Starwars Land

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It’s difficult to believe that it’s already been a few years since Disney acquired Lucasfilm for $4 billion. The acquisition was about the biggest news one could possibly dream up for the entertainment industry and was quickly followed by the promise of a new Star Wars trilogy. It was an incredibly exciting development considering many fans of the iconic sci-fi franchise have clamored for a final trilogy for years. And once it was ultimately announced that widely respected director J.J. Abrams (who incidentally directed the recent reboot of Star Trek extremely successfully) was working on it, general excitement turned into eager anticipation.

The new trilogy is set to kick off later this year when Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters as Episode VII of the saga. This is sure to become the biggest story in all of entertainment as the year goes on, but the truth is that the upcoming film is far from the only significant development since Disney officially took over Lucasfilm.

Perhaps most exciting for fans is the progress being made toward spin-off movies. Episode VII (and the VIII and IX to follow) is going to be the biggest and most important project in a new era of Star Wars. Yet, almost as soon as Disney gained control of the creative rights, there have been rumors of various side projects that will accompany the main saga. These rumors are ongoing, but throughout 2015 we’ve seen tangible progress made toward one in particular: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is due out in 2016. Recently, the first cast photos were released, featuring the likes of Felicity Jones and Mads Mikkelsen, among other noteworthy actors. The film will tell the story of how a rebel squadron initially sought to steal plans for the Death Star.

But the introduction of new films isn’t the only way in which Disney has already asserted its firm control over the George Lucas empire. In fact, one of its first major moves actually resulted in less Star Wars-related entertainment for the public to enjoy. Following the purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney controlled various Star Wars-themed slot machines and casino games, which alongside those related to Marvel characters were popular among fans. However, in an effort to uphold its principles of providing family-friendly entertainment, Disney removed these machines from U.S. casinos in 2013, only about a year after the acquisition.

The decision drew the ire of some in the casino community, particularly Las Vegas Sands owner Michael A. Leven. He’s quoted in the aforementioned Guardian article as saying Disney’s opposition to resort expansion (with gaming integration) in Florida “demeans them significantly.” Leven’s opposition to Disney’s withdrawal from the casino industry makes perfect sense given that his casinos often rely upon diverse slot offerings for the bulk of their activity. The Venetian Palazzo, one of the Sands group’s most famous properties in Vegas, offers thousands of slot machines in a single venue, specifically arranged in a way that keeps gaming varied and entertaining. Losing popular licenses like those of Marvel and Star Wars characters naturally takes away from the variety in such slot machine banks.

Property owners aside, the decision was also a disappointment to a lot of fans; but a more recent decision made by Disney will further its Star Wars entertainment empire in a way that no casino game ever could have. In fact, the company might have just made a move that could be even more financially lucrative than carrying on the film saga. News broke earlier this month that Disney will actually be creating “Star Wars Lands” to add to its existing theme parks. Not unlike the introduction of the Wizarding World Of Harry Potter to Universal Studios several years ago, these new parks will invite droves of fans from all over the world as they bring George Lucas’s fiction to life in a way never before attempted.

It’s really starting to feel like there’s an exciting new Star Wars announcement coming out of Disney every month or so. One thing’s certain: the biggest name in entertainment is in full control of our favorite galaxy far, far away.

Utilitarian Review 8/29/15

Roundtable Question

Toying with the idea of doing a roundtable on women directors. Would anyone be interested in participating in that (or even in reading it?)

Wonder Woman News

Brian Patton reviewed my book for the Journal of Comics and Grahpic Novels (partially paywalled.)

Kent Worcester reviews a number of books about Wonder Woman, including mine.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Katherine Wirick on using OCD to sell make-up.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics in mid-1946.

Jared Hill hopes for the end of the Terminator franchise.

Nix 66 on acting as sex work and sex work as acting.

Me on Tarantino and genre pleasures (or the lack thereof.)

Me on Tarantino’s record on diversity.

Chris Gavaler on his daughter rocketing off from a doomed planet.
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Playboy I wrote about the Sad Puppies and the history of diverse sf.

At Quartz I wrote about

—how soaps are better than quality television.

Owen Wilson’s No Escape and treating Asians as a zombie horde.

At Splice Today I wrote about Bernie Sanders’ fundraising, which isn’t on part with Obama’s in 2007.

At Ravishly I wrote about how Hillary Clinton is not a dynastic candidate.
 
Other Links

Mallory Ortberg on crappy journalism about sex work.

The LA Times review of Ted Rall’s jaywalking story is pretty damning.

Katherine Cross on the Ashley Madison hack and the culture of shaming.

Interesting Playboy interview with Samuel L. Jackson.

My Supergirl

 
It wasn’t my fault.  It was the Iron Giant’s.

Do you remember how you adored that movie? The kid hiding the alien robot in his barn left some old comics out and the robot read them, or flipped through the pictures at least, fell in love with the caped man flying across the covers. The video played continuously in our living room while your mother battled false labor.

You longed for a Superman comic of your own. There were rotating racks everywhere when I was a kid, but I finally chased down an Action Comics in the bottom row of magazines in our mall CVS, Teen and Tiger Beat poised perilously close. You opened it across your foot-high table, shoving aside plastic ponies and teacups to make room. “He uses his powers only for good,” you said.

After your brother’s birth I rented the 1978 Superman, something a father and a recovering mother can watch with their three-year-old daughter. I was twelve when it came out, already invulnerable to PG ratings, but now I punched the forward button when I remembered a cop getting shoved in front of a train. It wasn’t the mangled impact, but the idea of it, the roaring tracks, the vanishing body. You were irate.

“It’s okay to die,” you said. “That’s what the boy in The Iron Giant says.”

It was true.  The robot sacrifices himself to save the kid, to save the whole town, shouting “Superman!” as he rockets into the oncoming warhead.

“When you’re grown-up,” I said, “you can decide for yourself, but while you’re little, Mommy and I have to.”

That was enough, that glimpse of your future self, a promise. The bad parts could wait. The next day you called me in a dozen times to fast-forward the boring bits too.

You found Batman on your own, a two-page cameo in that Action Comics, and asked who Superman’s friend was. I left out his parents getting gunned down in an alley outside a movie theater. The age seven TV rating worried me, but you and your mother started watching the cartoon before bedtime. You called his villains Kittycatwoman and Tutuface and pretended your floppy-necked brother was Scarface, the evil puppet. The bat costume for Halloween was pure coincidence. You wore it to the grocery store the day it arrived, admiring your bent ears, your scalloped wings, the gray felt of your belly.

Christmas came early. An uncle mailed you a Batman doll on my advice, and you gasped when you opened it, declaring how you had always wanted one and had waited so long and now you finally had it. You wowed the boys at show ’n’ tell, tucked him under a pink blanket, hung his cape in your toy barn, said he needed tap shoes. You wanted Superman even more. At night you dreamt of flying on his back.

“Superman should sleep with me,” you said. “Batman should sleep with Mommy, and Daddy can sleep with Robin.”

The Superman franchise was gestating between projects, so there was no doll to be found here or in neighboring towns, not even on Etoys or Amazon. Ebay listed collector items, ancient toys that had never escaped their packaging and never would. Your mother warned that Santa might not be able to find you a Superman, but you explained that he and his witches could make one. Santa, you warned your other dolls, can see them, though you sounded skeptical; you knew Superman’s x-ray vision was pretend. Your mother helped you write Santa a letter after I found a late ’80s version, with imitation rips in his plastic cape inflicted by a cyborg named Metallo, the villain the Iron Giant would rather die than become. She wrapped it in special Santa paper, to distinguish it from the mound of gifts coming officially from us. The ’40s and ’50s Superman videos arrived late.

You still dreamed of sleeping in his arms. Mornings you explained how he followed you downstairs and was hiding behind the couch because it was time for school. Batman was naughtier. He woke everyone up, so you had to tape his mouth shut. Your new Joker doll had a fistfight with Buzz Lightyear, but usually everyone got along, hugging, reading tiny books, gathering for tea parties, napping in all corners of the house.

I read you books, and I drew pictures with you: unicorns, dinosaurs, superheroes. You asked if Superman would ever die. You didn’t want to, you said. Family friends had just cancelled a playdate after a grandfather’s heart attack. One of your ponies succumbed the next morning; it lay on the kitchen tiles where you dropped it. “My granddad didn’t die,” you clarified.

When I tucked you into bed and rubbed your back, you told me you hadn’t decided yet whether you were going to leave our house when you were older. I promised you never had to.

“Even when I’m a grown-up?”

“Even then.”

I left your lamp on, the one I’d screwed a low-watt bulb into after a nightmare the week before. You said you’d thought there was a monster in the next room but that there wasn’t. Your longest and saddest life complaint was not having anyone to sleep with, not even a kitten to cuddle. You were in tears at your cousins’ because everyone else was two in a bed. You talked about sleeping with Batman and Superman, the way your mother and I got each other every night. Your brother could have Batgirl.

He needed shots at his four-month check-up, and so did you. We didn’t tell you till the nurse appeared with the needle. You always got so traumatized imagining what was coming that we thought a warning would have been crueler. I held you still in my lap as you screamed. Then your mother handed you the Spider-Man doll she’d bought that morning because the Batgirl she’d ordered was late. We were all amazed. Batman marched stiff-legged, Superman could bend knees and elbows, but Spider-Man used even his ankles and wrists, like a mechanical body transforming incrementally into a live one.

We had weaned you from evening Batman, because of those nightmares, but when you opened to a picture of the Justice League in TV Guide, you ran up the stairs shouting for me. You made me list every superhero in flying and non-flying categories. You theorized a tiny Superman was hiding inside Green Lantern’s ring. Easter morning exploded with your yelp when you unearthed the Batman T-shirt from the plastic grass in your basket, a partner for the men’s sized Superman tee you wore as a shin-length nightgown. The Easter Bunny, you said, was really a person in a costume who came to our house and hid eggs. Your mother tried to explain Jesus to you, the crucifixion, the resurrection. I pictured the Iron Giant in the final scene as his globe-scattered body parts rolled and beeped their way to the North Pole where he was patiently rebuilding himself.

The next Christmas you studied the manufacturing marks on the soles of your superheroes, irritated they were all made in China. You still let the entire seven-member League sleep in your bed for a week or two, before moving them into your dollhouse. You even spent your own allowance money on a Justice League coloring-activity-sticker book, a savior during snow days. But by spring, your heroes had migrated to your brother’s rug or attic boxes. Batman’s ears were chewed down, his mask dented by the baby teeth that I still keep in a jewelry box in my sock drawer. When Barbie launched a new line of superheroines—Wonder Woman, Supergirl—the Superman T was climbing up past your knees.

“If I only had one day to live,” you announced one afternoon after kindergarten, “I would watch Justice League and play with Lego.” You’d been studying the one-day lifespan of a bumblebee.

Justice League was only on Saturdays at noon, a weekly lunch date. When it went off the air, we rented the ’70s Wonder Woman, tuned in for Teen Titans and Who Wants To Be a Superhero, but you were as happy in a corner with a book or conspiring with friends in their faraway houses. I’d helped you conquer your bike, and now you could pedal wind across your own face. You were too big to hang on to an uncle’s shirttail, pretending it was Superman’s cape. You had changed rooms, houses, whole towns. You didn’t want to be given dolls; you wanted to make them. Your Human Torch was marker-dabbed cotton swabs, Invisible Woman a skeleton of paper clips with a cellophane force field. Raven, the brooding, dark-eyed Teen Titan who rebelled against her demon father, was your last game of dress-up. You liked twirling the black cape. You hunted down the website yourself and kept clicking that hip theme song, retro sixties style with Japanese accents. You tolerated Superman Returns but delighted over Bend It Like Beckham.

Your Wonder Woman calendar flew through its months. Next thing you were earning your own money battling the neighbor’s toddlers while she nursed her newborn. One called you “Poopman,” the same way your brother used to mispronounce Superman. The other demanded you build him a Batman house from his blocks, then smashed it and screamed at you to do it again the right way. Mornings I still read books to you and your brother at the breakfast table, Tarzan, Zorro, Dr. Silence, the Night Wind, century-old heroes, part of my research into the lost origins of the genre. The Superman nightgown had appeared in my pile of summer T-shirts. You were going to your first school dance and debated clothing options with your mother, costumes to hide your transforming body. I started Doc Savage, described the Gray Seal, but you asked if maybe we could try something other than superheroes for a while?

If unobserved, you and your bookish friends would still play “Powers” by the creek. You were all sisters, each gifted with control of an element. The bossy one always grabbed water, and you settled for earth, poked your stick in the mud. She could make giant whirlpools appear, but if you declared an earthquake, you were silenced for being unrealistic. The real battle was deciding which pairs were born twins, and then woe to the odd-numbered girl. What mattered most to all of you, though, was being orphans.

You were still hiding your new body in old shirts, preferring things baggy, not to be admired. You wanted to be invisible. You didn’t care about wowing the boys. Then one evening you turned to me in a restaurant parking lot and asked, “What does ‘apocalypse’ mean?”

I wasn’t startled. You wrote vocabulary words on your bookmarks to quiz your mother about later. “The end of the world,” I said. I pictured Krypton.

“But does it have another meaning, like if something is just weird?”

You had commented on someone’s girly blouse that day, had called it “cute,” and one of the popular girls, a former playdate friend, had blinked in shock: “It must be the apocalypse.”

You picked out some snazzy ballet slipper-style shoes that month, a fashion trend invisible to me. You asked for contact lenses to reveal your eyes. Mother-daughter shopping adventures followed, as I sorted strange new garments from my laundry basket: bras, halter tops, fitted tees.

I insisted on one more superhero story, a newly published novel, Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible. One of the two narrators is an evil super-genius, trapped in the social politics of a super-powered middle school. Your science teacher had just emailed to say you’d scored the highest grade in the class, the whole school, his career practically. In English, you startled your entire class by bellowing a supervillain laugh from a line of your own poetry:

“MWAHAHAHA!”

But you preferred the other narrator, the amnesiac cyborg. She doesn’t remember walking in front of a moving truck, the mangled impact, her vanishing body. I tried to read a certain paragraph aloud but kept choking, kept pinching my wet eyes shut. You and your brother peered up from your breakfast plates. You’d recently reclaimed that Superman tee and were wearing it to bed again with mismatched pajama bottoms. I had to hand the book over to you, the only way it would ever be heard aloud. You read with a question in your voice:

“When I think of the photograph of the girl I used to be, a stranger now, I think how much I miss her, and how she was never really happy in the first place … Maybe not everything changes for the worse. Maybe I just became what I needed to in order to survive. I miss the girl I was, and I wish I could tell her that … I bet she never dreamed she would live so long, or do the things she can do now. I wish I could tell her what she’d grow up to be, how strange and beautiful and unexpected she’d be. She’d probably feel a lot better if she knew. The sky and the stars are brilliant, and I think of how much she would have loved this.”

We used to take daily walks, pushing your infant brother in his stroller to the end of our dead end street, the one we left behind with the old house. I would tell you stories that turned into a chain of questions, and you would answer each. Where did Superman come from? What happened to Krypton? Who found his rocket? A catechism, your mother said.

Did I ever tell you Superman’s costume was made from his baby blankets? Have I ever said you are as miraculous right now as you were thumping your fists inside your mother’s gut? Growing up isn’t dying. I’m not mourning you—I’m mourning myself. As his world crumbled under him, Superman’s father tucked his child into a spaceship and sent it rocketing into its own oncoming future. You have your own planets to conquer. The yellow sun will make you strong, keep you extraordinary. It’s okay. You’re not supposed to come back.
 

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[This essay was originally published in Brain, Child Winter 2010. Madeleine leaves for college next week.]

Tarantino and Diversity

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Recently I saw someone say on social media that if you’re considering Tarantino’s approach to race, you need to look at all his films, not just Django. To my surprise, though, the writer went on to say that looking at all the films, Tarantino was revealed as a filmmaker who didn’t get diversity, and didn’t care about race.

That doesn’t seem right to me. Tarantino does mishandle race sometimes, and can be racist. But compared to his white peers, he shows a consistent engagement with race, and a consistent commitment to casting actors of color in his films. Sometimes he doesn’t even come off so badly compared to black directors (he arguably has better roles for women of color than Spike Lee.)

Django Unchained and Jackie Brown are both thoroughly integrated, with numerous black actors in both starring roles and bit parts. Kill Bill 2, and especially Kill Bill 1, use numerous Japanese actors (and some other actors of color as well.) Death Proof has 3 or 4 (depending on how you’re counting) leading roles for women of color, which is practically unheard of in mainstream action films. Pulp Fiction has multiple leading roles — including arguably the lead role—for black actors. Four Rooms has a small cast of five people or so, of whom two are black. Reservoir Dogs and Inglorious Basterds are more like traditional Hollywood films; they both have minor roles for one black actor (though Samuel Jackson sneaks in as a voice over on IB). But still, it’s pretty clear that Django isn’t some sort of tacked on aberration. Much more than contemporaries like the Coen Brothers, or David Lynch, Tarantino has thought about racial diversity, and used diverse actors, throughout his career.

Again, diverse casting isn’t the be all and end all. Reservoir Dogs indulges in a bunch of racist chatter for no real reason except that Tarantino seems to think it’s cool (he is wrong.) Steven in Django is (I think) a racist caricature. Making a slavery revenge narrative is arguably a bad idea. And so forth. And of course, Tarantino is a white guy; when he sits in the director’s chair, he does nothing to advance the most consequential kind of diversity in Hollywood. Still, if Hollywood in general could get to a Tarantino level of diversity, that would be a big step forward in terms of representation. And a lot more actors of color would get paid.

Basterd Pleasures

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Quentin Tarantino implicates the viewer in onscreen violence, while also delivering standard genre pleasures. You laugh as people are shot, and you also laugh as people are shot. The audience feels superior to the rush of violence, while participating in it.

This seems like a standard criticism of Tarantino; I’ve had people make it in discussions with me several times this week. But, I have to say, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Tarantino is very interested in genre pleasures, obviously, and sometimes he delivers on them. But just as often he interrupts them, or refuses to follow through. He really isn’t Paul Verhoeven, who will show you Sharon Stone’s crotch while sneering at you for looking at Sharon Stone’s crotch. Tarantino is almost always doing something more complicated.

I could use any Tarantino film as an example, I think, but since I just saw Inglorious Basterds, we’ll go with that. This is a war film, obviously. When Verhoeven shot a war film, Starship Troopers, he hit all the marks of the war film — battles, crusty sergeants, bravery, visceral victory— while suggesting off to the side that the humans were in fact that evil bad guys killing the aliens. You get your critique of genre pleasures, but you also get genre pleasures. That’s the Verhoeven way.

It’s not the Tarantino way, though. There aren’t any pitched battles at all in Inglorious Basterds. Nor as a result are there standard moments of bravery in battle—unless you count the Nazi war hero Zoller’s filmed recreation of his own fight killing the good guys. There are certainly brave people in the film on the Allied side; one of them gets ignominiously choked to death; another gets shot because he can’t do a German accent right; a third dies before she can see her revenge enacted; several others show their bravery by killing a roomful of unarmed civilians. The person who saves the world and ends the war is a Nazi traitor motivated purely by greed and self-interest. The big name star, Brad Pitt, does basically nothing throughout the film except speak in a ridiculous Appalachian accent and torture people.

Other Tarantino films make a few more concessions to genre; Kill Bill 1, especially. But Tarantino is always taking genre apart in ways that render it nonfunctional. The big final shoot out in Pulp Fiction never happens; you never see the heist in Reservoir Dogs; the hero refuses to ride off into the sunset with the heroine in Jackie Brown. Kill Bill 2 ends with an hour of nattering talk. Which I think is kind of a crappy, boring conclusion. But a big part of the way it’s crappy and boring is that it doesn’t fulfill genre conventions.

And I suspect that that’s why other people react to Tarantino with such visceral dislike, when they do react to him with visceral dislike. His relationship to genre is frustrating. He uses genre markers, and sets up situations where you expect genre pleasures, but then he refuses to follow through. You could argue that that makes him too clever by half. But I don’t think you can really argue that, in Inglorious Basterds, he’s giving the audience what they want (unless, of course, what they want is to be frustrated.)

Acting as Sex Work, Sex Work as Acting

(Editor’s Note: I (that’s me, Noah) interviewed Nix 66 about performance and sex work for this piece at Pacific Standard. Nix said a lot more in response to my questions than I was able to use in the piece, so I asked her if she’d reprint the whole thing here.)
 
Noah: What sort of sex work do you do? (I know you said phone…is that something with visuals? That’s different from camming, right?)

Nix 66: I’ve been a fetish sex worker for a year now, starting with my own phone line, doing occasional private camming sessions (not on open platforms), and just now having made my first two clips. And my first two clips look like my first two clips. (Egads, that lighting!)

Writing, directing, acting, lighting, costuming, etc. — Independent Adult Content Providers are responsible for all of these things, not to mention promotion and letting people know that you exist. Coming off with a polished-looking alt-porn or fetish clip is no easy feat. I am certain of this because I’m currently grappling with it, and have yet to achieve it. Maybe some day.

But mainly I do phones.

Most of my clients (all sexed male at birth w/ one exception – a couple – in the past year) fall into one of three classes: 1) Those struggling with issues of gender and sexuality (in light of our current culture, a huge market); 2) Those who want ongoing companionship (literally, an alternative to dating with no marriage at the end); 3) Those who want detailed sexual descriptions of a genuinely Sadean nature (shock talking; the dirtier and more detailed the better).

If you want freedom of speech, you call me. The worst thing that could ever happen is that I hang up on you and block you because you haven’t abided by my limits. But those limits are generally much more broad than one could expect to find with a psychologist, a partner, a priest or equivalent, a best friend, a family member, etc. Mainly because culturally normative notions of masculinity are narrow, limiting, silencing, and damaging (to everyone). I think sex workers are, in large part, confidantes and secret keepers. That’s one of the main social functions. And it’s a damn important one. Society dispenses with it at its own peril.

I listed my main classes of clients because I have cultivated them. Any SW-er who is doing well has a persona, a list of unique skills that s/he brings to the business. They have cultivated that persona and those skills no differently than any actor, particularly the Hollywood variety.

When I first began, I didn’t want to use my image at all for fear of stigma and violence. I bought stock photos that didn’t deviate *too much* from my own body type and said I was brunette because I don’t like men who prefer blondes.

That’s visual. It also has to do with character. I am not a Princess, a MILF, a co-ed, or even a Dominatrix in the most stereotypical sense. I am terrible at getting men to take me to the mall because the mall is the last place on Earth I’d want to be. Persona and experience. You gotta play to your strengths and you gotta create a mythology around those strengths.

Do you see a similarity between what you do and acting, or performing? How is your work creative (or how is sex work in general creative?)

I think of the different branches of sex work as the Greek Muses, personally. Meaning if you were to combine the many different forms and mediations of sex work into a whole, you’d end up with something that looks very much like the “Humanities” or “Arts,” writ large.

I feel like a performance artist, actually. But what I do, specifically, I see more in line with raunchy comedy and improvisation, as well as psychotherapy. I’m a great conversationalist, an ex-literature major, with life-long interests in power, violence, class, and sex. That’s my shoo-in. But other sex workers bring different skills to bear.

Full service providers and pro-dommes deal in touch, presentation, smell, and conversation. I have also been made to understand that they spend a great deal of time doing laundry.

Porn performers must master scripts, characters, and camera angles – and that’s just if they’re in front of the camera.

Cam models improvise on the spot much like I do, but they generally rely more on visual presentation than narrative description. They also might do cos-play and scripted shows.

And exotic dancers… dance! (Is now the right time to mention that I once worked as a professional Egyptian bellydancer in my early 20s, until I was informed that it didn’t matter how well I danced because people just wanted to see me naked? And I quit. On the spot. Cuz we all know there’s no art to nudity and/or sexual desire… right? Right? Amirite?)

Roleplaying is inescapable in sex work, because ultimately – much like actors — we’re hired fantasies. The only difference really is who is doing the hiring.

Do you see a similarity between actors like Lena Dunham and Anne Hathaway and sex workers? Is sexuality part of their performance, in your view?

Ha! What a question. Lena Dunham has built her entire identity on sex and her body type. Pretty overtly. Can you imagine “Girls” stripped of casual, random, unpaid sex premised upon profound self-loathing on the part of 99% of its characters? There goes Ms. Dunham’s “edge.” Here are the top three links I found googling “lena dunham girls sex,” some with great visuals that come directly out of porn:

One.

Two.

Three.
 

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Why should the cast of “Girls” be paid for raunchy sex scenes? Shouldn’t they be doing this for free if their heart was really in it? If they loved it? If it was a true passion and calling?
All the more so since Lena Dunham has never believed in paying (poor) people for their labor anyways.

Anne Hathaway, well… Her entire career has hinged upon the Princess because she’s playing to her strengths just like the rest of the savvy purveyors of high class (and overwhelmingly white) “pretty.” That seems to be her range, her persona. She’s a Disney Princess. Check out some cam platforms and alt-porn and you’ll see some folks being far more creative with that role than her privileged little mind could ever conceive. But then, I only ever enjoy seeing Princesses set against the backdrop of the Terror. ;)

And Kate Winslet, why should she have any more right to all that hideous kinky? I know her body almost as well as I know my own.
Ultimately, celebrities *are* sex workers. It’s just that they sell to studios and call it “art,” which makes the masses feel much more comfortable with the fact that they’re consuming sex day-in, day-out, by the millisecond.

Do you have other comments on the actors who signed the petition for criminalizing sex work, or on that situation in general?

Yes, concerning the situation in general:

  1. Some people may try to discount what I have to say because I engage in sex work that is currently legal in my region and have not met a client in person (though it’s not completely inconceivable). Firstly, sex work is so thoroughly stigmatized, despite the fact that it’s a booming industry, that sex workers who currently operate legally have difficulty getting paid for online services. See here. That’s just one slice of the day-to-day, structural discrimination we have to deal with. De-crimininalization and de-stigmatization of sex work, in whatever forms, benefit me directly.
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  3. Anyone who has been in sex work (regardless of medium) for any length of time has undoubtedly been propositioned for other services, in other media. I recommend clients to other sexual service providers when they are seeking services that I do not provide personally. That means that I know and respect sex workers in a variety of media. It also means I skirt the line of procuring, most probably. Even being legal, you can’t be a sex worker without stigma and criminalization touching your life, so that friendship might implicate you as a “pimp.” And I’m not even addressing the laws that affect property and the like.
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  5. Tara Burns recently wrote this article wherein she talked about how, at the age of 15, having been trafficked by her father, the DA said that her testimony against him would be unreliable because she had been a “child prostitute.” Firstly, there ain’t no such thing. But survival being what it is in a callous, child-hating, capitalist, sex-obsessed/deprived culture such as ours, it will take way more nuance and care than a brute law to address survival sex work, sex trafficking, and the sale of sexual services by minors.

    Still, that’s rape culture. That’s the same treatment Kipnis has dished out to the survivors of Ludlow. That’s why it took multiple decades and 35+ women (many ridiculously high profile) to finally accept that Bill Cosby is a rapist. And some people still don’t.

    Similarly, Meg Munoz gave a great interview to Tits and Sass on being blackmailed as a sex worker, which lead to her being trafficked as a direct consequence of criminalization of sex work.

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  7. Lena Dunham tweeted that “I recognize that I’m not a sex worker or a trafficking survivor. But I’m blessed to have a platform that many close to this issue do not.” Sex workers and sex trafficking survivors are all over the internet. You can’t miss us. She is co-opting our stories for her own fame, just as Hollywood co-opts our tales for passive, easy, guiltless titillation by way of disapproval.
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  9. I joke about being a “moneysexual,” but I mean it. I LIKE being paid for sexual services, even if that like is more about power and grifting a system (actually, it’s plural: systems) I hate. Still, I like it! Really. And I love the creativity and engagement that I have with clients. That I don’t do full service has to do with personality and preferences, not morals. Anything consenting adults agree to — whatever conditions an adult wishes to place on their attention, time, and companionship — is no one’s business save the people involved. And that anyone else should judge it or condemn it is fundamentally inhumane, hypocritical, prurient, and cruel.

 

Terminator Genisys – Reinventing the Robot?

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James Cameron’s first two Terminator films continue to be regarded as two of the best examples of action/sci-fi storytelling of all time. The sequels that followed, despite being supplied with sufficient star power and formed around a familiar mythology, failed to generate the same critical acclaim or fervor from fanboy audiences. This year’s Terminator Genysis, which opened last month, has already been cited as the first picture in a new stand alone trilogy – Terminator 2 (working title) is set for release on May 19, 2017 and Terminator 3 (also working title) has a release date planned as far ahead as June 29, 2018.

Lightning rarely strikes in the same place twice, let alone 4, or even 5 times successively. Despite this, studios have nowadays become accustomed to dropping buckets of money on the umpteenth iteration of the same worn-out tale – the Terminator franchise being a prime example. Before the most recent film even hit theaters, James Cameron went on record saying that Terminator Genisys is the “real” third Terminator film, effectively writing off the other two features as non-canon. Though Cameron had no direct involvement in the production or filming of Genisys, his endorsement hinted at its potential to re-inject some life into the storyline. But even with the help of the first T-800 himself (the inimitable Arnold Schwarzenegger), it lacked the strength to assume responsibility for yet another reprisal.

Unable to participate in the fourth film Terminator Salvation due to his political pursuits, the former California governor, now 67, quickly slipped back into his former role as cinematic cyborg. The Genysis screenplay explains why the T-800 ages like humans do, using a life-size CGI model of a 37-year old Arnold to represent him as the younger robot from 1984’s original The Terminator. Schwarzenegger had to train twice as hard to get back to the same weight he was in 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, as Genysis features T-800s from all three different time periods. The overall plot is mired in temporal paradox, as Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese battle both a “killer” app and the nefarious satellite internet-based plague that is Skynet while simultaneously attempting to change the outcome of life in a parallel universe. Too convoluted for casual viewers and too much of a stretch for anyone else who has grown up loving the series, appreciating Genysis requires a full reimagining of time as a linear construct.

After the announcement of the arrival of another Terminator film hit the Internet, comment trolls immediately questioned the need for it —  even the most devout fans seemed to agree that Salvation should have effectively closed out the saga. Studios pressed ahead anyways, and Genysis went on to generate relatively lukewarm box office numbers alongside mixed critical reviews. One of the film’s harshest critics, Grantland’s Wesley Morris offered some particularly scathing insight, saying, “It’s neither a surprising work of pop art nor an entertaining piece of crap.” Within the Terminator universe created by Cameron, this film stands out not necessarily for its explicit awfulness, as it is arguably a “better” movie than 2003’s T3 or 2009’s Salvation. However, treading on overly familiar ground, it does little more than dig a deeper grave for the once-great story of robotic apocalypse.

Paramount Studio’s premature hopes for the franchise’s longevity (evidenced by their early announcements of both additional sequels) may be dashed, as it hasn’t truly seen success since the mid-’90s and for many, the lackluster Genisys is just further proof that it’s best years are over. Unfortunately, film studios seem to pay less and less attention to the creation of uniquely compelling characters and plots. This year’s release of Mad Max: Fury Road and Jurassic World, as well as the upcoming Star Wars sequels and the initiation of projects like the all-female Ghostbusters only serve to indicate Hollywood’s increased reliance on the exploitation of familiar, formerly-glorious, success stories. Paramount has suggested that if the film fails overseas (it has an August 23th release date in China) plans may be scrapped for the 2017 and 2018’s Terminator pictures. A disinterested Asian audience might be enough to finally convince executives that there is an important distinction between giving up and knowing when you’ve had enough.

Good films don’t necessarily need critical support, but they do need to tap into something primal within the hearts of audience members. In a world where robots are achieving an ever more powerful presence in our day-to-day life, there’s no reason why the stories we write about them should fail to excite. If Paramount does choose to carry out plans for two additional sequels they would do well to abandon the Terminators completely – today’s technology is surely enough to inspire a new storyline, full of the imaginations and intrigue which made the first two films so great.