sticks and stones may break my bones but slut shamers exhaust me
Click to viewETA: basically, don't bother reading my post, because this one on racialicious is way better than mine, and touches on the same things. also i suck really hard for not living up to all the intersectionality i talk for not touching on race at all in my post. seriously, i am a sucky asshole. read racialicious always.if you have something to say ( Read more... )
- 1000% with you on being disappointed in El-P's statement. I find it hard to keep out of my mind that he is also a survivor of the daily, ongoing, physical abuse of his mother by one or more partners in his childhood... and it doesn't make him any less WRONG to be looking at it the way he did when he tweeted that, and I also know that judging him isn't the point... but... I don't know, that shit pops up in my head when I think about it. So there's that;
- the dude who looks AMPED on a leash is Perez Hilton, who is himself such an inveterate abuser of women (in general rather than in particular, granted) that giving him airtime at all is probably in worse taste than any sexual scenario depicted could be arguably said to be;
- I found the scene of the bound journalists ran up against the line for me (for GENERAL decency, not for what it is okay for a survivor of anything to do, which I should have said sooner I think is not a special subset of what it is okay for anyone to do but the same), because I read their facial expressions and reactions as distressed and unwilling;
- And that last bit brings me to something I find tricky about non-private forays into imagery and concepts found in BDSM play: it is not the same thing as abuse, but it certainly enfolds things which mimic and appeal to abuse. In the creation of art, I don't always know when it is acceptable to portray a fantasy as though it were okay (which probably works best for someone who wants to experience their fantasy in art) and when it should have rubber bumpers on all the corners and a lot of reminders that if it were real it would NOT be okay. I think that my boundaries stop short of thinking it's harmless to play Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" video decontextualized and just where anyone might bump into it. Most of this video I think stays on the side of the line where I'm not even worried***, but that room full of scared journalists is a little bit more of a horror movie than I'm down for, I think.
***I guess I am all the time worried that the projection of S&M couture into the mainstream eye is almost invariably dominated (ha ha) by images of women in (obviously or subtly staged) compromising, degrading, and/or physically injurious situations. It's a little bit of a this-would-be-less-of-a-problem-in-the-glorious-post-patriarchy deal, sometimes.
I don't want anyone to be ashamed of their sex, but I don't want anyone to be subjected (past I guess a difficult, nebulous threshold) to the sex of others without opting in. Where are the lines though????
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pleeeeease write it!! FOR ME!!!
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- i was not unaware of el-p's history as a witness to his mother's abuse. he actually brought that up himself in the middle of his several tweet tirade against this song (which i'm sure you saw at the time; i'm just refreshing your memory here). i just linked the tweet i did, because i thought it best summed up what i had a problem with about the things he (and several other people on my radar) was saying. i just don't really think i'm prepared to forgive him at all for it. to be honest, i think i'm actually angrier about this because of the way he invoked his past.
remember how this summer i showed you that gavin de becker book, and we had that conversation about the part where he was like: people send me letters every time i say something victim blamey telling me that i don't understand. well i do understand, i understand intimately (because his parents had an abusive relationship) and i got all ragey about it? yeah, that. it's hard for me to talk about this and not sound dismissive of el's (or de becker's) experiences - and this is so very much something i desire strongly to not do - but i also can't help but feel a little chafed by dudes laying claim on women's experiences with abuse like that, based on proximity. basically i believe that his experiences as a witness were horrible, and i think there's room to talk about that, but just not in terms of that somehow making him an authority on, as he puts it, 'battered women.' i'm angry that he invoked those experiences as a part of this conversation, as if it validates the wayyyy off-the-mark things that he had to say.
- i (obviously) did not recognize him as perez hilton originally, and now i am pretty pissed off about that!! i'd actually only seen an image of him once that i can think of before ever (the infamous carrie prejean clip), which i guess ended up serving me poorly now, but i am quite familiar with him in writing. UGH!! thank you for pointing this out to me - egg on my face!! i've updated my post now. THIS MAKES MARIA'S COMMENT UPON READING THIS POST MAKE SO MUCH MORE SENSE. when she was all like "wow perez," i thought it was some non-sequitur and started flipping through feministing quickly, because i thought she was commenting on a post miriam made. couldn't figure out why i couldn't see any recent posts from hir. it's funny now. kindof like this. HILARIOUS, PEREZ! YOU ARE SUCH A JOKER!!
- interesting. i re-watched the video with this in mind, and i can see what you are saying. THERE ARE A LOT OF JOURNALISTS IN THIS THING! at first i thought you were referencing the ones at the start with the ball gags, and i was like 'what? they mostly just seem really eager to call her a slut?' but then i got to the part that you were talking about. i think maybe i originally read this scene as like... not necessarily non-consensual? i mean, there are huge parts of bdsm/kink culture that sortof rely on playing with appearances re:consent as a part of their whole appeal (it's part of why safe words are a thing, right?), but that was maybe wrong of me to make those assumptions. this gives me lots to think about. i can totally see how that whole thing could squick you out, though. easily.
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i realize that you know that this was not even what i was originally talking about, but i wanna re-assert that right now, because i don't really want potential comments readers to think i am a monster or something.
can't help but think of the corinna/baumgardner "i was raped" shirts from a couple years ago, and the conversation that happened around those.
i don't actually think that there is a real answer to the tricky parts of this that you bring up here in your last point, though. part of me wishes there was, and part of me is super grateful that i get to hash this shit out continuously for the rest of my life. thanks for participating in that, jesse. you are the greatest.
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