Melissa Gira Grant

January 23, 2012 11:46 am

You were all right. Pulp is coming to Radio City on April 11.

4 notes Filed under: pulp,.

January 22, 2012 1:17 pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] 57 plays

“Target Practice”
from Free To Fight, 1995, compilation in support of Home Alive

This is totally what high school feminism looked like.

5 notes Filed under: 1995, free to fight, eyes knees groin throat,.

January 19, 2012 11:58 am

Still home.

(Source: The Atlantic)

6 notes Filed under: san francisco, 1955,.

January 18, 2012 12:39 am

SEX WORKER PROBLEMS: Notes on a whore's authentic orgasm →

via sexworkerproblems:

Getting people off is only a small part of what sex workers do. “Escort” is often viewed as a polite euphemism, but most of what we give clients is time, attention, and company. Clients don’t just want orgasms, they want affirmation. They want to look and be looked at, desire and be desired, experience pleasure and take pleasure in their ability to give it in turn.

I’ve never, in years of sex work, met those mythical clients who really just want to talk. I believe they exist, ‘cause my fellow whores say they do. But I’ve never met ‘em.

I do know that every guy who sends me a cock shot asks, “Do you like it, baby?”

Look at me. Like me. Validate me.

Do you like it, baby?

That’s why my orgasm matters. There it is, the concrete evidence that I experienced real pleasure with and for and perhaps most importantly because of a client. Squirting seems to be all the rage these days and I get lots of requests for it, and I wonder if it isn’t because it’s just too damn tangible a proof of a (female-bodied) whore’s real pleasure.

After all, whores are all liars, aren’t we? Faking feelings and enjoyment for a paycheck? Isn’t it the ultimate demonstration of your sexual prowess? To make a whore feel something real?

Which is why my orgasm doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to me, because my orgasm was never about me, even if I had one. And it also doesn’t matter because if I succeed in giving my clients what they come for—attention, validation, recognition—they also don’t need to ask whether my pleasure was real.

To me, it’s telling that the longer I work, the more mad my skillz, the less I hear that question.

-SW1

74 notes

January 17, 2012 6:03 pm

View high resolution

via publiccollectors:

Public Collectors is a big fan of guerrilla libraries and the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street in particular. To encourage and support this work, I’ve reprinted Mandy Henk’s excellent essay “Occupy Libraries: Guerrilla Librarianship for the People” as a big, color offset, double-sided postcard. This is the front side of the postcard. You can read the full essay here.

2,500 copies were printed and a thousand of these cards will travel with People’s Library librarians to be given away when they speak at the American Library Association Midwinter conference in Dallas on Saturday, January 21st. More details on that presentation and their work here.

If you’d like to support this project and receive a couple copies in the mail, please consider making a donation of $1.00 or more to my Paypal email address. If you donate more than a couple dollars, I’ll throw in a free Public Collectors booklet and additional ephemera. Thanks.

83 notes Filed under: take this book,.

January 10, 2012 10:17 am

View high resolution

Notable interviews acknowledged but omitted for “reasons of structure” from EDIE: John Cale, Dennis Hopper, Robbie Robertson, Gloria Steinem, Tennessee Williams

12 notes Filed under: edie sedgwick,.

January 9, 2012 10:40 pm

lynchian-appreciation-society:

LYNCH/BADALAMENTI - Nightsea Wind (1992)

For the rest of 2012, possibly unfollowing everything that doesn’t involve a Lynch reblog at least once a week.

14 notes Filed under: 2012, david lynch,.

9:50 pm

youngmanhattanite:

ninety9:

Everyone got their copy.

You might be thinking what took so long, but you have to wait for the right moment for these things.

Book-on-face. When did this start, really? Who is old enough to remember the first person on the internet to pose with a thing that they liked up next to their mug?

34 notes Filed under: internet, history, book on face,.

January 6, 2012 12:31 pm

January 25 at Kelly Writers House: Feminism/s presents Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O’Connell

comingandcrying:

January 25, 2012
6pm
Kelly Writers House
3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Join us (Melissa and Meaghan) at Kelly Writers House to talk Coming & Crying, writing, feminism, and ladybiz. There will be a reception and there will be books!

ABOUT THE SERIES

Feminism/s is an interdisciplinary series exploring how art, criticism, political action, and community building can create structural and cultural solutions to gender hierarchies. Feminism/s aims to give voice and consideration to the (macro) micro that surround contemporary feminisms in all their pluralities. Feminism/s supports conversation, analysis, philosophy and community connection related to structural and cultural solutions to the gender hierarchy. Feminism/s is a group-curated series supported by the Fund for Feminist Projects at Kelly Writers House.

ABOUT KELLY WRITERS HOUSE

Founded in 1995 by a group of students, faculty, staff and alumni, the Kelly Writers House is an actual 13-room house at 3805 Locust Walk on Penn’s campus that serves as a center for writers of all kinds from Penn and the Philadelphia region at large. The intrepid band of students, faculty and Penn staff who formed the Writers House in the fall of 1995 were committed to a form of literary communitarianism.

32 notes Filed under: coming and crying, Glass Houses,.

January 4, 2012 4:47 pm

Porn as ritual communication, and fighting words for pro-porn people (or leaping off from Iowa, without Santorum)

Reading Jay Rosen on Iowa this morning, who points back to James Carey’s essay “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” which proposes we discern two models of communication: the transmission, or “the transmittal of information across space,” and the ritual, which is concerned with creating a moment for shared belief, the aim of which is not to inform but to ensure the “maintenance of society in time.” (Iowa? And the Santorum jokes on Maddow that others dutifully post to Twitter and riff on for hours? You guess which column that goes in.)

Leaving the obvious (froth) out of the picture though — how can, or have, these two models of communication been applied to understanding pornography as media?

Both pro- and anti-porn thinkers apply the transmission metaphor; that pornography conveys information about how to have sex, who has it, and what sex looks like.

But if we take the ritual metaphor? That pornography creates a shared moment, between the audience (or consumer) and the actors on the screen. It simulates desire: the commercially-produced desire of the actors for one another, the desire of the audience for the actors, or to participate in the acts on the screen. What’s on screen doesn’t convey information so much as it advocates norms. (The act of searching for and downloading porn can’t be entirely divorced from the viewing of porn, and it — like masturbation — becomes part of the ritual communication itself.)

Anti-porn people have been much louder than pro-porn people in challenging the norms conveyed by pornography, particularly the unspoken norm that desire can be performed, that desire is a creation. They might oppose porn on the grounds that it is dehumanizing to women, but they often point to the idea that the reason it’s so dehumanizing is because it “forces” women to perform sex on demand (in opposition to sex outside of porn, which is understood to be natural, not a performance, etc.).

But what would pro-porn advocates have to offer, by taking up the porn as ritual metaphor? What values and norms would they defend in porn, or advocate for? That sex is good for its own sake? That sexual variation is a human norm? That sex is sometimes a performance of desire? That paying for sexual entertainment is okay, or good? Is that kind of argument no longer fashionable? Must pro-porn arguments always start with the sigh, “Yes, but of course no one really believes this is good sex information, but…”? Could they begin with the assertion that it is okay to consume images of people having sex, and that it is okay to pay people to have sex? How much further can a pro-porn argument go without that much on the table to start?

This might explain why so many pro-porn arguments fall apart. To apply only the transmission metaphor to porn, we end up debating whether or not pornography is a valid source of information, if pornography accurately represents sex, or if pornography is invested in educating the public. As Rosen argues of the media coverage of the Iowa caucus, the transmission metaphor is of limited use when the media in question are chiefly concerned with “the gathering of a tribe, which affirms itself and its place.”

Maybe this is just too uncomfortable a perspective to take with porn, which is undeniably invested in the perpetuation of itself, in illustrating and then obscuring the commodification of desire (the assumption being, an audience will pay for people to perform sex so long as they don’t really have to remember that what they are watching is a performance). But is the perpetuation of porn the perpetuation of a market for selling dirty pictures? Or is it the perpetuation of the idea that it is okay to sell dirty pictures, and okay to pay people who perform them? (Anti-porn people have gone after both the market and the idea.)

Can pro-porn people abandon the fight re: is porn good information or not (it is not, and it is against its own business model to become so), and take up this other set of questions, about the values and norms and community implicit in porn? Here’s Carey again:

[In the ritual metaphor], communication is linked to terms such as “sharing,” “participation,” “association,” “fellowship,” and the “possession of a common faith.” This definition exploits the ancient identity and common roots of the terms “commonness,” “communion,” “community,” and “communication.”

Here’s some fights worth having: who is presumed to be in the community of porn viewers? What are the values produced by their communion? Who is excluded from this “common faith”? Is this common faith broadening? Do we value broadness, or narrowness, in depictions of sex acts? Do we even want to see ourselves on the screen? And can we get off on difference?

(… and thank you, Jay Rosen, for making me actually want to think about porn again?)

32 notes Filed under: porn, iowa, jay rosen,.

3:35 pm