Tag: sexuality

Crap emails, man angst, better living through feminism…

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I try to be calm and cool…… but my body language always gives me away & creeps women out some how. I start conversations easily, but I find myself saying too much or confusing women by saying things that they cannot understand or are too deep, for the amount of Vodka-Red Bulls that they have consumed.

This post at Letters From Johns reminds me of this (much longer and funnier) Crap Email From A Dude. They both remind me of crap emails I’ve received in the past from various acquaintances and from strangers who read about my vagina.

It’s weird to recognize a whole collection of traits— the insistence that they like women even though they are unable to avoid venting their anger at/about women, the over-analysis often constructed from one chapter of [dead guy of your choice], the obsession with yet lack of self-awareness (“I’m very direct, here’s 3000 words about nothing.”), the refusal of independent responsibility (“I hate it when people hang out with me even though they obviously think they’re too good for me.”), the fucked up gender stereotypes, the obsession with yet discomfort over sex… It’s a whole syndrome. In high school, my friends and I called these characters Deep Teen Smurf, or Bad Teenaged Poet.

Off and on, I’ve wished for a book to recommend to these guys, to help them snap out of it and get past being so angry and hurt about their entitlement not working out for them. I would call this book “Put On Your Big Boy Pants, OK Thanks.” I’ve seen The Gender Knot recommended as a book that explains how patriarchy even causes problems for men (while distinguishing those problems from the problems of being oppressed). So maybe that would work. It’s on my excessively long personal reading list for 2008, to find out.

G-rated YouTube porn, feathers.

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I ran into this while I was looking for info about whether found feathers can have any germs or mites or whatever (probably not). I love the wealth of g-rated porn that has blossomed under YouTube’s anti-nudity terms of service. I don’t think they intended to create a video sharing service where only kinky sexplay is allowed (watching women fart, smelling socks…), but I guess that’s a fairly predictable side-effect of banning mainstream, tab-a-slot-b, show-the-boobs sex in an online space.

So far I haven’t found anything especially subversive— lots of groomed women and muscular men, lots of hypergender, whatever— but I actually like this tickling video because the tickler and the ticklee seem to have actual communication with each other. “OK, OK,” feet flex, feet relax. That’s kind of magic to see on YouTube.

Curling, graininess suitably expressing surreality.

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Uh, me curling.

I went curling after hours at a rink owned by some friends of my cousin, out near Sidney.

  • It was surprisingly fun, in the way that bocci, billiards and croquet are fun. Minimally-confrontational exercises in physics.
  • So far I’ve never once been a fan of flattening large areas of land (parking lots, malls, golf courses…), especially land where I understand something about it having been colonized and occupied. It’s extra absurd when the flattening is done for sports. Non-cooperation overload.
  • If I were actually into playing sports, I would set up a beautiful place to play for once. Rinks, fields, courses and courts are all so ugly! Wow. I wonder if spending time in artificially lit, flattened out, weirdly-proportioned, echo-y, energy sinkhole type spaces might be damaging on its own, even without the formalized competition and violence and the addiction to contrived adrenaline rushes. (Hi, I have fun ideas about sports!) Certainly people say that about office cubicles, that the ugliness is demoralizing, even without the bureaucratic hierarchy crap.
  • And, curling was really fun. Pushing heavy things across ice with measurement marks is basically sensory play. Balance, momentum, angles, stretching, muscles. I bet curling kink parties would be fun.

Pets, sex, reading about tantra

sarah

During a mission to get a couple of books for holiday gifts (look out family, I have eliminated my filter on gifts related to self-help and patriarchy), I picked up a copy of Urban Tantra for myself. The author, Barbara Carrellas, seems like a fab and interesting person in the realm of Annie Sprinkle, Betty Dodson, Kate Bornstein, etc., so I decided to risk offending my atheist sensibilities.

So far, as long as I interpret all talk of Kundalini snakes and chakra colours metaphorically and keep an eye out for my personal standards of cultural appropriation, the ideas and practices in the book are useful and fun and kind of adorable. I laugh with delight at least twice per chapter. It helps that besides being “urban,” the book is super queer, feminist, safety-aware, BDSM-friendly and supportive of sex workers.

My top delighted giggle so far is this suggestion from the chapter called “How to Touch.” She’s talking about something she calls “the Resilient Edge of Resistance,” a balance between pressure and support, touch that isn’t too hard or too light but just at the edge where you can gradually go further. She suggests some exercises to practice finding this edge, including this one:

Practice by petting a cat or a dog. Pets give great feedback. If they stick around and beg for more, you’ve found their Resilient Edge of Resistance.

I don’t usually think of that as feedback, but of course it is! I’m happy to see somebody giving pets credit for being in touch with their bodies and uninhibited about communicating feedback. That seems genuinely body-positive, to not just acknowledge our animal natures but admire other animals’ skills.

“Babe of the day”

sarah

Flickr photo sharing

‘birdi speaking of her son while undressing on her (sorta)ex-lover’s father’s rented roof’ by tetheredto

Casey phoned the other day to ask about my top photos of undressed women, as a response to seeing one of those lame “babe of the day” widgets on somebody’s Facebook profile. (I think he wanted to build an arsenal, in case he had the opportunity to unleash it on somebody.) I am pleased that somebody thinks I am a potential resource for images of people who are sexy in the body hair and bellies kind of way, but I don’t have a stash of that stuff at all.

For a start, I thought of Rose and Olive, photographers I found awhile ago, I think on Warren Ellis’ blog. Their photos are often quite posed, and they seem caught up in starving artist glamour and that artier version of girls gone wild that hipsters like (wet shirts, polaroids, poetry…), and they have a blog at Nerve.com which is a creepy place to have a blog… and the photo above is one of only two black models in their entire archive as well as one of a very few models who look older than nineteen and aren’t showcasing skinny bony shoulders… but also, they seem to know that wide thighs and forehead wrinkles and messes are beautiful, and they seem sincere, so I pick and choose from their photos.

I appreciate the love of armpits, textures and complicated facial expressions going on in this photo, and the way the model is kinda subverting a classic pin-up pose. It makes me want to be on that roof, in that light, touching skin with somebody. So this might go in my babe of the day stash, if I had one.

Imax, slasher films, pornography

sarah

I feel a meandering mind-map coming on, starting from an essay about slasher movies by Carol Clover (roughly summarized here ) that I read in this anthology about gender in myth.

On the civilized side of the continuum lie the legitimate genres; at the other end, hard on the unconscious, lie the sensation or ‘body’ genres, horror and pornography, in that order. …

It is a rare Hollywood film that does not devote a passage or two— a car chase, a sex scene— to the emotional and physical excitement of the audience. But horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation. They exist solely to horrify and stimulate, not always respectively, and their ability to do so is the sole measure of their success…

I’ve seen a lot of people try to show that horror and pornography are related, usually based on some inarticulate statement about the similarity of sex and death. This bodily-sensation aspect seems like a more accurate connection. It’s got me editing my ideas about pornography (again), too.

For the last couple of years, my working definition has been that something is pornographic (to me) when it is presented for its own sake with no intention to communicate further meaning. Literal as opposed to symbolic, I guess. Showing literal sex rather than any experience of eroticism, or showing literal blood and gore rather than communicating a meaning of injury or death or fear (a la gore-porn). I don’t mean that as a diss to actual porn, more as an explanation of why I call Cute Overload cute-porn, and why I sometimes object to the ways other people use hyphenated, non-sexual porn labels. (I’m not sure I experience the Ikea catalog as storage-porn just because it shows a lot of shelving.)

This sensation definition is way simpler, and avoids having to argue about what is meaningful or symbolic. Since porn is some of the most intensely deconstructed media around and easily supplied with symbolic meaning, I think this simple sensation definition is a lot more accurate too. So thanks for that, early nineties essay collection.

Thinking about movies that are made for my body got me thinking about imax. All I want from a six-story tall movie is a strong sense of vertigo! I see an imax film about once every two years, but in my limited sampling they seem to be getting less motion-sick overall. Anybody have better evidence on that? (Tosczaks, or other bearers of yearly passes?) At the least, I’ve been disappointed with the imax films I’ve been seeing. I don’t want a plot at the imax, I want a bodily experience. More helicopter shots going over a cliff, please. I want imax to be more pornographic. Imax has not been fulfilling its potential.

So yup. The other idea I want to store here is about “legitimate” genres. I don’t really buy the idea that they’re less focussed on bodily sensations. The most pretentious, high-class films I’ve seen could be called superiority-porn. Feeling superior is a real sensation, although not often acknowledged as a physical/chemical state. I just dug up a clip from the Helvetica movie where Erik Spiekermann explains that he just likes looking at type. “Other people look at bottles of wine, or whatever, or you know, girls’ bottoms. I look at type.” He looks; it feels good. I’ve only seen the trailers, but that documentary is clearly modernist-typography-porn, and totally classy. (Or, ahem, neutral.)

The pretense seems to be that some cinematically-induced sensations are intellectual, rather than bodily, which actually seems very similar to my original working definition about pornography being devoid of meaning. So again, why am I reading anthologies about symbol and myth in these “body” genres if they are so literal and physical? This seems like a very weird manifestation of the usual classist aesthetic distinctions, where “legitimate” good taste just happens to be whatever working class / uneducated / trashy people don’t appreciate. Classy movies are secretly about sensations, and trashy movies are secretly full of cultural symbolism. Oops.

I’m probably specifically bad at this game— personality quiz questions on the theme of “do you pay more attention to rational thoughts or gut feelings” make my head explode, because surely thoughts and feelings exist in the same soup. I mean, you have to feel whether you’re being honest about your logic; I don’t know any other way. From now on I’m paying special attention to how my body feels when I watch fancy art films.

Sex, death and consensual education

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Christina Aguilera as a schoolgirl in a Skechers ad.

I’ve finished reading Instead of Education, one of John Holt’s influential tomes about unschooling and home schooling. As soon as I started typing my notes into the thesis wiki, I had to make a Vagina deja vu category to keep track of all the concepts I recognized from studying women’s sexuality and reproduction over at All About My Vagina. The root of all the deja vu seems to be one single thing, and it’s one of my favourite things, too! It’s consent.

John Holt spends a lot of Instead of Education making the point that compulsory education is, by nature, oppressive and unethical. (The book is a bona fide manifesto! ‘Students, you have nothing to lose but your chains’… the whole deal. I liked it.) My favourite quotes on this topic are in the wiki:

This seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why until, about a hundred pages in, Holt started writing about teacher-learner relationships. He insists that because these relationships involve one person assuming a position of authority and power (the teacher), teaching relationships need to be temporary, well defined, and free to leave. Maybe I’m the only person who hears that and thinks immediately of BDSM, but I think it’s a really useful parallel!

There is a huge amount of sex writing about boundaries, relationships, temporary roles, domination and, above all, consent. I think what John Holt was after was consensual education. When he talks about the impossibility of consensual education within the framework of compulsory schooling, he sounds exactly like lesbian feminists who believe hetero sex is automatically oppressive within a patriarchal society. It’s about consent, and the circumstances under which it is possible.

My favourite discussion of consensual sex is The Ethical Slut‘s characterization of consent as an active collaboration for the benefit, well-being and pleasure of all persons concerned. An ‘active collaboration’ is exactly the kind of learning John Holt promoted. E.g.,

Like a few children I know in the U.S., [unschooled children from Ny Lilleskole in Denmark] are probably much more able than most of their [conventional] schoolmates (who can only submit or resist it) to make use of [conventional] school, to get from it at least some of the things they want for their own reasons.

It makes perfect sense that a freedom loving gal such as myself would want all relationships to be consensual, but I’d never thought of teaching as a relationship. I started to wonder what other situations I might enjoy more by examining the relationships involved and finding ways to make them consensual.

I think this definitely applies to self-defense (I had trouble making sense of it until I realized that being attacked is a relationship, not a situation). Cooperation and competition in business is another one.

Mainly though, I think this might be a good way to think about dying and death. There are obvious hot topics about death and consent (euthanasia, living wills, etc), but I wonder what could be gained by trying to have a consensual relationship with Death itself. It clearly has terms of engagement; maybe I could come up with my own set of terms and we could collaborate.

The vagina method of narrowing a thesis

sarah

Today I went hunting for influential works about death and dying on Amazon and got vagina-related deja vu again. Last time this happened I was reading hospice literature about rejecting the default role for dying people, and it was exactly like vaginal literature about rejecting the default role for women (or sexual beings, mothers, etc). Death is regularly compared to both birth and orgasm, so maybe my background in vaginas will be useful in more direct ways than I expected. Ha ha.

I joke about having a Bachelor of Vaginas, but I think I might start saying that more seriously. I did pretty extensive studying on the subject, but I’m starting to wonder if I may have also worked out a decent method for researching general, interdisciplinary sorts of topics, like vaginas or death. It makes me feel a little safer to realize I know how to choose books and papers to read, and how to make sense of them. Go team!

But more importantly (for me), All About My Vagina might be a workable machine for turning curiosity into thesis topics. As I’ve been telling more and more people about my indie thesis, I’ve become more and more aware of how painfully broad my topic idea is. What I want my death to be like, or how I’d like to deal with dying? That’s big, and too vague to be a real thesis topic. A book topic maybe, or a website topic, but not a new, exhaustive, academic contribution on a specific idea.

And yet, “all about my vagina” is exactly as big and fluffy a topic as this (I could call this project All About My Death, yes?) and I’ve managed to pull a specific area of expertise out of that website. Ask me sometime about women understanding ideal vulva shapes and forming body image in relation to their own childhood genitals.

I could write you 100 or more pages on it, with dozens and dozens of references including my own primary research. Except none of the primary research is actually rigorous, and I’ve never written out the whole document, because that’s not what I had planned to do with the vagina website. (What does a person plan to do with a vagina website? That’s funny.) So I think that project will stay a website, and not be any kind of thesis. But it could be, I think, in a pinch.

So here it is:

Method for turning curiosity into thesis topics using a vagina website.

  1. Post everything you know that is interesting or important
  2. Keep reading and investigating
  3. Post your new results and ideas
  4. People will ask you questions. A lot of them will be the same.
  5. Try to answer the questions. Research to find answers.
  6. Post the new results. Get more questions.
  7. Notice the things you can’t find answers to. They are thesis topics.

This strikes me as a Wisdom of Crowds type of method, where I’m kind of an aggregator. Hooray! I like thinking about complexity and information overload, and how generalists and interdisciplinary projects are useful to deal with that, so it’s kind of hilarious to see that it might work the other way, too. Complexity and crowd actions might be useful for dealing with generalism and interdisciplinary projects! (I only said kind of hilarious.)

Erotics of sports?

sarah

Chinlone players from the movie Mystic Ball.

Here are two things I’ve been trying to combine in my head since June:

  • I watched the World Cup soccer games this summer. I’ve never been a sports fan. The competition seemed meaningless, like it was wasting its potential. It was still fun, but I wanted something. Surely atheleticism and competition could add up to more than some arbitrary, slightly psychotic spectacle.
  • In his workbook The Erotic Mind, Dr. Jack Morin wrote that “eroticism is the process through which sex acquires meaning.” That made me think immediately of sports, believe it or not. I think my experience with sports might be like boring sex, without any erotic framework.

I’ve just been kind of storing that partial idea, pending further inspiration.

But, I think I found a film I need to watch. I spotted it in the Vancouver International Film Festival guide (after the festival was over— argh!). It’s called Mystic Ball.

Chinlone is a unique combination of sport and dance, a team sport with no opposing team. The focus is not on winning, but on how beautifully you play the game.

For director Greg Hamilton, what begins as a physical exercise soon becomes a meditation and a dance with gravity. Mystic Ball follows Hamilton as he evolves from an awkward beginner to a teammate capable of soloing with the greatest chinlone players in the country. During numerous trips to Myanmar and the city of Mandalay, Hamilton is embraced by a community that shares his passion. We see the development of his friendship with the “Golden Princess” Su Su Hlaing, the greatest chinlone solo artist in the country. And we learn what chinlone means to a couple of elders who have been playing the game everyday for the last 70 years.

That movie might be beyond my New Age threshold (Golden Princess?), and the sport sounds suspiciously like Burmese Hacky Sack, but I’m going to file it away just in case.

Internet wish: find likely pornographic typos

sarah

Any page offering advice on choosing a domain name will insist you consider common typos and misunderstandings. No need to end up the latest sexchange URL (lawyersexchange.com, editorsexchange.com…). And nobody wants to end up a typo away from hardcore porn. Especially if your website features Christian hymns.

So why can’t I find a tool to check these things?

I just got an email from a web design client (who really does make Christian hymns) saying that one of their customers had accidentally found porn while trying to type in their website address. “They probably just made a typo.”

But darned if I can figure out where this typo porn actually is. None of my misspelled attempts are registered domains, and I can’t find a tool that suggests similarly spelled URLs that exist.

There are lots of tools to find websites with similar content, but none to find websites with similar addresses. This second tool is what I wish for.

The best thesis since Xena

sarah

I helped my granny pick her peach tree on the weekend, so I took the opportunity to explain my new thesis project to her and ask for her input about mortality and dying.

She’s 86; she grew up on a farm; she’s had her funeral and burial plans pre-paid for years; she tells a story about her experience speaking with the spirit of her recently deceased sister; and we often have conversations about my grandpa’s advanced Alzheimer’s dementia and the merits of burning out versus fading away (elder nursing home version). I thought she’d have lots to contribute.

The first thing out of her mouth?

“Oh darling, there’s a book I’ll have to give you when I’m finished. It’s about one of those… those men who never die? (Well he could die in a fight, but not of old age.) And he’s supposed to hunt evil? It goes back centuries. Just centuries.”

(The name she’s looking for is Dark Hunter, and he surely owes his existence to Boris Vallejo.)

Dark Hunter novel cover

I know that I need to start narrowing my topic as soon as possible— at the moment I’m reminded of my aunt’s high school independent research project on the entire history of ancient China— but for now, while I scope out the lay of the land, it’s pretty cool to just ask everyone I know if they have any tips or resources about dying, to see all the different angles that pop up. I would not have thought to examine sexualized immortality in post Buffy pulp fiction if granny hadn’t suggested it.

A start: normal dying processes

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I’ve heard a lot of stories of dying people needing to get a good sleep before they have enough energy to die, or of dying at contrived times like right before an annoying doctor is due to show up, or right after seeing a new baby relative.

I’m sure a lot of those stories are coincidence, but I’m intrigued by the idea that dying is an action the body takes, rather than an event that just happens when the body fails. Zoe pointed out the other day that many people think of death as a failure of medicine, rather than as a normal event in everyone’s life. To me, thinking of death as an active, biological process makes it seem more like a normal function (which I’m interested in, for now).

This morning I’ve been hunting for information about the normal dying process, and how it varies, and whether there are conflicting models for “normal” death responses the way I’m familiar with different, biased models of sexual response from working on my vagina website (and indeed, Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief seem to draw similar controversy to Masters and Johnson’s model of the human sexual response cycle).

Zen Hospice has a great overview of the physical changes a person goes through as they die, from a hospice perspective. I recognize all of those symptoms from the few people I’ve known at the end of their lives. I can see immediately why there are so many comparisons between giving birth, having orgasms, and dying: all involve extreme physical responses that start to seem normal when you know what to expect. Learning about the physical symptoms of dying feels a little like getting to know the birds in your neighbourhood or something: gaining context.

Graceful Exits:How Great Beings Die apparently deals with conscious dying and dying on purpose, such as the idea of elders wandering off alone into the woods to die. It sounds a bit flaky (i.e., possible use of ambiguous generalizations like “aboriginal cultures”), but still really compelling to me. I’m all for special skills, and this intro sort of makes dying sound like a superpower:

Then the person is left alone. He or she sits down, and within a matter of minutes is able to intentionally close down the body and die.

That would be both more and less useful than being able to cry on command.

But, from my scattered reading this morning, I gather that I should do some searching for literature about “deathing” and “timing of death” rather than the process of dying. It’s a bit weird that “dying” gets used more as adjective than as a form of the verb “to die.” When a person “dies” that describes the moment of death fairly precisely, but when a person “is dying” that could refer to almost any stage of life or illness or injury.

This is the kind of jargon I should figure out soon— it’s hard to organize notes when you don’t know the names for things (and stuff).