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Ten Minute Social Critic

It's social criticism written within a strict ten minute time limit.

Not really on here anymore.

I won't have my professional photos for a few more weeks, so here are some snapshots from my wedding!





















It was quite the party.

We danced all night.

I'm getting married tomorrow!

In March of 2008, Pat Buchanan posted "A Brief for Whitey" in his blog at the Patrick J. Buchanan official website. Always outspoken about his (euphemistically-termed) conservative views concerning African-Americans, women, queers, immigrants, and all other non-white non-men, in "Brief" Buchanan focuses his indignation against African-Americans as he enumerates the various "convictions, grievances and demands" the "Silent Majority" of white America holds against the black community. While his comparison of then presidential-candidate Barack Obama's suggestion for an honest discussion of race to a "shakedown" run by "black hustlers" seems a bold display of unapologetic racism, one may find it easy to imagine that Buchanan's vitriolic spew represents little more than the ravings of a backwards and anachronistic dinosaur. When Buchanan argues that "America has been the best country on earth for black folks," we may twinge with distaste at his gross neglect of the Middle Passage and the centuries of atrocities that followed, but nonetheless we dismiss his words as ineffectual and decaying in an Affirmative Action world. As he concocts rape statistics and worries for the safety of the white woman from the lascivious urges of the black man, we may imagine Buchanan a mere crackpot, behind-the-times--certainly not representative of the modern American framework of racial discourse. But Buchanan possesses an audience, and they are not the marginal group of recognizable bigots that we'd like to imagine. Currently, the hit counter on his website posting of "A Brief for Whitey" sits at 173,927 views (with a 4.27 out of 5 star rating, nonetheless). This count represents only a small portion of Buchanan's audience, as the essay's publication in numerous and widely-read online conservative journals, even its discussion in the Forum section of Playboy, garnered “Brief” further attention.

But for a moment let's forget Buchanan's readers. Let's forget his fan base. Chances are you're not a member. You're not a racist or a sexist: you recycle regularly, drive a hybrid, have a few degrees. In that case, Buchanan's views don't fit within your worldview--do they?

Regardless of the vision of a "diversified" America that so many politically-sensitive liberal progressives embrace, regardless of the narrative of a unified nation that has moved beyond the ravings of a few lingering bigots, Buchanan's bold words prove a condensed manifestation of a symbolic narrative that reflects not merely the madness of a few hateful old men but rather the foundations of American cultural identity. Although many find it appalling when Buchanan claims that slavery provided "black folks" with the gifts of community, Christianity, and capitalism, these shocking words in fact reflect basic building blocks that enable the very production and proliferation of race in America. When Buchanan names white America as the benevolent savior of "black folks" in Africa, he calls upon an insidiously naturalized logic of racial binary that constitutes the politically opposite identities of 'white' and 'black.' This logic sets up a binary of domination in which whiteness signifies a common community representative of civility and American identity, while blackness describes the opposite type of people from the opposite side of the world: savage, mysterious, dark. When Buchanan labels African-Americans as the exploiters of welfare and Section 8 housing and in the next breath demands African-American gratitude for the white community's valiant completion of the White Man's Burden, he indulges in the fantasy of American Moral Purity, a place where white families have tolerated--nay, even aided--the exploitative Others who nonetheless continue demonstrate an insatiable appetite for undeserved goods. This moral fantasy has a reputation of historically justifying quite a bit of violence.

Among the underserved goods these black folks seek, Buchanan warns us, remains unbridled sex. Racial purity emerges inevitably entangled in sex, and as Buchanan charts the rise in illegitimacy among African-American babies, he reminds his readers of the inherent sexual turpitude of these monolithic black folk. When he warns his audience that "black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse," refers to the "hoaxes" that certain rape-crying black women enact against innocent white men, and finally laments that the "epidemic" of black sexual assaults against white women remain unsung, his accusations echo the battle cries of the lynch mobs of the Reconstruction-era South as they murdered their "rapist" victims in the name of white purity. Conversely, the white rapes of black women go unpunished under the assumption that the victim�s innate promiscuity disallowed the possibility of her refusal. Yet while the black rapist, the chaste white woman, the jezebel negress, and the heroic white man appear in obvious and condensed driving symbols behind the explicit narratives of white masculine dominance demonstrated by lynch mob logic and Buchanan's white demands for black gratitude, the characters in this drama don't remain locked in the corners of the past or the minds of extremists. Rather, they exist in our every day world, populating an invisible ideology of white masculine supremacy that constitutes the dominant frameworks of American race and gender as it remains necessarily hidden behind a naturalized veil.

White supremacy silences other narratives as it monopolizes the position of the dominant cultural mythology. Those great white "Founding Fathers" don't populate our mythology of American heroism based upon their singular merit; women, queers, and people of color do not remain hidden because of their natural inferiority. In order to drop the veil of "natural truth" which hides the face of white supremacy, we must reveal the narrative as just that: a narrative, a story, a perspective that comes from a one particular position. Furthermore, we must recognize the validity and right-to-life of other non-white-male ontologies--and this, at times, will be difficult for even the most progressive. The goal, as Jaqui Alexander suggests, remains to engage in conversation without domination, criticism without colonialism. White supremacy occupies only a position in a power structure of oppression that occurs at the site of difference. The dismantlement of this structure cannot occur by the mere displacement of white masculine supremacy with supremacy of some other sort. The goal does not reside in proving one narrative more "true" than the rest. Rather, the deconstruction of the "truth" to reveal its fictional nature proves at least one necessary step to dismantling the oppressive monopoly the narrative of white supremacy holds over a story's right to count.

OMG i love to dance.

Last night one of my dance instructors informed me that he's been taping some of our classes.

So every class, we learn a new choreography. We only have an hour to learn and perform each dance.

Here's what we did last night...

Bollywood!



I'm the one on the far left in the pink pants and grey tank.

The song is from Slumdog Millioniare.

Enjoy my mad skills!

Hi!



Between finishing my coursework for my Ph.D., researching tons, and writing even more, here's what I've been up to...

making my wedding invitations:



trying on wedding gowns:





(no, I won't be wearing either of these!)

planning my awesome honeymoon in Holbox Island:



writing an essay that won me a free week at this dope-ass beach house...



...complete with pool and hot tub:



life rocks right now.

new blog.

I'm not leaving SG yet. I'm addicted to the SG groups and my SG friends and my internet community.

But I still won't take any more sets. I meant everything I said...

but I just love you guys too freakin much to leave.



In other news:

I used to be a little kid.



can you believe that?

I'll definitely never shoot another set for SG. And I probably won't hang around much longer, either.

Not because of any internal SG politics, and not because I "dont like the way the site is changing"--

(although I don't like the way the site is changing)--

And while I've met some fucking awesome people on here--especially other SG's
(lyxzen, flux, anarchie, wendy, lauren, geraldine, and of course my girl jaime come to mind),

I'm really starting to question my willingness to sell myself, and I'm starting to question the pro-porn rhetoric. This proves a difficult ideological transition for me, because both personally and professionally I have long advocated porn, sex work, and general sexual subversiveness to hold great potential as pro-female. But the deeper I get into this doctorate, the less pro-female sexual commodification seems--even when enacted willingly by the female. Selling your image no longer seems progressive, but regressive. It no longer seems to challenge the patriarchy, but rather to enforce an ideology which locates woman as thing.

As a younger woman, I sent a lot of time giving myself away. My image has appeared upon the screens of many strangers. Those who consume my image are necessarily unaware of my value, distanced by the digital. I'm working on my third degree. I have two dogs. I write fiction. And I'm not the only one. But unlike a lot of these amazing and beautiful women,I'm no longer comfortable utilizing my sexuality, physicality, and image as social currency.

It's a valuable currency, the female sexuality. I know I've made a lot of money--and various other social gains--by utilizing my "hotness." The way I looked at it was: my sexuality is a commodity; someone will spend my sexuality; that someone might as well be me. I felt as if I'd figured out some game, as I swung from poles and traveled the world on strange men's money. Selling my sexuality certainly opened some positive doors for me. My sexuality remains a more valuable commodity than any intellectual properties I may possess, and those girls out there hustling (and hustling comes in many forms) have figured out the game: they've located their commodity and capitalized on it. I can't blame them for that. An old friend used to tell me, "Just because you know the rules doesn't mean you don't have to play the game." That old friend was me.

I thought I'd figured out the game, swindling men out of thousands of dollars at the titty bar, collecting those SG checks that seemed just to easy to make, getting free drinks all night because I smile once every fifteen minutes at some old dude across the bar. I thought I was tricking people into paying me loads of easy cash. But I wasn't tricking anyone. They want to pay you. They want you to think it's easy so they can keep paying you. No one was being tricked but me.

The system that sells sex locates the woman as commodity. No personal economical or social gain is worth the collective damage that this does to both genders. The "anti-establishment" stance of "female-empowered" porn unfortunately (and often blindly) contributes to a patriarchal hegemony in which "establishment" gender roles are further cemented: woman as commodity to be consumed. Regardless or whether I take my own nudie pics, or my punk rock best friends takes them; regardless of how empowered I feel when strangers tell me my "anti-establishment" tattooed naked body looks beautiful; regardless of the alterna-style of naked lady that this site sells--

the bottom line is that we're still selling naked ladies. And that shit ain't cool.