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Archive for the ‘values’ Category

Today we went to a protest against civil rights abuses and I realized THAT’S THE FIRST ORGANIZED PROTEST I’VE EVER ATTENDED! Which seems nuts, that as a thirty-six year old woman who is opposed to SO many things and has lived near Seattle my whole life, I have never been out in the streets with my floppy tits wrapped loosely in a shredded flag, armpit hair fluttering in the breeze as I pump my fist shouting a determined message even as I’m hoisted over the bulky shoulder of an armed man in riot gear.

Sorry to disappoint, but today was nothing like that.

Still, it was important and I’m glad we went. I’d love to be more specific and share the details with most everyone but as my webwhoring years have added up I’ve realized that sometimes I need to withhold some information for the sake of privacy and safety. What I will say, though, is it isn’t connected to porn or sex work which in a way is sad because I’d like to be a better activist when it comes to civil rights issues related to the sex industry. This, though, is more local and I feel like I can more safely make a difference by being involved in it which is not something I can do locally (meeting up with people face-to-face) as a webwhore.

Delia actually sat this one out in the car because she has a soul-patch-like burn on her chin from her first overzealous laser hair removal treatment (she’s been going through the process for years now and this is the first time she’s gotten burned like that) and she didn’t want to be out in the sun. This left me open to being approached by a cute ewok-looking fellow with a jaunty chipped front tooth who appeared to be about seven to ten years my junior. I almost told him I have a girlfriend, but then decided if he really was “interested” maybe it would lure him into getting involved. See, deep freckled cleavage can really win support for a cause. And I like bearded little roly poly guys.

I was actually a little concerned about the location of this protest because it’s right next to an ultra-conservative hangout but they didn’t come streaming out to scare us away or even mount a counter-protest. Instead I only saw about three people give us the thumbs-down and everybody else who responded as they drove by seemed happy to see us and honked, waved, hollered, etc. in support. That’s a good feeling, but scary knowing this shit is going on even with so much outspoken criticism.

*****

The past few days have been pretty windy here (I could barely hang onto my sign today) so it wasn’t a big surprise when we lost power for a few seconds tonight. Could throw a monkey wrench into our spycam transmissions and Delia’s update which she’s trying to get uploaded and posted tonight, though. After the protest we had to drive all the way back to suburban hell to have them remove the inky security tag on a pair of jeans Delia bought on Thursday that they forgot to remove. Sometimes living so far from a real city is inconvenient. And sometimes it’s just kind of scary (see above: there is some bullshit that wouldn’t be tolerated in Seattle but in rural and small-town areas it’s commonplace). But of course so is living near or IN a city, just for different reasons.

I love casinos.

It’s pretty rare that we go to them (and we have LOTS of nice ones on reservations in Western Washington where the tribes actually make decent money off of them instead of simply being exploited by outside corporations which is what happens in most states) and the amount of money I spend is trifling, but I still love walking around in them and being absorbed by the noises and orderly rows of tables and machines.

A few nights ago I needed to get out of the house so I went with Delia to her 12-step meeting. Meaning I went along for the ride, dropped her off, and headed to the casino by myself. Delia doesn’t like wandering around aimlessly in casinos the way I do so I really got to enjoy spending an hour there with my free Sprite, completely overwhelmed and unsure what to do with myself (but in a good way). Eventually I made a $7 donation to the tribe via penny and nickel slots after I figured out how to get and use their club card.

I allowed myself to be completely unhurried and take as much time as I needed to make and execute the simplest of decisions, like whether or not I should remove my club card from the lanyard so that it wouldn’t be dangling across the screen or tying me up by the neck to the machine. Seriously. I spent ten minutes trying to figure that out and get the card OFF the clip. I am not very bright or coordinated, especially when there’s a lot of distractions around so it’s a huge relief sometimes to be completely alone with nobody (I know) watching and just allow myself to sink into being massively stupid, completely enveloped in the casino atmosphere where you’re allowed to publicly do nothing but throw money away while you sit on a stool and look at little pictures of monkeys and fruit and BARBARBAR spinning around. For hours. I suppose that’s pathetic, but it relaxes me to feel no pressure. To not have to try to be smart. To be hidden between the slot machines that are all taller than I am.

I love casinos enough that I would throw much more money away in them if I could afford to. Enough that I can envision myself having a serious problem, especially if I ever learned to confidently play cards which is one of those perfect-for-Trixie ways of being around other people, in a completely structured semi-social exchange where the object isn’t to chat, but to play and to win. Everybody has a clearly defined role. There are RULES. I like that.

But I don’t have money to throw away so after I (ever so slowly) spent my seven dollars I wandered around looking at the steakhouse menu and the cafe menu and the people and the machines and the gift shop. And while I looked at the two pound steak special it occurred to me that it would be very convenient if someone offered me money for sexual favors. That I would DO IT without hesitating, return to consume my blowjob-earned steak, and spend the rest of it on slots.

On the Golden Girls, Blanche referred to buying things with her body as “using nature’s credit card”. I wonder: what is the percentage of women who 1) want things and 2) immediately scan the room for men who can provide the means for procuring the things that they want. I imagine it’s pretty high. It seems perfectly natural. And of that number, how many would use “nature’s credit card” to seal the deal?

Of course I wouldn’t do that at the casino. Probably not. Unless I did become addicted to gambling.

When the thought first (naturally) crossed my mind it seemed totally logical and if it would’ve only taken 20 seconds for an opportunity to present itself then YES, I would have done it. But after a minute reality set in and I realized I wouldn’t have time to do that before Delia’s meeting was over. I don’t know enough about the casino to know what the risks are. I have no desire to be publicly humiliated there or never allowed to return. I’m not sure what safety precautions to take. And the whole thing would be so much messier and uncomfortable in real life than in my imagination. Plus the guy would probably offer way less money than would be worth it. Plus I really didn’t feel like talking to anybody.

But I didn’t look “hot” so I’d have probably performed, for example, a low-priced handjob with my tits out for groping if I knew it was safe and the guy didn’t want a big long conversation. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to ever know for sure that something is safe. And I hate the idea of someone following me around, eyeballing me before they make an approach, or worse, following me around afterward when I’m trying to enjoy the money I earned.

It’s much better to be a lone stranger in the casino that the security guys suspect is autistic rather than a prostitute. I didn’t feel like smiling at anybody or talking. I veered away from a chunky black guy earlier (before my whore light bulb dinged outside the steakhouse) who seemed to be pursuing me; in hindsight he might have been a perfect mark for that handjob exchange. But at the time I just wanted to sit alone on a stool at a slot machine without being hemmed in by people on both sides.

At the printing company where I used to work there was an autistic guy working in the art department. He scanned logos and cleaned up the artwork. I briefly worked there too on the night shift. Sometimes our boss would look at me working, obsessively sharpening the edges of black, shaving off pixels that shouldn’t have been there, and would complain with a laugh that I worked exactly like Bill (the autistic guy). I took it as a compliment even though she didn’t mean it that way. Even though she liked Bill better than she liked me, what she meant is that it had been revealed to her that I wasn’t so fucking smart; I was actually slow and retarded with no clue how normal people do things.

Everybody liked Bill. So did I, and when someone got in his way when he was headed somewhere or tried to stop him and engage him in conversation and he’d pointedly stare straight past them above their heads and try to GET AROUND THEM, to steamroll straight past them, I totally understood what he felt like. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but very few people respect how we want to go directly from point A to point B without someone interfering with our straight line. GET OUT OF MY WAY.

I think it’s that desire to connect the dots (going from *not* having something I want to procuring it) in a very direct way that makes turning a trick in a casino to get money for a steak and more time at the slots seem perfectly logical and also anathema to me. It’s not a moral or ethical issue to me at all. It’s not natural to me to think about it in those terms. The notion of NOT doing it because it’s “wrong” is complete nonsense to me. There are plenty of reasons not to do it, but that’s not one of them.

Anyway, I had a good time by myself at the casino. I used to hate public smoking, but now that it’s illegal (except on reservations) it’s been so long that I actually sort of welcomed the stench and that whole Vegas smell. I was dizzy by the time I left.

I couldn’t resist looking at the beautiful man-body chopping wood next door so I did something I think (I thought?) is really, REALLY wrong: I took sneaky pictures of him without his knowledge or consent. And now I’m doing something even MORE wrong: I’m posting one of them here:

He’s not our neighbor, he just delivers and chops wood for our neighbor. And I HAVE to watch him do it, because the guy is incredibly beautiful. Not his face, just his whole old-fashioned working-man’s body with that wedge-hourglass shape. The thick pants with the shiny metal details, the gloves, the white tank top, the cap, the scraggly mullet and those pale muscles built up in the shade and from working outside when it’s raining, because it rains all the time where he works. He’s like an 80’s version of the guys in old propaganda posters like these:

I have always been in love with watching men do physical labor. Even though I felt sort of dreadful about it, I was compelled to run and get the camera. I stood in the kitchen and snapped a few pictures where he could have turned around and seen me. But before that happened, I ran into the bedroom and took pictures of him through the crack between two panels in our shoji screen so he couldn’t catch me watching him through the magnifying lens of our camera. My desire to capture his image forever outweighed the voice in my head reminding me I was doing something wrong. Something I’ve seen/heard of other people (men) doing that sickened me, but that memory didn’t stop me from doing it myself.

You shouldn’t spend time on fetish-oriented forums online if non-consensual voyeuristic photography (and other stuff) bothers you. You’ll find out things that you just don’t want to know and see things you weren’t meant to see. Like pictures of used maxi pads guys steal out of public restrooms or photos a foot fetishist surreptitiously took of his neighbor’s niece’s bare feet while their family unwittingly enjoyed a barbecue in their driveway. The woman was probably in her twenties and the guy who took and shared the pictures described his sneaky method for capturing them and the type of camera and settings he used and how he managed to not get caught.

The freaky part is the way these people usually don’t even acknowledge the line they’re crossing, or worse, act like they’re ENTITLED to snagging these things that belong to other people. Of course, half the time someone with common sense will challenge these people or point out the err of their ways, but most people don’t bother to post any opposition, instead just showing their appreciation for what the voyeur-thief has “created”/salvaged for the members of the board. Or they will critique the spoils, like the guy who complained that the neighbor chick with the bare feet was so fat, how in the world could the spy-photographer possibly think anyone would be interested in seeing her or be aroused by her himself? So not only is this woman with the arched foot and a BBQ rib in her mouth being displayed on the internet without her knowledge or consent, she’s ALSO having her weight criticized. AWESOME, right?

I pretend that I’m not quite as bad as these sociopaths because I know what I’m doing is wrong. But I guess that actually makes me worse because I know it’s wrong and I’m doing it anyway (and those guys on the forums might know it’s wrong too, they just don’t waste time making a big show of acting guilty about it the way I am in all of my gross hypocrisy).

I can pretend I’m conducting an experiment or research. That I’m a writer. That the end result of provoking thought about these important issues of privacy, consent, and all SORTS of interesting things is worth the negligible or nonexistent “damage” I’m doing. And after all, it’s a really REALLY grey area, right? I mean, how many people would even think me taking and posting the picture of the axe man is wrong if I didn’t tell you that *I* think it’s (maybe) wrong? And this isn’t really a blog entry about that guy, it’s about me or the collective us and the image is actually a snapshot of me — the voyeur — and my thoughts, not him. It’s entirely possible to intellectualize it that way. He could be anybody. You can’t see his face. No one will ever know who he is. Probably not, anyway.

And would he care if people DID know? Maybe he’d WANT to be credited and known far and wide as The Woodsman Who Got Trixie Hot. Of course, that brings me back to the obvious trespass of not asking for his permission to photograph him in the first place, but speaking of consequences, *I* certainly don’t want to pay them. I don’t want *him* to know he was chopping wood next to TASTYTRIXIE and therefore knows about our websites and where I live and can tell everyone how to find me (I’d have to tell him about our sites in order for him to give INFORMED consent, though that disclosure would be out of ethical, not legal obligation; you don’t have to specify where or when something will published on a consent form, just that you as the photographer have all rights to the photos which legally you don’t REALLY need to do anyway since in our country the photographer automatically owns the photos, not the model). I don’t want to tell a big strong stranger with an axe and a cock that he gives me a boner and I want to take pictures of him — LOTS of pictures. Well, I do sort of want to tell him that, but I know it’s not such a good idea/could cause problems. He might be weird or scary or even if he isn’t, then our neighbor (a decent neighbor, not our scary neighbor) would know about us and that would make everyone on the block uncomfortable. Most of all us.

If it were my actual neighbor out there making me hot chopping wood, I wouldn’t have taken the pictures. Because that would be violating the good neighbor code of pretending each other doesn’t exist. And I certainly wouldn’t take pictures of his young daughter! Even if it were to record how she trespasses on OUR property, walking just three feet past me sitting in our window. Well, maybe I would (for proof of trespass only!), but I wouldn’t post them on the internet. But maybe only because I’m a pornographer and could get in trouble for it just by virtue of that fact.

When I pondered these things aloud to Delia, she doubted my assertion that if it were a woman out there, hanging laundry or washing a car, I totally wouldn’t have taken the pictures. She’s probably right. After all, I took this picture (without her knowledge/consent) of a hot redhead fishing because she had a really great ass:

It’s the kind of picture you can get away with taking in public and even sell prints of in local galleries that don’t have any artistic standards. It’s the kind of picture no one (except other wankers) would bat an eye at as long as you keep up the appearance of it being completely innocent. Even though I know that I took it purely out of sexual/sensual interest. And I know that any straight man with a camera would have taken it for exactly the same reason (or to prove to himself that he wasn’t) whether he would admit it or not, and there are tens of thousands of men with cameras with hobbies or professions doing exactly that. I know a lot of people who take completely g-rated innocent-loo
king pictures and jack off to them later even if they didn’t intend to when they snapped them.

Part of me feels justified in posting this because there are so many writers and artists and reporters and network television stations getting away with doing so much worse with absolutely no compunction. It’s only people like me who openly call ourselves pornographers who are recognized for exploiting and objectifying others even though we play be much stricter rules and are faced with much harsher penalties for violating them than any other industry would be. But that train of thought is just another diversion from asking myself how *I* would feel if my neighbor were peeping through a crack in the blinds taking pictures of ME doing yardwork or thinking he’s not home when I sunbathe naked on our deck when actually he’s hidden behind a tree and rubbing his crotch against its bark. Of course, I’d feel totally different about it if I had a teenage son or daughter being spied on. But the guy chopping wood is clearly an adult. And he wasn’t sunbathing naked. And again, I don’t think I’d care if my neighbor secretly stood in his kitchen taking pictures of me as I walk around OUR kitchen at night topless (which I do sometimes with the blinds open, not because I’m an exhibitionist but because I just don’t care) as long as he didn’t hang them in the post office with our address printed on them or something.

Meh. Now that I think about it, I really don’t care. As long as someone stays on their own property (not sneaking onto mine or a stranger actually stalking into the neighborhood to spy on us or putting on an obscene display of masturbating and shooting cum into our yard) and is only taking pictures of what I do outside or with the windows open then who cares. It’s kind of fucked up, but not a huge deal. It’s not like I’m lying in wait every day, conducting surveillance on everything that our neighbors and their visitors do.

After completely overthinking this, I absolve myself from guilt. It’s harmless and legal. But I guess if I give myself permission to be an opportunistic voyeur-perv-photographer that means I have to stop being shocked and offended by other people who do the same thing. I’m reluctant to do that.

Here’s a couple with a sleeping bag and no picnic basket that I shot entirely because I knew they were setting out to lie down together and *do things*:

If I hadn’t admitted that and had posted the picture somewhere else, like on a stock photo site using woman-approved keywords like “young love” and “spring romance” (and cropped out our cracked windshield & wipers giving away that I’m like a dirty old man doing a drive-by) it would probably be perceived in a totally different way. It would just be a bad snapshot. But because of who I am and what my site is and my confession that I’m a voyeuristic pervert who sees sexual potential everywhere, it seems more DIRTY and exploitative than it really is. What if a local television station were doing one of those weather “stories” about how people were still going to the beach even though it’s overcast, and those two lovebirds were in the background? Would the station be committing an evil deed? If not, why does it seem so evil when I do it and admit that I see erotic potential? And why would it seem so much grosser and more evil if I were a man instead of a woman?

Bah.

Speaking of double standards and being a horny woman, check out this post by Goddess Glory where she describes her friend getting mad at her for drooling over a waitress’s ass at dinner:

“. . . my mind was completely focused on fantasizing bout our waitress’ beautifully ginormous ass sitting on my face, cutting off my air supply.”

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.

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

Bloggers and webwhores around the world are making “year in review” posts right now. I’m not very good at instantly recalling and ranking The Most Important Things That Happened Last Year (seriously, I’m not even capable of ordering food in a drive-through — something every other moron in America is MORE than competent at). I do feel really excited about 2009, though. It’s like the past four months have been a slow, gradual process of skill-building, cleaning-up, clarifying and prioritizing to prepare for a great new year/rest-of-my-life.

Before I sum up my too-personal stuff, here’s a picture of me from way back in February of 2002, before my members-only area opened, right around the time I met “my houseboy” before she became Delia:

And photos from a couple of my favorite shoots this year:

Probably the most important thing that happened in 2008 was we both started going to twelve step meetings. If I just said, “the most important thing that happened in 2008 was Delia stopped drinking” it might make more sense to people, but that really isn’t the most important thing that happened. The most important thing for me (and equally important for our relationship) is that when she stopped drinking this time AND started going to meetings, I had to start getting my OWN shit together instead of thinking things were just hard because of her alcoholism. I sort of thought everything was perfect before EXCEPT for her drinking, but the month after she stopped? It totally wasn’t perfect, because I had a complete meltdown. Obviously I know *I* am not perfect and I know a lot of the ways I’m an asshole (and will continue to be no matter how hard I sometimes try to stop being), but I really didn’t have a plan or consistently work towards or ask for any help being a better, happier, healthier, nicer person. Working and worrying about other people (what they’re THINKING, what they’re DOING, what they EXPECT from me, how I think they’re so fucking WRONG/fucked up, etc.) were my top priorities. I didn’t really accept that me being a crazy asshole was/is my absolute biggest problem.

They seem like a simple concepts to apply to life — just worry about your OWN shit, don’t try to control anyone/thing except yourself — but no matter how much I know those things on a rational level, applying them on a daily basis is a struggle and going to meetings helps me with that in a way nothing else ever has before.

Getting back on Ritalin has helped a lot, too. Another thing that’s helping is making exercising a priority — on December 5th I moved “exercising” to the top of my to-do list. I’ve exercised 21 days out of the past 29 (walking, dancing, stretching, DDRing, pilates, etc.). I need to keep reminding myself that my health is a bigger priority than work — that taking care of myself IS my job and the foundation of doing everything else better. And being less of a crazy asshole.

This year when I filed our 2007 taxes (late, in October) I also had to face that we didn’t meet our money goals in 2008; like, our sales were almost exactly the same as in 2007 when my goal was to double it (not as insane as it sounds, especially given our growth rate in years past). It’s not that I’m not thankful — I know that lots of people made LESS money in 2008 than 2007 — but there’s really no excuse for us not to be making more money. Yes, it’s hard. But it’s at the point now where we really NEED to, and that challenge/brink-of-disaster is good for me because it focuses me. I’ve been pushing everything to the sidelines that is not an efficient way of meeting our sales goals and promising myself not to pick those things up again until our goals are met and I can *justify* doing all those extra things and have the *resources* to do them well.

We also tried harder in 2008 to take days off. We didn’t succeed in doing that consistently/regularly, so I should make that a resolution for this year. In general 2008 taught me that I can do more work better by not trying to do so MUCH of it and by working on improving myself.

In between meetings, exercise, Ritalin, fewer goals in my field of vision/better priorities, I felt really good about taking down the 2008 calendar and hanging up 2009. Everything feels like it’s falling into place and I feel more patient about the time that’s taking than I ever have before, and massively excited about the way Delia’s and my relationship with each other is evolving and deepening — our need to spend non-work time with each other and making/hearing music, fucking, laughing, kissing, talking, cleaning house, playing games, etc. is another huge motivator to push other stuff off the table so we can just ENJOY each other.

I am still going to be an asshole in 2009, but I will be a healthier asshole with a more flexible pucker. I know I won’t STOP blowing hot, rank air but I will concentrate on cooling it down and remind myself to focus on cleaning myself up from the inside out to reduce my stench. I will be a more kissable asshole in 2009, and if all goes well perhaps I will be wiping myself with money by the time 2010 rolls around.

Yes, an asshole can dream.

Everyone’s been talking about Bettie Page’s recent death. I felt almost guiltily unphased by it, especially considering that I cried when I heard Bernie Mac died.

Tonight I burst into tears upon reading that Majel Barrett (Gene Roddenberry’s wife) passed away.

I’m a latecomer to Star Trek; even though the original series did make an impression on me as a little kid, it was of alien go-go boot sexiness and little else. It was only after Delia and I watched Trekkies that I got drawn in and we watched all of Next Generation from beginning to end. Gene and Majel Roddenberry’s work and values have come to mean a lot to me; I’m thankful and inspired by the positive and progressive ways Star Trek depicts gender, sexuality, aging and ethics.

Whenever I see Majel on tv, a burst of love, appreciation and adoration swells up inside of me and I SCREAM it to her.

Her characters are inspirations to me and the work she and Gene Roddenberry did together and legacy they’ve left behind are models of working relationships, vision, humanitarianism and hope that make me feel richer, happier, and better about myself and other people.

We’ll miss you, Majel.

While other women are out shopping for bargains today, we’re staying home to masturbate on cam. Yes, I planned it that way deliberately to target the men in the states who stay home jacking off to internet porn while the wimmin-folk are out in the malls blowing money.

I’m sure many of those women would call me evil, exploiting the Thanksgiving holiday for profit by appealing to people’s “base” instincts. Leading their men-folk astray and causing them to cyber-cheat while their loving wives are out dutifully blowing wads of dough.

Can you tell I think that’s all a crock of shit? The way the chaste and moral crowd points their fingers at whores like me while they’re out TRAMPLING PEOPLE TO DEATH for Black Friday bargains?

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

As far as I know, no one has ever had a miscarriage watching porn, so take THAT family values!

I break out into a cold sweat whenever I hear about and imagine crowds-gone-wild; all of those sports arena horror stories and such make me crap my pants; I am deathly afraid of the mob, of our basest, wild-eyed instincts stomping the fuck out of each other. Of having the breath crushed out of me.

We were watching one of those MOST SHOCKING CRAZY-ASS THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO shows the other night showing a riot in Vancouver after a hockey game; people running amok, setting shit on fire, overturning cop cars, smashing into storefronts, etc. It’s just bizarre to me that people are so scared by PORN and do so much to try to censor it out of existence, but no one ever says we should stop allowing mass-attendance at sporting events, or we should ban sports all together. It’s a stupid proposal, I guess, but one that makes WAY MORE SENSE than getting rid of porn or continuing all the lame-ass crackdowns on sex work in general.

People are fucking insane, especially when they’re in large groups where they feel no personal responsibility for the damage that can be done by the mad power of the unstoppable horde.

On that note, I must now prepare myself for the unruly, anonymous crowds that might attend my webcam show in a couple of hours. But no matter how badly they behave, it couldn’t possibly be as unpleasant as SHOPPING today.

Thanks to Delia for the heads up on today’s trampling death.

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.