Tag Archives: feminism

Is the Bamboo Curtain More Treacherous Than the Glass Ceiling?

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I read an odd entry in my Twitter feed the other morning. Not unusual for a forum dedicated to misinformed celebrity rants and the beekeepers that idolize them, but what struck me about this tweet was that it came from the account of Hayao Miyazaki, He that is Deus in the Machina at Ghibli Studios, and dare I say… a generally uplifting and motivational Twitterer. Bear in mind the Japanese language is composed of ideographs, so 140 characters can read like an American paragraph. Nonetheless, this morning I read this:

@Miyasan_bot:
They say it’s over for animation in Japan. When we look for new hires only women respond, and I get the feeling that we’re done for. In our last hurrah we borrow from outside staff (i.e. outsource), but soon we won’t be able to do that forever.

OK, now mind you, Miyazaki’s been talking a lot about the end of anime on Twitter lately. Sort of the same way people are decrying the end of print publishing. He’s not giving up on animation but suggesting it might be best to face up to the fleeting nature of all things. Yes, his micro-wisdoms border on sermonic.

So what I found interesting in this tweet was the casual observation that a sign of decline was that only women are responding to job solicits. He wasn’t trying to say anything about women. He was saying it’s over for Japanese animation. The bit about women was just a bit, but the mumble was deafening.

So I mustered some courage and replied to him.

@ill_iterate:
Really, @miyasan_bot?

I didn’t get a response per se… A few hours later, I saw this in my feed:

A five-part transcript of the whole statement from which he’d excerpted the top line earlier in the morning. The full statement is from a lengthy interview in Eiga pia (Movie Peer) magazine

@miyasan_bot:
Part 1:
They say it’s over for animation in Japan. When we look for new hires only women respond, and I get the feeling that we’re done for. In our last hurrah we’ll borrow from outside staff, to lend a hand but we can’t do that forever.

Part 2:
These are not reasons for me to take production to China. I don’t want to deplete Japan in that way. So, what do we do?

Part 3:
(Ghibli Studios) has been resolved to rowing the boat altogether as a team and giving it our all, while everyone around us is jet-propelled with new technology and running at full-speed. We still illustrate with pen and paper. I say we continue to give this our all, together.

Part 4:
I counter the point some make that we’re in an age where you’ll find women driving buses by asking if it’s ok to have women all over cotton mills. (LOL)

Part 5:
I think it would be great to see a female animation director, but as far as Ghibli’s concerned, I can’t think of a single one for us. So what about newcomers? Well, I believe women are incredibly fast-learners and self-starters. If you look at men, even today, they develop much slower.

I’ll cut to the chase: What do I see in the full statement? More obfuscation of the glass ceiling, but a genuine interest in seeing it shattered.

The first part of his quintweet is sort of unfortunate as there’s not doubt about it. He just said: women in the employment queue bum me out. Chauvnism is colorblind, deaf, and a little obnoxious, but well, let’s see what else he’s saying.

In Part 2 of the quintweet, Miyazaki calls out the harsh realities of competing with China for animators and technology. It’s a problem in just about every industry outside of the People’s Republic. From textile manufacturing to bootlegging Apple retail, we the people of everywhere else is kung-fucked. I empathize as my bootleg Apple store doesn’t stand a chance against theirs.

In Part 3 Miyazaki explains how Ghibli’s work is a labor of love. As much a labor as the biggest animation production company in Japan whose American distributor is Disney (one of the biggest media companies in the world) can be. Though it is really beautiful that they work in analog. I mean that. No one watches Pixar to see peach-shaped marhsmallow humanoids. No, we fell with the kid from Up because he was part of a good story.

Part 4 is as baffling as it is evocative to me. Miyazaki’s recapitulating his point about evening the status by playing devil’s advocate to some truism that “women are even driving buses now.” I’ve never thought of it that way, but (thinking…) yeah I guess it’s sort of a man’s world behind that huge steering wheel in Japan. In New York City I think every third bus driver I’ve encountered has been female but it just goes to show… Strange where we engender jobs, isn’t it?

Moreover, to counter the observation on female bus drivers by suggesting labor-equality can turn be flipped and end us up with sweatshops full of women begs the question… has Miyazaki picked up a newspaper in the last decade? These cotton mills ARE populated by women. This statement is what baffled me most particularly. Cotton mills? I’m hoping it’s
lost in translation. Hoping cotton mills is Japanese for Dick Shop. And yet…
there is no mistaking “LOL” which I’m positive is the correct translation of (laughter):

My conclusion from Part 4 of the Quintweet is that for Miyazaki, status quo is an issue that starts with the basic tenet that women do work at all. Amazing to think the studio responsible for so many phenomenal heroins doesn’t think women actually earn their keep in modern professions. Actually I take that back. Nausicaa is an animist warrior; Chihiro and Ponyo are both children, as are Totoro’s neighbors. The closest thing to a working professional woman in Ghibli films is a witch who delivers packages from a bakery. [Note: I LOVE all these films and still think primary, secondary and all tertiary female characters could categorically kick every female animated Disney character in the proverbial “Pocahontas”.]

And finally, Part 5. “Show me the women!” he says. Damn straight. And this is the variable that changes my perspective on the entire argument against his seeming indifference to the glass ceiling. Women are fast learners. Men are comparatively late-bloomers. Get a leg up, women! Get out of the cotton mills, stop driving all those buses and start rowing this boat to nowhere.

I Spit on Your Quietism

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This piece first ran on Splice Today. I’m reprinting it here as part of the Juxtaposition Blogathon at Pussy Goes Grrr.

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If I were going to remake I Spit on Your Grave, the notorious 1978 rape/revenge thriller, I’d add more women. Not necessarily to the rape, but definitely to the revenge. The reason’s fairly simple: I think it would make the movie more feminist.

This is hardly at odds with the intent of the original. Director Meir Zarchi has said that he made the film after encountering a young rape victim and attempting to aid her despite police indifference. The film’s infamous 25 minute rape scene captures that sense of blunt, hopeless outrage — it has to be one of the most harrowing depictions of violence in film. Jennifer (Camille Keaton) attempts again and again to escape, only to be captured and recaptured, humiliated and brutalized until she’s little but a traumatized, naked slab of blood and terror. Meanwhile, the four rapists talk and joke among themselves, urging each other on with taunts or threats. It’s clear throughout that they’re much more interested in each other than they are in their victim. She’s just the excuse for extended male bonding and one-upmanship, a convenient non-person onto whom to safely displace and act out the real male-male passions. As Carol Clover writes in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, “the rapes are presented as almost sexless acts of cruelty that the men seem to commit more for each other’s edification than for their own physical pleasure.” Clover also notes that one of her male friends “found it such a devastating commentary on male rape fantasies and also on the way male group dynamics engender violence that he thought it should be compulsory viewing for high school boys.”

While I Spit on Your Grave is very aware of how men relate to each other, however, it has virtually nothing to say about how women interact. Its vision of female, and, indeed, feminist empowerment is entirely individual. Jennifer fights the patriarchy herself — abetted by the abject stupidity inflicted upon men by their own hierarchical obtuseness and sexism. Jennifer avoids death because the rapists deputize the mentally retarded Matthew (Richard Pace) to do the dirty work of killing her, and he wimps out. Weeks later, after she recovers, she is able to murder her assailants in large part because they are ideologically incapable of believing (a) that she is able to kill them, and (b) that she didn’t want to be raped in the first place. She seduces Matthew, fucks him, and as he cums she slips a noose around his neck and strangles him. She then finds Johnny (Eron Tabor) at the gas station, convinces him to get in a car with her by flipping her hair winsomely, and then drives him out to the middle of nowhere and forces him to take off his clothes and kneel at gunpoint. He starts to explain himself…and he’s so stubbornly obtuse that he thinks he’s swayed her, and actually allows her to seduce him again. So Jennifer takes him home with her, maneuvers him into a tub, tells him she killed Matthew (he doesn’t believe her) and then, under pretense of giving him a handjob, cuts off his dick.

Finally, she climbs aboard a motorboat with Stanley (Anthony Nichols), fools him into thinking she’s going to kiss him, then pushes him into the water and disembowels him with the motor blades. (The final rapist is the only one who doesn’t get seduced; he’s so upset at seeing his pal menaced with the motorboat that he rushes into the water, where Jennifer kills him from the boat with an ax.)

There’s obviously some satisfaction in seeing the men hoisted by their own…bits. But it’s a bitter pleasure. To get her revenge, Jennifer has to turn herself into the sexual thing the men imagine her to be. It’s notable that while the rape itself is probably about the least arousing half hour ever filmed, the seduction scenes have a queasy erotic charge. Jennifer caters to men’s desires only to cut them off, but she’s still catering. It is, then, not the men, but Jennifer who completes her degradation. The loss of her self is the price of her victory — though it’s not clear what other option she has. Men are despicable — and they are also, in this world, effectively all there is. Jennifer wins, but it’s man’s game she wins at. There isn’t any other.

Of course, feminism offers some other options — most notably sisterhood. Nor is it unheard of for rape-revenge (or rape-revenge inspired films like Tarantino’s Death Proof) to explore female relationships . So if you had to do a remake, and you wanted to throw in some clever plot twists for the jaded exploitation viewer, adding female relationships to the plot seems like it would be an unexpected but not unprecedented tack. Why not see what happens if, say, you had Johnny’s wife (who gets a notable ball-busting walk-on in the original) find Jennifer after the rape and take her side? Or perhaps more realistically, you could have Jennifer come out to the cabin with her sister, her mother — or perhaps with a girlfriend? Certainly, gay rights would have some of the polarizing power today that feminism has in the ‘70s. As such, including lesbian themes in order to ramp up both the exploitation and the political edge would be perhaps the best way to stay true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Zarchi’s original.

It probably goes without saying, but this was not the path taken by the actual 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave.

In fact, the remake takes the opposite approach; instead of an additional revenger, it adds an additional rapist. At one point in the remake Jennifer (Sarah Butler) maces one of her four attackers and manages to escape into the forest. She runs into the town’s sheriff (Andrew Howard), who takes her back to her cabin…where the other rapists reappear. Instead of running them in, the sheriff rather inexplicably joins them.

As I noted above, the original film took some care to show that male bonding and rivalry were central to the rape. The men’s mean-spiritedly jovial desire to “help out” sad sack Matthew by using Jennifer to deflower him; their need to impress Johnny, the way they only expressed their emotions for each other (whether affection, dislike, or envy) through aggression and humiliation — it’s those interactions which powered their misogyny and violence. And the film also took pains to show these impulses as unremarkable. In a scene before the rape, where the men chatted with each other, they didn’t appear dangerous.. Indeed, they seemed like naïve adolescents, wondering (mostly, but not entirely in jest) whether really sexy women shit or boasting about their plans to visit New York or Los Angeles. It was only in retrospect later in the film that their casual abuse of one another and their casual jibes at women appeared ominous.

The remake follows through on the group dynamics to some extent — the guys egg each other on; they bring Matthew along to lose his virginity, etc. etc. But it abandons the effort to make the men appear like just folks. Ironically, the director Steven R. Monroe gives one of his characters a video camera, and we see some of the rape through the lens. This is an obvious effort to implicate the viewer — but in fact, this version of the story is much less accusatory than Zarchi’s original.

That’s because, instead of seeing the rape as a result of standard male group dynamics, Monroe tries hard to decollectivize the guilt. In Zarchi’s version, the men were typical guys, and the rape, too, was therefore typical — a possibility for any man. In Monroe’s version, on the other hand, the rapists are individual monsters — a much less frightening idea.

In the original (top), the rape is about the interactions between the men. In the remake (bottom) it’s about individual sadism.

Thus, for example, in the first film, when Jennifer first meets Johnny at the gas station where he’s an attendant, he’s nondescriptly polite with the distant friendliness of the perfect service employee. In the remake, on the other hand Johnny (Jeff Branson) is a lecherous jerk right from the get-go. Monroe even makes sure Jennifer (Sarah Butler) humiliates him explicitly (though accidentally) to add an additional personal motivation. This is carried through into the rape itself, in which Johnny devises elaborate humiliations for Jennifer — humiliations which are predicated on his commanding her to, for example, drink booze or show her teeth like a racehorse. There are no such commands in the original, and, indeed, there can’t be, since the rapists barely talk to their victim.. The rape, in other words, becomes about Johnny’s wounded vanity and his investment in elaborate sadistic games, rather than about the way the men perform for each other. In fact, in the first film, when Stanley starts to yell personal insults at Jennifer and generally to treat her as if she’s a person to be dominated rather than a piece of meat to be used, the rest of the men get more and more disturbed, and finally pull him away.

The remake turns Johnny into a sociopath; Matthew (Chad Lindberg), on the other hand, is given a conscience. His mental deficiency, the fact that he isn’t as much man, is, in Monroe’s version, a sign that he is not as evil or irredeemable as the others. There was no such shilly-shallying in the first film; there, Matthew’s incapacity simply made him less able to rape, not less eager to do so. When confronted by Jennifer in the second half of Zarchi’s film, Matthew does apologize and claim that the assault was not his idea…but Johnny and Stanley do the exact same thing when Jennifer comes for them.

Again, for Zarchi, the culprit is all the men and the way they interact, suggesting that violence against women is a systemic, social sin. For Monroe, though, Matthew really is sorry, while Johnny, even up to the moment of his gruesome demise, expresses no sorrow, feigned or otherwise. In the remake, the crime is a crime of individuals, which means some are more guilty than others and some (like Matthew or, the men in the audience) are less guilty.

Where the group dynamics completely come apart, though, is with the introduction of the sheriff. As I said above, his actions are inexplicable. We never even see him with the other men before the rape. He does mention that he’s known them since they were boys — but he’s in no sense their peer. We quickly learn (through a cell-phone call mid-rape) that he has a loving pregnant wife and a daughter in the honors program. He’s got, in other words, a lot to lose — and he’s willing to throw it all away for what? To have sex with some random city girl? To impress some subordinates?

In the first film, where it’s Johnny who has a wife and kids, Zarchi confronts this issue directly: Jennifer actually asks Johnny if he loves his wife while she’s seducing him. In response he says, “She’s okay. You get used to a wife after awhile, you know?” His family is a routine; it doesn’t particularly touch his inner life, to which, in any case, he seems to be only tangentially connected. The sheriff, on the other hand, is shown to be deeply invested in his child and his wife — he’s a doting middle-class family man. The idea that his spouse or daughter might find out about the rape sends him into a panicked rage. So what could possibly have led him to participate in a felony with a number of extremely untrustworthy accomplices?

We don’t know the answer to that question because the movie doesn’t tell us. And it doesn’t tell us because it doesn’t really care what his motives are. He joins in the rape because he’s the villain and, more, because it’s surprising. The sheriff is a plot device — a contrivance. Which means the real fifth rapist here is, in some sense, the director, who throws logic and coherence to the wind for the sheer pleasure of a cheap thrill.

Cheap thrills are what exploitation is supposed to be about, of course. But, while you certainly couldn’t say that Zarchi had a light touch, you also never felt that his hands were on the scales. This is part of the reason that the first I Spit on Your Grave had such an indelible, inevitable power. There weren’t plot twists or clever reversals; there was just sex and violence and their remorseless attendants, rape and revenge. Zarchi’s world fit together. Men were rapists. Rapists destroy women, and also themselves. QED.

Monroe, on the other hand, doesn’t believe any of that. His men don’t die because they’re rapists; they die because they’re in a movie and Monroe can do whatever he wants, damn it. In the remake, Jennifer doesn’t outthink the men because they’re sexist idiots and then dispatch them efficiently. Instead, she kills them because the script calls for her to turn into an avenging, unstoppable force of destruction — a petite Jason. From the moment she escapes her assailants by diving into a river and improbably disappearing, she ceases to be an actual person and becomes, like the Sheriff, a contrivance. Her revenges are much more elaborate than in the first film, but the rituals of torture aren’t her triumphs (or her degradations): they’re the directors’. A vision of essentially communal, and therefore political, justice has been replaced by individual punishment. Karma becomes deus ex machina.

It’s not really a surprise that a 2010 remake lacks the political charge of its 1978 prototype. The last thirty years or so have been rough on radicals, and while feminism has certainly made advances, the vision of apocalyptic, violent gender justice which inspired the rape-revenge films now seems both naïve and distasteful. As Terry Eagleton put it in his 2003 book After Theory, “Over the dreary decades of post-1970s conservatism, the historical sense had grown increasingly blunted, as it suited those in power that we should be able to imagine no alternative to the present.”

Perhaps the best demonstration of why a 2010 I Spit on Your Grave was bound to suck can be seen in another movie; Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. This film (in both its 1997 Austrian original and its 2008 American shot-for-shot remake) does not suck. It’s also not technically a rape/revenge. Instead, it’s a negation of the genre.

The brutality in Funny Games is flagrantly, explicitly unmotivated. In I Spit on Your Grave, humiliation and aggression is linked to gender politics — and also to class. The men in I Spit on Your Grave are hillbillies who resent Jennifer’s affluence, freedom, and economic power. This is shown most clearly in the 1978 film when the rapists, as part of their abuse, read sections of Jennifer’s novel-in-progress out loud, mock it, and then destroy it. Her work is, to them, not work at all, but a ludicrous affectation. (“I really despise people that don’t work,” Johnny says at one point, “they get into trouble too easily, you know?”) The movie does not suggest that these class antagonisms justify the rape, but it does show that they facilitate it. Economic imbalances, as any Marxist knows, are linked to violence.

In Funny Games, on the other hand, there are no economic gaps. At the beginning of the film, a comfortably upper-class family arrives at its lakeside vacation home. There, mom, dad, and son (Anna, Georg, and Georgie in the original) are trapped and systematically tortured by Paul and Peter two well-scrubbed young men with a passion for golf and sadism. The two torturers refuse to say why they are brutalizing their victims; when asked, they propound a series of more or less ridiculous scenarios (I was a poor child! I had sex with my mother!) which are clearly supposed to be bullshit.

Just as the film teases the viewer with reasons, it also teases them with rape — the two sadists force Anna to strip to her underwear, but never precede any farther than that. Most of all, though, it teases with revenge. Anna makes repeated attempts to escape and to turn weapons against her assailant. In the most startling of these moments, she actually manages to grab hold of a rifle and shoot Peter dead. At which point Paul finds a remote control and uses it to rewind the film to the moment before Anna shot his companion. He then casually takes the gun away from her

This flagrant breaking of the fourth wall can, of course, be seen as a way of (here it is again) implicating the viewer in the onscreen violence — of exposing our own sadistic and/or masochistic investment in tales of torture and brutality. And it does, certainly, show very nakedly the kind of narrative contrivance epitomized by the sheriff in the 2010 I Spit on Your Grave. Diagetically, it is the evil characters doing these things to these people we care about. But really it’s the director doing it for our amusement, which calls into question whether we in fact care about anything.

The use of the remote control is, though, not primarily an accusation of complicity. It’s an accusation of naivete. We in the audience are hoping the rape-revenge narrative will play out; that justice will be done. And the film mocks us for that — or (what is effectively the same thing) pats us on the back for knowing that such narrative justice is only a convention, not the truth.

Paul (Arno Frisch) knows the score in the original Funny Games

My hope that I Spit on Your Grave might have more of a feminist consciousness in a remade version was, then, clearly idiotic. The climate even for a film as vacillatingly feminist as the original I Spit on Your Grave has, it seems, evaporated. In current iterations of rape-revenge, violence is disconnected from causality, which means that it can call forth no real retribution. Some random God-surrogate pulls the strings and people suffer and that’s that. The best that can be offered as a political vision is a land in which people turn off their televisions to avoid political visions. Only suckers still believe that you can rise up against your oppressors and disembowel them with an outboard motor.

Die Hard, the Last Man

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Die Hard (1988) presents itself as a movie sympathetic to feminism. The protagonist, John McClane (Bruce Willis), is estranged from his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) essentially because she moved to Los Angeles to take a high-powered corporate job. John, a New York cop, can’t handle her success. The film takes care to show that John’s attitude is ridiculous and stupid — John’s limo driver from the airport calls him on it; Holly handily wins their big onscreen argument which John assholishly starts; and even John himself admits that he’s in the wrong (“very mature, John,” he mutters out loud to himself after Holly stomps out the door.) Throughout the film, Holly is shown to be a competent and successful manager, and it is never suggested that she should, or will, give up her career for her husband.

Moreover, Die Hard goes out of its way to ridicule and reject machismo. During the terrorist/hostage standoff that takes up most of the film, the cops and FBI continually act like impulsive dicks — much the way, in fact, we first see John acting in his argument with Holly. The cops and feds all are much more interested in being, as John terms them, “macho assholes” — swaggering around at the top of the pecking order, impressing their male compadres, and kicking terrorist butt. The parodically homosocial FBI agents Agent Johnson and Agent Johnson let out adolescent yawps as they fly around in their helicopter, boasting to each other how they can “live with” 25% hostage casualties. Their cockiness is presented as both idiocy and sin, and the film gleefully executes them for it. McClane survives precisely because he’s more cautious and more intelligent; a feminized action-hero who constantly exhorts himself to “think! think!” before unleashing the inevitable uber-violence.

But despite the critique of traditional action-hero masculinity, Die Hard is in the end extremely ambivalent about the idea of autonomous women. Holly wins the argument with John — but the result of that victory is not that John acquiesces. Instead, the result is that Holly and all her coworkers are immediately captured and held hostage, allowing John to cast aside the role of idiotic, defeated husband, and adopt the much more congenial and testosterone-fueled persona of heroic savior.

Coincidentally, as the plot unfolds, all those against whom John might be presumed to harbor a grudge are systematically and efficiently punished. Holly’s coworkers, of course, are all terrorized. More particularly, Holly’s Japanese boss Mr. Takagi — a fatherly executive whose warmth, manners, and calm all contrast painfully with McClane’s bad temper and working-class manners — is shot through the head by the terrorists. Later, a slick coke-snorting dealmaker who had earlier hit on Holly is similarly dispatched. The terrorists are then, not so much John’s enemies as they are his avatars — the catspaws which eliminate the other men in Holly’s life so that McClane can sweep her off to renewed bliss at the end of the film.

In the way that its feminist trappings concealing male apocalyptic fantasies, Die Hard reminded me strongly of Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s “Y: The Last Man.” In that series, too, a relationship crisis (in this case Yorick’s breakup with his girlfriend) is interrupted by unexpected violence which eliminates potential rivals (in this case a sudden disease which kills *all* rivals, as all men on earth but Yorick keel over.) And, like Die Hard, “Y: The Last Man” presents itself as feminist while actually treating the egalitarian relationships, with the concomitant possibility of rejection, as an occasion for anxious and protracted male posturing of a very familiar kind.

I go back and forth on whether I prefer Die Hard or Y. On the one hand, Y is clearly a lot smarter about gender politics; on the other hand, I find the straightforward male violence of Die Hard a good bit less off-putting than the SNAG self-pity that permeates Y, especially at the end. In either case, though, I think the parallels between them are pretty telling. Men, it seems, in different mediums and over several decades, have a tendency to turn feminism into a male growth experience. With guns. Or, in other words, don’t trust the patriarchs, even when they say they love you.

Bewitched: About That Premise

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Many people know of, if they do not remember, the classic 1960s television show Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery.  However, for those of you who don’t remember it, here is a quick refresher on the premise: Montgomery plays Samantha, who is highly independent.  Her husband, Darrin, bids Samantha to hide her superior self-sufficiency, and for the most part, Samantha complies.  Sometimes she doesn’t, and wacky hijinks ensue.

The premise is laid out in the very first episode.  On their wedding night, Samantha reveals to Darrin her cosmopolitan background.  With her mother, Samantha has lived in a bohemian style that differs from many women of the early 1960s.  She’s used to supporting herself, and has a college degree.  She’s willing to give it all up to be married to Darrin, but Darrin is disturbed.  Soon his attraction to Samantha overwhelms his qualms, but after the wedding night, he warns Samantha, “It won’t be easy.  It’s tough enough being married to an advertising man if you’re normal.  [. . .] I mean you’re going to have to learn to be a suburban housewife.  [. . .]  You’ll have to learn to cook, and keep house, and go to my mother’s house for dinner every Friday night” (1×01, “I, Darrin, Take This Witch, Samantha”).

“Darling, it sounds wonderful!” Samantha tells him.  “And soon we’ll be a normal, happy couple with no problems, just like everybody else.  And then my mother can come and visit for a while and—”  At this point Samantha stops, seeing the look on Darrin’s face.  Realizing her mother is the very person who instilled her with the fiery independence Darrin so loathes, Samantha backs down.

In the second half of the episode, an old flame of Darrin’s—Sheila Summers—learns that he is recently married.  Sheila knows how to keep house, cook, and act as hostess—which she proves by inviting Darrin and Samantha to a dinner party.  At the party, she attempts to outclass Samantha.  Her experience in entertaining is obvious, she flirts with Darrin, and she continues to let fly clumsy verbal barbs in Samantha’s direction.  At last, unable to contain herself, Samantha lets loose against Sheila, delivering such an articulate dressing-down that the entire table remains stunned and incredulous in the face of Samantha’s lingual acumen and wit. Darrin, however, reprimands her she promised to give up that “stuff.”

Not only does he ask her to hide her intelligence, but he is appalled even when she uses it in the privacy of her own home.  He is not just asking that she give up the trappings of her former life: a career or any life she might have had outside of caring for him.  Housewifery, indeed, can be a career, and Samantha would make it an intriguing one.  He is asking instead that she give up something more intrinsic: the very power and abilities that would give her the means to live without him.  The message is clear: she is meant to exist only as an accessory to Darrin.

Darrin appears to desire this because it is “normal.”  Again and again, Bewitched tells us that it is “normal” that a woman should exist as a mere ornament to cook and clean for her husband, and make him look good at parties.  When Samantha acts outside of these parameters, Darrin reprimands her.  When she acts within them, but uses special skill or intelligence to solve problems, Darrin again reprimands her.

The subtext—at times, explicitly made text—is that Darrin resents the fact that his wife is more savvy and talented than he is.  While Darrin makes it clear that he finds Samantha’s ability to fend for herself unnatural, it also becomes evident that he asks her to hide her skills less because they are strange in and of themselves, and more because the fact that she is, in effect, more powerful than he is damages his ego.

The “unnaturalness” of Samantha’s abilities is fundamental to the central premise.  At one point Darrin tells Samantha that he loves her for herself, and doesn’t need any of the “extra,” revealing that he does not regard anything that makes Samantha strong as a part of who she is.  He demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the various factors which may have informed Samantha’s character.

No doubt Samantha’s self-sufficiency is related to her socioeconomic status.  While the focus of Bewitched is on Samantha’s powers of intellect, we are given hints that she also may be powerful due to wealth.  Wealth gives Samantha a financial autonomy that Darrin demands she forsake.  In fact, there is an episode in which Darrin receives the benefit of Samantha’s wealth: he is laid up from a sprained ankle; Samantha buys him everything he requires, including a nurse to see to all of his needs.  While Darrin obviously enjoys being pampered, by the end of the episode he decides he would rather work in order to earn what he wants, and Samantha takes back everything she purchased.  Again, this is what is considered “normal” (1×17, “A is for Aardvark”).

Samantha’s socioeconomic status may be related to her culture, though obviously the latter is not causal to the former.  Bewitched suggests that Samantha and her mother may be of a different ethnicity or religion.  Samantha is attempting to “pass,” whereas her mother demands that she embrace her heritage.  Darrin, in typical fashion, requests that Samantha hide all evidence of her background, and sometimes is outright bigoted toward her culture.  In “The Witches Are Out,” Darrin’s art for an ad-campaign portrays the very stereotype that has been applied to Samantha in the past (1×07).  He doesn’t understand why she finds his ad offensive.  In the same episode, Darrin suffers a nightmarish vision in which all of his children take after Samantha, demonstrating the more stereotypical behaviors of someone of her background.

Although Samantha is frequently offended or angered by Darrin’s prejudices, she submits to the ultimatum that she refrain from using her superior intellect or skills, and that she hide her background from other people.  Not only does Samantha submit, she seems eager to participate in this form of indentured servitude.  When she uses her powers to solve a problem, give people their just due, or enjoy herself a little, she seems apologetic, often admitting she shouldn’t have done so.  Her ultimate goal, she claims, is to be a normal wife, which apparently means cooking and cleaning without bringing any of the creativity or flare to it that her heightened intellect might warrant.

A prime example of Samantha’s desire to submit is the episode, “Witch Or Wife” (1×08).  Samantha goes to Paris with her mother (again, a reference to her wealthy background) without informing her husband first.  He is upset, but Samantha going to Paris causes him not only to reflect on her behavior, but the entire circumstances of their marriage.  At last he concludes that he is standing in her way: “You can’t expect to snatch an eagle out of the sky, tie it to the ground, clip its wings, and expect it to walk around with a smile on its beak.”

Samantha tries to apologize, but Darrin goes on to say that no one could blame her for her behavior.  It’s one of the only times that Darrin seems to understand that his terms for their marriage dictate that she behave in a way that is not natural to her.  “This is a poor swap for Europe, glamor, and gaiety,” he says (again referencing Samantha’s rich—and cosmopolitan—background).

But Samantha replies by saying, “All I want is the normal life of a normal housewife.”

“I’m saying I’m not going to stand in the way of your freedom,” Darrin goes on, “and that’s obviously what you want.”

“That’s not true,” Samantha says, making it very clear that Darrin standing in the way of her freedom is precisely what she does want.

Samantha, as an intelligent an independent woman, has obviously made this decision of her own accord.  She claims she wishes to give up her intelligence and skill because she loves Darrin.  The implication that love demands submission and sacrifice of our assets and skills is upsetting, but this is Samantha’s individual choice.

More unsettling is the sense from the show that Darrin’s expectation that she make that choice—that she accept the clipping of her wings—is perfectly normal.  There are very few moments where the audience is given to question why Darrin would want her to be less than she is; instead, the premise seems to be just a given.  The idea that what they both want is “normal” is never called into question.  A “normal” household in the 1960s, Bewitched suggests, is one in which wives, if they are more intelligent or skilled than their husbands, hide their abilities such that their husbands are shone in the best light, and their egos don’t get bruised.

The only one who questions this situation is Endora, Samantha’s mother.  Endora, rather than rejecting her freedom as Samantha does, embraces it.  In doing so, she makes use of her considerable intelligence and wealth.  She also does not seem to care if she appears “unnatural,” almost always appearing in eccentric dress (possibly culturally influenced).  Over and over again Endora tries to point out to Samantha that she is enslaved; Darrin is denying her her freedom.  Samantha, however, thinks her mother is wrong, as does Darrin.

The text of the show itself seems to suggest that Endora is wrong.  Her frequent protests are met with the sound of a laugh track, and the characters react to her with a typical, “this is how mothers-in-law will be!” attitude.  And yet, on some level the writers of the show seem cognizant of the indignity of Samantha’s situation, and Darrin’s unreasonableness in demanding that she submit to it.  Darrin’s speech about the eagle in “Witch or Wife” is evidence of that.

Yet the premise of the show must be maintained; Samantha must refrain from using her powers and pretend she does not have them, and Darrin must continue to ask that she do so.  By the end of every episode, we are returned to the status quo: a world in which it is normal to request that a woman never be more powerful than a man, and to forsake her intelligence, wit, and talent in order to cook and clean.

Bewitched could have been a metaphor for many different things.  It could have been a very insightful show about a woman who has to keep elements of her background a secret, and the partner who has to help keep that secret.  But because the secret that has to be kept is the fact that Samantha is more powerful than her husband, it is instead a show about gender politics, and repression in the 1960s.

I was watching Bewitched with a man approaching sixty years of age the other day.  As we incredulously viewed the spectacular amount of sexism unfolding before our eyes, he said, “Just think: I was raised on this.”

The series itself is charming: Elizabeth Montgomery is as bewitching as the title suggests; her intelligence and wit truly sparkle, and Darrin is a bumbling fool who is amusing to watch.  It would be possible to view this program, even today, and forget what the show is really about.  But as magical as our media is these days, it is important to consider the true implications of what our symbolism and metaphors mean.


The Twilight of Intercourse

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Romance was her suicidal substitute for action, fantasy her suicidal substitute for a real world, a wide world. And intercourse was her suicidal substitute for freedom.
— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 1987

In the quote above, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin is speaking about Madame Bovary. But she could just as easily be referring to Bella Swan, the heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s preposterously successful tween vampire book and movie series Twilight. In Twilight, Bella does substitute romance for action, abandoning her future plans, her academic interests, her family, her personality,and her life for her vampire lover Edward Cullen. She substitutes fantasy for reality in a manner which is literally suicidal, choosing to die and enter the twilit unageing faery world of the undead rather than grow into the responsibility and autonomy of adulthood. And she substitutes intercourse for freedom, believing that being “bitten” will grant her self-determination and happiness, when, in fact, it will simply kill her.

In short, the millions of tweens trooping in lockstep to the Cineplex to see the latest Twilight Saga installment might as well be trekking over Dworkin’s corpse. It’s a wonder she doesn’t just rise right out of the ground, fangs bared, spitting blood, and personally castrate both Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner with a rusty cleaver out of pure spite.

I don’t really have much doubt that Dworkin would really and truly have hated Twilight. She hated most things; it was part of her mean-spirited second-wave charm. At the same time…there are aspects of Twilight that resonate in odd harmony with Dworkin’s particular feminist convictions.

The most obvious of these is virginity. Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon, and her novels are obsessed with self-control in general and chastity in particular. The chastity is both literal and metaphorical; Edward won’t sleep with Bela before marriage both because he doesn’t want to damage her immortal soul and because he’s afraid of hurting her physically— he won’t bite her and turn her into a vampire for analogous reasons.

On the one hand, this virginity seems to be more about Edward’s struggle; a typical conservative vision in which female safety is placed in the hands of male renunciation and chivalry. But there’s also a sense in which virginity is not about Edward at all, but is instead Bella’s gift. Edward has a special vampire superpower, and can read minds — but for some reason he can’t read Bella’s. Over the course of the series, Bella proves immune to the mind manipulation powers of various other vampires; she is “safe in her own mind” as the books put it.

This brings to mind Dworkin’s discussion of Joan of Arc:

there was no carnal desire felt [by men] in the presence of [Joan’s] beauty [although that beauty was] female by definition…. This brings with it the sense that it was physically impossible to do it; her body was impregnable…. Joan accomplished an escape from the female condition more miraculous than any military victory: she had complete physical freedom, especially freedom of movement — on the earth, outside a domicile, among men. She had that freedom because men felt no desire for her or believed that “it was not possible to try it.”

The analogy isn’t perfect; Edward wants Bella sexually, and as a vampire he finds her blood especially attractive (“You are exactly my brand of heroin” he says.) Joan mystically shuts down male desire, thus becoming herself masculine; Bella on the other hand inflames desire, becoming all the more stereotypically female. But if Dworkin would no doubt see Twilight as a self-defeating fantasy of objectification, the fact remains that neither Edward nor anyone else can get inside Bella — and this fact eventually allows her, at the climax of the final book in the series, to save her family and change the geopolitical balance of the vampire kingdom. For both Dworkin’s Joan and Meyer’s Bella, virginity is power.

So if Dworkin and Meyer are chattering on about the wonders of virginity, that must mean they hate sex, right? This is certainly the mainstream vision of Dworkin,— her critics often claim that she believed that all heterosexual sex was rape. Though she explicitly denied that, her take on sex is hardly a cheery, rah-rah, Susie Bright one. As she says in Intercourse

With intercourse, the use is already imbued with the excitement, the derangement, of the abuse….Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society — when pushed to admit it — recognizes as dominance…..There are efforts to reform the circumstances that surround intercourse….These reforms do not in any way address the question of whether intercourse itself can be an expression of sexual equality.

So intercourse isn’t quite rape…but it is dominance, is inherently unequal, and it is not subject to reform. Intercourse oppresses women.

Again, you can see why people think that Dworkin has a problem with, as she often calls it, fucking. And yet, the truth is almost the opposite. Dworkin isn’t down on sex because she hates it. On the contrary, she hates sex as it is practiced not only because it defiles women, but because it defiles sex itself. When sex is rooted in self-knowledge and love it becomes, she says,

a complex and compassionate passion…. Fucking as communion is larger than an individual personality; it is a radical experience of seeing and knowing, experiencing possibilities within one that has been hidden.

Behind and in between Dworkin’s condemnation of fucking there is this other vision of sex as a sacrament; the idea that intercourse is an expression of the bonds between loved ones and is therefore holy. The introduction of dominance, hatred, hierarchy, and cruelty into sex is for Dworkin a kind of blasphemy; an original sin, if you will. Intercourse for Dworkin is always already corrupted, evil because, in some unknown place and in some unknown way, it was first good.

women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too….These visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them. They are not searching analyses into the nature of intercourse; instead they are deep humane dreams that repudiate the rapist as the final arbiter of reality. They are an underground resistance to both inferiority and brutality, visions that sustain life and further endurance.

They also do not amount to much in real life with real men.

Dworkin won’t embrace the vision…but she still sees it. Which makes me wonder, if after all, she might not have found something to respond to in Twilight. In the last book of the series, Breaking Dawn, Bella is finally transformed into a newborn vampire, with physical strength that is (for a time) even greater than Edward’s. Suddenly it’s she who has to be careful not to hurt him when they embrace. Before the transformation, she was afraid that the elimination of the differences between her and Edward would spell an end to their passion; he would no longer find her soft or warm, no longer feel the pull of her blood calling him. In other words, she worries that becoming strong will make her unfeminine. But that’s not what happens at all.

He was all new, a different person as our bodies tangled gracefully into one on the sand-pale floor. No caution, no restraint. No fear — especially not that. We could love together — both active participants now. Finally equals.

In her essay in the Atlantic about the Twilight series, Alyssa Rosenberg argues that the vampirized Bella “cuts even the romance buffs out of the equation” as Meyer rambles on and on about how Bella can now see Edward like never before and appreciate him in ways beyond the merely human. “Meyer is telling [her audience] that they are literally incapable of seeing through Bella’s eyes,” Rosenberg notes, as if this were a bug. But, as Dworkin could tell her, it’s a feature. Intercourse with men in this world is inherently unequal, and therefore inherently flawed. There is a dream, though, that things can be different. Or, as another imaginer of other worlds and other loves once put it, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The transformation Bella experiences is not just personal; it’s social. On the surface, Meyer’s fantasy is of a traditional patriarchy. The Cullens are an extended family living under one roof led by a benevolent father. In addition, the book resolutely champions the iconic conservative social issue when Bella refuses an abortion despite the fact that her pregnancy endangers her own life. Though this kind of conservatism is usually seen as denigrating women, Andrea Dworkin had another take. In her 1983 book Right Wing Women, she argued that conservative social arrangements actually offered women some modicum of protection and dignity.

Right-wing women consistently denounce abortion because they see it as inextricably linked to the sexual degradation of women. The sixties did not simply pass them by. They learned from what they saw. They saw the cynical male use of abortion to make women easy fucks…. Right-wing women see in promiscuity, which legal abortion makes easier, the generalizing of force.

Thus, for Meyer, the ultimate expression of Bella’s virginal inviolability is her decision to have her child — a decision whereby she refuses to allow sex to become inconsequential.

But while Meyer is in some sense a proponent of traditional (and Mormon) values, in another sense turning into a vampire involves a rearrangement of familial relationships which can only be described as perverse. The Cullen vampire household is composed of a bunch of married couples who all also see themselves as the children of Carlisle Cullen — so in becoming Edward’s wife, Bella also becomes virtually his sister. Bella’s child, in perfect horror movie tradition, grows at a superfast rate — and is barely out of the womb before she “imprints” on Bella’s best friend and former suitor Jacob. Meyer swears up and down and all around that there’s nothing sexual about this Oedipal imprinting…but even Bella herself finds that hard to believe.

In fact, if the land of vampires is an Eden, then it makes sense that (except for that one about biting the red apple) taboos no longer apply. And this too resonates with Dworkin — particularly with the writing of one of her chief inspirations, the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that:

without the incest taboo, adults might return within a few generations to a more natural “polymorphously perverse” sexuality, the concentration on genital sex and orgasmic pleasure giving way to total physical/emotional relationships that included that. Relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of…. Adult/child and homosexual sex taboos would disappear, as well as nonsexual friendships…. All close relationships would include the physical, our concept of exclusive physical partnerships (monogamy) disappearing from our psychic structure as well as the construct of a Partner Ideal.

Meyer’s vampiric family is, then, in its own way, a kind of prelapsarian feminist utopia, pointing on the one hand to a stable, benevolent society in which all can live safe from the threat of sexual violence, and on the other to a world of libidinal overflow in which staid restrictive rules are smashed in an onrush of egalitarian ecstasy. Vampires, significantly, experience unchanging, never-ending passion — Bella and Edward can fuck monogamously forever without ever tiring or growing bored. And so they will every night for the rest of their eternal lives…though every morning they pause to go to hang out with their family in sort-of-bourgeois domestic bliss.

In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin actually has some things to say directly about vampires. Talking about Dracula, she writes:

vampirism is — to be pedestrian in the extreme — a metaphor for intercourse: the great appetite for using and being used; the annihilation of orgasm; the submission of the female to the great hunter…. While alive the women are virgins in the long duration of the first fuck…after death, they are carnal, being truly sexed…. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth-century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, no matter with how many, no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freeom)…we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched unless blood has been spilled…this elegant bloodletting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair.

For Dworkin, then, Dracula is the ultimate profanation of both virginity and sex; a reimagining, in fact, of one as the other, and both as death. Instead of virginity leading to autonomy, it becomes just another fetish, to be consumed like all others. Instead of sex being a sacrament of love and connection, it becomes a form of “freedom” from connection, an alienated desire which feeds on itself. Vampirism is a way to make intercourse penetrate virginity, corrupting freedom without allowing for love, leaving only a life in death. It’s sex as consumption.

Stephenie Meyer’s vampires, though, don’t swallow Bella’s virginity. On the contrary, the point about the vampires seems to be that they can have sex and still remain virgins, inviolate and unchanging. After Bella has sex, both really and through the metaphor of being turned into a vampire, her power to stay safe in her own mind expands, until she can shield others from psychic invasion the way she shields herself. And at the very end of the book she gets the best power of all; the ability to let Edward read her thoughts when she wishes. Eternally loving, equally superhuman vampires joined in a monogamous relationship consummated by a perfect meeting of the minds. That’s a kind of intercourse maybe even Andrea Dworkin would have approved of.

The Wire Roundtable: Cherchez la femme

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The Wire may or may not be the Greatest TV Show Of All Time, Now And Forever, In Any Language And Genre, In The Whole World, And Throughout The Whole Extent Of Spacetime — but one thing’s for sure. It’s definitely The Most Praised Show Of All etc. Time, Entertainment Weekly and the Guardian have all labelled it the greatest, as have lots of other folks with and without column space. Metacritic.com assigned the fourth season an aggregate score of 98%, which is higher than the rating for God Himself; more strikingly, it’s even four points higher than the score for Kanye West’s most recent album.

The Wire‘s legion of enthusiasts regularly point to a couple of features that merit especial praise: the show’s realism; its panorama of an entire society at every level; its giving voice to the marginalised and disempowered. Realism: swearing! Panorama: Drugs! Unions! Politicians! Schoolkids! Settling old grudges Journalists! The marginalised: Black people! Gay people! Gay black people!

In interviews during and after the show, creator David Simon consistently claimed the highest ambition for the show and its themes. In particular, the show would

with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.

First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.

Throughout the whole show, however, there’s one group of marginalised and disempowered that is not given proper representation; one type of individual that gets eaten by institutions but is not explored; one group which has historically faced, and continues to face, massive inequalities of opportunity.

That’s right: I’m talking about the ladies.

Simon identifies The Wire‘s great theme as “institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them”. And throughout all five seasons, the show develops this theme in detail, in a variety of institutional contexts and with a variety of individual players. Institutions fuck over McNulty, Daniels, Bubs, Wallace, D’Angelo, the Sobotkas, Bunny, Randy, Bodie and plenty more besides.

But, from Snot Boogie’s sad demise at the very start to the much-exploited homeless guy at the end, The Wire is singularly unconcerned with how women fare in these institutions, the fates they face, the options open to them.

Consider: by my count, over the course of five seasons, thirty-seven cast names appear in the opening credits. Of these, four are women. These are the actors playing Beadie, Kima, Pearlman, and (!) Alma Gutierrez. Beadie is in the credits only for season 2, despite playing a sizable role in the final season too. Shardene and Snoop never make the credits. By contrast, Burrell, Rawls, Sydnor, Clay Davis, Clarence Royce, Maurice Levy and Chris Partlow do.

Chris Partlow makes the cut and Snoop doesn’t.

(This gender imbalance is presumably, totally unrelated, in any way whatsoever, to the fact that ten out of the eleven writing credits throughout the show are men)

Or consider: of those thirty-seven cast members, the relationship status of three of the women are plot points. Pearlman fucks McNulty and then Daniels; Beadie fucks McNulty; Kima struggles with her (de facto) wife and child. Alma gets nothing, but that’s only because she has no internal life to speak of or, really, any kind of life to speak of, beyond learning at the feet of the great David Simon Gus Haynes.

Sure, much is made of who the guys are fucking, too — McNulty and Omar in particular. (And, of course, if Pearlman is fucking Daniels, then Daniels is fucking Pearlman too). But, for a lot of the male characters, it’s simply not an issue. They may be married or have a girlfriend, but it doesn’t matter much to their character. Prez has a wife onscreen for all of one scene, as I recall; Bodie, Herc and Carv take dates to the movies and that’s about it; Marlo and Avon are mostly asexual; Rawls’ sexuality is a throw-away gag (well, two gags, if you include the graffiti in the homicide toilets); and who the hell knows about Royce, Davis, Burrell, Levy, Sydnor et al. The point isn’t that the show isn’t interested in who the guys are fucking; it’s that the show is much more interested in who the women are fucking.

And once you get beyond the “main” cast — even if you include a couple of extra characters not in the opening credits, such as Shardene, Snoop, Prop Joe, Jay Landsman and the like — it gets even worse. Most of the tertiary female characters are WAGs, would-be WAGs, one-night stands, or mothers. Going down the cast list, if we skip the few women who actually do appear in the opening credits, we get: Snoop; Marla Daniels, who’s fucking Daniels at first and then she’s not; Cheryl (you know, the one with her coupons); Theresa D’Agostino, who fucks McNulty and then tries to fuck Carcetti; Grace Sampson, who used to fuck Cutty; Donette, who fucked D’Angelo and then Stringer; Elena McNulty — look, it’s too depressing to go on.

The biggest missed opportunities comes in season four, with the introduction of the school. Here you have an environment with a lot of women and a lot of girls, the powerful and powerless. Maybe they couldn’t fit in a new major character as a teacher, given that they already had Prez undergoing his learning journey and growing into his new role. Maybe there wasn’t any need. But surely — surely — they could have made one of the four kids that we track a girl?

For the point of season four is, in part, to show the options available to black children in marginal environments. Randy, the budding entrepreneur who ends up traumatised by his glancing contact with crime. Michael, the child of abuse, who’s recruited to crime by way of protecting his family. Namond, who’s too weak for the streets and lucks into a way out. And Dukie, poor Dukie whose fate seems sealed from the moment we see him.

We see what the boys can do, what can become of them, what few roles are offered by the system — the systems — that surround them. But what are the fates for girls? Do they become dealers, junkies, citizens? What specific options do they have that the boys don’t have? Questions not answered by the show; worse, they’re not even asked.

The show isn’t altogether clueless on gender. There’s a nice bit in season four when all the neighbourhood mothers converge on Cutty, as one of the few eligible bachelors going. Or the bit in season one when D’Angelo lets his casual misogyny slip to Shardene. And the instigating incident of season two — the dead sex slaves — suggests a show not entirely uninterested in how women are used by power. But is that enough for a show that aims to reveal an entire society, and how that society grinds down its members? Is that enough for the Greatest TV Show Of All Time?

Or, to quote the great Bunk Moreland: Happy now, bitch?
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The entire Wire roundtable is here.

Jenna Does Jenna

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I wrote this for the Bridge Magazine website; when that folded I put it up on Eaten By Ducks. I suspect most people over here haven’t seen it though, and I’m fond of it, so I thought I’d reprint it.
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When asked by porn review site rogreviews.com if she was nervous during her first filmed sex scene, porn star Belladonna responded, “I hadn’t had sex for a couple of months so I was really horny. I wasn’t nervous at all.” And if you believe that, I’ve got an aphrodisiac to sell you. Belladonna’s been asked the same question in other forums, and her answer seems to vary widely, depending on what she thinks the interviewer wants to hear. That’s just good business; a sex-worker is paid first and foremost to bare her body, but she’s paid even more to bare a certain kind of inner life — what kind exactly varying from customer to customer. Or, as Jenna Jameson puts it in discussing her work as a stripper, “Everything that came out of my mouth was complete bullshit. I could tell by looking at each person what he wanted to hear. I’d tell him I was studying to be a real-estate agent, a lifeguard, a construction worker.”

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