A Debate Between Pro- and Anti-Sex Feminists Moderated by a Depth Psychologist
[reposted by permission of author, FL user "irtehkinkylol"]
HORNEY: Hi, I'm Dr. Carolyn Gustav Horney and welcome to another edition of Compulsive Ruminations, the show where we disappear into our navels talking in circles about the issues that matter to you. With me today I have two distinguished panelists to talk to us about the relationship between sex, power and liberation. On my left is Annie Bright, avant garde performance artist and self-styled pro-sex feminist. Ms. Bright was the director and head perfornographer of the recent event, Labial Folds: A Happening about Pussies and Papercrafts. And since nobody wanted to be on the right, further down on my left is Dr. Cynthia McDworkin, who describes herself as a radical feminist and is the author of the recent article And Ain't I A Woman, The Sojourner Truth Stamp as the Spinning, Folding, and Mutilation of Women.
As always here on Compulsive Ruminations we will slow down, reflect, listen deeply into our diverse voices, and manipulate each other with passive-aggression and victimhood; utterly failing to work through feelings, let anything go, or move forward into happier and healthier ways of living. I'm Dr. Carolyn Horney and this is Compulsive Ruminations.
I'd like to start with opening remarks. Dr. McDworkin?
MCDWORKIN: Thank you Dr. Horney. Notwithstanding the denial of a few pornographers, in a world where one in three girls is sexually assaulted before she reaches eighteen, where emaciated women are used to sell everything from alcohol to toothpaste, and where women's tortured bodies are dumped like so much litter in the desert outside Juarez, the public display and commodification of what should be the most intimate areas of our lives can only be an act of aggression. Setting aside a few token Uncle Toms, men own everything, write the laws the govern everything, use the force that imposes those laws on everyone, and more often than not get away with it when they rape someone, anyone. The pornographers dress our young sisters up in schoolgirl drag, truss them up like turkeys and insert cold metal implements into their vaginas and rectums, saying that I have been a dirty, dirty girl looking at the magazines under daddy's bed and I need a firm hand of discipline on my white cotton panties followed by daddy's hot load in my face-- In such a context, that is, under patriarchy, the conclusion is inevitable: sex is violence.
HORNEY: Ms. Bright?
BRIGHT: Thank you, Carolyn. While rape and exploitation are serious issues, we can all cum as we are to the revolution of pleasure. The big secret they don't want you to know is that we are all freaks. The only people who even think they are normal are the ones who have so cut themselves off from their own desires and the associated shame that they live in an Ozzy and Harriet world where the married couples have separate beds, at the cost of all the of the color, beauty, and depth of feeling in life. Further, where porn goes up rape goes down. It is the repression of puritanism that leads to the exploitation and aggression--you can use women to sell toothpaste because the buyers are so full of repressed, fearful desire that sex is a back door into their most vulnerable places. In conclusion, I would like to invite everyone to my performance tomorrow at eleven PM at the PussPuss Club, entitled Full Cavity Pee, in which I suspend myself upside down from the ceiling at the edge of the stage and audience members are invited to urinate down my nostrils and into my sinuses while I enter a Tantric state of infinite sexual bliss. At the climax of the show and of my body, the orchestra plays Ode to Joy while I blow the urine out of my body and into the first five rows.
HORNEY: Wow, Annie, that's a very evocative image for me. It makes me think of Odhinn hanging on the Yggdrasil to attain knowledge of the runes, or the Hanged Man of the Tarot. It also makes me think of Shiva holding the pain of the world in his throat chakra. I see themes of death and rebirth, sacrifice, subversion--turning the order of things upside down to attain deep wisdom. What do you think, Dr. McDworkin?
MCDWORKIN: I see rape.
BRIGHT: Now, Cynthia. I spent months organizing this thing. I did the promotion, booked the venue, hired the orchestra, built the suspension rack. Could it be any clearer than I want it? No need to ask for a consent form, I had to fill out one of those for the insurance people.
MCDWORKIN: You're identified with the aggressor. In any trauma there's a part of us that survives by submitting. Any mammal will do that if it's helpless enough.
BRIGHT: But this really is what I want to be doing. Don't you think a desk job would be easier? I went out of my way to carve this niche out for myself because it's what makes me happy.
MCDWORKIN: When you grow up being used, it can be the only thing that's fulfilling, because it's how you learned to get love. We're swimming in oppression like a fish in water, we're permeated with it, it's normalized. In such a context you can't trust your instincts. Female masochism is expected and we are trained for it from before we can walk, that doesn't make it a good idea.
BRIGHT: Supposing I agree with you, and I don't, what better way to turn that masochism around than to make them pay for it? Have you ever tried to change your kinks? You can't. The Mormons tried that by showing gay guys pictures of hot men and then shocking them or making them puke. But all the hot sexy Mormon torture in the world can't control desire. I met a guy who bottomed for the research daddies in Salt Lake. He was a little weird but still gay as a tree full of parrots. If the patriarchy has made me a masochist I'm stuck with it, I might as well put it to work for me. I have wild sex, I meet interesting artists, I travel the world, I don't have to slave away in an office or as a housewife. If this is oppression I don't think I could stand the pleasure of liberation.
MCDWORKIN: But you'll never know the pleasure of being your own woman.
BRIGHT: What does that mean, being an academic suck-up?
HORNEY: I'd like to take a moment to invite us to examine the themes that have been coming up so far. I find it interesting that here we are, early on in this rather public exchange, and the discussion is centering around power, submission, and what feelings we can trust. Is it possible that we are really more concerned with being dominated by each other, here in this room, than we are with the patriarchy? At least in the short term.
[LONG SILENCE]
BRIGHT: I'm sorry I called you a suck-up. I think that article of yours was brave. I know it's a man's world in the academy.
MCDWORKIN: Thank you.
[SILENCE]
HORNEY: Dr. McDworkin, you've touched a couple of times already on denial and normalized sexual violence. I wonder if you have anything to say about recent comments by Whoopi Goldberg, for which she has taken some heat. She asked whether the rape allegedly committed by Roman Polanski was, quote, rape-rape, and later defended Mel Gibson after tapes emerged on which he threated his estranged wife. Your thoughts?
MCDWORKIN: Roman Polanski drugged an underage girl and penetrated her while she begged him to stop. How is that not rape-rape? What would a partial rape even look like? An act is either consensual or it isn't. I have to wonder what happened to Whoopi that it's such second nature for her to make excuses for perpetrators.
BRIGHT: I don't have much to say in defense of Mel or Roman, or Whoopi for that matter. But look at all the sadomasochism in Mel's movies. Braveheart is an elaborate torture fantasy, toward the end he even refuses the drug to block the pain that is smuggled to him. Well before The Passion of the Christ it should have been clear that noble suffering is part of Mel's core life theme, and probably his core erotic theme. If he had worked that out consensually in bed he might not have wound up imposing it nonconsensually on a woman and child. It's when desire is repressed that it pops up in the wrong places.
MCDWORKIN: In his movies Mel was perhaps trying to work his stuff out symbolically, but clearly it didn't work. What's your evidence for fantasy preventing oppression rather than encouraging it? And where are the right places for violent desires, your sinuses?
BRIGHT: See? Right beneath the surface of your outrage is the shame and scapegoating. You can barely finish a thought without talking about how dirty I am. I think you're the one who feels dirty. [PAUSE] Look, rape is horrible but there are things you can do. Go to therapy and cry it out, your rage is legitimate but contain it appropriately, don't impose it on those of us who are ready to take some risks and have some fun.
MCDWORKIN: Oh, sure, therapy solves everything. I see fourteen year old girls out hooking in the streets of Oakland. They're probably acting out abuse they're getting at home, and soon they'll be addicted to drugs to cope with the pain, and then they'll be slaves to the pimps. When they're thirty year old hags who look sixty, dying of AIDS on the street, I'll be sure to tell them that everything will be fine when they get some therapy. This is my whole point, rape is not some bizarre aberration, it's more common than having good health care, it's as American as apple pie, baseball and genocide. You can't solve something like that by talking about it quietly one-on-one with a well-paid professional. It's the rapists and pornographers who need therapy, I'm just fine, thank you.
BRIGHT: Wait, rapists and por--
HORNEY: I'd like to turn the discussion if I could to a recent event, the shutting down--some would say censorship--of the erotic services section on craigslist. Annie, it's your turn to start.
BRIGHT: The most troubling thing about the censorship of craigslist is that anybody who understands anything about the internet knows that it's not going to work. The pimps and their clients have already gone to other sites. They have money and power, it's easy for them to move around. The only people hurt by this are the independent sex workers who can't as easily or as safely shift to seedier places.
MCDWORKIN: But it sets a precedent. A company that was making money on the exploitation of women was stopped. Others will follow.
BRIGHT: Craigslist didn't charge for erotic services ads until they were taking so much heat they had to hire lawyers to review every post. But lets talk about making money from sex work. Craigslist's CEO pointed out that their erotic services ads weren't any worse than what was appearing in the back of the weekly alternative papers. I find it notable that the most-read progressive media in the country is funded largely by escorts. And it's not much different for me. I don't have a cushy academic job, I would be silenced if it weren't for the sex work I do.
MCDWORKIN: You could make money and speak your mind working with spammers, too, but you'd probably object on moral grounds. I find it interesting that you won't help annoy people with unsolicited email but you're fine doing business with pornographers and pimps.
BRIGHT: I don't recall ever working with pimps--
MCDWORKIN: You just said they were on--
BRIGHT: --we're going to talk about each other's strange bedfellows let's look at your friends, the fundamentalists. They spend most of their time trying to push us back into being barefoot and pregnant household slaves but suddenly they're your best friends when they go after porn. And these are the same people who went after craigslist. I don't see them in the rape crisis centers, they're not interested in fighting exploitation they're just puritanical moral crusaders who want sexual slavery to happen in the shadows where they don't have to think about it. And where they can secretly take advantage of it.
MCDWORKIN: At least I'm not having sex with them.
BRIGHT: Yes, you like the power dynamics simple in bed and complicated in politics. What do you do in bed anyway, masturbate on opposite sides of the room while talking about how much you respect each other?
HORNEY: I'd like to point out that--
MCDWORKIN: Better a prude than a tool of the patriarchy.
BRIGHT: I'll get my harness and give you my tool of the patriarchy, ice queen.
HORNEY: Can we just take a --
MCDWORKIN: RIGHT TO THREATENING RAPE YOU PRETENTIOUS POSTMODERN TOWN BICYCLE!
BRIGHT: YOU BACKED ME INTO THAT YOU VICE-CUNTED PROFESSIONAL MARTYR!
HORNEY: In this exchange I see the archetype of the Divine Twins, lovers and rivals, united in--
MCDWORKIN AND BRIGHT: SHUT! UP!
HORNEY: I -- um.
[SILENCE]
MCDWORKIN: You two set me up. This was a journalistic ambush.
BRIGHT: You think I would conspire with that headshrinker?
MCDWORKIN: A minute ago you were going to rape me with a strap-on, I wouldn't put anything past you.
BRIGHT: Oh, please, I should go get it just so you can see it's nothing to be afraid of.
MCDWORKIN: Go ahead, rape me right in front of the cameras, show the world what you're made of, what really gets you off.
BRIGHT: You'd like that wouldn't you, everybody watching while I open up your tight little pussy for you.
MCDWORKIN: (folds arms) ... Yes.
BRIGHT: ... You wanna beg for mommy?
MCDWORKIN: ... Yes.
BRIGHT: Huh?
MCDWORKIN: Yes, mommy.
BRIGHT: C'mere mommy will make it better.
[MCDWORKIN AND BRIGHT BEGIN TO MAKE LOVE]
HORNEY: And so we end with an alchemical transformation, a hieros gamos, ...
MCDWORKIN: Please ... yes ... please ... yes ... please ...
HORNEY: ... A Mercurial mystical marriage of seeming opposites into blissful union ...
BRIGHT: God ... God ... God ... God ...
HORNEY: ... reconciling conflicts and remaking the world, ending where we began with sacrifice and deep transformation. I'm Carolyn Horney and this has been Compulsive Ruminations.
BRIGHT AND MCDWORKIN: GOD! PLEASE! GOD! PLEASE! PLEASE! YES!
HORNEY: Hi, I'm Dr. Carolyn Gustav Horney and welcome to another edition of Compulsive Ruminations, the show where we disappear into our navels talking in circles about the issues that matter to you. With me today I have two distinguished panelists to talk to us about the relationship between sex, power and liberation. On my left is Annie Bright, avant garde performance artist and self-styled pro-sex feminist. Ms. Bright was the director and head perfornographer of the recent event, Labial Folds: A Happening about Pussies and Papercrafts. And since nobody wanted to be on the right, further down on my left is Dr. Cynthia McDworkin, who describes herself as a radical feminist and is the author of the recent article And Ain't I A Woman, The Sojourner Truth Stamp as the Spinning, Folding, and Mutilation of Women.
As always here on Compulsive Ruminations we will slow down, reflect, listen deeply into our diverse voices, and manipulate each other with passive-aggression and victimhood; utterly failing to work through feelings, let anything go, or move forward into happier and healthier ways of living. I'm Dr. Carolyn Horney and this is Compulsive Ruminations.
I'd like to start with opening remarks. Dr. McDworkin?
MCDWORKIN: Thank you Dr. Horney. Notwithstanding the denial of a few pornographers, in a world where one in three girls is sexually assaulted before she reaches eighteen, where emaciated women are used to sell everything from alcohol to toothpaste, and where women's tortured bodies are dumped like so much litter in the desert outside Juarez, the public display and commodification of what should be the most intimate areas of our lives can only be an act of aggression. Setting aside a few token Uncle Toms, men own everything, write the laws the govern everything, use the force that imposes those laws on everyone, and more often than not get away with it when they rape someone, anyone. The pornographers dress our young sisters up in schoolgirl drag, truss them up like turkeys and insert cold metal implements into their vaginas and rectums, saying that I have been a dirty, dirty girl looking at the magazines under daddy's bed and I need a firm hand of discipline on my white cotton panties followed by daddy's hot load in my face-- In such a context, that is, under patriarchy, the conclusion is inevitable: sex is violence.
HORNEY: Ms. Bright?
BRIGHT: Thank you, Carolyn. While rape and exploitation are serious issues, we can all cum as we are to the revolution of pleasure. The big secret they don't want you to know is that we are all freaks. The only people who even think they are normal are the ones who have so cut themselves off from their own desires and the associated shame that they live in an Ozzy and Harriet world where the married couples have separate beds, at the cost of all the of the color, beauty, and depth of feeling in life. Further, where porn goes up rape goes down. It is the repression of puritanism that leads to the exploitation and aggression--you can use women to sell toothpaste because the buyers are so full of repressed, fearful desire that sex is a back door into their most vulnerable places. In conclusion, I would like to invite everyone to my performance tomorrow at eleven PM at the PussPuss Club, entitled Full Cavity Pee, in which I suspend myself upside down from the ceiling at the edge of the stage and audience members are invited to urinate down my nostrils and into my sinuses while I enter a Tantric state of infinite sexual bliss. At the climax of the show and of my body, the orchestra plays Ode to Joy while I blow the urine out of my body and into the first five rows.
HORNEY: Wow, Annie, that's a very evocative image for me. It makes me think of Odhinn hanging on the Yggdrasil to attain knowledge of the runes, or the Hanged Man of the Tarot. It also makes me think of Shiva holding the pain of the world in his throat chakra. I see themes of death and rebirth, sacrifice, subversion--turning the order of things upside down to attain deep wisdom. What do you think, Dr. McDworkin?
MCDWORKIN: I see rape.
BRIGHT: Now, Cynthia. I spent months organizing this thing. I did the promotion, booked the venue, hired the orchestra, built the suspension rack. Could it be any clearer than I want it? No need to ask for a consent form, I had to fill out one of those for the insurance people.
MCDWORKIN: You're identified with the aggressor. In any trauma there's a part of us that survives by submitting. Any mammal will do that if it's helpless enough.
BRIGHT: But this really is what I want to be doing. Don't you think a desk job would be easier? I went out of my way to carve this niche out for myself because it's what makes me happy.
MCDWORKIN: When you grow up being used, it can be the only thing that's fulfilling, because it's how you learned to get love. We're swimming in oppression like a fish in water, we're permeated with it, it's normalized. In such a context you can't trust your instincts. Female masochism is expected and we are trained for it from before we can walk, that doesn't make it a good idea.
BRIGHT: Supposing I agree with you, and I don't, what better way to turn that masochism around than to make them pay for it? Have you ever tried to change your kinks? You can't. The Mormons tried that by showing gay guys pictures of hot men and then shocking them or making them puke. But all the hot sexy Mormon torture in the world can't control desire. I met a guy who bottomed for the research daddies in Salt Lake. He was a little weird but still gay as a tree full of parrots. If the patriarchy has made me a masochist I'm stuck with it, I might as well put it to work for me. I have wild sex, I meet interesting artists, I travel the world, I don't have to slave away in an office or as a housewife. If this is oppression I don't think I could stand the pleasure of liberation.
MCDWORKIN: But you'll never know the pleasure of being your own woman.
BRIGHT: What does that mean, being an academic suck-up?
HORNEY: I'd like to take a moment to invite us to examine the themes that have been coming up so far. I find it interesting that here we are, early on in this rather public exchange, and the discussion is centering around power, submission, and what feelings we can trust. Is it possible that we are really more concerned with being dominated by each other, here in this room, than we are with the patriarchy? At least in the short term.
[LONG SILENCE]
BRIGHT: I'm sorry I called you a suck-up. I think that article of yours was brave. I know it's a man's world in the academy.
MCDWORKIN: Thank you.
[SILENCE]
HORNEY: Dr. McDworkin, you've touched a couple of times already on denial and normalized sexual violence. I wonder if you have anything to say about recent comments by Whoopi Goldberg, for which she has taken some heat. She asked whether the rape allegedly committed by Roman Polanski was, quote, rape-rape, and later defended Mel Gibson after tapes emerged on which he threated his estranged wife. Your thoughts?
MCDWORKIN: Roman Polanski drugged an underage girl and penetrated her while she begged him to stop. How is that not rape-rape? What would a partial rape even look like? An act is either consensual or it isn't. I have to wonder what happened to Whoopi that it's such second nature for her to make excuses for perpetrators.
BRIGHT: I don't have much to say in defense of Mel or Roman, or Whoopi for that matter. But look at all the sadomasochism in Mel's movies. Braveheart is an elaborate torture fantasy, toward the end he even refuses the drug to block the pain that is smuggled to him. Well before The Passion of the Christ it should have been clear that noble suffering is part of Mel's core life theme, and probably his core erotic theme. If he had worked that out consensually in bed he might not have wound up imposing it nonconsensually on a woman and child. It's when desire is repressed that it pops up in the wrong places.
MCDWORKIN: In his movies Mel was perhaps trying to work his stuff out symbolically, but clearly it didn't work. What's your evidence for fantasy preventing oppression rather than encouraging it? And where are the right places for violent desires, your sinuses?
BRIGHT: See? Right beneath the surface of your outrage is the shame and scapegoating. You can barely finish a thought without talking about how dirty I am. I think you're the one who feels dirty. [PAUSE] Look, rape is horrible but there are things you can do. Go to therapy and cry it out, your rage is legitimate but contain it appropriately, don't impose it on those of us who are ready to take some risks and have some fun.
MCDWORKIN: Oh, sure, therapy solves everything. I see fourteen year old girls out hooking in the streets of Oakland. They're probably acting out abuse they're getting at home, and soon they'll be addicted to drugs to cope with the pain, and then they'll be slaves to the pimps. When they're thirty year old hags who look sixty, dying of AIDS on the street, I'll be sure to tell them that everything will be fine when they get some therapy. This is my whole point, rape is not some bizarre aberration, it's more common than having good health care, it's as American as apple pie, baseball and genocide. You can't solve something like that by talking about it quietly one-on-one with a well-paid professional. It's the rapists and pornographers who need therapy, I'm just fine, thank you.
BRIGHT: Wait, rapists and por--
HORNEY: I'd like to turn the discussion if I could to a recent event, the shutting down--some would say censorship--of the erotic services section on craigslist. Annie, it's your turn to start.
BRIGHT: The most troubling thing about the censorship of craigslist is that anybody who understands anything about the internet knows that it's not going to work. The pimps and their clients have already gone to other sites. They have money and power, it's easy for them to move around. The only people hurt by this are the independent sex workers who can't as easily or as safely shift to seedier places.
MCDWORKIN: But it sets a precedent. A company that was making money on the exploitation of women was stopped. Others will follow.
BRIGHT: Craigslist didn't charge for erotic services ads until they were taking so much heat they had to hire lawyers to review every post. But lets talk about making money from sex work. Craigslist's CEO pointed out that their erotic services ads weren't any worse than what was appearing in the back of the weekly alternative papers. I find it notable that the most-read progressive media in the country is funded largely by escorts. And it's not much different for me. I don't have a cushy academic job, I would be silenced if it weren't for the sex work I do.
MCDWORKIN: You could make money and speak your mind working with spammers, too, but you'd probably object on moral grounds. I find it interesting that you won't help annoy people with unsolicited email but you're fine doing business with pornographers and pimps.
BRIGHT: I don't recall ever working with pimps--
MCDWORKIN: You just said they were on--
BRIGHT: --we're going to talk about each other's strange bedfellows let's look at your friends, the fundamentalists. They spend most of their time trying to push us back into being barefoot and pregnant household slaves but suddenly they're your best friends when they go after porn. And these are the same people who went after craigslist. I don't see them in the rape crisis centers, they're not interested in fighting exploitation they're just puritanical moral crusaders who want sexual slavery to happen in the shadows where they don't have to think about it. And where they can secretly take advantage of it.
MCDWORKIN: At least I'm not having sex with them.
BRIGHT: Yes, you like the power dynamics simple in bed and complicated in politics. What do you do in bed anyway, masturbate on opposite sides of the room while talking about how much you respect each other?
HORNEY: I'd like to point out that--
MCDWORKIN: Better a prude than a tool of the patriarchy.
BRIGHT: I'll get my harness and give you my tool of the patriarchy, ice queen.
HORNEY: Can we just take a --
MCDWORKIN: RIGHT TO THREATENING RAPE YOU PRETENTIOUS POSTMODERN TOWN BICYCLE!
BRIGHT: YOU BACKED ME INTO THAT YOU VICE-CUNTED PROFESSIONAL MARTYR!
HORNEY: In this exchange I see the archetype of the Divine Twins, lovers and rivals, united in--
MCDWORKIN AND BRIGHT: SHUT! UP!
HORNEY: I -- um.
[SILENCE]
MCDWORKIN: You two set me up. This was a journalistic ambush.
BRIGHT: You think I would conspire with that headshrinker?
MCDWORKIN: A minute ago you were going to rape me with a strap-on, I wouldn't put anything past you.
BRIGHT: Oh, please, I should go get it just so you can see it's nothing to be afraid of.
MCDWORKIN: Go ahead, rape me right in front of the cameras, show the world what you're made of, what really gets you off.
BRIGHT: You'd like that wouldn't you, everybody watching while I open up your tight little pussy for you.
MCDWORKIN: (folds arms) ... Yes.
BRIGHT: ... You wanna beg for mommy?
MCDWORKIN: ... Yes.
BRIGHT: Huh?
MCDWORKIN: Yes, mommy.
BRIGHT: C'mere mommy will make it better.
[MCDWORKIN AND BRIGHT BEGIN TO MAKE LOVE]
HORNEY: And so we end with an alchemical transformation, a hieros gamos, ...
MCDWORKIN: Please ... yes ... please ... yes ... please ...
HORNEY: ... A Mercurial mystical marriage of seeming opposites into blissful union ...
BRIGHT: God ... God ... God ... God ...
HORNEY: ... reconciling conflicts and remaking the world, ending where we began with sacrifice and deep transformation. I'm Carolyn Horney and this has been Compulsive Ruminations.
BRIGHT AND MCDWORKIN: GOD! PLEASE! GOD! PLEASE! PLEASE! YES!