Slice and burn: violent feminist humor

The "Ex" Knife Holder

A feminist friend of mine used to tell the following joke:

How many men does it take to tile a floor?

(I don’t know.  How many men does it take to tile a floor?)

It depends on how thinly you slice them.

Violent feminist humor is a precarious thing.  Some violent feminist humor, like the above, is simply modeled after violent jokes about women.  In fact, in a lot of these jokes, “man” and “woman” can simply be exchanged, depending on who is telling the joke.  The following joke is from a feminist blog, but replace “man” with “woman” and it’s a classic anti-woman joke:

What does it mean when a man is in your bed gasping for breath and calling your name?

You did not hold the pillow down long enough.

It may be argued that since women are not equal in power to men, such jokes told by women do not wield the same influential authority as jokes told by men. True, such jokes told by women do not allude to and bolster real practices of widespread violence against men.  Equivalent jokes told by men do allude to and bolster men’s real, widespread violence against women.  However, authority is not the only issue.

Just as sharing racist jokes strengthens the camaraderie and group identity of racists, classist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, sizeist, and sexist jokes function in the same way.  In fact, humor is one of the tools used to check who is and who is not part of a group.  If a man wants to know, for example, who the radical feminists are in a group, he needs only to tell a pornographic joke.  Degree of laughter and facial expressions will quickly tell him who is in his in group and who is out.  Violent feminist humor can be used by women in the same way: to establish who is part of one’s trusted group.

However, the bonding function of violent feminist humor differs from the bonding function of men’s violent sexist humor in a key way.  While men use violent humor to tighten their unified power over women, women do not have such power over men to tighten.  Instead, women use violent jokes as a way to cope with fear.  We fear men’s violence, so we joke tough:  “We may have come out of the kitchen, but we still know where the sharp objects are kept.”

Because we joke from a subordinate position, not the position of power, this may create the illusion that violent feminist jokes are essentially benign.  They are not.  Violence is never benign.  Violence always destroys and undermines, sometimes in insidious ways.  When violent practices of any sort become rooted in feminist identities and practices, they destroy the fabric of transformative feminism (witness: pro-pornography feminism).  Bonding like the guys does not move us forward.

I am Not Your MILFtastic Fantasy

“I wasn’t spying on you, I was spying on the MILF in the running shorts.” — Dr. House of “House,” October 2009 episode

Look MILFtastic!  — sidebar ad on my Facebook page

Here’s how some girls make fashion statements these days: They buy T-shirts with phrases like “Future M.I.L.F.” — BeWild online merchandising

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“MILF” was apparently coined in the 1999 movie, American Pie.  The plot of American Pie, considered by some to be riotously funny, is formed around four male teens in search of losing their virginity.  In one scene, two of the teens are looking at a picture of another’s mother:

Dude that chick’s a MILF!
What to hell is that?
M-I-L-F Mom I’d Like to Fuck!
Yeah dude! Yeah!

MILF mug: "Mothers, whether married, separated or divorced, that a male individual sees as physical attractive enough to want to have sexual intercourse with them....They want to fuck with abandon...."

Popular culture and porn culture have an elastic coexistence.  Whenever a new motif, technology, or concept presents itself in one, the other is soon to respond. Although MILF was coined in a pop culture “classic,” the porn industry quickly adopted MILF as a category of porn.  “MILF” was much more catchy than traditional descriptions of older women in porn, such as “mature” or “women with soft tits.”  Besides, the porn industry needed a snazzy new category name to assist in its continuing efforts in colonizing women of the baby boomer generation.

Baby boomers were born between 1943 and 1960.  In 1999, the year of American Pie, baby boomers were 39 to 56 years old.  Baby boomer women had become the majority of women in education, leadership. politics, and business.  They had grown into a significant power group.  It is not then a coincidence that this is precisely the dominant age group found in MILF porn (ages 35-55). [1] One of porn’s functions is reductivity.  MILF porn erases all other aspects of middle aged women’s identities and reduces them to mothers who “want to fuck with abandon” (see mug at right).  They are no longer a power group with whom men must contend.

Women's MILF t-shirt: "I make motherhood look good."

Nevertheless, MILF is a popular slang word among women.  Many women claim it with pride.  In a culture where being over 40 and having stretch marks, wrinkles, and less than perky breasts is seen as a personal failure (one didn’t do enough sit ups, run enough marathons, get enough Botox, or get that needed boob job), any woman who can claim MILFdom feels triumphant over aging: someone still finds her “attractive enough to want to have sexual intercourse with.”

However, who confers MILF status?  Who is the “I” voice in MILF?  The voice is not a woman’s voice.  Originally, the voice was a male teen’s.  That voice still persists.  However, the “I” voice is now also the voice of a husband, partner, and/or father of one’s children. In this way, for a woman to wear a MILF t-shirt is similar to having an ownership tattoo: she has the voice of a male who wants to fuck her scribed across her chest. [2] Arguably, the “I” may also be considered any straight or bi male.  As such, “I” can be understood simply as patriarchy.  Translation:  Mothers Patriarchy Would Like to Fuck.

The availability of MILF message wear for kids, including toddlers, even allows MILF ownership to be transferred to a woman’s children.  A child dressed in “I’m with the MILF” toddler-wear is given the “I” status in a bizarrely incestuous way: I’d like to fuck my mother.

Given this, it is troubling that many women value being called a MILF.  Yet as long as we continue to see our identities through the desires of those who are not us, we will never have our own identities, sexual or otherwise.  Moreover, middle age and older women are role models for younger women fighting their own generational battles against (hetero)sexism.  If we permit our consumption, we betray the next generations of women who are already being consumed by patriarchy as “Future MILFs.”

MILF-wear for toddlers

MILF-wear for girls

1. Some MILF porn sites also include “grannies.”   In addition, there are MILF dating sites for mothers of any age whose primary interests are sexual dates.  As such, MILF is evolving to include all mothers.

2. Pimps and porn “agents” sometimes have the phrase, “Property of” (followed by name), tattooed—or branded—on “their” women.  This is referred to as an ownership tattoo.  One of my acquaintances who was formerly filmed in bondage porn, also had a bar code tattooed on her by her former husband/agent/pimp.

Being “older”: cautionary notes on the medical industry

One mark of the social construction of aging is overemphasis on bodily decline. The meaning of old age then becomes physical loss…seeing old age in this narrow way has many consequences…. —Margaret Cruikshank (1,  p.35)

For me, it started 5 years ago.  I was 42.  For several days, I had been feeling odd.  I was experiencing a pressure in my chest and a strange, unfamiliar feeling in my body overall.  When I went running, I felt particularly strange.  My heart didn’t seem right.  It felt “big.”  It was working harder to do a familiar task: my everyday runs.

I had a hunch that my blood pressure was elevated.  I checked it out on one of those free machines at a pharmacy.  I have always had healthy blood pressure, usually in the 105-115/60-70 range—that day at the pharmacy, it was 145/95.  My conclusion: it was the medication that I had just started taking.  I made an appointment to see my doctor.

She told me it was because I was getting older.  “It’s not uncommon for a person’s blood pressure to go up as she ages,” she informed me.  She wasn’t interested in investigating it further.  I was astonished.  The fact that the increase in blood pressure had not been gradual but rapid and coincided with the new medication was completely irrelevant to her.  Since the literature showed no indication of elevated blood pressure for this particular medication, she concluded it was because I was middle age.

So I bought a home blood pressure kit.  I stopped taking the medication.  I monitored.  In couple of days, my blood pressure was back in my normal range.

Also recently, my middle age kitty had blood tests run.  Everything was normal, except one slightly elevated area.  The vet’s conclusion: “It’s not uncommon for an older kitty.”  There was no suggestion as to how we might address it–or equally important, as to investigating whether something other than being “older” was influencing her health.

However, the most critical—and tragic—lesson I have learned (thus far) about ageism in the medical industry is my mother’s story.  When she was 55, she was experiencing some troubling symptoms.  She called to make an appointment with her gynecologist.  When she described her symptoms over the phone, she was told that she was menopausal and to wait for her annual appointment.  She never needed to keep that appointment.  Instead, a couple of months later she was in the emergency room, hemorrhaging.  She had metastasized uterine cancer, from which she eventually died.

As a result, when doctors tell me, “Don’t worry.  This is normal aging,” I tell them I want them to investigate further.  I refuse to have them write off any medical concerns as simply unconcerning because I am “older.”  It’s tough to do when I am sitting there butt naked to the world with my bare feet dangling over the cold floor.  And I know it will get harder and harder as I get older and doctors are even less likely to take me seriously.

Note to self: proceed with caution.

Juxtaposition’s Second Saturdays Variety Show

Kicking off today’s inaugural show are recipients of Juxtaposition’s Litter Box Award.  Get the pooper scooper out.

Juxtaposition’s November 2009 Paws Up Awards go to Kris Kitko and her song,”I am not Wal-mart,” and to the Cat House on the Kings.

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Thanks for staying for the show!   Auditions for next month’s show are already underway.

Porn in the New Millennium (Part Two)

Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. –Andrea Dworkin, 1979 (1, p. 167)

From the 1960s into the early 1970s, pornography rapidly entered the American public sphere via the readily available supermarket magazine.  Prior to that, most women had little exposure to pornography in the public domain.  Once porn moved out of the private lives of men, it had to contend with women’s opinions of it.  By the late 1970s, radical feminism was battling the porn industry with both political theory and legislative initiatives.

In the early 70s, the porn industry was already testing the three strategies that would become its beloved triplets in its fight against radical feminism.  The first was to portray radical feminists as loopy and ugly.  Truly, it has gotten a lot of mileage out of the “ugly feminist” stereotype (try googling “ugly feminist”).  Without a lot of effort, porn proponents were quickly able to convince our beauty-centric society that the only reasons feminists have been upset about porn is that we are too unattractive to be featured in it.

Gloria Steinem is an ancient-old-relic feminist whose only claim to fame is helping some ugly women march. — Larry Flynt, 1997 (2)

Its second strategy was to rally together its liberal support base by arguing that the two polar groups, conservative religion and radical feminism, were “in bed with each other.”  Although in truth these two groups had distinctly different arguments about and desired outcomes for the pornography debate, by parodying (uptight, sex-shame-centric) ultra-conservatism and (ugly, loopy) radical feminists as bed partners, it gave porn lovers permission to laugh off radical feminist critiques.

The porn industry’s third strategy was to consume women as a market group.

The first issue of Playgirl hit the shelves in 1973.  The magazine slowly evolved, experimenting with different formats (including a non-nude year in 1987), until the early 1990s.  Then almost overnight, the magazine dove deeper into more objectified depictions of men.  Illustrative of this shift is the 1991 cover shown below.

Playgirl 1976

Playgirl 1991

There were at least a couple of reasons for this shift.  One, the magazine knew that in addition to a female readership, it was also catering to a large gay male readership (by 2003, gay readership was estimated to be between 30-50%) (3).  Two, the magazine recognized that after over 20 years of living in an increasingly pornified society, women were now seeing the world more and more through the lens of pornography.  Therefore, they were ripe for usurpation.  It was the dawn of porn’s perfect world: where women would be both objects of porn and its avid consumers.  Then there would be no complaints.

Then, serendipitously for the porn world, the Internet arrived.  This was the next of two necessary cinch points for consuming women as a market group.  The Internet began to flood women’s lives with a lot more than soft porn.  However, having been eased into the porn world through a quarter of a century of gradually intensified exposure, many women were not, as Andrea Dworkin was able to say in 1979, astonished.  Some were downright excited about it—in particular, an elite cross-section of well-educated white women who rallied around to endorse pornography as essential free speech.  This was the last cinch point.

Pro-pornography feminism, which tucked pornography under the umbrella of “sexual speech,” was strongly solidified by the mid-1990s.  Some pro-pornography feminists defended pornography as if it were an oppressed boy child being bullied by radical feminists:

Sexual speech…is the most repressed and disdained kind of expression in our world, and MacKinnon is no rebel or radical to attack it. – Susie Bright (4, p. 50)

Others argued that the fantasies portrayed in violent porn were born of women’s inherent self.  Therefore, dismantling porn would be an affront to women and their self-originating imaginations:

…rape fantasies are part of our brain.  They are part of our genetic heritage, and that’s not going to go away if you ban pornography.  It’s an archetypal fantasy. –Anne Rice (5, p. 174)

Regardless, all of them concurred that supporting and/or using pornography was essential for women’s sexual emancipation.

The sex industry now had women exactly where it wanted them to be.  A growing group of women were both avidly consuming and/or advocating for pornography.  Whether women got there fully by choice, by acculturation, or some combination of agency and socialization is moot.  That fact is, they were there.  And the porn industry was in its happy place.

Playgirl 2000

By the time we arrived in the new millennium, the current generation of young women and feminists were growing up on the Internet, consuming male-as-object porn, and reading the stories and theory of “sex-positive” feminists.  They were learning to love all forms of “sexual expression,” including bondage, fisting, and rape sex.  Thus, today the new feminist is cool with porn and pornified sexual violence, which she doesn’t see as violence at all.  Alternatively, she may see it as violence, but uncriticizable when coded under “choice.”

Every extremely violent porn site I visited last week (see Part One) was responding to this new feminism in some way.  To be clear, I did not visit a lot of sites (maybe 15) and only viewed film stills and trailers, so I am not making a sweeping statement about all contemporary Internet porn.  Nevertheless, this microscopic speck in the macro of porn was certainly in a dialogue with the new millennium feminist.

These sites included bondage and machine sex sites (women penetrated violently with a variety machines).  Each of these sites opened with an interview with the woman before filming.  She would chat about how she was excited but nervous/a virgin (“an orgasm, what’s that?”)/always wanted to try this/liked it hard and fast/etc.  She would be in her street clothes and smiling.  This is not a new formula.  However, on the machine sex sites, for example, all of the off-screen interviewers were female.  The few glimpses of the camera crew also only showed women.  For example, at an end of a trailer where the “star” was lying on the cement floor and unable to get up (because of the incredible violence of the machines, she was likely injured) yet smiling and saying how “great” that was, a female crew member walks on screen and announces, “That’s a wrap.”  With no men referenced to at all, these films feed the new feminists’ idea that violent porn emerges out of a woman’s “archetypal fantasy.”

On the bondage sites, it was also a common formula to end the film by showing the women back in their street clothes talking about how great the experience was.  A few minutes earlier in the trailer, they were being submerged under water/being electrocuted/hands purple without circulation/nipples clamped/etc.  Nevertheless, by showing the women arriving in their everyday clothes and leaving the same way, the women were portrayed as moving seamlessly out of and back into the non-porn world—the illusion being that none of them could have possibly been coerced, that it was only their own agency that brought them to choose to be beaten up.

However, this may be the most dismaying fact about porn in the new millennium.  Although I would rather not concede that some women are freely choosing to be in porn, even very violent porn, they are.  Less and less coercion is needed if you have a pool of women who see “sex radicalism” versus “radical feminism” as a way to achieve equality with men.  In truth, degree of choice exists on a sliding scale, starting with no choice and ending somewhere near free (we are all always influenced by something).  On one end, there are runaway kids picked up by predators and thrown into porn and prostitution, women and men in abusive relationships whose partners force them into porn, and the endless porn images posted on the Internet without the consent of the person photographed.  On the other end, there are well-privileged, middle class women who choose to drop a successful career outside of porn to take one up within it, who run their own porn studios, who publish.  However, real choice also comes with accountability.  Women of privilege who participate in and endorse pornography as essential free speech contribute to the popular skepticism that anyone could truly be coerced into something so wonderful and liberating—and that, of course, even if coerced, every woman will ultimately recognize how “great” the porn experience is.

The colonized are truly colonized when the only path they can see out of their colonization leads to the colonizer’s definition of heaven. — D.A. Clarke (6, p. 66)

Kris Kitko

I have been following Kris Kitko, feminist folksinger and composer, for fifteen years.  I just got back from a performance of hers, and she just gets better and better.  Her songs range from simply silly to incisive political and social critique.  The Bitch Song, which I heard in its early form years ago, was recently declared by Windy City Times to have “anthem written all over it.”  With humor and eloquence, her music takes on rape culture, sizeism, homophobia, and myriad other oppressions.  When she wraps her talent around these difficult issues, she leaves the listener inspired and not overwhelmed.  She’s good.  Check her out.

Kris Kitco MySpace page (with sound clips).

Kris Kitko’s homepage.

To purchase Krissy Made a Funny.

To purchase I Am Not Wal-mart.

Porn in the New Millennium (Part One)

Note:  This post includes some brief, factual descriptions of violent pornography.

What is happening before your very eyes is that the pornography industry has managed to legitimize pornographized sexuality….Partly, there is an increased cruelty of touch.—Andrea Dworkin, 1999

In the early mid-1990s, the Internet had just emerged as a wide-spread phenomenon.  Home computers had also become more user friendly with the introduction of Windows.  Within just a few years, the Internet seamlessly merged with the lives of the middle class—and the Internet was quickly recognized as a marketplace bonanza.  The porn industry was one of the first and most successful markets to move in.

At the time, I was working as the director of a non-profit, feminist organization.  As part of my work, I conducted intensive, two-day workshops on the commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls.  This required ongoing Internet research.  Because Internet porn was developing at a staggering pace, it was nearly impossible to keep up with.  The porn industry was exploding wide open.  In the Internet it knew it had found its perfect domain, and it was absolutely giddy with its freedom.  After a few years of ongoing research, conducting trainings, working on public campaigns and policy initiatives, and weathering a variety of hostile actions toward our organization, I needed a hiatus.  It ended up being an eight-year hiatus.

A couple of years ago, I did my first Internet porn search in the new millennium.  That research resulted in the piece, Anorexia Porn, White Porn, that was published in Rain and Thunder.  Then I pulled out of the Internet porn world again, until last week.  Surfing some anti-porn blogs, I opened an ambiguous link and ended up on a porn marketing blog.  I decided that I may as well update myself.

There are significant ways that Internet porn has changed since the advent of the World Wide Web.  The most obvious is the ways in which technology has created a veneer of “class” over an industry that even only 20 years ago had been dominated by grainy, poorly lit photos and videos.  The old porn evoked seediness and amateurism.  Whether you liked the stuff or not, it always smelled of men masturbating in sticky porn theaters.  When I was first researching Internet porn 15 year ago, quite a bit of online porn was simply scans of paper porn or photos of variable quality shot with film cameras.  Now, however, digital cameras loaded with megapixel technology along with snappy blog and website templates can make just about any seedy, amateur photo or video look “nice.”  Because we live in a culture that is highly seduced by things that look “nice,” we are less likely to reject nice-looking porn.  “Nice-looking” confers status and acceptability.

Another significant shift is the pornification of broader and broader populations.  Internet porn is rapidly eliminating the idea of niche or fetish porn.  There are endless sites for any type of porn.  15 years ago, for example, a search may pick up a few sites for “older women” or “disabled” porn.  Now they are just part of the immense slurry of pornobjectification.

In addition, the degree of freely available, extremely violent porn has increased tremendously. When the porn and prostitution industry first started exploring the Internet as a marketplace, it tested societal tolerance by typically offering “soft” porn as its free material.  To access more violent porn, one usually had to pay.  Then the industry sat back as if it were a disinterested bystander and watched the debate on free speech wage and the ACLU to offer its defenses.  As it became clear that the Internet would an unfettered romping ground, the industry continued to increase the range and type of free pornography.

This is not to say that extremely violent porn was not freely available online 15 years ago.  I’ve never paid for porn on the Internet, then or now.  Yet among other things, I clearly remember 15 years ago the free teaser page for a “big shit” site (women defecating), an unforgettable image of a woman with a wine bottle inserted wide end into her anus, women being raped by dogs, and a fuzzy picture of a young girl raped and murdered with a broom.  (I did notify the FBI.)  However, those images now are mainstream freebies on the Internet.  In fact, one can easily find a bounty of free videos of the same, which are the best how-to manuals for sexual violence ever made.  (The bondage and rape videos may not show you how to carry through to an actual torture murder, but they provide all the steps up to it.)

Hardee's "fist girl" ad.

As Internet porn became more violent, soft porn needed somewhere to go.  So it moved into the culture of the 1990s generation of teens and young adults.  This created a growing market group that had not known life without soft porn.  Thus, in our new millennium, companies find it a cinch to use the soft porn model for marketing.  In fact, companies have begun testing those limits as well.  For example, in the “fist girl” Hardee’s ads (2005), the heteroporn idea of lesbianism (women who fist each other) was used to promote its Monster Thickburger.

There are other ways that I observed that Internet porn has shifted and morphed, particularly in the ways it has responded to its critics and has consumed women as a user group.  However, I need more time to ponder before I write.  Also, when I am writing about porn, the images sit in the forefront of my consciousness for the duration of the project.  And I’d like to let the images fade for a while.  I’ll return to them in a few weeks.  Part Two will be forthcoming.