TastyTrixie.com

Archive for the ‘art’ Category

Have you noticed us getting up earlier and going to sleep sooner on our cams? That’s (partly) because starting September 3rd I’m going to get up early to head over to the cabin we’re (good news!) officially renting to do off-cam no-internet work sans distractions. Normally I quickly grow disgusted with a morning-person routine, but now it seems totally different knowing there’s a purpose to it.

It rained heavily on Thursday. If I hadn’t gotten up at seven in the morning, excited about the possibilities of such early rising once the cabin time begins, I’d have never known there was any blue sky to be had that day. I’d have missed seeing this moon:

Blessing Bestowed from the West

There’s a place – a real live place – where women artists can apply for residencies. Actually, there are lots of places like that, where those kinds of people can get free lodging in inspiring locations to focus on their work, but the one I’m thinking of is SUPER DREAMY . . . fucking storybook-land perfection in terms of its tiny private artfully-crafted houses (each resident has one all to herself) and woodland setting.

Most shockingly dreamy of all is the way the women are catered to; the small handful of residents (women, all of them!) have a chef who prepares crazily wonderful dinners for them every night. There are pictures proving how thoroughly stocked the kitchen is with racks of zillions of containers of spices and rows of carefully labeled provisions and specialized pots and pans used to make what appears to be an ABUNDANCE of food every night just for these six or seven women. Meats and comforts and fresh green things and berries and sauces and fanciness and desserts and lots of colors and textures on big plates and side dishes.

On top of all that, the chef ALSO prepares individual baskets for each resident full of her favorite foods to help sustain her throughout the day while she works in her perfect little house. And there’s a garden full of plants someone else tends that each resident gets to pluck and cut flowers and leafy things from. FOR INSPIRATION AND SHIT!

I know that being there wouldn’t be actual utopia, but it does provide a model to ooh and aah over. I think it’s awesome that a very teeny-tiny percentage (wish it were more) of talented women in the world get to experience opportunities like that, to be told that their own self-directed art is so valuable as to warrant a few days . . . maybe even a whole month(!) . . . of concentrating on nothing BUT the work she most wants to do and that she will be sheltered and reliably fed to delicious excess if she likes so she can take care of her work while someone else takes care of her basic needs with sensual generosity.

Same time as picture above, but looking 80 degrees to the south.

What an exquisite fantasy! But it seems so decadent, like I know that I personally could never warrant such treatment. It’s a nice daydream but it actually makes me nervous to think about having such a giant privilege bestowed upon me. I’m nervous enough about the idea of renting this cabin, feeling like I need to prove that I “deserve” it. That I’m worth blowing more money on when I already have so much.

And then I remember that my grandma made my grandpa dinner every night to his specifications. Dished it up and brought it out to him. It wasn’t fancy, but she SERVED him. And every day she fixed him a box lunch even on the days when he was only working in his garage out back, a one minute shuffle away from the back door. I know times have changed, but when I was growing up I never fucking once saw a man prepare and serve a grown woman food. NEVER ONCE outside of restaurants (which I rarely saw) and pancake breakfasts at the Masonic Lodge where it was a wonderful novelty to see the men with aprons on, coming out to the long tables to pour coffee and bring us our hotcakes.

It wasn’t just my family that was like that. Most people my age and older grew up seeing men (and children) waited on at home and women NOT.  I suppose gender-blind egalitarianism is the ideal I should desire (and I do in some ways) but part of me needs to experience the balance of intimate privilege tipped dramatically towards women to undo what I learned by watching. I wasn’t brought up to BE that kind of woman who waits on men — not at all; I wasn’t taught with words to do it  — but that’s what all the women in my family DID to one extent or another and the men DID NOT. You have to be crazy to think that kind of learning is something you can just erase with your intellect when you grow up or even along the way with words of “you-go-girl” encouragement.

Looks promising upwards and eastwards

Even though I never grew up wanting to be a woman who takes care of a man, once I outgrew the entitlement of childhood I came to FEEL that having someone take care of me wasn’t something I deserved or could expect the way a man in my grandparents’ and parents’ generations could and that the only way to live my life just-so, to my specifications, was to live alone. I didn’t think this on a conscious level, but I think the past ten years (and then some) of webwhoring have involved more conscious efforts to recognize and reconcile this conflict; I want to work — to do MY work and do it MY WAY — and have someone else take care of the housekeeping and cooking. For my work to be the most important thing I do and everything else to be relegated to the distraction pile which I should be able to demand someone else pick up and put away. To believe that my work is so important that I should be angry and frustrated when I do not have the tools or environment to do it properly. BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT MEN OLDER THAN I AM GREW UP EXPECTING AND DOING. And so what if their work wasn’t important or they would bankrupt the family with their business schemes? You didn’t fucking criticize the work, jobs or dreams of men. You just didn’t unless you wanted to be the evil villainous bitch in the story.

I shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting to have as many places to do my work alone as my grandpa did: a garage, a basement, a toolshed, a closet where he kept his Black Velvet and other private treasures, and a windowless office he hardly went into that nobody else was allowed into that was always at least 15 degrees cooler than the rest of the house. My grandma didn’t have any place in her house that was her own like that, just like my mom didn’t have a special place in our tiny house for herself like my stepdad had a whole room for his model train. And if Grandma fucked up some shit in the kitchen Grandpa would go ballistic on her ass. So I guess maybe I SHOULD feel guilty about wanting all that man-privilege since being an abusive asshole came with the territory. I don’t know. But on Friday morning I’m going to work alone in the cabin AND I CAN HARDLY WAIT!!

Also? I’ve drafted a new personal ad for a slavey-houseboy type. Not putting it up for awhile though as that’s a whole time-consuming process in itself. I also keep wanting to blog more about how going to college totally distorted my idea of money and assessing the worth of an investment in myself, perhaps making me approach financial risk-taking in a more “manly” way than I would have otherwise.

More morning moon pics to come?

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So. I don’t anticipate members and fans seeing a noticeable change in focus on our sites because of this and will probably see more exciting stuff on cam rather than less since we have to cam more to pay for everything. One of the good things (in terms of “earning” my cabin keep) is it’s already making me more disciplined and focused in how I prioritize things, clarifying what needs to come first (which is really REALLY challenging when you have boatloads of everything to do and have an easily-overwhelmed mind like mine). Right now at the top of the list is simply getting ahead on shooting and getting updates lined up, so that’s what I’m going to get back to work on right now.

I just used some of my webcam money to subscribe to one of my favorite radio programs ever, Hearts of Space. Nevermind the ill-advised acronym (so typical of nerds to make a hilarious mistake like that, god love ‘em).

Since our porn business operates on a subscription basis, it’s interesting to research other subscription-based internet products, their price points, and comparing the offerings. I loved reading the HOS: WHY PAY? page. Like porn, music is something you can get free online in a million places. Even when people don’t ask you to justify charging for it, many of us feel we MUST explain it (I’ve been criticized by adult webmasters for the times when I’ve disclosed similar information and confronted those questions when maybe I should leave them alone). It’s inspiring to read the way Hearts of Space explains some of their business approach (and costs outsiders don’t comprehend without being taught) because it’s so firmly rooted in a clear vision, one that I know DELIVERS an experience I’ve never gotten from any other radio programming. There is a certain personality, there are seductive, hypnotic voices I’m attached to, and there is a well-planned journey offered by HOS.

HEARTS of SPACE PRODUCER STEPHEN HILL’s CAREER seemed to take a sharp detour in the early 70’s when he abandoned his architectural career and opened a recording studio. . . . In retrospect, Hill realizes he never really left architecture. He simply became a sound architect who learned to build his castles on the air. “Architects create environments with physical materials.
I do it with sound.” - Stephen Hill

It’s also interesting to observe my own thought process in deciding what kind of subscription to get: I chose the $13 a month all-access plan because I don’t feel like I can shell out the money for a year even though I know it would save me money in the long run. Also, The internet radio channel only (no archives or playlists) probably would’ve been good enough for me, but if it wasn’t, I didn’t want to try to figure out how to upgrade mid-month. Out of laziness/a desire to be efficient with my time and not necessarily need or probable usage, I chose the more comprehensive membership. I know people go through similar though processes when deciding which membership plan to get for our sites.

Hearts of Space is an inspiring model of how to create and sustain and love a “product” that’s not personalized for each individual listener but still manages to feel intimate even though it’s mass-delivered and not even live (except maybe one hour a week, I think).  It speaks of a void and manages to fill it –inside of me and outside of me — at the same time. I’m fascinated by people and groups who design and deliver stimuli producing what appears to be a relatively mundane experience (compared to, say, a roller coaster ride in a theme park or a provocative theatre piece, etc.) that manages to infiltrate people’s lives by being constantly accessible in private, demanding little of them but providing addictive stimulation. A little like a favorite diner or coffee shop. Something offering sustenance you could get elsewhere, but elsewhere just wouldn’t be QUITE right. I believe there’s something about the earnestness of the proprietors to deliver an actual EXPERIENCE they’ve envisioned in rich detail and feel in their own bones that makes Hearts of Space , some bookstores, a couple of Indian and Thai restaurants in Tacoma, and some porn sites exceptional.

I love music and I love feeling distant connections to people, but it’s impossible for me to listen to voices or most music and WORK at the same time. “Space music” offers me the kind of escape and transcendence I long for. It’s a spiritual salve for me that allows me to imagine journeying into a meaningful peaceful nothingness of wind and colors and stars and the smell of ozone. It gives me a lot of the feeling I get from imagining my ideal forms of church or prayer or sanctuary or space travel. It’s like having a lucid flying dream. That’s totally worth $13 a month to me. “Greetings, space fans . . . “

There’s a vibe on Hearts of Space that I’d like to infuse my own site with – that I’ve always wanted to be there and have maybe succeeded in transmitting some of the time (not the SAME vibe, but a quality or peculiarity of vibe). I think it will be helpful to listen to HOS on a daily basis to remind myself of the possibilities and how personality and vision and voices (even in very limited doses, more often without words) can combine in powerful, seductive, and soothing ways. How to make transportation out of your aesthetics and values to take people to a place they recognize as one where their belief systems make perfect sense. Or freewheeling careless nonsense. Where you look around and feel yourself and even though nothing has changed, you’re like, “THIS is it, what I was trying to remember that was bothering the tip of my tongue.”

Like, fucking psychic alignment, man!

Click here for an older post about new age music, porn and more.

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I know, you’re all like . . . post some porn, woman!! Are you losing your mind?

I can only answer in a predictably crazy way by insisting that no, I’m totally on the verge of genuine SANITY, motherfuckers!! Seriously, like, all is about to be REVEALED!!

I’ll try to post something porny and down-to-earth for you soon, mkay? I’ll TRY.

I am always trying. I don’t know if that’s apparent or not, but it’s true.

A few awesome things I’ve done/felt today:

*walked through a quiet art gallery and had time to stroke an inlaid wood table decorated with shiny, randomly-inset little nailheads of different sizes and metals.

*bought some favorite usually-overpriced tomatillo salsa on sale which I’m eating right now. Thick green stews and salsas always feel like delicious magical potions to me.

*enjoyed Delia’s preview of some of the pics I shot of her recently for her Fall Flower Fairy gallery.

*woke up without a headache after having one for five solid days (don’t feel sorry for me; I made some bad choices with food, how I mishandled stress, and delayed getting my B vitamin shots).

*bought myself little foil star stickers. To reward myself for finishing items on my to-do lists. This is not as childish as it may sound, and I really love shiny little stars in red, blue, silver, green and gold.

*had two awesome poops

*am wearing my octopus necklace, handcrafted by a local artisan

*scoped out / walked through a really cool coffee shop. Even though I’m not a coffee shop kind of gal, I love knowing there’s one I might actually enjoy sitting in if I ever decide I want to. The kind where there’s plenty of space between plenty of armchairs and darkness and both good coffee-n-pastry aromas plus dank book smells. The kind where, I hope, no one would talk to me. Of course, that desire for solitude didn’t deter me from fantasizing VIVIDLY about seeing a hairy man I fancy and wordlessly tangling into each other and fucking in one of the fairy-lit corridors there.

*survived and almost enjoyed capturing & editing my masturbation video that I’ll post for members tonight: tidied and put away a multitude of things while each of four files were encoded. Enjoyed afore-mentioned tidying.

*Fondled silky lingerie in a little independent shop downtown.

*Picked out striking, large, dramatic pieces of jewelry I’d buy for Delia if I had money to.

*Looked in two shops for crock pots. Neither place had one.

*Didn’t really waste as much time as  you think doing all of these things because I was alone, undisturbed, and easily able to soak up and get my fill of each stimulating little experience.

The best part is I think we might fuck tonight. IT’S BEEN WAY TOO LONG. I need to write a little something about how much of our lives revolve around cum-rationing. And how someday we’ll fuck hairy men in fairy-lit corridors and never want for extra cum again.

Blogroll update alert: I’ve got a few new (massively overdue) blog links in the sidebar for you:

Sequoia Redd’s blog

She describes herself as an “eco-feminist-pagan-hippie sex-worker chick currently residing in a Nudist Colony in the last redneck outpost of South Florida”. Loosely translated, that means most of my blog readers will dig her for at least one reason, if not more. Plus, she’s FUCKING GORGEOUS. Like, a totally striking knockout. She reminds me of Emmanuelle Seigner and a girl I went to high school with (I know that means nothing to you, but the reminder of my gorgeous German friend with her cheshire cat grin is lovely to me).

She’s also a fellow Niteflirt/phone sex operator and I squealed when she set up an appointment to “consult” with me on different possibilities for setting up spycams. After I got off the phone with her I watched her free Masturbation Impossible video (wankers: you will not make it through the portions where she carefully wobbles down the stairs wearing her rollerblades and smiles mischievously – SUPER HOT).

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rollertrain

Right now Libby Lynn’s describing herself as an art student and porn cashier and it’s just a MAJOR OVERSIGHT on my part, me not adding her to my blog links before this. I think I thought she was already in there. From her I get a depth and breadth of inspiration/relation(? if that’s the right word)/variety that I don’t get from most other blogs and online contacts.

I sort of don’t know how to describe the connection I feel when I read her, but as far as you go in deciding whether or not to dig into her posts and flickr and twitter and stuff, I think she’ll appeal to smart voyeuristic types who like meaty posts and porn and art or are working on the process of their own selves/work/art.

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I also updated my link to Mia who is now blogging at MiavonDoom.com, my online buddy from way back and a multimedia POWERHOUSE.

We woke up early to watch the Inauguration yesterday; I turned the television on as fast as I could and pretty much started crying immediately. I’m a sucker in general for ritualized ceremonies, but a lot of things made it extremely emotional for me. There’s all the obvious stuff of watching a momentous, proud, hopeful, inspiring piece of history, but other stuff, too. Like remembering watching Reagan’s Inauguration with my grandpa when I was a little girl. Like seeing two little girls who love their dad and thinking of my own dad and my sister and I when we were their ages. Seeing the former presidents and vice presidents and first ladies from my lifetime walking (or hobbling) in or not being there at all (like my dad and my grandpa) was like looking at a timeline with my own lifespan clearly marked on it. It’s not a long line, even if I’m lucky and only a third of the way through it. I didn’t think of it this way on a conscious level until hours later and realize that part of what I cried about was my own mortality.

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Then I had a doctor appointment. That made me feel even more like a rusting machine getting ready to be dismissed from operation. It wasn’t a good experience and by the end of last night with money stress, the emotions of the morning, sleep deprivation and all of the symptoms I went to the doctor for in the first place, I was really ready for a good night’s sleep and too wound up to jump right into it.

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Check out my Inauguration Day tweets if you want some more of my reactions to yesterday. Apparently I’m the only person who loved the poem. Other people thought it was robotic — not a word I’d have chosen to describe it, but even if it was I totally love robots so maybe that’s why I liked it. At first I thought her delivery was too contrived, but a few lines into it I just heard the words/saw the moments she captured and thought it was fucking brilliant and spot-on. I burst into tears when she said the last nine words of this chunk:

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

I complained yesterday about not hearing anyone comment on the poem (and felt totally annoyed seeing people walking away from the ceremony before she even started; these must be the same assholes who go to watch fireworks displays but leave before the finale because they want to “beat the traffic” but maybe I’m being unkind and they all just have small bladders and/or diarrhea) but now I’m glad I didn’t hear any chatter about it on CNN or online (I know it’s out there, I just haven’t looked for it or read it). I don’t know anything about poetry, but I do know I love Walt Whitman and I do know he loved Lincoln and I do recognize nods to Whitman in yesterday’s poem and that all of that fits into the deliciously morbid Lincoln-channeling going on with Obama being the first to use the Lincoln bible and doing all of those other following-in-Lincoln’s-footsteps black-cat-crossing things.

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We spent most of today shopping since we had to make the journey to suburbia for Delia’s laser hair removal appointment. It was so much fun hearing people, especially kids, talking about Obama (kid pointing at books & magazines: “look, Mom! It’s Barack Obama!”). I hate that I can’t shake the feeling of impending doom, though. I know other people have to be feeling it, too. Still, everything’s shimmery and sparkly right now . . . very storybook-like (even with the oath do-over). Watching the ceremony yesterday I did halfway feel like I was watching a pre-pre-pre-prequel to Star Trek Next Gen. Like everything good could really come true someday and all of the buildings and monuments were bad backdrop paintings of futuristic architecture.

I don’t regularly fantasize about the White House as a super-glamorous place and never have felt like the people living there were royalty the way people felt about the Kennedy years. It’s kind of exciting to experience that now; I can’t help it, thinking about those girls moving in there and having slumber parties. I’m totally sucked into it. The allure of a lot of chick things (weddings) escapes me but stories involving orphans, boarding school, or preteen girls spending the night in museums or moving into the White House are always going to capture my imagination. It’s almost as good as eating buckets of mashed potatoes and gravy, imagining Sasha and Malia safe and happy, the most famous little girls in the world ensconced in THE WHITE HOUSE with closets full of pink clothes and barbies and books and halls to run in and a prissy nanny who tells them stories and feeds them cucumber sandwiches.

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I’ve got some Obama-themed pictures to post from my latest members-only gallery but haven’t had a chance to make promos so it’ll have to wait. In the meantime you can check out Delia’s samples if you’re not a member.

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Another sad thought I had yesterday was for our friend whose mom just died. I imagined him and AmberLily dealing with their loss and this Inauguration going on at the same time. How weird it would be to feel like everyone in the world is paying attention to this ceremony while they’re distanced from it by having a huge personal transition and ceremonies of their own to attend to. When big events coincide with personal crises it can be so isolating and bizarre. I haven’t wanted to call them, but I’m definitely thinking of them and hoping for the best for them.

I started taking piano lessons when I was about nine years old. My teacher, Joan, didn’t believe in using metronomes and always had long, fancy nails even though pianists aren’t supposed to. At some point during the first year of lessons, she told me that music is really all about MATH.

No math = no music. A huge revelation for me as a kid. It’s a big truth that’s never left me. At first my feelings about it were a little conflicted; it was sort of stressful (”I’m so bad at fractions!”), but realizing that math is the foundation of music (or at least one doorway into building and understanding it) never sucked the romance or beauty out of it. It never made it dry to me. It can be invisible enough that you don’t actually NEED to know it or think about it for it to be in there. That lesson primed me to notice as years went by that math and science are built into nature and art and our insides. That the basics of them are intuitive, like rhythm, but the more you know about the math and science of something, the better your music or art or appreciation of those things can be.

Knowing that art is really science has been a solace to me — art isn’t reserved only for a few people who are divinely inspired. It can be orderly: accessed and created systematically. With simple formulas. With a wide variety of tools mixed with individual perspective, personality and tastes to make it seem unique and magical, disguising the numbers in the craft of it.

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I shot a set of pictures of Delia wearing some hot Hello Kitty shorts on Friday night and the photos are all jacked up. I’m a long way from understanding the science of photography; I *like* numbers, but they don’t stick in my head very well so even though I’ve read about how cameras work and how OUR camera works I still don’t have it committed to memory or know how to manipulate light and settings quickly to achieve what I want. I have to just walk around and fiddle with things until I mostly-accidentally happen onto something lovely. Most of the good pictures I take are the product of luck and shooting A LOT without fully comprehending what I’m doing. I recognize what looks good and beautiful and erotic to me (or at least halfway decent) and what looks bad to me and have a few basic practices for making the former (especially in the “halfway decent” category) and avoiding the latter, but my technical skills are pretty basic.

All of the pics looked dark to me so I bumped the ISO up to 1000 or 2500, I forget now (hence the graininess) and the speed down to 25 or 30 — they still looked dark for some reason; I was letting the camera auto-focus (selecting the area to focus on myself with these little movable box thingies; I forget what Nikon calls that function but it didn’t seem to be working well on this particular night) and adjust the aperture itself until I decided to do a closeup and switched everything to manual (because it balks when we ask it to autofocus macros); suddenly everything was WAY TOO BRIGHT and I had to change the shutter speed. The only thing I can think of is that the camera wasn’t doing a good job of automatically adjusting the aperture and when I switched to manual and adjusted it myself then everything changed. It sucked because we wanted these pics to be bright.

The older I get, the more I see that MOST working artists — writers, photographers, graphic designers, sculptors, painters, musicians, etc. — are just people who’ve chosen to do that kind of work. That the only thing that sets them apart from the rest of us is the amount of time they put into their art and confidence they have in devoting themselves to it without worrying whether or not a jury of peers think they deserve to make money on it. Very few artists are people who actually possess something innate that the rest of us don’t have; most of it is taking the time to learn and apply information that’s available to everyone (or anyone with the resources to do a little research) and then investing money in the right tools and lots of time in practicing. Sometimes I think the most successful artists are the ones who are actually LESS gifted and too stupid/overconfident to recognize that there are other people (usually making zero dollars on their art) who are WAY more talented. Maybe the only way to be a successful “artist” is to NOT be great — to not complicate shit with too much vision, originality, or diverse techniques and just work from simple formulas to make things that are easily recognizable and accessible to the masses. See also Adaptation. If your work brings other people pleasure does it really NEED to be super duper excellent?

The older I get, the happier I am with shooting for mediocrity. Even mediocrity requires a lot of hard work (for me, at least). Mediocrity is attainable without being a given; you can stand out and make a decent living in a field simply by being one of the relative few to 1) choose that field, 2) commit to it for a number of years, and 3) make yourself known. All the better if you’re willing to take emotional and financial risks and make sacrifices for your work/”art”. The happier you are with mediocrity the wider your success. I’ve slowly shifted my focus of “pride” away from “talent” and pinned it on “work”; you can’t be proud of having good taste or being born with certain attributes making you better suited than most to doing one job or another. Those are only things you can be THANKFUL for. The things you can actually be PROUD of are hard work, dedication and defying convention to choose happiness. To call yourself an artist as soon as you choose to be one — to make it your job — rather than waiting until you imagine other people think you are good enough to deserve that label. Those are the people I admire more and more, the ones who are brave & devoted enough to create some form of art (even if it’s just fair to middlin’) and are savvy enough to make it a business.

I used to think having to work hard at something or take a lot of time to make something acceptable was something to be ashamed and embarrassed of. If it wasn’t easy it meant I wasn’t good at it. Now I realize that’s total bullshit (even if I still FEEL that way sometimes). The strategic choices and commitments you make to invest work in things that make you happy, better, more skilled, or even just capable of seeing you should make a different choice (I’ve always believed that quitting is something to be proud of; that whole “quitters never win” line is such a crock of shit). The time you spend allowing yourself to suck ass — IMMERSING yourself in sucking ass and slowly filling in the void of your ignorance with knowledge — just so you can become mediocre at something you love and then keep working to try to improve upon that. Beyond mediocrity there are so few people who are actually able to recognize the difference between mediocrity and greatness, there’s no reason to beat yourself up if you’re not capable of becoming that elite.

Being a “jack of all trades, master of none” ROCKS. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and I don’t love any one thing enough to give up all the other stuff. So I really have to be satisfied with mediocrity, slow progress, and making balanced choices to devoting little bits of time here and there to different things I love. Like making flash cards to learn photography stuff. You’re never too old for flash cards. I’m not, anyway.

I am mediocre at so many things, and have managed to balance (with great mediocrity) such a gigantic shitload of different kinds of work that I deserve to be quite proud of myself and my extrao
rdinary mediocrity. I feel so blessed to be in a position to dabble so widely. Lucky lucky lucky, and proud of myself for creating a notable percentage that luck by my choices. For recognizing my luck and exploiting it to the best of my limited ability.

Some of us are able to do our work just because we’re lucky enough to have the resources to buy tools, to live in an environment filled with inspiration and/or to be close to people who make beautiful subjects and do most of the art/work for you.

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I love arranging forkfuls of food. Ones where I have the perfect ratio of one thing to the other(s). Mashed potatoes to gravy to meat. Raisins to flakes. Heavens to Betsy. It doesn’t have to be fancy, the formula just has to be right. Everything pleasingly arranged in relation to each other. I will never be a good cook because I don’t want to practice how to be; that’s Delia’s thing. It’s my job just to love eating, every day, tasting and swallowing over and over and saying thank you, honey.. And to figure out how to arrange camera settings like food on a fork, adjusting hole-sizes, timing mechanisms, and digitally tweaking things in perfect relation to the kind of light shining on my girlfriend.

The other night we heard Martin Short ask Conan O’Brien if it’s okay to say “penis” on television. Conesy assured him that if it’s a “medical” word you can say it on tv. So they said it, “PENIS”, over and over. Martin also said, “ding dong”, “my unit” and a whole bunch of other terms as he used his hands to indicate EXACTLY what part of his body he was talking about.

Google agrees that “penis” is a word that should not be censored; even if you have SafeSearch on “strict filtering”, you’ll get 33,000,000 returns.

Guess what happens if you do a search for “clitoris”? BIG FAT ZERO.

I only learned of this reading Susie Bright’s post about this twisted double standard. Of course, to be fair, “vagina” doesn’t seem to be considered a dirty word since I just turned on strict filtering and did a search for that term and came up with (considerably fewer than penis) results so . . . yeah.

It IS upsetting and there’s clearly a weird double standard; it’s hilarious (in a very dark way) that anyone would think a clitoris is more dangerous than a penis, and “dangerous” IS the opposite of “safe”, isn’t it? Still, I don’t know that I feel exactly the same way about it that Susie does, though I think hers is an important perspective full of many truths and that we should all be pissed off about this kind of bullshit. But part of the hate, shame, and willful ignorance of women and women’s bodies is wrapped up in the shame and disgust men feel (and women AND MANY *FEMINISTS* REINFORCE AND ENCOURAGE) over straight men’s sexual response to women. If it’s a part of the body that makes a straight man’s dick hard — something they want to see and touch and lick and talk about and see pictures of — then it needs to be censored to save those crazed pudwhackers from themselves and the women from the damage that is wrought when men think of women in a sexual way!

I’m not sure “the giant obscene ‘F’ word in Internet censorship is feminism”. Yes, I think this is a feminist issue, for sure, but I don’t think the sole or even the primary motive for/cause of banning a word like “clitoris” from google’s safe search is a clear desire to silence feminists and shroud women and their bodies in a reinforced veil of ignorance. Sure, that’s one of many RESULTS (and there are plenty of places where plenty of people DO make silencing feminists and campaigning against women and knowledge of women’s bodies number one on their agenda) and it’s easy to see why Susie would feel especially pissed about it when she’s not one of the sex-negative feminists who thinks that every boner sprung is a rape waiting to happen (a way of thinking that, combined with the conservative, supposedly apolitical woman’s belief that every time a man masturbates to pictures of women who aren’t his wife that a family is destroyed, has made the men who are still in charge very eager to PRETEND to try to disapprove along with us of their dirty habit of jacking off over images of our bodies) . . . and when you turn safe search off to find “clitoris”, the seventh page-one result is her post on the internal clitoris, etc. Obviously safe search filters could make it harder for Susie to sell books.

A little diversion: laughably, the retarded UNfactual “ask men dating and love tip” page on “understanding the clitoris” ranks higher than Susie’s or Scarleteen’s pages, but that’s probably because a site like AskMen works a lot harder on search engine optimization than educators, artists, writers, political activists, etc.). The web used to be more of a woman, but now it’s poorly micromanaged by algorithms cooked up by men. Are their little mathematical formulas conscious attempts to censor feminist obscenities (like truth)? No. I don’t think so.

There are so many more pointed ways that women and the truths about our bodies told from our own perspectives are smacked down by corporate censors that the banned google clitoris isn’t at the top of my list of things to use as an example. It’s the more obvious and uncomplicated stuff I’ve had to deal with as a pornographer (one of those “commercial porn-makers” Susie identifies as someone who she thinks doesn’t suffer from bans and censorship the way artists, writers, educators and political activists do, which is an annoying and probably unintentional slap in the face I’ve felt delivered from the latter group and their “poor, starving, I-do-it-for-love-not-money mentality” before — I guess they always think we’ll know that they don’t mean pornographers like Tony Comstock who of course get to be included as ARTISTES) that really chap my hide as clear-cut cases of misogyny combined with the anti-sex backlash perpetrated by the feminists who deign to speak for all of us. Again, it’s not that Susie is one of those people, it’s just that I see feminism as one of many complex contributors to internet censorship, not just a victim of it.

So what IS a clear cut case of anti-woman, ignorance-enforcing internet censorship? When credit card companies and their processors tell me my body (and yours, if you’re a woman) is OBSCENE when I’m menstruating and I’m not allowed to talk about it or show pictures of it or have sex with myself or other people while I’m having my period on any domain where I make money selling my porn. When they spider our sites looking for banned words, take them out of context and threaten to take away our ability to be paid for our work even when it IS political, educational, artistic, etc. Guess what? Google is not the entity afraid of my bloody pussy. Google is not the entity hiding or demanding I delete blog entries discussing political, legal and ethical issues containing banned words. I just have to cross my fingers when I make posts like this one that they won’t come fuck with me, but technically I am defying their terms of service right now by posting this and could have my business shut down because of it. And it’s not just “the man” who’s against me, it’s the (other) feminists, too.

Censorship isn’t something you can blame all on men and their holy penises and their desire to stamp out feminism. And I’m starting to rethink that great old joke she mentioned; “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” It’s totally true, but I’ll bet if that were the case today, feminists would quickly become the new pro-lifers. The gender wars are far from one-sided and I’ve been hit by a whole fucking lot of “friendly fire” over here on “our” side.

I know I’m being oversensitive and carelessly lobbing my own grenades in the wrong direction at people who are my allies, but oversimplifying everything as “anti-feminist” undermines all of our arguments and neglects to acknowledge the ways that some of feminism’s “successes” have led to these failures along the way. There’s a bit Bill Maher does that annoys the FUCK out of me to listen to (off-topic sidenote: I didn’t like much about “Religulous“, fyi), but I can’t help thinking of it right now because some of it’s true and applicable:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8j4QJ0oiY&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1]

My guess is that banning “clitoris” has very little (if anything) to do with a campaign to censor feminist thought and information and women’s bodies, and
a whole lot more to do with thoughtlessness along with this thing Bill Maher talks about, with men trained to bow to “feminized”/feminINE values that anything that makes them erect is BAD. When you layer that onto the big problems that we SHOULD be focusing on like a) the people that make decisions in big companies being men, and b) men assuming everyone who uses their tools (like search engines) ARE men, and c) all men are straight, you wind up with guys jumping to the conclusion that any search for a clitoris is one that’s going to make someone bust a nut and is therefore unsafe. Or maybe a whole lot of confused and retarded thought WAS put into it (with a, b and c still factored in) and they decided that since, as feminists will proudly point out to you, they’ve heard that clitoris is the only organ with the sole function of PLEASURE, and MEN HAVE BEEN TAUGHT THAT THEIR PLEASURE IS BAD if they experience it themselves, especially by objectifying women in pictures or on the internet, that it should be banned. Or maybe it’s totally ridiculous to imagine ANY THOUGHT WHATSOEVER went into this arbitrary “decision”. I highly doubt that a bunch of people came together in a room with a picture of a cock on one side of the chalkboard and a vulva on the other, and came to a consensus that CLITORIS is a dirty word but PENIS isn’t, and high-fived each other on the way out the door saying, “right on, man! Another way to stick it to feminism!!”

Ultimately I think it’s paranoid to say, “it’s been clear for a long time that the giant obscene “F” word in Internet censorship is feminism.” And untrue. And I say that as someone who believes it IS true that feminism (and accurate information about women) is censored, misrepresented, considered obscene and something to quash and oppose on a very large, grand scale. I just don’t think that’s the case here with google and the clitoris, and if you want to point at double standards, the more glaring one is ignoring how much power and influence feminists and women in general have had and continue to wield in censoring the internet, art, and women who capitalize (the first offense) on men’s desires by selling them access to their bodies (second offense). It’s wrong to imply that feminist writers, artists, etc. have suffered more from internet censorship than pornographers.

Sure, feminist writers, artists, etc. make less money than smut peddlers as a whole, but that disparity has nothing to do with censorship – porn makes money in SPITE of censorship that FAVORS women writers and artists (who don’t create graphic material that is VISUAL), and is DEMANDED by the tag team duo of feminists and conservative women. You want to know why most women don’t make money on the internet? BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO. Because they don’t even try. Because they are content sitting around bitching and blogging and crying on each other’s shoulders feeling superior because they aren’t whores motivated by money, no they care about PRINCIPLES and getting warm fuzzies commiserating with each other and expect the “community” to take care of them rather than creating something marketable and making enough money to buy influence and support their causes themselves. Because they rely on the man to pay them just enough that they can bitch about it being unfair and that they only do it because they HAVE to, rather than BECOMING the man long enough and with enough success that they can subvert the system. Women don’t make money because they love just scraping by and they think that makes them superior to men, because they don’t think big except in terms of imagining some big plot designed to keep them barefoot and pregnant.

Whatever. Enough of this baloney — I need to stop being a hypocrite and make me some fucking money.