Another lazy post today, apologies. So in two and a half weeks time I will be making my way back to the good old US of A for my third visit. This time I'm going with my best friend and we'll be attending San Diego Comic Con, then driving up to Los Angeles and then on to Las Vegas...the city crafted out of my dreams. In honour of my impending reunion with my most beloved place on the planet, the Vegas strip, here are my favourite films either set in or about the sparkly, gaudy, neon, trashy, glittering city that is Las Vegas.
Because of laziness, I don't have a wonderfully written blog for you today. Instead, here are a few songs that I'm really digging at the moment. Best enjoyed with the speakers turned up to eleven. It's been grey, rainy and generally depressing weather today, but everything is sunnier when you have good music.
If you don't know who James Deen is yet, I can only presume the following:
You don't have a Tumblr account.
You haven't been paying any attention to popular culture recently.
For those not in the know, let me fill in the blanks. James Deen is a porn star, but he's not just any ordinary porn star. With his perfectly boyish good looks and penchant for kissing and cuddling his female co-stars, when he's not chaining them up and whipping them that is, he has become the new poster-boy of pornography. Females from their early teens to old age have been getting their panties in all sorts of knots over him, Tumblr has exploded with hardcore, most decidedly not safe for work GIFS depicting Deen making sweet love to all manner of ladies. Heck, even ABC's Nightline programme did a segment on him, painting him as some sort of social menace for having the audacity to make a living out of sex. According to Nightline, Deen is responsible for luring otherwise innocent, untouched, all American girls into a lurid, carnal world of floggers, electro torture and butt plugs. Of course, the segment is all bullshit. Girls have been watching pornography since it's explosion into popular culture. It's only now, in 2012, that it's finally become acceptable to say, "I'm a girl, and I watch porn."
For years, pornography was sneered down upon from a high-brow pedestal, blamed for everything from serial killers to AIDS. The entire industry was perceived, at one point in time, to be catering purely to a male audience that saw women as nothing but warm bodies with holes, in which sexual gratification could become an inevitability. This led to a wave of supposedly feminist criticism of pornography, which claimed that all women that performed in pornography were being exploited, taken against their will and forced into some ultra-macho fantasy in which they were the helpless, typically female sex object. Catharine McKinnon was probably the most vocal, hardcore-feminist that spoke out against what she perceived to be, "an industry of trafficking women." McKinnon's opinions were reminiscent of censors who tried to claim that slasher movies were pushing droves of young, impressionable minds out on to the streets to commit serial murder. Even though McKinnon's issues with female exploitation were something that other women could rally around, she went as far as to say that pornography that features a consensual female actor would ultimately end up being harmful to all women. Her premise was simple, all pornography would end up harming us delicate women because it promoted a certain idea of what a woman was supposed to be, the submissive, obedient play-thing that was created for no other reason than to provide a man with pleasure. She argued that pornography could influence and inspire men to rape, and that some pornography should be held directly accountable for rape under the law. It was the same argument that Ted Bundy gave in his final interview before execution, essentially blaming all of his acts on pornography, shifting the blame away from himself and on to an industry that was already receiving heavy criticism. Instead of blaming the perpetrator of the acts, a faceless entity is dragged into a heady debate about the thin line between sex and violence.
Feminists protest against pornography.
But here is an important question, is it just men that get off on seeing women portrayed as mere objects of sexual gratification? The answer is no. Out in the vast recesses of the Internet, there are thousands of anonymous women who enjoy nothing more than watching hardcore, simulated rape fantasies on pornography "tube" sites. They recognise that what they are seeing is a fabrication, a put on show by paid actors who have all consented to the acts beforehand, agreed upon their limits and set safe-words. Are these women contributing to an industry that will ultimately end up fucking them up the ass without consent? No, they're not. You see, women are not helpless little creatures, lured into the pornography business by big, bad men who only want to use them for a few pop shots before throwing them back in the gutter from whence they came. On the contrary, the majority of women in the porn industry are strong-willed and more than capable of making their own, consensual decisions.
Years ago, pornography was shared by women in secret, we would rarely admit to ever having watched it and we supposedly preferred 'erotica' to actual, hardcore pornography. Thanks to supposed feminists like McKinnon, the industry seemed like a male dominated Disneyland full of disgusting, debauching acts that us females couldn't possibly find stimulating. I'm not trying to argue that pornography isn't an industry that is almost entirely marketed towards males, it is, or at least it was. What I'm trying to say is that even though most of the content seems specifically crafted for men, women can, and have found enjoyment in it too. This is something that 'thinkers' like McKinnon didn't really take into consideration when they went on their self-righteous crusade against pornography. Is it so unthinkable that some women might like to be made to feel like a sex object, that being humiliated and "forced" to engage in sexual acts could be as much of a turn on for the 'victim' as it could be for the 'attacker'? It isn't the predominant focus on selling sex to men or the perceived 'exploitation of women' that has forced females to keep their interest in porn a secret, it's a fear of criticism from other women. That is, until James Deen came along.
James Deen exploded, quite literally, on to the porn scene in 2004. As a fresh faced Jewish boy from Pasadena, he quickly built a name for himself and to date he's starred in over a thousand pornographic movies. It's hard to decipher when the buzz around James Deen started, women have been fan-girling over him on Tumblr for what seems like a decade now. But what makes James Deen special, and how has he, almost single handedly, shone a light on the often tabooed subject of girls watching porn?
Let's be honest, ninety percent of James Deen's appeal is his looks. Aesthetically, he's not the most overwhelmingly beautiful man you've ever seen in your life, but he's a far cry from the Ron Jeremy's of the porn industry. Women have been making supposedly "female-friendly" pornography for years now, almost always focusing on some kind of storyline you'd expect from a Lifetime drama, with added soft lighting, and banging of course. But again, the men in these films leave a lot to be desired, and although most of them aren't repulsive to look at, they don't possess the kind of boyish, indie boy good looks that Deen has in spades. Deen has been credited with making pornography that is accessible to women, the media have picked up on his romantic scenes in which he passionately kisses a female co-star or whispers sweet nothings in her ear. Sadly they have failed to highlight the fact that most of the James Deen related content that gets passed around the internet, from fan girl to fan girl on Tumblr, isn't what would generally be classed as "female-friendly". Just a quick search of his name on the micro-blogging site delivers hundreds of photographs, from whipping a gagged woman, to forcefully ripping the vest top off a venerable blonde and slapping her in the face.
So what are we to make of this? Personally I think it's simple. Women enjoy pornography just as much as men, and we don't need it to be romantic or cutesy to find pleasure in it. We are not repulsed by pornography, nor are we so sickened and appalled by scenes of male domination that we feel the sudden urge to burn our bra's and preach about how evil men are. We don't require intricate plot lines, period costumes or candle light to get our kicks on a lonely Saturday night. And we most certainly don't need to be protected from the wicked demon that is the porn industry, a demon that, according to some self-proclaimed feminists, will end up turning the male population into sex-crazed rapists, kind of like zombies, only they eat your pussy instead of your brains. The popularity of James Deen among females has given us the chance to be open about what does and doesn't turn us on. Some women enjoy being dominated, others don't, some enjoy violent sex, others don't, and so on and so on. We aren't mystical, innocent creatures that don't have any fetishes or kinks, in fact, there isn't really much difference between men and women when it comes to pornography.
Thanks to James Deen's good looks, (let's face it, he's probably the hottest male porn star I have ever seen) more women are finding it comfortable and enjoyable to watch pornography. It's not because the scenes have become more watered down to cater to us girls that just adore love stories, it's because finally, finally, there is a guy that we'd actually fuck on the screen.
A friend said to me recently that she had become a fan of hip-hop, as an avid fan myself, I asked her who she'd been listening to. Safe to say, when she told me I was pretty shocked. Drake does not classify as hip-hop. To enlighten her, and the many others out there that may confuse real hip-hop with some auto-tuned, generic rubbish, here is a carefully curated post of my favourite hip-hop/rap songs.
I rarely ever get political on this blog, but seeing as Rodney King sadly passed away yesterday I thought I'd post some selected photographs from the L.A. riots. And let's not forget the fifty-three people that died in riots.
In the immortal words of Rodney King, why can't we all just get along?
This weekend I moved out of my house in London that's been my home for almost two years.
It seems like yesterday that I was packing my things to move here, but now it's time to head back to my hometown for the summer. Thankfully I'm moving back to the city in September.
I'll miss this place so god-damn much, and I'll miss my amazing housemates even more.
Here are some photographs of the moving out process, my best friends and our house.
She-Devil is one of those strange films I vaguely remember watching as a child. There is only one scene in particular that stuck in my memory, Meryl Streep's character Mary Fisher clambering across her bed in some sort of fit of rage. Forgive my memory, I haven't watched the film since so this post is going purely on childhood memories.
One thing that always struck me about this film was Meryl Streep's style. I don't know about you but I'm obsessed with the eighties power look, and to me, Meryl personified it in She-Devil. With her skirt-suits, marshmallow dresses and Dynasty style mansion, Mary Fisher had the life I wanted so badly when I was younger.
Oh how I wish we still lived in the eighties, with feathered hair and shoulder-pads and all the glorious pop music to soundtrack our fabulous lives. Mary Fisher's life is in many ways the complete opposite to mine, she's a well-dressed, filthy rich woman with perfectly coiffed hair. I'm a shabbily-dressed, band t-shirt wearing, poverty stricken student with the most frizzy hair known to man. If I had Mary Fisher's life, I probably wouldn't want it, but because it's seemingly foreign and interesting, I crave it.
Mary Fisher is also a romance novelist. I've always found romance novelists infinitely interesting, even the most ridiculous Mills & Boon writers fascinate me. There is something about a passionate, gaudy, Barbara Cartland-esque romance novel that strikes a chord with me. To me, romance novels are in the same vein as Bonnie Tyler's hit record 'I Need A Hero', little snippets of escapism from the otherwise boring relationships that are ten a penny on planet Earth.
I kind of wish Mary was a real person. If she was, I'm sure she'd have found a rich husband by now, someone to satiate her passion. She'd definitely be a cast-member of the TV show Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, maybe it's just me, but I think she'd get on swimmingly with Lisa Vanderpump and Adrienne Maloof. Time wouldn't have been kind to her, after numerous plastic surgeries she'd somewhat resemble Jocelyn Wildenstein, but she'd still have the swagger that she had in her younger days.
Is it proof of my bad taste that I can vividly remember Mary Fisher's trashy bedroom? With it's lush pinks and opulent gold features, it's something I've tried (and failed) to emulate in my own room. But one day, one day I will have my own Mary Fisher inspired Hollywood mansion, and it'll be the most trashy palace you've ever seen.
Courtesy of some wonderful stranger on Youtube, you can watch the entire movie...just hit play.
