Tilikum

amberhawkswanson.com

The fascinating and tragic tale of Tilikum, the male killer whale held captive at SeaWorld (Orlando Florida), is brilliantly told in the documentary Blackfish (2013), directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite.

The film focuses on the cruelty and stupidity of keeping such a large and intelligent mammal in what is essentially a fish tank and obliging him to perform like a seal and act as a living sperm bank for SeaWorld's lucrative breeding programme. 

If he enjoys doing tricks for the trainers who, when not throwing him food from a bucket, are masturbating him with a cow's vagina in order to gather his semen, it hasn't stopped him from being actively involved in the deaths of two of them (Keltie Byrne and Dawn Brancheau); as well as a Sea World visitor, Daniel P. Dukes, who made the fatal mistake of hiding in the park until after closing time and then getting into Tilikum's pool. His naked and mutilated body was found the next morning draped over Tilikum's back.

    

Inasmuch as Tilly has undeniably been objectified by owners who believe him to exist solely to generate profits and sire young and spectators who think his duty is to entertain them and their children, then the above deaths might well be described as the brutal and bloody revenge of the object. 

Undoubtedly, the person who best appreciates this aspect of Tilikum's tale is the very wonderful video and performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, for whom issues of power, violence, sex and objectification are clearly of great import. She is probably best known for her Amber Doll project (2007-10) in which she married a RealDoll made in her own image and jointly explored the distinction between fantasy and reality. 

Predictably, Amber Doll, and Ms Swanson's relationship with her, solicited some extreme reactions and they were involved in strange and disturbing situations. But who would have guessed that the severely damaged sex doll, with her silicone flesh and plastic skeleton, would one day resurrect and be transformed into ... Tilikum!

This, however, in December 2011, is precisely what happened and, I have to say, it's a brilliant move by the artist; as one pure object is turned into another, by a woman who is herself the object of her own work. The critic and blogger, Megan Milks, describes this best:

"With the transformation of Amber Doll into Tilikum, Swanson’s exploration of compound female subjectivity becomes an exploration of human-doll-animal intersubjectivity. Swanson figures Tilikum in the pose of the entertainer, with tail raised, greeting his spectators, with the collapsed dorsal fin characteristic of orcas in captivity; meanwhile his upward, unflinching gaze, communicates his enforced submission and his history of and potential for violence, inscribed back onto the female-gendered doll body that forms his own. Swanson as doll as Tilikum: the art object flickers with the radical passivity of these co-mingled subjects."

- Megan Milks: Free Tilikum, or the Transfiguration of Amber Doll: Radical Passivity in Amber Hawk Swanson's Doll Projects, posted on the multi-authored blog montevidayo.com (Oct 11, 2012) 

Good News / Bad News

 

In the news this morning: a UN General Assembly committee has agreed a resolution put forward by a Norwegian-led coalition to protect women's rights activists working around the world. 

That's the good news. 

The bad-but-sadly-predictable news is that the resolution was opposed by all the usual forces of reaction and religious stupidity, including the Vatican, which, working in alliance with the regimes of Russia, China, Iran and other Islamic states - not to mention some particularly unpleasant African governments - sought to weaken the resolution by refusing to endorse the idea that all forms of violence against women's rights activists were completely unacceptable, whatever laws, customs, traditions, or beliefs might be used to justify such. 

This led to prolonged negotiations over the wording of the document and, in the end, concessions were made; something described by the Icelandic ambassador, Greta Gunnarsdottir, as a low point for the UN rights committee who could have and should have remained resolute about the wording of the resolution.

Still, it's a small victory of sorts. Although, of course, the real work begins when it comes to enforcing the resolution and ensuring no more health workers, for example, are murdered for trying to immunize children or teach young women about the use of contraception.

  

On the Right to Bare Arms (A Post in Support of Pussy Riot)

The Right to Bare Arms (ffabyrd.deviantart.com)

Lawrence once insisted in a piece of fragmentary writing that he felt no deep hostility towards Christianity. Indeed, on religious fundamentals he maintained there was no breach between himself and the Church of Rome, whose authority he believed in.

Of course, this is slightly disingenuous to say the very least ... But, there is one occasion on which Lawrence leaps to the defense of the Holy Father and affirms Catholic teaching. In his long essay written à propos Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence savages George Bernard Shaw for daring to mock the Pope's attempt to maintain the modesty of women by insisting that they cover-up their bare arms and legs whilst attending Mass and, ideally, when in any public space whatsoever.

Not unreasonably, Shaw points out that the irony of wanting to veil female flesh is that this more often than not leads to its eroticization; that it is clothing that arouses thoughts of sex, not nakedness. For Lawrence, however, this remark is indicative of the flippancy and vulgarity of intellectuals and whilst he agrees that half-naked, modern women fail to stimulate genuine desire in the modern male, this he feels is a reason to despair and to rethink our relationship to the body (the female body in particular).

Ultimately, like the Pope, Lawrence, wants women to keep their limbs and their hair covered. Not because the exposure of such arouses sexual desire, but because it doesn't and that is a sign that something is sadly wrong: with men as well as women; but mostly with women who have lost their natural allure and become as sexually undesirable as plastic dolls. 

If, on the other hand, women have gained their economic and political freedom and the right to participate in society as equals; i.e. to work and to vote as well as to have control over their bodies, this means very little to Lawrence. It's the fact of female flesh being publicly displayed that continues to exercise and deeply trouble him. 

I was reminded of all this - of Lawrence's insistence that the bare arms (legs, necks, and shoulders) of women constitute a dangerous and vulgar form of atheism - whilst watching a film of the trial of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich. These three courageous young women - members of feminist punk group Pussy Riot - were convicted by a Russian court in 2012 of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred' and sentenced to two years in a penal colony, after performing a brief anti-government protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

During this performance, they shouted and swore and called on the Virgin Mary to support them. But, as pointed out at the trial, they also did so whilst dressed in an inappropriate and offensive manner to those who subscribe to the Orthodox faith; that is to say, they had bare arms and this seriously compounded their crime. The fact that they had their hair covered (beneath brightly-coloured balaclavas), unfortunately did nothing to redeem the situation and save them from jail ...

There's really not much more I can say on this: Lawrence's position is sincere in its puritanism, but mistaken in its sexism. I prefer Shaw's flippancy to the Pope's misogyny. And I support the right of Pussy Riot and of all women everywhere to expose or cover their bodies, however they choose, wherever and whenever they want to, regardless of men with beards who think them all witches at heart.


See: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, Produced and Directed by Mike Lerner/Maxim Pozdorovkin (2012)

Taste the Rainbow

Taste the Rainbow by Kameolynn: deviantart.com

Left, right, back to the middle / head on swivel, neck till I quivel 

taste the rainbow, taste my Skittles - Iggy Azalea

It has been said that oral sex is as American as apple pie; but this invariably refers to fellatio and not to cunnilingus. It's almost as if the latter is somehow un-American, or a little too exotic. And there also seems to be a very real concern amongst many men that giving head, rather than just receiving it, is unmanly and emasculating; or something rather abject to perform, like all jobs involving physical labour.     

Thus it is that, within the super-macho world of rap, whilst the magic and softness of the cock-sucking female mouth is enthusiastically celebrated, there has been very little sung in praise of pussy-licking. At the very least, we might say this refusal to reciprocate is a little ungenerous. And, as hinted above, a sign of male laziness and insecurity.  

However, things have recently started to change and going down on a girl is now no longer regarded as something to be ashamed of or grossed out by, but is seen rather as the sign of a real man. Suddenly, male rappers are falling over themselves to boast of their skills and techniques in this area; bragging of either how quickly they can make a 'bitch' come, or of how long they can pleasure a woman orally.

Check out, for example, the following three tracks selected by Rebecca Haithcoat of LA Weekly: 

- Eat the Pussy, by Ty$ and Joe Moses ft. Reem Riches and TeeCee4800
- Do It With My Tongue, by YG
- I Will, by Danny Brown.

As Ms Haithcoat nicely points out, the latter scores extra points for rapping that he doesn't even care if a real cunt doesn't taste of fruit Skittles.

White Skin, Black Mask: The Case of Iggy Azalea

Photo of Iggy Azalea: www.iamhiphopmagazine.com

According to one of her critics - and she has many - Australian-born rapper and model Iggy Azalea is hip hop's nightmare; a privileged blonde white girl who plays with African-American identity and exploits black culture and history, reinforcing the very worst racial and sexual stereotypes in the process of making mega-bucks for herself and the corporate-media pimps she hustles for.*

Now, whilst I understand and sympathize with this position - which is not simply based on personal hostility, so much as it is rooted in a long and shameful past that only an idiot would seek to deny - I'm wary about sharing or supporting it. Because in order to share and support this view one would have to understand race as an essential categorization.

And that's tricky for me, as I see blackness in terms of artifice and attitude, not authenticity; as a question of style, not soul. I also believe it to be performative; that is to say, a way of walking and talking, as well as dressing, thinking, laughing and loving.

In other words, negritude, because it is culturally constructed, is something that can be legitimately assumed by anyone - even a pale-faced young woman from Down Under. She might be wearing a mask and playing a role - but so are the rest of us - and despite some rather depressing and regrettable aspects of her persona it is important to recognize also the complexity of her performance as a postmodern minstrel. 

* See the essay by Aimee Valinski; Hip Hop's Nightmare - Iggy Azalea, (www.iamhiphopmagazine.com)

No One is Innocent

Innocent Drinks was founded in 1999 by Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright: three Cambridge graduates working in the well-paid world of corporate consultation and advertising who knew precisely how to market idealism in the form of fruit smoothies. As did design director, David Streek, who developed the brand identity based on fair trade, environmental friendliness, and making sure people get their five-a-day. Or bringing nature, community, and business closer together for mutual benefit.

Via the Innocent Foundation, a UK registered charity set up in 2004, the company donates a percentage of its profits to good causes, including development projects in the Third World. Innocent also run a campaign in partnership with Age Concern each autumn known as the Big Knit, in which people are encouraged to make tiny little woolen hats to go on top of 250ml bottles. Every sale of such results in a 25p donation to charities attempting to save the thousands of old folk who risk freezing to death during the winter because they can't afford to heat their homes.

So far, so saintly. But, of course, no one is innocent; not even Messrs. Reed, Balon and Wright ...

And so it came to pass that in April 2009, they announced that they had agreed to sell an 18% share of their company to Coca-Cola for a sum in the region of £30 million. Despite the horrified reaction of many customers to this news and the threat of a boycott, one year later Coca-Cola upped its stake in Innocent to 58% for a further £65 million. Coke applied the coup de grace in February of this year; increasing its holding to over 90% and taking full operational control whilst the three founders pocketed another £100 million.

Richard Reed described the deal as beautiful and pointed out that if it were not for capitalism we would all be living in mud-huts, or shivering to death from the cold like the elderly. It's easy to be cynical and sneering, but at some point customers and companies alike need to grow up and get real. 

It is, of course, an old story that follows a predictable path and no one should really be surprised by this sell-out. Nor shocked to hear that Innocent have now signed a deal with McDonald's. Even so, for the first time a fruit smoothie is starting to leave a nasty taste and one remembers again Malcolm McLaren's sage advice: never trust a hippie - particularly a hippie with a calculator.

Be a Wise Monkey

 The Three Wise Monkeys (Tōshō-gū shrine, Nikko, Japan)

Having recently written a post in praise of Iwazaru - the wise monkey who spoke no evil - I've been thinking over the last few days about the other two: Mizaru and Kikazaru; i.e. the monkeys who choose to see no evil and hear no evil respectively. 

Although it is often said that by encouraging us to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the unpleasant reality of the world we live in, the above thereby foster a wilful and shameful form of ignorance, I have to confess to a growing sympathy for those who choose to look away from scenes of grotesque violence and brutality (be they real or simulated) and listen not to the stream of foul and abusive language pouring from the mouths of those who conflate hate speech with free speech. 

I don't accept for one moment that it's cowardice or the refusal of our duty to acknowledge evil that's depicted in the famous carving at the Tōshō-gū shrine in Japan. Mizaru, Kikazaru and Iwazaru may be guilty of many things, but moral indifference is not one of them. 

Rather, I think the point is this: evil corrupts in its sensational character on the one hand and desensitizes on the other and it is therefore wise not to dwell on evil, or get it in your head, as Lawrence would say. Otherwise, before you know it, all you can palpitate to is murder, rape, and hatred and you end up feasting on corpses like some kind of zombie with atrophied feelings.

Anasyrma: Upskirt Politics and Vulva Activism

Illustration to La Fontaine's Nouveaux Contes (1764)

Once upon a time, when a woman lifted up her skirt and displayed her cunt, it invoked profound horror in male onlookers. Even gods, demons and insects were disconcerted by this apotropaic act of magical indecency and her anatomy was not merely her destiny, but also the source of her terrifying power over life and death.

Sadly, however, within our epilated culture of digital pornography and labiaplasty, the cunt has lost much of its monstrous beauty and effective capacity. Women have been fatally exposed in the name of emancipation and equality and close-up images of their exposure are today endlessly circulated via the media; an act of violent and systematic exorcism.

For their feminine power is rendered null and void when their sex is put on permanent display and everything is made visible and accessible. No longer the site of secrets, the cunt has become a disenchanted and sanitized hole that waits to fulfill a function by being filled; just another empty sign in a hypersexual and hyperreal universe.

Having said that, some women are at least trying to reclaim their own genitals. The Labia Pride movement, for example, seeks to combat the growing trend for designer vaginas and raise awareness of the fact that the cunt comes in many shapes, sizes, and colours and should not be expected to conform to a hairless and odourless ideal determined by pornographers and cosmetic surgeons.

And whilst some of the statements I have read by vulva activists strike me as philosophically naive, I'm more than happy to support the goal of genital diversity and to resist trends which seek to further shame and humiliate women via the creation of misogynistic cultural norms and new insecurities.

Revolutions are so vieux jeu

Image by party9999999 on deviantart.com

Having just watched the latest depressing news out of Libya, I can only send a message of sympathy and solidarity to my friend, the London-based freelance journalist and blog editor, Nahla Al-Ageli. She had high hopes of the Arab Spring and for a post-Gadaffi Libya. Indeed, despite the armed gangs of militiamen and the rising threat posed by Al-Qaeda, she still has what we might term revolutionary faith.      

For better or for worse, this is something I lost long ago, thanks to Nietzsche. For Nietzsche encourages his readers to reject notions of political redemption and belief in great events. Instead, he advocates a politics of pure resistance based upon opposition to all forms of idolatry (including state idolatry) and a refusal to trust those who promise salvation. By learning how to laugh at our own seriousness and ambition - as well as those who hold positions of leadership and authority - we may be able to offer at least a temporary defense against the desire for some kind of final solution to life's complexity, or the dream of a New Jerusalem.  

In an interesting passage of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche warns against revolutionaries who, in an attempt to garner public support, "transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities in order that they might paint them on the wall" [I. 8. 438]. He also argues that whilst political violence can be the source of stimulation via the resurrection of the most savage energies, it can do no more than this. For change of a truly important nature requires something else; not something bigger or more extreme, but, on the contrary, small doses of difference administered homeopathically. Nietzsche writes:

"If a change is to be as profound as it can be, the means to it must be given in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time! Can what is great be created at a single stroke? So let us take care not to exchange the state of morality to which we are accustomed for a new evaluation of things head over heels and amid acts of violence ..." [Daybreak, V. 534].

This crucially important passage concludes with a series of remarks on the French Revolution, but which might just as easily be read in relation to the recent upheavals in Libya and elsewhere: 

"It is now ... beginning to become apparent that the most recent attempt at a great change in evaluations, and that in a political field – the ‘Great Revolution’ – was nothing more than a pathetic and bloody piece of quackery which knew how, through the production of sudden crises, to inspire ... the hope of a sudden recovery – and which therewith made all political invalids up to the present moment impatient and dangerous." [Ibid.]

As Voltaire reminds us: Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu. And this is particularly true when large sections of the public are infected not only with political idealism, but religious mania.

Speak no Evil

Image from gracefyt.blogspot.com

It is important - if you wish to defeat fascism - to be sensitive to the use and misuse of language: to understand how the terms we use, the metaphors we subscribe to, the empty clichés and elevated banalities of idealism that we fall back on, essentially determine the world we inhabit and the kind of people we become. And it's important to remember that whilst sticks and stones may break bones, only words are really murderous.

Victor Klemperer, a professor of French Literature at Dresden University until the Nuremberg Laws obliged him, as a Jew, to resign his post in 1935, knew this when he bravely documented the role of certain key words and phrases within Nazi Germany. In The Language of the Third Reich, he demonstrated how language, culture, and history are intimately related and how a violent rhetoric demanding racial purity and Lebensraum resulted in obscene bloodshed and the digging of mass graves.

Klemperer rightly understood that it isn't only actions that need to be examined and combated, but also what he calls the Nazi cast of mind and its way of thinking rooted in the language of hate. He writes: "Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions ... taken on board mechanically and unconsciously." [14]

Denazification, if it is ever to be accomplished, is thus a procedure that must be carried out at the level of micro-politics; a fact recognized by Michel Foucault, who, writing in a preface to Anti-Oedipus, argued that the major and strategic adversary remained fascism: "And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini ... but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behaviour ..." The key task is therefore to learn how to "rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism" [xiii].

But this is no small task. For it involves the revaluation of everyday language; exposing seemingly innocent and innocuous words commonly used by all on the one hand, whilst giving formerly pejorative terms positive virtue on the other hand. It perhaps also obliges us to coin neologisms and find ways to speak with sensitivity and a certain softness of tone - unlike the Nazis, who endlessly shouted the same things and spoke with one voice that was as loud, monotonous, and threatening as the barking of an Alsatian dog.

In saying this, am I promoting a form of what reactionary idiots like to characterize sneeringly as political correctness? Perhaps.

I am certainly saying we all need to mind our language and be a wise monkey like Iwazaru. For although those who peddle hate speech often like to do so in the name of free speech, the latter is rarely contrary to propriety and good manners.

- Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady, (Continuum, 2006).
- Michel Foucault, 'Preface' to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al, (The Athlone Press, 1984).