WESTWOOD, CALIFORNIA—I found this Beer Dong poster attached to every other post on the street I’m staying on in Westwood. The street does have a map name but is more commonly called “Frat Row.” You’ll forgive me but this has put me in a gender war kind of mood. But screw you if you are a man!

Gender, because of Palin and Hilary Clinton, has become popular as a meme in 2008. Only gender is not actually ever discussed.

To really talk about gender, race and class must necessarily be connected. Instead, because of the Obama versus Clinton fight for the United States presidential nomination, gender was pitted against race. Laura Ann Stoler has written extensively on this and I know you won’t read this critical theory stuff. So here are the Chantelle’s Notes version: Patriarchy is goddamn hard to shore up. The few controlling the many can’t be set to ‘infinity repeat’; instead it has to be monitored, refreshed and re-established perpetually. The process of essentialization is, however, constant in this struggle. Our unfailing flair for essentializing people and collapsing complexity into singularity is a core conceptualization tool in our Western culture. Barack Obama is many things, but it all boils down to his blackness. Hilary Clinton is complex but, in the end, she has no cock. We can name and define based on a few characteristics and thus control our world and keep things the same. Race and gender and class are all products of the same fabulously harmful thought process.

Here’s something neat: Race and gender and class don’t exist. But that I mean aren’t tied to biology, destiny and need not determine anything. Except they do exist. And they define everything. Because we are social, cultural beings and so our identities, from birth, get tied to these essentializations. It’s so effed up.

Women, people of colour and poor people suffer patriarchy in harmony. Their varying oppressions dynamically weave together and patriarchy suckles at the nexus of what these identities produce: economically exploitable, enslavable, apparent powerlessness.  Tokenism here, phony debates there and presto—America is the Land of Freedom and Opportunity.

So back to the Beer Dong. It’s hard to explain how something can both not really exist and yet, be currently inescapable. One thing that is easier is reading the insecurities of the privileged white male tied to this contradiction played out magnificently in the dong poster: the dependence on the female gender to satisfy male fantasy and desire by getting drunk and rape-ready while mimicking oral sex; the fear of powerful black cock and phallocentric meaning is managed through explicit non-production; everything desired and feared only obtains validity when produced for sale and profit. 

I can be a smarty-pants and write circles around other bloggers—male and female—but in the tech world there is an electronic ceiling. This ceiling prevents any essentialized group from getting en masse where they’re not supposed to be. This ceiling is the beer dong of the 2.0 world. It let’s us see how threatening we are if we can bear staring long enough through it. If I am sexy and naked I’ll get so many more readers and hits than if I’m just talented. It’s not fair that power I have! It’s tempting to be the “life of the party.” It seems sort of like an advantage. But is it fair compensation for working under the gaze of readers who might enjoy your words but they’d adore them if you just flashed young, large and perfectly proportioned boobies at them? Maybe I should suck on the beer dong until I figure it all out.

Tags: beer dong, electronic ceiling, feminism, greek life, palin and obama

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Posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 1:33 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.