I hope you’ll be able to chip in, even if it’s just a few dollars. Thanks!

[X] – Pick up groceries
[X] – Do laundry
[X] – Get gas for car
[X] – Go to the gym
[   ] – Turn my penis into a vagina

With the last entry circled and underlined. I’m imagining the show title at the top and then ticket date/times/locations at the bottom. I like it, but also don’t want people to think it’s only about surgery.

Any thoughts?

I’ve been trying to use this realization – I hadn’t really thought about my shows in that way before – I’ve been considering what I want to examine in this show: How do we embody and physicalize gender and identity?

I’m hoping this line of inquiry will help me write more (and write more productively towards performance) as I’ve felt a bit blocked. Not that I don’t have any ideas, but that they’re so shifting and ephemeral it’s hard to pin anything down. Like things are coming in and out of focus, but no unifying picture is (yet) emerging.

Now, I don’t inherently object to plot lines where a man pursues a woman who isn’t interested. Likewise, this was a show with a lot of clowning, so the physical confrontation was not violent or objectionable in the way it could have been in a more traditional straight play (a term which has nothing to do with sexuality).  Likewise, the rejected man was shamed for his overbearing nature, and kicked out of the show as a result of his behavior. The other guy, the good guy, got the girl and all was right with the world.

At the same time, the way the female lead’s rejection of this man – and, more specifically, the way he responded – made me really uncomfortable. For me, it boiled down to frustration that this production used a character’s belief that “No means yes” for comedic value.

I’ve talked with a number of my friends about this, most of whom had seen the show. The general consensus was, “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from, but it was just for humor’s sake. I don’t think it was such a big deal.” And I honestly think it is possible to overreact to art or theatre or television or whatever with cries of “That’s not politically correct!” I don’t want to be known as an unnecessary complainer, or as unreasonably sensitive. At the same time, I think having a character explicitly say, “Hey! No means no!” (perhaps as the bad guy finally gets shamed in the end) might have gotten an even bigger laugh from the adults in the audience while making also clear the official position of the production.

More broadly, this has gotten me thinking about how being aware of a particular social issue (race/gender/ethnicity/class/religion/sexuality/whatever) makes one more sensitive to how that issue is portrayed. I think many of us have had (or perhaps been) “that friend” for a while, always crying foul at things that – with a bit more perspective – weren’t worth fretting over. Hence the title of this post, which I hope was obviously intended as joke. But choosing which battle to fight is always tough, and something I want to do properly. I just wish there were fewer of these edge cases, where there’s enough to make me want to speak up, but not enough to make me sure it’s worth the trouble.

• You Say ‘Trans’ Like It’s A Bad Thing
• Get Cuntfortable
• Get Uncuntfortable
• I’m Sorry I Make You Uncomfortable
• I’m Not Sorry I Make You Uncomfortable
• Body Topography
• Vibrators and Vaginoplasty
• Some Exclusions May Apply
• This Space Intentionally Left Blank
• For, Or Resulting From, A Gender Transformation Operation

Any feedback?

I disclose a lot about myself. (SEE: The blog you are reading right at this very moment.) My performance pieces may not be entirely disclosure-based – there’s some storytelling and fantasy, too – but they are entirely built around my experiences with gender and identity. I’m speaking to a class of middle school students soon, and it’ll be about on the same topic. I fully and completely appreciate disclosure as a cathartic, rewarding, and empowering act.

And yet certain types of disclosure – the type of disclosure that my brand of self-narrative work apparently evokes in certain people – makes me quite uncomfortable.

I realize my work is often the first time some audience members have heard honest narratives around trans experience. Perhaps the first time they’ve met an (out) trans person. That’s what I was thinking when a tall individual came up next to me after I finished my show and sat back at the bar. He (this person was presenting as male so I’ll use male pronouns) introduced himself as Joe. He wasn’t dressed particularly well, his hair was unkempt, and he was missing two or three teeth. He said he enjoyed my show, said I was beautiful, and told me he had “had thoughts like that.”

I never know what to say to that statement. It’s not a question, so there’s no obvious response. It’s not enough information that I feel like I can make an intelligent response, but it’s way too much for me to not say anything. This particular situation was made more uncomfortable because Joe then gave me intense, unyielding, unblinking eye contact.

I’m not proud of how I responded: some sympathetic noises and a turn back to the musicians playing on stage. But I was uncomfortable by the intense amount of focus Joe was sending my way, and could see him continue to stare straight at me even after I’d turned away. I got up and went to the bar to get another drink.

Joe followed, asking if he’d made me uncomfortable. I lied, and said no. The  bar was crowded, Joe wasn’t making me feel unsafe, and I wasn’t yet willing to be explicitly rude. We made polite small talk and Joe then asked, “Promise you won’t be angry?”

Those types of questions are obnoxious and unfair. I think they should only be allowed (maybe) by close friends, along the lines of “Can you keep a secret?” But coming from an almost-complete stranger, it seemed out of line.

“Well,” I replied, “it depends on what you say. I’m not going to promise anything.”

“I have masochistic tendencies.”

At that point, I walked away.

Later in the evening, someone told me that he’d had sex once with someone who he was “95% sure was post-op.” He quickly clarified, “I mean, I’ve slept with men, women, I didn’t care. I just wanted to know! When her top came off she’d had these scars under her breasts, from implants. And her clit was bright pink. Like, bright pink.”

Why did I need to know those things? For Joe, I can understand – assuming he was honestly trans or questioning – the desire to connect with another trans person. I’ll even give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his closeted life has led to a tendency for awkward and uncomfortable social interactions. But I didn’t need to know, didn’t want to know, and wish I didn’t know that he had “masochistic tendencies.”

And I know people have a desire to identify their own experiences with something they heard from another. “I have a black friend!” is the easiest example of this behavior. But I don’t like it, even though I’ve thus far been too polite to say “Why the hell are you telling me this?”

It’s particularly hard because I know my show has exactly that type of disclosure: my experiences being sexual, exploring my identity, figuring things out. That’s presumably what makes people feel entitled to the same sort of disclosure. But I don’t know how to respond. Where to draw the line between being a supportive and engaging activist, and keeping my own personal boundaries secure.

I think, in the case of the “did I have sex with a trans woman” guy, next time I will speak up more. Say that I’m not sure why it was important for him to know if she was trans.

But if someone like Joe comes up to me again? I don’t know what I’ll do.

She can't even read that! It's facing away from her! Stop looking so shocked!

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine, Rose, about pornography and acting. She is involved in the sex industry, has worked as a prostitute and escort, and occasionally does both photographic and film pornography. She mentioned she’d recently finished a shoot where she had earned more in five hours than I’ve yet to earn in all of January.

Curious about her experiences, I asked what being in porn was like. Specifically, whether she viewed it as a sexual experience or a ‘this is an action I’m doing because I’m getting paid’ experience. Rose said that it was the latter: really not much more enjoyable than serving coffee or collating copies, just quite a bit more lucrative.

The conversation got me thinking about what we – as audience members – ask of actors. Because going to a play almost always involves some suspension of disbelief.  Perhaps Chicago’s Neofuturists toe the line  of theatre which requires no suspension of disbelief, but they’re in the minority. For the most part, going to a show involves allowing ourselves to believe that the actors are their characters. That they’re falling in love, planning for battle, forging alliances, destroying relationships, and on and on and on. When I go to a play I could sit there the entire time thinking, “Well, she’s not really in love with him. He doesn’t really find what she says so funny as to laugh out loud.” But that would make me miserable, so I suspend my disbelief and allow their actions to read as true.

That’s not how viewing porn seems to work, however. For whatever reason, audiences want to believe the people they’re watching are really attracted to each other (even if only on a physical level) and do reach a real, satisfying, climactic (natch) orgasm.

Why is that?

This isn’t true for every porn. There’s a great movement of feminist porn that attempts to portray actual, pleasurable, orgasmic, sex (links obviously NSFW): Crash Pad, No Fauxxx, and Doing It Ourselves, to name a few. (Please share more in the comments if you know of any.) But those are the minority. Most porn is filmed the same way any other film would be: actors are told what to do, and they do it. Regardless of whether or not they really cum. That’s what I’m talking about when I use the word ‘porn’ in this post, even though I know it’s a subset of all porn.

I’m also talking from my own cultural understandings and assumptions about porn and American gender dynamics. This is a topic for a 300+ page thesis, not a little blog post, so I’ll be making a lot of unsubstantiated and unresearched claims about why people (mainly men) watch porn, and what they think while doing it. I’m also not focusing on kink or fetish porn. Feel free to correct me if you think I’m way off base at any point.

PORN!

The place to start in answering this question may be the perceived audience. This type of porn is primarily produced by men, for men. There are cultural expectations and understandings around the ease of the male orgasm and the difficulty of the female. Porn feeds into the first, but somewhat contradicts the second: a woman is going to get off because that’s how the audience wants to be projected into the story. The (male) viewer wants to imagine himself with the woman in the porn, easily and handily getting her off.

So there’s no desire for examination of the actors’ ability to portray getting off. Someone might come out of a theatrical production saying, “Wow, you could really feel the emotion on stage.” But – if they stop to think about it – they don’t assume the actors were all actually mad at each other, or in love with each other, or whatever. In porn, though, similar examination leads to questioning one’s own partners: If that porn actress was faking that orgasm, how do I know my own partner wasn’t doing the same?

There also seems to be a parallel with the use of stunt doubles in Hollywood. Audiences are impressed when there aren’t any stunt doubles. “She does all her own stunts” is a high compliment to pay an actress. Because we know what they’re doing is fake. There isn’t really a Nazi chasing Indiana Jones. Salt wasn’t really running from those assassins. And for sex scenes, the love interests aren’t really having sex.

In porn, though, there is actual sex happening. Someone is being penetrated, and someone is penetrating. Or licked/licking. Sucked/sucking. You get the idea. But why go that far if you can’t go the step further? Why aren’t they actually achieving orgasm? It seems more difficult to separate the fiction from the reality. Or to even want to separate the two.

Porn also generally serves a different, more (ahem) utilitarian purpose than non-sexual film or theatre. While audiences certainly view actors to evoke an emotional response, the expectations are generally more open ended. When I go to a comedy, I may laugh at the actors or with them. Likewise, a drama may evoke my pity or tears at love-lost or happiness at love-found-at-last. I don’t always know going in, except in the broadest of fashions. Porn, though, is different. The viewer is expecting a specific physical response.

Justifying any of these assumptions would take research that I don’t foresee doing anytime soon. But thinking about when and why I’ve watched porn, all of the above makes sense. I don’t watch much porn these days, but when I have I wanted where the women looked like they were enjoying themselves. Something I could imagine participating in, either causing the woman’s reaction or having the woman’s reaction (a whole different topic). And if pressed, I’d admit most of those women – perhaps all – weren’t actually enjoying what I was watching as much as they portrayed enjoying it. As much as they acted like they were enjoying it.

I guess my final thought is about whether or not this – the shared desire to believe women in porn are actually cumming – is a good thing. No one says “Dexter sucks! He’s not really killing people!” At the same time, women faking orgasms in porn seems to feed into all of the second wave feminist ideas of why all porn is inherently bad for women and creating unrealistic and overly-sexualized expectations around women. And – both as an occasional viewer of porn and a friend of people who work in porn – I don’t buy into that.

So I’m left not knowing what to think. I’d love to see a move toward more actual orgasms in porn, but some fantasies viewers want to see may simply not evoke an orgasm in the actor participating. And I’m hesitant to say that there should never again be porn of Situation X simply because they can’t find an actress who cums from it. But I don’t know how to balance that with encouraging healthier views of female sexuality. And male sexuality, for that matter.

Any thoughts?

Too Much Light…, with its ever-changing “menu,” is an attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. The single unifying element of these plays is that they are performed from a perspective of absolute honesty.

So I was a little surprised to come across this listing at Indy Fringe:

The Bloomington Playwrights Project presents The Blizzard, an evening of 30 super-short plays performed in 60 minutes. The Blizzard is short-attention span theatre at a breakneck pace. An ensemble of five actors will be performing each piece in a spontaneous random order selected by you, the audience. To add even more fun, the performers will try to finish all 30 plays in under 60 minutes!

When I asked one of the performers about its striking similarity to Too Much Light he replied somewhat sheepishly “Oh, yeah, we stole it from them.”

In general, you can’t copyright recipes or board game rules or instructions. And doing 30 plays in 60 minutes, as long as Blizzard isn’t using TML’s actual scripts, doesn’t seem to be violating any potential TML copyrights. At the same time, it seems sort of unethical – if not illegal  - to not at least credit TML when it’s so obviously inspired by TML.

I let friends of mine in TML know about this, not sure how they’d respond but pretty sure they’d at least want to be aware of it. They said they were contacting the Blizzard managing director, and I’ll be curious to see what happens. Again, I don’t want the Blizzard shut down, and I’m sure the Bloomington Playwrights Project does good work, I just want them to give credit to the Neo-Futurists.

More broadly, this has made me think about the ethics of inspiration. As many have said, most famously Isaac Newton, we all make artistic and scientific progress by standing on the shoulders of giants. It’s impossible to create in a vacuum, and I know my artistic ideals have been modified and honed by the work I see. (Even, or perhaps especially, by the always-awesome Too Much Light artists.) But when does the line cross from ‘inspiration’ to ‘artistic plagiarism’?

I really don’t know, but would be interested in others’ thoughts…