Indian Women Try to Arm Themselves

According to The Guardian, scores of women in India have been contacting their local police on how to obtain a gun license in the wake of a recent brutal gang rape and murder.

Unfortunately, India rarely grants such licenses, which means that these women will remain defenseless against attackers.  As one official recounts, "We had to patiently tell them that one needs to have a clear danger to one's life to be given a licence."

India's standard for obtaining a license to possess a firearm seems similar to New York's "proper cause" requirement for obtaining a carry license--individuals must show "a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession."  In New York City, this means "exposure . . . to extraordinary personal danger, documented by proof of recurrent threats to life or safety requiring authorization to carry a handgun." There must be "instances in which Police Department records demonstrate that the life and well-being of an individual is endangered, and that s/he should, therefore, be authorized to carry a handgun." And "the mere fact that an applicant has been the victim of a crime or resides in or is employed in a ‘high crime area,’ does not establish ‘proper cause’ for the issuance of a carry or special handgun license."  Since so few people can meet this criteria, licenses are only issued to the rich, famous, and politically connected.

In India as in New York, however, strict laws do little to curb illegal firearm ownership.  According to The Guardian, "There are estimated to be 40m guns in India, the second highest number in the world after the US. Licences are hard to obtain and most are illegal weapons, many manufactured in backstreet workshops. Official ownership levels remain low – three guns for every 100 people."  The DOJ estimates that there are some 2 million illegal guns in New York City.  Prohibition simply does not work.

India's rape epidemic poses a conundrum for mainstream American liberals.  Just as Siouxsie and the Banshees' Arabian Knights draws criticism for its harsh view of Muslim and Arabic men, many politically correct liberals hesitate to condemn misogyny in other cultures.  After all, liberalism is all about tolerance and acceptance of cultural differences, so we shouldn't judge other cultures by their misogynistic practices.  At the same time, violence against women is something that liberals do not tolerate, and rightfully so.

This liberal double bind often surfaces in discussions of violence against women.  On the one hand, liberals will sympathize with criminals, and complain that the American criminal justice system unjustly persecutes minorities.  At the same time, the pro-perp crowd routinely condemns rapists and domestic violence misdemeanants, as if drug dealers and other "non-violent" offenders were not the same people beating their girlfriends and committing rapes.

The situation of the Indian women inquiring about gun ownership further complicates the scenario for the liberal crowd, which views guns as a form of evil incarnate that must be eradicated. 

The liberal, "feminist" blog Jezebel mistakenly reported the story that gun sales were rising among Indian women, conveniently glossing over the fact that India's strict "gun control" laws assure that Indian women will not be able to lawfully possess firearms.

Interestingly, Jezebel simply linked to the Guardian article without comment, despite having spent the better part of the last month blasting guns and gun owners with all the sophistication of a twelve-year-old with ADD.

The fact that Indian women want to arm themselves for protection managed to silence the liberal "feminists" at Jezebel because their worldview simply does not allow them to comprehend that firearm ownership is a legitimate means of self-defense. But they would come across as insensitive to the plight of Indian women if they criticized them in the same way they criticize American gun owners.

American women, according to the liberals, should not own guns to protect themselves because guns are evil.  There are always "other ways" to protect yourself, the argument goes. Since "most" rapes (although definitely NOT ALL rapes) occur between acquaintances, having a gun would be of no use, since the rapist would already be too close by the time the need for self-defense arose. And, besides, guns are only magical, heat-seeking death rays when used by criminals; an armed victim will only have her weapon taken away from her by the attacker.

Luckily, the police in America are fantastic and will always be there in time to rescue you.  (Never mind that these are the same police who are violating the civil rights of minorities; when it suits the liberals' argument, the corrupt cops magically metamorphose into heroes.)  The real solution is to teach men not to rape (yeah, that'll work…)

Arabian Knights

I was lucky enough to be given Siouxsie and the Banshees' Juju for Christmas.  While I still prefer A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Juju is nonetheless an amazing album.

Here is some trivia about what is (as of now) my favorite song on the album, "Arabian Knights."

According to Siouxsie Sioux, the song's melodies were inspired by The Doors.  And the lyrics are indeed about the plight of Muslim women: "It's nothing to do with a 'feminist' thing, it's like a humane thing. Like how the Muslim women cope, I don't know.  The way women are treated in some religions, if it was a race being treated like that and not a sex, there would be uproar about it. I still haven't overcome being a girl yet, as far as other people see me, and that's very important. I think it's happened a bit, but not enough" (15/8/81).

Some of the more stirring lyrics: the haunting refrain, "I heard a rumor / It was just a rumor / I heard a rumor / What have you done to her?"  One commenter thinks this is a suggestion of female circumcision. While there is no explicit reference to clitorectomy, this interpretation certainly fits, as there is obviously some violence being done to the woman, although it is not clear what.

The last verse is simply magnificent: 

"Veiled behind screens / Kept as your baby machine / Whilst you conquer more orifices / Of boys, goats and things / Ripped out sheeps eyes-no forks or knives."

The meaning couldn't be clearer: the woman is secluded at home and covered in veils, her role reduced to reproduction, whilst the man goes out and fucks boys and goats.

The comments page linked above criticizes Siouxsie for her "primitive" view of Arab culture and her "massive racial stereotyping." Based on my personal experiences with Arab and Muslim culture, though, Siouxsie isn't too far off the mark.

On the Vietnam War

Excellent passage from Valley of Decision: The Siege of Khe Sanhn, by John Prados and Ray W. Stubble on the stress of combat in South Vietnam:

"In fact, Vietnam was a searing experience for all those who went through combat. World War II veterans may have seen battles unfold on a larger scale, but nothing rivaled Vietnam in the constancy of risk, the immediacy of danger.  The average World War II Marine spent seventy days a year in combat. A Marine tour in South Vietnam lasted only thirteen months, but in that time an infantryman could expect to be on combat detail for some 270 days. Moreover, combat in Vietnam seemed wholly illogical--veterans of the 'big war' proudly recalled the islands they had captured, the objectives seized. Marines the Vietnam spent their days repeatedly sweeping the same terrain, capturing the same hills and hamlets, sometimes falling victim to ambushes in the same places" (108).

I've always thought the brave men who served in Vietnam should be considered "the greatest generation."  Not only were they fighting for a government that woefully mismanaged the war and for a country that treated them worse than garbage, but they had to live in constant fear of attack.  The enemy was everywhere. There was no security: this wasn't like World War II where the Allies would clear and secure territory and then set up bases for future advancement.  Technology had also developed since 1945 or since 1953, making war all the more brutal and deadly.  Plus combat Marines were usually sleeping outside, in the rain, without the most basic facilities for human hygiene or comfort.  And they were draftees--just normal, working class kids who answered the call to serve their country. I wonder how many of us today would actually be able to handle all that.

Caitlin Moran: On Female Pubic Hair

Not surprisingly, Caitlin Moran holds the same opinions I do regarding female pubic hair and its political importance and connection to consumerism.  A few selections from How to Be a Woman:

"Hair is the opening salvo in decades of quietly screaming 'WHO AM I?' while standing in front of an array of products in the drugstore, clutching an empty basket."

"Pubic hair must be confined to a very small area or, increasingly, removed completely…While some use the euphemism 'Brazilian' to describe this state of affairs, I prefer to call it what it is--'a ruinously high-maintenance, itchy, cold-looking child's vagina.'"

"'I remember when it was all furry round here,' I will say sadly in the changing rooms of the gym, surrounded by smooth, pink genitals. 'Hairy toots as far as the eye could see. Wild and untamable. An arbor of nature. Playground of my youth. I used to spend hours there. Now…now it's all waxed and empty.  All the wildlife has gone. The bulldozers have moved in. They're going to build a new Safeway, there, on the vaginas.'"

"It is now accepted that women will wax. We never had a debate about it. It just happened--and we never thought to discuss it."

"I can't believe we've got to a point where its basically costing us money to have a vagina. They're making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like they're a communal garden. It's a stealth tax. Muff excised…God DAMN you, mores of pornography that have made it into my undies. GOD DAMN YOU."

"The real reason all porn stars wax is because, if you remove all the fur, you can see more when you're doing penetrative shots. And that's it. This gigantic, billion-dollar Western obsession with Brazilians and Hollywoods, which millions of normal women have to time events in their lives around, endure pain and inconvenience for…is all down to the technical considerations of cinematography."

"The crotch, the upper lip, and the armpit are miles apart…What happens to them, and why, is wholly different--primarily because armpits aren't intimately associated with sexual maturity, or, indeed, sexuality at all…So what you do with your armpits is just an aesthetic concern--and not really part of the Struggle."

FISA Amendments Act

Well, at least no one can accuse California Senator Dianne Feinstein of being inconsistent.  It's not just your Second Amendment rights she's after; Feinstein wants to gut the Fourth Amendment, too.

After an "unusual special session," Congress voted to reauthorize the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which "allows for the federal government to spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant, without probable cause, and without even informing the allegedly relevant oversight bodies in Congress as to the number of Americans being spied on." Read more from Reason.

Feinstein urged her colleagues to vote down proposed amendments (by Senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden) that would have strengthened constitutional protections.  In Feinstein's opinion, the government would never abuse its FISA power (no, of course not), and desperately needs to continue surveillance operations in the aftermath of 9/11…eleven years ago.

Slowly but surely, we are moving closer and closer toward becoming the police state that Feinstein wants America to become.  As long as liberals keep electing goons like Feinstein and Schumer, the gradual erosion of our constitutional liberties will continue unabated into the future.

Caitlin Moran: On Pornography

I recently started reading Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman, and, as expected, I found her comments on contemporary pornography to be spot on.

"Essentially," Moran writes, "the Internet vends a porn monoculture."  Precisely. When a person searches for pornography on the Internet, the majority of results will be short clips or pictures from mainstream American studios, filmed in the San Fernando Valley.  The woman will likely be slim and Caucasian (although mainstream "niches" feature women of other ethnicities as well), wearing heavy makeup and ridiculously revealing clothing, and sporting a completely hairless pubic region.  Her male partners will also likely be completely hairless, and will most certainly be well endowed.  The short video will begin with the woman performing oral sex on the men, who will often handle her roughly, slap her face, call her degrading names, and force her to gag on their genitalia.  The men will then proceed to penetrate the woman's vaginal, anal, and oral orifices, until the scene concludes with the men masturbating until they ejaculate on the woman's face. (The material from European studios will be mostly similar, although perhaps without the derogatory language and with most certainly with more fashionable clothing.)

As Moran observes, "That single, unimaginative, billion-duplicated fuck is generally what we mean by 'porn culture.'"  She then goes on to list several of its signature characteristics that have had a tremendous influence on the world outside of pornography: "Brazilians. Hollywoods.  Round, high plastic tits. Acrylic nails that make it impossible to do up a shoe buckle, or type. MTV full of crotches and tits. Anal sex being an assume part of every woman's repertoire. Posters for makeup, or TV shows, that show women glassy-eyed, open-mouthed, and ready for a faceful of come.  Knickers being replaced by thongs. High, high heels that aren't really made for walking--just lying back and being fucked in." Aside from the breast implants (which are no longer in fashion), Moran's list is certainly accurate.

As a result of the proliferation of porn culture, according to Moran "12 percent of the images of women on the Internet are of them either on all fours, rammed into some highly unhygienic PVC, or being forced around outsized male genitalia, as if their sundry openings were some manner of tube bandage."

As Moran's description emphasizes, porn culture is not erotic.  In fact, porn is the complete opposite of eroticism.  Porn depicts the distorted bodies of 21st century consumer capitalism engaging in an uninspired performance of various sex acts.  While the overwhelming majority of mainstream American porn focuses on men dominating and abusing women, the process effectively dehumanizes and degrades all those involved.

In response to anti-porn Feminists, Moran notes that "the act of having sex isn't sexist, so there's no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist."  Instead, she writes, "it's the porn industry that's the problem.  The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt, and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth…$30 billion to be.  No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb."
 
Porn in its industrialized form is human sexuality distorted by consumerism and commodified.  Porn perfectly illustrates McLuhan's point that "medium is message": it does not matter that most porn is consumed without paying for anything other than an Internet connection, because the very process of consuming it transforms us into more prolific all-around consumers.  By feeding us plastic sex acts devoid of desire, porn distorts our relationship to ourselves, our bodies, our sexual partners, and our own desires.  We then attempt to fill the void created by porn with renewed consumption in all aspects of our lives.  The consumer of porn may witness countless ejaculations, and may himself ejaculate more often than is healthy, but he never achieves the satisfaction of orgasm.  Porn creates desires but does not satisfy them.

Moran correctly notes the deleterious affect that porn culture has on the young, both male and female alike.  While porn is only intended for adults, its proliferation ensures that children will nonetheless come in contact with it at some point.  As a form of sex education, industrialized porn presents a single homogenous conception of sexuality, entirely centered on the phallus.  Porn teaches young women that they must remove their pubic hair and wear revealing clothing to attract men.  They are shown that their pleasure is not important; instead, their role in sex is to please the man and allow him to take his pleasure from her however he sees fit.  Men, in turn, are shown a selfish and violent version of sexuality that essentially amounts to masturbation, using the woman to achieve orgasm. 

Moran imagines that young boys encountering porn for the first time would be "scared of someone who looks like an angry Burt Reynolds, bumming someone across a landing."  I would add that even adults who encounter porn culture for the first time can end up feeling disturbed, if not frightened, by what it communicates.  A short personal anecdote may help illustrate this point.

Like Caitlin Moran, I count myself as belonging to "the last generation before free online pornography starts being handed out, with the same largesse with which the postwar Labour government handed out milk and spectacles."  As a teenager, pornography for me meant magazines with pictures of naked women, from the frustratingly obscure Playboy to the more satisfying and revelatory Penthouse, Hustler, and Gallery.  When I first started viewing internet pornography while at college, it was still confined to photos rather than videos.  The closest I came to the porn industry was through film stills (such as the scene between Nikita Denise and Lexington Steele in Heavy Metal 2, which was an early favorite of mine for some reason).

Fast forward a few years.  It was late at night, and I was surfing the web for some porn.  I came across a page with a few short clips featuring an Asian woman and two extremely well-endowed Caucasian males. (I later learned that the scene was from Redlight District's Two in the Seat, featuring Tolly Crystal, Steve Holmes, and Brandon Irons.) I was both horrified and incredibly aroused by what I saw, as the men handled Tolly very roughly, using her for their pleasure.

Tolly is clearly not enjoying the experience.  Early in the scene, Irons tries to insert his finger into her anus while he is penetrating her vaginally, but Tolly pushes his arm away.  Irons nevertheless persists, at one point telling Tolly, "I'm gonna hurt you, bitch." (He also tells her she has a "filthy pussy" and calls her a "whore").  Meanwhile, Tolly performs fellatio on Holmes, who pushes her head down on his penis.  At one point, Holmes tries to kiss Tolly, but she vehemently refuses.   When the men take turns sodomizing Tolly, they are obviously hurting her.  As she winces and screams in pain, Holmes moans in pleasure, and Irons emits his own joyful exclamations.  After a lengthy double-penetration sequence, the two men ejaculate on her face.  Tolly's relief at the conclusion of the scene is evident--although her body is damages, she has survived the ordeal and will get her pay check.  

As a sexually experienced adult, I can appreciate the Bataillean transgressiveness of the scene.  It is so obviously wrong, in so many ways--Crystal, a Mongolian who came to the porn industry through Budapest, died shortly after the scene when she "fell" from a roof under mysterious circumstances. (It remains unclear whether her death was a suicide, an accident, or a murder carried out by Eastern European mafioso and/or human traffickers).  Yet to this day it continues to arouse me, and remains one of my the few mainstream American porn offerings that I still watch.

The problem, however, is that there are just too many scenes like this out there, offering essentially this same violent and sadistic version of sexuality.  Two in the Seat is arousing in the way rape fantasies are arousing--as an outlier, a variation on shared, consensual, non-exploitative sexual experiences.  But when it becomes the norm, it looses its transgressive character.  When there are too many rough and abusive porn scenes out there, sex itself becomes impoverished.

As an alternative to porn culture, Moran suggests a new, female pornography,"something that shows sex as something that two people do together, rather than a thing that just happens to a woman when she has to make rent.  Something in which…everyone comes."  Indeed, if there is one critique to be made of today's American and European pornography, it is that it is exclusively phallocentric.  Even so-called "lesbian" porn scenes revolve around penetration and often female "ejaculation" (urination).  As in Tolly's scene, when the men ejaculate, the scene is over and the woman's work is done.  Her pleasure is not even an issue, let alone a focal point of the encounter.  Men and women alike would benefit from more female orgasms in pornography, and less focus on the phallus and male ejaculation as the center and focal point of each scene.

Moran then offers a brief vision of what female pornography might involve: "I suspect that female pornography, when it really gets going, will be something wholly other: warm, humane, funny, dangerous, psychedelic, with wholly different parameters to male porn." I agree with Moran on the dangerous aspect, as female pornography will certainly not be vanilla or politically correct.  Even Joan Sewell confessed in I'd Rather Eat Chocolate that, since adolescence, her fantasy has been that "these knights from the Middle Ages would ravish me" (essentially, that she was a prisoner having forced sex).  In my own experience, the women with whom I have viewed pornography tend to appreciate the rougher variety: gang rape, tentacle rape, etc.

What separates this sort of violence from the violence in mainstream pornography (aside from the fact that simulated rape scenes do far less damage to a woman's body than most "consensual" anal and gangbang scenes) is the ability to shift perspectives.  Whereas today's porn almost exclusively forces the viewer to experience the scene from a phallic perspective, Moran envisions female pornography as a polymorphous, pan-sexual journey: "In their fantasies, the women grow and shrink, shape-shift, change age, color, and location. They manifest as vapor, light, and sound, they strobe through conflicting personas (nurse, robot, mother, virgin, boy, wolf) and a zodiac of positions…Imagine if pornography was not this bizarre, mechanized, factory-framed fucking: bloodless, naked aerobics, concerned solely with high-speed penetration and ostentatious ejaculation. Imagine if it were about desire."

"Bloomberg, LaPierre, and the Void"

In what is perhaps the most sensible op-ed I've read in The New York Times in ages, Ross Douthat had the nerve to criticize mainstream American liberals.

Using Mayor Bloomberg as a figurehead for "the self-consciously centrist liberalism of the Acela Corridor elite," Douthat emphasizes Bloomberg's provincialism, and "his bedrock assumption is that the liberal paternalism with which New York is governed can and should be a model for the nation as a whole."

Appropriately, Douthat suggests that popular liberal proposals, such as a renewed "assault weapons ban" and crackdowns on "illegal handguns," would come with a tremendous cost.  In order to ensure effective enforcement, criminalizing harmless behavior (such as the mere possession of a weapon) requires the infringement of other Constitutional rights (in addition to the Second Amendment).  Further, at a time when our nation's prisons are full of non-violent offenders, weapons bans will ultimately place even more non-violent people behind bars, destroying communities in the process.  As Douthat writes, "cracking down hard on illegal handguns, for instance, would probably involve “stop and frisk” on a huge scale, and might throw more young men in prison at a time when our incarceration rates are already too high."  Liberals, however, seem completely ignorant of this practical reality, and instead advocate increased criminalization of firearms without realizing that proper enforcement would necessitate an expansion of law enforcement practices that they find to be objectionable.

Douthat's summary of contemporary American liberalism is spot on. "The establishment view is interventionist, corporatist and culturally liberal," he writes. "It thinks that issues like health care and climate change and immigration are best worked out through comprehensive bills drawn up by enlightened officials working hand in glove with business interests. It regards sexual liberty as sacrosanct, and other liberties — from the freedoms of churches to the rights of gun owners — as negotiable at best. It thinks that the elite should pay slightly higher taxes, and everyone else should give up guns, SUVs and Big Gulps and live more like, well, Manhattanites. It allows the president an entirely free hand overseas, and takes the Bush-Obama continuities in foreign policy for granted."

On foreign policy, today's liberals are the direct descendants of the liberal imperialists who spurred America's involvement in Vietnam.  The New York Times takes for granted that the United States should exert its military presence throughout the world, and only bothers to criticize the abuses of imperialist excess when a Republican occupies the White House.  Domestically, liberals favor civilian disarmament, secularism, political correctness, and excessive government regulation of all human behavior save what goes on the bedroom.  Ultimately, their faith in the power of the State to correct social problems is unwaverable (provided, of course, that the Democrats are in power).

What is perhaps most frustrating, however, is how liberals are incapable of accepting the fact that they might be wrong about something.  They know that they are right and that their views should prevail over those of others because they are smarter than everyone else (having attended the best schools and the best universities).

Living in NYC, most of the people I interact with are die-hard liberals who follow the opinions of The New York Times and The Huffington Post to the letter.  When they encounter someone (like me) who possesses different views, their reactions feature a combination of disbelief (how could anyone not agree with me?) and anger.  They are remarkably quick to turn to insults because they are not used to conversing with people who are not liberals--as Charles Murray shows in Coming Apart, they spend their lives in carefully guarded enclaves surrounded by other members of the liberal elite.  For them, I am insane for believing in the right to keep and bear arms, paranoid for not trusting my government, and anti-American for opposing U.S. imperialism.

As Radley Balko tweeted in a reaction to Douthat's piece, "I wonder if the angry commenters responding to Douthat's NYT column today realize that they're only proving his point."

In the posts that at least advanced some sort of argument, commenters parroted many of the anti-gun left's favorite cliches, arguing that no one "needs" an "assault weapon," that there is no reason for them "unless you are planning a massacre," and that any notion of resisting the almighty government through armed resistance is futile.  Joel Frielander from Huntington Station, NY bemoans "the tiny little brains of many of the gun owners," who mistakenly believe that "if you take one gun away from them you are taking away all of their weapons."  In her own column, Fellow Op-Ed contributor Maureen Dowd follows many liberals in misinterpreting the Second Amendment as applying only to hunters: "Hunters can have their guns without leaving Americans so vulnerable to being hunted by demented souls with assault rifles that can fire 45 rounds per minute."

Of course, the Second Amendment is not about hunting, but about self-defense and defending the nation from tyranny and foreign invaders.  Urban liberals who are not gun owners would of course fail to realize that, in a rural setting where the police are far away and the territory is much larger than a suburban lot, an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine would be a much better self-defense weapon than a handgun.  In that case, their provincialism can be forgiven.  But their defeatism in suggesting that an armed populace would be powerless to resist domestic tyranny never ceases to shock me.

Unfortunately, liberals will never understand that the government is not infallible, and that a massive, armed guerilla uprising could bring the government to its knees.  Although they see America as a force of good in the world, they nonetheless assume that the government would unleash the full force of the U.S. military on its own population (thereby destroying the very society and infrastructure that it wishes to govern over), and that all members of the military and law enforcement would just go on following orders in the face of armed resistance.  The right to own semi-automatic rifles with thirty-round magazines is at the very core of the Second Amendment, in that a well-armed populace ups the ante for the government and makes it think twice before oppressing a disfavored minority or the population as a whole.