Porn and gardens

This review of the new Legs McNeil oral history, The Other Hollywood, is really interesting and makes me want to read the book. McNeil put together a really compelling history of the rise of New York punk with just interviews, and I'll bet that this book probably does live up to they hype. Hopefully, this will be the book that gets people past the partisan style debate about porn--it's great, fulfilling, fun/evil, exploitative and addictive. Interview both Nina Hartley and Linda Lovelace and get at the crux of the matter--like anything else in this world, different people have different opinions on it and one experience does not negate another.

One thing in this review really struck me as a reflection of what I always say about porn, or more specifically, about the misogyny in it--that it's a symptom of a larger social problem, not a cause. The review states that the book makes the case that Linda Lovelace was horribly abused by her husband and that everyone else stood around and ignored it. But also that they didn't ignore it because they approved, but for much more mundane reasons than that.

And here is where the exhaustive chronicling of "The Other Hollywood" becomes not just compelling but important: In the back-and-forth between the couple on the page, and with memories from other actors and crew members thrown in, it becomes clear that Lovelace might have indeed been rather flaky or dumb or, in Traynor's word, a "dingbat," but she was also so battered physically and emotionally that it is little wonder that she felt coerced. And because her co-workers saw her problem as a private matter, they stayed out of it.

It reminded me of how abuse is ignored in every other arena of life, how people view it as a "private" matter and stay out of it. Traynor would have beat his wife no matter what they did for a living, and the people around them would have ignored it regardless of what they did for a living. You can argue that the sexual nature of the work made the abuse and you could have a good case. But it's more important to see the abuse that occurs in porn not as a cause of the abuse in the rest of life, but as part of the fabric of the rest of our society. A symptom, not a cause.


Anyway, sorry about the lack of posting today. I spent most of the day not building a new Mouse Words, though progress is being made on that front, but actually engaged in the real world task of building my garden. This is the first non-rainy weekend we've had in awhile, so we took advantage. The Man of Mouse is handy as hell and he also managed to tear apart a spare bench we had and turn it into a 2 foot tall wall for a massive compost pile in the time it took me to bag five 30 gallon bags of leaves to toss into our brand new compost pile. We then tilled and partitioned off an 8X8 foot area for the garden, composted it, put a pathway in it and planted tomatoes and some herbs. More herbs will be planted during the spare moments in the week of SXSW.

Pictures of said garden to come.