A much-shortened version of this review ran last week in the Chicago Reader. I also had an essay here a little bit ago about some other reactions to the book.
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It’s because I do see sex as sacred and potentially spiritual that I believe in commercializing it and making this potentially holy experience more easily available to all.
That’s Chester Brown , writing in the lengthy appendices to Paying For It, his graphic memoir about his experiences as a john. The quote is odd not so much for what it says as for what it doesn’t. Specifically, throughout the book Brown sets himself firmly against the ideas of romantic love and marriage, and touts sex-as-commercial-experience not just as a reasonable arrangement for him, but as the best arrangement for everybody. What, then, exactly, is the sacred nature of sex for Brown? Or, to put it another way, if the sacredness of sex isn’t about love, what’s it about?
In some ways, you could see Brown’s entire book as an answer to this question. The narrative starts as he and his girlfriend, Sook-Yin, go through an amicable break-up, and he realizes he doesn’t want to have a romantic relationship ever again. In fact, he decides that romantic relationships are actively bad. “…being in a romantic relationship brings up all [Sook-yin’s] insecurities,” he notes. “It does that for everyone — me too.”
Convinced of the evils of romance, yet not willing to give up on having sex, Brown eventually decides to get some the old fashioned way — by paying for it. As he learns the ins and outs of being a john (how to find an escort, when to tip, where to look for reviews online) he also becomes a more and more adamant proponent of legalization. The graphic novel alternates between Brown’s encounters with different “whores” (as he sometimes calls them) and his arguments with friends, family, and the prostitutes themselves about the morality of prostitution.
These arguments, continued in the appendices and notes, are by and large quite convincing. Admittedly, I’m biased — I thought criminalizing sex-work was a bad idea before I started reading the book. Even so, Brown pushed hard against my already-very-liberal opinions. He argues forcefully that prostitution should be not only legalized, but completely unregulated. In the appendix, for example, he points out that legal prostitutes in Nevada often aren’t allowed to leave the brothel without permission, and are sometimes forced to buy condoms and even food from the brothel-owner at exorbitant prices. These women, then, are much more exploited than they would be if they weren’t regulated, or even than they would be if they were just working illegally. Brown is also compelling when he insists that prostitutes should not be subject to mandatory health testing. “Medical treatment,” he says to his friend, the cartoonist Seth, “should always be voluntary. It should never be forced on anyone.”
But while Brown’s words make a strong case for the dignity and necessity of legalized prostitution, his comic itself is, seemingly unintentionally, more ambivalent. This is most noticeable in the portrayal of the prostitutes themselves. Brown, of course, uses fake names for all of them. He also, as he notes in the foreword, deliberately removes any reference to their real lives — boyfriends, children, childhoods, families. “I wish I had the freedom to include that material…,” Brown says, “it would have brought the women to life a full human beings and made this a better book.”
That’s no doubt true. But one could argue that, despite his protests to the contrary, Brown actually goes out of his way to dehumanize the women he sleeps with. Specifically, he never shows their faces. Presumably, this is meant to protect their anonymity — but he’s drawing them. He could change their faces, just as he made them all brunettes. By showing us only the backs of their heads, he turns them all into expressionless ciphers. His trysts with them seem like ritualized encounters with dolls. This is even more the case since Brown rarely varies layout or style; his comics are series of small squares, often with minimal backgrounds. His representations of sex, similarly, have a regimented similarity; he and the woman are placed against a black background, fucking with the joyless, repetitive deliberation of wind-up dolls.
Brown’s depiction of himself is even more disturbing. A thin man, he draws himself as a death’s head, his glasses staring blank and pupilless. And then words start to robotically issue from that cadaverous skull, reasoned arguments grinding forth like the granite lid scraping across a tomb. “Romantic….love…is…evil…*click* marriage…is…evil…*click* there…is…only…money…and…desire…click*”
Brown has, in short, turned himself into an uncanny libertarian caricature. And it is this libertarianism — along with its forefather, enlightenment utilitarianism — which forms the basis for his dislike of romantic love. Romantic love, he argues, “causes more misery than happiness.” It is wrong because its calculus is wrong; instead of maximizing joy, it interferes with the cheerful autonomous operation of the individual. Brown touts his own long-term, monogamous relationship with a prostitute named Denise precisely because it is entirely based on his own desire, rather than on potentially traumatizing reciprocity. “I’m having sex with Denise because I want to, not because I made a marriage vow to her or because she’d get jealous because I saw someone else.”
And this, I think, is why Brown sees sex as sacred. It’s because sex, especially paid sex, is divorced utterly from commitment or community. As a libertarian, he worships the individual, and sex is the ultimate expression of the individual autonomously pursuing pleasure. Brown even argues that prostitution, once legalized, should not be taxed. The government and, indeed, society has no place in the bedroom. Sex is sacred because it is private.
The irony here is that Brown thinks that he’s somehow challenging the basis of romantic love. The truth, though, is that he is merely carrying that logic of romance through to its conclusion.
In the 1978 essay, Sex and Politics: Bertrand Russell and ‘Human Sexuality,’ theologian Stanley Hauerwas notes that
marriage can be sustained only so long as it is clear what purposes it serves in the community which created it in the first place. With the loss of such a community sanction, we are left with the bare assumption that marriage is a voluntary instituion motivated by the need for interpersonal intimacy.
Romantic love, as Hauerwas says, is already an ideology of autonomous atomization. It assumes that you marry for love, and that love is an ideal because it is personally fulfilling. Brown does not dispute the liberal, capitalist goal of personal fulfillment; he just argues that liberal, capitalist fulfillment is ideally maximized by the market.
That’s a logical position, obviously. Indeed, its so logical it starts to verge on madness. If everyone is an entirely independent desiring subject in theory, then in practice everyone is an object, reduced, like Brown’s prostitutes, to blank toys manipulated for everyone else’s mechanical satisfaction. That’s true whether we’re trying to maximize our individuality through romantic love or through the sacred orgasms of capital. If we want a less soul-crushing sexual ethic, we may need to consider the possibility that sex is about other people, and possibly about God. In the meantime, I guess, like Chester Brown, we can look forward to life as happy, fulfilled, free-spending skulls.
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Addendum: I didn’t have space for this in the initial review, but I did want to highlight what I think is one of the most interesting interchanges in the book. Brown is talking post-coitally to a prostitute named Edith. Brown explains to her that he no longer believes in romantic love, which is why he visits prostitutes. He outlines the arguments I’ve already discussed, emphasizing especially that people change over time, and that it’s not fair to either partner to be tied down to a romantic relationship when both will eventually change.
The end of the conversation is as follows:
Edith:Yes, but you can try to continue to understand your partner. And if you love him or her you’d be willing to make that effort.
Brown: Yeah, effort. Romantic love is work. Call me lazy, but I don’t want to do the work.
Edith: If I met the right guy, I’d be happy to do the work. It takes work to get anything worthwhile in life.
What’s interesting here is that Edith gets the last word, her dialogue floating above Brown’s inevitably expressionless stare. Brown never makes any attempt to refute her — not in the narrative, not in the notes (which don’t mention this exchange at all.)
I suspect the back and forth with Seth will get more attention for various reasons (it’s longer, it’s Seth.) But this is the moment in the book where Brown comes closest to letting someone get the better of him. Edith’s argument — that relationships are about work, and that that is in fact what makes them worthwhile — is a fine thumbnail paraphrase of Hauerwas’ position, and Brown, apparently, has no response to it.
There’s a nice irony, too, in the fact that Edith, who is extolling the virtue of work, is in fact working as she speaks. The sequence get at the class divide between Brown (artsy middle-class hipster with disposable income) and the women he’s seeing, and raises the question — largely unexamined in the book — of privilege.
I don’t think that Brown is actually endorsing Edith’s position. The rest of the book makes it quite clear that yes, he really does think prostitution is the ideal way to conduct sexual relations. Even when he admits that he is in love with Denise, he does so by arguing that paid sex is the ideal expression of, and venue for, that love. Still, he’s to be commended for giving someone else a chance to put forward a contrary view; that you get, not what you pay for, but what you work for.
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Update: Naomi Fry’s review at tcj.com posted today touches on some of the same issues discussed here.
“Brown has, in short, turned himself into an uncanny libertarian caricature. And it is this libertarianism — along with its forefather, enlightenment utilitarianism — which forms the basis for his dislike of romantic love.”
I would argue that it is the significant emotional abuse he suffered as a child which forms the basis for his attachment issues, and that he libertarianism is just a convenient rationalization.
All this fuss. Would that jerking off would be sufficient.
Hey Tom. I didn’t know he’d suffered emotional abuse as a child. I don’t know anything about his biography (haven’t read the book about his mother’s schizophrenia.)
I was referring to the logical basis, rather than the psychological one. Still…if he has psychological reasons, those don’t necessarily invalidate the logical ones.
Funnyanimal, you need to create a comic diatribe arguing that masturbation, not prostitution, is the ideal way for our society to satisfy it’s erotic needs!
This is my favorite review of PFI, and also the most thoroughgoing in its attempt to pin down the logic that underlies Brown’s argument on its own terms. It’s insightful and generous but maintains a critical edge. I apologize for unsettling the mutually antagonistic ethos of the HU comments section, but man, this made for some good lunchtime reading.
Aw, thanks!
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Chester Brown says:
It’s because I do see sex as sacred and potentially spiritual that I believe in commercializing it and making this potentially holy experience more easily available to all.
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(!!!!!!!) “So logical it starts to verge on madness,” indeed.
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Tom S says:
I would argue that it is the significant emotional abuse he suffered as a child which forms the basis for his attachment issues, and that he libertarianism is just a convenient rationalization.
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Yes. And I did read that Brown story about his mother’s schizophrenia; though would quibble that rather than abuse (which implies active malevolence) it was more a case of childhood trauma which led to his bottling up of emotions (despite clearly having them) pattern. What is also called…
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Blunted affect is the scientific term describing a lack of emotional reactivity on the part of an individual. It is manifest as a failure to express feelings either verbally or non-verbally, even when talking about issues that would normally be expected to engage the emotions. Expressive gestures are rare and there is little animation in facial expression or in vocal inflection.
Victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome are often said to display blunted affect. Veterans of intense combat have been described as having the thousand-yard stare…Some of these veterans suffer from a disorder once referred to as shell shock and may experience a number of symptoms, including recurring nightmares, hypervigilance, and avoidance of situations that may cause distress. Others have developed less emotional reactivity as an arguably natural reaction to stress. Those displaying on this end of the spectrum may self-report dissociation but no psychological distress per se. People diagnosed with this disorder often endure a chronic course of blunted affect with the onset being subtle yet considerable.
The precise boundary between the generally positive personality trait “serious” and the generally pathological “blunted affect” is impossible to describe precisely because it is culture specific and relies on subjective values…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blunted_affect
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Nate says:
This is my favorite review of PFI, and also the most thoroughgoing in its attempt to pin down the logic that underlies Brown’s argument on its own terms. It’s insightful and generous but maintains a critical edge. I apologize for unsettling the mutually antagonistic ethos of the HU comments section, but…
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It was pretty outstanding; one of the best I’ve seen from you, Noah, and overall the finest essay written — so far, anyway — on “Paying for It.”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I did want to highlight what I think is one of the most interesting interchanges in the book….
Brown: Yeah, effort. Romantic love is work. Call me lazy, but I don’t want to do the work.
Edith: If I met the right guy, I’d be happy to do the work. It takes work to get anything worthwhile in life.
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Bless her heart! I hope she does meet the right guy. The irony, that someone one would think would be most cynically burned-out, is the humane voice of reason here…
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There’s a nice irony, too, in the fact that Edith, who is extolling the virtue of work, is in fact working as she speaks.
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Which segues into a thought that had occurred to me; isn’t Brown, selling a book telling about and depicting himself having sex, in the “sex business” too? (At least the “arty erotica” subdivision.)
While having these experiences, was the thought of turning them into what is — whatever its artistic merits — also a commercial product, on his mind?
It’s…pretty difficult to imagine anyone using this as stroke material, I have to say. it is not a very sexy book.
But thanks for you kind words about the review!
Noah, a petty nit-pick, perhaps, but…could you resist that vile journalese habit of using ‘notes’ as a mere synonym of ‘says’ or ‘writes’?
It colors your text in ways you don’t necessarily anticipate…
I’m probably too far down that road already, alas. So far down I don’t know which way is up, as I think somebody has noted….
“Been down so long, it looks like up to me…”
Kris Kristofferen? Who, dang it?
I think it’s a traditional blues lyric.
Could be, I’m such a whitebread I wouldn’t know.
The sentiment is, though, alas all too familiar.
This book really makes me embarrassed for the comics world. If Chester Brown wants to make a creepy, crackpotted spectacle of himself, I suppose that’s his business. But did everybody have to go whole-hog to identify themselves, and by extension, the field with this thing? Judging from the comics-media sites, it’s the book of the year so far. It’s Chester Brown week over at TCJ, for pity’s sake.
This is probably the best review of the book I’ve seen, by the way. I liked Fiore’s a lot, too, but I could done without all the winking at the reader. You know, he’d be into hookers if he just had more money on hand. Spare me.
Thanks!
I haven’t read Robert’s yet….I thought Naomi Fry’s was pretty good. She’s certainly not especially enthusiastic about it.
I don’t think it’s a bad book. It raises interesting issues at least, even if I ultimately really don’t agree with where he’s coming from. I guess I’m a little surprised at how excited folks are by him…formally it doesn’t really do very much…but I guess that’s autobio comics for you….
I don’t think every utilitarian would agree with Chester Brown … I guess Bentham probably would. John Stuart Mill would probably claim that Brown’s preferences are lower pleasures, and that by forsaking companionate love he’s forsaking a higher pleasure which would actually give him more utility. But Mill was never a “pure” utilitarian.
You know, I’ve never read Bentham. I just tried to read Mill’s autobiography, and it was like eating my way through 12 bowls of dry cornflakes. Which is not unlike the experience of reading Brown.
Anyway…I think you’re right that Mill and possibly Bentham would balk at this particular extension of their ideas. I think it is an extension of their ideas though….
Okay, read R. Fiore’s essay now.
And…though it’s of course well written — wow, I really am surprised at how much I hate that essay. I think it’s a lot more morally dubious — even contemptible — than Brown’s book. Fiore’s jovial, winking, we’re-all-above-taking-these-issues-seriously thing really serves him extremely poorly in this context. He just seems oleaginous and so embarrassed by the subject matter that he can’t do anything except ritually chant “I’m not a Puritan! I’m not a Puritan!” over and over again.
Maybe it struck me worse than it is, though I don’t think I can make myself read through it again. I do like his writing a lot sometimes, but man, when he misfires it’s kind of gruesome….
This is an excellent piece, as everyone has said (written? pointed out? noted?).
Robert – What’s embarrassing about discussing prostitution and the legality thereof? Is it that people are paying a lot of attention to a book which depicts the author unapologetically engaging in a behavior with which you disagree? Do you think that Brown is so deeply, obviously wrong that even entertaining his views is embarrassing?
I really hope you don’t mean to imply that “non-mainstream” views such as Brown’s are “crackpot” – if so, you’re dismissing many of the major traditions of political thought out of hand. Just because they’re not popular name brands here and now doesn’t mean that they should be taken less than seriously.
Noah – One thing I’d protest is your conflation of the liberal (or, rather, liberty-minded) value of personal fulfillment with capitalism. Contemporary capitalist consumerism is very bound up, certainly, with selling (illusions of) personal fulfillment – but personal fulfillment is just as much a factor in radical discourse, and as a partisan to radicalism, I of course see radical ideas of personal fulfillment as generally much more real than those offered by capitalism. In fact, isn’t the capitalist sale of consumerism as a way to personal fulfillment just a highly efficient derail of a radical desire for self-liberation and self-realization?
Having read Mill’s On Liberty, I seriously doubt that he (at that point in his writing, at least) would have been in favor of the criminalization of prostitution. That doesn’t mean he would’ve favored the employment of prostitutes as a way to personal fulfillment, though.
Ha! The thing about Mill’s work is that his ideas are fairly simple, and his prose is not convoluted. But he is MINDNUMBINGLY boring, it was impossible for me to read “On Liberty” for more than a few pages without taking a break.
Richard – I think I found On Liberty pretty exciting at the time, but it was one of my first exposures to the politics of radical liberty, so that would explain it. Thank baby Jesus I didn’t end up become a “libertarian…”
Noah – Yeah, I couldn’t make it past the binary universalizing on gender in that essay. It’s too bad – he might have had something interesting to say, but I couldn’t put up with the bullshit, so I guess I’ll never know.
Anja…I tend to see the radical demands for personal fulfillment and the liberal/capitalist demands for personal fulfillment as coming from the same impulse…so, yeah, I think this is a point on which we’ve disagreed in the past and will probably continue to disagree in the future. I think there are some radical discourses that are not committed solely to personal fulfillment, though. Marxism is definitely interested/obsessed with community and social bonds, for example….
I think I liked On Liberty okay…but the autobiography, good lord….
Noah – Oop! Yeah, I think I just reflexively universalized my radicalism to radicalism as a whole. Yikes!
For what it’s worth, my own radicalism isn’t committed *solely* to the concept of personal fulfillment. I’m not a socialist because I think that socialism is the only way for autonomous, disconnected individuals to gain radical personal fulfillment – I’m a socialist because I value community and feel on a very personal level how destructive it is not to have any voice in one’s community, not to have a community which provides one with a language in which to safely and fully speak oneself and connect with others. I’m also extremely suspicious of the ability of social planners, vanguards, and other power-holding professional “radicals” to do that community-building, language-crafting work; I think such community-language has to be built by the people who speak it, and owned by the people who build it. That makes me a very liberty-minded socialist.
Am I getting that you’re suspicious of personal fulfillment discourse? You been reading Marxists again? :D
But Marxists aren’t entirely opposed to personal fulfillment, right? Didn’t Marx believe that in a communist society personal and collective fulfillment would be one and the same? Or am I making that up?
I’m somewhat suspicious of them, in that I think they’re capitalist, or continuous with capitalism. I don’t think capitalism is the worst thing in the world, or even bad in every instance. So…yeah, suspicious is a good word, but that doesn’t mean necessarily opposed.
Hey Richard. No; Marx definitely feels that the triumph of the proletariat will lead to personal happiness for all and a more fulfilling life. The trick is (I think) that the oppression really has to be lifted first in the context of class consciousness and struggle. So there are things that are more important than personal fulfillment…and it’s for that reason that personal fulfillment is more fulfilling under Marxism (according to Marx.)
Or at least that’s my take. I’ve read embarrassingly little Marx (just the manifesto, I think, though I reread it recently.) I need to read more.
Richard – Well, that’s certainly what I believe, at any rate. The problem with Marxy types is that they insert an “in the meantime…” clause into that argument, requiring sacrifice of personal freedom until such a time as a stateless society is finally achieved. That, of course, tends to turn into a justification for obeisance to an authoritarian “socialist” state-capitalist body – and the stateless society is held in front of the obedient comrade, like a carrot on a stick. If you sacrifice just a bit more, fellow worker, one day we may have a classless society! Devotion to the liberatory cause is converted into obeisance to power as efficiently as capitalist consumerism converts the desire for radical liberation and personal fulfillment to the constant craving for products.
Hi Noah. On utilitarianism…I’m by no means a historian of philosophy or political philosopher, so take this with a grain of salt. But the historical consensus seems to be that libertarianism has its roots in Locke. And Locke, of course, was writing well before Bentham and Mill.
For mine, Mill would be more accurately described as a liberal, not a libertarian. The difference being, roughly, that a libertarian thinks liberty is intrinsically valuable, while a liberal need not think so. I would guess that Mill thought liberty was either only instrumentally valuable (insofar as it tends towards utility) or else constitutively valuable (insofar as it’s part of utility, among other things). In general, libertarianism and utilitarianism don’t sit together very well.
As to the utilitarian view of prostitution, well, there isn’t such a thing. By and large, utilitarians judge actions, and by extension institutions and laws, by whether they (tend to?) maximise utility. (There are about a million different variants of utilitarianism, which differ on the details, but this is close enough to what they all say). For any given institution/law, it’s an empirical question whether it does or doesn’t maximise utility. And the empirical question doesn’t seem to be entirely settled in the case of legalizing/decriminalizing/regulating prostitution, or at least not obviously so. So reasonable people can disagree on how the utilitarian calculus comes out and, hence, what to say about prostitution.
I’m a utilitarian, I guess, and I’m neutral on what to do about prostitution because I don’t know enough of the relevant facts. The only utilitarians who venture firm opinions on the matter are either more knowledgeable or more foolhardy.
But if it’s going to be legal, then FFS it had better be regulated and, even better, unionized. Arguing against regulation because there are some bad regulations in some places is like…well, arguing that pharmaceuticals should be completely unregulated because the FDA sometimes makes mistakes. Um, no. Surely that’s not Brown’s best argument against regulation?
Jones, the difference is that regulating prostitution means regulating people’s bodies, usually on a pretty intimate level. The potential for abuse is enormous – a regulation scheme could very easily make things worse for the sex workers, as it seems to in Nevada (although mileage varies, I’m sure). That’s not to say that regulation is out of the question as a practical measure, although frankly I personally find it distasteful on bodily autonomy grounds…
Unionization is of course something I reflexively support, although legal sex worker unionization has had literally only one success story in the US, at the Lusty Lady peep show here in San Francisco – which is a substantially different affair from the other strip clubs in the city, in terms of the politics of the place, the kind of dancers hired and so on.
Anja, that’s an interesting difference but I’m not really seeing it. Maybe it’s because I don’t know any of the regulations in question for sex work?
But leaving aside the specifics, I don’t see what’s special about sex work that makes regulation a particularly severe violation of autonomy there. We regulate athletes, doctors, teachers… All of these involve people’s bodies too; there’s nothing magical about sex that puts it in a whole other class…at least as far as I can see.
And if you’re especially worried about autonomy, then one could easily argue that autonomy will be even more impeded in the absence of regulation. (Just as workers’ autonomy is generally worse off in countries with weaker work laws, although they’re “more free” to sell their labour there)
In general, it seems…well, let’s just say “dubious”…that there will be more abuse in the presence of regulation than in its absence. Children were more exploited before the introduction of child labour laws, for instance, even though the laws opened up new avenues for exploitation and a different set of perverse incentives. If the potential for abuse in regulating sex work is enormous, the potential for abuse of sex workers *without* regulation is even enormouser.
The answer to the abuse of regulation isn’t no regulation; it’s better regulation (or better oversight and enforcement). When I hear about Goldman Sachs circumventing US financial regulations, I don’t think “well, what the finance sector needs is *less* regulation…”
Do cop have a tendency to rape and abuse athletes, doctors or teachers?
Sex certainly has it own qualities that make it especially ripe territory for abuse, but my central argument would have to be that the culture we have around sex is unhealthy and dangerous. Coercive power is always at its base immoral; making a deal with that devil for now or for the forseeable future may be necessary until such time as people are finally ready to slowly dissolve coercive power or throw it off, but allowing coercive power to invade our bodies, to dictate how we fuck, is pretty mind-bendingly dangerous. Rape culture will not magically dissolve when sexuality is being handled by state power; state power is coercion. That is its basic nature.
I’m not completely against some regulation as a practical measure – I’d support outlawing pimping and madames in favor of self-employment and collective ownership of brothels. Various other things, like anti-trafficking efforts, free sex worker STD testing and specific protections against sex worker abuse, are pretty obviously desirable. Regulating the workers themselves, though, is more or less completely out of bounds to me.
We regulate doctors in order to protect patients; we would employ the state to regulate prostitutes in order to protect (ie control) the prostitutes themselves, manipulating them to suit our leering obsesions, fears and insecurities around sex. What incentive has a prostitute to engage in unsafe behavior? If a toy company has to recall a product, they get bad PR and lose money; if a prostitute fucks up on safety practices, they may end up personally damaged and/or out of a job. There’s no one more militant about safer sex practices than a sex worker.
Legal prostitutes in Nevada can’t leave the brothels without permission – they’re literally *imprisoned*. Meanwhile, even here in San Francisco the cops have a long record of sex worker abuse. What makes you think that state power can be trusted to get that up close and personal with people’s sexualities without doing some damage?
Regulation is (or should be) a tool, not a moral principle.
What if we think of it in terms of regulating prostitution as opposed to prostitutes, the distinction being that every side of the transaction is entitled to certain protections? Any legislation that protects one side at the expense of another can be considered bad, but without protection I’d be willing to bet that it’s the prostitutes who would lose in the end, particularly given the tendency to blame the victim in cases of sexual exploitation.
Well, Sweden’s just moved away from that model…they’re targeting johns for prosecution, though not women. Many people say it’s a better system which is reducing prostitution. There are some folks who argue that it just effectively criminalizes the job again, and some prostitutes have spoken out against it.
I think Anja’s right that you run into special problems regulating prostitutes because the stigma is so great. Even asking them to register, for example, is a serious burden, since public exposure of their profession can have devastating consequences.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
It’s…pretty difficult to imagine anyone using this as stroke material, I have to say. it is not a very sexy book.
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People are turned on by the darnedest things! Why, on the TCJ message board Matt Feazell once posted a Wonder Woman drawing he’d done, in his trademarked stick-figure style. But, all it took was for WW to have a pair of big ol’ circles on the upper part of her chest, for me to find her awfully appealing…
(Never found that drawing, but ran across this, from Joel Thingvall’s WONDER WOMAN GALLERY: “Joe Matt meets Spanking Wonder Woman”: http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=52697&GSub=6648 )
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Alex Buchet says:
Noah…could you resist that vile journalese habit of using ‘notes’ as a mere synonym of ‘says’ or ‘writes’?
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Hey, I like using “notes” too! Adds some variety instead of repeating “says” and “writes”…
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
This book really makes me embarrassed for the comics world. If Chester Brown wants to make a creepy, crackpotted spectacle of himself, I suppose that’s his business. But did everybody have to go whole-hog to identify themselves, and by extension, the field with this thing? Judging from the comics-media sites, it’s the book of the year so far. It’s Chester Brown week over at TCJ, for pity’s sake.
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I’m more embarrassed in that it’s mainly the lurid, sensational subject, rather than anything remarkable about the approach, or perceptiveness of the narrative (much less the typically-simplistic libertarian arguments), that are what’s getting the book all the attention.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…formally it doesn’t really do very much…but I guess that’s autobio comics for you….
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Yes, that’s the tendency there. At least Alison Bechdel’s fine “Fun Home” — though conservative in its visual style — did a lot of playing around with time, literary allusions, etc.
(Speaking of “blunted affect,” check out young Ms. Bechdel’s deadpan mug in the book as, for instance, she gazes upon a just-killed-in-a-car-accident boy in the care of her mortician dad. A common coping strategy in dysfunctional households; act as if all this weirdness is nothing to react to.)
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Anja Flower says:
…isn’t the capitalist sale of consumerism as a way to personal fulfillment just a highly efficient derail of a radical desire for self-liberation and self-realization?
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Indeed it is! But then, isn’t it a tendency of capitalism to prostitute anything?
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Coercive power is always at its base immoral…
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So the “coercive power” of the police to arrest murderers, rapists, thieves, spouse abusers “is always at its base immoral”?
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…making a deal with that devil for now or for the forseeable future may be necessary until such time as people are finally ready to slowly dissolve coercive power or throw it off…
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Don’t hold your breath! Might as well say, “laws are necessary until people are finally ready to ALL be considerate of others and do the right thing in every circumstance.”
And if “the people” are finally ready to “throw off” coercive power, don’t you think it’d take, well, coerciveness to do so?
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…state power is coercion. That is its basic nature.
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Sounds like you’ve a lot in common with libertarians. In a far-from-ideal world, which is what we will always have, even if some aspects greatly improve, less-than-ideal measures are NECESSARY.
Do you think a factory owner would stop dumping poisons in the river that supplies drinking water by appeal to their “higher nature”? No, coercion — whether by boycotts, heavy fines, or forcible closing of the factory — is necessary.
And if one sees the “basic nature” of a state as merely harsh “coercion,” how easy then to dismiss — as right-wingers and libertarians do — all the good that it can do.
Free public libraries and education, regulated growth-management, environmental protection, nature preserves, food, drug, product, workplace safety, traffic laws and regulations, postal service, minimum wages and the banning of slavery and child labor, roads and so forth, all made possible and financed with taxes through coercion.
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Various other things, like anti-trafficking efforts, free sex worker STD testing and specific protections against sex worker abuse, are pretty obviously desirable. Regulating the workers themselves, though, is more or less completely out of bounds to me.
We regulate doctors in order to protect patients; we would employ the state to regulate prostitutes in order to protect (ie control) the prostitutes themselves, manipulating them to suit our leering obsesions, fears and insecurities around sex…
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So the only reason to regulate someone who could be passing STDs to their customers is because of “our leering obsesions, fears and insecurities around sex”?
How about simple health-protection? In the fashion that “employees must wash hands after using the bathroom” regs (which interfere with “bodily autonomy”) seek to prevent e.coli from getting passed onto food, or — more finickily — food preparers are required to wear hats, or at least hair nets?
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What incentive has a prostitute to engage in unsafe behavior?
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As mentioned in that earlier “Paying for It” thread, some clients reject the suggestion that they wear condoms. Thus, there is a “market demand” encouraging unsafe behavior, in prostitution as well as in the porn industry. With no regulation, hookers and porn performers are also vulnerable to pressure from their “bosses”:
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Darren James…a well-liked porn star known for his courteous nature on set, was at the center of an HIV outbreak that shut down the San Fernando Valley’s multibillion-dollar porn industry for a month in the spring of 2004. He had tested HIV negative just days before performing on screen. After a later test came back positive, James learned that he had spread the virus to three actresses with whom he worked.
In recent months, James has become a advocate of mandatory use of condoms on porn sets to protect performers from HIV. At a hearing of California occupational safety officials in Orange County in March, James called the industry’s reliance on testing performers for HIV a “false security blanket.”
…“The actors … they’re not getting the protection that they need. There should have been mandatory condoms,” James said…
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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/10/former-porn-star-darren-james-speaks-out-about-latest-hiv-case.html
Getting somewhat back on subject again, I didn’t have many problems with the R. Fiore critique, and it had some delightful lines:
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Many are happy to declare themselves regular users of marijuana because the image the practice projects is of a raffish, roguish rebel against petty and foolish laws. The frequenter of prostitutes, even among those who don’t condemn the practice in principle, is seen as a creep, an image that Brown does little to discourage when he draws himself to look like the Crypt Keeper. …
My first hand impressions of working prostitutes was in Hollywood in the late 1970s. In those days the forces of libertinism had pushed all the way up to Pyongyang and were contemplating crossing the Yalu. …
According to the ground rules Brown sets, he doesn’t depict the faces of the women in order to protect their anonymity. Though he attempts to fill in the women’s personalities in the word balloons that render them faceless, if you’re going to hand your opponents a loaded gun you have to expect to get shot with it. …
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http://www.tcj.com/some-girls-work-in-factories-some-girls-work-in-stores/
I tend to agree that assuming prostitutes will be careful out of self-interest only goes so far. As Mike says, there can be various pressures on them. In addition, people in general are stupid and careless, I don’t think prostitutes any less so than anyone else. Add in the fact that there’s a significant crossover between prostitution and drug-addiction, and the fact that drug addiction does not tend to push people towards responsible decision-making….
I think there’s a definite question as to whether regulation would improve safety practices, or what kind of regulation would. And there’s also something to be said for requiring johns to undergo testing, and or making failure to use a condom illegal….
One can imagine an anonymous registry– although recent massive data leaks don’t inspire much confidence… really, legalisation would have to go hand-in-hand with destigmatization. I think that’s the sort of work organisations like Coyote were aiming at.
Gad, “Coyote,” that brings back memories! First read about their work, what, twenty, thirty years ago?
(Stood for Call Off Your Old, Tired Ethics. It’s true what they say about getting older: stuff that happened long ago is better remembered than recent events.)
I should clarify that Like Anja am wary of state regulation, though it’s because said regulation favors the maintenance of the state over the citizenry. And, like Anja, I agree that extra caution in order where the body is concerned. That said, in many states health care workers and child care providers are subject to tb testing, and as a potential patient, and parent, I’m fine with that.
What about a regulatory agency where current and former sex workers are strongly represented? Who participate in the actual drafting of regulations?
BTW, the ‘sex workers’ denotation troubles me, as it covers everything from prostitutes to adult film actors to live sex show actors to strippers to some sex therapists. This isn’t a catchall constituency.
I’m an anarchist; that’s my utopia. That’s what I think is worth working for. I have in common with “libertarian” capitalists that I’m pretty acutely aware of how undemocratic and dangerous state power is, and that I value personal liberty and the ability of people to defend themselves against the state. I also happen to value autonomous individuals getting together and forming consensual communities, and wouldn’t you know it? I don’t see Monsanto and BP as consensual, democratic communities of free individuals.
I’m also an eventualist, not an Instant Macho Gun Revolutionary type, although our future is so volatile at this point that, you know, who knows what’ll happen?
I value many of the various public services that the state performs (libraries and public schooling especially!), and advocate for more of some of those services (funding for California public schools, please?). I just don’t harbor any illusions about the state being at its core a democratic, consensual community institution. I’d like a future in which those services really and truly are democratic and non-hierarchically, communally run.
How is the force of the state that determines them to be Bad People (muderers, rapists etc.), imprisons them and executes them not at its base nakedly coercive? If you support it, that’s fine (Angela Davis doesn’t, for what it’s worth), but I don’t see how the “justice system” can be described as anything other than coercive.
I should point out that I’m not at this point a well-read or theoretically competent anarchist, so if you’re looking to argue the merits of anarchism, I’m not the person to do it with.
I just wanted to wave my arms and yell “STATE POWER IS BAD, DESTRUCTIVE AND SCARY!” a bit, which has been achieved. So yeah, don’t really want to perform an anarcho-derail. Just wanted to explain where I’m coming from.
I meant to indicate that Angela Davis doesn’t support the *prison system*, not the justice system.
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Anja Flower says:
…I’m pretty acutely aware of how undemocratic and dangerous state power is, and that I value personal liberty and the ability of people to defend themselves against the state. I also happen to value autonomous individuals getting together and forming consensual communities, and wouldn’t you know it? I don’t see Monsanto and BP as consensual, democratic communities of free individuals.
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So, what happens when — in the wet dream of right-wingers and libertarians — they “…shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub,” as Grover Norquist ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist ) put it?
Do you think some “autonomous individuals” are going to be oganized and powerful enough to stand up against megacorporations like Monsanto and BP? The conflict would be as uneven as shown in this Tim Kreider cartoon:
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/05.jpg
Even when an elected minority, Republicans slashed through the Democratic party — hardly a hippy-dippy bunch — like a chainsaw through cotton-candy.
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I value many of the various public services that the state performs (libraries and public schooling especially!), and advocate for more of some of those services (funding for California public schools, please?). I just don’t harbor any illusions about the state being at its core a democratic, consensual community institution. I’d like a future in which those services really and truly are democratic and non-hierarchically, communally run.
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So if some Bible-thumpers decide that their “democratic and non-hierarchically, communally run” public-school system teach Creationism as science, that any non-heteros are loathsome sinners, that girls only be allowed to learn cooking, housekeeping skills, and submission to the “God-given” authority of their husbands, that’d be fine, then?
As for a more “well-read or theoretically competent anarchist…[better] argu[ing] the merits of anarchism,” that particular “ism” is even more reality-denying than usual…
Mike, like I said, I was just stating my position for the sake of clarity. I’m not really prepared to engage in anarchist apologetics (or very interested in doing so, frankly).
I suggest, though, that you gain a better idea of anarchism as a school of political thought, so that you at least know what you’re arguing against. You could read the Wikipedia article, I suppose, although it describes anarchists as considering the state “unnecessary,” which for me isn’t true in the short term.
Do you think that meager capitalist reforms are going to be able to rein in the likes of Monsanto and BP? The so-called “Democrats” can’t even pass meager half-measures like Cap & Trade – much of the time, they don’t even seem to be *trying*.
The “autonomous individuals” you so readily dismiss conducted a leftist revolution in the Ukraine, made up a large, highly organized portion of the Spanish Republican peasant and worker resistance against Francisco Franco, and regularly risk life, limb and imprisonment to conduct radical direct actions against the corporate murderers and thieves both of us despise, including sabotage, occupations, seizures, property destruction – actually stopping the machinery of capitalism in its tracks. Is it futile? Maybe, probably. It’s a fight worth having, at any rate.
Your Tim Kreider cartoon is a very accurate portrait of liberals. Anarchists aren’t liberals.
I’m quite aware that anarchism is utopian, which is why I also support democratic-socialist reform measures. It’s at least as utopian to me, though, to think that we’re going to be able to build stable, long-lasting solutions to the global crisis we’re in using the same methods that got us there in the first place. When given a choice between those two unlikely outcomes, I choose the one that’s in line with my values, and that’s anarchism.
I know you think I’m a wild-eyed utopian, and that’s okay. The movement for global justice needs both radicals and reformists; we can each play our role.
I’m not going to win you over to my side, and you’re not going to win me over to yours, so I suggest we call a truce and forgo a pointless argument.
That’s a pretty great cartoon, though. :D
“forgo a pointless argument.”
Oh sure. Just ask Mike to cut off his right arm, why don’t you….
The thing with Anarchism, though– it doesn’t work, it never has worked, and it can’t work.
It’s never worked once in the entire history of human culture.
Apologists for Anarchism often point to hunter-gatherer societies, but they always turn out to be as hierarchical and oppressive as post-agrarian societies…often worse. But the myth of the ‘Noble Savage’ dies hard.
I spent a goodly portion of my life describing myself as an Anarchist, until the day I recognised that this was an unreachable ideal– a “utopia”, to use ‘Anja”s word– and an excuse for lazy BoBo posturing.
Sex workers don’t need self-proclaimed Anarchists cheering them on– “Yeah! We’re right behind you!” — who then contribute bubkis, zero, nada to their welfare.
But…does capitalism work? In what sense? For whom?
And isn’t the anti-anarchist stance an excuse for lazy pragmatic posturing?
What if we all stopped having sex? We could easily leave our reproduction to mechanical extraction and gestation. If we got religion into it we could renounce our genders and orientations and see ourselves as “female partners” of God. Then the world would become one big cult full of boundless, universal love.
At least… that was my takeaway from your Gay Utopia thing. “We love gay people, we just want them to stop having sex, along with everybody else.” Possibly I misunderstood. I’d like to put you guys in touch with an editor. Can you fill me in?
I thought my point in the gay utopia was that everyone, gay, straight, and in-between, should start having sex with giant insects. I like your vision too though!
I’d rather live in that world than a Firestone/C.S.Lewis Frankenstein… Mantis Kings, my orifices are yours.
Humans attempting to fly never once worked in the history of human culture…
…until it did.
That’s about as far as I want to go with this. :3
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“forgo a pointless argument.”
Oh sure. Just ask Mike to cut off his right arm, why don’t you….
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Well, I’m left-handed, so I could live with that…
And sure, I don’t want HU to be cluttered with endless back-and-forth debating such as went on between yours truly and a certain “I’m from Chicago, and so I know that Democrats are a bunch of crooks” chap. So if Anja wants to call a cease-fire, I’m OK with that.
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Alex Buchet says:
The thing with Anarchism, though– it doesn’t work, it never has worked, and it can’t work.
It’s never worked once in the entire history of human culture.
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Yes; as opposed to things which actually have worked in the past, like democracy, or the power for good of the State, which once upon a time actually did go and do things like reining in and punishing giant corporations. And there actually once was a time when Democrats weren’t a bunch of wimps falling all over themselves to suck up to Big Biz, cater to Republicans, and instantly cave in on every front.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
But…does capitalism work? In what sense? For whom?
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In a carefully controlled and regulated manner, with wrongdoing seriously punished, and plenty of “socialist”-type social programs added to the mix, it’s — in a less-than-ideal world dominated by a pretty damn less-than-ideal species — overall the best method.
Not exactly a ringingly enthusiastic endorsement; but look at what had happened when…
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The communal nature of the new Plymouth colony [in 1620] required all of the crops produced, game harvested, fish caught and products made by one to be shared with all. This led to laziness, lack of initiative and starvation. Half the colonists did not survive the winter of 1620-21, and starvation continued through the winter of 1622-23. William Bradford, governor of the fledgling colony, recognized it was this communal structure that took away the incentive of people to produce, and made the decision in the spring of 1623 that ultimately saved the colony.
Bradford distributed plots to each family. Whatever a family produced would be used as that family saw fit. It was a free-market model in which people would retain whatever they grew, harvested, caught or produced. They then were free to use it as trade and barter for other goods and services, as well as to feed their own family.
The yield was more than expected. Not only was starvation staved off, but the bountiful harvest enabled them to barter and exchange their crops with others. In fact, the harvest was so bountiful by 1624 that the colony began to export crops.
It was not the bad farming techniques that caused the colonists to starve; it was the socialistic nature of the colony’s organizational structure. William Bradford wrote that “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” He further observed that the system originally prescribed “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”
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http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/112508/opi_359308235.shtml
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…Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609-10, called “The Starving Time,” the population fell from five-hundred to sixty.
Then the Jamestown colony was converted to a free market, and the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth. In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote that after the switch there was “plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure.” He said that when the socialist system had prevailed, “we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have done for themselves now.” …
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http://mises.org/daily/336
No, I don’t go to the extreme that those Capitalism-worshippers citing this story go to: that, therefore, the Free Market should reign unchecked, and the less well-off deserve their state.
However, it’s an unfortunate fact of human nature that when everybody is rewarded equally, slackers will not hesitate to mooch off the productive; the latter then becoming disgusted that their hard work goes to benefit those who goof off.
Humans being able to fly was a technical achievement; something far more easily accomplished than changing human nature.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
And isn’t the anti-anarchist stance an excuse for lazy pragmatic posturing?
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Being pragmatic is “posturing”? I guess telling the Yippies that their plan to end the Vietnam war by levitating the Pentagon (I swear I’m not making this up) was a futile, ridiculous gesture would likewise be “lazy pragmatic posturing”…
There is lots and lots of lazy pragmatic posturing amongst the punditry in the U.S. Reflexive pragmatism is the current ideology of the ruling class.
Oh, and for an example of a lazy pragmatist argument, your sneer at the yippies works quite well. They were attempting to bring attention to the anti-war effort by making outrageous claims. Attacking them on pragmatist grounds for making outrageous claims is just silly.
Not that I even agree with what the yippies were doing or how they were doing it, but the knee-jerk pragmatic objection isn’t very thoughtful.
Well, I could cite successful examples of highly productive anarchist collective farms, and we could go back and forth – but that would be tiring and pointless.
Chastising the Yippies for insufficiently practical plans, though, is like chastising Karlheinz Stockhausen for not being danceable.
Now, this brings me back. Have any of you guys read DC Comics’ Anarky? I certainly enjoyed reading him, even if he was probably such a closet case. I suppose it was never meant to be literal, maybe even “what if Jesus was part of Batman’s rogues gallery”, but I did dig some of the ideas presented.
oh. my. god. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarky
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Noah Berlatsky says:
There is lots and lots of lazy pragmatic posturing amongst the punditry in the U.S. Reflexive pragmatism is the current ideology of the ruling class.
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Pretty huge difference between pragmatic posturing (“We can’t do anything about global warming/raise the minimum wage/toughen pollution regulations/etc. because it would be bad for the economy!“) and real pragmatism.
The latter, clearly, is hardly in oversupply, in a country where a huge portion of the people seriously believe that…. (Fill in a list of idiocies.)
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…the yippies…were attempting to bring attention to the anti-war effort by making outrageous claims.
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Because, I guess, the anti-war effort really needed the publicity. Why, in the late 60’s, who even KNEW there was anyone opposed to the Vietnam War?
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Attacking them on pragmatist grounds for making outrageous claims is just silly…
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Though I didn’t make it clear, it was for more like for making the anti-war effort look like futile, ridiculous posturing.
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oh. my. god. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarky
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Sheesh! When I think of the substantial subjects which end up as “stubs” in Wikipedia…this thing just goes on and ON!
For citizens in a democracy to gripe on endlessly about the incompetence and/or evils of the State is like the passenger in a taxi kvetching about how the driver is going too fast or too slow, driving recklessly, or in a roundabout route to increase the fare.
It’s the stupidity and negligence of the voters — who with but a few rare exceptions should be acting like attentive, demanding managers, immediately firing or warning employees who don’t perform adequately — which permits this sorry condition to go on.
After all, in the U.S. the police aren’t going to throw you in prison for criticizing the government, have you tortured for voting the “wrong way.”
My favorite comic-book character, V, had a great speech in “V for Vendetta” — deleted from the virtually de-politicized movie — in which he mentioned how the human race had been led by a collection of incompetents, lunatics, and criminals, then upbraided the masses: “But who elected them?” Who let them stay in power?
As just one glaring example of why it’s the imbecility of Boobus Americanus rather than the inherent perfidy of the State which is to blame for “why things suck,” now a higher percentage of older Americans think Social Security would be better protected by Republicans. Ah, if all America had one ear, and I could scream into it: “You utter IDIOTS!! Republicans have been slavering to DESTROY Social Security since it was first started!!!”
A Tim Kreider cartoon from 2008: http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/KreiderWhyAreYouVoting.jpg
(Yes, that’s him and his friends in the last panel.) In the accompanying Artist’s Statement, Kreider writes:
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I don’t just mean to make the pretty obvious point that, although all Republicans are not bigots and fag-bashers, it does seem to be the case that all the bigots and fag-bashers are Republicans. I just wish everybody in the world would stop pretending to give a shit about any political ideology at all. Everybody’s political philosophy is exactly the same: they want to get what they want. Only a handful of puds who had nothing better to do in college have ever bothered to formulate a political ideology, and even they all abandon it anytime it becomes inconvenient…
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I.e., Libertarian Party candidate Chester Brown taking yet ANOTHER Canadian government arts grant, as that R. Fiore critique informed…
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Let us look, as an example, to the recent bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (A disclaimer: I do not even really know what these entities are so maybe you should not pay too much attention to anything I have to say on this subject.) All the same Wall Street wankers who believe in free markets and deregulation and the ineluctible wisdom of the Invisible Hand are now letting out a vast, shaky sigh of relief that the despised Government has come to save their asses now that their various lies and swindles and ponzi schemes have imploded on them. Nobody actually believes in, or cares about, limited government; they believe that the government shouldn’t be able to keep them from running any scam they can and that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes, but they also want the government—meaning taxpayers—to give them a metric shit-ton of cash when they’ve accidentally blown all theirs on the high-finance equivalent of Keno. They are actually not so different in their political ideology from the sneering teen anarchist who calls his dad a capitalist asswipe until he needs to borrow a couple hundred to pay for an abortion.
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Kreider’s full commentary may be read in the Archives section at http://www.thepaincomics.com/ , under
September 10, 2008 – “Why Are You Voting Republican in 2008?”
Getting a bit off topic?
At least I picked on Libertarian Chester “Canadian Arts Council government grants helped keep me in hookers” Brown a little bit….
(Meantime, looking up the link Noah provided to the R. Fiore essay, both http://www.tcj.com/some-girls-work-in-factories-some-girls-work-in-stores/ and even http://www.tcj.com/ , take one to a Network Solutions “Backorder this domain/Renew this Domain” window.)
Yeah, something’s weird going on over there; when I click on http://www.tcj.com, I get text and no graphics…this thru Firefox?
(‘Thru’ for ‘through’ is a Stan Lee Homage, Mike.
Excelsior, effendi!)
Hooray, tcj.com is back! (Not that I spend anywhere near as much time there as at HU…)
(And yes, I recall that “Lee spelling” well…)
To clarify, I liked the emphasis on personal responsibility and “no force, no fraud” in Anarky but I think it’s telling when you create a teenage superhero without a social life.
I listened to part of an interview with Chester Brown on the radio yesterday, and it’s available at: http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/TI
The interviewer (Benjamen Walker) knew a lot about comics and Brown’s work in particular. Also, he gave him a really hard time about the libertarian-accepting-a-government-grant thing, at one point interrupting Brown’s explanation about why it’s okay to say, “Chester, this sounds like hogwash!”
Ha! Thanks Jack.
I’m a little afraid to hear what he sounds like. He can’t be as terrifying as he presents himself in his comics though….
In this one, he definitely looks like he’s drawing a sequel to the Hernandez ‘Mr X’ comic of the ’80s…
Anja–
I’m sorry for the late reply. I’ve been–um–distracted.
I don’t consider the discussion of prostitution and its prospective decriminalization embarrassing. I don’t think it’s particularly worthwhile, except as an intellectual exercise. The reason is that with, for lack of a better term, morals laws, I don’t believe they get changed unless people feel that one is or could be unfairly deprived of something. Obscenity laws began being undermined by people not feeling it was appropriate to legally deny them the opportunity to read writers like Joyce, Lawrence, and Henry Miller. Laws barring gay marriage in the U.S. are now taking a beating that I expect will end in their repeal. Homosexuality is increasingly acceptable in our society, people are more likely to have social relationships with people who are openly gay, and people are seeing that gay partnerships are in practice identical to heterosexual marriage. They increasingly don’t think its appropriate for gay couples not to have the legal prerogatives of straight ones.
I don’t think that’s going to happen with prostitution because I don’t see the stigma of being on either end of the transaction going away. I think lax enforcement of the laws is probably the most that can be hoped for.
What I find embarrassing relates to North American comics and their community of artists and readers.
North American comics are invariably unconscious allegories of male potency anxiety that stink up the field like a miasma. (The comic-book efforts that have broken through to success in bookstores–where the customers for memoir and fiction material are overwhelmingly female–either eschew this altogether or interrogate it with such sophistication that people are able to get past the ick factor.) What Chester Brown has produced is an intellectually pretentious acting-out of his fantasies of himself as a porno stud.
Brown has demonstrated exhibitionist tendencies in his work almost from the beginning. A minor example was an autobiographical piece that featured an extended sequence of him picking his nose and eating the half-dried mucus. The major one is The Playboy, a memoir of his experience with pornography that featured several bluntly explicit scenes of him masturbating. Brown obviously has a compulsion to publicly show himself engaging in activities that most people would just as soon stay private. Paying for It is his latest venture with this tendency.
What the comics community has never been able to get through its head is how repellent mpa material largely is to people in the outside world, who at best just consider it adolescent. Show Paying for It to a halfway reasonable person outside the comics world, and they’re going to see a rather pathetic crank flaunting his emotional shortcomings and grody personal behavior, which he then tries to portray as virtues. Any other field would marginalize this, such as the literary community did with Mailer’s misogyny. But not the comics field. The message of “Hey, everybody! Isn’t being a socially stunted dweeb who’s into hookers and wants everyone to share the joy fun and cool!” blares like a civil-defense alarm from tcj.com and other comics-press mainstays. The field has had more (much, much more) than its share of embarrassing spectacles, but the reception accorded this book just takes the cake.
Let me add that in general I hold Chester Brown in very high regard as an artist.
Ed the Happy Clown, which I read during its initial serialization, was my entry into alternative comics. It set a standard for cartoon surrealism that all subsequent works in that mode must be measured against, and none have yet to meet. I Never Liked You is an outstanding memoir of adolescence. I’m putting together a list of my top-ten all-time favorite/best/most worthwhile comics for another project, and one or both will likely make the final ten.
As for his other major efforts, what I’ve seen of Underwater shows it to be an interesting and admirable misfire. I have yet to read Louis Riel, but by all accounts it’s a strong piece of historical fiction, and I look forward to reading it. And his Gospel adaptations show just how tepid Crumb’s Genesis effort is by comparison.
I want to add that I think he’s a nice person. I encountered him once at a Barnes & Noble signing with Seth and Adrian Tomine in New York a few years back. He’s a friendly–if very reserved–fellow face-to-face.
However, we all have our unfortunate sides, and Paying for It is the worst aspects of Chester Brown’s work writ large.
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
…The message of “Hey, everybody! Isn’t being a socially stunted dweeb who’s into hookers and wants everyone to share the joy fun and cool!” blares like a civil-defense alarm from tcj.com and other comics-press mainstays. The field has had more (much, much more) than its share of embarrassing spectacles, but the reception accorded this book just takes the cake…
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Though Brown goes to great lengths to defend the whole prostitution thing, it’s pretty obvious from the many examples shown that his depiction is, if not utterly grim and dreary, hardly “joy fun and cool.”
And the overall critical reception given the book is, though overall positive — Brown is an important art-comics creator, the book has its share of aesthetic merits — hardly unmixed. And certainly not in the nature of “hooray for Chester Brown for showing how kewl it is to be a socially stunted dweeb who’s into hookers!”
“I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure–that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.”
–Norman Mailer
Cynthia Ozick : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obaL0gRKw7k
And the man wondered why his peers didn’t want to be seen in public with him.