Poder paralelo no Rio? Ahn, 'tá.

 O Excercito use tanques para ocupar a Rocinha e acabar com o "poder paralelo".

 "Poder paralelo"? Ahn, 'tá...

Na recente operação contra a Rocinha, a polícia encontrou 9 rifles e uma "metralhadora" (termo usado pela imprensa brasileira para qualificar o tipo de cópia barata chinesa do rifle de assalto russo AK47 que vende-se por 800 dólares em todos os shows de armas nos EUA).

Ou o "poder paralelo" andava-se singularmente desarmado, ou essas operações de pacificação são para os gringos verem.

Do meu ponto de visto, a relativa facilidade com que a polícia carioca anda "ocupando" por aí indica o alto nível hiperbólico da retórica midiática a cerca do suposto "poder paralelo" que impregnava a imprensa brasileira no período 1995-2008, e não o bom desempenho atual do Estado.

Pessoalmente, acho que o atual "paz" nas favelas é o resultado de uma série de acordos que tem sido contruida entre os donos de poder e seus sometimes parceiros bandidos e semi-bandidos que mandam em nossas favelas. Me chame de gringo cético, mas vejo a criminalidade no Rio como um ADJUNTO ao poder do Estado e não como uma organização paralela do poder. Vejo a estrutura dessa "organização" muito mais semelhante àquela retratada por Foote-Whyte na "Soceidade da Esquina" do que uma verdadeiro esquema paralelo de poder.

Penso na facilidade com que uma organização paralela poderia ter resistido esse atual incursão na Rocinha. Em Afganistão, por exemplo, onde existem vários poderes legitimamente "paralelos", uma tática comunamente utilizada é misturar óleo diesel e fertilizante numa panela de pressão e enterrar o dispositivo resultante numa estrada de acesso frequentado pelos comboios do governo, onde será ativado por vias do controle remoto (tipicamente um telefone celular ligada a algumas baterias). Tal dispositivo seria facilmente construido por nossos atuais "inimigos públicos" urbanos, se eles tivessem a mínima pretensão de montar um poder verdadeiramente paralelo. A bomba caseira, fabricada dessa maneira, não teria nenhum problema em seriamente avariar os transportes blindados LVTP-7 e M113 utilizados nessas operações (e sempre rotulados pela impressa brasileira, com seu habitual hiperbolismo, de "tanques").

E, no entanto, não vemos no Brasil nenhuma das táticas ou tecnologias rotinaeiramente utilizadas pelos pretendentes ao poder mundo afora, mesmo pelas organizações mais pobres e impopulares oriundas das populações mais miseráveis do planeta.

Resta só duas conclusões: ou o CV e seus semelhantes são compostos de integrantes singularmente burros, ou o objetivo desses grupos não é disputar o poder com o Estado e sim vender suas drogas em paz, lucrando-se com o comércio.

Se aceitamos a segunda hipótese, então todas essas ocupações são facilmente organizadas, na grande maioria dos casos, através de tratados temporários que permitem a comercialização das drogas e que focalizam os esforços da polícia em outras atividades de repressão - atividades que não tangem nas interesses dos assim-chamados "gangues do tráfico".

Em outras palavras, para sensivelmente diminuir o nível de violência no Estado do Rio de Janeiro, a única coisa que o Governo há de fazer é declarar uma trégua informal mas efetiva na "Guerra Contra as Drogas". Sendo que o grosso da violência que vara o Rio é oriundo dessa violência, utilizar o poder do Estado para congelar as atuais linhas de batalha entre o CV, os ADA, o TC e seus aliados/adversários milicianos resultaria numa queda imediata nos confrontos armados na nossa cidade.

Minha hipótese é que é isto que está contecendo no Rio. Resta saber o que a história vai mostrar.

Marnia Robinson, Gary Wilson and The Good Men Project Magazine

Recently, I've been involved in a series of debates over on The Good Men Project magazine with Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson, two self-proclaimed sexperts who (based on their writings around the blogosphere and Marnia's newly published book) seem to believe that orgasm is the root of all evil.

As far as I can tell, Marnia and Gary believe that the chemical reactions created in the brain by orgasms are dangerously addictive. Pornography makes one want to masturbate to orgasm and is thus dangerous. "Internet porography" (by which Wilson and Robinson apparently mean anything at all on the internet that gives you a chubby or that deep, mysterious stirring inside) is particularly evil in this respect because it gives us multiple images on demand and thus causes human beings to masturbate non-stop.

Of course, all of this is so much moral entrepeneurial bullshit, in my opinion. Marnia - an ex-corporate lawyer with as much formal study and training in matters sexual as I have in nuclear science - has a bone to pick about sex and is very good at cutting and pasting links to scientific studies to apparently "prove" her pet theories about human sex.

A few weeks ago, I got into a verbal tussle with "Garnia" (for they never post as a singular entity) as I call them here on The Good Men Project Magazine. I admit to going out of bounds into the realm of ad hominem attacks, because nothing gets my dander up more than people misusing science to create sexual stigmas and push for a particular brand of sexual morality. TGMP's editor Lisa Findley rightly censored me and I shut up.

This week, however, Garnia came back to The Good Men Project Magazine with another article banging the drum of sexual panic once again and telling us all how orgasm and "internet porn" will make slaves of us and our children.

Taking my censorship seriously, I replied to their article in a rational way, staying as far as I could from ad hominems, but not sparing critical commentary when it came to trashing their theory.

Result: more censorship.

I then e-mailed Lisa Hickey to ask what the problem was. Ms. Hickey, The Good Men Project's chief CEO and publisher, gave me the surprising information that Gary and Marnia were being allowed to moderate their own comments section on The Good Man Project and that they considered my attack on their theory to be a personal attack on themselves.

This is quite disturbing news, which should be shared out there among you sex and gender bloggers.

Personally, I have no problem with the fact that two people who I consider to be hucksters and charlatans of the worst sort are posting article after article on one of the only non-MRA-oriented men's issues blog-magazines out there. Hey, it takes all kinds and I'm personally in favor of the complete and free exchange of ideas.

But Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson are moral entrepeneurs with a very specific and radical view of human sexuality (to wit: orgasms are bad) who are wrapping their political beliefs in the trappings of scientific research. Gary and Marnia have block-censored any attempts to engage with their "facts" by pointing out logical and scientific holes in their data.By giving them control over their comments section, TGMP makes it effectively impossible to critique the couple's claims and thus, effectively, gives them a chunk of editorial control over TGMP itself.

Below, you'll find my response to Garnia's latest article, "Can you trust your Johnson?". This went up and was taken down several times on The Good Men Project Magazine before I found out from Ms. Hickey that she'd ceded editorial control over the comments section to Garnia. My response is not a masterpiece, by any shot, but the censorship of it by Garnia, aided and abetted by TGMP Magazine, deserves to be confronted.


I think it shows just precisely how nervous Garnia are about their theory: real science and logic can't be let anywhere near it for fear that it will fall apart like a cardboard suitcase in the rain.


*********************

Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson’s main affirmation is this: “Porn has changed – a lot.”

According to the authors, internet surfing for porn “keeps the reward circuit [of the brain] buzzing” by “spiking dopamine levels”. We look for porn with anticipation and are rewarded when we find it, so we go back and do it again. And again. And again. Literally ad nauseaum.

The authors, it should be noted, have never scientifically studied porn use first hand, although they run a website where they claim to receive many “self-reports” (what scientists properly call “anecdotal reports”) from self-acclaimed “hard-core porn users”. Presuming that Robinson and Wilson’s  informants do indeed exist in real life and are accurately reporting their experiences (a very large presumption in these days when kids flood sites such as “Your Brain on Porn” with fake and exaggerated stories simply “for the lulz”), one needs to ask exactly how representative of the porn-using population these people are?

In their article, the authors present what they apparently see as a fairly typical internet porn session:

“Using three high definition screens, with nine windows open, to search for new scenes, genres, whatever, until you find just the right shot to take you home. After a five-minute breather you can search via Google for something you’ve never seen, so you can whack away once more”

Like Gary and Marnia, I happen to know many “porn users”: not a single one of them enjoys sexual imagery in the manner described above. Of course, this is anecdotal, too, but I’d be willing to bet that if all the people out there reading my words were to be honest with themselves, they’d have to admit that the situation above, clearly described as a sort of “baseline” for the kind of “internet porn” Wilson and Robinson are talking about, is extremely rare.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it isn’t. This just begs another question: if someone was so “addicted” to “porn” that they would buy three monitors to get themselves off, how is this sort of experience essentially different from accumulating a huge video, DVD or MP4 collection and viewing it on three different T.V. screens?

Wilson and Robsinson would have us believe that there’s some sort of deep “novelty” factor in “internet porn” and this factor “keeps the brain buzzing”. But given the evidence they cite and their extremely open-ended, dopamine-based understanding of addiction, it would make just as much sense for a true dopamine addict to have their own “library” of special images on DvD which they use to get off without having to go through the constant boredom of digging through page after page of crappy, uninteresting images to find just the “right shot to take them home”.  

If the real goal was to constantly flood the brain with dopamine, browsing a meticulously selected video collection would be the way to go. And, of course, that sort of “porn experience” has nothing necessarily to do with the internet. The person who was that much of a dopamine junky, using sexual images to get their fix, would probably be very quickly frustrated by what they would consider to be the low quality (i.e. unappealing images) of most internet porn. Put simply, browsing about the internet pornocloud wouldn’t be a reliable enough way to get themselves off in a quick, reliable fashion.

So no, porn has “not changed a lot”. The distribution of it has perhaps changed. I’d be willing to agree that a so-called “porn junky” now has easier access to images and thus a much easier time of it when it comes to building her own library. But that’s not the point the authors are making: they’re claiming that the internet itself has made a difference by offering up appealing images in a much more high-speed way and that this presentation of imagery is in and of itself so radically different that it can easily “addict” the average person. That is simply not true.

This leads us to another huge assumption that Wilson and Robinson seem to make: porn is porn is porn.

Neither of the authors bothers to ever define porn, either here or in any other writing I’ve ever read by them. However, if one were to take their dopamine-based understanding of “addiction” seriously, then the only logical definition of “porn” must be “anything at all that turns a given person on”. Furthermore, Robinson and Wilson seem to think that all sexual imagery is equally titillating to everyone, at least in potential. If it weren’t, their “gradually heavier fixes” model simply doesn’t work.

As it turns out, however, human sexual interest is hardly a “one-stop shopping” affair. People have VASTLY different tastes when it comes to sex. If the men and women I’ve listened to are any indication (and once again, yes, this is anecdotal, so use your own honest experience as a guide), most of the stuff on the internet that’s designed to sexually titillate isn’t very interesting to most people. People tend to have pretty specific tastes when it comes to sexual imagery – sometimes even fetishisticly specific. Yes, they want “new images”: but they want new images of more-or-less the same kind.

A woman who’s into watching gay gang-bang sex doesn’t suddenly become interested in dog and pony shows or Two Girls, One Cup just because they are out there on the internet. The idea that average peoples’ sexual tastes are so flexible that simply offering up images of sexual acts of a radically different nature can change their tastes on a basic level is simply not supported by scientific evidence (and let’s put a qualifier on that) ANYWHERE.

Finally, although Robinson and Wilson distance themselves from this position, their views, if proven correct, do in fact mean that one could “reprogram” a straight person into a gay person, or vice-versa, simply by exposing them to “novelty on demand, surprising and shocking visuals”.

Fortunately, that is not how human sexuality works out there in the empirically-occurring universe. People generally do not grow new sexual interests simply because they are exposed to “surprising and shocking visuals”. Be honest with yourself: you know this and I know this. We know what kind of erotica we like and, when we are interested in looking at erotica, we tend to go back to the same kinds of things again and again. We don’t suddenly become interested in the things we qualify as “yucky stuff” simply because we run across them on the sites we surf. And we certainly don’t become “addicted” to that stuff.

Now yes, I’m aware that there are all sorts of individual exceptions to this rule and that there probably is a small minority of people out there who are exactly as Wilson and Robinson describe them. The problem is, this minority is being held up to the world by the authors as if they were the new norm, being inexorably created by our evolutionary-driven brain chemistry.

But it’s Wilson and Robinson’s emphasis on “addiction as brain chemistry” that’s the really interesting part of their argument. After all, if we take their definition of “addiction” seriously, it’s sexual release itself that is the real culprit here, not porn. Porn is simply the means through which people achieve sexual release. What gets the dopamine flooding, of course, is orgasm.

Now that’s damned interesting, seeing as how the female capacity for multiple orgasms in one sitting (laying?) has been bandied about by feminism for the better part of four decades now as God’s Gift to Womenkind. An entire industry of vibrators and sex toys has been built off of the fact that when the ladies go to it, they don’t even have to take a “five minute breather” before they get back to the serious business of, as we say here in Brazil, “making like a crab” (think about it).

So if Robinson and Wilson are correct, the masturbation-positive emphasis on female multiple orgasms that Western culture has been living since the early 1970s, at least, should have already produced two generations of hopeless female dopamine addicts.

Again, I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide for themselves, based on their own experience, if this is true.

Evolutionary Psychology and Sexuality

I've recently been having a discussion with Jen Wading regaring evolutionary psychology and its use by one Ms. Amy Alkon on her blog, "Advice Goddess". (The particular posting in question can be found here.)

As some readers might be aware, I have problems with evpsych, not so much as a field (hey, it generates a lot of whacko theories, but then again, so does anthropology. Leví-Strauss and his views on structural cybernetics, anyone?), but the miraculous and myriad uses that its untrained or self-trained proponents put it to in trying to explain human sexuality as some sort of field subject to univeral rules.

Ms. Alkon is apparently one of these pop evpsych practicioners and Jen wanted to know more about the holes in her theories. I thought it'd be useful to post our conversation here, because this sort of thing comes up a lot in internet discussions and I'd like to be able to refer people to a set document regarding ev psych and why it isn't a magic key which unlocks the mystery of human sexuality.

Jen started out byindicating she didn't quite understand what biodeterminism was, so I gave her a pocket definition:

Biodeterminism = Biology is the primary and ultimate explanation for our social behaviors.

Ferinstince: Women are naturally less promiscuous than men because, biologically speaking, they have more investment in a baby than men do.

Jen then responded:


So would something such as this be considered biodeterminism?

commenter: "There are all types of men and all types of women and saying there is only one correct way for them to proceed is overly simple."
 
Amy Alkon: No, it's absolutely not. There are variances in people, but we have evolved human psychology that is more similar than it is different. As a woman, you take a risk in approaching a man because he is likely to devalue you (because his genes are well aware that sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, per Daly and Wilson). 

My answer follows below...

It is extremely biodeterminist.

It also points out a main problem with evpsych: most of its proponents simply haven't read sweet fuck-all in ethnography so they tend to blithely assume that whatever their own culture does is somehow a transhuman norm.

Take the "higamous, hogamous women are monogamous; hogamous, higamous men are polygamous" crap Amy seems to support. Yes, it MAY be a fact that "women invest more in their children" than men, biologically speaking, but to go from that to "women thus need to play hard to get" in the dating game" ignores a shitload of research in so-called "primitive" societies which shows plenty of examples of women being sexually aggressive and not biologically monogamous. Folks who use evpsych to explain their dating problems tend to presume that "marriage" means "never fucking anyone other than one's husband". But just to pull one example out of a hat, there are many, many societies where women's sexual favors are "given" to guests as a matter of course. Certain traditional Eskimo societies spring to mind, but our own society also tosses up plenty of examples where monogamy isn't the rule...

So how does all this square with the idea that women's sexually is somehow driven by the relative rarity of their eggs?

In fact, there are plenty of serious biologists (Jared Diamond springs to mind) who point out that human sexual receptivity (which is constant) combined with the fact that human women have hidden ovulation may suggest that NOT KNOWING who the father of one's child is may in fact be the glue that held early human societies together. In this reading, it would be biologically in the woman's interest to have an "official" mate and yet also have sex with other guys now and again. That way there'd be one man with a primary interest in her children, but all men in the band would have at least SOME interest in her children.

This is even more likely when one takes into consideration that early human bands were small and very probably inbred, so from a pure "Darwinian transmission of the genes" rule, pulling for the team as a whole became a very solid evolutionary strategy rather than just pulling for one's own whelps. It's also notable in this context that anthropology and psychology have both looked long and hard at the birth of the incest taboo as the possible foundation-stone of "modern" human sociology.

Evpsych people - especially the self-taught amateurs - also generally preume that there's been no substantial biological evolution among human beings for the last 250 thousand years (generally true) and that this thus means we are basically larger, naked, tool-using, walking chimps (largely false). When we learned how to manipulate symbols via speach and especially when culture was born some 40,000 years ago with the birth of abstract thought, we became socially-programmed, culture-bearing animals. Sure, biology still INFLUENCES us. It does not, however, DETERMINE our behavior: culture plays a much larger role than biology in determining what you do and, of course, there is always individual agency to take into consideration.

Take my country, for example. There's no evolutionary reason for anyone to use clothes in a climate like Brazil's and yet everyone I see around me is using them. That's a fact created by our history and society, not our genes. And our sexual behavior - especially our supposed penchant for greater acceptance of "trans-racial" and extra-marital sex - can be much more convincingly traced back to slavery and its consequences rather than any particular combination of genes.

Evpsych people (and again, particularly the amateurs) like to hand-wave everything discovered by sociology and anthropology over the last 200 years as "squishy science" and thus not even worth looking at. They thus miss out on social science's one indisbutable contribution to human knowledge: its dense and varied descriptions of thousands of diversified human societies. And in the field of sexual mores, it's REALLY diverse. One of the things evpsych amateurs ignore is that today's norm of "civilization" is quite well linked, scientifically speaking, to a norm of hypergamous marriage, female subordination and female sexual passivity. Given that the vast majority of the world is now "civilized", evpsych people point to the majority of today's peoples as "proof" that these characteristics are transhuman norms. What they should be doing, were they truly serious about their field, is looking into the vast corpus collected by anthopologists re: "non-civilized" sexual behavior in order to see if it meets their predictions.



It generally doesn't.

This shit is convincing in theory. Where it fails is when we look at what people REALY do as opposed to what evpsych theorists think they should be doing according to there readings of Wilson and Dawkins.

R.I.P. Bennet A. Masel, All-American Activist, 1955-2011

"I transcend your puny categorization."

What to say about Ben Masel?

Unlike many of the people mourning him today, I was never a close friend of Ben - more like an annoying hanger-on at his house, one of those punk kids on the porch. But Ben had an enormous influence on my life. What always impressed me about him was his ability to never, ever feel that the system would win. He was absolutely convinced that WE were winning, that the system had clay feet, that it could and should be fought. That anything, ultimately, could be done: it was only a question of us going out and doing it. I first met Ben in 1985 when I was a freshman at the UW and I cannot even begin to count the things he, Rob Koenig and Brian Allen turned me on to in politics, history and culture.

The first time I was ever busted, at the 1985 shanty town demos, it was Ben who calmed me down and let me know it was all part of the game. Ben was a true CITIZEN, in the most precise and absolute sense of the word. A person who realized that it is us who make the rules and the power, ultimately, and that we thus need to be responsible for them.

Ben Masel was one of the few really great people I have known in my life and not a week goes by that I don't think of him. Wherever I was in the world, there was always a big portion of my heart that was warmed just knowing that he was out there in Madison, kicking ass and taking names. That no matter how politically isolated I felt, no matter how unreal things seemed, I knew that Benny would look at what I was seeing, smile his sardonic smile, shake his head, and sum up in one pithy sentence an analysis of the problem that a lesser man (like myself) would have to use a thesis to describe. I could always comfort myself with the fact that as long as Ben was out there, someone would understand this shit and wouldn't let it defeat them, no matter how overwhelmingly awful it seemed to me.

Today, all I can think of is what a horrible moment it is for us all - especially those of us who love Wisconsin - to lose him. But then again, that was also a part of Ben Masel: he'd take us to where we could be effective, make sure that the dance was well underway and then he'd smile, go home, smoke a joint, watch T.V... He always knew when to step back. Then he'd return. The morale of any demonstration, occupation - any political event at all - would rise whenever his face appeared. My deepest pain, today, is knowing that we won't have that feeling again. But Ben always trusted that the rest of us would keep the ball rolling. Now that we no longer have him to fall back on, we need to make sure that we don't betray that trust. Big, big hugs out to all of you who are today missing Bennet Masel.

You are not alone.

In memory of Ben, here are two Pete & Lou Berryman videos. While virtually visiting with friends today, I realized that a big part of what I’m missing about Ben is the Madison Wisconsin of the 1970s and ‘80s that he represented so well. The demonstrators and radicals in The War at Home were my childhood heroes and when I arrived at the U.W. in 1984, Ben’s house was a hang out for those folks from that time who were still keeping up the good fight.

I think the first of these two videos represents the world’s sense that Madison at that time was a very magical conjuncture in human history and no one who lived there, then, can ever forget it.

In my dreams, I often find myself back in the old La Chateau Co-op or walking down State Street when it was still the city’s commercial center. Going into the old Pegasus Games, for example, and seeing Laurie behind the counter, passing by the Soap Opera, or studying at Steep & Brew (still there). So this video is very poignant to me, as I'm sure it will be to many old Madisonites.

The second video, however, is for those of you who, like me, are threatened to be overwhelmed by nostaglia and what we in Brazil call saudades. It’s Pete and Lou on the steps of the capitol during the demonstrations a month ago. This is the Madison we all love and remember and it’s so important for us now to keep it in our hearts and not let it die.

Hugs out to all of you who are missing Ben today. Please leave a commentary relating one of your best memories of Ben, so that they can be registered in something a bit more firm than Facebook.

Love to you all.

Ben in an iconic moment, and also as I best remember him.

"A new kind of Republican with nothing to hide"

Ben's campaign for Governor on the Republican ticket

Madison Wisconsin - Pete & Lou Berryman

Pete & Lou on the Capitol steps, 2011

(If you're looking for more information on who Ben was, go here. I'll add more links as other stories come in.)

Daily Kos on Ben.

We take the show to Minnesota, we take the show to Monterey

We fly to Boston on a plane and we drive to Portland, Maine
And we gig along the way
And at the end of each performance we blow the audience a kiss
And when following the show they come up to say hello,
Seems it always leads to this:

CHORUS
So how’s ol’ Madison, Wisconsin, is that Paul Soglin still the mayor
And is Rennebohm's expanding, the Club de Wash still there?
I used to sit out on the terrace and watch my grade point disappear
For the life of me I don’t know how I wound up here

Now I can see us in the future, we take a boat to Bengal Bay
From Calcutta on a train to the Himalayan chain
Takes at least another day
We hike for weeks among the foothills, it feels like 700 miles
We ask a Sherpa, could you please help us carry all our cheese?
And he turns around and smiles:

CHORUS

We leave Mount Everest behind us, we hop a steamer tramp to Perth
Old Australia seems to me's far away as you can be
And remain upon the Earth
But in our Bucky Badger derbies as we survey the billabong
We think we’re really off the map till a local sees the cap
And didgery-does a little song:

CHORUS

We leave Australia in a rocket, we hit the moon and take a walk
The craters all are full of guys with enormous buggy eyes
And they all begin to talk
It sounds like "hey gadeng vadaieda oh yah gadeng vadeida hey"
But we realize pretty soon, they mean 'welcome to the moon,
Have a beer and by the way'...

CHORUS
So how’s ol’ Madison, Wisconsin, is that Paul Soglin still the mayor
And is Rennebohm's expanding, the Club de Wash still there?
I used to sit out on the terrace and watch my grade point disappear
For the life of me I don’t know how I wound up here

Bruna Surfistinha: A Review

Note: the following review was also posted on Regina Scharf's "Deep Brazil" blog. Hat's off to Regina for letting me repost it here.











A week before Carnaval, Ana Paula and I had an opportunity to see “Bruna Surfistinha“, the new film by director Marcus Baldini, together with sex and gender researchers Gregory Mitchell and Fatima Ceccetto.

The film is loosely based on the writings and experiences of Raquel Pacheco, AKA “Bruna the Surfer Chick”, a paulista prostitute who became briefly famous in the early aughties as one of the pioneers of internet commercialized sex. Long before Craig’s List became notorious as a virtual meeting point for pros and punters, “Bruna” had her own website where she’d describe her day in florid prose and “grade” her clients as to their sexual performance. Punters apparently couldn’t get enough of it, confirming the old saw that what really turns most clients on is the illusion (?) that their sexual prowess impresses even sex workers. Bruna’s blog became an overnight sensation, winning prizes and even earning its author recognition by the Old Media. Surfing on her new-found celebrity status, Raquel retired from The Life, married a client and entered university as a psychology major.

I had to admit that walking into the theater, I had deep reservations about the film. Given the Brazilian media’s current artificially-induced panic regarding trafficking of women and sexual tourism, I expected a tiresome morality play. To a certain extent, I wasn’t deceived: the end of the film shows Bruna leaving prostitution to be reclaimed by society as a good girl and potential future wife. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by all the twists and turns the plot took to get to the predictable denouement. When I left the theater I felt that, while the film has major issues that need to be addressed, it does a better job showing the diversity and ambiguities of prostitution than any motion picture I’ve seen thus far.

The problem with most whore flicks is that they tend to focus on only one experience of sex work: either it’s a rollicking, laugh-a-minute blast (think “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”) or a degrading, humiliating, awful experience akin to slavery (think “Cristiane F”). Few films, if any, deal with sex workers’ main complaints about their jobs: to wit, it’s generally boring work where employees are routinely treated like subhumans, PARTICULARLY by the folks who want to “save” them from “a life of exploitation and degradation”. Even fewer try to show the vast diversity of sex work, which ranges from quick “buck-a-minute” blowjobs to lavish “call-out” services which provide entire sexual fantasy packages for thousands of dollars a shot.

To its enormous credit, “Bruna Surfistinha” attacks both of these cinematographic blind spots head on.

The first half of the film focuses on the day-to-day routine of sex work in almost tiresome detail. Raquel and her co-workers are shown as a diverse group of people who are in the job for a variety of reasons. Sure, there’s the drug addict. But there’s also the single mom, whose kid is the center of her life and the black maid who’s delighted to be promoted to the position of prostitute. And there’s Raquel herself, who found in sex work an escape from a suffocating and patriarchic family. The madame at Bruna’s first job is neither a scheming, exploitative viper, nor a matronly figure with a heart of gold: she’s just a slightly bitchy businesswoman trying to run a knocking shop full of diverse and problematic personalities. The film also shows her kicking workers out for using drugs, something that’s far more common in the sex biz in Brazil than the oft-repeated stereotype that brothel managers use drugs to keep sex workers addicted and passive. (Anyone who’s ever had firsthand experience dealing with someone who’s far gone on booze and coke – prostitutes’ two drugs of choice – can testify as to how ridiculous that particular stereotype is).

And then there are the clients.

At first, I was afraid that the film would follow the tired old stereotype that punters are an evil brood of ugly, sex-deprived, quasi-rapist perverts. Raquel’s first sexual experience with a client is truly horrid, verging on rape. The camera zooms in on her wincing face as the john plunges away, oblivious to her discomfort. However, she soon gets into the swing of her job and as she does, her clients become better looking and more attentive. At first I thought this ridiculous, but afterwards, in a moment of fridge logic, I thought that perhaps this was the director trying to show Raquel’s changing perceptions of sex work: first, all the men are repulsive, creepy and stereotypical; later, they become more interesting, handsome and individuated. The film even shows her having what is possibly her first orgasm-through-intercourse with a client, something that pros from three continents assure me does happen from time to time (if not as often as punters imagine it happening). In a surprise switch, it’s Raquel’s awful and apparently heartless first client who’s always there for her in moments of crisis and who probably saves her life. The end of the film implies that, upon leaving prostitution, Raquel hooked up permanently with him. Now THAT’S a Chekov’s Gun few American directors would have the balls to fire.

Another great thing about Bruna Surfistinha is that it when it comes to showing the diversity of sex work venues, Baldini really gives it the old college try. Raquel is shown working, in sequence, in a small downtown brothel – or privé – as a rent-a-girlfriend at Love Story disco, trading blowjobs for transit-fines with cops, as a high-priced call girl, as an internet-based one-woman brothel and, finally, as an addicted, coked out whore giving it up for 15 reais a shot in a fast foda in crackolândia. (A scene which is responsible for what, IMHO, is the film’s best potential internet-ready meme: “Hoje não estou dando: estou distribuindo.”)

But for all its positive points, there are problems with Bruna Surfistinha. For one thing, in trying to show the diversity of sex work, the director puts Raquel through a veritable rollercoaster-ride of a career which only vaguely resembles the real woman’s memoirs. In real life, Raquel claimed she entered sex work with eyes wide open and a set goal: make a hundred thousand reais to pay for college and get out. She paid for health insurance (including psychological care) and registered as a tax-paying independent worker. Apparently, she did get addicted to coke at one point, but not to anything like the degree shown in the film. Shortly after she became an internet celebrity, she cashed in her chips and retired. By all accounts, Raquel is doing fairly well in the straight work market today.

In the film, however, “Bruna” rises meteorically from privé puta to high-priced call girl in one fell swoop. She then, predictably, falls into the degradation of drugs, trading sex for coke money in São Paulo’s worst zona (all without ever losing her swank pool-equipped penthouse, mind you). This “rise and fall of the whore”-style plot was hackneyed even back when Jesus was a kosher carpenter washing sex workers’ feet. Seeing it on the silver screen today can only make the spectator groan, especially if they’ve actually read Raquel’s book “O Doce Veneno do Escorpião”.

In fact, last Thursday I interviewed a prostitute in Macaé who spared no words in qualifying the film as “trash” specifically because of its “romanticized notion of prostitution as degradation”. “OK,” she said, “yes, there are women strung out on crack and other drugs selling sex. But hell, I’m 44 and entered into the life when I was 40 and I’ve already bought two houses for myself on my earnings. You mean to tell me the Bruna supposedly did all that, got a penthouse apartment and everything, and still didn’t put a single Real away for herself? That’s not how it works”.

But it’s perhaps too early to hope that the cinematographic industry would produce a “true-to-life” pop film about sex work, especially in today’s climate of hysteria regarding trafficking. When it comes to portraying the face of Brazilian sex work, “Bruna Surfistinha“, for all its faults, is a valiant effort and a necessary corrective to 2009’s execrable “Filhas do Sol”, though it’s perhaps not as good as 2008’s indy production :”O Céu de Suely”. With the reservation that showings of the film should be accompanied by readings of Raquel’s book, I can recommend it as a good resource for the professor who wishes to educate regarding sex work in terras brasilis.

Are you sick of highly paid teachers?

Are you sick of highly paid teachers?

(by Meredith Menden, shamelessy copied by Thad)

Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or10 months a year! It's time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do - babysit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan-- that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.

However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET'S SEE....

That's $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute -- there's something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher's salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student--a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!

(This one goes out to my mom, my aunt and uncle Lewis and all the educators who made me what I am today.)

Figleaf on the Myth of the Man-Hating Feminist

by Thaddeus Blanchette

Anti-sexist, pro-sex blogger Figleaf brings up an excellent point about the male origins of "feminist" male-bashing:

Kind of funny how many of the bitterly anti-male slanders, slurs, and stereotypes commonly attributed to "radical feminism" predate feminism. Sometimes by centuries. Occasionally by millennia! They were already highly common in American and English male-only dance halls and similar entertainment venues back when "mainstream feminism" meant the possibility of women owning property and "radical feminism" was the crazy idea that women might someday be allowed to vote.

I bring this up in no small part due to allegations that these are feminist in nature. And I bring that up in no small part because those allegedly feminist characterizations of men are nettlesome to men in general and extremely nettlesome to men's rights activists and their allies.

M'kay, and now, confronted with that sort of incontrovertible proof that sexist and/or "reverse sexist" stereotypes about men predate feminism and, indeed, often originate with men themselves, a lot of guys who are still nettled will say things like "yeah, well, some feminists still propagate those stereotypes so feminism is still all about hating men".

What's always bothered me about the "anti-male feminist myth" is precisely this point: the people perpetuating male-hating rhetoric are, in their great majority, not feminists at all

Again, I get to hear this sort of crap all the time in my fieldwork here in Rio, where gringo men constantly complain that "feminism" has turned European and North American women into greedy, self-absorbed bitches with an agenda who only want to take men to the cleaners. Typically, these guys say this while holding two prostitutes on their lap who, while generally not bitches, are very much women with an agenda which involves siphoning the maximum amount of money out of the guy's pockets.

And time after time, these guys tell me about how I "don't know what it's like up there" and how it's "impossible for a guy to get laid these days without risking his life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness". And every one of these post-modern Lotharios claims to have met legions of man-hating feminists.

Now, what bothers me is that when I lived in the U.S. back in the 1980s, I was a student at the U.W. Madison in the sociology department. One would be hard put to find a higher concentration of sho' 'nuff man-hating feminists than that time and place and it was hard to run into them even back then. These women had exactly ZERO impact on my sex life. They also had pretty near to ZERO impact on the campus cultural and political life. Mostly, they ganged together in their own café and bookstore, debating whether or not homosexuality was indeed the practice of feminist theory. Most of the lesbians in the community couldn't stand them, either. One only occasionally had to deal with them when they came out of their empowering lavender and pink "girls only" clubhouse for large community events like "Take Back the Night" or the anti-apartheid rallies.

Seriously, even in feminist-friendly, radical 1980s Madison, I would have been hard pressed to point to a more marginalized and irrelevant group than the radical man-hating feminists. These weren't folks that even a co-op-living, feminist-supportive, commie-loving, sociology major boy like me were likely to run into, but yesterday's fraternity Biffs and dormer Billy Bobs are now saying they've met literally tens of thousands of young  would-be castrators...?

Do tell, boys.

Now, I'm not saying man-hating feminists didn't have any influence at all. Pretty much every woman I know went through a "man hating" stage at some point - usually for a week or two during their first women's studies course - but that was more venting than anything else. And I do find that a lot of women will sort of unconsciously fall back on this stereotype when confronted with what they feel is an egregious example of male chauvinist pigism. Because of my work with prostitutes, I get to see a lot of American and European womens' knees jerk in precisely this fashion.

But this attitude is actually a good measure of how UNATTACHED these women are from today's feminism. The typical college educated American woman of my generation hasn't thought of feminism in theoretical, philosophical or even practical terms since her school days. ("Prostitutes' rights? What's that?") This is why you'll often the 30 to 50 set reaching for Andrea Dworkin when confronted with male behavior they don't like. It's reflexive form of defence, not some sort of deeply thought out political position and it's certainly not a plot to diminuish men. They just go for the largest rhetorical brick in their arsenal when a male does something they classify as "anti-woman".

That's why I agree that the people keeping the myth of the man-hating feminists alive are generally anything but feminists. Alot of the women who do this sort of thing are actually quite sexist and homophobic and "strategically remember" only those things about feminism that are contextually, rhetorically valuable to them at the time. Sort of a "pick and choose" version of feminism.

You want to see full-on, Dworkin-style man-hating feminist rhetoric? Don't talk to a feminist: talk to a 40-something, middle-class soccer mom with a BA in Comparative Lit (or Anthropology), 4 kids and a bills-paying husband. Tell her that you think that trafficking in women is by-and-large a moral panic and not a multi-billion dollar industry the way the media plays it out to be. Or say that you frequent prostitutes - whether you do or not, just say it. THERE'S your instant "man hating feminist": the woman who's lifestyle is maintained by a male's labour, who would be tossed into penury in an instant if she lost her mate and - worse - who is smart enough to know full well the bind she's gotten herself into. That's the most commonly encountered kind of woman who spouts "man hating rhetoric" these days, if only occasionally. A woman who considers Hillary Clinton to be the greatest statesperson of the age and Princess Diana to be the next step over from Mother Teresa. Someone who once dreamed of a fulfilling career for herself, but who became a professional mom through the force of circumstance of living in a country where the labor of raising a family is considered to be a "private" (read female) responsability. 

And who can really blame her?

But dude, if THAT'S the kind of woman you've gone and married, then you've got a big load of blame to shoulder yourself, don't you? After all, you could've done the male version of Lysistrata a long time ago and simply insist that all the women you date pay 50/50 (or at least propostionately based on salary) for your common life together. You didn't do that and now you're bitching that women treat you like an ATM machine and it's all the "man-hating feminists'" fault, is it?

See this, man?

That's the smallest violin in the world and it's playing "My Heart Bleeds for You".

Wagadu Special Issue on Demystifying Sex Work and Sex Workers

New stuff hot off the academic press, free and (for a change) in English. Our article is not nearly as good as some of the others, but it's still an excellent collection that deals with many of the issues being raised here regarding agency, power, victimization and peoples' presumptions that they know what's going in places like Brazil, Thailand, or Cambodia because, like, y'know, they watched an Oprah show about it once.


Wagadu special issue on demystifying prostitution.

Amy Winehouse says goodbye to Brazil

...by Janis Joplin
(translated by Thaddeus Blanchette. The original can be found here. Segue o link para o original.)

Amy Winehouse and an unidentified Brazilian friend enjoy afternoon

cocktails on the veranda of the Hotel Santa Teresa.

Amy's left town already? Her Brazilian tour is over? That's it? Half a dozen pocket shows, a flash of her tits from the hotel veranda, a few other photos showing her looking drunk and lost, a stumble, an attempt to sing into her water bottle as if it were the mike and a few discreet exits from the stage during her performances?

That's all?

And people still want to compare her to me? For the free love of God! I recognize that the girl has talent. She's an inspired singer with a potent voice. She has carisma and a good nose for repertoire. But in terms of tossing a world class fit, on or off stage, she still has much to learn.

When I was in Rio, also in search of rehab, I did a lot more than one would expect a marginal pop star to do.

Janis in Rio, 1970.

(And isn't it odd that the Third World is often used as a rehab center by washed up or burnt out stars? Perhaps the audiences there are so thankful for some contact with their idol that they'll applaud even when she forgets the words or spits out her dentures. Maybe now that the BRICs are getting stronger, we'll see Benito di Paula do a tour of the U.S. with semi-V.I.P. boxes going for 300 bucks a head.)

Whatdaya think, Benny?

But like I was saying, when I was in Rio in February 1970 during the Medici dictatorship (and isn't it interesting that HE isn't up here in Heaven?), I really kicked out the jams. I was tossed out of the Copacabana Palace on my ass for swimming naked in the pool. I sang in brothels, mixed barbiturates with caipirinhas and Globo biscuits... I was busted several times for going topless on the beach. And then there was the biggest scandal of them all: I fucked Serguei. Or so they say. And if they say so, I believe it. I certainly can't remember what happened.

Say it loud, Serguei! "I'm a douchebag and I'm proud!"



And just look at how things are now. None of that would even raise an eyebrow today. (Well, maybe fucking Serguei would still shock some folks as an act of exceptional courage.) Excesses and outrageous behavior are the classic script for for a drugged-out rock star. It's what's expected. What no one was really ready for was the sight of Amy at Bibi Lanches on Copacabana placidly eating a bowl of açai fruit with granola.

Today, in order to shock, you need far more than a dose of heroin. A pop star would need to, I dunno, marry Michel Temer, start her show on time, say she doesn't have an e-mail account or declare that she thinks social networking is garbage and a tremedous waste of time.

Or, if she wants to get really radical, she'd at the very least have to refuse to get a pair of silicon tits.

(Hats off to Blog da Janis. Our translation of their material is done volutarily and represents no challenege to their ownership of it.)