Follow-Up on George Sodini Note Below

Justin, thanks for your comments. You write:

A. On Schwarzenegger -- 

I am in broad sympathy with this. Here are a few quick comments and questions. You write, “In cutting all funding for domestic violence shelters [Schwarzenegger] is directly leading to the death of people who did not need to die.” I’m willing to concede this point in a certain sense. But I want to clarify that sense. It is the same sense as the sense in which you and I are responsible for the deaths of who-knows-how-many little boys and girls that we could have sponsored for a dollar a day in Liberia or Bolivia (and practically all of us – even those of us on welfare in this country -- *could* sponsor at least one more child than we presently do [we could move into a single room with 10 other people, invariably rely on free clothes, work three jobs, eat only at soup kitchens, etc.])…
…As Singer or Unger might put it, we have “let such children die” rather than “killed them”. Of course, it could be argued that there is no morally relevant difference between killing and letting die. But that would have to be argued. It isn’t obvious that all of us have the same moral standing as someone who shoots a convenient store clerk in the face merely because we’ve let die more children in Uganda or whatever than we absolutely had to. By the same token, it isn’t obvious that Schwarzenegger is a murderer because he decided to prioritize whatever he decided to prioritize over the possible prevention of certain forms of violence against women (I’m not claiming that you suggested that he is).

First of all, he is the governor of California, and can affect lives in a manner and scale that I cannot replicate, and that it doesn't make sense for everyone to try to replicate. Society can't be composed entirely of politicians, and nor do I have the private wealth that would enable me to undo the effects of his funding decision. 

For my part, I do give at least a dollar and usually more, per day, to the homeless people who live on my block. I do this despite not really having an income beyond what I need for rent, food, and basic healthcare. I agree that we could all be doing more in this vein. 

Two more interesting points on this topic --

There is a minimum living standard beyond the necessary which I don't think we should ask people to sacrifice. This is the living standard which makes, broadly speaking, civilization possible -- scholarship, art, and other cultural practices arise in part out of leisure and the celebration of leisure. I think we do have an obligation to give when giving makes all of us stronger (and as long as I am able to handle it emotionally I will be volunteering as a rape crisis counselor and hospital advocate). The government of CA, I believe, could certainly find some way to cut other costs besides basic security measures for women. One of the main reasons the cuts are being made to begin with is the fact that Californians, wealthy or otherwise don't like taxes.

There is a fundamental sense in which I think you're right here, and ultimately I can't give a reason that this case of human suffering deserves specific attention over the myriad, equally problematic ones that deserve our care today. I can only say that it is an issue which I am personally highly motivated to impact, and one which I think tends to be under-estimated and under-represented due to a certain backlash against feminism that is happening to day (see Pat Buchanan telling Rachel Maddow that electing Sotomayor meant discriminating against white men, and see also the common argument that women in the United States shouldn't complain, because things are worse elsewhere. Not only are things just as bad for some lower-class women here as they are almost anywhere else, but despite the problem of upper-middle class white entitlement feminism, it doesn't make sense to compare and contrast oppression, any more than it makes sense to stop prosecuting rapists because a rape victim was "lucky he didn't get murdered.")

Lastly, Arnold Schwarzenegger has given women in California no reason to trust his motives. In a much-publicized video, he announced the budget cuts by waving a knife around and suggesting "cuts must be made." He claims it was a joke, but -- whatever his reason for the video or the budget cut itself -- this betrays an incomprehensible level of insensitivity towards the struggles of the women whose lives he is affecting in this budget cut.

B. On Censorship -- 

You write, “A cursory glance at cable TV, YouTube, or the movie theatre reveals that the mistreatment of women, and quite often their outright rape and murder, gets sexualized…” Is your view that we should censor movies so as to avoid sexualized depictions of violence against women?

I'm not sure why so many people take away from my writing that I want censorship to happen. There are many reasons censorship is a terrible idea, not least of which is that it simply won't work. And yet, one person went so far as to tell me repeatedly that I believe that "pornography is murder and the TV kills people." This is certainly a problem for some feminists. People like Andrea Dworkin do go, in my opinion, a little too far. Even the pornography documentary I linked to in the previous piece, I think, overstates the case by comparing BDSM pornography to waterboarding. My problem isn't even as much with things like BDSM pornography, when it is quite clear that they are participating in a consensual subculture/lifestyle decision, but rather where things like date rape or "raping to seduce" are naturalized into the 'everyday' life of heterosexual and 'vanilla' people. And again, no filmmaker is directly responsible for the actions of their fans. Even an ostensibly feminist depiction of a rape still gets misinterpreted by some people. (http://bitchmagazine.org/post/mad-men-i-love-you-but-your-fans-are-freaking-me-out) 

The resemblance to the Christian right among "all intercourse is rape" feminists is uncanny and significant. But it is also important to realize that one of the most common stereotypes against feminists is that they are humorless, frigid shrews, and to avoid giving that stereotype any more attention than it merits. 

A few ideas on this topic. I actually have used depictions of sexualized violence against women in my own art. And I enjoy some pieces of art that do the same (Videodrome comes to mind). Think of the song "Strange Fruit" -- we can talk about violence beautifully, and quite powerfully, without thereby encouraging it. Art is, I think the barometer of a culture, and thus it is all the more vital that it not be censored so that we can come to terms with how sexist ours really is. If anything, we should be more transparent about it. 

However, I think it is undeniable that there already exists a certain "positive censorship" when our systems and markets are rigged to allow the Judd Apatows of the world to make all the money. Sex sells, right. But undoing this involves undoing discrimination on the level of the industry, in pay gaps, and opportunities for female and feminist filmmakers -- it doesn't involve standing in the way of Judd Apatow (far be it from me). There is also a lack of positive media about women. The onus here is on the feminists to produce a positive result, rather than censor the negative ones. Ultimately we should be able to create a self-regulating system where depictions of Hillary Clinton cackling like a witch, or throwing a "temper tantrum" or having a "gigglefest," are just as rebuked as the watermelon or monkey jokes about Obama (for the record, I don't necessarily support Hillary Clinton's politics, and I think racist jokes about Obama are tolerated too much). But this involves, as I said, positive media, and also education about the historical context which creates the political implications of these depictions (psychiatric diagnoses of female hysteria, Salem witch trials, et cetera).

One more reason censorship is not good -- there is a distinction between a) depictions of sexualized violence that are therapeutic or cathartic for sufferers, b) that which is depicted for pedagogical reasons (to spread awareness), and c) that which is gratuitous or unexamined. There is no way we could create a bureaucracy to distinguish between these, and I don't think we should try. The problem isn't with the inert media itself, but with the lack of an education which would allow people to critically examine their media (in all spheres, not just feminist ones). 

C. On Power and Violence -- 

You write, “Clearly these homicidal actions, like (if not the same as) the violence of the patriarchy itself, like all of the fantasies about violence against women that do exist in media today, stem from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women.” I wonder what your evidence is for this (it’s not clear to me). Is you view that all violence against X arises from a feeling of powerlessness *in the fact of X* (as opposed to a feeling of powerlessness under God, in the face of one’s boss, etc.)?

Where Mao Tse-tung says "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," Arendt suggests that "power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent." The important thing is that every time a group feels its power decreasing, there is an "open invitation" to violence. I think that any oppressing group does run up against this conundrum when facing its "dependence" on the service of the oppressed group. There is violence against women for many reasons, but I believe one of these reasons is a feeling of powerlessness against women. If we don't have the power to gain non-violent assent from the women we oppress, then the only way to reinstitute the patriarchy is by force. I think similarly of hate crimes against homosexuals -- they are pinpointed because they are seen as a threat. If they really were "less than nothing," it wouldn't be necessary to attack them. And it is a serious and open question why people get killed for "walking like a girl," to use an example of the randomly motivated homicide of a gay teenager that Judith Butler discussed in a documentary I saw recently.

I definitely overstated the point by saying that *all* homicidal fantasies against women stem *directly and only* from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women. Obviously it happens for many reasons. The reason I thought it was important to highlight this specific cause is for the sake of women readers --- instrumental to taking back power over oneself is realizing that one has it to begin with. Instrumental to that is realizing that every enemy pays a compliment to the person he attacks by suggesting that this enemy is worth attacking.

George Sodini

As someone who has survived serious sexual violence on a few different occasions, I live with a fair amount of hypervigilance and fear for my safety. On the street I very routinely get harassed (not just like "take care of those gorgeous legs baby," which doesn't really bother me, but things like "I had better put my eyes back in my head because I am going to get arrested for what I am thinking about you right now." this would be a direct quote). Now, the fact that all of these men are not psychotic or homicidal is precisely the point. Rather than speculate about whether George Sodini was insane, (he clearly was) or even whether he should have gotten a long prison sentence (in a world of ideal penal reform he probably should have, but I am undecided here), the only responsible thing to do is to think about how to prevent this violence. 

If it turns out that a culture of sexism encourages the likelihood that crazy people will kill women, it is irresponsible not to examine that. The psychological and physical well being of the women being victimized is just as important as that of any man -- and I have an inkling that the feeling of persecution straight men may get from this critical examination is not as serious as the situation for women in California, who, for example, recently had all funding for domestic violence shelters -- all of it -- cut by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who again is not a psychopath. But indirectly, in cutting all funding for domestic violence shelters he is leading to the death of people who did not need to die.

A cursory glance at cable TV, YouTube, or the movie theatre reveals that the mistreatment of women, and quite often their outright rape and murder, gets sexualized (in everything from Judd Apatow films [he blames anti-semitism for the criticism that Knocked Up is sexist], to the treatment of Hillary Clinton's recent trip to the Congo to talk about her $17 million dollar program to keep women from being raped with the barrels of guns, to basically every horror film ever, except perhaps this... http://www.teethmovie.com/ ). 

The naturalization of male violence is not backed up by scientific evidence (see Pulitzer-prize winning biologist Natalie Angier's text 'Woman') . Recognizing this is good for both men and women, because it means men don't have to be violent. What it also means is they have effective free will, or at least a serious obligation to continue assuming they have free will. And when we realize how extensive the positive depictions of the rape of and violence against women are in our culture, it is obviously more important to subject "their" media to critical examination than to blindly disavow any possible linkage whatsoever and thus save face.

You do not need to say that any man is directly responsible for George Sodini's actions other than himself to say that critical examination of media is called for. And by the way, I don't think that these straight men you are talking about should have any sort of monopoly over "their" media, as you say. The lines are not so clean. The pornography industry is responsible for all kinds of violence against women and their economic oppression. One of the main men in the pornography industry today is also a major movie producer and has ties to the KKK ( http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=235&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html) 

This doesn't mean that pornography viewers are murderers any more than casual cocaine users directly cause the guerilla warfare which they support with their purchase, but it does mean there is a linkage.

Furthermore, mental illness doesn't happen in a vacuum. Nor is it a necessary fact. If it is remotely possible that we can create a culture that doesn't encourage men to think of violent or hyperaggressive behavior against women as sexy -- which is a situation that hurts plenty of men too, by pressuring them to demonstrate their "straight male" macho-ness in a way that leaves millions deeply emotionally and psychologically wounded (http://community.feministing.com/2009/07/why-pornography-hurts-men-repo.html) --if we can help to prevent people like George Sodini from feeling so boxed-in by this caricature of masculinity that he suffers a mental breakdown and commits heinous acts of murder against innocent people, I think we have a huge obligation to critically examine whether it is possible. It makes just as much sense to deny that as it does to say that a man who murdered a black man after watching casual racism in some movie over and over doesn't obligate the filmmaker to even ask himself once how he could have depicted race differently. We will save so much more time, money, angst, and innocent life if we do this than if we wait for psychiatric "cures" and prison sentences after the fact. The "after the fact" concern only helps George Sodini -- it doesn't help the women he killed.

The one point where I do agree with you, Steve, is in saying that people like George Sodini need help. Psychiatric help, but not only psychiatric help -- also help through cultural education. As Hannah Arendt says, violence can only exist in the absence of power, and power is precisely the ability to effect change without stooping to the use of force. Clearly these homicidal actions, like (if not the same as) the violence of the patriarchy itself, like all of the fantasies about violence against women that do exist in media today, stem from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women. Women, after all, are these "inferior" beings upon whom even sexist men inevitably have to depend in order to, at the very least, perpetuate the species. And no man was always independent of his mother.

It's funny, because in creating a caricature of women who use sex, not violence, to effect the changes they want to see in the world, the patriarchal media has, like Midas, unwittingly projected into women a weird cartoon version of what they wanted all along: the power to impact the world without being so desperate as to stoop to anger, or force.

Thought Of The Day

I recently read that a woman is unlikely to orgasm during intercourse unless the distance between her clit and her vag is less than one inch. In that case, it is more likely that she will not be able to comfortably accomodate the average-sized wang. This is certainly not true for all women but the majority.

Some evolutionary biologists contend that the clitoral orgasm (despite being, strictly speaking, the only orgasm that exists*) is an evolutionary "holdover" that serves no discernable purpose and is on its way out. However, given the clit-vag distance conundrum, in addition to the fact that, strictly speaking, male orgasm is no more necessary for reproduction than female orgasm -- cf. preseminal fluid -- I am forced to conclude that, unfortunately, it is not the clit but the vag which is the gracious holdover of the female body which, all things told, would do perfectly well for itself reproducing parthenogenetically.

*There has been much 'scientific' debate about whether there is a "vaginal orgasm" in addition to the clitoral one. However, a simple look at female anatomy shows us that the average clitoris** is actually 7.5 inches long and wraps in two prongs around the pelvic bone and hence the vagina. This is clearly the source of female pleasure during intercourse, and allows us to conclude that female pleasure is female pleasure -- which, biologically speaking, develops out of exactly the same erectile tissues as male pleasure. 

**For a sweet picture of a giant mothership vagina and also one that looks suspiciously like the virgin mary please consult Wikipedia.

to see mad tom of bedlam

i give so much money to the birds and the cats and the homeless people who live behind the whole foods by my house. really, we are becoming friends. there have never been homeless so regular as to provide me with the rare opportunity of saying i have made their acquaintance. i want to be able to say i know what their lives are like in the form that they will share it to me. but not yet. right now all i know is that they tell me i have nice shoes, that i can't help but give them five, one hundred dollars whenever i see them.

i haven't opened a philosophy book in too long. simultaneously afraid of and nostalgic for nietzsche, like a father. like a father equally as angry and tyrannical and influential as my own. my paintings are the only ones with whom i have improved my relationship since i left new college, a newfound patience and trust in the internal logic of the images which i couldn't have anticipated and cannot thank enough for the existence of -- particularly for the fear that the discussion of them will make them vanish into the night, a cadmium will-o-wisp. i loved those when i was little.

i was unabashedly un-urban when i was young. i gardened not because it was the proper actiivity for women but because i could lord over a world there, create things that inspired my own attention, find privacy that is rare here. i am glad i didn't get to work on the farm in massachussetts because the multiple emergency root canals which several years of white person poverty created in the recesses of my teeth, but the privacy is still waiting for me. there is a zen monastery here waiting for me to build sheds for them, live off lentil soup. there is a world waiting for me to be its exhibitionist, its subject of controversy and disconcertment. fashionable dismissal.

to see mad tom of bedlam ten thousand miles i'll travel.

Sex Tourism in Thailand

I recently had an exchange with a friend of mine about the conditions faced by sex workers in Thailand. I was quite surprised by the casual acceptance of the situation that this friend expressed, along with being greatly misinformed about the extent of the problem. I think lack of information about the experiences of those whose lives are radically incommensurable with our own privileged experiences is the main reason people don't feel compelled to alter the situation both internationally and locally. I have been reading reviews of the recent book by Richard Bernstein on this subject, "The East, West, and Sex," and am realizing that people on a large scale seem to think about the issue in a similar way to my friend. So thought I would transcribe the correspondence below. I have cited the articles I consulted at the end, and there is also a blind five-year-old Korean girl playing "Für Elise." Enjoy.

My friend writes:

I was thinking more of how laid back, socially accepted, and relatively healthy the flesh trade is. There is an open recognition of a dividing line between women who market their sexuality and those who don't, and those who do are more or less all considered "bar-girls". They're not hookers, per se. It's more of a lifestyle. They're loose girls who hang at a certain bar and will sleep with you if 1) they like you and 2) you give 'em some money.

Of course, the dregs of desperation arise there as they do in any field, but for the most part there is no stigma. No one looks down on them, although few young ladies aspire to be a bar girls, admittedly.

As often as not, they land a white whale with the grisly, poison barbed harpoon of marriage, get them to pay for a village and transfer their money into a Thai bank account, then empty the account and disappear to live as upper class ladies. That's how a good number of Thai families make their upwards economic transition.

When the potential for exploitation is even on both sides, I think it's just called... business. Or politics.

My response--

I do see your side of the matter regarding this. I think that decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work internationally is a huge part of solving one of the many problems that exist in sexual culture globally, along with the problems of women's rights. However, I don't think that either of us really can claim to know what the life of the average sex worker in Thailand is like. I grew up in a working class family. My father painted houses. When I moved out of the house at fifteen, my parents, who have two other children, weren't able to provide me with financial support, and I really struggled a lot of the time, especially when I left school. I pitied myself and felt plenty desperate about my economic situation, but I have never experienced the situation in question here, because I have never been faced with a choice between death and sex work.

Unfortunately, that is commonly the case globally and domestically when it comes to sex trafficking. I have linked you to two articles. In the first one, you will see that in Appendix I there is a list of trafficking incidents in the US (which is not comprehensive, it goes from 1999-2001 and only refers to those that police actually busted. In about half of these cases, each of which sometimes involves 700+ women and children being forced to pay off 'immigration debts' of $40,000 or more, the women originated from Thailand, or Laos. No other country contributed as often.

Here is some analysis I have done with information from the first article. The article suggests that there are 50,000 women annually trafficked into the US., and 12,000 into Thailand. However, the population of Thailand is one-fifth that of the United states. So this means that 1 out of 5,000 women in Thailand is trafficked. In the U.S. the number is 1 out of 60,000. This means 12 times as many women per capita are trafficked into Thailand, leaving aside the number of women who are already imprisoned or who are being trafficked internally.A 2004 estimate by Dr. Nitet Tinnakul from Chulalongkorn University gives a total of 2.8 million sex workers in Thailand, including 2 million women, 20,000 adult males and 800,000 minors under the age of 18. This means that about 2,800,000 women and children, out of a total population of a little more than 30 million Thai women, are involved in sex work. This is nearly 1 in 10. Studies (done, yes, prior to concerted public health efforts on the part of the Thai government) have suggested that 44% of Thai sex workers are HIV positive. The majority of Thailand’s HIV infections (around 80%) occur through heterosexual sex. HIV prevalence among pregnant women, which reached a peak of 2.35% in 1995, had fallen to 1.18% by 2003. Studies have shown that men in Thailand and the United states will consistently pay more money for sex without a condom than with one. Nearly 50% of the time they pressure women not to use one.

Most of the women who are trafficked into Thailand come from Myanmar. They are either forced by crime rings, lured by the promise of legitimate employment -- or they are fleeing one of the worst absolute military dictatorships in the world. They do not usually work in places that Westerners frequent, so you probably would not have seen them were you to visit. However, most of the criminal organizations which control sex trafficking also run larger rings of prostitution. Most women who are in sex work or trafficking are undoubtedly almost never there because of their own volition. They are there because of their pimps, US military servicemen and tourists (who often marry Thai women, and bring them back to the United States in order to force them into prostitution here) or pressure from their families, as you said, to become economically upwardly mobile. Again, the sex trade is ubiquitous, diffuse throughout the entire country -- every major city and province in the country -- not merely large cities like Bangkok, Pattaya, and Phuket. So, while some women in larger cities may indeed be willingly working at bars, this is by no means the rule, but the exception. And even then, willing dancers and bar-girls usually only get 2-3 days off per month.

Thai elites tend to be polygamists, and men are considered to have a right to as many mistresses as they like. My close family friend, Mrs. Cho, is originally from Myanmar. While in Myanmar she was forced to have an abortion by her family while drugged because she had run off with an impoverished Buddhist man she wanted to marry, rather than the extravagantly wealthy Muslim one they had arranged for her. As you said, she is not by any means considered a sex worker. However, she remains with the wealthy man in the United States and is not permitted to even go out to dinner without his permission. And he does not grant that permission. As you can see, the cultural lines between sex work and "legitimate" marriage are not always so clean. There are usually no other "employment" opportunities save marriage or sex work for large numbers of uneducated rural women -- who deserve other options.

You are totally right. Some forms of acceptance of and honesty about the sex trade are a huge improvement upon the Ted Haggard style sexual hypocrisy that reigns supreme in the United States. It is certainly good to not blame a woman for taking the best available economic opportunity. But there is no reason for this to extend to not blaming the customers for continually creating the demand that permits this economic stranglehold to remain the status quo. Western customers are encouraged -- by the government -- to visit Thailand and pursue sex workers and slaves, because such a huge portion of the Thai economy has come to rely upon sex work after various forms of economic depression (including opium suppression programs). It is not at all clear to me that this is a good thing. There is no simple or moralistic solution to the problem -- it is cultural and economic, and yes, a large portion of the work must be done by the women themselves.

However, among trafficking victims the women never even see the money they make. The Yakuza consistently deceives women -- mostly Thai -- into coming to Japanese brothels, either under the guise of legitimate work or at least sex work under humane conditions. There have been reports there of wealthy Western businessmen paying to rape and kill young children. There have been reports in the U.S. and abroad of women being locked in hotel rooms, drugged intravenously, and having their clothing stolen from them so that they cannot leave their hotel room. They are then forced to service men indefinitely for artificially low prices in order to pay off an arbitrarily defined "debt." This is all recounted in the last article below.

In the United States, thousands upon thousands of Asian "massage parlours" operate, staffed by illegal immigrants who are strictly forbidden to provide sexual services to any non-Asian men who frequent them so as not to blow their cover. People who think they are being hired for legitimate secratarial, au pair, or even stripping gigs arrive illegally, illiterate or at least not speaking the language, totally dependent upon their traffickers, only to get raped and beaten. 52% cannot speak English. In Thailand, women have reported being kept by armed guards in squalid conditions at their brothels. They have, in both Thailand and the United States, sought help from the police only to find that the police force is one of the main customer bases for the pimps, who then bring them back to their brothels. Or they have been considered hysterical since they arrive half-dressed and cannot speak English, and end up in psychiatric wards. While they are enslaved, these women are shipped from city to city continually, sleeping on concrete floors in the backs of massage parlours and often being woken up at four in the morning with no warning, and forced to other sides of the country -- lest any given customer base lose interest in a parlour for its lack of variety of women.

Sex trafficking always operates through the front of a legitimate business, such as these bars you mention. Even if all bars are not involved in sex trafficking, all sex trafficking tends to operate either as a legitimate bar, strip club, or massage parlor, or an organized criminal network with governmental collusion. The burden of proof should not be upon those who feel that the two (sex work and sex trafficking) are related, but those who feel that they are not.

Child sex tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry currently enslaving 2 million children under the age of 18.* Thailand is widely known in the United States as the prime location for this practice. There are frequent stories of pedophiles and traffickers fleeing the United States to seek "asylum" (a phrase not without some irony here) in Thailand, which again shows that being content to remove the social stigma from sex work can have terrible repercussions. Bangkok is one of the primary destinations along the main smuggling route for Asian sex traffickers. Further, no trafficking organizations internationally, except possibly some in Russia, can compare to those in Asia with respect to scale, scope, and sophistication. In the U.S., trafficking operations are usually limited to one- or two-man operations. Most of these traffickers also traffic general male and female laborers into conditions of slavery which are every bit as significant as sexual slavery. We have heard at New College, for example, from the Hispanic, Haitian, and Mayan Indian Immokalee workers in Florida (www.ciw-online.org). In the city where I live, San Francisco, the "yellow slave trade" has been around at least since the 1800's and possibly longer.

I really think it makes no sense to suggest that the potential for exploitation is even on both sides. Although there are isolated cases of sex workers or pimps robbing Western tourists, there is absolutely no ring of Thai women who traffic pudgy white men internationally in order to sap their bank accounts through forced and repeated Cartier gifting. Poor and uneducated Thai women, kathoeys, adolescents, and children really do not have the ability to, via their sex appeal alone, force Asian or Western men to sign away the deed to their house and their children's college funds.

Force is a strong word, and it means something very specific here -- that there is a threat of death through violence, lack of healthcare, starvation, botched abortion, insufficient care during childbirth, or disease. Even if a woman is "successful," and independent, and perhaps persuades multiple johns to support her, there is no reason for any woman's best economic option to put her at a huge (44%) risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, not to mention the risk of violence, kidnapping, or perhaps a simple desire not to sleep with 7-45 men a day (on average). No matter how maligned men who have stupidly involved themselves in sexually dissatisfying marriages, or who have come to Thailand seeking a solution to an Orientalist fetish, may be, there is not even the weakest case to suggest that the disadvantage their blue balls put them at compares to the situation on the end of the sex workers they purchase.

I can envision, and hope we can achieve, a society in which sex work will a healthy part of the cultural life of a country. But the work required to get there should not be under-estimated. It will require radical re-structuring on the level of kinship, global economics, and moral culture -- and would not be quite recognizable in comparison to the world we live in today.

*Here are two obvious, publicly-available examples of girls who have clearly been sold into marriage while under 18. The makers of this website (lifepartnermatchmaker.com) brag that the dock from which their brides (complete with certificate of virginity) leave Vietnam is unowned property so you do not have to worry about being caught.
http://70.85.180.226/~evacom/photo/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=33
http://70.85.180.226/~evacom/photo/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=12

Here is a five-year old blind girl who was adopted out of who knows what conditions, and can play piano by ear. I am well aware that I sound like a late night celebrity voice-over for a Feed the Children infomercial, but I think it is clear that these girls deserve greater opportunities.



If you are interested in reading more, here are my sources:

• Article on the trafficking of women and girls from Myanmar into Thailand
  

• Wikipedia article on sex work in Thailand

• A wonderful, comprehensive, 141 page report by professors at University of Massachussetts, Amherst and University of Rhode Island on sex trafficking in the U.S. as it compares to the international situation


*In short, parrhesia, the act of truth, requires: first, the manifestation of a fundamental bond between the truth spoken and the thought of the perso who spoke it; [second], a challenge to the bond between the two interlocutors (the person who speaks the truth and the person to whom this truth is addressed). Hence this new feature of parrhesia: it involves some form of courage, the minimal form of which consists in the parrhesiast taking the risk of breaking and ending the relationship to the other person which was precisely what made his discourse possible. In a way, the parrhesiast always risks undermining that relationship which is the condition of the possibility of his discourse. This is very clear in parrhesia as spiritual guidance, for example, which can only exist if there is friendship, and where the employment of truth in this spiritual guidance is precisely in danger of bringing into question and breaking the relationship which made this discourse of truth possible.

But in some cases this courage may also take a maximal form when one has to accept that, if one is to tell the truth, not only may one's personal, friendly relationship with the person to whom one is speaking be brought into question, but one may even be risking one's life. When Plato goes to see Dionysius the Elder -- this is recounted in Plutarch -- he tells him truths which so offend the tyrant that he conceives the plan, which in fact he does not put into execution, of killing Plato. But Plato fundamentally knew and accepted this risk. Parrhesia therefore not only puts the relationship between the person who speaks and the person to whom he addresses the truth at risk, but it may go so far as to put the very life of the person who speaks at risk, at least if his interlocutor has power over him and cannot bear being told the truth.

Thus the true game of parrhesia will be established on the basis of this kind of pact which means that if the parrhesiast demonstrates his courage by telling the truth despite and regardless of everything, the person to whom this parrhesia is addressed will have to demonstrate his greatness of soul by accepting being told the truth. This kind of pact, between the person who takes the risk of telling the truth and the person who agrees to listen to it, is at the heart of what could be called the parrhesiastic game. So, in two words, parrhesia is the courage of truth in the person who speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole truth that he thinks, but it is also the interlocutor's courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truth that he hears.

Now parrhesia contrasts with these different characteristics of prophetic truth-telling in each of these prcise respects. You can see then that the parrhesiast is the opposite of the prophet in that the prophet does not speak for himself, but in the name of someone else, and he articulates a voice which is not his own. In contrast, the parrhesiast, by definition, speaks in his own name. It is essential that he expresses his own opinion, thought and conviction. He must put his name to his words; this is the price of his frankness. The prophet does not have to be frank, even when he tells the truth. Second, the parrhesiast does not foretell the future. Certainly, he reveals and discloses what people's blindness prevents them from seeing, but he does not unveil the future. He unveils what is. The parrhesiast does not help people somehow to step beyond some threshold in the ontological structure of the human being and of time which separates them from their future. He helps them in their blindness, but their blindness about what they are, about themselves, and so not the blindness due to an ontological structure, but due to some moral fault, distraction, or lack of discipline, the consequence of inattention, laxity, or weakness. It is in this interplay between human beings and their blindness due to inattention, complacency, weakness, and moral distraction that the parrhesiast performs his role, which, as you can see, is consequently a revelatory role very different from that of the prophet, who stands at the point where human finitude and the structure of time are conjoined. Third, the parrhesiast, again by definition, and unlike the prophet, does not speak in riddles. On the contrary, he says things as clearly and directly as possible, without any disguise or rhetorical embellishment, so that his words may immediately be given their prescriptive value. The parrhesiast leaves nothing to interpretation. Certainly, he leaves something to be done: he leaves the person he addresses with the tough task of having the courage to accept this truth, to recognize it, and to make it a principle of conduct. He leaves this moral task, but, unlike the prophet, he does not leave the difficult duty of interpretation.
--Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth


/////

So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.

To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.

the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal

I have posted this essay in other forums, but I just wanted to repost it here because I like it. It's the spiel I was going to give prior to introducing Dr. Kwasi Wiredu at the African Philosophy talk I organized; at Dr. Edidin's suggestion I cut it down to a paragraph or so. But the full version is reprinted here.


Something which is becoming significant to me, which is also becoming significant to others in the pursuit of philosophy -- it could be called an issue in linguistics or philosophy of language, but in fact, I think it has roots to which those titles confer nothing except a technical gloss. This issue is one of personhood, but first and foremost, it is a question. The question is -- what is language? Letting the many other questions encapsulated there flake away -- is language first an alphabet, a grammar, a syntactic structure? Is it first a context-specific language, so that French and Japanese, as soon as they come into existence, change the very definition of what a language can be? Is language a symbol, a tool, a weapon, an anesthetic, a lesson, a game, a home, a gesture? Yes.

Language in some situations is a weapon -- albeit a symbolic one, still a weapon which causes very real bloodshed, which even gives us a certain power in constructing and destructing what is real at all. Language becomes a weapon, for one, by systematically distributing itself to controlled populations. Language can do this this by forcing certain kinds of vocabularies on some groups of people, denying that vocabulary to others, privileging still more with another kind of language altogether. Language can do this by erasing parts of itself -- erasing entire languages, cultures, and thus the people who speak it.

For example -- the English we speak is not the English you will hear in low-income neighborhoods down the street. It can sound completely different, be used completely differently, serve a completely different purpose and have a completely different level of priority in life -- and yet they are both called English. In both cases the language provides listeners with a sign to interpret, a password -- but in each case, the password provides, or forces, access to a different society. Whereas some dialects signify entrance into certain types of poverty, ours happens to appeal to a certain elite, academic, liberal-democratic demographic of people -- and thus gives us an entry into an extremely privileged society.

Upward mobility is the work of language as much as of anything. So say that we were entirely selfish and, rather than worry about those folks who are excluded by our language, we were to simply congratulate ourselves on learning it. Even in this case, there would still be a valid criticism of the scenario as it exists. Because -- isn't there still something missing? Isn't this specific language, the academic language, so dry and arcane, so fluffy and cumbersome -- completely unintelligible to most people -- isn't it lacking something? bell hooks, a prominent African-American writer and radical feminist, says that a great secret white supremacist capitalist patriarchy keeps from those who can't or don't read much is that all of the really powerful information is kept hidden away, in books. If you watch television instead -- well, pray to the gods that you will be able to afford cable if you hope to find anything worth talking about at all.

But does this have to be? Why should encode all of our most valuable information solely into written languages? Does this have to be the authority? Although I couldn't possibly memorize what the New College library contains, I could certainly spend some time telling you about things in there which are most relevant to my life. Why do we trust the internet more than our own memory, and how much sheer information do we really need? How do we ourselves benefit? Isn't this, at worst, suffocating more relevant experiences we could have here? Isn't this, at best, just boring?

Nietzsche said he knew of few things worse than rising early in the morning, when the light and air are bright and electric, only to go hide in a dusty room and squint at the yellowed pages of some book. So how did we come to think that language works best when it is written out? Maybe we were really proud of our ability to use tools, like the hallowed calligraphy pen. Maybe we were afraid of public speaking. Maybe we were really ugly, or had ugly shoes, and thought that people would take us more seriously if they never had to be in the same room with us. This is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. Armed with this excuse, we can now employ our dusty paper weapons against the uncivilized world. And anything which we hear, which we don't like, we can simply mistranslate, or refuse to write down. Which is what "anthropologists" visiting Ghana in the 1850's did with the entirety of Akan culture and philosophy.

Yet if we are quiet for a moment -- and ask ourselves why we use language, in any form, to begin with -- the meaning language has in our lives is not itself written down. I think language justify itself almost entirely in our desire to remember and give ecstatic descriptions of the world, of ourselves, of others -- to others. Don't the roots of language itself run straight under our skin, deeper than any book? Don't these roots spring from the desire to affirm everything that exists in this world, and not in books? Language can be a weapon, but it can also be a gift, which gathers together everything in the world, and gives everything, named, back to that world. Books help with all this, certainly -- but so do crutches, if your legs are broken. This distinction -- between written language and speech -- is what is becoming significant.

I am irreverent because I think what is at stake when writing, which originated out of speech and gesture, tyrannizes them, is the very way we inhabit our own bodies, our own mouths, our own voices. Also, our relationship to the bodies, mouths, and voices of the world we encounter. This prioritizing goes right along with a Cartesian mind-body dualism which subordinates the body to a supra-natural mind. Why have we inherited a tradition which mistrusts the respectability of any language that first explodes outward, like dynamite, from a tongue between two lips, or in the gestures of two hands? It seems that such a mistrust amounts to nothing more profound than a mistrust of the body and, to again defer to Nietzsche -- maybe all of Western philosophy has been a misunderstanding of the body. Maybe historically, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy -- forming the writers and readers of most canonical Western science and literature -- has endeavoured quite nerdily to use writing in order to free a certain privileged population from the terrible burden that is having a body. Hence the body is labeled the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal -- and history's wives, slaves, and serfs are burdened --not with bodies, which they had always already had -- but with that rejection of the body, and those labels.

What was the goal behind this trend? To leave our bodies and go to heaven? We simply wanted to die? A question for the audience -- how do you feel about that? I, for one, don't dislike myself nearly that much. For to free someone from the body would be, I think, to free them from themselves. Admittedly, there is ultimately something uncanny about the way language, as speech, possesses the space around it like lightning. It strikes and individualizes the speaker, illuminating his world, and illuminating he, himself, to the world. If you don't like the sound of your own voice, the anonymity of the page will be preferable. However -- if you find you can sing --



"All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives. Thinking entered into literature. And literature has decided the fate of Western science."

-- Martin Heidegger, What Calls For Thinking?

Dream Log

I gave Kim Jong-Il a handjob for $$$.

Dream Log

I am standing in a health food store, filled for some occasion by New College students -- Lea, Zachariah. Everybody European cheek-kissing. Wandering the aisles. A male in a hooded sweatshirt begins bordering the crowd, quiet. I somehow become aware that his plan is to leave the gathering for a while, then reappear, taking the group hostage, going on a shooting spree. Somehow he makes this obvious, somehow we all know, but no one moves to lift a finger. He leaves.

He returns, wrapped in cellophane, standing next to me. I consult a few guys who are leaving the party -- fraternity boys, not who I have any desire to spend my time with, except out of desperation. They live high up, high above the store, almost in the mountains, but they allow me to flee with them. We climb a tree-ladder, almost like the bamboo rungs that took me once to the roof of Pei. Then I go upstairs in their house, which is full of mahogany wooden paneling -- and the boys are gone. Only downstairs, the lumbering of wide grizzly bears, the same color as the mahogany. Rummaging in the fridge, on the kitchen counter.

Somehow I escape through the roof -- but there was no roof, only an opening. To a fenced area, where I can look down to see a procession of people leaving the store, in single file. Everyone was safe, but I don't think the killer was arrested. Lea was there. Then we are driving away, I am following he down a hill, but I can't drive. I am only keeping my car in the lane by leaping up intermittently and holding onto the traffic-lights until the car is re-aligned. But Lea turns on the highway and I know that I can't be carried by momentum in the same way there, so I tumble out the side door before the car hits the highway.

Suddenly I am barefoot and half-dressed on the side of the road, clamoring for help. A man in something like a UPS truck stops. He speaks English, but it is not my language. He doesn't understand, but takes me to the yard of a church, where an older blond woman with leathery skin and powder-blue eye make-up stands in the fading light. She tells me I am in trouble, that I had better stick my chest out and pull my stomach in for The Lord, "not sexually or anything, but, you know."

The New World

In his first TV interview with al-Arabiya, President Obama suggested, by way of reconciliation, that the Muslim world remember that "America was not born as a colonial power," that the war in Iraq was an exception to the 'rule' of the Revolutionary United States. Ultimately, this amounts to the same defense as McCain's of himself: that America was the underdog. Indeed, we were fleeing an oppressive regime in Great Britain. Could Obama have forgotten that as we fled one regime, we instituted our own?

The most effective ethnic cleansing is the one that is totally forgotten.

In theory, if we who presently claim to be human were to forget our efforts to find the traces of divine movements in our own actions, our fate should be something like the people in Popol Vuh. For them, the forgotten force of divinity reasserted itself by inhabiting their own tools and utensils, which rose up against them and drove them from their homes.
Today they are swinging through the trees.

--Dennis Tedlock

Space Moms

i love you because

when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop

lolz

"Criticizing pornography doesn't mean you're anti-sex
any more than criticizing McDonald's means you're anti-food."

--Gail Dines

Break Bread.

Painting is the residue of
chasing after something else.

Motto for Painters.

I do what I do and you do what you can do about it.

Hypatia rebuffed a suitor by showing him her menstrual rags, claiming they demonstrated that there was "nothing beautiful" about carnal desires.[13]

Britney Spears - "Circus": "Circus"

like a killer whale trapped in a bay

the black man
operates garbage truck
the white man
trims his own leaves

i smoke
one cigarette and
watch the boy
polishing in the morning
his own mercedes
near the ocean.


Gardener and garden.-- Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 382, R.J. Hollingdale transl

In this time of excess and recess

Everybody everwhere needs to listen to Kaki King. Last November, I left a friend waiting in a park for several hours. I also ignored a hangover and braved expensive cabfares. All just to see her with The Mountain Goats in Manhattan, at Webster Hall. John Darnielle started out Way Back When by repping her on his own blog when people hated on her whispery singing style. Her singing has since improved. And at this concert, it became clear that John and his bandmates had been doing their best to emulate her stringed-instrument technique. I'm glad he knows when to stand down.

Listen to Kaki King's new album, Dreaming of Revenge, while avoiding painting an oil portrait of your father. Kaki King. I would in all likelihood be willing to have a few of her children. I would also, for the first time (that's a lie), be interested in purchasing the ipod vibrator in order to listen to her. She is one of the best guitarists around, period. She is a gorgeous person. And, she has good taste in art (above by Marcel Dzama).


Consolidate your student loans, people.

Sleep Log

I had a dream that I lived in a prison that was ten-stories high, and every room was a closet, that opened onto another closet. There was a middle aged man above me, who was in for murder, and he kept pounding on his closet doors speaking in his broken English. He was Chinese. The entire facility was. Down in the kitchen there was an old man, and I was there with a little baby, who I think was my sister Nicolette, but as an infant. I was feeding her long, pale blue cellophane noodles. The old man watched a woman learning her craft and became visibly concerned I was going to feed her too much. He didn't speak, though, for so long I didn't think he could. He saw me shaking and realized I was frightened because of the man upstairs.

He smiled and said, "we are actually lucky to have such a sadistic prison warden," Laughing. "Because it means this man would never get free before being punished, severely. You have nothing to worry about."

Just as he said that, I started walking away from the prison, towards the parking lot of a store selling Lebanese food. I suppose I had the privileges to leave intending to return. I was about to close the door when I saw the angry man driving his dusty turquoise Cadillac towards the door. He did not have those privileges, but I realized I would rather have him escape than live next to me any longer. So I left the closet door open. The old man gaping, horrified, and the baby forgotten, the murderer drove through the wide closet doors. I ran, quicker and quicker, wearing high khaki wooden heels, wearing a sparkling blue high-waisted skirt, realizing that because of these things, he might chase me.

The man sped down the street, screaming hoarsely, over his thick Chinese accent,

"AMERICA.
AMERICA.
AMERICA."

Then, as I suspected, his car pulled into the darkened parking lot where I was, leaving no chance of escape -- except waking up. So I woke up.

Although, the celebratory shouting of the name of my country continued to reverberate in my ears, even then.

This followed the cycle of being woken up by a nightmare to return to happier dreams. Later, my brother was accidentally spilling personalized greeting cards he had bought for my mother, with her name misspelled on them the way the electric company misspells it; "LAURIE BROWN."

There was another Sesame-Street style speculation, complete with diagrams of receding roots, that made very real the tradeoff that animals make, between having roots and having mobility. Watching housewives strike deep taproot. Thinking, we really could turn back into plants if we wanted. It would take several million years. But life really is that malleable.