Kanye, you Monster (or, does Mr West need psychotherapy?)

Kanye certainly has a penchant for unfortunate imagery (what with his constant twitter barrages and endless self-publicity, I think I can safely say the world is on a first-name basis with Mr. West).

And I love him for it.

It takes a true Byronic Hero to name an album “My Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy,” direct its first video, Run Away, singing “Let’s have a toast for the douche-bags! Let’s have a toast for the assholes!” and fill it to the brim with the kind of revealing, reflective and ridiculous imagery that plays Pavlov’s bell to thousands of drooling pop culture critics and arm-chair Freudians.

What’s that, Kanye? You want to fuck a bird? You’d like to keep a woman as a pet? You enjoy long walks in woods and learned helplessness? You ultimately acknowledge that your manic, self-centered, border-line-delusional behavior drives love away while simultaneously blaming your lover for not wanting to exist solely for singing out melodies of praise from your ego’s gilded bird cage?

Oh Kanye, you card. You are the height of too-muchery.

So imagine my delight and discomfort in learning that the best traditional rap track off of his new album had a brand new video. And imagine my wincing squeal win, having pressed play, the very first image I receive is women in high-heels hanging from the ceiling.

Merry Christmas, bored feminist bloggers, from Kanye West- sorry the gift came late.




Before we even begin this difficult discussion/dissection, I will allow that this video is the artistic vision of multiple sources. Moreover, I will admit that I am not of the school of thought that finds that every line, word, character and image speaks to a deeper truth about the artist his or herself. Myself a writer, I would hate to think that the behavior of my characters became a reflection of my inner demons and unspoken hatreds to critical readers.

That said, come on. Kanye BEGS for this kind of attention. A man with diamond studs surgically inserted into his teeth has a lot to say even when he’s saying nothing.

The key to watching a video like this is to watch it with the song off. Without the distraction of the lyrics or melody, you have the image in its purest form- and it’s a doosey.



The women we have here are highly sexualized. Ugly faces abound but, even when a woman in a wolf-monster or zombie, she’s still showing an awesome rack. Dead models lounge on couches, posed with the suggestion of necro-lesbianism (Rule 34); the aforementioned hanging women are all model-sized, leggy, high-heeled and in lingerie. This heady mix of violence and sex is juxtaposed with the glamour of the male rappers: Rick Ross, doning a Hefner robe and smoking a cigar; Jay Z in his trade-mark glasses, suited-up and swaggering; Kanye himself, open-shirted while the flesh-starved hands of (I presume) zombie fans claw his clothes off…. The men, the height of power. The women, more than submissive- corpses. Dolls to be played with, as Kanye shows in one scene.

An eagle-eyed observer would note that there are scenes with live women in this video. Saving Nicki Minaj’s self-flagellating sado-masochism (oh I went there), we begin with a pale male model-type bringing dragged, shirtless, across a floor- to be impaled by the living woman, with a heel.

The high-heel has a special place in the fetishistic circles. It is both an artifact of female sexuality and female submission. It is dominant while binding, something meant to pleasingly shape the female calve and add a few inches height even as it painfully cramps toes and alters one’s gait. In the modern world, only the corset can match it for schizoid sexuality.

So, on the one hand, there is a woman who is alive and killing, just as the men are presumed to be. The sexual power is in her hand (er, shoe). On the other hand, the murder is done with a phallic fetish object that seems to be aimed at the victim’s heart. Choose your own symbolic interpretation of that one, folks. And my (admittedly limited) experience with the sort of men who go to professional Dominatrix’s is that, even in submission they are a demanding lot. In the end, the woman is still very much an object.



Which brings us to my favorite verse, Nicki Minaj: the only female with a legitimately powerful (though, again, highly sexualized) role and who is she dominating? Another women. Not just another women, infact: she dominates herself.

Minaj is a bit of a mystery, in the hip hop world. A mix-tape diva, she was known for taking on multiple personalities on her verses and having a style that moved more towards diary than braggadocio. Many fans were disappointed by her debut album, Pink Friday, for being more mainstream than expected- the diary had given away to a younger, more energetic Lil Kim.

One could almost see this scene, made for a song that dropped before her album did, in those heady days when Minaj was the one to have guesting crazy verses on your rap albums, as an acknowledgement of her lessened personal presence in the making of Pink Friday. Here she beats the other side of her multiple personality, self-hurt in video-form, beating herself over selling out. This, on Monster, is the beast we expected and did not find much of on Pink Friday. Don’t worry, fans, she hates herself for it too.

Or I’m bullshitting. Either way, a woman on woman lap-dance is pretty hot. Perhaps Minaj could have been suited-up, ala Jay Z, interrogating a shirtless male model in a gimp mask? It’s another artistic choice but, ultimately, more teasing lesbianism- the most frequent and juvenile of male sexual fantasies- wins the day.

So, what are we left with? Women as objects, fetishized heart-breakers, wonderful background furniture or lesbian fantasy. Typical frightened teenage boy stuff.



Ouch.

It’s kind of hard to make a case for Yeezy on this one.
Erasing media portrayals of women and sexualized violence has long been the strongest column of the last feminist crusade. It’s hard to argue against domestic abuse, rising sexual assault rates and the blasé hilarity that is Snooki getting punched out in a bar.



When the criticism comes (and it will, oh lord it will), the question is how will Kanye respond? He can be wonderfully tongue-in-cheek (though one never really knows if it’s self-aware, self-delusion or self-loathing). A man who names his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy using cover-art of what looks like an African caricature drinking a beer while fucking a white harpy has to have a few aces up his sleeve. Perhaps this plays into his hand, as a pop culture creator and critic?
Perhaps the only woman who can truly understand Kanye West… is Lady GaGa (The Fame Monster and the Monster? Imagine the gossip columns!).

I’ll just wait for the fire-works here with my bag of pop-corn.

Here's the video:

Why Men Cheat. No, for real. I have all the answers.

I cheated.

Years ago, while in a loving and committed relationship, met another woman, we hit it off and in the electricity of the moment we were damn near fucking. Were it not for the intervention of a good friend, we would've had sex that night.

Didn't matter. Fuck the Clintonisms; it was still cheating.

Let me tell you, though, that I can say without any reservation that cheating was the best mistake of my life.

It seems the entire world is obsessed with cheating right now. The reasons are simple, of course. Jesse James, Tiger Woods, any given congressman, an episode of South Park and every cover of every women's magazine--- the entire world is obsessed because women are obsessed- and scared. If some other man cheated well, then, your man's gonna cheat.

So women want answers. As a cheater, I can very easily give those answers.

But first, a story.

The reasons behind my cheating may be rendered in complex terms: my ex and I were at a crossroads, an ebb in the flow of our relationship. She was suffering from a libido-killing depression, I was feeling tied down and unattended to and into this mix came my very own Manic Pixie Dream Girl... and movie magic happened. Or some approximation.

As far as I'm concerned, the why doesn't matter-- well, not until the end, that is....

It's what happened afterwards that's important.

I woke. I looked over, seeing the pantied and snoring form of my mistake. I went home. Not mine. Hers. I crept into my ex's apartment with her spare key and I wept. I cried as if some important person, my mother, my sister, my child, had died. I grieved.

I called my mother, weeping like a widow, bargaining with her and God to somehow make this not-alright thing, alright. And then, later, much later, I sat my girlfriend down and I told her.

And then... she told me. Yeah. She'd cheated too.

It was years ago, with someone who I used to joke about her cheating on me with.

She told me she was afraid. She told me she knew, the way I was, that I would leave her the minute she told me. Leave her and hate her for it. She was absolutely, 100% right. In hindsight, I approve her actions-- they showed she knew my character better than I did.

If I remember correctly, I laughed. And in those moments, I had an epiphany that has since changed my life: people cheat. You can't control them. You can't figure out reasons, you can't guilt or bribe them and you can't even love them into not-cheating. Some people cheat and some people don't and that's the universe, in a nut shell.

Let me tell you something I believe about human nature: we are all, each and every one of us, the protagonists of our very own living novels. Humanity, being what is it (a rational-seeming being in an largely chaotic, irrational set of circumstances), tries to make sense of the world through narrative. We tell ourselves stories, about the trees, about the rivers, about the Gods and about our own motives.

Ask yourself, after all, which comes first? The emotion or the action? The feeling or the processing of what that feeling is? Do you feel anger and then realize it is anger you felt? Do you feel love first, then call that feeling love?

We're all in a story, written by ourselves, starring ourselves and let me tell you, we are very, very unreliable narrators. Whatever our actions, most people, at core, believe they are good... or at keast just. Everyone believes there's a good reason for whatever it is their character is doing. Just ask a rapist-- that bitch always deserves it, doesn't she?

This may seem like a philosophical digression (and it is), but there's a point.

Would you like to know why men cheat? It's the same reason why women cheat.

Because it felt good at the time.

We'll call it sex addiction, we'll call it a moral lapse, we'll call it a drunken escapade; we'll blame our spouses for not loving us enough or loving us too much. We'll need space, we'll need attention, we'll need whatever but in the end those are just the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of an irrational chemical instance: we fuck because it feels good. We flirt because it feels good. We cheat... because it feels good.

Got your answer? Good. Now stop freaking the fuck out. You can't control other people any more than you can control the weather.

All you can do is all you can do and the rest? The rest is just someone else's story. Live on, writing your own.

Public/Sex.

I am in love with My Hot Mess (mostly safe for work, but don't scroll down past mid-point, one naughty picture), the blog that insists it's not a blog.

It's raw, honest, brutal-- its writer talks about ignoring douchebag's she'd never date (while happy to use them for cheap ice cream), about her interactions with celebrities and coworkers and, in it's most recent, about how she's used loved one's and grown as a human being.

Oh. And she fucks for the camera. She's porn star/director Penny Flame and she must be one of the most public personalities in all of creation.

Imagine: getting on camera to have sex, displaying the most societally-intimate acts (although in the gonzo style, which isn't terribly intimate), putting them on the screen then opening up the lap top to admit to coke habits and a fucked up break up.

I am fascinated by the phenomenon of the public personality- and most especially by the female public personality. In them, there is a measure of instant fame that comes from being on the power-end of a relationship with a lustful audience.

How else do you explain others, like Paris Hilton, like Kim Kardashian, or that Alysson chick Gawker is so obsessed with?

In a way, it's like the Dominatrix (fodder for another post, I assure you); her audience is already a sexual fandom, worshipful of her body-- but is that enough? Apparently not: now, they need her heart, her mind, her private self and her public pussy.

That's quite a bit of "self" to be selling.

Question is, which side of the Porn Star argument do you go by? The empowered woman, controlling and profiting from her own sexuality-- or the Sarah Silverman, a thousand penises can't fill the hole in your soul argument?



It's hard to say, vis a vis her porn, but I love, respect and wish more of her written work-- (I wasn't actually familiar with her porno work-- I'd stumbled onto her from the totally NSFW Fleshbot site (kind of a Jezebel for porn)-- as the level of honesty she displays, there, helps every jerk-off and chump save himself, from himself:

Its good to play dumb when you are breaking someone’s heart in front of their coworkers. Nothing worse than the shit talking that commences as soon as dream girl walks over your heart and out the door with a big ass extra special cheap acai bowl. So I play dumb and he accepts my ignorance and I walk out that door, bowl in hand. It was this final interaction that I make it clear we would not be going on a date. Fuck, I mean, and I hate to say it because it makes me sound like a shallow fucking bitch, but really?

I’m just not going to date the guy from Robek’s. And while his employment at said smoothie shop is a big factor in me not dating him, there are other reasons as well. Here are my reasons for not dating the guy at Robek’s.

1. He works at Robek’s. This should explain itself, from the apron and the visor to the minimum wage paycheck. I need a self made nucca, who is driven and going places.

2. He has roommates. He’s mentioned them, and I am not into that.

3. He is my height. Fucking shallow bitch.

4. I have a hard time respecting people that hook me up because I am a pretty bitch. If you know me, and we are friends, fine, but just random good looking strangers? Come on dude, paying $5.95 for a bowl instead of $6.95 is not a big deal, and it isn’t going to impress me.

5. He works at Robek’s.

She admits to being shallow about his job, shallow about his height and, most importantly, disrespectful of the fact that he's giving her a cheap hook up as a way to get into her pants.

Basically, she's telling men (her primary audience) the truth about women (or, at least, herself). And that, my friends, is very necessary.

I was at a bar the other day, sitting with a girl who was pining over a guy there-- a guy there with another woman, who wasn't even as attractive as she was, who still had no interest in her.

I tried to tell her the truth, the same truth that I'd tell any guy: he's not only not into you, you look like an idiot. But of course, she didn't listen-- why should she? I'm just a guy in a bar and her future husband is the only man for her, so what do I, some dude, know about male psychology that she doesn't?

She's probably going to very visibly take someone home one night, having been rejected (again) and hoping to make him jealous somehow (it won't). But who am I to tell her the truth?

Enter Penny Flame, sex object: In telling the hard truth to the public, in being honest about herself, she gives the lessons to an audience who might be more receptive, if only because it gives insight into how to get into her (fantasy) pants.

She's in a position, as pornographer, to affect her audience's cocks and their behaviors.

She's also in a position to just seem more human. Imagine that: jerk-off material, thought of as a living, breathing person.

She isn't just a pussy and a pair of tits. She works out at Bally, knows Murs, hangs in Vegas, used to have a coke habit, needs to knock off with the weed and sometimes directs videos of her and her costars sucking the very real cocks of pretend strangers. What's more, unlike the Lindsey Lohans of the world, her frailties aren't exposed by the media, but herself. She creates a product (and uses herself as such), then engages in a dialogue. And well written, at that.

I have to say, from the profession to personality, I have nothing but respect.

A Man's Making of Woman (or, What the HELL is wrong with Frank Miller?)

Friends, let me introduce you to a pencil necked geek:



Meet Frank Miller. You may know him from such hits as 300, Sin City or, if you're a real nerd, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

I know him as the cranky prick who has been humping the dead corpse of the noir genre for so long, there's isn't an orifice he's left unraped, the director of what looks to be the shittiest movie of the year and, of course, the poster boy for the Manly Man complex.

Frank Miller is obviously a punk. Look at him, in that 1986 photo above-- that's the face of a man who hangs out at arcades, goes to Goth clubs, rages against the jocks who kicked his ass in high school and, most importantly, calls every woman to reject him a whoring bitch and every woman to tolerate him a bitchy whore.

Think I'm pulling it out of my ass? Art tells us a lot about the artist so what can the working life of comicdom's crankiest creator tell us about himself?

Well, let's look at the Spirit, his first full directorial effort:




What do these clips tell us (besides the fact that Eva Mendes isn't even bothering to phone it in-- seriously, you'd have to WORK to act so badly)?

Once again, as he did in Sin City and as he's doing in All-Star Batman, Frank is showing his scared little inner boy. Every woman he creates is a prostitute, a whore, a victim or a monster. All women are Femme Fatales in the Millerverse: and if they aren't, they'd better be Donna Reed.

Miller is afraid of women.

And in Miller, we find the kind of man every man is, at core, afraid of becoming: bitter, angry and ultimately weak. He's a Manly Man, the cartoon of a strutting mouse-- the kind of man you can see ducking a bar fight and beating his wife when he gets home. Someone who wants to be powerful, but isn't. Mostly, he's afraid.

All men want to be powerful, but few fetishize power like the Manly Man- and that fetishization often has to do with a kind of fascistic lust for violence and an absolute Us and Them mentality. It isn't so surprising to find that the Them (you know, besides the gays and minorities, which Miller perfected in 300's giant bald RuPaul)-- can be women too. And why not? What could be more threatening than that which we desire but has the ability to reject us?

And so Miller's creation of women. The prostitutes of Sin City are fiercely protective of one another but, in the end, reflexive of his inner belief that there's always a trade in male-female relations-- the villainesses of The Spirit, always self-interested or even the Woman In Trouble he employed in the Hard Goodbye ultimately had a quid pro quo in the very base of the "love" story. This is Neo-noir with a kind of paleoconservative twist.

Frank Miller remembers an age that never existed and it seems he's obsessed with it: back in the 20s and 30s, I suppose, back when men were men and women were women. He lived through the 70s and 80s, through Second Wave feminism and its backlash and, for that, I have to have some sympathy for him-- Second Wave feminism must have been a hard time for a pencil-neck with a yen for the pulps.

But whatever it is that he wants, that his fantasy mind keeps calling back for, it isn't worth it. It doesn't make a better man, to think of women as either the Enemy or the Mysterious Other. It doesn't come off as strength, the thing that Miller, I think, ultimately wants.



It's okay, Frank: whoever she was, let it go. You're a famous director now! All the chicks dig directors. Ask Woody Allen.