Treats

It has been a crazy summer for us here, what with our moving all over the place and gallivanting to beaches near and far. Here are some lovely treats for you, our dear readers.

1) "Whore Makeup Tutorial" from the lovely and hilarious YouTube-er "Glowpinkstah"!



2) ...and my new favorite songstress, Melody Gardot!



Check out some more of her awesome voice , music video , and myspace.

3) Buffy vs. Twilight, aka: an appropriate (fantasy) response to abusive stalkerish behavior:

Value of Virginity, pt. 4

The Value of Virginity

An Exploration of Contemporary Attitudes about Virginity

This squares nicely with what teenage girls articulate about their own virginity. On CollegeNET.com, a website that offers scholarships to high school seniors and college students, teenagers create popular message boards. On a forum called ‘How old was you when you had sex for the first time1,” [sic]. After prefacing her comment with the disclaimer that she is a virgin but isn’t “saving herself” for marriage, 18 year old ‘Emily Westberg’ describes “virginity [as] a gift that you should present to a guy that you are head over heals [sic] for and madly in love with,”. On the ‘Sex Before Marrage2’ [sic] forum, ‘businessbound’ writes,

“God made virginity for a reason, and it was for marriage. Once you give it away, you can't ever give it again. It is the most intimate and valuable possession we hold and it was made for the most intimate act with our true love, which can only be protected within a marriage. Sex is like a chainsaw - once you take it out of its environment, it gets dangerous.”

On the same forum, ‘Bryndee’ agrees that virginity is a ‘gift’, arguing “Wouldn't giving your virginity to your husband be the greatest gift that you can give on your wedding night?” On a forum titled “Lets talk about SEX3,” ‘One Love’ writes “I believe that teenagers do not realize how precious virginity is. Virginity is something that once it's gone, you can never get it back. I think that teenagers should cherish it and think seriously and deeply before letting it go.”

Repeatedly, teenage girls describe their virginity as “a gift,” the significance of which is in the giving. They rarely describe feelings of validation for holding on to it, but never articulate the anything about virginity bestowing personal benefits upon them, even in terms self esteem or pride in the present. Instead, virginity is deemed important based on the value they imagine their future lover will assign their ‘most intimate and valuable possession, though it is unclear what that esteem may be. By far, the most common articulation of the experience of “taking” a girl’s virginity on the Huffington Post, Howard Stern, and The Daily Beast message boards was that it was uncomfortable and a little tedious. However, girl’s belief that the value of virginity lies in the “taking” by a “special” male is a neat reflection of the sentiment that the most valuable women are the most difficult to acquire (as in the whore/call girl hierarchy), and that the “taking” of a girl’s virginity confers a higher degree of status onto the man that is so skilled.

From the comments on Dylan’s auction, it appears that the status-quo concept of virginity is an important vehicle for male aggrandizement, and for this reason, it is socially crucial that women continue to cherish it lest it loose its luster. To add insult to injury, by retaining the right to choose the winning bidder, Dylan also removed the opportunity for intra-male competition, so whoever winds up “winning” did not necessarily do so by “besting” the other men. Dylan’s auction, then, is upsetting precisely because it reverses this equation. Instead of “giving up” her virginity to a man that has impressed her, allowing him to parlay that experience into greater social standing, she stands as the primary benefactor of the exchange.

Value of Virginity, pt. 3

The Value of Virginity

An Exploration of Contemporary Attitudes about Virginity

Though Dylan claims to be interested in studying only two types of women, virgins
and prostitutes, a third type of woman appeared frequently on message boards: the mother. Many commenters, as well as radio host Laura Ingraham, attempted to shame Dylan into compliance with the sexual status quo by asking her how this would effect her as a potential mother telling her daughters about her “first time.” These comments questioned Dylan’s family life, moral upbringing, or parental approval, sometimes conflating several as in the comments by ‘ObamaEdwards’ who asked, “[i]s she without parents? Too stupid to qualify as a teaching assistant in a master's program--which would offer partial tuition waiver?” and ‘adamsmith’ who stated,

“there are many beautiful women out there who were raised by parents who taught them to actually respect themselves and they have sex with people who they are in relationships with that care about them, and most importantly, don't devalue themselves by getting paid for sex.”

Ingraham stresses Dylan’s maternal obligations to her potential future children,
“This goes to not just the moment… We’re talking about stuff for eternity here and the legacy you’ll leave behind. If your daughter came to you and said “Mom, I’ve maintained her virginity for twenty-two years, but I want to sell it off to the highest bidder.” Would you be pleased with that…?1”

It was in these comments that the shift in ownership over virginity became the most apparent. Though all of these comments expressed extreme disapproval, none of them questioned Dylan’s authority in the matter of her virginity auction, only her propriety and its legality. This is a significant departure from the relationship between virginity and parental authority expressed in Dylan’s own example of the dowry, in which fathers and husbands absolutely held that authority. In Deuteronomy of the Christian Bible, it is made clear that a girl’s virginity belongs, with the rest of her, to her father and then to the man her father gives her too. Deuteronomy outlines how complaints about a new wife’s chastity are to be directed to her father, and if the complaint is found to be false, the new husband owes restitution (a hundred sheckles of silver) to the girl’s father for the slight (Deut. 13-20).

Only two comments addressed “the dichotomous nature of virginity and prostitution,” what Dylan herself stated she wanted to examine on Tyra, and both did it snidely. On Huffington Post, ‘Angelic11’ wrote “Huge Oxymoron, A Virgin Hooker,” and in the YouTube comments for the Tyra Banks Show ‘makemehavefun,’ explains the “dichotomous nature of virginity and prostitution” writing, “Here you go... dichotomy between virginity and prostitution: some guys are willing to pay more if you're a virgin because they like that. Dichotomy over.” Aside from displaying his/her misunderstanding the word ‘dichotomy,’ ‘makemehavefun’ expressed a common discomfort with virginity being questioned in this fashion.

That Dylan was negatively influencing other virgins was a common complaint permeating comments that issued ‘dire warnings’ to Dylan and the American public. On Huffington Post, ‘KISSman’ wrote “[s]eems like a bad precedent to set. This won't be the first of this kind of thing after seeing these kinds of numbers roll in. There'll be a lot of virginity being sold off after this instance.” On the same thread, ‘Gidster’ complains about the deleterious effect this will have on men’s access to virgins, saying, “[s]orry guys, unless you already have wads of cash, you are not needed or wanted!” Haramagoti echo’s ‘KISSman’s’ thoughts on Dylan’s auction setting a “dangerous precedent,” as it encourages young women to turn “out their first sexual experience… onto the auction block, and in doing so, trading a potentially pivotal emotional and singularly humanizing experience with someone they love into a material one lacking all sincere emotion, and which… is all too dehumanizing.” On Daily Beast, ‘web83’ concludes a lengthy comment with a warning about moral relativism that contains a tacit endorsement of moral relativism:

“I would warn anyone to stray away from this type of moral relativism that may cause you to awake years from now feeling deathly null to all forms of emotion, both the joyous and the dreadful ones. Find a set of values that you feel redeem your perception of good and do whatever it takes not to let them be compromised, perhaps not even by your future self.”

This type of encouragement to suspend and engage moral relativism in order to maintain women’s sexual status quo came up a few times in the Daily Beast message board. On the same board ‘SAMMY88’ displays the same relative relationship to relativism coupled with an unusual inversion of evolutionary psychology, positing the social mores surrounding virginity as the reason for its ‘evolutionary’ importance, writing:

“…the evolutionary importance of virginity …. Is that its only natural that throughout history men wouldn’t want to marry a woman who is used goods. She is to bear his children, and a woman who goes against society’s mores will likely do the same in marriage.”

In these comments, virginity is construed as something belonging to a girl that she needs to “give-up” to a special man, for her own well-being as well as the common good.

Value of Virginity, The Return of the Dylan pt. 2

The Value of Virginity

An Exploration of Contemporary Attitudes about Virginity

Interestingly, given the obvious socially constructed meaning of virginity, Dylan herself has said very little about it. Though she has launched a thousand articles and been interviewed by hosts diverse as Howard Stern and Laura Ingraham, she rarely gets a sentence out before being interrupted, and in any case, nobody has bothered to ask her. In the article she wrote for the Daily Beast, Dylan contrasts her earlier feelings about virginity with her current, implied, but never quite articulated current understanding, writing that “…virginity [as] a sacred gift a woman should reserve for just the right man,”

“ … is just a tool to keep the status quo intact. Deflowing is historically oppressive- early European marriages began with a dowry, in which a father would sell his virginal daughter to a man whose family could offer the most agricultural wealth. Dads were basically their daughter’s pimps.”

This is a significant elision for a woman with Dylan’s educational background to make. The state of virginity is not the act of ‘deflowering,’ though deflowering is the action that renders virginity relevant in most of the discourse surrounding it. The immediate shift from the state of virginity to the financial negotiation of dowry’s, bride-prices, and pimps is similarly curious. Regardless of how we might look today at the ‘early European marriage’ practices, (by no means relegated to the past or to Europe) Dylan alludes to, they are distinct from prostitution. In these cases, fathers did not ‘pimp’ their virgin daughter’s bodies for sexual gratification, they exchanged them for alliances between families that would be cemented in a presumed future bloodline. Virginity was factor of some importance, as it would help assure both the active parties of the transaction (father and husband) that the woman’s offspring would indeed cement the bloodlines together, but it wasn’t the motivation for the exchange. It was this guarantee of alliance that a groom bought with a bride price or a father ensured with a dowry, not sexual favors bestowed by a virgin.

Dylan’s slippage from virginity to deflowering to marriage to prostitution, and confusion between bride price and dowry may have been an editorial mishap born out of the urgency to explain her motivations in one page or less, but she makes other questionable statements as well. Dylan has repeatedly been quoted as claiming that she finds it “…shocking that men will pay so much for someone’s virginity, which isn’t even prized so highly anymore¹.” This comes across as blatantly disingenuous, seeming more like intentional provocation then honest befuddlement. In interviews, she does come across as a little unaware of her audience; saying on the Tyra Banks Show that she intended to “study the dichotomous nature between virginity and prostitution,” but generally intelligent, charming, and markedly assured. On the same show, Dylan addresses Tyra and her audience’s double-standard of sexuality directly when Tyra invited Lee, one of Dylan’s bidders, to join her on stage, saying;

“This is a prime time to interject. My… main objective with doing this was to do a case study as to how impassioned and how opinionated the world would be when a woman chooses what to do with her body, and in my case, it is selling my virginity. And you know, I came out here and I received a lot of negativity, as I expected. You know, women are condemned for taking control over their body and Lee, lovely Lee, comes out there and… people applaud, and are flirting with him in the audience…. People are all completely missing the politics behind this, and that was the point.”

It seems unlikely that she is so economically naïve as to try to auction something that she truly believed “wasn’t prized so highly”, particularly after reading about the Peruvian woman who earned over a million dollars for her virginity. More likely, Dylan is goading the public to articulate it’s thoughts and opinions about virginity and prostitution, and they have not disappointed her.

Dylan was correct in believing that the public would be impassioned and opinionated when it came to her decision. The short blurb that ran in the liberal-leaning Huffington Post, which was the first sites to appear on Google when “Natalie Dylan” is typed into the search engine provoked approximately 630 comments over thirty-two pages. YouTube message boards for the Tyra Banks Show² featuring Dylan averaged about five pages of comments each, and still growing slowly, while CNN and the NY Daily News⁴ averaged around 70 comments per post. Dylan’s own article on the less-partisan Daily Beast⁵ generated 216 comments, some several paragraphs long as commenter’s rationed out accolades, condemnation, and observations.

By far, the most common reaction to articles posted on Natalie Dylan were questions regarding the legitimacy of her virginity, and the point that selling sex is called prostitution. Combined with posts that expressed the value judgment that Dylan is “nothing but a whore,” often accompanied by unflattering physical descriptions, these three subjects made up approximately 25% of the commentary on Huffington Post. Other repetitive themes in the comments addressed her supposed moral decrepitude, lack of family support and intelligence, comments about how a girl’s “first time” should be “special” because it is a significant moment in her psychosocial development, and ‘dire warnings’ as to what could befall her and America if other girls emulate her. A very few comment addressed the motivation of Dylan’s 10,000 bidders –usually attributing their interest to pedophilia, and, tellingly, only four attempted to examine the nature of virginity itself.

According to the comments on Huffington Post, virgins look and act in a particular manner. ‘Daddysgirl’ comments “[p]lease, those boobs certainly don't look like that of a virgin; they look like they've been around the block, or at least down the street. Someone is very likely going to get duped for this,” while ‘SonyaInTX’ elaborates, “[s]he looks like an experienced pole dancer.” Mick on the Howard Stern message board writes, “[n]o way she is a virgin. What virgin would willingly have sex with a stranger?” while others allow that Dylan may have an intact hymen but still “is no virgin,” because she is willing to auction her virginity off. On the Tyra Banks Show, Tyra playfully objects that Dylan doesn’t look like a virgin because she looks “like, sexy” to which Dylan playfully responds, “I look like you, Tyra!”

In each of these instances, ‘virginity’ functions as a preformative identity much more dependent on an outsider’s interpretation of a woman’s appearance or behavior then her actual physical state, and this is predicated on the assumption that ‘virgins’ appear and behave in ways that are visibly distinguishable from sexually-active women. This is by no means a novel interpretation, and it has appeared in various iterations. The thirteenth–century philosopher and scientist Albert Magnus wrote in 1240 of four types of virgin, including one that may act like a prostitute. In 1933, Havelock Ellis wrote in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex that “the female responds to the stimulation of the male at the right moment just as the tree responds to the stimulation of the warmest days in spring⁶.” Both of these authors square up will well with the modern imagination, where sexual activity is often believed to change how someone (especially a woman) looks, or turn her into a “nymphomaniac”.

Most of the comments that emphasized prostitution simply said something like “this is prostitution,” and found that to be sufficient to dismiss Dylan, her auction, and the discussion entirely. Multiple comments in this vein expressed a moral indignation that Dylan was manipulating the system of prostitution to her benefit and men’s apparent detriment. On Huffington Post, ‘BillMelater’ opines “[a]nd how is she not demeaning herself? It's prostitution. Unfortunately, this is how too many women see men - just a meal ticket to be bilked for everything possible. And unfortunately, too many men go along with this…” On the same thread, ‘TLaw’ was upset over the million dollars she asked for and the 3.8 million she was offered, demanding to know, “what makes her better than the typical whoring wench walking the strip or working at a brothel?” another unnamed commenter seemed more upset that Dylan was retaining the option to chose from among the bidders of her option, calling her a coward and accusing her of trying to “maintain some semblance of dignity in the whole process,” which he implies that she has no right to as a prostitute.

The “prostitute” and “whore” comments illuminate a clear hierarchy of women who sell sex, where the most available women have the least social standing. On the message boards, “whores,” and “hoes” are women who deal in sex but who are unattractive and can demand only a low price. “Prostitutes” are attractive women who sell sex, such as the ones on the Bunny Ranch website, and as such can demand a higher price for their time. At the top of this hierarchy are the “high-class call girls,” who in the comment threads are perfect “10s” who can demand thousands of dollars ‘legitimately’ because they can “fulfill any sexual fantasy.” That a great deal of the cost of the “high-class call-girl” ensures discretion more than fantasy fulfillment is, unsurprisingly, ignored. Natalie Dylan does not fall into this category, because at best, she is “only about a 6 or a 7,” in one comment and at worst “super-sized” in another. These commenter’s do not appear to recognize virginity as a specific sexual fantasy, which is unremarkable, because according to Blanks, neither sexology, psychiatry, or sociology have ever identified the fascination with virginity as a ‘discrete phenomenon,’ either. The few comments that view the interest of Dylan’s bidders in her sexual status as odd describe it inaccurately as ‘pedophilia’.

The Return of Natalie Dylan

In honor of Natalie Dylan's virginal return to the public imagination*, I am publishing a piece I wrote about the what the content of the (internet) commentary about her tells us about the significance of contemporary virginity.

Some notes:

1- It will be published in installments, so be forewarned.
2- It is actually much more topical then I am strictly comfortable with- I feel like its a book report on the book I haven't written yet.
3- When I explained it to my 90 year old Italian grandmother, she said: "Well! That young lady is certainly thumbing her nose at those men!"
4- In the interest of saving space, the relevant background information may be found here.
5- *Gracias, Hector. (an mp3)

The Value of Virginity

An Exploration of Contemporary Attitudes about Virginity

Despite directly demonstrating its financial value, Dylan’s auction is almost uniformly construed on message boards as an assault on the meaning and worth of virginity. It must come as no surprise to Dylan that the commentary generated around virginity and prostitution through online forums such as the YouTube threads for the Tyra Banks Show, The Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, CNN.com, FoxNews.com, and the Howard Stern Show website, came quickly, are highly charged, and continue to aggregate today. Despite the impassioned nature of the approximately one thousand comments I reviewed, however, not one offered a shred of evidence that the meaning of virginity has changed in recent years- only the locus of control over has shifted from fathers to the virgins themselves, creating new arenas for intra-male competition as well as anxiety over what the virgins may elect to do with their status.

Dylan no doubt anticipated that the public commentary around the of virginity would prove to be far more interesting then the auction itself. After all, this has been done before by women in Peru and more recently the UK, and there is nothing whatsoever novel about women’s bodies as marketable commodities. Neither is the fetishization of virginity a wholly recent development. “Naughty School Girls,” for example, are never naughty because they read banned books or ‘liberate’ laboratory animals, and the outfits remain popular as adult novelties as they are for children’s Halloween costumes. Brittany Spears launched her career as a ‘virginal’ school-girl in pigtails and a miniskirt, pleading with an off-camera love interest to “hit [her] one more time.” Jessica Simpson, another pop star who branded herself ‘virgin,’ promoted a brand of very flirtatious stupidity and line of sparkling, flavored, body oils called ‘Dessert Beauty’ that retailed in teen jewelry stores. Both made heavy use of sex-appeal and were packaged to appeal more to the puerile then to the pure. More recently, in an oddly Freudian gesture, popular musical virgins the Jonas Brothers sprayed white foam onto their predominantly pre-adolescent, purity ring-wearing audience during a Disney concert. Add to this forbidden fruit cocktail the political use of the virgin body in the fight between ‘comprehensive sex education’ and ‘abstinence-only’ proponents for millions of taxpayer dollars as well as, in some cases, the conservative vote and mega-church influence, and it is evident that virginity is big business, with the same degree of self-interest and ‘purity’ quotient and any other large enterprise. What isn’t evident in this cultural milieu is what virginity is supposed to be, and given this ambiguity, precisely what it is that Natalie Dylan is selling.

Virginity has always been a fraught, as well as uniquely human, concept. Though all vertebrates are born ‘virgins’ in nearly any applicable sense of the word, according to Hanne Blank, author of “Virgin, an Untouched History,” (2008) humans are apparently unique in that we notice its existence, and are certainly the only ones that assign it a social meaning. Typically, virginity is described as a lack of sexual experience, but what constitutes relevant “sexual experience” can vary widely. Blank argues that vaginally penetrative sex is the specific act which separates virgins from non-virgins, then immediately complicates that argument by saying that this renders virginity “at least in the classic, canonical form… exclusively heterosexual,” and usually female because “virginity has never mattered in the way men are valued… whether they are considered fit to marry, or indeed, to be permitted to survive.” The common, but not universal, emphasis on the presence of an ‘intact’ hymen similarly creates more problems than it solves. Though hymens in virginity-themed pornography are often absurdly thick and colorful, in reality hymens come in a multitude of configurations. Hymens may be annular, crescentric, septate, redundant, fimbrated or imperforate depending on their shape or features. The imperforate hymen, which Blank calls “the most common in the popular imagination” and covers the vaginal entrance is caused when the canalization of the vagina is not completed, and is actually quite rare. Hymens may be brittle enough to break without notice or discomfort, or flexible enough to endure throughout intercourse till childbirth without a woman ever becoming aware of it. In other cases, they may be thick enough to require surgical intervention if penetrative intercourse is desired.

The human hymen is notable in how dimly it compares to the hymens of other mammals. Hymens in whales, for example, are manipulated keep water out of the vaginal canal while allowing for mating. Guinea-pigs and Bushbabys (nocturnal primates native to Africa), have hymens that actually dissolve when a female is in estrus and regenerate when she is not, saving her the metabolic cost of mating with males when she cannot produce a litter. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about human hymens is how dull they are compared to the excitement they generate. Hymens in humans exist solely because internal and external female reproductive organs develop independently until the vaginal cord connecting the uterus to the body wall hollows out. When the hollowed cord, or canal, forms an opening, the small flange of tissue we call the hymen (formally the body wall) remains. Essentially, a hymen is to a vagina as an instep is to a foot.

Blackwater Rebrands, Hoping to Lure Lucrative Transgender Contracts

Seeking to re-brand in order to distance itself from controversy and diversify in a tough economy, notorious private military company Blackwater Worldwide has abandoned all iterations of its butch but amateurish bear paw/cross hair logo in favor of something a little sleeker, and welcoming to what it hopes will be its new clientele.

Spokesperson Tyrrell explains, ""We've taken the company to a place where it is no longer accurately described as Blackwater," and accordingly, been re-named "Xe," pronounced "Zee," a word Tyrrell acknowledges "holds no special significance," to the public at large, but "[Xe] thought it had the best potential for brand identity.” To Xe's new target audience, of course, the name holds great significance.

"Xe," (like its homophone "Zee") is one of the gender-neutral pronouns commonly acknowledged (though in my own experience, infrequently used) by transfolk and those who love them. (See notes below for usage).

Though this shift in focus from foreign wars to domestic discrimination may seem abrupt for a company, Tyrrell explains to the Washington Post, “The idea is to define the company as what it is today and not what it used to be.” To ad a degree of sincerity to the gesture, Xe even opted to change xyr's name on February 13th, so that the shift would be covered on the 14th, as sort of a Valentines Day gift to the transpopulation Xe intends to court.

Though Xe has always been closemouthed about its internal processes, it is clear that the re-branding and shift of focus was necessary for the company's survival. Editor at the Center for Media and Democracy Landman explains that such drastic re-branding, "usually means a company is in pretty deep yogurt. ...When they do that, they’re confronted on all fronts: legal problems, public relations problems, how they’re portrayed in the media. They need to jump out of their old skin and into a new one, and hope that we don’t notice.”


Though this decision was likely made under duress, Xe may find that it has granted xemself with a first mover advantage. Since transfolk are discriminated against on the legislative level, they frequently find themselves at a disadvantage when seeking legal restitution for assault and harassment. With the services of their own private militia, however, they can stop these problems before they occur. Most transphobic civilians will find that they are less prone to violent acts when they have to go though a former Seal to do so.

Until transpeople find that they are recognized as full humans under the law, Xe can benefit from such diversification of services and realize financial advantages from staying stateside. Doing so will also help to support local economies, as Xe's personal spend more of xyrs paycheck in American businesses.

Though Xe, in xyr's previous presentation as Blackwater, has changed xyr's logo before, I for one feel that xyrs dramatic image transformation and shift in focus is commendable. Hopefully, Xe's controversial past as Blackwater will only add muscle to xyrs present commitment to transactivism.

More information on the pronoun Xe may be found here.

He	He laughed	I called him	His eyes gleam	That is his	He likes himself

Xe[6]	Xe laughed	I called xem	Xyr eyes gleam	That is xyrs	Xe likes xemself