HUMBERT

 

 The only satisfactory cover of Lolita.

This photo has been reposted from www.porno-grafia.pl

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN

The Scream

Domestic violence and violence against women in general seems to be a big problem everywhere in the world. It seems to me this problem comes from stress, pent up anger, frustration, and all kinds of negativity within human beings. If people in a relationship are both filled with torment inside, it’s easy to see how violence can erupt. And people do things on the spur of the moment without having a chance to think about the consequence of their actions. If the people in a relationship were able to get rid of this torment within and replace it with happiness, love, and a sense of well-being, they would never think to hurt another human being. They would be filled with an understanding of others and an appreciation of others and have an ability to reconcile differences without any violence whatsoever, to reconcile differences in a very loving way, a very happy way.*

David Lynch, 2014.
 
For me, Twin Peaks has always, ultimately, been about domestic violence and violence against women. Everything else is a beautiful, intricate, solipsistic vision of a transcendental meditator.

*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marianne-schnall/interview-with-david-lync_b_6294092.html

FEMALE TALES: A WHORE, A DETECTIVE, AND A HANDMAID

for Beata

Once in a while I wander upon a tv show which introduces a memorable female personality, and at the same time a good, gripping story as a showcase for her experiences. This post is about three women protagonists who have captured my attention in the abyss of TV hard-boiled detective narratives demarcated by pugnacious male horizon (True Detective and Hannibal at the fore with their garnished violence, victimization of women and ostentatious bromance) The shows I focus on here present divergent storylines, but concordantly propose psychological intricacies and imaginative reuse of feminist representation as part of their imagined realms. 

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (2016-)

The show is based loosely on Steven Soderbergh’s low-budget, drama-satire from 2009 starring porn idol Sasha Grey as an elite New York escort. In a way it continues with the movie’s smirking critique of capitalism in post-2008 financial collapse, but it also evolves beyond the limitations of its 80-minute running time when it comes to the psychological portrayal of the heroine. I was skeptical at first – the story matured somewhat languidly and the main star Riley Keough seemed to go an extra mile to emulate the unemulatable blankness of Grey’s visage, but in the end the plot delivered and I was a bit disappointed about the abrupt (albeit climactic) parting with the heroine – Christine Raede. Firstly, it must be said this is not the first show about the life of a prostitute. There are TV dramas like Satisfaction (2007), Blue (2012), The Client List (2012), or the recent Harlots (2017) by Hulu. In a sense, all of these productions are modern revisions of a literary genre called whore dialogues whose popularity throughout Europe rose in the 17^th century. The aim of these stories was to unveil truth(s) about sexuality, human nature and all sorts of social debasement. In other words – they were both pornographic and educational. There’s a lot of erotic content in The Girlfriend Experience, but it's never gratitious - every scene is intended as a part of "maturation" process of the main character. The creators stated they wanted Christine to be the epitome of a modern woman, but she’s more than that. Before she turns into an escort, she’s already juggling studies at law school and an internship at a law company. She’s beautiful, smart, cynical, realistic and determined. As she transforms into a prosperous call girl, she becomes, like Sasha Grey (porn star-turned-actress-turned-enterpreneur), “dangerously androgynous, …[combining] that which is most attractive about women – physical beauty – with what men fear most from each other – commercial competition” [1]. Additionally, she defies commodification by taking more pleasure from sex than men who pay her for it. At least, until excitement drifts into routine. She’s what Camille Paglia would call “the femme fatale as a sexual personae.” [2] Christine likes performing and has no problem switching identities when circumstances require (she assumes three working aliases during the season, and has three low-profile private personalities). Her sister often calls her egoistic and Christine herself wonders whether she’s a sociopath. Paglia’s description fits her perfectly: “She is not a neurotic but, if anything, a psychopath. That is, she has an amoral affectlessness, a serene indifference to the suffering of others, which she invites and dispassionately observes as tests of her power.” [3] At this point a few things need to be written about the male characters in the series who mostly consist of Christine’s clients. Rarely do wee get to know such a pitiable assemblage of well-groomed adult individuals. In the beginning, these are wealthy, innocuous businessmen above their forties who are procured by Christine’s soigné pimp, Jacqueline. It is clearly established that the company of an escort provides them a valve to stress induced by highly competitive and unstable job environment, as well as dysfunctional marriage. As the story progresses and Christine starts to prowl on her own by means of Internet, her clientele expands to sexually and mentally perturbed fetishists and ego-maniacs for whom sex amounts to masturbation to their own fantasies of a female. Aside from her job, there are naïve, seductible fuck buddies whose indolent virility quickly becomes tedious. Christine’s sexual and ethical superiority over men is founded on the notion that prostitution is the most honest form of capitalist transaction. When accused of being a whore, she states that she’s economically righteous because “she knows exactly what she’s selling and the men know exactly what they’re buying”. On the other hand, people around her are confined  by superficial social roles and dubious morality, especially visible at higher professional positions. Notably, when a sex tape of Christine is publicly released by her jealous ex-client, both her acquaintances and family turn away from her. He mother resorts to an emotional blackmail while her father withdraws into an emotional limbo – typical patterns of parental coping mechanism. Christine is not able to convince her beloved sister that she actually likes her new way of earning money. Funnily enough, her scheming boss at her law firm initially denounces and fires her, only to masturbate later to her sex tape when denied sex from his wife.

On the surface, The Girlfriend Experience might be accused of propagating a sanitized view of luxury prostitution in which men are confined to relatively benign power relations while women make volitional career choices. However, I’d ultimately read it as a critique of a system based on reification and undying patriarchisms practiced in both low- and well-paid professions. It’s also a compelling sexual coming-of-age story. Central to the plot are the figures of a whore and a nymphomaniac, embodied by Christine, who disclose uncomfortable truths about society [4]and irreconcilable gender differences in term of sexual liaisons. This is particularly visible in the sex scenes where insatiable female jouissance is beyond male logic and physical faculties. The story culminates in a 17-minute MMF threesome role-playing arranged by a client with cuckolding fetish. The happening is orchestrated from beginning to end by amused and clinically indifferent Christine, and it’s rather fun to watch the compromising befuddlement of a handsome male escort enacting the role of a secret lover. At least he got it up, but – taking about equal pay..

That face you make when you realize that men are good-for-nothing sexual muppets

Sexual encounters in The Girlfriend Experience mirror Harmut Böhme’s statement that “[i]t’s difficult to think of something more theatrical than a sexual act. The deeper the passionate frenzy, the more we are confronted by the lack: nobody is who they think they are; nobody possesses what they want, everybody gives what they do not have, and nobody receives what they need.” [5]

Leaving beside the issue of sex, the extent of real economic/- empowerment women get from sex labor business is, of course, debatable and dependent on many factors. The author of this post is a firm believer in pro-choice fairytales, and that potent nymphomaniac and prostituting heroines in popular entertainment are at least expanding the meaning of feminism. As Vicky Funari clarified: “There is no standard sex worker. Each woman has her own reasons for working, her own responses to boredom, pleasure, power and/or trauma, her own ideas about the work and her place in it. This work can be oppression or freedom: just another assembly-line job, an artistic act that also pays well; comic relief from street realities; healing social work for an alienated culture. What is at work within each woman that lets her accommodate this situation? Intense denial, infallible sense of humor, codependency, incredible strength, a liquid sense of self? The only safe thing to say is that we’re all in it for the money.” [6]

[1] Bradford K. Mudge, The Whore's Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830, p.50 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)

[2] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, p.15 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990)

[3] Ibid. 

[4] As did Lars von Trier's nymphomaniac Joe in his 2013 controversial two-part feature film.

[5] Hartmut Bohme, Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity, p. 392 (Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN: Warszawa, 2012)

[6]Jill Nagle, ed., Whores and Other Feminists, p. 28 (New York and London: Routledge, 1997)

  

THE FALL (2013-) 

It was around season four of The X-Files that I started to realize who the main protagonist of the show was. Fox Mulder turned from a passionate believer into a child-like phantom chaser and Scully – from a sceptic nagger to an intelligent, complex and pulchritudinous woman. I couldn’t even think to imagine back then what a television icon and feminist personage Gillian Anderson would become, but she has – to the point that she’s been given the role of Goddess Media itself in Bryan Fuller’s tv adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2017). Since 2005, she has been cast mainly in small UK productions, neglecting nearly altogether American entertainment which didn’t have a lot to offer to her anyway. It was then that she started to hone her superior drama skills and excrete an enigmatic atmosphere of sophistication which made even Dr. Hannibal Lecter appeared provincial next to her in the NBC's series Hannibal. I even sat through two tv mini-series based on Dickens, whom I whole-heartedly abhored during my studies, only to see how brilliantly Anderson would interpret the roles of Miss Havisham and Lady Deadlock. That’s the level of reverence I have for her acting skills and British accent. In The Fall she plays Detective Superintendent (in Polish that’s “inspektor”) Stella Gibson who, to cut long story short, has been summoned to investigate the murder on a thirty-something, prosperous woman in Belfast. Needless to say, Anderson totally steals the show here, as probably intended – other characters float around her like planets around the majestic, all-seeing sun. 

 

No matter how hard you try, you will never be as supremely chill and fashionable as Stella Gibson

 

She’s impeccable in terms of appearance [1] and behaviour – the aura of perfection is at the same time formidable and frustrating for men, and she finally pays a small price in the third season, getting a face scar and some fractures during an unexpected assault. The male villain named Paul Spector, portrayed by Fifty Shades of Grey’s pretty-faced Jamie Dornan ,delivers a  performance more dullish and clinical than sinister. Basically all male characters could be categorized under four adjective-based categories: violent, affective, alexithymic, fuckable – though mixed groups can be formed adding dim-witted and mean. So Stella spends her time working the case with her emotionally disadvantaged colleagues, developing sexual liaisons with both men and women AND lecturing men on the fascinating profundity of the female psyche. I coined the new word for the last activity, as it takes place numerous times in the series and involves high-class mesmerism  – “Stellasplaining”. Her eyes transition from tiresomeness to lancinating persuasiveness as she explicates the difference between forced and willing submissiveness, the grammatical misconceptions of gender, the media’s limited view on women, or provides a plain answer to her chief’s question about female spiritual superiority: “the basic human form is female. Maleness is a birth defect”.

One of the many instances of Stellasplaining

Such quotes are not uncommon throughout the three seasons as the series plunges into the feminist territories devised by writers and theorists like Margaret Atwood and Melvin Konner [2]. The show often borders on androphobia, as in the scene where Stella rebukes her young lover’s suggestion that she might be attracted to a serial killer by means of a scarily ironic anectode about the divergent fears of men and women. The male-female relations in the series are underpinned by constant violence and misunderstanding, resounding with Rebecca Solnit’s interpretation of rape culture in the essay “The Longest War”: “a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed. The fury and desire come in package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally” [3]. Neither husbands nor fathers get favorable representation. Paul Spector’s apparent affection for his daughter is tarnished by his double-faced hatred towards women. A young girl who falls in love with Spector deplores the fact that her father chose to die in a careless motorbike accident instead of taking care of her and her mother. Stella’s daddy issues reappear time and again, but we never discover their true source apart from the fact that he too died too early. There is something exasperating in the male inadequacy when it comes to fulfilling the lowest of standards for social and emotional competencies. 

 

Dealing with men is exasperating but that's what women do between shopping, lesbian bonding, sipping wine and saving the world  

Stella knows this – this is the reason she prefers the lonesome wine-consumption evenings  to family life. She knew before Rustin Cohle addressed this problem one year later in the hit HBO drama True Detective: “Men, women. It’s not supposed to work except to make kids.” The Fall is no serial killer chic show like Dexter or Hannibal. In the end, Spector is no enigma – we learn that his father is a murderer and Paul has been traumatized by experiences in the foster facilities run by men who were unwilling to control their impulses, thus unloosening further wickedness into the world. The perpetuum mobile of death and suffering makes a full circle – bad men do not keep the other bad men from the door – they keep the door open.

 

[1] In order to get the sense of the fashion statement Stella has made, visit:

- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/what-stella-gibson-gillian-anderson-wears-in-the-fall/

- http://bryntaylorstyle.com/2015/01/30/six-things-ive-learned-from-stella-gibsons-style/

- http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/fashion-beauty/dressed-to-kill-steal-the-falls-dsi-stella-gibsons-wardrobe-30793633.html

- https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/tvandradioblog/2014/dec/19/-sp-the-fall-an-anatomy-of-dci-stella-gibsons-series-2-blouses 

- http://standardissuemagazine.com/lifestyle/dressing-like-stella-gibson/ where Bertie Bowen states that Stella “oozes luxury with her smooth silk blouses and soft cashmere coats. She just looks expensive, yet never ostentatiously so. She achieves this by sticking to minimal, smart tailoring; her style is understated yet imposing, mirroring her persona with precision.”

[2] In Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (2015)  Konner writes: “There is a birth defect that is surprisingly common, due to a change in a key of chromosomes. In the normal condition the two look the same, but in this disorder one is shrunken beyond recognition. The result is a shortened life span, higher mortality at all ages, an inability to reproduce, premature hair loss, and brain defects variously resulting in attention deficit, hyperactivity, conduct disorder, hypersexuality, and an enormous excess of both outward and self-directed aggression. The main physiological mechanism is androgen poisoning, although there may be others. I call it the X-chromosome deficiency syndrome, and a stunning 49 percent of the human species is affected.

It is also called maleness.”

Konner further believes that “[i]n addition to women’s superiority in judgment, their trustworthiness, reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and violence make them biologically superior [...]. Contrary to all received wisdom, women are more logical and less emotional than men.”

[3]Rebecca Solnit,  Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays, p. 27 (Granta Books: London, 2014) In the same essay, Solnit provokingly inquires: "What's the matter with manhood? There's something about how masculinity is imagined, about what's passed and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed."

THE HANDMAID’S TALE (2017-)

Watching the first few episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale has been a nauseating experience. It’s like sitting at one of Aunt Lydia’s film viewing sessions at the Re-education Center, getting jolted by cattle prods at the same time. The presented world is every extreme right-wing misogynist’s wet dream – a biblical kyriarchy based on revived Puritan values. In the future, assumingly due to the increasing environmental pollution, most women are not able to conceive children. In a “society dying of too much choice” [1] and depopulation, a group of conservative males and their wives decide to abolish the government and create the Republic of Gilead. In this upside down of current Western democracies, society is divided into hierarchical system where men constitute militarian governing bodies and women are subjugated to perform in “traditional” roles of wives, mothers, or domestic workers. The titular handmaids are a scarce group of fertile women who were mostly captured and forced to bear children for the ruling Commanders of Gilead and their wives. This is all part of a scheme designed by deranged nationalists aimed at re-creating America free of demoralizing influences of anything different than a white heterosexual penis. That’s Trump’s government, by the way – one of the reasons The Handmaid’s Tale has attracted lots and lots of publicity.

The story is told from the point of view of Offred (a patronymic name)- a 33-year-old woman apprehended during unsuccessful escape from Gilead with her daughter and husband. Offred is posted to the household of Fred Waterford and his wife, Serena Joy, to be their unwilling surrogate. If that’s not crazy enough, the Gilaedian law requires the insemination to happen during a kinky threesome re-enactment of the biblical story of Rachel and Bilhah called pompously “The Ceremony”. The Ceremony (aka The Rape) is only one of few wacky events invented by Gileadian rulers. There are also Prayvaganzas, Salvagings (aka Public Killings of Traitors), Particutions (Public Killings of Rapists by Handmaids), or Birth parties – you can imagine. It’s an insanitarium derived from the nightmares of totalitarian regimes, stories of Shirley Jackson and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the madness of Trump’s administration all at once.

"The Ceremony"

The series is based on the 1985’s novel by Margaret Atwood, and there are a few differences between the original and its modern-day television rendition. For one, the book implicates the reader in mellower forms of terror: the stifling domestication, suggested physical tortures, indetermined fate of secondary characters, internalized struggle of the heroine. Elisabeth Moss, the actress chosen to portray June/Offred, is allowed much more intensity in terms of emotional expression – I believe not only on account of the different medium. Her “fake subservience” is accentuated by sneer, grimace and gaze which smuggle fear, desperation, disgust and mockery. She is given a few hammy moments of confrontation with Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) involving physical violence, and direct verbal slamming, namely she calls her a psychopathic bitch. Also, in the show, Offred is much more involved in the activities of Mayday – a mysterious resistance organization of unknown origin. Additionally, her sexual liaisons with Nick, Commander’s chauffeur and, possibly, a Mayday spy, is much more stressed to provide an air of eroticized female subjectivity, guessably, for that Harlequinized part of porn feminist audience. And while adding those elements to the plot may have been justified by the heated political climate and genre requirements, I felt the literary Offred to be more honestly envisioned under the highly oppressive circumstances presented in the novel. In the book, Offred’s internal monologue is the sole device of comprehending the past and the present, as well as her psychological condition. It is emphasized that she perceives herself as an object suspended in time and determined by her body, and she believes to be perceived so by everybody else: “I resign by body freely to the use of others. They can do what they want with me. I am abject.” [2] This is a reasoning of a defeated prisoner, theoretically explicated from a feminist standpoint by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror. Meanwhile in the series, June won’t allow herself to be a girl in the box, trapped in a patriarchal system of torture, hypocrisy and injustice. Atwood accentuates that in this context, keeping sanity is a Sisyphean feat and women’s primal means of doing it is by telling their stories, but this motif appears in the series only once. The 1985’s Offred would put love/life, desire and forgiveness over hate and disobedience, because reasonably it was either that or death. In the end, she’d choose Nick’s warm body over futile heroism and graveyard, but frankly one can’t blame her. She’s not a warring feminist like her mother, not a rebel like her friend Moira [3], but rather a survivor. It needs to be underlined because contemporary Offred subtly usurps all of these roles. She helps Moira flee from the Red Centre (conditioning facility for handmaids), she’s the one who gets her feet whipped for no reason whatsoever (in the book it was Moira who was punished for another escape attempt), and finally she’s the first to publicly disobey Aunt Lydia (handmaids’ Chef Oberaufseherin) by refusing to stone her brainsick colleague. Her reaction after finding out that she’s pregnant with Nick is also telling and deviates from the novel. She believes it’s a catastrophe – he, on the other hand, regards the baby as a miracle. That’s not a reaction you would expect from a woman who stays home during very important political riots because her husband tells her to think of the family. That’s what Atwood’s Offred does while her mother fights for freedom to be later pronounced an Unwoman by Gilead’s authorities [4]. I don’t mean to say by all of that that the creators (including producer Atwood!) of the show are untrue to the novel or that they propagate unrealistic patterns of behavior under horrific conditions of modern-day concentration camps for women. Many brave people have survived Holocaust. Nevertheless, the series is most frightening when it centers on the “ordinary” and allows Offred to be merely an observer. The fact that her everyday existence boils down to shopping, eating and pelvic exercises is scary enough. Above that, all the scenes with Aunt Lydia (great Ann Dowd) at the Red Center are hauntingly disturbing, even though she’s been made more humane in the show comparing to her book equivalent. Ann Dowd evokes the psychotic maternal propriety immortalized by the characters like Annie Wilkes or Nurse Ratched. I also loved how they depicted the “Ceremony” parts as casual boudoir horror. Additionally, Ralph Fiennes as two-faced Commander has convincingly captured the neat politeness of a Nazi bureaucrat. [5] Last but not least, the scenes where men contrive to hide rape and objectification of women under political laws and religious rituals reek of recurring historical formula for control and domination of “inferior” social groups. Yet, there are times when The Handmaid’s Tale farcically slips into the trap of a silly girl power movie, as Wonder Woman did most of its screening time [6]. It occurs everytime the Handmaids are made into the exponents of the maxim “Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum” (roughly translated as “Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You down”) which has been elevated to the status of a new feminist catchphrase. It does look good as a tattoo, but there’s vagueness and conspiratory hostility to it that smacks of misandry for misandry’s sake. The “Handmaids posse” moments that reminded me of Clueless, Sex and the City, Mean Girls, or The Babysitters look simply ridiculous considering the gravity of the subject matter - trampling human rights among others.

Handmaids posse, bitches.

The show does great job exploring the “popular” topics of abortion, sexism, rape, homosexuality and prostitution, but it also omits a lot of the book’s side content – discrimination against race and different religions, resettlements, econowives, the Colonies, Unbabies, Gilead as a dystopian zone. Perhaps more of that is to come in season 2. Nevertheless, I’m grumbling. It's alarming that the show is as disquieting now as the novel was in the 80s. It's a well-done, culturally accurate and important premonition in the times of rising pro-nationalist and alt-rightist sentiments.

[1] Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, as all folllowing citations.

[2] Offred also says: "I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting."  "Maybe none of this is about control [...] Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it." It's been suggested in the book that the handmaids are being sedated to keep them under control more easily. 

[3] Of her friend Moira, Offred states: "I don't want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack."

[4] The main protagonists's mother has some thought-provoking musings about Offred's father and men in general: "A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but he wasn't up to fatherhood. Not That I expected it of him. Just do the job, then you can bugger off, I said, I make a decent salary, I can afford daycare. So he went to the coast and sent Christmas cards. He had beautiful blue eyes though. But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like they can't quite remember who they are. They look at the sky too much. They lose touch with their feet. They aren't a patch on a woman except they're better at fixing cars and playing football, just what we need for the improvement of the human race, right?"

[5] I t must be said that the Commander has some pretty commiserating thoughts on the situation of women in the pre-Gilead social order: "We've given more than we've taken away .. Think of the trouble they had before. Do you remember the singles bar, the indignity of high-school blind dates? The meat market. Don't you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a man easily and the ones who couldn't? Some of them were desperate, they starved themselves thin or pumped their breats full of silicone, had their noses cut off. Think of the human misery."

[6] Wonder Woman is a not only a bad "girl power movie" or a superhero movie , it's a bad movie overall. It partly stems from the fact that Gal Gadot it a beatiful woman and a bad actress, but the film is mainly just badly written. The scene in which Wonder Woman enters a village where people had been gassed to death a moment before is particularly hilarious to watch. She's so emotionally torn between grasping her head in terror and keeping her impeccable hair intact that that I felt tremors running through my body.

5 SEX POSITIVE DOCUMENTARIES YOU SHOULD SEE

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ARE WE IN HELL YET?

Don Juan's Proverbs of Hell

1. Sex is Life.  Love is not Life.  Love is the Abyss.
2. Sex is light, fire, friction, a spiral, exterior.  Love is interior, a vicious circle.
3. Sex isn’t just sexual intercourse.  Some equate it with the divine.  Or the demonic.
4. Sex is not Romance; Romance is the human quest for Love, not Sex.
5. Sex is everywhere, from a glance to a butterfly tattoo.
6. The repression of Sex occurs in our surrender to the experts, to the Sexual Inquisition, and they are everywhere.
7. The price of democracy is the temptation to add more regulations; the price of openness is the temptation to violate those regulations.
8. Sexual pleasure is enhanced by risk, by transgression, by the forbidden.
9. Affluence and education just mean you have more to lose by trying the forbidden.
10. The erotic child is a myth.  Children aren’t “eroticized”; adults are.
11. Adults are attracted to children’s ability to reshape reality imaginatively and playfully.  The child is father to the man, but the gift is lost with age, which is why we have Generation Gaps.
12. Seductive adults communicate best with teens and children.
13. Sex scandals are secrets wrapped inside of mysteries, not right vanquishing wrong.
14. The fate of Romance in the West: over-protective adults as Hero, and teachers, priests and politicians revive the Monster to be slain…again and again.  In the name of the children.
15. The over-protection of children makes their violation inevitable.
16. Creating sexual victims robs them of independence, imprisoning them in the “police state of sexual myth.”  Adults are more susceptible than children.
17. Various Age of Consent penal codes are pornographic documents.
18. Sex offenders are today's witches. From sexual harassment to sexual abuse and sexual assault, to predators and prey; this is the language of the Inquisition.
19. The banishment of Sex from Western society is directly proportional to the decline of the Western birth rate.
20. Sex can be dangerous; the act of creating Life can be the act that kills you.

From the wildly insightful, interactive  http://www.sexualfables.com/.

PORN REVIEW: PORTRAIT OF A CALL GIRL/WASTELAND

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PORN REVIEW: STAR BALLZ

Yup, I'm starting a new section dedicated exclusively to hipster pornography ;) Next is Graham Travis and his stylish female-focused psychoporno(d)ramas, so stay tuned.

Star Ballz

As the title indicates, Star Ballz could be generically contextualized as a comic crossover between Star Wars and Dragon Ball Z but if you're looking for a light-hearted parody in the manner of Mel Brooks' Spaceballs (1987) or the recent Star Wars XXX (2012), you may be baffled. I personally liked it, perhaps due to the fact that I'm a fan of neither series, at utmost a neutral admirer of the Freudian murkiness that distinguished The Empire Strikes Back and the entertaining artistry of The Return of the Jedi. The prequel trilogy bored me to death. Likewise I'm not an aficionado of anime and manga, which didn't prevent me from enjoying the reviewed production. Althought packaged as a low-budget hentai spoof,  Star Ballz uses its form to provide a clever and merciless bastardization of some of the most iconic imagery of the American film industry in the last decade of the XXth century. It fuses obscenity and references to cult flicks[1] in the most bizarre and humoristic manner. The prefatory overscreen commentaries from Beavis and Butthead prognosticate the viewer's entrance into the world of moronic voyeristic experience, but the joke is on the ataractic consumer of pop porn and franchise blockbusters like Star Wars. The plot begins with the busty Princess (Leia stylized as Sailor Moon) and her magical girls battling penis-headed Sperm Troopers led by D Villy (Darth Vader with Mickey Mouse ears and a red bowtie). As in the original version, Leia is captured but her anal transmission with plea for rescue is caught by "Wank" Solo (Dragon Ball Z's Goku) and his companion Chihuahua [2](hairy Howard Stern look-alike). The duo journeys to a Transformer-like space ship to lock laser swords in the final battle against the dark side of the Cum Force, on the way encountering cameos from pop culture personae who engage in the most delirious rule-34 sexual scenarios (cue Jar Jar Binks sodomized by xenomorph's alien-tongue) [3]. The film features, among others, a very gay version of C3PO as Pikachu, Ewoks as Internet anti-piracy squad, or Mulder and Scully in an absurdly anti-climactic episode of sex files.

It's easy to miss the ingenuity with which the creators filled the fatuous 45-minute story with over 20 innuendos to events, characters and citations that shaped the collective American imagination at the turn of the century. In one scene Bill Clinton receives a blowjob from Monica Levinsky who simultaneously hums Star Spangled Banner; in another George Lucas has oral sex performed by the supposedly kid-appealing Jar Jar Binks. It's sheer mindfuckery that's also reporting the status of contemporary American artistic and political scene.

Recommended for all cine buffs, those looking for a satirical angle, weird humor or a good postmodern porn parody (not to confuse with anything that has "A Porn Parody" in its title.)

[1] Direct references to/quatations from include: Trainspotting, Aliens, Silence of the Lambs, Die Hard, The Shining , Matrix, Saving Private Ryan, Good Fellas, Conan the Barbarian, the Abyss, Mission Impossible, Reservoir Dogs, the Planet of the Apes, Seven, Forrest Gump, The X-Files, Meet the Parents, From Dusk Till Dawn, Wayne's World, Blue Velvet, The Sixth Sense, Basic Instinct, X-Men

[2] Also, a reference to the Eurodance trash hit by DJ Bobo?

[3] I presume that's how Star Wars fans must have felt after the screenings of The Phantom Menace.

Best quotes:
Quote from X-Men inserted into Princess's reaction to Sperm Troopers's impressive erections: [Princess/Rogue:] When they come out... does it hurt? [Wolverine/Sperm Troopers: ]Every time.

Princess: I'm gonna tell you three things. If I'm right you walk forward, if I'm wrong you walk back and let me go. Gaga should die right after the opening credits of episode two. Girls really lie when they say size doesn't matter. Everyone thinks it's about time I got fucked.

Princess: Let your empire strike my back.

R2D2: Do you mind if I download some MP3 from you? Do you got some metallic cunt?

Ewoks: Everybody stealing MP3s should die and suffer ... and suffer more.

Mulder (to Scully): Listen, I don't know what we're doing here, so why don't you show some tits?

Danny Torrance: Red bum, redbum, redbum.

Best sex scene(s): the Princess gangbanging Sperm Troopers