Torture Porn

...is another thing I'm getting really sick of, specifically, the use of the term to describe movies involving highly explicit scenes of torture and mutilation. It's not 'porn'; it's art, or at the least, entertainment. By tossing into the cum bucket of the pornographic, you're trying to revoke its status as legitemate art or entertainment and implying it has no value, or even affect, beyond that of sheer prurience; that the only possible reason to watch such films is that you get off on watching people being tortured and mutilated. Just the same as people have always said about Slashers, Zombie flicks, the whole cornucopia of horror and gorelesque. Yet there is a long tradition of critique defending the artistic value of horror films, horror novels, and the grotesque in art generally; why should none of this suddenly apply to 'Torture Porn'? It's the reductive critique of 'yuck' at its finest, a reflexive act of normative disgust, an attempt to label as 'valueless' what should merely be labelled 'do not want'.

I could go on about Captivity as a feminist staement of empowerment, Hostel as anti-capitalist and anti-western discourse, and Saw as an exploration of the principles of virtue ethics; but why bother? It's nothing but Torture Porn, after all.

I would submit that we re-label this genre as 'Torture Box' or 'Torture Trap' or 'Torture Game' horror. Anything but 'Torture Porn'. When I want to see torture porn, I go to askjolene.com, not to the movie theatre.

The value of virtual items

...specifically, as digital heirlooms. What might the value be, in the year 2100, of a genuine World of Warcraft sword? Of 100 carefully hoarded and preserved Linden Dollars? Or 10$ in E-Gold or PayPal money? Remember that old comic book or baseball card collection that would be worth thousands of dollars now if your mom hadn't thrown it in the trash? Think twice before clicking the 'delete' key.

POST 100!!!!!!!!!!! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-EE!

Stonewall all over again?

Police in Fort Worth, TX raid a gay bar and arrest the people there for 'public intoxication'. They are handcuffed and shoved face-down on to the floor. One man has sustained a serious brain injury. This is Stonewall Day, 2009.

Sounds to me like it's time for a fucking RIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The War Against Gender: Pop

A Swedish family is refusing to reveal the sex of their 2-year-old child:

Pop’s parents [see footnote], both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

And damn rights they shouldn't have to; it's nobody else's bloody business whether a 2 year old child has a penis or a vagina. But some people don't quite see it the same way:

“Ignoring children's natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

[...]

She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.

Yes, because that's what we teach them to do. And since children learn to tell apart different languages when they're still in the womb, I don't think they have too much trouble learning what type of behaviour is rewarded and encouraged for kids bearing the male vs. female gender markers like clothes and hair. I mean, humans taught a horse to do math (or rather, to act like it was) using involuntary, subconscious body language alone. Kids are smart little shits, way smarter than most of us grown ups care to admit. They pick up on that stuff.

Now, I'm afraid I don't feel comfortable hailing this as a great victory in the war against gender. A successful first strike, maybe. But my personal intuition is that little Pop is going to end up as a martyr to the gender revolution. If the authorities don't end up swooping in and taking zer off to a foster household to be dutifully stuffed into the appropriately gendered box, zie's going to get the ever loving shit beat out of zer by kids already well versed in the unspoken rules of binary gender. By the time zie is growing into adulthood zie will most likely hate zer parents for letting zer grow up without the emotional bedrock of a socially-mandated gender identity that everyone else just takes for granted. And I can't help but feel sorry for the poor kid.

I understand and even to an extent applaud what the parents are doing. To grow up never being told what you can and can't look like, dress like, say and do; not getting an automatic succession of trucks/dolls to reinforce some arbitrary view of what you're supposed to do with your life; free of all the conditioning and bullshit. It honestly makes me choke up just a little bit, to imagine what my life might have been like if I'd been free to create my own gender identity instead of cobbling one together out of left-over offcut bits and pieces of masculinity, femininity, and fey gothic otherness.

But I do have a bit of a problem with the concept of a child being used as a weapon in this war. If there were a community out there where such children could be raised in a supportive manner, with more people than just their parents and immediate family refusing to gender-program them, it would be different. Unfortunately, there is not; we as a society have yet to create one. And the really sad thing is that sacrificing kids like Pop on the altar of gender conformity is just about the only way to go about creating such a community. It really is a catch 22; deliberately subjecting a child to judgement and ridicule from their peers, the media, society-at-large, even their own family - in an attempt to create a world where children are no longer subjected to judgement and ridicule, should they dare to transgress the artificial boundary of the gender barriers. I don't have the solution. All I can do then, is wish Pop and zir family all the best, and hope to goth zie doesn't end up dead or insane.

Why I'm not a 'Men's Rights Advocate'

I'm starting to get deeply, violently pissed off with anti-feminist fucktards telling me that because I respect women and see them as equals, this is somehow evidence that I hate myself or hate the fact that I was born male; telling me I'm not a 'real man' because I decline to treat my betrothed and my closest friends as if I have the right to expect domestic servitude from them; that I'm stupid and naive because I don't buy into the (largely debunked) pop-evo-psych just-so stories about men being uncontrollable rape-and-violence machines and women being helplessly manipulative gold-diggers. Just look at this latest exchange between myself and a Reddit commenter who shall remain charitably un-named:

xauriel: I would humbly suggest that Twilight a) sugarcoats sexist ideals in a way that deliberately appeals to the emotionally immature, and b) is intended at least in part to normalize such ideals, ie. make young girls think that they should see stalking and other controlling behaviour as a sign of affection (rather than aggression).

imadumbdouchebag: I would humbly suggest that since it was written by a woman, the film adaptation directed by a woman and the mass media consumed almost entirely by women, that this is one case of victimization and blaming men that just isn't going to work.

xauriel: I'm not 'blaming men'. I'm blaming the patriarchal system, which does not include all men (I am a man after all) and does include a large number of women who wilfully oppress other women in return for the small favour of not being constantly called out as an uppity bitch. People, men and women both, are sadly proficient at participating in their own oppression.

Women taught as little girls that victimization and abuse constitute 'romance' and fed a steady diet of syrupy objectification grow up to become women who write 'romantic' novels about pedophilic stalkers who sparkle in the sun.

imadumbdouchebag: Spare me your ridiculous conclusions about the phantom patriarchy, a concept I doubt you could even elaborate, much less show any evidence of.

We MEN are struggling for our own rights which have been stolen away from us and we have to fight both an oppressive climate for men and self-loathing dipshits like you who still think it's 1965.

This isn't the third world. Men have it much worse than women across the board. Educate yourself before you throw around vapid terms that you read in "Cosmo".

xauriel: I'm really getting sick of this shit. That's right, because I dare to break from the MRA party line that us poor men are oh so oppressed by the evil feminazi conspiracy to emasculate us and take our precious privilege for themselves, I'm 'self-loathing' and obviously have no idea what I'm talking about. Not as if I have mountains of feminist theory and scientific studies to draw my conclusions from, beyond what I read in a submissionist rag like Cosmo, which I apparently read for some fucking reason (I mean seriously, like '500 ways to keep him gasping for more sex' and 'fashion tips to keep you looking slimmer and more acceptably gendered' is some sort of feminist rallying point?) Don't fucking act like you know the first goddamn thing about me, my life, my views, or anything beyond the boundaries of your little bubble of denial and self-righteous self-justification. I gave you your chance to engage in reasoned debate like a human being, and you blew it. I don't owe you a fucking thing, douchebag. Crawl back into your fetid hole of misogyny and bile. I hope you enjoy your life fighting for the rights of the overclass to keep a leash on your neck.

imadumbdouchebag: You gave ME a chance to debate? You have no debate. Your laughable piles of "feminist theory" and "scientific studies"? Man-bashing and false statistics, always disproven.

You talk a big talk about facts but you bring none to the party. There are no facts. Your entire argument is built on lies and you are a sunshine feminist who has deluded himself into thinking that hating yourself will get you laid.

Don't worry, you fucking loser. Real men, even as we speak, are fighting the good fight for you so that you can squirm around on your belly and reap the rewards later.

Sir Galahad! I am LITERALLY laughing out loud at how deluded you are.

This could have gone on had I not gotten completely sick and fucking tired of the whole exchange. It's all there: the innapropriately angry ad-hominem response to what I don't consider and unreasonably phrased argument; the assumption that any fact or idea I could possibly reference is de facto corrupt purely because I argue from a feminist perspective; the blind, uncorroboratable assumptions about my personality and education; and the self-righteous assertion that somehow this individual and all the other 'real men' he has taken the mantle of are somehow standing up for me by fighting against every principle I stand for. Because, you know, I'm too dumb to know what's good for me and too weak to stand up for myself.

I honestly can't comprehend how gutter trash like that can expect any 'real woman' to love him or any 'real man' to respect him. How can a person love someone who believes that they are at war, locked in some zero-sum struggle over petty privilege? How can a person respect someone who believes that one half of the human race literally owns the other half? If my choices are to 'csquirm around on my belly' to please such misogynistic genderstraight assholes, or stand beside my beloved, free and equal, and fight for what I know is right - well, that's just not a choice at all to me.

It's fucking sad and pathetic, too, because the MRA's have a few valid points buried in the tide of castration anxiety and testosterone enemas. Yes, it is in fact true that domestic abuse, child molestation, and sexual coercion of males by females is sadly underreported and treated as a joke rather than a problem. Yes, it is in fact true that women almost automatically get awarded custody of children and that divorced men are treated with suspicion and petty backbiting. And yes, there is a certain strain of misandry running through the feminist movement that needs to be exposed, critiqued, and excised if we want to end up creating a truly equal society. But no, we do not live in a matriarchy, and no, feminists are not trying to create one, and no, 'womens rights' have not gone so far that men's rights need an advocate to counter-balance them. The endemic problems experienced by men in our society are created by the patriarchal, state/church/capitalist exploitation system, just as much as those experienced by women. The social construction of what's 'masculine', what a 'real man' is and is not, is a control tactic that places men into rigid shells and restricts them to their bubble of 'acceptable' behaviour. If they happen to be restricted to a plane that's just a little bit above the women of their own social circle, well, apparently that's enough of a bone to make them dance and fawn for their masterclass.

It's as if these people can take the first step toward true liberation and equality, but instead of taking the next step they prefer to stand where they are and drag everyone who's moved beyond their level of awareness backwards. If women's liberation is giving women rights and freedoms that they don't feel they have due to the (largely self-imposed) strictures of what society tells being a man is, they seem to find it much easier and more fulfilling to scream about 'evil feminazis' than to actually take a look around and try to deconstruct exactly why it's acceptable to laugh and joke about a man being beat up by his wife or a young boy being molested by his female teacher; why women are seen by the law as the default single parent and single, childless men are seen by the law as potential sex offenders; why people can get away with jokes trashing and stereotyping men and sitcoms or TV commercials portray them as incompetent in the domestic sphere. There is so much great critique waiting to happen, if it could only get from under this cloud of paranoid fantasy that feminists, despite still being cut off from every major power centre and media theatre in the western world, are somehow in control and are out to cut their dicks off.

Signals of Impending Doom: California is Out of Money

No, seriously. California is out of money.

Lawmakers today rejected the core of a Democrat-backed plan intended to tame California's $24-billion deficit, even as a top state finance official warned that failure to resolve the budget crisis will force him to begin issuing IOUs next week.

I'm alive!

I've just been very busy/depressed lately and having trouble finding the time or energy to get my thoughts in order, research, etc. This blog will be continuing publication, I swear it! Until then - well, there are plenty of other ranty anarcho-satanist blogs out there..... OR ARE THERE?????