Dustin M. Wax » media

Who Drives Tech? Wankers Drive Tech!

dustin — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 01:32:30 +0000

Porn Industry Again at the Tech Forefront: LA Times story on the role of the porn industry in driving technological advancement. Nothing new, but nice to see that acknowledged in a major outlet.

Money quote: “Historically, the porn industry has adopted new technologies more nimbly than Hollywood. It embraced home video in the late 1970s, allowing people to bypass seedy theaters and watch the movies in their living rooms. Mainstream studios, by contrast, fought home video all the way to the Supreme Court before making it one of the most profitable pieces of their business.”

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Pornographic Assumptions
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Notes Towards a Gender Analysis of the X-Men

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Female X-Men

Power comes from control over their surroundings or other people; beautiful (some would say “stacked”)

Dr. Jean Grey: intuitive, empathic, manipulates people and things from a distance
Storm: controls natural forces
Rogue: consumer, parasite; saps men of their vital powers

Male X-Men

Power comes from ability to physically defeat opponents; some good-looking, some not so much (e.g. Nightcrawler)

Psyclops (sp?): creates energy, destroys all in his sight; male gaze destroys opponents
Wolverine: stereotypical male hero — a loner, a maverick, a loose cannon, can beat the hell out of anyone, modeled very consciously after Eastwood’s “Man with No Name”
Xavier: the exception; physically disabled, shares most powers with Jane Grey, physically and “mutationally” feminized — but he’s the boss. He’s also a real ~~George Washington Carver~~ Booker T. Washington (I confused my Washingtonians!) type, with his politics of appeasement, as opposed to Magneto’s more DuBoisian “Mutant Power” rap. Maybe he’s more the MLK type, with Magneto his Malcom X. He still has his “slave name”, unlike all the other X-men, for what that’s worth.

I wrote about X-2 when it came out, though if I recall more about race than gender. That post is here.

Note: This is really in reference to the movies, not the comics, which I’ve never really read.

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How Gay am I?

dustin — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:48:53 +0000

According to this test (which must be scientifically valid, as it’s on Scientific American‘s website) I’m equally heterosexual and homosexual.

How will I explain that to my parents?!

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When Monogamy Isn’t Monogamous

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Originally posted at Savage Minds on November 16, 2005.

Every time I teach the section on marriage in my Intro to Anthro class, I inevitably face the same question. The book lists four types of marriage: monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, and group marriage. and someone always asks “What about swingers?” (Of course, I live and teach in Vegas…) The question points to a limitation of the concept of marriage not just for anthropological understanding but even within our own everyday usage.

Writers Em and Lo confront these limitations in their current New York Magazine piece The New Monogamy, addressing the kinds of open relationships that some married couples are evolving in order to both maintain their commitment to each other and manage their attractions to other people. Em and Lo’s “new monogamists” represent a new twist on the more well-established swinger scene, combining professional lifestyles, post-feminism, and a modern psychotherapeutic understanding of sex, relationships, and the self in an attempt to navigate the pitfalls of tradtional marriage in a society increasingly ill-equipped for long-term exclusive bonding.

There are a couple of irritating quibbles in the article that I’d like to get out of the way before moving onto the meat of the topic. First, the framing of the New Monogamy as not just a move away from cultural norms but from human universals is not only gratuitous but wrong. “For much of human history,” the authors write, “monogamy (or, at least, presumed monogamy) has been the default setting for long-term love.” We do not know what sexual/emotional relationships were like “for much of human history”, but judging from the ethnographic evidence gathered over the last century or so among today’s populations, the norm has likely been serial monogamy (as we find in many foraging societies today; see e.g. Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa), likely with numerous temporary relationships “on the side”, and polygyny, which is today accepted and often preferred in 80% of contemporary cultures, with no reason to assume it was any less common in “much of human history”. Monogamy as practiced in the United States is a function of our particular history, especially the inheritance of British agricultural traditions and the impact of the 19th century Industrial Revolution.

The other issue I have is the constant reiteration of stereotypes of open relationships as the province of either “earnest, hairy polyamorists” or “doughy, middle-aged swingers”. While there are obviously precendents for today’s New Monogamists in the Haight-Ashbury hippie culture of the Free Love generation and in the key parties and wife-swapping of ’70s suburbia, various kinds of open relationships have been practiced from the dawn of American history (to their credit, Em and Lo mention the 19th century utopian Oneida Colony) and have cut across a wide range of American social strata. The point that their subjects come from neither a bohemian subculture nor a suburban middle-class but rather a professional, urban, and upwardly mobile mainstream can be made without the repeated images of purple muumuus and Tupperware.

With those objections out of the way, I can move onto the more substantial topics at the heart of the article. Em and Lo speak with a selection of couples — straight and gay, as well as mixed straight/bi relationships (on which more later) — who are struggling to accomodate their decidedly non-monogamous sexual desires while continuing to nurture the marriage commitments that they still find meaningful. Ranging from shared fanstasization about Friends–style fantasy lists of famous people and collaborative surfing of online personals to fully open sexual relations, each of the couples has attempted to divorce their sexual desires from the romantic committment of their marriage without divorcing their spouses. For instance, Diane and her boyfriend have agreed to allow flirting, dirty phone talk, and cybersex over IM, “as long as no one ends up actually making out with anyone else”; Mike and Jessica indulge in three–ways, four–ways, and even a full-blown orgy; William and Dan have a closed relationship — unless one or the other is out of town; and Siege and Katie follow a code of “body-fluid monogamy”, indulging in safe sex with whomever they like, even in their home while the other is busy in the other room.

The key to these relationships — as Ann Landers could have told you, if the word menage-à-trois had been in her vocabulary — seems to be communication. Many of the partners had seen previous relationships dissolve when their partner cheated on them, and in retrospect many felt that it was not the cheating so much as the erosion of trust and honesty which had created the problem. So they share fantasies, experiences, and even partners, all under the aegis of pre-negotiated rules, in order to preserve the trust relationship and (hopefully) forestall jealousy, suspicion, and betrayal.

Trust, sharing, communication, honesty, commitment — the language is straight out of Oprah and reflects an intersection of ’70s self-realization, 80s self-help and relationship manuals, and ’90s post-feminism. The women in these relationships are active professionals, empowered both by their social status and by their own sexualities, unwilling to limit their sexual urges for the sake of a husband like their mothers and grandmothers were typically expected to do — and like their fathers and grandfathers were not expected or obligated to do. The arrangements featured in this article have been designed as much out of the women’s need to assert and satisfy their sexual needs and desires as for the men’s, and explicitly with equality in mind.

One of the pull-quotes in the article notes that, with all the concern for communication and equality between partners, “perhaps this time around, seventies-style swinging and slutting will actually be feasible — and fair.” And yet it bears asking whether this assumption of equality has been realized in actuality. The easy response is that given the label “slutty” and the lack of an equivalent label for men engaged in the same behavior, there is still an obvious inequality — but I think the issue runs much deeper than that.

How much deeper begins to be clear when Em and Lo breach the subject of bisexuality. In many of these set-ups, the men are straight and the women bi, and rules have been adopted limiting both husband and wife to female extramarital partners. For the men, the thought of another man involving himself in their relationship is threatening in a way that another women’s involvement is not; consider Siege’s statement that “I just don’t want her messing around with other guys. Because I don’t find men attractive, my only instinct would be to punch them.” All of the mixed-sex couples seem much more willing to experiment with her sexuality than with his.

While the article suggests a couple of explanations for this double-standard, only one of them really seems to get at the reality of sexuality in the 21st century. It’s unlikely that women are, by nature, simply “more fluid” sexually, especially given the incredible restraints around any expression of male homosexuality; it’s also unlikely that women have more sexual freedom than men in our society, given the way so many other aspects of their lives are socially programmed. At the same time, none of the women seemed to express the feeling that she was being made to perform for the benefit of her partner — and given their economic and personal independence, I find this a doubtful proposition in any case. But I think the authors are moving in the right direction when they guess that “It could be that sexually speaking, women are just not taken seriously: Hot, yes, but as sex toys, not real romantic threats.”

The idea of women as “sex toys”, as objects to be acquired, used, and either discarded or grown out of jibes well with the commodification of sex in general in our increasingly consumeristic society. Sex has come to stand alongside other entertainments as a way of expressing our individual identities, like the choice of a double grande mocha latte, the latest art house film, or an indie CD. One person likes Fellini, another likes fellatio — to each his own. (Or her own, but that would ruin the rhtyhm of the cliche now, wouldn’t it?)

The marketing of sex as product, though, is much more easily achieved in the case of women’s sexuality than men’s. As John Berger noted (Ways of Seeing, 1972), gender roles in Western societies can be summed up by the simple maxim: “men act and women appear” (47). To commodify a woman’s sexuality, to objectify it and make it available for consumption, is easy because we are already predisposed to do so; men’s sexuality, however, is wrapped up with notions of virility, strength, and power — aspects of character as much as or even more than of appearance. I had a graphic illustration of this in a recent classroom discussion on gender, when I asked why so many women find John Goodman sexy. “He has character,” one of my female students responded. When I noted that Roseanne Barr has lots of character and asked if she was also sexy, I received a chorus of “no’s” — and the same student replied that “Character doesn’t count for women.”

Many of the women Em and Lo spoke with summed up this attitude quite nicely, saying they were “sexually, but not romantically, attracted to other women”. That is, they were interested in other women because they found them physically attractive, but were unwilling or unable to imagine other women as potentially meaningful partners in life. For their male partners, then, there was little risk in seeing their wives getting it on with other women — no more risk than seeing their wives pick out a brand of coffee or a DVD. You don’t lose your wife to a product.

You lose your wife to other men, though. Men are agents, not products, and neither the men interviewed nor most of the women could as easily divorce their sexual attraction to men from the potential for romantic involvement the way they could with women. This resonates well with the way many men fetishize lesbianism, even as they deeply fear anything that even faintly smacks of male homoeroticism. When a woman makes out with other women, she’s “bi”; any contact with another man though, especially a gay man, is tinged with panic that the encounter might reveal a man to be — or even worse, turn him — “gay”. Because male sexuality is premised on character and not superficial appearance, a man’s attraction to another man — or a women’s attraction to another man — implies a deeper level of commitment than the consumerism satisfied by the consumption of other women as “living, breathing sex objects”.

The danger of shifting commitment obviously poses a threat to the marriages that the men and women in Em and Lo’s piece are struggling to negotiate. In a society like ours, with personalities both shaped by enculturation practices to be independent and self-serving and to be focused strongly around sexuality as the core of the self, marriage as traditionally understood seems artificially limiting — and we have been trained to see such limits as challenges. The commodification of sexuality is not just a temptation threatening to destabilize the institution of marriage, but can be seen also as an accomodation to that institution, a way of allowing expression of our consumeristic, sexualized selves without further destabilizing the relationship. The stress on “cheating” is important in this regard — in their former relationships, without the possibility for acceptible extramarital sex, the partners were forced to resort to secrecy and dishonesty, which eventually undermined their emotional bonds with their partners, making it all the more likely that they would seek romantic, as well as sexual, release with their new partners. By limiting extramarital encounters to the purely sexual, these couples are trying to prevent the erosion of their romantic relationships — thus making the extramarital relationships into a supplement, rather than a replacement, for their relationships with their spouses.

Of course, we might ask why such a supplement is necessary in the first place, but I think it’s fairly clear. If we did not seek something new, different, and exciting, we would not be very good consumers — and we are very good consumers! And if we did not do everything in our power to attain the objects of our desires, if we did not view social restrictions as obstacles to be overcome, we would not be very good individualists — and we are not only good individualists, but we have to be to function in our highly mobile, highly specialized society. As women have become more and more expected to function as workers and participants in the public sphere, the role of monogamous wife has become as untenable as the role of monogamous husband has been for centuries.

It may be that the institution of marriage itself is becoming untenable, and the couples in this article are not the vanguard of a New Monogamy but are rather leading a fighting retreat. More and more people find marriage simply unnecessary to their lifestyles — what with professional obligations requiring more and more frequent travel, the difficulty of finding satisfying work in the same place as your partner, the risk of boredom in the face of lifelong commitment, and the failure of more than half of the marriages in oursociety, marriage seems particularly ill-suited to modern living. Increasing numbers of people are turning to short-term relationships, casual encounters, and alternatives to long-term monogamous relationships that better fit the demands of their lives. The rise of polyamory — semi-closed networks of friends and lovers often spread out over several cities — represents one adaptation to these demands. It may well be that the only thing supporting traditional marriage in Western society is the fear of disease; as new treatments for STDs become available, we may well see the end of marriage altogether, or at least its diminishment as a primary organizer of social relations.

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Tough Times for Vulvaes

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Our Vaginas, Ourselves – New York Times
Daphne Merkin explores the raft of surgical procedures now on the market for “sprucing up” the collective genitalia of the modern woman. It should be noted that “upper-middle-class professional Americans” are not usually included among the categories of women for whom Female Genital Cutting is considered a problem. Merkin’s money quote:

So step right up, ladies. Your labia may not be up to snuff – they may extrude too much or lack youthful plumpness – but a quick nip/tuck or strategic injection of fat from Dr. 90210 and his colleagues will take care of that. And thanks to the wonders of hymenoplasty, you can get to be a virgin – or at least like a virgin – all over again. From where I sit, life looks to be one long Madonna-esque self-invention tour, and there’s nothing to be done but to grin, tighten your Kegel muscles and bear it.

PS Sorry about the double plural in the title — it makes the rhyme work…

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The Tyranny of Tiny Differences

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The Y Files: Hyping sex differences
Cathy Young of the Y Files has a fantastic post on the way that tiny sex differences discovered in research get inflated, by the media and often by the researchers themselves, into essentializing characterizations of men and women. “[T]he truth,” she writes, “is that on the popular level — and also among the anti-PC set — talk about sex differences often tends to lapse into unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping.” These generalizations and stereotypes often tell us more about the political goals of the people describing the research than the research tells us about men and women.

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Pornography and Representation

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

In the last couple days, I’ve come across two interesting critiques of pornography. The first is Pornography Is A Left Issue (via Lauren at Feministe) by Gail Dines and Robert Jensen, which addresses pornography as corporate media (which it surely is — the top distributors of pornography are your friendly neighborhood cable and satellite companies, including Rupert Murdoch’s DirecTV, and your homes away from home, the major hotel/motel chains); the second is blac(k)ademic’s Why Pornography Harms Women of Color (via reappropriate’s Carnival of Feminists 6), an attack on the explicit racism that fuels much of today’s pornography. Both are deeply thought and deeply felt critiques that raise a number of important points, but are ultimately unsuccessful as arguments against pornography in general.

blac(k)ademic’s post is inspired by the high number of websurfers that find her site via searches for racial/racist porn. The meat of blac(k)ademic’s argument is that:

pornography hurts women of color, because it reproduces the racist imagery assigned to brown bodies. when people type in “black lesbian bitches,” or “lesbian niggers” [on search engines] they are perpetuating the dehumanizing stigma attached to all women of color. the only thing that is different, is that pornography suppossedly makes these racist ideals sexy or desireable. it absolves racism as it is turned into a seemingly harmless sexual gratification.

I’m not entirely convinced that this is an argument against pornography so much as it an argument against the type of people or the type of desires serviced by pornography. The strength (or weakness) of the argument relies on how much of a role you believe pornography plays in shaping those desires; I tend to think “not very much”, noting for example that dehumanizing sexual relationships between white men and women of color predate the modern pornography industry by several hundred years. Neither do I think racism is “absolved” by the gloss of desire — the rationale here being, I think, that “if I were racist, I wouldn’t wanna fuck black chicks, now would I?” The reality is aptly described by blac(k)ademic a few paragraphs later: “the sickening part of it is, is that, when people…i assume men, young men or boys, look for “lesbian niggers,” they are relating their sexual arousal with racial hate.” Racism is not glossed over by racial porn, it is the object of it.

But raising the issue of racism in porn begs the question of whether blac(k)ademic would not be against porn if there were no racial porn. Is it just a particular type of porn that’s “bad”, or is it the nature of pornography itself? This question haunts Dines and Jensen’s piece, which advocates a strong anti-pornography stand as part of the mainstream liberal position.

As leftists, we reject the sexism and racism that saturates contemporary mass-marketed pornography. As leftists, we reject the capitalist commodification of one of the most basic aspects of our humanity. As leftists, we reject corporate domination of media and culture. Anti-pornography feminists are not asking the left to accept a new way of looking at the world but instead are arguing for consistency in analysis and application of principles.

Leftists regularly challenge representations of women, homosexuals, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, Arabs, workers, and so on in the mainstream press, while “giving a pass” to troubling representations in pornography. This is troubling not only because the nature of pornographic representation is so often racist and misogynist, but becuase for all intents and purposes, pornography is mainstream media. Pornography is no longer an underground, even criminal, business but is produced and distributed by some of the world’s largest corporations — and produces revenues outweighing the entirety of American professional sports.

The strength of this approach, however, is also its weakness. The corporate media produces sexist, racist, and classist representations, it’s true — and pornography is no exception:

Despite naïve (or disingenuous) claims about pornography as a vehicle for women’s sexual liberation, the bulk of mass-marketed pornography is incredibly sexist. From the ugly language used to describe women, to the positions of subordination, to the actual sexual practices themselves — pornography is relentlessly misogynistic. As the industry “matures” the most popular genre of films, called “gonzo,” continues to push the limits of degradation of, and cruelty toward, women.

No argument there — but then we’re objecting to a specific kind of imagery, not to pornography in general. When leftists critique the news, or movies, or sitcoms, they’re arguing for better news coverage, better representations of women and minorities in movies and TV programming; somehow, though, I do not get the impression that this is what Dines and Jensen are asking of pornographers. Rather, they are not “pro-better pornopgraphy” but explicitly “anti-pornography”, ostensibly supporting some kind of anti-porn legislation like the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinances. But if we are to legislate against certain kinds of representations — of women, of minorities, of whomever — and if pornography is just another form of mainstream media, then the focus on pornography seems a little misplaced. After all, however popular, porn is consumed by only a small fraction of the number of people who regularly consume similarly degrading, sexist, racist, and otherwise offensive representations that make up prime-time television, or women’s magazines, or Hollywood blockbusters.

Now, we can and should be critical of degrading representations wherever they occur, and maybe we should even outlaw all forms of such imagery (bye bye Man Show) — but this doesn’t explain or justify the persistent singling out of pornography, nor is it likely to affect corporate control of the media, which will simply shift its focus to different ways of commodifying and alienating our bodies. What I’m wondering is if there’s anything particular about pornography, anything essential to the medium/genre itself that merits drawing a sharp distinction between it and other forms of corporate media? Sharp enough, anyway, that the idea of an “anti-pornography” stance seems rational, while an “anti-media” stance… not so much. Is it possible to portray sexual relations in a way that is not degrading to women or minorities?

A tentative answer might explore some of those representations that are de facto not degrading to women or minorities — those in which either women and minorities do not appear, or those in which women or minorities are represented in empowered ways. The first would include, of course, gay male porn (I’m sure there’s racial gay porn — but as with all racial porn, I think we have to ask whether the portrayal of racialized subjects is different, either quantitatively or qualitatively, from representations of non-racialized subjects — and how it differs). Feminist anti-porn writings rarely consider gay porn, which is a shame because most of the tropes that feminists discuss (the woman held up to the male gaze, the violent or pseudo-violent rape or gang-rape of a woman, the ominpresent female sexual receptivity, etc.) are necessarily absent from gay porn. The second kind of porn might be harder to find and identify — I would guess that the “new wave” of female-produced “woman friendly” porn might qualify, or lesbian-produced porn. Another possibility might be, ironically enough, S&M-related porn, in which the same qualities that anti-porn critics find offensive in depictions of women bound, gagged, tortured, and otherwise dominated are very often present in depictions of men, often stereotypically represented as strong and powerful, likewise bound, humilaiated, and dominated. Does the semiology (maybe I mean semiography) of the image change when the subject is a man instead of a woman? How, and why?

I cannot answer these questions, but I think they are crucial to our understanding not only of misogyny, racism, male/white privilege, and so on, but of the commodification and alientation that have become central characteristics our our societies and of our selves in our societies. The reason many leftists are hesitant to challenge pornographic representations, why many lionize pornographers like Larry Flynt (but, interestingly, not Hugh Hefner), is that while many are uncomfortable with the imagery of pornography, they are also uncomfortable with the explicit anti-sex message that pornography’s other critics, conservatives an religious fundamentalists, have embedded in their characterization of pornography. Depictions of sexual activity challenge the kinds of bodily control that is the goal of those who are not only anti-porn, but anti-birth control, anti-abortion, anti-sex education, anti-gay marriage, and so on — and often provide rallying points in the opposition of sex-unfriendly forces in our society.

And yet, many anti-anti-porn leftists are not actually regular consumers of porn (including myself), for exactly the reasons Dines, Jensen, and blac(k)ademic describe. My own feeling is that a) pornography has a function (or functions) in our society that has nothing to do with the objectification of women, and b) that it is possible to depict and even celebrate sex, even “weird” sex, in ways that are not demeaning to the represented participants (as distinct, I must note, from the actual participants, the models and actors involved, which is a different subject and deserves more consideration later — but, quickly, who tend to have a range of responses to their work ranging from disgust to feelings of empowerment). Thus, while not embracing the strong anti-pornography stand of Dines and Jensen, and in fact opposing it, I feel that their critiques, and those of blac(k)ademic and of so many others, are necessary for creating a better understanding of both how power works in our society and how those whom power works against might become better empowered.

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Cuteness and Culture

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The Cute Factor, Natalie Angier
Angier struggles to find some deeper biological meaning in our responsiveness to “the cute”, ostensibly evolved as a means of assuring adult human responsiveness to defenseless and oh-so-cute human babies.

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

Though I am willing to concede the possibility of a “hard-wired” responsiveness to cuteness, the idea begs the question of why this responsiveness waxes and wanes over time and from culture to culture. Why do some people even in our currently cute-obsessed culture see cuteness as a thing to be destroyed (e.g. kids who kill puppies), and why is cute so fashionable at the moment (as documented by Angier) but wasn’t before the 1960′s (again, acc. to Angier)? How do cultures like the one described by Nancy Scheper-Hughes become able to disregard the influence of cuteness and the parental attentiveness it supposedly engenders?

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