Welcome back!

. . . Is that a lot of the smart people have something to do with the University. Today, I received a mildly clever and interesting response to my AdultFriendFinder account. I replied by giving my screen name that I use for that purpose and didn’t think much more of it. Imagine my shock when I got an IM to that screen name from the radio station that I work at. The person quickly introduced themselves as the guy from AFF. He had no idea who I was.

I scrambled for the radio and just caught him announcing. Fuck fuck fuck. I recognize him as a philosophy professor that sometimes does shows during the summer. So, I’m presented with an ethical problem. I know a big secret about him (conspiring to cheat on his wife) and he doesn’t have any clue about me. I bit the bullet and decided that he was at much higher risk than I and told him who I was. I was expected a flurry of embarassment, backtracking, and begging for mutual secrecy.

It wasn’t that simple. The Prof didn’t seem phased too much and kept hitting on me. This had me floored but surprisingly intrigued. It seems deliciously dirty to have an affair with a professor (even if he isn’t from my current department).

We’re having coffee tomorrow.

Too bad he isn’t the one I wrote this about.

How many more times does this have to happen before people realize that women can also be sexual predators? Maybe I’m insane but over the last few years there seems to be an epidemic of teachers fucking their students. The response from most people seems to be to laugh it off (and many men mention that they wish they had a teacher like that.) Would anyone think this was funny if it were happening to 12 and 13-year-old girls?

Recently, Debra LaFave’s case was dropped by the prosecutor even though she admits her guilt. The article is full of maudlin bullshit about her faith in God and this being a bump on her Christian path. The most interesting thing about that link is that on the right side of the page is a CNN poll asking this question:

“Did Debra Lafave benefit from a double standard on sex crimes?”

90 percent of people say yes. This isn’t a political issue. This isn’t about feminism or mysogyny. This is about our standards of sexual misconduct and expectations of men and boys to be always already sexualized.

I grappled this week with a difficult to stomach passage in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, those who are familiar with it will remember the “curdled milk” story, I’ll post the paragraph for the benefit of the others:

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simpleminded, employed here then there, depending on teh season, living hand to mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned into authorities. At the border of the field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins around him; for at the very edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicholas, they would play the familiar game called “curdled milk.” So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intoleracne but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. The thing to note is that they went so far as to measure the brainspan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect for possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life; that they made him talk; that they questioned him concerning his thoughts, inclinations, habits, sensations, and opinions. And then, acquitting him of any crime, they decided finally to make him into a pure object of medicine and knowledge – an object to be shut away till the end of his life in the hospital at Mareville, but also to be made known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis. One can be fairly certain that during this time period the Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to mind their language and not talk about all these things aloud. But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions of enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society – and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures – assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating.

I know that at first reading, this seems like a contradiction. Here I am concerned about the exploitation of children and I am quoting an author that comes off as irresponsibly cavalier on the issue. The point here, though, is not whether Foucault rhetorically trivializes child abuse (he does) and whether or not that is a cheap shot (it is in many ways). The purpose of this passage for me is to question our deepest assumptions about sex in society. The assumption that Foucault questions is about the sexuality of children and how we pathologize deviants like the village dimwit. Reading this passage isn’t easy, it makes you angry, and then that anger makes you realize just how much you’re steeped in the ideologies of sexuality that our society proscribes.

The particular one that is upsetting me lately is that men cannot be victimized and if they are it is certainly not by other women. Do you think for a moment that these cases are an anomoly? Certainly, they must be symptoms of a much larger problem. I don’t want to use hysterical language or point to an epidemic that probably doesn’t exist but I also don’t see the point of burying our heads in the sand. Women can be child molestors and sexual agressors and violent criminals just like any other human being. We are so used to thinking of women as victims that that is difficult to remember and regard that fact at its full weight.

This oversight is, in my opinion, the single biggest mistake of modern feminism. My feminism is about challenging gender roles and recognizing patriarchy as an ideology that every human operates within and is affected by. Feminisms have done a terrible job of incorporating men because of this shortcoming and everyone is still playing the same gender roles whether they want to or not.

. . . academy, watch out who you shake hands with.

Who knew that the porn studies field would be so couched in niceties that there wouldn’t be a single concise description of the state of interracial porn? There are plenty of screeds in the anti-porn, MacKinnon-esque camp to latch onto. But, in the world of people taking a rhetorical or cultural studies approach I found very little in terms of hard-hitting soundbites. So, who summed things up best, in my estimation?

None other than Sam the Man over at SugarBank in his post “Porn and Prejudice.” He says in a bulleted list what it takes the academics three chapters to write.

So, why am I linking to a 5-month-old entry in a blog you all read anyway? Because this week I cited it in a paper I wrote for a graduate seminar in Postcolonial theory. Sammy, step right up and receive your accolades with Judy, Michel, Gayatri, Frantz, and Homi.

The title of my paper? “Black Dicks in White Chicks:
fantasies of miscegenation, black power, and the colonization of
interracial desire”

I will be back in full force on Friday, I have one more big paper to finish before I can return to blogging on good conscience. However, I am doing a lot of work this semester on sex and sexuality so I thought I would hit you with some of the more provocative quotes from things I am reading and writing.

One research project is in the area of sexuality, violence, and colonialism. Frantz Fanon gives a touching and ambivilent perspective on this in Black Skin, White Masks:

Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddely white.

I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white.

Now – and this is a form of recognition that Hegal had not envisaged – who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man.

I am a white man.

Her love takes me into the noble road that leads to total realization. . .

I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.

When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.

I also recently delivered my paper on masculinity in the works of Kate Chopin. I’ve been delving pretty deeply into the masculinity studies literature but the best part of delivering papers with a psychoanalytic bent is watching everyone squirm in their seats when you talk about the phallus. Especially cigars conferred in homosocial gift situations as phallic symbols.

I leave all of you fellow bloggers with some words of encouragement from Michel Foucault, the theoretical ally of perverts and miscreants everywhere:

If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact of speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.