cliterature

In our current culture it often seems that you are meant to pick sides: be girly, or don’t. But I am a liberated woman who also likes a lot of feminine things, even those developed in an overtly sexist context. But I don’t see why not having to wear pastels means you can’t wear them–or why not having to play will dolls means you can’t like dolls. And I think the marketing boffins have found a way for us to break free from feminine assumptions, but have our girly stuff too.

Enter retro chic and ironic fashion. I can wear my pretty pink “Princess Sparkle” T-shirt with pride because the label tells me it is “retro”. I am not being juvenile and stereotypically girly, I am making a hip statement about classic toys and modern culture. Subtextually I am not saying “weee, i luv baby ponies”, but “Wow, Dude. How ironic is that rainbow motive. Princess Sparkle is totally a drag name.” All the while one thing is undeniable.

Princess Sparkle totally rocks.

There are some things happening out in the world that most of us would probably be happier not knowing.  So if you haven’t already heard about “Crush” videos you may want to stop now.   The basic idea of crush or squish video is a women in barefeet or high heels squishing small animals of some kind, any thing from baby mice or ducklings to a puppy.  This is not the kind of movie with a happy ending for the animals.

Selling Crush videos was criminalised in the United States in 1999, along with making or trading an depiction of illegal animal torture in the absence of any “serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value”.  Now online sites are largely limited to unprotected animals such as insects and plush toys.

This is a law that largely escaped comment.  However, yesterday a New York Times columnist perked up and decided to belatedly protest this terribly restriction to free speech. Now ordinarily you could depend on me to be sympathetic.  The key exception to first amendment protection is obscenity–and it is routinely misused.  But another is child abuse.  And I bet any depiction of people actually being hurt against their will would also not be protected.

We don’t let people profit off violence against the helpless.  It doesn’t matter if they do it here, or overseas, or on a train, or to a goat.  We don’t trade in blood diamonds, or the parts of endangered species.  We don’t let people buy and sell their children or their organs.  So I don’t see why we should let people stamp on kittens for fun and profit, or buy the products that support this activity.

If it is a book, a cartoon, a clever Poser simulation fine.  If it is an actual animal–make them stop.  If they are outside our jurdistiction and we can’t make them stop, we can stop them from get rich off selling it here.  No amendment offers a protection that is absolute or immune to criticism.  I certainly believe that people have a right to their fetishes, so long as nobody gets hurt unless they consent to it.  And animals, like children, cannot general give consent and if they could wouldn’t sign up to be stomped to death.

The reason said columnist is talking about the law now is because it has been struck down to protect a man’s right to “fee speech” in the form of dog fight videos.  That isn’t something I have a huge amount of respect for.  Fascinating, isn’t it, that that bastion of public moral, President Clinton, signed the law in on the understanding that it would be limited to “wanton cruelty to animals designed to appeal to a prurient interest in sex.” 

That is do say:

 Women stomping on animal to cause sexual excitement=felony.

Men urging dogs to kill each other to experience sadistic excitement=free speech.

Got that, sex=bad.  Violence=good.  Business as usual.

Animal torture is obscenity, not just a kind of tawdry sex you wouldn’t want your grandmother to know about, but real outright outrageous obscenity.  It is the one true real obscenity of violence just to exercise power, hurting for the enjoyment of hurting.  And free speech is *talking* about it, depicting it fictionally, reporting it journalistically–not doing it or profiting from at as an intermediary trader.  This is not free speech because it is not “depiction” of a crime, it is collusion after the fact for the purposes of profit or ideological approval.

Take away my bleeding heart liberal card if you like, but abstract principles come second to the interests of people and animals who actually can bleed and so have a real claim on my heart.

So if you want to combine kitty cats and high heels, try this lady instead.

This is the time of year where people start to bring up trivia, such as that the reindeer ostensibly pulling Santa’s sleigh would–if they have antlers–be female (or castrated males).  Bull reindeer, you see, shed their antlers before Christmas.  It is interesting that it matters.  Are Santa’s deer presumed to be male because they do physical labor, or on some weird assumption that only males have horns.  This is true of some species, but in most horned species both the male and female go equipped.  (And that would include common livestock like cows, sheep and goats of their horns were not surgically removed).I spend quite a lot of time on this blog questioning what people assume about gender.   But it is worth considering that although the meaning of gender beyond chromosomal and anatomical domain is disputed, gender itself is a categpory even broader than species.  That is, there are far more individual out there that are female, than that are human.  This is not to say that I have more in common with a female giraffe than a male human (although it may sometimes feel that way) but that the meaning of gender can be considered across species boundaries.

It is said that in technical terms, only humans have “gender” which implies a cultural meaning attached to perceived male-ness or female-ness.  Animals are described, in most scientific publications, as being of the male or male ’sex’ not ‘gender’.  But I have recently noticed a number of exceptions.  This may be simply because ’sex’ is a word that makes people uncomfortable because it is now used vastly more often to refer to copulation than to specify between male and female.

I would argue that referring to an animals “gender” is equally justifiable because animals are also treated differently, by their own species and others including our own, depending on whether they are male or female.  And this is not only for innate and unchanging biological reasons, but also due to what individuals learn during their lifetime–due to within and between species culture.  I would argue that more sentient species of animal have a basic concept of their own gender and that of other animals that goes beyond reflexive reproductive acts.

And animals are a diverse and shocking lot when viewed with an open mindm rather than through the lens of Disney-fied assumptions that plague even scientific endeavors.  Research focused for a long time on male combat, not female choice.  On aggression and not bonding and appeasement.  In the animal king/queen and drone-dom every  norm of femininity from size to nurturing role is reversed as a norm in some species, and by at least some individuals in every species.  Even if you hold animals do not have “gender” not every animal of a certain sex follows the life path typical for the species.  Some either do not want to, or chose not to breed, some are homosexual in their focus, some are poor or abusive parents, some fill the role in their community more typical of the other sex. In short, every ‘deviancy’ painted as unnatural in humans is found in other animals.

So by saying sex is more pervasive than species I am not say it is more rigid and standardised–quite the reverse.  Looking at the mouth brooder, the lilytrotter, the reindeer and the honeybee, it is in fact flexibility and diversity of sex roles that we see.

And p.s. to be perfectly honest, why are Santa’s reindeer shown with antlers?  I suspect it is because later days artists find that embellishment aesthetically pleasing, and no other reason.  After all, Santa doesn’t employ all that many fact checkers to protects his brand and trademarks from such misrepresentation.   (Although, if Santa is sensible the team are non-breeding girls and eunuchs rather than bulls exhausted after the rut or pregnant females.)