what the military needs: more porn

i can get the snark tone coming from archpundit. what's porn compared to a frakked up politically motivated war? i get it.

but...is it such a bad idea to protest more porn in the military?
i mean, considering the military's already frakked up record with sexual violence against women (both within their ranks and outside of them), is this really a bad idea? i don't think we should pooh pooh it.

of course, there's the question of whether porn contributes to an environment of misogyny and sexual violence? well, it doesn't necessarily encourage the porneur (my word: porneur - one who reads or watches porn) to see women in ways other than a wet pink hole in the service of masculine power and sexuality, so i'd say yes - porn contributes to misogyny and sexual violence.

and, of course, one needs to ask if porn, misogyny and sexual violence is less important than war?

well, if you're a woman in the military, already keeping your head down from all the sexual harrassment and covered up rapes going on, and you're surrounded by all these guys reading hard core porn - or if you're an iraqi girl just minding your own 14-year old business surrounded by a bunch of drunk, angry soldiers reading porn that strongly suggests there's nothing better to solidify male bonding than a gang bang of a barely legal hot chick - then i'd say that you would find the situation pretty damn important.

historically, where soldiers are so exists rape, porn and/or a sex industry where women's individual or collective empowerment has never been the object. in the crimean war and as the british empire spread and british soldiers were stationed in far off 'exotic' colonies, so proliferated the creation, sale and dissemination of pornographic postcards, pamphlets, stories and pictures that reinforced the notion of british masculine hegemony and the racially marked 'whoredom' on the part of those colonized which offered an excuse to the occupying military for raping 'native' women; the existence of forced prostitution and camp bordellos for german officers, soldiers and collaborators during world war 2; japan's use of 'comfort women' and the enslavement of asian women for forced prostitution, also during world war 2; and during the vietnam war it was estimated that 400,000 prostituted women in thailand were procured for american soldiers on leave, as well as the now confirmed stories of american soldiers raping civilian women. more recently, the stories of soldiers raping civilian women during the serbian/croatian conflict, the ensuing trafficking from that conflict or even the current events in darfur as woman are raped by rebel soldiers?

what's porn compared to war? for women who are unfortunate to get caught in a male fantasy of control via sexual power over a woman's body, porn is war.

this is offensive, tom ford

in a move that demonstrates that being an A-gay does not automatically translate into being a feminist, tom ford's latest ad for his men's cologne hammers that point home:

you know. just in case you didn't get it the first time:

[thanks, Feministing!]

pr0n preachers and dirty old men on buses

just think of the special homily he could give on pr0n sunday in october!

Man of the Flesh to Man of the Cloth - New York Times
...
i had to report a CTA bus driver today. after waiting for a bus that would take me back to my office i got on the #10, which had been slow coming up State street because of all the traffic and construction nonsense. between my stop on State/Randolph and my office, the bus driver had engaged in behavior so completely inappropriate i had to call the CTA: talking on his cell phone for the whole ride, being sexually lewd and suggestive to two african american girls on the bus and being so incredibly rude to the tourist passengers the rest of us took pity on them and tried to help them out.

was this some new CTA record? he was rude to 6 different people in under 10 minutes over the course of 3 bus stops.

but what really got me was the way he talked to the two young women. when they asked him if he stopped by water tower, not only did he ignore their question, he gave them that long, dirty look that older black guys so love to give a black girl and said very loudly to her, 'Unh, girl, just stand there! Come here and stand by me so I can look at you!' he said it twice: "Come here! Just stand here! Stand here!" then, when the tall girl turned away in disgust after not getting her question answered, he yelled down the aisle that she knew she was fine and she needed to come stand next to him.

yeah, dude, because that's what cute young 20-something girls are made for - to stand next to your nasty ass while you don't do your job.

i mentally made a note of the bus and route number so that when i got back to the office i could call CTA customer service immediately. after being on hold for 10 minutes i calmly described the incident, described the driver and gave the dispatcher my name and phone number. then i said to her: 'you know, he was unprofessional all over the place but as an african american women i was especially offended. no one should talk to black women like that. do you know what i mean?'

she said, 'ma'am, i'm african american, too, and you're right. i know exactly what you mean.'

here's to hoping some nasty old man gets fired today.

horror, torture and misogyny! all mixed in together.

like a disgusting stew.

Jill Soloway: Remove the Rating for Captivity - Living Now on The Huffington Post

goodness knows i'm a fan of a certain kind of horror film.
self-referential horror that makes fun of itself while it scares me? check.
well-written old school ghost stories, vampires, haunted houses, monster flicks, scary cemetaries? i'm all for. (like, The Haunting, The Changeling, Ghost Story, Scream, and even The Exorcist because it was creepy as all hell.)

but there's a certain kind of film i can't stomach anymore: the Saws, the Hostels, the Turistas. all of them. can't. take it. the torture, the eroticized killing, the elaborate fetishistic murder just skeeves me out and makes me hurt the way looking at porn now makes me hurt.

just lately, i've been watching the quick tv ads for Captivity and it turns my stomach: stalker capturing a woman and some guy and torturing the hell out of her. this is entertainment? this is what we need to see to get our rocks off now? woman-hating death porn.

gross.

and, if you read solloway's column, you'll see the grossness isn't an accident. it's done on purpose; it's a thoughtful kind of 'accident'; the misogyny is how the film will succeed. it's built into the marketing and business plan. sick, really. and if you read here, you'll see that the disgusting dude who created it is counting on our shock and repulsion to drive more people to the film.

well, i don't want to drive folks to see the film. i want the film to disappear. so we're thinking about that at the office - how exactly to make it disappear.

i mean, if the fundamentalists can make a regular old movie about evolution disappear, can't we make a piece of woman-hating crap just fizzle out of existence?

[read about it at feministing and it's been bothering me all day.]

coming to a seminary near you: the pr0n elephant

Feministing has a riotous post about the big blue porn elephant that's making the church rounds as a way to educate congregations about our christian (i.e., hidden) porn addiction.

heh.

mark your calendars, folks. october 7 is porn sunday.

(and, hey. i got rid of my pr0n, thank you very much. it made me sad.)

two down: Boy Gone Wild Joe Francis Cries

oh, how sweet it is when a disgusting piece of exploiting trash gets a comeuppance.

how many more to go?

oh, ick: when the money shot is a little too...money

In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real - New York Times

gick.
there are so many things wrong with this article, i can't even begin to list them. but the biggest is that it assumes we should care that the porn industry (enough with the antiseptic 'adult industry' moniker) is wringing its hands because we can see all the razor burn and augmentation during the money shots. um, no.

what's fascinating and appalling about this piece is the way it accepts at face value the female sexbot ideology of the industry and turns it into a matter of business practice. while sony shies away from the porn industry and distribution the pornographers tsk and say "it is shortsighted of Sony to snub them, given how pornography helps technologies spread." well, pornography helps other things spread, as well.

remember the guy who created Girls Gone Wild? the men who, over the summer, killed those girls in two school shooting sprees (remember the amish school shooting)? i don't think it's too extreme of me to say that the female sexbot ideology that porn transmits created these men and influenced their acts. i don't think it's too far afield of me to say that porn, more than just exploiting women's bodies (and that's too simplistic an argument to make against porn because of the participation of women in the industry, i think), makes it possible for our culture to see women merely as receptacles, objects, holes and mouths and wet pink things. it dehumanizes us. it desensitizes us.

(if you've seen any porn for any length of time, you know what i mean. and, yes, i've seen porn.)

and so here's this article, taking dehumanization one step further and making it part of an industry's strategic business plan, deflecting our gaze from what porn actually IS to see it as just another circus of smoke and mirrors (like Hollywood, the article implies.)

so, thanks, new york times.
you've just given the cleanest patriarchy blow job ever.

the title's sardonic...

KtB - Bible Porn

not that this is exactly the same thing, but i used to do the same thing: in sunday services when jake was preaching, i'd open the bible and find the 'naughty' stories. it looked like i was being studious, but i was reading for naughtiness.

i was 10. i was curious. and if you can't giggle at the song of solomon, then what can you?!