I’m taking a break from the never-ending thesis revisions to complete an application for a post-doc at a prestigious Ivy League university. This is the last thing I have time for right now, but tomorrow is the last day to apply. I had to write a course proposal, a teaching reflection, etc. etc. I’ve been working on this since 11am and it’s now 10:30pm and I’m still not finished. So…terrific.
At least 900 people will apply for these post-docs (this is the norm). Statistically I have no chance of getting it, but someone has to get it, right? Just like someone has to win the lotto and someone has to be eaten by sharks and someone has to be taken hostage by Somali pirates. You never know if you don’t try! [That's what everyone keeps telling me.] So in a nutshell, I have no chance of getting this, but I’ll spend a whole day working on it anyway. This is not good for morale. What is also not good for morale:
I just realized that all my documents are formatted to A4 paper size, which is what is used in the UK. So I had to change the paper size to US letter size and now my CV has gone haywire and is now 4 pages instead of 3 (not good).
And then I was looking over my writing sample just now, which is 25 pages from my dissertation. I chose an excerpt from my chapter on Fight Club, because that is my strongest writing. Once I was finished editing it and formatting it, I realized that the excerpt contains the word “dildo” 3 times and the phrase “F-ck Martha Stewart” and lots of other f-words because, you know, this is Fight Club. You can’t quote from Fight Club without that kind of language appearing. And now I just don’t have time to put together another writing sample, because I just don’t have time and I’m tired, so I’m stuck sending this potty-mouthed excerpt to the Ivy League.
My 87-year-old grandmother has recently moved over here from Denver. She is obsessed with the Denver Broncos and always has been, but now that she’s living nearby, we have to hear about them all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to check the Broncos’ website for game times in recent weeks. Anyway, thank you for this, Jimmy Fallon.
Live women in porn being pissed on = sexually arousing
[Of course, the difference is that the women in porn "choose" this and they "enjoy" it. For men, even dead ones, this is humiliating.]
The news that U.S. Marines in Afghanistan pissed on dead Taliban soldiers is drawing comparisons to the torture at Abu Ghraib. In both cases, the soldiers filmed/photographed themselves degrading the prisoners/corpses. This is significant. The term “war porn” was often used to describe what happened at Abu Ghraib, but only in that sloppy way the word “porn” is often used to describe various things (i.e. “food porn”), which is completely detached from all critical analysis and context. Only a few brave writers (mostly feminists) drew comparisons between what happened to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and to what actually happens to women in pornography every day. [Most commentators on the left-wing remained silent about this aspect, not surprisingly.]
D.A. Clarke’s essay “Prostitution for Everyone: Feminism, Globalisation and the “Sex Industry” [PDF], which I first read in this book, includes an addendum about Abu Ghraib. I thought of this essay today when I read the news about the pissing Marines. I’ve included a few quotes from the essay below, but the whole thing is worth reading:
Our reaction — as a nation and a public — to the use of Iraqi prisoners in amateur pornography shows that we believe this was a deeply humiliating experience for them. Our media have made much of the “special” characteristics of Arabs, to explain why this experience is so very humiliating for them in particular — whereas it is of course perfectly harmless and good for the women and girls spread, splayed, stripped and mocked throughout our commercial advertising/porn media nexus.
[...]
Structural similarities between the documented humiliation of prisoners and the conventions of “normal” pornography are many and strikingly obvious. The prisoners were made to masturbate for the camera; images and footage of women masturbating are a stock theme in commercial porn. The prisoners were made to pose in tableaux suggestive of homosexual activity such as fellatio; a large and profitable subgenre of commercial porn is “girl/girl”, in which (presumably heterosexual) models are posed in tableaux mimicking lesbian sex, or directed to engage in sexual behaviour with each other while the camera rolls. These models usually bear little resemblance to real-life lesbians, being selected (like most porn models) for their conformity to commercial and male-defined standards of heterosexual attractiveness.
In these forms of documentary porn there are surely two gratifications, one overt and one tacit. The overt gratification is the fantasy of violation of privacy, of spying on the intimate and private acts of another person. But the Abu Ghraib pictures should illuminate for us a further, tacit or covert gratification: the gratification of knowing or believing that the persons depicted were compelled or persuaded or paid to submit to a violation of privacy in reality, to strike poses and perform acts in reality which most people would not care to have seen or photographed by others. This is one sense in which this genre is genuinely documentary.
The “kick” of girl/girl porno lies partly in its catering to the fantasy of violating the privacy of lesbians, of making even sex between women — something quite threatening to male sexual prerogative — serve a male agenda; the other, tacit element is the kick of seeing “normal girls” made to emulate lesbian sexual activity. The assumption is that homosexual activity is repulsive, and that therefore the models are disgusted by it and endure it under some compulsion — whether the compulsion of money, force of personality, or physical threat.
[...]
Misogyny drips from all accounts of Abu Ghraib, and from all attempts to analyze it. The outrage of Arab men that the Americans “treated our brothers like women.” The idea that making men wear “women’s undies” is a form of torture. The overarching, stunning hypocrisy of the world’s largest pornography-exporting nation acting so dreadfully shocked when its line troops treat POWs in the same ways that its prison guards and stronger inmates treat weaker men, and that its pornography and prostitution industry treats women, every single day.
For this radical feminist the Abu Ghraib pictures merely elucidate what porn is really about. The essence is not obfuscated for once, because the victims are men, and literally prisoners behind bars and facing guns (instead of behind economic bars, facing hunger/homelessness). Therefore we can suddenly perceive that they are victims, that they have personal pride and dignity which have been assaulted, that they have rights which have been violated. The nameless, traceless women posing for websites like “See Asian Sluts Get What They Deserve” or “Farm Girls And Their Pets” — whether guns are pointed at them in the course of their work or not — arouse no such outrage or compassion.
Taking a quick break from writing to share a few links about the sex industry. Those of you who read this blog know I have strong feelings about it and that the uncritical, neo-liberalistic embrace of prostitution and pornography by so many on the left-wing of the political spectrum (including “sex-positive” feminists, liberals and even so-called progressives and radicals) has left me feeling alienated from people with whom I tend to agree on other topics. I’m not only alienated, but extremely angry and disgusted.
I also want to recommend the Canadian feminist blog called The F Word (not to be confused with the British blog of the same name, which I do not recommend). This blog deals with a wide variety of feminist issues from a mostly radical perspective, including posts about the sex industry. Highly recommended.
Finally, below is a video that shows women being abused on a porn set. Trigger Warningfor sexual abuse. I must stress this — do not watch this video if you are sensitive. I have done a lot of research into the sex industry, yet I just watched this myself and feel terribly shaken by it. If you know anyone who thinks porn is great, send them this video. Of course, any porn apologist will just say these are isolated events, but when you watch porn, do you know what happened behind the scenes? Nope, not unless you were there in person.
Happy New Year, kids! I hope 2012 is a fabulous year for all of you. Amidst all the doom and gloom in the world at the moment, I still think it’s possible to carve out some joy and success. Strength comes from adversity and all that. Yes, it’s true.
2012 is going to be a major year of transition for me. I’ll finish my PhD. And I’ve just started querying literary agents in NYC with my novel, so we’ll see how that goes. It’s finally happening!
I’m also applying for post-docs and scouring the academic job adverts in the US, UK and worldwide. I’m not going to MLA in Seattle this week — I couldn’t really afford it and I didn’t have time to prepare. To be honest, I have no idea what I’m doing in this job search. My university didn’t prepare me at all. I feel at a big disadvantage in the job market because of this. I think I need to pour all my energy into getting published. For me, a job is likely to come from that.
Anyway, I am feeling upbeat, despite having a huge question mark hovering over this year. None of us can predict the future, but I have no idea where I’ll even be living. The US? The UK? Elsewhere? I’m just living out of a suitcase at the moment. If I think about that, and looming student loan repayment, and unemployment, it becomes too overwhelming, so I won’t think about it. I just need to finish this thesis first and then go from there.
Posting will be light around here (or possibly non-existent) until I submit my thesis, which I hope will be the week after next. You’ll know when I’m done — you’ll hear my screams of joy wherever you are in the world. Yes, it’ll be that loud.
