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Going through some files on my hard drive, I came across this biography of the Blue Chieftains, a sadly defunct — but forever great in the hearts of its fans — New York City bar band from the early ’90s. It was written as a writing sample for a job I didn’t get, and so has been gathering e-dust for several years. On the off-chance that someone remembers the Blue Chieftains, here’s my take on the World’s Greatest Bar Band.
During the early 1990’s, the Lower East Side was home to a burgeoning country music scene, one that reached back past the commercial panderings of the current wave of
This is the new and dis-improved One Man
This post is a response to the increasingly heated thread at Feministe on Female Genital Cutting (FGC). Nearly every mention of FGC in our society elicits condemnation of the practices and the people who practice them as “bestial”, “barbarian”, “inhuman”, “uncivilized”, “heinous”, etc., which has a tendency to set me off. For a long time I’ve wondered about the incredible and disproportional response FGC incites in Westerners, feminists and non-feminists alike, responses which generally are very far removed from the reported responses and experiences of women who have undergone some form of FGC. Since I was obviously not able to make a meaningful intervention at Feministe, being limited by both the “sound-bite” nature of a comment thread and the increasingly furious response to my posts, I decided it would be best to bow out of that discussion before someone burst a vein (especially if that someone was me!) and build my arguments in the less-limited space of my own blog.
This post turned out to be well over 6,000 words (including footnotes and references) — for those who find reading long documents online uncomfortable, I have posted a PDF of the post (with minimal formatting) that can be downloaded and printed.
Few aspects of global women’s lives attract the kind of attention that Female Genital Cutting (FGC) 1 has in the last decade or so. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 100 – 140 million women living in 28 African nations (and a handful of women in Asia and the Middle East) have undergone some form of FGC. FGC practices include the cutting of the labia or clitoris, removal of the prepuce (clitoral hood), removal of the external part of the clitoris and/or the inner labia, and sewing up the vaginal opening, and any combination of these practices. Although often found in Muslim societies, FGC is not specifically Muslim and is looked down upon by most non-African Muslims; most likely such practices pre-date the introduction if Islam into North Africa and were carried forward with new meanings as groups converted.
Western attention on FGC has focused on two aspects: the potential health impact on women undergoing these procedures, and the potential impact on women’s ability to engage in and enjoy sexual intercourse. Because data in both areas has been scarce – the worldwide interest in FGC developed fairly recently, so long-term health trends are only now beginning to be apparent, and data on sexual enjoyment is nearly impossible to compile in any meaningful sense – FGC has proven an empty template for the projection of Western conceptions of sex and sexuality and their relation to individual identity. Most arguments against FGC see these practices as an attempt by native men to control the sexuality of “their” women, by reducing the ability of women to enjoy sex and therefore reducing the likelihood that they will engage in sex for any reason other than wifely duty. While people in some societies do describe their particular practices in such terms, this is hardly universal; women are just as likely to describe the empowerment and control they feel as a result of their procedures. Responses to FGC among the women who undergo such procedures are complex and nuanced, in a way that Western responses absolutely are not.
This piece has two aims. [Continue reading] »
Zuzu at Feministe comments on a site advocating “organic sex”, which turns out to be an apparent appropriation of the language of the organic food/healthy living movement in the service of religious anti-sex, anti-contraceptive goals. This sort of appropriation is clearly not new (e.g. “greenwashing” in the corporate world) but it is new for the anti-sex crowd, I think. While this sort of thing doesn’t post much threat to people with a solid background in sexual health, I agree with the final assessment offered in zuzu’s post — it makes the dissemination of accurate information that much more difficult when misinformation is passed on under seemingly well-intentioned health concerns.
With the issue of what people do with their genitals looming larger with every passing day, I’ve been thinking about the way people talk about the function of sex. “It’s for procreation”, they say. Asked why, they may point to Genesis, saying “God said so.” Or they may point to Darwin, claiming “natural selection says so.” Underlying even sex-postivist, ethical slut, reclaiming cunt attitudes is a sense that reproduction is the primary function of intercourse — they just believe we’re lucky enough to be smart enough to figure out ways to forestall reproduction and still have the sex.
But why privilege the reproductive capacities of our genitals as their primary function? (4,000 years of Judeo-Greco-Christo-Roman-Celto-Muslim teachings, that’s why!) Sex, it’s true, is involved in the reproductive process (except when it’s not — see below), but function does not necessarily show intent. My car makes a good deer-killing tool, but that’s not what it was intended for. And it’s the assumption of intent that dominates the debate — that sex is somehow “intended for” procreation, by God or by nature or by both — as if either had intentions (ok, God, if she existed, might have intentions, but most of the faiths I’m familiar with that posit such a being place those intentions well beyond the ken of meagre human minds and thus hardly applicable to human understanding).
Frankly, reproduction isn’t something sex is even particularly good at achieving. In the best of circumstances, the odds of viable sperm actually reaching and fertilizing a viable egg, and of an egg thus fertilized actually implanting in the uterus, and of a zygote thus implanted developing properly and reaching term, and of a fetus thus developed being delivered, and of an infant thus delivered surviving a reasonable amount of time, are pretty slim. And that’s under ideal circumstances — a thin sheet of latex drops the chances to virtually nil, a simple pill drops them even further.
What’s more, as every right-winger railing about lesbian-raised “baster babies” (I’m talking abou you, Hannity) tacitly admits, there’s lots of ways to achieve reproduction without having sex at all — ovum can be fertilized in vitro and implanted in the uterus with nary an orgasmic groan. What’s more, our genitals seem perfectly content to do their thing regardless of the reproductive potential of the encounter (with the odd exception of the neurotic sperm played by Woody Allen in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask).
No, sex is hardly necessary for reproduction — and getting less so — and not much good at it. On the other hand, sex is really good at creating orgasms, and, defined widely enough, some sort of sex is essential to the process. Sexual excitement is crucial to orgasm, whether through touch, language, or really vivid fantasization. Considered something like obectively (that is, in the absence of literary traditions like that of Christians condemining sexual pleasure) we would probably have to admit that the primary function of sex — the one it’s best at, and the one it’s most necessary for — is to produce pleasure. Reproduction is merely a side-effect of some ways of achieving pleasure — sometimes a pleasant and even desirable side-effect, but by no means a predictable outcome of pleasure nor necessary to the attainment of pleasure.
Of course, I’m not saying that sex is “intended for” pleasure — it just is what it is. We assume, impose, invent, construct the intentions, sex doesn’t. In the end, sex is much better at creating orgasms than at creating babies — that’s just the way sex is. It functions to create babies, just not well — that, too, is just the way sex is.
Hypothesis: Nudity, pornography, and open sexuality have absolutely no harmful effects on children (when the child is not the subject of sexual behavior).
Discuss.
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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