I went to see Inside Deep Throat yesterday. It's a documentary about the making of the movie Deep Throat and the impact it had on American society and on the people involved in the film.
If you're not familiar with Deep Throat, it was the first (and probably last) big mainstream porno movie. It created a huge uproar when it came out and was shut down by court orders in many states, including New York. Hollywood stars rushed out to defend the movie and their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Those rights didn't apply to "obscene" materials, said the courts.
Anyway, Deep Throat seemed to be the next step in the sexual revolution that had begun in the sixties with the advent of birth control pills. Many Americans flocked to see it, simply because they were being told that they shouldn't be able to. Fellatio, which was illegal (and I believe, still is) in some states came out of the bedroom and onto the big screen.
Then something unusual happened: the feminist movement began boycotting the movie. Gloria Steinem hooked up with the star of the movie, Linda Lovelace (who had experienced a change of heart about her role in the film and claimed she was coerced into making it) and began speaking out against pornography and the objectification of women.
All of this took me back to my college "Philosophy of Feminism" class, when I used to feel like the only pervert who would actually admit to enjoying pornography. You see, my only regret is that there are not enough women writing, directing and producing erotica (or pornography, if you prefer). Of course, pornography that is created by men is going to tell about a man's sexual desires, which includes the objectification of women. How many women have not imagined sex with a faceless stranger? Do you think men would be insulted if we objectified them?
Anyway, this brings me to a term I recently heard in a MySpace group that deals with beauty standards. The term is MILFs and it stands for Mothers I'd Like (to) Fuck. I don't find the term insulting, but I understand why others find it insulting and would never address anyone by a term they found derogatory. Do we really need to protect ourselves against this term? Are mothers not sexy and fuckable objects of desire? Many of us have embraced the term "bitch" as a synonym for a strong woman. Why don't we take these terms, grab them by the balls and make them ours? I didn't pick up on the implication that mothers were somehow less attractive and that a MILF would be an exception to the rule. I simply thought it meant a sexy woman who happened to be a mom. Maybe I'm being naive, but I'm guessing that when people hear the term "mother", they think of more than a woman's physical attributes. There's a whole bunch of other baggage tied up with that word. They probably assume there's a certain amount of stability, maturity, differences in values and priorities. And maybe, just maybe, we've got some experience that makes us better at fucking.
In any case I don't think human sexuality works that way. It's not that analytical. A fuck is mainly about chemistry, and if there's an Oedipal component that makes it more exciting for someone, I say enjoy.
In the words of Peaches, "Are the motherfuckers ready for the fatherfuckers?"
13 comments:
I think we as women need to be careful in accepting labels that other people put on us when those labels are intended to portray us as sex objects. If you are comfortable being identified as a "MILF" that's fine but you should consider how the term MAY be being used to exploit women and once again turn them into sex objects. Being sexy is wonderful, but if you are only being valued for sex then that's different.
Lucky said...
We as a society seem to have some double standards when it comes to sex and women.
It's O.K. for women to be sexual as long as they:
(a) Are selling a product
(b) Don't challenge the authority of males
(c) Stay within the boundaries of what is considered "feminine."
It's why so-called lipstick lesbians are ready for primetime and butch lesbians are still unacceptable. Maybe if we could talk about sex without squirming like John Ashcroft or some of the other people running this country we'd all be a lot happier and less uptight. I think this we've actually gone backwards in the last twenty years. Isn't the Supreme Court threatening to reverse Roe v. Wade anyday now? What does that say about our society and how it uses sex to control women?
I had never heard of the term MILF before but I think it is just another judgement of a women's "fuckability" based on a testosterone sensibility that is largely visual and superficial. I would personally take this backhanded comment with a grain of salt because I think most guys would fuck anything that let them.
I agree with anonymous who said that it's great to be sexy. But if that is all you are being valued for. . . that's different.
And to accept and perhaps even feel empowered or validated in some way by those type of judgements seem to perpetuate them and the ideals benind them.
I close with a thought inspired by the film The Elephant Man
I am not a vagina, I am a human being.
In that one color photo of the BAGS publicity tour for the first show at the MASQUE in the punk gallery,you can see "Douche Bag Alice" standing in front of a poster for "DEEP THROAT" at the old Pussycat Theater (now a Christian fellowship hall)..thats all
Chris
Hey ALice,
Do you remember Craig Lee's original BAGS alias ..I saw in in an old Flipside article online about a December 1977 show that says the comers were GAG,BIZ AND DOGGIE!..Wondering if you remember what he was called?
Hi Alice! It's Lisa. I agree that more women should work in porn--I mean, on the other side of the camera. As you know, the adult magazine that I edit features photos of girls who have "just turned 18." It's a classic, very male fantasy. However, all the text accompanying the photos is written by another woman and me, in the voice of various 18-year-old girls. The other writer and I were 18-year-old girls once. We remember how we felt, we remember how *horny* we were, we remember what we couldn't wait to do as soon as we were old enough. So the whole magazine is written, not in the voice of male-generated fantasy version of an 18-year-old girl, but in our specific, real, old 18-year-old voices. I like to think that it's a very feminine porn mag.
Thank you all for your thoughtful, intelligent comments. I’m glad that there was a variety of responses and differences of opinion.
I want to clarify that I am not advocating that women allow themselves to be labeled in terms they find offensive. Nor do I seek validation in the form of another person’s sexual attraction to me.
A human being is a complex thing, but we don’t always need to relate to all aspects of an individual. A casual sexual relationship does not necessitate a relationship with the total me. To quote Camille Paglia, “Perhaps eroticism has a right to live without intimacy and may in fact be most free in that state.” I am a multifaceted individual, but when I teach I don’t expect my students to relate to my sexuality. By the same token when I fuck I don’t always expect emotional or spiritual intimacy, or even an acknowledgement that there’s anything more to me than sexuality. In fact, I am not concerned with my partner’s thoughts at all during that time because I would rather focus on our desire and pleasure than on whether there is respect involved in what we’re doing.
My sexuality is not an inferior trait that needs to be chaperoned by emotionalism or spiritualism, nor does it need to be intellectualized. Sure, love and sex are great together, but sex for the sake of sex is good too. I am not holding out a reward for those who understand me, or agree with my ideology.
So I agree with Sweet Pear, I don’t want to be thought of as just a vagina either, I’d much prefer to be thought of as a melting ice cream cone.
Alice Bag is obviously one of the last women in America typifying
psychosexual health. The shallow, predictable rejoinders issued by "feminists" in this forum only reveal how easily neurosis can pass as ideology in a country in which females are taught, chastized, and conditioned in every possible way---now by the Left as much as the Judeo-Christian
Right--that sex and men are "evil," "dirty," and that the valuations of asceticism, self-denial, suppression--both in invididual & class-- are now held as The Good.
(And to the woman who warns of adopting "labels" put on women, I say invent then YOUR OWN LABELS which do something other than condemn, villianize, and nullify female sexuality. But American especially just want to ignore sex altogether, and pretend as if 3 million years of evolution didn't happen, and that the permanent estrus of humans and chimps is just an annoyance---as if ignoring an instinct is possible, an instinct which is now a pleasure reflex and has nearly nothing to do with reproduction, which is why our closest species-relatives,
the Bonobos, have sex about every two hours, or why female loins seduce males even when out of rutting peroids).
(And to other, " men will fuck anything that lets them": really, well, WOMAN WHO ACTUALLY ORGASM FROM INTERCOURSE are the same way, because nothing succeeds like pleasure mixed with gene-diversity
in the evolutionary scheme of things: puritan, middle class moral judgements are not what evolved the female sex-drive, wake up and grow up: you condemn beautiful nature, and you might ask yourself what a sexual instinct is or why you would condemn it.)
There are so many errors of just plain fact in the presumptions of these Blogger-replies that it would require hours correct, so I'll stick to one error that's complex enough: the silly feminist notion of "sex-object."
Firstly, feminists did not invent this term, they merely bastardized
and abused it. Freud, and his many ingenious female cohorts like Jean Lampl-De Groot, Joan Riviere, and Melanie Klein invented and used this term/idea to distinguish a simple fact, and it is fact that psychoanalysis is concerned with, not with establishing moral edicts for sexual behavior, which feminist theorists routinely do, i.e,. they conflate FACT with value. The simple or not so simple fact is that the sexual drive attaches to both the self (narcissism), and to things out side the self, "objects," of all varieties, including plain objects like underwear (fetishism), or people like parents, siblings (incest-object) or peers, friends, elders, "men," "women," (normal love object). Psychoanalytics therefore wanted a term which distinguished SELF-love (narcissism) from OBJECT-love, the libido dirtected outside
the self. That's it. Feminists came along about 40 years later and blurred and screwed up these distinctions by injecting their politics into a scientific scheme for classifiying libido. Worse, they are dead wrong. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OBJECTIFICATION in the actual world, except strictly speaking, in the minds of psychotics who are unable to literally, perceptually, and emotively to distiguish things from people, although of course there are degrees as manifest in primitive man's animism; it is impossible for anyone to be a "sex-object" in the feminist sense of the term, because no matter what people say or do, the vast pre-conscious, and more vast unconscious invest every sex-act, and even every human contact with some amount of love, hate, or both,
and often combined with envy, contempt and other emotions. Whether or not people aware of their causes of action is irrelevant, in that the truth of the causes is in end what matters:
and feminists have rountinely shown their disregard for truth by their zany and even hate-ladden theories, which more resemble delusions of persecution than bona fide empirircal work. In the psychoanalytic sense, we all and at all times are "sex-objects," because some amount of libido infuses all human relations. But in the feminist sense, no, no-one is "just for sex only," even in the most callous one-night stand, because the unconscious is always at work: to paraphrase one reply:
no, you are not "just a vagina,"
but you may be a representation of a mother's vagina, and her breasts, and her bad temper, and there's not a fucking you can do about it, especially in advance.
You cannot police the unconscious
of yourself or that of a potential
lover. For this reason, all this feminist blatherskite over "sex-objectication" is only a moral outburst which resembles what many of the early christains like St. Paul did: condemn human nature, esp. individual psyches which abrade the sick moral vision of denying all pleasure, or, equating all sex-pleasure with evil like murder or rape, which is exactly what feminists like Andrea Dworkin do. It's also hilarious that these replies are also sexist in their assumption that only men perpetrate
anon. or casual sex: there are women who can only orgasm in no-strings attached sex, or have a colorful range of perversions---but fact isn't as important as mouthing morals to excuse inhibition and frigidity evidently.
Feminists would be better served to scrap all talk of sex-objects--since we all are voluntarily or otherwise sex-objects due to the sexual instinct---and to adopt and better develop the idea of sex-commodification and sex-commodity.
Of course even in the healthiest
society there will always be SOME commodification of sex because of the stark reality that the old will always want the young, the ugly will always want the beautiful, etc. To place condemnation on, say, an 70 year woman who wants to fuck a young hot stud one last time before dying and to pay him to do it is the type of life-negating morals that feminists usually traffic in.
But there is a significant "wrong" in the commodifcation of sex which teaches a whoredom ethic that sex should always be paid for, that it is always for sale, that it is used constantly for the fetishistic
sickness of selling items like cars, clothes, even hardware, and that these sellings and marketings of sex rely upon a libidinally frustrated, chronically under-sexed populace, that is, Americans. Sadly, feminism has done almost nothing to correct the commodification of sex. In fact, by preaching celibacy, and condemning sex generally, and by putting more conditions on sex than even the Catholic Church, American feminism has actaully worsened sex-commodification in this country. Anyone doubting this should have a look at feminists theorists in France and Germany who adopted as a goal to educate men how to better court, fuck, and bring women to orgasm.
Lesbians have also broken rank with traditonal feminists, and now produce their own porn, etc., because dykes simply got sick of the puritian paradigm of sex which most feminists still cling to; Candida Royal, Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle and others who have preached sex-automony and anything-goes female libido have been largely exile by NOW and other fem-politc-theorist groups.
It's all too bad. But for all you women who want to condemn Alice Bag for saying the very punk and revolutionary thing of "FUCK AND BE MERRY" you might actually consider what would be revolutionary? Becasue all I see in your statements is typical bourgeois-Judeo-Christian bullshit
merely in drag as "women's rights," which to free-spirted
and free-fucking women has to be the greatest insult and treachery of all.
Anyway, Happy Saturday night. bye.
I just want to comment on the mean spirited response of the pseudo intellectual, brown nosing thug who has somehow misunderstood the objection of some women to being judged and labled as bourgeois- Judeo- Christian- bullshit. What is worse are his assertations that we must be frigid, non-orgasmic, sex hating, bible thumpers because we do not echo his opinions of what a proper feminist is.
No where in any of the comments I read was any woman claiming to not enjoy sex or deny her sex drive. No one ever hinted at the notion that sex is dirty and men evil. We were merely commenting on the use of the term MILF. Some of us are comfortable with the term others have concerns about the external judgement it implies. Is there really a right or wrong way to look at the subject? And because some of us do not embrace the term does that make us prudes who do not enjoy sex and find men evil?
In a way this response speaks to the idea that women need to think and behave in a certain way to be credible, accepted. Isn't feminism about allowing women to decide for themselves how they want to live their lives, how they want to see the world, and allowing them the freedom to express and pursue these choices?
Yet here we are again being scolded and demeaned by the pontifications of an angry soul.
"brown nose?!"---Yep, I adore and admire Alice Bag: I would stick my tongue right up her ass. "pseudo intellectual"--Oh? What journals
are you published in? Also, check how many women are Philosophy majors at any major university in America. This I saw directly. "Sweet Pear"--incidentally, have the guts to use your real name--you don't know your own psyche very well: "men will fuck anything that lets them."
What does that say about your conception of men, if not contempt and hate? What does it say about your conception of sex? Don't pretend we are all so fucking naif as to believe this is a mere discussion about "labels." You make theory-ladden assumptions all through your quaint little post, and you aren't the only one. And please, male sexuality is "superficial"---what a fuckless joke: tell me of any woman in America that will even LOOK at a man under 5'6, even if he's a former facial model. Nor do I tell women--or men--how to "behave," but if they can't engorge or come, or if men can't get it up, Nature should tell them how to "behave"
because there are such things as
psychobiological facts. Grow up.
But you're right about one thing:
I am an angry soul. Golly, I wonder how that happened?
PS: 1.) As a matter of aphrodisian
etiquette, the clit should be rubbed during analingus, but of course that's just my opinion 2.) my poems, essays, and art are in over 30 journals from Prague to New York City; I was a Master's student in philosophy---don't you fuckin dare call me a "pseudo-intellectual," try reading Engels on sex-commodification, and a real female revolutionary, EMMA GOLDMAN. Now go back to your corporate job and packaged rebellion.
Um, nice topic. Im glad someones tawkin' about it. Cause you know what? I dont, and have never, found girls attractive. I like WOMEN. Theyre boring in the sack, and you cant talk to em. And our society does seem to focus on a male centered idea of what an attractive female is. Blonde, tan, bleached teeth, tiny upturned nose, and in many cases prepubescent looking. What with all the bald pussies in the mags and in pornos now? Is it so you can see the goods better? Or cause its prepubescent looking? Blek! Gimme a full figured woman with a nice round ass, and NOT BLONDE.
hey Jason, you arespseudointellectualfuckwad.
eat me.
kk
i like teenage frankensteins comment on the blonde tan bimbos with tiny upturned pig noses, how did that ever come to be the beauty ideal? i scratch my head with that one. i prefer a roman nose and interesting exotic looks maybe even a little fucked up looking. i don't mean to deviate from the subject matter, but i just had to throw that in.
We are all just animals. What's the big deal?
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