Week 35 (0)

Why I give it away.
Saturday, 16:06

You can read the long (if incoherent) form, if you like, but you could also read someone else’s fable which helps explain where we’re headed, if things go on the way they have been.

And yes, it’s a fable, and yes, it seems extreme—until you read this.

We’re already there. We’re already at a place where companies can fuck up your life in the name of protecting their intellectual property. Academic research is stifled and whistle blowers are arrested and perfectly natural human reactions to art and ideas, facilitated and made visible by the internet, are turned into criminal acts.

Ideas cannot be commodified. If they are, they become something that can be bought and sold and taken away.

And copyright commodifies ideas.

Alternatives? Why, there are dozens. The Street Performer Protocol, for instance, and the copyleft crowd. Micropayments and honor systems. One merely has to look to the ingenuity of cam girls to see what is possible with a little imagination, gumption, and brass.

But no one will get rich with those, I hear you cry.

Take a look around you. Who’s getting rich here and now, huh?

(What’s that? Sex? Oh, fine. Here.)

Ten years ago.
Friday, 19:49

Walking along the Charles River. Roughly twenty-four hours before, the dyke and my best friend’s sister had been smoking the pot I wasn’t really interested in and hadn’t, I don’t think, been the reason they’d called me over in the first place.

Do I remember the sex? Not specifically. Not in any detail. Not the first time we’d done it; not the several other times in between. What I do remember: odd, isolated moments. Taking turns with my best friend’s sister nibbling at the dyke’s breasts. Watching them roll across the floor, giggling with the effects of the pot. My best friend’s sister voguing in the dyke’s leather jacket before it all really began. Kissing the dyke that first time. (I’d had a crush on her for, what, three years?) Leaning back against the wall that last time, the dyke leaning back against me, kissing me, as my best friend’s sister licked her cunt, making her shiver in my arms, and looking down to meet my best friend’s sister’s eyes—this look, this little, knowing look passing between us as the dyke came.

Then, after, ten years ago, roughly, walking along the Charles River. My best friend’s sister turning suddenly, her face ugly. Spitting something. I can’t remember what, for the life of me. Not specifically. Just this sudden, overwhelming shift—the faces, suddenly becoming a vase—the dyke, stopping in her tracks—

And a month later, I was two hours away, in another part of the state.

I’m just saying.
Thursday, 23:41

It’s funny when Karen does it; it’s downright creepy when Howard Stern does it. But that’s probably just a difference in approach.

Then again: there’s ever so much more of the one than the other.

(Of course, one might point out that that which is considered “normal” is rarely given a name, as such. Differences in approach, such as they are, aside.)

Samuel Delaney says that he always says “that if gay men and women didn’t exist, straight men and women would have had to invent us.”

Which might well explain Joxer and Ares, but not Buffy and Faith.

So. Should I feel guilty about really wanting to read Michelle Tea’s new book? Which I’ll be reading as soon as I finish the book by Delaney which has an adolescent girl as its main character, whose undercurrents of desire are marked by men with pockmarked faces and dirty, nail-bitten hands...

Pornotopia.
Wednesday, 23:26

That place where “all men... are always and infinitely potent, all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for everything.”

Steven Marcus coined the term in his 1964 study of Victorian porn, The Other Victorians, which I do not have to hand at the moment, and so I’m quoting Keith DeVries, who quoted Marcus in his review of Martin F. Kilmer’s Greek Erotica in the August 1995 edition of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

Gotta love that internet.

Susan Sontag (see below), in her seminal essay on assessing pornography critically, “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967, collected in Styles of Radical Will), likens pornography to science fiction—not because both are paraliterary genres (genres that have proven themselves more than capable of creating lasting works of breathtaking art which, nonetheless, have yet to be taken seriously by academia, keepers of the literary canon) (though yes, her argument does make that point about both—ancillarily), but because both take place in a heightened or hyper-reality. “The ahistorical dreamlike landscape where action is situated, the peculiarly congealed time in which acts are performed—these occur almost as often in science fiction as they do in pornography,” she says, which immediately begs the question of what science fiction, exactly, she’s been reading, and where can I get some? —Leave off for a moment how science fiction frequently fetishizes its “ahistorical” status with detailed timelines of future histories yet-to-be, and sidestep her assertion that science fiction, like pornography, is one of those branches of literature that aims at “disorientation, at psychic dislocation”—it’s clear she never took into account Star Wars novelizations; then, one might imagine her sniffing, “That’s not science fiction,” which is a back-handedly funny punchline to a very old debate I don’t want to go into now, as I fear my point is lost utterly—wait—I think I’ve got it—

It’s interesting to think of pornography as a fiction of location. Like science fiction, or fantasy in general, the place where the story occurs is as important as the characters and the plot (such as it might be). Moreso, even.

Pornotopia: think of the endless dreary castles of the Marquis; the yacht and islands of Pleasure Bound; Anonymous’s isolated country estates and chateaux filled with randy aristocrats who think nothing of schtupping their own daughters and sons and siblings and cousins and chambermaids and stableboys and even, on especially perverted occasions, spouses; the too-comfortable suburban houses filled with kitchen tables that don’t bruise your thighs or your back or scrape the floor, shag carpeting that never chafes, phones that never ring at inopportune moments (unless it’s to signal more randy fun); the eternal jet-setting party filled with descendants of those randy Anonymous aristos lolling languidly about the pools in Belize or Tangiers— Certainly, a lot of energy is spent on imagining the participants, and the things they get up to, but as much is spent on laying out the space that allows them to get it on. And not just the physical space, either: the emotional, the social, the political—it’s a world like ours, but subtly different, here, and there, and there. And not so subtly. (And not just in the size of the average dick and lubricity of the average cunt.) (Think, to name but one gross example, of the one-stop contraception and STD-prevention vaccine in Mark Aster’s My Friends, the Allens—and how that might have affected the overall arc in the plot which leads to the narrator and Pat deciding to have a kid.)

But think also of Kilmer’s quote regarding the Greek erotica he’s studying: “it is... something of a misnomer to call these representations ‘relations between human beings.’ They are rather juxtapositions of human bodies, parts of bodies, limbs, and organs; they are depictions of positions and events, diagrammatic schema for sexual ballets—actually, they are more like football plays than dances.”

Bodies moving in space; the space which allows, facillitates, encourages that sort of movement. I mean, you certainly wouldn’t want to live there...

(And it’s not that I’m going to be this prolix or hardcore all the time, you understand. All this, I think, is just by way of me fumbling for something of a mission statement. Ick.)

It’s... it’s... unspeakable...
Tuesday, 23:16

This all comes rather liberally from a footnote written by Anang Saighal to Leopold Roth’s unfinished translation of and commentary on the Kama Sutra. Said footnote cites “Written Descriptions of Orgasm: A Study of Sex Differences,” by E.B. Vance and N.N. Wagner, as a notation to an ancient debate between Vatsyayana and Auddalaki as to whether men and women feel the same sensation upon orgasm, or fundamentally different sensations. Forty-eight descriptions of the sensation of orgasm written by Psych 101 students (twenty-four men and twenty-four women, natch), carefully expunged of any reference to specific anatomy, were presented to seventy professional consultants who acted as judges: gynecologists, urologists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Saighal notes that one of the most frequently used words in describing orgasm is “indescribable” (though “tension,” “relief,” “spasm,” “tingling,” “fluttering,” “pulsating,” “explosion,” “flash,” “vibration,” “surge,” and “rush” were also popular), and muses a moment on the inherent peculiarity of describing an experienced event (orgasm) by referring to events no one has ever experienced first-hand (volcanoes erupting, cannons firing, clouds bursting, etc.). And then we get the money shot:

In other words, of course: masturbation.

But—is this necessarily true? Is it an actual limitation? Is it impossible to capture the flavor of orgasm using nothing but words? (Is the literary endeavor truly empty?) That it is hard, I’ll grant: writing about sex is some of the most coded writing we can do—there are any of a number of phrases that are used not because they describe something we actually felt or experienced, but because they were used by another writer we read when writing about sex, and even if you make a conscious effort to reach beyond the standard incredible indescribable (unspeakable) blasting pulsating fucking spasms and “Ohhh Godddd, I’m cuuummmminnggg!”s (and what does that sound like? “God-duh-duh-duh-duh?” What is that?), it’s all too easy to end up cannibalizing oneself; certainly, I’ve got to do something about all those damn hills my characters seem to climb, and that desperate grasping at the present tense. —But I balk at saying it’s impossible. Then, I don’t think the literary endeavor is empty, either. Far from it.

It’s interesting, in this context, to note a thread on the alt.sex.stories.d Usenet discussion board (for those who didn’t buy a program: a Usenet board for writers and readers of mostly free porn) in which writers are taking turns describing their various strengths and weaknesses. A strong undercurrent is the number of writers who claim to find writing sex scenes dull, boring, a chore, or especially frustrating; also, those who compartmentalize writing the sex scenes from writing the other portions of a story. Which does beg a number of questions: Why write sex stories if you don’t like writing the actual sex? What are you getting out of it? What’s going on?

(Of course, by way of a partial answer to those rhetorical questions, there’s the old chestnut: I don’t like writing so much as having written.)

What, the study? You want to know what happened with the study? The seventy professionals, reading descriptions written by forty-eight undergrads, half male and half female?

They couldn’t tell the difference. Take that, Dr. John Gray.

Of course, you should keep a few things in mind: Anang Saighal and Leopold Roth don’t exist; they’re characters in a novel by Lee Seigel. (Vatsyayana and Auddalaki probably existed; no one knows for sure.) (But the Kama Sutra is as real as anything like that can be.) The study really was done—E.B. Vance and N.N. Wagner do exist, and you can find the write-up in Archives of Sexual Behavior 5, ppg 87-98. But it was published in 1976, and my (admittedly cursory) research has turned up no follow-up studies, though the conclusions certainly seem to have percolated as gospel into the Cecil-Adams-Straight-Dope level of common sense. And come on: we’re talking about judging something terribly fundamental based on the reactions of 118 people, tops. All of them in academia. (Anyone want to fulminate on the mind-body split as experienced by Psych 101 students ca. 1976?) And is the question even a sensible one in the first place? Women have orgasms during heterosexual intercourse less frequently than men—doesn’t that affect the way they anticipate and think of and conceptualize orgasm, and doesn’t that affect how they experience it? Does it make more sense to postulate a difference between a straight man’s orgasm and a gay man’s orgasm? (And what about the bisexuals?) Do smoking-jacketed professors of either sex experience fundamentally different orgasms than grease-engrimed truck drivers, ditto? And hell—think of the difference between, say, a heel-pounding teeth-grinding sheet-clenching screamer and, say, a furtive quickie squeezed off in the bathroom because some tension built up like a sneeze and, like a sneeze, is easily if shamefully wiped away and forgotten. —I mean, do you ever really experience the same orgasms your own damn self?

Actually, it’s all his fault.
Monday, 17:56