A Study in Contrasts and Other Lame Blog Post Titles
It’s true that The Books’ new album is pretty fascinating . Like in “Cold Freezing Night”, my favourite track off the disc, The Books have become experts at weaving strange, catchy soundscapes of ‘found poetry’ and music.
And the new Lali Puna album isn’t bad either. I guess it’s pretty standard as indietronica goes, but it’s pleasant, and the kind of thing well-suited to late-night listening now that the weather will soon get colder.
But what does it mean, as white hairs sprout sporadically in my beard, that this is the sort of song I find myself listening to most?
(Hint: It’s “Dark Clouds” by Sarah Harmer, off the unabashedly poppy Oh Little Fire).
(Hint #2: The Books’ label, Temporary Residence, houses all kinds of great acts, including the now defunct Sonna, who are one of my favourite bands ever.)
Checking In to Check Yourself Out
It is difficult not to occasionally smile a bit wryly when people take to Twitter to decry the ‘inanity’ and ‘narcissism’ of location app Foursquare. Like Twitter before it, a brief description of the service—that it “combines social networking and games to allows users to document, share and earn rewards and badges for publicizing their whereabouts—seems a bit baffling, particularly if one already feels that social networking encourages a bit too much self-concern.
Still, also like Twitter, Foursquare can be unexpectedly interesting, particularly in its capacity to create a ongoing narrative of sorts about an individual’s doings. It is quite easy to look back upon one’s list of ‘check-ins’ and recall that evening you saw an amazing band or that date that went surprisingly well. As I’ve argued repeatedly about Twitter, by centralising and publishing a person’s activity at a virtual ‘place’, Foursquare produces a personalised text of what you’ve been up to.
Yet, as someone once asked me on Twitter when discussing the service, why can’t you simply write where you’ve gone in a diary? What’s more, why must you create a record of where you are and where you have been it all?
The question sounds very similar to the classic Twitter criticism: “why would I care what some random person is having for lunch?”. And like that question (both misguided and inaccurate as it is), the response has something to do with not only the ambient social awareness fostered by real-time social networking, but also the difference between writing something privately and writing something publicly.
When we publicize actions, there is obviously a desire for something that is not met by private writing. It’s a call out to something and for something: for recognition, for engagement and for legitimacy. To write publicly is to write oneself into the social, to stitch oneself into the shared exterior space we call the common.
So checking in on Foursquare is many things: beyond the gaming aspect (in which, when you check-in somewhere more than anyone else over 60 days, you are awarded the title ‘Mayor’, which can carry real rewards), it also is act of deliberately making yourself public in order to see yourself there. To wit, you check in so you can check yourself out, making yourself into a kind of public persona or representation.
Frequently, this act is positioned as a weakness of sorts – that you only need the recognition and legitimacy conferred by the public space if you are somehow lacking. But hovering on the fringes of the accusation is an an act of forgetting caused by privilege. If you, through whatever collection of cultural and social capital, have never had to question your status as a legitimate member of society, it is easy to forget that this legitimacy often stems from being able to see oneself reflected in the public sphere. Given that not everyone gets to check that, yes, ‘the President’s hair is just like mine’, rather than just narcissism, to write oneself publicly can also be an ongoing project in which we make ourselves real to ourselves my creating a public image of ourselves.
To make oneself real, however, is not only to make oneself public – it is to make oneself public in a manner both recognised and affirmed by current social standards. You insert yourself into a network of legitimacy by performing ‘correctly’, and interestingly enough, when it comes to contemporary phenomena like Twitter and Foursquare, use of the network itself as well as one’s activity on it confers a kind of cultural capital.
So a Foursquare profile is an expression of desire, not only for connection, but also, in its own small way, but for the solidity of autobiography (and thus, we return to Mr. Penumbra).
This is only one aspect of Foursquare. After all, another trait is that it’s (apparently) a good way to meet people. But by constructing ‘checking in’ as an act of writing, it helps lay bare the mutually constitutive nature of the public and private in the self. What is inalienably and inextricably inside – i.e. subjectivity – is built from the ‘outside’ of the public space. To write oneself there is to make oneself real both in it and through it according to its rules. You are sutured into the public space by both constructing yourself in its image, but also seeing oneself presented there – and the strange tension between the joyous relief of affirmation and coercive fear of conformity never disappears.
So, the next question to consider then: what happens to both writing and the self when utterances are not, as 20th century linguists discovered only social – but persistently public too?
Twitter, My Peg Leg
A while ago, I was walking home at around midnight. Across the road, a woman was also walking, perhaps a few steps behind me. I had to cross the street to get to my apartment and, despite normally avoiding walking straight into someone’s path, I just couldn’t avoid coming rather close to my fellow late-night perambulator – maybe about 3 or 4 meters. She looked up, stopped, and turned the other way.
I was, though totally sympathetic, a bit wigged out by it. So naturally, I twittered the experience.
Though it was something that someone with my personality would have usually ruminated on for a while, by ‘putting it out there’, that slightly manic mental activity that I might usually go through disappeared quite quickly. Cleansed by Twitter, I guess.
It was Lisan Jutras’s great recent column in the Globe that got me thinking about this again. In it, Jutras outlines that thing that we all do – confess online:
This wasn’t the first time I’d felt the need to go public with some personal shame, and where better than the Internet? When I found myself weeping at everything on Glee one day, with neither alcohol nor hormones to blame, I tweeted it, not without misgivings.
“Happens to the best of us,” someone tweeted back. It was nice to hear: a little absolution. But – bonus – the solace goes both ways. I’ve read touching things about friends’ “bad” taste in movies and music that have warmed me to them. I’ve read soul-searching revelations about mental health, love lives, family. It’s always comforting to discover you’re not the first person to have doubts, weaknesses or problems of a specific shape.
[...]
Tweeting can make you feel closer to someone, less alone. If someone is put off by your disclosure, you don’t have to risk seeing their discomfited facial expression, or hear them say, “Ew, really?” You may notice you’ve dropped a follower, but you don’t have to know who.
There’s something interesting here. In a sense, the web is functioning as what I’m starting to call social prosthesis (Many have used the phrase, but I came it across it from Bill Buxton).
Like comparing an artificial leg to a flesh and bone one, it’s missing some obvious benefits: feeling, for one, not to mention the immediacy of being connected to the body and being around other bodies. Lacking both the immanence of a face-to-face interaction, its intimate one-to-oneness, online social interaction can be distanced and strangely textual – as if you were acting out a play in which you were the main character.
But, as Jutras describes, you also cathartically purge particular emotions by making them public. Inscribing oneself in the public sphere – and then receiving absolution in the form of sympathy or empathy – is like the online version of getting a reassuring hug from someone. What’s more, it’s precisely the image of oneself (exterior, looked-at) that produces shame – so why not Twitter it to get rid of it?
[Half-assed theory: "web 2.0" functions in part through and because of the desire to write oneself into the social fabric (to inscribe oneself as text into the public text-ile?). Foursquare, Last.fm, Foodspotting, Yelp, Flickr - they all share this in common. The description of this trend as narcissism - which stems from the desire to see only oneself reflected - is, I think, a mistake, as it misses the exterior constitution of our 'inside selves'. Publicising your activity is a way of not only making it concrete through a form of writing, it is a way of connecting individual action with the social.]
But if something like Twitter as a social prosthetic has its limits – the reduction of the self to a ‘corrupted, lesser image’ – like more advanced prosthetics, the web as social prosthesis can also be superior in some ways. As I once said, the online self is “not touched with the same extravagances or the same tortuous, bodily limitations – of cheeks that blush too quickly, or a mouth that moves a hair faster than the brain”. To engage with others online is to be social through (and not just as) an online representation of oneself – one that, while created by you, is not and can not be entirely you.
So, there’s another type of prosthetic here too that, rather than subbing in for some aspect of sociality, is instead producing a substitute version of experiencing selfhood. It’s the online persona or avatar as a prosthetic for subjectivity.
The prosthetic limb is one attached to regain function. It’s utilitarian. If one could one run with a flesh leg, it is replaced with a prosthetic limb so one can do the same. Similarly, if one cannot in a bodily, social way – i.e. sitting at a bar – engage in heated, controversial discussion, talk about touchy subjects, flirt, be funny, whatever – one turns to the avatar to perform these tasks in a still-social, if differently framed, environment.
This, I think, is where the warning bells about “using the web as a substitute for real life” go off. But key here is that one performs these things ‘prosthetically’ in order to reconfigure the bodily self – i.e. “the real self” (In 2010, I still feel comfortable prioritising the bodily self over its projection). To put it another way, the ‘outsourced’, prosthetic subjectivity is a way of testing out things online that one can then do in real life. Like the social prosthetic, is a way of inscribing a new vision of oneself ‘out there’, which also redefines the vision of oneself out here. But unlike the social, the subjective prosthesis is not an object – a text or image – but a process and experience. (Those distinctions can be broken down – but all in good time).
I think this is why I am constantly talking about the temporal aspect of the web: these interactions that take place in text carry some of the temporal demands of face-to-face interaction. But that slight delay is, in a very practical, basic way, a chance to gather oneself. It’s a cushion. You have a minute to gather your thoughts – so you test out how to express controversial beliefs politely. And next time you’re at a bar or a party…
Of course, the important question is that if one’s Twitter stream is the peg leg – then what part of online life is the parrot?
A Random, Stupid Thought About The Attention Economy
A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing sitarist Irshad Khan play at Harbourfront.
Like all Indian classical musicians, Khan has spent his entire life practising and playing his instrument – and it showed. His capacity to produce a sweeping range of emotions, moods and tempos was pretty amazing. Also like many Indian musicians, he would often lose himself in the moment, swaying his head and exclaiming out loud.
And occasionally, between refrains of incredible complexity, many of which he was improvising on the spot, he would lean in towards the microphone and say to some audience member “please, no photos”.
Then, as if there was no break, he would resume his intricate playing.
I have a couple of theories of why this stark difference from Western classical exists. They mostly have to do with the musical performance as an event produced within a pre-existing social space – like how famed bansuri player Hariprasad Chaurasia plays down at Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh on summer mornings, while people jog past or do yoga or go for a stroll.
More generally, it just feels like it’s a different way of thinking about intense mental work and ‘distraction’. Is the discussion around attention and focus constrained by a (Western) emphasis on solitude and the kind of focus and interiority it could bring? This was the crux of Sven Birkert’s The Gutenberg Elegies, right?
So, are we ignoring the cross-cultural dimensions of attention, and instead focusing only on the historical?
Bonus: I couldn’t write this and now not post some Hariprasad Chaurasia vids. That would be cruel! He’s my favourite classical Indian musician. The first one is the more traditional raga, long and in-depth; the second is a shorter, more accessible piece.
Unboxing Unboxing
I have always wanted unboxing to get more attention than it does. It’s not just the fetishization of the object that seems so intriguing to me, but also what almost amounts to an unexpected rebirth of the object’s ‘aura’.
Thankfully, my pal Greg J. Smith, who writes the great Serial Consign, has tackled the subject. Rather than the glib Russell Smith-esque treatment (sorry, Matt!), in this great post, he gives it a more subtle, careful look.
The post has some great videos, including artistic takes on unboxing, that make it well worth the read, particularly because it also thinks about unboxing’s partner, the teardown (which it seems is a different sort of fetishisation dedicated to deymstifying the ‘aura’ of devices like the iPhone).
There is still lots of things to think about too. The public nature of unboxing feels key; why is there this performance for other people? Is it conspicuous consumption. Or, is it related to what Greg astutely points to as the quasi-religious nature of the reverence involved? Is there some shared sense of awe in the fetishization of the objects in play? (It has to be objects in the plural too, right? It’s not just the thing in the box. It’s the box itself, the packaging, the manual etc.)
Anyway, I would write on this more but I just connected Walter Ong, Descartes and #hashtags while on the bus a couple of hours ago, so I’m gonna’ put my rather limited brain capacity toward that right now…
Writing on Film
This may be nothing at all, but I feel like I’m noticing a trend: Film is suddenly being infiltrated by text.
I saw this first in Zombieland, in which rules were written on the screen as the film proceeded. This you can see above.
Second, I saw this in the new BBC series Sherlock. In one of the opening scenes, when a group of people all receive the same text message, we see that text appear above each person’s phone.
And third, as half of Toronto knows, overlayed text forms part of the film itself in Scott Pilgrim, a movie that obviously draws from its ‘video game-inspired comic’ roots.
So, is the obvious conclusion too obvious? That screens, now the cultural home of both moving pictures and text, cannot help but show both at the same time?
“Like Walking Through Cobwebs”
Today on Twitter, a couple of people I follow had a brief conversation about polyamory. It was intriguing, in part because it was tinged with the ambivalence that can often characterize some aspects of modern feminism. Like the relationship towards traditional ideals of femininity, it’s hard to both disavow the structures that produced something – whether sun dresses or monogamy – when those same structures were part of the cultural milieu in which one was raised. To wit, you can be a feminist woman and yet still ‘not feel like yourself’ wearing men’s clothing; you can believe in polyamory and still get wigged out by it.
Polyamory represents an alternative to the social and material practice of monogamy. But rather than only being a different lifestyle, it is also part of a historical moment. The effects and causes of feminism – which is to say the combination of activism and socio-economic change like, for example, women working during World War II – have opened up space for a change in the social organization of sexual relationships. It’s not so much that the notion of polyamory never existed before as much as the social and material conditions for its practice were never very, um, favourable. That we exist in an era of ‘sexual liberation’, feminism, secularism, female economic independence etc. has made the option of polyamory a reality.
At the same time, what was clear during this conversation was the conflictedness that polyamory can introduce. We still live in an age when sexual fidelity and morality are linked. Additionally, there is, I’ve heard, some small amount of discourse committed to celebrating the notion of the lifelong love, ‘the one’ and monogamous marriage as the ultimate goal. What’s more, there are still the psychological impacts of polyamory: of not only the possibility of external, social censure, but a kind of internal punishment too, one that stems from directly contravening one of the core principles around which goodness, the good life and morality is centered.
So, naturally, you can see why I thought of the hijab.
This is an argument I’ve had floating in my mind for some time. In much the same way that polyamory is a sorta’ ‘edgy’ rejection of established social norms that carries with it both external social consequences and also psychological ones that come from flaunting standards, so too is the choice of a Muslim woman to uncover her hair.
I say this because, so often, the hijab vs. no-hijab debate is constructed in terms of freedom and personal liberty vs. repression and misogyny, as if all someone wearing a hijab must do is simply see the light, peel off her headdress and step into the future. But it so often misses that, like choosing to be polyamorous, it is a decision that removes one from – and places one against – an entire network of socio-cultural beliefs. It is not a single act or a solitary moment, but an ongoing reconfiguration of your relationship to a set of structures and practices that have not simply ‘governed your behaviour’, but constituted your identity. It is not about throwing off shackles, but instead, choosing to let your skin be chafed by a new pair.
But making matters even more complicated is the inextricability of rejecting of what are often called ‘traditional beliefs, and the accusation of becoming westernized. In the contemporary moment, articulating something like ‘Eastern’ (or, more specifically, Iraqi or Pakistani) feminism is essentially impossible to do outside of some kind of discourse in which change is a movement from East to West. As Fanon notes, history has been constructed such that the East is the past of a timeline on which the West is forever the present and the future. Or, to put it in slightly more contemporary terms, Microsoft Word recognizes the word ‘westernized’ but not ‘easternized’. That is not a viable option. It does not ‘exist’.
To take off the hijab, then, is always read as the inevitable movement toward the telos of western, individual liberty. But if one is concerned with a kind of ‘fidelity’ to an identity that is not simply about enabling or submitting to a neat East/West dichotomy – that one either participates in ‘traditional beliefs’* or assimilates to a set of western values – this presents a problem. Suddenly, your lack of faithfulness hurts not only those around you, but you yourself hurt too. You have betrayed something by becoming someone who cannot stick to one thing and one system. You have become a floating mark in a system that cannot locate you adequately because you are no longer recognizable by its most treasured precepts, ideas that form the very structural basis of social relations. You have sidestepped the control of female sexuality. You no longer makes sense within the ways of speaking about the individual or the woman or faithfulness because your actions contravene accepted truths.
What you do know though, is that with each step forward, the ‘fine meshes of power’ tug at you ever so slightly. They drag. They weigh. So that, as if walking through a stream of cobwebs, you are constantly reminded of your choice: to exist just on the edges of the world that made you as it keeps trying to pull you in.
Google, China and The Ghosts of Opium Ships
One aspect of the web that I have pretty consistently ignored here is some inquiry into what I guess you’d call its ‘global dimensions’. For example, I imagine that if you were to somehow map both global flows of online information and global flows of capital, you’d find some interesting things: places where they overlap in ways you expect, and others where the opposite is true.
Given that for some time, ‘postcolonial studies’ was my field, this oversight is rather strange. So, in my most recent column for This Magazine, it felt sorta’ good to take on some of the online ‘inter-cultural issues’ that aren’t discussed as much I wish they were. This particular one is about Google, China, and the wave of strangely strident blog posts that accompanied the Mountain View company’s withdrawal. Yes, it’s significantly later than the actual event, but “print time” etc.
Also, in a weird and strange twist for me, I was almost, kinda’, sorta’ happy with this one. Not that it’s particularly brilliant, mind you – just that I think I’ve said what I set out to, and that re-reading doesn’t entirely make me cringe. Which, you know, feels nice.
The Unending Flood, Hipsterism and Hope
The web makes it rather hard not to have opinions. The constant rush of new information, media and art means that the way we situate ourselves in life – which is to say, the way we position ourselves in relation to the culture around us – is constantly undergoing change, in part because it is constantly under attack.
Twitter is so full of expressive exclamations not because it is a platform for inanity, but because it is a place for people to publicly inscribe their stance. When somebody complains about ‘public transit hygiene’, prejudice or how “Nick Carr is so totally wrong”, they do in part to condemn, but also to assert their own perspective against the perceived threat. As Bhabha suggests, each inscription “is always marked and informed by the ambivalence of the process of emergence itself”; put more simply, once you acknowledge your own process of interpretation, you open the possibility for other, legitimate interpretations.
The internet, then, is full of polemical exclamations. I am guilty of these myself. Still, perhaps the unending flood has done something to solidity and certainty. Enter Kevin Kelly, on what the internet has done to the way he thinks: [via Mark Bertilis]
For every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges the fact. Every fact has its anti-fact. The Internet’s extreme hyperlinking highlights those anti-facts as brightly as the facts. Some anti-facts are silly, some borderline, and some valid. You can’t rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an equal and countervailing anti-expert. Thus anything I learn is subject to erosion by these ubiquitous anti-factors.
So, those of us who, through some strange assertion of will and ego, have designated ourselves ‘bloggers’ or ‘writers’ feel compelled to enter in the debate – to mark out territory, but also to inscribe ourselves into the public space.
* * * * *
Up pops some new idea. It doesn’t matter what it is. Literacy. eBooks. ‘The Death of Old Media‘ (good lord, I’m sorry internet). And then people spin themselves into a tizzy articulating their opinion on the topic. By people, I naturally also mean me. I live for that shit.
So this is the game. Culture happens and cultural critics pontificate. The entire critical game – this massive, overlapped network of discussion and debate – has become its own sphere because it becomes like the ‘ego, inscribed’ writ large – not so much in terms of personalities, but world views. Critical debates – whether Foucault vs Derrida, or Apple vs. Google – are ways of marking out differing views of constructing reality. This is easy to detect. Read Roger Ebert’s critique of 3D film, and it’s not hard to parse his conception of what the world should look like.
* * *
So, the other day I stumbled upon a solid post by Russell Smith over at the great site Ryeberg. It’s on Pomplamoose, the band that has become famous mainly because of their ridiculously catchy covers. You can probably guess where this is going. Smith – a writer who I used to quite like before he started saying ignorant things about the internet and stupid things about being a dude – has developed a reputation (in my mind) for being a defender of the old guard.
The piece is subtly titled “Die Hipster Scum”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our pal Russell is not a fan”
Why does Pomplamoose continue to focus so on covers of mainstream pop songs? Well, this is pretty much the definition of a certain kind of postmodernism: the idea that there is nothing original in art, that everything is a reference. And that every perception is filtered through a haze of mass culture, the omnipresent noise, so all art might as well be about, in some way, Beyoncé and McDonalds. And that there is no difference between a parody and an homage, that one laughs at everything one admires anyway, that irony is so unavoidable that it is impossible to differentiate from seriousness.
There is something defeatist and basically not brave about hipster post-modernism – and this goes for the domains of visual art and literature too. If you claim to believe that there is no possibility of original art in an age of reference, you are cleverly avoiding the nauseating stress of being original. It’s too easy. And you shouldn’t believe it, either, because it’s not true.
Thing is, Smith has a point. It’s the same point I’ve been making for a long time, if less articulately and less derisively. But it’s a cogent argument. Sure, it asserts a belief in what art is and what art is not. But so what? It sounds convincing. I mean, I’m convinced.
Isn’t that the point. We read and immerse ourselves in this ongoing dialectical process of debate in order to mark out our own Hegelian teleology in miniature? Isn’t the point to call out what we think is wrong or misguided in order to make the world a better place?
Well, sorta’
* * *
Long ago, others were also discussing Pomplamoose (Smith operates in ‘print time’). In December 2009, here’s what Robin had to say about the videos:
What I love about the approach is that it’s showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It’s entertaining, but it’s also an exercise in demystification—which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.
Even live performance videos mystify in their own way: “Jeez, how did they get so good?” What I appreciate about the pro/per, at least in Pomplamoose’s hands, is that it acknowledges: Yes, to make music, you need a lot of tools, and you need a lot of tries. And I really like (maybe even need) the notion that things can be assembled. They can be built from parts, improved piece-by-piece. You don’t have to do it right the first time through. That’s what Pomplamoose seems to be saying, and showing.
This is distinctly different from Smith’s take. Instead of critiquing through positioning Pomplamoose in relation to history, Robin talks about the possibilities in both interpretation and inspiration produced by the video.
It’s not isolated. Instead, it’s the reason that Snarkmarket – and Fimoculous before it – became my ‘homes away from home’ on the web: because there was this relentless push to give the positive spin when, quite literally, tens of thousands of other voices were giving the opposite. If you were looking for hope as we slip and stumble into the murky future, in these sites you find some comfort.
I’m not the only one who has noticed this. The other day, in the midst of one of ‘our’ breathless, excited comment discussions, Gavin said this:
When Robin in particular talks about a big new thing, he’s usually not really making a big claim of “this is the new narrative,” or “this is totally different than anything that has existed before.” What he’s usually saying is “I can totally see how someone could use this to do something great.”
To which the response is not “eh, I’m not sure that this is really new,” but “go, man, go!”
Should “Go, man, go!” be the new critical rallying cry?
The question is this: in this pulsing mass of public critique in which we all etch ourselves out through inscribing our difference, our likes and dislikes, does optimism have a kind of politics? Does the relentless insistence on the positive spin produce a kind of force, not only rhetorical in nature, but of a kind of energy that, when compared to the relentless criticism of most cultural critics, results in altogether more creation? What does it mean to be presented with the headlong rush into the new and embrace it by finding the hopeful in it? There’s a sense reading Smith that he is, in a way, “right”. But in another – in a sense far more broad, and more concerned with what criticism and analysis produce – I’m left feeling there’s something wrong.
Such an approach relies on a kind of critical categorical imperative: I critique in the manner I would wish all others to critique. But that kind of universalism ignores the reality of the massive expansion of the critical conversation. You are no longer talking to other academics or writers. You are talking to the whole world.
This is a question of scale. The sheer variety of opinion online exercises a kind of rhetorical drag. It weighs. It looms. The near-infinite rhizomatic mass lingers menacingly each time one sets proverbial pen to paper. There is a reason our age has given rise to the term ‘takedown piece’.
Robin in particular (sorry to single you out dude) has managed to somehow sidestep or ignore this. I mean, it’s not like he can’t do the negative critique, as if he doesn’t know enough. It is, like in those fundamental parts of us involving faith and politics, a measured, considered choice. I will give the positive take.
You might object: well, it just makes sense to take the measured approach – the one that considers and weighs, and then comes to a reasoned, balanced conclusion that says “here is the good and here is the bad”.
But to put it differently – and to reveal the impossibility of anything but inscribing the self through one’s choices – what place do you want to carve out for yourself: the person who critiques the hipsters?; or the person who abandons themselves to hope?
Fucking with Fucking
Of all the many contradictions of modern North America, few are confusing – and yet emblematic – as the double-standards that surround female sexuality. That we live in a world in which the image of sex and sexuality – gestures towards a salacious something – saturate everything is, I suppose, to be expected. If capitalism works by beckoning us not only to enjoy, but to indulge our desires – whether for an iPhone or a threesome – it’s unsurprising that bodies on display and double-entendre are to be found everywhere, particularly when we consider that the 20th century was one long, yawning awakening from the repression and misogyny of Victorianism.
So this we know. There is a reason that the newest, hottest technology is referred to as ‘sexy’. It certainly feels there is a case to be made that our big economic engine runs on libidinal desires as much as it does oil.
Less expected though – at least from my unabashedly naive perspective – are the constraints still placed around the female expression of sex. Yes I know, it seems almost cliche to complain about the ‘he’s a stud/she’s a slut’ dichotomy – but that the disparity is so entrenched in our culture does little to make it less baffling.
So, two pieces today caught my eye, largely because they seemed to challenge the hypocrisy so forcefully – because very simple expressions can, even now, seem vaguely revelatory.
The first is called “My Sluthood, Myself“, in which writer Jaclyn Friedman argues for the redemptive power of, well, sluttiness:
Because sluthood isn’t an action, it’s a state of mind.I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me. Sluthood gave me the time and space to nurse a shattered heart. It gave me a place where I could exist in pieces, some of me craving touch, some of me still too tender to even expose to the light. Sluthood healed the part of me that felt my body and my desires were grotesque after two years in a libido-mismatched partnership. Now I felt hot, wanted, powerful. My desire and enthusiasm was an asset, not an unintended weapon. Even now, with more time passed, now, when I am actually ready for and wanting a more emotional connection, sluthood keeps me centered. It keeps me from confusing desire and affection with something deeper. It means I have another choice besides celibacy and settling. It means I won’t enter another committed relationship just to satisfy my basic need for sex and affection. It gives me more choices, it makes room for relationships to evolve organically, to take the shape they will before anyone defines them.
It also contains the best Jane Eyre reference I’ve read… well, ever.
The other is Part 11 of a longer series simply called “The Whore Journals”, which recounts the experiences of a sophisticated, educated woman who decides she wants to make a living by being paid to fuck. It sounds like it would be deliberately titillating – and perhaps it is – but it’s also genuinely interesting because of what it reveals about this thing that is so often thought of as simultaneously sacred and profane: that instead, it is just as much captured by the dichotomy of the ecstatic and the mundane.
