Objectify This

On Fighting Corporate Mind Control:

Yes,  the Yes Men are awesome. Yes, they are fixing the world, or at least promoting a movie about it. They’re committed to demonstrating that corporations’ dignity is not as important as human dignity.

So is Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping, who are concerned with helping us all look past capitalism and into the political issues in our communities — with a large spoonful of theater and a psuedo-Evangelist spirit. Reverend Billy is also the Green Party candidate for mayor of New York, running against Bloomberg and his henchmen.

At Boston Review, the Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg breaks down the concept of peak coal and its consequences.

On Sex Work:

Working Girls and Johns share their perspectives on sex work through two linked projects by British journalist and blogger Susannah Breslin. Their human perspectives help to illustrate why legalizing prostitution might do some good.

On Porn:

This Recording discusses how women are changing the sex industry from inside.At The Rumpus, Katie Ryder comments on the dissonance between sex positivity and psuedo-violent porn.

On Rape:

On Feministing, Wowcabbage suggests that rape might be divided into degrees as murder is, prompting a discussion of varying degrees of intellectual rigor. At Harper’s, in an article from March, 1994, called On Not Being a Victim: Sex, Rape, and The Trouble with Following Rules, (subscription required, but it’s $16 for all of their archives) Mary Gaitskill details two rapes she experienced and describes the difference between date rape and stranger rape. It’s the date rape which haunted and hurt her, she reflects rigorously, because she felt powerless to stop it, and that feeling had longer-term effects on her agency and self-esteem, while the stranger rape was more obviously a random act of cruelty and entirely not her fault. But at the same time, she rigorously rebukes Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe for dressing down rape-crisis feminists:

“Roiphe and Paglia are not exactly invoking rules, but their comments seem to derive from a belief that everyone except idiots interprets information and experience in the same way. In that sense, they are not so different in attitude from those ladies dedicated to establishing feminist-based rules and regulations for sex. Such rules, just like the old rules, assume a certain psychological uniformity of experience, a right way.

“The accusatory and sometimes painfully emotional rhetoric conceals an attempt not only to make new rules but also to codify experience. The “rape-crisis feminists” obviously speak for many women and girls who have been raped or have felt raped in a wide variety of circumstances. They would not get so much play if they were not addressing a widespread and real experience of violation and hurt. By asking, “Were they really so innocent?” Roiphe doubts the veracity of the experience she presumes to address because it doesn’t square with hers or with that of her friends. Having not felt violated herself-even though she says she has had an experience that many would now call date rape-she cannot understand, or even quite believe, that anyone else would feel violated in similar circumstances. She therefore believes all the fuss to be a political ploy or, worse, a retrograde desire to return to crippling ideals of helpless femininity. In tum, Roiphe’s detractors, who have not had her more sanguine “morning after” experience, believe her to be ignorant and callous, or a secret rape victim in deep denial. Both camps, believing their own experience to be the truth, seem unwilling to acknowledge the emotional truth on the other side.

“lt is at this point that the “date-rape debate” resembles the bigger debate about how and why Americans seem so eager to identify themselves and be identified by others as victims. Book after article has appeared, written in baffled yet hectoring language, deriding the P.c. goody-goodies who want to play victim and the spoiled, self-centered fools who attend twelve-step programs, meditate on their inner child, and study pious self-help books. The revisionist critics have all had a lot of fun with the recovery movement, getting into high dudgeon over those materially well-off people who describe their childhoods as “holocausts” and winding up with a fierce exhortation to return to rationality. Rarely do such critics make any but the most superficial attempt to understand why the population might behave thus.
“In a fussing, fuming essay in these pages (”Victims, All?” October 1991) that has almost become a prototype of the genre, David
Rieff expressed his outrage and bewilderment that affluent people would feel hurt and disappointed by life. He angrily contrasted rich Americans obsessed with their inner children to Third World parents concerned with feeding their actual children. On the most obvious level, the contrast is one that needs to be made, but I question Rieff’s idea that suffering is one definable thing, that he knows what it is, and that since certain kinds of emotional pain don’t fit this definition they can’t really exist. This idea doesn’t allow him to have much respect for other people’s experience—or even to see it. lt may be ridiculous and perversely self-aggrandizing for most people to describe whatever was bad about their childhood as a “holocaust,” but I suspect that when people talk like that they are saying that as children they were not given enough of what they would later need in order to know who they are or to live truly responsible lives. Thus they find themselves in a state of bewildering loss that they can’t articulate, except by wild exaggeration-much like I defined my inexplicable feelings after my [date rape] episode. “Holocaust” may be a grossly inappropriate exaggeration. But to speak in exaggerated metaphors about psychic injury is not so much the act of a crybaby as it is a distorted attempt to explain one’s own experience. I think the distortion comes from a desperate desire to make one’s experience have consequence in the eyes of others, and that such desperation comes from a crushing doubt that one’s own experience counts at all.”

This argument, in addition to being well written and insightful, reminds us that all of us struggle — that none of us, even the most entitled and least sympathetic– deserve to be objectified. The introduction of legal degrees of rape, which could help to clarify some of the ambiguity around the subject — see Whoopi Goldberg’s distinction between “rape” and “rape-rape” in the Polanski case– would also risk reducing the perceived legitimacy of rape survivors’ experiences, ultimately disempowering them further.