"I sold my first harness yesterday!"
K tells me, all excited, in a downtown Oakland restaurant where, I'm
sure, such words have never been uttered til then. As she's relating her
"firsts" --first vibrator, first dildo, first harness sold-- I think to
myself that I've never seen anybody get so excited about their retail
job, and wonder if the glow of selling sex toys will fade, in time. I
hope the businessmen at the table next to ours can hear, and then change
my mind -- I don't think they deserve the cheap thrill.
Jokingly, I ask her just what differentiates one harness from
another, and she launches into a lecture --still fresh in her mind--
given to her just the day before. Leather harnesses come with a lifetime
guarantee, some people prefer buckles over d-rings, some harnesses come
with different-sized rings for different-sized dildos, et cetera. I get
dizzy with the wide array of choices available on the market and my mind
starts wandering into theory, as it often does when not corralled, and
into theories of consumer capitalism and the utopian promises offered up
by the commodity and oh dear, should I be thinking these things while
Karyn explains the difference between silicone and rubber?
I remind her to let me know where the products she sells are
manufactured, again.
::
The other day I was browsing Good Vibrations in the City –I think
Mark and I were cracking on the "innocent" packaging of a "sport
massager" when I practically stumbled over their "African-American
History Month" display. On a low-standing table covered in kente cloth
sat propped-up porn videos featuring black performers, "black erotica"
novels and how-to guides (including Taschen’s Black Ladies
volume, the epitome of the "colonial gaze"), and a veined black rubber
dildo, complete with testicles, modeled on black porn star Sean
Williams’ penis.
Both vaguely disturbed, I grabbed Mark’s arm and we left. Out loud,
we might have said something about "niche" marketing, the mostly white
clientele in the store, or the further commodification of an already
token gesture (being "African-American History Month") by a
supposedly conscientious feminist collective. We might have said
something about how black struggles’ for civil rights was summarily
distilled into the freedom (if you’ve got the cash) to buy product.
But what had really unsettled me, what I left unspoken at the time
because I didn’t know how to articulate it, was this: for a split
second, looking at that display, my mind had conjured photographs and
descriptions of lynchings.
::
A few years ago I attended a forum organized by a group of
Korean/American feminists. Through a translator, a Korean woman
described her efforts to help other women escape U.S.
military-sanctioned prostitution or service (including employment at the
myriad of bars and clubs geared toward the U.S. troops), detailing
abuses by U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea, including rape,
kidnapping, mutilation, and brutal murder. One young woman, Yoon Geum
Yi, a bar waitress, was repeatedly beaten over the head with a Pepsi
bottle. Her murderer then inserted an umbrella into her anus, the Pepsi
bottle in her vagina, and a match between her teeth.
The guilty G.I., Kenneth Markle, got away with a slap on the risk for
her murder. (Most crimes committed by U.S. soldiers against Korean
civilians go unpunished.) It was, to say the very least, nerve-wracking.
And carefully outlined was the U.S. military’s neo-colonial role in
South Korea, ties to other outposts of American masculinist imperialism
(the Philippines, for another), and an analysis of that invasive
historical narrative.
During the Q&A session, then, a young white woman in the crowd, a
few rows back, stood up and asked, "Isn't her message damaging to the
sex-radical movement in the U.S.?"
The audience was stunned into silence. If I recall correctly, the
translator and the panel moderator refused to address the question.
The myopia is amazing.
::
Months later, the "African-American History Month" display at Good
Vibrations still nags. I wonder, out loud, what kind of historical
narrative is being consciously invoked and to myself, I wonder which
ones are repressed, those that inevitably haunt the "positive" space of
celebrated black (porn) sexuality and evoke its own structuring
absence.
See, at about the time I wandered into Good Vibes I'd also been
reading A Red Record by anti-lynching black activist Ida B. Wells
in a graduate seminar. A Red Record is simply that: a record of
lynchings so, it’s hoped, we never forget the breadth of racist violence
that laid the foundation for much of American ontology. Among the more
common features of lynchings is the genital mutilation and castration of
black men (and, it should be noted, black women).
And the recent trial that eventually convicted one of the white
supremacist men who brutally murdered black Texan James Byrd, Jr., was
simultaneously present, a reminder of a past that’s hardly past at all.
I remember listening to the reports from the courthouse that February; a
Pacifica reporter had described the damage done to Byrd’s body, seen in
autopsy photographs. Flesh torn from bone, the reporter also noted the
mutilation of his genitals.
It’s these things that flashed before me, standing in front of that
display, noting the prominent place of the black rubber dick.
How should I read this? I see ghosts as the violent historical
circumstances of maligned black (and in the dildo context, specifically
male) sexuality are seemingly disappeared here. Because this history of
violence is so integral to our collective psyches, I want to know
how it haunts, and who; if it signals a loaded racial fetish, a
bondage-and-domination fantasy with deep historical roots.
And I’m thinking of a sex column I read over a year ago in which a
white straight woman narrates her arousal watching Amistad,
visions of buff, black men in chains. She doesn’t understand why
her black boyfriend doesn’t want to enact those scenes and wants to know
how she might convince him.
Is sex always just about fucking? Does sex have a history? a memory?
For the white woman, it seems the violent legacy of slavery is best
dealt with by stripping it of its historicity, its material and psychic
realities of torture, suffering, and death. But as feminist theorist and
video-maker Laura Kipnis writes, "How long can the amnesia last? And
does it stay forgotten?"
And what if he wanted to do it, and who’s to decide what counts as
"authentic" sexual expression? The idea that we come to know and love
someone, including ourselves, through the lens of an inevitably produced
social identity – including one filtered through stereotype, the Black
Buck, for instance, or a dystopian historical tale—only disturbs because
it is, after all, a very real possibility.
::
"What a radical concept! Our own sexuality offers us liberation
here on earth, in our lifetime. Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican,
whether you’re an industrialist or on welfare, whether you’re a
struggling young artist or have vast holdings in South Africa, you too
can be liberated. Why bother to demonstrate, contribute to Amnesty
International, or try to change the system when you can now achieve
liberation in the privacy of your own bedroom?" –Laura Kipnis, "Ecstasy
Unlimited: The Interpenetration of Sex and Capital"
::
Flipping through the catalog K left with me, I start wondering, once
again, about the utopian promise of the commodity, the ideological guts
of consumer capitalism, and the glowing rhetoric of freedom and
individual self-determination that defines all ad copy – including that
for sex toys. The revolutionary premise of sexual liberation feels
short-sighted. What does it mean when political is an individual
enterprise that can happen entirely within the confines of the bedroom
(or whatever room you decide to deploy your toys) and the orgasm the
tool of emancipation? What exactly counts as "liberation," and what is
the vehicle for it?
What partially counts as subversion in this scenario is also a matter
of material privilege, niche marketing and complicity with the
problematic logic of transnational capitalist production. Those
battery-operated vibrators aren’t manufactured by other First World,
savvy urban (white) women. Turn the box over and there’s the "Made in
China" tag that potentially signals poor factory conditions and low
wages. In an age of globalization of "free trade," it’s the goods that
get to travel across national borders (in order to "liberate" First
World sex radicals), but not the workers (who might be a little queer
themselves). The sex-toy industry is also just that: a
multi-million dollar industry pulling down more than the GNP of not a
few "Third World" nations. We may be purchasing opportunities for
self-reinvention and sexual pleasure, but we are also hopelessly
complicit in –and appropriated by-- the commodity logic of
techno-culture.
And so I’m thinking of something Kipnis wrote: "Our sexuality is
produced in the form of a commodity; our fantasies are repackaged and
sold to us as products in porn stores; our desire has the grammar of
consumer capitalism, and those sexual forms will exist as long as those
social forms exist. The irony is in having us believe that our
'liberation' is in the balance."
I don’t have conclusions, only questions and frustrations. I’m a mess
of contradictions myself – a bi-queer Asian girl madly in love with a
straight white boy. I don’t deconstruct, I just bask in the glow. I want
to acknowledge complexity, that we are more than the sum of our parts –
which is why, I think, I don’t like the formulaic stuff.
Anti-porn arguments bore me. Such accounts get in bed with
right-wingers, infantilize women, condescend to sex workers, refuse to
critically consider porn as a social practice, and prescribe what gets
to count as "healthy" sexuality (usually vanilla, reproductive
heteronormativity). Yawn.
But sometimes, it’s true, as a critical theorist, pro-sex politics
also bore me. They sometimes (not always, sometimes) feel
limited, especially when what counts as politics is just about
fucking. And because I’m a cranky girl, I worry about the very real
potential for flattening all those uneven social relations and their
histories into a spread-around lack of mind-blowing sex. (If you doubt,
did you read the above?) If we meaningfully consider sex and sexuality
–especially in its regulation and criminalization—in a dialectic with
ideologies of race, gender, nation, capitalism, and material relations,
the rhetorical hard-sell of personalized liberation falls flat.
It’s Queer Pride weekend and I open up a local weekly and the Good
Vibes ad copy catches my eye: "Out of the streets, into the sheets." I
know it’s meant playfully, but it still itches badly. To paraphrase
critical theorist Lauren Berlant, the real fear in America is not that
we –queers, feminists, and others of our kind – will have sex in our
bedrooms, but that we will have politics in public.