cliterature

Nature red in manicure. Within three feet of a wall socket Gorilla Lux is the brightest creatures imaginable, anywhere else she is just an ape with a fragile skull.

This is the second feral doll and I am fairly happy with her, except that I accidentally super-glued the light switch open. Which is better, I suppose, than gluing it closed.

The next feral doll is in the works–her name is Feral Fatale.

I got a box of old doll parts and have been putting together what I think of as “the feral dolls”. They are a bit of statement about dolls and femininity–but you don’t need to take them all that seriously. This is the first of them to be more-or-less finished. She may need a little more detailing. Once I have them finished the feral dolls will be free to good homes (should anyone want them).

Tribelle

Tribelle is a counter-culture artiste. She is very concerned with being beautiful and creating beauty, but constantly worried that people night discover that her deliberately obscure symbolism of her paintings covers up a complete lack of anything meaningful in their content. Her work is as exquisite but as hollow as her bell-shaped head.

Welcome to the world of the feral dolls :)

This is the early stage of my work in progress, Femme. The basic idea is that the immature girl figure is the female ego. The right shoulder will be Lilith, the left Eve. It is about the old angel/harlot dichotomy. When the main options are the ends of a false dichotomy it becomes hard to…. become.

Which is all too deep for me. But once I ad some folliage and a snake I hope it will pass for far more meaningful than it is.  If I was a better write I would throw together some lines like Byron’s “She walks in beauty like the night.”  he was writing about how dark and light can, with innocent and true inner beauty, be effortlessly combined.

He was writing about a beauty seen when he was in mourning, an attraction to a woman who was his cousin, and a love of one woman shortly before he married another.  So maybe it was an ease he yearned for an imagined more than one any person obtains.  Or maybe it was simply that he to had long lost the innocence that allows it.

But we can still appreciate that quality if serenity when seen in others–or imagine it there:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o’er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o’er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,—
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

I, on the other hand walk headless, with an imaginary Judeo-Christian ancestor in each shoulder. But what’s a girl to do :)

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.)

“Altered Art” is basically something make out of scrap, discarded objects and other bits and pieces.  It can be scrap-booking, cyberpunk taxidermy or pretty much anything.  Recently I have been making cute little monsters out of old My Little Ponies and mythical creatures from scissors confiscated at airports.  (I just put the finishing touched of ‘My Little Cthullu’ and sprayed on that coat of sealant that means I have to stop fiddling with it).

I recently suggested that it might be fun to make altered art based on a page from a romance novel.  This is normally done by selectively blocking out some of the words to create a different message.  It is a method often used by the poets, but can be a fun exercise for anyone (well, I thought so).  As it happens, I wasn’t exactly stampeded by people taking up the challenge.  But what was lacking in quantity was more than made up for by quality.

 Bree Bridges came up with this stunning digital approach (shown below).  Bree is half of the wonderful writing team Moira Rogers.  So show some appreciation of her obvious talent by visiting her/them at moirarogers.com.  (Go on, go and have a look.)

And here is my rather less skillful stab at the same idea–which is not at all digital and predictably came out…well, a bit rude. (Quelle surprise).  And a little bit rude in an M/M sort of why.  (ditto).

If anyone else wants to have a go at it, please do send me the results and I will be sure to post it.  That would be worth at least 5 bonus points, maybe even as many as 10.

What, nobody wants a toaster?

I recent picked up a copy of Lovers in Art, a small book with color plates showing paintings of lovers.  In the whole it is a nice collection and does not avoid more sexual depictions so long as they have a fine art provenance.

One particular painting, excerpted to the right, is Jean-Leon Gerome’s Pygmalion and Galatea.  The basic story of Pygmalion is that he was disgusted by the women in his town.  The back story is that a man in the town had refused to worship Venus, and so his daughters had become (according to this fable) the first prostitutes.  Pygmalion was so disgusted by women being so sexually active that he would have nothing to do any women–and just occupied himself carving, um, life sized realistic nude females.  One of which he fell in love with.

So, quick recap, because some of the women in town were selling their bodies he wouldn’t touch them (or any other woman), but he fell in “love” with a simple depiction of physical beauty that he himself created.  I mean I understand wanted a lover who isn’t sleeping with every other man in town, but isn’t it something of a leap to go from avoiding hussies to only wanting a woman that you created to match your exact physical ideal?

Pygmalion starts giving gifts to the statue, “caressing” it and decking it up in jewellry, laying it on a couch, and referring to it as his wife.  So, basically he had created a precursor to the ‘realdoll’.  He then prayed to have a real wife just like the statue.  Venus saw the statue and thought it look rather like her, and perhaps partly from that flattery brought the statue to life to be his real wife.

 I understand this myth was written by and for people from a very different culture so the strands of moral condemnation of female sexuality, desire to completely control and actually create your wife from scratch, not to mention that the closest biological equivalent of marrying your creation would be daughter-incest…. well, that’s put that all to one side.

This book was assembled in the 90’s and is is meant to depict people in love.  I would argue that of Galatea was in love upon her creation it was not of her free will, if indeed she possessed any.  And Pygmalion may have thought he was in love with a non-sentient ivory statue but that is lust at best and more like puritanical insanity.  I just do not see that, for a modern book, this picture qualifies as depicting what we would define as people freely and romantically in love.  And yet, looking online, I see this myth often listed as one fo the ‘great romance’. 

Really?

(And on a minor note I find the description of the painting rather coy.  Specifically “Galatea was only colored above the waist”.  I don’t know about you, but that is not where I keep my waist.)

For a bonus point: in what way was the artist Gerome just like the mythical figure of Pygmalion?

I am a big fan of artist James McPartlin, ever since he was good enough to provide the cover art for my first (now out of print) novel Broken Sword.  So I was doubly pleased when he completed another painting using one of my poems Here Are Shades (shown below) as a jumping off point. 

The model is, once again, moi–albeit looking a little more feminine on this occasion.  I would encourage you to check out his gallery at Epilogue.net–a great website for fantasy, sci fi and anime art.  You can see the full size picture of Shades (excerpted to the right) here.

Thanks to James for making me look so mysterious and mystical :)

HERE ARE SHADES

This is an old land.
Stone house
paperweights.
Green fields,
its patchwork shroud.
Deeper than the dead
it sleeps.

Light my steps,
to Scotland’s earthen ears,
the living
here are shades.

I beleive I have mentioned that I have some antique and vintage pin-up photographs. They are part of a larger collection of ephemera relating to sexuality in the arts. Today I thought I would show this 1972 publicity shot for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. In this scene Alex (Malcolm McDowell) uses a phallic statue to murder a women referred to as the “cat lady” after breaking into her house. (by the way, I plan at some point to write a post about the connections between cats and women in sexually-charge literature, particularly of the more abusive type).

There is no doubt that A Clockwork Orange, like the Anthony Burgess novel on which it is based is overflowing with highly objectionable sexual violence. For almost 30 years (until 2001) is was banned from being shown in the UK. It was widely rumored that Kubrick asked for this ban because the movie was implicated and real life rapes and murders. However more recent reports suggest he was motivated more by threats directed against his own family. I have linked to the actual scene below–note that although it contains no explicit material at all it is a deliberately unsettling, violent scene and you should only view it if you are an adult and this will not be disturbing to you.

A Clockwork Orange-Death of the Cat Lady

I think that, in both the novel and the movie, seeing depiction of extreme hyper-masculine violence does give us cause for thought (that is, it is not gratuitous). Delinquency and violence against women are still with us. In the era of this novel and movie it seemed possible that behaviorist psychology could effectively program people to obey the law, whether they chose to or not. And that certainly does raise issues about how meaningful forced virtue is. These days we realise that temperament is not quite so plastic, but other methods of control (chemical, genetic) seem to lie just around the corner.

However both in reading the book and watching the movie one thought occurred to me.  Why is there such a focus on the ethical morass of Alex’s coerced change in behavior–and so little to the rape and murder of his female victims?  They are placed in the scene merely to illustrate Alex’s degenerate state, not to represent real people.  My main discomfort as a consumer of the story was for it to be meaningful you have to accept that the key point is how Alex is changed and whether it is acceptable, the death of these women is beside the point–their perspective silenced as effectively as the cat lady is with the statue.  The Clockwork Orange, like the phallic sculpture, is certainly art–but art of a hyper-masculine type with preoccupations to match (e.g. male autonomy).  And that, more than the sex and violence (which is actually rather mild by modern standards) is what makes me so uncomfortable watching it and so  taking on that point of view.

Much is sometimes made of how the recent upsurge in erotic romance is some new and outrageous development. The sex, the salacious covers, the gay and group sex! As a person who has been reading erotic books all my life I find this perspective a little naive. There has always been erotic fiction with lurid covers and options including gay, group, furry and so much more (erotic romance ebooks have a ways to go before I’ll consider them really decadent). Reaching to my bookshelf I pulled down a few examples.

First up we have The Velvet Trap (1971) with a cover showing two women and the tag line: “She spent one night with another woman–and never wanted a man again!” and the first line is: “Jan Flowers, from early childhood on, had always known the difference between a penis and a pencil.” That’s right, the word ‘penis’ in the very first sentence.

Next on the shelf is When Men Meet (1963). The blurb on the back ends: “In the arms of this voluptuary Cassius found himself helpless … a slave to unlooked for passions.” So that covers FF and MM within the first two books.  Beside that sits The Sign of Eros (1953): “Two Women … one man … a single love”. FFM, check.

Then there is In Bed We Cry (1943): “This gay and clever novel by the glamorous Ilka lays bare the secret intrigues and love affairs that take place in the smart atmosphere of New York’s ‘beauty and fashion’ world … the intense struggle for money and glamour, the casual love affairs, the pleasure-hungry of cocktail parties and night clubs.” Erotic chick lit, check.

Finally–because this is just an illustrative sample, I could go on–there is The Waters of Centaurus (1970) : “The Sea King was handsome, perhaps the most overwhelming male personality that Police Sergeant Sibyl Sue Blue had ever met … but he wasn’t human.”  Furry, or in this case scaly, check.

So before suggesting that the new incarnation of erotic romance, ebooks, the internet or any modern phenomenon is somehow creating a new wave smut hitherto unknown to womankind–look back. Exactly the same themes of alpha men, shape shifters, threesomes, orgies, furries, spanking, bondage, seduction and morethan seduction, slavery, fetish, role playing etc etc etc is there when you look back to the mass produced genre fiction of the day. Pulp novels, penny dreadfuls, medieval poetry, neolithic stone carvings… (no idle claim, I will show all of these, or at least pictures of them, in later posts).

And interestingly in all the cases where the gender of the author or artist can be determined, women have been represented in this activity. Women have not suddenly leaped into creating and consuming erotica, we are part of a long, rich and diverse tradition of treating sex like (shock, horror) it is alluring, amusing and just plain fun.  Like it is something to package for consumption and make money of, unapologetically or–if we must–anonymously.

Women, books and sexuality–not just for the new millennium.