TastyTrixie.com

Archive for the ‘pop culture’ Category

As a feminist and a sex positive person I probably should DESPISE Twilight, but I don’t. I read the book (and only the first one so far) because it takes place near here and I saw the movie because the previews made it look way better than the book . . . I felt compelled by curiosity, local interest, a desire to know more about a pop culture phenom, and because I TOTALLY WANTED TO.

]

The book? Meh. It was entertaining, mildly annoying from a local’s perspective, and mind-boggling since I wouldn’t have STOOD for so many pages of overt chastity when I was a tween reader myself in the eighties. A sign of the conservative times, I guess; I am DAMN glad I grew up with Judy Blume’s Ralph-named penises and totally taboo rape scenes in Flowers in the Attic.

The movie? LOVED IT. I mean, I seriously fucking LOVED it. The previews drew me in because it looked dark and funny (there wasn’t a trace of self-aware humor in the book, so that was an improvement already) and I wanted to see the flying scenes. It was just an all-around great movie-theater movie — pretty, entertaining, moody . . . familiar.

Here’s the deal about Twilight: no matter how loathsome it may be from a political point of view, that movie (and the book for other people) delivers exactly what a lot of young women crave and feel romantically. It’s extremely exciting and beautiful and “sexy” in a vague, inexplicit, totally hysterically emotional way. Beautiful boy looks at beautiful girl and they are CONNECTED, locked together . . . anticipating . . . SOMETHING totally INTENSE!!!!

You can criticize that all you want, but when you do, you’re trashing the (natural) fantasies of lots and lots of young woman. When I watched that movie I really didn’t care what the implications were, I cared that it DELIVERED visions of something deeply desired by girls. After you finally kiss? Something very exciting happens, kind of like exploding into a flying spell into the sky!! Yeah, it’s fucking stupid, but that overwrought anticipation of something that gobbles you up entirely and transcends the mundane is part of most young women’s hormonal pre-teen/teenage experience. What’s next isn’t sex, it’s MAGIC!!

I had orgasms and the anticipation of sex on the brain a lot as a young woman and I *probably* wouldn’t have liked that movie as much then as I do now (my generation’s Twilight was Legend, which I thought was a enchanting for two minutes then a total fucking bore except for when Tim Curry as the devilish dark beasty was going to do whatever dirty things he was going to do to Mia Sara), but I still had to celebrate it for being pure fore-fore-foreplay and girly fantasy with pretty menacing shadows.

In general I’m becoming less and less tolerant of myself and other people making fun of what women want or theorizing that the politically incorrect, unempowering things women want are *entirely* constructed for us artificially. There is nothing fake about girls wanting to fly around on the back of a strong beautiful sparkly vampire boy’s back or to be a vampire and run-really-really-fast/fly themselves (I haven’t read the rest of the books so I don’t know if she eventually gets there or not, but clearly there are OTHER female characters who do).

I don’t know why it should make people cringe that girls want to immerse themselves in the fantasy of being in tragic love with such a creature or that the public version of this particular popular story is g-rated (except for the violence, of course — this IS America, after all). Personally? I watch a lot of porn but there were scenes in this movie that were five billion times more agonizingly erotic than anything XXX rated ever could hope to be. It was a brilliant fucking tease, and there’s nothing hotter than having no release. I don’t give a fuck about the stammering heroine and her shortcomings; she’s a blank slate and nobody else cares much about her either because it’s a fucking FANTASY. Do girls really need a fucking role model in every single fantasy they have or are they entitled to be thrilled and entertained and suspend contact with reality just like everyone else? I also *almost* don’t care about the scariness of fantasizing about a creepy stalker boyfriend who sneaks into your room at night and stares at you while you sleep; yes, it’s totally gross and weird and dangerous. But a lot of us have had that same exact unrealistic fantasy and it made us feel good (in more ways than one). That? It’s human nature. And I’m sick of women being shamed and cautioned into censoring their own fantasies because we’re apparently too stupid to distinguish between fantasy and reality. IT’S A STORY ABOUT VAMPIRES. Can we tell reality and consequences to fuck off for a little while?

If anyone wants to post relevant links like feminist critiques of Twilight, etc. feel free. I honestly have clicked off of just about all of them without giving them the time they probably deserve simply because I’m not in the mood for dissecting it, but I totally understand if other people are (and that my “arguments” are ill-informed and based totally on suspicions and raw emotion). One of the good ones I clicked off of made interesting observations regarding the popularity of abstinence-only sex “education” and Twilight. I don’t know why I’m just not in the mood to care a whole lot this time around (I was certainly pissed enough about The Girl with a Pearl Earring that I almost walked out of the theatre) unless it’s as I said above; that girls deserve to have their desires spoken to and to enjoy their daydreamy fantasies regardless of how unrealistic and bizarre and dangerous they might be. So yeah — *I’m* not very interested in getting into a discussion about it in comments, but I totally understand why others might be so more info and other people’s perspectives and discussions are still welcome.

After the gloomy pictures and tone of this post I’m overdue posting something cheerful that reflects how I’m feeling A BILLION TIMES BETTER, so here are some happy pictures from a recent members-only gallery and an update on what’s going on in my body and head.

It’s hard for me to describe how profoundly different/healed I felt within a week of starting to treat my hormone problems. I can only compare it to what born again Christians feel like. Seriously. Only I feel like I just established a close personal relationship with NORMALCY rather than with Jesus. And now I am wondering how the fuck I was even getting out of bed at all, because I was really REALLY sick.

A lot of stuff that I was experiencing I couldn’t even verbalize without sounding totally crazy and was effecting me on every level you can possibly think of: mentally, spiritually, physically, socially, sexually, etc. My muscles, joints, head, eyes, guts, boobs, feet, jaw, ears HURT and weren’t working right. Pretty much everything was causing me pain and fatigue, from the sound of people’s voices to the loud conversations being held in my head to the TORTURE of dropping something and having to go through the agonizing, soul-sucking motion of bending over to pick it up. I thought I was being a hypochondriac to worry that I had lupus or something horrifying going on. All I wanted to do was work and be happy and do the millions of things I want to do, so I tried to exercise more, to cut back on things that were especially tiring (which got to the point of being EVERYTHING except the bare minimum — I haven’t been seeing my family, friends, or doing anything except trying to survive). The slightest annoyances were sending me into paroxysms of mean-spirited anguish. If you think I was complaining a lot about headaches and stuff, you don’t know the tenth of it. I actually didn’t even want to recognize how incredibly bad it was.

But then last week I started to feel INCREDIBLY GOOD. Like I looked in the mirror and didn’t see death warmed over staring back at me — oh yeah, THAT’S what I look like without a sickly pallor and giant, deep, dark circles rimming my eyes! Like, getting out of bed in the morning IS EASY and something to celebrate instead of something that caused me physical pain. I’m not exaggerating, I had been feeling PAIN reverberating through every fiber of my being. I thought it was just me being not-a-morning-person, “sensitive”, etc. but as it turns out? FUCK NO. The first three days of feeling awesome last week are my new standard for how I should feel 99% of the time and I’m not going to accept anything less ever again.

Here are the supplements I started taking:

*Evening Primrose Oil
*iodine
*birth control (chick hormones)
*omega oils
*potassium (in grapefruit juice, etc.)
*awesome Vitamin B complex
*digestive enzymes

and changes I made:

*maintaining a stable blood sugar level (not letting myself get hungry, eating way less simple carbs/sugars)
*continuing to use tools & learn more for anger management, concentration, calm, etc.
*exercising consistently
*continuing to make 8-9 hours of sleep per night my goal

——–

A lot of these are things I’ve done before that yielded positive results, but I never did them consistently or all at the same time or appreciated the importance of spending the money to stay stocked up on all of the vitamins or understood the big picture of how they were helping me. I still don’t have a thorough grasp of that, but getting as totally fucked up as I was forced me to do a lot of research and over the years a lot of people and circumstances have handed me clues. Like not being able to get pregnant and slowly finding out a whole bunch of possible reasons why not. Like having people tell me over and over and over again to have my thyroid tested. Like having almost no stressors in my life and often doing everything right and trying my fucking hardest and still feeling WORSE instead of better. Like having some really great health care providers in my life and then having to deal with one who was really bad. Like THE INTERNET being an imperfect but still fucking fabulous resources. Like having a trans partner and thinking more about hormones, identity, and the nuances of gender. Like having people tell me I have too much testosterone. Like having my hair stylist tell me I had an unnatural amount of HAIR FALLING OUT OF MY HEAD (ahhh, so it WASN’T my imagination that was noticing my part widening in pictures and on the webcam I have staring down at the top of my head).

I really am sorry for how impatient I’ve been, how easily agitated I’ve been, and for how little time I’ve had for people and issues and projects I care about. Mostly I’m sad that Delia had to live with someone so unpredictable and “touchy”. But I’m really happy for us now that we are both getting ourselves sorted out.

I think this year (or at least the next six months) are going to be a time of simply catching up on time I/we’ve lost personally and financially/professionally. I know I’ve made a lot of posts in the past couple of years about ways I was reorganizing and reprioritizing things, and while many of them were necessary, very few of them were productive or successful because of what I now realize was a significant health problem. I am going to be patient with myself and try to enjoy simply feel good. REALLY good.

I’m not saying my life has been nonstop misery because that’s not true at all — hormones are shifty fuckers so there’ve been lots of highs and lows and near-normalcy, but I’ve likely been suffering from this for most of my post-adolescent life to one degree or another judging from how rarely I ovulated on time or at all; most people would say “judging from how rarely my period was on time”, but I now refuse to refer to on-time periods as the sensible indicator of health when it totally ignores that timely menstruation is reliant on timely ovulation. It’s not that I think ovulation is some holy fucking grail or that every woman should strive for FERTILITY, I just think there’s so much MISSING from (and deceptive about) our language for talking about how our bodies function and how to identify problems and heal them. And you know how women who understand their clits and their g-spots and the rest of their bodies and how they work and where those parts live CAN MAKE THEM OPERATE BETTER and experience more pleasure? I don’t think the rest of our anatomy and functionality is any different. If I understand that high blood sugar and cortisol and stress and testosterone and estrogen suppression and ovulation and concentration and happiness are all linked up and I can visualize those things and better know how to achieve stability there, then I am going to be a happier, better-functioning person.

Personally I’m excited about the discoveries I’m making about myself and feel so fired up about so many things I’m back to my ”
normal” scatterbrained whirlwind of divided attention (and haven’t been taking Ritalin since I started my little regimen above). I’m also really angry and thinking a lot about how most health care providers are totally incompetent and uncaring when it comes to endocrinology (unless it has to do with diabetes) and SUPER COMMON hormone problems. I believe to my core that misogyny is the root of the ignorance and lack of care; people believe and want women to age a certain way, to become dried-up shrews. They believe we’ll complain about anything and are still mostly just hysterical, crazy bitches and that our problems are all psychological. Everyone thinks it’s so “advanced” to treat depression and anxiety as real stand-alone illnesses now that we can throw fucked-up, addictive drugs at when so much depression and anxiety and other mental illness are probably caused by hormonal problems that don’t always originate with (or aren’t limited to) poor brain chemistry or treated best just by addressing them. I’m certainly not suggesting we all go Tom-Cruise-Vitamin-Crazy, I’m just saying that health care professionals aren’t even bothering to test for or treat underlying hormone imbalances, and most people like it that way. It makes a lot of women sicker, not healthier. Just to give you an example, this doctor I went to was ready to put me on anti-depressants, didn’t believe me when I told her I knew the birth control itself would help a lot, and refused to test my thyroid (the most common “thyroid” test done is for TSH — thyroid stimulating hormone — and it doesn’t really test your thyroid gland, it tests your pituitary gland AND the results are months old by the time it reaches your blood). You have to wonder how this woman thinks that anti-depressants are going to cure me of hair loss, weight gain, constipation, lethargy, etc. when you know it will make most of those symptoms WORSE. To her I was just a crazy, miserable bitch demanding a “complicated” explanation for what seemed obvious to her: THAT I’M SIMPLY A CRAZY MISERABLE BITCH.

If we removed the stigma and value judgment from the statement “she’s got hormone problems” we’d lose one of our most precious and reliable punch lines. So many women would feel so much better the world would be turned upside-fucking down. It probably wouldn’t be very good for the sex industry, I imagine, if more middle-aged women felt like a million bucks. Or maybe it would . . . . My sister, a nurse, said she thinks endocrinology is too nuanced for traditional western medicine to deal with and that it’s not a “sexy” field like surgery. I think it’s the opposite. It’s the sexiest field of all. It IS the source of what we think of as sex and gender and for us to really understand it and the role it plays in our lives and how it is the foundation for so much of our identities would pose such a threat to the status quo and to the people we rely upon to make the rest of us feel normal by comparison that it’s just a giant taboo. In generations to come I think it’s transgender and people who defy gender stereotypes and limitations who will force the medical community and other people to understand endocrinology a whole lot better and how hormones can be manipulated to help us lead our best, most authentic and healthiest lives.

Anyway, long post short, I was feeling pretty bad. And now I feel really great. And that makes me really happy. I’m fueling up now for good things to come.

Did you see the chick who kept mispronouncing “larynx” and “trachea” on American Idol?

Yeah, well I *loved* her. Because I could relate to her so much. Her seriousness and convictions and reaching for the right words (but getting them all wrong) and insisting upon precision with her responses to questions and bewilderment over the rules of the interview at the end. I loved her voice and she was the kind of smarT I recognize as my own.

I hate myself for watching that show, but almost feel like it’s my duty to know how we’re being taught about our own and other people’s value. If you have bad teeth, if you’re mentally ill, if you’re overweight, if you’re an aspie (see above), if you’re overweight AND wear tight or revealing clothing, if you’re borderline retarded, you’re fair game for the Idol freak show. All of America joins together not just to laugh at you, but to FEEL GOOD about laughing at you without compunction. It’s a family show! Everybody’s watching! It’s okay to laugh in someone’s face, punctuate every gaffe with sound effects, play songs like “Weird Science” when you walk into your audition if you’re a nerd (two scores I’d personally be pleased with — that song is googlyicious GOODNESS and that one nerd with bad teeth could have played Patrick Bateman’s long lost hillbilly cousin!). You can laugh right in someone’s face and still be considered kind as long as you chuckle “good lookin’ out!” and say, “awwww, you should never sing again but I can tell you’re a real sweetie!” as they exit.

They pretend American Idol is a competition only one person wins at the end, but the real reason it’s popular is because we ALL get to be winners at home each and every time they show us another fucking loser. The same people who’ve been targets of cruelty and ostracism for centuries — sissy boys with lisps, fat girls whose pants split, ugly people who dare to smile wide, and village idiots whose ears stick out and eyes are too close-set — willingly subject themselves to torment. Compared to them, the rest of us come out so far ahead! We are smarter, prettier, stronger and more likely to fit in than THOSE Americans. We wouldn’t make their stupid mistakes!

We just watched an episode (Yokel Chords) of The Simpsons that made fun of this phenomenon with Homer demonstrating exactly the behavior I’m talking about, pointing at the inbred hicks on tv, calling them stupid and feeling so good about himself in the process. I totally understand the appeal; in the internet porn industry I’m surrounded by people I subconsciously think of as easy targets (mostly my male “colleagues”); I feel like it’s my duty to be mean and ream them out, but maybe I actually waste time around them on webmaster boards because I’m a small person who wants to pretend she’s an advanced and sophisticated thinker. How petty and embarrassing is that?

It’s taking me a long time to put it into practice, but I really want to stop doing that. Awhile back we heard a comedian on the radio asking why it’s not okay to make fun of retarded people but people who are just plain STUPID are totally fair game. It kind of blew my mind because I like to think I’m one of those defenders of political correctness and sensitivity, but I totally have that double standard that I should be empathetic towards people who are developmentally delayed or have other identifiable REASONS for not being great intellectual thinkers, but it’s not only acceptable to mock and hate on stupid people — it’s like I sometimes feel it’s my fucking DUTY to be mean, angry and impatient with stupid and/or ignorant people. Like they have no excuse for being so dumb or lacking information. Granted, most of the time when I feel that way it’s because they’re acting like judgmental know-it-alls themselves or because they’re idiots writing to me with offensive demands, but it doesn’t really accomplish anything or make me a better person to behave the same way. I feel especially gross about it considering that under other circumstances — if I were in a different role doing a different kind of job (teaching, for example) — I would never allow myself to act that way and would be horrified by other people doing it. There are a bunch of ways I defend my behavior and even as I write this think it’s the RIGHT thing to do in certain circumstances. What I want is to understand what *I* get emotionally out of being an asshole to stupid people and decide whether or not it can accomplish anything positive next time I feel like calling someone a moron. It’s gotten so reflexive that nary a day goes by that I’m not screaming at someone for being a dumb-ass. Dumb fuck, dumb ass, crazy bitch, stupid shit, crazy SON-of-a-bitch, cocksucking moron . . . apparently they’re everywhere I look and it doesn’t really make me feel good to label people that way everywhere I look, even if I only do it in my head or muttering under my breath at the grocery store, “MOVE, you stupid shit-for-brains, MOVE!!”

I wonder why I’ve gotten worse about this as I’ve gotten older. Is it because I’m more socially isolated and feel less connected to other people? Is it because I’m more and more aware of my own limitations and am just projecting my own feelings of inferiority? Is it because I have some hormonal stuff going on that’s making me more of an asshole than I really am? Is it because I know that I’m actually one of those stupid hillbilly nerds they make fun of on television? Whatever it is, I’m going to try to be less of a shithead and recognize that the only person I am in competition with is myself.

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

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.

Guess what gets the most play on our satellite? It’s the XM channel called Audio Visions playing new age music. We have it on almost all of the time; our dog LOVES it, curls up right next to the speakers and trances out. During the day they sometimes play annoying cheesy crap, but at night they start up with “Night Visions” and this creepy woman with a vampire accent practically whispers interjections like, “in the TOETull dahknessss of nighyyt you sseeeee nahthing but ah beeelliyawn starssss . . . NAHthing but peeeeeeeeace, sweeet peeeeeeeeeissssssse. This is oddyo veezhuns, and you haf nighyyt veezhuns.”

So yeah, we totally love it and daily mimic her pronunciation of Audio Visions, like when we see the longing look in the dog’s eyes and ask, “awwww, do you want your awwjoveezhuns?”

Audio Visions rocks at night when they play spookier, spacier new age music, including delicious programs from Hearts of Space (note: only new age nerds would be oblivious enough to the world to waste an excellent three-letter domain like hos.com on music that once had such a limited audience it could only find space on public radio, but I digress). I’ve bought a lot of new age mp3’s based on play they’ve gotten on Audio Visions that I never would have heard otherwise.

Because Audio Visions, Night Visions and Hearts of Space have been cheap auditory therapy for our household I’m pretty fucking attached to the channel which is why I’m freaking out today upon seeing the channel name has changed to read, “Spa (replaces Audio Visions)”. Does this mean no more Hearts of Space? No more vampires reading poetry accompanied by the sounds of trickling streams, heartbeats and twittering birds?

Of course, it’s possible that it won’t change, or that if it DOES change it will be for the better, though I doubt it if their recent broadcast of a muzak-styled saccharine rendition of a sickly sweet piano tinkling the precious Beatles’ melody “In My Life” layered over ocean waves is any indication of what’s to come. Apparently there’s some kind of Sirius / XM merger going on which I haven’t taken the time to read about but is fucking up almost all of the music we’ve been enjoying via Directv.

Note added Aug. 8th 2010: I just found this interesting post on the Hearts of Space website with more information about XM, Sirius (who recently dropped HOS), Audio Visions and Spa.

This is even more upsetting to me than when Court TV changed their channel name to the criminally deceptive “TruTV” and amped up their programming with even more super-dramatized crime and disaster “documentaries” with titles like, “Most Shocking” cops and robbers high speed chases with fake sound effects dubbed in. I pray for media literacy to be taught in this country, but I don’t hold my breath. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching all of that shit, but it pisses me off when mainstream media gets away with passing skewed misrepresentations of real events as “truth” without disclosing how they’ve distorted it with artifice, bias, and added “production value”.

“TRU” my ass! Maybe they think the stupid spelling is enough to act as a disclaimer: TRU! Not true in any boring conventional sense of the word. TRU! Because you don’t have time to squeeze in all of those letters, much less all the pesky facts! TRU! As much truth as we can squeeze in between ads from our sponsors! TRU! For people who don’t believe in accuracy of reporting OR spelling! I know, I shouldn’t take the misuse of words like “reality” so seriously. I guess I’m just old-fashioned that way, especially when I suffer from the double standards that allow television giants to distort and shit all over essential words in our vocabulary while I am threatened with federal obscenity prosecution and having my payment processing taken away if I dare to tell the TRUTH about my body (that blood comes out of my pussy and that’s totally healthy and I can and should be able to have sex with myself and others while that’s happening). Instead I am forced to misrepresent myself, women’s bodies and sexuality by hiding my period on my porn sites.

Seriously, is my bloody cunt more dangerous than using words like “truth” so loosely?
How irresponsible is it to degrade the meaning of words that are supposed to be the cornerstones of civilized ethics? I do not trust that all people will intuitively recognize the difference between “TRU” and “true”, “reality show” and “reality”, or porn pussy and real pussy.

How did this post arrive here? This is why most of my blog entries wallow in draft mode. I’m going to have to start advertising myself as The Naked Non Sequitur. Except it’s not really true that I’m naked right now or even most of the time just because I’m a webwhore, but I guess it’s TRU enough.

I’m glad there’s still no clear winner from yesterday’s pick-me-a-blog-topic post because I don’t have enough time to blog or masturbate or do anything enjoyable except snatch some tv while we’re eating as therapy to recover from the stress of . . . not having enough time/having time sucked up by STUPID stuff. Uncreative, unsexy, uninspiring, frustrating, lame-ass, stupid stuff.

Specifically? Too many hours spent over three (not consecutive, phew!) days replacing our router. Summing it up in one sentence like that hardly seems fair to me and only makes ME look stupid. Like only a dumb fuck could lose days of work on what sounds like such a simple little task. But it wasn’t simple (and even when it was, it was still excruciatingly time and money-consuming) and was connected to many other things. Being a camgirl/pornographer? So not fucking glamorous most of the time. And it’s not just me: pretty much all of my fellow camgirl/pornographer friends are constantly battling the same obnoxious tech shit that interrupts the fun parts of our jobs and makes us all want to just go bathe in gravy-covered carbs. Tech problems are the ultimate turn-off.

Sometimes when my eyeballs feel like they’re about to pop out of my head from the force of my frustration and I start hyperventilating and looking around for things to throw out the window (or AT the window while it’s still closed so they’ll both make satisfyingly loud shattering sounds), I try to calm down by asking myself, “what would I do if I were an Officer on the Starship Enterprise? I certainly wouldn’t behave like this, even if WebWhore Headquarters were about to blow up in forty-five seconds!” Patience! Faith in one’s own problem-solving abilities! Barely a sense of urgency: just a confident, one-step-at-a-time pursuit of a solution with nary a raise in my heart rate.

So far this technique hasn’t worked for me. But maybe someday it will; it’s dorky enough that it might do the trick when nothing else can. Or maybe I just shouldn’t skip my Ritalin.

*****

Tomorrow night we’re going to *try* to trek to Ron’s to do some shooting for IMakePorno. Hopefully I’ll have gotten most of my “asshole” out of my system today, part of my tax return done (I *have* to get that done, like, yesterday), my hair colored (it’s the color of faded, sun-dried feces from a malnourished cat right now) and have time to pack and plan before we get there.

I am a Starfleet Officer, though. I can do anything.

Actually, I’m like an unholy (and super-irritating) union between Barclay, O’Brien (cranky DS9, O’B) and Quark. Sprinkled with the annoyingly pompous, bossy, hypercritical, controlling, buttinsky loudness of Kira and Riker.

Yes, you *should* feel sorry for my friends and family.

Our friend AmberLily is a big Dexter fan, so her blog and tweets reminded us to check it out. I figured I would love it and looked forward to getting it through Netflix and starting from the beginning.

We only made it through one and a half episodes before we sent it back. In some ways it was just my style; I *DELIGHT* in movies like Gacy, Ed Gein, May and American Psycho. Dexter is stylish, a little campy, witty, etc. I appreciated many aspects of what I saw, but I totally didn’t want to spend any more time watching it. Part of the problem was that I loathed the female characters. Another problem is that we watch our netflixed tv shows at night before bed, and Dexter is just too dark and ludicrously violent to be relaxing then.

I’m also hypercritical of stories of vigilantism when the vigilante is a MAN, meting out “justice” for crimes perpetrated against women and/or children. REALLY annoys me (except in the movie Buster and Billie which I *love*).

And it was just too far-fetched. I know, it’s in a way that’s probably cool to other people but for me was just annoying. I’m pretty hard to please in the crime drama department, preferring/loving the stuff that’s openly based on real crimes or is documentary style (almost all the crap on “Tru” tv). Also, since we’ve been part of shooting a few low-budget movies I have a harder time suspending disbelief when we watch other people’s acting; I feel awkward for the actors and wonder how much time went into crafting certain scenes – the veil has been lifted even with the small-scale stuff we done and everything seems so transparent. I felt that way (embarrassed) a lot watching Michael C. Hall in his “action” scenes where he’s confronting his victims.

We prefer to watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine before bed. I know it doesn’t make sense when I criticized Dexter for being too far-fetched, but whatever. It makes me feel good to totally escape into a positive, optimistic vision of the future. I like going to sleep with messages of hope. Watching shows like Next Gen, Deep Space Nine, and Northern Exposure is like going to an ideal version of church for me where nobody expects you to believe in God and everyone at least TRIES to treat everybody else with kindness. People express enthusiasm, wonder and awe at the mystery of it all and the boundlessness of possibilities is depicted as something people can experience while they’re still alive.

So Deep Space Nine (with help from Weeds, Entourage, Spaced and Big Love) beat Dexter off our queue.

Note to AmberLily: I just want you to know that I started writing this BEFORE you tweeted that you hate Seattle. And I don’t hate Dexter as much as you hate Seattle — I was so close to loving it! Some of the images were so beautiful . . .