totalitarianism today

A compendium of red pill research: The Men's Rights Activist Movement.

1974

Warren Farrell publishes The Liberated Man as an addition to the growing women's movement. In it, Farrell argued that gender roles wounded men as well as women by forcing them to carry the burdens of supporting a family and stifling their natural emotions. 

1988

Warren Farrell publishes Why Men Are the Way They Are, depicting a world in which women wield enormous influence and power.

Even those women who are less successful have "enormous sexual leverage over men" and "can use the power to get external rewards," he wrote. Men, on the other hand, have been reduced to "success objects," judged solely by their status and earning potential. *

1993

Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex is published. In it, Farrell suggests that the American male is the new "nigger", and that feminism allows women to pursue their goals through charges of sexual harassment. It becomes the holy script of the MRA movement. 

2009

Paul Elam launches A Voice For Men from his laptop. It serves as "the vanguard" for a growing activism to reclaim male privilege by reducing female power. 

2011- November

Anders Breivik murders 77 children and adults at a camp in Norway. His manifesto is published online. In it, Breivik rages against political correctness and offers an engaged expression of men's rights ideology in which females use "erotic capital" to "manipulate" men, fathers become "disposable", and "using terror to wake up the masses."

2011- December

A Voice for Men launches Register.her, intended to mimic sex offender registries and claiming to track female murders, rapists, and schemers. The site's motto: "Fuck Their Shit Up."

2013

MRA's continue to refine and propagate their "doxing" techniques, which involve publicizing personal information to make someone a target of harassment. See the case of Ohio college student, Rachel Cassidy.

2014- June

Journalist Jessica Roy travels to an MRA conference and attempts to digest the ongoing sense of victimization she hears in the room. The article is published in Time, a major news outlet. 

2014- September

Anita Sarkeesian and other female game designers are targeted in the Gamergate campaign.

2015 - January

Warren Farrell does an interview in which he boasts of a forthcoming book with John Gray titled Beyond Mars and Venus.

2016- November

Donald J. Trump is elected President of the United States of America.

"The desire for this kind of freedom subsumed every other...."

The crime of sex was like guilt by association-- not visible to the eye of the outsider, but an act that could be rather easily conjectured. Consequences would make it manifest...

He was the concrete embodiment on my more abstract desire to be "free". By which I meant-- if I'd been pressed to admit it-- sexually free. The desire for this kind of freedom subsumed every other. 

Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

 

I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.

Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

 

And "Why I Like Complicated Positions", courtesy of [b]oink.

Inside the mind's of Trump's Neo-Nazi white base.

Lovely MRA agitprop from Return of Kings.

Considered "a leader in the emerging field of masculinity studies", sociologist Michael Kimmel examines the relationship between masculinity and political extremism. On the controversial thesis that returning vets are susceptible to political extremism (a correlation borne out in the Middle East, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia), Kimmel says:

What we do know to be true is that our military exercises in Iraq and Afghanistan have left veterans coming home with serious PTSD. I mean, think of the types of terror that they’ve lived with – that any time you get into a car could be your last time on earth. That can’t help but shake you up. Couple that with racism towards your enemy – one of the ways you convince yourself to kill an enemy is to hate them; think about what we used to say about the Vietnamese, or what my father’s generation used to say about the Japanese. I think that is an equation that might make some people susceptible to far-right ideology.

Kimmel references James Gilligan's assumption that shame and humiliation underlie basically all violence: “Because I feel small, I will make you feel smaller.” Interviews with extremists confirm these groups are often bound by a shared sense of "humiliation and shame":

In his famous statement, Osama bin Laden talked about how the west had humiliated the Muslim world … that conservative Muslims have been humiliated by hyper-modern society and the cosmopolitan McDonaldization of the world. For them, restoring the seventh-century caliphate is their way of reinstating traditional masculinity. 

He calls this “aggrieved entitlement”: "If you feel entitled and you have not gotten what you expected, that is a recipe for humiliation." 

The false nature vs. nurture dichotomy does little to elucidate rigid and/or persistent masculinities. I wish my ev-psychy friends would stop trying to build a scientific case for evangelical pop psychology. As Kimmel notes, nature and nurture are "intimately linked": 

What we know is that testosterone as a hormone both drives aggression and responds to aggression. It is a really malleable hormone. And I think that you can’t understand the natural biological conditions of violence without understanding the social conditions, and I think you can’t understand the social conditions without understanding the biological conditions.

Let me give you two examples. The first: how come men use a biological argument when they are angry and they beat up someone smaller or older than they are or they beat their wives – yet they don’t beat their bosses? I mean, my boss would likely piss me off more than my wife would, right? Why don’t I beat him up? Because you have to feel like you have permission. You have to believe that the target of your violence is “legitimate”.

..............

There is a famous experiment by a primatologist at Stanford. He takes five monkeys and measures their testosterone. Then he puts the five monkeys in a cage. The monkeys immediately establish a hierarchy of violence – number one beats number two, number two beats number three, number three beats number four, number four beats number five. Of course, number one has the highest testosterone, and so on.

So the experiment is: he takes monkey three out of the cage and he shoots him up with testosterone, off the scale, and puts him back in. What do you think happens? When I tell this story my students always guess that he immediately becomes number-one monkey. But that’s not true. What happens is that when he goes back in the cage he still avoids monkeys number one and two – but he beats the shit out of numbers four and five.

So what any reasonable biological researcher would conclude is that testosterone does not cause aggression, it enables it. The target of the violence must already be seen as legitimate. You have a biological argument and a sociological argument. So the answer to your question is that it is never either/or. It is always both. Always.

More on fragile masculinity happening now at a gas station or Senate chamber near you:

Republicans attack University of Wisconsin-Madison's The Men's Project, a program intended to help males see outside the box of their socialized masculinity and into a world inhabited by fellow human beings. 

James Gilligan celebrates the 2011 USC decision in Brown v. Plata ordering the state of California to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000. But what Gilligan celebrated in 2011 is under attack by Sessions' Justice Department. 

Crown Equipment CEO James Dicke II expresses his enthusiasm for Trump's cabinet picks while complaining about how regulations stymie "the cost of production". What he fails to mention is how the US health system could absorb the costs of China's unregulated, toxic workplace environment. 

Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill gets huffy about what fascism is-- and isn't. Alas, he overlooks the extent to which the aggrieved "workers groups" were actually subsumed under the former blue-collar worker badge in this election. Perhaps Brendan ought to watch a few stadium videos for insight into how militarization of angry aggrieved workers takes place in the internet age. Trump isn't arming militaries-- he's arming and supporting a growth in militias. If you imagine a happy ending to this story, you should stop watching porn. There is no happy ending to the militarization of stupidity.

Oral history, memory, and the salience of exculpatory narratives.

 

Pablo Picasso at the beach.

In 2014, I travelled to Russia to study Jewish life during the late Soviet period, and to collect oral histories. Most of my relatives emigrated to the US from the Russian Empire in the early 1900s to escape anti-Semitism, and this project was my attempt to piece together, if not my own family history, then what could have been my family history.

While first-hand accounts of almost any subject are prone to distortion and lapses in memory (intentional or not), the collection of oral history within a Jewish tradition presents a specific set of challenges. Oral history has become a hallmark of Jewish culture and of the attempt to come to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust. Phrases such as ‘never forget’ are ubiquitous, and form the basis for the preservation of memory. The word ‘preservation’ itself suggests an embalmment of a narrative. In a tribute to the victims of oppression and horror, we give voice to those who were silenced.

[Helen Haft, "Telling Memories", Aeon]

Part of memory, of course, is involved in the construction of identity. Who am I and how can I validate what distinguishes me from you? While the personal aspects of memory are easily grasped in a therapist's office, the collective and social nature of memory is fraught with peril. How many times has one uncle's memory of a family event threatened the integrity of the family identity?

"Looking at oneself in the mirror is a self-cancelling phenomenon. Eyes looking into eyes make a hole which spreads out and renders one invisible. I had seen more of myself in that single glimpse of a ghostly image in the pier mirror, not knowing it was I."

[Walker Percy, Lancelot]

As the mother of a child on the ASD spectrum and the daughter of political defectors, I am fascinated by the social boundaries of memory. A person who never met another person would have no reason to speak. He would remain speechless. Our social and physical environment gives us a space and means in which to define ourselves against others of the same type. To be a singular specimen needs no definition-- one grows accustomed to being foreign.

"...It says in the Kabbalah if you can't get off the ground you should stay on the ground. ... unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne, and somehow the male and female parts of me refuse to encounter one another tonight-- and God does not sit on his throne."

[Leonard Cohen to an Israeli audience at an early concert]

When I jokingly told friends that the rise of Trump killed Leonard Cohen, I discovered a musical distance that sounded political. Those friends who supported Trump had never heard of Cohen-- "Who's that? Was he Jewish? Oh is that the Canadian guy?"-- whereas my liberal, freedom-hungry friends mourned the loss of freedom alongside the loss of the melancholy baritone that carried them through first kisses and break-ups and abortions.

"Why do you like depressing music? That guy needs to get a grip."

[Trump friend after listening to Cohen's "The Gypsy's Wife"]

As a liberal, my tolerance for vast degrees of uncertainty and dissatisfaction reached an apex in this election. I still can't believe the story my Trump-loving friends tell themselves about America. I can't believe how insecure they must be to heed the promise of security frothing from the lips of a rabid nut-job in a stadium. I can't believe I discounted their obsession with football teams as mere entertainment. 

Trying to trace a line from November 2016 to the present is difficult. I am limited by my liberalism and tolerance. I am sickened by my own disbelief and desire to find socioeconomic excuses for blatant racism and misogyny. As if I didn't know about the power of the red pill from my days in DC. As if there is friendly ecological co-existence between feminists and pick-up artists. As if a jerk by any other name would smell as sweet.

And yet memory has a fatalistic undercurrent. We need to know why. We need to connect points into a line and say a-ha. We narrate the past as if we had no choice except to wind up at this particular present. Haft again:

Though the Jewish community in Russia today is largely thriving, this family had frozen time for themselves at the moment of emigration. By denying the existence of potential alternatives, they were preventing a re-evaluation of memory, the past, and even the present.

While the desire to validate the tragic decision to leave can prevent a re-evaluation of the past, preclude analysis and definitively stamp out alternatives, the flipside was the re-assertion of a false power over choice, and a downplaying of anti-Semitism and the difficulty involved in making the decision to emigrate.

The tension between narratives that justify and narratives that inspire seems to be related to the power accorded pain. Much of the anti-Trump resistance right now congeals around the pain illiberal democracy brings to our friends and family in minority groups or under-privileged status. Haft observes:

...there was a dichotomy between those who, 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, tailored their memories to dull the pain of their past, and those who shaped their memories to emphasise and hold on to that pain. In many narratives, there was a denial of any memory that diverged from their own, and even denials of their former selves. But while myth-making and a reworking of memory was undoubtedly taking place, that didn’t undermine the validity of what was being said and felt, nor does it mean that the interviewees were intentionally distorting history.

At the Thanksgiving turkey table, many of us were forced to reconcile our narratives of disbelief and horror with the triumphalist perspectives of Trump apologetics. Political theology has never been so complicated and alienating.

The sacredness of memory, and the taboo associated with examining it, can preclude analysis, denying a voice to those, such as Slava, Chlenov and Yelena, who have something legitimate to say that does not fit into a convenient narrative, or suggests one we might not want to hear. It also makes it uncomfortable to identify the faults in what is being spoken by those same people. While facts are not negotiable, our interpretations and experiences are never unanimous, and clashes of narratives lend insight into the deep internal conflicts that each person faced and continues to face.

Memory, by its very nature, is never fully formed. Preservation of memory is vital, but the genre of oral history does not immunise speakers or their words from questioning. Memory is not stagnant, but constantly changing and continually shaped by our present and the stories we tell ourselves. It is fallible, as are our perceptions, interpretations and the conclusions we draw from events. It is unnatural not to question or speak back to the stories we hear. Leaving memory unexamined, and granting it the status of sacred or untouchable history, does memory itself a great injustice.

I leave you to your memories that may or may not MAGA. I leave you to tiny acts of unceasing resistance. I end these thoughts with the shrapnel of a poem by Anne Sexton... the only weapon I use without regret...

And we are magic talking to itself, 
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins 
forgotten. Am I still lost? 
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself.

A compilation as the debate over hook-up culture continues.

La Mariée by Marc Chagallin

For the sake of elucidating all the furrows and lines drawn in the sand, here's a compilation/playlist of positions and arguments on the hook-up culture and its benefits, drawbacks, and social effects. But first, allow me to show my hand.

I believe gender to be largely a matter of social construction. Specifically, in this day and age, gender norms are communicated to most Americans through media and ad campaigns- we are consumers of gender norms rather than reflective, self-narrating individuals.

Laura Sessions Stepp, like many who are concerned about the hook-up culture, relies on sexist essentialism to support her view that men get more from hook-ups than women. It would be far more interesting if she considered hook-up culture from the perspective of 21st century gender construction- how girls seek to imitate the cultural norms established for men in an effort to prove themselves worthy of respect or power. And, it would be even more interesting to see an analysis of how these male gender norms prevent modern males from experiencing the richness of uncompartmentalized modes of cognition.

THE CRITICS
Those who enumerate the costs or inconsistencies

"9 reasons hook-up culture hurts boys too" by Ryan Sager (Time)
"In hookups inequality still reigns" by Natalie Kitroeff (NYT)
"What is hooking up?" interview with Laura Sessions Stepp (Unhooked)
"Hookup culture run amok" by Ruth Marcus (Real Clear Politics)
"Sexual hook-up culture" (American Psychological Association)
"Sexual assault on campus and the curse of the hookup culture" by Jonathan Zimmerman (L.A. Times)
"For students, hookup culture leaves much to be desired" by Eric Niehaus (The Miami Student)
"Why a real date is better than hooking up" by Jill P. Weber (Psychology Today)
"The college professor changing the way we date" by Cassie Shortsleeve (Shape)
"Time to stop hooking up" by Donna Freitas (Washington Post)
"The hookup elites" by Lisa Wade (Slate)
"Is hooking up bad for young women?" by Elizabeth A. Armstong, Laura Hamilton, and Paula England (Contexts)
"Hook-up culture is good for women, and other feminist myths" by Amy Julia Becker (Christianity Today)
"Hook up feminism" by Emily Esfahani Smith (The New Criterion)
"Does hooking up hurt you?" by Colleen Oakley (Marie Claire)
"Hooking up" by Tom Wolfe (MacMillan)

THE CHEERLEADERS 
Those who extol the benefits 

"Boys on the side" by Hanna Rosin (The Atlantic)
"Sex on campus: She can play that game, too" by Kate Taylor (NYT)
"#Love: Design for it" by Jordan Crook (TechCrunch)
"Hookup culture", a how-to by Brenna Dilger (UC Highlander)
"Finally someone says it: Hook-up culture is good for women" by Katie J. M.  Baker (Jezebel)
"We don't think she should play that game though..." by Jessia A. Joseph (inkblot)
"Hook-up truck: Bay Area's rolling venue for private acts in public" by David DeBolt (Contra Costa Times)
"How hook-up culture is helping women gain power" by Ashley Lutz (Business Insider)
"New poll reveals singles want a Fleet Week Hook Up in the Dugout at Yankee Stadium" (PR Web)
Hookup with Canadians Guide, bearers of market niche
Local Hookup and an endless array of websites that promise you a quick hookup ASAP with pictures of teenage girls that resemble 1970's porn

THE NAY-SAYERS
Those who don't believe the hookup upculture exists in a signficant way

"Another study shows that hookup culture is a myth" by Eliana Dockterman (Time)
"6 reasons the hookup culture is a myth" by Nicole Weaver (Your Tango)
"Radcliffe women have always enjoyed hooking up" by Mitch Wolfe (Huffington Post)
"New study on hooking up shows no sexual sea change" by Brian Alexander (Today Health)

THE INTERESTED PARTIES
Those watching the numbers and taking notes

"Demonizing sex, then trying to get laid: The art of hooking up at CPAC" by Amanda Marcotte (Slate)
The Casual Sex Project, an ongoing study by Zhana Vrangalova
"The sociology of hooking up" by Andy Guess (Inside Higher Education)
"Hanging out, hooking up" by Anna Lockhart (Times Free Press)
"Sex without intimacy: No dating, no relationships" by Brenda Wilson (NPR)
"Tons of people are hooking up with their co-workers" by Martha C. White (Time)

MY PERSONAL FAVORITES
Because it's not the same old drivel

"On hookup culture and an imagined sexual liberation" by J. A. Martino (Feminist Current)
"Sorry feminists, I'm too oppressed to hook up" by Evette Dionne (Policy Mic)
"Hook-up culture's bad rap" by Kate Harding (Young Feminist Wire)

A few brief notes on secrets, sociopaths, selfies, and integrity.

[Image source: Thinking Through My Lens]

Keeping a secret is hard work for the brain. And the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep.

Unless you are a sociopath.

For sociopaths, nothing is sacred.

Sociopaths tend to stare into people's eyes intensely. This act of unabashed staring, often despite social cues which encourage the contrary, is known as the "predator's stare". 

A sociopath suffers from antisocial personality disorder, or APD.  Technically, APD is “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.” Typical characteristics include overconfidence, lack of remorse, high levels of manipulation and an inability to confirm to social norms.

Lacking an established sense of self, sociopaths are social chameleons- they adapt to different social settings depending on what the situation demands. They constantly change and transform to get the best out of the world around them.  

Integrity involves loyalty to one's core beliefs and principles. It requires a strongly-held concept of self. 

To have integrity is to be loyal to the "self" we try to be. 

There is no such thing as a sociopath with integrity.

Sociopaths are drawn to employment that involves wielding positions of power over people– the more helpless and less likely to be listened to the better. They flock to working with children, animals, the elderly, and the mentally, emotionally, or physically challenged. They also enjoy power-heavy jobs as police officers or prison guards.

They are aware of projecting a personality, though they have no remorse over failing to identify with this projected self.

[Image source: Design Instruct]

Some sociopaths teach Sunday school in the Church of Latter Day Saints. E.M. Thomas is one such sociopath. She likes to look into people's eyes:

Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of my confidence is the way I sustain eye contact. Some people have called it the "predator stare." Sociopaths are unfazed by uninterrupted eye contact. Our failure to look away politely is also perceived as being aggressive or seductive. It can throw people off balance, but often in an exciting way that imitates the unsettling feeling of infatuation. Do you ever find yourself using charmand confidence to get people to do things for you that they otherwise wouldn't? Some might call it manipulation, but I like to think I'm using what God gave me.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, the basic physics of flirting involves making eye contact with someone, giving a small smile, then looking down and averting your gaze. 

I find myself wondering if sociopaths' sustained staring making it impossible for them to be coy. 

Sometimes people envy sociopaths for their lack of moral inhibition. They don't do what most of us call "regret". 

[Image source: Alapan]

Nor do they bother with what philosophers and psychologists call "human self-reflection", or the capacity of humans to exercise introspection and the willingness to learn more about their nature, purpose, and actions. A reflection is defined as "a thought, idea, or opinion formed or a remark made as a result of meditation". Sociopaths are very conscious and adept at observing their own reflections. A reflection also means "an image that is seen in a mirror or on a shiny surface".

Rachel Simmons says selfies are "good for girls". Erin Gloria Ryan says selfies are "a cry for help". We are drawn to ugly selfies. Scientists have linked selfies to narcissism, addiction, and mental illness. 

Many women take a large number of exciting, half-nude selfies after healing from breast implant surgery. Post-surgery selfies even include credits- the name of the surgeon or implant size is mentioned.

A sociopath is just as likely to take a selfie photo as any other American. They may even take selfies at funerals. But what they see in the selfie is rarely a self with whom they identify- only a personality they pretend. 

Selfies are the sociopaths propaganda machine, allowing them to flit rapidly from one personality to the next. Now you see them, now you don't.

[Image source: the new is tired of you]

I'm a big fan of shadow selfies.

Unlike selfies that reveal false facial expressions or newly-bleached teeth, shadow selfies reveal only the darkness that comes from the way our bodies block or absorb light. They depict only what they can afford to inhabit- a shadow of a self.

Shadow selfies, unlike sociopaths, have integrity.

The strain of narcissi: Dorothy Thompson and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Narcissus poeticus (Poet's Daffodil, Nargis, Pheasant's Eye, Findern Flower, and Pinkster Lily) was one of the first daffodils to be cultivated, and is frequently identified as the narcissus of ancient times—often associated with the Greek legend of Narcissus. Extremely fragrant, with a ring of petals in pure white and a short corona of light yellow with a distinct reddish edge, Poet's Daffodil grows to 20 to 40 cm (7.9 to 15.7 in) tall and is widely naturalized in North America and Europe. 

Poet's Daffodil is cultivated in the Netherlands and southern France for its essential oil, narcissus oil, one of the most popular fragrances used in perfumes. Narcissus oil is used as a principal ingredient in 11% of modern quality perfumes—including 'Fatale' and 'Samsara'—as a floral concrete or absolute. The oil's fragrance resembles a combination of jasmine and hyacinth.

It was 1922. Edna St. Vincent Millay, known to close friends and family as "Vincent" was involved in the lovely geometry of a triangle formed between herself, Arthur Fiske, and Hal. Vincent tried to explain her sentiments to Arthur in the medium which left her with the most liberty, the epistolary:

No one can ever take your place to me. We know each other in such a terrible, certain, windless way. You and I have almost achieved that which is never achieved: we sit in each other’s souls.

Dorothy Thompson, who had not yet made a brave name for herself in journalism, married the first man with whom she made love. Josef Bard was a Hungarian Jew, a novelist and short story writer, a man who reflected the Viennese coffee house culture with all its cosmopolitan strains. Their lives tangled in Budapest on streets with gas-lit lamps. Vincent became part of the fray when she shared a room with Dorothy during her visit to Budapest. As Dorothy saw it:

She was a little bitch, a genius, a cross between a gamin and an angel. In Budapest, she had two lovers…. both from the embassy. Keeping them apart was a kunst, an art…… She sat before the glass and combed her lovely hair, over and over. Narcissan. She really never loved anyone except herself. Very beautiful, with her little white body and green-gold eyes. “Dotty, do you think I am a nymphomaniac?” she asked. Then she comes in a Grecian robe and reads aloud to the Ladies’ Club, “Such lips my lips have kissed….” And what a sonnet that was.

Dorothy’s work required her to go back to Vienna. She did so, and left Vincent “the toast of half the town”:

 Handed her all I had because she was an angel. A bright angel. She might have left Josef alone, but not that, either. When she came back to Viennna, she twisted a little green ring on her finger. “Josef gave it to me,” she said absolutely brutally. “But he really cares for you.” “It’s all right Edna,” I said, “I know he does.” And I was full of furious tears.

 Vincent cancelled her mother’s plans to meet her in Europe and wobbled over whether to return stateside. It was the heaviness of a despair she couldn’t seem to lose that sent her careening back to New York, where her antics took place on a familiar stage with all its familiar props and characters. The solace of the the avant-garde and the way it absconded the distinction between center stage and backstage.

Hurly-burly. Lovers pairing up with wives, and all the seasonal flowers rapidly collected into bouquets, destined for a parlor and perhaps, even, a crystal vase. 

Dorothy quickly grew disenchanted with the cosmopolitan man who was supposed to be her Svengali and savior. She discovered her own strength and wit outshone Josef’s. There was nothing he could offer her that she could not discover on her own. 

It was the era of indecisive bohemian women. In March 1922, Vincent returned to await her mother’s arrival in Paris. She decided to stick it out. John Carter wrote to Vincent with chargin, wondering about rumors he’d overheard that she lived with Griffin in Vienna. Not that it mattered, of course. Griffin had moved on to the next soiree. He wasn’t the kind of man who stuck around for the seance.  

The April Fool was on the woman who believed in the formidable power of erasers.

PARIS APRIL 1ST, 1922

A mile of clean sand.
I will write my name here, and the trouble that is in my heart.
I will write the date and place of my birth,
What I was to be,
And what I am.
I will write my forty sins, my thousand follies,
My four unspeakable acts…..
I will write the names of the cities I have fled from,
The names of the men and women I have wronged.
I will write the holy name of her I serve,
And how I serve her ill.
And I will sit on the beach and let the tide come in.
I will watch with peace the great calm tongue of the tide
Licking from the sand the unclean story of my heart.

In the summer, Cora and Vincent escaped to the English countryside of Dorset. Plants and flowers grew between the mother and daughter. Cora used Culpeper’s to take pages and pages of notes about herbs that helped induce abortion. A reference to willow tree “under the dominion of the moon”. And how leaves, bark, and seed can be used to staunch the bleeding of wounds and to reduce vomiting. 

“Leaves bruised and boiled in wine stayeth the heat of lust in man or woman and quite extinguisheth it, if it be long used”. Certain leaves, if steeped as tea, should not be given to pregnant women. Henbane, caraway, all-heal, heart trefoil, hedge hyssop, and gentian. Alkanet again and again, a herb “under the dominion of Venus”, one which helps to draw forth a dead child. 

In July, Cora found the first flower of alkanet. She used it to help Vincent miscarry in the early months of her pregnancy. The sperm donor could have been any man. 

Dwight Townsend couldn’t say for certain if Vincent had a miscarriage during that warm Dorset summer. Nothing was certain with Vincent. But he remembers other things, like the way she tried to instruct him in the secret language of flirtation.  

“When a man looks at you you simply look back,” she told Dwight. “Or ask him for something, for a match.” Dwight tried to explain that men did not ask him for matches or for the time- that going to the post office for a stamp meant only that he would return home with a stamp and not that he would be “met by a man”. As a married father, Dwight concluded that he lacked “whatever it is to arrest men”. But Vincent, on the other hand, reeked of it. 

In 1923, Man Ray took a photography of Vincent sitting with her back to a window in a Parisian apartment. 

The poet Virgil, in his fifth Eclogue, wrote about a narcissus whose description corresponds with that of Narcissus poeticus. In one version of the myth about the Greek hero Narcissus, he was punished by the Goddess of vengeance, Nemesis, who turned him into a Narcissus flower.  Linnaeus, who gave the flower its name, quite possibly did so because he believed it was the one that inspired the tale of Narcissus, handed down by poets since ancient times.

In September 1928, Vincent met the young George Dillon after a poetry reading. They became lovers. His lips were as soft as “kissing the flesh of a girl’s nipple”. Vincent told her longtime partner, Eugen, of this new intoxication. 

This, as she warned George never to let doubt come between them. That they had the most treasured things two people could possess- “that we love each other, ; and that we have told the truth about it.”

Nevermind the frequency of this truth when plotted on a graph or chart. Nevermind the way the science of statistics undermines our claims to what is unique and precious. Nevermind the way in which Vincent reassured herself, “I have never once turned my back on the beautiful thing.”

The fragrant Narcissus poeticus has also been recognized as the flower that Persephone and her companions were gathering when Hades abducted her into the Underworld. This myth accounts for the custom, which has lasted into modern times, of decorating graves with these flowers.

While all narcissi are poisonous when eaten, Poet's Daffodil is more dangerous than others, acting as a strong emetic and irritant.  The scent is powerful enough that it can cause headache and vomiting if a large quantity is kept in a closed room.  

“The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity,” said Vincent, knowing how a splendid fragrance suffocates in a closed room.

It was Dorothy Thompson’s pugnacious honesty that prevented her from falling into the morphine-induced stupor of narcissism. Lacking the cultivated feminine wiles, Dorothy used her access to warn of the horrors Adolf Hitler planned for the world. In her eyes, he was a “a little man”, no less dangerous for all his pettiness and sordid insecurities. 

It was Dorothy who related the gruesome tale of Hitler’s alleged sexual involvement with his niece which resulted in her suicide/ murder. Angela Maria "Geli" Raubal (4 June 1908 – 18 September 1931) was Hitler's half-niece. He discovered that she was having an affair with his chauffeur Emil Maurice. So Hitlet promptly dismissed the chauffeur. Geli was kept under close wraps but planned to escape to pursue singing lessons. On the fatal day they argued and she was found shot, with Hitler’s pistol, through the chest.

Dorothy quickly dismissed the notion and official ruling of the death as a suicide. Suicide by gunshot to the chest was a highly unlikely way for a young girl to take her own life.  Instead, she claimed Geli experienced Hitler’s sexual perversion which she threatened to reveal. 

Only in the final days in the Bunker in Berlin did Hitler marry his long time mistress Eva Braun. They committed suicide shortly after the ceremony. It is known that the SS shot secret film of Hitler and Braun engaging in unconventional sex. The film was kept as potential blackmail or evidence in the event of a coup to discredit him to the German people.

During her remarkable career, Dorothy acted as an eye witness and primary source for some of the great moments in modern history. In addition to Berlin, she was also assigned to cover the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow in 1927. Through her voice as a journalist she worked for refugee relief. When the State of Israel emerged she raised unpopular questions about the fate of displaced Palestinians.   

"Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict,” wrote Dorothy, reflecting on the ravages of the twentieth century. 

Vincent leaned against another bookshelf, leaned into the words, the scaffolding. “You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling,” she said. “It’s only that.” And that is it.

Why Miriam Weeks needs to do more than read a little critical theory and call it a feminist day.

I can't help it.

I wanted to keep mum on what I've come to call the Miriam dilemma- the question of whether "doing porn to pay for college" is a liberating experience. But the way Weeks frames her viewpoint- and her amateur application of barely-digested critical theory- makes it impossible for me to stay silent.

Sometimes a woman has to come out and say what's on her mind, if for no other reason than to defend fellow feminists from the surly marriage-stalwarts like William Tucker, who finally gets to deliver those finger-wagging lectures to a broader audience than the one captive in his own idyllic kitchens. The fact that Tucker holds Miriam's personal choices against feminism is certainly disturbing. 

The story goes like this: An 18-year-old teenager from an affluent family decides to do porn to pay her way through college at Duke. Miriam has affirmed that making adult movies - she has starred in around 30 films so far - leaves her feeling "empowered". In my opinion, a female empowered to inhabit her own erotic longings and fantasies is a wonderful thing.

But empowerment comes with caveats. For example, a female empowered to live out her longings and fantasies is a tragedy waiting to happen if these longings involve the desire to hurt or kill other human beings. Before we get into the Miriam dilemma, let's agree to assume that sexual or gender liberation (like any other form of liberation) might involve social costs. These social costs are part of the equation of sisterhood- my liberation is not a liberation of womankind in general if it costs other women more than they wish to pay.

I agree with Miriam's empathy for sex workers. She is right to observe, "For centuries, sex workers have been the untouchables of society", and she is absolutely right to be "sick of it" and to take "a stand against it". But telling the story of sex workers requires us to acknowledge the large number of females and children who are employed in an industry that creates a market for human trafficking.

Most sex workers are not privileged American kids who have chosen to be so employed- many are prisoners of a patriarchal system in which consent is the luxury of citizenship and "rape" is a crime for which the victim is as guilty as the perpetrator. Miriam casts a weary nod towards the exploited while maintaining her firm position above them. 

Unfortunately, Miriam's empathy for fellow human beings does not extend to blue-collar workers. "To be perfectly honest, I felt more degraded in a minimum-wage, blue-collar, low-paying service job than I ever did doing porn," she wrote.

It seems that "low-paying service jobs", many of which allow Miriam to shop at her favorite stores and grab that burger between classes, are humiliating and degrading. Such jobs lack the excitement of being on a film set and require consistency, motivation, and a willingness to work hard for extended periods of time. Such jobs also don't allow you to be the star of the show. That can be rough for privileged American teens.

Miriam has explained that she entered the porn industry to pay for her $60,000-a-year tuition at Duke. Supposedly, she makes around $1,000-$1,500 for each film she stars in. When asked by Barbara Walters on Monday's The View why she could not work at something else to help pay her way through college, she replied:

"I'm an 18-year-old without a college degree. Any other job would not have footed the bill."

But Miriam's reasoning keeps slipping apart at the seams. First it's a lack of other jobs to foot the bill. Then it's the "burden" she would impose on her family by accepting their financial assistance. Last week, Miriam said the financial aid she received to pay for her tuition "was insufficient and just really an enormous financial burden" on her "family". I'm not sure the burden of money isn't a slight one in comparison to seeing videos of your daughter being abused in porn videos.

Miriam noted that her parents were not aware of her decision to enter the porn industry but are now 'absolutely supportive" of her choice. By this, I don't think she intended to convey her parents' sexual preferences so much as to acknowledge that they love her and are trying to support her decisions to the best of their ability. Nor is Miriam suggesting that her parents had any knowledge of the fact that she had been watching online porn alone since the age of 12. 

She described her career in porn as 'empowering' because it allowed her to make decisions in a 'safe, controlled environment'. In Miriam's words:

For me, shooting pornography brings me unimaginable joy. When I finish a scene, I know that I have done so and completed an honest day’s work. It is my artistic outlet: my love, my happiness, my home.

I can say definitively that I have never felt more empowered or happy doing anything else. In a world where women are so often robbed of their choice, I am completely in control of my sexuality. As a bisexual woman with many sexual quirks, I feel completely accepted. It is freeing, it is empowering, it is wonderful, it is how the world should be.

When Miriam articulates this unavoidable choice between becoming a porn star and not going to college at Duke, she undermines her own agency in the choice to pose for porn. You can't be forced by exigent financial circumstances to pose for porn AND be perceived as an autonomous, sexually-liberated woman. Either you had to do it (which is an awful choice for a woman to make, one deserving of sympathy and anger) or you chose to do it (which is a personal choice, which some will find exciting and others not so much). 

'Be a lady in the streets and a freak between the sheets.' That's the trick isn't it?

It's the "trick" part that worries me- and the assumption that being a "feminist" requires inauthenticity and participation in social delusions. Rashmee Kumar's thoughts on this strike me as particularly insightful:

While Knox feels empowered through being a porn actress, many of her videos do not portray her as a sexual agent and recirculate porn narratives that pigeonhole women into subservience to dominant forms of male heterosexuality. She is featured on a website called “Facial Abuse,” in which a man forces his penis down a woman’s throat as she gags, cries and sometimes vomits until the man ejaculates on her face. The caption next to Knox’s video states that she is a women’s studies major, but “she says she enjoys watching our videos and what turns her on the most is ‘seeing the misery in the girl’s eyes.’ Those are her own words.” The website mocks Knox’s feminism and makes her complicit in the brutal and dehumanizing treatment of other women on the site. Promoting respect and appreciation for female sexuality is important, but we must be critical when these desires are represented in a way that rearticulates male sexuality and misogyny.

Pornography itself isn’t inherently negative, but the messages mainstream porn disseminates are. Subversive porn, according to [Gail] Dines, would need to disrupt these messages and “be as powerful and as pleasurable as porn, telling men that porn’s images of women is a lie, fabricated to sell a particular vision of sex. This alternative ideology would also need to present a different vision of heterosexual sex, one built on gender equality and justice.” The message received from Knox’s videos is that she is just another run-of-the-mill porn starlet who submits to men’s sexual fantasies, which contributes inadvertently to pressuring women to conform to pornified standards of female sexuality rather than exploring on their own. Knox’s decision to appear in porn is further coercion for men to maintain narrow conceptions of female sexuality and for women to believe that being petite, hairless and exhibitionistic is the way to feel free, happy and empowered.

I am fortunate enough to have been raised by a mother who acknowledged the beauty of sex- a woman who enjoyed her body- and never felt the need to hide it from us. When she warned us "never to do anything with our bodies just to please a man", I took that to mean that my body and sexuality were too precious and powerful to waste on those who couldn't appreciate it. Or me. 

So when Miriam claims that, "We tell our children through school and socialization that sexuality is bad," I find myself at a loss for words. I chalk it up to her personal experiences rather than social ones. 

Perhaps she has somehow missed out on the billion-dollar sex-marketing industry or the Victoria's Secret stores now found in every all-American mall. Or maybe Miriam has been fortunate enough to miss out on all the billboards promising women eternal youth and male attention for the price of a little plastic surgery. Maybe Miriam even fails to see that the commodification of sex enslaves as many as it empowers. Having watched porn from the age of 12 might make it difficult to discern the willing participant from the tormented object.

When Mirian writes,"My entire life, I have, along with millions of other girls, been told that sex is a degrading and shameful act," my heads shakes back and forth in horror. But I also I find myself thinking that sex, like every other activity under the sun, CAN be degrading. Not all sex is good sex. Not all sex is pleasurable. The thought that some women will never taste the fantastic experience of orgasm strikes me as a testament to our culture's lack of effective, empowering sex education for women. As developmental psychologists and neuroscientists have long asserted, human beings tend to repeat what they see. Those whose sex education consists in pornography tend to re-live this porn and call it "sex" without discovering how sex can be a source of incredible pleasure and affirmation.

The feminist in me is as disturbed by Miriam's brand of feminism as I was by that of ditzbag Sarah Palin. Ripping a page from Sarah Palin's lexicon, Miriam went online to defend herself against claims that posing for abusive sex discredited her allegations of feminism. She is perturbed by the "condemnation-happy state of 'gotcha feminism'", and refuses to feel bad about how others perceive her contribution to the sex industry:

Whatever choice a woman is making and she is the one deciding to do -- reclaiming the agency behind the decision to do, even if it is a degrading sexual act -- is absolutely feminism. To me, feminism is about women not being shamed but rather being empowered.

If one of my daughters boasted of an internship at Pornhub.com, I wouldn't feel overjoyed at her sexual liberation or freedom- I would wonder, quite frankly, what (if any) role I played in de-eroticizing sex for her. Like Stephanie Williams, I would revisit the costs of a sexual liberation that caters to the gaze of misogynism. Stephanie thinks the vast majority of pornography "takes credibility away from women's sexuality because most porn is really just abusive in some way". 

The moment a woman signs up to be paid for porn, she's forfeiting the choice all together. There's no empowerment in that. There's no liberation in that.

So when you have this very inexperienced girl doing a media blitz claiming that there's some kind of liberating, feminine empowerment in the things she does, it worries me as a woman. No woman should have to be told to let a stranger ejaculate all over her face for the public in order to pay off a student loan. No girl should have to put numbing cream on her cooch or butt in order to endure the directed roughness of a scene in order to cover her textbooks....

Sugar-coating the reality of the industry she's chosen in order to gain approval from the masses of people who are criticizing her for her choice in employment isn't promoting sex worker rights.

Miriam or Belle is enjoying the feeling of sexual desire and sexual spectacle. That's a good thing. It's a heady, exciting experience for a girl to discover the way in she inhabits her body and her sexuality. Unfortunately, Miriam's decision to "do porn" greatly reduces the likelihood that her sexual experiences will match up to the spectacle itself. Faking an orgasm is not the same thing as experiencing an orgasm. Pretending to enjoy sex is not the same thing as actually enjoying it. I reserve my right to shun the former while claiming and living my way through the latter. 

Alas, all those red-blooded American boys watching Miriam's performances are receiving the same shoddy sex education that Miriam received. It's a sex education that focuses on pleasing a man and deriving one's own pleasure from the knowledge that a penis found it worthy of ejaculation. How much more pathetic can we get?

Rather than teaching men how to approach the mystery of the female body with the appropriate erotic humility and wonder, porn teaches men how to deface it. Literally. When Miriam prides herself on liberating women, I wish she'd consider the overall costs of her contribution to the porn industry. I wish she'd stop vaccilating between owning her choices and sounding like a sad little girl, desperate for acceptance and admiration. I wish she'd decide that sisterhood matters more than the services she performs to the satisfaction of sexually-unliberated men. Honestly, perhaps most of all, I wish she'd learn how to enjoy sex itself rather than its commodification.

Some men think women are tools.

I couldn't help being intrigued by a report by Christie Nicholson that probably wouldn't excite longtime ev-psycho, Jesse Bering, whose blog for Scientific American reads more like a dated issue of Men's Health. Assuming my being intrigued by the article was a function of my need to secure food and male protection for my children, I still don't understand why I feel the need to excerpt and share it here. (Hopefully, Jesse can help me understand.)

Do men objectify women? Well some say there may be a tendency, since there’s a booming business in pornography. But to answer the how, when and why men objectify women requires some science.

Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske presented findings from a new study this past Sunday, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago, where she and her colleagues compared, "...heterosexual men’s perceptions of scantily clad women, scantily clad men, and fully clothed men and women."

And what they found is the 21 male subjects had the best memory for photos of sexy bikini-clad women. No surprise. Then they had the men look at the photos while their brains were scanned and what she found was that, "...this memory correlated with activation in part of the brain that is a pre-motor, having intentions to act on something, so it was as if they immediately thought about how they might act on these bodies."

Fiske explained that the areas, the premotor cortex and posterior middle temporal gyrus, typically light up when one anticipates using tools, like a screwdriver. "I’m not saying that they literally think these photographs of women are photographs of tools per se, or photographs of non-humans, but what the brain imaging data allow us to do is to look at it as scientific metaphor. That is, they are reacting to these photographs as people react to objects."

Fisk also tested the men for levels of sexism and found a surprising effect those who scored high on this test, "...the hostile sexists were likely to deactivate the part of the brain that thinks about other people's intentions. The lack of activation of this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens. It’s a very reliable effect, that the medial prefrontal cortex comes online when people think about other people, see pictures of them, imagine other people."

"Normally when you examine social cognition, people’s aim is to figure out what the other person is thinking and intending. And we see in these data really no evidence of that. So the deactivation of medial prefrontal cortex to these pictures is really kind of shocking."

To be sure this is a preliminary study, and Fiske intends to follow up with a larger sample, but nonetheless she concludes, "...these findings are all consistent with the idea that they are responding to these photographs as if they are responding to objects and not to people with independent agency." Fiske suggested that if there are sexualized pictures of women in the workplace, there may be a spillover effect, perhaps influencing the way people perceive female colleagues.

Hopefully, this will put an end to that dazed and mysterious expression that makes its way onto the faces of well-read sociologists whenever the phrase "objectification of women" is mentioned. Even folks who take things and Bible verses literally can now appreciate the fine-toothed literal quality of the expression "seeing a woman as an object". 

As for social ramifications and rape-prevention, it might be a good idea for dads to teach their sons the ways in which a female is different from a tool or an object. For example, hammers don't have feelings, hopes, dreams, yada yada. Better yet, tell your boys the only tools they should "act upon" are the tools in their own toolbox.

Riding the waves of feminism.

Francie Prose asks if the ink of women writers has a funny odor to it- the kind of odor that calls for red tents and social quarantine. Of course, Norman Mailer comes up.

Surf's up, it seems. Martha Rampton describes the three waves of feminism.

Miley Cyrus and Sinead O'Connor are like two waves of feminism cresting against one another. The future of feminism requires a collision.

Co-founder of Bitch magazine Lisa Jervis thinks the third-wave of feminism has come to an end. But that was almost a decade ago. And only four years after Alternet published the Third Wave Manifesto. And one year before the assertion of a fuzzier, sexier fourth-wave. 

Leave it to Adbusters to pick a great photo of Anne-Marie Slaughter for the occasion of reminding us that women, like men, can't "have it all".

Hadley Freeman wants to know if fourth-wave feminism is "all about boobs and beauty".

Lindsey Dodge asks why fourth-wavers must always look to the state as the answer to their troubles. Emma Goldman answered that question many years ago.

Meanwhile, Jack Donovan frets about whether the feminist hatred of testosterone will further emasculate good old boys. (Sign me up, Jack- I had no idea feminism could be so exciting.)

Meanwhile, British feminists long tired of cleaning tea cups have taken to social media in a battle over money. But it's not what you think....

Maybe the fourth wave of feminism, like the Arab Spring, requires the destablization of entrenched models and can only emerge as a digital phenomenon. 

And then, yes, Amanda Fortini.