Sex Geek

No, I can’t make your penis longer or your boobs bigger. I can’t solve your financial woes or make that hottie fall in love with you. I can’t resolve your issues with your parents or make you stronger, younger or smarter.

But goddammit, I can move this blog to a better site! Yes indeed, you read that right: I’m ditching this here piece o’ crap Friendster blog and climbing on board with WordPress. Wheee! Now you can comment without having to register a bloody profile and deal with Friendster’s many (many MANY) bugs and overly enthusiastic spam filters and so forth. Am I stoked? Hmmm. Can ya tell?

Happily, WordPress will also tell me how many people come and read my stuff, so I’ll perhaps finally be able to figure out if I’m rambling by my lonesome or reaching interested parties.

So… (putting on my best naughty Mae West voice)… why don’t you come up and see me sometime? http://sexgeek.wordpress.com/

I haven’t really studied the Kama Sutra in any way, but one of these days I’ll get around to it. There’s a person in Toronto who gives workshops on the topic - maybe one of these days they’ll line up with my travels and I’ll get the benefit of their expertise. Or maybe I’ll read the whole bloody thing online for free - how wild is this?!

In the meantime, I’m going to continue enjoying the extremely explicit Kama Sutra chocolate that my friend A occasionally brings me. I’ve meant to post pics of it for a long time now, but I finally got around to taking a few shots of the most recent batch just this weekend. Here it is, for your viewing pleasure.

The chocolate itself is nice and all, though perhaps not as dark, decadent and cocoa-y as I usually prefer. But really, when your chocolate depicts a very elegant blow job or an acrobatic multiple-partner sex act… really, who’s in it for the flavour?

I just found out the top 10 reasons why geeks make better lovers, and I simply had to share. Unfortunately for me, they are talking about the classic geek rather than the less traditional versions such as myself, but I know enough classics (some of them biblically) that I figured it was worth posting this despite the glaring omission. In any case, you hafta admit, it’s pretty awesome when your honey can provide multiple orgasms and fix your computer and have an intellectual debate on the relative merits of (insert odd topic here) all in the same afternoon. Even if they do sometimes have terrible fashion sense.

Tonight I attended a concert given by Viva Voce, a professional vocal ensemble in which my good friend D sings soprano. They’re classical singers, which usually means music written and composed by dead white guys, and audiences who are close to being the same. OK, so that’s not quite accurate, but let’s just say it’s a very Westmount crowd and I’m usually the only person in the room with more than one hole per ear.

Needless to say, I did not expect the evening’s entertainment to include sexual references, let alone explicit ones explained by Peter Schubert, the choir director, before the song in question.

I don’t know if I can quite do it justice here, but I’ll try. The concert theme was "The Art of the Fugue," so fugues were the main feature of the program. Please don’t ask me to explain the technical details accurately; Encarta defines it as "a musical form in which a theme is first stated, then repeated and varied with accompanying contrapuntal lines." In other words, "Frère Jacques" on crack.

In one particular song, which Peter told us was a drinking song (?!) written in 1798 (definitely a cut above "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"!), the lyrics and music, especially the pauses, were arranged in such a fashion that at certain points, various words from different lines combined to create the sentence "drink to her commodity." Which might not seem particularly scandalous until you learn, as I did, that commodity, according to the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, is defined as "the private parts of a modest woman, and the public parts of a prostitute."

Here are the full lyrics, kindly provided in the program:

"Juliet is pretty, she has charms to boast. Come fill a bumper, let her be the toast. Juliet is witty, and well deserves a glass; fill, fill and drink to her, she’s a lovely lass. Her sister’s rather younger and lately got a spouse, altho’ she is an oddity, as ev’rybody knows."

That’s it. Now just picture the words in bold sung in just the right order by three different voices, and you get what’s going on.

There you have it, folks. Montreal’s renowned professional vocal ensemble can now be credited for educating me about pervy 200-year-old drinking songs and giving me one more synonym for "cunt" to add to my list.

‘Twas a scandalous night indeed. Needless to say I put my name in for the draw for 2007-2008 season tickets. You never know when you’ll come across a gem like that. And they sing good, too.

Just a little P.S. to yesterday… apparently New York City’s Pride is having a permit problem with the city administration, and the organizing committee met just a couple of days ago to figure out whether or not they should cancel the whole thing. Their website doesn’t say anything about the decision resulting from that meeting, but knowing they’re at the point of potentially cancelling Pride… yowza. I mean, I referenced Stonewall in yesterday’s post, but for chrissakes, we’re not even in the same country - whereas New York is the very city where the Stonewall riots happened in the first place. And they might have to cancel Pride?! This is nuts.

As Wikipedia so kindly explains: "The forces that were simmering before the riots were now no longer beneath the surface. The community created by the homophile organizations of the previous two decades had created the perfect environment for the creation of the Gay Liberation Movement. By the end of July the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed in New York and by the end of the year the GLF could be seen in cities and universities around the country. (…) The following year, in commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, the GLF organized a march from Greenwich Village to Central Park. Between 5,000 and 10,000 men and women attended the march. Many gay pride celebrations choose the month of June to hold their parades and events to celebrate “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World" (D’Emilio 232)."

So there you have it, folks. The original Pride, 1970-2007. RIP. Well, OK, I’m crossing my fingers it won’t come to that, but it’s a rather funereal thought nonetheless.

Good thing it’s so damn sunny and warm out, or I might just cry.

Things I learned today:

- Not every Raelian looks like a sex-crazed nudist hippie on ecstasy. Sometimes they look like middle-aged businesswomen wearing skirt suits, except for the telltale flower/saw wheel pendant. Not that this makes them any less freaky. I do appreciate the baseline acceptance of sexual diversity that the Raelians support, but that’s about where it ends. Yes, there are limits to my open-mindedness.

- There will be no Pride parade this year in Montreal, and no community day. I’m serious; I just got a copy of a press release, which is not posted on the Fierté LGB2T website but which I have included in full at the bottom of this post. The backstory is that a few months ago, Divers/Cité (Montreal’s Pride week organization) decided to operate exclusively as a cultural festival, with no parade and no community day. A separate group of people decided to organize the parade and community day, and they took on the name Fierté LGB2T. Doubtless there’s a ton of politics behind all that, but I’m not in the loop and I don’t really care to be.

Now, Fierté LGB2T has sent out a press release announcing, more or less, that it’s too complicated to fulfill their mission, so they’re dropping it. So there you have it. We’re still going to have a week of performances and parties in early August (1-5 this year, specifically) thanks to Divers/Cité, but there will no longer be a day showcasing community organizations, and there will no longer be a Pride parade.

It amazes me to think that Pride events all over the world began as a direct offshoot of the Stonewall riots, which are one of the most famous incidences of protest and social visibility the gay world (in North America at least) has ever experienced, and now Stonewall’s grandchildren - less than 40 years later - are starting to become nothing more than an excuse to pay a bunch of big stars big money to entertain us on an outdoor stage, leaving the community itself - and the visibility the parade affords us - completely by the wayside. It’s kinda mind-boggling. I wonder what the state of things will be ten years from now.

On the up side, this means we won’t have to suffer through one of the Raelians’ clichéd, shock-value-oriented, oversexed (yes, you read right!) - and over-the-top parade contingents this year. Small miracles.

- Not only will there be no Pride and no Community Day, there will also be no Boudoir this year. Check Miriam’s site (under "Events") if you don’t believe me. Really - is this city’s entire roster of mass community-based queer summer celebrations going belly-up in the same year? Frankly, I’m appalled!

Let me make it clear that Miriam is one of the most hardworking and devoted people I know when it comes to creating places for underground queer culture to flourish; in no way am I intimating that she’s doing something wrong. I’m sure she has really strong reasons for a 2007 hiatus, and particularly if those reasons include her just wanting to take a bloody break after investing countless hours of effort into Montreal’s les/bi/queer world over almost 15 years, I am totally behind her. But that won’t stop me from being completely heartbroken that Boudoir is gone for this summer. That and Image+Nation are the highlights of my queer year. (Have no fear, I+N is hitting their 20th anniversary this year, and they don’t seem like they’re going anywhere, thank goodness.)

- The website doesn’t seem to be listing the date, but I have it on good authority that the next Pussy Palace, the Toronto women’s bathhouse, will be taking place on Thursday, June 14. Whee! Guess where I’ll be that night? Drowning my Montreal Sapphic sorrows in Toronto dyke debauchery, that’s where.

- Infantilism and other forms of age play are totally not my kinks, but I am fascinated to learn that Montreal has its very own adult-baby nursery. ABDL stands for Adult Baby / Diaper Lover. Hey, whatever floats your boat!

- Queer theory can make me cry. All right, it’s not quite that simple. More specifically, today I was reading a huge rant written in 1983 by Larry Kramer, AIDS activist extraordinaire (with a lasting reputation for being a panic-starter, though he has certainly been proven right many times over), and it had enough emotional power behind it to make me quite literally choke up and spill over in a metro station. Thank goodness for poor lighting and sunglasses, or I might have made a few people wonder what the heck was wrong with me. I have Larry’s novel, Faggots, but I haven’t yet read it; something tells me it should be on the list real soon. Anyway, his essay - a story published in 1983 in The Native, which I gather is (was?) a small New York City-based paper - was reprinted in one of the books I’m currently devouring, entitled simply Queer Theory, edited by Iain Morland and Annabelle Willox. The rage and terror that come through in Larry’s writing is really hard to ignore, and for some reason - though I have known more people with cancer than with HIV, and have certainly experienced a number of cancer-related deaths among my family and friends - rants about HIV and AIDS hit a particular spot inside me that just makes me come apart way faster than anything else.

- To end on a high note, it was confirmed todaythat I’ll be hosting Dykes on Mikes, CKUT 90.3 FM, twice this month since the regular hosts are both gone. Tune in on Monday, May 14 at 7 p.m. when I’ll be talking to Nada Raphael, who recently released D’ici et d’ailleurs, a documentary about lesbians and bi women of colour in Montreal, and Nairne Holtz, a Montreal lesbian writer who just launched her first novel, The Skin Beneath. Then, bookmark May 28 for another show - we’re working on the guests right now so I can’t announce them, but if the people we want come through, that too will be a kick-ass show.

That’s it, end of the night’s pithy observations. Time for bed now.

***

Célébration de la Fierté LGB2T de Montréal est dans l’impossibilité
d’organiser les festivités de la fierté LGBT de Montréal

Montréal, 7 mai 2007 – Célébration de la Fierté LGB2T de Montréal, l’organisme mis en place par Divers/Cité afin d’organiser les festivités de la fierté LGBT à Montréal (Défilé et journée communautaire) et ainsi créer un second événement LGBT d’envergure à Montréal, constate, après un processus de consultation auprès des groupes communautaires, la difficulté de mener ce projet à terme. Les groupes communautaires consultés ont exprimé le besoin d’être écoutés et entendus par ceux qui auront comme tâche d’organiser ces événements rassembleurs. Comme acteurs du défilé et de la Journée communautaire, les groupes ont exprimé le besoin d’être représentés au sein de l’organisme qui va organiser ces activités.

De plus, il s’avère très difficile de réserver des dates propres à l’événement dans le calendrier estival de l’arrondissement Ville-Marie tout en parvenant à un consensus auprès des groupes présents aux réunions de consultation. Vu la situation, le présent Conseil d’administration de l’organisme Célébration de la Fierté LGB2T de Montréal termine ses activités et souhaite de tout coeur que le défilé de la fierté LGBT de Montréal et la journée communautaire puissent revenir et connaître autant de succès que ces 14 dernières années, lorsqu’il était organisé par Divers/Cité.

– 30 –

Source : Célébration de la fierté LGB2T de Montréal
(514) 795-3597

Wow, I’ve been remiss in blogging lately. That will change; there has been lots going on that’s blog-worthy, so doubtless I’ll manage to find a few moments to write about it all soon enough. In the meantime, please be amused by this video. Well, not amused exactly - more like intrigued.

Basically, the filmmaker interviewed 11 "older" people - it’s not quite clear exactly what range qualifies as "older," but whatever - about their experience of sexuality and relationships. Even in this little 13-minute version, it’s pretty darn diverse and really quite engaging. She’s got people of various ethnic backgrounds (though it’s mostly white), men and women in more or less equal measure, a person with a disability, a person who had/has (it’s not clear) an open relationship with her husband, a bi man, and other interesting variations. It’s not a simple mainstream portrayal of standard heterosexuality, but neither is it sensational or preachy. Of course there’s a noticeable lack of lesbian sexuality and sadomasochism, but it’s still worth a look-see. The best part: nobody talks as though they were ashamed of being who they are. How lovely!

Anger unspoken becomes pain, expressed becomes rage, released becomes violence

- Snap! spoken word piece in Tongues Untied

***

Not too long ago, Queer McGill screened a film as part of their more-or-less-monthly Divergence Movie Night, entitled Tongues Untied. It’s a sort of hybrid documentary/art film shot in 1986, and it addresses the realities of racism and homophobia faced by black gay men in New York City around that time period. A lot of the film is made up of well-filmed performance art pieces by the group Snap!, and possibly others - the credits went by pretty fast so I didn’t get all the specifics.

The film was remarkably effective - probably one of the better examples I can think of that conveys a really strong message through performance and images rather than in a didactic style that relies on statistics or argumentation. I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest, but the film really went deep for me, and I can still feel it hovering at the edges of my mind sometimes when I look at things going on in the world around me.

The two parts of the film that struck me the most are, in a way, polar opposites of each other: one showing how racism and homophobia, both from the world at large and the internalized sort, serve to isolate black gay men from each other, and the second showing the richness of the community that black gay men created for themselves in the 80s. Of course that lack of homogeneity makes sense; both of these things were (are) true, and their juxtaposition in the film is incredibly effective at conveying the multiplicity of realities within the spectrum of struggle.

The first, a particularly hard-hitting piece, involves a montage of phrases coming out of mouths filmed in extreme close-up, and repeated at different speeds and in different combinations, interspersed with a more linear narrative spoken by a single artist we see mostly from the torso up. Black men’s mouths say the words "punk," "homo" and "faggot" and white men’s mouths say "motherfuckin’ coon" and "niggers go home." The artist in turn speaks in sentences ranging from poetic to conversational - about his childhood, his understandings of himself as gay, his experiences with lovers. "Cornered by an identity I never wanted to claim, I ran fast deep inside myself where it was calm, silent, safe. Deception." He talks about the way that black men often won’t acknowledge other black men within the larger gay community, saying that it can be difficult "admitting we are worth loving each other."

In the second piece, I was really impressed by the way these men claimed femininity as their territory. This is particularly evident in the scenes of black men voguing on the streets in a performance structure that looks, to me at least, a lot like what I see breakers do today - the taking-turns style of competition without points or rules, with the aim of the game being to impress the audience and get applause and cheers for good moves before stepping aside to let the next artist in for a shot. (Hah! And whaddaya know… Wikipedia tells me that "Some dance historians even point out that breakdance and vogue evolved together in a state of mutual borrowing, with artists from both sides interacting with each other in New York City’s Central Park, West Side Piers, Harlem, and Washington Square Park during the 70s and early 80s." Neato. I had no idea.) They aren’t just striking interesting twisted-up poses; they are performing deft, rhythmic, spot-on mime-like imitations of "women’s" motions, such as putting on make-up, preening in the mirror, fixing hair, walking on a runway. Slick women’s high-fashion culture appropriated and given new meaning by black gay men on the street - if there ever were a way to de-naturalize conventionally commercialized femininity, this certainly is it.

I already knew that Madonna had stolen her vogue moves from black gay men, but I’d never seen the real thing being done by those men themselves - unless you count her backup dancers. But somehow the context makes all the difference. A slick auditorium stage or music video featuring the snowy-white Queen of Pop front and centre - uncomplicatedly embodying the very things the dance is intended to parody and question - simply doesn’t convey the same message as a New York City street corner used as a makeshift stage by the denizens of a very specific subculture.

The cultural process is fascinating. Without even daring to attempt an explanation of the processes of appropriation that create high fashion in the first place, it’s still mind-boggling to think of the high-end production of packaged femininity co-opted by street-level black gay dancers to express their own femininity while making a rather barbed statement about queerness and race… and that statement being in turn co-opted by a white pop star, removing its irony (though perhaps adding its own, however unconciously), putting it in a music video with a hit song that popularizes the dance - or a shoddy imitation thereof - among straight, white suburban teenagers all over the world, who pay big money to watch the star imitate the moves that imitated the moves that… wow.

All in all, I think the film’s strength lies in its ability to convey, on an emotional level, the magnitude of the oppression these men faced, and then to follow it up with images of their creativity and power. And here lies the message I walked away with… There’s something about these men daring to produce creative work and beauty amid the kind of violence, racism and anger that characterized their lives, that’s just an incredible show of strength. It’s more than simply surviving; it’s putting joy out into a world that’s determined to impose hatred and misery, that’s trying to tell people it’s not OK for them even to exist. To react to that kind of experience with an outpouring of beauty - not for the benefit or entertainment of the oppressors, but for the building and sustaining and nourishment of their own very rich culture and community - is an amazing and awe-inspiring act of resistance.

Prior to seeing Tongues Untied, I always had an academic understanding of cultural production as political resistance, but somehow I see it differently now, having watched it play out in this intensified way within a really specific microcosm. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, perhaps a film is worth a thousand books? (Which is saying something, coming from me…)

With that in mind, to segue smoothly into current events, I’m really looking forward to this coming Saturday, when the In/Visible Identities day is taking place - the third annual GLBT Ethnocultural Day, which features a full day of speakers layered on top of a full day of - you guessed it - films. Yay! You can check out my Mirror article on the Ethnocultural Day here, but one way or the other, I encourage you to just show up. I’m thoroughly impressed by their programming this year, and for films in particular, Nada tells me they really focused on bringing in hard-to-find works by independent filmmakers - the kind of thing you just won’t find elsewhere. Who knows… maybe there will be another gem like Tongues Untied, and this time, I won’t be seeing it 20 years after it was made!

I always know I’m on a roll with my reading when I’ve got so many books on the go that I forget to review them. Case in point: I read Sarah Waters’ latest, The Night Watch, for the Queer Ladies’ Reading Society meeting of two months ago, and it’s still sitting on my desk waiting for me to write about it. So here we go.

My general feeling about Sarah Waters is that she’s got a damned fine pen, and a really rich and unique way of writing about what kind of adventures a lesbian might have gotten up to in the distant past - her first three novels were set in the late 1800s - in ways that feel realistic rather than idealistic, and yet no less delicious for it.

That being said, nothing so far has quite topped Tipping the Velvet - her famous début, a complex lesbian love story set in the world of 1880s cabaret variety shows, and later made into a very successful three-part TV movie. It’s full of glamour… the stage, the debauchery, the villainy, the heroism, the cross-dressing, the despair, the quaint references to cunnilingus. It is a masterpiece.

Her second, Affinity, set in the 1860s, dealt with spiritualism and other sorts of trickery, and pulled off a plot twist worthy of M. Night "I see dead people" Shyamalan, but it didn’t quite grab me by the innards the way the first one did despite its lesbianful plot and equally skilled writing.

Her third, Fingersmith, is set in part in a madhouse with the attendant lesbian tropes of the female warden and the wrongly imprisoned young girl, among others. This one climbed a few notches higher than Affinity (in my humble opinion) but didn’t make my readerly heart soar to the heights of Tipping.

The Night Watch, now… well, it’s very different from the first three in a number of ways. First, Sarah has parted (with such sweet sorrow?) from her lengthy love affair with the Victorian era and leapt forward into the 1940s, setting the book during wartime  London. Rather than imagining what lesbian lives might have looked like, this one gives some fairly realistic descriptions (thanks to her extensive research) of what they probably really were like - among other things, one of the main characters is an ambulance driver, the kind of position that our queer sisters of yesteryear very much did gravitate towards (even in WWI, for that matter - witness Stephen’s crowd of army gals in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness). So the whole story has lost the mystical, romantic flavour of her first three while gaining a certain not-quite-familiarity, or perhaps resonant believability that, despite its certain status as fiction, feels less like fantasy and more like history. Yum.

That’s not the only difference. Instead of focusing 90% of the narrative on lesbians, she gives a little more plot space to others as well, entering into the trials of a few straight folks and even touching on male same-sex desire (in prison, no less). This gives the story a greater range than her past work, in some ways, setting up lesbian lives within their necessary and fully fleshed-out co-existence with non-lesbians rather than letting all of them fade into the background. It’s also intriguing to see her tackle a few sex scenes that don’t take place between girls - not because they’re particularly titillating, but because she doesn’t come at it with distaste or discomfort, just realism. Good job!

She’s also tried out a new narrative structure - the book starts in 1947 and moves back to 1944 to then conclude in 1941. It’s an odd tack to take, and all the more so for its failure to produce a staggering plot twist. There is no satisfyingly ta-daaa finish here, as I figured that out about halfway through. Certainly, various mysteries of the characters’ interconnectedness are elucidated as the book moves forward (backward?) but there’s no moment of Truth, simply a number of small revelations.

That being said - at that fateful halfway mark when I realized I might well have figured out the bulk of the plot mysteries already - I started to simply enjoy the story for what it is. Rather than looking for a Big Magical Moment, I just absorbed the flavour of the times, and let myself settle into the melancholy, the confusion, and the aching joy of love between women - between people in general, really - in, and after, a time of war. Read with this mindset, the book became enormously compelling, an opportunity to soak in the flavour of history through a tale that’s pleasantly queered, unlike most stories of the time.

I definitely give this latest oeuvre a thumbs-up. It still hasn’t earned itself a place higher than Tipping in my personal rankings, but it’s a notch higher than the last two. Really, it’s a luscious read.

Why, oh why, do I end up being the staunch defender of porn? I don’t even like the stuff most of the time. And yet here I am, like an insistent mosquito in your ear, saying once again that naked people fucking on camera is not inherently a microcosm of every bad thing the patriarchy has ever done.

OK, so we start by referring you to a recent anti-porn post on I Blame the Patriarchy, a blog whose title I can definitely get behind. The problem is that while I do definitely blame the patriarchy for a whole frickin’ lot, and while I don’t in any way wish to minimize its effect on women and the world at large, I also don’t think it’s so all-powerful that it removes all options for free choice. That’s just attributing way too much power to it - and the patriarchy is intent on claiming as much as it can in the first place, so let’s not give it the rest on a bloody silver platter.

I patently refuse to believe that I live in a world where my agency, consciousness and desires are entirely dismissed in favour of bowing down to the god that is patriarchy. And it bugs the shit out of me when other feminists want me to do that. Talk about sleeping with the enemy! I just don’t buy it when otherwise articulate, engaged and intelligent feminists stand up for the idea that they themselves can’t be making free choices - particularly sexual choices, but I don’t see how you can draw a line in the sand to separate those ones from all the rest - because those choices are all so deeply dictated by the very patriarchy that feminists otherwise seem to be capable of actively critiquing. What the fuck kind of feminism is that? It plays right into the hands of the people who really do want women to be nothing other than two boobs and a few fuckable holes. Crikey.

There’s another element of frustrating complicity that’s also endemic in this kind of thinking, and that’s when feminists tar all porn with the same man-on-top-of-woman brush. Statements like this one boggle my mind: "Porn — gay, straight, bi, live-action, animated, or ‘feminist’ — is the graphic representation of the oppression of the sex class. Until the sex class is liberated from male oppression, porn can be nothing else, no matter how many fun feminists claim it empowerfuls them."

(On a side note, I really do hope that IBIOTP has invented the word "empowerfuls" on purpose, because I’m gonna have a hard time taking her seriously at all if it’s not ironic and she really does have that poor a command of the English language.)

So let me get this straight, so to speak: gay porn is oppressive to women because it’s a graphic representation of the oppression of the sex class? Hmmm. Last time I checked, man-dick up man-ass didn’t have all that much to do with women, the so-called "sex class."

How about lesbian porn? (Note that IBIOTP has not mentioned lesbian porn specifically; perhaps she is conflating it with gay porn. Never mind the whole penis thing.) Oh, yes, I forgot, we clueless apolitical dykes have so deeply internalized patriarchal values that now we’re oppressing each other. In small underground independent DIY collectives of avant-garde radical sexual art-makers with little or no commercial financial backing, of course. But never mind the incongruities there; clearly the patriarchal values are still strong enough to completely invalidate our made-for-us-and-by-us erotic entertainment. Gosh, it’s too bad, we were enjoying it until the reify-the-patriarchy’s-power people came along and pooh-poohed our (highly politicized) fun.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the systems that produce most heterosexual commercial porn are pretty heinous, and some of the women in those porn movies may very well be there through some process that doesn’t involve them having a lot of agency and choice. Porn is not always empowering for the participants, and it’s produced in a consumerist system within a racist, sexist world, and it’s certainly not always consumed by people with a politically appealing agenda. But then again, there’s not always a ton of empowerment in, say, working at McDonald’s for seven dollars an hour, or even for that matter working as a cog in the corporate-office wheel.

We could debate ad nauseam the relative merits of various sorts of employment and the empowerment and agency that come with them, but my point is simple: I don’t think it’s accurate, useful or politically astute to equate, say, a drug-addicted 19-year-old who’s in service to a threatening porn producer, with someone like Montreal’s independent amateur-porn star Seska, who has built her own little private porn enterprise with her husband and whose website features well-researched essays on various sexuality-related topics as well as statements about her personal politics on subjects as diverse as veganism and polyamory. I mean, really - any analytically-minded person, feminist or no, should be able to see that there’s a wide range of circumstances that may lead a woman (or a man, or a trans person) into the world of porn, and a wide range of experiences once a person gets there.

And that’s what, in the end, bugs me the most about the tired old feminist argument against porn. It oversimplifies what is in fact a very complex phenomenon involving multiple influences from all areas of the political spectrum, of which patriarchy is only one. Anytime we rely on black-and-white, binary-minded defenses, we’re obliterating reality, which is never that conveniently simple. As a feminist, I want to actually think about things, analyze them, pick at the nuances until I truly understand - not that I think understanding is a finite goal in the first place. And I resent it when people of any stripe try to dismiss that entire process in favour of a by-rote, inflexible answer. As a feminist, I declare that just isn’t good enough for me.