Film Review, All That Sheltering Emptiness

Gina Carducci and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's beautiful, meditative seven minute short film All That Sheltering Emptiness explores rape, public sexual culture, and the troubling issue of arousal in the face of reluctance. Shot on 16mm, the film's grain, flaws, and faded palette parallel the simultaneously pointed and ambiguous narrative voiceover.

Like the work of queer experimental filmmakers Barbara Hammer and Kenneth Anger, All That Sheltering Emptiness uses evocative imagery to explore themes of queer sex without the didacticism that narrative film often exudes. Sycamore describes a scene with a trick in a nameless New York hotel. Images of a hotel lobby and lingering shots of pendulous chandeliers blend into the poetic narration as she talks herself through the triggering power imbalance between hooker and john, payer and payee, fucker and fuckee. Sycamore's cadence and exaggerated upspeak mask the seriousness of the question: What is rape? What is consent? An answer of sorts comes at the end of the film when the narrator says, "I didn't want to call it rape because it was so commonplace." This is a brave and incredibly beautiful piece of art that everyone should see.

This is a NewFest (or whatever lgbt film fest you have in your town) Must-Not-Miss. Thanks to Shelly Mars for turning us on to this trailer. I cried in under 30 seconds!

Sharp and spirited, Edie Winsor and Thea Spyer met in New York in the 1960s and have spent the next 43 years in a committed relationship, but they long for the acceptance that would come through marriage. The directors (The Brandon Teena Story) have created an intimate and lively portrait of two women striving for civil rights.

2009, video, 67 minutes.
Directed by Greta Olafsdottir and Susan Muska

I noticed designers Jeffery Costello and Robert Tagliapietra themselves before I saw their designs. A 2005 photo of the flannel clad, hairy bear couple in Vogue magazine caught my queer eye. Gay male designers are nothing new in fashion, but bears in Vogue, oh my.

Known for their skilled draping and carefully constructed pieces that seem effortless on the body, the pair built their reputation on dresses in delicate fabrics with French seams and fine tailoring

In bear culture I'd be a Goldilocks. The label means exactly what you'd think — a femme who hangs with bears. I especially love hanging out at the Lone Star, the San Francisco bear bar ("Where the crowd never thins out," is its affectionate tag line). As it turns out, being dressed by bears is nearly as good as drinking with them. Costello and Tagliapietra's dreamy designs are as lovely as a mid-Summer beer bust. And their biography — life-partners taught the craft of dressmaking by their respective grandmothers — is almost more adorable than I can stand.

The team recently paired up with UNIQLO, the Japanese retailer famed for its basics. The collaboration is stunning. I swear it's nearly perfect. The dresses are made of slinky jersey, a famously clingy fabric that I wasn't sure I could pull off, but these pieces are cut so that swaths of fabric wrap breasts and hips in a flattering, touchable, subtly sexy way. This collection makes a curvaceous bod look perfectly elegant.

The UNIQLO collection features 14 unique designs in a muted palette of blue, gray, rose, tan and yellow. Everything in the collection retails for $29.50-$39.50, a tiny fraction what you’d pay for their RTW line.

Here's a fantastic video tour of the duo's Brooklyn studio.

Velvetpark caught Jill Zarin, Sigourney Weaver, Sandra Bernhard, Joy Behar, and a ton of other celebs last night on the red carpet at the Glaad awards. Here's our fabulous results. Enjoy!

I'm disappointed that in the question about Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin, you didn't address the rampant transpobia of either one! What's up with that?

Second wave feminism was (is?) plagued by transphobia. It's not limited to Daly and Dworkin, so I don't see a reason to single them out. But a more useful discussion would include transphobia in current feminism, because it's not like transphobia has been eradicated. In fact, I find transphobia in current feminism, the LGBT movement, and mainstream (read: homophobic, transphobic, sexist, racist, classist) society even more troubling because it's empirical evidence of our lack of progress.

Also, limiting the discussion to the second-wave would mean criticizing the work of many revolutionaries who, though short-sighted and stuck in an essentialist view of what it means to be man and woman, still paved the way for the rest of us to wonder what the terms man and woman really mean. I'm not making excuses here, we all know how lacking previous waves of feminist thought have been and that non-white, straight, middle-class, non-trans women were either ignored or met with open hostility. That exclusion held all of us back, including the women who fit all those labels.

I tend to pick and choose and take what I can from different thinkers, reserving my criticism for feminists whose thought hasn't evolved in thirty years. Germaine Greer comes to mind here, The Female Eunuch was a huge, huge influence on me and I will forever think she's brilliant in that book. But the fact that she still talks that transphobic smack about "pantomime dames" from The Whole Woman (1999) just makes her seem stupid and lazy. (I'm referring to the comments she made in the Guardian about Caster Semenya).

Ask me anything

I have read some of your articles and find your perspective and outlook on issues very refreshing and enjoyable to read and listen to. Your intellect and sense of humor in your writing is quite appealing. What was your major/field of study in college?

This is incredibly flattering; thank you! The only problem is there's no way for me to answer this without looking like a douche.

I have an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State. But I don't think it added much to my intellect or sense of humor. Mostly it just made me hate writers.

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What are some nice normal things I can say to girls I don't know at the bar that wont read as creeper? I keep defaulting to space camp, but, as I've no real interest in space, it's really failing me.

FTW is space camp? How the hell did you settle on space camp as an innocuous topic? I'm fascinated. Did you go to space camp? It sounds kind of cool. Do you have all your teeth? Because if you do, I bet I'd be attracted to you.

Girls like compliments. Make them sincere and not overtly sexual. Complimenting her on her shoes is a good bet. Complimenting her on her tits is dicey.

Open a conversation with a compliment, or a question about something that's going on in the room. You can't say something completely random, it's too obvious. You have to anchor your conversation opener to something that's actually going on around you.

Once you have her attention, switch to something that's happening or has just recently happened in the news. From there, if she seems comfortable and interested in you, you can start asking her questions about herself. If she's still talking to you by this time, she's interested.

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HAITI AND HATEFUL RHETORIC

I sent my Haiti donation through an LGBT organization called Rainbow World Fund. They are completely volunteer run and no one is taking a salary from your donation, and I thought you might like to know about it.

I know this sounds sanctimonious but I woke up at 6 a.m. crying about the people in Haiti. I keep thinking about trapped mothers and children and injured people with no help. I can't get these images out of my head. And worse, I don't know how I can help beyond donating and texting and facebook and twittering. And me sitting on my broke lesbian ass in Brooklyn, updating my facebook status to encourage my friends to donate money to Haiti, seems, well, almost embarrassing.

What's more embarrassing than me not knowing how to help is Pat Robertson claiming Haiti brought this disaster on themselves by making a pact with the devil or Rush Limbaugh discouraging people from donating and exploiting a heinous tragedy to make a racist dig at Obama.

Of course there will always be crazy people like Limbaugh and Robertson spewing insanity, and for the record I do think Pat Robertson is mentally ill. Limbaugh, on the other hand, is just mentally challenged. The crime here is not that those two people, among others, can spread hateful rhetoric, but that they have a platform with which to do so. Remember when Pat Robertson claimed that 9/11 was brought on by tolerance of feminists and homosexuals?

It's hard to believe, but people actually listen to this stuff. This sort of dialogue sways public opinion, which eventually affects policy because politicians want to get reelected. And those politicians reelected by crazies keep their constituency happy by denying you rights. So there you have it, I just spelled out the cycle of abuse.

It's a little too easy for those of us with a brain and a conscience to tune out the Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, various Evangelicals, Michelle Malkin, columnists and commenters on The National Review, the #tcots on Twitter, and all the other crap. But I strongly encourage you not to tune them out because what they say has a direct effect on your quality of life. It's better to pay attention to the dialogue, no matter how much Xanax you have to take, and respond to it.

There are a lot of things that self-serving racist, sexist, homophobes like Limbaugh conveniently overlook when they discourage people from donating to Haiti. For instance, you'll never hear Limbaugh talk about the ways in which abject poverty in Haiti has been encouraged, if not caused by, U.S. policy.

This is how it works: as a way of sustaining agriculture here in the U.S. we subsidize our farming, farmers overproduce crops like rice, we export it to third world countries like Haiti, and effectively ruin their ability to sustain their own agriculture. So instead Haitians move to overcrowded urban areas and live in squalor, working in U.S. sweatshops so we can buy cheap underwear at Walmart.

And here is where we come back to the beginning of this column. How do we fix things? How do we create change? I've worked in media for nearly ten years now and I don't have anything to add beyond the tired cliches about doing something small, being thoughtful in your own life, living in a sustainable way, having compassion, and being kind and thoughtful to people around you. I guess that's why I chose to make my Haiti donation through an LGBT organization. To me, it seemed like one small way I could contribute to the greater dialogue.

Do you think some people thrive on drama? Perhaps to the point where they cannot function without it?

Well you can be addicted to anything, can't you? Oxytocin or Oxycontin, either way if you like it you want more of it.

I do think drama can be a form of addiction. And it can also be a symptom of addiction.

Constant romantic drama is a cycle of highs and lows. It's like doing speedballs. You get so high from fighting, all your aggression is triggered, your fight or flight hormones, the cortisol and the adrenaline, are coursing through you. You need something to bring you down, so you process with your lover. You talk through the fight and your bonding hormones kick in, the oxytocin and the vasopressin, and you come down and you feel better and more relaxed.

But then you remember the thing that set you off in the first place and you get all high and freaked out again. And that cycle can keep going. Some people can keep it going so long that the other person gives up and gets out of the relationship. So then the addicted person has to find a new lover and the drama starts back up.

But some people use drama as a way of hiding or justifying their other addictions. An alcoholic might want to drink all the time, but on some level she knows drinking alone isn't ok. So she or he will seek out the most dramatic situations she can possibly find. She might befriend or date a lot of trainwrecks, so she has an acceptable excuse to get drunk.

If everything around her is always on the verge of collapse, it works like a smoke screen so you wont notice that she's in the bar every night.

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How many 100s of questions have you got now? What are the likely delays in answering them - and are you being selective in who/what you respond to??( So much magnetism - so little time!)

I'm not gonna lie to you, there are a daunting number of questions in my inbox. I can't tell you what kind of delay to expect. A few days to a week? Maybe?

But I'm not being selective; I plan to respond to all questions except the really crazy ones from my ex girlfriend.

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Why do I like David Letterman better than Jay Leno, even though David Letterman is a boob in a suit?

Letterman is a douchehose but he's much smarter than Leno. Also, Jay Leno's head is shaped like a chicken McNugget, which makes him hard to look at.

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Oh Diana Cage, will I ever find love?

Love is just a chemical trick designed to get you to stick around after your orgasm in case there is some baby making involved. It's not that hard to find love. If you haven't found it yet it's probably because on some level you don't really want to.

Take a good look at the relationships you've had in the past. Were the people you dated actually available? Were you? It's a lot more likely you were only pretending to want love when you really just wanted sex.

The key to finding love that lasts beyond the crazy humping stage is actually letting yourself be vulnerable and maybe even occasionally bored or disappointed. And being vulnerable, bored, or disappointed seriously suck so most of us avoid it.

In the meantime, just keep screwing everyone until you get bored of it. After a while you've slept with enough people that you get it out of your system. Being bored with the highs and lows of casual affairs helps with the whole falling in love with someone part. If you still crave the drama, you aren't ready. Falling in love means sticking around once the oxytocin and dopamine hits wear off. When you decide you don't want emotional ups and downs any more the more quotidian parts of love will seem more attractive and you'll actually be into it.

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Last night Meghan McCain twittered a low-res, black and white picture of herself holding a copy of a Warhol biography and most notably sporting what can only be described as a truly great rack. Immediately her 87 gajillion twitter followers went nuts; replying lewdly, criticizing her, demeaning her, defending her, praising her, jerking off to her, etc. It's the Internet, that's what happens. The only reason it's even notable is that the news blogs picked it up and this morning she addressed it in her Daily Beast column. 25-year-old women twitter scantily clad pictures of themselves into the ephemera every five seconds. But Meghan McCain is a notable Republican media personality so this photo spawned Boobgate.

That said, in the photo her breasts are awe-inspiring--cantilevered to a remarkable height by a well-engineered Wonderbra. She's kidding herself if she didn't think the millions of pervs trolling the Internet would crawl all over her. The reaction was instantaneous. The main problem is that she reads her replies. It seems like she got a little overwhelmed by the attention and sent out a few more ill-advised tweets ending with an apology.


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Recently articles about the new masculinity, masculism, and the call for regressive gender roles have started to grate on my nerves. New masculinity, a buzz term with a nebulous meaning and various interpretations, has been co-opted by organizations like Focus on the Family as a call to men to be more "manly."

My professor girlfriend tells me the call for manliness is nothing new. Muscular Christianity was a Victorian era movement telling Christian men to embrace physical strength along their devout Christianity.

The current interpretation, however, is a mess of anti-feminist sentiment. Religious neo-cons say feminism has turned men into a society of wimps. They want you to git yer wives back to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant like they should be.

But it's not just women's independence that's shrinking the collective American phallus; supposedly teenage sexuality also makes a mockery of manly dominance. Father-daughter purity balls-formal events almost like anti-debutante balls-want to keep daughters away from the world rather than present them as adults. The balls promote female sexual abstinence; no nookie until marriage. Oddly though, teen boys aren't subjected to rituals like these. Girls, apparently, will always carry the burden of saying no. Boys will be boys, after all.

More here

The media is health care reform crazy. You can't turn on the news without hearing about it. I'm sure you know why it's such a big deal right now; Obama is trying to make it happen. Reform means change, and people in this country are freaked out by change.

The vitriolic opposition to the current administration seems deeply rooted in racism. We have our first African American president. That's a new thing. That's already a change. Ultimately any reform made during this administration will likely be met with the type of crazy racist resistance that happened during the general election, the tea party demonstrations, and the current health care reform town hall meetings.

Racists seem to believe that racial equality will take something away from them. Racism opposing Obama's policies is rooted in the same fear that causes homophobes to oppose equality for gays. Creating equality doesn't take anything away from anyone; in fact, if you take away infighting and create economic, racial, sexual and gender parity we'd have a stronger nation overall. Think about how much faster we could make good things happen if we were all in solidarity.

But again, creating equality for less privileged Americans requires change. And so many people out there reject new ideas without even taking time to understand them. I don't know if they lack the ability to think critically, or if they're just lazy, but remaining uninformed and believing propaganda spread by legislators who might not have your best interests in mind doesn't seem so smart. We'd all be better off if we took a minute to work through a new idea and decide how it might actually affect us before we reject it.

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How'd it feel for you to get two new states on our side within the same week? I had a raging case of PMS which made me so emotional about the whole thing I was just stupid. My girlfriend called me to say hi on the morning of the Vermont decision and I answered the phone crying. Add to this that last week I wrote a mushy, lovey-dovey letter to her, and in one of those terrible email snafus we've all had, I accidentally forwarded it to my friend Grace Moon. It wasn't just lovey, it was chock full of those little animated gmail emoticons. I mean the really sappy ones. It was full of all the hearts and flowers and little smileys kissing each other. Ugh. Any reputation I had as being reasonable is shot now. I give up.

The Iowa and Vermont decisions are happy ones, and ultimately not surprising. Vermont was early to allow civil unions and Iowa might be smack dab in the mid-west but the state has a reputation for being fair-minded and taking the constitution very seriously. And it was Barack Obama's win in Iowa in last year's election that secured the presidency for him. We like you Iowa. Thanks.

Because precedence is what gets these court cases rolling, and Vermont and Iowa have now set legal precedence, we may actually see a series of states legalizing marriage in rapid succession. Ultimately, you can't argue with the Constitution, which clearly states that citizens can all expect equal protection under the law. No state Supreme Court has ever ruled marriage unconstitutional, it's the crazy wing-nut voters that get all high on God and start getting marriage bans on ballots.

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont--you've got four whole states you can get married in now. You better hurry if you are eyeing Iowa though, the same kinda crazies that got Prop 8 on the ballot in California and then, to everyone's dismay, got it passed, are gearing up to get a constitutional ban on gay marriage rolling in Iowa.

The difference, though, between the California Prop 8 debacle and the wing-nuts wanting a ban on the ballot in Iowa, is that getting a constitutional amendment passed is a much more arduous process than it is in California. Because it's more time consuming and has to be approved by two sessions of the state's legislature as well as by the voters, Iowans wont be voting on an amendment like Prop 8 for at least three years. And it's those three years that are going to make all the difference.

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March is Women's History Month, a time when we're encouraged to look back and acknowledge the important contributions women have made to society throughout history. Which is a fine activity and all, but it doesn't do much in terms of alleviating the burden that systematic discrimination has put on us over the years.

This recession is impacting women especially. There's a lot of conflicting information to dig through--the first reports claimed that men were losing jobs at higher rates than women, due to the high rates of job losses in construction and manufacturing, two fields that are largely male dominated. As job losses in those sectors continue some researchers have even speculated that women may eventually make up a greater percentage of the overall workforce. That sounds like positive thing until you take into account that even if more women remain employed they are still earning far less than men overall.

Consider for a moment that in California 68 percent of minimum wage workers are female, there are more female than male borrowers holding sub-prime mortgages, and women and children in developing countries are being hit harder by higher food prices and the slowdown in markets for exports. This recession is killing women. We're poised to make up a larger percentage of the workforce but only in lower paying occupations.

The path to true economic equality is radical change that starts with the way we view gender and how we raise our children. For years studies have shown that boys and girls are encouraged differently in elementary school. Boys are encouraged to be more aggressive in class, are called upon more often and are challenged by teachers in ways that girls are not. Boys are praised for speaking up; girls are praised for having nice penmanship and manners. This disparity in earning potential is something we start setting up our kids for from day one.

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