Week 7 (22)
Clitoral
gratitude.
Saturday, 10:17
To anyone who voted in the January Silver Clitoris award, thanks; to anyone who voted for me, extra super double thanks. There was, somehow, a menage, a three-way tie, in fact: three Clitorides to be awarded: “Topped,” by Katherine T.; “Empirical Research,” by Wiseguy; and As Falls Cuyahoga, So Falls Cuyahoga Falls—all named Best Story of January, 2002.
Now. Go read some stuff and start nominating the best for the February Silver Clit, already.
See that colored block up and over there to the right margin? That’s a link to this specific entry in the archives. Each entry has one. It’s there in case, you know, you wanted to link to something specific that I said. So you could use it, if you wanted to. (Hey. You never know. It might happen.)
Perhaps it’s the sound I’m making, rubbing my feet after a semi-productive day wearing out my shoeleather: an interview here, an invoice there, a tax bill over yonder (it seems you don’t have to become a tax-hating Republican when you buy a house. There’s no by-law or anything). Waiting for the Spouse to call so I can start dinner. Sucking down a cheap Portuguese red that’s not too terribly dry but full enough of body. —But really, it’s the best I could come up with as a title for talking about the Fish Tank. Glub glub.
One might on a breezy pass through alt.sex.stories.d mistake it for a chapter meeting of any small, marginalized group: paralyzed by bizarre infighting no one can follow without a program; long-winded inside jokes elasticized far beyond their breaking point; trolls gleefully leaping on hot buttons and the hot buttoned scrambling over themselves to feed the trolls. But: look for the words “Fish Tank” in the subject line (or visit the web archive of these discussions), and you’ll find something astonishing: calm, reasoned, intelligent, helpful, constructive discussions of stories. About sex.
(Can Usenet groups be penalized for abiding by their charters? —We might want to investigate this further.)
The Fish Tank is the creation of Desdmona, with a simple mandate: a story, unpolished, is presented. The author has to keep mum for a week as anyone who wants to says what they want to about it, as long as they keep to the spirit if not the strict letter of The Law: two positive comments, two negative comments, and try not to repeat what someone else has already said.
—Basic writers’ group protocol, except most writers’ groups don’t guarantee positives. But one’s skin is perversely thinner on the internet, where body language and tone of voice can’t leaven harsh words, and cold cuts are preserved in text to come back and haunt you again, and again, and again . . . Still. Thanks to Desdemona’s dilligence, and the overall goodwill of a bunch of rank pornographers, the Fish Tank’s going on its twenty-eighth week, give or take, and building a core of supportive critics, close readers, better writers, and good porn.
So: glub glub. Come on in; the water’s fine.
Again
with the Salon.
Wednesday, 09:57
Of course, today’s cover story is much less cuddly and comfortable and much colder and scarier than machines that screw. —Ah, one more perversion of justice, decency and privacy that we can lay at Ken Starr’s feet. Thanks ever so fucking much. (Remember those bumper stickers about how it only took one nuclear bomb to really ruin your day? I think we need a new one, about overly zealous prosecutors run amok.)
Return
of the Fucking Machines.
Wednesday, 09:43
In yesterday’s Salon, Katherine Mieszkowski had an excellent take on Fuckingmachines.com, which sharp-eyed readers might remember Ray Glass rather lacklusterly covered a while back at the Spectator. Mieszkowski offers an excellent overview of the bigger picture, and an amused and amusing take on some of the erotic vectors that intersect hereabouts, as well as commentary from Carol Queen and Susie Bright (plus, news of the impending Buttmachineboys.com—hurray for equal opportunity!). —Of course, Glass’s piece had photos. You decide.
Debra has a) some further valuable insight into the teacup tempest over Taylor’s article on “American Porn,” the sort of grounded factual basis that naïve but passionate young idealists like yours truly really appreciate; b) said some blushingly nice things about me, and c) a great idea: “I Fist!” buttons. (Perhaps: “I Fist! And I Vote!”) (Myself, I was thinking of jokes involving snazzy kitchen faucets: “Do you like Pfister?” “Why, I don’t know. I’ve never—” Ahem. Her way is funnier, and more succinct. —Or, perhaps a theme song, based on the old Dr. Pepper jingle—)
Also: another good piece on “American Porn,” this one unmarred by bewildering calls for prosecution. (Thanks, Daze Reader.)
And: Jane’s Guide just said some very nice things about Ruthie’s Club, which I do design work and typesetting for. “...laid out to be easy on the eyes.” Why, thanks for noticing. (Pardon me while I preen.)
And I do find it amusing that of the banner ads I rotate through for Clix (the silly I’m-more-popular-than-God-and-I’ve-got-the-numbers-to-prove-it webrating system for journals and blogs that is, trust me, more fun than it seems), it’s this one that generates far and away the most click-throughs.
There would be more, but I started cleaning my office and most of it is on the floor right now. But I did find my birth certificate—and unlike Heather, who found hers in a shoe, I’d been keeping mine in a file folder. (Full of IRS booklets from 1999, but hey: nobody’s perfect.)
It
remains to be seen.
Monday, 02:18
So. Frontline. Charles Taylor over at Salon went and made a lot of the points I was thinking of making, most notably the “who is this news to?” point, and the “how neatly it distances us” point (think, for a moment, of the 12 people in a jury that rules a film obscene, as violating community standards of decency, and ask yourself, and be honest, now: how many of those people have—alone, or with someone, a friend or a lover, at home, in the dark, slipping naughtily into a shop through the side door, not in a public courtroom, under the glare of the lights and the DA’s stern gaze and the judgement of 11 of their peers—how many of them do you think have sought out something just like it, or “worse”?)—but we part company on something significant, on, I think, one of the hinges of the whole Frontline piece, so go read what he has to say or at least skim it and get the talking points and come back; it’ll save me a lot of time and effort in rhetorical build-up. Okay?
Okay.
Check this: hitting someone with their consent is a crime. According to Charles Taylor.
Can we back up a moment?
This is, of course, referring to the infamous rape-torture-and-murder video being shot by Rob Black and Lizzie Borden of Extreme Associates—the scene that was so extreme that the Frontline crew walked out on it. What did we see of the scenario before they wigged? A woman with car trouble; a couple of skeevey guys in a van pulling over; her being dragged into the van; her being dragged from the van into a standard-issue graffiti-scrawled room; thrown against the wall. We heard some shrieks. The Frontline crew then leaves (shot in grainy black-and-white 60 Minutes “secret camera” style, so we know it’s beyond the pale). We haven’t seen anything we couldn’t see on Up All Night or an episode of Walker: Texas Ranger.
Nonetheless, Taylor is ready to prosecute Black and Borden—not for obscenity, but for assault. He doesn’t even mention the most controversial aspect of the scene (to me, at least): the actor playing the damsel in distress knows she will be hit, but is not aware of how far it will go. It’s unclear if she knows she doesn’t know, or if Black and Borden are pulling an especially dirty trick; the actor, says Borden, is a good friend; she’s strong; she can take it; they’ll go out shopping afterwards. In other words, there’s a very real question as to just how consensual this really is. —But that doesn’t matter to Taylor; even if it’s fully consensual, “a distinction needs to be made... We’re not talking about S/M here. We’re talking about a beating that, consensual or not, is a crime.”
(One wonders, uncharitably, perhaps, if Taylor is aware of a number of things, ranging from the nature of some S&M sceneplay to the legal definition of assault to the staging of fight scenes in many action-adventure movies, in which people are beaten under controlled circumstances pretty much every day.)
Once again, let me stress: we don’t know. Black and Borden could have been pulling a Blair Witch on their good friend. Get her in a little over her head, but under controlled circumstances, to get that extra frisson of verisimilitude on tape. Or they could have been pulling an unbelievably sleazy stunt that, yes, borders on assault. Or it could be somewhere in the large and muzzy grey area in between. We could be talking about smacks and pulled punches to the gut, the sort of thing stuntfolks have to deal with regularly; we could be talking about, I dunno, broken bones or knocked-out teeth. We don’t know.
You know why we don’t know?
“It was too much for the show’s producers, who left in the middle of taping the shoot (and you can hardly blame them),” says Taylor. —Bullshit, says I. I can most certainly blame them, and will. They abdicated their basic journalistic duty by walking out, and they compounded their crime by presenting the aborted scene with all the sledgehammer subtlety of Stone Phillips at his sleaziest. (Any respect I might have had for Frontline would have been demolished by this.)
—If it had been too much for them, why didn’t they follow up? Why didn’t they contact the actor afterwards? Hey, that looked pretty rough, what do you have to say about it? Or if she wouldn’t talk for whatever reason, why didn’t they say something about that?
They weren’t interested. They already had their point of view. They already knew what they wanted to get out of it. And hey, it worked: Taylor was certainly snookered.
(We see her, later in the broadcast, in the “porn bootcamp” segment; she’s identified as the actor from the Extreme Associates video. It’s unclear whether this later segment was shot before or after the rape-torture-murder tape, but it nonetheless makes it clear: they really weren’t interested in anything she might have to say about how the experience affected her, personally, about why she might have done it, and whether she thought it was okay, or going too far; she doesn’t matter. She’s just a porn star, after all.)
People have violent sexual fantasies. People like acting them out, and seeing them acted out. People have the right to express themselves this way, and the right to enjoy these expressions. If the actor knew she might be getting in over her head; if she consented nonetheless; if Black and Borden knew what they were doing—and we have seen nothing to indicate they did not—then there is no problem here. No crime. Nothing went wrong. Period.
But all that remains to be seen.
—Beyond that: Christ. I had no idea the first obscenity case to be brought up in Los Angeles County in, like, eight years hinged on fisting. That’s—that’s almost as funny as the curtains around the Spirit of Justice. If I lived in Los Angeles, I’d start making some noise about where my tax dollars were going...
Singing
for sharks.
Sunday, 11:56
Oh, there’s stuff to say, about this and that and the other, and I’ve seen the Frontline and was not impressed, and I’ll have something to say on that if and when I get around to it, but first there’s Ruthie to tweak and stories to write and an essay and an introduction and there’s this pesky life that needs leading and, well, I’m in a hurry. So I’ll leave you with this story from Ananova about Barry White serenading some lovelorn dogfish, starry smooth hounds and tope, and this one about two people I feel I vaguely know but who don’t know me at all, in the peculiar manner of hanging out at cocktail parties and eavesdropping on everyone else’s conversations while not really saying much of anything yourself that the internet tends to foster (and it was written by this other guy whose work I’ve appreciated, too, but I stumbled over him because of one of the aforementioned other two, so it doesn’t really count), and I’ll even throw in this gallery of porn pictures with the people removed, which is really quite creepily fascinating, and utterly safe for work.
nicholas urfé
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