Tag Archives: Laura Kipnis

An Open Letter to Meghan Murphy, fwiw, from an Other Side of Feminism.

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Editorial Note: This was originally posted by Nix on her tumblr on July 1, 2015.
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Hi Meghan,

I hope you’ll permit me to address you by your first name.  I do so not out of any disrespect or desire to minimize you or your work, but because I want to speak with you directly, a bit intimately, as one woman to another, as one Feminist to another, as one human being to another.

I’d like to tell you a bit about my life and the experiences that led me to choose sex work at the comparatively late age of 33.  I sort of want to confide…

I’m 34 years old, white, and from a Leftist, activist, middle class background (in Southern California).   My family has been torn apart by all manner of deceit, greed, abuse (including sexual), and hypocrisy, but I can assure you that there has never been a conscious moment in my own life when I wasn’t a Feminist.   I wasn’t permitted Barbie dolls unless I worked for the money to buy them for myself. I was given unlimited puzzles and books. I was told I could be anything that I wanted to be.  And I was encouraged to invest in my intelligence and physical capacities, as opposed to being “pleasing” to men.

I was not raised to see myself as an object.  I was raised to see myself as a subject, and a talented one at that.

Anyway, in 2008, I found myself in the very uncomfortable position of reporting two of my colleagues for sexual harassment at Northwestern University.  I was two years into a PhD program there.  One colleague had grabbed my ass at a bar (he was married and I thought we were meant to be discussing Deleuze) and another had told me that he had raped me and I didn’t remember it because I had been so drunk the last time he saw me (and technically, that was possible).

I did not want to ruin anyone’s career. But I did want to report for record, in case this sort of thing happened to someone else. I also requested sexual harassment training for my entire department in an effort to make sure that it would not.

Unfortunately, the Chair of my department was a woman who would not permit any training session to occur unless she knew which students were involved.  Conflict of interest much?

I had planned on letting it all slide.  I wasn’t about to out myself like that, as my department was so tiny and gossipy, and there would undoubtedly be negative repercussions.   Further, I was TAing for the Chair with that married colleague who had grabbed my ass.  I figured that I just needed to make it through the quarter… Until she asked me to compare grades with him at a coffee shop.

So I confessed to her, for lack of a better word, because I wasn’t about to meet with him off-campus.

She told me: “People get grabbed.”  She told me: Rape was “unthinkable” and “why would anyone say such a thing?”  She told me: “The Sexual Harassment Office is just an excuse for a sad, incompetent woman to hold a job and drink from her Northwestern coffee mug.”  She told me: “Americans are too uptight about being touched… Why, even her yoga teacher had to ask before touching students!”  She told me: “Reporting sexual harassment is a weak act.”  She told me: I needed “to take better care of myself and not worry so much about other people.”  She told me, in short, that: The only problem was me!  I was just too sensitive, weak, and fragile.

I’ll be honest with you, of all the words used to describe me over the course of my life, that is the only time I’ve ever heard “weak.”   She maintained this line and I eventually reported her to the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention for gender discrimination and a toxic work environment.

She was investigated over the course of a 24 hour period, which is an amazing turnaround, don’t you think? And then, nothing happened!  So I eventually attempted to report the entirety of Northwestern University to the Office of Civil Rights for violation of Title IX, arguing that NU has absolutely no protocol to speak of and pointing to their own lack of staff, myriad conflicts of interest, and lack of training, generally.

I still maintain this. And they’ve had three public scandals since I attempted to file a complaint against them with the OCR in 2010: one concerning a fucksaw, one concerning Ludlow and an undergrad, and the latest over this piece of pablum.

Of course, the OCR didn’t take my case.  I wasn’t raped, or at least, I don’t think I was.  And nothing that happened to me was a big enough offense to move a federal agency like the OCR, even if I was pointing to NU’s bureaucratic structure and lack of training as the root cause of my problems which would necessarily produce more problems for others.

So, by 2012, after fighting within the system with everything I had, I dropped out A.B.D.  I couldn’t justify writing a dissertation for a university that didn’t care about my own bodily sovereignty and safety, particularly as a “Feminist.”  And how was I supposed to be an authority on any topic whatsoever if I wasn’t the authority of my own personal space?  The entire experience was immensely disempowering.

I moved back to Southern California and I set out to get a job.  Any job!  Because I was starting my life all over!   Clearly, the academic route had been a terrible, terrible mistake for me.

As you might imagine, though, no one – and I mean no one – is inclined to hire someone who left their last post because they found out their institution had no functioning sexual harassment policy.  It’s too likely that you’re… fragile, weak, and sensitive.  And you’re a whistleblower.  Who the hell wants to hire someone that you know will blow the whistle on you if she deems it necessary, according to her own lights?

This left me in the position where I would have to fabricate a biographical lie for job interviews, which frankly I see as censorship and a disavowal of what happened to me.  This seems resolutely anti-Feminist to me and I was unwilling to make prospective employers comfortable with me, my past, or Northwestern.  I was unwilling to deny what I saw to be a fundamental injustice that must necessarily perpetuate itself by way of an almost willful negligence on the part of NU admin.  Not having a functioning sexual harassment and assault policy at a major university seems to me like a fucking crisis if ever there was one.  People should know.  And why should I be ashamed?  I left. I didn’t stay like some obedient slave. That would have been truly shameful, in my opinion.

Thus, I was unemployed for a good 6 months before I started my first business – which failed – after which I finally got into phone sex and camming as an independent domme in August of last year.  I’m a newbie, but the decision to do sex work was a long time coming and there are two important moments/thoughts that brought me there, and which I’d like to share with you.  (I thank you if you’ve made it this far.)

The first was when I was still at Northwestern.  I told a few of the professors, in 2010, that in light of the Chair’s clear policy on ass-grabbing, they really weren’t paying me enough and, indeed, I didn’t think they could afford me, and even if they could, it certainly wouldn’t go down like this.  I am not some unoccupied lot of land waiting for some intrepid male moron to come squat on me!  My existence is not an invitation to anyone for any reason!  I am not your Lady Everest!

The second thought occurred to me in April of last year.  I was very much unemployed and sort of psyching myself out for homelessness when I realized – If I was an exotic dancer at a reputable club, my ass would not be grabbed against my will because there would be bouncers.  Any ass-grabbing would only ever happen on my terms, with my consent, for money.

How in the hell is it that I’d be better protected from sexual assault taking my clothes off as sensually as possible in a designated area for money than as a PhD student at Northwestern University interacting with colleagues?  That’s a very sincere question.  How is that possible?  What insane fucking world is this?  But there you have it.

So, about four months later I spent an entire week researching my sex work options and deciding what I might commence with, what I was willing to do, what I was not willing to do.  I bought stock photos of sexy ladies – no shortage of those! – and framed body parts as if I was creating examples for a Mulvey lecture.  That wasn’t hard, as I’m sure you can imagine.  (I use my own image now, but I didn’t start that way.)

And you know what I thought? If this works, I’m finally going to profit off of the very thing that has been harming me my entire life.  It felt like grifting a system that had only ever grifted me.  And that felt really good.

The clients were not at all what I expected.  There are creeps, to be sure, but most of my clients are not even remotely abusive or rapey, because the most entitled men don’t pay for sex at all.  They just take it.  There are no boundaries with them, only overarching entitlement.  Ratio-wise, though, I encounter far more of these rapey men in my day-to-day than at work.  And I think there may be a plethora of them in academia, but who knows?  Still, there does seem to be a suspicious trend.

This all leads me to making the online acquaintance of Noah Berlatsky, a man you clearly hate, I understand… but I do think you have the wrong end of the stick here.  Please bear with me and grant me the possibility of a free (and stubborn!) will. I do appreciate your consideration and time.

Noah wrote an article that I became a little obsessed with on the UVa Rolling Stone scandal and Eden.  I was reading it because I was a sex worker and his work had been referred to often enough. I liked his articles.  But what struck me the most with this one was how it related to what I had experienced at Northwestern.  What happened to me was quotidian, not a big deal, something I was supposed to suffer under to prove that I was “tough.”  In it, he quotes Jessica Luther as telling him that:

 “We are saturated by a culture that sexualizes women but also demonizes them, that celebrates fuzzy consent and certainly doesn’t punish it, that blames victims for the sexual violence done to them, that is sometimes willing to ask people to intervene but is never willing to directly say to men that they should not rape. This kind of saturation makes it so people don’t really want to hear another story about a woman being sexually assaulted—and even if someone is willing to listen to story after story, what has to change to make it so these kinds of violent acts don’t happen with such regularity feels insurmountable. So there is this idea then that to get people to care, the story of that violence that you share (either as a journalist or a survivor) has to shock people so that they say, “Damn, even in THIS culture that doesn’t care much for women, THAT is bad.”

This quote seemed to exactly sum up my problem at NU and with the OCR.  And Noah seemed to be tracking two problems of which I was, and am, particularly aware – Sex worker stigma and sexual assault.  Or to put it another way – If I use my sexuality to extract cash from men, I’m a victim.  But if male sexuality is aggressively thrust upon me, that’s somehow my fault.  It honestly feels to me like my limited agency within this jackass culture is completely inverted, and whatever I say about myself will be turned upside down by those who “know better” than me, about me.

So I tweeted at Noah and told him how much I appreciated his articles.  And that was that.

I’ve had a ton of online exchanges with him and one chat by phone.  He has not once commented on how I look, referred to me by any diminutive, called me food items or pastry titles, solicited my services, pried into my personal life, condescended, or even ignored me, the latter of which wouldn’t be gendered violence so much as modern busyness and I-can’t-even.  That is pretty rare.

And that’s why women, and perhaps sex workers in particular, are willing, and even enthusiastic, to speak with him.  He isn’t objectifying us.  If he was objectifying us we would most certainly be charging him, or he’d end up listed as a loser by STUPIG or some other service like it.  It’s that cold, jim.  It’s that cold.  But there is nothing of the kind.

This leads me to the travesty that you think sex work is.  It wasn’t because I wanted to be an object that I got in to sex work.  It’s because I found myself sexually objectified even in places wherein I was meant to be valued for my intelligence.  It’s because I’m supposed to interpret an invitation to discuss philosophy as a sexual overture by virtue of me being cast as “girl” and my colleague being cast as “boy.”  And this ridiculously heterosexist garbage passes as “common sense” and even “professionalization” amongst people certified in the Humanities.  Ha!  Great. Why would I ever want to finish my degree?

So you tell me: What made me a whore?  It wasn’t sex work. I got into sex work because I wanted bouncers, distance, control, agency, choice, money, and all that freedom that I’m well aware you don’t like.  I got into sex work to capitalize off of what was always and already, my objectification. And before you call me a capitalist, please know that I am not.  But this is a capitalist society.  And I do seem to be reduced to my sex no matter how smart or competent I might try to be.

No.  I got into sex work because I don’t care what men think.  I don’t want their love.  I don’t want their approval.  I don’t want their advice.  I just want their cash, after which point I want appropriate behavior, and then I’d like them to go away.

As for Playboy… I get it.  It’s probably the premiere magazine in which the Beauty Industry and the Sex Industry overlap most overtly.  And that is a problem.  But it does have an impressive readership as well as a history of fabulous interviews with intellectuals.  Further, the sexism is not denied and the women do get paid.  It’s not free as you indicated in The New Statesman.  Sex workers are hustlers, if nothing else.  We want money, not to be told by the 50 billionth schmuck that we’re “fuckable.”  We know we’re “fuckable.”  As dumb as you might think sex workers are, we’re crystal clear on this.  That’s the business.

But this business doesn’t function with quite the stringent “boy”/”girl” beauty standard bullshit you might expect.  Really, this industry is built on fantasy, fetish, and to be perfectly frank, I think shame.  There is a performative quality to sex work that has the potential to be very subversive and very political.  But mainstream crap is generally just that, and it’s always been regressive and propagandist, not just in the sex industry.  My point is – It’s not the only type of sex work out there, even if it is the “norm,” which is, of course, a fiction.

With that said, I can’t say that I have a problem with a fantasy sex world existing, pending it is circumscribed and designated between consenting adults.  But I do have a problem when those fantasies start being projected on real people trying to live their lives in peace.

Personally, I am much more disturbed by The Chronicle of Higher Education. This is a supposedly non-sexist, sober-minded American standard that has continuously and seemingly willfully made errors of fact concerning specific allegations of rape and sexual assault on my former campus against one professor in particular.  These two cases don’t concern me personally in the slightest, but the negligence with which The Chronicle has addressed them here, here, and here – and the way in which every other news source has parroted Kipnis’ thesis again and again, from Jezebel to NPR to Reason just yesterday – is distressing to me,  to say the least.  I don’t know what to call it, save a snow job.

I think Kipnis, who repeatedly calls herself a Leftist and a Feminist and then gives not one whit of proof by way of any of her arguments is more damaging to Feminism than Playboy, because she’s more sinister and covert.  And if I were to be mad at Noah Berlatsky for being published in Playboy I’d likewise have to be miffed that he’s published by Reason.  I mean, Kipnis actually says in her latest interview that she feels sorry for men making 98 cents on their past dollar when women currently make some 70-something cents.  Ha!  Wow.  I honestly can’t wrap my head around this. And she also re-uses the same example of an “anonymous prof and student dating” which she was specifically taken to task for here because it’s from the professor’s testimony only and concerns a rape case that is still being considered.

Anyway, while I do understand that you’re angered by the existence of Playboy, I’d be really happy if you might consider those day-to-day factors which might lead a woman to choose sex work and attack those much bigger issues, as opposed to attacking sex work, itself.

Because, ultimately, I think the main reason that you and Noah butt heads is because you’re trying to deconstruct Femininity and those with less power, when you really might want to start with Masculinity and those with more power.  Masculinity is a far more damaging and destructive force than Femininity at the moment, as the two genders are currently culturally coded. And Femininity is put down all the time. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see Whorephobia as anything other than internalized hatred that originates from male violence.  Because let’s be honest: We’re called “whore” no matter what we do.  Or to quote Emma Goldman:

“Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.”

Anyway, I’m rather sorry this is so long and I sincerely thank you if you made it to the end.  I don’t want to start a feud with you and I don’t want to convert you.  Indeed, I don’t really expect anything from you.  But I did want to share my perspective with you because I am angry, I am Feminist, I am activist (albeit despite myself), but my traumas and targets seem to be a bit different than yours.  It sort of seems a shame that we should be on different sides.  But then, I suppose it takes all kinds.

Take care, and thanks for your time, Meghan. – Nix

Biting the Hand That Feeds: Hannibal, Rihanna, and Sexual Harassment

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I had somehow missed The Silence of the Lambs, viewing it only a few years ago, well into my adulthood. After years of making jokes about how “it rubs the lotion on its skin,” my husband got frustrated with my blank looks of incomprehension and queued it up on Netflix. As Buffalo Bill grows increasingly irate with his captive, screaming at her “or else it gets the hose again!”, I burst into tears. A 30 year old woman frantically crying over an often-mocked scene in a 20 year old film.

My husband was unnerved to say the least—he had seen the film when it came out, and since it circulated in popular culture in a recognizable way for him, the line had lost its teeth. It was cheesy, and morphed into a joke. I, on the other hand, had no context for the line, and had heard it for years as a cutesy phrase that referenced a film I’d never watched. Having it replaced in its proper milieu was jarring. Instead of a tacky scene worthy of ridicule, something about the pronoun—“it”—and the directive about lotion reached around the rational part of my mind and struck me directly in the amygdala.

I unintentionally overlooked the television series Hannibal until two seasons in, when I was looking to kick off last summer with some horror. The glorious cinematography, the powerfully reserved acting, and the beautifully rendered script combined to make a stunning and tense dance of intellect and gore.

The first and second seasons are fixated on the strain between knowledge and ignorance. Will Graham, a special investigator for the FBI, is capable—according to Dr. Lecter—of “pure empathy”; he can mentally reconstruct a murderer’s actions, playing the role of the criminal in his internal recreation of the drama. Special Agent Jack Crawford contacts Will to assist him on a case in which young women of the same physical description have been disappearing. Crawford’s initial role is less that of a capable investigator than a pushy delegator. Dr. Alana Bloom, a purportedly intelligent psychiatrist, has taken an interest in Will, and wants to protect him from what she sees as Crawford’s potentially disruptive pressure. To this end, she introduces Crawford to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who is tasked with monitoring Will.

The show relies on the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of Dr. Lecter operating in the background. Assuming we have seen the unhinged Anthony Hopkins biting the cheek off of a prison guard and recounting eating a liver with “some fava beans and a nice Chianti,” we are faced instead with an eminently rational and restrained Lecter in the show.

Lecter’s self-possessed mien in Hannibal stands in stark contrast to Hopkins’ portrayal, and while the audience knows he is the “bad guy,” the show operates less on the shock value of the murders under investigation or Lecter’s own gastronomical vagaries, and more on how power and knowledge must be—as Michel Foucault insisted—thought together.

Foucault equated knowledge with power, something that those currently struggling under the auspices of austerity in the academe may find laughable, but it’s an equation that is nonetheless compelling for situating current debates about the role of those with knowledge, and what types of knowledge can (or should) be leveraged into power. In Hannibal, Lecter uses his intellect, as well as his privileged status as confidant and guide for Will, to conduct increasingly bizarre experiments on him while the latter is in a fugue state. Lecter manipulates those around him, relentlessly curious about the boundaries of goodness and empathy in those who have the capacity for them.

Foucault is careful to distinguish between knowledge that is laden with power and knowledge that is marginalized. He specifically notes the “disqualified knowledges” of the mentally ill, but broadens this to say that “We are concerned, rather, with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods, or concepts of science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and functioning” of a discipline (Power/Knowledge 84). In regards to this, he parses the way in which power is only thought of as something that is exerted, rather than something that is naturalized and replicated without direct activity.

As shorthand, it can be thought of as the distinction between the power of having and the power of doing.

Hannibal’s ability to unnerve and disquiet rests not on the “reveal,” as with many crime thrillers. The audience already knows who the villain is, even as the team tries to sort out other cases of varying drama and terror. Instead, the appeal of Hannibal rests almost entirely with the tacit knowledge shared by the audience and Lecter: that he is the antagonist, but we still want to see precisely what he is capable of in relationships. In fact, the least interesting scenes in the show are those that depict him enjoying a meal of a person alone. The tension instead resides in watching Lecter use the knowledge he has of himself—as well as his developing theories about other characters—to his own ends.

I’ve been reflecting on Hannibal throughout the year because its peculiar blend of refinement, psychopathology, and epicureanism holds me in a strange thrall. It reminds me of other debates about power, both the having and the doing, because the show has crafted a world in which the rules of behavior and the exercise of power are nearly illegible to those in the best position to address the atrocities occurring within their midst.

In particular, as I watch the third (and possibly final) season of Hannibal, I’m also embroiled in the ongoing debate about campus sexual harassment, launched in part by Laura Kipnis in her now-famous Chronicle of Higher Education article “Sexual Paranoia Strikes the Academe.” This may seem an odd pairing—a show about a psychiatrist/cannibalistic serial killer and a turgid debate about whether or not professors should be permitted to have sex with students—but I can’t help but think that the same questions about power are at stake.

For those who haven’t followed the discussion, Kipnis’s argument rests on three major elements. The first is that administrators are overstepping their boundaries and are infringing on academic freedom. This is patently true, and doesn’t merit debate. Administrative overreach has been consistently critiqued over the past 30 years, and is getting worse as faculty are increasingly shifted to the status of contingent labor. Furthermore, because of this administrative overreach, it is increasingly clear that non-educators are determining educational policy, always to the detriment of students’ actual development.

Second, she contends that an obvious example of this is new policies prohibiting professor-student romantic relationships. These policies have been implemented at a variety of universities to quell the tide of demonstrations against campus sexual assault. While I personally agree with these policies, I can see the potential problems with them, and am willing to debate them.

Third, she argues that the supposed “sexual panic” on campuses is vastly overinflating a relatively benign problem, and that students’ own sense of exaggerated vulnerability is actually making professors the more vulnerable class. This is ridiculous. Professor-on-student sexual harassment and assault are still significant issues. While student-on-student sexual harassment accounts for 80% of reports on campus, that still leaves a sizable problem. Furthermore, many cases of both varieties go unreported. For example, Kipnis asserts that

For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition.

Here, she is conflating normal misunderstandings with harassment.

My annoyance with the tenor of this discussion has increased with the tone-deafness of Kipnis’ understanding of power and its subtle manifestations.

In Hannibal, the audience is in reluctant collusion with Lecter as he manipulates and slaughters characters. There are—of course—the “ordinary interpersonal entanglements” of daily life. Will Graham and Alanna Bloom share an attraction, but because Alanna is concerned about Will’s mental state, she refuses to enter into a relationship with him. Jack Crawford’s pressure on Will to use his empathy can grow harsh. However, standing in stark contrast to these relatively benign interactions is the maneuvering of Lecter.

Interestingly, both Will and Lecter work from the point of curiosity about human emotions and motivation. While Will is able to adopt the perspective of others who have committed misdeeds in the past, Lecter is able to use his observations to predict future behavior. Both are talented, but only one begins the series with a sense of the way in which his knowledge brings him power. In the first season, Lecter experiments on Will after discovering that he has the symptoms of encephaly. Instead of seeking surgical treatment for his patient, Lecter devises a series of experiments in the clinical setting to encourage Will to lose time. In entrusting his mind to another, Will is violated at both the psychological and bodily levels because he fails to discern how this power can be leveraged against him.

After Will reconstructs a crime scene that includes a grisly totem pole of bodies, he loses time and appears at Lecter’s office door. Lecter tells him that this is the result of his psyche “enduring repeated abuse,” and Will frantically objects that “No, NO! I am NOT abused!” Lecter repeats that Will has an empathy disorder, and that disregarding his disordered psyche is “the abuse I’m referring to.” Here, abuse is relocated as being the act of the person suffering—abuse at his own hand—rather than being visited from the outside. This recalls Kipnis’s argument that it is students’ sense of vulnerability, rather than objective conditions in which they are disempowered, that is the problem.

Will wants to find a physical—objective—cause for his disorder. The viewer already knows that Lecter is hiding some aspect of this from Will, but it is not until the following episode that we see there is indeed a physical cause for Will’s rapidly fraying sanity, a cause that Lecter pressures the neurologist to conceal. Much like the objective problem of sexism within the academe, Will’s disordered brain matter has psychological effects that are erroneously attributed to more ethereal causes.

It is not that Will or Lecter stand in an easy allegorical relationship to students and professors in relation to Kipnis’s argument. Instead, Will and Lecter represent two distinct modes of knowledge, both of which are necessary to understand the real causes, circumstances, and consequences of sexual harassment in the academy and elsewhere. Lecter has power in his superior knowledge of the mind, and is not afraid to leverage it to his own ends. In this sense, we must remember that knowledge is not equivalent to ethics.

Will, on the other hand, has the capacity to understand others on an experiential level—to feel as they feel—but this very gift is also potentially disabling. Neither emotion nor reason are able to wholly grasp the diegetic world of Hannibal. Instead, there is a third term—power, and its subtle operation—with which all of the characters in both the on-screen and real-world dramas must contend.

It would be foolish, however, to equate Lecter’s power with his capacity to do violence on others. Violence is almost beside the point of the show, much like violence is frequently beside the point in terms of sexual violence. It remains popular to say that “rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power.” However, too often, those who remark on this conflate power with violence, as if violence is the only way in which power operates. Power in the world of Hannibal is not Lecter’s murders, or the murders by other various and sundry psychopaths populating the chorus of the show. It is the leveraging of psychological force.

One of the greatest myths that persists to today is that sexual harassment, and sexual violence, are invariably violent in the traditional sense of the word. The ham-handed training on sexual harassment provided by private companies making money off of universities trying to comply with Title IX do little to help this issue, as they have themselves a vested interest in concealing how subtly power circulates in a workplace, classroom, or clinic.

Perhaps this is less than legible for those who have acclimated themselves to shows of force. For example, Mads Mikkelsen, the actor who plays Lecter in Hannibal, was recently featured in Rihanna’s new video “Bitch Better Have My Money.” The video represents Rihanna as a kingpin of some sort whose accountant, Mikkelsen, has stolen her money. She kidnaps and tortures his wife, which doesn’t particularly phase him, so she goes on to torture him.

The video is an interesting contrast to Mikkelsen’s role on Hannibal. While he is still situated in relatively luxurious surroundings, he is ultimately at the whims of Rihanna. Furthermore, some critics have levelled the charge that the video is misogynistic because of the violence she visits on the woman who plays the wife of Mikkelsen. Speculations flew about whether or not this was a revenge fantasy about Rihanna’s real-life former accountant. Feminists of color have (rightly) pointed out that white feminism hasn’t always been welcoming to women of color.

Even the debates surrounding this video illustrate how fraught power is, particularly in relation to those who have been historically oppressed. Of course, the theft of money and sexual harassment or assault are not equivalent. Instead, this clearly illustrates how the public tends to react to obvious displays of violence—particularly from a disadvantaged woman, and in this case, particularly a woman of color—versus its critical acclaim of a white man with an advanced degree who eats people.

Hannibal is more than a show about a dude with “refined tastes,” however. It’s a series that best hits its stride when the audience is gazing on the beautifully plated delectables we know for a fact are composed predominantly of the minor character killed off in the previous scene. It’s a series that does more with an eyebrow raise, a small hand gesture, or a mild remark, than most shows are capable of doing with an ample explosives budget.

And it is loved—and found disturbing—precisely because we recognize that the power wielded by Lecter is at its most insidious when it is least obvious.

Obvious displays of power are few and far between. It would be delightful if tomorrow I could wake up in a world where power had shifted so far from the hands of professors and administrators that students weren’t threatened in a variety of ways by their moods and their decisions. Lecter remarks late in the second season that “Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude,” but even at this point, Lecter still knows much that Will does not.

After all, Hannibal kills both for pleasure and for necessity. He only eats those he considers equivalent to the animals most humans ingest. As he remarks to a character he’s keeping captive, “This isn’t cannibalism, Abel. It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals.”

And so goes Kipnis’ argument. It is only sexual harassment if we pretend that we are equals, and that there are not small, subtle (or even obvious) power dynamics at play. It’s only violence if it looks like it to her.

Power isn’t merely in the exercise thereof. It is in the ability to assess whether or not it was exercised.

Yippee-Ki-Yo-Kipnis

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Northwestern_Arch

 
I want to start out by congratulating Ms. Laura Kipnis.
 
I want to congratulate her for making it into menopause without ever having been sexually harassed, assaulted, stalked, or raped.

I’d like to commend her on her heterosexuality, on her cis-gender, on her white skin, and her evident comfort with (and indeed, ignorance of) all that these markers might entail.

I’d like to toast her for attending universities and colleges at a time when the average student debt was at half of what it is today, when a Humanities degree was not considered an utter wash of one’s time, when 1/3 of the student body did not take medication for depression and/or anxiety, when paper tablets were all the rage, when porn was something you had to purchase in a real-life sex shop, when no one even knew what ‘bukkake’ meant.

What foresight this woman had in the circumstances of her birth!

I curtsy her supreme majesty at not having been born in an abusive home or in poverty.

And I salute her stolid mental health.

May this Great Impenetrable continue to satisfy her narcissism in harmless, minxy flirtations with younger colleagues, while tickling her own fancy with the naughty high school thought that the very man who is meant to be teaching a Sexual Harassment workshop might be substituting masturbation with coin-jangling right in front of everyone! Tee-hee-hee…

What a saucy girl that Ms. Kipnis is. How great her imagination on the masturbation front, but occluded to literally all else.

It must be comfy… That whole ignorance thing.

To never have to wonder why all the training she received was voluntary (according to her own article), to entirely miss the seemingly singular incompetence of those running the workshop – and to miss it so thoroughly that the lack of preparation on the part of the man running it, “David,” becomes proof positive of her own superior intellect.

It is not that Northwestern has a muddy, ill-conceived Sexual Harassment and Assault policy with little-to-no training for its members, which is further executed (and exacerbated) by people who cannot answer the most basic questions pertaining to universal policy. It’s just that she’s a psychoanalytic genius perceiving the unconscious masturbatory signals of “David”!

Way to turn a potentially PTSD’ed frown upside-down, Kipnis!

May all us fragile, mentally-ill, pattern-perceivers bow down to your prurient ingenuity and robust one-track-mind!

Unless, of course, Freud was also right about that whole cigar thing… You know, about it not always being a penis?

At which point Professor Kipnis, herself, becomes evidence of the very lack of training and education that she failed to note during the voluntary Sexual Harassment workshops that she attended at Northwestern University; indeed, a symptom of the institution, itself.

This latest Kipnis fiasco is the third public scandal her esteemed institution has seen in the past five years alone, with Ludlow and a public fucksaw demonstration preceding it.

But I am certain that such mass hysteria is in no way linked to the fact that the people leading the only (read: voluntary) Sexual Harassment and Assault workshops at NU are unable to answer the simple, and daringly querulous question posed them by the ever astute Ms. Kipnis. Namely:

“How [does one] know that [their sexual advances] are unwanted until they try?”

Yikes! What a stumper! The answer to that couldn’t possibly be:

“Is this honestly your first try?”

Unfortunately for both NU and Ms. Kipnis, that would take some form of memory, and memory is so frighteningly close to PTSD, what with its pattern recognition and all, that I hesitate to recommend such a guideline for fear of contaminating Northwestern Professors’ collective mental health.

And certainly, that could never be my intent. Oh, no. All hail.

Besides traditionally powerless people/students now have such insane, castrating, vagina dentata powers that, as Kipnis points out, a married male editor in his undies of her acquaintance got on Skype with a writer and because of his undress suffered… absolutely nothing save the loss of one book contract. And for his part he got to repeatedly present himself to an accomplished, 30-something, woman writer as if she were an unpaid Cam Model cruising the interwebs for some sad-sack ‘pleasure’ worthy only of a Todd Solondz film.

I mean, imagine if this “nebbish” editor, and all the other quotidian creepers like him, were to be fired for their lack of professionality? Or for not doing their jobs? Or for (gasp) sexual harassment?!

My lord, it might be a veritable holocaust of male sexual entitlement in the halls of the hoity-toity.

And how thoroughly embarrassing for all the white, straight, cis-men! To actually have to conduct themselves with the same level of professionality expected of the hysterically unbalanced “survivors.”

But Kipnis, bless her simple heart, wouldn’t really know. She’s no “survivor.” (yuck!)

Rather, she’s got an iron uterus, having never suffered such an onslaught of psychotic male attention in all her mentally stable days! Or, at least, none that she cares to serve up publicly.

She only ever serves up other people’s traumas publicly.

And for such courage, as well as her willingness to speak for, and over, those with less power than herself, I salute her!

After all, why should Professors be held to the same professional standards as Therapists and Medical Professionals by students paying $50,000+ a year? The very idea is infantilizing to all grown-ups everywhere!

And so, I hail Kipnis and her rousing, pom-pom performance for the old-boys’ club that is academia. I was really worried for a second that it might actually die off. But thanks to Kipnis’ new Estroven regimen, I now know that there’s not a chance.

Stay free, Kipnis. Stay true. Stay privileged!

And don’t ever let your own students’ experiences sway you. After all, it’s your job to teach them (the hysterical child-sissies), not the other way around! Your brave fight is the stuff of which ballads are made, Sister.

The System works

                        Cuz I got Mine.

                        My Solidarity extends

                        Only as far as My own Behind.

Update: Northwestern has issued a notably unenlightening statement about recent sexual assault findings.