June 2013
“The conditions in which the actresses work, the degrading contracts they sign, their inability to either control images of themselves once they’ve left the profession, or earn money from their use—the censors aren’t interested in any of these aspects of female dignity. The authorities aren’t bothered that there isn’t a single specialist center where actresses can go to access the various pieces of extremely specific information pertinent to their work. One kind of dignity obsesses them, but they don’t give a damn about the other. Yet porn is made with human flesh, with the flesh of actresses. And in the end, the only moral issue it poses is the political aggressiveness with which these women are treated—offstage.”
—King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes (via marginalutilite)
“Imagine if we spent half as much time talking about the needs and challenges of freelance journalists as we do talking about “becoming your own brand.” Or imagine if we acknowledged in all the debates about new business models, how many of those models depend on stringers and freelancers.”
—Talking To Strangers: How Do We Make Freelance Journalism Safe, Secure and Sustainable?
Radio Dispatch, 6/17/13 →
b-t-r.co
Today I talked with the excellent Molly Knefel, co-host of Radio Dispatch, all about the constitutionality and politics behind the anti-prostitution pledge (which the Supreme Court is expected to rule on in the next two weeks).
“At her lawyer’s office, a week before her arraignment, Neiers denied any involvement in the burglaries. “I’m a firm believer in Karma,” she said, “and I think this situation was attracted into my life because it was supposed to be a huge learning lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being. I see myself being like an Angelina Jolie,” she said, “but even stronger, pushing even harder for the universe and for peace and for the health of our planet.” She was sounding almost like a real celebrity. “God didn’t give me these talents and looks to just sit around being a model or being famous. I want to lead a huge charity organization. I want to lead a country, for all I know.”
—Lots of Lean In vibes in The Bling Ring. (Here’s the original Vanity Fair story.)
“One of our members works in a prison with women offenders, and she relates to a conversation she had with a young woman who had experienced prostitution of her own volition. The young woman was adamant that she was not a victim and that it had been her choice. Without wishing to patronise her in any way, her forearms were covered in so many scars it was impossible to see any unmarked flesh. To those of us who have been fortunate to have had a (fairly) stable childhood, where abuse has not damaged our understanding of bodily boundaries, her defence of ‘not being a victim’ has a hollow ring.”
—This was offered as “evidence” from a local chapter of Amnesty International to support a sex work criminalization bill. Amnesty International was not pleased, and told me why they actually support sex workers’ rights for the New Statesman.
“…and so each of us have heard, over and over and from all the good liberals, “but you’re doing it for a story, right?” The tone says, “if you’re doing it for money, ew” and/or, “do it so I can do it vicariously.” Marche says so, too, when he burdens Calloway’s choices with his respect. He is comfortable with her sex work, if not with the sexuality itself, because he sees it as performative—sacrificial, even!—or for reasons of art. That “art” is more important than “work” is often questionable, but never more so than when I’m reading sentences as artless and un-startling as Calloway’s. Her documentation strikes fresh awe into this Romantic Dad not because it’s original, but because—I will bet my entire gchat log—he’s never used Tumblr, heard of Constantia Phillips, or read Mary MacLane. Like the middle-aged men who watch Hannah Horvath disenjoy herself on Girls, Marche has found a female writer he can love specifically because there’s fuck-all to fear. Calloway’s plain, stated vulnerability poses no threat to virile hope. Her willful naïveté won’t wilt his intellect. At one point in Adrien Brody, she writes, “I’ve never been able to figure out why I get off on being used as on object.” To this, as a writer who cares about girls enough to want them to grow up, I would say: Try. Or else: Decide your sexuality is something visceral, pre-verbal. If old words don’t suffice, make new. Try. The purest thing is really to work.”
—Sarah Nicole Prickett, The “Real Thing” of Women’s Writing: A Note for Stephen Marche | The Hairpin
“The sexuality itself, at least to me, is utterly boring. But then again I have never been turned on by the sight of a bruised tit. Certainly the taboo violations are old hat. There is nothing here that hasn’t been explored in Belle de Jour or Story of the Eye.”
—
Marie Calloway and Tao Lin - The New Bad Kids of Fiction - Esquire
I don’t know why I keep posting these, but only an idiot reviewer would a) need us to validate their sexuality and b) compare these three books.
“More than once I have heard expressed by other women—particularly woman writers—the wish that Calloway and her book simply didn’t exist, that we might all just ignore it. It’s a weary wish, not a malicious one: It would just be easier, they sigh, and maybe better that way. I confess that being asked to write about this book inspired in me a similar wish—that the email had not been sent, that I would not have to decide—and mine was as useless.”
—
How is wishing a woman simply didn’t exist not violent – when it’s admitted to this limply?
Play
- Amanda Hess, on Playboy & what women want“See, I’m in the minority. I can appreciate a good piece of equipment,” Jellinek said. “There’s a hypocrisy in consumer culture today,” he continued. “As difficult as it is to show nude women, it’s that much more difficult to show nude men.” After all, “men dominate all forms of media, so they’re going to dictate the tastes that are unleashed among the masses.”
“He’s a socialist,” Flanders told me.
“With a Porsche,” Jellinek added.
“You know that Paul is besotted with a woman when he is discovered “reading all four years of her Facebook wall and, in one of Chicago’s Whole Foods, one night looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friend’s photos to find any she might have untagged.”
—‘Taipei,’ by Tao Lin - NYTimes.com
May 2013
“Here’s another perverse aspect of Facebook’s lack of action: in order to raise awareness to the existence of this page, I would have to link to it, further participating in the potential exploitation of what looks like underage girls. I did so earlier on Twitter hoping that the collective outrage would lead to Facebook taking action. I thought, erroneously, that sharing the link was justified as the page would be removed shortly. Hours have passed and the page is still there.”
—Red Light Politics: Lean In… on Facebook’s prepubescent child pornography
test a for-now-secret project, re: sex work, cats, art?
If you’ve done sex work and have a cat and want to help me test out a secret (for now) project, message me here pls.
(or, for non-tumblrs, here)
“…he’s the master at weirdly relatable, normal dirty talk, the kind of dirty talk that doesn’t sound like a hodge podge of nonsensical unrelated curse words and body parts strung together like a popcorn garland.”
—Amelia McDonell-Parry
April 2013
Deanna Zandt
“It was so hard to explain to people that I was going to meet people from the internet and no, they weren’t going to murder me”— @deanna
Deanna Zandt remembers Usenet, the launch of Mozilla, IRC, and meeting people from a Barenaked Ladies fan chatroom at a New Year Eve show in 1996.
I interviewed Deanna, who is joy, and pretty much uses the internet just like this today (maybe less IRC?).
“…within the pink-and-gray-specked Atlantic granite confines of Zuccotti, the physical book had been repurposed. If its interior can be digitized, the pages and spine are even more free to take up space as we do with our bodies, in parks and ports, and in intersections and auction houses, on sidewalks and even on the steps of the New York Public Library, where the mobile library brought out a small reference collection one Sunday, a selection from the few books recovered from the raid, evidence of the destruction that released whiffs of gasoline-scented rot when you flipped the pages. Now that the physical book itself must do less, maybe that’s why now it can be laid on the line.”
—Take This Book, which, now that the story has turned its final bend, gets a public release (and if you didn’t get to back it during the original Kickstarter run at the end of 2011, now is your chance, and you can sign up to the Glass Houses newsletter to be alerted when)
“While I was in the process of leaving my abusive ex-partner, I confided in my social worker (after asking at length about her confidentiality policy, which she assured me was full proof) that I had previously worked as a sex worker in a parlor. She agreed to leave this off my notes but informed that had I still been working at that time, she would have informed child protective services. When I asked why, since I was based away from my house and my children were looked after by family while I was at work, she said that “prostitution is usually indicative of other issues.” Later, speaking to a friend of mine at the brothel about this, she told me that her child had been removed from her care because her ex partner told child protective services about her job during a custody dispute. There did not need to be “other issues”; the assumption of other dysfunction and ignorance of the realities of sex work was enough that she lost her child to the state. Another friend of mine from the same parlor was threatened by her soon to be ex-husband with being outed if she obtained legal council during their separation. Rather than take the risk of losing her children and her family, she lost her house, financial stability, all her savings and everything she had worked for up to that point. Her ex-husband took everything.”
—The Legends are True: I’m A Whore (and why I will never tell my family) | The Life and Works of Olive Seraphim (via redupnyc)
“Lock-em-up laws, aggressive policing, runaway prosecutions and racist policing have all been about enforcing a new social order on population segments whose labor is no longer needed as it was 50 years ago, and for whom no jobs, training, quality housing or meaningful education will be provided. Prisons are about showing somebody who’s boss, about perceived “public safety”, about enforcing an unjust social order.”
—Black Mass Incarceration —— Is It New? Is It Jim Crow? Is the Prison-Industrial Complex Real? And What Difference Does It Make
Aaron Straup Cope
“I sent my lithography professor an entire email in the subject header” — Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland
Aaron Straup Cope on Toronto Free-Net, discovering how to email, when the internet looked like a “typed mimeograph on a screen,” and the web appearing as a “complete end run around the gallery system.
I recorded Aaron’s N4TN at Brazenhead Books during Joanne’s last party in New York in January, then immediately walked him over to meet Molly Crabapple.
“Lilly’s designs seemed to emanate, to borrow a phrase from Tad Friend, “cheerful money.” Now, in a decade where there is a lack of money, or guilty quiet money, Lilly Pulitzer dresses seem like relics–shrouds of Turin in polka dotted lime green. After all, pink and green and paisley all mixed together could really only be worn by people secure enough in their place in the world to not give a damn–people who, if they had problems, discussed them on their sailboats. And when problems take place at the New York Yacht Club, how bad can they really be?”
—Remembering Lilly Pulitzer, Jennifer Ashley Wright
“Maybe one day soon you’ll be able to PayPal some young blogger $15 for a zip drive that gives you access to their radical (or radically boring) e-mails and Gchat transcripts.”
—Alice Gregory (see also: What Price Love?)
March 2013
Molly Crabapple
“You would think someone was hot based on how well they wrote” — Molly Crabapple @mollycrabapple
Molly Crabapple remembers the anarchism and anonymity of the early days like alt.satanism, alt.goth.fashion, Satanist Geocities pages and gifs, Gothic Martha Stewart, and looking at “every single thing you’re not supposed to look at.”
Such a joy to trip down memory lane w/ Molly in her studio. Listen in.
Speaking at Duke University next week →
calendar.duke.edu
Next Wednesday 3.27, I’ll be doing a talk as part of Duke University’s Feminist Week, on The War on Sex Workers. Free & open to the public.
“There’s an argument to be made — and it has, many, many times — that there’s nothing inherently wrong with spending money you can afford on things you want. But the central challenge of financial planning is balancing the short- and long-terms, and the trouble with getting used to a $200 backpack or a $3,000 apartment is that it doesn’t leave much up to chance. “In the Bay Area particularly, there’s no understanding of risk,” Richards said. “I’ve had conversations with people who work at very well-known companies in the Bay Area, and we’ll be talking about risk, and they’ll say, ‘what, you mean the risk that the stock will got from $300 to $250?’ No, I mean, that the stock will go from $300 to $0.” That’s the thing about peaks: They’re hard to see over until you’re on the way down. And in tech, which has a tendency toward social insularity and a financial interest in talking up its own growth, the concept of risk, on both an individual and company-wide level, can seem particularly abstract. A surprising number of people I spoke to for this article were living paycheck-to-paycheck, or close to it — regardless of how large that paycheck is.”
—The Bacon-Wrapped Economy, Ellen Cushing
“
I feel like our culture, as a movement, has come to revolve around either the memoir or the closet, after work in the sex trades. You can make a career transition without hiding your past or living in it, and that might be the best legacy of all: to show that one can treat work in the sexual spheres just like any other job, and do what’s right for you and your path while honoring the one you once walked.
I would love it if we stopped looking at leaving sex work as an eventuality, the beginnings of a ‘real career,’ a victory for someone else, or an admission of defeat and simply saw it as switching jobs. There’s a lot of unneeded pressure on our colleagues to remain in the profession as a fighter or to leave it as a victim. It’s work, and when it no longer fits and our larger work takes us elsewhere we should listen.
” —Sabrina Morgan (via narratrix, but curious about the original source!)
“…The shocking thing about any stripper gathering, I discovered, was that you have never heard women talk so fast and so explicitly about money in all your life. They make the guys on the trading floor on Wall Street look like a bunch of pansies.”
—Susie Bright’s memoir, _Big Sex Little Death_ (via marginalutilite)
“One of the responses to Bound and Gagged that pleased me was being told that I write about sex differently than most people do, because it’s not personal. It’s not about my life in some direct fashion, though no doubt it is in more indirect ways—I mean in fact I’m very ambivalent about pornography and I think I was trying to work that out in the book. In Against Love, I think autobiography is embedded at the level of style, in the humor and in the intellectual style, and the way points are made, in the kinds of analogies I tend to use. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s autobiographical at the level of form. That’s where personal expression interests me, not boring people with my sad life story. Obviously I have a complicated relation to love—though who doesn’t?—and the book comes out of that also, but it’s what energizes the style.”
—Style: An Interview with Laura Kipnis
“
I want to better understand where “sex radical” and “sex positive” feminisms converge and split off from one another. I don’t think they are the same thing, and I think we lost something when “sex radical” (mostly) dropped off the radar. If this transition, from sex radical giving way to sex positive, mirrors anything like the parallel changes in queer and women’s movements, it follows a time, moving from the 80s to the 90s, of an underclass getting more visible, and later, getting more respectable, while still preserving an underclass within the people just barely formerly known as the underclass.
I know it might be hard to to conceive of “sex positivity” as respectable in anyone’s eyes. But just as when Pride went corporate and when feminism becomes a corporate slogan, when “sex positivity” became closely identified (if not entirely identified) by sex toy stores and sex positive porn, where did our ways of talking about inequality go?
” —A porn of her own | postwhoreamerica
“And so I’m thinking of something Kipnis wrote: “Our sexuality is produced in the form of a commodity; our fantasies are repackaged and sold to us as products in porn stores; our desire has the grammar of consumer capitalism, and those sexual forms will exist as long as those social forms exist. The irony is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in the balance.” I don’t have conclusions, only questions and frustrations. I’m a mess of contradictions myself. I don’t deconstruct, I just bask in the glow. I want to acknowledge complexity, that we are more than the sum of our parts – which is why, I think, I don’t like the formulaic stuff. Anti-porn arguments bore me. Such accounts get in bed with right-wingers, infantilize women, condescend to sex workers, refuse to critically consider porn as a social practice, and prescribe what gets to count as “healthy” sexuality (usually vanilla, reproductive heteronormativity). Yawn. But sometimes, it’s true, as a critical theorist, pro-sex politics also bore me. They sometimes (not always, sometimes) feel limited, especially when what counts as politics is just about fucking. And because I’m a cranky girl, I worry about the very real potential for flattening all those uneven social relations and their histories into a spread-around lack of mind-blowing sex. (If you doubt, did you read the above?) If we meaningfully consider sex and sexuality –especially in its regulation and criminalization—in a dialectic with ideologies of race, gender, nation, capitalism, and material relations, the rhetorical hard-sell of personalized liberation falls flat. It’s Queer Pride weekend and I open up a local weekly and the Good Vibes ad copy catches my eye: “Out of the streets, into the sheets.” I know it’s meant playfully, but it still itches badly. To paraphrase critical theorist Lauren Berlant, the real fear in America is not that we –queers, feminists, and others of our kind – will have sex in our bedrooms, but that we will have politics in public.”
—Punk Planet 33 (Sept/Oct 1999) | Mimi Thi Nguyen (which I am so glad is still online)
Marisa Bowe
“I was dreaming in orange pixels” — Marisa Bowe
Marisa Bowe on using computers “100% for social” in the 70s with her father’s PLATO terminal in the basement, “boring” matches on EchoNYC, and how the “Grateful Dead freaks are what saved the Well because it’s fanatical people who keep things going.”
This interview goes so deep. (And here’s more on Echo & online identity.)
Kimmie David & Lola Pellegrino
“We all fucking built our websites by hand” — Kimmie David & Lola Pellegrino
Kimmie & Lola on meeting on the internet. “Laundro”, domain names with .nu, numbering website layouts, and ten years with the same Livejournal icon
Joanne and I just launched Nostalgia for the Net, where we ask friends to tell us about their earliest experiences with the internet. Each week we’ll post new stories, about what we remember and what we miss.
“When Madonna’s “Sex” was released, actor Udo Kier, who was featured prominently in some of the photo book’s best pictures (forever beautiful Udo does not take a bad shot), was asked about Ms. Ciccone. What she was like? But more specifically, since Kier had ample chance to see, What was her vagina like? Mr. Kier’s answer? “Organized.”
—“The Power of the Purse: Marnie,” by Kim Morgan (via jomc.links)
“To get up to speed on HTML, Fortuna—like most of the staff—put in months of twelve-hour days. “I’d smoke incessantly while I worked, and I timed my breaks for when the ashtray was brimming with butts,” he laughs. Co-workers would breeze by to drop six-packs on his desk and challenge him to the inevitable multiplayer Quake sessions. In 1996, he spent Christmas Day writing code for a video-publishing database. “It was just insane! I was working all the time. I lived here. But I didn’t mind. It was like a clubhouse. And I was learning a [computer] language; I was immersing myself. ” He gestures around the loft, pointing to its kooky mix of high- and low-tech—screaming Pentium computers sitting on top of scarred, third-hand, wooden desks, with broken piping and heaps of refuse lying about. “You know, it’s ironic,” he grins, “but in the last century, this used to be a sweatshop.”
—Who pays writers?: Weekend Reading: Why Your Fabulous Job Sucks (1999), by Clive Thompson
“Donald Windham’s incredible life story should serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers and journalists for generations to come. He was living proof that heart, passion and determination can be far more valuable than any formal academic credentials. I have always believed that journalism is a trade, like plumbing or carpentry, and that some of the best journalists never stepped foot in a journalism class. I am deeply honored to be among the first recipients of the Windham Campbell Prize and am very grateful to the fiercely independent man who made it possible.”
—
YaleNews | Yale awards $1.35 million to nine writers
Jeremy Scahill, one of the people who helped me get my start, someone I’m proud to call a friend, won a $150,000 literary prize from Yale, and managed to make his thank-you a deeply honest statement about journalism as a working-class job.
Here’s to Jeremy and to all the working journalists in his tradition.
(via differentclasswar)
“
Why aren’t we also saying that criminalization makes it harder to keep your job private? Let’s say you’re on the street, you pick up a celebrity and you both get busted. Your face is all over the media, as we saw with the lady who picked up Hugh Grant in the 90s. If you got busted for running an escort agency in the 80s, your face was on the cover of the New York Post. Now that the internet splashes these things around more widely, and we get spam offering to tell us which of our friends or neighbors has broken the law, with considerable emphasis on sex laws, I think the argument that we hide our work because it’s against the law is beginning to sound like a 20th century trope.
This idea – that our need for privacy is a symptom of illegality – sprang up before the internet was part of our lives. Facebook didn’t exist when 20th century prostitutes were developing their political rhetoric. So now I think it’s more likely that legal reforms could be seen as a way to take back some privacy, because people everywhere – including sex workers and their customers – are feeling freaked out about their privacy.
I know we say that sex work is work, but sex work is also SEX. I don’t know everything about my parents’ sexuality—and they’re open, liberal people. A sex worker might not want her kids to know all her business because parents need to retain some mystery in order to be respected. A sex worker might not want the local dry cleaner or the man who repairs her air conditioner to know she has sex for money—but that might have more to do with erotic boundaries than the law.
These creepy web pages created by police departments. The rise of the commenter which has its most problematic manifestation on escort review sites. The 24-hour news cycle. These things didn’t exist in 1975, when our big sisters occupied the churches in France and put us on the map. But some of our rhetoric, even coming from newer voices, has a 1975 quality. When I hear activists ranting about how we should come out of the closet, I feel like I’m in the presence of the thought police. In 2013, people are more interested in reinventing privacy than they are in some fanatical version of liberation.
” —Tracy Quan, as interviewed by Caty Simon for Tits and Sass