Some more outrage

As with most things I bitch about on here, I know very little about Buck Angel. I first became aware of his existence through Corin, who is a fan of his on Facebook; essentially, he is reportedly the first FtM porn star, and seems pretty popular. From the little of his online presence that I have researched, I've noticed that he sees himself as a success, primarily because of the authenticity he and others perceive in his masculinity. His bio on Facebook is essentially presented as a wrong body narrative; we are encouraged to see him as an ordinary guy who was unfortunate enough to have been born into a female body.

A few days ago Corin read a status from this page to me and it's been troubling me ever since. It reads:

This was sent to me today. Pretty Cool!

"
My ass.
You have not been a woman.
That's impossible.
You have a bitchin mustasche and you could probably beat a wild
animal to death with your
bare hands.
You look like you could star as a villian in a Die Hard film.
You look like you could demolish a house by headbutting it.
You simply look to convincing to have ever been a woman."

Obviously I have several issues with this. For one thing, 'been a woman' is really problematic terminology - I recognise that this is the terminology of the person writing to Buck, but it is also terminology he tacitly supports by publishing it without criticism. The following account leads me as a reader to believe that both Buck's fan and Buck himself believe women to be inherently inferior to men, and this makes me fucking angry.

According to this quote, it is 'impossible' for women to have facial hair or, at least, facial hair that is so socially acceptable as to be 'bitchin'. Similarly, a woman could not possibly 'beat a wild animal to death'; she could not star as a Die Hard villain; she couldn't have the strength to 'demolish a house by headbutting it'. And, by she, I mean we. We, as women, are weaklings and failures. We can't impress people with our plumage (possibly because, since most women feel under pressure to present themselves in a way that indicates great care has been taken over their appearance, it just isn't special when our hair - non-facial, non-armpit, non-pubic - looks good. It's meant to look that way). We can't take on wild animals - we simply don't have the necessary testosterone levels. We are worse than ordinary - we are substandard because, in the grand competition to be entertaining that apparently is life, we barely have half the physical resources of people signified as male, or 'appropriately' masculine. We don't exist in this conversation except by omission and derision. I am not trying to say that conversations about transmasculinity ought to refer to women - sometimes women are not relevant - but, when heteromasculinity is being so revered, women become present through their silent inadequacy.

What is strength in this conversation? It is destruction, brute force, the ability to literally throw your weight around. Fuck childbirth. Fuck existing in a society that constantly undercuts you - Buck Angel has apparently made a safely-unnoticed exit from the parade of fuckery that assaults most of us who are not heteromen on a daily basis, so it's alright for him. He can become an oppressor of those less 'fortunate' (i.e. less outwardly normatively masculine) than him. I feel very self-conscious about coming across, to myself as well as others, as being transphobic in this complaint but, more importantly than that, I cannot subscribe to something that relies on the subordination of femininity to be 'successful'. Because according to this narrative I am not strong, and I do not have strength. While Buck is made a spectacle - which I do not mean to imply is okay: he is a person, not a freakshow - I am fainting somewhere in a corner, where I am either being attended to by another woman behind the scenes or ignored entirely. As is every other woman. And, essentially, it seems to be that we are being ignored because society has not awarded us the resources to throw our weight around.

This is not to say, though, that the only strengths that can be ascribed to women are separate from those ascribed to Buck (or Buck's masculinity): there are strong fucking women. There are women body builders and women wrestlers and women cage-fighters and women who pull cars with their teeth. Corin remarked, and I think this is totally feasible, that working out to the extent that you become a body builder does basically the same things to any body, be it a woman's or a man's, or male or female, or something else. Are woman-identified body builders too 'convincingly' masculine to be considered women? Are other people's gender the properties of outside critics? I find it disturbing that anyone, let alone a queer person, would endorse these ideas.

And what's 'convincing'? What exactly is being celebrated when Buck Angel is seen to pass? To me, this is not about his personal journey, or his comfort. This is about supporting a gender binary. This is about celebrating the idea that even queers can support this myth, this piece of shit idea that seems to permeate everything, that sits in so many people's heads and dictates so much about how they treat people and how they let themselves act: the idea that the genders are the (perceived) sexes and are opposite and entirely different, and that it's of the utmost importance to assert this at all times. It's fucking bullshit and I'm fucked off about it. I feel like I've probably made a lot of oversights in this blog, because there is so much about gender that I do not know, because I'm angry and when I'm angry I tend to throw rationality to the wind and often debase what I am attempting to defend by being too obtuse to understand, let alone defend, it properly. If you're reading this and you want to call me out, please do. I'd like to talk about this with someone.

A sad story

Tonight I went to see Scream Club. After listening to a few too many Robots songs this afternoon I realised that they were actually quite annoying and I was possibly not in the right place to see them, and so Scream Club became all the more the focus of my evening.

I arrived at the O2 Academy and everyone there was a twatty fifteen-year-old girl bleating incessantly and taking MySpace pictures of herself and her friends. Throughout the evening I saw one woman I thought might be gay, barring Scream Club. This isn’t anything to hold against anyone, but it did make me feel a bit more alienated than I was expecting to be; I later found out from Corin that Scream Club had only sent an email saying they were going to be performing in Britain a few days ago, so I guess those who might have been interested probably weren’t aware.

The first band on were fucking dire. They were called 123 something (123 on? 123 go? Something shit like that) and were comprised of lazy fucking ‘pretty’ boys who seemed to believe that being male and wielding a guitar meant that they were worth something. They sounded like an awful mixture of Low Shoulder, Euphoria Audio and Fall Out Boy – they sang in American accents despite being British. The lead singer was only a performer in that he performed privileged male heteronormativity – he was constantly flirting with the audience in a really sickening, authoritative way, and most of the teenage girls were fucking loving it. I felt grossed out and left to rant at Corin for a bit down the phone.

Upon returning to the room I bought some Scream Club merch, feeling more than ever that they were to be my salvation from marginalisation and general extended fury. I spent £22 at their table on a DIY purse and a t-shirt. The t-shirt was an XL women’s size; I did not get it because it was the last size they had; I got it because it was the size that fitted me. I usually wear a size 14, although I can sometimes fit into a 12 depending on the generosity of the sizing. Size 14 is not fucking extra fucking large. I felt a bit grumpy about this but didn’t pursue it, still mostly excited for Scream Club to come on. It was at this point that a girl a couple of people along from me started repeatedly impersonating a rape alarm. I wanted to tell her to stop because it was triggering and trivialising an important issue but I felt like I'd just come across as lecturing and mental. I also hoped she'd just stop. She didn't.

And then Scream Club came to my rescue. They were wearing awesome stripy DIY suit-y things and looked superb. Cindy Wonderful said that Party Time, their opening track, was about everyone, ‘boys, girls, in-betweens’ getting together and having a good time. There was audience participation (SC: What time is it? Everyone: PARTY TIME!). Things were looking promising. But that was literally the queerest moment of the entire gig.

While they didn’t go so far as to remove all references to homosexual feeling from their lyrics, they cut out swear words and more explicit sexual references. This fucked me off because I thought Scream Club were all about sexual liberation, about being able to be explicit without being told you were being inappropriate or wrong. Turns out I was wrong. They still played And You Belong and Girl, You Look Expensive, but the queerness was only visible if you already knew they were queer; the vocals were not particularly clear and their between-song banter indicated nothing.

The worst twist of the knife came when they closed with Revolution. Cindy, who clearly thought she was being inspirational, was talking about how the song was about the importance of challenging injustice. The examples she used were sexism, racism and ablism. Of course I think these are laudable – but they missed out homophobic?! They didn’t even mention the elephant in the fucking room?! I mean, Jesus fucking God, the three –isms mentioned, whilst barely always fully acknowledged, are the most fucking famous ones, and also the ones which many an ignorant person can (to their minds) unproblematically tell themselves they are tastefully avoiding. They did not acknowledge the insidiousness of prejudice; all they did was tell a roomful of twats that ‘revolution’ was flapping around with fake guns and feeling self-satisfied. Of course you can’t hope to convey every complexity of discrimination in one set, but you could try a lot fucking harder, especially if you’re a band whose core fanbase is comprised of queers who felt they had a home in you. That’s what I felt – I thought they were going to relieve me from feeling misplaced, and represent, or even just acknowledge, my values and identity politics. But nothing of the sort happened – they seemed to be far more concerned with appealing to as wide a demographic as possible rather than staying true to the very principles that they purported to support. I was left feeling disenfranchised and really, really let down – particularly when these people eschew playing Sapphic Traffic, a genuinely positive queer night where the audience would really get something out of seeing them and where they could be fucking real and inspirational, in favour of playing with a bunch of penises with guitars and a band whose every output sounds pretty much the same as all the others. Or the fact that they wouldn’t play ST at all if Staffy didn’t pay far more than she was willing, or even able, to do.

Cindy said they were going to be at the merch table after their set to meet people. At first I left the room, feeling like there was nothing I wanted less than to meet those sell-outs, but then I thought that perhaps I could turn the situation into something positive and just try to encourage them to be a bit queerer, maybe. I imagined telling them about how I’d found out about them, that my girlfriend had told me on the first night we met about the bands she was into, about how they were one of the bands she said were her favourites, along with Team Dresch, and that I’d had no idea who these people were and it was really awesome to discover all this queer music I’d never known before, and how she’d put Internationale on the first mix CD she made for me and how we used to listen to Big Deal at her house all the time. I imagined saying this to them and then casually mentioning that I was surprised that their set wasn’t queerer; not berating them, but just sayin’. But after twenty minutes they hadn’t shown up and Robots were going to start their set in ten and there was no way I could even hope to express this to them once they’d started, and I also realised that I was probably far better at expressive myself in writing, so would be better placed to try to email them or something. I left and called Corin and ranted to her all the bus-ride home.

Now I’m in my house with my mother and dog and some wine. I feel a bit less upset, but still rankling. I have £22 worth of merchandise that I am going to have to seriously work to reclaim. I understand that being out is difficult, I do. But when you are, you make a promise, however tacitly, that you will defend your right to be. When you are an out queer artist, you lead your fans to believe that you will represent them, because you are in a far better position than they to do it. I am not naïve; I don’t think that being an out queer artist is going to give you financial security, or that financial gain doesn’t matter to the artist. But there is a fucking line between compromising and selling out, and tonight Scream Club crossed it. 

The Vajayjay Monologues

Last week, the School of Culture and Performance (or whatever) put on The Vagina Monologues. Ryder noticed that it wasn't either week surrounding Valentine's Day, which isn't in keeping with Eve Ensler's seemingly excessive performance rules (apparently she dictates costumes and set and everything? I mean, not that I don't have any understanding of artistic ownership, but let yr frickin' baby grow up, Ensler). Anyway, that's a sidenote. The important thing is what I thought of it. Which was considerably less than I was expecting to.

TVM was quite a formative part of my formative years - I bought a copy of the book from Fopp for about £3 when I was thirteen or so and, for some reason, was pretty interested in it. I especially liked My Short Skirt, and the monologue about all the different types of moans. When I was nineteen and in my gap year some local feminists were putting on a showing, which I auditioned for and got a role in - due to some fuckery, which I won't go into because it's tedious and beaurocratic and long ago and also I'm still a bit cross about it, I didn't end up being in it after all (N.B. this experience is not accountable for any ill-feeling I have towards the play, just FYI).

Then comes Friday night. Corin and I went alongside (not really with - we missed the preceding Old Bar gathering) the feminist society. I was quite looking forward to it, since it'd been present in my consciousness for some time but I'd not seen it before. Then it started and I felt immediately out of place, like I should have been catapulted into the past but actually it was the present and it was actually a bit embarrassing. I mean, some bits were good - the woman who performed the moaning monologue was especially good - but overall it was quite shambolic, which I think was more to do with the script than the actors. It seems to aim to represent women of several different backgrounds, but in this attempt it only really succeeds in othering those who are not straight, white, and middle-class. The attempts to represent queerness where patchy - as before, the moaning monologue was done well, but the woman talking about her seduction by an older woman as a teenager just wasn't convincing, and I don't think that's just because of the performance. (Also, PROBLEMATIC - if that monologue were about a teenage girl's experiences with an older man it wouldn't have been 'acceptable', so I suppose women just can't be sexually predatory or abusive in the same way.) Furthermore, the intermissions of images of acid burn victims in Asia was not made congruent with the rest of the pieces - which mainly amounted to middle-class women voicing concerns - which completely othered them. The assumption seemed to be that these women *should* be in a society like ours, that they would want that. I'm not saying that many people would *want* to be in societies in which 'honour' killings etc are accepted, but our presumed superiority was all over the whole thing.

Also, and I think most importantly, I think something like TVM just doesn't do now what it may have done (or sought to do) when it first came about. Most women in the room were feminists, most women I know know where their clitoris is, and probably more know that they are worthy of liberation. I think we're living in a post-Vagina Monologues state of consciousness, and I don't think it has much political weight, particularly since it is only accessible to people of a very specific group, and fails to offer that group much in the way of feminist realisation that is inaccessible anywhere else.