For the love of Bitchy Jones

I miss Bitchy Jones. Part of me feels like I can’t do kink without her. And she, apparently gave up on kink herself. So if even she can’t do it anymore, the woman with a brain of steel and a whip as sharp as a razor, if she, a dominant, sassy, fucking switched on piece of tits and ass couldn’t sort it out, you can see why shy quiet riot girl got lost on the yellow brick road, can’t you?

Take her essay on gender and domination/submission. Take it and read it until you understand it. And if you are a gay man, think about how you might also be ‘doing gender’ in your top and bottom world, where all men are equal, but some are more equal than others. Where some are more ‘manly’ and some are  less. And then read it again. And then think of me. Still down the rabbit hole but quite lonely and not sure who to turn to for comfort or even a fuck. If I  had Bitchy’s number I’d give her a call. But she doesn’t do girls…

http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/when-mandoms-stalked-the-earth/

My point is this. Femdom is broken. It’s not even there. In a way you can’t blame mandoms for thinking there are no actual dominant women. Real femdom based on the desires of dominant women and submissive men coming together to find places of intersection is gone or never was. All there is a male-desire based economy so pervasive that even people doing stuff for themselves think the women needs to be dressed like and advert for herself as if she needs the business. And it isn’t really surprising that this popular idea of femdom fake out doesn’t have the visceral power of the popular idea of mandom. Because it isn’t real. Actual sex is so exciting because there are two people involved. Two desires. Unpredictability and compromise and magic. If one person is just doing what the other person wants it’s just enacting a fantasy. One person’s desire. Not the same thing. Wanking with special effects; porn with a smaller audience than usual.

Practically everyone inside and outside kink (really, if they’re being honest) discounts prodom/mansub as nothing more than exotic prostitutes for enthusiastic fetishisers (which is what it is) and considers what is actually happening to be the mandom/femsub stuff. And if most people (not just those mandoms) see kink as exclusively men dominating women are you surprised they get so squicked? (Don’t get me wrong – mandom/femsub doesn’t squick me, but that being the only way kinky sex ever kinked probably would.)

If kinky sex felt like a world were women were as likely to be dominant as submissive, where who got to crawl didn’t feel like it was some kind of gender expectation, it would be far harder to criticise kink. And that’s another reason why fixing femdom can save the fucking the entire world – not just the bit of it that is in my bedroom.

When PETA Gets It Right

You gotta give them credit where credit is due. PETA get a lot of stick from all quarters-the carnivores, the feminists, the people who just think ‘You what?’.  Let’s face it, their radical veganism espoused by very rich celebrities (some seen in fur coats even in their publicity) is a little bit incongruous. But today I have absolutely no complaints whatsoever. This hunk of meat is making me crave a nutburger right now.

Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls: Bullet

They are in the midst of a discussion about the ‘clone’ identity that emerged in Sanfrancisco in the 1970s. Colette had read somewhere, she forgets where now, how those moustached guys in their leather and their caps, with the hair from their chests poking out from their shirts, probably invented themselves to kill the myth that all gay men are effeminate queens. They were the real men they had been looking for all their lives. But, Mike suggests, getting excited and animated by his own idea, wasn’t the clone identity really just another form of dominant masculinity and maybe not quite as radical as it seemed at the time? Because those macho macho men were making women out of other men. Not in sex he adds, hastily, those dudes can fuck each other as ‘real’ men all they like, but in discourse. Sexual difference has to exist in discourse. Somebody has to be the fairy!.  He gulps his wine in triumph and wonders if it would be too pretentious to stop the conversation and write that down. He also wonders, less triumphantly, if Luce Iragary hasn’t said that very same thing before him. Just in her usual, incomprehensible, cloyingly feminine way. For a split, heartbreaking, Freudian, terrifying second he reminds Colette completely and utterly of her father. But she feels so comfortable, and relaxed by the wine, that she doesn’t let the similarity take hold in her mind. Her subconscious has other ideas however. It joins the dots and jumps to the conclusion and interrupts him and uses Colette’s voice to ask,

‘So are you gay?’

She always expects the intelligent ones, the articulate ones, the ones who can deliver a line, the ones with the tight asses that wiggle so well in their jeans, the ones she falls in love with, to be gay.

‘No!’ he replies, laughing. ‘What made you say that? Just because I am into Foucault?’

‘No not really. More that you seem to know so much about the gay scene and, about, er, about gender’.

‘Ah, gender’. He nods and strokes his chin, in a mock-intellectual way.

‘No I am not gay. I am just not a typical ‘dude’ as they might say. I’m not even a typical untypical dude if you see what I mean.’

‘You mean you are a freak?’

‘That is correct’.

‘I don’t really bother with sexual identity, anyway, it just seems one surefire way of closing down your options. And honey, I need all the options I can get!’

‘Good answer’.

And then he gets really serious. He isn’t stroking his chin now, but looking straight at her, so she can’t escape. Colette has learned over the years to duck out of the way of positive attention the way someone else might dodge a bullet. This time she is too slow and the shot reaches its target.

‘I am into Foucault though. He is one of my favourite untypical dudes’. He pauses, for dramatic effect, and because he is suddenly struck by the blackness of her eyes, in contrast to the paleness of her skin and hair, ’But I am into Foucault’s daughter more’.

‘Oh’.

‘Yes. Oh’.

Colette sips her wine in silence. Mike continues to ponder on the blackness of her eyes. And the bullet, the bullet makes itself comfortable, lodging itself deep under her skin, somewhere that it will not be found. Not until it is too late, when the wound has spread and infected her blood, when the words have long since been forgotten, but their shadow has remained hanging over her all this time.

True Stories

I’m Telling You Stories. Trust Me. – Jeanette Winterson

In Fiction, we find acts that make our own lives worth living- Nietzsche

I have been looking for someone to endorse my decision to write a fictional account of Foucault. I can’t ask the man himself, and some of his ‘sons and heirs’ have been decidedly vague or unresponsive about my endeavour. I wonder if they think I am crazy to seek the opinion of a bunch of homos on a writing project by an unkown woman.  But I obviously need this endorsement because I have been searching far and wide for it. And I think I  have found it here, in an essay by John Carvalho, which refers a lot to Foucault’s biographer, James Macey:

‘Foucault, of course, had a special relation to fiction. “Foucault liked to say that all his works were ‘fictions’,” Macey tells us, “which did not necessarily mean,” he goes on to explain, “that they were untrue.”[47] Foucault admitted to Claude Mauriac that he had made fictional use of materials he assembled in his books and made fictional constructions from authentic elements.[48] And he told Raymond Bellour that Les mots et les choses was “a ‘fiction’ pure and simple; it’s a novel,” Foucault said to him, “but I didn’t make it up.”[49] Macey traces this notion of fiction back to Nietzsche and a passage from Daybreak.[50]

 Facta! Yes, facta ficat! A historian has to do, not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happenedY.All historians speak of things which have never existed except in imagination.[51]

Macey uses this reference to endorse Guibert’s novel which he speculates Foucault would have preferred to the biography he has written. It abbreviates, in Nietzsche’s inimitable way, the detailed argument for the preference, not to say the privilege, of fiction over fact presented in Les mot et les choses. In literature, Foucault says, words, otherwise burdened with representing the truth, bring a world back to life. In fiction, according to Nietzsche, we find facts that make our own lives worth living. In the best case, no doubt, a story like the one I’ve just told complicates the facts about Foucault’s death and, quite provisionally, to be sure, brings Foucault back to life again. As the story finally ends, I can only hope that whatever fiction it contains will have made our own lives worth living’

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=463#FN33link

Even more satisfyingly, from a selfish point of view (writers only have this point of view), I have found some readers along the way, as I have begun to discuss and show excerpts of my work. If fiction makes life worth living, then readers make writers’ lives worth living. I think Foucault is a testimony to that, as is the love and reading of his work that somehow seems to  keep him alive beyond the grave.

Thank-you for keeping me alive!

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Ne me quitte pas

Il faut oublier
Tout peut s’oublier
Qui s’enfuit deja
Oublier le temps
Des malentendus
Et le temps perdu
A savoir comment
Oublier ces heures
Qui tuaient parfois
A coups de pourquoi
Le coeur du bonheur
Ne me quitte pas (4 fois)

Je t’inventerai
Des mots insensés
Que tu comprendras
Je te parlerai
De ces amants-là
Qui ont vue deux fois
Leurs coeurs s’embraser
Je te raconterai
L’histoire de ce roi
Mort de n’avoir pas
Pu te rencontrer
Ne me quitte pas (4x)

Moi je t’offrirai
Des perles de pluie
Venues de pays
Ou  il ne pleut pas
Je creuserai la terre
Jusqu’apres ma mort
Pour couvrir ton corps
D’or et de lumiere
Je ferai un domaine
Ou  l’amour sera roi
Ou  l’amour sera loi
Ou tu seras reine
Ne me quitte pas (4 fois)

On a vu souvent
Rejaillir le feu
De l’ancien volcan
Qu’on croyait trop vieux
Il est para�t-il
Des terres br�l�es
Donnant plus de bl�
Qu’un meilleur avril
Et quand vient le soir
Pour qu’un ciel flamboie
Le rouge et le noir
Ne s’�pousent-ils pas
Ne me quitte pas (4 fois)

Ne me quitte pas
Je ne vais plus pleurer
Je ne vais plus parler
Je me cacherai l�
� te regarder
Danser et sourire
Et � t’�couter
Chanter et puis rire
Laisse-moi devenir
L’ombre de ton ombre
L’ombre de ta main
L’ombre de ton chien
Ne me quitte pas (4 fois)

Don’t leave me. I will invent words for you that don’t make sense, that you will understand. I will tell you about these lovers that saw their hearts kissing twice, I will tell you the story of the king who died of not having been able to meet you. Don’t leave me.

… I will offer you raindrops from countries where it doesn’t rain. I’ll scour the earth, just after my death, to cover your body with gold and light. I’ll make a kingdom where love is king, where love is the law, where you are queen. Don’t leave me.

…Don’t leave me. I won’t cry anymore, I won’t talk anymore. I will hide myself there where I will watch you dancing and smiling. There I will listen to you singing and then laughing. Let me  become the shadow of your shadow, the shadow of  your hand, the shadow of your dog. Don’t leave me.

 But she left him.

Songs like this exist because someobody always leaves.

Even if a relationship lasts a lifetime. Somebody leaves by dying first.

Sometimes I imagine living in a parallel universe where I am with someone who I love forever, and we live in a house like in that Tom Waits song ‘and in that house there is a woman and in that woman there’s a heart that I love, and I’m gonna take it with me when I go’.

But you can’t take it with you.

So the leaving has to happen at some point. It may as well be when you have the energy and the spirit and the strength to listen to your own pain via the voice of Jacques Brel

singing ‘ne me quitte pas’.

But what if you are the one who leaves?

Where are the songs for the one who goes?

Maybe this is it.

Killer Poet

I heard a  poem that called to me, in rhythm and imagery so clear

But when I came to write it down, I saw that bastard Fuck Yeah Menswear

Had tagged my blog with his nihilistic beat. His chilling, chilled out killing steeze

Murdered my poem. Will he now come for the air I breathe?

Violently fashionable

Everybody up on my prep steelo these days.

Thinking they iced out.

In they sperrys and J. Urban.

Fuck ‘em.

Don’t act like you’ve ever set foot on a Squash court.

10 years old.

After midnight.

I’m Space Jammin’ in a cube with a glass wall.

Flying like an eagle.

When the game copies.

You go next level.

You can buy the polo I’m wearing.

But you can’t buy my scars.

My stylist is a fucking boxer.

Punched in the face.

The bleeding Edge of style.

Gaining so much steez.

Loosing so much blood.

Get my boy Boyle to shoot the adaptation.

Written by Wes Andy.

Staring Stevie McQ.

Two and a half hours of a dug up corpse kitted out by Mr. Ned.

But even then.

It’s not enough.

People still be right clickin’

Saving my steeze to desktop.

They dressed by the Internet.

Stressed. Dying to forget.

Bout all these fuckin’ bloggers

Tryna step to Prep Imhotep.

Heritage brand afterlife.

Embalm me with the shreds of Yizzie Co-op OCBDs.

Organs stored in I banking gym bags.

Build me a tomb.

York Street and Broadway.

Go ahead.

Try to re-blog a fucking Pyramid.

You know what this reminds me of don’t you boys and girls?

Yes. Funny Games by Michael Hanneke.

 

I always knew Michael Hanneke had his finger on the pulse of end-of-the-world abjection.

This proves I was right.

And I get that same thrill when I click on FYM as I do when I watch Hanneke films. A sick, sad, thrill.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrn/4012192701/in/photostream/

http://fuckyeahmenswear.tumblr.com/

The Unexamined Life

 

School students were demonstrating yesterday; this doesn’t happen very often in the UK. It made me feel… old.  I couldn’t think clearly about my political response to their uprising, when all that was going through my mind was… when did I last demonstrate as a school kid? In 1986? Shit I am old.

And I know this misses the point probably but the thing I liked best about hearing of them taking to the streets was the fact that they bunked off school to do it. I spent many a lunch-hour at school, sitting in my friend’s kitchen saying, ‘I know, we could just not go back!’ and then come one o’clock we’d be at the gates like good little pupils, turning up for afternoon classes despite the sunshine and our plans to drink cider in the park. School is a kind of police state isn’t it? Maybe it is a benign one on the whole but it is still the place we learn to be controlled, as citizens, as subjects. I loved learning and I liked my friends but I didn’t like ‘school’. I was a rebel who just never really got round to rebelling because she was worried she wouldn’t have time to start the revolution and finish her French homework.

I made up for my obedience later though.

Anyway I saw this great placard which a friend, who is a university student, made for yesterday’s demos. It read:

‘The unexamined life is kind of looking like the only option now, eh?’

http://twitpic.com/39zajq

It made me smile.

But it also made me think, which is quite an achievement for a placard. It made me think that is university really the place we learn to ‘examine’ life, ourselves, the world? I don’t know. But I do know some incredibly intelligent philosophical people who never went to university, and I do know I read some of my most difficult philosophy outside of university: hello Madness and Civilisation! I am glad to know you.

And then I read this in the Guardian and I loved those school students harder. What a load of condescending authoritatian anti-youth crap! It’s not even written by old people but by journalists who are young enough to feel they have left those silly schooldays behind and now are grown-ups in the big wide world, who have the authority to judge what young people do. I am sure they will grow out of that sense of superiority at some point. If they ‘examine’ themselves at all during their lives that is.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/24/student-demos-in-twitter-age

Is the unexamined life worth living? I think it is. But once we have some tendency and some tools to examine and analyse, which most people do, I think we should do so whilst still remembering what it is like to be young, and feeling constrained and overpowered by that confusing, seemingly monolithic, institutional, paradoxical ‘adult’ authority. It is only our youthful, rebellious, let’s just not go back to school and go drink cider in the park instead spirit that will see us through the dark, dreary days of adulthood.

Its 11 am. I think I have some cider in the fridge.

CHEERS!

Gay Whores

So ‘gay’ used to mean ‘whore’ and ‘gays’ really do have a lot in common with ‘whores’ – the way the history of homosexual sex has often been to do with ‘trade’ and how men meet other men for sex in quite ‘transactional’ ways even if nobody gets paid, and how gay men have traditionally been vulnerable to attacks and violence, just like whores have, and how prejudice and hatred has meant some illnesses that have been prevalent among gay men and whores have gone without enough care or public health services, and how this  has led to both gay men and whores becoming very knowledgeable and responsible about sexual health, and how gay men and whores have been criminalised, and how the spaces they occupy have been regulated and policed, and how they have had their own ‘districts’,  and how they have been the subjects of depictions in art and literature as interesting cases of their gender, how they threaten the dominant norms of masculinity and femininity and how the words have blurred and changed over time and how there are so many words for each one: slut, slag, slapper, hooker, tart, meat, fag, queen, bitch, twink, pansy, homo, whore, gay.

What I wish is that queer historians and theorists, instead of saying that women don’t have a history of sexuality like gay men do, because women were all locked up in the domestic sphere (except for the whores), I wish they had made the link the comparison between the history and geography, the ‘ontology’ and epistemology of being a ‘whore’ and being a ‘homo’.

And I wish feminists, who on the whole don’t give a shit about either whores or gays (they have that in common too), could have found a way to examine how both have pushed the edges of gender out from the centre and have challenged what it means to be a man or a woman and have offered us great examples of revolutionary figures.

I wish you’d made these links.

I can see the links and I have not been looking for very long, or very hard.

It would have changed the course of history maybe.

Metro Man Is Armed and Dangerous

http://fuckyeahmenswear.tumblr.com/post/1650932088/everyday-im-carryin-everyday-im-carryin

Yeah, I stay laced.

But I also stay strapped.

I always keep the biscuit on me.

It’s the only way.

I can get a holster fade on my New Cures.

And that machete ain’t for looks, kid.

This blade has spilled the blood.

Of a thousand ill placed Rugby patches.

A seam ripper is a man’s best friend.

Along with a smart phone and a ruler.

So you can measure your inseam.

And simultaneously tweet about trouser break.

WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!