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 Can't Men Play With Sex Dolls? (Or, Why isn't MY sex-toy empowering?)

Have you ever read or heard an account of a man going to a porno shop to buy himself his very first Fleshlight (NSFW)? Was it a powerful experience that left him flush with confidence? Did he walk out of that porno shop with a brown paper bag and the swagger of independence?

Not much a realistic narrative is it? Okay, try this one on for size: a mouth-breather in a heavy overcoat slouches into Babylon to a chorus of fake moans echoing from the jerk-off booths where a mustached man idles against his spunk-mop. Pit-stained and nervous, the man enters the shop, buys his Fleshlight, averting his eyes from the bored punk chick who takes his money as if it expects to be sticky, and slinks out of the store and into the night to watch ANAL ANNIHILATION 3: The Quickening in his dingy studio apartment.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Contrast with this:

The staff members who work at the store left me pulsating with a sense of sexual liberation, feeling that there was no shame in any interest or fetish that I might have locked away. The saleswoman lead me around Babeland describing different products, asking me if I liked anal stimulation as casually as an employee at Banana Republic would ask if I want a rewards card. With each object she offered, she gave an informative explanation coupled with an open understanding of the good it can bring into people’s lives. Having a bizarre-looking stick described to me as if it were a family photograph or beloved tchotchke transformed the process into something much more normal and inviting.

“If you treat something as your ugly toy, then you will think it is ugly and never want to use it,” she explained and I realized how true that was. Before coming into the store, part of me looked at toys and fetishes in a negative light, but I was so wrong. What started off as a trip to buy a vibrator turned into a realization that everyone has a different way of pleasing themselves and that knowing what mine is will only make my life better.

If only my masturbatory habits were so life affirming!

A funny thing happens when you try and talk about sex toys and men. Masturbation is an assumed habits but if you use something like a plastic poon-tang, you are an aberration-- a real man goes out and gets laid; you want sex toy, buy a Mustang.

A dildo is a form of independence from male dependence; a fleshlight is a loser's security blanket. What's worse if it you add the notorious Real Doll to the equation:

Just ask Salon:

For a cool $5,000, scrubs of all shapes and sizes can obtain unlimited access to all three orifices on a bootilicious bombshell fashioned from high-grade silicone flesh.

Sure, your local porn palace offers any number of disembodied vaginas sculpted after those of adult film vixens, and the plastic blow-up doll has been around for decades. And Abyss Creations has a number of competitors: Triple-X-Sextoys, for instance, offers a silicone love doll modeled after pornstress Chasey Lain for $259.

But Realdoll is the Cadillac of the club. With five anatomically correct body types; nine head styles, including a Japanese cutie named Mai; and a wide choice of characteristics including eye and hair colors as well as breast size, the company has gone a long way toward fulfilling the promise of that prescient 1975 flick, "The Stepford Wives." You know, the one where a cabal of yupper-crust executives take over a Connecticut town and replace their wives with oversexed androids who dig housework.

Well damn.... buy a dildo and it's rainbows, lolly-pops and You-Go-Girls rolled up in plastic phallic form; buy a Real Doll, it's a patriarchal conspiracy.

Continued:

Crikey, what have we come to? After all, $5,000 can buy a lot of trips to the local brothel for sex with an actual woman, not a lifeless puppet. Apparently some guys would rather own a trailer than rent a penthouse.

Hear that, ladies? Why buy a ninety dollar vibrator when you can go out, get drunk and fuck a random dude in your local dive bar? Ahem. Excuse me: I mean, fellas, why buy a sex toy when you can fuck a hooker? Ladies? Carry on.

Well, screw the biased (and male) writer of this article-- Where's The Pants is about the feminist/masculine conversation; what does a feminist scholar have to say about this?

"Obviously, I don't think it'll make women obsolete," says M.C. Sungaila, an attorney and writer in Southern California specializing in feminist issues. "But reducing a woman to an inanimate object in order to relate to her in the most intimate way is kind of disturbing."

Sungaila grants that individuals have the right to pursue their own fantasy lives but objects to Realdolls' larger message.

"Knowing that it's out there and that somebody thought this was a good idea -- to make money off the complete objectification of women -- is discomforting to say the least," comments Sungaila.

You'd think Sungaila never Jilled-off with a Feeldoe (and I find myself wondering whether, if she did, was it to Martin Luther King speeches and Betty Friedan Audiobooks?).

I believe we've moved on from the antiqued image of the 70s, second-wave feminist and the "All Sex Is Rape" strawman, but there is a lingering cultural threat from male sexuality-- specifically, male masturbatory habits.

In the use of porn, we reduce women to objects- we dehumanize; in the use of sex dolls, we only seek to perfect the patriarchal project, with perfectly submissive, perfectly docile sex holes in vaguely feminine shapes.

We shoulder the guilt of the long-standing stereotype that man is a beast with a penis and woman is a complex work of art: remove the penis from a man, you have safe sexuality; remove the personality from a female, you get pale imitation.

I don't solely blame the old-thinking feminists for this perception: no, I blame the lingering sexist attitudes of men for most of the issue.

Women are the competition and the prize. A woman's value is in her vagina and a male's virility is in how much value he's accrued in the plunder of said vaginas. If a male uses bought and paid for, toy vaginas... well, the question becomes, is he a real man? It is aacceptable for a man to remove himself from the competition for sex?

Ask most men and the answer is no: refusing the compete is to admit failure. The very definition of "Loser."

I recognize that I come at this from a male perspective: if you ask a woman about her objection to the idea of realistic sex dolls (as I've gathered from the comments sections of these various articles), the question then becomes one of relationships.

Can a man who has invested his sexuality in a silicon girl with a fixed smile ever be emotionally rehabilitated? And if one has voluntary chosen to "love a synthetic human", are they mentally disturbed and in need of psychiatric help?

The (full) documentary, Guys And Dolls, delves into the lives of men who have used these toys to varying degrees and purposes: we have Davecat who considers himself on the forefront of a new kind of sexuality, "Organiks" loving "Synthetiks"; we have Everette, the photographer who has found his perfect subjects; Gordon, the liver-faced, angry misogynist loser we've come to expect. And then we have Michael, who uses his 6 Real Dolls the way a woman would use a variety of vibrators and sex-toys-- something to hold him over until he finds himself a real, flesh and blood woman.

Michael finds his woman, Jody, someone he openly talks about on camera as "the one." She knows he has a secret and it bothers her that he won't share. So he shows her his doll collection. On his birthday.

She leaves him a week later. So much for honesty....

Two of these men are simply lonely; one has a fetish; the last is someone you wouldn't want in the gene-pool anyway.

What's wrong with these men? They're human.

They have problems. They have idiosyncrasies. They don't fit in very well. Or they're just plain disgusting. And most well-adjusted women wouldn't give them the time of day.

To quote Everette, "There are worse things in life than living with dolls, really. Like living alone."

So why shouldn't disgusting people be happy too? Is it so wrong to be QuirkyAlone?

It all comes back to a piece of M.C. Sanguila's quote: "individuals have the right to pursue their own fantasy lives," full-stop.

Part of sexuality is objectification: it is breasts and abs and detachable penises.

Part of modernity is isolation: the disintegration of traditional communal ties, the re-ordering of society along more niche, individualist lines.

Industrial societies are becoming more physically alone, while increasing their interactions through objects. Flirting through texts, selecting dates from the content of their essays, falling in love through font.

That is modernity. Get used to it.

So if a girl can name her dildo Long John Silver and still find herself, if she so chooses, a mate-- why can't John screw his Real Doll until the right Jane comes along? Or not?

Why can't men play with dolls?

Week 4.

I haven't been updating on the weekly schedule I expected to because a funny thing happened in week 2-- all the changes went away.

I no longer have strange, strong dreams.

I still am not easily aroused.

I am no more aggressive than I was a month ago.

While I severely desire to end this fast already, I'm determined to stick it out through the 20th-- at this point, it has become less an experiment than an exercise in will power.

What we may learn, here, is that while the body may hormonally jerk about from temporary conditions, it will find a way back to its balance.

Week one: complete.

Perhaps it's that I've been biking nearly 20 miles most days of the week or the fact that I haven't orgasmed for the same amount of time, but I've been having the most vivid, memorable dreams: and not all of them are sexual.

Mind you, most ARE in some way involving the opposite sex or the female form, with only a few blatantly pornographic (indeed, one dream was neither-- I was a wolf, hunting someone-- yet I still woke up unusually aroused), but the only consistency is that they are there, every night and morning, at the very tip of my thoughts when I wake up and often lingering after.

Thus, my first week of the sex-fast has been one filled with fantasy.

The interesting thing about this little experiment is that while, yes, I get very stiffly aroused and, yes, I give second and third looks to every and any woman with a wisp of flesh showing (thank god for Lakeshore jogging paths), I also found that, after the first few days, I'm not easily aroused. The first day? Drop of a hat-- second, third, a stray thought could get me going.

But then around the fifth I found that I'm not as constantly hard as one would assume, considering a pop culture that SCREAMS that men are horny beasts-- especially without any manual relief.

The truth, it seems, lies in the middle-- I think I've moved a bit passed the physical and into the psychological. I'm not hard at the drop of a hat but my mind is still pretty preoccupied.

Are these clues to the supposed "sexual energy" some gurus of abstinence are so adamant about? I'm a believer in energy, in the non-spiritual sense: I believe we pass on subtle behavioral cues that influence group behaviors, whether you realize it or not. So, perhaps, there is a sexual energy but it is only the build-up of hormonal tensions then expressed in interpersonal interactions.

In the mean time, I find myself more focused on the physical, again: daily, I find myself distracted by the desire to do push-ups, pull ups or get a ride in.

Mind you, that may be tied to hormones crying out for relief: the "Look good, drop fat, get chicks" model.

Indeed, I've actually thought more about dating, more than I have in some months. I idly peruse OKCupid. I listlessly click pretty faces. I passively hunt, late into the night. Still, for now, it's only looking.

I'm curious to see if this is going to make me more aggressive in my interactions with women I don't know: aggression being something that only manifests itself in me when I've been drinking.

The only thing I'm sure about, in this little experiment, is that it is very, very hard to complete-- no pun intended.

This is going to be one long, hard month.

No pun intended.

The Sex Fast. Week 1

It occurred to me the other day that I had stopped enjoying sex.

Not to say sex wasn't enjoyable-- it was, as far as it goes. What I noticed was that, enjoyable as it was, I was less and less there as it was happening.

There I'd be, in bed with some wonderful girl or another, and my mind would be elsewhere-- the passion, the fire, would be elsewhere. For a while, the only thing that really worked for booze: properly drunk, I would bowl a girl over like a far-sighted caveman, drooling and slobbering until I got my last "grunt."

Not my best performances, I'm sure.

Truth was, and is, I had been in a sexual funk-- no interest in hunting Big Game and, if a deer happen to stray into the line of my phallic metaphor, no real interest in pulling the trigger either.

Worse yet, I didn't even want it alone. Every orgasm was a limp cough, a fleeting spark without a fire. The worst time to be disappointed in yourself is when your masturbating.

So I got an idea. And by "got," I mean stole.

Some guy had posted in a forum about how he had gone without an orgasm for an entire month-- no sex (he was married, so it wasn't hard-- har har), no masturbation, no nothing.

Eureka.

Since yesterday, August 19th, I have gone without touching myself and will do so for 30 days.

And you, lucky readers, will be along for the ride.

Like smoking, I hear the first week is the hardest (har har): so, a week from now, I'll report again on how my thing fares.

As for right now, I don't feel any different. No blue balls, no leering at high schoolers, no morning wood. But, my friends, we shall see.

If I don't report back by the end of the 30 days, assume I've gone on a killing spree.

(by the way, how is this about masculinity or feminism? Seriously, a 30 day fast from sex? What better way to find out what a man truly is... when he's not trying to get laid.)

Victims of Rape.

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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.