Archive for the ‘POWDER ROOM: gender agendas and queer queries...’ Category

Delusions of Gender

From the Salon.com interview with Cordelia Fine, author of “Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference”:

“…It began when I read a parenting book that claimed that hard-wired sex differences meant that girls and boys should be parented and taught differently. When I looked at the actual studies being used as evidence, I was really shocked by how badly the neuroscientific findings were being misrepresented. I saw the same thing going on in other popular books about gender, and when I looked, I was surprised to discover how little convincing evidence there was that, for example, the male brain is hard-wired to be good at understanding the world and the female brain is hard-wired to understand people…

…We look around in our society, and we want to explain whatever state of sex inequality we have. It’s more comfortable to attribute it to some internal difference between men and women than the idea that there must be something very unjust about our society. As long as there has been brain science there have been misguided explanations and justification for sex and inequality — that women’s skulls are the wrong shape, that their brain is too small, that their head is too unspecialised. It was once very cutting-edge to put a brain on a scale, and now we have cutting-edge research that is genuinely sophisticated and exciting, but we’re still very much at the beginning of our journey of understanding of how our brain creates the mind…”

Full interview here.

Girl on a Motorcycle

I recently read a titillating piece of short fiction about tough, boyish women on motorbikes. It surprised me that, even in the twenty-first century, this image still felt somehow subversive. The female biker is nothing new, but whether a real flesh and blood woman or a fictional character, society still experiences a collective frisson at the thought of her.

Motorbikes have always been symbolic of rebellion. As a traditionally male mode of transport, the bike is seen to embody the spirit of independence, dominance and danger. These factors are amplified all the more when the rider is female. Many men feel intimidated by this. It’s common, especially in the bike community, for them to react by reducing women to pillion-fodder - merely decorative accessories for vehicles, whether or not the woman herself is the bike’s sole rider.

However, the iconic girl-on-a-motorcycle image is one that intrigues and arouses me. The closest I ever got to being one myself was a couple of years on a moped as a teenager, but nevertheless I chose to wear full leathers, gloves and the biggest, butchest pair of boots I could find. My tough image was somewhat undermined by the fact my bike wouldn’t go over 40mph. Still, it was a start.

Here’s part of a rather telling article from the Deccan Chronicle on the allure of the motorbike in Indian culture, and how men perceive female bikers:

‘…The sight of a woman on a bike is an instant turn on. Megan Fox in super hot pants straddling a bike in Transformers 2 and Priyanka Chopra in Don up the oomph factor while they accelerate and sizzle on a machine.

“A hot woman riding a Harley Davidson, dressed in a leather suit and wearing red lipstick — it’s every man’s fantasy,” says adman Prahlad Kakkar.

Anshumani Khanna, creative director, DDB Mudra says, “If you have a good looking woman and a motorcycle, then you are the envy of every person in the group. And that’s what most men want — to be envied. Bringing women and bikes together is not the closest you can get to appeal to men’s sensuality, but it’s definitely an appealing image, it has always been.”

Kakkar calls a motorcycle a modern-world replacement for the stallion, which has traditionally been a symbol of power and virility. For a long time, a women on a horse was seen as something erotic, now the motorcycle has replaced it.

Women are no longer just the titillating element on a bike. The “men’s territory” has now been invaded by women biker groups. They love speed and the adrenaline rush as much as their male counterparts. A remarkable change was seen in the show Stuntmania, which had four women stunt bikers out of the 12 participants. They not only stunned everyone with their skills, some performed better than the men. “If a man can ride a bike and perform stunts, so can women, and we have proven that,” says 25-year-old Smitha Gondkar, a professional stunt biker and one of the participants in Stuntmania Season 2. She loves her Pulsar 250 as much as any other biker would. “Biking is liberating. It makes me feel free. The fear and excitement is something you don’t get anywhere else,” she says. When Smitha started riding bikes, men wouldn’t take her seriously. “They used to consider me as just another babe who was there to be a pillion rider. It was frustrating,” she adds.

Vartika Pandey, another avid biker based in Pune, recently rode across 12 states to spread awareness about smoking. Being a woman biker makes her feel special. “I love the sound of my bike and the way it looks as much as any other biker. My bike is like my companion…”’

Full article here.

London Fetish Weekend 2010

From the LFW newsletter:

“Now in its third year, the London Fetish Weekend is firmly in the diaries of kinksters worldwide. Tickets have been selling fast and include guests from around the globe and as far away as Australia!

The fun packed weekend offers something for everyone and kicks off on 1st October with a Club Subversion Special at the Colloseum in Vauxhall. The theme for this year’s event is Uniforms which is great for boys and girls! Subversion will have five themed areas including a huge dungeon area by Playpenz with ambient music so you can hear your whip crack, a French maid cafe with maid service, a pumping dance area with resident DJs Marky Moo, Si and Bas along with guest DJ Miles. Doors open at 10pm and tickets are just £18 in advance or £20 on the door.

Saturday daytime is shopping time with the London Alternative Market at the Royal National Hotel near Russell Square. A great chance to pick up outfits, toys and accessories from some of London’s most talented kinky traders. As well as being a great place to shop it’s also a great place to meet up with friends or make new ones in the bar area. The market is open from midday to 6pm and is just £6 entry (tickets are available in advance or on the door).

Torture Garden, the world’s largest fetish club, presents the London Fetish Weekend Ball at Mass in Brixton on Saturday night. This huge event features 6 themed rooms, radical performance art, body ritual, fashion shows, burlesque cabaret, live music, art installations, eclectic music and an enforced fantasy dress code. The range of music from DJs including David TG, The Secretary and Jimmy Mofo will make sure your feet don’t touch the floor from the moment you arrive! Tickets are £27 in advance or £30 on the door.

On Sunday you can choose from twelve workshops within three streams of play; Fetish & Fashion, SM play and Bondage brought to you by SiMply Workshops and the LAM. Workshops start at midday and go on until 6pm but you can arrive when you want and choose which workshops you attend as the day goes on. Food and drink are available throughout the day and with tickets at just £8 for the full day it is a great chance to brush up on your SM skills and pick up tips on play and fashion whilst socialising and making new friends.

Finally, Sunday evening is After Pandora in London Bridge. The theme is Bedtime Stories and will entail an enchanting night of kinky fairy tales, a sexy playful night to wrap up a fabulous weekend of fetish clubbing. Tickets for this adult pyjama party are £10 and numbers are limited so make sure you book in advance.”

Click here for more information.

Anti-Porn Feminists

Here’s a really interesting couple of checklists from an article by Clarisse Thorn for Carnal Nation on “Sympathy for the Anti-Porn Feminists”.

“Anti-porn folks are shaped by society’s irrational sexual fears and stereotypes:

1) There’s a stereotype that male sexuality is inherently dangerous, unwanted, or predatory and that it must be contained or restrained at all costs. This means that porn cannot be allowed to thrive, especially if it seems to cater to men. This is also, I suspect, the source of the claim that porn access increases rape (again, false). Anti-porn activists rely on the societal belief that men’s sexuality is hard to control, scaring us into believing that allowing porn will enable uncontrollable men.

2) There’s anxiety about alternative sexuality. Almost everyone in the world can be freaked out by some form of sexuality, and most people are freaked out by very predictable taboos. This freaking-out reaction doesn’t actually mean that there’s anything wrong with that form of sexuality—because, folks, nothing is wrong with any form of sexuality as long as it is 100% consensual!—but most people don’t think past their immediate freakout. So anti-porn folks often use images of extreme sexuality to alarm people who aren’t prepared to see those images. In other words, they often rely on freaking people out to make their case—possibly because otherwise they haven’t got a case.

3) Does porn create certain desires? Or does it merely cater to existing desires? The answer is probably “a little bit of both”, but anti-porn activists rely on the idea that porn makes its viewers want certain kinds of sex or certain kinds of partners. Many of us (like me, years ago) are afraid that we can’t “live up” to our partners’ preferences, and many of us (like me, years ago) tend to believe that “all men” or “all women” want the same thing. So there’s an anti-porn fear that if we allow porn to flourish, those of us who don’t enjoy acting like [mainstream] porn stars will be unable to satisfy our partners.

Again, I got sympathy. I understand these fears because I used to feel them; I felt them so strongly that it made me cry in a public computer lab. But the solution isn’t getting rid of the porn, it’s getting rid of the fears. The solution is:

1) Reframing male sexuality so that we aren’t so damn scared of it all the time. Men can and will control themselves sexually, and they’ll only get better at it—not worse—if we encourage honest, non-scary, open-minded dialogue about male sexual desire.

2) Encouraging people to see alternative sexuality as just another human preference, rather than something weird and/or freakish. Encouraging people to accept and come to terms with their own sexuality, though this can be a tough and hard-to-recognize process—it certainly was for me. Once people feel comfortable in their own sex lives and recognize their own weird fetishes, they’ll be much less likely to judge other people’s sex lives.

3) Making it incredibly clear that everyone has different sexual desires, that different kinds of porn express different desires, and that “all men” and “all women” don’t want the same thing. Porn can be a wonderful tool for exploring particular desires, and allowing people to explore their particular preferences makes it easier for everyone to find sexual satisfaction, not harder—because it means that people with particular preferences can find each other, rather than ending up in unhappy partnerships where those desires are ignored.

4) Oh, and of course we need to encourage people to recognize that violent sex isn’t necessarily bad sex; that even something as extreme as a rape scene can be 100% consensual. One key tactic that I’m trying to push is writing about the amazing variety of sexual communication tactics derived from S&M—tactics that enable some awesomely extreme, awesomely consensual sex.”

Full article here.

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