Monk

Larger male sharks have to bite or trap the females to keep them around during courtship; marine biologists can tell when a female has been mating because her skin will be raw or bleeding. The process is so violent that, come the mating season, female nurse sharks will stay in shallow water with their reproductive openings pressed firmly to the sea floor. Otherwise they risk falling prey to roaming bands of males who ‘will take turns inserting their claspers in her’ (the clasper is the shark version of a penis, found in a pair behind the pelvic fins). A litter of fifty pups will have anything from two to seven fathers.

-- Sully's Dish

[N]uance is felt as a threat by activists who cling to their depiction of rape as the ultimate horror. They seem to think that if it’s not the superlatively worst human experience, it will become acceptable or even more prevalent.

[T]he notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available. Common sense instructs us that it is far more "dangerous" to insist to young women that they will be broken by an unwanted sex act than it is to propose they might have a happy, healthy, and sexually pleasant future ahead of them in spite of a sexual assault.

-- Charlotte Shane

Besides her name, I suppose you may also call her popular.

A provocative lament on how sexual energy is always there and seldom nice. The primal animal stirs within. Hungry.

( Rape Themes )

There has been a little fireworky controversy on LJ over a picture taken from D.C.'s Slutwalk, that feminist protest in which women assert that they can dress as they please without excusing rape. Here's the first pic:



( And here's the refashioned pic )

Well-meaning laments about violence in the media usually leave me wanting to bash someone upside the head with a tire iron. To begin with, the reformist spirit is invariably aimed down the rungs of cultural idioms, at cartoons, slasher films, pornography, rap music and video games, while the carnage and bloodletting in Shakespeare, Goya and the Bible get a pass. Low-culture violence is literal, while high-culture violence is symbolic or allegorical and subject to critical interpretation. Low-culture violence coarsens us, high-culture violence edifies us. And the lower the cultural form, or the ticket price, or — let’s just say it — the presumed education level of the typical viewer, the more depictions of violence are suspected of inducing mindless emulation in their audiences, who will soon re-enact the mayhem like morally challenged monkeys, unlike the viewers of, say, “Titus Andronicus,” about whose moral intelligence society is confident.

-- Laura Kipnis for The New York Times

Yeah, I thought it was amusing to think that the richer and more educated classes have greater moral intelligence. I imagine they have a rather more sophisticated understanding and appreciation for the subtler shades of sadism and perversion, in art and in life. In any case, I would suggest less hand-wrining about any violence in art, low or high brow. If you don't want to see it, don't go and spend your money and look at it, and that way you would also find less of the stuff being produced, not that I am expecting any of this to happen, because I take human nature to be fiercer than we would like in our our more sober and civilized reflections, which is also why I think it is good to exorcise some of this antisocial and violent energy through art and fantasy. The hard line that we need to be clear about is the one between fantasy and reality. Or so I like to think. I am more concerned about the great economic and social inequality that makes some people powerful and most others powerless, which creates conditions that give rise to very real, nasty cruelty that makes up so much of our day-to-day world.



I like dessert, too!

Scott Adams, the "Dilbert" cartoon guy, has put up a post that is riling some feathers, as he takes up the sexually charged issue of men behaving like men badly. People are bashing him for being an apologist for rape. I think he is just playing on the idea why the world is not a happy place. Christians might call it original sin, our depraved nature.

( Man Talk )