Side effects include an ORGASM!!

Exercise is a dreaded activity for most but for some, the idea of gaining a booty and experiencing an orgasm makes excising more appealing than ever.

A Victoria’s Secret model boldly reported experiencing an orgasm while doing squats!… this drove the internet bananas!  The idea of experiencing an orgasm in the gym was a foreign idea, so the tabloid and women around the world hit the gym hoping to experience an orgasm, CRAZY I know.

Interestingly, there are a set of exercises known as ‘Corgasm’ where researchers promise a less intense version of vaginal orgasm. The steps to experiencing these interesting side effects to excising start with at least 30 minutes of cardio excise which activates the sympathetic nervous system making one more likely to ‘corgasm’. After the 30-minute cardio workout, it is suggested that you immediately go into some intense ab workouts. They suggest keeping up these intense ab workouts even when the core muscles reach maximum capacity. After muscle fatigue is reached, you will be on your way to the promised O world!!!

The gym as a new location to search for orgasm for women shows the long-standing struggle which is women experiencing an orgasm far less frequently than their male partners. I think it is interesting that of all places the gym is sucked into the search for an orgasm. Excising is great and all but telling women that a gym is a place they can experience an orgasm shows the lack of effort in our society to teach healthy sex education. Women are again given the responsibility of figuring out the best possible way to experience an orgasm rather than teaching their partners how to meet their needs. The gym is sexualized I think with reports of weirdos staring at women running on the treadmill to the type of workout clothes promising that you will get attention from your gym crush.

 

Chute Just Got Real!

Welcome to the hottest new game on the market, “Chute just got Real!” This is not your run of the mill chutes and ladders game kids. This is a game where you get to create a BRAND NEW BODY but no you don’t get to choose what the body looks like, ya just get what ya get.

The first step of the game is to place all player game pieces in the middle of the board on square #57.

To start the game the first player rolls the dice. Then that player will move their game piece whatever number of spaces the dice landed on. However the player gets to decide on which direction (up, down, right, left, diagonal) they would like to go.

If a player lands on a chute or a ladder the player must take a chute or ladder card (whichever one they land on). For example if player 1 lands on a ladder then they must take a ladder card which will give them a somatechnic body part, the same goes for if a player lands on a chute spot. The player MUST take the card.

There is no winning in this game, but in order to end the game all the cards must be taken by the given players. Each player will continue to roll the dice and land on different spots until all the cards are taken. It does not matter who has the most cards or the least amount of cards, everyone is equal in the end. There is no winner and there is no loser.

There is also not many rules to the game either, however the rules that must be obliged are the following:

  1. In the end the amount of cards collected is the amount of cards you have. You cannot do take backsy’s or trade amongst the players (Tip: you can however play the game again).
  2. When landing on a chute or ladder spot a card corresponding to that spot must be taken. However all feelings associated with that somatechnic card are valid and should be expressed.
  3. Play the game and have fun! (Tip: telling stories about how your body was altered and your life journey with your body at the end of the game has been proven to increase joy 3x while playing the game than if you don’t).

You know the saying “Life is just like a game” well this game sure is! So let’s get into what this game REALLY means…

Straight narratives label individuals based on what they observe outwardly. Bodies are forced into submission by doing what society has enforced as “appropriate” behavior. Preciado’s struggle with identity and research into the world of bio-possibility takes us into the reality of lived truth vs ascribed roles. Preciado’s experiment with chemicals to feel masculine speaks to the denial of lived truth making chemicals the only avenue to feel masculine.

In addition to somatechnics, this game interrogates the idea of normality and normalization in everyday life. Straight somatechnics are often seen as natural or taken for granted, while people whose lives work outside of them are more aware of how they influence bodies and society. As Carter writes in The Search For Norma, “being one of the normal people means being defined by reference to what you already are and so slides easily into the (empirically inaccurate) conviction that one’s own position is simply natural and devoid of political meaning” (22). By inviting straight people to play this game, we hope to open up a conversation about the “always already” nature of somatechnics: the roles that they can play in our lives, and the way that their status as straight or normal allows them to slip under the radar, while queer somatechnics are flashy, overt, and outside the norm.

Notably, our game, Chute Just Got Real!, does not have a specific goal oriented end of the game. This was intentional. In a board game that has a specific goal/end point in mind, the way the game is played becomes a means to an end. The end becomes a main focus of the activity. While there is not necessarily something wrong with such games, the human experience is rarely so linear. Something that we have learned (or unlearned, if you will) in class, is that there is always room for things to be done differently than the norm and there is a lot to be learned by thinking about things in a different way. This sort of thinking is a main part of what is driving our version of Chutes and Ladders. The game we created is more about the journey and creating a story than having a set goal from the beginning. We don’t always end up where we planned, and this game is no different. The way the players move around the board is not linear, and as the players compile different types of somatechnics they become a character with not just one type of bodily expression. In our culture, it’s hard not to participate in certain ways of modifying our bodies, as many somatechnics are very deeply normalized. This amalgam final character shows how varied and different the outcomes of our somatechnic practices can be. And lastly, the game is more about fun than competition for success — a queering of the way day to day life is usually expected to be.

Bookish Desires

Rainbow bookshelf from book blog A Beautiful Mess. Blogger Elsie Nelson had these shelves custom-built and collected books to fit the rainbow aesthetic. https://abeautifulmess.com/elsies-rainbow-bookshelves/

Book bloggers and instagrammers show off their carefully curated rainbow bookshelves, hold coffee and pose while reading in front of a scenic background, and curate book cover aesthetics to show off their latest purchases. None of these activities necessarily relate to the stories contained within the books that they read – instead this pleasure and obsession with books is linked to a more basic capitalistic desire, the desire to collect, curate, and luxuriate in your possessions.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes desire as a lack, something that can only be permanent when the lack is also permanent. I’m interested in how desire is expressed in bibliophilia, which Merriam Webster’s defines as “enthusiastic or extreme interest in collecting books.” Acquiring books is only one desire that drives bibliophiles – they also exhibit the desire for curation, display, and luxuriating in their collections. I hypothesize that a bibliophile’s desire achieves permanence because their desire is only an outward indicator of a deeper, inner desire for success and stability that is unachievable for most people.  Wishing to collect books on a whim feeds into the desire for a disposable income and for the stability of homeownership. The desire to have a rainbow bookshelf masks a desire for free time to spend organizing something you enjoy rather than making money or taking care of your immediate needs. These goals may seem so impossible as to be unthought of, or at least not something you can directing visualize or relate to your everyday life but manifest themselves as the desires of a bibliophile.

New Book Pages candle by ChiCandle on Etsy. It smells like paper, fresh ink, and amber glue, and it has 117 reviews and a five star average rating.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/614322097/new-books-new-book-pages-8-oz-glass-jar?source=aw&utm_source=affiliate_window&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=us_location_buyer&utm_content=258769&awc=6220_1651107733_2e81eecfb3bcc6808d8ab8200d0737c8&utm_term=0

Bibliophiles don’t limit themselves to the books themselves. There’s an entire book-related market, encompassing t-shirts, teas, candles, posters, perfumes, cosmetics, mugs, coasters, embossers, stationary, paper napkins, and egg cups. Whether it’s collecting books or book-related objects, book lovers who may consider themselves above such basic impulses are simply reenacting self-perpetuating consumerist desires.

The Erotics of ASMR

Woman making ASMR sounds with microphone and bubble wrap on pink background, closeup. Source: IStock

One moment I am watching a video of a woman making a smoothie, and then the following video that pops up on my TikTok For You page is a large boombox microphone with a mouth taking ¾ of the screen and softly but aggressively chewing a cheese stick. The next thing I know, I am down a deep tunnel of ASMR videos with hundreds of people (mainly females) tapping a microphone or crunching slime or spraying a water bottle; the variety goes on forever.
Autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, is a tingling sensation when some people hear soft sounds, such as whispered voices or the poof of a bag of chips opening. Something about the tingling sensation of the noises triggers this deep pleasure and relaxation in so many, and others don’t get it at all.
ASMR is seen as exceptionally sexual due to the intimate nature of the whispering and soft voices. ASMR also equates to sex because the noises and sensations from the Youtube and TikTok videos are understood by some but not by others; this is where desires come in. Once an ASMR advocate watches a video and feels the sensations that ignite pleasure, they desire that sensation again, similar to how certain sexual acts can ignite joy. This drive for more ASMR in the online community is driven by the desire for more sensation, so as the ASMR community has grown over the past few years, so has the variety for different sounds. Once someone has watched a sound continuously, the sound will not have the same effect as the first time watching it; it is the same feeling someone can get when they have had too much of one kind of snack, and eventually, they get sick of it. So the ASMR community has had to keep up with the demand for new sounds to get the same sensation that drives the whole community. As Elizabeth Grosz says, “Desire desires to be desired.”
ASMR enacts a pleasure response no matter what video you watch. The sounds tickle a part of the brain that creates a “silvery sparkle” inside the head, a euphoric “brain-gasm” or a feeling like goosebumps in the scalp that faded “in and out in waves of heightened intensity.” Vertebrate brains are fundamentally hardwired for pleasure and pain. Yet with joy comes consequences. The fact that ASMR gives people a “brain-gasm” elicits a judgmental reaction from anyone who does not feel the same sensation when listening to the noises. Listening to ASMR becomes deviant and pornographic since people feel such an intense pleasure that can turn into a desire for more content. However, individuals have a range of likes and dislikes, and there are individuals and even subcultures that seem to have a different pattern of pleasure stimulation than what is typical. (Perhaps in some cases, this is mainly cultural, not neurotypical.) S&M comes to mind. Some people experience pain as pleasurable and erotic.
The internet is vast, but it brings like-minded people together. At its best, it serves to unite kinky freaks, dissidents of oppressive regimes, and sufferers of obscure diseases. Simultaneously, this tendency can do the cruel or misinformed — giving shared language to Nazis and incels and other bleak dopes who were once kept mercifully isolated from one another. This feature of the internet is, at best, value-neutral; in any case, A.S.M.R. tests its limits. The YouTube subculture is bonded not by belief but rather by an ineffable sensation — perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.

https://www.tiktok.com/@the_object/video/7009619355252165890?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7086634394501809707

Weirder Than Sex?!

We often hear of experiences that are “better than sex,” e.g. chocolate or jumping out of a plane. But what’s weirder than sex? What human (or beyond human) experiences make us question how pleasure, desire, and fantasy structure our social world. Queer theory has often turned to study sex as an important cultural practice where people elaborate both their desires and their sense of self. Sex is an important site to study because of the many incoherent narratives that people construct around it. By looking at why each one of us has the pleasures, desires, and fantasies that we do, free of a moral structure around those dispositions, we better understand the human condition. Sex can be exciting, scary, affirming, harmful, unexpected or monotonous. But it is above all else weird—a space where alternative ways of encountering our own bodies and the world can be explored (or avoided). Yet sex is not the only site to explore the weirdness of human experience. We use the language of pleasure, desire, and fantasy to narrate our relationships to food, consumerism, “the good life,” activist politics, and fan fiction. What do these experiences tell us about the ambivalent, overwhelming, or incoherent character around desire (+pleasure + fantasy)?

Unlearning Manifesto

Dear Ignorant People,  

 

Do you avoid new information that doesn’t mesh with your worldview? 

Do you quickly change the subject if someone comes out to you? 

Do you experience a tongue twist pronouncing names that divert from Sarah, Anna, or Jessica? 

Have your friends noticed you clutching your purse when a mysterious Black man walks by?  

Have you ever hypersexualized a woman to bond with your bisexual female friend? 

Have you ever felt compelled to say, “Good guys always finish last?” 

Do you feel anxious when you don’t know someone’s pronouns? 

Are you afraid of using someone’s correct pronouns so you just refer to them by their name? 

Do you mistake the same three black/Asian people but somehow can distinguish 20 Laurens from one another? 

Do you assume your roommate is Mexican just because they know Spanish?  

The bad news is: your ignorance is deliberate. The good news: it’s treatable! 

We’ve diagnosed you with a propensity towards disciplined knowledge. By thinking that the world is predictable and well-ordered, you’ve closed yourself off to the ideas and perspectives of people outside your worldview.  

We notice you may also have tendencies towards “seeing like a state,” which was first brought to our attention by James C. Scott (MD). You tend towards orderliness and ease rather than empathy, and you choose the path that is easiest for you and fits in your pre-established worldview. Tragically, you just don’t know as much as you think you do.  

We invite you to consider a situation from another person’s perspective, and then use your newfound empathy to alter your behavior going forward. It’s not on the marginalized person who is being disrespected to educate you, it’s time for you to treat your ignorance yourself. Repeat as necessary (once daily at minimum). 

Doctor Julien Carter has diagnosed you will subconscious heteronormative ignorance. The treatment plan is to unlearn the normative practices that dictate your everyday life in society. This treatment will include a daily dose of 25mg of learning that normality made it possible to discuss race and sexuality within the restraints of a dominant cisgender heteronormative power structure without fully engaging in the relations of power in which they were embedded. In simpler terms understand that cis-white-heterosexual people are in fact not the default. In addition, you will receive a weekly dose of 130mg of understanding that norms are a social construct that is always evolving, so therefore when cis-white-hetero norms are applied over norms that include the perspectives of those who have not had dominant power for centuries and centuries, you will feel the side effect of historical guilt. 

We remind you that another side effect of ignorance you may experience is privilege. It is important to know this because if you remain ignorant of your ignorance you might be complicit in regimes of power that harm those who are marginalized.  

We urge you to be aware of the many silences that exist in the constructs of society. What we experience is not always the truth of the situation and what is offered as truth may be a performance.  

We urge you to remain conscious of what you declare and how you enact norms through speech acts. A side effect of your ignorance may be further perpetuating norms that harm not only you but others as well. Performances are relational. The closet is a truth left unspoken and an act put on for a world that is unwelcoming. 

We prescribe a healthy dose of Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet. Wash that down with considering the effects of the said and the unsaid. 

Embrace the treatment plan! Stretch and bend your mind! Stop looking for the straight and narrow and find the paths that are crookedy and windy. Once you start the unlearning process, you will open yourself up to the possibilities of a queer utopia. 

Your treatment plan is ongoing. Your ignorance can be managed but never cured. It will be difficult – but we are here unlearning too. Start now. 

TIKTOK: THE FACILITATOR OF GENDER

 

A person holds a smartphone as TikTok logo is displayed behind their silhouette. Source Reuters.com

TikTok (once the home to lip-syncing and musical.ly challenges) has become a dominant social force that dictates the latest trends and facilitates societal norms for Millenials and Gen Z. This change was brought about during Covid-19 quarantine. Sitting at home and not being able to interact with, well anybody, left society depending on social media like never before. During quarantine, the dormant state of society provided time and space for individuals to explore and express their identities without the harsh constant eye of society. Individuals turned to TikTok to share their newfound identity expressions, thus creating a collective community of queer exploration. 

As quarantine got longer, and people kept protesting masks, people had more time to interpret and change the codes of previous gender norms and share their knowledge. People watched hours of TikToks including constantly (subconsciously) absorbing gender codes around them. Gender is created through a series of codes enacted by how we dress, talk, gesture, and all aspects of our identity reflect gender somehow. As Judith Butler would say ‘Gender is always active,’ one cannot escape or dismantle gender. Since gender is always active, then as individuals we are constantly producing and generating the idea of gender. Gender moves through us when we start talking, dressing, moving about, and reinforcing codes of gender. So when new vocabularies of gender were being formed and shared on social media, gender started to become a collective experience. 

 

TikTok is life-changing in many ways (exhibit A: taking a 16-year-old dancer and making them a soon-to-be millionaire) but over quarantine, TikTok allowed for millions of homebodies to enact gender at a societal level. A brand new gender cannot just be formed out of thin air. Instead, new meanings are given to gender using vocabulary that already exists. So when people on TikTok saw different forms of gender being repeated, they were able to not only create their own expressions as an individual but also share and learn as a society. It is hard to ultimately say if gender is enacted by an individual or together in society. However, the conclusion that can be made is that with social media platforms like TikTok giving access to an exploration of ideas and norms at a global level then gender will change in an individual because of the society living at our fingertips.  

TikTok still image of Alex Renee (@stapleyourmouthshut) saying things they get asked as a Gender Fluid person. Source @stapleyourmouthshut TikTok page.

The imposter among us.

 

Harry Styles wore a dress becoming the first male given a solo feature on Vogue. This milestone achievement reached more audience than ever as this magazine never featured a solo male on the cover. For context, Harry is very vocal about his straight tendencies and so for him to be in a dress did not have anything to do with his gender as far as the public is concerned. Billy Porter, a gay man was the first man to wear a dress on the red carpet to push gender boundaries, but he was snubbed the opportunity to grace the cover. Billy publicly called out Vogue and Harry in disagreement with the cover saying that allowing a straight white man to be given this opportunity to influence so many people highlights the ‘erasure’ of the contribution of queer individuals to popular culture.

As Kendall Gerdes wrote, “Gender is performative because it inscribes itself as a discourse each time it inscribes itself on a body, as a lived experience.” The issue with the cover is not that Harry wore a dress but that he is portraying a gender identity that is not a lived experience for him. Neither is he part of the community that has this gender identity as part of their daily experiences.

Since birth we have been taught how to act our gender and avoid looking like, acting like, and talking like the opposite gender. Before social media, gender was learned from those around us but in this age of mass media consumption, it is what is depicted online/in magazines that inform how gender is performed. Gender is something we do together that influences who we are and how we belong in communities. When one deviates from gender norms and does gender alone they are met with heavy criticism. Gender is reinforced through others who share the same gender identities because we don’t invent gender spontaneously but pick up on clues that inform our idea of the self in the larger community. That is why representation matters especially who is given the power (through social media) to influence others. Meaning members within communities should be the ones granted to grace the covers of pop culture bibles like Vogue to show others that they matter.

Gender: the final frontier

Front cover of the first edition, with art by the Dillons. Cover depicts two faces against an abstract background.

The cover of the first edition of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

 

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s groundbreaking 1969 book The Left Hand of Darkness, the people who live on the planet Gethen are androgynous, and don’t identify with a specific gender except during a period called kemmer when they become fertile and can have children. Despite this novel view of gender and gender roles, LeGuin uses the pronoun “he” as a neutral pronoun to describe the people on Gethen. Seemingly in response to LeGuin’s book and responding to the history of using “he” as an assumed neutral pronoun, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice features a major intergalactic civilization whose language has no concept of gender or gendered pronouns. Leckie chooses to use the pronoun “she” as the default neutral pronoun as she writes about this civilization. The Radch empire considers their ungendered language a mark of civilization, and characters often commit social gaffes when they visit other planets and make guesses at the genders of the people around them.

Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1) by Ann Leckie

The cover for Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.

Both of these science fiction novels attempt to describe civilizations that have moved beyond our human perception of gender and gender roles. However, in doing so, they are constrained by the language, tools, and perceptions of gender that already exist. These authors can’t invent a new gender in a vacuum, so they are forced to use our current understandings of gender as a reference point. Though they are trying to invent new genders and ways to understand gender on their own, their imaginations can’t move beyond societal iterations of gender. Even as they deliberately try to take gender out of the picture, these books prove that gender is something we do – even when we’re deliberately trying not to.

Gender…Alone Together

Do we enact gender alone or together? Gender in one aspect, highly individual. Feminist and trans* activism has made respecting the autonomy of one’s gender a key political act. Under this paradigm, we each present gender based on how we intuitively feel about ourselves and express those feelings outward through clothing, gesture, voice, etc. But gender is also incredibly social. We don’t invent gender spontaneously, but rather rehash it through codes that are given to us. Our set of gender intelligibility is limited by the citations of previous gender norms and how we interpret them. To what extent, then, is gender something we have, something we are, or something we do? How do we contend with the “forcible citation of the norm” (Butler 1993), as something that both breaks us and makes us?