Pin-ups and Porn

Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Linda Williams
Pin-up Grrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, Maria Elena Buszek

Where do I begin to even approach the issues surrounding the multiple meanings of the depiction of women as sexual people in North American society? How can I hope to do any kind of justice to all the words that have been spoken and written about women as subjects and/or objects of desire, of the gaze - male or female – that fixes itself on female images of sexual expression, reception, assertion, invitation.

If only it could be as simple as this: people, for the most part, like sex. They like having sex, and often, when they aren’t having sex, or when they’re preparing to have sex, or thinking about how they’d like to have sex, they enjoy looking at images of people having sex, or looking like they might want to have sex. Some people like to look at men, some at women, some at couples or groups. Some like to look at the kinds of sex they’d like to have, others prefer looking at kinds of sex they would never in a million years consider having.

But because we have brought a specific kind of power relationship into this whole sex thing, to wit, the idea that people of one sex are more powerful than people of another sex – instead of admitting that there is some kind of power dynamic in all relationships, and working with that – the meanings of looking at sex and people in sexual situations gets all mixed up with ideas of social power and control, and suddenly you’re wondering if people are looking at other people because they think they own them, or because they don’t see them as people but as objects, and all sorts of other questions about what it means to like looking at people and thinking about sex while you’re looking.

These two books are about some of the ways that people look at pictures of other people doing things that are intended to be in some way sexual, and some of the ways that people present themselves or allow others to present them as people who are doing things that are intended to be in some way sexual. They explore all those tricky questions, such as whether it is empowering or demeaning to have other people look at your picture and think about sex. And they demonstrate that the issue is complex, and the meanings, both social and personal, of looking at sexual images for the purpose of pleasure, go far beyond the simple but all-to-common argument that all pornographic images represent male objectification and degradation of women, because they are made by men for men by the means of oppressing and humiliating women. There’s some of that, but there’s a whole lot more, too.

As Buszek comments in Pin-up Grrls that “the hand that creates does not necessarily control – and that there are great pleasures to be found in exploring this contradiction.”

A Fabulous Empire

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was, Angélica Gorodischer
trans. by Ursula K. LeGuin

Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer's collection of 11 meandering tales of the history, cities and people of an immeasurably vast and ancient empire, Kalpa Imperial is, I am informed by various reviewers, considered to be a fantasy classic in the Spanish-speaking world. Originally published in Spanish in 1983, it is the first of Gorodischer's books to be translated into English. I really hope we see more English translations soon, hopefully by someone so admirably suited to handle such material as Ursula K. LeGuin (whose marvellous novel, Always Coming home, displays more than a few stylistic, thematic and structural similarities to Gorodischer's book).

These tales are beautiful, wonderful, fabulous (and fabulist). They wind and wander through the vast landscape of history and geography, all the while grounded by the tiny but eloquent details of the lives and deaths of everyday people, from beggars to emperors. They give the sense of being, all at once, intimate narratives and archetypal legends, naive stories and universal wisdoms.

If you are, as I am, an admirer of the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, then you will find much to admire in Kalpa Imperial as well.

A Linguist Looks at Science Fiction

Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction, Walter E. Myers

Walter Meyer’s book, published in 1980, is and overview of the use of the science of linguistics in science fiction. As Meyers notes:

Recent years have seen a number of introductory critical works bent on discussing the “science” of science fiction, to shoe how the field achieves that alchemical mix of art and science that is its distinguishing characteristic…. But we notice a gap in works of this kind: they neglect linguistics.

Meyer goes on to discuss the irony inherent in the lack of interest in the use of linguistics in a genre that places so much emphasis on communication – not only within the works of the genre, where first contacts and other challenges to communication are prominent, but also in the nature of the genre as, at least in part, a genre in which "what if" scenarios are used to propose and explore and communicate ideas, speculations, theories, thought experiments, cautionary perspectives or future possibilities.

Meyers looks at how both the ideas and theories of linguistics, and the technical specifics of language formation production, and development, are used in a wide variety of classic science fiction (and fantasy) texts and for a number of different purposes.

It’s an interesting way to look at many of these older texts, and I enjoyed the new perspectives that reading this book gave me on some familiar (and not-so-familiar) works - even though it is occasionally disappointing to discover that a book that seemed so insightful on precisely these issues of language and communication (to a layman reader such as myself) is in fact riddled with inaccuracies (as is my beloved childhood favourite, Samuel Delaney’s Babel-17).