Month: February 2018

Lyrics from “I’m Not a Loser” by The Descendents

Though these are lyrics to a song, I chose them as a visual element due to their poignant resonance when taken out of context on a lyrics sheet. The lyrics to “I’m Not a Loser” exemplify the heteronormative, queerphobic, cis narrative of early US hardcore punk, pairing aggressive, outward lyrics with simplistic and fast instrumentation to get the words across as feelings more than poetry. This is a good example of sexual panic, though, because of how the words (both in the music and out) represent genuine fear on the part of a straight, cis, man of queer people who pose no threat other than having sexual lifestyles that deviate from the supposed norm. To impressionable high school-aged kids (the age at which I began enjoying this music before noticing the very queerphobic tendencies), these words fly by in a song but have power to queer listeners when presented on paper.

On another note, words like “gay” and “homos” being used to discuss strictly sexual feelings erases homoromanticism and subsequently asexual tendencies from the narrative. This is seen through the usage of “your pants are too tight” and “Mr. Buttfuck”, limiting queerness to supposed stereotypes and sexual roles that are harmful in this context due to their supposed threat to the narrator.

REFERENCE

The Descendents. “I’m Not a Loser.” 1982. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiltQYlNot0

The above photograph depicts one protest as a part of the feminist anti-pornography movement. This directly relates to Rubin’s term “sex panic” due to the moral, social, and political panic that was happening around the porn industry. The moral panic of pornography was that children would be subjected to these pornographic images and that pornography is objectifying to women. Further, the right does not support pornography due to their belief in family values and the use of sex for procreation. This resulted in multiple protests and calls for legislation to prevent pornography.

Asexuality complicates this objection of pornography because asexuality does not conform to sexual hierarchical roles and can be seen as deviant. At the same time, asexuality is a lack of sexual behavior and therefore would likely not partake in the watching of or production of pornography.

Image from http://www.ownzee.com/cschmid

Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality , ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge,1992), 143-172.

Ela Przybylo, “Introducing Asexuality, Unthinking Sex,” in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies , 3rd ed., eds. Nancy L. Fischer and Steven Seidman (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 181-189.

 In focusing on “Less Birth Control More Self-Control” which is the first thing that jumps out, it is implying that women need to control and restrain themselves and their bodies from engaging in sex. This image contains a variety of larger societal implications and relates directly to the concept of “sex panic” as it serves as propaganda for women to prevent themselves from expressing their sexuality. The image also attempts to attack women and accuses them for being killers as it also serves as an anti- abortion and blames their lack of control. This image displaying “sex panic” might have been something imposed by the Church as it is a potential way to implement some sort of control by invoking a sense of shame or guilt in women when it comes to their sexuality.

Asexuality complicates the heteronormative message of this image.  Its focal point is on the what Przybylo would call the “centralization of sex and sexuality in Western contexts” (Pryzbylo, Chapter 21).  Sex, as explained in the text, is “used in the service of building intimacy and creating and maintaining social bonds” (Pryzbylo, Chapter 21).  This image portrays the dominant narrative of Western heterosexuality and that women should only be having sex with men if it is for the purposes of procreation and condemns women having sex simply for pleasure. Asexuality disrupts this pervasive narrative as there is no sexual inclination, hence, self-control is not an issue nor is it even existent when it comes to asexuality.

Sources:

Image, “Less Birth Control More Self-Control.” Life News, www.lifenews.com/2014/01/27/black-media-shills-for-big-abortion-planned-parenthood/.

Ela Przybylo, Introducing Asexuality, Unthinking Sex.

I believe that the image presented here perfectly exemplifies what Gayle Rubin termed “sex panic.” In Rubin’s own terms, “Right-wing opposition to sex education, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and premarital sex moved from the fringes to the political center stage after 1977, when right-wing strategists and fundamentalist religious crusaders discovered that these issues had mass appeal.” It is exactly this opposition to sex education and anti-homosexual sentiment (as well as media sensationalism) that led to the misidentification of this flag of dildos and sex toys as an ISIS flag. It is essentially the stigma against the erotic that caused this misidentification, and demonstrates the true nature of “sex panic.” However, Rubin’s arguments about sex panic are entirely hinged upon the Western emphasis on the “sexual imperative,” as Ela Przybylo puts it. There is no mention of asexual erasure, e.g. insisting that asexuality cannot exist, or that the asexual experience is not valid. The image I present is innately sexual as the objects depicted on the flag are for the sole purpose of sexual acts. This complicates sex panic in the context of everyone within society as not everyone in society has sexually driven thoughts and / or feelings. 

Asexuality and The Sexual Imperative: An Interview with Ela Przybylo

Thinking Sex

To me, this image relates to sex panic because often times the people perform sex acts that fall outside of the “Charmed Circle” are often villainized for being ‘deviants’. To those inside that circle, these people represent something they cannot understand; and fear is a common response to things people do not understand.

Asexuality complicates the message a bit because there is a lack of sex acts being performed, but even that falls outside of this “Charmed Circle”. If it is ‘unsavory’ sex acts that are deemed as ‘unnatural’ or ‘deviant’, then a lack of sex acts should not illicit a similar reaction. However, that is not the reaction to asexuality that we see.

In this scene from the film But I’m A Cheerleader,  the homosexual residents of a conversion therapy program are instructed to roleplay sexual acts with each other in boy-girl partnerships.  The parents of the gay and lesbian characters in But I’m A Cheerleader are swept up in the sex panic of their children being abnormal or diseased and elect to send them away to be treated. I chose to discuss this image because it seems to privilege one type of sexual panic over another. When present for the purpose of de-gaying characters, re-enactments of heterosexual sex are justifiable, but because a relationship (devoid of explicit content) between a lesbian couple unfolds  throughout the film, the movie was originally given an NC-17 rating and was directed to tone down its sexual content in order to receive an R rating like many other films with queer content (Rated R for Ridiculous).

If the Motion Picture Association of America, like many other institutions, censors on the basis obscenity, asexuality would likely fall into an indeterminable space. On one hand, asexuality is not widely understood or accepted. Asexuality can be interpreted as a deviant sexual behavior in the way that someone who is asexual departs from the sexual standard. But on the other hand, asexuality usually produces no sexually explicit content to be regulated.

References:

Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge,1992), 143-172.

Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIaeMTYtHgM

In the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, there is a sex panic surrounding sex that is not for procreation, which exemplifies Rubin’s use of them term. Homosexual sex is explicitly forbidden, as is abortion and birth control, and the sex that is purely for procreation is lacking in intimacy; these restrictions against sex for reasons other than procreation is enforced militarily.

Asexuality complicates this because, in a society that is focused on sexual practices and desires, they lack sexual desires. Sex is central in the society of The Handmaid’s Tale; however, the citizens are not acting on sexual desires as much as societal obligation enforced by violence. Therefore, asexuality complicates this universe because asexuals don’t desire sex at all, meaning that although they would not be having sex for reasons other than procreation, it’s unlikely that they would be having sex for procreation either.

References

Rubin, Thinking Sex

Ela Przybylo, Introducing Asexuality, Unthinking Sex

Image retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4504744/Joseph-Fiennes-plays-rapist-Handmaid-s-Tale.html

This visual object exemplifies what Gayle Rubin terms “moral panic” because sexual offenders created a huge sex panic in which the media, policy makers, and activists all got involved (WITN.com, 2017). Sexual offenders are a group of people that pose a threat to societal values—one group being pedophiles. As depicted in this photograph, media coverage frames the problems of sexual predators in terms of morality and usually depicts well-known cases as outrageous.

Society catalogues both pedophiles and asexual people as abnormal on the basis of their sexual practices. Asexual people lack sexual desires and are then categorized as abnormal while pedophiles are committing sexual wrongdoings, which society detests.

References

Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex

Ela Przybylo, Introducing Asexuality, Unthinking Sex

Supreme court strike law banning sex offenders on social media. (2017). WITN.Com, pp. 1-2.

In the poem “To Live in the Borderlands”, Gloria Anzaldua speaks about “the Borderlands” as both the land surrounding a border (presumably between the U.S. and Mexico due to the juxtaposition of Spanish and English) and a personal direction for processing feelings of being from multiple cultures. The aforementioned usage of Spanish and English interchangeably is sometimes to insert words that do not have accurate translations in English and to simply translate the English words (“To live in the Borderlands/Cuando vives en la frontera”). In both situations, though, this juxtaposition appears to highlight the difference and difficulty between switching languages rapidly in the same way that being multicultural might cause a confusion of identity, especially in the context of a society like the U.S. that integrates elements of other cultures just as easily as it rejects them (i.e. elements of other cultures being strong in many sections of the U.S., sometimes existing alongside intense xenophobia and racism towards them).

In this context, the poem rejects the notion that this means defeat. Anzaldua does not hide the pain of this dilemma, exploring violence (“the mill with the razor…”) and addiction (“fight hard to resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle…”), but the poem ends with a more hopeful message: “To survive the Borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads.” Because the Spanish translates to “without borders”, I believe that Anzaldua is arguing that in order to fight against a society that defines culture, identity, and citizenship as being separated by borders, you must internalize the notion that borders do not exist, welcoming everything else in.

CITATIONS

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “To Live in the Borderlands.” Power Poetry, www.powerpoetry.org/content/live-borderlands.