Welcome to the 1st Annual Do Not Want Festival! Starring: Bush! Obama! And Caffeine!

So, does everyone remember that time that I needed emergency contraception when I was eighteen, and I asked for it at a local clinic, and the doctor told me that (a) according to her faith, it was a "form of abortion," (b) that she therefore refused to give it to me, and (c) that I "should have kept my legs together?"

What? No-one remembers that? That is just the horribly scarring incident that turned me into the frothingly sex-positive pro-choice militant that I am today? Well, darn.

The good news is that, even though it would have been possible to fire Dr. McJudgey for this behavior back in the day, starting today it is totally legal and she can do it to whomever she likes with zero repercussions! And by "the good news," of course, I mean "the news that makes me want to staple my eyelids shut so that I do not have to see one more depressing piece of news today!"

Yes, George Bush has signed into effect "a sweeping new regulation that protects a broad range of health-care workers—from doctors to janitors—who refuse to participate in providing services that they believe violate their personal, moral or religious beliefs." Meaning, basically, that if it is your doctor's personal, moral belief that you are a scumbag who doesn't deserve medical treatment, or that Tuesdays are "me time" days during which patients cannot be treated even if their heads will otherwise explode, you will end up with an exploded head and the hospital can lose its funding if it fires the doctor responsible. Not to worry, though: people's heads don't explode all that often, and there's no real cultural weight on "me-time Tuesdays," so the only people this will affect are women in need of contraception or abortions! Women like Eighteen-Year-Old-Me (hey there, lady! Your outfit is atrocious) and thousands if not millions of others every year! PHEW.

So, let's sum up the day in Do Not Want:

(1) Doctors don't have to be doctors any more.
(2) This dumbfuckery is still going on.
(3) They are taking the caffeine out of Sparks.

Now I can write all day about the first two items on the list. But about that last one, I can only say: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

What Do Steven D. Levitt and Summer's Eve Have In Common?

Answer: they are both douches.

Today, as you may be aware, is the Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. In a culture where it's cool to play a game that has a "fuck prostitute then beat her to get your money back" option (yeah, I know, you can kill anyone in GTA, and maybe you can even rob anyone in GTA - the prostitutes, however, are the only ones that you basically get to rape by retroactively removing the grounds for consent) that is mighty necessary.

I've known a lot of women who have worked in the sex industry - phone sex operators, dancers, pin-up girls, escorts - and they tend to have several things in common, among which are (a) amazing senses of humor, (b) a very low tolerance for any variety of bullshit, and (c) stories about being treated like subhuman trash by bosses, clients, and even friends or lovers who had "moral" objections to their jobs. The abuse they take can be emotional, financial (just ask a dancer about how club owners work - they can charge you for working in their establishment, then take a percentage of the money that you make there, meaning basically that you pay a fee for making them a profit) or, yes, all too often, physical; what matters is that sex workers can't really fight back. When you enter the industry, it seems, you're stripped of both your voice and your right to defend yourself. The other person always has a superior weapon: I may be an asshole, a con man, an abuser, or a rapist, they can say, but you're a whore. The legal system, along with most of the American public, will agree.

Sex workers are considered expendable - and, because of that fact, they're all too often targets of violence. Because of that fact, it's also not considered necessary to treat their deaths with any pretense of respect or compassion.

Look at this. Now look at this. Now, tell me that I'm wrong.

Because sex workers aren't considered fully human, it's completely acceptable to form strong opinions of them or use them as fodder for your career-making journalistic think-pieces without soliciting their input, representing their (diverse, obviously) perspectives, or even speaking to one of them. Even DFW's piece on the AVN Awards had an unfortunate "look at the freaks/what if I get a boner?" tone, but the worst example of it, in recent memory, is Female Chauvinist Pigs, a Defense-of-the-One-True-Feminism type deal by journalist Ariel Levy. Female Chauvinist Pigs contends that (a) more women these days are modeling their sexuality on that which is presented by sex workers, specifically that of porn stars and strippers - which is true, (b) it has become culturally acceptable to visit strip clubs or watch porn, even if you are a lady - which is true, and (c) all sex workers hate their jobs and are exploited and sad and never experience "authentic" arousal, which could be true (although it's, you know, not, because you can never begin a sentence with "all sex workers" and have any hope of its being accurate) although Levy would have no way of knowing that, because in her little opus on the fakeness and sadness of sex workers she does not interview a single goddamn one of them. She seems never to have considered that they might have a perspective on the matter, or that they could say anything she could not say for them.

Which, all things considered, is still a step up from writing an article in which sex workers - people, who happen to do sex work- are referred to, repeatedly, as "goods." As objects. As inhuman, removed from any discussion of human opinions, or experiences, or rights.

Just in time for the Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

Wow, what a fucking douche.

[Via and via.]

Welcome To My LiveJournal

Hola, amigos. It has, as they say, been a while since I rapped at you. Let me attempt to explain the delay. As you may know, I: 

• Quit smoking, after which I 
• Hated everything, then got really
• Sad about everything, and then
• Cried a lot, then contracted
• The flu. 

I also: 

• Lost my wallet. 

This does not really look all that impressive in bullet list form, so let me just add: 

• Lost my wallet.
• Dammit. 
  
• Dammit. 
  
• Dammit. 
  

Oh, and also, I am normally not the sort of person to volunteer this information, but on the very day that my wallet went missing (yeah, my wallet "went missing" like JonBenet Ramsey "went missing" - MY WALLET WAS MURDERED, I TELL YOU, MURDERED) I: 

• Got my Mystical Wombyn Moon Ocean Nature Lady Time. 

Now, having read The Mists of Avalon, I am fully aware that, were I to have sex with a man during this Mystic Time, I could bewitch him to do my will. Unfortunately, my will at this point in time is that I be given a backrub and some hot tea while I watch re-runs of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the Internet, which is so boring that even a sex zombie would pass on it. So I guess I'll just be looking up those YouTube clips myself. Oooh, hey! 

Also, I know that right now you are like, "none of this is remotely funny, nor does it have anything resembling a point. In fact, I find it tasteless! Were I not offended, I would be bored." I quite agree, my good man or woman! Sadly, everything that I've written recently has inspired the same feelings of shock and/or tedium. And that is why, for the past week, I have refrained from posting. 

So, that's it: my absence, explained, with bullet points. Now, on to something resembling news. 

And This Is Why I Read Bitch

From "The Ambition Condition: Women, Writing, and the Problem of Success," by Anna Clark:

Perhaps you know about Emily Gould’s cover story, “Exposed,” in the New York Times Magazine last May. Even if you didn’t take in all 8,002 words on the former Gawker editor’s gains and losses from blogging about her personal life, it would be hard to miss the criticism of the piece elsewhere... Whatever the valid faults of Gould and her article, the attacking comments were unmistakably gendered. “Attention whore,” was one favorite catcall. “Get over yourself, sweetheart,” advised a commenter. Another scoffed, “You are just a stupid little girl”—a comment 67 others recommended. What’s more, the comments were full of parental advice offered as if to a 10-year-old and intended to steer the writer away from, well, writing: “Don’t you have important things to do?”; “Like your tattoos, I’m fairly sure you’ll regret all this by the time you get into your 40s”; and, “You really want to find some meaning?… Go to the local VA hospital and volunteer to spend a week changing bedpans and rewrapping dressings. Or try teaching English as a second language to a new immigrant...or read to the blind.”

And then there was this one: “I suspect that one day, when a stalker appears in this girl’s life (you can’t call her a woman), she will have no idea that she brought it upon herself.”

Yep, it’s all the fault of the “girl” writer who put herself out there. Add the Gould Incident to the uneasy history of ambitious women writers told that they have nothing of worth to say.

Oh, and also:

So goes the equation of female ambition with selfishness and unhappiness. But the translation of this old story into the world of writers takes a curious turn.

Anyone who’s stepped into a literary community—readings, performances, writing workshops, MFA programs—will testify to the disclaimers that issue regularly from the mouths of women writers in particular. “This is just something I thought I’d try,” and “I’m not really a poet, but…” are words regularly uttered even by those who made drastic life changes in order to carve out time to write. I prepared for months for a major fiction contest in college, for instance, which I entered five years in a row, claiming to others each time that I just “threw something together.” Later, I applied to a single MFA fiction program, and told no one until I got in. I just didn’t want anyone to know what I wanted most. Perhaps I was preparing for failure: If I said openly that I not only wanted to be a writer but that I worked hard at it, my ambitions could be judged against external rewards—and easily dismissed when I missed out on them.

Oh, and:

Furthermore, to even say that you want to write lasting novels, garner hundreds of thousands of blog hits, or handmake a chapbook is to expose yourself to the “who are you to think you have anything to say?” sort of pummeling that Gould received. It can be tempting, then, for women in particular to write quietly and hope that the work will speak for itself. But by not owning up to her ambitions—whether they are in the public or private realms—a writer feeds the machine that discounts the aspirations and talents of all women writers. The silence is implicit support for editors who claim that their byline disparity is because women don’t want it enough. It sets an example for other writers that ambition is something to be ashamed of. Though it might be the last thing in the world she means to do, by keeping her intentions for her work hidden, a female writer allows others to make assumptions about her work, and to decide where it will and will not go.

Seriously, I may never stop quoting this piece. Read the entire thing. It's brilliant.

Also, since we've fallen onto the subject, most of my opinions on personal writing, and on the Gould backlash (which, by the way, did I mention that JOSH FUCKING STEIN wrote a nasty Page Six article about Gould which was met with just about zero backlash, even though it had his name on it and pictures of him brooding in a sweater, as opposed to her anonymous blog which disguised his name, and she was supposed to do what? Let him control the public representation of a difficult period in her life? Fuck that) were summed up by Melissa McEwan in a blog post that has nary a mention of Gould, so yeah, read all of that post, too:

Making the personal public and political is serious business. Because women's stories aren't told, it's incumbent upon female feminists to tell their own stories, to fill that void, to be unrepentant and loquacious raconteurs every chance we get, to talk about our bodies, our struggles, our triumphs, our needs, our lives in every aspect. It's our obligation to create a cacophony with our personal narratives, until there is a constant din that translates into equality, into balance.

Telling our tales is not a weakness. It's a strength.

No matter who says otherwise.

Correct. Also: if a woman writes something you like, tell people about it. It's not going to get out there on its own.

[Via.]

What It Looks Like

So, yes, I burst into tears last night, but now I want to tell you why.

A few days ago I wrote this:

Most people do not belong to the (incredibly small) demographic of white, straight, middle-class men at which most "mainstream" media is targeted; most of us will, at least once per day, be smacked in the face with a message that tells us we are unimportant or inferior, and most of us learn to shrug those messages off.

I was thinking about the election when I wrote that. I was thinking about the election, and I was thinking about the most basic and most urgent task that I engage in every single day: looking at that white/straight/middle class/male narrative of America - the atmosphere through which I move, every day, absorbing its countless messages that only those people truly belong in this country or this world, that only they matter, that only they can ever be imagined when we say the word "American" or even "person" - and understanding that for what it is, and talking back to it. I don't do this because I want to; I do it because I have to, in order to believe that I belong in this world.

There were two men who shaped the course of my education: Sekou Sundiata and Gary Lemons. Sundiata taught me to write. He insisted that I learn the necessary discipline and technique, while acknowledging that writing was - or should be - only one facet of a greater engagement with the world. He told me that your message is your instrument: it doesn't matter how beautiful that instrument is if you can't play it. Lemons shaped the nature of my political engagement. On the day I met him he stood in front of the classroom and told us about his childhood: his father's violence, his mother's pain, and how he learned to internalize racism, which told him he was worth nothing, and sexism, which told him that black women were worth even less. He spoke of political engagement as a life-saving action, a recovery, which allowed him to overcome the ugliest aspects of his own socialization and work to heal the same wounds in others. I do not engage with this theory because it is intellectually interesting, he said, I do it because without it I would be insane or dead.

I knew that it was true. It was true for him, and it was true for me. I was falling apart that year. I was living with the memory of my father's violence, and my mother's pain. I was coping with the ways that I had swallowed the misogyny embodied in that family dynamic whole, and had treated myself - or allowed others to treat me - as a piece of meat or a garbage dump because of my gender. I was coping with my departure from the very white, very racist community I had grown up in, and was uncovering unconscious prejudices and attitudes of entitlement in myself to which I had never consciously admitted - and I had never had to admit them, because within that very white, very racist community, they were simply normal.

You want to talk about hope: I will tell you about Gary Lemons and Sekou Sundiata. I do this theory because without it I would be insane or dead; your message is your instrument, so learn to play it. These men were never easy on me, or on any of their students. They called me out, over and over again, for sloppiness in my work, for errors in my arguments, and for exhibiting a privileged, entitled white middle-class feminism which reified the system I claimed to be working against. I owe them more than I can express.

Lemons, who had been openly critical of the school's student diversity and faculty hiring policies, was fired a year after I met him; he had served at the college for more than a decade. Sekou Sundiata died last year.

So, yes, directly after Obama's victory speech, I excused myself from the room, and I went out onto the sidewalk, and I cried, harder than I have cried in years. It was not about the Democrats winning, or about me getting what I wanted, which was a Democratic win. It was about the fact that people have given their lives to this work, and many have suffered for it, and many have died, and some may have believed, as they died, that it was worthless. Many have developed, as I have, an ugly cynicism - we push for things that we don't honestly believe can be achieved, so that, when we lose, we don't mourn. We just say, what more would you expect from this country? I want you to believe me that, when I cried last night, I was grieving. I was also feeling that cynicism lift from me. I was realizing that it had been so, so, so heavy.

The narrative is wrong. It has always been wrong. "People" and "Americans" and "America" do not look like forty-three white married men of means. They look like this:












Yes, evil still exists. No, electing Barack Obama did not magically solve racism or end the dominance of the master narrative. Yes, we have a lot of work to do. You know, last night, this kid showed up to the party:

He is still going to grow up in a world where his success and his comfort are prized more than those of others, because of his gender and his race. He will still see that people who look like him occupy the most respected and powerful positions far more often than people who do not. He will still be taught in schools where the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of people who look like him are considered "canonical" or "foundational" or simply "great" works, with no identity-based qualifier, whereas the contributions of people who do not are typically described as "great works by women" or "great works by African-Americans" or what have you, rhetorically and conceptually separated from pure (white, male, straight) "greatness." He will still be encouraged to consider his successes as entirely his own, without taking into account the privileges and support networks that people who look like him necessarily inherit, which have made his success not only possible but likely. He will still live in a world where it is unlikely for him to gain the critical apparatus necessary to understand his own privilege, or the empathy necessary to join others in dismantling the institutions and assumptions which make it possible. He is still, most likely, going to make things harder for the rest of us, without entirely knowing what he is doing, or why.

I know this. I know this because I am a white, straight, college-educated, middle-class professional, and I am constantly extended privileges that I do not deserve, and I am constantly encouraged to simply embrace those privileges as my birthright. It is easy, safe and comfortable for privileged people like me - and lots of people are privileged, like me - to affirm and reinforce the structures of oppression; it is painful, dangerous, and difficult for us to resist them. But I believe that, in order for last night's victory to happen, millions of people had to vote against their own privilege. They had to defy that master narrative for long enough to cast their votes. I hope that we are able to continue this; I hope that we continue to reach past the politics of pure self-interest. I hope that boy is going to be able to carry this moment with him, and to serve its spirit. He is going to need good teachers.

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.

New Feature: Slightly Insane Media Studies

I am not smoking! Well: I'm not smoking much. This is very exciting, for several reasons, the chief of which is that I've spent the entire day straddling some sort of barbed-wire fence between panic and irritation. (That is what we call a metaphor, and it is one of many things that you cannot do well when you are trying to overcome your weird emotional/physical dependency on something that makes you smelly and unattractive and also might kill you.) Yes, lots of things are hard when you do not smoke: talking, working, and not whining constantly about how much you want a cigarette would be my top three. But also writing, it turns out, is pretty hard! Which is why it is so, so gratifying when someone else manages to sum up - in only one sentence! - that one thing you just keep bitching about re: popular culture but can't quite communicate in a clear or succinct fashion (do you ever communicate in a clear or succinct fashion, Sara? probably not!) and that you just keep trying to communicate, awkwardly, thereby wasting endless time and space and making everyone think you are kind of a sour nag. Are you ready for the sentence? Here it is!

Thank God we have another film about the fantasies, hang-ups, unintentional cruelties, and eventual redemption of a fucked-up straight white guy.
- Dana Stevens, first sentence in her review of Choke.

Ha ha ha, AWESOME. But can she keep it up? Let's check in with the second sentence:

For a moment there, I had almost forgotten to keep such dudes at the forefront of my concerns.
- Dana Stevens, second sentence in her review of Choke.

Oh, snap!

It's not that I don't care about FUSWGs. I do! They are a part of our human community. Some of them are quite talented. It's just that these stories dominate the landscape, in a way that often makes me feel that other perspectives aren't valued, and at a certain point my relationship to the culture at large starts to feel like hanging out with a dude who has to tell me everything about everything and quite blithely and confidently cuts me off when I start to speak. At some point, my willingness to listen wears thin, and I excuse myself so that I can step outside and smoke.

I should note that this sentence, for me, really hangs on the phrase "unintentional cruelties." Always, in these stories, the FUSWG in question hurts someone - typically a girl - either through sheer doltishness and immaturity, or because he actually does believe that he matters more than she does, that he can and should be cruel or disrespectful or dishonest, because it's fun, and because he can get away with it. The "sensitive," navel-gazing aspect of the story, and the eventual redemption, are supposed to legitimize this: I know I'm an asshole, but I just can't help myself. This is a common line, and it wearies me. If you don't want to be an asshole, there are plenty of ways to avoid it - like, say, listening to the women in your life when they tell you how they want to be treated, or challenging your own belief that respecting women's boundaries is "emasculating." Also, you might not want to surround yourself with narratives that legitimize asshole behavior - although, as previously noted, they will be difficult to avoid.  

--- WORKBOOK: FUN WITH THIS SENTENCE ---

This sentence is fun because you can use it in different contexts! Let's start by applying it to, say, Indecision:

Thank God we have another [novel] about the fantasies, hang-ups, unintentional cruelties, and eventual redemption of a fucked-up straight white guy.

Let's apply it to All the Sad Young Literary Men:

Thank God we have another [novel] about the fantasies, hang-ups, unintentional cruelties, and eventual redemption of [three] fucked-up straight white guy[s].

Let's apply it to Knocked Up and High Fidelity and Fight Club and Garden State and Elizabethtown and The Last Kiss and About a Boy:

Thank God we have [all of these stories] about the fantasies, hang-ups, unintentional cruelties, and eventual redemption of [a bunch of] fucked-up straight white guy[s].

BONUS QUESTIONS: Can you think of any narratives to which this sentence might apply? Be creative! Is it okay that many Charlie Kaufman movies fit this pattern if you also think Charlie Kaufman movies are just really good? Consider fucked-up straight white chick media: is it equally insufferable, not least because of the amount of privilege inherent in being a straight white chick, but also because self-pity and self-absorption are just really unlovely traits? How about this blog? Is it annoying you yet? Do you think that it will start to? Also, can I have a cigarette now? Please. I want one. Please. 

Things Michelle Tea Does Really Well: Long, Long Quotes Edition*

Item #1: Capturing The Thought Processes and Fantasy Lives of Adolescent Girls: "Smoking Marlboros with Marisol, we planned our escape to New York City. We would wait till we were sixteen and had tits and were pretty, because the only way we could think to make money was to pose for Playboy. It was such a dirty thing, we figured not many girls would do it. Playboy would be desperate for models, and happy to have us. Me and Marisol would shave our heads into tall perfect Mohawks that stretched to the sky like the tall New York buildings. We would befriend Billy Idol. We had this plan, we would find out where he lived, ring his bell and pass out on his doorstep. He couldn't leave two unconscious girls on his doorstep. He would have to carry us inside, touch us, lay us on his furniture, and when we came to, he would see what wild young things we were and he would want to be our boyfriend."

Item #2: Embedding Rather Complicated Critiques in Stories About Having a Bad Trip at Lollapalooza: "The panic was not subsiding, it was growing, and I realized that it was only the beginning. I had just eaten the stuff, it hadn't even fully dissolved, more and more of it would be released into my bloodstream and I would lose my mind. That's what would happen. I was an idiot. I took this drug I knew nothing about, a drug that affects your brain, and like a fool I just ate it and now I would go mad. I was overcome with grief... Up on stage Ice-T was yelling at the audience. I say... what good is a beautiful girl if the bitch don't fuck?! Oh no. He said it again. What good is a beautiful girl... IF THE BITCH DON'T FUCK, chanted frat row, the millions of white boys with baseball caps cheering Ice-T with their fists in the air, over and over. Oh god, I wanted to die. Ice-T was evil. I was on drugs and he was the devil. I looked over at Clive. That's not cool, he said uncomfortably. Duh, Clive."

Item #3: Writing About Sex Work in a Way That Buys Into Neither the Third-Wave "Empowerment" Bullshit or the Second-Wave "Unenlightened Victims" Crap, Making It Clear That the Real Mind-Fuck of It, the Part That Can Screw You Up, Is the Way It Sheds Light Onto Men's Secret Lives and the Relationships Between Men and Women in the "Normal," Outside World: "It was a whirlwind, a blur. A landscape of heaving chests, scribbled with hair and hung with belly, corrugated with ribs. Each man astounded me, again and again, with his complete obliviousness to my hate and my absence. I was not there, except when a spool of rage would suddenly unfurl itself and shake me... It's True, I thought. Everything You Hear About Men. Your Worst Fears, All Of It, It's True. I lay back in a random bed and felt strangely vindicated. I thought about Ma, about all of the good women out there with their men, how their closeness to them sheltered them somehow from reality. How only the ruined girls knew, only the whores and the dykes and the crazy women, only they knew what this world was really like. I was slobbered on, my tits slick and spitty. I was sore."

Seriously: this looks so easy, and it's not. Whenever I give a friend a Michelle Tea book (something I do often), she's either scandalized by all the queer sex and/or sex work, in which case I start to feel uncomfortable around that person and regret giving her the book, or she says something like "this reminds me of my diaries," which is a feeling I also share, but which can be deceptive, because the genius of Michelle Tea lies in the fact that no matter who you are, she can make you feel as if you're reading from your own diary.

She doesn't use a "writerly" voice or retreat into academic language when she's dealing with subjects like gender or sexuality or class or sex work - subjects which do invite high-flown prose, because using fancy diction can be a way of telling your reader, I am not a feminazi/a man-hating lesbian/white trash/a dumb whore: I am educated, and along with the privilege of education I have gained the privilege of being taken seriously. Like bell hooks, Tea doesn't play that. Her prose is always accessible and conversational. The run-on sentences, the colloquial language, the non-standard grammar (people who hate Tea always harp on her "grammar mistakes"), the bluntness of her phrasing - all of these things make her voice seem like the voice of a friend, or the voice inside your own head. Which makes it, ultimately, harder to dodge the message - when the voice in your head talks about these things, how do you distance yourself from them? How do you turn back into the safety of your privilege? How can you refuse to hear?

I saw Augusten Burroughs read, not long ago, at an event in which a friend of mine participated. He was promoting his memoir about his abusive father. I haven't read his work, but the brief excerpt he shared reminded me of everything I don't like about the genre of Trauma Memoirs. It was self-consciously lyrical, stilted; it romanticized pain, tried to make it seem bizarre and theatrical and out of the ordinary, something you could take in as part of an evening's entertainment. I'd met him backstage prior to the event, and had asked him if he could help me open my beer; I didn't recognize him then, but he seemed offended by my request, in a way that told me he was probably Someone Important. On stage, I was struck by how much his voice changed, and became the voice of An Author Reading His Work. It was at least an octave deeper. That brought into focus the thing I like most about Michelle Tea, which is: her shamelessness.

I mean that she is shameless, in the most positive sense of the word. She does not allow shame to enter into her work, or to distort her truth, no matter how weird or dorky or stigmatized it might be. It would be so easy not to tell people about the crush on Billy Idol, or the melodramatic and embarrassing fantasies it inspired. It would be so easy to just gloss over the Goth phase in high school, or the fact that she lost her virginity to a dude who drove a hearse, or her early, '70s-inflected feminism which verged, at times, on unrepentant Dworkinry. It is easy for a writer to just drop any portion of the truth that clashes with her current image, to heighten the dramatic bits whilst grooming them to fit into standard trauma-recovery dogma and to let the rest go unspoken. Michelle Tea does not do that. So, when she writes about her sexually abusive father, it exists in the context of stories about dance class and sneaking into neighbors' pools to swim; when she writes about prostitution, it exists within the context of crushes on rock stars and buying liquor with a fake ID for her friends and learning to put on makeup. It all says, yes, all of this is real, we share the same context; yes, everyone has experienced some of this, although no-one has experienced it exactly as I have; yes, I am just like you, and yes, that is the point.

* All of this is from "The Chelsea Whistle," which I've been told for years is her best book. I am slowly starting to agree with that consensus, although I (like everyone else) enjoy "Valencia" a lot, I guess because it is much more fun and the prose has a lot more velocity and weirdness to it. I cannot understand, by the way, why "Chelsea" is referred to as a "coming-out memoir" on the dust jacket, because (a) "Passionate Mistakes" was clearly the coming-out memoir, being as it was about her first sexual experiences, first boyfriend, first girlfriend, etc. and (b) even though the same period of her life is touched on here, this is quite explicitly meant to be a book about class, family, abuse, and creating a self. So, in my chronology/bibliography, "Passionate Mistakes" = coming-out, "Valencia" = sex & San Francisco, "Rent Girl" = sex work, "Chelsea Whistle" = class/childhood, "Rose of No Man's Land" = first novel, which is something completely new & goes for a lot of these themes from a direction we haven't seen before, for which I have no pithy summary.