why sex are not victim?
As I wrote in the comments sex are not victim was written after spending some time on UbuWeb. I watched Cheryl Donegan's Refuses, which is interesting, but wouldn't in itself have generated any response from me. However, Ubu provides links to Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, and to Caroline Bergvall's response to that earlier film, FUSES (after Carolee Schneemann). These both strongly influenced what I wrote. From FUSES I took the simplification of language, which largely meant dropping prepositions and conjunctions, the look of the piece, and by simply describing without taking a position. Everything else came from Fuses.
The starting point was thinking about what separates Schneemann's film from pornography - to which one answer is a hell of lot. But I realised in fact that was really the wrong question to be asking. I was thinking in fairly simplistic terms about sex on film necessarily having a relationship to pornography, and of pornography only being about sex. The film itself provides the answer, it has a lot more in it than sex for one thing. And what sex there is isn't centered around climax, miniscule detail, or a power dynamic where the woman is watched and has things done to her, and the man is just a cock. This difference in the power dynamic seems to me to be one of the important features here.
This realisation helped me to further develop an argument I last made in a review of Inland Empire in March last year:
"the taste of misogyny can’t really be shaken from the film. There is a real repulsion for the way men treat women, and an acknowledgement that women have their own resources and strengths. But this seeming contradiction can be easily reconciled by thinking about post-romantic representations of women from Thomas Hardy and DH Lawrence through to Lars von Trier and Lukas Moodyson. They present ostensibly strong, independent and fully realised women, who are nonetheless misogynist caricatures. They are often victims, and only defined in opposition or in relationship to men. On the occasions when they are fully sexually independent they’re either presented as animals or as innocents verging on the mentally defective. The post-romantic male artist frequently portrays women in a sympathetic light, but with distrust and an unwillingness or inability to identify with them."
As with my initial reaction to Fuses, the conventional reaction to sex on film (which is by no means confined to men) is to read it solely in terms of sex. This makes it about the sexual exploitation of women, which perhaps reductively makes it all about the evil cock, but ignores the power dynamics at work. This is serious because it devalues and ignores other forms of exploitation and abuses of power. Pornography, and prostitution, are regarded as somehow intrinsically more damaging than non-sexual abuses, like slavery, violence, and so on. The tendency is to regard women as more vulnerable, and more in need of protection than men, which simply reaffirms the existing power structures. It plays into the historic perceptions in many cultures, of women as possessions, and of sex as immoral outside of narrowly defined bounds (even more so when it comes to the conduct of women). I think this is why liberal male artists, however well-meaning and feminist they may be, can come across as very reductive and condescending. They're blinded by the cock, and fail to see what's wielding it.
None of which may be very clear in the poem. But that's some of the thinking behind it. Of course there are a number of aesthetic judgements that are made at the same time, but I'm not going to cover them here.
.
The starting point was thinking about what separates Schneemann's film from pornography - to which one answer is a hell of lot. But I realised in fact that was really the wrong question to be asking. I was thinking in fairly simplistic terms about sex on film necessarily having a relationship to pornography, and of pornography only being about sex. The film itself provides the answer, it has a lot more in it than sex for one thing. And what sex there is isn't centered around climax, miniscule detail, or a power dynamic where the woman is watched and has things done to her, and the man is just a cock. This difference in the power dynamic seems to me to be one of the important features here.
This realisation helped me to further develop an argument I last made in a review of Inland Empire in March last year:
"the taste of misogyny can’t really be shaken from the film. There is a real repulsion for the way men treat women, and an acknowledgement that women have their own resources and strengths. But this seeming contradiction can be easily reconciled by thinking about post-romantic representations of women from Thomas Hardy and DH Lawrence through to Lars von Trier and Lukas Moodyson. They present ostensibly strong, independent and fully realised women, who are nonetheless misogynist caricatures. They are often victims, and only defined in opposition or in relationship to men. On the occasions when they are fully sexually independent they’re either presented as animals or as innocents verging on the mentally defective. The post-romantic male artist frequently portrays women in a sympathetic light, but with distrust and an unwillingness or inability to identify with them."
As with my initial reaction to Fuses, the conventional reaction to sex on film (which is by no means confined to men) is to read it solely in terms of sex. This makes it about the sexual exploitation of women, which perhaps reductively makes it all about the evil cock, but ignores the power dynamics at work. This is serious because it devalues and ignores other forms of exploitation and abuses of power. Pornography, and prostitution, are regarded as somehow intrinsically more damaging than non-sexual abuses, like slavery, violence, and so on. The tendency is to regard women as more vulnerable, and more in need of protection than men, which simply reaffirms the existing power structures. It plays into the historic perceptions in many cultures, of women as possessions, and of sex as immoral outside of narrowly defined bounds (even more so when it comes to the conduct of women). I think this is why liberal male artists, however well-meaning and feminist they may be, can come across as very reductive and condescending. They're blinded by the cock, and fail to see what's wielding it.
None of which may be very clear in the poem. But that's some of the thinking behind it. Of course there are a number of aesthetic judgements that are made at the same time, but I'm not going to cover them here.
.
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