Remittance Girl's Blog, page 7

The Sin of Words

[image error]She wished that she had a story to write about lovers who were so taken up in each other that they’d lost all words. Or a story about a passion quick and sharp like a piercing that heals but never completely disappears. Or a love triangle where she was the wounded one, or where the chains that held each to the other dragged them under the sea, mute and moved by currents, each lover a somnambulant creature creeping along an ocean floor strewn with curious and unidentifiable corpses. She’d had each of those loves,  she’d told those stories, and they were much easier to tell.

But this is a love story all about words. Even from the start, there was no interested glance, no hesitant first touch, no first kiss. There were only ever words about all those things.

“Tell me how you’ll kiss me, if you kiss me, when you kiss me.”

“When. Say when.”

“When, then.”

“I’ll kiss you like breathing. Like the first conscious breath of the morning. Like I’ll never stop kissing you. As if the kiss freezes time and we will stand forever in that airport, in that moment, when we kiss, like the first dot of an ellipse.”

“We’d grow old in that kiss.”

“We would. One day our bones would crumble and they’d have to sweep them up. There’d be no telling them apart.”

Words are impossible promises, she thought. Too big and too small. Who has ever had a kiss like that? They only exist where words sprout them into being. They die there, too: the thought trapped in the web of letters, imprisoned in its own structure. Far too big for its boots.

“Skin,” he said. “Soft, next to mine. I’ll eat your skin like a lizard devouring the shell it was born in.”

“How do you know my skin is soft?”

“It is. I know it is. And salty where your sweat has erupted like desire. Every pore stinging a tiny crystal of salt to the surface. When I fuck you, you’ll shimmer. You’ll arch your back and come, and I’ll watch it seethe through your skin.”

She shimmered anyway, words stuck to her chest, like paper passions in lurid colours, plumped up and unfurled in the humidity of wanting.  “I believe you,” she said. And she did truly believe him, because she came to believe in that curious miracle of the word made flesh.

Sometimes, she hungered for the pain of that impossibility. Not the fucking or the shimmering, but the delicious cruelty of the words, closed tight like buds around the thing itself, never flowering, never releasing their scent, or their pollen.

At other times, all those words seemed too heaving to carry along. Once she didn’t talk to him for months, hoping that desire would fade, the way it had in earlier days. She kissed, and tasted flesh and fucked others in the hope that reality would rob the words of their power. But it didn’t.

This is the tyranny of words: they can contain inside them so much more, richer and more frightening than anything the senses can perceive. This is the sin. Not the taste of knowledge in the garden, but the abyssal unknown. Not fire stolen from the gods, but the vast longing for warmth. Not the meeting, but the appointment forever delayed.

There is something beyond the practiced proposal, beyond the feral sounds that lovers make in the moment of ecstasy. Beyond all those things are words.

In Defense of the Offensive

[image error]

In the past, censorship was enabled through regulations on what could be sent by mail.

I found it hard to find a good title for this; the one I’ve chosen doesn’t really fit the bill. Our world is becoming more and more complex, and the modes of distribution wider and wider. The internet and digitization of material has meant that barriers to publication –  once the purview of mostly wealthy, entitled white men – have been dramatically lowered. Censorship was never solely in the hands of the state. True, states enacted laws that limited what could be published (made public), but publishers and bookstores have always been able to exert control on what, in practical terms, saw the light of day. With a few, notable exceptions, this form of control resided in the hands of the privileged. And indeed some of those privileged entities did see beyond their own narrow interests and published and distributed works that reflected other realities, told stories of the unempowered, served as rallying cries to revolutions. But it was always dependent on their choice to do so.

I want to make this point clearly. Even when publishers like Grove Press chose to publish works that were deemed ‘obscene’, they weren’t obliged to do so. They were always the decision makers. Similarly, bookstores could choose whether or not to carry those books. Some stores may have chosen to – but they were in control of the decision to do so.

Our historical memory is often convenient and selective. Miller vs California, the landmark case that brought the subject of obscenity to the Supreme Court was not about whether it could or could not be published, but whether it could be sent through the US postal service. States have always employed middle-men to do their censoring for them.

The ability to write, format, upload and self-publish on the internet changed this. Yay. It’s not that you might want to read whatever is available to you now, but at least the choice lies with the reader, not with the middle-men. Mostly.

However, there are significant limits to this freedom. Huge online bookstores like Amazon DO make active decisions on what they will allow sold on their sites. And transaction processors, like Paypal DO make active decisions on what material they will process payments on. The state now rarely needs to prosecute a publisher directly. It can rely on commercial entities to act in fear of prosecution, or simply rely on them to act of as arbiters of what is ‘fit’ for readers to read. Very much like the U.S. Postal service in 1973. Similarly, servers can be pressured to ban customers who post obscene material – and do so regularly. It is fundamentally disingenuous to say that the acts of these commercial entities don’t constitute a form of censorship. And in the 21st Century, economic censorship has just as much teeth to stifle speech as the Committee for Unamerican Activities once had.

Yes, of course, a writer can choose to publish their works for free. But in a society where money has become the single, most important measure of value, this becomes a complex matter of perception. How can any work offered for free be of value? Oh, you may say it is the content that counts, but this attitude is not borne out by consumer behaviour research. A book given away for free is consistently rated lower than a book someone has paid money for, even when it’s the same book. So having a book for sale – even when its pricetag is $0.99 – is always going to infer that its contents are of greater worth.

A couple of weeks ago, Jenny Trout, an author, decided to express her disgust for an ebook called ‘Thomas Jefferson’s Mistress: Werewolf Fetish Vampire MILF Sex Slave‘. I haven’t read it and, after perusing the other titles the author has on offer, it’s unlikely I will. Not really my cup of tea. But the irony is that the title is misleading. There is, it seems, one very short story that involves the subject matter in the title, along with a bunch of other short erotic stories having nothing to do with it. So, you get the idea: sensationalist title with not much follow up.

I think it is entirely appropriate to give a work, once read, a scathing review. Competent critique engenders debate and analytical thinking. It encourages readers to form their own opinions – positive or negative. I also think it’s very legitimate to take issue with the title, and critique it robustly, because for historical and humanitarian reasons, it seems gravely insensitive. In truth, it may be a worthless piece of crap. Or not. It may be a piece of post-modern satire. It might be the literary equivalent of Django Unchained. I simply don’t know. I do know is that the vitriolic nature of Trout’s post has ensured that the book has sold more than it might have. One has to wonder if a more measured approach would have been more effective.

What I know is that it is a piece of paranormal fiction. It isn’t a rewriting of history, or a non-fiction book that champions the perpetuation of a slave economy. It’s fiction. It’s fantasy. It might be highly offensive, but then, to a lot of people, so was Crash, by J.G. Ballard. And in its time, the explicit eroticization of a relationship between the female member of the British landed gentry and her gardener was also considered obscene. Not just for its sexual explicitness but because of its portrayal of a relationship between classes. It’s not my intention to compare the literary merit of ‘Thomas Jefferson’s Mistress‘ with Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover‘, but to point out that we’ve never been good at measuring the literary merit a book at the time of its publication, especially when those books are clearly intended to shock and confront social norms.

What I do know is that using one’s influence to encourage a demand for a book’s removal from e-book stores is, in my opinion, a step too far. By all means critique it. Address the important socio-historical issues at play. In fact, the existence of the book on Amazon’s shelves offers us the opportunity to discuss why this sort of subject matter is problematic. By all means, let people know that you found the whole premise of the work offensive! But the minute you demand that it be barred from sale is the minute, in the 21st Century, that you are championing censorship. And to deny this is disingenuous. Moreover, removing a book from the virtual shelves robs anyone else of the opportunity to make up their own minds about it, including coming to the decision that eroticising slavery is in bad judgement and poor taste. If the book doesn’t exist, in the public sphere, then we are robbed of our decision not to buy it or read it, and robbed, as authors, of the decision not to write anything like it.

I am very glad that Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf‘ is available for sale at Amazon. It is a disgustingly racist screed. I’m sure there are people out there who read it and embrace its ideas, but for many more, it serves as a reminder that one ignores the published intentions of murderous madmen intent on achieving power at one’s peril. I am equally glad that Amazon sells ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion‘ because it serves as an exemplar of how a spurious piece of text can be used to encourage race hatred. Even when it comes to non-fiction, my stance is that it is much better to have the crap out there so you have an exemplar to push against, to rail against, to criticize, to engender discussion.

Censorship – whether by state, or by economics – treats grown adults like children. It is always a testament to how little trust we have in our ability to educate and encourage critical thinking. But it inevitably relieves us of the harder task of providing better education and producing more profound critical thinkers.

Lately, I have watched intelligent, thoughtful people reject nuance in favour of intransigence and absolutism. It is always easier to draw a hard line than to defer judgement, to live with what is offensive, to bear the disorienting fluidity of meaning. But it ensures our decisions, as consumers, and our discussion, as thinkers, are borne of choice and consideration, not force and ignorance.

Cunts

[image error]

L’Origine du monde by Gustave Courbet, 1866

 

Facebook’s banning of the posting of this painting and the subsequent legal wrangle in the French courts got me thinking about where I first saw this painting and the impact it had on me, on my understanding of myself as female, and the strange social aversion we seem to have to our  genitals.

I don’t really want to get into an anti-Facebook rant. I had a fight with them about five years ago over a Modigliani painting. I want to prompt a dialogue about our strange ambivalence over our bodies.

The first time I saw Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (The origin of the world), I was 13. I honestly cannot remember where I saw it, which is odd. It would have been 1975, so I would have been in London, and as far as I know, the original painting was in the private collection of – you’re going to laugh, I certainly did – Jacques Lacan. He bought it at auction in 1955. It wasn’t installed at the Musée d’Orsay until 1995, but it was ‘toured’ on a few occasions between those dates. So perhaps I saw a reproduction. All I know was that my mother took me, and it was in a public space, because I remember feeling embarrassed to be looking at a cunt with a whole load of strangers.

But I have a very precise memory of what that picture did to my psyche. It didn’t look like my barely pubescent cunt at all. I told my mother and she said: “That’s because you’re not a fully grown woman yet. This is it. This is where you came from and it is going to be part of you. You can choose to hate it, or you can decide to love it. And how you feel about yourself as a woman is going to depend on the choice you make. So look again.”

And I did. I looked again. Moreover, my mother’s words did sink in. And I decided this was something I would decide to love. How can you fear or hate or find ugly something you’re born with? How can you make something that is such a fundamental part of your body into a problem? Cunts go beyond beauty – which is the assessment of the other. It’s not right, or logical, or sane to ‘other’ a part of your own body. But as I grew up, I noticed pretty much the entire world was hell bent on trying to make me see it as something apart from me. Since viewing that picture, I’ve been exposed to more than 30 years of images that pornographized cunts, that put them to purposes that were not mine. Shamed, hidden, mystified, medicalized, brutalized, venerealized, powdered, sprayed, shaved, waxed, pierced, idolized, worshiped, classified, mutilated.

Now I look at this cunt and I think… it’s beautiful. I can smell it. I can taste it. I know it in all its physicality. I’ve lived with this cunt a long time and, recently, in a very odd way, I’ve moved past it. I remember the first time I found a grey pubic hair and cried for a day. But that, it transpired, was nothing. It’s only when you begin to hit menopause that you get the scary news about what happens to your cunt once you stop producing female hormones. The skin grows thinner, you tear more easily. It isn’t as robust anymore. You’re faced with the spectre of letting nature take its course, or using hormones to artificially keep it in stasis. There’s tremendous implicit social pressure to maintain your cunt in ‘working order.’ But working for who? It’s perfectly happy as long as someone doesn’t plan on treating it like a battleground. Apparently your clit never stops working, which is good to know.

But what I’ve found more curious is that these encroaching realities have forced me to realize that, although I’ve always been on very good terms with my cunt, it never was the place my sexuality or my eroticism resided anyway. And I really don’t need it to be an erotic being, or express my sexuality.

 

BDSM, Consumerism and The Care of Self

[image error]This is in response to a very disappointingly unnuanced article published in the Atlantic Monthly.

So, you’ve just seen Fifty Shades of Grey, or you read the book, or both and you’re thinking… wow, that’s looks sexy. I could go for some of that….

Okay, I really hope you read this fully and take what I’ve written here to heart and give it some deep consideration.

1. Fifty Shades of Grey is fiction, written for the purposes of selling books. It was written by a woman who is NOT a practitioner of BDSM and knows literally fuck all about it. It’s an amusing read, a sexy film, whatever. It has no data in it that is reliable for you to apply to real life. Watching Top Gun can’t teach you how to fly a plane and FSOG contains NO practical info on BDSM.  Similarly, the stories you will find on this site are fictional. They are not self-help guides, or how to manuals. In fact, quite the opposite. Narrative form leans towards conflict, not harmony. My characters are not admirable, healthy people. They might be interesting fictional characters, but they’re all terrible role models.

It turned you on? Wonderful. Have a wank. Have five. But there is very little chance, statistically that you are a masochist or a sadist, or even all that wired to sexually enjoy the kind of explicit power dynamics involved in domination or submission. So, right off the top, enjoy the fantasy. You don’t have to take it into  your real life to be cool or legitimate or trendy.

2. Being sexually aroused or getting erotic pleasure from inflicting pain or receiving it is not normative. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying it’s less common than the hype would have you believe. There is a consumer trend at play at the moment to convince you that being that way is a glamorous and desirable thing. Manufacturers of Fifty Shades of Grey and BDSM merch and paraphernalia have in interest in trying to convince you that if you don’t have this stuff, you’re not hip, you’re not sexually aware, or liberated. This isn’t true. They just want to sell stuff and they don’t give a shit who they hurt or what kind of physical, mental or emotional trauma results from their lifestyle identification brand strategy. Bondage, beating and rough sex all carry significant physical and emotional risks. Anyone who tells you it’s absolutely safe is lying.

3. Many people who DO really find the giving or receiving of pain, humiliation, degradation, sexual control, etc., pleasurable have an agenda. They want the rest of the world to think they’re not sick or deviant or evil. There’s nothing wrong with this, because the vast majority of people who practice BDSM are ethical people who feel very strongly about consent and the rules that surround the practice of BDSM. BUT they have an agenda too. They don’t want to be persecuted or punished for their sexual tastes. They want to be validated and recognized as good citizens by mainstream society. This means that some organizations are guilty of downplaying the risks inherent in the practice and downplaying the fact that some people use the cover of BDSM to sexually abuse unwilling, non-consenting people.

4. Being someone who gets their sexual pleasure from causing another pain is problematic within a culture that condemns acts of violence. Generally, it takes a person who is wired this way many years to come to terms with their appetites and figure out how to engage in their type of preferred erotic activity while still staying within the bounds of the law and of humane ethical behavior.  And some sadists NEVER manage it. So, cosying up to one carries risk. Always. I’m not engaging in victim blaming. When someone breaks your rules, breaches the boundaries you have set, they are ALWAYS the ones at fault. BUT, violence, especially associated with sex is a taboo in our society. People who get off on it are transgressive by nature. Transgression is about rule breaking. So, you are dealing with a person who is sexually aroused by breaking rules and you are depending on the fact that they will break the ones you like broken, but not the ones you don’t.  YOU have an obligation of self-care. You have an obligation to understand that you are placing yourself at greater risk. If the world were fair, all sadists would be scrupulously ethical. But the world is not fair. When it gets fair, I’ll let you know.

5. Being someone who is sexually aroused or gets erotic pleasure from being hurt, humiliated, degraded, restrained, having one’s ego decimated, engaging in symbolic self-annihilation, etc. is also problematic in our culture. Our culture emphasizes the need to avoid pain, to care for oneself, to keep healthy, to hold oneself in high regard. A masochist also faces a difficult path in negotiating his or her way through mainstream society. Their need to get the kind of stimulation that satisfies them often leads them to take risks that others would not take. Just because a person gets sexual satisfaction from being caned doesn’t mean they are asking for or deserve to have their spine broken. But to not acknowledge that in letting someone cane them, they are taking a chance that this might happen is to be willfully stupid. Furthermore, servicing a masochist also requires having limits yourself. And although most masochists are ethical will accept what those limits are, some will not be able to do that. And that can make them very dangerous.

6. Shaming, bullying or manipulating someone into being submissive or taking pain when that isn’t what gets them off is FUNDAMENTALLY lMMORAL. No matter how cool the movies, books, the press or sex toy sales companies say it is. It is a deeply emotional and traumatic experience for anyone whose psychosexuality doesn’t lend itself to this kind of thing.

7. Shaming, bullying or manipulating someone into being dominant or inflicting physical or mental pain is JUST AS IMMORAL. And I suspect there are even more adults being cajoled into this kind of behaviour than anyone wants to admit. Acting in the capacity of a dominant or a sadist can be deeply traumatic to a person who is not naturally inclined to this.

8. Sex is not safe. It’s not safe in nature and it’s not safe in human society. People are vulnerable in sexual situations, both physically and emotionally. Society can inscribe laws that attempt to mitigate the risk and prosecute people who violate them. You can take sensible precautions, and minimize the risks on a personal level, but you can never eliminate them completely. If the world were fair, it would be different, but the world isn’t fair.

9. BDSM is FAR LESS SAFE. If sex carries some basic risk, kinky sex carries a much greater level of risk. It is transgressive sex. To transgress means to consciously and intentionally step over boundaries, to contravene taboos established within any given society. The eroticism at the core of BDSM lies exactly in the fact that kinky activities flaunt established social conventions and carry a level of risk. If it were safe, and socially acceptable, it would not be so erotic.

So… this is the paradox that few people want to accept. We live in a world that encourages us to have our cake and eat it too. But cakes and BDSM are both always subject to the laws of matter and physics. This can be very hard to accept because our consumer society keeps on assuring us that we can have BOTH transgressive pleasure AND perfect safety. It is a lie perpetuated for the purpose of encouraging your consumption.

But you can be thoughtful and self-reflective and refuse the Koolaid. Please, in this instance, stop thinking about what might be cool to have, or be or do. What do you need? What do you really need sexually, erotically, inside? Please ask yourself that.

I do not want to dissuade anyone from pursuing their kinks. I am not condemning, pathologizing or shaming anyone who has non-mainstream sexual tastes. I am not a hypocrite. I just want to try to inform you that you have a duty of care to yourself that goes far beyond this month’s hip thing, or this week’s sexual flavour. Ultimately, I want you alive, uninjured and untraumatized. And it is foolish to ever depend on anyone else to ensure you remain that way. If the world were fair, you could depend on others, organizations, websites, groups to help keep you that way, but the world is not fair.

I have mixed feelings about the debate regarding Fetlife and outing dangerous people. Even if Fetlife were to allow users to publicly accuse people of rape or lesser unacceptable behaviour, it would be a grave mistake to believe you were any safer. Meanwhile, its proponents seem unwilling to address the rare but grave issue of false allegations. A lot of rapes happen when people meet in a bar under very vanilla auspices. Do we post notes naming rapists in bars? I still think the best response to a rape is to formally accuse that person and make the law work. If what is at issue here is that the law, the police and prosecutions are not dealing with this, then that’s the battle we should be fighting – for everyone, kinky or otherwise.

You need to acknowledge that when you step into the world of transgressive sexual practice, you have walked into a less safe place. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be there, but it means that you need to be very vigilant and take responsibility for your safety.

You need to practice the care of self. Be well. Be careful.

 

 

Bad Men and Why Perfectly Intelligent, Independent, Sane Women Fantasize About Them

[image error]Do you ever get the sneaking suspicion life would be a lot easier if we shut up about our erotic fantasies? I do.

Picture Miss Catherine Thoroughgood: a primly dressed, middle-aged spinster sitting at a window on a cold autumn day, overlooking a bleak rural English landscape, trying to get enough light to darn a rip in her undergarment. It’s 1849, her fingers are almost blue, and while she’s mending a shift that’s seen better days, she’s imagining being rudely used by ruffians. With every tiny, neat stitch she makes, she produces another lurid imaginary moment in the forbidden narrative. Dirty, calloused hands on her white skin, her hair in disarray, beery breath against her cheek and, perhaps, someone unseen holding down her shoulders while the main miscreant forces his cock into her. She sighs, shifts a little in her chair, and goes on stitching. The nameless rapist doesn’t have a name, and his face changes each time she imagines looking into it. He doesn’t beat her to a bloody pulp, or stab her to death once he’s had his way with her. He doesn’t  – because Miss Thoroughgood hasn’t thought of it yet – flip her over and fuck her up the ass.

Luckily, Miss C doesn’t have to indulge in long bouts of self-examination about her essential worth or her sanity or her sinfulness or her disloyalty to the feminist cause, because although she is fairly certain a lot of women just like her have thoughts just like hers, she isn’t subject to having her erotic fantasies publicly examined and judged as disgusting by all and sundry. She’s perfectly free to acknowledge just how filthy they are by her own standards, and gain an extra little frisson of pleasure from it. But on the whole, being the captain of her own internal erotic seas, she can sail them any way she pleases.

I can’t cop to moistening over the likes of Christian Grey. I need and indeed produce a delicious villain with more substance and substantially less money. I’ve never been turned on by wealth, but that’s probably because I’ve always been fairly economically independent. However, my demon lovers tend to like blades. They are driven to cut into my flesh and watch the blood well up against my tawny skin. They enjoy forcing their attentions on me where the risk of getting caught en flagrante is greatest. They fuck me with their fingers in featureless corridors. They watch passively while I fellate them and tell me how bad I am at it, just before they come. They wanna make me beg and laugh at me when I do.

Oh, wait. That’s mostly stuff I’ve actually done.

No, it’s worse than that. My demon lovers go down on me and literally – yes, I mean that in the literal sense – eat me alive with forked serpentine tongues and impossibly sharp teeth. They sometimes choke me to death just after I’ve orgasmed. They break their own vows to have me. They fuck me with a mask on so I cannot see their face. They take me as a child. They kiss me in the gutter and smear me with stinking mud. They pry my thighs apart and penetrate me with ridiculous objects. They kill me so I’ll never taste another man. They tease me on broken glass.

These are demons I author myself. They are part of me. They come from my imagination and they do my erotic imagination’s bidding.

Yet… it has never once occurred to me to date a serial killer. And I have absolutely no wish to take my leave from this earth. I’ve had one, very short, bad relationship with a truly selfish asshole, when I was very young and my instincts weren’t as good; I dumped him within the week. Other than that, I’ve had nothing but the pleasurable company of warm, intelligent, ethical men – and women. My erotic fantasies do not in any way reflect a tolerance for entitled, sexist pricks.

Go figure.

Meanwhile, many people’s erotic fantasies allow them to cast themselves as the erotic demon, who preys mercilessly and beyond all civil limits on some fantasy victim. I’ve had a few of those myself. I get off immensely on making my victim weep. Although not as common, I do indulge my sadistic fantasies with great gusto. That doesn’t mean I would never let those desires out inappropriately in the real world.

The fantasy demons of our erotic imaginations serve hazy psychosexual purposes. Very often they’re twisted nostalgias, puppets to enable us to confront our fears and triumph, agents of ego enhancement or ego destruction, guides to take us places we would not go in reality. But, most importantly, they are ours. They’re projections of our own complex inner lives. They aren’t rational, or principled, or political. I’m fairly certain, in my own case, they are the paradoxical healers of deep wounds. Just because you can’t figure out how my fantasies attend to my particular psychic wounds, doesn’t mean they don’t.

The difficulty has arisen since we began to speak about them, write about them, make films about them – these shadowy malefactors of our own making. Society has decided to ignore the fact that they are entirely fictional, and primarily authored by women, to beat us over the head with them. As if society hadn’t already found enough ways to make women feel bad about their bodies, their skills as lovers, mothers, professionals, their intellects. And how entirely ironic that of all the very real and embodied entities who shame us, it is fellow women who call themselves feminists who seek to shame us the most.

So… this post is a safe place for you, as a woman, to introduce me to your nastiest erotic demon. Whether in your fantasies, you make the imaginary Other the demon, or whether you play the demon yourself. You don’t have to use your real name or your real email address. Make it up. I’ll never judge you for what you create. Meanwhile, I’d be interested to know what purpose you feel your erotic demons serve for you.

The Cypher Dom: Christian Grey and the Failure of Visual Media

[image error]I guess you have to thank a bad book and a mediocre film if it engenders thought on the subject of the textual and visual portrayal of eroticism. The success of Fifty Shades of Grey has certainly brought a debate about BDSM, stalkerish males, passive women and the compromise of bad sex for love into the mainstream. And beneath all the poorly informed articles on sadomasochism, the feminist rants on the glamorization of abusive men, etc., is an interesting ongoing dialogue as to what made the novel – and it seems the film – so popular, so acceptable now, and how it fails as a lifestyle guide.

One of the ways in which it has been creatively and critically interesting to me is in highlighting the differences in modes of narrative consumption and especially how, for many women, the fantasy male object of desire fails, in film, to live up to the promises of prose. The other is in how Hollywood juggles explicit vs implicit eroticisms.

Many of the reviews of the film, including my own, had words of praise for Dakota Johnson’s portrayal of Anastasia Steele. Besides being visually appealing, and walking the line between innocence and sexual interest well, the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey manages to dispense with the poorest aspect of the book: all that embarrassingly digressive and cringeworthy internal dialogue. There’s no inner goddess doing a the cha-cha. A lot of the most boringly adolescent bits are gone. I can only offer my sincere thanks to the director for forgoing the narrative strategy of a voice-over for Ana’s internal thoughts. But, in essence, what the visualizing of the novel did for the main character was act as the editor E.L. James should have hired in the first place.

However, I have yet to see a film review that has anything good to say about Jamie Dornan’s portrayal of Christian Grey. I’m starting to feel a little sorry for the actor, because I think he’s blamed for things that are simply not his fault: the cardboardish quality of the character and the distinct lack of heat in the BDSM scenes. One is a flaw in the original narrative and a subtractive, rather than additive approach to the script, and the other is a bad piece of casting. Let me elaborate.

As a deeply dispassionate reader of the books, I can’t fault Dornan’s faithfulness to the textual character; it lacks dimension and depth because it’s simply not there in the text. Despite the few hints at a painful childhood, Christian Grey a cypher Dom in the book. Admittedly, he doesn’t much resemble any real-life version of a dominant, but hey, this is fiction. But it’s a very specific type of fiction: it’s romance. And romance often offers their readers alpha males as cypher characters, because reading is far more interactive than most people imagine. First, romances are seldom written from the POV of the male character, and so their thoughts and feelings are often only revealed in action and dialogue. Second, readers bring their fantasies of a perfect lover to the text and actively construct their object of desire out of an absence of information in the text. I found this out when readers of some of my work commented on a piece and reflected back qualities they believed to be aspects of the male character I had written that simply weren’t there in the text. A very good example of this occurred with the character of Shindo, in the novella Gaijin. They found astoundingly redemptive qualities in him that, I swear to you, I didn’t write. Superficially, he’s a sociopath and a rapist, but many readers brought qualities they needed to him have to their reading. The book is no longer for sale, but if you want a copy of it, you’re welcome to one for free. Just email or tweet me.

Prose requires a lot of reader interaction. It cannot describe the whole of anything (and when it attempts to, it becomes a very boring piece of prose). Readers are constantly ‘writing’ into the text as they read. It’s what makes the act of reading so personally rewarding. I think it is also why eroticism works so well in text form. Our personal erotic minds have very specific keys and good erotic texts have very weak locks; they can accommodate any number of fantasies into the silences of the text. Of course, when it’s too open, too unspecific, the text feels incomplete and hazy, but the prevalence of cypher Doms in a lot of BDSM erotica tells you something about how flexible we can be, as readers.

Film is a more concrete medium. It has the ability to deliver hyper-specific information very fast due to its visual nature. All the little nuances readers ‘fill in’ to their own specifications (tone of voice, phrasing, body language, facial expression, motivation) while reading are delivered to them in a WISIWYG fashion in film. But also, I think it is a question of how we read. Much has been written on the miraculous double-think we do when consuming something we know to be fiction. Part of our mind is there, in the moment of narrative in the book, and part of it perfectly aware that we’re holding a book in our hands, or reading on a screen, and that this is fiction. I think this is why, in particular, many women are so gratified by the portrayal of politically incorrect men in erotic fantasy texts, while finding them rather harder to tolerate in film. So all of Christian Grey’s flaws – his dictates, his self-absorption, his manipulative, rapey, and stalkerish behaviour can be very erotic in text, when it is addressing our erotic fantasies. But the film brings the contemporary, concrete social implications of that kind of behaviour into focus. Our visual senses are inundated by the ‘real seeming’ setting of the filmic world, with its traffic, its weather, and its extras walking by. In a way, the realism of film clashes with the cypher fantasy of a character like Christian Grey. A lot of women who found Christian Grey very erotic in the context of a novelistic universe may find Jamie Dornan lacking and somewhat revolting the passively consumed filmic world.

This is something I think a lot of feminists who are critical of women’s politically incorrect erotic fantasies simply don’t get: our erotic fantasies – whether only played out in our minds or enacted in the bedroom – are seldom reflective of how we want to order our everyday world. The sexual may be political, but the erotic is often deeply anti-political and, indeed, socially transgressive. The philosophy of the bedroom is NOT the philosophy of the state, and insisting it should be is inauthentic and authoritarian – whether it originates from the Vatican or a Take Back the Night rally. We are private creatures, with very specific, private erotic histories that cannot and should not be erased in a Pol Pot-style ‘Year Zero’ attempt to create an egalitarian society by cleansing our erotic imaginations of its culturally-informed history. I’m fairly confident that 100 years of truly egalitarian social order will slowly shift those erotic fantasies into something more socially palatable. Or, to put it another way, please stop denying us our erotic traumas. Get us equal pay and affordable reproductive healthcare first and, eventually, our erotic minds will probably follow.

Its not constructive to bludgeon women for a one-handed reading of Fifty Shades of Grey – that’s a private and unpolitical interactive erotic experience. But my guess is that most women’s reaction to the filmic Christian Grey will be much more indicative of their real-word levels of tolerance for  sociopathically entitled, withholding, obsessive and abusive men.

The other problematic aspect of the Fifty Shades of Grey film is the portrayal of its apparently central BDSM theme. A great many erotic romance readers (and writers, too) enjoy the fantasy of BDSM but have vanilla sex lives in reality. Text allows us to choose the level of concrete detail we wish to entertain internally. Film doesn’t. It’s fair to say that most women who read BDSM coloured erotic romance would not enjoy the real thing. They aren’t physically or psychologically wired that way in reality, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all have erotic fantasies we would not choose to play out in reality – even those of us with kinks the would squick the mainstream. My guess is that, for instance, many reading fans of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy would not get off to explicit BDSM video porn. I think the filmmakers were very aware of this, and this is why there is very little real BDSM vibe in the film. It’s all trappings and no substance because the filmmakers knew that BDSM substance would freak the hell out of a mainstream audience. While E.L. James might have been writing BDSM out her ass, I’m fairly certain the filmmakers were able to consult people who knew a lot more about it. The lack of any real BDSM vibe is, I think, intentional. But the eroticization of excessive wealth, or consumption fetish, which plays an implicit but central part in both the book and the movie was something the filmmakers decided would appeal to a mainstream audience very comfortably.

Meanwhile, Mr. Dornan, if the media is to be believed, was pretty revolted by his research into BDSM. This royally pissed of the BDSM community, but I don’t think it was warranted or justified. Admittedly, he could have been a little more measured in his language, but individuals in the BDSM world have a lot more experience in how to express their ambivalence for kinks that don’t appeal to them. The vanilla world simply doesn’t get that training. Erotic responses are not critical or conscious or rational. Whether positive or negative, our responses are visceral and it takes more practice than I think the BDSM community is willing to admit to learn how to acknowledge someone else’s kinks while refusing to embrace the eroticism of them yourself. It’s a discipline we expect amongst practitioners, but to assume a vanilla person can instinctively produce that kind of measured reaction is silly. He went to a dungeon and felt dirty and sordid afterwards. Well, what’s odd about that? Mr. Dornan is not wired to like feeling dirty and sordid. His remarks about it reflect his vanilla wiring. He didn’t insult or denigrate the people he saw – he just expressed his reaction and his expectations revealed his ignorance of that environment. That’s no different than a layman who upchucks when witnessing a c-section. He was a tourist who does what tourists do: read their environment poorly and without the benefit of cultural context.

Why the filmmakers chose to cast someone who knew so little about a theme that was, at least superficially, central to the story might seem puzzling. It wasn’t as if he was a ‘name’ for the box-office. I’m fairly certain there were actors with a little more kink to their sexual personality who would have been more appropriate for the role IF a believable Dom vibe is what they were after.

Please note how I’ve bolded and capitalized that ‘if’.

I remind you to my earlier remark that there are two forms of eroticism in the narrative of Fifty Shades of Grey: there is the explicit BDSM eroticism and the implicit consumption fetish. Another reason why I believe the filmmakers cast Jamie Dornan is because they decided to lean on the second, far more accessible form of eroticism. And in that arena, Jamie Dornan is akin to a dungeon master. Long before he was cast for the role of Christian Grey, he’d modeled for Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Armani, Aquascutum, (I’m not going to list all of them. That’s MY squick.) He may know nothing at all about BDSM, but he knows about the erotics of conspicuous consumption. It’s practically in his bones. That’s why I suspect they chose to cast him.

Fifty Shades of Grey: A Film Review

[image error]Fifty Shades of Grey is the first mainstream film based on an ‘erotic novel’ in quite a while; the last one I can recall was The Secretary, loosely based on a short story with the same title by Mary Gaitskill, but I could be wrong.

There have been numerous recent art-house films considered to be erotic, like Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour), and Andrew Haigh’s Weekend but none of these, to my knowledge, were based on written prose. All are more explicit than Fifty Shades of Grey, and the last two mentioned are certainly, in my opinion, more erotic. But they are also not as accessible to mainstream movie-goers since both films focus on  same-sex couples. I admit to being bored to death by Nymphomaniac, but the opening sex scene of Von Trier’s Antichrist still sticks in my mind as one of the most explicitly erotic pieces of film I’ve ever seen. The rest of the movie was in need of a stricter editor, but that initial scene is raw,  feverish and terrifying, which is probably a telling clue as to my tastes.

Explicitness, it seems, is relative. There has been a great deal of television – True Blood, Spartacus, Deadwood, House of Cards, etc. – that is just as explicit as this movie, but those works don’t expressly promise to turn you on. Fifty Shades of Grey sells itself specifically as an erotic film.

First, I’d like to draw a distinction between erotic film and pornography because it helps to explain why it’s not the lack of explicitness that rendered Fifty Shades of Grey unerotic for me. I watch porn – I sometimes get myself off to porn – but I seldom consider it erotic.

Erotic narrative – filmed or textual – can be explicit, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t serve to remind our bodies that we’re mammals who seek pleasure in the vague and often failed hope of conforming to our biological imperative. It addresses our cultural mind and talks, not of sex, but of what we as humans have made of it: not urge, not drive, but desire. Eroticism is seldom about the pleasure felt or the orgasm; it’s about the desire to get there, all the cultural and personal detritus in which we wrap that pilgrimage, and the curious delusion from which we all suffer that there is some tremendous, epiphanic mystery that lies beyond that moment of pleasure.  We settle for less. We settle for the orgasm and the intimacy and the delusion fades, until the next time.

Much like watching animals fucking, porn works on my lizard brain. It works at a very uncritical, unthinking and physical level – it speaks to my muscles and my glands but not my mind. Porn that made attempts at narrative always put me off because it was invariably facile. People used to put narrative into porn as if they needed an excuse to show people fucking, but we’ve gotten past that. Now we just have video of people achieving orgasms in various ways. For me, porn is a bit like running the faucet in an attempt to encourage urination; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not as if we don’t remember how to pee theoretically, but the sound of that water running kind of bypasses the understanding part and nudges the bladder to take the jump.

Romance is about love – a cultural construction but no less powerful for that. It often has a sexual dimension, and this is undoubtedly true for Fifty Shades of Grey: the story of a young woman who falls in love with a very rich man whose sexual practices are – even if she is intrigued by the trappings – repugnant to her. So, essentially, Fifty Shades of Grey is, for all it’s superficial focus on sex, neither pornography, nor erotic film. It’s a love story. Some might consider it a very conservative sort of love story, because the main character (not in the movie, but by the third volume of the novel) trades the sexual relationship she would prefer for love. This is what women have done for thousands of years.

For anyone who has practiced BDSM, the book and the film are both rather offensive parodies. Like spies who watch espionage thrillers, or soldiers who watch war films, or doctors who view medical dramas, there is always a sense of the false depiction of their lived realities. Fifty Shades of Grey portrays a highly fictionalized and poorly researched approximation of BDSM. All the props (too many, in fact) and none of the soul. There is none of the visceral understanding that BDSM is not a game of sexual ‘Simon Says’ but an erotic experience that people go into very willingly, driven even, to ‘queer’* the biological imperative and revel in the ways that culture has embellished it.

There has always been dominance and submission in mammalian sex, BDSM unpacks it and examines it, dissects it and revels in the dichotomy of humans as animals and humans capable of making a conscious choice in the power dynamic. Similarly, there has always been pain and danger in the nature of biological sex; instead of trying to mitigate or overlook it, BDSM reveals it, gazes into it, glories in it. Semiotics – the many layers of meaning we ascribe to any given word, act, person or event – are central to BDSM, even when we don’t explicitly acknowledge them. The handcuffs, the crops, the floggers, the wooden spoons, the sterilized needles, the corsets, the gags are not tools without context. It is their historical and social semiotic baggage that makes them erotic. BDSM is an erotic defiance of allowing things, people and acts stay in their socially and historically ascribed places. That’s why it’s fundamentally obscene and immoral to whip a non-consenting individual and deeply erotic to whip your consenting submissive lover. It may appear sexist and unfeminist when a male is dominant and a female submissive, but consider that both parties have made a deliberate choice of positioning, in disobedience of what cultural norms are now or what they have been in the past. We didn’t have a choice. Now we do and we exercise the choice consciously. It is an intentional transgression, a defiance and sometimes a parody of the status quo.

What makes the trappings of BDSM in Fifty Shades of Grey so upsetting to practitioners is not just the absence in both the book and the film of any sense of BDSM’s complexity, but the knowledge that, for many people in the mainstream, this is their first encounter with something purporting to be BDSM. Sociologist Eva Illouz points out that erotic romance in general and Fifty Shades of Grey in particular is being consumed as a kind of dramatized, sexual self-help guide.

Fifty Shades of Grey serves up a heady cocktail of paradox. It glamourizes BDSM, adorns it with conspicuous consumption, bling, polish and muted lighting, while responsibility, agency and choice are hauntingly absent. Meanwhile, subtextually, BDSM is pathologized, criminalized: Christian Grey is into it because he was abused. The only other practitioner we even hear of is his first lover – a dominant, pedophilic woman who initiated him at the age of 15. So the message is: the sex is hot, the toys are expensive, and the only people who really enjoy this are sick. It’s not difficult to see why so many in the BDSM community are ambivalent about the book and the film. Much like EMTs who complain about the way film portrays CPR. Of course, if you performed CPR on film with veracity, you’d risk cracking someone’s ribs while boring the audience to death.  If the BDSM in Fifty Shades of Grey was performed with any level of veracity, there’d be a lot more sweat, snot, welts and screaming. It’s likely there’d be a few more obvious orgasms, too. I’m sure neither of the staring actors would be willing to expose themselves quite so thoroughly, even if those sorts of details had been in the book.

Personally, I’m not so concerned. Hollywood is constantly producing films where women are innocent victims with little or no agency – this is just another. It’s also constantly pumping out films where characters make monstrous compromises in order to be loved. I’m sure many filmgoers will return home after seeing the film and attempt a bit of tie-me-up-and-spank-me’, and most will survive it. A very few may find it immensely erotic and seek out more informed and detailed sources of information. It may lead to some undesired and upsetting bouts of rough sex, but so does going to a bar and by all accounts, so does attending many universities. It might even result in a few break-ups as partners find their tastes are incompatible. But, let’s be honest, anyone with even an inking of interest in BDSM may seek out far more explicit and harrowing videos on the net.

Fifty Shades of Grey is just not that important a film. Go see it. Just don’t expect to come away with a new lease on your sex life.

True to the book, the dialogue is pretty cringe-worthy. Jaimie Dornan came across as a joyless, humourless, self-important pedant. He reminded me of guys who tell you they’re ‘Doms’ but turn out to be bitter, mean, self-pitying and entitled little boys. But, in all fairness, that’s how Christian Grey is written in the novel. Dornan’s far, far sexier as a serial killer in the British series The Fall. However, I found Dakota Johnson much easier to stomach than her textual counterpart; she did the best she could with the lines she had and I found her smile rather contagious (even when I was trying hard to dislike her lip-sucking). She really does have a very erotic mouth. Finally, if director Sam Taylor-Johnson does a poor job of visualizing the eroticism of BDSM, she more than compensates for it by making helicopters, gliders, Audis and interior decor look sexy as hell. My guess is that she finds wealth a lot more erotic than kink. But then, so do most people.

Reflective postscript: 24 hours later, I forced myself to consider whether there was any teensy, weensy little bit of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie that turned me on. And yes, dear reader, there was: that short bit at the end, where he’s on her bare ass with a belt and she’s all teary and blubby? That bit turned me on a lot. Not nice, I know, but I’m kinky and film is not reality. Right at that point, I really wanted to be Christian Grey.

If you’ve seen the movie, I’d really like to know what you thought of it. If you’ve decided not to see it, I’d be interested in your reasons.

Recipe: Pad Thai

[image error]Here’s a pdf guide to making Pad Thai with Shrimp.

http://remittancegirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Pad-Thai.pdf

Right-click to save.

 

The Flesh Web

[image error]It’s just sex, I tell myself.

Again.

Just nature doing what it must, working its fossil finger between the tight layers of accreted me and crooking a digit at him. The Helen Keller of my desire is oblivious to the futility of the coupling; she’d breed me until my womb prolapsed. She wants and wants, careless of the impossibility of the task.

So, why the excess? Why the twinge of the heart? Why the sense of brimming? Why does the back of his neck make me cry? Why do I feel a foot taller and so much more worthy of walking this earth when I curl my hand around his cock and feel it already hard, already the underskin of veins ripple across my fingertips.

Here, beneath this teetering pile of meaning, of all the things he is to me, I cower and bristle and strut, part bitch in heat and part ministering angel. Horrified at my bludgeoning appetite and hypnotized by the grave absurdities with which I have somehow, without even knowing, adorned it.

I don’t know how not to want him, and so I fabricate the reasons I should, weave a cloak of it, and call it love.

I Am Charlie, Uncomfortably: The Price of Free Discourse

[image error]

Offensive? Yes, of course it is. Your choice is to dismiss it, disagree with it, or sanction the execution the cartoonist.

“To hold a pen is to be at war.”  Voltaire

In the wake of the murder of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo Magazine offices, there has been shock, mourning and much passionate debate. It is sad that it takes the assassination of a group of French satirical cartoonists to prompt a serious discussion of what constitutes freedom of expression and where the limits of cultural offense might be located.

The most difficult part of defending freedom of expression is that it requires that you take a stand with people whose ideas are offensive to you. Much Charlie Hebdo’s satire took aim at the hypocrisy, intransigence and parsimony of the religious groups that make up French society. I, and many people, found the cartoons produced by Charlie Hebdo offensive; they were often racist, homophobic, sexist and concertedly insulting to Muslims, Jews, and Catholics, using exaggerated visual stereotypes to get their point across. I can’t defend the content or the artistic merit of much of Charlie Hebdo’s work, but many people would equally refuse to defend the content or the artistic merit of what I write.

That’s the thing about freedom of expression: the worth of any particular act of expression is always going to be subjective, but the freedom to express it is not.

If you’re puzzled as to why so many French people have taken to the streets holding up pencils in solidarity with the executed cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, it’s not because they all were fans of the content of those cartoons. It’s because the French have historically been staunch defenders of free expression. They believe the fabric of their society depends on it. The same principles that ensured the publication of the works of the Marquis de Sade, Guillaume Appolinaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Bataille, Anais Nin, and the most famous ‘obscene’ works over the centuries ensured the legal publication of the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. This isn’t to say the French are perfect. They also banned the wearing of Niqabs (full face covers). Which, to me, is also a freedom of expression issue. However, it is worth remembering that much of our understanding of what a liberal society is comes from French philosophy.

It is apparent that there are many people out there who cannot conceptually distinguish between the defense of free expression and the content of what is being defended. This is a serious intellectual deficit.

@remittancegirl welp then we disagree. and I am absolutely saddened you choose to defend racism, homophobia, and anti-semitism.

— Kitty Stryker (@kittystryker) January 8, 2015

Yesterday, I was publically accused of defending “racism, homophobia and anti-semitism” by Kitty Stryker, who calls herself a pornographer and airs her views on Huffpo. She later went on to write a long blog on the topic, attempting to explain why some free expression is okay, but not the free expression of opinions she finds offensive. But what is more, she believes that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were responsible for inciting acts of violence against religious minorities and bringing about their own tragedy. Similarly, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League stated that the editor of Charlie Hebdo was personally responsible for the death of the magazine’s employees because of the religious offense the cartoons inspired. Yes, in essence, both of them imply that Charlie Hebdo was ‘asking for it’. I will leave spotting the similarity of this to other preposterous illogical statements up to you.

They are both representative of a growing anti-liberal, anti-rational movement that, essentially, excuses acts of violence brought about by feelings of offense. They demand tolerance for their views while being intolerant of the views of others and they find no incongruity in this. Ms Styker demands tolerance for her pornography while denying it to Charlie Hebdo’s satire. When missionaries of Mr. Donohue’s faith are slaughtered in Nigeria, they’re martyred innocents, but when gunmen assassinate cartoonists, they were ‘asking for it’.

A civil society requires that people understand the difference between an act of expression and a physical deed. People may say, write or draw things that you find offensive and, in a free society, you get to say, write or draw offensive things back. Language and images are symbolic acts, not physical ones. This is the basis of civil – yes, civil – discourse: the trading of symbolic expression, whether ideas or insults.

No civil society should tolerate, excuse or defend a physically violent response to an act of symbolic offense.

What people like Kitty Stryker, Bill Donohue and many so called ‘activists’ have in common is their apology for people who allow their emotions to overcome their rational thought and vent their anger in ways that go beyond the symbolic. Unless, of course, they are themselves the victims of that violent response.

To a man who has been the victim of abuse as a child at the hands of a priest, watching someone in a cassock walk down the street may be offensive. To a Palestinian, a man wearing ultra-orthodox Jewish garb may be offensive. To a feminist, a group of Muslim women covered in burkhas might be offensive. To someone with strong views on the sanctity of sex within marriage, pornography may be offensive. They all have the right to complain, to write, to draw, to express their displeasure or disgust in symbolic ways. What they don’t have a right to do is shoot the people who offended them.

In the last few decades, with talk radio, reality TV, tabloid journalism, political speech and Hollywood movies, we have consistently witnessed the rise of the valorization of emotion over reason. There is a constant narrative of insulted people who ‘just can’t take any more’ and act out their rage. Meanwhile, we are constantly encouraged to feel what we feel, say what we want to say, free ourselves from social restraint.  Moreover, at every level of society, we are encouraged to see ourselves as the most important person, put our needs before others, serve our own interests.

For me, it comes down to this: no words, no pictures, no ideas, no matter how offensive gives a person the right to act violently. No symbolic attack on an ideology or religion excuses a physical act in response. We are individually, ultimately responsible for governing our behaviour and limiting it to the symbolic realm.

We need the Charlie Hebdos of the world; in the same way we need Pythagoras, Galileo, pornographers, the Pope and Voltaire. And we each of us have the right to ignore or dismiss or contradict any of them. We need them all because there is no really free discourse without all of them, because anyone empowered to limit that discourse is on the road to totalitarianism.

So yes, reluctantly, I am Charlie. Because the consequences of not being Charlie are dire.