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There’s a big high-five circulating on the social networks about award winning artist David Tremble’s “World Of Women” collection.

Mr. Tremble’s taken high profile sheroes and made them user friendly for little girls by transforming them into Disney princesses.

The artist has received applause from women and men for saying:  “Fiction is the lens through which young children first perceive role models, so we have a responsibility to provide them with a diverse and eclectic selection of female archetypes. Now, I’m not even saying that girls shouldn’t have princesses in their lives, the archetype in and of itself is not innately wrong, but there should be more options to choose from. So that was my intent, to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to paint an entire gender of heroes with one superficial brush.”

I agree.  The princess motif in and of itself isn’t wrong (and I know plenty of men who want to be the beautiful princess), but it’s wanting.

Girls already have an extraordinary range of fiction, i.e., fable, myth, story, fairy tale, through which to read themselves.  The ones that Disney has historically preferred follow a familiar and narrow cultural consumer construct: a beautiful princess-woman suffers some calamity, her true royal personhood obscured by evil (usually an evil woman, so the good woman and bad woman are pitted against each other), and her prince comes and saves her.

These are powerful narratives — for love overcoming all obstacles is a fundamental human truth, one deserving to be planted in the young imagination.  “Love overcomes” is usually at the princess story’s heart, the cultural stereotypes, anachronisms, and oversimplifications of good versus evil are the unfortunate baggage that rides along.

Presumably, it’s smart and compelling to take the love conquers theme, exemplified in the princess trope, and do something relevant and meaningful for women. But do we really need to have Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Rosa Parks, Anne Frank, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Goodall, Harriet Tubman, Marie Curie, Gloria Steinem, and Malala Yousafzai cast as glamour girls (or “princesses”) to make them important in the youthful imagination?  Is superimposing the princess motif the only way for the young to understand the historical significance of these iconic women?

Isn’t the reason these women took their place in his-story was because they refused to be princesses?  Didn’t they essentially rescue themselves?  Didn’t they have to go against the powers that be — often alone — to become the hero of their own story?

Is his-story pulling her-story back by subsuming these women into more comfortable and familiar narrative forms?

Because while love overcomes in the princess narrative, in the real world, these women are icons of unflinching warrior-like bravery, justice, and intellectual superiority, historically, the realms of power and patriarchy.  So the icons of cultural power are thus folded into a powerful visual narrative asserting that love overcomes.  My guess is that for most girls, love already looms large, and perhaps justice, intelligence, and character strength are being surreptitiously subsumed into love’s pretty gowns.

I don’t know.

There’s another issue that seems to me even deeper and more problematic: why aren’t we fixing the conspicuously absent and uninvolved princes.

Why is a well-intentioned man stepping in and helping society redefine the way little girls see themselves, by throwing sparkles all over Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s SCOTUS gown, and portraying a Holocaust victim as a magical figure of feminine power?

I don’t have children.  I can’t speak to the efficacy of recasting these women as prettied up Disney princesses.  Mr. Tremble’s re-imagined cultural artifacts look to me more like Beyoncé or Kim Kardashian wanna be’s, appropriately cleaned-up for Disney consumers.

Here’s an idea:  I would like to see Mr. Tremble address that male role model problem, the one where the good prince does absolutely zero throughout the narrative but gain control of the kingdom and acquire the ultimate spoil, the beautiful princess.  I would like to see a visual narrative in which the prince refuses to pick up a sword and acts a catalyst for social change with his head and not violence.   A prince who falls for a less than beautiful princess, because he’s smart enough to recognize beauty as a social construct.  A prince who may not be charming, but is steadfast, supportive, and unwavering in his love.  Or something similar.  Reality is malleable, there is no formula.  Just fix the prince a few times.

What I think is fairly certain is that women really don’t need any more fixing.  Please.  No more.  Men fix us.  The media fixes us.  Photoshop fixes us.  Conservatives fix us.  Liberals fix us.  The feminists fix us.  Religions fixes us..  We fix ourselves.  It’s tiring, no matter how well-intentioned a good guy Mr. Tremble would like to be, and no doubt is.  But instead of educating men on the importance of male role modeling — that is, men looking at male behavior and reinventing themselves — we’ve got the well intentioned (read: prince) coming in and helping all his princesses.  Meanwhile, the prince is still charming, and instead of helping men, he’s fixing female iconography.

That’s a big chunk of the problem.

Or how it looks to me.

 

(Here’s a link to Mr. Tremble’s original Huffington Post article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-trumble/ten-real-world-princesses_b_3275835.html)

Several lifetimes ago, I lived on the brink of homelessness for about four years.

Had it not been for rent control, both in Manhattan and Cambridge, I would have ended up on the streets.

After barely escaping Manhattan, and washing up into the then People’s Republic, I found myself without money, without employment, and basically at life’s mercy.  Not a bad place to be, if you believe in mercy.  But it’s not a state of grace.

Mercy implies a severe power relation between the giver and receiver — to say I was at life’s mercy is not hyperbole, and should conjure the fear and trembling of being absolutely alone in the world, with anxiety pressing within and without at every given moment, as I possessed only the invisible thread called faith to get me through.

For two weeks, I didn’t eat.  A neighbor and I were talking, and she casually mentioned something about a food bank.  I don’t remember why, but it seemed an offhand reference.  I wasn’t sure, but I decided to follow up, on a hunch.  I had never been to a food bank.  Didn’t know what they were.  I wasn’t certain that I would be eligible.  I was a nice, educated white girl.  Food bank?

Walking in behind the urine and feces soaked schizophrenic who lived on Cambridge’s streets, I got the first food I had eaten in two weeks.

Food.  How many of us have gone hungry because of economics?

As a backstory, I suffered late onset eating disorders starting in my twenties — for nearly half of my adult life I never cycled, my body constantly suffering because of my relentless and unforgiving war against its many perceived imperfections.

But that was a self-imposed war.  I made the rules, and I could decide when and how to punish myself, with whatever tools I had at my disposal.

This was a different war: this was an economic war.  No longer was it beauty or body image or deep and unforgiving self-loathing furiously carried out against myself, with food or lack thereof being one weapon in my arsenal.  This was a multilayered economic struggle to stay off the street, keep some semblance of what still remained of my mind — which was tenuous at best — and acquire life’s basics that we usually take for granted:  toilet paper, shampoo, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, and food.

For four years, the divide between myself and that intolerable smelling waste soaked homeless schizophrenic grew thinner and thinner, and food deprivation  was no longer simply a handgun my arsenal of self-destructive behaviors.  Not eating for two weeks was relatively doable, when I wrote the rules.  This new game was part of a larger more consequential fight that I might not survive, and I understood that the house of cards called my life was dangerously close to collapsing.

I might be the next one soaked in urine and feces, a leper of circumstance and mental disenfranchisement.

The food bank had muffins in the front.  My eyes immediately fixated on them when I walked in.

“I haven’t eaten,” I asked, “do you mind?”  My voice was sheepish, and, I believe, nearly inaudible, the beggar’s bucket being a newly acquired handbag.

“No, of course not.  That’s why they are there.”

I must have eaten four, without breathing.  I didn’t think about my body, how many calories were in each bite, or whether or not I’d purge on a box of laxatives after the fact.  I just ate.  The sugar hit my bloodstream giving me a badly needed energy jolt, and a joyful euphoria, making my gratitude as much biological as transcendental.  The woman looked at me, and asked, “Have you thought of applying for food stamps?  You can get food stamps, you know.  Are you working?  Have you thought of unemployment?”  She asked as if the answer were obvious.  No, I wasn’t working.  No, I wasn’t getting any assistance.

“How do I do that,” I said.  I hadn’t a clue.  Weren’t food stamps for people on welfare?  Women with kids?  Blacks?  I was a single white woman, shouldn’t I be working and paying bills?

Unemployment?  I’d never done that.

That day, after waiting my turn behind the schizophrenic, I took home two bags of food: dry and canned goods, a bit of produce, drying out bread and muffins, and I ate every bite found in those bags with gratitude.

In a few days, I got the food stamps.  Eventually, I got the unemployment.

There were no EBT cards in those days.  I had to pull out the the scripts, and pay with the stamps themselves.  No mistaking the fact that the government was giving me 123 dollars to buy food.   Every so often, I could see the acrimony in the eyes of those who failed to understand why a white girl needed to use food stamps, when obviously I should be able to just go and “get a job.”

Well, no.  That was the issue.  I couldn’t.  I was barely sane, quite literally.  People joke about being crazy.  I have the papers to prove it.

If I had been black or brown or red, there would have been a whole other series of criticisms and stereotypes in those gazes, because the judgement just would have taken a different form.  The presumption being that people on food stamps want a hand out.  So we return to one of the oldest arguments in the book, and one that currently falls on a deaf and dumb Congress and too many of its misguided supporters: people don’t want a hand out.  Given a choice, they really do enjoy thriving and excelling when given opportunity.  They sometimes need help.  All of us need hope.  The costs incurred when people don’t have food and opportunity outweighs any costs that we incur when a few people take advantage of the system.  Mind numbingly so.

The cost of giving food assistance to our fellow citizens is marginal compared to the corporate welfare handouts that we’ve seen doled out over the past decade in the name of economic stimulus. We may have needed that stimulus, but there’s an equally important stimulus: to our fellow citizens, people just like ourselves, and the promise each carries in their lives, to live, to grow, to prosper, to contribute.

Without those government handouts, I never would have survived.

Nor would I have gone onto to graduate school, graduated with a 3.91 G.P.A. earned Dean’s Honors, and be working on a book that will give many the hope they need, because they’ve been unnecessarily stigmatized for no good reason other than a few bad stories that need some editing in the collective consciousness.

Hope.  It’s not a political brand for a Presidential campaign.

Sometimes, it’s free muffins and food stamps.

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re not going to offend someone, you don’t need the First Amendment.

—  Larry Flynt

On March 6, 1978, Larry Flynt was shot outside a courthouse during an obscenity trail and it left him paralyzed.

What many don’t know is that Flynt’s shooter was sniper Joseph Paul Franklin, a serial killer who went on rampages through the south targeting black men and whites who had sex with blacks, at least in the first part of his career.  Franklin once said that he didn’t bother with black women, because “they weren’t worth his time.”  Obsessed with white supremacy and purity, he entertained fantasies of renting a small plane, loading it with poison, flying to Chicago, and systematically spraying the south side to kill as many “darkies” as possible.

Flynt bore Franklin’s wrath because Hustler published the first interracial spread.

Unlike Hefner or Guccione who work(ed) entirely within America’s race-class system, and whose content allowed their gentlemen readers to identify with a construct of the cultured white alpha male who has unlimited access to the prettiest white pussy money can buy, Larry broke new ground.  The first inter-racial spread was consistent with Larry’s founding of Hustler: he understood himself as poor white trash, and he wanted to make porn for the working man.  He saw Hustler as breaking free from a “bullshit” class system.  No airbrushing.  No faux arts and culture articles.  Abominable low-brow humor.  He has always seen himself as an iconoclast, and takes deliberate shots at the status quo.

Hustler deserves its reputation — but there’s an interesting caveat, that I respect even if it comes from a ‘let’s shock and sell’ business model.  I come from a poor white trash background, and I empathize with Larry’s ‘fuck you’ to the status quo and its wardrobe of numbing hypocrisies.   In his mixed race spread, Larry gave his African American models humanity.  Blacks and whites were equal in this photo feature.  The original spread, if you can still find it, has none of the characteristic Hustler denigration, potty humor, go for the lowest common denominator and create controversy tenor.  Instead, Larry portrayed his African American models equal to the Caucasian models, and there’s a deliberately executed, beautiful charm to these photos, a non-exploitive eroticism, if one isn’t offended by seeing naked men and women embrace, couple, exchange pleasure.

Playboy would not have its first black centerfold until 1990, because, apparently, black women “weren’t worth their time.”  But here’s Larry, in the late 1970’s having the audacity to show one-on-one interracial couplings, without a smidgen of racist narrative, other than simply exploiting sex for its own sake.

And he took a bullet for it.

The financial cabal behind the 1978 obscenity charges again rose to the challenge when Larry famously satirized so-called Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell.  (If interested, google ‘Charles Keating savings and loan’ for more on this righteous lot.)  Supported by the financial cabal, Falwell sued Larry citing emotional distress over a cartoon that depicted Falwell’s first sexual encounter being with his mother in an outhouse.

Stunningly bad and vintage Flynt “humor.”

Eventually, the case made it’s way to the Supreme Court.  Flynt won.  The decision in favor of Flynt was unanimous, and a great milestone in First Amendment decisions.  If you read SCOTUS decisions, you glean subtitles.  In Texas v. Johnson, for example, the case which protects flag burning, there’s near acrimony in the dissent and final response, a 5-4 decision, with conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist leading the dissent.

But in Hustler v. Falwell, there’s no such tension.  Rehnquist wrote and delivered the unanimous opinion of the Court.  Near its conclusion, the decision quotes the FCC v. Pacifica (1978):

[T]he fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it. Indeed, if it is the speaker’s opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection. For it is a central tenet of the First Amendment that the government must remain neutral in the marketplace of ideas.

Larry Flynt, white trash smut monger who gets zero respect from the feminists, the morality police, the article reading, status conscious white men who fancy themselves lovers of women and better than Hustler’s depravity, takes on the status quo, gets his case heard before the SCOTUS, and wins a unanimous decision written by the court’s conservative Chief Justice, protecting and ensuring the rights of all of the aforementioned holier than Flynts.

As “poor white trash” Flynt recognizes the inherent dehumanization and hypocrisy of the class system (“I exploit women like McDonald’s exploits hamburgers”), he doesn’t bury this truth, and he takes keen shots at it while being a knowing participant in it.  He makes no apologies — rather, he makes iconoclastic inroads.

The depravity isn’t in the porn, the depravity is an economic system whose entire structure relies on exploitation.  Being the class conscious outsider, of all the porn peddlers, Larry is the only one who seems to recognize the depth and breadth of the system’s game.

You don’t have to like what he does.  I respect that his smut mongering is executed with greater cognizance than those who are socialized into the system, but without a clue as to its economic underpinnings.  I therefore return to the laborious background I offered in Part I —  as a pretenseless smut peddler, Larry sees the system more clearly than the educated elite who ignore women’s studies in deference to his-story, female Harvard undergraduates who unwittingly fail to defend powerless women, or any of the well educated, highly regarded social leaders who cathartically punish (or worse, underpay) their sex workers because they haven’t a clue as to how to deal with their closeted demons.

Larry’s First Amendment win further guaranteed  those of us concerned with social inequality and the system’s inclusive evolution the right to use image and language in the most colorful ways that our imaginations can bring to bear on discourse, impolitely exposing our cultural hypocrisies one insult at a time.

Moses freed the Jews.  Lincoln freed the slaves.  I freed the neurotics.  

—  Larry Flynt

In Part I, I described my experiences while attending two “Women’s Studies” courses at Harvard, with a total of two men in both classes.  Only one man was actually registered, and he was an older student who had already left a successful law career and was working on a book.

I attempted to illustrate that women’s studies offers little to no cultural or professional currency for those who are career fast-tracking, also known as the “ghettoization” of women’s studies.

I then described the philosophical position of female  students — primarily undergraduates — who argued for a hand’s off approach to female genital mutilation out of deference to cultural difference, or some such intellectual good.  Their position was best understood as being the consequence of”socialization,” but their lack of empathy was disconcerting at best.

In conclusion, through dramatic if strained anecdotal leaps, I posited that most of our so-called sexual morality is actually economic, rooted in externalized authority, i.e., the status quo, that rarely sees through its own shortcomings, as it’s habituated and unconscious.   To this end, I concluded:

“Correlation may not be causation, but socialization usually hides behind truth’s intellectual respectability.  For this reason, the moral awareness diplomat argues against intervention for the lives and bodies of other women, because society’s truths keep her safe.  Her father, meanwhile, confesses to his phone whore his need to humiliate several types of women, mitigating the pain of his safe guarded domestic life.  The systemic violence lurks, in the father’s fantasy, in the daughter’s diplomacy.

If you will indulge the strained analogy, privileged father and surrogate daughter suggest the wholesale socialization of men and women, in a comprehensive system that is economic, not moral.”

Now to Larry, and why he is important.

Larry has said, “I exploit women like McDonald’s exploits hamburger,” (I think he means cows) and this assertion is the unvarnished, honest truth.  He doesn’t speak about how the world ought to be, or hide behind the ‘crinolines of respectability’ (Toni Morrison, Nobel lecture) where wholesale violence goes unchecked, invisibly under the radar, in social norms and comforting if empty language.  Unlike the female Harvard undergraduate that I portrayed, or her symbolic father who must cathartically humiliate and torture during paid sex to release the tensions caused by his unexamined status quo driven life, Larry shows us what this culture is made of, and it’s violent and it’s ugly and he lays it bare with brutal honesty.

I like Larry, for many reasons, his raw honesty being one.  He’s not socialized into what needs to be said to gain cultural capital.  He doesn’t give a damn, and has created an empire by not caring what anyone thinks: he takes our many hypocrisies to task with attention grabbing flamboyance and great business acumen, and doesn’t pretend to be doing anything other than what he does, i.e., capitalist exploitation of a consumer commodity, women.  Consequently, in the most base terms, he lays out what this culture is made of.  Unlike other mainstream sex for sale enterprises, Beyoncé, J-Lo, just about everything else bought and sold, or Hefner’s polished cultural posturing, Larry doesn’t pretty up his exploitation narrative with anesthetizing bull-shit about “the articles,” if you will indulge my own predilection for honest language.

He knows precisely what he does, and he owns it outright.

Larry has also said, “I love women, as do our readers, all of our readers.”

Of course, he means “men.”

Men who buy his magazine, in which women are exploited, because, according to him, sex has always been exploited, and will always be exploited.

He’s right.

Larry’s (or Hustler’s) biggest challenge these days is finding women who are still au naturel, because in the past decades, despite all the feminist dialogue about our right to be ourselves, women are going barer and barer, and it’s always been Hustler’s policy to have them be bushy and beautiful.  So while many of our well intentioned feminists ignore the rights of sex workers in their dialogue, trashing sex work as demeaning and horrible and oh the men who consume this stuff are just rotten to the core, they are more than happy to go on crusades against Larry, who has a hard time finding unshaved women to exploit, because feminism has been so effective in one of its presumed goals, having us not be made in man’s image, which is now defined by the Brazilian wax.

Gotta love irony.

Back to Larry.

Larry freely admits, yes, I exploit women.  Using one of the most egregious metaphors possible if one wants to be an effective agent provocateur and marketing master for a publication empire:  compare women to hamburgers.

Then he goes onto to say:  “I love women. [Hustler] readers love women.”

Exactly.  And I believe he does.

He loves them and he exploits them.  It’s called cognitive dissonance, a.k.a.,  neurosis.

This is the insanity of the world that we live in.

We’re living in cultural neurosis twenty-four seven, and buried under so many inconsequential narratives about crap that doesn’t matter, meaningless narrative piled upon meaningless narrative, most of us fail to recognize the depth and breadth of our personal neuroses, let alone the fabric of the neurotic meta-narratives governing our lives.

Stripped of pretense, Larry lays that neurosis bare, cuts straight to the heart of at least one aspect of our cultural cognitive dissonance.

Of course, knowing that you’re neurotic and actually fixing it are two different beasts.  But recognizing neurosis is the first step to freedom.

However, until we understand our own sexuality and its many complex layers, sex work and sex for sale will be with us, and we are simply arguing ideal worlds and caught in false dichotemies of right and wrong, good and bad, what might be versus grappling with what is, impeding our personal progress, and progress as a species.

More important, we’re ignoring the sex worker’s sacred and vital function, as it has been deeply buried under meaningless morality narratives about dignity, many of which are built on inglorious concepts of shame, vaguely comforting ideas about what is wholesome and good that issue from religion, cultural mores, or the violation of individuals who will not be consoled.

We’re also ignoring life’s most precious lesson, that to live is to be interdependent.  If left unchecked, that interdependence becomes exploitation, but exploitation can only take hold when the dignity of that work is stripped away under a sanitized notion of “the greater good.”  To deny the sex worker her or his dignity and needed role in society is itself a form of exploitation — it’s a way of buttressing a grossly self-righteous view of the world underneath the ‘crinolines of respectability’ that serve those who have, almost always at the expense of the have nots.

We possess dignity, not because of our religious beliefs, our moral position, our status, our livelihood, what we do or don’t do with our genitals, whether other people respect us or not, whether or not life has graced us with people and circumstances that treat us well: we possess dignity because we live, breathe, and occupy the planet with our one precious life.   It’s not the onus of the sex worker to garner their dignity through getting new work and creating a new life, it’s the onus of society to recognize the sex worker’s inherent human dignity through legal and economic rights.

If religion teaches us anything, it’s the redemptive power of love, and the only vital morality in religion’s pages is the dictate of love.

Love.  That’s it.

Or as Cornel West writes, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Of course, it’s getting to love that’s the big issue for most of us, one interaction at a time, one social reform movement at a time.

I’m going to invoke a flawed analogy.

As a human who has rarely eaten other animals since she was eleven years old, I consider myself a much better pro-life advocate than many of those I hear moralizing about the unborn child’s right to life.

I love animals.  I don’t eat them.

Similarly, because I embrace life, and actually do not consider that the being a woman carries in her body is simply a cluster of cells, but a potential human with a world of experiences that may be lived, the idea of abortion disturbs me.  If confronted with a healthy pregnancy, I doubt that I could deny life to another.  The unborn feels pain as early as two months into gestation, the heart beats, the nervous system feels the mother’s moods and feelings in an extraordinary symbiosis, and who that person will be already carries a spark deep inside, connected by a beautiful cord of cells and membranes and veins to a woman’s body.  “I need you” is the place we all start from, it’s our first life lesson, right there, between mother and her unborn.

When we sever the “I need you” life lesson and bury it under the socially respectable language of science and objectivity, we’ve lost something important in our world view, we’ve replaced the experience of vital connection with a scientifically skewed idea that too easily distances us from our first and perhaps most important life lesson — interdependency.

Fetus?  Not in my mind, nor for my understanding.

But that’s my choice, my world view.  It’s also not for me to shame those who must make a different choice, because their reasons are valid and true for them and their life circumstances.  Shame and blame aren’t my place or prerogative.

Because I choose a world where we all need each other for survival, and I respect difference.

At this juncture, I presumably still live in a democracy, and in the conundrum between the life that has already been realized, and the one which is still forming, the rights go to the woman carrying the unborn.

What I can do is support democracy, then make my voice heard,  and learn in the process.

My respect of interdependency and difference holds for the lives of nonhumans.

I can try to explain that I believe nonhuman animals have souls, they think, they feel, they learn, they protect, they fear, they make decisions, and they have a right to live without being exploited for something as frivolous as human consumption.

Larry’s easy use of the hamburger analogy speaks to yet another cultural malaise, our easy and unchecked exploitation of gentle creatures with a life to live.  Certainly, no animal deserves the kind of treatment that most of us are aware of by now.

We love animals, but we exploit them.

Cognitive dissonance.

A nonhuman life and a potential human life carry meaning for me and my world view.  But the world we live in is not ideal, it’s a world we’re working towards  A world in which animals are free to live without pain and suffering, and universal access to healthy reproductive choices exists unfettered, is taken advantage of, and every child grows up wanted, loved, cared for, free from war and poverty.

A world in which sex is no longer written in Madonna-Whore narratives, where economics welded to morality doesn’t dictate that swaths of women will be cared for, and others will be treated as human trash, working for slave wages.  Or pitied as victims.

Or whatever other narrative assumes that sex work is fundamentally “dirty” and therefore we have some neat little cognitive box to stick it into, because cultural neurosis keeps us hypnotized.

I would love a world in which all intimate relationships were written in love and understanding, and we could all find the partner of our dreams, a place where our egos had already gone through the necessary lessons needed during this lifetime, and we enjoyed complete and fulfilling intimacy with the partner(s) of our choice, because there was no mucking around in the complexities of life.

What we can do, until then, is learn the simple lesson of dignity, and have it be written deeply in our behaviors.

And law.  And public policy.

Of the three, a world where animals remain free from human selfishness, a world where babies are born into love and caring, and humans will give and get the intimacy that they need, it’s the last that I believe will be the final frontier of change.

Too many men and women benefit from the Madonna  –  Whore schism, and, unfortunately, many women who rabidly support women’s issues are smitten with an idea of dignity that belies how removed they are from the lives of those who are simply trying to support themselves.  To this writer, ideologues fail to understand that Larry Flynt does indeed love women, people love animals while chowing down their McDonald’s hamburger, all life is a precious gift that we need to affirm with a deep and circumspect reverence if we’re to embrace sustainable interdependence, and sex work is an economic issue waiting for its workers to be treated with legal dignity and respect, simply because they are humans, it’s their right.

No other reason needed.

 

More ruminations, and more on Larry’s importance, in Part III.

I am taking a brief blog hiatus.

“On The Importance Of Larry Flynt”  (probably three parts) will return, soon.  It’s an important entry, but I am working on a couple of things that prevent me from lucidly flushing out the ideas.

I am also setting an intention: to juggle multiple projects at one time, including writing blog entries while hacking away at other projects.  Not this week, however.

****

Plato’s Symposium comes to mind this morning, so I offer the following.

It differs from most of Plato’s works, as it’s not a study in the Socratic method.  In the dialogues, Socrates usually engages a question and answer dialectic; in the Symposium, Plato credits a woman for Socrates’ ideas of love.  Not just a woman, but a priestess.  Not just a priestess, but a teacher of mysteries, i.e., a mystic.  What’s presented is essentially revelatory and authoritative.

In this all male gathering pontificating on love, desire, and eroticism, Plato introduces a woman mystic to give the final word on love — she is the teacher’s teacher.  Though Plato transcribes his teacher’s teaching to Athens’ most honorable citizens throughout his dialogues, in the Symposium, Socrates appears merely as Diotema’s student in love’s mysteries.

There’s an interesting tension in the work — the piece of literature that inspired me to major in philosophy.  I use the word “inspire,” deliberately, because it’s anathema in a discipline rife with logic and reason, and dialectical inquiry.  Yet, in this dialogue, Socrates learns from a woman priestess, who teaches him with a comic tenor that Plato usually casts  between Socrates and his students.  In the Symposium, Socrates emerges as the dumb and  fumbling student, and it’s Diotema who is given authoritative center stage.

This tension is huge for an Athenian audience.  By most accounts, Athenian democracy was much harsher on women than in other Greek states: women did not own property or vote.  That Plato vis-à-vis Socrates hands over this topic to a woman speaks volumes. Arguably, and I believe this is the work’s most important subtext, surreptitiously introduced, love’s nature and responsibilities are the most important questions that we’ll grapple with while we live: it’s from our understanding of love that our other personal and public inquires — intimate relations, normative values, ethics, morality, justice, social governing — issue from, and within which they must find their resolution.

The dialogue lays out the soul’s progression into love’s mysteries.  More important, it lays out Plato’s theory of forms, a cornerstone of Platonic philosophy.

Diotema, not Socrates, is the origin of origins for this theory.

In overly simple terms, the soul’s desire towards the beautiful proceeds as follows:

Physical beauty:  love of bodies as ends, pleasure, sex, marriage, domestic comfort, and material acquisition are portrayed as the most vulgar, these souls are living on the material plane.

Next, beauty of body and soul:  love of the spiritual, brings civilization into being, transcends carnality.  (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 comes to mind, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments, love is not love which alters when it alteration finds . . .”.)  This love still differentiates within knowledge, culture, society’s formal structures, however.

Finally, love of the beautiful and the good:  the love of wisdom.  True immortality through possession of the Forms, beyond all material considerations.  The ground of being, beyond being, “in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible-you only want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty-the divine beauty, I mean, pure and dear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life-thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities . . .” (Jowett translation).

This reality, or realities, exist beyond time and space, and, therefore, beyond opinions, ideas, judgements.  It’s beautiful and good in itself, not because we judge it so, but because it is.

The “I Am” behind appearances.

Centuries later, Nietzsche took Plato’s (i.e., Diotema’s) idea to task, and rightfully so.  Via Platonism and ad hoc political appropriation, the bifurcation of the spiritual and the material profoundly influenced Christianity and its correlative doctrinal morality.  Dogma in ideology, in religion, in thought becomes a waste product when one projects one’s own learned ideas of the good onto the world.  However, I would argue that the ground of being described by Diotema is beyond good and evil, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase.

Precisely because it’s been freed of materiality, it’s beyond judgement.  Diotema’s soliloquy doesn’t resonate with the Christian morality that Nietzsche took issue with, but with the visions characterizing the quintessential mystical experience, for example, Meister Eckhart , St. Teresa of Ávila, Rumi, Hafiz, and on and on.

Our best mystics are frequently branded as heretics by orthodoxy for precisely this reason: they see beyond learned ideas of sacred and profane, good and evil, moral and immoral.

Diotema’s revelation possesses none of the dogma that Nietzsche takes issue with; rather, she describes that beyond time and space, beyond our restrictive limited imaginings. Here’s a twist:  despite Nietzsche’s objections, Diotema gives no answers.  Logic, reason, dialectic, have nothing to do with  life’s most pressing intellectual inquiries; it’s love’s vision that governs our undefined and uncertain course, while we experience this life, as we too briefly live it.

So I offer an alternative reading:  while Athens’ leaders sit around bantering about the basis of life and civilization, Plato simply describes Diotema telling Socrates “there are no answers, for those who see the beauty behind everything, in the moment that it presents itself.  Only love is real, all else is illusion.”

 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.  

There is a field.  I’ll meet you there.”  

—  Rumi  

 

I exploit women like McDonald’s exploits hamburger.

— Larry Flynt

 

One term, before settling in to write my thesis, I took two women’s studies courses, “Feminist Ethics,” and “Women and Religion.”

Only one man registered for the “Feminist Ethics” course.  He was a teacher at an all girls school.  His undergraduate major was in philosophy.  He had a law degree, had been an attorney, left corporate law to teach, and was working on a Master of Theological Studies; he also wrote.  The short version — he was no longer career fast tracking, so he had the luxury of taking a “girl’s class.”  A young man who was a graduate student in philosophy also attended the course.  He audited.  Registering wasn’t a priority.

No men registered for the “Women and Religion” course.  When the prof went over the syllabus, the young men who were shopping during the first class walked out, one shook his head and mumbled something as he left.

Two “women’s studies” courses, two males in one class.

Yet I have been in “men’s studies” courses for most of my adult life.  Philosophy.  Literature.  The Study of Religion.  Art History.

Written by men, professionally studied and taught, mostly by men.  Yes, the status quo has shifted.  Still, my adult life has been intellectually dominated by what I’d like to call “men’s studies,” because it’s his-story writ in the intellectual disciplines, where one by necessity gains her cultural literacy and professional lexicon.  A woman professor in literature once told me that universities assume the “ghettoization of women’s studies” — the department is considered a polite dead end within the system.

I told friends, mostly men, during the throes of my graduate career, “I am so sick of being in men’s minds, I could scream.”  I was drowning, feeling as though I was literally living in men’s heads:  reading men’s writings, reading men writing about men (a.k.a. “scholarship”), writing about men’s writing, then writing about the men who write about men and their writing.  Then earning my living by listening to men’s stories, and subsequently getting into their heads.  No pun intended.

One of the requisite graduate seminars for Comparative Literature scholars was an intensive survey course in criticism.  Mostly European, white, and, of course, male.  About 35 or more critical perspectives that we were required to metabolize in order better understand theory, or some such thing.  Two women, two Americans, who were also the women, no African-Americans, no Latino/as, no Asians, no diversity.  When I pointed out the skew to my beloved and trusted mentor, who happened to be teaching the seminar that term, he gave me a blank stare, followed by a “probably not something you should bring up too often,” and a weak apology for the curriculum’s anachronisms.

This was the same trusted advisor who told me not to mention that I was an “erotic artist” on my Ph.D. applications.  He was the [male] professor.  I lacked courage.  I listened.  The failures were guaranteed.

The ironies are so loud, they deafen.  More on this, in time.

If you will, let’s return to my “women’s studies” course.

During a class discussion in “Women and Religion,” the subject of “female circumcision” came up.

“Female circumcision” seems to me a grievous misnomer.  One may persuasively argue that removing a male child’s foreskin is an undesirable and arcane practice.  But there’s a world of difference between hacking off a girl’s clitoris with a knife, a machete, a piece of sharpened stone, whatever might be available, and the surgical removal of the foreskin on an infant male.

The equivalent of “female circumcision” would be hacking off the underside of the glans, if not the glans itself.  The glans’ underside and the clitoris share the same nerve density and pleasure receptor function.  When a female is “circumcised” it’s rarely only the removal of her clitoral hood; usually, the entire clitoris is removed, often violently, and without sanitation.

I unapologetically prefer the term, “genital mutilation.”  Describe reality as it is.  “Circumcise” comes from the Latin circumcidere, “to cut around.”  Rarely is the clitoral hood cut around; rather, the practice exists to annihilate female pleasure, and protect the woman’s family from future shame.  To call it anything other than “genital mutilation” is sloppy, a disgusting if comforting politically correct nod.

So the topic of “female circumcision” and religious practices in nonwestern cultures came up.  To my astonishment, and I do mean astonishment, I heard sexually liberated and self-identified “feminists” support a [male] culture’s right to systemic violence.  Without blinking, I saw them build a consensus defending “female circumcision,” in deference to cultural respect and cooperative international relations.  There were a few hold outs, but most agreed it was imprudent and shameful for the economically privileged [read: western white male class system] to tell others what to think, what to do, and how to behave.  “It’s really arrogant of us,” one explained.

“Truth” is a trap for the confident.  I consider it slippery at best, but I recognize that the idea holds a permanent, meaningful location on most people’s mattering maps.

Meaning, that’s what matters.

The “truths” of these women eluded me.  They were simply living in reflexive socialized mores, established mental networks of right and wrong created by family and culture, Harvard’s so-called liberalism notwithstanding, while bantering an empty notion of respect, however meaningful.  To them.

But their truths and realities held little meaning for my life.  When one mentioned to me after class that she was training with her father to run a half-marathon, my mind flashed to a client, who had told me that he was training with his college aged daughter to run a half-marathon. I froze.

No, I didn’t believe my classmate was his daughter; but in that moment the insidious if subtle machinations and sweeping ramifications of socialization, sexual politics, and class, and how these invisible realities play day-in-day-out in our lives were epiphanic.  She could have been his daughter, and, in a perverse synchronicity, I could have been having a conversation with the child of a client who the week before revealed his marriage’s many intimate failings, before entertaining a fantasy with extraordinarily violent underpinnings.

Accident?  I think not.  Correlation may not be causation, but socialization usually hides behind truth’s intellectual respectability.  For this reason, the moral awareness diplomat argues against intervention for the lives and bodies of other women, because society’s truths keep her safe.  Her father, meanwhile, confesses to his phone whore his need to humiliate several types of women, mitigating the pain of his safe guarded domestic life.  The systemic violence lurks, in the father’s fantasy, in the daughter’s diplomacy.

If you will indulge the strained analogy, privileged father and surrogate daughter suggest the wholesale socialization of men and women, in a comprehensive system that is economic, not moral.

For this reason, male career fast trackers don’t enroll in annexed women studies courses; most professional capital is still achieved in the study of intellectual his-story; burgeoning women scholars defer to gendered political norms, e.g., “we can’t tell those [men] how to behave, it’s wrong.”

And I kissed my Ph.D. good-bye.

Not because I believe that sex for sale is wrong.  Far from it; I possess hubris because I believe that I  see behind other people’s “truths.”  I kissed my Ph.D. good-bye because in my own moral lapse, I accepted advice that the system couldn’t handle the vocation that has given my life meaning.  I understood the system’s hypocrisy, and I acknowledged that if I were to get a shot at its benefits, I needed to heed a man’s counsel.

Economics not morality dictated my decision.

What does all of this have to do with Larry Flynt?  I hope you’ll check back.

My original title for this post was “What I Am Not,” but I my self-help gurus would frown on that title.  Focus on the affirmative “I am’s,” they repeatedly tell me.

Psychiatric and economic circumstances pushed me into mainstream sex work many years ago; I found a vocation that I enjoyed, connecting with humans on innumerable levels, the sex becoming incidental if necessary for most of the patrons.

I came to deeply love many of these men, and have learned extraordinarily from them.

When I started by myself as a lone classified advertiser in The Nation too long ago, after working in the mainstream for about a year,  I had two thoughts:  1) to serve, for what I heard over and over was loneliness and pain; 2) pursuing my education, or, more precisely, pursuing knowledge, for its own sake.

Please notice the order I laid these out in, first service; second, learning.

No person — male or female — should enter sex work thinking that it is a get rich quick scheme, even if one goes independent and eventually caters to an educated and affluent clientele.  They bind themselves to personal failing, if they do.  For more than likely the only thing that will transpire is mutual objectification, the stereotypes of this kind of transaction loom large and ugly.

There’s a better way.  Negotiating many realities while providing a service requiring listening skills, people skills, business skills, compassion, and non-judgement, no matter the venue.

Ultimately, whether the clients recognize it or not, what I provide is solace and with time, deeper spiritual and personal meaning than most would have found otherwise.  Most recognize a more fundamental need than sex, eventually, depending on where they are in their development.

I have counseled, consoled, and helped heal hundreds of men through some of their most difficult times.   While doing so, I earned an extraordinary education, traveled, and lived autonomously  while pursuing my idiosyncratic spiritual and creative path.  My money has been my own, and the number of other women’s children that I have feed, clothed, educated, and supported would make your jaws drop; I went beyond “tithing” and into philanthropy, a service which deeply resonates with me.

Some of the more high minded might look at my life and see me as a victim, or an amoral sex worker.  In fact, I am the hero of my own narrative, a narrative I am currently writing, that will give men and women the opportunity to rethink their own stories, and create better ones for themselves.  I am a woman who has overcome near insurmountable obstacles, some of which will make it to the pages here, and in my book.  I have survived myself, learned to thrive, and I continue pushing on and beyond, because this is as good as it gets: to love, listen, learn, heal, create, and give while living this precious life we’ve been given.

 

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Thank you.

I remember the first time I had sex – I kept the receipt.  —  Groucho Marx

In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Gabriel García Márquez’s portrays a 90 year old journalist who seeks a 14 year old virgin for sale, and finds love for the first time.  Having paid for sex his entire life, the narrator boasts, “I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn’t pay,” and explains that he was “twice crowned client of the year” in his city.

As New York Times reviewer Terrance Rafferty writes:  ” . . . the young virgin whom the old man calls Delgadina, after a girl in a song – is an abstraction, and that, as we all know, is no basis for a mature, healthy relationship. The wonderful joke of ‘Memories of My Melancholy Whores,’ though, is that its hero’s life is changed by the late onset of a profoundly immature and not especially healthy emotion: the painful, idealizing, narcissistic romanticism of adolescence. And the narrator knows all too well how ludicrously out of season this desperate yearning is, how silly it is for a man his age – the whores’ client of the year, no less – to be born again into puppy love.  Who needs Nabokovian verbal ironies when time itself plays practical jokes like this?”   (The New York Times, November 6, 2005.)

I’ve already alluded to the odious aspects of “sex work,”  but like everything in life, and perhaps more so, the relationship between an erotic artist and her patrons, especially the regulars, is often quite complicated.  For over time, an important and essential transition happens.

With the many creative hats I wear, and the many roles I play, I create an intimate space; in this space, my patron shares with me as he rarely does with others.   I’ve heard volumes of secrets, personal and professional.  In phone work, invisibility, that is, a lack of eye contact, and the stigma of “sex work,” create a comfortable, safe environment.  The latter rests on the implicit assumption that nothing shocks a “sex worker” (and after awhile, nothing does), and, therefore, the oh so revealing ramblings of the so-called profane imagination are given free reign.  As a modern day confessor who requires no penance, and as pleasure provider, in my company the patron freely travels to his secret places, while safeguarding his vital social role — keeping Hestia’s domain safe.  Keeping the home fort safe is usually paramount, because those arbitrary boundaries between sacred and profane are near solid in the collective consciousness, and security’s illusory veneer rules most lives.

Hestia was a virgin goddess, her comforts conspicuously conscripted to domesticity, her warmth issuing from an inanimate fireplace, not her passion or person.  The mythologies of Hestia are fairly simple and not too varied.  Most revolve around hearth and home, the rest of her mythology lacks development.   In one sequence of myths, Hestia deliberately rejects the cult and practices of Aphrodite, swearing herself to perpetual virginity.  Hestia becomes Vesta in Roman mythology, and the Vestal Virgins are her cult priestesses.  Vesta emerges as one of Rome’s most important state deities,  her rulership of the home and her chaste virtue become cornerstones of Roman values, values subsequently informing early Christianity.

Then there is Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and pleasure.  Aphrodite and her myths are where things get complicated and interesting.  Aphrodite gives birth to Eros, love’s unrestrained passion.  In some myths, Eros predates his mother and embodies the primordial generative urge relentlessly seeking expression in the world — all creative longing flows from Eros.  In other myths, Eros is Aphrodite’s son, the universal generative urge’s power subsumed into passion’s expression, and ruled over by Aphrodite.  Perhaps because of the erotic impulse, there’s much ambiguity in Aphrodite’s mythology.  Scholars quibble whether her influence and person are transcendent or material.  Most agree that she “arose from the foam,” meaning the ocean, but the sexual implication seems inescapable:  she is the deified incarnation of male desire.  Yet, in many sources, the description “from the foam” includes a reference to shining.  Or, “she from the foam who shines.”  In other words, the transcendent ideal of desire, the luminous one who emerges from desire’s waters.  Aphrodite’s ambiguous identification — are we to understand her as carnal or spiritual — seems to confuse scholars, the presumption being that she must be one or the other.

I suggest that Aphrodite is both, material and transcendent, the material constantly edging towards transcendence for full expression; transcendence desirous of entering time and experience.  Aphrodite seems as close to immanence as Greek myth allows, her complex nature not so coincidently tethered to Eros.

So what does this mythological meandering have to do with “phone sex?”

Perhaps nothing.  Perhaps everything.  Perhaps something in-between.

The phone exchange permits the imagination unbound wanderings.  Desire enters a landscape where pure fantasy can overwhelm the narrative: the artist and her patron don’t inhabit the world, they often inhabit other worlds.  Not necessarily “perfect worlds,” where the artist portrays herself in stereotypical ways to cater to a pedestrian male fantasy.  No, imagined worlds.  For example, a client whose foot fetish so controls his erotic life, that he imagines himself as a bug.  (Move over, Kafka.)  The moment of release happens when the female narrator crushes the male protagonist under her ever so soft and well manicured big toe, as that graceful high-arched foot slowly and sensuously descends over his little blattidae body, until the big toe’s pad deliberately crushes and annihilates him.  (See my entry, “Death And Sex,” on thanatos and eros, love and annihilation.)

Although framed carnally, bodies as bodies may disappear in these narratives.  Rather, the explorations are personal fictions writ by an artist-patron collaboration, with varying degrees of reality as their backdrop.

Consequently, the patron may push against the fiction, in all sorts of ways, the most persistent being the invitation to meet, “no sex, just a cup of coffee,” because the created intimacy pushes itself into embodied erotic longing, even if the fantasy could not be realized in any world.  If the fantasy is relatively straightforward, for example, a homoerotic fantasy, the patron often has no desire to pursue the fantasy beyond fantasy.  But he will still want to meet the artist, the one who really gets him.

The above may sound like a high-brow way of saying that the guy just wants to meet his phone sex worker, big deal.  But that’s not the point.  Rather, the shared safe space creates a unique intimate pull.  When done right, the patron may come to see the artist as the person who understands the real him, even if those fantasies involve violence and denigration, because the artist creates a non-judgemental space for the patron to play out  these psychic rumblings.  If truly skilled, and depending on the relationship, the artist becomes a surrogate therapist, a healer on the patron’s journey, by helping him put pieces of the puzzle together, if he is so inclined.  Because often the relationship spills over into an exchange between humans, no matter the context.  Ironically, the reason the patron shares his closeted fantasies, the distance created by sex for sale, urges him to try and break the distance: intimacy’s power compels him.

The more astute clients recognize that the encounter is art (or “business”); others, less so.  These may eventually leave the relationship, believing that all of the exchanges were “just fantasy.”  Usually, after some sorting time, they return.

Love comes in many hues; it’s been my vocation to learn about love’s complex variegation, while often looking through and beyond some very damaged souls, or souls who are simply lonely, in the moment.

Hestia’s mythologies are simple.  However, domestic security doesn’t feed our innermost being, for that inanimate hearth doesn’t ignite the experience of living.  As Joseph Campbell writes, “I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on this purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”   Eros escorts us to a vital life experience; it’s a passage from our purely material existence to something larger than our selves.   The best of us often foolishly run into the deeper experiences of this abandonment, to live free from our selves, in the presence of the other, and experience “the rapture” of life lived intensely.  A teacher said, “the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls, when he found one of great value, he went away, sold everything he owned, and bought it.”  Believing that the kingdom of heaven exists now, life’s ecstasies and joys should compel us daily, eros leading us to some of experience’s deepest reservoirs.  If our wires have been short-circuted, the best we may have is someone who will listen to our erotic yearnings, no matter how untidy and uncivil: that’s all love may be, at that moment in time.  Love still redeems: it still makes us better, no matter how inadequately sought out, or expressed.

Unfortunately, Aphrodite’s complex dual nature has been sequestered, and her daughters are bound to the purely materialistic understanding of her being.  Yet the transcendent push and pull are always there, if one attentively listens, goes a little deeper, reads between the lines, asks a few questions.  Hestia’s still powerful in her control of social mores, and as obstinate as ever.  But she can only reject Aphrodite and offer a cold stone hearth of security in front of our collective consciousness; she cannot control or govern Eros’ complicated urges, the way they burrow, expand, demand.  The primordial creative impulse will find its way, eventually, even if those ways have become mangled paths, strewn with garbage and waste, they demand to be traveled.  For what they seek is the experience of being fully alive, waiting to be realized.

Gabriel García Márquez’s protagonist isn’t sympathetic, a 90 year old man falling in love with a 14 young girl seeming both repulsive and morally bankrupt.  But his “painful, idealizing, narcissistic romanticism” ultimately redeem him.   Terrance Rafferty’s choice of “born again” strikes me as particularly telling, the pull towards Aphrodite’s spiritual immanence, right there, in Christ’s paradoxical dictum that we must find our spiritual nature if we’re to fully live in the world, the kingdom of heaven, here and now.  García Márquez portrays this paradox when an old man loves a young girl, a person who the old man never really sees as human, and who remains a fantasy abstraction in his dim mind.  From the outside, it looks disgusting, if not absurdly hilarious; but touching love however obliquely, returns the old man to life and living, and not just living, for he finds personal redemption before death.  Love and death, side by side, once again, forever coupled and haunting the human imagination.

Groucho Marx kept that receipt.  While it may not be a true story, I’ll see Groucho and raise him.  I believe Groucho kept that receipt, and I believe he kept it until his death.  For it was his first love letter, however clumsily written, and he treasured that memory in secret sweetness until his final breath.

If a titty is pretty, it’s dirty, but not if it’s bloody and maimed.  —  Lenny Bruce  

Bob Fosse’s “Lenny” starring Dustin Hoffman was controversial on its release, and morally reprehensible to the two Christian women — my mother and my grandmother — who were responsible for my well being.  Though never having seen it, they heard of it, and, like Jane Fonda and marijuana, it was part of litany of threatening, intolerable social ills.

When I asked my mother, “Can I see that movie, ‘Lenny,'” no doubt because of the controversy, the forbidden fruit being irresistible, I was strictly told not to mention it again.  “You will never see that piece of filth.  You are too young and there is no way that you will ever see it as long as you are living in my house.”

Funny, I thought.  How did she know it was “filth,” if she had never seen it, and what exactly was “filth,” anyway.

Filth.  It sounded exciting.  Much better than National Geographic photos, because usually the guys were covered up — I assumed filth meant I would be able to see naked men as well as women.  National Geographic offerings were limited: only on the rare occasion did some remote tribe of men not cover their genitals with a piece of fabric.   (Which, by the way, I find the near ubiquitous appearance of phallic insecurity fascinating, but that’s another entry.)

Yes, filth sounded better than National Geographic.  I was certain “Lenny” was going to have lots of sex and filth.  Filth sounded good.

Eventually, one Saturday afternoon, I managed to sneak in and catch a viewing at the local mall cinema.  Well, local is a bit inaccurate.  I had to take the bus near an hour long to get to the mall.  It was a filth adventure, after all

I’ve since decided, that Lenny would have been proud of me.  An eleven (or twelve) year old girl sneaking in to see a biographical movie about the great comic genius who changed the landscape of American social satire, eons ahead of his time, just biding her time, waiting for the security guard to turn his back, so I could slip in and steal a Saturday afternoon matinee movie.

The things I have done for love.  Or God.  Or knowledge.  Or filth.

The movie was beyond my comprehension.  I couldn’t grasp the humor.  Really didn’t understand most of what was going on, the subtle emotional layers, the social ramifications, or any of the mature, well developed subtexts.  Valerie Perrine showed her breasts.  Big deal.  National Geographic showed lots of breasts.  Still not filth.

Watching the movie, though, I understood viscerally that what happened to Lenny was very, very wrong.

I saw the expense his genius exacted.  I also got that freedom and choice were important, and that the system was grossly flawed.  Fosse romantically portrays the quintessential anti-hero, and I felt it deeply, the artistic black and white cinematography captivating my imagination, even if I was pretty clueless about why it was captivating and important — nominated, by the way, for an Oscar for cinematography.

Finally, at the movie’s end, I saw filth.

Hounded by the police and law enforcement for years, and banned from performing, Bruce’s addiction issues escalated, and he was found dead of a heroin overdose, August 3, 1966.  The police, as a final farewell “fuck you,” took official pictures of Lenny, his naked body sprawled out in his bathroom, his arm tied for shooting up, bottles and syringes around him.  The photos were released, a deliberate exercise in post-mortem humiliation.  Rock and roll bad boy and friend Phil Spector eventually bought all the negatives and photos, in order to prevent the photos from being reproduced ad infinitum.  Today, a google search shows up only one or two, at most.  Thank you, Mr. Spector.

The filth of “Lenny” has nothing to do with nudity or language: the real filth is the image of Hoffman as Bruce sprawled out, naked and bloated, surrounded by drug paraphernalia, with a police officer smugly looking on Bruce’s dead body, as if to say, “hey, you son of a bitch, we finally got you, and got you good.”  We see a filthy system, and a filthy hypocritical way of being whose perversity lies in its superficially constructed values of right and wrong, which have nothing to do with any higher moral ground, but a bully system with a billy club for anyone questioning its arbitrary authority.

Filth?

Filth is the death of an innocent man hounded by the system until that system broke him.

Now, what exactly is filthy about sex work?  The system.  Not the women, not the men, not the product.  It’s the system that stinks to high heaven.

Filth is women earning less than minimum wage, in a system that stigmatizes them, usually though not exclusively on so-called Christian values, at least here in the U.S.   Filth is not banal advertising stating, “let me be your dirty little cum slut.”  Filth is earning less than minimum wage with absolutely no social or economic standing in order to protect one’s self, and being completely demoralized in the process because the work breeches an arbitrary divide of what is moral and good.

Filth is a group of stigmatized women, serving the most intimate and sometimes reprehensible needs of men, still believing in a good girl myth, and believing in that good girl myth for themselves, while happily referring to themselves, in emails, as “sluts”  — while getting dewey eyed over female sacrifice, as if their lives weren’t already writ in hardship’s extremes.

In other words, filth is the systemic social and economic socialization and its correlative mythologies that keep women stigmatized and dependent on male bad behavior to support themselves, and usually their children: it’s a system rigged to serve male economic and social needs, and too many of the women benefitting from this structure simply don’t care enough to help other women, so long as their own homes remain unsullied from bad behavior.   In popular jargon, “De nile isn’t just a river in Egypt, baby.”  But let’s be clear, not all men who procure sex are married, and in many marriages, there is intimacy, and the guy simply wants more than he’s getting, or wants it dirtier or nastier, or whatever the backstory.  Rather, the filth that I speaking about is an economic social structure in which class insulates and precludes privileged women from caring about other women, because, hard core sex is messy, complicated, and Real Housewives offers some of the best available porn for women, second only to Martha Stewart.

That’s the kind of filth that no laundry machine can take of.

The smell is putrid and would be unforgivable, if change were not possible and necessary.