Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Sorry for the Emma bait derail, but hey bitches! Gordon McLauchlan is really disappointed with you -
Women are a disappointment, although he admired them in 1976 "and still do, particularly older women. I was a great fan of the feminist movement."
Feminism was in full swing in 1976, but now he observes that the feminists' determination not to be seen as sex objects has been betrayed by their own children, with women sexualised as never before in magazines and television produced and run by women. And liberation has meant for many women "that men owe them nothing and especially don't even need to offer the perverse kind of loyalty they once would concede. Some women seem lost in shallow and sneering hedonism. "I do feel a bit let down by young women."
Patronising much, Gordy?
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They’re absolutely talking about white urban liberals, aren’t they?
I’ll hand that question off to Mister Brown, who I believe was reliving his dissolute youth last night. Backward baseball caps on middle-aged men are a crime against fashion, but I’m not sure whether it constitutes grounds for a community moral panic.
Apropos of nothing, the closest I ever came to my own private Altamont was at a Muttonbirds gig in Rotorua. (Don’t ask, because I don’t remember enough to tell.) A fine flower of provincial beauty (answered to “cunt”) felt another young lady (a.k.a. “Whore”) was paying untoward attention to her beau. Can't take you white folks anywhere...
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I would like to apologise to anyone who's been trying to get to this only to be obstructed by fumble-fingered technical incompetence.
For my next trick: I plan to break Europe's internet through incompetent misuse of over-priced hotel wi-fi.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Deborah,
I dunno. I think that even in a sexual utopia, there would still be people who can’t access sex, and there will still be sexual jealousy.
Sure – becuase as the subtitle of The Dispossessed reminds us all utopias with real people in them are ambiguous ones. You can’t take sheer human bloody-mindedness out of the equation but, yeah, I’m pretty happy to be a gay man in a society that’s a lot more open than it used to be. Doesn't mean New Zealand is a place without homo-hating but when you have the possibility of walking though an open door instead of having to force a window in the middle of the night, it helps.
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A slightly tangential but still relevant quote from this essay by Marilynne Robinson:
There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell.
Robinson is talking about her approach to writing fiction, but I think it can be applied to the matter in hand.
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Hard News: Did Holopac change everything?, in reply to JackElder,
There's a lot of CG in current films and TV; you spot the bad stuff, sure, but I guarantee you that there's a lot that goes unnoticed.
Quite - but that's often things that aren't really foregrounded. A surprisingly large amount of CGI work on The Hunger Games involved digitally cleaning up blood splatter and dripping blades in post that were making censors nervous. Boardwalk Empire's lushly detailed exterior sets are "enhanced" and "extended" with CGI. Even in action flicks you'll now see wire work being digitally scrubbed when once upon a time you'd just have to frame and light it all very carefully and pray nobody noticed.
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And another takeaway from the video Emma linked to. I wouldn’t call myself a BDSM or D/S practitioner, but sometimes I found a bit of light spanking and dirty talk from a partner who was similarly inclined awesome.
Not sure how anyone would extrapolate into a belief that I’d put up with anyone subjecting me (or anyone else) to verbal or physical partner abuse. Really. Please think that chain of reasoning through all the way.
It's also really hard to rebut people who trot out the "I think your sexuality is icky, therefore you're suffering from sexual false consciousness as a result of either repressed abuse or internalized cultural factors." Seriously, I'd like to figure out how to smash that rhetorical teapot because it's actually pretty dangerous.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
Apropos of nothing, on my to-do list when in Berlin in a fortnight is a visit to this exhibition at the Helmut Newton Foundation. If you’d like to DM me your postal address, Emma, I’ll make sure you get a postcard. :)
And that video just lays out something everyone I know who is involved in BDSM or D/S communities make crystal clear -- in a very meaningful sense, all parties have to be more explicit and honest about their needs, expectations and limitations (and absolutely respectful of them in others) than a lot of folks with "vanilla" sexual tastes ever are. Otherwise, it just doesn't work.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Lilith __,
And in other news, look forward to the sex-bot utopia!!!!1
All I'll say to that is it's all fun and games until the sex-bots get religion and nukes.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
The media’s still getting their heads around women being interested in sex at all. The fact that they’ve noticed one terrible book doesn’t mean women’s behaviour has actually changed in any way..
And as others have pointed out with some asperity, if "mommy porn" (i.e. "OMFG, mothers lady-wank too!") is such a new thing, who the hell has been buying around US$1.4 billion dollars worth of romance/erotica novels in the U.S. every year for the last decade, and why? Romance may be the most popular genre in American publishing, and arguably the only recession proof thing around, but I guess it's a genre overwhelmingly created for and consumed by WOMEN WITH SEX DRIVES so who cares.
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