Persephone's Box: In Praise of Degradation

Persephone's Box: In Praise of Degradation

I've written before on how objectification has a place in society, that it's not necessarily sexist or offensive. As I reiterated at a recent post, I hate when sexual gets confused with sexist. But today I want to get right into degradation.

Significant ancient rites of passage almost always have a place for degradation, destruction, and/or humiliation. In moving from one type of person to another, the old self must be destroyed. Neophytes are made to destroy their old clothes and give up their names. Then, after challenges have been completed, in rising up into a more exalted status, the new self must be brought back down to earth with the others. A tame example of this profaning is the tradition of "roasting" the bride and groom at the reception party with embarrassing pictures from childhood for all to see.

We tend to look at life in dichotomies: creation is good, destruction is bad; life is good, death is bad. Ritual is useful to remind us of the Truth that both creation and destruction are necessary for life to flourish, and therefore, both are good. Imagine if nothing ever died or was destroyed, only created. Life would be like a perpetual mosh pit, jostling our way to the bathroom or kitchen. Ritual reminds us that there's beauty in death, and there's growth to be had from destruction. Some forests can't maintain themselves without an occasional burning down and renewal. When people close to us die, we're saddened partly because we're used to looking at life in a linear path instead of cyclically.

....I used to be a serious disciple of Eisler's, and I still use sections of her works in my classes. But in the past few years I've been reconsidering some premises of her arguments.

In a nutshell, she insists that the fact that people in this society actually find violence arousing indicates that our society is sick and in need of healing. I personally find violence arousing, so I was all over this, reading all her books in hopes to change the world and thus save my own damaged self in the process. But then I started reading Jung and Hillman and Moore (whom hooks also references) and Nietzsche (whom she doesn't). And I've come to believe that the mix of pleasure with pain (viewed or experienced) isn't necessarily disturbed, but is instead a connection to basic archetypal experiences.

Life is all about living and dying and pain and joy and suffering and mind-blowing orgasms. The connection to the destruction and desecration of life is within us all no matter how much we fight to repress it. Jung suggested that the less we acknowledge this consciously, the darker is our sub-conscious world. We need to synthesize our shadowy hidden bits typically in the recesses of our mind with our consciousness instead of continuing to repress what we perceive as evil within ourselves.

So, when I think of that hideous rape scene from A Clockwork Orange, it hits me on a gut level of disgust and aversion, but it's also mesmerizing as my thighs begin to get warm. Like a traffic accident, it can suck us in even as it's turning us away. I used to reject these feelings and refuse to tend to them, thinking of myself as one sick puppy, but I've come to accept it as just the way I work.

Yes.

That.

Yes.

and now...

...for something that's just plain fun: Ask Golden Age Wonder Woman!

If anyone cares to do some serious feminist exegesis of those panels or of Wonder Woman comics, please go ahead in the comments. For now poor T's mind is too busy coming up with Kant lectures.

Assault

I am in South East London, underslept, a little hungover. I've been to a lecture, seminar and spent a couple of hours in the library.

I'm at the bus stop, waiting to make my journey into the West End and smoking a roll up, when a man jumps off a bus and demands, not asks, to be given one. He is 6 foot + and beefy, and looks me directly in the eye. There is something confrontational about his gaze. Usually, if someone asks me nicely, I happily share my tobacco, but he is trying to get me to give in by intimidating me. There is no-one else around. I have two paths of choice, and perhaps rather rashly choose the riskier one.

I say 'no, sorry' politely. Usually most people would shrug and wander off.

But he is clearly not in the mood to be refused.

"Why the fuck not, bitch?" he spits in my face.

I look straight back at him, fighting to stay calm. "I don't want to give you one", I say.

He begins shouting in my face.

"Give me a fucking cigarette."

I ignore him. I look the other way. I stay calm and attempt to look bored.

"Take that look off your face and give me a fucking fag or I'll fucking steal your bag and stick my dick in your dirty fucking mouth, you stupid piece of gash." he yells.

He comes over and leers over me, putting his hands above my head. But I have decided I will not give in.

"Fucking cunt! You look like a fucking dirty slag." he yells. But still he does not lay a finger on me.

I look up, and summoning every ounce of courage stare him straight in the eye.

"Leave me alone," I say, quietly and calmly. "And stop threatening me, please.

He steps away. He runs off.

It is not about the cigarette. Let it be known that I couldn't give a damn who I share my tobacco with, if they ask politely. This is about not allowing a man to dominate me because he is male, and I am female. And he is using my femaleness to show me that I am somehow weaker, that I am in some way there for his use - whether it's about cigarettes, my bag, or his cock. I won't let him dominate me. And he is clearly shocked by my refusal.

Bizarrely, perhaps, the more I delve into submission, the more I make sense of my taste for psychological masochism and degradation, the less shit I take in situations where I would usually be subordinate. I can imagine playing a scene of this kind - taking pleasure in it. Still playing myself at my most stubborn and insolent, still not giving way. Being forced, assaulted, taken. But my ability to consent to play of that kind only makes me stronger in situations where there is no consent, where my submission is expected, even at the expense of the certainty of my safety. It is the principle of the thing, and I have lived up, for once, to my own principles.

My bus arrives. I board, elated.

Anti-SM views shaping modern SM?

Figleaf has an interesting post up at his blog on whether and how SM has evolved in reaction to anti-SM feminisms:

I've been reading a ton of old-school radical feminists lately (Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer) and... This could be a possible total brain fart here but I think one of the problems with trying to match theory of 40 years ago with BDSM as practiced today is that when they were writing there was no legal or philosophical basis for sexual consent. When those authors were writing their classics there was, for the most part, no such thing as dominance or submission. There was just "the way it is in heterosexual relationships."

Now I happen to think that the work those early writers did, particularly the extraordinarily brusque (and possibly sexually submissive) Dworkin, to make "no means no" real (against resistance that still, unbelievably, has life in it) created the safe spaces for the total explosion of conscious BDSM and other forms of kink we're able to practice today. (Consent lies at the basis of almost all BDSM today.)

After this a commenter mentions SSC, specifically:

Peter Tupper said

Interesting thought, that it took the anti-BDSM feminists to motivate the pro-BDSM culture to create the SSC/RACK ethos.

IIRC, the first edition of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" included a tentative endorsement of consensual S/M.

I can't comment there due to a server error, so I'll just post my thoughts here, for now:

Peter:

"Safe sane consensual" was actually coined by a gay leatherman in a gay leather context:

http://www.leatherleadership.org/library/safesanestein.htm

It seems obvious to me now that "safe" and "sane" derived from the good old American practice of urging people to have a "safe and sane" 4th of July celebration. i heard that exhortation every year while growing up, and it stuck. It stuck with Tony DeBlase, too, and appears in an unsigned essay he wrote for the Chicago Hellfire Club’s Inferno 10 (1981) run book: "In 1980 the following was adopted as the club’s statment of purpose: ‘. . . to provide education and opportunities for participation in S&M sex among consenting adult men and to foster communication among such individuals.’ Responsible S&M has become more popular and less feared in the gay community and Chicago Hellfire Club continues to serve its community — striving always to educate and promote safe and sane enjoyment of men by men." Since Inferno 10 was the first Inferno i attended, and it made a big impression on me, Tony’s words may have reminded me of "safe and sane," and even suggested the association with "consensual." But the GMSMA statement was the first place the three terms were actually conjoined.

As a kid, what i took "Have a safe and sane 4th" to mean was something like, "Have a good time, but don’t be stupid and burn down the house or blow your hand off." A couple of decades later, that seemed to fit S/M just fine. What we meant by "safe and sane S/M" in 1983, and what i believe GMSMA and most other organizations still mean by it today, is something like, "Have a good time, but keep your head and understand what you’re doing so you don’t end up dead or in the hospital — or send someone else there." Possibly the echo of a familiar phrase explains why so many other kinky Americans have also felt immediately comfortable with "safe, sane, and consensual S/M," which still isn’t nearly as popular in Europe or elsewhere as it is in the U.S. even aside from the issue of language.

I'm not unsympathetic to the view that anti-SM feminist criticisms had an influence on various SM communities that was ultimately positive, but I think we need to be careful about what comes from where, and look up and be thoughtful about actual documented history where we can. It doesn't look *to me* like the feminist debates had much to do with SSC.

Scarlet Women, Feminism, and Aleister Crowley

For reasons even I don't know (that probably include surfing Wikipedia a little too much) I found myself reading a book on thelema last night. As far as I can tell, it's your usual mishmash of Nietzsche and occultism and plenty of taboo sex.

Not particularly interesting, considering one could just read Nietzsche or Sade and it would be better written and easier to understand. But I happened to notice a comment on women that got me thinking about the ways in which even traditions and groups that encouraged women to explore sexuality often did so on men's terms. The book I read, Liber AL vel Legis, is no exception:

III.43. Let the Scarlet Woman beware! If pity and compassion and tenderness visit her heart; if she leave my work to toy with old sweetnesses; then shall my vengeance be known. I will slay me her child: I will alienate her heart: I will cast her out from men: as a shrinking and despised harlot shall she crawl through dusk wet streets, and die cold and an-hungered.

44. But let her raise herself in pride! Let her follow me in my way! Let her work the work of wickedness! Let her kill her heart! Let her be loud and adulterous! Let her be covered with jewels, and rich garments, and let her be shameless before all men!

45. Then will I lift her to pinnacles of power: then will I breed from her a child mightier than all the kings of the earth. I will fill her with joy: with my force shall she see & strike at the worship of Nu: she shall achieve Hadit.

Here women are not just told to be sexual and shameless, but told that if they're not they will be punished with a bad reputation, cast out from everything. They're not encouraged to be libertines, they're ordered to be. It's presumed that they will have great difficulty letting go of old modesty, and they're castigated for it. I don't see such attitudes towards men. To the men I just see exhortations to be libertine and wanton.

This reminds me of two things. First, I think of certain feminist critiques of "sexual liberation" or "the sexual revolution". These critiques say that encouragement for women to be sexual rather than to be gatekeepers still happens on men's terms. The idea is that providing women with sexual freedom is really providing men with sexual freedom to use women's bodies. And that is what I see here.

But the thing that fascinates me about that is that many feminists who notice this don't actually divorce themselves from this context at all. Instead of answering the critique with a thoughtful exploration of what it would mean to be a sexual woman on your own terms, they simply leave it at this idea that sexual desire drives men. They leave it at the idea that the libertine woman is a man's creation, so there is no way for a woman to be sexual on her own terms.

And that worries me, because that's the same exact thinking as the men they criticize. That's not replacing a masculinist idea of the scarlet woman with a woman-centered idea of desire and need. And unless we have that, I don't see how we have a feminist environment that's truly safe for women. I suppose we could have one is truly safe for celibate women, or asexual women, but I don't think that's most women.

And I suppose it could be said that such a world would be truly safe for lesbians, if by the word lesbians we mean a certain kind of political lesbian. But that kind of lesbian is only one small subset of lesbians, and some lesbians who are not political lesbians think political lesbians are appropriating their experience anyway.

So while I don't think we get far at all if we just take on images of female libertines that were created without women in mind, I don't think we get much further if we don't then work to transform the meaning and understanding of what a sexual woman is. I think that's an integral part of the work we have to do, and we neglect to do it at our own peril.

Rubber Bands and Kittens

I was just watching this YouTube vid, featuring an ex-"ex-gay" man. In it the man talks about his therapist having him snap a rubber band on his wrist each time he finds another man attractive.



I post it because it reminds me of my own experience as a teen, when I finally got up the guts to tell the therapist I was seeing that I had sadomasochistic fantasies.

"Imagine touching a boy," he said (I thought I was heterosexual at the time), "and then imagine petting the cat."

Ostensibly, it was to teach me to learn to enjoy touching people gently -- which I was never against doing, anyway.

I tried it all of once. Attempting to conjure up thoughts of my cat while sexually excited did nothing but creep me out.

I never brought up sadomasochism again to that therapist. I think I might have told him that I didn't think his method was helpful, but I may not even have done that. I just let the matter drop. I wanted health care -- I needed it, for a lot of other more pressing reasons. So I got the health care, and pretended my sexuality issues weren't there.

Calling UK sex-"poxes"...

New activist venture....

The Pleasure Salon is being created to build community, allowing sex-positive activists to cross-pollinate. We are inviting organisers, activists, pioneers and the movers and groovers of the BDSM, swinger, alternative gender, LGBT, sex-activist, nudist, sex-magic, polyamory, Pagan, radical faerie, tantra, dark odyssey, sex-blogger, porn, pervert and sex-worker communities. Through networking and learning about each other, The Pleasure Salon hopes to act as a sex-positive think tank and eventually create a sex-positive world. It is a place for the open exchange of ideas and sensual expression.

Pleasure Salons will take place on the second Wednesday in each month, starting in March 2008. They will be in Amora, the Erotic Museum 13 Coventry Street just next to Piccadilly Circus from 7pm to 9pm.

Each month will have a speaker - one of us who has something exciting to share, or an expert to advise us on how to lobby, influence the media, politicians, and society. The talk will just be for 20 minutes with ten minutes for questions and then a short news update. After that it will be networking. There is a bar and we will charge a nominal £2 to cover costs.

The Pleasure Salon is replacing the Sexual Freedom Conference and will hopefully continue to improve on it, both in enjoyment and effectiveness.

Suzanne Noble has attended the Pleasure Salons in New York and testifies that they are most empowering, and we start one in London with their blessing.

Suzanne, Tuppy, Cat

Well, I'm excited!

Sadomasochism: The Incredible expanding word.

as if it weren't long enough, right?

It's a bit petty of me to quote this, but I want to for a not-petty reason.

From Heart's place, discussions she will not allow on her blog.

See here: http://womens space.wordp ress.com/2007/11/29/discu ssions-we-will-not-h ave-here/

Defenses of sadomasochism as liberating, empowering, or good, whether it occurs in the course of sexual intimacy of any kind, in “scenes”, in “play parties,” between fundamentalist men and their wives, in marriage, out of marriage, in relationships, in friendships, overt, covert, unapologetic, unrecognized, none of it is going to be defended here. Sadomasochistic relationships are at the heart of the systems, institutions, mechanisms, dynamics, social orders which have created the world as we know it, teetering on the brink of annihilation. Whether it is the sadomasochism inherent in war, imperialism, colonialism, conquest, fundamentalisms of all kinds, sexism, racism, classism, lesbophobia, transphobia, abuse of children disguised as “discipline,” abuse of animals, abuse of the planet, seas, mountains, skies, earth, or whether it is sadomasochism in intimate relationships between individuals, all of it, because it is about dominance and subordination, about some groups subjugating others, harms human beings, creatures, and the earth, it participates in the destruction of beneficent life on the earth, and so I oppose it. It will not be defended here. Defend it elsewhere.

What I really want to point out, to people who have not seen this yet, is the way the term "sadomasochism" gets expanded here. Inflated like a balloon until it has no precise meaning. Watch:

whether it occurs in the course of sexual intimacy of any kind, in “scenes”, in “play parties,”

okay, that's about the SM scene, a particular subculture, and also some people outside the subculture who fuck a certain way. "Sadomasochism" here means something like "people who consensually play with power for sexual gratification." Which is what I'd say it usually means, though I'd add "or pain"; I don't think all consensual sexual SM is about power, and some may arguably not even involve it.

between fundamentalist men and their wives, in marriage, out of marriage, in relationships, in friendships, overt, covert, unapologetic, unrecognized

And here, well, wrt "fundamentalist men": yes, there's traditionalist Christian D/s if you want to look for it. And, expanding further, an argument could be made that a particularly consensual, aware, chosen version of religious submission *could* be similar to the D/s sadomasochists do.

But "in friendships" is where she begins to lose me, and she doesn't stop there. Yes, there are power dynamics between friends. They can be harmful. But why are they "sadomasochistic", if so? In most cases, they will not be sexual, though they may have undercurrents of sexual intimacy and attraction. Are they consensual? Do they really involve submission? How are we defining domination and submission when talking about friends?

What leads people to conclusions like this, as near as I can figure, is a notion of "sadomasochism" that divorces it from sex or even from chosen dynamics of nonsexual service, and takes it to stand in for any and all relations of power-over:

Sadomasochistic relationships are at the heart of the systems, institutions, mechanisms, dynamics, social orders which have created the world as we know it, teetering on the brink of annihilation.

Which of course means you find it anywhere and everywhere, and there's no relevant difference between the play party and the invasion of Iraq:

Whether it is the sadomasochism inherent in war, imperialism, colonialism, conquest, fundamentalisms of all kinds, sexism, racism, classism, lesbophobia, transphobia, abuse of children disguised as “discipline,” abuse of animals, abuse of the planet, seas, mountains, skies, earth, or whether it is sadomasochism in intimate relationships between individuals, all of it, because it is about dominance and subordination, about some groups subjugating others, harms human beings, creatures, and the earth, it participates in the destruction of beneficent life on the earth

This is just sloppy. Which is what gets me so much when I look at things like this (and you can see it other places too... just go read some Daly, for example) isn't even the opposition to consensual sexual sadomasochism (though duh, I don't like that) but the sheer papering over of issues.

Even if the play party *is* objectionable, because power-over *is* dangerous and not to be fucked (heh) with:

where is the difference between the play party and global warming? Surely, even if these are related (and I don't think it's completely *unarguable* that they are, *if* we assume all power-over to be pernicious), the harms each does are not the same.

Shouldn't it be part of our analysis, a strength of our analysis, that we can say

"these are the harms of consensual SM"
"these are the harms of religiously-motivated female submission"
"these are the harms of war"
"these are the harms of rampant consumption of resources"
"these are the harms of child abuse"

and have each of those be A DIFFERENT THING?

Presumably, "sadomasochism" is a word, here, for whatever thing they have in common, whatever holds them together.

Which has to do with power.

But we can't really say how. It's like Socrates asking "What's virtue What's common to any and all virtues that makes them what they are?" No one can answer him, and he doesn't know himself.

"What's pernicious power-over? What's common to it in every instance, when the instances look so different?"

No one can answer, and we don't know ourselves.

Which is why we need the ten-dollar word that means fucking to paper over it.

"Sex Pox"

x-POXted from my LJ:

On the term "sex pox", coined by some anti-porn radical feminists as a cutesy put-down version of "sex positive":

So - "sexpox".

I think the term originated a couple of months back, as a way to convey contempt for people who espouse a non-anti-porn, non-anti-sexwork, non-anti-BDSM, "sex-positive" point of view.

And then it was bandied about by people who espouse a "sex-positive" point of view, as a sort of snide self-identification, as a way to convey contempt for people who used the term to convey contempt for "sex-positive" people.

Now that I think about it, despite the fact that it's catchy and easy to remember and evocative and really, only five or six people use the term in its pejorative on a regular so maybe it's not such a big deal - I gotta say, I'm agin' it.

cuz, y'all, what about AIDS?

whatever side of the porn/sexwork/bdsm fence you sit on, what about AIDS, y'all?

I'm not HIV+, nor am I an AIDS activist. But I know people who work long and hard to purge the idea from the human consciousness that there is some consensual sexual behavior that deserves PUNISHMENT. Not just any punishment, but The Biggest, Baddest, Most Punishing Punishment - long, slow, conspicuously Capital Punishment in the form of a wasting disease, with clearly visible physical benchmarks of its progress as it slowly kills its victims.

so, when I see the word "sexpox", I don't think of cute hawtt titjobbed bisexee suckfuckers who giggle and simper on their spindly heels and tilt their empty heads and smile while cooing "ooh! I'm so empowerful! aren't I, Nigel?"

(and even if I did get that mental picture, it wouldn't match any of the individuals I know who identify as "sex-positive." the gulf of understanding here is unbridgeable, apparently, when it comes to that.)

when I see the word "sexpox", I think of a fatal disease that happens to people who fuck the wrong way, and need to be punished before they can die as a consequence for their behavior.

Totally bang-on, AP.

And pretty chilling.

Personally, I don't know if the person who coined this *was* thinking of HIV or not. I personally thought of syphilis. And while "syphilitic" isn't the greatest thing to call someone, it doesn't kill like it did back when *it* was the scourge. (At least until the "Bah, I scoff at your silly antibiotics!" version has its fun with the silly little humans....)

And I'm a bit leery of getting too Freudian, usually.

But I really do wonder: if you come up with a term like this, you have to know that you're calling people diseased. From sex. And any way you slice it, that's creepy.

That's not just calling people bad, wrong, misguided in a hellaciously frustrating way. That's saying people ought to be suffering for their views. That we're destined for illness, as AP says, as a punishment for our refusals to fit a particular mold of female sexuality.

I see a very strong loathing of bodies, in general, in the insult of choice being "sex pox.:" There's a strong body-disgust there. It's not just about the realm of the mind, when you call people poxy. It's like something out of the Old Testament: misstep and you get LOATHSOME BOILS as punishment for your sexual sin.

Or at least, that's the mild version. AIDS is our big sex pox, as AP points out -- and AIDS is worse than an angry deity giving you a few boils.

I'd know; as I've mentioned before, I'm watching someone waste away of it. And it's not pretty. He had a brain infection, people. He went blind. This isn't just "You get pneumonia one day and can't fight it off."

(ETA: I'm also grimly amused that "sex pox" is usually used by these people to indicate feminists who are pro-porn. Porn is generally used as a masturbation aid, and masturbation's guaranteed *not* to give you the sex pox, whatever disease it may be.)

More of the "consent? wuzZAT, you patriarchs?" meme

(zposted from my blog)

http://wom ensspace.word press.com/2007/11/30/todays-m ale-terrorism-exploiting-the-brut al-murder-of-emily-san der/#com ment-72901

I’m wondering (no seriously, guesstimate with me) how long it will take before “rape kill fantasies” are defended. Women collecting en masse (feministing, Bitchphd, pandagon, feminste, etc…) to assure everyone they find pleasure and joy in the sexualization of their own death.

Then police won’t even have to worry with their half-assed investigations–all “murders” of women will be considered assisted suicide (which will become legal once more).

Can we, as radfems, not use words like “want” and “consent” for, I dunno, another 1,000 years? Right now it has F$$$-all to do with us and I’m really tired of such concepts being thrown around.

My heart goes out to Emily Sanders and her loved ones.

I'm not here for long today (yay weekend fun -- no, not quite that kind), but I just want to note it.

I know these people aren't representative of feminism or even of thoughtful radical feminism. But it's often taken as a Feminism 101 point to assume "no one would ever REALLY say 'all sex is rape,' stop putting words in Dworkin's mouth."

And the thing is, whether Dworkin said it or not, there was, and still is among a very kooky, small minority of women who use feminism in some very weird ways, a strain of feminism where this kind of inversion happens. And it makes sense that it would, among absolute extremists, really, because their basic position is that choice is illusory in a world where one social class has control. If that control extends to hearts and minds, consent isn't real, isn't deep, isn't personal...

...so it's hardly surprising someone would go all the way and ask if consent is meaningful in any way at all.

But of course, that's chilling. With no notion of consent, everything is rape.

Or nothing.

Or nothing at all.

As suspicious as some of us are (and rightfully, in some cases, IMO) of liberalism... we do need some liberal concepts mixed in with our radical ones. We need notions of bodily autonomy, free choice, and consent (whether to sex, to medical procedures, to body modifications, etc.) I'm the first to acknowledge that autonomy is a tough one, consent is a tough one, fully free anything is impossible since we're influenced all the time.

But that doesn't mean we abandon these concepts. That means we use our massive monkey brains to be sure as we can of when and how they apply.