographs as the twentieth century progressed. If there was to be any more hand-holding, lap-sitting, or chair-sharing, there would usually be an exaggerated facial expression or some other gesture, reassurance to the observer and the observed alike that this was all purely in fun, with no genuine intimacy involved. The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s.
The closeness of old, and even studio portraits of men together, survived, however, even thrived, in the military, particularly in wartime. So common were poses of obviously tender affection between servicemen during the Second World War, and so extensive was men’s participation in that war, that one can speak of no less than a widespread revival during those years of romantic friendships among men.
Some of the wartime photos displayed in Picturing Men may well be of those who discovered other men with same-sex yearnings during the War, a development analyzed well in Allan Berube’s 1990 book, Coming Out under Fire. But the everyday photos that I have studied, unless there is some explicit inscription on an image, cannot document a sexual relationship between the subjects. The presence or absence of intimacy is another matter, and is something to which an everyday photo can sometimes eloquently attest.
Revealingly enough, the ubiquitous intimacy of wartime was conspicuously absent among male civilians in photographs taken during the early postwar years. Even young boys, who, in contrast to older males, had shown more closeness in everyday photos before the War, posed in the 1950s with a formality and lack of closeness that mirrored the poses older males had been striking for decades. The fear of intimacy that would account for the empty theater seat had triumphed, commonly inhibiting the relationships of American males of all ages. Though Picturing Men ends with the 1950s, I believe that the distancing and fear of intimacy that was intensified and became so widespread during those years continues to vex American males in our own time.
The price paid for the fear of men’s intimacy is high––for all males, not just those who yearn for each other sexually. William Pollack, Jr., in his Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, in their Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have been foremost among those contemporary analysts looking at how lonely and emotionally inhibited the world of boys can be. They have shown how an intense fear of being thought gay can lead to various forms of overcompensation with cruel consequences. For many American men, this overcompensation does not cease with the end of boyhood.
Because men’s doings have been given more weight, deviations from the culture’s prescriptions for men are particularly troubling for many Americans, with displays of intimacy between men arousing much more scorn than similar displays among women. For example, with a tiresome, utterly predictable, yet highly revealing frequency, the lead actors in Brokeback Mountain were asked what in the world it was like—implicitly how they could possibly have endured—kissing another guy. You’d have thought that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal had climbed Everest. Culturally speaking, for male leads in a major American film, apparently that’s just what they’d done.
It seems plausible, therefore, to propose that some of today’s opponents of same-sex marriage are more bothered by men marrying than by weddings for women. My argument for a gendered approach to sexual orientation does not imply that lesbians have it better. If this must be made a contest, it might be said that, as women, with their doings trivialized, lesbians actually have it worse. What I am suggesting is that some opposition to “gay marriage” is animated by tremendous discomfort with the love, tenderness, and intimacy between men that their marrying each other implies. Notions of men having furtive sex with multiple male partners with whom they are not in love or lastingly involved might be considerably less disagreeable.
Apparently thanks to the cynical design of Bush partisans, debates over same-sex marriage, usually focused on proposals to ban the practice, have in recent years aroused the Bush political base, sending the president’s supporters to the polls in numbers larger than might have been the case without a “gay marriage” controversy. However, the recent Democratic electoral successes suggest that many voters weren’t as distracted by the sexual orientation of their fellow citizens as they had been in 2004. This allowed attention to be turned to more pressing concerns.
It might be well if sexual orientation were less of a distraction––for us all––in other aspects of American life beyond politics. We would be a considerably healthier society were we to see sexuality as a matter of much more nuance than a simple gay-straight dichotomy implies. And American men, whoever their sexual partners, would surely have a better time of it if they were able to restore some of that world lost to homophobia. At its heart, history teaches us that little in life is inevitable or immutable, that things surely don’t have to stay the way they currently are. In looking at the quite different way that things once were, Picturing Men reinforces that lesson.
posted by LeBlues @ 1:26 PM,
,
