Life and the Mind

My little city has a Roller Derby Team team. Written up recently in Velvet Park women’s roller derby is back with a vengeance. I met members of our team, The London Thrashers, at the Velodrome where they practise after hours (no, not on the banked track, that would be lunacy, but rather on the concrete infield.) The 20-something year old women are a range of shapes and sizes, they sort of look like Suicide Girls, but tougher, less-waif and stray like. They have muscles along with their tattoes and torn fishnets. Fun fun. I’d love to watch sometime. I admire very much their physicality and the "tough broad" attitude, kind of combination of sex, sleaze, and sport. I’m often the only woman riding the track in a group of a dozen or so guys and so I sometimes stop and chat with the roller derby set. I told them I’d love to come watch but they tell me they need another six women (actually they said "girls" but I still haven’t quite gotten used to that as a word referring to adult females over the age of 18) before they can actually compete against another team. They asked me to join. I laughed and said ‘too scary." Then they laughed as I’d just been riding my track bike round at speeds over 40 km/her on a track banked in parts at 50 degrees. Scary is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. And for me it’s the physical aggression of roller derby which makes it a sport I can appreciate but in which I don’t want to take part.

As a philosopher I like hard questions. I like teasing away
all the easy stuff and getting to the conceptually difficult. But this
sometimes gets in the way of good teaching, I think. Or at least I worry it
leaves students with the wrong message, that certain questions are HARD when in
fact, for the most, they’re EASY. I just think the easy ones aren’t so much
fun, so intellectually challenging to think and talk about.
Examples of this problem came up yesterday in two different
class discussions.
The first case concerned Female Genital Mutilation. The
discussion arose in my Global Justice and Human Rights course after a student
presentation on FGM and human rights.. Yes, a truly horrible practice Yes, when
performed on young girls without anesthesia it’s especially evil. Yes, the
basis of the practice—a focus on female chastity, a denial of female sexuality,
sex defined purely as male sexual pleasure—makes it a particularly loathsome practice
for feminists to consider. Yet, I tried to get the class to see that these same
impulses exist here. I drew their attention to the rise of genital cosmetic
surgery in North America. Yes, you too can
have evenly pink symmetrical porn star perfect labia! A whole new area of the
body to be self-conscious and self-loathing about and the anxiety about which those
selling cosmetic surgery can exploit. It’s often packaged along with vaginal
tightening and in some cases reinstatement of the hymen for the perfect faux
virginal wedding night. Just try googlesearching (all one word, as my kids say it) The
Wonder Woman Package ™ if you’re curious for more details. Why be concerned?
Well, reduced sensation is listed as a possible side effect and again the whole
focus is on appearance and male sexual pleasure over female sexuality.

Now cosmetic surgery, think my students, is all about
choice. Women do it for themselves. They assure me that mostly OLD women, like
in their 40s (ha), have cosmetic surgery to feel better about themselves. Of
course there’s no coercion involved, no pressure, no need to look one way or another.
(I always find that one particularly ironic as I stare out at the sea of
largely indistinguishable faces, body shapes, wearing strikingly similar
outfits. Really? No pressure.)

But after some discussion, having made the point, that North
American culture is far from immune to coercive practices around female
sexuality, they now think that FGM is a hard case. FGM, again in its worst
version, performed on children without consent or anesthetic is an easy case.
It’s morally wrong. My point was only that there is a range from hard to easy
and that the values are part of all patriarchal cultures, our own included. We
don’t notice it, it’s the air we breathe, but it’s there and also worthy of our
moral scrutiny.

The other case was kidnapping, sex trafficking and the
global market in girls for sex. The numbers are truly horrific. But it’s easy
to see what’s wrong and why. Global markets, child exploitation, and violence
against women. The hard question is the nature of sex work itself. Under the
best circumstances, in the best of all worlds, is it a practice about which we
can feel good? Why not? One common argument is that sex is close to the core of
my identity and it’s wrong to alienate that for money. But surely that can’t be
right! I’m an academic. I get paid for thinking, reading, and talking. My
mental life is on the auction block. The academic job market may be
exploitative but no one thinks the work itself is morally problematic because I
sell that which is closest to my sense of self. So it’s not, I think,
intrinsically problematic. Yet the culture, the laws, and the practices which
surround sex work are problematic. And talking to my students about this
distinction is interesting.  Worry though is
that they leave with the view that all questions about sex work are hard. They’re
not. The sexual exploitation of girls is wrong and that’s easy. But because it’s
easy, it’s not a particularly intellectually challenging problem even if it is
very serious real world important political problem.

As feminist academics, our angels dancing on the heads of
pins are a bit different. My angels are idealized liberated women in an
egalitarian society and I wonder not how many could fit on the head of a pin
but whether they would sell sex….

That’s a hard question but sadly given the horrible world we
live in most of the important questions are easy. I guess I can wish for that:
a world in which the hard questions were more pressing and the easy ones were
all solved.

I think I have one of the best jobs in the world and I am shocked at how much my colleagues complain about academic work to their students. It has an effect. We have a captive audience and people listen to what we say and take it seriously and not just in the "will it be on the exam?" sense. Today I had a young woman in my office telling me she loved philosophy but didn’t want to get a PhD. Despite a fascination for metaethics, she was convinced that she ought to study law. Why? Because she heard female faculty members talk about how stressful, how busy, and how underpaid academic work is. I get red in the face angry whenever I hear this. It just isn’t true. Take the underpaid complaint. I heard this as a student too and I thought faculty members barely scraped by. I came from a working class family so I knew what badly paid meant. I figured faculty members must have inherited their houses and supplement their meagre incomes with family wealth. I was shocked and appalled when I found out the truth. University faculty members are not badly paid. Most of our salary information is public so I am not telling tales out of school here. Starting salaries for tenure track faculty range from $60 to $75 thousand a year. Many of my colleagues, whose salaries are public info thanks to my province’s "sunshine law" earn over $100,000 a year. Again, that’s not badly paid. My salary puts me in the top 5% of women’s incomes. Yet, we are a whiney bunch. We tend to look at those who make more and think we’re badly off but really that’s just utter rubbish. Daycare workers are badly paid but university faculty members are not.     Stressful? Well, sure there is a rough patch pre-tenure. Publish or perish is all too true. And the demands of teaching can be hard too. But once we have tenure we have more independence and freedom than most professionals. Academic freedom is a tremendous amount of job security too. And while I do work long hours, for the most part it’s work I love: reading, writing, talking to students, thinking. My children when they were young practically lived on campus. We have good campus daycare and summer camps. The environment is much like a giant park. What better place to raise kids? I don’t teach in the summer and though I need that time to get writing done I have a good two months when my classes are done and my children are still in school. Of course, I hate it when people presume I have summers off. That’s not true at all. I have papers to write, graduate students to supervise, and classes to plan. But it is true I work at my own pace. The work is very flexible which is both a blessing and a curse. The upside? I can grade papers on the beach. The downside? I grade papers on the beach. It’s not just a job, it’s a lifestyle, an identity and that’s both the best and worst side of life as an academic. Whenever  I feel a complaint about my work starting to surface I compare my life to two other sorts of working lives I know. There are women in my family who wait tables for a living. That’s hard work. That’s badly paid and stressful, hard to do with kids. Academic work is not. But I also look at my female friends who are lawyers and I think about the hours they work, the clothes they have to wear, and I don’t envy them the money they make. So I talked to this young women about her choices and her reasons, and I hope I was able to help dispel some of the myths about academic work.

Just got this email from the conference organizers so my planned road trip to Syracuse is off, I think.
                           

Profs. Judith Butler and bell hooks regret to inform us that
they will be unable to attend the "Feminism, Sexuality and the Return of
Religion" conference to be held at
Syracuse University April 26-28,
2007 (http://thecollege.syr.edu/admin/pcr-conference/)
Prof. Butler is sending us her paper which will be read at the conference and
followed by general discussion. We are presently seeking a replacement for
bell hooks and hope to have an announcement soon. Any questions or request
for refunds based on this development should be directed to Elizabeth Kad (emkad@syr.edu).

Linda Alcoff and Jack Caputo

So I try to be out in the classroom. I try to make sure my examples involve male and female partners. And though I don’t talk much about my personal life, I think it’s important for a wide range of reasons, given the world we live in, that my students know I am a bisexual. But these days I am encountering an interesting generation gap as my use of the word "bisexual" doesn’t match up so well with the word as it’s used by my students. If my student newspaper’s sex survey is to be believed fully 25% of my female students count themselves as "bi." Does this mean that 1/4 of my female students have relationships with other women? Sadly no. Would that it were so. The student facebook interest groups include the following when you search for "bisexuality":

• A woman is like spaghetti - they’re all straight until you
  get them wet …

• A straight girl is just a sober bisexual

Now I’m no model of perfection here says the married (to a man)  with 3 kids bisexual…maybe it’s a case of people in their yellow brick houses shouldn’t throw stones! But my bisexuality is more than a party trick, more than a taste I indulge in bars when drunk. Certainly it’s not something I do to impress or turn on straight men. And part of me really hopes that it is more than that for these young women too. We should all resist divisions among us and be wary whenever we want to say "I’m not that sort of queer." So as much as I think I am not that kind of bisexual, I try not to ever say it. People who would judge my sex life as sinful and evil would certainly lump them in with me. And I can’t regret the freedom these young women have to experiment, who knows what they will discover. I can wish it were there for the young men too. I don’t hear much talk of young men making out in bars to impress the girls. That might be fun but from what I can tell it isn’t happening. Soon maybe.

I’ve enjoyed reading bitch phd for some time and lately have found other female academics blogging, such as prof grrrl . I like these two for including their personal lives but I also like some of the sites that stick to more academic matters, such as Feminist Law Profs. Back to work…

March 6, 2007 — A man who tortured a "sex slave" then forced her to
maintain a Web site filled with depraved images of her bleeding and
bruised body was convicted of sex trafficking and forced labor
yesterday in Brooklyn federal court.

Glenn Marcus - who sources said turned down a plea deal for no jail time - faces up to life in prison for the crimes.

A seven-man, five-woman jury deliberated for seven days before finding
Marcus, 53, guilty of the two charges. They acquitted him of an
obscenity charge he faced stemming from the graphic images depicted on
his slavespace.com Web site.

Marcus, a chubby, balding man with thick glasses, showed no emotion as the jury forewoman read the verdict.

After the jury left the courtroom, Marcus spoke to a meek-looking woman
in the courtroom who sources said was one of his current "slaves." He
told her: "It’s a victory in one sense," apparently in reference to the
acquittal on the obscenity charge. Friends say Marcus refused the plea
deal because he saw his case as a First Amendment issue.

He will remain out on $1 million bail until his sentencing.

stefanie.cohen@nypost.co

Brooklyn jury given graphic S&M lessonPosted 2/23/2007 4:16 AM ET

The testimony came
during a trial in Brooklyn that has given jurors lessons on the
lifestyle of a man dubbed an "S&M Svengali" by the tabloids, the
inner-workings of a sadomasochism website and the federal government’s
crackdown on obscenity.

The jury began deliberating Thursday.

In
recent years, federal authorities have stepped up prosecutions of
purveyors of hardcore adult pornography to "protect citizens from
unwanted exposure to obscene material," Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales has said.

One pending case in
Pittsburgh — involving videos of simulated rape and murder — was
initially thrown out before being reinstated on appeal by the
Department of Justice.

Under the Bush
administration, at least 52 people or businesses have been convicted of
violating federal obscenity statutes, and more than a dozen indictments
are pending, federal officials said. By comparison, there were four
such prosecutions during the eight years of the Clinton administration,
they said.

In the Brooklyn case, Rona and the
prosecution’s star witness, named Jodi, gave conflicting accounts of an
alleged campaign of sadism by Glenn Marcus, 53, operator of a website
devoted to BDSM — shorthand for bondage, domination and sadomasochism.
A judge allowed both women to testify using only their first names.

Marcus
included Jodi and other women in thousands of photos posted on his
website — a practice that prompted the government to bring obscenity
charges along with sex trafficking and a forced labor count.

The
most serious charge — forced labor — by statute carries a potential
life sentence, although such a punishment is unlikely under federal
sentencing guidelines.

Jodi told the jury
that after meeting Marcus over the Internet in 1998, she agreed to
become one of his "slaves." Over two years, he systematically degraded
her by shaving her head, branding the initial "G" on her buttocks and
carving "Slave" on her stomach during liaisons in homes in Maryland,
Washington, D.C., New York City and on Long Island.

When
the 39-year-old Jodi failed to properly perform tasks for the
defendant’s website in 2001, he punished her by putting a ball in her
mouth, closing it shut with surgical needles and hanging her on a wall,
she said. Other times, he tied her down and mutilated her genitals with
a smoldering cigarette as she screamed out in pain, she said.

"I felt like I was literally in hell," she said. "I felt like I was on fire and I couldn’t put it out."

Rona,
51, a longtime friend called as a defense witness, said that while
living with Marcus and Jodi, the accuser was a willing participant in
their sex games. She called the defendant harmless.

"I
love being around Glenn," she said, even as prosecutors displayed
photos of her breasts punctured with dozens of pins. "He’s a lot of
fun."

Jodi testified she built up enough
courage to leave Marcus in late 2001, but also conceded she continued
to have contact with him, even going camping. She decided to go to the
FBI when he refused to take her photos off the Internet.

By
law, it didn’t matter that the accuser wasn’t always under lock and
key, prosecutor Pam Chen said during closing arguments Thursday. "She
was terrified. She was made captive by the fear."

Chen
told the Brooklyn jury it must agree that Marcus’ website was "patently
offensive" to convict on the obscenity count, and argued the material
was "so misogynist and so violent, it’s offensive."

The
defense has countered by arguing that Marcus and Jodi had a "contract"
to engage in a master-slave relationship that, while potentially
offensive to the general public, was consensual and even pleasurable to
the participants.

"Cases like this test the
very capacity of this society we live in for tolerance," defense lawyer
Maurice Sercarz said in his closing argument.

Defense
experts testified that the BDSM scene follows rules that purposely blur
the line between pleasure and pain, but demand mutual consent. One said
it draws from a "vast array of people," including judges; another said
that Marcus’ website had "serious scientific value" as a tool to study
sexual behavior.

But Chen portrayed the
defendant as a sadist who violated both the standards of a civilized
society and of the S&M community.

"Glenn Marcus made his own rules," she said. "He thought he was God."