Thursday, August 20, 2009

Twisty Faster Shares Definition of "Porn" with Anthony Comstock! Film at 11.

The flap over "cuntalina" caused Twisty Jill to explode over the course of several posts, change her name, and then retreat into silence and cutesy dog posts for weeks. Just the kind of resilient scrapper spirit we'd need in a revolution.

But she's baaack, and I haven't done a TFIFI in so long. Today's brilliance: "your so-called 'artistic' photography is a horrible affront on decency!" Because, y'see, we will never liberate vaginas as long as people can go around looking at them and stuff.

The evil pornographer in question is just some random DeviantArt guy with a slick and fairly tasteful portfolio of artistic nudes. His stuff ranges from the kinda porny to the more restrained to the definitely not porn at all. Oh, and this clearly raving misogynist also has pictures of himself naked, which just shows you how he equates nudity with dehumanized worthlessness, or something. He also posts in the commentaries about his friendly relationships with the models and which shots were their ideas, which shows the sad depths of this pornographer's self-delusion.

But Twisty cares not for your "art." What she sees is naked, and naked always means exactly the same thing to all people in all contexts. PORN! Which is an alternate spelling of "rape."

This amateur pornographer, known on the website Deviantart.com as “Pelicanh,” snaps photos of naked ladies, stands back, basks in it, and calls it art. Furthermore, he puts it on the World Wide Web and gets thousands of hits a day.
THOUSANDS OF HITS A DAY! I'm sure he's becoming a billionaire.

"Anyone taking even a casual stroll through my gallery will see a lot of pussy photos. Let’s just call them what they are, OK? NO….they are NOT photos of “vaginas” - learn your anatomy, people.
I’d LOVE it if there was a sweet and endearing name for them, ya know. “Pussy” sounds pretty “Playboy-ish” to me but it is the best I can do because it ISN’T a vagina photo and that sounds waaaaayyy too medical to me anyway. There are at least a billion names for that part of a woman’s anatomy but that’s not what this journal is about. SO - get over it, I’m gonna call it a pussy."

Well, sure, you’re a pornographer. This means you think “pussy” is “anatomy.” But even if you didn’t, obviously you’d have to call it “pussy,” since degrading women and telling them to “get over it” is one of the Inalienable Rights of Man.

Fuck am I supposed to call it, lady? "Vulva" is a detached, ugly, medical-Latin word; "pussy" is indisputably English and ground-level and kind of cute. Degrading? Acting like a woman's anatomy is too sacred, obscure, or disgusting to describe in ordinary language is degrading. "You have an abnormal growth on your vulva"; "I think your pussy's beautiful."

I'm not a man, but I think that being comfortable with women's bodies is part of being comfortable with women. If the pussy is always hidden, always referred to in precise and hushed tones, it's up on some kind of fucking pedestal. A pussy that's part of a human being, that gets used and revealed and exercised and loved, is going to get called a lot of things and seen in a lot of ways, and that's a good thing.

It might also dawn on you that a “sweet, endearing name for them” would be useful only to you and your efforts to distract their owners, through some kind of phony sympathetic display, from the fact that you are a dehumanizing, exploitative prick.
So if you say bad things about pussies, you're obviously a jerk; but if you say good things, you're faking, Twisty can tell. Win-win situation here. (The solution, of course, is for men to never speak or think about pussies, which will undoubtedly give them a very healthy attitude toward people who happen to own You-Know-Whats.)

It doesn’t occur to old Pelicanh that a vulva might have aspirations that rise above being photographed by some perv for public display on his perv web page, where viewers are “made” to look at “beauty.” Aspirations, for example, that do not involve complicity in dudely “art” projects, dudely perceptions of “beauty,” or perpetual availability for pornsick voyeurism. A vulva might want to just hang around. Hit the links. Go to a museum. Menstruate. Enjoy a taco. Chillax on the chaise with a marg and a copy of I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
Or a pussy--or rather its owner, sheesh, I'm up here, honey--might want to be photographed. Why is it beyond conceivability that a woman might think her pussy was beautiful enough to share, or even that it was just fun to be photographed that way or even--really stretching the limits of what's possible in Twisty's reality here--that as a paid model she didn't mind accepting money for artistic nudes?

Give me the choice between being part of a well-crafted, beautifying, even kind of worshipful photo or sitting around menstruating, fuck, I know what I'd choose.

The “It’s beautiful so it’s art, not porn” argument always hilarifies me. Haw!
The "It's a crotch so it's porn, not art" argument always hilarifies me. (Although, really, most of the guy's photos are of women's entire bodies, so when you call those crotch-shots, well, tells me where you're looking. Who's reducing women to their fun bits now?)

What could it be about a vulva that makes it the universal Holy Grail of a certain species of male shutterbug? Why must these vulgar specimens insist on its unique “beauty” when, in fact, a vulva is precisely as “beautiful” as an elbow or a nostril? Why do they so vociferously declaim that they are not pornographers even though their “work” depends entirely on the gross imbalance of power between dudes and women, specifically on flattening women into 2-dimensional sex graphics?
Is it really bad to say that pussies are nicer than nostrils? Sure, there's a sexual attraction; why is that wrong or exploitative? Sex is part of life and art addresses life. It's not like the models are being kept in his basement and have no say in the matter.

And as for gross power imbalance--OH NOES NOW HE IS OPPRESSING HISSELF

A photograph of a disembodied vulva is not, as is one of an elbow or a nostril, a politically or socially neutral concept. It is the graphic representation of the universal belief that women = sex, and a symbol of male dominance in a rape culture.
It's the graphic representation of the truth that women include sex, and a symbol of our fundamental humanity. A woman who's nothing but pussy is problematic; a woman without a pussy is messed up.


I have a pussy. I love it. As a practical matter I don't hang it out in public, but I refuse to be ashamed of it. I refuse to be told that it is somehow a tool of my own oppression. My pussy is mine--mine to hide, mine to show, mine to protect, mine to offer up.


Shit, at least when this guy tells strange women what to do with their pussies he has the decency to pay them.

15 comments:

  1. Having not seen a Twisty-related post from you, I wondered if she'd somehow gone all sane (I don't have the fortitude to read her batshit-crazy blog).
    I should've known that'd never happen.
    Congrats to you for having sense. I like women who are comfortable with their bodies. Any chick who thinks certain parts are "dirty" or "bad" is one to avoid. Oops--I called womyn "chicks"; I must be an oppressor.

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  2. There's one problem with your post here, and with the psychotic bim...errr, I mean: Twisty's post: you need a DA account to view the pictures. Some of us don't want a DA account. So we(I) can't view the images.

    Ah, well. There's enough pictures of naked females on the web to compensate. I'll just go look at them...

    Signed,
    A proud member of the oppressive Patriarchy ;-)

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  3. "Stop doing what you like with your body! It offends me!"

    --Twitty Faster or Jerry Falwell?

    "Cuntalina"?

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  4. Twisty called somebody "Cuntalina" a few weeks (months?) ago. Then people accused her of insufficient feminism. Then her mind snapped and she started writing about how she didn't even post that stuff, it was "Twisty" who posted it, and she was Jill and everybody loves Jill Jill is a good feminist good good feminist . . . .

    It was fairly fun to read. You should definitely do a search. She's really no different than all the tinfoil-hat wearing right-wing crazies on the internet . . . they're all mad that everyone else isn't up in arms on the internets, not realizing that posting about what a revolutionary you are guarantees that you'd never revolt. If there's ever a revolution, Rexall Rangers posting on internet forums will not be involved.

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  5. Hmm... if she goes to a website titled DEVIANT ART, surely she will find a deviant!

    I went to church and found... christians! Just shocking.

    I went to the dog pound. I found... dogs! Shocking.

    My goodnes, did the girl have her oxygen cut off at birth?

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  6. Stiff Man - DeviantArt is a pretty wide-ranging site with a lot of different types of art (including a high proportion of the "utterly, carelessly incompetent" style, but c'est la Vie 2.0), it's not literally aimed at deviants.

    And hell, by both the sociological standard and the colloquial "ew, a perv!" one, that guy isn't a deviant.

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  7. My vulva had aspirations of being an architect but I knew it was just a phase and I wasn't about to put up the tuition for design school without a real commitment or at least some decent GRE scores.

    In fact, anthropomorphizing your body parts, granting them membership to your book club and teaching them about Flemish painting makes it easier to claim them as dependents on your taxes.

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  8. @ L - I am now cleaning coffee off of my monitor and keyboard. thanks a lot.

    really. Thanks a lot!

    :~)

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  9. I agree with you so, so much. OMG. I can't even add anything, because you and the commenters, especially perlhaqr, summed it up perfectly.

    Twisty/Jill is, in fact, fucking insane. More people need to speak up against her, since all I can find is mindless asskissing. (Does she ever let any comments through that say anything contradictory to her beliefs? I know she moderates them heavily, but I don't know to what extent.) That's actually how I discovered this blog - I was desperately searching for someone to say something that made sense so I wouldn't feel so alone in the sea of crazies.

    Anyway, more relevant to this post: I seem to recall she doesn't like the concept of art or something. I guess that might be part of why she doesn't like this photographer (that, and the fact that she thinks pretty much everything ever is misogynist).

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  10. Sometimes it seems like that anything which has even remotely to do with nudity or sex will be found, by some people, to be somehow oppressive and/or dehumanizing.

    And I don't agree, at least not in a general sense. Humans are capable of having sex all the time. Most other animals can't claim that. We also now have contraceptions and STI barriers to make it safer. Why not celebrate that?

    And nudity. The human body is, well, human. And wearing clothing is hiding that, whether it is one's intention to do so or not. And not allowing people to remove it whenever it's not necessary to wear anything, now that's oppressive.

    Nothing wrong as seeing someone as a sex object (people my be a special class of objects in our own minds, but they're still objects) so long as you also see them as much more than that. Now treating only one gender as a whole this way and like little else is wrong, yes, but most modern societies are getting better at that.

    It seems like some so-called feminists want to not only make women equal in all ways to men in terms of rights and treatment, but equal in terms of limitations as well. Basically, two steps forward, one step back. It would probably be better to move men one step forward instead.

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  11. Holly, I am familiar with DA through the work of some fine art nude photographers, and I realize that there are a whole range of types of photography on DA. My point was that we have a person that went to a website, most likely knowing some of the types of photography that would be there. She then picks out the lowest-of-the-low photography (to her) and throws a fit at its existence.

    My comment to her would be, "Put on your big girl panties, pull 'em up and act like a big girl."

    If she doesn't like that type of photography, stay away from it.

    One photographer that I "met" and followed his work for a bit had a project where he took polaroid photographs of any subject around him, buried them in the ground for 2-3 months, dug them up and displayed how the acids in the ground changed the picture.

    Now I'm all for freedom to do things as neat or as silly as we wish, but that wasn't my bag of tricks to look at for long. I didn't complain about it, I didn't rag on the guy... it was what it was and I let it be.

    Twisty seems to seek out things to be offended by. She is often successful at it.

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  12. I like that this "It doesn't occur to old Pelicanh that a vulva might have aspirations".

    My vulva has hopes, dreams and a mind of it's own, apparentally? Or am I skimming her posts too quickly and misunderstanding?

    I have a headache.

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  13. "A woman without a pussy is MESSED UP."

    I actually know some women who don't have pussies, at least not ones that look like cis women's. I'm almost positive this isn't what you mean to say, but an indication of that would be nice.

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  14. Gosh, as someone who has been a nude model, I've gotta say that I never found it degrading. Reading that blog post by Twisty made me feel like she was degrading me.

    I hope someone tells her that.

    (BTW, thanks Holly for writing this. You hit the nail on the head).

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  15. A vulva doesn't menstruate, nor does it walk around or think. Some people menstruate. It actually involves the brain, endocrine system, nerves, uterus, ovaries...

    Oh wait, that's bringing logic and reality into Twisty Faster. My mistake.

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