Oh, no! The ladies, they're getting drunk! AGAIN!

Guys just aren't into drunk girls

STUDY | Women mistakenly believe men think it's sexy

Oh, dear. It seems that, once again, I may have failed to appeal sexually to each and every member of the male gender. It's not that I'm not trying: I spend several hours of each and every day pondering how best to serve the boner needs of my community. I would not even let the Demon Alcohol pass my lips, did I not believe I served some higher, boner-related purpose by so doing! Yet I seem to have let the boners down. Can you tell me more, Mark J. Konkol of the Chicago Sun-Times?

Attention college girls: Pounding beers to keep up with the cute guy at the bar won't make him want you.

This, based on everything I know, is false. Also, kind of patronizing, in that, "you know, young lady, you may think that you're pleasing that man, but you have failed: let Papa explain" way that media written for young women can so often be. (TIP FOR JOURNALISTS: When writing for an intended audience - say, women, or young people - try not to assume that each and every one of them has some sort of head injury that precludes full adult-level comprehension.) Surely there must be some SCIENCE behind this counter-intuitive claim?

A recent study of college co-eds found women 18 to 25 believe men view excessive drinking as a sexy trait, but they're wrong. Seventy-one percent of women overestimated how many cocktails men would like them to drink on any given occasion, according to a study in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

Hurray! It's time to play Where Is The Mysteriously Missing Piece of Information in This Science Report! Again! Here's a hint for you: in studying co-eds, scientists found that women drink too much in order to get laid. They studied co-eds, and have findings about women. What can you add to a group of female students in order to make it a group of co-eds? HINT: It has a penis!

While we're at the business of adding in context, maybe we could address a few more things. Like "drink until she's cute" T-shirts, sold to dudes, or the pressure on young men to drink as part of their performative masculinity, or the fact that people drink to allay anxiety and that young, relatively inexperienced people may specifically experience anxiety about fucking, or the fact that college is an environment where people of both genders are encouraged, even pressured to drink, and where an inability to keep up with one's friends may be a social handicap!

While we're at it, we could even address rape culture. Yes! I said "rape culture!" I felt very '80s for a moment! But what else can you call it? The idea is that women naturally withhold sex, and that men have to wear women down and circumvent their defenses in order to get sex, and therefore you have manuals from seduction-artists-cum-date-rapists encouraging men to fake drinking while women actually get drunk and thereby lower their defenses to The Evil Sex They Would In No Way Consent To While Sober, and therefore men are pressuring women to get drunk, sometimes to the point of incapacitation, in order to have sex with them, even though they (obviously, because this is misogyny we're talking about: the woman you have the most contempt for in this world is the woman you've just fucked) have no respect for women who actually go along with it, and THEREFORE, my friends, THEREFORE, young women who have had men invite them out for drinks and invite them over for drinks and buy them drinks and pressure them to have just one more drink and (in an anecdote that is in NO WAY ABOUT MY OWN LIFE, except that it is: don't judge me) actually physically pour drinks down their throats as a prelude to fucking them might just possibly be under the impression that men are attracted to girls who get drunk.

"The message to college girls is: Hey, your perceptions about what you think men want in a date, a friend or a sexual hookup are not very accurate," said lead author Joseph LaBrie, of Loyola Marymount University. "Guys don't want girls who drink a lot."

Oh. Or we could do nothing to address the role men play in linking drinks with sex with social acceptance in the female mind, and just employ our privilege of retroactively tsk-tsking with no critical examination of the hypocrisy therein. Whatever.

A Tale of Two Trampolines; Also, Vaginas

My goodness, reading the news is hard. All day, every day, I engage myself in the tedious and unprofitable business of news-reading, attempting to extricate some random series of coherent thoughts from it in order that I might bore you, the reader.

Sometimes, when I am reading the news, I read Jezebel, or Salon! Today, Rebecca Traister and the fine publications mentioned above have done me a service: they have provided an article about TMI(ASV) or, for the acronym-illiterate amongst us, Too Much Information (About Some Vagina).

Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation... Other recent, mainstream expressions of the form have included Elle magazine's brutal piece last summer by Miranda Purves, called "The Ring of Fire," about how giving birth to her child tore her vagina asunder. An English translation of Charlotte Roche's German bestseller "Wetlands" ("It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel," read a story in the New York Times about "Wetlands," "and hard to describe in a family newspaper") is due in April. It opens with the sentence, "As far back as I can remember, I have had hemorrhoids." And this month, a younger iteration of the lay-it-bare form: the publication of "My Little Red Book," an anthology of more than 90 women's stories of the first time they got their period.

Oh, thank God. Finally, I can stop trying to understand what happened with Tom Daschle (back taxes?) and get back to thinking about what all girls love to think about most: their periods!

Periods, as you may have heard, are scary and stinky and un-sexy and drive you clinically insane, which is why whenever you are angry with a dude you must be having one. They also, according to landmark feminist novel The Mists of Avalon, allow you to bewitch and kill a man with your dark magic. Yet chicks are writing about them now! Who would have thought?

Yep, chicks love period talk. They also love white leggings, or did in rural Indiana circa 1995, which is where I was vacationing when my two older female cousins decided to invite some boys (including one my age, for potential making-out purposes: his name was Chet, he had a trampoline) to their majestic rambling farmhouse so that we could watch Speed, and made me wear said white leggings so that I would not scare the boys away with my decidedly un-sexy pants. Oh, God, white leggings. Leggings, which were white, worn in the place of pants. Guys liked them! Or so my cousins explained. I went with it, but there was terror in my soul.

At that time, I had been having my period for a year, in Imaginationland, and also in the lies I told my cousins and any other girls who wanted to compare stats. In reality, I was thirteen, and periodless, and therefore convinced that I was a barren freak, a Benjamin-Button-style womanchild whose body would never reach the ripe flower of sexual maturity. The lies were meant to spare my family and friends the stark reality of my fate. Also, other girls kept talking about their periods, and I didn't have one, and was jealous.

I got a stomachache while watching Speed. Whatever. Maybe I was caught up in the pulse-pounding action! Maybe I was nervous about sitting next to Chet! He had a trampoline, after all: would I ever see it? If I saw it, would we make out? How would that work? Was I, perhaps, sexually aroused by the prospect? Nobody had ever told me what getting turned on was supposed to feel like, just that you'd know it when it happened, which seemed like a cheat to me; at least boys got boners, like their penises waving "hi" and letting them know what was up, whereas I would just have to make out with people until I felt some thus-far-undefined sensation. Abdominal pain seemed as likely as anything else. Also, I'd heard there was moisture involved, and I was definitely starting to feel some of that going on in the old white leggings. Yep: I was turned on by Chet, I decided. We were going to do it. Probably on a trampoline. The prospect seemed less thrilling than one might hope.

As I pondered the inevitable and rapidly approaching loss of my virginity to Chet, I decided to get a Coke from the refrigerator. Did Chet want one, I inquired? He did. We'd been together for such a short time, and yet I had already demonstrated my essentially giving and generous nature. In our relationship, Chet would always have Coke. So I stood before him, ready to make the long walk to the refrigerator that had come to symbolize our love.

Now, Speed is a violent movie. People get blown up. Dennis Hopper is beheaded. This, at first, is what I thought Chet was reacting to, for the look of raw horror on his face was something I had never before seen in man or boy. You know that scene in The Shining, where the twins are like, "come play with us, Danny - come play with us forever," and then they're all bloodied, and then a tidal wave of blood gets aimed right at Danny's face? Well, that was what my vagina had done to Chet.

"Ummm?" Chet squeaked at me, and then I looked down.

"Oh, that's my period!" I said. My cousins' eyes reached maximum censorious boggling width. One of them shook her head slightly, warning me off this disastrous course, as I proceeded to wow Chet by dropping some menstrual knowledge. "Well, it happens every month, you know! It's totally natural, all girls my age have one. It just means that you can get pregnant! Well, I guess I'd better go put in a tampon now!"

Reader, I put in a tampon. And lo, I have been putting in tampons these many years since. Nor have I ever lost the sense of gratitude I had that day. I was not a freak. I did not have to sleep with Chet. Neither I nor anyone else would ever again be forced to wear those hideous white leggings. The thing that I had been fearing and coveting for two years had finally happened - and it didn't hurt as much as I'd been told, it didn't make me crazy, it wasn't terrible or wonderful, it was so fundamentally unremarkable that I didn't even know it had happened. Once upon a time, I had no period; now, I had a period. It didn't change me. It was just there.

Which is why girls talk and write about it, often in a detailed and explicit way. It's just there. Vaginas are not the mystical dictators of a woman's inner experience; they just happen to be around. The shame or fear or worship of anything related to the vagina, the mystification and heaping of positive or negative values on it, is fundamentally silly, like being scared of your left ankle. TMI? Oh, spare me. There are nine million articles published daily about women's skin and hair and teeth and noses and waistlines and upper arms and every other part of their bodies; assuming that the vag is the one unspeakable thing, or demanding that we always present it as a clean perfect man-pleasing baby-making machine, only contributes to women feeling estranged from their own experience.

There was only one regret I really had about the incident of the white leggings: I never got to see Chet's trampoline. I rued that one for a while. Then, a year later, my family got one, and it was all OK.

A Revolution Without Dancing

... Ugh. That'll learn me not to Make Statements while I'm drunk. Seriously: the "calling in gay and/or Bjork" thing? I had meant to post something in support of it, and I also thought it was funny that when I told someone I missed work he said, "oh, you called in gay!" And then I hadn't posted yet, and it was 11:45 p.m., and I was watching this PJ Harvey cover of "Satisfaction" on the YouTube, and somehow my need to steal that dude's joke became identical with my need to
share the PJ Harvey video with the world became identical with my thoughts on "Satisfaction" as feminist statement (like, yeah, the Rolling Stones are totally sexist dudes, but in a female voice it means differently, and anyway, as Emma Goldman said, "a revolution without arguments after which I get to cry to 'Angie' in a crappy bar is not a revolution worth having") became identical with "withdrawing a marginalized group's labor and capital from the market in order to demonstrate that group's crucial role in society is a pretty great statement, at least on a symbolic level" and all of this, combined with a not insubstantial amount of whiskey, melded into a post that was... well, not offensive, I don't think, but definitely dumb, and also not really about any of the above-listed things at all. So, yeah, for the record: I would say that drinking and feminist politics definitely have a relationship, of the "they totally do not get along and should not be invited to the same party" sort.

Which is not at all the point of this article! The point of this article, actually, is probably to whip the lady blogs into a furor and thereby increase the author's name recognition - oh, and hey! it worked - but Alex Morris, on the way to her (his?) five minutes as a succes de scandale, manages to make some random point about how feminists are all big lousy drinky drunks who ruined feminism, as in:

For better or worse, drinking has become entwined with progressive feminism. “I don’t think that the drinking in and of itself is feminist, but I do think that it comes from a feminist place, that it can bolster one’s sense of herself as liberated,” says Jezebel editor Jessica Grose. “You know, the whole point of Third Wave feminism is that individual choice should not be judged. If you choose to opt out and be a stay-at-home mom, then that’s your choice.” And if you choose to drink yourself unconscious in some random guy’s bed, that’s also your prerogative. To say that you shouldn’t would be paternalistic hand-wringing, implying that a woman needs to be protected from herself.

Yes, ladies: thanks to feminism, you can be a selfless stay-at-home mother or a drunk slut who gets date raped! I mean, I guess it kind of sucks that there are no other options, but hey! At least you have a choice!

This article is so dumb in so many ways (for example, it contains about 5,900 iterations of the word "alcopops," which I think means Zima and sparkletinis, and I don't think the young, Third Wave-influenced, New York-based feminists to whom Morris refers would ever even drink these apparently feminism-killing beverages; I mean, fuck, he or she is talking about me here, indirectly, and I'd get drunk off my own fermented urine rather than put a Captain Morgan's Bottled Raspberry Mojito Drink to my lips; girls drink them, sure, but the girls who do that and the girls Morris writes about are culturally and alcoholically distinct groups) that it is tempting to focus entirely on its mistakes and to ignore the real news: all of these responses, which are fun. You'll note that none of these writers really denies drinking! In fact, some of them use the piece as a way to squeeze in irrelevant back-handed boasts about what big drunks they are. Check out this irresponsible twat, who, within the space of one essay, manages to reflect poorly on women, feminists, bloggers and alcoholics alike.

The thing is, it's not as if I've never yelled at another lady, or accused her of killing feminism. I do that a lot, actually! It is this super fun circular dialogue that goes as follows:

GIRL #1: You're killing feminism! Stop it!
GIRL #2: Stop saying that I've killed feminism! It kills feminism when you accuse me of killing feminism!
GIRL #1: You're the feminism-killer, as evidenced by your efforts to censor all criticism of or dialogue about your feminism-killing, which by the way have killed feminism again!

It just goes on from there. I mean, I hated the "Thinking and Drinking" thing - hated it - because I generally believe that jokes about date rape are never ever ever funny. I could probably find lots of folks to back me up on that. Then again, those same folks would probably be disgusted by my frequent and casual use of the word "retard," and I would make fun of them for being vegetarians, and the whole thing would just go South really fast, so maybe we should all just aim for a little more nuance and a little less righteous scorn.

This may come as a shock, but a lot of feminists are, um, girls - and the narrative of morality, for girls, is pretty retarded. We're all brought up on the same fairy tales, which tell us that women are either pure, virtuous maidens or evil witches - stay-at-home mothers or drunk sluts. There's Cinderella, and there's her Wicked Stepsisters, but the character of the Stepsister Who's Pretty Nice and Tries Really Hard but Has Some Failings does not exist. We require perfection of ourselves, and we require perfection of others, and in the process of demanding universal moral purity, we all too often make hypocrites of ourselves.

It was Emma Goldman who said that "a revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having," and I don't know about you, but I don't dance until I've had a few. She also said that "it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think," which, if true, means that Alex Morris's article about drunk feminists must have been an absolute breeze to write. She did not, on the other hand, say "I yell because I care." The person who said that - often! to me! - was my mom. We all care, and we're all yelling, and just because we don't always agree doesn't mean that we can't respect each other. These conversations about who's killing feminism - whether they take the form of shouting matches, passive-aggressive blog posts, or articles in New York magazine - are, in fact, the proof that feminism is alive and well, if a bit hung over.

They're Selling Postcards Of The Hanging: Max Hardcore & The Business Of Abuse

Yesterday, I tried to write a post about this incident, in which a girl (on my street) was raped in a subway station while the man working the token booth watched. I tried to talk about this incident in the context of my own rape, and the prevalence of rape, and the context of our culture, in which rape is persistently either trivialized and eroticized or swept under the rug. I tried to argue that watching a woman get raped in front of you and trivializing or ignoring the widespread presence of rape in our society are not ultimately that different, in that both reactions essentially give rapists a free pass.

Unfortunately, as often happens, I got mad, and the writing got messy. I also got pretty messy, by the end, and I learned that the "save" button is dangerously close to the "publish" button, and that the "dear God, get this off Google Reader" button does not exist. I'd really rather not tell you guys about my experience of sexual assault, right now or ever, because I am not a precious little flower, and my personal experience is not the point. The point is that it happens to many women, and it is considered acceptable to dismiss or make fun of that fact.

So, let's not talk about me. Let's talk about Max Hardcore. He's a porn director, producer, and "actor" (that last word is HIGHLY iffy, in his case) who was recently sentenced to 46 months in prison for "obscenity." Unfortunately, this means that some folks - including folks at Gawker and Salon - are referring to him as a "first-amendment martyr."

Now, I've done some time in proximity to the porn industry. I know about Max Hardcore. I know the men who like Max Hardcore. I've heard those men talk about why they like him. And before we start talking about the terrible things that have been done to Max Hardcore - before we start talking about his fucking martyrdom - I think it behooves us to talk about what Max Hardcore has done.

Susannah Breslin, in her excellent post on the subject, points to a Hardcore fan's list (not linking here, because I can't visit it right now) of "extreme scenes" he's done. I encourage you to read it. See how far you can make it down the list. Here, I'll give you some highlights, which I copied last night:

* Pamela Dee; In 1992, Little sent performer Pamela Dee to the emergency room at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank "after she suffered vaginal hemmhoraging during a taping," writes Nick Ravo in the 2/98 ICON magazine. Dee, a writer in Reno, Nevada told Ravo that Paul came up behind her and, without warning, rammed his fist into her vagina. "I never heard of anything like that being done to anyone before. I felt ripped open... He could kill someone - he should be behind bars... he really screwed me up."

* Ryan: She is pissed on and anally raped in her scene. Matt wrote in his review for the film. "severely mouth rapes her. Man what a segment that was. She begs for him to slow up or stop and is definitely crying in agony! That only infuriates him more along with her wiping away/spitting saliva in disgust and he pounds harder into her mouth leaning backwards on his chair." I've watched this scene and the girl is in no way faking it, she is crying and begging Max to stop. "Can't you take your prick out." She cries to Max, he keeps saying, "A little bit longer," while continuing to pump away.

* Melody Love pisses onto ground for Max. "after the normal start suddenly the music wells up and overlays the human voices and at this point Max tries to anal her. She's pushing him away and obviously saying no with her face contorted in apparent agony (facially she's not too attractive anyway but this makes her look really ugly). He holds her down and continues anyway, at one stage choking her. She seems to appeal to the cameraguy but of course he just continues videotaping. Then Max goes back to vaginal sex and the music dies down and is replaced by normal human noises." - Patrick Riley.

* Olivia; Actress Olivia claimed that she was coerced into sex during this shoot. All copies of this film were pulled. "After a while he tries to get her to do an ass to mouth and she won't do it. She says "no no no no no". Max sort of pushes her mouth towards his cock, but she resists. She then looks up at him and at the camera man, then gives in and does the ass to mouth. It's pretty compelling to watch. I wouldn't say they forced her to do it, but I think they made it clear that she should. I would think she would have known beforehand that ass to mouth was part of the deal but who knows. There's more to the story here. Later in the scene, Max has her upside down and he's forcing his cock down her throat. After a few minutes of this, she tries to get up and says "that's it, I've had enough." But Max just keeps going. I have to admit, that was a bit distrubing. Actually, quite distrubing. Max ignored her when she said she wanted the scene to stop. That's just wrong. The only other notable part of the scene is when she says something like "god, I'm such a whore" and looks off the set at the camera people as if she's shocked at what she's doing." - bofnyc. Max also pissed on Olivia's face during the scene. Some of which goes up her nose.

Let us be clear here: Max Hardcore is a rapist. He rapes sex workers, who are notably less protected from rape than other women, but that does not in any way lessen the seriousness of his crime. In fact, since those women have less access to legal recourse - remember, we are operating within a justice system where proving a woman is a "slut" can get you off the hook, and monetary exchange or contractual agreement stands in for consent, regardless of whether the sex worker consented to the specific acts which took place in the transaction - it makes his crime greater. He is a rapist, and he is in jail, and it is acceptable to be happy about that.

It is also acceptable to advocate banning Max Hardcore's work on the basis that he is selling authentic footage of rape and abuse, and must commit acts of rape and abuse in order to produce the footage. This is the same argument that we've used to ban child porn and snuff films, and it is not incompatible with a pro-sex or pro-porn viewpoint. To argue that Max is a victim of prejudice against sex work is to ignore the fact that, in his films, he aims to degrade the actresses (not their "characters," but the actresses themselves) specifically because they are sex workers - "whores," in his preferred language, who are "stupid" for agreeing to do the scenes and are therefore "get[ting] what they deserve." Max Hardcore is not a victim of anti-sex-worker prejudice; he actively perpetuates it. Women have the right to have sex when they choose, and in the ways that they choose, and that freedom does not end once a woman enters the sex industry. People have been working for decades to make porn safe and fun and sexy for women - those who consume it and those who make it - and getting people like Max Hardcore out of the business is essential to the success of that project.

It is not acceptable to make like Glenn Greenwald and get all OMG WTF WHAT ABOUT TEH ABU GHRAIBS. As if people who object to Max Hardcore don't care about Abu Ghraib. We do. We care precisely because we believe that torture and forced sexual humiliation are unacceptable. We do not believe that it is any MORE acceptable to torture an American female sex worker than it is to torture a Middle Eastern man.

It is not acceptable to refer to Max Hardcore's films as merely "distasteful," without addressing the fact that Max Hardcore's work rests on the infliction of severe and unfaked pain, and sometimes on rape. It is unconscionable to say, as Greenwald does, that "there was no suggestion that any serious violence was ever inflicted or that the adult actors in the film were anything other than completely consensual." Olivia's rape is on record. The tapes were pulled, which is as close to a public admission of guilt as one can get. Pamela Dee's vaginal hemorrhage is, likewise, a matter of public knowledge. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from within the industry to support the fact that, with Hardcore, the pain is real and there is no safeword. Any journalist who makes Greenwald's argument, or one like it, is either bending the facts to make a point, or else publishing his work without checking to make sure that his article is factually correct. In either case, such a journalist is unprofessional, if not downright dishonest.

Yes, obscenity laws are bad. They use definitions which are broad and subjective, they criminalize sex no matter what level of consent is involved, they are selectively enforced, and they can very easily be used to punish folks who are already marginalized, such as sex workers and queers. Andrea Fucking DWORKIN didn't support obscenity laws. So we can talk about obscenity laws, and we can talk about freedom of speech, but one thing we cannot do, if we want to be honest and accurate, is to argue that Max Hardcore is anything other than a dangerous criminal. Max Hardcore went to jail for obscenity; Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion. Neither one was convicted for his most severe crime, but both were bad men who got caught.

Revolutionary Road: My Heart Will Go On, Unlike Your Fetus

I had a discussion with someone, not so long ago, about The Awakening. I said that I couldn't bring myself to engage with it, because it fit into a pattern that I had noticed in certain nineteenth-century novels - woman has sexual awakening, cheats on husband, dies - and that struck me as the manifestation of a conservative impulse to contain or negate female sexuality which is not inextricably bound to one man, which must spring on some level from paternity anxiety. (I am fun at parties.) He said that the death was earned by the internal logic of the story, and by the characterization of the woman in question. I said something like, "that's very nice, but also: woman has sexual awakening, cheats on husband, dies." Then I realized that I was being obnoxious.

But I didn't let that stop me! Here is a brief survey, composed entirely of books that I can name off the top of my head.

Survey #1: Books Which Center On Female Protagonist's Sexual Awakening & Consequent Adultery - Does She Die?*

Madam Bovary (1856) - She dies.
Anna Karenina (1877?) - She dies.
The Awakening (1899) - She dies.
Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - She does not die! She learns the joy of submitting to an outdoorsman! Welcome to the twentieth century.

Then I read Revolutionary Road. While we are on the subject of paternal anxieties and gory lady deaths: oh, my sweet Jesus, this book has them. If I had to compose a one-act play about Revolutionary Road, which completely oversimplified its plot, it would go as follows:

FRANK: We live in the 1950s! We are under great pressure to conform.
APRIL: Bad news: I want an abortion.
FRANK: No, you totally can't have one, because it's my child too!
APRIL: I guess I won't do it, then.
FRANK: Wait - I forgot that I hate you!
APRIL: Truly, our marriage is a sham. Life in the suburbs has killed our spirits! I'm going to abort myself now.
THE NEIGHBORS: Isn't it a shame that April Wheeler died?

The good news is that this play totally has a chance of being optioned for the screen now, because Hollywood is finally making Revolutionary Road: The Movie. Its casting - which I learned just last night - is so amazing that I can't even begin to wrap my mind around it. Which leads us to Survey #2:

Survey #2: Movies In Which Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet Play a Couple Struggling With the Social Constraints of Their Time - Does One of Them Die? If Yes, How?

Titanic (1998) - Yes, there is a shipwreck.
Revolutionary Road (????) - Yes, their marriage is a loveless wreck to which death would be preferable, and also Kate Winslet bleeds out through her crotch.

"...you HOL-low FUCK-ing SHELL of a WOMAN..."

*Any additions to this list are welcome. I've ruled out Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Tess is raped, and later becomes a kept woman to survive - she's never after her own pleasure, although she does in fact die), and Wuthering Heights (spiritual infidelity, but no sex, although she is quite vocally dead throughout most of the book).