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Bitch Magazine, #64 LoveLust Digital
Bitch Magazine, #64 LoveLust Digital
28
features
the madame butterfly effect
Tracing the history of a fetish.
columns
17
by patricia pa r k
20 falling in self-love
by yu m i sa ku gawa
by joshunda sa n d e r s
by l i sa c . k n i s e ly
50 scandal-less
66 cast aside
73 rock of ages
in every issue
3
4
5
26
61
69
76
80
Amanda Jarman, Chair; Kate Copeland, Evy Cowan, Grayson Dempsey, Hilary Doe,
David Frias, Jodi Heintz, Megan Kovacs, Megan Shipley, Gretchen Sisson, Allison Sneider,
Mary Kay Tetreault, Deborah Walsh, Megan Wentworth, Kendall Youngblood
Veronica Arreola, Madeline Buckingham, P.C. Cast, Judy Chicago, Kate Clinton,
Abby Dees, Carla DeSantis, Susan J. Douglas, Rachel Fudge, Rita Hao, Jean Kilbourne,
Laura Lippman, Katha Pollitt, Ann Powers, Cameron Russell, Urvashi Vaid
B-Word Worldwide, dba Bitch Media, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, tax ID no. 94-3360737.
Contributions are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law!
contributors
Yumi Sakugawa (Falling in Self-Love,
page 20) is a comic-book artist and the author
of I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You and Your
Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the
Universe. She is a regular comic contributor to
The Rumpus and Wonderhowto.com, and her
short comic stories Mundane Fortunes for the Next Ten Billion Years
and Seed Bomb were selected as Notable Comics of 2012 and 2013
respectively by the Best American Comics series editors. A graduate
of the fine art program of University of California, Los Angeles, she
lives in southern California. Learn more at yumisakugawa.com.
Patricia Park (The Madame Butterfly
Effect, page 28) is a writer whose work has
appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian,
Slice Magazine, and others. She was a former
Fulbright scholar to South Korea and has
taught creative writing at Boston University.
Her debut novel Re Jane, a Korean-American retelling of Charlotte
Bronts Jane Eyre, will be published by Penguin/Viking in 2015.
She was born and raised in New York City, where she currently
lives. Follow her work at patriciapark.com.
Lynsey G (Blowing the Budget, page 45)
is a journalist, blogger, poet, and writer who
focuses on sex, feminism, and pornography.
Shes written for outlets as diverse as Juggs,
xoJane, McSweeneys Internet Tendency,
TOSKA, Menacing Hedge, and Luna Luna
Magazine, among others. Shes still on a high after winning a 2013
Feminist Porn Award for her short film Consent: Society and is now
at work blogging at her own website (lynseyg.com), finishing her
graphic novel Tracy Queen, and editing a poetry chapbook about
Audrey Munson.
Phoebe Robinson (Cast Aside, page 66)
is a stand-up comedian, writer, and performer
living in New York City. She has appeared on
Comedy Centrals Broad City, FXs Totally
Biased, and NBCs Last Comic Standing.
Behind the scenes, shes a writer for MTVs
Girl Code and the VH1 pilot Chateau Buteau. When not working
on television projects, she writes for Glamour.com and contributes
to the New York Times, VanityFair.com, xoJane, Bitch, and The Daily
Beast. If youre in NYC, you can catch her at 9:30 p.m. on the last
Tuesday of every month at UCB East hosting Blaria LIVE!, the show
that spawned from her popular, Huffington Postapproved blog
Blaria (a.k.a. Black Daria).
Perrin (illustrations, pages 58, 66, and 73)
is a designer, illustrator, mover, and shaker.
Her work has been recognized by the Society
of Illustrators, American Illustration, and
3X3 Magazine. She is originally from a small
harbor town on the northern coast of Long
Island. After earning her MFA in illustration
practice from the Maryland Institute College
of Art in 2013, she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she now
practically lives in Lake Erie. She can often be found obsessively
making art and spending time with her beloved rabbit companion,
Blanche DuBun. See her portfolio at madebyperrin.com.
Your purchase of this digital edition makes it possible for us to thrive.
fa l l . 1 4
issue no.64
bitch | 3
letters
& COMMENTS
Pulling no punches
Many thanks for Sarah Browns article,
Against the Ropes, and the powerful accompanying photographs by Delilah Montoya
(no. 63). A quick story: A friend with whom
I watch a lot of football once told me that he
thought womens sports were generally pretty
boring. I disagreed, heatedly, while privately
admitting that I had no idea. Besides a few
Olympic events, Id never watched female
athletes compete. I made a point to start paying attention, and although watching men
box still makes me squeamish, Ive become
a big fan of female fighters. Why the difference? Is it the novelty? Maybe, in part. But
the idea that Theres no way for women to
express that kind of feeling out there in the
worldand that for this reason, their fights
are better, more dynamicis a refrain I hear
again and again from other fans and from
the athletes themselves. The unique hurdles
that female boxers facetiny paychecks, few
televised bouts, insufficient sponsporship
opportunitiesstretch for miles, and its
tough to know how best to right this wrong.
4|
bitch f e m i n i s t
r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
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not exactly Gang affiliated
issue no.64
bitch | 5
love it
SHOVE IT
u.s. army
6|
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r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
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Texas Tech: Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) of Halt and Catch Fire .
California Guys: The bros of Silicon Valley.
fa l l . 1 4
issue no.64
bitch | 7
love it
SHOVE IT
ecstasyofacripple.tumblr.com
Portrait of an artist
Vermont, she reflected on her recent respiratory illness. Hovering on the edge of mortality,
she had found clarity and revelation.
The purest communion with infinite life
and divinity is inherently sexual, Woods says.
What better metaphor for that than the female orgasm, which is a moment when all the
aspects of yourself dissolve and yet expand
into that vastness, the unknown?
Woods and Dodd set about visualizing the
project, drawing elements from Shakespearean plays and other bardic poetrystrong
influences in Woodss work. The series clearly
illustrates how neuromuscular disorder isnt
crippling for Woods. Rather her approach
to art is intrinsically linked to her experience
living with neuromuscular disorder.
Woods addresses sexuality and disability
in many of her endeavors. In her play, The
Fools Riddle, Woods portrays an ambassador from the ship of fools, a concept she
borrows from Foucault to represent the outcasts of society. In an accompanying photo
series, also shot by Dodd, she explores the
origins of hysteria, its history as diagnosable
mental illness, and how it informed the foundations of modern medicine.
In shrugging off the -isms Woods works
beyond categories that could perhaps
support her in her message. But her work
serves to illustrate how one can help to
abandon assumptions and perceptions when
it comes to tough issues. Woods says, My
motto is, Authentic expression heals.
Elizabeth Hewitt
hen it comes to
domestic violence,
mainstream French
media seems to think that soccer is more headline-worthy
than dead women. In fact, backto-school sales, the anomalous
November-like weather, the
government retreat on teaching
girl-boy equalityall are given
better treatment in the recent
news than violence against
8|
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r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
love it
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Anyone else want to chime in? Michael Goldens version of She-Hulk is drawn with
brawn on the cover of Savage She-Hulk #8 (Marvel, 1980).
Its heartening that She-Hulk creator and comics legend Stan Lee
stepped up to the plate and corrected Goyer. As her creator, he
would know. Writers have a position of power and influence over fan
spaces whether they admit it or notand when folks like Goyer mouth
off, its enough to make you want to smash something.
Brandann Hill-Mann
issue no.64
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butts, beefcakes,
and burt
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***
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fully clothed.
By the mid 70s, Playgirlhaving outlasted most of its early competitorshad clearly
sights on People.
Playgirl is far more varied and diverse than that of Playboy, and
not just because the latter has almost always featured solo female
models provocatively attired (or unattired) on its covers.
Actor Lyle Waggoner has the distinc-
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Roseanne on.
the guys.
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A not-so-thin line: Vanessa (Sarah Baker) dishes some real talk to Louie (Louis C.K.) on Louie.
fx networks
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trying to say.
Culture Quarterly.
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O N T H E COVER
CO N T I NUED FROM PAGE 19
of Congress.
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THE
bitch
LIST
Y-Y Girls (Feral House). Todays candy-coated pop stars (looking at you, Katy Perry)
and their fans owe a huge merci to their predecessors, the Y-Y Girls of 60s French pop.
In his book of the same name, Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe explores the music and legacy of
the young women who took the western world by storm, ushering in a teen-girl culture
thats going strong half a century later. From France Gall to Franoise Hardy, Y-Y Girls is
an encyclopedia of this influential subgenre of pop, making up for what it lacks in political
analysis with detailed discographies, liner notes, and lyrics written in French and English.
Its fun reading for any Francophile or pop fan, and full of gorgeous photos to boot.
Chouette! Kelsey Wallace
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Symbology: an A to Z of
Archetypes and Epiphanies
(Grimoire Press). Annie Murphys
32-page personal journey through
magical symbolssits somewhere
betweenscholarly musings on the goddessand alphabet primer for a cool
witch child.The book designwhite,
die-cut style illustrations starkly sitting
atop black-inked pagesmakes this minicomic feel like a sacred object. Murphy
may be familiar for her previous feats
of publishing as editor of the 2011 Gay
Geniusanthology (Sparkplug) as well as
her extensive work with the Collective
Tarot. Suzette Smith
Static TeleVision. If you like to wear your pop culture enthusiasm on your sleeve,
youll definitely want to pick up what Static Television owner and designer Lizzie May is
putting down. The one-woman Brooklyn companys black-and-white line drawings and
repeating patterns of tv and music icons are printed on plain white t-shirts and sell for
$35. Whether you want to wear a rendering of Elvis Costello (I know I do!) or get inspired
by the Women in History design featuring the likes of Tina Turner, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
and Sally Ride (again, I totally do, and my birthdays coming up), these shirts really are
tops. Andi Zeisler
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ThE madAMe
BuTTErfly effECt
Tracing the history of a fetish
I cant compete with an Asian chick, says the comedian Amy Schumer. When a
busty, blue-eyed blonda type that launched a thousand wet dreamsadmits she
cant contend with Asian women, it signals a certain shift in our cultures preferred
sexual tastes.
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she so chose). Still, the geisha became a highly sexualized image for the Western male.
The East Asian female in native dress, Brandt says, was viewed as a decorative object but
also a sexual object.
At its core, to fetishize somethingor someoneis to objectify it to the point that it
becomes divorced from the person herself. And its easy to see how the fetishization of
Asian women developed. Valerie Steele, in her book Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power, turns to
19th-century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing for an early working definition of fetishism: The association of lust with the idea of certain portions of the female person, or with
certain articles of female attire. According to Krafft-Ebing, in pathological eroticism the
fetish itself (rather than the person associated with it) becomes the exclusive object of sexual
desire. There is an inherent deconstruction at work in this definition of the fetish, one that
breaks down the actual female body. Steele posits that some degree of fetishization is the
norm for men (but not for women); to indulge the old adage divide and conquer, one reading of fetishization could be the male attempt to conquer the foreign female body.
French writer Pierre Lotis wildly popular 1887 novel, Madame Chrysanthme, largely
cemented Western perceptions of Japan and, in turn, of Japanese women. The book is a
semiautobiographical tale of a naval officer who travels to Nagasaki and takes a temporary wifea woman who is painted as a plaything, another piece of Oriental artifact to
be acquired. The wife he desires? A little, creamy-skinned woman with black hair and
cats eyes. She must be pretty and not much bigger than a doll. The novel is peppered
with details of slim, graceful, dainty little women with delicate hands, miniature
feet and natural skin of deep yellow, who are the exact types of the figures painted
on vases. In one scene the narrator describes how the local women grovel before me
on the f loor, placing all this plaything of a meal at my feet. What we see emerging from
Lotis text are continual images of tiny, doll-like Japanese women no more human than,
in Lotis own words, china ornaments.
In The Chrysanthme Papers: The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysanthme and Other
Documents of French Japonisme, Christopher Reed describes the unquestionable impact of
Lotis noveltranslated into every major European language and reprinted over 200 times
during the course of the authors life aloneon the Western construction of the East Asian
woman. Reed writes that while Madame Chrysanthme still evokes a nostalgic pleasure for
its era in French literature, recent scholarship on it and Lotis other popular novelswhich
include similar travel narratives of Western men taking on a native woman as lover from
Turkey to Tahitioften assess them as tools of sexual and cultural exploitation.
Reed goes on to tell us that Loti today is widely read as exemplifying what went wrong
with Western approaches to the East. Still, the image of miniature Asian dolls scuttling
about with food trays was already set in motion.
Pierre Loti starts it all with his diary-novel about a French naval officer stationed in Japan whose sole goal is to find a doll-like Japanese
wife to amuse him, only to unceremoniously leave her when its time
to return to Europe. How does one say icky and pig in French?
Puccini would base his opera on this short story by American author
John Luther Long, which Long in turn based on Lotis novel. Longs
character Cho-Cho (which means butterfly in Japanesesigh) is left
with a son by the American officer Pinkerton. The ambiguous ending
in this version lets Cho-Cho-San live on with her son in Japan after
attempting suicide.
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Madame Chrysanthme is widely acknowledged as the source for Puccinis famous opera,
Madama Butterf ly. The opera, which premiered
in 1904, chronicles a similar story: Pinkerton,
an American officer, travels to Japan and takes
on a local wife during his sojourn, only to
return to the West to legitimately marry a white
American woman. Cio-Cio-San, the abandoned
Japanese wife who has given up everythingher
religion, her family, her son, and finally her
own lifeto be with Pinkerton, became a new
archetype. Now the image of the Asian female
dainty, diminutive, doll-likegets compounded
with yet another feature: self-sacrifice. This
specific narrative is so intertwined with the
perception of Asian women that it was reworked
with another Eastern locale in the 1989 musical
Miss Saigon, set in Vietnam with the American
war as a backdrop. After an announcement of
the 2014 London revival of Miss Saigon, presale
tickets were reported to be $4.4 million on the
first day, breaking box office records and proving that the narrative is not just still popular,
but profitable as well.
Lotis and Puccinis inf luence also found its
way onto the pop charts; the band Weezer gave
a direct nod to Madama Butterf ly in their album
Pinkerton (1996). Take, for instance, the lyrics to
the song Across the Sea, dedicated to an 18-yearold Japanese girl: I wonder what clothes you wear
to school/ I wonder how you decorate your room/ I
wonder how you touch yourself/ And curse myself
for being across the sea.
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Hollywoods Golden Age gave rise to another archetype of the sexualized Asian
female: the dragon lady. Unlike her butterf ly counterpart, the dragon lady was a fierce
Asian woman who wielded powermore often than not of a sexual natureto the
detriment of the men around her. This vampy femme fatale was first popularized by the
Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong, who, as the only high-profile Asian American actress of that era, fascinated European and white American men at the time, says
Elaine H. Kim, professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley and writer and director of the short film Slaying the Dragon Reloaded: Asian Women
in Hollywood and Beyond. The character was an exotic (read: dangerous) seductress,
and Wongs dragon-lady status was epitomized in her role as Fu Manchus daughter
in Daughter of the Dragon (1931). Yet the characters Wong played always met the same
tragic end; in many ways, dragon-lady roles were merely a racier rehash of Loti and
Puccinis quivering butterf lies.
But perhaps the biggest factor sealing the image of the sexualized Asian female as
we know it in the United States was the U.S. military presence in Asia, beginning in
World War II and continuing through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Military camp
towns cropped up around the U.S. bases, and a local industrynamely juicy bars and
brothelswas created with the sole purpose of servicing U.S. soldiers. With the universal draft, American men who may not have held preconceived ideas of Asian women
were now shipped to Asia, where they would be confronted with local women working
in the sex industry. Stanley Kubricks film Full Metal Jacket (1987), about American gis
in the Vietnam War, made famous the following quote, uttered in broken English by a
Vietnamese female prostitute: Me so horny. Me love you long time. Me sucky sucky.
Mixed in 1989 as a sample in 2 Live Crews Me So Horny, the quote has taken on a
pop-culture life of its own.
The American soldierAsian female union began as one of commerce: money
exchanged for sexual services. But historians layer a possible second reading to this narrative: colonization. The American gi representing a first world power with first world
resources and privilegescolonizes the Asian female, who comes from a place of poverty, weakness, and everything else often associated with the third world. The Asian
female sex worker could be read as another version of the dragon ladya seductress
capitalizing on the demand for sex.
The end of the Korean War in the early 1950s created a rise in overseas adoption. War
orphans were airlifted from Korea and later Vietnam. The aftermath of the wars abroad
brought about an idea of benevolence toward Asian countriesof bringing women
and children into our beautiful families, Kim explains. At that time, it was possible to
think of bringing an Asian woman into your family, and not just someone you take in
the back alley.
A savior narrative began to take shapeAsian women became the native women who
needed to be whisked away from their impoverished homeland. In the backdrop of the emergence of blended families came two films introducing the archetype of the noble-hearted
Asian prostitute in need of salvation: Sayonara (1957) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960).
The native woman gets her fairy-tale ending: The Western man marries her.
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LETS GET D
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DIGITAL
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More troublesome is the fact that one evil deity, Loviatar, the Maiden of Pain, is
given a strong bdsm theme. In fact, most games often portray dominatrices as explicitly
evil characters who do not distinguish between painful pleasure and actual torture. World
of Warcrafts shivarra and succubi creatures are given similar motifs, one being called a
foul demon dominatrix by a human questgiver.
Players are therefore left on their own if they want to color outside the lines. In the
shadowed world of erp, players must weave their own stories of love, lust, and everything
in between, with no help or guidance. The resulting culture is a paradox: emancipating
gamers from the sexual monoculture of mainstream gaming but trapping them in new
(albeit sexier) fetters as well.
n 2011 I interviewed two erpers for a project at the feminist gaming blog The Border
House entitled Cyberfucking While Feminist, with the intent of exploring
genders valence in erp.
The two women I spoke to were adamant that erp had allowed them to experience a
magnificent sexual awakening. One spoke of the raw sexual power she felt after a good
erp session; the other felt it lent depth and complexity to the character she played, providing a compelling backstage to her adventures in WoWs Azeroth.
Yet they also had to navigate a tricky minefield because of the silence around erp that
prevails in gamer culture. I really dread the idea of my normal friends ever finding out
that I enjoy erp, one said.
The women also talked at length about the way gendered double binds seeped into the
play, one explaining that erp is used as a means of argumentum ad hominem. Its a way
of discrediting someone. Just as in the physical world, in the realm of rpgs, a woman (or
a man roleplaying as a woman) is most easily vituperated by insinuating that she has an
active sex life.
When I caught up with one of my interview subjects to probe her thoughts for this
piece, she described erp as a sword that cuts both ways. It could be positive and affirming, potentially, but also a conduit of toxicity and sexual insecurity. She recounted how
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DA2 was that even if they roleplayed as men, a male character by the name of Anders would f lirt with them. (Yes,
the phrase shoving homosexuality down our throats
came up.)
This soaring level of original discourse is matched by
YouTube comments on a video made by a young man exploring
Goldshire with his character and reading out the hypersexual
profiles of other characters. (Sample text includes macro futa,
loves giant booty, blow jobs. Turnoffs: all gore, watersports,
scat, boys, other futas (sorry).) While some erpers disdain
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sentences: When bringing love and sex into a game, its important to remember that
most of our modern-day sensibilities about those topics dont carry over into Numenera.
Because people of the Ninth World dont have the same cultural norms, pressures, and
expectations that we do today, they have very different views of relationships and sex.
Unlike most other games (which, despite their fantastical settings, just give us
reruns of television and film clichs about love and sex), Germain digs deep into the
larger source material to compel players of Numenera to think differently about how
they play with sex and gender in their games; she skillfully harnesses the climate of
alien unfamiliarity to pique player curiosity about kink, queerness, polymorphously
perverse morphology, and more. Much of what she describes in these all-too-brief
pages is not unfamiliar to some of usqueerness, transness, bdsm, sex toysbut she
queers it all again through the vagaries of the titular numenera. The hyperadvanced
technology suffusing the otherwise medieval setting magnificently warps and distorts
the society.
Enchanted sex toyspreternaturally cool rods that stay chilly regardless of temperature, a randomly vibrating sphere, super goo that assumes any shape, devices that change
a persons physiologyall abound. Rituals and wildly disparate norms of gender also
populate the text, as do frank discussions of all the ways sexual exploitation can occur in
the setting. Rather than eliding such things or shying away from them, Germain makes
clear the dynamics inherent to coercion, rape, and sex trafficking, as opposed to enthusiastic consent and sex work as a career.
She does this through the authoritative voice of the text (which, in most roleplaying
games, dictates what the entire game world looks like) but she also takes things a giant
step further by encouraging that all-important discussion in the text. Time and again she
encourages openness and respectful dialogue among players to sort out the understandably controversial and, perhaps, discomfiting material they are presented with. But what
this also does is short-circuit the everyone knows fallacy that suffuses other roleplaying
games by reminding players that, when it comes to sex, everyone doesnt know; boundaries and comfort levels vary, and the most important thing in introducing sexual roleplaying is to respect that, Germain argues.
She also throws a wrench in other long-standing rpg conventions by stating clearly
that no player should feel their character is being compelled to do anything sexual that
they want no part offor example, forced seduction (I have a numenera device
that puts you under my control, and theres nothing you can do about it) and impossible
circumstances (Sleep with me or I kill your loved ones). If only such rules had been in
place in one D&D game I played where the dungeonmaster took his title a bit too seriously and imposed impregnating tentacle rape on all of the players.
Bringing consent and dialogue back into the picture, as Germain avers in her Numenera
ruleset, would go a long way to preventing players from stoically facing such nonsense during
their leisure time because they dont know how to say no,
or know of any sexual alternatives.
There are hopeful signs in Paizo Gamess Pathfinder as well, where a good deal of text has been
devoted to new imaginings of fantasy religion that are
more sex-positive, while avoiding the association of free sexuality or
kink with evil or femme-fatale archetypes. Pathfinder, now the biggest rival to
Dungeons & Dragons, has surpassed the granddaddy of rpgs in sales. This happened
for a number of reasons, some of which would be far too nerdy to get into (Id rather not
bore you with the finer points of the fourth-edition D&D ruleset), but Pathfinders bid
for sexual maturity and diversity is surely not repelling players either.
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by joshunda sanders
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I was born to a devout Catholic mother and grew up in New York City in the 1980s and
90s. In middle school, I found my first literary angel and mentor, James Baldwin, in
a nonfiction collection called The Price of the Ticket. In his essay Here Be Dragons,
Baldwin wrote about each human as androgynous, containing elements of both man and
woman. Until I read his work, I was fundamentally unable to separate the act of loving
from the act of sex: Popular culture discussions and depictions of sexuality, after all, center on who does what with whom. But love enchants us because it is the least mechanical
aspect of our lives, the place where we can still encounter spontaneity.
Love between any two human beings would not be possible did we not have available
to us the spiritual resources of both sexes, Baldwin wrote. Love and sexual activity are
not synonymous: Only by becoming inhuman can the human being pretend they are.
Black mothers are so frequently portrayed as f lawed and inhumane that I struggle
always to describe the cruelties and failings of my mother, even though those are the
key aspects of my childhood with her that I remember. She was a funny woman, but
also mentally ill and unmedicated. I do not know how much of her religious fervor was
related to her bipolar disorder, but I do remember watching her disgust during Mass at
St. Patricks Cathedral as men with pink triangles and the words Silence = Death on
their shirts stood up in silent protest during homilies.
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though she knew she had always been attracted to men, her
choice to identify as gay was purposeful: Adopting a label
that didnt quite fit me was definitely a political choice. No
one wanted to discriminate against me for liking men.And
with people getting fired and denied many basic rights for
having same-sex relationships, I felt the term bisexual,
though accurate, just confused the issue, she wrote. Refusing a label altogether? Tempting, but total political cop-out.
The way I looked, people would just assume I was straight.
Until I read Sloans piece, it had never occurred to me that
my steadfast ambivalence about labeling my sexuality might
be viewed as a political cop-out. Bisexual erasure and invisibility are real, for certain, but so is the invisibility of those
of us who feel levels of attraction along a continuum. What
of those of us who, even as adults, are not adamant about a
specific location along the sexuality spectrum? Questioning ones sexuality is often considered (like bisexuality) to
simply be a confused, temporary stage on your way to being
gay or lesbian, a mushy gray area of romance.
Lisa Diamond, who studies identity and same-sex attraction,
was quoted in the New York Times Magazines The Scientific
Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists, and took the words right
out from under my keyboard: I think our categories of gay
versus bisexual dont capture all the important space in
between. Diamond was also quoted, along
with several other researchers, in a
February 2014 piece published in The
Advocate, Exploring the Umbrella:
Bisexuality and Fluidity, discussing
data that shows that 10 to 14 percent
of American women
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As a reviewer, fan, and critic of adult entertainment, I talk to people about pornography
a lot, and I frequently hear a common refrain: A lot of peopleparticularly women, and especially feminist womenhave trouble finding porn they like. Its not that theyre against
porn, per se, its that most of the porn theyve seen is the same: skinny, white, able-bodied,
hetero people in the same (ridiculous) positions with the same (bad) music, performed
and edited to conform to culturally prescribed ideas of a white male fantasy. The resulting
material ranges from boring to laughable to downright gross, and many viewers feel slimy
for watching it. Why, people often ask, isnt there better porn out there?
The answer is simple, but surprising: Its not that there isnt better porn out there, its that
the people trying to make it find it enormously difficult to do business. There are plenty of
producers who want to make better adult entertainment. Many of them make feminist porn
featuring explicit consent, a wide range of sexual practices, and performers of diverse body
types, races, genders, and ability levels. While the Internet has leveled the playing field for
creative start-ups in many sectors, and even made cookie-cutter porn from southern California more mainstream, adult entertainment start-ups face financial obstacles on every
imaginable rung of the ladder to success. Cindy Gallop and her team, along with numerous
other adult entertainment start-ups who are trying to disrupt established norms both inside
and outside the adult industry, have a particularly difficult time swimming upstream against
a financial current that discourages and sometimes outright discriminates against their type
of business.
Right out of the gate, adult start-ups of all stripes have it tough. Investors are terrified
of them. Small business loans for porn start-ups are virtually impossible to get due to
banks morality clauses. Kickstarter and most other crowdfunding websites do not permit
pornographic projects to raise funds on their platforms. And porn-friendly crowdfunder
Off beatr takes 30 percent off the top of funded projects, which any start-up founder will
tell you can make or break a f ledgling company.
And, once capitalfrom an investor, crowdfunding campaign, or elsewherehas been
located, finding a place to keep it is another challenge. Cindy Gallops exasperation is visible when she says, I couldnt find a single bank in America that would allow us to open a
banking account for a business that has the word porn in its name, even though our name,
by the way, is MakeLoveNotPorn. But the mere mention of the P-word sets off red flags
for banks with time-honored morality clauses. Chase Bank closed the MakeLoveNotPorn
teams account when the nature of its business surfaced, and has recently been closing porn
performers personal bank accounts for no given reason. (Yesthe establishment that paid
$1.86 billion out of court this February to settle accusations that its unscrupulous handling
of home loans was a prime mover behind the 2008 banking crisis is calling shots on what
is and is not immoral.) Most adult start-ups must resort to moving their money through
innocuously named holding companies to fly under the radar.
Even when bank accounts have been set up somewhere, adult start-ups must register
as a merchant with Visa and MasterCard, the two biggest credit card companies on the
planet. Both card companies require that adult merchants, which fall into the high-risk
category (along with loan refinancing and online gambling), pay fees of at least $500
to register with each of their networks. Once theyve passed muster, another $500 is
charged annually for as long as the businesses operate. Thats $2,000 up-front, to accept
credit card payments from just two companies, before the start-up in question has earned
any profits. Two grand may sound like small potatoes to some start-up founders, but for
many feminist adult entertainment start-ups, which often run on shoestring budgets
with the goal of making a positive change in the world rather than big profits, such sums
sound a death knell.
A producer of feminist porn from Australia, who prefers to remain anonymous, attests
that these up-front costs are essentially nothing more than a blackmail fee. They make
it difficult for independent adult businesses to get off the ground, and, even if a company
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is doing well enough to pay the fees, she says, it only takes
Visa or MasterCard to get angry and everything collapses.
But high fees arent only being leveled by the credit
card companies themselves. After all, once a business has
been approved byand paid intoVisas and MasterCards networks, it must still find a payment processor.
Online payment processing is an oft-overlooked but
powerful industry, essentially gatekeeping every monetary
transaction on the Internet. But the big guysPayPal,
Amazon Payments, and Google Walletall refuse to work
with adult merchants. When I contacted the companies
for comment, they each sent me some variation of the
following statement (from Amazon Payments): We are
prohibited by our agreements with providers to service
sexually explicit material for transmission over the Internet. Not much in the way of explanation there, and their
terms of service arent much more illuminating, offering only blanket prohibitions against pornography and
sexually explicit materials.
While its certainly within each companys right to deny
service to whomever they wish, it bears mentioning that
Amazon makes a hefty profit on its sexual wellness section,
which sells vibrators, sex furniture, erotic films, and more.
PayPal is owned by eBay, which happily allows its users to
sell porn in its Adults Only area. And lets not even start on
what sorts of entertainment one can find using Google. But
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Revenue-sharing model or no, most feminist porn start-ups simply cant afford to keep
out of the red with adult-friendly processors rates when theyre already moving their money
through holding companies and paying obeisance to credit card giants. Hill-Meyer, who
makes films for a niche audience as a form of activism, has typically made profits under
$1,500 a year (before the launch of her new website, DoingItOnline.com, whose profitability remains to be seen). It just does not make sense to hand over more than a third of my
income to the payment processor, she says.
Jiz Lee, an award-winning genderqueer performer, educator, and activist, ran an art project called Karma Pervs for years. Karma Pervs raised money for sex-positive, kink, eco-sexy,
queer, and trans-friendly nonprofit organizations by selling artwork for which Lee modeled.
But in 2013 Lee shuttered the project due to the cost of doing business online. [Credit cards]
were charging $1,000 a year, and [my payment processor] was taking out a percent of the
income as well, Lee says in an e-mail. Considering I was only able to raise a little more than
$1,500 each year for nonprofits, it seemed like it just wasnt a good investment. Lee hopes
to keep the project alive as an art book or as collectible postcards, but the original vision of
Karma Pervs has taken a back seatat least for nowto financial concerns.
We dont know how many other feminist-minded, progressive adult efforts like Karma
Pervs have folded under the pressure of feessome of which can reach 15 percent per
transaction for high risk merchantsbut it seems safe to assume that others who
might want to make better porn or sex-positive art have been unable to make their
efforts financially viable.
However, some adult entertainment start-ups see the high transaction rates as worth
the hassle. Courtney Trouble, a trailblazer in feminist queer porn for over a decade, runs
numerous websites and uses profits from membership fees and clip stores to afford an
adult-friendly payment processor. Trouble thinks their comprehensive service plan is worth
the expense. The merchant account company I work with also handles all of my subscriptions, affiliates, cancellations, and renewals. Its a business cost thats worth paying.
Troubles is an exceptional case of perseverance, though. I would keep doing it even if I
were broke, she says. In fact, there have been many years that I have been broke.
To be fair, financial institutions do have reasons for making things difficult for adult
entertainment companies. Because of the industrys notoriety in the financial world (documented ties to organized crime, money laundering, etc.), audits and investigations are more
common in that sector, which can lead payment processors, credit card companies, and
banks to spend more money on oversight for accounts that fall into the adult category. Charging high fees helps to offset these potential expenses.
But theres a more immediate reason for the high rates: chargebacks. An anonymous
source at a payment processor presents a hypothetical scenario of somebody buying a
porn subscription in the heat of the moment and their partner later finding the charge.
If the purchaser denies any involvement, the partner calls the credit-card issuer and
demands the money back. These chargebacks are more common in the porn industry
at large than in most others, due to our cultures generally shame-filled relationship
with porn. The anonymous source says hes seen easily 6 to 7 percent of an adult
companys transactions called into question. A percentage that high requires more
oversight from the processor involved, which is expensive, so higher fees are seen as a
preventative measure.
Chargebacks are, in theory, a legitimate concern for payment processors and credit-card
issuers, but its important to note that many of the people I talked towho pride themselves on ethics and transparencyhave lower chargeback rates than even many low-risk
merchants. These companies, which are actively trying to counteract the sexual shame
that leads to chargebacks in the first place, cater their products to a customer base that
stands behind its purchases. Feminist consumers, in particular, are so hungry for sexual
entertainment that meets their ethical standards that they are willing to pay for it when
they find it, and to remain loyal to the people who make it. Hill-Meyer is proud to say, Ive
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SCANDAL-LESS
WHY ARE FEMALE POLITICIANS IMMUNE TO SEX SCANDALS?
2017 will mark 100 years since the first woman, Jeannette Rankin from Montana,
was elected to serve in Congress. Since then, a total of 298 women have served in
the Senate or House of Representatives. In other words, if we were to take all of the
women whove ever served in Congress, theyd fill only 56 percent of seats in the
current congressional class. If thats not sobering enough, consider the June 2014
report from the Institute for Womens Policy Research, which predicts that we wont
have gender parity in Congress until 2121. A baby born today would have to live until
the age of 107 to see a congressional class that has equal parts men and women.
BY
HINDA MANDELL
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
NESS LEE
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Yet to date theres never been prolonged news coverage at the national level of a Congresswoman Antonia Weiner sending sexy tweets of her nether regions. No media spotlight on a
Governor Eliana Spitzer, going wild with escorts (while still wearing her black trouser socks)
in a five-star hotel in the nations capital. Theres certainly no news of a Congresswoman
Vanessa McAllister, swapping spit with her staffer, only to immediately fire him and
declare that shes still going to run for reelection, or of a mysterious black book bursting
with the erotic preferences of the Capitols women.
Through it all, female politicians have sat on the sex-scandal sidelines, and as more and
more of them are elected, perhaps its worth wondering why. Are female politicians better at
keeping it zipped, or simply better at keeping the unzipping out of the medias unyielding
scandal spotlight? It cant just be that female politicians are too Pollyanna for illicit activitiesor, on the flip side, simply better at not getting caught. Its tempting to think, rather,
that political sex scandals are just as gendered as politics itself has long been.
Dr. Kathryn L. Pearson, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who
studies women and politics, was quoted in the New York Timess 2011 article When It
Comes to Scandal, Girls Wont Be Boys: I have no hard evidence that women are less
likely to engage in risky or somewhat stupid behavior. But women in Congress are still
really in a situation where they have to prove themselves to their male colleagues and
constituents. Theres this extra level of seriousness.
[Politicians] go through a grueling process in order to get elected, and once in office
people kiss [their] ass constantly, said Dr. Alison Dagnes, professor of political science at
Shippensburg University. For men it gives them validation that they can pretty much do
what they want. It amplifies in men a sense that they are as important as everyone says
they are. But for women, I think, its validation of all of the hard work theyve done.
A communications director for a veteran congresswomanwho requested anonymity
due to the sensitive nature of the subjecthas witnessed male politicians do what they
want when it comes to private affairs, a trait that he says is absent in female politicians, at
least from what hes observed of them. When he was working at the state level in the 1980s
he met a U.S. marshal who was an assistant to a statewide elected official and whose job
was to hold off any potential love interests in order to prevent hanky-panky. He was not
successfuland he was a U.S. marshal.
As for why so many male politicians succumb to the hubris that makes them vulnerable to sex scandals, the communications director speculated that men are attracted to
the power, prestige, and treatmentlike royalty in the United States, as he puts it.
There are young staffers, interns, you name it, everywhere, and they are all adoring
well, maybe not all. But many understand the power relationship and look up to these
men. He adds: In Washington, D.C., its all about power.
But those beguiled by power relationships can become careless, and overestimate its ability to save them from political collapse. Men are under the assumption that they dont have
a price to pay, says Jennifer L. Pozner, a media critic and founder of the New Yorkbased
advocacy group Women in Media & News. And quite often, theyre correct. Pozner cites New
York politicians Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner as Exhibit A: The fact that they both had
enough support to launch new campaigns for office after being sidelined by their unethical
behavior [suggests] men in politics dont have to pay much of a price after sex scandals.
Still, sex scandalsespecially lurid ones like Spitzers and Weinersdo have legs, and
not all scandalized politicians become political phoenixes. Weiner lost his post-scandal bid
for New York City mayor in 2013, as did Eliot Spitzer for New York City comptroller five
and a half years after he resigned his governorship in disgrace. They may think theyre
immune, they may think the [scandals are] nothing, says New York State assemblywoman
Amy Paulin, [but] the people obviously dont agree with them, and the people are voting
them out. If they won, I think it would be very troublesome.
In the Democratic primary in September 2013, Spitzer lost by just under four percentage
points to Scott Stringer, even though he outspent his opponent by two to one, according to
Politico. An unnamed political consultant in a September 2013 Buzzfeed article noted that
Spitzers whole message was overshadowed by his past misdeeds. He should have known
that. (Spitzer also should have known that the public would not look favorably on his romantic relationship with the spokeswoman of his comptroller campaign, which came to light
issue no.64
bitch | 53
Celinda Lake. (Indeed, Davis has placed her experience as a single mother at the forefront of
her campaign, although shes caught heat about the truthfulness of some story fragments.)
For [both] male or female candidates, we try to figure out what may be known and what isnt
known, says Lake, president of the Washington, D.C.based Lake Research Partners. In her
experience, women are more transparent about sensitive details of their private lives that have
the potential to harpoon campaigns. Men, she notes, think they can get away with [lying]
the thing that leads them to have affairs is the same thing that leads them to lie to the pollster.
bitch f e m i n i s t
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The New York State Assembly has had its share of sexual impropriety in recent
years, including at least three instances since 2012 of assemblymen sexually harassing
their female staffers. Amy Paulin says that when news breaks of yet another scandal, it
consumes the leaderships timeand regardless if that leadership is male or female, it
does nothing to advance the often pressing issues on the table. Were dealing with this
nonsense instead of dealing with the peoples work, said Paulin. Instead of advancing
issues that matter to people were getting stuck.
New York State Assemblywoman Sandy Galef adds that her female colleagues scratch
their heads in disbelief when they learn of yet another instance of bad behavior on the
part of an assembly member. The discussion is [like], Dont they understand this? It
happened last year. The person was on the first page of the paper. He lost his position;
he lost his race. Dont they understand theyre in a very public space?
Most academics, political scientists, and consultants interviewed said they could envision
the day when a major political sex scandal with a female politician becomes media fodder.
(But it would surprise me if the scandal was happening in real time, said Lawless.)
Others are less sure. Dr. Justin Esarey, a political scientist at Rice University, found in
his 2013 article in Politics & Gender that female politicians in democratic countries from
Mexico to Burkina Faso are, overall, less susceptible to corruption than their male counterparts. According to the article, thats because women, who generally engage in less
risk-taking behavior than men, are less likely to offer or accept bribes when bribery is not
a routine part of the political landscape. In addition, Women are also more vulnerable to
punishment for violating political norms because of explicit or tacit sex discrimination.
The Pew Research Center reported in 2013 that media coverage of major sex scandals can
occupy as much as 20 percent of a weeks entire newshole in the United States. Thats a
whole lot of media coverage devoted to the same gender narrative over and over again, further
reinforcing culturally embedded gender traits that women cant be bad and men cant be good.
But we might be on the cusp of smashing these cemented gender traits, especially with
the possibility that our first female president might also be a grandma. Hillary Clintons
potential to be elected as the most powerful person in the world will forever reframe gender
norms in terms of what we expect of men and women politicians. And if theres a grandma
in the Oval Office, it might also be time for a grandma to have her own sex scandal. Im just
sayingwhy not smash both gender stereotypes at once?
Hinda Mandell, PhD, is an assistant professor in the department of
communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Her
2011 doctoral dissertation focused on media coverage of political wives
whose husbands were caught in sex scandals.
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fa l l . 1 4
issue no.64
bitch | 57
book
REVIEWS
LOST IN
THE AMAZON
ARE DIGITAL BOOKSELLERS
SUPPRESSING SELF-PUBLISHED
EROTICA?
BY KATE LARKING
ILLUSTRATION BY PERRIN
bitch f e m i n i s t
r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
books
Erotica author M. Keep of the duo J.E. & M. Keep sees it as a direct
blow to womens sexuality and sexual desires and expression as
women are the primary consumers of erotica, including dark erotica.
I think the reason that people are panicking so much is that on some
level they realize this, and that women are interested in sex that isnt
always vanilla or light bdsm, and that scares them under the guise of
protecting children. Keep adds, Im sure youre aware of just how
often they say protecting children and silently add on and women
from themselves.
In addition, the way Amazon and other digital booksellers seem
to judge the legitimacy of eroticaand, by proxy, the artistic nature
of the workis whether or not the work is self-published or not: traditionally published works are examined with a less critical eye than
self-published authors.
But burgeoning self-published erotica writersmostly women
sharing sexually freeing fiction (according to one survey by The
Fussy Librarian, an e-book blog approximately 94 percent of erotica
authors are female)struggle against these restrictions with little
recourse. Self-published authors are eager to meet the guidelines
set out by Amazon, but the terms of service are so vague that erotica
authors must use a sophisticated (and expensive) guess-and-check
method to know if their work passes muster.
Frustrated erotica authors are stuck with costly changes and a
potential loss of transparency with their readers. Rework costs have
been enormous, explains Kitt, author of Babysitting the Baumgartnersnow Sitting for the Baumgartners. Every cover [Amazon] disallows has to be redone. Titles have to be changedsometimes more
than once, because Amazon will decide down the road that something that was once acceptable now suddenly isnt. She gives an
example: My book Babysitting the Baumgartners has three separate
covers. The first showed a womans bare bottom. Then they slapped
that with the adult filter, so we put a thong on her. Then Amazon
decided thongs werent okay, and we had to have a full bikini bottom
on. Three covers.
These expenses are magnified for authors working to expand their
audience. Translations and audiobooks are also filtered, comments
Wade. If its [filtered] in their store, you wont recoup your costs. I
learned that the hard way.
Self-published authors network on forums outside of the Amazon
environment. It only takes a few mentions of newly blocked books
for the erotica authors to know that a crackdown is on the way. On
communities like KBoards, a forum for Kindle users, authors put
together updated lists of what is and is not acceptable from Amazons
point of view based on what books are blocked and titles censored.
There is no formal communication from Amazon when these crackdowns occur on what is not prohibited.
Mentioning babysitting in the erotica category is a no-no, as Kitt
found out with her bestselling Baumgartners series. But this list is
constantly shifting and not communicated. Amazon is notoriously
inconsistent when it comes to applying filters on erotica, says erotica
author Aubrey Rose. They claim to ban such things as incest,
bestiality, and portrayals of underage sex. However, V.C. Andrewss
incestual Flowers in the Attic sells quite well, as does Nabokovs obviously underage Lolita. Is Amazon then in the business of deciding
fa l l . 1 4
issue no.64
bitch | 59
books
what is literature and what is not? It appears that they are trying, and
obviously failing, to arbitrate such a distinction.
Authors of erotica featuring legal or college-aged protagonists
in the new-adult age groups receive the most censorship from
mainstream erotica listings. Is your protagonist a virgin and is that
mentioned in the title or the product description? Forget about it
that titles blocked from search results.
Fetish-based erotica and taboo sexual literature has also been hit hard
by the restrictions. Readers of this brand of erotica argue fetish-erotica
can enlighten and educate readers while the taboo topics fascinate and
enthrall readers imaginations. Pseudo-incest stories, where characters
of legal age have step-relations, are frequently filtered. But why are
taboo sexual subjects judged so harshly when other illegal subjects,
such as graphic depictions of murder and other types of crime, remain
untouched? Kitt says, You have to remember, this is fiction. Fantasy.
No different than a horror author writing about a serial killerjust because you write about serial killers doesnt mean you want to be one or
condone serial killing. So because an erotica writer writes about incest,
that doesnt mean they want to do it or condone it.
Wade tackled the cryptozoological porn taboo with her work, Cum
for Big foot. Amazons spring 2013 push to filter erotica caused 60
percent of her work to disappear from searchesand caused her
income to plummet. Amazons fall 2013 crackdown led her to change
the title to a less graphic name, Moan for Big foot. All the filtering
and tinkering has ruined this pen name. Ive moved on to romance
because its a less stressful work environment.
bitch f e m i n i s t
r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
books
{Harper Perennial}
Men Explain
Things to Me
Rebecca Solnit
{Haymarket Books}
Roxane
Gays cultural
and feminist
analysis is
intriguing
mostly because it is
confessional,
authentic,
andin the best
way possible
lowbrow.
Solnit, meanwhile, leveraged the
pieces popularity into her new
collection of seven complex, passionate essays.
Though well known for her
intelligent, precise writing on
subjects including politics,
literature, and the environment,
Solnit cares deeply about gender
inequality, and in particular,
domestic and sexual violence.
Several of the essays in Men
Explain Things center on those
topics; others employ the tactic
of shifting focus stealthily but
dramatically, the better to highlight how harm comes in degrees.
Take Grandmother Spider,
where Solnit begins by discussing the invisibility of womens
accomplishments in history, but
ultimately leads us to an analysis
of womens actual disappearances
through abuse and murder. In
this way, Solnit attempts to bridge
the gap between the abstractions
of womens oppression and their
tangible consequences.
fa l l . 1 4
issue no.64
bitch | 61
books
A common
thread of
Craftivism
is that the
seemingly
simple act
of making
is itself
political.
writing. The second-to-last essay,
an examination of Virginia Woolf
and the importance of addressing
the unknown and unpredictable,
is the books strongest. Solnit
is at her best in pieces like this,
which take a specific topic and
weave it into a wide range of other
subjectsfrom Susan Sontag to
walking and wanderingrather
than those that make broad generalizations about gender. A m e l i a
Ay r e l a n I u v i n o
DONT MISS: Each essay is
paired with a beautiful painting by
Ana Teresa Fernndez, an artist
who engages in performance documentations that depict womens
labor and sexuality.
Craftivism:
The Art of Craft
and Activism
Betsy Greer, Ed.
{Arsenal Pulp Press}
bitch f e m i n i s t
r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
My Body is a Book
of Rules
Elissa Washuta
{Red Hen Press}
books
Sworn Virgin
Elvira Dones, translated
by Clarissa Botsford
{And Other Stories}
Scandals of
Classic Hollywood:
sex, deviance, and
drama from the
golden age of
american cinema
Anne Helen Petersen
{Plume}
issue no.64
bitch | 63
books
Making Sense of
Intersex:Changing
Ethical Perspectives in Biomedicine
Ellen K. Feder
64 |
bitch f e m i n i s t
r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
books
The Reappearing
Act: Coming Out As
Gay on a College
Basketball Team
Led By Born-Again
Christians
Kate Fagan
{Skyhorse Publishing}
Things I Should
Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons &
Love Affairs
Pearl Cleage
{Atria Books}
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issue no.64
bitch | 65
screen
REVIEWS
CAST ASIDE
THE RECENT TV RISE OF THE
BLACK MISTRESS
BY PHOEBE ROBINSON
ILLUSTRATION BY PERRIN
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Thats right, Pope and Paul are the foremothers of a growing trend in
tv : the black female side piece. To be clear, these two are no ordinary
mistresses. Rather than being stereotypically uncouth baby mamas,
these highly successful women are, respectively, a Washington,
D.C. fixer and a popular tv anchor/pundit who are ensnared in starcrossed love affairs. Their relationships are riddled with over-the-top
yelling, lengthy speeches, and what I affectionately call #StruggleSex
(because in tv, the best way to illustrate an illicit couple in the throes
of passion is to show them tugging at each others clothes like kids on
cow udders at a county fair). You see, as in all Side Piece Theater, Pope
and Paul are each consumed by a love that, while passionate, probably
wont pan out in their favor. This timeless conundrum has captured
the hearts and minds of millions of viewers and received plenty of
positive reviews from critics who are happy to see more fully realized
characterizations of black women on the screen.
Still, the shows have their detractorsviewers incensed with what
they perceive as a glorification of the mistress role. I am not in this
camp. Both shows are must-see-the-day-it-airs tv for me. However, my
enjoyment is not without ref lection. It seems like a black woman who
is one-half of her romantic relationshiprather than a third partyis
exceedingly rare in television. Gone are the days of Clair Huxtable
playfully chastising her husband Bill over his diet. Instead, we see
Pope and President Grant sneaking a kiss in the Oval Office with his
chief of staff and first lady right down the hall. True, some of the differences between the two scenarios are due to The Cosby Show being a
family sitcom while Scandal centers around a dramatic love triangle.
But a switch in genres doesnt quite explain the subtle shift from the
sexless strong black woman (or if were lucky, the happily married
black woman) to the mistress black woman as the de facto image.
Im curious as to how repeated exposure to such images informs
the black female psyche, her expectations for current and future relationships, and whether or not she is subconsciously acting out what
she sees on tv in her personal life.
Ever since I have been dating, Ive noticed several media outlets will,
every few months, do exposs on the less-than-satisfactory love lives
the tip of the iceberg of the Oh noes, its hard out there for single black
ladies articles that are spoon-fed to the public. This is to not to say that
these op-eds, even the supremely bone-headed ones, arent rooted in
some sort of factual data. Unfortunately, they are.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau Survey of Income and Program
Participation, In 2009, 70.5 percent of black women age 25 to 29 never
married compared with 43.3 percent of non-Hispanic white women. As
a black woman in this age range who is open to the possibility of marriage, this news is disconcerting. However, the same study also showed
that black women 55 and older have a higher marrying percentage rate
compared to non-Hispanic white women. So what does this all mean?
It seems that black women are marrying later as opposed to the
widely held belief that they dont marry at all. This is great, except
for three things. One, the average life expectancy for black women
is around 74 years according to the Health Services Research study
conducted by UCLA (white women are at almost 80 years). Sure, its
better to find long-lasting love later in life than never at all, but excuse me for not finding solace in the notion that many black women
wont find sustaining love until theyre eligible for AARP benefits.
Two, the cold, hard fact is that the dating pool for women gets
shallower and shallower as they get older. The men in their age
bracket tend to date younger, which leaves middle-age and older
women with fewer options. As a result, some may find themselves in
competition with younger ladies, which may explain the legions of
middle-age women getting their faces surgically pulled tighter than
an Olympic figure skaters ponytail in hopes of snagging a partner.
Three, and this is probably the most damning of all, black women,
on average, want to end up with black men. However, because of various factorsincluding but not limited to the disproportionate rates
between black women (63 percent) and men (37 percent) obtaining
higher education and the rapidly growing number of incarcerated
black men (which then further hurts their chances of winding up in
the same workplace and social scenes as black women)it appears
that, statistically, black women have a much more difficult time finding a partner within their race than women of other races.
On top of that, black women also have trouble finding love outside
their race. Based on the latest census data from the Pew Research
Center, one in six new marriages in America are interracial, but just
9 percent of them include black women, making them the least likely
of any race to marry outside their race. Nika C. Beamon, the author
of I Didnt Work This Hard Just to Get Married: Successful Single Black
Women Speak Out (2009), sheds some light on that statistic during a
February 2012 interview on BusinessInsider.com, saying, Most of the
women I spoke to preferred to date black men. It wasnt that they were
opposed to dating men of a different race, but there was often guilt associated with dating men who werent black, and concerns about being
accepted by friends, family, and members of the community.
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issue no.64
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screen
Given all this context, it is not surprising that these recent television
series headlined by black actresses deal with the somewhat dire romantic prospects of black women, especially considering that the shows are
created by black women of differing relationship status (powerhouse
and single mother Shonda Rhimes is the mind behind Scandal, while
Mara Brock Akil, married, came up with Being Mary Jane).
So maybe it would be a touch disingenuous for them to create Clair
Huxtable 2.0 when both creators (Akil more so than Rhimes) like
their work to ref lect what is happening in the world. This is not to say
that showing a black female character in a healthy relationship would
be unrealistic; rather, that perhaps the black tv pendulumonce
firmly in the area of traditional family values, particularly during the
90s with The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Martin, etc.is
now swinging toward a decidedly murkier area. Now, the female protagonist doesnt have it all figured out, she might not spark with eligible men the way she does with one particularly unavailable one, and
she may ref lect the 70 percent of late-20s, unmarried black women.
But why the role of mistress? Perhaps these characters mirror accomplished black women off the screen who, as they advance further
in their careers, are less likely to mate up. With coupledom nothing
more than a dream deferred, they settle for what they can geta
part-time man. While Ive never been a mistress, I can attest to the
difficulties of trying to date as I advance further in my career as a
stand-up comedian and writer. The number of eligible men, black or
otherwise, has dwindled significantly as I have progressed.
Or maybe its simply a case of one or the otherRhimes and
Akil have no interest in contributing to the Hollywood stereotype of
black women who are loud, lazy, and uneducated. If Pope and Paul
are going to have it together professionally, then their personal lives
have to be a mess in order for the show to have conf lict. Given that
some of todays most compelling dramas (Breaking Bad, Mad Men,
bitch f e m i n i s t
r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
but it would be naive to believe that they arent inf luenced at all by
the fantasy of tv drama. The typical straight-girl fantasy of finding
a soul mate to build a life with has been usurped, at least for black
female viewers, by a tragic, devastating loveone that is seen as
desirable because, after all, love is only really love if it hurts.
But its just tv, right? Well, if that were the case, folks wouldnt
have cared that Kerry Washington was the first black woman to
star in her own network tv series in 40 years. Twitter and Tumblr
wouldnt be f looded after every episode of Scandal and Jane with
women posting that what happens on these shows is just like their
lives. Imagery, whether in the media or in art, can help shape how
people behave and how they perceive their lives. And in the case of
Pope and Paul, theyre the leaders of the small pack of black women
on television, and, fairly or unfairly, have to carry a disproportionate
amount of the burden of representing all black women. They cannot
simply be one among many like The Good Wifes Alicia Florrick or
Homelands Carrie Mathison. Instead, their every move is scrutinized, their every line of dialogue is infused with a meaning that
may or may not be there, and most importantly, their actions (say,
infidelity) take on a level of import and may even become inf luential
with some viewers. This may explain why their characters mistress
status is not always interpreted as merely an act of storytelling by
some critics but as real-world commentary and perhaps, to some
viewers, a ref lection on their everyday lives.
But when viewers are proclaiming, This is just like my life,
theyre probably not talking about the Pope-like scenario of POTUS
building them a cabin in Vermont to shack up in once (read: if) he
leaves his wife. None of the black women I know are like Jane, having this is true love shower-stall sex with a married man professing his love. Instead, their reality is a Zales pendant with a gift
receipt and a dude who disappears for weeks at a time, sending them
into a what does it all mean tailspin. These feels, while confounding, align with what they have seen in the media. Nowas wrong as
this wrongness seemsits somehow right because thats how love
is shown time and time again in the mediapainful and impossible. While Scandal and Being Mary Jane may have started out as a
ref lection of some black female lives, they may now have become a
definition for some black women to live by.
And yetquite a few of my female black friends are married. I,
myself, am in a long-term relationship. So, clearly, some real-life black
women are not only bucking the trend of the mistress role, but are also
proving that the relationship statistics they are bombarded with on a
daily basis are only telling part of the story about black women and
relationships. What seems to be happening is that because the de facto
image is ever-changing, virtues are being pulled from all the black
women in the media, both past (the healthy relationships that both
Clair Huxtable and Fresh Princes Aunt Viv forged with their partners)
and present (the career-driven nature of Pope and Paul) and used to
illustrate how truly multifaceted we can be. Hopefully, this means
we are one step closer to having completely three-dimensional black
female characters in tv that ref lect the newer generation of real-life
black women.
screen
REFLECTIONS
UNHEARD:
black women in
civil rights
Director: Nevline Nnaji
{women make movies}
Nevline Nnajis first film is a feature-length documentary focusing on the role of black women
in the civil rights movement and
their dual marginalization by
the Black Power movement and
the mainstream white feminist
movement. Through a combination of archival footage from the
1960s and 70s and interviews
with black female activists from
organizations like the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers,
Nnaji crafts a compelling narrative of the struggles these
activists faced in their fight for
liberation, and the intersectional
RUNOFF
Director: Kimberly Levin
{Cantuckee pictures}
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screen
MY ATOMIC AUNT
Director: Kyoko Miyake
{inselfilm produktion}
Ship Out of Water: A surreal scene from My Atomic Aunt, which looks at the aftermath of a tsunami that turned the coastal city of Namie into a ghost town.
MY PRAIRIE HOME
Director: Chelsea
McMullan
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Istanbul, with
its current
boom of drastic, neoliberal
urban renewal,
displays in
rare clarity
how gender
minorities are
casualties of
gentrification.
Love You? Raes Bandcamp page
(raespoon.bandcamp.com) features covers of both, along with all
of the tracks featured in this film,
available to stream or download.
Trans X Istanbul
Director: Maria Binder
{maria bendor-cornix film}
REDEMPTION TRAIL
Director: Britta Sjogren
{Breaking Glass Pictures}
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screen
Sex (Ed) is
funny at
times, referencing film
strips with
titles such
as Condom
Sense and
Would You
Kiss a Naked
Man? But it
also confronts
current ways
sex is taught
outside of
the home.
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The New Jersey 4, Now: Venice Brown, Terrain Hill, Patreese Johnson, and Renata
Hill of Out in the Night.
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REVIEWS
ROCK OF AGES
ELLEN WILLISS DAUGHTER
DISCUSSES HER MOTHERS
LATEST ANTHOLOGY AND
ONGOING INFLUENCE
BY ALYXANDRA VESEY
ILLUSTRATION BY PERRIN
Ellen Willis committed her life to envisioning the future. As a result, many of
us are still catching up with her. As a
critic and scholar, Willis used words to
elucidate her radical, sex-positive perspective on feminism, popular culture,
and politics. Between 1968 and 1975,
she served as the New Yorkers first pop
music critic. While the work of contemporaries like Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs,
and Robert Christgau was championed
in their time, the annals of rock criticism often left Willis out.
That is, until the 2011 collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis
on Rock Music resulted in renewed interest in her work and recognition for her inf luence on feminist music criticism, such as the 2011
Sex, Hope & Rock n Roll: The Writings of Ellen Willis conference
at NYU, which was attended by Ann Powers, Daphne Brooks, Nitsuh
Abebe, Kathleen Hanna, Irin Carmon, and Maura Johnston.
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music
What did you learn about Willis in the process of putting this
collection together? Specifically, what did you learn about the
evolution of her feminism through the political history she
wrote about in comparison to editing Out of the Vinyl Deeps,
which focused on her music criticism and fandom?
Growing up, I only knew her as somebody who wrote about politics
and feminism. I didnt know her when she really had her finger on
the pulse of music. But I knew that that was something she loved.
When I first put Out of the Vinyl Deeps together and realized just
how much she thought about and cared about rock music in the
larger cultural and political conversation, that actually did really
surprise me at first. Because when I was a kid, I just thoughton
one hand my mom writes about politics and feminism, on the other,
my mom writes about rock n roll. And yes, I knew that she had
been a music writer at some point, but putting together Out of the
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it or that she felt like it wasnt relevant to her politics anymore, but I
think she really did feel that way.
music
First of all, I think some of the intergenerational tension is manufactured. Many of my personal and professional interactions with older
feminists have been perfectly fine; theyre interested and theyre
relieved that young women call themselves feminists. I think that a
lot of editors who are finding older feminists to write hit pieces on
younger feminists are not taking into account that its the exception,
not the rule.
But I dont think theres any problem with arguing. I think when it
gets personal, thats when it gets petty and unproductive. But I dont
see any problem with arguing, especially wellthought out arguments. I tend to think that writing something substantive in response
to somebody else, whether its on your personal blog or a publication,
is better than having a 140-character argument on Twitter or a bitchy
comment section back-and-forth.
As a feminist media scholar, I was especially struck by Williss commitment to recognizing the range of pleasures found in media
consumption and sexual practice rather than resorting to easy
vilification, especially in Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution,
Lust Horizons, Sisters under the Skin?, Radical Feminism and
Feminist Radicalism, Villains and Victims, and Tis a Pity Hes
a Whore. At the very least, it made me wonder what Willis would
say about recent commentary surrounding Beyoncs representation. What conversations and debates do you think she would
enter into about sex in politics and popular culture?
She might have something to say about Beyonc. I dont think she would
engage in the issue of whether Beyonc was a feminist. I think she
understood that celebrities are ultimately not going to be the leader of a
grassroots movement and we shouldnt pin so much hope on them. She
wasnt wading into everyday feminist issues by the time she died. She
was more interested in larger, straightforward political questions on the
national level. Besides The Sopranos maybe [Our Mobsters, Ourselves],
I cant think of any other pop culturerelated pieces that she wrote in
the 2000s. The pop culture she would be commenting onrepresentations of feminism in pop cultureI honestly do think she would have
done a lot more [on] t v, because she loved The Sopranos so much and it
was the iceberg in terms of the golden age of t v that we are currently
living in. She could very well have written something on Orange Is the
New Black or Mad Men. But I dont think shed be arguing about semantics. I think she would have been terribly bored by that.
She tended to take a real birds-eye view on these issues rather than
reacting to something small and finite, and I really kept that in mind
when I picked these pieces. I wanted the pieces to take you on a journey, to place these issues on a larger continuum, and transcend that
conversation about minutiae. And transcending that ending point
where we just get exhausted and feel like nothing can really change. I
think thats what it really comes down to for me. Shes one of the few
writers that goes past that moment where we get politically exhausted
and where we just get depressed and says, Well, you know, we can
actually change things.
Alyxandra Vesey is a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies gender, music,
and labor. She frequently writes about such topics on her blog, Feminist Music Geek. She also volunteers for Girls Rock Camp Madison
and deejays at WSUM.
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COMET, COME TO ME
Meshell Ndegeocello
{Nave}
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LP1
FKA twigs
{Young Turks}
British dancerturnedtrip hop/
r & b singer FKA twigs is notable
as an artist in large part because
she uses more than a cult of
personality in the creation of her
APARaTO!
Aparato!
{E.L.E. Records}
Aparato! is a vessel that takes
listeners to another level of
consciousness, a collaborative
machine working to enlighten
a world of injustices and bring
a voice to the voiceless, fusing
dualities of Chicano culture
through their mixture of jaranas
and electric beats. The duo of
Cat Mendez and Alexandro D.
Hernndez Guitrrez transcends
borders with their post-punk
electric beats and what they
call Indigenous instruments
of mass descent, whose songs
raise awareness of immigrant
politics and feminist issues.
Estrellitas is dedicated to
AB 540 undocumented students
fighting for a higher education
and citizenship while living
under the threat of deportation.
Like many of Aparato!s songs,
it looks at the in between condition and invisibility of people
who are systematically rejected
by mainstream American society
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music
Cursed to
See the Future
represents
the internal strength
needed to
survive and,
more importantly, fight
for what you
want and
what you
need. And
for Mortals,
they convey
it through
some serious
blackened
metal.
CURSED TO SEE THE
FUTURE
Mortals
{Relapse Records}
The debut full-length from Brooklyn trio Mortals has a certain
soundone I associate with fellow Brooklyn-based bands such as
Tombs and Black Anvila feeling
that can only come out of living in
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YESWAY
Yesway
{self released}
Listening to the self-titled debut
album from San Francisco duo
Yesway is like soaring above the
coast of Northern California with
two folk-singing celestial beings
in perfect sync with each other.
The sun sets, and shadows cast
along mountain ridges and the
ocean deep. Emily Ritz and Kacey
Johansings voices melt together,
and their close friendship offstage allows them to write lovely,
darkly rich, intimate songs. On
first listen, the album as a whole
is so soothing that it can be
almost sleepy, but with further
listens, the layers shine out, and
you will find yourself humming
the melodies hours later.
Ritz and Johansings harmonization is clearly the driving force
behind their music. However,
their guitar picking, bells, light
percussion, and occasional shimmering electronic pings cushion
their vocals and often serve as
the third harmonizer. The album
begins with Whoacean, and the
tracks vocal abstractionsohs,
ahs, and whoasserve as a nice
primer for whats to come. Ritz
and Johansing mix in just the
music
Ellis Bell
The Cold and Lovely
{self released}
YELLOW MEMORIES
Fatima
{Eglo Records}
New Yorkbased Fatimas debut
album Yellow Memories starts with
NATION
Katie Kate
{Self Released}
Kate Finn, a.k.a. Katie Kate, is
a Seattle-based artist and selfproclaimed frontier of future
pop. Her training as a classical
musician and an electronic composer makes for compelling oscillations and musical collisions.
Kate does her own rapid-fire
rapping, occasional spoken-word
and sylph-style singing over an
amalgam of vintage analog synth,
live elements, and syncopated yet
perfectly melodious beats that
wont quit. Nation provides many
moments of pure honest-to-goodness head-bobbing music despite
its moments of incompatibility
within itself (while hip hop,
electronic, and pop have mingled
before, it is a rare occasion where
it is all mostly doneand mostly
done well, by one person).
Katie Kate exhibits all of the
braggadocio and ambition necessary for an emcee combined
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