| Un: | My self. |
| Deux: | My friends. |
| Trois: | My past. |
| Quatre: | Memories. |
| Viewing the 6 newest posts. | |
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Here Be Dragons
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| Thu 31 May 2007 |
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This LJ Abuse / Warriors For Innocence debacle has brought up an important conflict in the way we use terms like "rights." A number of users have written that LJ has violated their right to free speech. On the other hand, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jamie_miller makes the point that words like censorship, free speech, and right to expression pertain to the relationship between a government and its citizens. Only a government can commit censorship; a private, for-profit company can allow or disallow whatever content it chooses on its servers.A few months ago I engaged in a discussion with febomac about whether the partner of a pregnant woman has a right to a say in whether she has an abortion. Of course not, I said, that's a relic of the patriarchy; should an abusive or absent partner be able to force a woman to carry a pregnancy and run the health risks of childbearing? To which she responded, quite sensibly and from a much different angle, but shouldn't some partners have a say? If my husband and I were to conceive a child, I feel like he would have a right to some say in what happened to it.In essence, we were having two different conversations. I couldn't understand what she meant: how could some people have a right, and others with the same legal status not have it? And there's the key: I was thinking of legal status. When I used the term "right," I was thinking of it in the very narrow, legal sense of the term: absolute obligation enforced by the government universally on all people who fall into the same category in its view. But that's not how we use the term on a daily basis. We say, "I have a right to know if my boyfriend is cheating on me." "I have a right to be involved in that decision about the budget at work, because I've put a lot of time into it." "I have a right to know what my grade is in the class at the moment." Now, I think we understand, when we say it, that we mean it in some private sense that's unrelated to the government; we understand that we couldn't sue to get involved in that work decision. Where it gets slippery is in cases like this one, which involve a private institution -- a university campus; LiveJournal -- that had previously permitted certain freedoms, revoking them. When users assert that we have a "right" to write what we want in our privately-owned speech outlet, some of us mean it in the private sense; some mean it in the legal sense; and some of us haven't made the distinction. There are certain private institutions that act in a quasi-governmental capacity, I would argue, and therefore we expect, intuitively, that they will operate under principles similar to the ones that bind the government. University policies of fairness and intellectual freedom lead us to expect it to behave in much the same way as a government institution, which is purportedly bound by those principles. Because LiveJournal had not previously regulated the content of its journals, we come to think of it as operating under the free-press umbrella. Now, in a strict legal sense, this isn't true. And on occasions when that becomes apparent, like this one, there is a lot of outrage. The legal picture is not the whole picture. I may not have a legal right to give input on that work decision, but that doesn't mean that there would be no moral violation if I were left out. We use the term "right" in two senses, then. One is legal. The other is moral. To make the distinction clear, I'll replace the moral sense with "claim" and "obligation." A husband does not have, and should not have, an absolute legal right to veto his wife's abortion by virtue of his legal status as her husband. In the context of an ongoing, loving relationship, though, a given individual man might have a moral claim to participate in the decisions surrounding his partner's pregnancy. And legally, LiveJournal can control the content it permits on its servers however it sees fit. But they've created a community that was instituted and perpetuated on the premise of (relatively) unrestricted expression and communication. We are invested in this community as such. Thus, morally, we have a claim upon them to continue to provide this environment, in accordance with their prior actions. And it's morally appropriate to experience and express outrage at a capricious, unjustified change in that environmnent. |
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| Sat 30 December 2006 |
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There are a number of books about stripping and other sex work, a small explosion of which were published in the past year or so. Most of these follow a certain formula: a third wave feminist or postfeminist college graduate straps on some platforms and spends one year dancing in an expensive gown club or taking calls from an elite escort agency. Then she quits and writes a book about it. "Whee! Look at me! I took off my clothes! I'm so empowered, and such a rebel against my nice-girl background! I can be a feminist too!" Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It As a Girl For Hire, by Sarah Katherine Lewis ( markedformetal), stands out in a number of pleasant ways from the crowd of sex-work books. Lewis entered the industry because she was sick of food service work, not because she was sick of her high-powered desk job (or needed a subject for her master's thesis). Ten years after her first terrified day in the "lingerie modeling" branch, Lewis is still an adult worker. And unlike most of the authors, whose clients never get within six feet or see their exposed pink bits, Lewis does what she has to do to pay her rent: grinding crotches, getting licked, and dealing with a veritable ocean of foul-smelling semen.Not that she's writing this to titillate -- nor, one hopes, are you reading it that way. The reason it matters is that the other writers' work experience is the equivalent of being a server at the Russian Tea Room or the Four Seasons: hard work, no doubt, but worlds removed from the exhausting, disgusting, degrading ordeal that is the Friday night shift at Waffle House. The analogy barely scratches the surface: it hardly does justice to the distinction between gyrating on a squeaky-clean platform, doused in glitter and wearing a G-string and pasties and having men put down money for the privilege of sitting six feet away, versus feigning enjoyment and arousal in a filthy back room while a grossly malodorous man gropes your nude body and moans about wanting to do revolting things to you. The former is the province of a fortunate few who are well-spoken, thin, relatively young, middle class (no tattoos, good teeth), urban and savvy. The latter is what's available to everyone else. The former is titillating, and it gets the writers published. The latter is appalling, and it's the story that Lewis tells without batting a single eyelash. Allowing those few privileged, slumming graduate students to claim the story of the whole industry erases the endless violations of most sex work. In so doing, it does a grave disservice to the women who work in the industry because they must -- and who have no choice but to do the "extras" and "dirty work" that the high-end gown-club women are able to avoid by virtue of their unmarked, middle-class bodies. Lewis's voice is sorely needed. One of the most refreshing aspects of Indecent is that it doesn't try to maintain complete consistency or take a definite stand or position: a Verdict on the Adult Industry. Some days Lewis feels sexy and powerful, other days remote and appalled. At times she points out quite reasonably that no one would ever do this for any reason other than money, while at others she describes craving the thrill of mastering a new segment of the industry, or wanting to maximize her earnings not because she must but because she can. She notes rather wistfully that stability, marriage and children have become the norm for women of her age, but revels in the freedom of living unattached and being able to pick up and go on a moment's notice. Although some might call this disjointed or incoherent, to level such a charge is to miss the point. The apparent chasm between self-professed "sex-positive third-wavers" (sex work as empowerment) and so-called "sex-negative second-wavers" (sex work as exploitation) is not particularly germane to the actual experience of being a career sex worker. What Lewis shows so well is that on a day-to-day basis, that experience is sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both at once, and frequently "none of the above": merely menial and tiring. It's precisely this complexity -- the glamor and seediness, the sensuality and apathy, the feigned emotion and brutal exploitation, the high payoff and uncountable cost -- that makes the industry such a juggernaut. Lewis, too, is a juggernaut in her own right, whip-smart, powerful, articulate, strong, working the system with the best of them. Her battles with and within the adult industry make for an edgy, gripping read that refuses easy answers. |
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| Sat 23 September 2006 |
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In other T-shirt annoyance news, I'm sick of brand new T-shirts advertising products from the 80s: Nintendo, Thundercats, Strawberry Shortcake, Tab. It's a double layer of capitalist branding and consumer need-creation, a corporation slurping up the backwash from the marketing done by an unrelated corporation 20 years ago. I can't decide what's worse, the cynicism of the Target or Gadzooks in selling the shirts and milking our too-precious twentysomething nostalgia, or my generation's uncritical purchasing of said products -- i.e., the demonstration that the corporate cynicism was literally right on the money. Why should my generation choose to define itself in terms of cheap mass-marketed ephemera? It was terrible the first time around and we ate it up because we were six years old. How are we proud that our formative experiences were of disposable yuppie crap, some company contracting out the production of meaning and memories to the lowest bidder and then marketing it to us as our childhood? Why are we not outraged about that? Why, instead, do we happily buy it all over again twenty years later when we ought to have developed the critical capacity to see through it?! What does it mean to advertise a brand that no longer exists? It means that the brand has taken on a life of its own. We're now well beyond the corporation as legal person; we've arrived at the brand as cultural person. More than most historical figures, the story and significance of Atari lives on in the hearts and minds of America's youth. Picking up a falling-apart T-shirt with a defunct brand from Goodwill for fifty cents was an ironic statement (however limited) on the transience of popular culture. For Abercrombie and Fitch to take a brand-new T-shirt, beat the crap out of it using pumice gotten by destroying a mountain, reprint an obsolete logo on it and sell it for twenty bucks to people who have no critical eye is a twisted and retwisted symbol of the way we live now. Nothing means anything. Fake is the new real. Let's not forget the classed and raced aspect of these things: you're advertising your lifelong membership in middle-class white America. If you grew up outside white middle-class America, your experience of these things would have been of not being able to afford them and not belonging to the culture they were selling. Yes, I grew up with Get In Shape Girl!, an Easy Bake Oven and Shrinky-Dinks. But I am not proud of that. I have no desire to literally advertise that as a badge of pride, to laud the corporate genesis of the experience of my childhood by giving money to another corporation who's iteratively generating yet more profit from the fact that my lived experience was already a corporate cash-in from the moment I was conceived. |
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| Sat 09 September 2006 |
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(This is a public clone of my friendslocked post, for lostcosmonaut's linking purposes.) Because I don't find the Bertrand Russell argument for atheism persuasive, nor any logic that objects to Christians rather than Christianity. As usual I don't mean this as an attack on anyone and I don't intend to offend. Just working out my own thoughts in my own journal. If you yourself feel that God exists, I'm happy for you and in certain ways envious. It must be comforting.
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| Sat 20 May 2006 |
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Sometime between midnight and 1 AM today, five workers in a coal mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, died in an explosion. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060520/ap_ Harlan County ought to have been regarded as a national tragedy long before this. Like most of southeastern Kentucky, this is a place that virtually is coal mining. Hemmed in by mountains as far as the eye can see, barely connected to the rest of the world by hours of tortuous two-lane roads that are frequently washed out, and run by a few elite families who ensure that the schools, the federal money, the jobs, the roads, and the elections all benefit them and their proteges and no one else. The things that happen in Harlan County are things that I used to believe simply didn't happen in America in the 21st century: vote-buying, corruption, schools where the students never learn to read because teaching jobs are allocated based on political favoritism, people who live indefinitely on government checks because they haven't been given the life skills to reach another way to live. The men work in the coal mines or they don't work, the women teach or stay home, the children plot to leave and they get into trouble and they have babies and they drop out of schools that weren't teaching them anyway. It resembles a cross between an American inner city and a company-run banana republic. Just as the corruption in Latin American governments was created and perpetuated by the United States' systematic crippling of the countries' power structures, so Big Coal in the early 20th century used force and favoritism to create dependence in its workers. When the major companies stepped out when the profits shrank, the power vacuum was filled by the certain favored local families, who continued to run the county in the same exploitative fashion as their predecessors. We're at war in Iraq. So oil prices are surging. So demand for coal has rebounded. So there's a sudden demand for mine workers, which can't keep pace with the supply of skilled workers since the coal industry has been shrinking its hiring since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the coal companies, synonymous with power in these counties, have been cutting safety corners with impunity for as long as the industry has existed. And today, May 20, 2006, five men, in a narrow endless underground black tunnel in the middle of the night, died for the same industry they'd been living for. |
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| Mon 24 November 2003 |
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Hi! This journal is friends-only. If you want in on the party, please: 1) Add me to your list. 2) Leave me a comment introducing yourself so that I may be satisfactorily assured that you are not a stalker or a ghost from my past (or present). 3) I'll add you, unless you fall into the aforementioned categories, in which case you may kindly fuck off. Thanks. -The Management |
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Here Be Dragons
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