Being Amber Rhea

Fancy that… I don’t exist!¹ (Dan Savage’s take on Joan Sewell’s I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido.)

See also: “Chocolate” and sex (figleaf’s post on the matter). He’s actually read the book, which I suppose I’ll do at some point. If I was able to make it all the way through Female Chauvinist Pigs and Pornified without taking a claw hammer to my eyes, I can probably manage the trifecta. Anyway, figleaf is much more charitable than I imagine I would be. But who knows, maybe I’ll surprise myself with a sudden stroke of even-temperedness after reading the book. Stranger things have happened.

Anyway, if after hearing about yet another book that reinforces the tired old dog-and-pony show of men being ravenous sexual fiends and women just wanting to cuddle and bake, you feel the claw hammer inching dangerously close to your eyes, I suggest you hop on over to Sexerati and read Lux Nightmare’s interview with Dacia, about her forthcoming book Naked on the Internet. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for this book, during which time I talked about being ‘libidinous’ and dealing with male partners who didn’t want sex nearly as much as I did.) Amazingly, Dacia’s book operates on the premise that women are individuals with unique sexual identities.

Asexuality is, of course, just as valid a sexual identity as any other. But no matter what identity one is talking about, a problem arises when one extrapolates their own preferences/experiences to the entire rest of the world. I completely agree with Rachel Kramer Bussel’s point that it’s important for women to speak their truth about their lives. (Coincidentally, I just left a comment to that effect yesterday on a radical feminist blog where I think my presence might be less-than-appreciated, but which I read and find interesting nonetheless. In fact, I’ve spread that mantra all over the blogosphere in recent months.) But again, the problem comes with making the logical leap that your personal experience is representative of the world at large.

Okay, morning rant over. Now to come up with good questions for the would-be interviewees in the previous thread!

¹ Ed. note: I am, generally, no fan of Dan Savage, and this column does a good job of proving why. You can cut the self-congratulatory male privilege with a knife. I’m citing it, however, because David IMed it to me first thing this morning and got me thinking about Sewell’s book, which I had conveniently pushed to a far corner of my mind several days ago.

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.

My plans to go to the Pink Pony dashed, I instead spent the evening at Barnes and Noble, eating cheesecake for dinner and reading Pamela Paul’s Pornified¹ (which Sara Beth awesomely gave me for my birthday). I made it through the introduction and first chapter before the store closed.

What do I think so far? Well, by page 3 I was already brimming with unwritten commentary. In the introduction, Paul wrings her hands over there being “no stigma attached to porn anymore” (completely untrue, btw) and pines for the days of good old-fashioned shame being part and parcel of porn use. She relates an anecdote in which she worries about what a nosy septuagenarian couple think of her. (Sophomoric aside: I wonder if I’m the only one who found the phrase “she fingered her pearl necklace” amusing, placed as it was just after the elderly woman’s rant about kids these days. I wonder if Paul did that on purpose. I’m thinking not.) Overall, the introduction left me bristling at Paul’s harsh, judgmental tone, and wondering how she could possibly not see that the more things change, the more they stay the same. She actually writes, “It just plain wasn’t considered nice to look at dirty pictures.”

In chapter one, at least, Paul does an okay job of not inserting her personal ‘ick’ issues. Not great, but at least she seems to have made an effort, which is more than I can say for Ariel Levy. Also, unlike Levy, Paul provides actual citations, and notes that many of the surveys are not representative of the general U.S. population, and explains why.

Still, there was plenty of non-Paul material to rankle me in chapter one. The chapter consisted mainly of interviews with various men about their use of porn. Most of these men demonstrated a profound hypocrisy - they claimed to be sexually progressive, yet were all too quick to make statements such as this one:

“It’s not like I would ever date a porn star seriously,” Ethan explains. “They’re not the kind of women you could bring home to your mother. My mom would go out of her mind seeing me date a slut, a girl with no moral compass whatsoever.”

I love how Ethan and his fellows talk out of their asses as if it’s the gospel truth. And if that’s what they really believe about women who work in the sex industry, then the fact that they continue to view porn, go to strip clubs, etc. as if it’s no skin off their backs speaks volumes about what they think of women. Progressive my left nipple. Again, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Oh and also? I should do a shot every time one of these interviewees makes an appeal to “evolutionary psychology.” I’d be ready for NaDruBloDa a month early. Seriously, stop talking about how men are “biologically programmed to fuck as many women as possible.” Just stop. No one wants to watch you rationalize your sense of entitlement.²

And just a quick tangent here, but that bullshit about “those kind of women” - ah yes, othering! - annoys me on a personal level. It started about 8 or 9 years ago, when I realized that, hey, I wouldn’t mind doing a lot of this stuff that’s apparently so awful, and guess what? I’m not a drug addict, I wasn’t sexually abused, I’m not incapable of having a relationship, and whatever else is supposed to be wrong with me if I want to (for example) be a stripper. (As we know, that idea fizzled out back in college, for a variety of reasons. And though I can now walk in heels, I imagine there might be other crap I’d have to put up with. For instance, I’ll be damned if I’m going to wax my asscrack. The customers would either have to deal with natural ass, or my employer would have to subsidize my ass-waxing sessions, as well as the required daily moisturizer, hemorrhoid cream, etc. Okay, parenthetical statement is now longer than the original sentence…)

Anyway. We’ll see where the book goes from here. Honestly, I don’t have high expectations. And oh god, soon I’ll have to write about the trainwreck that was Glenn Beck’s 4-part “exposé” about porn. Yes, I actually suffered through all 4 parts. It was excruciating.

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¹ Interesting factoid about the book. The hardcover edition (which I have) is subtitled, “How pornography is transforming our lives, our relationships, and our families.” But the paperback edition is subtitled, “How pornography is damaging our lives, our relationships, and our families.” Hmmm…
² I will smack the first person who comes along and asks why I’m saying there’s something wrong with having lots of sex partners. Read anything else sex-related I’ve written on this blog and then come back, k?