I cite

Sex is boring

From the Guardian

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing "a flight from human intimacy" – and it's partly the government's fault.

The sign outside her building says "Clinic". She greets me in yoga pants and fluffy animal slippers, cradling a Pekingese dog whom she introduces as Marilyn Monroe. In her business pamphlet, she offers up the gloriously random confidence that she visited North Korea in the 1990s and squeezed the testicles of a top army general. It doesn't say whether she was invited there specifically for that purpose, but the message to her clients is clear: she doesn't judge.

Inside, she takes me upstairs to her "relaxation room" – a bedroom with no furniture except a double futon. "It will be quiet in here," she says. Aoyama's first task with most of her clients is encouraging them "to stop apologising for their own physical existence".

The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

...

Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time.) Kunio Kitamura, head of the JFPA, claims the demographic crisis is so serious that Japan "might eventually perish into extinction".

Japan's under-40s won't go forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar generations did. The country is undergoing major social transition after 20 years of economic stagnation. It is also battling against the effects on its already nuclear-destruction-scarred psyche of 2011's earthquake, tsunami and radioactive meltdown. There is no going back. "Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard."

Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men have become less career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job security has waned. Japanese women have become more independent and ambitious. Yet conservative attitudes in the home and workplace persist. Japan's punishing corporate world makes it almost impossible for women to combine a career and family, while children are unaffordable unless both parents work. Cohabiting or unmarried parenthood is still unusual, dogged by bureaucratic disapproval.

Party in the USA: Optimism of the Will

One way to discern an "idea whose time has come" is by the strength of the urge to evict it.

A new rejection of calls for a Party of the left suggests that, finally, a sense of the need for something like a Party is so undeniable that opponents feel like they have to confront it directly. Instead of coughing up old criticisms from late nineteenth century agrarian anarchists or early twentieth century Dutch councilists, those who attempt to divert the energies building toward greater organization are now having to look at our current situation.  In related good news, the very weakness of "Party in the USA: the New Newest Left & the Organization of Sadness" signals the diminishing persuasiveness of those who want to prevent the left from coming together. 

Tiredly repeating the irony and innuendo of late nineties academic jargon, Party in the USA: The New Newest Left & the Organization of Sadness criticizes recent arguments for a Party, one from Jacobin, the other the #Accelerate Manifesto. The post begins by exploring the 'masturbatory metaphorics' of the essays, relying on word play that insinuates that calls for left unity are little more than masculine narcissistic fantasies. The intent is to make left organization seem silly, even embarassing: "can one think of something more auto-erotic, more narcissistically invested, than some dude offering up yet another contribution to the archive of revolutionary Party invitations?"  Well, sure. How about a rejection of the Party that trades on the playfulness of blogosphere psychoanalysis?

This kind of simple reversal, although adequate as a response to the post's wankery, only repeats the gesture animating the piece. What matters more than the author's indulgence is the position from which the author's critique is raised. What is at stake in ostensibly left positions that want to prevent the left from unifying? 

Why would someone on the left want the left to be weak, to remain where it is, to refuse to learn from the Occupy experience and take the next step? What accounts for this left particularism and for its insistence that what we have now--fragmented groups that affiliate from time to time while focusing on their own particular issues and agendas--is the best way to end capitalism and build a more egalitarian world? Is it the narcissism of small differences? the fear of change? the assumption that capitalism is here to stay? a failure to grasp our present situation? Is it an individualist conception of freedom? A hopelessness with regard to the capacities of organized political subjects?

As it rejects the Party, the post depicts the 'new, new left' as sad. This is a mistake. What the author calls the "new new left" isn't sad -- it's energized, vital, fully aware of the urgency of the present. That's why meetings like Historical Materialism and Left Forum have been getting bigger every year, why there are more seminars, reading groups, actions, discussions, symposia, journals, and events, why Jacobin is making a mark. 

I now take up some of the specific arguments offered against the Party.

1.    "Left unification is not an unqualified good."  Since these day everything is qualified--qualification being the quintessential gesture of the left--this point doesn't need to be made. So, what's at stake in stating the obvious? Opening the door to race and gender (has anyone else noticed that white male anarchists never talk about race and gender so much as when they are attacking communists, revolutionary socialists, and anyone else arguing for organizing the left?).

What's disingenuous about such appeals to race and gender is their obliteration of the history of the Communist Party in anti-racist struggle, the reality of Third World Communism (particularly in the seventies), and the fact that sexism and racism are not limited to the organized left but appear throughout society, including anarchist and insurrectionist settings. Perhaps the author is covertly urging a logic of separatism, of identity politics (the implication of the author's invocation of racism and sexism in Marxist groups being that criticism implies splitting rather than learning and change)? If so, then how far does it go? All the way to the individual (itself a false stopping point giving the imaginary character of identity). If not, then it is necessary to acknowledge that a left Party today, one with the capacities of the communist Party, wouldn't exist in the past but would incorporate and learn from the last sixty years of struggle and critique.

The author of the post, though, thinks that what we are doing now is the way we should continue to do things -- it's more flexible. It allows for more autonomy. But autonomy for whom and in what contexts? It seems to me that it's the autonomy of the ineffectual, one that continues to enable an economy that traps people in debt and furthers the intensification of inequality. The author, though, emphasizes "flexible forms of putting groups in contact" with no attention to what it might mean to create structures capable of enduring over time and space in the context of ever intensifying political struggle.

2.  Left organizing should not "step back to (pre-)Fordist modalities of political organization in a post-Fordist capitalist landscape. Even MBAs know that flexible decentralization—for them in terms of labor processes, not in terms of the channeling of profit, of course—unleashes greater productive potentials than hierarchical forms of centralization, and I like thinking that my comrades have at least achieved the level of savvy of a Wharton undergrad." This lets us know the author's primary commitments -- to a vision of society in neoliberal economic terms. In this vision, the political is completely absorbed in the economic: both seem to benefit from the productive potential that comes from decentralization.  Note as well the omission of the fact that there have been multiple models of the Party--not one "pre-Fordist" or Fordist model (a point which has to be occluded if the binary between bad centralization and good decentralization is to hold). 

More horrifying, though, is the repetition of a primary myth of the new economy, that of flexibility and decentralization. If that were true, then why has there been consolidation in the finance sector, in communications, and in oil and gas? Doug Henwood demolished this myth in his After the New Economy. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, shows the connections between ideas of flexibility and military research (Rand Corporation, defense contracting, advanced research programs). And hubs are an immanent property of complex networks -- growth and preferential attachment result in powerlaw distributions, fundamental features of the winner-take-all and winner-take-most characteristic of communicative capitalism (Barabasi, Taleb). This doesn't even scratch the surface of the effects of so-called flexibility on workers and communities. Flexible for whom? Certainly not for laid off workers.

The post, though, announces "horizontalism does in fact produces a robust economy of organizations." It's already a bad call to render left political groups as an economy, as if groups were competing with each other rather than engaged in struggle against a common enemy. But can we say that there is robustness here? And in what sense? The fragmentation of the energies and efforts produced during Occupy has cost us a lot of time and good will. Attachment to horizontalism has been one of the problems. Without clarity of membership, infilitration is easy. Without clarity of vision, constant fighting over goals is unavoidable. Without a shared sense of how we are going to work together, what sorts of decision rules will let us determine which projects to pursue and when, we fall into patterns that reinforce prior privileges. It's not for nothing that Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" became so prominent during Occupy. 

3.  We don't need small groups of militants, leaders, an orientation, or a plan. I will ask again: who does this benefit? Who would want to seduce the left into thinking that we can have a politics without plans, a disoriented politics? Who would want to eliminate or undermine left militants and leaders? It makes me wonder about COINTELPRO and disinformation operations.

Planning is only a problem if one thinks that all potentials emerge in ways that leftists support. Since this is obviously false, planning ways to move forward (as well as ways to respond) is crucial. The most significant recent tragedy on the left is our failure to use the financial crisis of 2008 to our benefit. Occupy was a much needed (although a little late) response. The post asserts: "The last cycle of rebellion closed because we couldn’t keep up the intensity, because our feedback loop of positive affect was shattered by the State and by our own failures to stay committed to the democracy that we were making." Maybe we couldn't keep up our intensity because we lacked organizational structures that would distribute tasks such that we knew that someone would take responsibility for them. Too few people felt like they had to do everything (because some would drop the ball, fail to show up, volunteer but then not carry out what they had agreed to do). And maybe planning, having a clear orientation, would enable us not to be "shattered by the State." If we collapse whenever the State intervenes, we have and will have no movement.  The one thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that the stronger we become the more repression we will encounter. 

4.  The turn to the Party is therapeutic, done in the "spirit of sadness." This doesn't ring true. In fact, it's so false as to invite diagnosis. Perhaps the sadness is over the failure of horizontalism. This would make sense. Many people are still grieving over the inability of horizontalism to last or scale. I think, though, that it has been an important experiment. We've learned from it. Indeed, as I argue in The Communist Horizon, this experiment should inform our thinking as we figure out the form of the Party that will work for us today.

The remainder of the blog post sets out what the author prefers to the Party. He advocates

a.  "the production of new political sensoriums, new sensoriums of the political, so that we can ironize the ontological density of the state and capital and not feel like we’re living defective half-lives if we’re barred from access to either." Given that irony is a primary marketing tool and content of pop culture, it's hard for me to see exactly what it contributes to a new political sensorium. It also seems to me that trying to feel better about being barred from the state and capital is exactly what capitalism wants of those it's immiserating. Unhappy about your 80 thousand dollars of student loan debt? Try yoga, a 12 step program, Zoloft, or ironizing ontological density!

b.  All of the social knowledges and powers we used to attribute to those terms are immanent to the social itself. We don’t need to organize, to treat ourselves or the social as a technical object. The terms to which the author is referring are "activists, militants, and Parties." I confess that at this point I wonder if the author is actually a Platypoid doing his best to kill the left. Dismissing the dedication of our activists, the courage of our militants, and the histories and organizational capacities of our parties, he evokes a social free from antagonism, inequality, oppression, and exploitation. How are knowledges and powers distributed? Who can access them and for what purpose? 

c.  Let’s disorganize.  Who benefits from a disorganized left? A prominent paper last year documented the rise in inequality and decline of labor unions. There is no reason to think that the immanent movement of capital will do anything but enrich the few and immiserate the many. 

Search and store

In One Dimension Woman, Nina Power offers the notion of taxonimal drive.  She introduces the idea in the context of contemporary pornography: on the internet, one can find whatever one wants, although almost as soon as one finds it, one doesn't really want it anymore. Rather, one wants to see what else is out there. The item itself no longer scintillates. The drive to find other images, to keep moving and looking and marking, takes it place. After you've seen five or six busty amputee tops, you've seen them all--or have you? maybe there are different types? let's look for them! Desire switches into drive, now a drive to taxonimize and classify (blond, with shoes; shaved, no gun; etc...).

Nina links taxonomical drive with contemporary porn's endeavor to bore us all to death and turn sex into work. That is to say, her point is part of a larger argument about contemporary capitalism and its absorption of its outside. I agree. I also think it could be useful to think further with the notion of taxonomical drive. Who is the taxonomy for? The easy answer is that it is for the individual porn consumer: I download, classify, and tag photos and videos so that I can find them when I need them. The taxonomy is for me, in the future. I never know what I might desire, so I can plan for desire in the future. Clearly I don't desire now--if so, I wouldn't be archiving all this stuff, I would be enjoying it.

Differently put, taxonomical drive is a component of archival culture, a culture where we try to control our reality by selecting specific features of it, labeling, and storing these features. It is as if we so fear the changes in which we situated, the rapid flows and movements online, the appearance and disappearance of sites and features, that we try to construct a knowable space or path. Here, at least, we know what's what.

It's odd, this taxonomical drive. In a just in time culture, a culture of preemption, where connectedness has taken the place of planning, the archive serves as a kind of fortress of planning, a backup plan, a reserve army of the not yet desired but could be. We store up for the future, presuming we can access these stores rather than just add to them.

We archive music, links, cites, photos, videos. We backup our hard drives--suppressing the suspicion that our future technologies won't be backwards compatible (our vinyl albums! our dissertations on floppy disks!). Archiving, or digital hoarding, is the background supposition of taxonomical drive. Saving displaces expenditure, putting it off into the future when we can desire again.

 

The Unrepentant Marxist on Sex and the City 2

Another positive review of SATC 2:

My favorite is when Samantha, the oldest of the four female lead characters who is on a date with a Danish architect in a hookah bar in Abu Dhabi, begins to suck on the mouthpiece of the water pipe as if it was a penis. When the aroused architect stands up, you can see the outlines of his erect penis through his trousers, thus infuriating observant Muslims at the next table. If this is not the thing that you would find funny, then don’t bother seeing the movie. I can say this, however. The movie is about as potent a weapon against Islam as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s “Road to Morocco”. Indeed, this is where SATC #2 was filmed.

Oddly enough, mainstream film critics have rallied around this question of Islamophobia in a way that is truly remarkable given the steady stream of poison that comes out of Hollywood about “the war on terror”, including “The Kingdom”,  “Body of Lies”, and “Hurt Locker”, the truly rotten recipient of the Oscar for best picture in 2009.

The other thing that struck me as hypocritical was the outrage over the lavish lifestyle of the heroines, starting with their staying in a $22,000 per night hotel. The NY Times’s A.O. Scott assumes the posture of James Agee in finding the movie insensitive to our current economic crisis: “But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.” Scott also appears to have read Karl Marx at some point in his life based on this observation: “The Emirate to which the four friends repair is an oasis of gilded luxury in a world that has grown a little ambivalent about unbridled commodity fetishism.”

Excuse me. Am I missing something? If there’s any media outlet that should not be talking about “unexamined privilege” and “unbridled commodity fetishism”, it is the NY Times that is almost singlehandedly responsible for backing the yuppification of the island of Manhattan. This is a newspaper with society pages gushing over $10 million weddings and whose restaurant reviews are strictly devoted to venues that will cost you $150 per meal.

Leaving aside the obvious political charges of Islamophobia and “unexamined privilege”, there is an element of the hatred directed against the movie that is a bit beneath the surface in most reviews. It does raise its nasty head above the surface briefly, however, in Scott’s review where he writes, ” the party girls of yesteryear are tomorrow’s Ladies Who Lunch.” For those who know something about the life-style of elderly Manhattan dowagers, the phrase “Ladies Who Lunch” is a clear reference to Scott’s disappointment that the movie treats women in their 40s and 50s as if they still had a libido. The wiki on the term states:

Ladies who lunch is a phrase to describe slim, well-off, old-money, well-dressed women who meet for lunch socially, normally during the working week. Typically, the women involved are married and non-working. Normally the lunch is in a restaurant, perhaps in a department store during shopping. Sometimes there is the pretext of raising money for charity.

Rex Reed, a gay film critic and a colleague in NYFCO, writes what A.O. Scott and other more respectable scribes will not, for fear of being accused—rightly—of ageism and sexism:

The women-too old now to pout, whine and babble about their wet dreams, affluent and successful for reasons that are never clear-are all vain, narcissistic, selfish, superficial and really rather stupid. The actors work hard to perform triage, but they’ve been playing these roles so long they’ve grown moss.

There are some out there that have figured this angle out, most notably a certain Balk who wrote:

My theory is that the radical aversion to the current installment of Sex and the City says something about the way we look at elderly women in modern American society. We would prefer that, if we must indeed be subject to their representation in popular culture, they be confined to small supporting roles in which they play spinster older sisters or embittered, loveless career women. The idea that we are not only supposed to pretend that the shriveled harridans we see on the screen might still engage in the act of sexual intercourse but that we are supposed to celebrate their enjoyment of such defies both credulity and good taste.

via louisproyect.wordpress.com

how I got defined by lack and lived to tell the story

From Jill's thoughtful review of SATC 2:

If you are a woman in your forties (and I’m not even married, to make matters that much more indiscernible) with no plans for children, many people will think you are selfish, or will assume that you are infertile and sad. But most will not even go that far. They will simply fail to imagine that you have a life at all. A nothingness will appear where your life might otherwise have been in the narrative that another person’s brain gives to the world and your place in it. A childless woman is defined by lack, as is a childless marriage or an unmarried couple (with or without children). It happens all the time.

There’s that. But Carrie and Big also have a relationship with each other, and that takes work. It takes work not to take each other for granted, to love each other actively instead of passively, and to keep being who you are while also being a person who isn’t single, who is part of a couple. And to do all this while living a life that others, if they see it at all, see as lack. These are all struggles, inasmuch as you have to work to make love, relationships, or your own self “happen,” and life will often make things difficult, as it tends to do.

...

As I left the theater I was mulling all this over, and wondering about the strangely hostile fever-pitch of the bad reviews… and it hit me in the stomach all of a suddenlike, that the movie is Miranda in the workplace. This is not true of every criticism of the movie. There are plenty of valid reasons not to like it. But my concern, right now, is that many of the reviews, whether authored by men or women, may themselves be caught up in a kind of unreflective misogyny—unreflective because it is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is largely invisible. It parades around as normal, as justified, as earned. Why else would the reviews be so full of certainty that these characters are now bad, bad women who have betrayed their fans. How dare Charlotte not be perfectly happy with the children she so desperately wanted? How dare Miranda quit her job because she’s unhappy and rarely sees her son? How dare Carrie want jewelry instead of a bedroom television as an anniversary gift? And how dare Samantha want to keep feeling desire? Such terrible trespasses! Surely they must be punished. And so they are punished.

via culpa.diaryland.com

Why I liked Sex and the City 2

Already the Guardian is saying that Sex and the City 2 is on its way to becoming one of the most critically derided films of all time. Here are a few examples:

New York Post:

The transformation of the girls from winsome wisecrackers into whiny bling-obsessed chuckleheads is complete.

New York Times:

But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense. Over cosmos in their private bar, Charlotte and Miranda commiserate about the hardships of motherhood and then raise their glasses to moms who “don’t have help,” by which they mean paid servants.

The Guardian:

Not since 1942's Arabian Nights has orientalism been portrayed so unironically. All Middle Eastern men are shot in a sparkly light with jingly jangly music just in case you didn't get that these dusky people are exotic and different. Even leaving aside the question of why anyone would go on holiday to Abu Dhabi, everyone who has ever watched a TV show knows that the first rule is: don't take characters out of their usual environment.

Last night, two friends and I went to see it. We saw it in the Geneva, NY movieplex. It wasn't sold out, but it was full and, yes, women outnumbered the men by at least 12:1. The crowd was appreciative and enthusiastic. Both my friends liked it--and one had hated SATC 1. A bit more background--all 3 of us are over 40, have been married, have had kids. From here on in, there will be a lot of spoilers, so if you want surprises and plan on seeing the movie, stop reading now.

The movie explores fantasy and disappointment (I wonder if the critics saw the movie or even recognize the fantasy components; my god, one of the framing devices is old black and white movies, the first with Clark Gable--It Happened One Night--and the second with Cary Grant--I didn't recognize it; if those don't signal Depression-era escapism, what does?). The television series always had a fantastic element--fantasies of great clothes and apartments on a writer's income, of fulfilling careers, of complete sexual enjoyment. So not only did the series actively invite women to imagine themselves as one of the 4 characters, but it also staged fantasies of fashion, success, romance, and sex. The best episodes pressed the limits of fantasy. Particularly after 9/11 there was increasing pressure to wake up from the dream. One could almost say that the failure of the first film was its inability to resolve or represent the tension between the fantasy of the wedding and the reality of the end of Carrie's life as a single woman.

The two primary sites of fantastic investment in SATC2 are homosexuality and a mythical Middle East. Since 3 of the 4 women are married and Samantha is having a hard time holding onto her mojo (her fight is admirable, making me wonder why fighting cancer is glorified and fighting menopause is roundly condemned; misogyny anyone?), straight love has lost its allure and become a lot of work. Marriage and babies, marriage without babies--not what it was cracked up to be, a giant pain, and not the source of completeness at the heart of their fantasies. With straight marriage on the decline, who can believe in it anymore? Who really wants it, anyway? The gays!! 

Gay marriage is the one cultural site where marriage means something. Weddings can be over the top (there really is something to celebrate) and maybe the rules are different, easier to renegotiate. The guys' solution to pressure for monogamy--infidelity is only allowed in states that won't recognize their marriage--at first seems a gesture to the fantasy of fabulous, frequent, promiscuous sex in which gay men are often cast, yet the explanation--it's not because he's gay, it's because he's Italian--situates the solution back within one of the main issues of the movie, how will the women deal with being with the same person, in the same bed, most every night, FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. It's like a prison sentence, a kind of capture, maybe even a form of cultural silencing.

So, the wedding is totally over the top--more perfect than any wedding ever, complete with swans, a gorgeous men's chorus in white, and Liza. Liza's rendition of "Single Ladies" was unlike anything I've ever seen. The closest I can come up with is Tom Delay on Dancing with the Stars.

So, Liza does Beyonce, Carries wears a Tux, and a cute man flirts with Big. Safely enveloped in gay fabulousity, even the most stilted interactions can be a little wonderful. But life isn't a great big gay wedding. Miranda has an asshole of a boss who makes her life miserable. Charlotte is cracking under the pressure of cheerfully acting like some Betty Crocker ideal of total mommy completion. Carrie is frustrated by the everyday-ness of married life: after the apartment is decorated, then what? And, as mentioned, Samantha is courageously pursuing experimental vitamin treatments for menopause.

This is one of the first places where the reviews miss. Critics say the women are bling obsessed--false. There is no bling obsession, if bling means jewelry. Carrie says that Big could have gotten her a ring as an anniversary present, but that's as a counter to the television in the bedroom, not a statement about jewelry. Charlotte gets upset because her daughter apparently ruins a vintage designer skirt, but, again, this isn't about the clothes per se--it's about Charlotte's stressed out enfrazzlement with cupcakes, a screaming baby, and another kid insisting on attention at exactly that moment. Critics say that the women's careers have been sidelined: wrong again. Miranda doesn't quit her job to stay at home and be a mom--she quits because her boss is a jerk and she can find something better. Carrie goes to her old apartment to work on her writing, has a book come out, and stresses over a bad review. Work matters--to them. And the whole trip to Abu Dhabi is connected to Samantha's job as a publicist. 

The second site of fantastic investment is Abu Dhabi. It's not portrayed ironically because it is portrayed fantastically. It relies on Orientalist fantasies stretched into camp. The shift in setting works because it enacts the change in NYC as a figure for fantasy: NYC can't or doesn't function in the same way it used to (in the show, perhaps in the world). It's not invincible; it's not ideal. It doesn't welcome anyone from anywhere. It's harder to make it. But the Middle East, in this fantasy, has unfathomably rich sheiks; they build new sparkling cities; they attract money, fame, luster. Just like the women's old dreams of romance, sex, fashion, and success don't fit the realities of their lives as straight middle aged women, NY has lots it magical allure.

So, enter Lawrence of Arabia style fantasy, complete Orientalist escapism (including camels, a gorgeous man riding a jeep over sand dunes, World Cup finalists showing off their abs in the pool). Everything is completely over the top--and we know from the beginning that they don't have to pay for it (even their 13 hour plane trip is the fantastic air travel promised in the 60s and now the privilege of our global financial overlords). They are guests. They get 4 cars, 4 butlers (completely hot and also continuing the fantastic element of hot gay men). The hotel and their suite was so over the top that it made me think of old Marx brothers films where the guys find themselves in luxurious environments that will ultimately become the setting for mad cap adventures.

Of course, the fantasy can't hold up under any scrutiny. We learn that one of the butlers is Indian and has to work months at a time to save money to go home to see his wife. I guess the reviewer who mentioned unexamined privilege was in the bathroom during that scene. 

I wonder if that same reviewer is over 25--I doubt it. She didn't get at all the scene between Miranda and Charlotte where they talk about how much it sucks to be a mom. Do reviewers not want to hear this? Do they want to think that it's really fulfilling to spend hours on end with crying kids? In the scene, Miranda helps Charlotte to be more honest with herself, to let go of the fantasy that motherhood provides serenity and completeness. Before each hard admission, they take another drink. And they let go of the guilt and the pressure and the illusion. Really this is the ideal drinking game and the mommies in my small town multiplex loved it (Miranda was my hero throughout the whole thing). The reviewer slams the film for an implicit elitism when they raise their glasses to women without help. The moms of Geneva, NY--most of us who get help where we can find it, from friends, from neighbors, from relatives, from paid day care providers when we can afford it and when there are openings in the few available places--raised our imaginary cosmopolitans and toasted right back.

The fantasy also can't bear up under the tensions over the veil--choice? tradition? custom? oppression? In fact, grappling with restrictions around dress and sexuality becomes one of the central problems the 4 women encounter during their visit. While the other 3 seem to want to 'respect local customs,' Samantha is having none of it. She's not a good girl in the US and she isn't going to be one here. And, as usual, she pays a price for her sexuality: the scene where she is on the ground in shorts and a tank top, her purse broken and her condoms and other belongings strewn all about, sweaty with messy hair, messy make up, exhausted, hungry, menopausal, furious and surrounded by robed men (they looked like sheiks to me) yelling and condemning her seemed one moment before a public stoning. She was close to humiliation, but fighting it, not giving in.

In fact, Samantha's sexuality, her fierce commitment to her own enjoyment, ruptures the fantasy Abu Dhabi and opens their way back home: because she is charged with open displays of sexuality, she loses the business opportunity and the women have to either pay for the hotel themselves or leave; at 22 k a night, they have to leave (of course they can't afford this!); and now instead of 4 nice cars, they have trouble getting even a couple of pretty crappy taxis. They don't look particularly glamorous, either.

Some might say the movie tries to make Samantha stand in for all women, for the true woman behind the veil, and thus for a universal feminine against patriarchal sexual oppression. Such a reading makes a kind of liberal capitalist subject into the universal subject. It makes sense given the scene that follows: a group of women in abayas rescue Samantha et al. Of course they are all wearing cutting edge designer clothes under their abayas. And, like Samantha, they are reading Suzanne Sommer's book on dealing with menopause. Women across the world are united in their love of shopping, good clothes, and courageous battle over hormones. Unsurprisingly, the four heroines themselves have to put on the robes in order to escape from their predicament and get their first class seats for the flight home. The veil is a vehicle for escape as well as capture.

The fantasy of underneath it all women are basically the same, the liberal feminist message, also drives one of the most difficult scenes: the four heroines karaoke performance of "I am Woman." It's a nice parallel to Liza's "Single Ladies." On the one hand, the cringe factor is nearly as strong. On the other, the almost unbearable cheesiness and absence of irony actually lets a sincere aspiration shine through. The camera moves to the different faces of the women  in the audience--heavy, older, global (although clearly all wealthy), to the heroines, to the belly dancers now doing some kind of weird muscle man dance, to the soccer players flaunting their 12 packs. It's too strained to be joyous or even emancipatory. But they persevere, nonetheless. They don't flee into the safety of irony but actually persist in a kind of stand, a kind of fierce insistence --"I am woman." The truth of the anthem is realized in its liberal capitalist form, but that doesn't make it less of a truth (ideology always has to include an element of truth).

The film wakes up from its Middle Eastern fantasy into the fantasy of liberal feminism (gay salvation remains: Charlotte is saved from her fear that her husband might have an affair with her buxom Irish nanny by the nanny's lesbianism). It's still a fantasy and maybe even the notion that this the biggest thing the women have to deal with is the biggest fantasy of all. But it rattles the supposition that having it all is possible, it addresses disappointments and pressures, and it guarantees that finding a straight man and settling into straight domesticity is not a sure path to happiness. Since that fantasy is the primary motor of  the chic flick, disrupting it is pretty satisfying. Friendship, connection with other women, is a much better fantasy.

SEC and Pornography: Employees Spent Hours Surfing Porn Sites

I'm not sure exactly why this is interesting. Possible explanations:

Religious/conservative: they are really sinners (which is why regulation won't work)

Puritan: they weren't working hard enough (which is why they need surveillance)

Liberal: they confused public and private pursuits

Therapeutic: they needed to relieve stress

Psychoanalytic: they can't not enjoy

Eight Hours a Day Spent on Porn Sites

One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.

An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.

Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.

In one case, the report said, an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a "significant number" of porn sites.

The employee also said he deliberately disabled a filter in Google to access inappropriate sites. After management informed him that he would lose his job, the employee resigned.

A similar SEC report for October 2008 to March 2009 said that a regional supervisor in Los Angeles accessed and attempted to access pornographic and sexually explicit Web sites up to twice a day from his SEC computer during work hours.

Porn Problem Began as Economy Collapsed

Ironically, the report says most of these cases began in 2008, just as the financial system began to collapse. The same SEC officers who should have been safeguarding the economy were instead spending their working hours surfing the Internet for pornography, and the problem hasn't stopped.

via abcnews.go.com

Truth and consequences

How often have we heard Republicans, Conservatives, and Christian fundamentalists preach about responsiblity? Everyone is supposed to take responsibility, personal responsibility. People are supposed to take responsibility for their drug and alcohol use (rehab? no! no! no!); for their obesity, lack of exercise, and failure of will power; for their credit card debt and excess expenditures; for their unprotected sex. Three strikes and you are out, out, out. Unwanted pregnancy? Responsibility means having that baby. The smaller and more personal the transgression, the greater your exposure to excessive punishment, all in the name of responsibility. We are small enough to be allowed to, even encouraged to, fail. If we don't fail and encounter the consequences, the system can't work--no incentives to be good (Reagan taught us this back in the 80s by making sure that we saw homeless people all over our cities; he called them welfare queens; the media called them bag ladies; we knew they were that the fate we had to avoid at all costs). We are all supposed to face the consequences of our actions.

But this 'all' is actually pretty narrow. Who's left out? The rich and the privileged, especially if they are white and male. And they get extra dispensation if they are or have been employed in the finance sector or the Bush administration (sorta the same thing, if you think about it). So the finance sector doesn't have to face any consequences. And it looks like the Bush administration might escape the consequences of its actions as well (I favor a war crimes tribunal and execution, myself; I expect they will escape accountability for running torture and prison camps because leading congressional Democrats were in on it all along; I admit the drawback of my position is that it rapidly escalates into mass hangings).

Which 'all' comprises the citizens? It seems clear that the 'all supposed to accept the consequences' are the people--but this people isn't the part of no part. It's the part that has to be counted, included, and literally made to pay. Those excluded from this all, excluded from the consequences, are the privileged ones, the exception. It's like a state of exception turned inside out: those who inhabit the terrain of lawlessness are the financial elite and their state arm.

Too many voices of the allegedly pragmatic Democratic left claim that Obama should move on, deal with the economy, and let the crimes of the past remain in the past. This is wrong, severely, unconscionably wrong. The crimes are the same crimes. The economic crimes are inextricable from the crimes of torture and aggressive war. All result from the attempt to escape law, to move beyond and outside it, to persist in exceptional space without consequences.

Palin as continuation of Bush: Guest post by Lori Marso

Sarah Palin Nomination Continues the Bush Presidency's Gender Politics

            Though Sarah Palin's breakout speech to the Republican National Convention stressed her identity as a "maverick" and "reformer," a closer look at her message reveals that her selection as McCain's vice presidential nominee continues the legacy of the gender politics inaugurated with the George W. Bush presidency.  Touting that "W Stands for Women," George W. Bush surrounded himself with professional and accomplished women, such as Condoleeza Rice and Karen Hughes, sought the so called "soccer moms" demographic in the 2000 election, and staked his run for office in 2004 on issues like freeing the women of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Critics have derided the Bush Presidency for standing against women in terms of his positions on issues such as health care, wages, welfare, social security, and the tax structure.  But if we take Bush's rhetoric seriously, we see that has stood for women.  In fact, Bush has shaped a new politics of gender that has sought to hijack the language of feminism for socially conservative ends and feminize American citizens in advocating a strong, chivalrous presidency that can save us in times of crisis.  The McCain/Palin ticket continues and extends this legacy.

Palin's speech at the Republican Convention illuminates a rhetoric that is deeply gendered though we might not immediately recognize it as such.  Not surprisingly, she didn't hit on the usual "women's issues" such as abortion even though she was chosen for her pro-life views.  As a pro-life feminist, Palin has argued that "no woman should have to choose between her career, education, and her child."  Last night, however, Palin packaged herself as another kind of feminist: a spunky, white, rifle-shooting mom, governor, and beauty queen who, like McCain "doesn't run with the herd," and can stand up to tough challenges.  And in contrast to McCain, the "great man," Palin painted Obama as a feminine alternative.  In Palin's gendered and racialized universe, Obama comes off as a narcissist who authors autobiographies instead of legislation, a "community organizer" who wants to "heal the planet," a weakling who would "meet terrorists without preconditions" and who worries the "Al Quaeda terrorists" won't be "read their rights."

Real women, it turns out, support and work in the administrations of real men like George W. Bush and John McCain.  This is a fundamentally heterosexist, white, god-fearing universe where strong hockey moms, who differ from pit-bulls only in that they wear "lipstick," lead alongside strong men who "do more than talk."  They "flash a grin and a thumbs up" in the grimmest of circumstances to reassure us all that "we're going to pull through this."

As my co-editor, Michaele Ferguson, and I wrote in the introduction to W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Duke, 2007), "the constellation of an eviscerated liberal feminism, a hierarchical gender ideology, and a neoconservative security strategy articulated by the Bush presidency represents a new configuration of gender politics whose significance and impact will extend far beyond Bush's two terms in office."  In fact, the McCain/Palin ticket promises to push this legacy even more powerfully. Packaged as a historic achievement for women, and as a "maverick" move, this ticket promises instead a man and a woman who continue George W. Bush's politics of gender with more of the same: a macho politics that favors war over diplomacy, a tax policy that disadvantages women who disproportionately fill out the ranks of the poor, a masculinized security state, hetero-sexist policies on marriage, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  This is not a break with the Republican past, but consistent with what Bush has been doing all along.

Religious fetishists

Thinking about fetishized religions, I could only come up with Catholicism. The Catholic schoolgirl's uniform is the most obvious, but sexualized nun toys and habits, and games about priests are close behind, traditional fetishist scenes predictable to the point of boredom. I asked some friends about this and no one could think of any examples of rabbi fetishism, Dali Lama fetishism, or Islamic or Hindu variants of sexual fetishism. I think that charismatic Christianity could probably slink into the category; baptism scenes can have a wet t-shirt quality and the laying on of hands is intense to the point of eroticism. But I almost think this is derivative of Catholicism. Maybe Mormonism can be included insofar as people fantasize about polygamy, but this seems a stretch; a fantasy is not the same as a fetish. Does anyone participate in anything like Islamic or Buddhist drag where they dress or adorn themselves as practioners of a religion in order to derive sexual pleasure? If not, how come? What is it about some religions that makes them available for fetishization?