Other people have made better arguments (here’s one, and here’s another) than I could for why having a teenager with her tits out in the first few pages of a national newspaper might not be a particularly stellar idea. It’s objectification at its worst, and the empowerment argument neglects the fact that there are better, safer, and more rewarding ways to take your clothes off for financial gain if that’s what you truly want to do.

My argument against Page 3 is quite simple; if you don’t want to reject it simply because it’s in bad taste, insensitive, and chauvinistic, then reject it because it uses psychological techniques to manipulate your views into agreeing with whatever fits the Sun’s goals at the time. The Sun sees its readership not just as customers, but as bargaining chips and weapons.

Let’s take a quick look at a few examples of Page 3. The rather excellent Tim Ireland over at Bloggerheads, nemesis of Nadine Dorries, has been collecting these –  I hope he won’t mind me mirroring them here. Credit due entirely to him and anyone who might have scanned them for him.

Now, it’s quite possible that these women hold these opinions. It’s quite interesting, however, that they coincide with the vitriol that appears in the The Sun Says portion of the paper, home of a much more blatant attempt to tell their readership what to think.

Think about this, though – what if these statements are invented by the paper? Then, what we have on our hands is a cheap attempt to use the many cognitive biases that sexual attraction brings into play to form an opinion in the undecided. This person is attractive; you’re naturally more inclined to agree with people that you find attractive; your opinion is swayed. All the time, you’re seeing it as just a bit of fun, just a silly piece of paper with a pair of breasts. Every day, this message hits home. Over time, it affects people – they think the way the Sun, and thus the Murdoch empire, wants them to think.

Yes, alright, I’ve strayed a bit into tin-foil-hat territory. The fact is, though, that this is having an effect on the Sun’s readership. How big an effect is arguable, of course, but it’s non-zero. Also, don’t forget that there’s a huge line on the role of these women – they’re being used as tools, to have opinions thrust into their mouths. Even the names are probably pseudonyms. They are there for no reason at all other than to be a pair of tits, and that shit is just not on.

If you won’t boycott the Sun because you hate the exploitation and objectification of women that it represents, boycott it because you value your own power of self-determination.

The first play of Kaliana’s I saw was Hooray for Hollywood a while back. It told the story of her own horrific childhood in the child sex industry. The play showed adult actors from the waist down (just jean legs, skirts and overheard dialogue) and focused on the level – both emotionally and physically – of the children, who were portrayed with puppets.

I first saw Hooray for Hollywood in July 2010 and wrote about it then for feminist mag Fat Quarter. More recently an abridged version of the play has been filmed for wider distribution and showed at an event on ending child pornography held at Amnesty International Headquarters. The work is powerful, brave, and through ingenious staging conveys what it would be near-impossible to bring out for open discussion any other way. Frequently Hooray for Hollywood is played with a talk afterwards, hosted by various child protection charities.

Puppet (R)Evolution’s current play, Fragile/Sacred, was on as part of the Suspense puppetry festival.

Whereas Hooray for Hollywood was already an extremely creatively-presented play, Fragile/Sacred pushes the boundary further and forms more of an art piece. Once again part of Kaliana’s autobiography, and drawing this time from her teens, the entire performance is wordless, and uses four live actors along with a minimal number of puppets.

The set is a large, square tunnel – with each side draped in a different material, used to great effect to convey everything from undergrowth to water to a hospital ward. The opening sequence of the abusive father figure holding a light-up model of a home and pushing his hand into it and licking his hand – clearly getting a sexual kick out of it – set up the creepiness of the story’s homelife, and was one of the most uncomfortable few minutes of stagetime I have ever seen.

I feel I very much benefited from seeing Hooray for Hollywood first, and feel the two plays could, perhaps, complement each other on a double-bill. As it was, I’m not sure if those coming to Fragile/Sacred afresh would have understood all of it.

However, that said, the play is as much about atmosphere as it is about plot. The father figure character (opening scene aside) is oddly inexpressive – tightly-wound and capable of violence, but the actor playing him nonetheless gives little away facially. I say ‘the actor’ as the part is also sometimes played by a puppet for the longer-range scenes.

Compared to Hooray for Hollywood, Fragile/Sacred is very light on puppetry. It has a father puppet, a rabbit and a raven, as well as some shadow-puppets, but the play also makes good use of models and toys to convey the larger scenes. Puppetry in this play is just one element in a large range of innovative techniques used to convey the story.

Watching adult actors move toy cars or toy helicopters around added a layer of non-optional make-believe to the production. I occasionally found the lines between characters playing and representation of wider plot a little difficult to discern, but that in a way added to the dreamlike quality of the piece.

I found the complete lack of dialogue a little difficult, but – as in the earlier play – this is about a protagonist who sees a lot, but is often scared to speak or act. The character seemed on the surface to be very passive, yet was making brave and bold moves throughout the play. The dreamlike quality of the production conveyed a kind of inner sanctuary that the protagonist retreated to and drew strength from.

A fascinating, artful and thoughtful production – and an absolute must for lovers of physical theatre, as well as anyone working in fields which touch on the themes of abuse. But, strange as it feels to say, I found Fragile/Sacred – the gentler of the two plays I’ve seen – was slightly more difficult for me than Hooray for Hollywood with its more straightforward plot. While Hooray for Hollywood was entirely viewed from the protagonist’s (physical) point of view, Fragile/Sacred seems to be viewed from mostly inside the protagonist’s mind, where there is an often luscious stillness while horrors swirl around her and worlds blend together. That said, the two pieces do inform each other hugely, and I repeat my call for a double-bill.

• ravenkaliana.com
• Puppet (R)Evolution

Photos by Emma Leishman and Tinka Slavicek

]]> /2011/11/16/personal-revolutions-raven-kalianas-fragilesacred/feed/ 0 8482 /2011/10/27/dave-mckeans-celluloid/ /2011/10/27/dave-mckeans-celluloid/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:00:03 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=8052 As a big fan of Dave McKean’s rich and haunting art and illustration, I was intrigued and admittedly a bit excited to hear he was producing an erotic graphic novel earlier this year – Celluloid.

Pr0n

I’ll get my position down as briefly as I can here so I can get on with the post. I wouldn’t say I’m ‘pro-porn’ because I’m dead against the unsafe and exploitative (like many industries, it must be said) mainstream porn industry. I find a lot of it distressing and unpleasant to watch. But I don’t accept the argument that violent porn has any causal link to violence against women beyond the fact that it re-inscribes the values already at large in our society. Symptom not cause, I‘d say.

I have no problem with porn in theory. But mainstream heterosexual porn and all its cliches has become so dominant and so widely accepted that it has become the ‘norm’ against which the bodies, fantasies and sexual experiences of real people are judged. We need positive, progressive sex education and much greater diversity, acceptance and openness about sex and representations of sex.

Back to Celluloid

Anyway. Here’s a brief synopsis I pinched from this Comics Alliance review:

Celluloid is the story of a woman who, during a moment of sexual frustration, discovers a film projector and reel of film that depicts a couple having sex… this woman finds herself traveling from our world into a dreamlike realm of sexual fantasies that’s presented in the artist’s trademarked style(s)…. The woman begins simply as a voyeur and eventually graduates to full participant in various activities with the entities she encounters.

And here’s a Flickr slideshow of images from the book so you can see what they’re talking about. It’s terribly beautiful, which to be honest I have come to expect from McKean. But the whole thing left me with a sadly unsexy feeling of ‘meh’.

Tickle my Intellect

Of course, reviewing an erotic work is tricky because what flicks your switches is such a personal matter, but even setting that aside I found I was disappointed. It didn’t turn me on. But it didn’t interest me either. In this Comic Book Resources interview, McKean outlines some of his aims behind the project:

Most pornography is pretty awful. I mean, it does the job at the most utilitarian level, but it rarely excites other areas of the mind, or the eye. It’s repetitive, bland and often a bit silly. I was interested in trying to do something that… tickles the intellect as well as the more basic areas of the mind.

Yay for intellect-tickling! That sounds right up my street. But I don’t think Celluloid delivered. I realise now that what I was hoping for was something that felt as different to mainstream porn as Black Orchid was from most 1980s superhero comics. And of course it is different on its shimmering surface, but the fantastic situations and sensual artwork are resting on some conventions from mainstream pornography that hold no allure for me.

For example: the female protagonist is inevitably thin, white, and able-bodied, with long blonde hair. She’s apparently bi-curious heterosexual. After having a bath in her empty house, she decides to put her high heels back on. The situation that frames her sexual journey is that she comes home and calls her boyfriend/husband/playmate, but he’s still at the office, so she’s stuck with a pout, a bath and some self-pleasure. I was half expecting her to order a pizza and get it on with the delivery man. One reviewer, who I won’t grace with a link, even described her as a ‘bored housewife’. It just feels so clichéd, and for me that undermines the eroticism of the art and the originality of the project.

Boobfruit

Visually the weakest section (in my opinion) is what I’m going to call the Boobfruit section, in which the protagonist:

…encounters an “earth mother” figure, haloed in fruit and with fourteen breasts… as the woman consummates her meeting with the goddess, the resultant imagery throws some interesting analogies between fruit and the body.



The beginning of the Boobfruit episode. The 'earth mother' character is wearing some grapes on her head. Image © Fantagraphics, 2011

I don’t know what Graphic Eye find so interesting about the analogies between fruit and the body. Fruit as a symbol of sex and fertility, and particularly cis female reproductive organs, is pretty much as old as art. Here’s some extremely luscious fruit conveniently dropped into a painting of a youthful Elizabeth I, painted at a time when her fertility was a subject of international political speculation. And what could Frida Kahlo possibly be referencing here? You get the picture.

There’s also a cliché-within-a-cliché of fruit being used as a sensual reference point in descriptions of lesbian sex. I just couldn’t take this episode seriously, especially as the fruit pictures look like they’ve been cut out of an M&S advert.

Subject or object?

In the Comic Book Resources interview, McKean says:

I also thought it would be more interesting coming from a woman’s perspective, and for it to be essentially fantastical, a series of sex dreams, allowing for a more impressionistic view, trying to express the feelings of each stage, rather than just showing you literally what happens…



Image © Fantagraphics, 2011

But although the story ‘stars’ a woman, it’s not really told from her perspective. I mean, you follow her on her surrealist sex adventures, but at no point do you get any real idea of her feelings or thoughts. She is stereotypically passive; she wanders into situations and things happen to her, and she embraces them, but doesn’t act or take the initiative.

Although the woman begins as an observer and becomes a participant, it’s just a trade of one kind of objecthood for another, we have no sense of her interior life, to the extent that I find it a bit creepy. She is even drawn in a remarkably dead-eyed, expressionless way.

I still admire Dave McKean as an artist and illustrator, and I don’t intend this review as an attack on him; he seems like a thoroughly nice bloke. I understand that he didn’t produce Celluloid with me in mind as his target audience, and perhaps he never intended to challenge all (or any) of the conventions of mainstream porn. But I wish he had, since for me that would have turned a mildly interesting and attractive book into something extraordinary.

]]> /2011/10/27/dave-mckeans-celluloid/feed/ 2 8052 /2011/04/04/an-alphabet-of-feminism-24-x-is-for-x/ /2011/04/04/an-alphabet-of-feminism-24-x-is-for-x/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 08:00:50 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=4350 X

X

Intro

X is for X is unique among Alphabet posts in that the letter does not stand in for a word – like A for Amazon and B for Bitch – because, in fact, the letter is the word.



The Eleanor Cross replica at Charing Cross, London.

Yet this word – simultaneously standing in for itself and existing as an independent unit of meaning – is possibly one of the most widely-used symbols of all. How exactly this might be relevant to a consideration of feminism will be herein considered, but I hope my indulgent readers will excuse a slightly cheeky use of theoretical thinking. We all know each other well enough by now, don’t we?

VCR

The most straightforward significance of X is, as Latin-fans will know, ‘ten’ / ’10’ (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X). Two tens side by side is XX, or twenty / 20. How many tens can you think of? Ten lost tribes of Israel, ten commandments, ten plagues of Egypt, ten dimes in a dollar, ten years in a decade. It’s a pleasingly round number, and an easy times table, even if it frequently loses out to ‘twelve’ / ’12’ in mystic significance.

But x is not simply a linguistic unit: it is also a visual one. Two diagonal lines; two Vs touching each other; a crossover; a cross; a cross-roads. Like ‘0’, which means ‘oh’, ‘o’, ‘zero’ and ‘nothing’, it represents one of its meanings aesthetically: it is a cross. Thus King’s X and Charing X (this last was named for the Eleanor Cross built on the site by Richard I to commemorate the funeral procession of his wife) – but, perhaps because of its relationship to the Greek letter ‘Chi’ (‘Ch-‘), which is the first letter of ‘Christ’, x can also signify he-who-died-on-a-cross (‘X-mas‘), although it actually looks more like the St. Andrew cross, which makes up the Scottish flag.

Crystalised

In numerical terms, though, x can also take on the role of an unknown quantity – ‘Find the value of x‘, where the x is italicised to mark its distinction from ‘x’. It is ‘unknown’, not ‘multiply’, an absent value rather than a pluralised one. Here too, we bump into a common significance x has: it represents absence. It is the legal signature of the illiterate (‘I cannot write; here is the x that represents “yes, I agree” but also “no, I cannot write”), and the standard stand-in for a quantity that is unknown or not yet provided (‘Dear X’).

The unknown or unstated quantity has also fed over into censorship: an X-rated film is one only suitable for those aged over 18. It was replaced in 1982 by the ’18’ certificate, but such certificates have frequently been seen by directors as more of a target than an impediment: Hitchcock’s extremely grim Frenzy (1972) was conceived to coincide with the USA’s revised R-rating so that the Master of Suspense could claim his place in the pantheon of horror with a badge of censored honour.



Hitchcock's Frenzy.

This was his penultimate film, and the only one to carry an ’18’ certificate in the UK or receive an ‘X-rating’ after the age restriction was moved up to 18 in 1971. It’s about a rapist serial-killer. If the accusation of misogyny leveled at him impedes your appreciation of Hitchcock’s films as a whole, I would not recommend this one. It features an extended rape scene shot with a disturbing emphasis on its supposed eroticism, and some true masterpieces of misogyny in the dialogue.

There’s also this scene, which features Babs’ death: from the moment Rust enters the frame we know she’s dead, and the line which precedes the attack, ‘You’re my kind of woman’ (whose results we have already seen in graphic form on his previous victim) precedes one of Hitchcock’s most underrated panning shots: the camera backs out down the stairs and out into the street in what the director himself dubbed ‘Bye Bye To Babs‘. This is the second of the film’s rape-murders and one no less disturbing for being ‘exed out’ – its self-censorship makes its own point.

There is a beautifully dark irony in how this most censored of Hitchcock’s films is also one focused almost entirely around silencing and deleting women – exing them by using the Latin prefix ‘out of, from, utterly, beyond’ (ex), thus, in verbal form, ‘to delete, to cross off’ (as in ‘to x‘, to ‘cross’, which can also be ‘to thwart’ – ‘Don’t cross me!’). This is the x-form that gives us ‘ex-boyfriend, ex-girlfriend, ex-wife‘, so that the x acts as a negative, canceling out the word that follows it, making the spouse a stranger, and the act of so doing is, in fact, an act of deletion – ‘exing‘ someone, crossing them out (indeed, we frequently drop the specifics altogether, don’t we? ‘My ex’.)

If you buy the theory that Hitch was himself a Horrible Misogynist (which, with regret, I think I must – in this film at least) – the fact that he chose a kind of Jack the Ripper style return to his London roots for his attempt on the R-rating is a masterpiece of gyno-negation (yes I made that compound up, but I’m running with it):

Solicitor in Pub: Let’s hope he slips up soon.
Doctor in Pub: In one way I rather hope he doesn’t. We haven’t had a good juicy series of sex murders since Christie. And they’re so good for the tourist trade. Foreigners somehow expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs and *littered* with ripped whores, don’t you think?

Frenzy (1972)

Heart Skipped A Beat

It is, then, fantastically dark yet undeniably fitting that x is frequently appropriated as a symbol of sexytimes: XXX (thirty) means ‘extra strong’, via an x homonym extra. Thus it is an identifier for pornography and x-rated movies, and, in the form .xxx is a ‘sponsored top level domain’ (what?) intended as a voluntary option for porn sites (instead of .com, .co.uk etc), to allow clear classification and prevent The Children accessing such sites ‘by accident’. The difficulty here, of course, is that it requires binary identification of What Is Porn and What Is Not (of which more presently).

In lower-case form, xxx connects love and lust: most people know of x = kiss (I’ve always wondered if there’s something in ‘k’ being an ‘x’ that may have hit a wall), but Wikipedia claims ‘xxx’ means ‘I love you’ through the power of three. Like ‘heart’, which is a very different thing from ‘love’ (‘I heart NY’), ‘X’ is frequently something distinct from ‘kiss’, and rarely a simple representation of it. Just look at Holly Valance, whose 2002 single ‘Kiss Kiss‘ (and its predictably lips-obsessed video) repeatedly blocks out what comes after ‘my…’, replacing it with a ‘mwah mwah’ which is frequently not even mimed in the video, and, as the song progresses, gets increasingly mixed out, blanked out and fragmented.

Don’t play the games that you play
‘Cause you know that I won’t run away
Why aren’t you asking me to stay
‘Cause tonight I’m gonna give you my (mwah mwah)

– Holly Valance, ‘Kiss Kiss’ (2002)

Where this is all leading is, of course, ‘tonight I’m gonna give you my XX’… which is also ‘my XXX’. Add to this the traditional association of mouths and vaginas (whose natural endpoint is the vagina dentata, whence a man ‘always leaves diminished’) and you have a really rather porno-tastic song all round (yet one that would never come with a domain name culminating with .xxx).

Basic Space

By contrast, xoxo means ‘kiss, hug, kiss, hug’ (less sexual all round) and is another way of using letters as symbols for something else – O is ‘hug’ because it enfolds itself, yet that self-enclosure also makes it 0 = nothing. To borrow the assumptions of the seventeenth century, this ‘nothing’ is also equivalent to ‘cunt’, since it is an empty space (as in Rochester’s poem ‘Upon Nothing‘, which describes ‘nothing’ as ‘a great uniteD What‘ (pronounce ‘what’ to rhyme with ‘cat’ to get ‘pussy‘)). Similarly, in Hamlet, Ophelia tells the protagonist she thinks ‘nothing’ – which, he replies, is ‘a pretty thought to lie between maids’ legs’, and (given that ‘th’ was frequently pronounced ‘t’ in the sixteenth century), in the light of this you may wish to reconsider the meaning of Shakespeare’s title ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. There is a curious irony here in the use of ‘x’ and ‘o’ side by side: one crosses out and refuses, the other is ‘nothing’ in the first place.

Stars

You have all been mighty patient, but here I draw towards a conclusion: x is a letter so many-layered as to refuse any comprehensive analysis. But this is itself quite appropriate, because those of its meanings I have looked at here all hinge around negation or deletion. That these should happen to focus around sex and (specifically) the vagina is not necessarily something intrinsic to the letter, but it certainly tells you a lot about how that letter is used. Blocked out, crossed out; rendered titillating or exciting; exclusive or exclusionary – exit, stage right.



NEXT WEEK: Y is for Yes

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