Being Amber Rhea

This photo is not from tonight. It’s from February, when Jenny, Niki, and I got together in DC and were boozing in the hotel restaurant. But it came up in my random Flickr sidebar, and I thought it was appropriate, so I figured I’d include it in my next post.

Anyway. If I don’t start ranting now, then when? But I’m kind of drunk and it’s hard, and I still have this on-again, off-again headache. And Sara is distracting me. But I’ll just jump right in and give it a try.

So over at fucking Will Hinton’s blog a few weeks ago, that guy Expat Teacher wrote some shit about “porn deadens sex.” O, woe is me, I’ve never heard that line before!! First of all, I fucking HATE how people will throw out a fucking platitude like that and just expect everyone to just swallow it, without asking what the fuck they even MEAN by that statement or anything. Everyone is just supposed to nod approvingly. Because we all just KNOW that porn is wrong an dbad, right? Right??

Those fuckers in that thread absolutely REFUSED to hear what I was saying. I lose my patience real fast with some people. I mean, when people just refuse to hear me? Then what the fuck can I do? There’s nothing else that I can do at that point. I have made myself excrutiatingly clear, endured personal attacks and having my words twisted all around,m posted explanation after explanation, and still… they DON’T. FUCKING. GET IT.

The absolute funniest part was when some guy (and most of them were your garden variety straight white middle-class males, of course) ended up saying EXACTLY the same thign I had said, but as if it were COUNTER to my argument!! So then I posted his shit and my shit side by side to call him out… natch, no response. Here’s the link to that specific comment. (It’s good I can still do links, right?)

And not a one of them comprehended ANYTHING I was saying about class. Guess what?? That’s because they are head-up-their-asses, middle class white dudes with THE MOST privilege of any type of people in this society, and guess what, that’s why they can’t see it!! It’s awlasy these kinds of fuckers who like to think we live in a meritocracy. That’s bc they don’t realize all the shit they THINK has happened to them out of a meritocracy, is largely because of them being at the top of the fucking heap. Someone said on a blog somewhere, the best way to think of privilege is, if one person is on a smooth road and another is on a road filled with potholes, let’s not say one is a better driver. Or wait, maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it was like, let’s not blame the car. Ah shit. I am fucking this up. Anyway, I think I have it bookrmarked in delicious somewhere… it was some brilliant stuff. I’ll find it later. –[Sober update: The analogy I was grasping for came from Alas, A Blog (via The Angry Black Woman). Here's the part I was trying (and failing) to articulate: "Imagine two roads: one smooth, well-paved, well-maintained, the other lumpy and full of cracks and pits. Most people will drive over the smooth road without even noticing it - but that doesn't mean that the smooth road hasn't facilitated their driving. Nor does it mean that the person driving on the smooth road has more merit, as a driver, than someone stuck on pothole avenue."]–

So here’s what I want to talk about with class. This guy was all, “I would like to see sex shops zoned into a particular area.” Well that’s how it Already IS, fucker!! That’s how it’;s BEEN for decades now, and guess what, that’s where the PROBLOEMS come from! Just think for one nanosecond about the term “slumming.” That is fucked up. That implies a direct corrolation between porn/sex/dirty stuff and LOW CLASS. And let’s not forget lower class folks are presumed to be “wilder” and all that bullshit… oh and when it comes to sex shops, strip clubs, etc., eben if they DON’T want it in their neighborhood, guess who has the most effect when it comes to NIMBY (not in my back yard) bullshit? It’s not the poor!

Look I was blind to a lot of this stuff (not all of it tho) for a long time but now that I see it? I fucking see it EVERYWHERE, and it pisses me the fuck off!! Because to me it is now so fucking OBVIOUS, that it pisses me off that some people just.don’t.see it.

Okay and this is one of the main things that annoyed me about Pamela Paul’s book Pornified too. She doesn;t want porn to go away. She just wants it to go back to being something confined to the wrong side of the tracks. And she doesn’t see anything wrong with that! She just puts it out there like there’s nothing worth examining. She even used the phrase “low class stripper” a couple times and just didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. (She also misquoted Andrea Dworkin, and while I am no Dworkin fan, it pisses me off when people misquote so egregiously, especially with feminists who get a bad rep anyway just for being feminists. She NEVER SAID that thing about “all sex is rape.” THat is a MADE UP LINE and somehow Paul’s editor let that shit slide!!) Check out Amy’s review of Pornified… even tho she is a radfem and anti-porn and I disagree w/ her on a lot of stuff, her review pretty much sums up the problem with the book.

I truly believe that until we begin to dismantle this deeply entrenched classism that is directly intertwined with erotophobia in this country, we will never make any real progress.

Well, this did not make any sense. But I’m going to go ahead and post it because it’s LONG. I’ll try to write more on this subject later. I want to talk about why sex workers are so reviled and why it’s total bullshit the way some radfems say “sex workers are the patriarchy’s dream girl”. No they fucking are not, you idiots!!

More to come. Later. Maybe. I hope. Arrrrrgh.