"It is unquestionable that. . . the remarks made by Thomas D. Horton are of the shock variety, but then the truth has always been so." - Bethlehem Bulletin
"There is not the slightest likelihood of any male ever reviewing this book before a women's club. The insurance premium would be prohibitive. Turn to any chapter, any paragraph and read it aloud in the presence of a female, and you'll have fury with its claws out." - Columbus News
The blurry lines at the bottom reveal the ruse: that this book is meant to be comedy, not misogyny: "Enjoy the most rib-tickling treat you've ever had or return in 5 days - for refund. Don't delay. A unique hilarious experience is yours! Send this coupon - TODAY!" Doesn't exactly match up with the hateful copy we've seen up to now. Or maybe it does? Too bad these books aren't still around. They'd be a unique, rib-tickling psychological illumination.
This animation I made wasn't an animation at all, until I converted it from a series of still pictures from the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge.
THAT Eadweard Muybridge, the man who predated the motion picture by formulating the idea that a lot of still pictures shown in rapid succession would help us see exactly how people and animals moved.
Muybridge only toyed with the idea of looping all these pictures together to attain the illusion of motion. That came later, with the Lumiere Brothers, a few dozen others, and anyone but Edison.
Who ripped off ideas right, left and centre, but was quick on a patent like Billy the Kid was quick on the draw.
SO. I decided to try an experiment and just take a few seconds of video of my little animation. Which I did, and posted it on YouTube. Or at least I thought I did.
Next time I tried to get on YouTube, a stern full-page warning flashed on the screen telling me I had violated their Code of Decency and that my video had been censored/deleted. Forever. Well, maybe that was OK or maybe not - it seemed stupid to make such a fuss over a few seconds of educational material. But then they started talking about "strikes against your account". I already had one strike against my account by posting an obscene pornographic video of two women frollicking with a bucket of water (though obviously they saw it as the sort of explicitly sleazy garbage I see on YouTube every single day).
If I got to three strikes against my account, my days with YouTube would be over. Forever. All my videos would be gone.
I have something like 800 videos on YouTube, most of it personal stuff only meaningful to me, but I didn't keep 800 originals, I just couldn't. And over the years, I had no idea how much these videos came to mean, a record of my life, my pain and joy and discovery.
So to lose it forever. . .
But then I thought of something: hadn't I SEEN a Muybridge video not long ago, one which showed very similar scenes (motion studies!) which lasted four minutes and went into a lot more detail?
Of course! And it looks like this.
Not only that, but you can see MY animation at 2:23. Exactly the same thing, all two seconds of it. I don't know what is going on. I don't understand the double standard, or why Muybridge is suddenly such a threat to common decency. I find it hard to see these pictures of women as "dirty" or titillating - they weren't meant to be, though some say Eadweard favored comely young women over men for a reason. Be that as it may, THIS ISN'T PORN, it's nothing to do with it or even with sexuality or eroticism. If it's censored, what we are censoring are women's bodies. What we are saying is that the female body is inherently sexual, and sexuality is (of course!) dirty, bad, and wrong. We need to do this, to make sure our children get the message. Particularly our female children. The sooner they learn that their bodies are filthy, depraved, and slimily disgusting, the better.
These photos were taken in the Victorian era, but not much was said about their erotic content. As far as I know, NOTHING was said. The Victorians were quite OK with Muybridge because he was he was a scientist and educating the public in a fascinating way. He also provided work for young women who might otherwise have been shop clerks or chambermaids. When you look at how sick this all is, when you look at how contradictory - . The slobbering idiots at YouTube are the ones with the dirty minds, sexualizing something that's meant to be innocent and even has an important historic and scientific origin. But what's worse is that a much longer and more explicit version of MY VIDEO is still up, under someone else's account, someone who has no "strikes" against him and probably never will.
(Please note. Several paragraphs just dropped into oblivion, and I have no way of reconstituting them. Sorry about that - something to do with the photos).
Post-blog thoughts. I did contest the "strike", which you are allowed to do, by pointing out to YouTube that I had only used material already in a published video. I doubt if I will win this, however. Something about the way I presented the material, perhaps? I don't know. I hope contesting it doesn't count as another "strike". Sounds almost as bad as a stroke. On top of that, after perusing what passes for "commentary" on thousands or perhaps millions of existing videos, I see hatred, racism, white supremacy, the n-word, the J-word (Jews, universally evil and hated), and all manner of other vile ideologies, if you can call them that. Those people are allowed to say anything they want under "freedom of speech". Now I worry about my twobucket ladies (which, by the way, I had already posted on an earlier video) being censored by Blogspot, my reputation besmirched by posting utterly disgusting pornography. A bucket of water! Imagine. Maybe I should just join a white supremacy group. It would go down a lot better, and I'd have a lot less worry of being shut down.
Post-post. The offending nine frames. Cover your eyes if you're easily frightened, have a weak stomach, or have never seen a naked woman before.
Depressed post-script. Today I had one of those fantastic ideas, encouraged by someone who actually made a comment on one of my YouTube videos (something which is, to my astonishment, happening more and more these days). I kept wondering aloud "why isn't there a troll channel on YouTube, like all those reborn doll channels?", and this person said, "What a brilliant idea! You should do it."
I had almost 50 videos already in my troll playlist. My idea wasn't to run a serious collector's channel, which interests me about as much as worms. I don't care if the troll has a 456 stamped in its foot, or if it was made in 1959 in Oslo or wherever they were made. I care about whether it's "trollie" and FUN.
So I eagerly began to title the videos in my troll playlist as The Troll Channel. And I was all the way through adding this title (laboriously, one at a time) to all of them, until I realized -
There was a good chance YouTube would shut me down for it.
Why? Do I need to tell you why? Even though there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of videos labelled The Troll Channel, MINE would be seen as "violating community standards" and outside the realm of common decency. They had already hit me in the face with that one. That one strike had made me vulnerable, bleeding on the jungle floor, a thing carnivores love.
So, very reluctantly, I changed the title to The Troll Doll Channel. I like the double-oll, the way it looks at least, but it lacks punch. And yet. When I finally looked up The Troll Channel on YouTube, I was horrified at how obscene, violent, and thoroughly awful these videos all were.
But it is also the fact I would have two strikes against me, you see. I am teetering on the brink. But now that I think of it - and I have been on a total rollercoaster about it all evening - I don't want a channel, or even a playlist, called The Troll Channel, not even with a museum called The Troll Hole somewhere in the States. (Now, just think if I started a channel called The Troll Hole. Probably there already is one, if not 4 or 500, considered perfectly acceptable. Who's doing favors for whom here?)
The word has been poisoned, and not by me. I don't want any idiot looking up obscene violent crap and finding MY little innocent playlist with its 47 videos, me playing Mama to a bunch of trolls.
It's really too bad that word got so poisoned, and I don't know where it came from - Lord of the Rings, perhaps? But keep my trolls out of it!
A lot of this was a desire to get out of those snotty Facebook groups that DO go into troll foot size, number of fingers, etc. Who gives a royal rip! Dates, times, and price tags mean nothing to me. And I found myself trying to get into their good graces, trying to get "likes", and hating myself for it.
So it's now The Troll Doll Channel, much as that takes something away from it. But I cannot afford to have YouTube squeeze me any further by using a title 5000 other people are already using withoiut penalty. I've learned a lesson or two about that.
(Wouldn't it be funny if I lost my account because my troll account was about TROLLS and not. . . trolls? We can't let the public down, can we?)
There was a time (think Mad Men) when smoking was so entrenched in culture as to be expected, even required. A non-smoker was a social pariah, an oddball who lived on wheat germ and drank only celery tonic. Maybe he belonged to the Oddfellows (whatever that is). Old movies abound with cigarette symbolism, usually sexual in nature. It's all part of the art of seduction. Think Bette Davis and Paul Henreid blowing smoke in each other's faces.
Nobody mentions coughing your lungs out in a cancer ward.
The following little slice of post-war wisdom came from one of those oddity sites, so I felt free to borrow it. No doubt they did, too. Let's zero in on it some more. . .
Even without reading the text, we can already see that hand position is paramount, even if the meaning isn't crystal-clear. The middle position is kind of baffling to me. I've never in my life seen anyone hold a cigarette like that. It's positively weaponlike. Is it meant as a sort of ash catapult, or an enemy smoke-wafter?
All of these photos remind me of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, for some reason. He was constantly smoking in that one, just as EVERYONE was constantly smoking (and drinking). In every picture he made, the cigarette was his signature. But we all know how it ended. One might say that it cost him a lot.
Here the good doctor goes into detail about how smoking style reveals a man's personality. Man's. Not woman's:
OK then. So where do I start? For one thing, that Dr. Neutra thing is suspicious to me. I think of Mr. Neutron in Monty Python. . .
. . . and of course the words neutral and neuter. And a nutria, which is a kind of large beaverlike rodent made into coats (and other things).
But the reason women's smoking gestures aren't considered significant is obvious to Dr. Neutron (or whoever he is): "Women are so affected naturally in their regular posture that they're more often than not too conscious of how they hold a cigarette, and therefore useless as subjects for this experiment."
Useless? Affected? I can think of something to do with my cigarette. Dr. Neutron: sit on this and rotate!
But there's more of this shit to trudge through:
Note that the descriptions of women are devastating, even abusive, whereas he goes fairly easy on the men. If they put on airs, they're not "affected" but "sort of the Texas millionaire type". It's obvious the vast majority of the adjectives to describe men are positive (intellectual, brainy, contemplative, direct, straight-forward, hail fellow well-met, daring, calculating, dreamer, replete with business caution). As for women, any analysis is "just a guess" because they are so "affected": "insecure, afraid to lose that cigarette" (? They come in packs, don't they?). "She probably holds on to her man like glue." Greedy, graspy, possessive! But the next one is worse: "Typical grasp of a female bored with her date. She has to concentrate on the tip to keep from yawning." One has to wonder if this Dr. Neutron has a filthy Freudian mind and sees prick-symbols everywhere he looks.
Is this whole thing a joke, a bit of satire to send up people's smoking habits? I think not! I believe it's drenched with misogyny and contempt for women, and trivializes everything about them.
So what is the conclusion? While you're busy rotting your lungs and throat with terminal cancer, boys, make sure you hold your cigarette in the proper way. Cultivate it for a good impression. Grasp it properly so that the tip is sticking straight up. And good luck in the heart-and-lung ward.
Can you imagine, when you're going at it hot and heavy, suddenly whipping out your Arrid with Perstop to deodorize your "sex perspiration"? This product supposedly nukes the "most offensive odor" (sex sweat), not unlike the Lysol douche which disinfects away all signs that you've had sex. All these ads talk about how doctors recommend the product, though they don't say WHICH doctors and how they managed to solicit their medical opinions. This is yet another of the ubiquitous ads of the era (1950s) which convey the message that women stink, but here they are saying women particularly stink when they are sexually excited, an odor so foul and offensive that it must be stamped out at once or it will knock your partner on his ass. The only good thing about it is the acknowledgement that women feel sexual "excitement" at all, though of course, if and when they do, all signs of it must be immediately eradicated.
I didn't write the intriguing article below - it was written by Martha Kempner for an interesting site called RH Reality Check (RH standing for reproductive health). No discussion of reproductive health would be complete without a mention of education. This makes the article's revelation even more shocking: Anne Frank's immortal diary is being criticized and considered "inappropriate" for adolescents, not for its stark description of life under Nazi oppression but because Frank includes an accurate description of her developing adolescent genitals. This kind of insane prudery is both headspinningly ignorant and groaningly typical in a culture that really hates women's pussies.
I'm sorry, but it does. Hates them. Women (myself included) have been boondoggled into thinking they're abnormal, weird, bad-smelling, and shouldn't have anything "down there" but a neat slit or, like a Barbie doll, nothing. We should not swell or protrude or bush out in any way. If anything does, shave it, trim it, even cut it off (and labioplasty, incorrectly referred to by plastic surgeons as "vaginal surgery", is now becoming frighteningly common as young women seek the "perfect slit", free of mess, fuss or feeling).
Barbie - You Bitch! Conforming to Sociocultural Ideals of the Perfect Vagina A Public Health Issue If this reminds you queasily of a slightly less-drastic form of female circumcision, then - you'd be right. That is exactly what it is. Cutting off parts of ourselves because they're seen as ugly, abnormal and (worse than that) sexually taboo is nothing more than socially-sanctioned mutilation. What else? Though we've supposedly outgrown the Freudian dinosaur belief in the "vaginal orgasm", "vagina" has taken over as the descriptive term for everything below the belt, obscuring and even denying the locus of sexual response and enjoyment for almost all women. The vulva. The pussy. The (if you don't mind the term) cunt.
If you don't like cunt, and some don't because it's also used as a nasty name for someone we don't like, then just come up with some other term such as muff (female masturbation is sometimes called "buffin' the muffin") or jellyroll, which was blues singer Bessie Smith's favorite euphemism. As with Mae West and her infamous "is that a gun in your pocket" line, the censors didn't even know what it meant. Not so incidentally, vulva has a very different sound and feel to it, a different texture than the clinical-sounding vagina. It's voluptuous, is what it is. It sounds like Volvo, a luxury car. It has curves and folds. Vagina always reminds me of Regina, and I sure don't want to go there. I think people are uncomfortable with the word vulva because it sounds dusky and erotic. I think people are uncomfortable with the IDEA of vulva because it's so much simpler for women just to have a neat little hole.
The vulva is external, and yet at the same time fairly well-hidden, like a rabbit in the bush. Female masturbation can also be called "petting the bunny", and we know what bunnies are like: not the Playboy type, but the sort that spring around in the lush woods, coupling joyously whenever the urge strikes. Once they get started, there's just no stopping them. Take that, you Michigan mother!
Half the People in the World Have a Vulva—Can We Please Get Over Our Fear of the Word?
A Michigan mother has become the latest person to complain that a blunt, accurate account of female genitalia—one that uses descriptive words and proper names—is too explicit for school. It’s an argument that we’ve heard many times recently about textbooks, sex education lectures, and even political speeches, but this one is a little surprising. This time the source of the “pornographic” material is the classic book about the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank. Are we really so obsessed with women’s body parts that one paragraph about them is enough to cause a panic even when it’s in a book about far more serious issues?
The book, as most people know, features the first-hand account of a young Jewish woman who was forced to hide in an attic with her family and others during World War II. A new, less edited version of the book has been released. It includes passages in which Anne explores her own body. In the passage in question, Frank writes:
Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris.
The Michigan mother complained that this was far too graphic—in fact pornographic—and completely inappropriate for school. In an interview with the local Fox affiliate, she explained that her daughter brought this too her attention: “I thought it was because she was concerned about the depressing aspects surrounding Anne Frank and all that, and she said no it was because they were talking graphically about Anne Frank’s genitalia.”
Although it is 2013, and about half of the world’s population is female, our body parts seem to cause constant kerfuffles. Recently I wrote about a biology teacher in Idaho who is under investigation in part for using the word vagina during his lecture on human reproduction. (As I said at the time, I’m really not sure how one could give a lecture on human reproduction without using the word vagina, given how many roles it plays.) Last year, I wrote about a report on sex education in New York state and was particularly horrified to learn that one textbook used in New York and other states defines the vagina as the “organ that receives sperm during reproduction.” This description is inaccurate (it’s not an organ) and offensive (a part of the female body should not be defined exclusively in terms of what it does for men). And who can forget last summer when state Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield) was banned from speaking on the Michigan house floor because she used the word vagina in a speech against an anti-abortion bill.
Things get worse the more specific you get. The word vagina is often used to describe everything between a woman’s legs, because, despite the controversies surrounding the word, it’s considered more socially appropriate than accurate terms like vulva, labia, or clitoris.(Emphasis mine. This whole issue exposes the hypocrisy of supposed "openness" when referring to women's genitals: now it's almost OK to say "vagina", but the word is constantly being misused to stand in for all the sexually-responsive parts of a woman's body. The culture seems to prefer the less-threatening concept of an uncomplicated, functional tunnel.) What struck me most about Frank’s description is just how accurate it is. Though she starts by laughing at her past ignorance, the passage provides a spot-on description of where everything is and what it looks like. She also knows all of the correct terminology (though obviously the book has been translated from the original Dutch). Frank was clearly a great writer, and her parents seem to have educated her well about her own body.
Unfortunately, many women growing up some 70 years later do not have this kind of education, at that, in my opinion, is what’s behind our obsession with female genitals. As Frank said, these parts are hidden between a woman’s legs. This makes them very different than penises and testicles, which are more visible and recognizable to most. If we don’t look at these parts and we don’t talk about them in any detail—or worse, if we insist on using nondescript or cutesy terms like “down there” and “vajayjay”—two things happen: ears perk up when you say vagina, and panic ensues if you even whisper the word clitoris. My first reaction upon hearing this mother’s complaint was about perspective and priorities. The book starts conversations about a disgraceful chapter in human history. Kids ask questions about anti-Semitism, concentration camps, gas chambers, and the complete and utter disregard for humanity. On a personal level, they likely think about how they would react if their freedom was taken away and they had to live in hiding. How shallow do you have to be to be more worried about how they’ll react not to this horror and misery but to a description of some body parts?
In one way, the Michigan mother is right: Kids do not need to know about Anne Frank’s genitals to learn about the Holocaust, and they will likely focus disproportionately on this passage because they are in seventh grade and because they’re not hearing about this anywhere else. That said, had the passage been in any other book, be it a novel or a biology textbook, it likely never would have made it into a school in the first place. The solution is not to ban this new version of Anne Frank’s diary. The solution is to make vulvas about as mysterious as elbows. No, I’m not suggesting that we walk around pantsless with legs splayed. I’m simply proposing that we do what we do with all other body parts: Call it by its proper name, define it clearly and accurately in school, and stop freaking out. Half the people in the world have a vulva. Can we please get over the word already?
