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Targeting the sexual woman [1]

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Date: 2023-04-05  

Purported Christian pastors (at least one, Shane Vaughn) are handing Trump a total pass for his “dalliance,” while declaring—for the audience to nod in full agreement—that there’s no reason to take Daniels seriously, because Trump’s a “successful businessman” and she’s a “porn star.”

Aside from the colossal hypocrisy displayed, what’s striking is what is embedded in these phrases. Never mind that it’s debatable whether Trump is or is not successful as a businessman—the phrase itself confers prestige. It in itself is a desirable status (and even role) in our society.

So that’s one side of the contrast. On the other, you have the phrase “porn star.” And while we all may have differing relationships to each of those words separately, we generally as a culture have been taught what status to accord to such persons who hold such a title.

Not only is pornography by its very nature considered obscene (i.e., it takes place offstage, out of sight), the people who are involved with it themselves are obscene. The obscenity resides inside of them somehow. The threat to society (what the religiously minded would term ‘evil’) is locatable inside the body—it is physically trapped there. Therefore, destroy the evil body, destroy the evil. To do so would be a cleansing mission.

But note, one, that such only applies to the sexual woman. Male porn stars are tolerated, seen as gigolos, those that get the party started for everyone else. Ron Jeremy is a household name and continues to enjoy name recognition, despite being indicted for rape. How can he rape anyone? one may be tempted to ask. He gets an automatic pass. Or, why would he—he gets to have sex all the time: surely he would be able to wait until the next shoot (as though desires operate by the clock). (Jeremy, as it stands, has been found incompetent to stand trial.)

Meanwhile, sex workers are commonly presumed unrapeable, as though they had given permanent and irrevocable consent to sex with anyone, anywhere, anywhen, without consideration of her will and without recourse. This explains how we have reports of police officers, charged with maintaining the well-being and safety of citizens, blackmailing or extorting women into providing them sex. This is rape of a population at those officers’ mercy. There is no other authority to which these women can turn.

But also, two: see the sleight of hand, the legerdemain of phrasing here? Stormy Daniels has asked journalists to use her stage name when referring to her. Why? I would posit it’s because she’s seen great success under that name. She’s won awards. It’s how people know her—it’s part of her fame. So she in all actuality could be called “successful [at] business” herself, and those scales between the two contrasted phrases would balance. But the pastor deliberately set her status at lowly and disdainful “porn star”—no one to be taken seriously, no one to be believed.

In this environment, an exterminator may arise. Because our media environment, both print and broadcast, are now highlighting the sexual circumstances of the encounter and not emphasizing the actual underlying Trump crime, which is fraud, the average person is left to imagine lewd happenings and to locate them in the bodies of scapegoats—not just Stormy Daniels herself but also all those that she represents.

These scapegoats can range from sex workers who have intimate, one-on-one private encounters (escorts, brothel workers, streetwalkers) to those who merely depict such acts (those who are acting in the adult film industry, magazine industry, erotica market) to those on the outskirts of such commercial activity (burlesque dancers, camgirls). Even sex therapists could be targeted in such an environment; or someone who “looks” (i.e., dresses) like a sex worker. Slut walks take place precisely to challenge such worldviews: women should be able to wear whatever they want and not be molested. One’s choice of clothing should not put into question whether one can be safe and secure in one’s person. A person’s clothing should not determine if that person lives or dies.

Consider, too: in our culture, porn is ubiquitous. An entire generation of young people—young men as well as young women (and intersex besides)—has grown up with access to moving images of explicit sex, even live performances. Like it or not, this has had a profound impact on how female bodies are scanned and how consumers of those images (including and in many ways especially young female consumers) view the role of the sexual focus of that imagery.

For the female consumer, there can be an internal sense or pressure to be, to play, the pornographic woman. The marital bedroom is often seen as a place for exploration and playacting, and that now regularly includes expectations and reenactments imported from the screen, to be applied and tried in real life. The pornographic woman is amiable but direct, always makes eye contact, is unashamed of her body, celebrates nakedness, always communicates desire with her face, freely offers every orifice to her partner, radiates enthusiasm and true sexual hunger, revels in the result of ecstasy, spreading it all over her skin, smiles in afterglow despite not having her own orgasm attended to (as though that were rather negligible), attentive, enraptured, fun.

But the pornographic woman, at the heart of the matter, is disposable. She is ever separated from the image of the good and loyal wife, “good” in this case meaning nonsexual. The pure woman, the virginal girl (she’s immediately infantilized) can be put on a pedestal and protected, even revered; while the sexual woman is good for a dalliance and then cast aside, cut asunder. The pornographic woman is commercialized and thus consumed, consumable: she is not to be kept. One does not love the sexual woman; one may only use her.

And so the modern woman is doubly caught: she can never enjoy sex, not openly; and certainly not until she is married, where the groom has made “a proper woman” of her. Then and only then can she begin to display a sense of joy with the inherent sexualness of her body.

This is key, and make no mistake about it: humans are inherently sexual. It’s intrinsic to our basic drives, along with hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep. In our culture, it’s commonly seen as a rite of passage for boys to lose their virginity (“he’s becoming a man”), while for girls the right is purely physiological (“she’s got her period”), and doesn’t involve the act of sex at all.

This disparity leaves the impression that there is no acceptable outlet for female desire, for interest in sex. Because sex is interesting. People from all corners and of all stripes find it compelling. But the ones punished in our society for openly exploring such material are females, or those who are viewed by men as surrogate females (gays, those openly trans, etc). To the traditionalist, and certainly to the fascist, only heterosexual men have a right to pursue sex without repercussions.

An enforcer of this code may rise up, nominate himself as an exterminator, a maintainer of purity, and begin “cleaning up.”

All of the latent activators, the terms to describe “loose” women, “dirty” (perhaps, as in the cultural view of sex workers, even possibly “diseased”), can be harnessed in this openly disdainful and dismissive environment by such an exterminator. Armed with these stereotypes and a deep sense of woman-hatred, such a self-radicalizer might take it upon himself to rid the streets of such “filth.” Then the serial killings come.

It takes time to put together a trail of evidence that points to such sequential and premeditated crime. The police themselves already are biased against sex workers but also sexual women in general, neglecting to test rape kits and pursue perpetrators of violent and/or nonconsensual sex-based crimes. It takes a number of nameless, nondescript women before they “add up” to what might indicate a serial murderer. The police don’t take time to count what are to them the worthless. One less arrest they’ll have to make later.

We’ve already seen how many body counts a serial killer who targets sex workers can tally before alarm bells ring. Witness the story out of Iowa late last year where the daughter of a now-deceased man told police of how her father, Donald Studey, made her help drag slaughtered women to a well on their property and directed police to that well. Dozens of women over several decades were targeted by that man, women who were never missed or made a priority. (The daughter estimates anywhere from 50-70 women were murdered.) Even in death they were not afforded respect, as the police of the otherwise sleepy town announced that there was no urgency in the case, as the perpetrator had already died. They just swept it all under the rug. May as well have left those women in that well.

The enforcers will emerge, the ones who’ve deputized themselves to uphold the social compact—the patriarchal, male-headed family made possible via the marriage contract—by visiting personal disorder upon transgressors, outright destruction in some cases.

Women will be targeted, raped. They will die. All to reassert some fantasy of ultimate and unfettered male domination of society, which extends all the way to the interactions between two private persons, whatever the financial arrangement or benefits exchanged. If women have agency, that necessarily deducts in this view from the full flex and freedom accorded to men in that arena. Thus they must be taught not to compete. They must be taught to comply, to be “good girls,” so as to remove themselves from the executioner’s pool of targets. Not me, she should say, as she scurries to obey society’s dictates. I won’t be sexual. I won’t be killed.

I urge those who are inclined to be dismissive of Stormy Daniels’ status, using that to diminish the strength of the overall case: look again. Give her the benefit of the doubt. We know that Trump is sociopathic—we’ve had plenty of demonstrations of his cruelty and avarice. He’s a dangerously selfish man. We needn’t ignore that in this case—in fact, his streak of sadism should rise in significance. Predators know which prey are most vulnerable, and openly sexual women in our society are of the least protected, most vulnerable in our midst. Trump is banking on the rest of us being so squeamish that we turn away.

Focus on his behavior. These are his crimes. Stormy Daniels, for her part, engaged in no illegality. Everything here is about Donald Trump’s malfeasance, his insatiable appetite, his rapacious need to get one over, defraud, make small. Even now, with the media adopting the frame of his conduct as “hush money,” he enlarges himself as one in control, the one nickel-and-diming, of avoiding taxes, of eluding the state. Even now, with this framing, he means to put all the blame on the sexual woman, as though it weren’t his own deceit and proclivities that brought him—and us, as a nation—to this point.

This is Trump’s wrongdoing. Focus on that, and put the double standard aside. Retraining our focus might prevent a self-actuator from taking it upon himself to avenge Trump’s honor (which, when you think of it, is the truly distasteful thought).

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