ha-rebecca-blog

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Untitled (thoughts on tourism as a tourist in San Francisco)

Waking up at dawn, spaced out on jetlag and clammy with summer sweat we weren’t used to after the fourteen hour flight/seasonal inversion, we rubbed our eyes. Onward. We bought cheap coffee and donuts, and set out on our way to retrieve our Nissan Altima from the rental place. We took a wrong turn, and cut right through the Union Square side of Tenderloin, San Francisco. We waltzed our white wealth right through the living rooms of destitute black people, cardboard boxes on concrete, chewing donuts as we went. Gluttony.

Then, piled into the Nissan and heading East on Highway 120, we saw whiteness in all its glory: white picket fences; a sea of carbon copy mansions caught somewhere between the Cold War and Stepford; mass-produced barnhouses; buy-one-get-one-free fireworks; big, red Girls Girls Girls.

When we had wound up the mountain range to Yosemite National Park, we found an overstuffed car park at its core. Once Anwahnechee land – tarred, and feathered with old white men who’d seen fit to remove their shirts. No shame, no reservation. A white priest in full regalia resting in the shade a week after the Catholic Church’s third most powerful man was returned to Australia to face historical charges of sexual assault. I only thought of the native people when I saw him and realised that this holy space was not his holy space, nor mine.

We also stopped, awestruck, outside the Women’s Building mural in The Mission. Brown and black latin@s depicted caring for each other’s minds and bodies, larger than life in vivid colour. We traced over the links in chains of women’s involvement in modern art, bowing our heads to see more clearly Andrea Gaynor’s ongoing artwork, “Revolt, They Said” (2012 – ) installed at SFMOMA. A matrix of women’s art laid out in intricate mind map. A diagram of women rarely seen. At Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) we soaked ourselves drenched in Tania Bruguera’s survey exhibition, “Talking to Power”. In one of her video works, I learned for the first time about Operation Peter Pan in which the US Government and The Catholic Church conspired to steal away over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors. I should have already known, but I did not. At the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), I heard four artists speak on their relationship with identity and narrative through video installation, and felt more conscious than ever of the disconnect between art and philosophy. Gratitude.

In an independently run store, I bought a lovingly printed edition of Merill Mushroom’s “Bar Dykes” and had a conversation with the storeowner about lesbian bars in The Mission. Gentrification had forced several to close. There was one left standing. The lesbians were moving to Oakland or Portland.

Still, standing outside the YBCA I watched a white man in blue jeans become solitary outrage when he saw their billboard. “BORDERS KILL, SHOULD WE ABOLISH OUR BORDERS?” 381 this week said yes. 99 said no. He prodded the digital display with pink hands, hoping to tick that 99 over to 100 without purchasing a ticket. It remained unchanged. He threw up his hands. Walked away. Between hacking coughs, another old white man catcalled me. Hello, beautiful. How you doin? – Repulsion.

We needed a beer, so we stopped at a Bar on Valencia Street and sat facing outward. Unpacking the week we had just drifted through, we started at what the Sydney art community is missing in comparison to somewhere with such a diverse art history. We worked backwards through our experiences and found ourselves talking about the smallest details of human experience, flipping over coins in the light.

And this is where we got to – eyes opening on both sides, the details spilling over after being jolted into a different reality and back to our own.

Image: ruby onyinyechi amanze, ‘just being there with you is like flying’ (2014). onyinyechi amanze’s work was on display at MoAD during my stay in SF, and will be until August 27, 2017

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The Danger of Biologising Women’s Intuition

The results from a recent study have demonstrated that women are better than men at reading emotion based on people’s expression. Researchers from across the world showed 90,000 participants photographs of people’s eyes, and asked them to select one of four responses to identify the emotion behind the eyes. Women more consistently selected the correct feeling.

According to reports, the researchers are enquiring further into genetic factors that would influence women’s ability in this skill. However, we might wonder what other factors might be at play in this pattern.

It is important to recognise that there is no universal woman. Biologising womanhood leads to a slew of dangerous consequences, including the exclusion of trans women, and non-binary and gender non-conforming people from our discussions about gender. It also reduces people’s lived experiences to their physical and biological makeup – something that has historically undercut women’s testimony about their experiences and led to the medical and scientific world distrusting or disregarding common complaints that women make (from pain to illnesses more commonly represented in women).

Furthermore, the expression of emotion is so deeply socially and culturally constructed, it is a wonder that we don’t look to social and cultural markers in order to determine why it is that women so often read emotion better than men. Gender, of course, is also socially and culturally constructed and so we might find more answers looking at the phenomenon from this angle.

Women are often the ‘keepers’ of culture, world over. As women are so often charged with the task of raising children and maintaining social relationships, it becomes their social responsibility to cultivate a pinpoint accuracy in their emotional responses. Emotional knowledge, like any other kind of knowledge, improves through a concerted effort to learn more, get better at applying, and practicing that knowledge. Perhaps women’s ability to read emotion may be influenced by the social space that women often occupy.

But there are other possibilities, too. Women are often more responsible for providing emotional labour than men are. Moving from the social to the personal world, this imbalance may actually give them greater accuracy in describing emotions – acting as mirrors to the emotional responses that we all learn to read, and thus enhancing their reflective and analytical capacities and so the study may simply reflect an ability to describe emotion with accuracy.

At a more sinister level, this could even be an indicator of women’s intimate vulnerability. Women are disproportionately affected by violence in their personal relationships. It could be that the increased risk that women face leads them to become more adept at interpreting emotional signs and responding to the appropriate emotional cues. It could be born of necessity, of women’s need to protect themselves and neutralise negative emotion. It could be a stress response.

These are not answers to the question the researchers are asking, per se, and I am not pretending to be an authority on women’s intuitive emotional capacities. However, it is more than likely that the answer to a social and cultural question is social and cultural in nature. Biology is rarely if ever the place to find answers about gender performance, and in 2017 it is dangerous to pretend that it might be.

Image still from Gestures (1974) by Hannah Wilke.

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The Love of my Life: An Ode to Female Friendship

I was a very, very shy child. I averted my gaze from strangers, I hid in my mother’s skirts, and my twin brother often acted as my spokesman. In kindergarten, lunchtime was initially a terrifying prospect. I would have to somehow find other children to play with while my brother rough-housed with the more confident children. This is why I asked him to choose who I should sit next to at lunch time. He thought about it, and told me that he thought Karen would be a good option. I asked him to help me find out if I were welcome. I waited nervously about four paces behind him as he approached Karen and two other girls, Amy and Andreena. After a moment, he turned and beckoned me over. The girls were smiling. Karen shuffled to make room as I sat down beside her. So began the most important relationship I have ever had.

Karen and I have now been friends for eighteen years. We have developed into different, but wholly compatible people, and we will be together for the rest of our lives. That’s how it is. We haven’t lived in the same city since we were 13, when Karen moved to Tokyo, and we spent our adolescence in different countries. She has lived in Melbourne for about five years now, and the distance does not damage what we have. The thing is, what we have is eternal, devoted, and so very representative of the kinds of intimate friendships that women can give to each other.

Female friendships are rarely treated with the respect that they deserve. In 2017, we are just beginning to come to grips with representations of friendships between women that we take seriously and treat with honesty. Broad City is one of very few examples of this; Abbi and Ilana are unapologetically at the centre of each other’s lives in ways both big and small. However, most media representations of female friendships suggest rivalry, invite titillation, or privilege women’s romantic relationships above their friendships (case in point: Sex and the City, which was lauded for its radical depiction of women’s friendships but decided to close the show with Carrie marrying Mr. Big, much to the dismay of the show’s creator). These lacklustre representations of female friendship indicate how limited our broader cultural understanding is of the matter.

While I can only speak to my own experiences as a cis woman, it is by no means true of only cis women’s friendships that women can provide each other with unparalleled emotional support. Woman-identifying people are often burdened with the task of providing emotional labour. Between close friends who identify as women, however, this relationship is reciprocal. As needed, each offers the other a depth of emotional support that is rarely-if-ever found in relationships with those who identify as men. What’s more, in relationships with people who identify as men, those men can never fully understand the truth of this emotional offering. Women are aware that their emotional labour is so often used and abused, that their emotional wholeness is often disregarded, and female friends are aware of each other’s experiences here. What results is a kind of understanding and care that cannot be replicated.

Beyond this mutual trust and understanding, women’s friendships provide respite from a world that is hostile and bitterly unkind. Patriarchal conditioning is, sadly, the reason that this respite is necessary. However, women’s solidarity with each other, when it is distilled into a friendship, is the kind of remedy to the harsh world that is the subject of poetry, of romance novels, of every great love story there has ever been told. When I got out of a toxic, abusive, soul destroying relationship in 2015, I booked tickets to Melbourne to stay with Karen for a few days. I don’t know how I would have gotten through that time if not for her love. It was so, so restorative to find her open arms waiting for me at the end of the coldest experience I’d ever had. We spent those days talking, smoking, drinking, holding hands – unfolding the pain I was going through and folding it back up again. Karen was, in my darkest moment, the only light in my world.

This wasn’t the only time this happened. When I was fifteen, and my father died after a five year struggle with cancer, in the aftermath one of the most painful revelations was that other children (through no fault of their own) didn’t know how to respond to me, asking questions that rubbed salt in the wounds and caused my chest to tighten. That is, except for Karen. About a month after my dad’s death, Karen came home to visit. When I first saw her, she said nothing. There was nothing she could say. She simply held her arms out until I was standing in her space, and she enveloped me in them, holding me silently. She knew.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Karen and I are just especially good friends. In part, that is true. But we could only have the depth of kindness, care, and openness in our friendship that we do have as women. Our status in the world contributes to the way in which our relationship exists, and there are scores of women worldwide who enjoy friendships just as pure and whole as ours. The stereotype of female friendship does exist for a reason, but it fails miserably to adequately reflect the phenomenon. Ultimately, females are socialised in such a way that they often develop the emotional maturity and intelligence to make up for the shortcomings of a world that doesn’t treat them nearly so well as they deserve.

Image: Best friends Laura Palmer and Donna Hayward in Twin Peaks

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What Counts as Sex? Rewriting the Sexual Script

In 1973, John H. Gagnon and William Simon released their groundbreaking book, Sexual Conduct. In it, they argued that social sexual development plays out in accordance with ‘scripts’ for sexual behaviour that are historically and culturally determined. We perform, so to speak, what we learn from the world around us. This theory has continued to be of profound importance in Gender and Cultural Studies, feminist theory, and queer theory. However, if we are to use the metaphor of scripts to discuss our sexual behaviour, we should probably admit that the script we are reading from at this particular point of history and culture is kind of depressingly B-Grade. It sort of resembles the scene we want (even though the angles are kind of off, and the lighting is sort of bad) but it lacks the resources to really nail it.

One of the most insidious reasons for this is the heteronormative and hierarchical way that we treat sex. We still seem to cling to the idea that the preeminent mode of sex is phallocentric and penetrative – in opposite sex relationships, “standard” penis-to-vagina action is what we expect, and we seem to have made a half-hearted attempt at guessing that cis male same sex relationships involve something quite like this (as in, they would involve exactly this if there were any vaginas present). All other sex acts get strewn haphazardly down the line. Oral sex is next, followed by digital sex, followed by fondling, and so on and so forth until we’re no longer actually touching.

Queer femmes will be the first to point out a problem with this, referencing a history of sex that, even for queer femmes who have penises, decentralises the penis. Queer femme sex is, of course, real sex. Reasonable people are able to recognise this, but the fact that it ever needs to be said sheds light on a broader flaw in our social discourse regarding sex. We may be tempted to say that this means that we ought to scale queer femme sex up to the same status that phallocentric penetrative sex has, but this would be missing the point entirely, and actually serves to reinforce a phallocentric idea of sex. This hierarchical organisation of sex inhibits our ability to perform sex in an honest way. Like all aspects of patriarchy, it is the structure itself that is the problem, not the placement of the acts within the hierarchy.

The effects of this sexual hierarchy are evident everywhere. The ‘orgasm gap’ resurfaced in mainstream media earlier this year, after the findings from a US study into the phenomenon were published in the journal, Archives of Sexual Behaviour. The study fails to reflect all people, as it focuses on cisgender sexual experiences. However, the results are illuminating when treated with caution. Heterosexual men most often reported that they usually or always orgasm during sexual intercourse with a partner, taking the lead with an unfathomable 95%. Heterosexual women least often reported this experience, at just 65%. Interestingly, homosexual and bisexual identifying men were next in line with 89% and 88% respectively. Lesbian women were similarly placed, at 86%, but the gender gap remained quite stark for bisexual women who reported similar levels to heterosexual women, at 66%. The study highlighted, however, that heterosexual and bisexual women more often reported that they can climax during sex with a partner if the sexual acts they are engaged in are not only penetrative sex. Surprise-surprise! Many cis women need the focus to be shifted away from the penis and toward the vagina in order to climax. The combined saucy effect of genital stimulation, deep kissing, and oral sex increased the ability of the study’s participants to orgasm to at least 80% (91% of lesbians reported that this increases the likelihood of orgasm). And yet, phallocentric penetrative sex remains at the peak of the hierarchy.

What if we were to start including more sex acts when we talk about “sex”? Of course, I am not suggesting that we ought to speak about all sex as some indiscernible, amorphous blob. That would probably be counter-productive. Being able to distinguish between kinds of sex acts is helpful. It increases effective communication between partners, and also helps people to set their boundaries so that they can say what they want to do, when, and under what circumstances (because it is okay to say that you are okay with blow jobs, but not penetrative sex. Or that you’d rather not go further than a bit of heavy petting tonight. That’s how consent works).

However, if oral sex is always a warm-up for the main event of penetrative sex that silently leaves you somewhere on the spectrum of unsatisfied to disappointed, there is a problem. If it really helps when your partner uses their hands during sex, but your socialisation doesn’t give you the words to tell them that you prefer this, there is a problem. If lesbians, who have been statistically demonstrated to have more pleasurable sex than any other women, are relegated to the sidelines, treated as a subplot in our sexual scripts and in our discussions of sex, there is a problem. And the smirking assumption that women who are attracted to other women might be ‘cured’ by sex with The Right Man is a serious problem. In some ways, it is okay to say “we didn’t have sex, I just went down on them” because it expresses something about your personal boundaries. But if people with vaginas who have sex with each other can call oral sex “sex,” then perhaps society at large should take a moment to think about what sex actually means to us.

Ultimately, it is not my place, or any individual person’s place, to determine for everybody else which sex acts should count as “sex” and which should not. The point is about our discourse. We need to open ourselves up to the possibility that, where sex is an expression of desire and intimacy between consenting human beings, that expression is not all some kind of progression towards disappointing cishet missionary (or even nice missionary). Sex is complex, and messy in ways both physical and emotional. It is worth embracing this in the ways that we talk about it, not only so we can have better sex, but so that we can practice respect for the immense diversity of sexuality and desire that exists in the world.

Image: Two Nudes in the Forest (The Earth Itself) – Frida Kahlo, 1939

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The Love Witch: High Femme Feminism

The second feature length film from writer-director Anna Biller, The Love Witch (2016), is a lush and irrepressible cinematic experience with a deeply self-aware feminist commentary at its core. Shot on 35mm film by her cinematographer M. David Mullen, the film is a visual tribute to 1960’s technicolour with entirely modern sensibilities, in which the femme fatale takes centre-stage, treading the line between anti-hero, and villain.

Samantha Robinson is captivating in the leading role as Elaine, a woman repetitively scorned who found the power of witchcraft after her husband, Jerry, divorced her. As dark and glamourous as Priscilla Presley, with the vixen sex-appeal of Brigitte Bardot, we learn in the opening scene that she is fleeing from San Francisco to Arcata, California following Jerry’s mysterious death. Elaine speeds down a coastal road, the rear-projected backdrop receding from view behind her convertible. Staring down-lens, her eyes bathed in pale blue eyeshadow, and framed by fiercely wings of eyeliner, she chain-smokes while her inner monologue tells us where she’s been, and why she left. Mistreated and abused, Elaine is desperate to find love by any means necessary. She is a dangerous woman, armed with the sex magic she uses to create love magic, a broken heart, and a wardrobe full of miniskirts and garter belts.

In an interview with Zing Tsjeng for Broadly, Biller reflects on one of the primary influences behind the film – that men are so ill-equipped to handle their emotions that a woman’s love is dangerous to them, that ‘it can kill them.’ Elaine’s powerful love magic does just this. We are unsure, as an audience, if Elaine is a killer, or if the men she romances are simply too fragile to withstand her. The men that she seduces are effusive in their praise as she draws them in – they have never met a woman like her, they have never been given such love, they have never felt such intense desire. It is a veritable powder keg of emotion; a sensory overload that threatens to make them vulnerable in a way they have never been. Elaine isn’t looking to tear down the patriarchy – far from it, she denies the importance of such a cause, cementing her status as an anti-hero in a feminist film – but she relishes her newfound power and freedom.

This power play is part of what makes The Love Witch such fascinating viewing. It is a dreamland of feminine aesthetics. A debate about sex and the patriarchy between Elaine and her landlord’s interior decorator, Trish, who is an outspoken feminist takes place in a pastel pink Victorian tearoom that excludes men. The apartment that Elaine rents, and in which we see her concoct most of her magical potions, is styled after a Tarot deck, reimagined in sixties high glamour. Many of the female characters appear in ultra-feminine lingerie throughout the film, which alludes to the private desires of women rather than appealing to the male gaze. In big and small ways, power is placed in the feminine realm.

And yet, we are made aware that there is a veil to be lifted. After a raunchy evening with a college professor, Elaine wakes to realise that she has gotten her period. We see her inserting the tampon in his bathroom. Later, she prepares a potion that requires her own urine and the used tampon, and we see her pissing into a jar for this purpose. As she prepares it, her voice-over monologue that runs throughout the film breaks the fourth wall and asks the audience, ‘do you know most men have never even seen a used tampon?’ It is an arresting moment. Biller is consciously addressing her audience, imploring us to consider the socially unacceptable, but natural, parts of life that all women experience (urination), and the feminised bodily functions that straight cismen are particularly repulsed by (menstruation). She recontextualises these natural parts of existence into a glamourous and powerful feminine image.

In these scenes, much like the entire film, Elaine remains astonishingly beautiful. There is no reveal of her secret ugliness, as there is in many witch stories. She is not an evil, old hag hidden away in the woods performing grotesque magic. She is a feminine archetype without apology – her own, or Biller’s. This film is about the female gaze, and feminine pleasure. Each of the men that Elaine sets her sights on immediately falls under her spell. They are powerless in the face of her desire to squeeze love from them so that she may feel like a ‘princess in a fairytale’. Importantly, is their inability to satisfy her desires, and not her apparent inability to find ‘the right man’ that renders them so vulnerable. As Elaine sees it, this is their problem – not hers.

The Love Witch is about the female monsters that patriarchy creates. While it is often unsettling watching, and consciously draws out several of its scenes to unsettle the audience (the film is 2 hours long), it is refreshing to see this explored so thoroughly on screen as opposed to tropes we are more familiar with such as The Strong Woman. Sitting in the audience, I was taken aback by how much of Elaine’s internal reflections on men resonated with my own experiences as a woman who dates men. This film centralises women’s experiences and voices. It relishes the kinds of femininity that male-dominated ‘progressive’ politics scoff at. Simultaneously, it is one of the most boundary-pushing and politically relevant feminist films to be released in recent years; a lovingly-crafted and sincere ‘Fuck You’ to contemporary misogyny. It is a timely, and deeply important film.

Image of Samantha Robinson and Gian Keys in ‘The Love Witch’ via Anna Biller’s blog