Tagline: Little Light
Wondering why Queer Dewd? Wondering what happend to Bitch | Lab? Read Why Queer Dewd and Shame Affirmative.
Skip all this. Take me straight to the comment form »
[...]
The wrong side of capitalism. Not my dirty brain.
Great review of the new Girls Aloud CD, although Idon’t think the overall interpretation of the album can quite be made to stick; I certainly hope not, as it trys to foist on the Girls an ideology much less radical than they’ve previously displayed. The problem running through the whole piece finally crystalizes in the conclusion:
Look, say the Cold Rationalists, this is what free enterprise leaves us as…sex as soap powder, love as a too-expensive/too-much-hard-work luxury, demographic husks of empty.Which seems to be nothing so much as an invocation of a _true_ sex and a true love behind the simulacra provided by capitalism. But this essentializing move is disasterous, because the idea of a true love, a true sex, a true body, a use value beyond exchange value, is precisely what supports capitalism, the fantasy that allows it to keep going (unlike what your old-school Marxist would tell you, it is not in his declaration of the death of reality, but in his nostalgia for that reality, that Baudrillard is most clearly the ideologue of capital).
Similar questions, in the context of anti-essentialist feminism, have also been animating the splendid Bitch Lab recently.
There’s also this recent article, ‘Pornography is a Left Issue’, which is curious in that it argues, as far as I can see, that pornography is _not_ a left issue. The argument, that is, is that leftists should be opposed to pornography because porn work is exploitative; but of course _all_ work is exploitative, and the only attempt to define the specificity of porn is:
In pornography, the stakes are even higher; what is being commodified is crucial to our sense of self. Whatever a person’s sexuality or views on sexuality, virtually everyone agrees it is an important aspect of our identity. In pornography, and in the sex industry more generally, sexuality is one more product to be packaged and sold.
This notion of the “importance” of sex then goes completely unexamined; which is unfortunate, because it allows a nominally feminist gloss on a classic position of patriarchy: women who have the right sort of sex are good, those who don’t are bad (although perhaps, poor victims of patriarchy, they can’t help it).Perhaps sex is important in a different way.
As Foucault put it, “sex is boring”; but, he immediately went on to say, discourse about sex is interesting. Or, to put it another way, sex is not important because it is _naturally_ important, but because of the particular and entirely artificial position it occupies in contemporary ideology. This would also suggest an alternative to the rather sub-Chomsky notion of media criticism employed in the article above (porn companies make money out of sexist stereotypes? Who knew?). The point of a critique of the media (which can surely only be weakened by trying to isolate and fence off pornographic tropes) can’t be to point out the things in the media which are false; the problem is the way in which the media constructs the truth. But this means that our relationship to the media cannot be entirely negative, it is not simply a matter of getting rid of distortions.
[...]
[...] Needless to say, the day began as others before it…with evacuations and showering and grooming and oatmeal and the quietly terrifying realization that the 21st century has arrived but instead of orbital hotels and thinking machines and free floating, 3-dimensional data displays with which I can navigate complex, multilevel databases we have Microsoft and debates about “intelligent design†and mid 20th century style military aggression and arguments over how women should dress. This drives me to the Internets for hyper linked solace (an ironic maneuver, since it’s simultaneously refuge from and enabler of the most modern of primitivisms) where we find… [...]
Weber’s Polar Night » In which I rediscover the dymaxion kinetic vector structure
Leave a comment, a trackback from your own blog, or subscribe to an RSS feed for this entry.
"For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that. ... Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better." - Ilyka Damen
"Speaking as a progressive radical Leftist feminist supporting Black man, I say: BRA FREAKIN' VO! Ms. Bitch." Anthony Kennerson
"Your blog warms my pervy queer heart. \m/" The Phrophet Lilith
"It's visually delicious and pensively random. Or maybe, it's deliciously visual and randomly pensive." Dave Harper
"Quite a good blog for a little edgy whitty sort of humor." Mr. Linuxhead
"Bitch Lab ... really hits (Daily Kos) where it hurts by mentioning the fact that he's raking in some $480,000/year in advertising revenue and should not be presenting himself as if he were leading an Alabama bus boycott." Jackson Free Press
Note: This blog is a natural product. Slight variations in spelling and grammar enhance its individual character and beauty and are not to be considered flaws or defects.
I’ll bite (coming over from Feministe). Though not without saying that you shoehorn so many references into your post, it’s a bit of a challenge figuring out where to start…
You seem to accept that clothes DO make a statement (based on your implicit references to Victorian womanhood, which seems to suggest that Victorian notions of womanhood were, to an extent, expressed by modest fashion conventions, okay?).
THEN you seem to be arguing that ANY criticism of the statement clothes seem to be making today is - what - stuffy, sexist, racist, crippled by class assumptions, based on jealous feelings or further messed up by the crazy, recently invented idea that kids are more vulnerable than adults - or all of the above?
The reason I don’t want my 13-year-old niece to dress like a hooker is because I don’t think she yet fully understands the message she’s putting out. I think her sense of irony is skin-deep, I think she’s bewitched by pop icon marketing, I think she’s in full, glorious rebel mode and I’d like to see her brains catch up with her body. Is that so very terrible?
Speaking as a progressive radical Leftist feminist-supporting Black man, I say: BRA - FREAKIN’ - VO! Ms. Bitch!!!
Nothing yanks my chain more than people who just crack on women and grils for no other reason than personal distaste for what they wear…as if their choice of clothing had anything to do with the attitudes of others. So what if a young woman decides to dress a bit more suggessively to a party or simply wants to attrach a man for a date or some other consensual pleasure…as long as she is respected as a human being by her suiters, her dress should not be any concern. And yes, it is very much a byproduct of classism and racism that we still have this Puritanical attitude that somehow women should only dress in ways that “protect” them from the supposed “male gaze”…as if seeing a bit of cleavage or a naked thigh of a flash of thong or belly button ring would turn ordinary men intp out-of-control rapists. Uhhh, newsflash: men were dissing and harassing women when they were wearing long dresses and burqas; and last time I checked, crime against women was actually on the decrease since the liberalization of sexuality over 20-30 years ago.
All this nonsense is simply old, tired prejudice against the young for their particular tastes; similar to young Black men getting dissed for their do-rags and earrings because they look like “gangsta rappers”.
As for Ms. Tresidder’s response: If you are that concerned about how your daughter looks to others, that’s your right..but don’t blame other adult women for your insecurities. Or maybe you still believe that women who choose to dress like “sluts” can’t be intellegent and smart on their own merits???
Don’t hate the players…hate the game. Don’t blame young women for dressing how they want or attracting men for their own pleasures; blame those who would abuse and disrespect their choices.
BTW…this is my first post here..but based on the brilliance I’ve discovered here, it won;t be my last.
Anthony
Lafayette, LA
Be careful where you do though! :)
I take it that’s bad — shoehorning references. I’m not sure what you mean though.
Yeah, but I don’t think meanings are seamless. I don’t think they are monolithic. I think we have agency — precisely because we live in a highly complex modern society. (In other words, I’m not talking about agency derived from our inner being, but an agency that is the product of social life, itself)
I don’t think clothes makes statements. I think people do, but I don’t think they can make it up willy-nilly either.
This entire site is an extended riff on having been called a bitch a few times. When I call myself that name and represent through visuals, quotes, my writing, my FAQ, etc. Do I make up what Bitch means, whole cloth?
No.
Do I simply reproduce what Bitch means according to the people who’ve called me that?
No.
What message is that? That’s a serious question. If your daughter isn’t a hooker and she doesn’t respond to requests for sex for pay, then… what’s the problem?
I wouldn’t call it terrible. I’d call it uninterrogated.
Some comments amidst the fray.
Re, “dress like a hooker”. I am wondering if the respondents have actually seen “real” hookers working. What they wear ain’t much like the clothes being described here.
Re Victorian “modesty,” propriety, or whatever. Turn the “properly dressed” Victorian woman sideways and what have you got? Tits and ass. Bustles and tightlaced corsets. And under the petticoats? Buttonhook high heeled boots. Crotchless bloomers. No “panties,” no brassieres. Those large families? They didn’t fall out of trees.
And how did Victorian hookers dress? On the street, like “ladies.” In the house, in dishabille, like ladies without the outergarments–stockings, garters, corsets, high heeled boots, braless decolettage.
Victorian society was obsessed with sex, and also highly “classed.” The economy apparently supported more rent boys and hookers than at any time in history, before or since. But it was very much two worlds. Respectability was exactly a middle class phenom. The real aristocracy didn’t have much truck with it, and the lower classes lived off of it as best they could.
We are certainly not a classless society but we are closer than the Victorians, and, I venture, regardless of appearances we are less obsessed with sex, we are more comfortable with it. We can watch, with a kind of amusement, the paroxysms of the proper over a pierced and bemedalled nipple at the super bowl on accounta chirrens are watchin. We can watch a jury have the equanimity to release Michael Jackson, not because they thought he was innocent, but in observation of the law defining “guilty” as established by the evidence presented “proving” that guilt as being “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Cheers,
g
The wrong side of capitalism. Not my dirty brain.
Great review of the new Girls Aloud CD, although Idon’t think the overall interpretation of the album can quite be made to stick; I certainly hope not, as it trys to foist on the Girls an ideology much less radical than they’ve previously displayed. The problem running through the whole piece finally crystalizes in the conclusion:
Look, say the Cold Rationalists, this is what free enterprise leaves us as…sex as soap powder, love as a too-expensive/too-much-hard-work luxury, demographic husks of empty.Which seems to be nothing so much as an invocation of a _true_ sex and a true love behind the simulacra provided by capitalism. But this essentializing move is disasterous, because the idea of a true love, a true sex, a true body, a use value beyond exchange value, is precisely what supports capitalism, the fantasy that allows it to keep going (unlike what your old-school Marxist would tell you, it is not in his declaration of the death of reality, but in his nostalgia for that reality, that Baudrillard is most clearly the ideologue of capital).
Similar questions, in the context of anti-essentialist feminism, have also been animating the splendid Bitch Lab recently.
There’s also this recent article, ‘Pornography is a Left Issue’, which is curious in that it argues, as far as I can see, that pornography is _not_ a left issue. The argument, that is, is that leftists should be opposed to pornography because porn work is exploitative; but of course _all_ work is exploitative, and the only attempt to define the specificity of porn is:
In pornography, the stakes are even higher; what is being commodified is crucial to our sense of self. Whatever a person’s sexuality or views on sexuality, virtually everyone agrees it is an important aspect of our identity. In pornography, and in the sex industry more generally, sexuality is one more product to be packaged and sold.
This notion of the “importance” of sex then goes completely unexamined; which is unfortunate, because it allows a nominally feminist gloss on a classic position of patriarchy: women who have the right sort of sex are good, those who don’t are bad (although perhaps, poor victims of patriarchy, they can’t help it).Perhaps sex is important in a different way.
As Foucault put it, “sex is boring”; but, he immediately went on to say, discourse about sex is interesting. Or, to put it another way, sex is not important because it is _naturally_ important, but because of the particular and entirely artificial position it occupies in contemporary ideology. This would also suggest an alternative to the rather sub-Chomsky notion of media criticism employed in the article above (porn companies make money out of sexist stereotypes? Who knew?). The point of a critique of the media (which can surely only be weakened by trying to isolate and fence off pornographic tropes) can’t be to point out the things in the media which are false; the problem is the way in which the media constructs the truth. But this means that our relationship to the media cannot be entirely negative, it is not simply a matter of getting rid of distortions.
[...]
I agree with all this wrt the general clucking over “too slutty.” And yet I sympathize with the first respondent in saying this:
>The reason I don’t want my 13-year-old niece to dress like a hooker is because I don’t think she yet fully understands the message she’s putting out. I think her sense of irony is skin-deep, I think she’s bewitched by pop icon marketing, I think she’s in full, glorious rebel mode and I’d like to see her brains catch up with her body. Is that so very terrible?
It seems to me there are two separate questions here: one, about whether adult women have the agency to choose their own clothes, sex lives, and “messages;” and, two, whether children do.
There’s a lot of grey, obviously, and you’re right that standards change–yesterday’s scandal is today’s “big deal, she’s wearing a tank top, it’s hot out, what the hell’s your problem?” And there’s a world of difference between, say, a high schol senior and a fourth grader. Or even one sixteen year old and another sixteen year old.
And yet I do think there’s something creepy about, for example, the Victoria’s Secret campaign (as cited on IBTP I believe) where the word “pink” is printed in a “U” shape over the seat of the pants, as marketed to prepubescents. It feels like a bad joke at the kids’ expense. It also smacks of pedophilia, I gotta say.
I have a big problem with paternalism (or maternalism, for that matter) cloaked in the guise of virtue or ideology or propriety, it’s true. And yet, is it inappropriate to be paternal/maternal when you’re talking about people who still need parenting?
Then again, I’m not a parent, so I’ll defer to the people who actually are.
>porn work is exploitative; but of course _all_ work is exploitative,
Word. Or, well, it can be. To varying degrees. It usually is, okay.
>and the only attempt to define the specificity of porn is:
>In pornography, the stakes are even higher; what is being commodified is crucial to >our sense of self.
I go back and forth on this. I mean, yes, sex is a particularly vulnerable area, certainly. Sex can get you where you live, for good or for ill, and to a certain extent it’s no wonder we’re all so protective of it.
But then I think: in terms of identity, is posing nude for a magazine a couple of times going to affect how you think of yourself than working nine to five in the same office, five days a week, for thirty years or more? Complete with title, office, and suit-and-tie uniform? Is it going to be more of a blow for people to know that you posed for the magazine than to get fired from the longterm job? In that case, I think context is everything.
And, too, is it more humiliating to massage people (complete with “happy ending”) for a living–even assuming that your particular work situation, while reasonably well paid and not indentured or anything, is not something you truly enjoy–than to, say, work at Burger King? Scrape pigeon shit from public statues?
>I think people are clinging to it far too tightly precisely becaue to think that the daughters of *your* kinda women –white, professional, upper middle class women with morals and manners — might actually have a couple of klews is terrifying.
Well, maybe. Probably. But I don’t think it’s the only factor here, either. My own concern is that truly, blame who you will, the patriarchy, the religious right, the relentless advertising blitzes, peer pressure, bourgeois hypocrisy, the decline of the extended family/neighborhood, economic pressures, plain old bad parents–that no, actually, a lot of kids *don’t* have a klew, or much of one. Which is not to say that none do, or even that the solution is to button up that sweater, young lady, problem solved.
But yah, I see problems with the *insane* mixed messages out there right now, I think more exaggerated even than when I was a lass (mid-to-late 80’s, a particularly arid, stagnant, reactionary time, culturally speaking, second only to now. or maybe that’s just me). The fact that Brit-Brit was as wildly popular as she was precisely because (it seems to me) she sent out double messages (sing about how you’re “not that innocent,” then bleat all over the place about your virginity)–well, look, however you slice it, that’s messed up.
And, too, a lot of the same kids who watch the videos and buy the clothes and talk (and maybe even act) all sexual and all-knowing with their friends–they may be getting a lot of incorrect information. Not exactly helped by the Bush/fundie abstinence only campaign, hello. If you’re fortunate enough to have parents/mentors who will talk to you without the bullshit, genuine friends, enough self-possession/street smarts/book larnin’, you may well do just fine. Lots of kids don’t have such blessings, and many don’t do just fine. Hell, lots of people don’t, period. I don’t have a solution either, but I can’t blame parents for being concerned.
It’s not that I don’t think kids can be sexual. What they aren’t is terribly analytical. (and no, she said, after having just completed her Human Development course, that’s *not* just a cultural thing. Formal logic and other reasoning abilities don’t kick in till after a certain age). And you really need to be armed with *some* sort of framework to wade through the morass of information and conflicting messages out there. Some support.
And then, too (too), sexism is alive and well and flourishing like kudzu. And while dressing like Christina Aguilera may not contribute to the problem, in itself, I’m not convinced it helps much, either, especially, in itself. And I do think help is needed, there.
Some months ago, I was on the subway coming from Queens into Manhattan, when a group of junior high-school or early high-school age kids trundled on board, shepherded by a couple of harassed-looking teachers/proctors. A field trip of some sort, I expect. They were your basic urban public school mix, probably more heavily Latino/a than anything else, reflecting the neighborhood.
Anyway, standing near to me was this little tableau:
A group of boys, one carrying a boombox, all decked out in the latest in street chic. Mostly they grooved to the music, shouted, and generally played one upsboyship with each other.
Every so often, though, one boy in particular, the alpha kid I guess, would–there’s really no other word for it–harass one of the two girls standing quietly nearby, huddled around a pole. He clearly did “like” her, as one of the friends shouted at her bent head, but he was also clearly hostile, and more invested in impressing his friends than in actually making a connection. He’d, what, talk along to whatever misogynistic beat was playing on his box in her ear, come up right behind her and thrust his pelvis, touch her hair, her cheek, her back. The adults supposedly supervising this did nothing, and the girls, well, they giggled, mostly. But the girl who was the object of all this didn’t ever turn to face him, and looked, I thought, decidedly unhappy.
Finally I decided to say something. After pondering my options, I waited till the boys were focused on something else, and said to the girl(s):
“Hey, listen. You know, if you like what that guy’s doing and saying, that’s cool. But if you don’t, you can say so.”
She gave a sad little half-smile and said, “It doesn’t matter what I tell him. He just do it anyway.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had to get off in a second anyway. I didn’t feel able to ask the monitor to pay attention and do her damn job, or speak sharply to the boys, much as I wanted to (I figured it’d probably backfire even if I were able to get their attention). Finally:
“Just so you know: it’s okay if you don’t like it. You don’t have to like it, or him. ”
I thought she did brighten just the tiniest bit, maybe. I wish to fuck someone would include assertiveness training in the curriculum where they are. And I wish I believed that that probably was an isolated incident, not at all representative of what goes on in schools today. But I don’t.
heh. sheeeeit. that was written when this site was just basically writing to people who’d been reading me for years. we shared a common history of argument stretching, for some of us, back to 1992/3 with the Bad Subjects list, for the rest, stretching back to 1997 with the birth of Henwood’s LBO-talk discussion list and the 1997 birth of the Pulp Culture list and the Pulp Collective run by Ken MacKendrick, Kirsten Nielson , and Jordan Hayes.
Geez. I took so much for granted in terms of who knew what, who shared what old debates, etc. etc. You know what I mean? Where you’ve already had all the arguments, so you can use shorthand to say what you mean, without elaborating or defendings — since you’re already done it before and who the hell wants to read it again!?
And, of course, who the fuck is paying attention to this blog. Even if it had passed back to Feministe through technorati ping backs, like Lauren and Jill gave a shit what I had to say. They have enough on their hands managing their own blogs, typing their own posts, and adjudicating comment wars. :)
[...] Needless to say, the day began as others before it…with evacuations and showering and grooming and oatmeal and the quietly terrifying realization that the 21st century has arrived but instead of orbital hotels and thinking machines and free floating, 3-dimensional data displays with which I can navigate complex, multilevel databases we have Microsoft and debates about “intelligent design†and mid 20th century style military aggression and arguments over how women should dress. This drives me to the Internets for hyper linked solace (an ironic maneuver, since it’s simultaneously refuge from and enabler of the most modern of primitivisms) where we find… [...]