Necrophilia and Pedophilia and Bestiality! Oh my!

I know that a post below me covered Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a personal favorite of mine, and Twilight, but I want to look at the vampires in True Blood and New Moon. New Moon deals with some topics pretty far outside Rubin’s “charmed circle.” There’s cross-generational relationships—Edward Cullen, the dreamy vampire lead, is after all, over one hundred years old. However, that little factoid is quite obviously ignored, as he looks just like a teenager.

This idea of the ageless vampire makes me think of cross-generational relationships. Age differences are so easily accepted when it’s dealing with fictional vampires. Edward and Bella of Twilight fame, Buffy and Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sookie and Bill in True Blood. In all of these examples, the vampire is always the man- because don’t we accept age differences when the male is older? While obviously vampires are not real, cross-generational relationships are the ones abhorred by the rest of the world. In a cross-generational relationship, people look at the older member of the dyad as being deviant. I wonder how people would react if Twilight featured a female vampire who was hundreds of years old, and a young boy? After all, avoiding cross-generational relationships purpose is to keep children “pure.” Well, in Twilight everyone stays pure, so I guess the age gap ceases to exist. 

Sup wit Ops?

What’s up with Oprah?  Every week, it seems like, she has a show about something to do with sexuality.  Everyone knows Oprah’s history.  As a child she was molested by her uncle.  She speaks out on it unashamed in order to help people.  She promotes people to “go with your gut feeling” when a situation seems like it might turn dangerous.

To name a few, Oprah began earlier this semester hosting episodes about victims of incest.  It went from celebrity down to everyday women, encouraging women to speak out about being victims of incest.  I wonder what Foucault would say about how incest is producing women who talk about incest, and what these women would produce in the future?  Would they produce an medico-juridical regime against incest, or would it reproduce and become complicit with what it denounces?

Recently she hosted a show on the topic of prostitution.  The show had a segment about sex trafficking and child prostitution in Malaysia with two “experts” to explain the situation and give suggestions on how people could help (give money! Surprise, surprise.).  One of the experts says he actually bought two young women in Malaysia and returned them to their families.  It only cost him about $300.00.  He seemed well off, so I wondered why he only bought two and not more.  But then I thought, how is he reinforcing and reproducing this system by buying these girls? One of the girls went back to her pimp for drugs to which her pimp got her addicted (Crystal Meth).  The other girl got married and is pregnant with her first child.  It’s interesting how the story went from “bad” sex to “good” sex by ending it with a note that now she’s having “good” sex so life is wonderful.  This may be somewhat true, but probably is not the whole truth.  The segment ended with a discussion of how one sex labor business shut down and turned into a grocery store when it wasn’t profitable any more.  So the story went from “buy their freedom” to “laissez faire” destruction of businesses.  But still, give your money any way, and we’ll give micro-loans to the women who are free and they will be superwomen taking over households and villages one at a time.

It’s interesting to ponder about why Oprah is choosing these stories, given her audience.  Her audience is mostly white women, stay-at-home-moms, retired women, grandmas, etc.  As a black woman telling these stories, how does this complicate what’s going on?  Does her audience feel like Oprah is their “black friend?”  And if so, maybe because she’s their “black friend” (read: different) and she’s uber-rich they must deal with her differently.  They have to listen to her.  They sit attentively in the audience waiting for their swag, or to watch other people get their swag, and listen while they wait.  But are they really listening?  Is Oprah taking advantage of her status to break down barriers in discussing sexuality?  Is Oprah taking advantage of her status and position by encouraging society’s powerful, wealthy white families donate to causes otherwise unknown?  Why is Oprah doing this, and what exactly are the consequences?

Tiger Woods

The Tiger Woods scandal recently publicized everywhere by the media has a lot of sexuality theory embedded into it. Let’s list some theories and then delve further into the story: Sex negativity, fallacy of misplaced scale, domino theory of sexual peril, hierarchical system, and black sexual politics. There are so many more.

First, the fallacy of the misplaced scale puts so much emphasis on Tiger’s celebrity status, his relationship with his wife, details of his personal life and now his sex life. Celebrities automatically get more attention than everyday people. We talked about the Cornell scandal in class, but that wasn’t blasted by the media in the way that this story has been. And arguably, there are more and juicier details there, if that’s what the public is looking for. Relationships get more attention because they are a social construct on which we put so much emphasis in order to keep our culture and being perpetuating over time. Stories about relationships get more attention than those about a single person. First story about a single person that comes to mind is James Fry and his lies in his book A Million Little Pieces. His story was big, but not as big as this story about Tiger (or Demi and Ashton, Nicole/Tom/Katie, JLo and Marc Anthony, Beyoncé/Rihanna and Jay-Z, Rihanna and Chris Brown, Reese and Jake, Brad and Angelina, Ellen and Portia, Oprah/Gayle/Stedman, etc.). I guess a person about a single story gets big if you lie to Oprah.

Because of some people in society’s concept of sex negativity—that sex is bad—the domino theory of sexual peril—that once you do one bad thing, what’s next—kicks in. In this case, Tiger did a “bad” thing. But he’s a spokesperson! We’ll skip the part about why spokespeople necessarily mean “role model.” Since he’s a role model but he did a “bad” thing, then kids who look up to him will think it’s okay, the theory would continue. Since affairs are okay, what else is okay? Marriage won’t have meaning. Sex will be rampant and society as we know it will fall to pieces!

What hasn’t been talked about much is that Tiger is mixed (or seen as black) and his wife and the “other woman” are both white women with blonde hair. It seems to me that this scandal is getting so much attention because of the level of discomfort many people have, due to our cultural history of slavery and oppression, with black men and white women having sexual relationships. This goes against what the dominant white male slaveowner would have wanted—to have his property (his white wife) be “defiled” and impregnated by his property (his black male slave). This loss of control demonstrates a change in society with which many people are uncomfortable. If Obama had a white wife, would he even be considered as a candidate? I’m not sure he would have. So, this media attention to Tiger’s “missteps” has demonstrated public sensitivity to interracial relationships. Unlike Vitter, Letterman and the rest who have been in the spotlight this year for infidelity, Tiger’s case is different. Tiger, and all people in obviously interracial relationships, are being publicly admonished for this coupling through all the negative media attention. Media is saying—see, this is what happens when you intermix, the relationship falls apart. Learn your lesson children!

Who is at the Top of the Naughty List This Year? Mrs. Claus.

How do sex and advertisements intermix? People say sex sells, but why do they feel the need to draw a line? In a recent article – http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/12/02/when-sex-doesnt-sell-slew-of-bad-ads-backfire-in-the-blogosphe they discuss some advertisements that have surpassed some sort of invisible line of appropriateness. Particularly noteworthy in this article is a advertisement from Boost Mobile: 

In this ad, you see a reindeer snooping outside a window while Mrs. Claus is getting frisky with a snowman. After being nuzzled by a carrot nose, Mrs. Claus says “What? You think this is wrong? Santa is busy and I have needs”. It is certainly far from the typical conceptualization of the wholesome wife of Santa. The author of the article writes that, “some may find the commercial amusing, others may find the depiction of Mrs. Claus as a cheating spouse with a snowman fetish offensive” And so begins the controversy.

But why is this offensive? There are ads that come out all the time with men checking out sexy women to sell beer, and there are far fewer qualms with any of those. This has a lot to do with people’s perception of adultery in society. It is outside of Gayle Rubin’s charmed circle, which is an exclusive group of accepted sexual practices that hold the power in society. Once you choose not to be part of a monogamous married dyad, the charmed circle says, ‘goodbye!’ Furthermore, it plays into Laura Kipnis’s views on monogamy. She believes that staying with one sexual partner for the entire rest of your life is impractical and only a way to maintain the status quo. And let’s face it, Mrs. Claus has been married to Old Saint Nick for a long, long time. As she says in the ad, she has needs, so while Santa is off delivering toys all over the globe, why can’t things get a little steamy with a snowman? Laura Kipnis certainly understands. Our culture is too caught up on upholding this view of wholesomeness with Christmas. Sex cannot enter the scene. Mr. and Mrs. Claus are the poster children of the married dyad, and when that is broken down, it is nothing short of shameful and inappropriate.

This also leads into Rubin’s misplaced scale. This idea is that members of society hold sexual acts to have much more importance than any other acts. When it comes to sex, everything is held up at a much higher level. In the case of this ad, people are so appalled, in part, because of this misplaced scale. Mrs. Claus having sex in general, forgetting the adultery, is far outside of the normal comfort zone.

This is reinforced by this ad of Snow White sleeping with the seven dwarfs.

Again, we see the misplaced scale, for people were not happy with it, and Disney made Jamieson take it off of the market. This is also a manifestation of a sexual encounter that is out of the charmed circle. Having sex with seven dwarves is way beyond a dyad.  Refusal of polygamy is a way to maintain hegemony is society.

Ads are way in which people are continuously socialized and affected. If the ads that suggest sexuality outside of the charmed circle are continuously pulled, then those acts will remain unaccepted.

Is Everyone a Prostitute?

Prostitution is defined as money exchanged for sex. However, I can’t help but think of different ways in which prostitution goes on everyday without crossing the line. There are many other ways in which something- a product, a favor- can be exchanged for sexual favors between women and men, leading to hegemonic male power and the reinforcement of heteronormativity.  

Below, T-Pain describes buying a woman a drink with the knowledge that he will then take her home. 

 

Can we ever really Take Back the Night?

Don’t walk home alone. Don’t dress like a slut. Don’t trust anyone. Watch your drink at all times. Be careful at frat parties. Don’t be a tease, because then you’ll lead him on and then you’ll deserve it. Don’t get too drunk, because then it might just be drunk sex—not rape.  

These are the conflicting ideas that girls are taught about their sexuality. Be sexy, not sexual- a sexual object, not an agent. These ideas are perpetuated in sex education in schools and through the penetrable nature of women’s bodies. 

 After attending Take Back the Night, I was asked by someone “Was it an event for girls who were really raped, or just girls who were drunk?”

1, 2, 3, Peter, Paul and Mary: The Prevalence of the Triad in Popular Culture

Really, Britney? It’s the sexiest threesome you could think of? 

Lately, threesomes seem to be everywhere. Britney Spears is singing about them, Dr. McSteamy of Grey’s Anatomy fame is having one, and Amazon is pushing them.

Super Freak

I was watching the movie Little Miss Sunshine the other night, and the story line is based on the young girl, Olive, attending a beauty pageant. For the talent portion of the pageant, she dances to the song “Super Freak.” Her dance moves would be referred to as provocative. The reactions from the audience and judges clearly supported the idea of the misplaced scale that Rubin identifies. Her moves are suggestive and gain more attention than the other girls’ performances in a negative light because of her forming sexuality as a child. The judges tell her father to get her off the stage. After the family ends up on the stage dancing all together, they are told that she can never be entered into another beauty pageant in the state of California ever again. This truly acknowledges the fact that children are not recognized of having any form of sexuality in our country. The fact that she was engaging in a performance like that needs to be stopped and silenced in order to not taint the child or the viewers.

 Not only is childhood innocence in need of protecting in this instances but particularly the girl’s sexuality. She needs to remain protected. Fields addresses the way in which education reiterates this idea. Through abstinence-only education, the powerful few have been able to deprive children from this knowledge. However, even comprehensive sex education still place female sexuality at a disadvantage in a way that does not occur for male sexuality. We have been socialized to see females as innocent and virgins in even a greater extent than we do children. We often think of the ways we need to protect the children, but specifically the girls. However, research shows that by educating children and recognizing them as sexual subjects, the problems we are trying to protect them from becomes less of an actual problem. This societal shift needs to occur away from un-educating and silencing to making children aware of their sexuality in a way to give personal power and agency.

How to be a Crimial– Sexual Discourses in Cop Drama

Ridiculous cop drama is one of my favorite things in the world– who doesn’t love to take a break with an hour long episode of a perfectly diverse group of good looking men and women running around catching murderers, serial killers, arsonists, and even the ocassional sex offender.  Sometimes they even shoot someone or become victims themselves.  Honestly, before I took this class I thought cop drama was pretty much the most amazing kind of television in the world–what’s not to like?  It’s only within the past few months, as I’ve been doing my reading for Mimi’s class and capping off my night with a Criminal Minds marathon that I’ve noticed some really intersting things about the way sexuality is approached.

This semester we’ve discussed a lot of forms of sexuality that are excluded from the charmed circle in one way or another.  The two most basic ways that ‘alternate’ sexualities– ones that don’t fit into the charmed circle– are excluded is through social exclusion and legal exclusion.  While, in several instances these go hand in hand, i.e. there are laws against certain sexual acts because the majority of people have decided it’s necessary to exclude them, this is not always true.  In cop drama, however, an intersting tie is made between these two forms of exclusion.  Because the characters of these television shows are supposed to be the ones upholding these laws, its intersting to recieve their perspective on the “criminals” that it is their job to arrest.

Simply put, the most interesting thing to me is the flat out lack of inquiry when it comes to crimes of a sexual nature. It’s likely that murder would have far less objections to being a criminal offense than prostitution, per say, but the alarming aspect of these cop dramas is that… this doesn’t seem to be the case.  In fact, the officers and agents discuss crimes of a sexual nature, whether it be child pornography to rape to murder to drug use to prostitution all in almost the exact same manner– with disgust.   It’s clear that none of the characters, or on a deeper level, the writers and producers of the show, have any doubt that prostitution or incest are just as unacceptable, on a social level, not simply a legal one, as rape or murder.  The disdain with which they treat the individuals who are “guilty” of these crimes suggests that they have been socialized to beleive “crimes” of a sexual nature– practicing a sexuality differnt from what is accepted by the charmed circle– are morally reprehensible.

In addition to this, monogamy is another serious issue which seems to be perpetuated by the content and dialogue of cop drama.  On could perhaps say this about almost all television shows which subscribe to mainstream norms, but for cop drama this portrayal  excessive.  In Criminal Minds, my personal favorite cop drama, they way they go about catching criminals is not by looking at DNA or physical evidence, but by performing a psychological and sociological analysis of the crimes and the criminals.  Part of this often requires researching parties involved with the crimes.  It seems that in the process of doing this, someone surfaces with an extra-marital affair, an alternative sexual preference, or some kind of behavior that separates them from the charmed circle and that automatically makes them a suspect.  What’s more is that, since it’s up to a writer to determine who the actual criminal is, the person who they become suspicious of due to these factors is usually the real criminal.  This leads viewers to believe that these trends are real– that alternate sexualities, being non-monogamous, etc. lead to being a dangerous predator who commits murder or rape.

Furthermore, and this is something that has only occurred to me sincedoing the readings for our last class, the image of children as being innocent is a prevailing ideal of the cop drama genre.  In fact, emphasis is placed specifically as victims against “innocent” children as being the most brutal and base of all crimes.  While this characterization is not always in relation to sexuality, the general characterization of children as being so innocent of “Adult” matter and cooncepts and ideas seems to follow from the assumption that they are unable to handle responsibility.  This is simply another way in which television series of this nature represent and perpetuate the dominance of the charmed circle.

Chicks and Vamps

For my Sociology Capstone, Sociology of Culture, I’m researching Vampire Culture through consumers of vampire media.  As you can imagine, even if you have a limited or minimal amount of knowledge about vampire media, gender plays a big role in the culture.  Something that I initially set out to avoid discussing in my research has now resurfaaced in my data analysis and presents itself as something almost immediately relevent to this class.  As one might imagine, vampire culture is not the most mainstream form of fiction (although, with the recent creation of works such as the Twilight series, this is becoming increasingly less true).  However, through content analysis of different forms of vampire media, everything from Nosferatu, the first vampire movie ever made, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, numerous renditions of Dracula, film versions of several of Anne Rice novels, such as Queen of the Damned and Interview with a Vampire, up until the most recent works of Twilight, there is an interesting progression of gender roles and sexual identity. Although the vampire is simply a literary figure, I think it can be thought of as a social narrative in the context of a specific subculture.  Through my analysis, I’ve found that the most common reason people are consumers of vampire culture, no matter what form of media, or what works they were intersted in, is that they feel displaced from mainstream society.  Therefore, they look to the vampire as a symbolic character which represents the same anguish they feel over being an outcast.  Therefore, people are interested in vampires because they feel like they, themselves do not fit in, so they are able to relate to the vampire in this way.

For this discussion post, I’ll go ahead and keep things simple, though, so that we can focus more on the dialogue of gender roles aspect than the vampire aspect.  The three works that seem to stick out the most in this dialogue of gender through this subculture are: Nosferatu (Which is loosely based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula) in which an evil vampire prays on young, helpless women, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (my personal favorite television show of all time) in which a teenage girl is selected to defend the human world against the forces of darkness, predominantly vampires, and finally, Twilight, the new and strange fantasy novel about a human girl who falls in love with a vampire.

One thing that’s become overwhelmingly apparent to me in this analysis is the shift in gender roles from Nosferatu (1922) and Twilight (2008)., specifically with regard to the female.  In Nosferatu, the female is portrayed as simply a helpless victim, and from the way the movie is shot, she almost seems to be portrayed as the sexual object of the vampire.  However, in Twilight (the movie at least, out of principle I refuse to read the books), the female has a different role.  She has moved from the role of victim to the role of savior, almost.  Now, in the content analysis of these sources, it still seems as if the role of the female is still the submissive one.  The female has gained some agency, but it seems that this is only through her sexual objectivity.  Because she is using her power as a sexual object to now gain some form of agency in the symbolic narrative of vampire culture, it’s intersting to parallel this to what this might mean in terms of social representations of gender roles.  It seems as if the parallel of the gender role of females over the course of the past 50-70 years has been one in which the female gender has done just as the female characters in vampire culture: they’ve developed thier sexual agency in order to move themselves from the subserviant role, into one of pseudo-power.

However, the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran for 7 seasons from 1997 to 2003 tells a much different narrative regarding gender roles of women.  Since the main character, Buffy, is portrayed as the most powerful force… in the world, she is valued for her strength rather than her agency as a sexual object.  However, this does not mean that she’s without sexuality.  In fact, her sexuality does have a big role in the show, it is simply not what she gains her power from.

From these different forms of vampire media, we can see that gender roles are given an intersting meaning in vampire culture, which in some ways can be seen to parallel the development of gender roles and performativity that are present at that time in society, while other works can almost be seen as agents that are working toward the empowerment of women by giving them strength or powers that are both superior to and inaccessible to men, both in conjuntion with sexuality and independent of it.