Literate Perversions

  • Home
  • Speak Out!
  • Writing
    • Times Square: A History of Sin
    • God Is A Bullet
    • Looking At My Cock
    • Two Women, One Year, and Hep C
    • Beautiful Scars
    • The St. James Infirmary: A Safe Medical Haven for Sex Workers
    • Sexy Beasts! A Look at Vampires in Porn
    • Review: The Good Old Naughty Days
    • Fencesitter Blues
    • The Barbary Coast
    • Review: Roman Sex
    • Sex and Death in Four Colors

To Maryam Namazie and Taslima Nasrin: No, You Are Not Whores

By Chris Hall
June 30, 2013
3 Comments

Tweet

Atheist Sex Work SymbolAs much as I value what Freethought Blogs brings to the atheist community in discussing social justice, I think that Maryam Namazie and Taslima Nasrin have seriously fucked up with this post, and really need to be called out for it.1

[Read more…]


  1. I left the following comment on Maryam’s post:
    I’m sorry, but I really object to this. If you’re not going to support real whores, then don’t appropriate their identity as your own. So far, FTB hasn’t been very vocal in supporting the rights of sex workers to do their jobs safely, legally, and without stigma. Taslima in particular has an extremely bad history on the topic, having equated prostitution with slavery and insulted actual sex work activists like Maggie Mayhem in the process. To my knowledge, she’s never apologized for either her treatment of Maggie in particular, or of her abuse of sex work activists. And yet, she’s willing to adapt that identity for the purpose of making a statement.

    In addition to our issues with misogyny and racism, it’s time for the atheists to start dealing with whorephobia in the community. Silencing women and men who do sex work, then grabbing their identities for your own use is in no way progressive or just. ↩

Tweet

Filed Under: Atheism, Sex Work Tagged With: Sex Work, sexuality, social justice

Natalie Reed Interview: Transphobia in the Hawkeye Initiative

By Chris Hall
January 11, 2013
3 Comments

Tweet

For my most recent piece at the SF Weekly, I wrote about the controversy that’s been boiling up around a new Tumblr Blog, The Hawkeye Initiative. In a way, it’s a blog that I’d like to applaud. It’s based on a very real and serious criticism of superhero comics for depicting female bodies in really weird, oversexualized, and distorted ways. The most famous example is the “boobs and butt” pose, which has become ubiquitous in superhero comics. A few examples of female characters contorting their spines in order to give the viewer tits and ass are seen below:

Wonder Woman strikes a classic "boobs and butt" pose.
Wonder Woman strikes a classic “boobs and butt” pose.
Red Sonja, swiped from Escher Girls
Red Sonja, swiped from Escher Girls
Fei Rin from Anarchy Reigns Videogame; another one from Escher Girls.
Fei Rin from Anarchy Reigns Videogame; another one from Escher Girls.

The Hawkeye Initiative has tried to critique this over-the-top aesthetic by having fans submit redrawn versions of comic book art that substitutes the Marvel character Hawkeye for female characters, in the hopes that it would make the absurdity of the poses more visible to people who take the boobs and butt approach for granted. And at first, there was a lot of positive response. The Hawkeye Initiative became the meme of the month for December of 2012, with media coverage from Wired, Geeks Are Sexy, Bleeding Cool, and i09, among others. But there’s also been an increasing amount of criticism on grounds that Hawkeye Initiative is using the very old trope of mocking effeminate men to make its point.

Transfeminist blogger Natalie Reed has been a very vocal critic of the Hawkeye Initiative. She was one of the first people I interviewed for the SF Weekly piece, and in fact, her thoughts make up the bulk of the quoted material in there, along with the ever-fabulous Kitty Stryker. One of the most painful parts about writing the article was figuring out just what I could cut and what to leave. She has a lot to say, and says it very well, and with her permission, I’m posting the full text of the interview here. There’s a lot to think on here; not only about gender and how we perceive it, but also about how to build and maintain truly intersectional analyses, instead of fighting one evil by building up another.

#

Chris Hall: First of all, could you summarize for me your criticisms of the Hawkeye Initiative?

Natalie Reed: So, my main concern with the Hawkeye Initiative, and related strategies of critiquing the representation of women in comics by placing men as substitutions in the poses, costumes or anatomy of female characters, boils down to how much of this strategy is based in the basic idea of “But it would be ridiculous if Hawkeye / Batman / Iron Man / Captain America were placed in this pose”, which is the suggestion that a male character being placed in the same pose/costume/anatomic-style will be perceived as more ridiculous than the female character, or make the ridiculousness more obvious while obviously the basic “point” here is to expose the ridiculous, impractical or anatomically impossible nature of the way female characters are represented, that point ends up falling over pretty heavily into transphobia and femmephobia by imagining these representations become more ridiculous by placing men in them. Frequently, in the Hawkeye Initiative or similar strategies, you see things like word balloons saying “I’m so pretty!”, or caption jokes about “look at Tony Stark’s seductive face!”, wherein the humor and “ridiculousness” of the drawing comes not from the basic preposterousness of the female representation itself, but from the way our culture perceives it as innately or intrinsically ridiculous, funny, disgusting, absurd or frivolous for a man (or person whose body we perceive as male) to dress, behave, or perform in “feminine ways.” This idea that it’s somehow inherently comical, or ridiculous, for a man, (or someone so designated), to do “feminine” things is one of the cornerstones of both trans-misogyny and femmephobia (the idea that femininity is inherently more superficial, silly, ridiculous, weak, or impractical than masculinity). [Read more…]

Tweet

Filed Under: Comics (and Comix), Gender, Pop Culture, Queer Politics Tagged With: comics, feminism, lgbt, queer, sexuality

Lolita, Darth Vader, and Hugo Schwyzer

By Chris Hall
April 13, 2011
5 Comments

Tweet

Darth Vader and Glenn Beck: It's their job to be villains.

When you watch Darth Vader blow up the planet of Alderaan in Star Wars, or telepathically strangle an incompetent flunkie in one of the sequels, it may be brutal, but it’s not really upsetting. That’s what Vader is there for; it’s his job to be a professional villain and spread bloodshed, pain, and misery throughout the galaxy. In a strange way, it’s comforting to see him relish his latest act of torture, murder, or genocide; it reassures you that the world is exactly the way you expect it to be.

The Darth Vaders of gender politics are people like Maggie Gallagher, Glenn Beck, Andrew Schlafly, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and their various hanger-ons . While I think that the world would be a better place without their hidebound misogyny and homophobia, I understand it. It’s their job to be assholes, and so when Beck spouts off his latest conspiracy theory about how the gays are going to shove their homo thing down his throat, I nod and take it in stride. The world is normal.

It’s when feminists, or anyone else that I think should be on the side of the angels, start weaving reactionary assumptions about gender that I wig out. The world is not as it should be. It’s as though I walked into a theater that’s showing another version of Star Wars, the one that Lucas keeps stored in his basement along with the last existing print of the Star Wars Holiday Special. In this version, Vader is still blowing up planets, but Luke and Leia spend their spare time downing beers with Imperial Stormtroopers and torturing kittens.

[Read more…]

Tweet

Filed Under: Feminism, Sex and Gender Tagged With: feminism, gender, lolita, sexuality

VULVA For Sale!

By Chris Hall
September 10, 2007
6 Comments

Tweet

When capitalism and sexual obsession collide, it provides some truly breathtakingly bizarre moments. Here, on the ingeniously-named smellmeand.com, we see the result of some entrepreneur who leaned back and said to himself, “You know, if I could just bottle pussy and sell it, I could make a fortune….”

I’m sure that’s what explains the origin of Vulva Original. I’m not sure what would explain people being sucker enough to buy it, no matter how much European fashion gloss you try to doll it up with. From the site:

[Read more…]

Tweet

Filed Under: Etc. Tagged With: fashion, perfume, sexuality, VULVA, weirdness

Recent Posts

  • We Need to Fight the (Police) Unions For Justice in Law Enforcement
  • Hooray for Femme Superheroes: Supergirl’s Skirt is Badass
  • Infographic: Police are Threats to Sex Workers, Not Protection
  • A Song Stripped Naked: The Be Good Tanyas Version of “Waiting Around to Die”
  • Steven Pressfield and Impostor’s Syndrome

Copyright © 2021 ·Metro Pro Theme · Genesis Framework by StudioPress · WordPress · Log in

✖

Cancel reply

Connect with:
Google Twitter Yahoo! Tumblr Windows Live

Cancel