THE VULNERABILITY OF BEING "DISGUSTING"

This is my last post responding to “From Disgust to Humanity:  Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law” by Martha Nussbaum, and some people will be grateful since the subject makes them feel a little disgusting for even reading about such matters -- as well as vulnerable.  It’s the vulnerability I want to address.  Nussbaum’s last chapters are about sex shows defined as a court case about women dancing nude.  She speaks of Justice Richard Posner carefully reviewing the history and uses of such dances through the ages and defending nudity as a necessary part of the meaning when describing eroticism.  Later she considers whether such businesses can be considered a nuisance, possibly a danger to the surrounding community.

She does not consider the male sex worker or the vulnerability of sex workers, which is simply addressed by the law in terms of assault and murder.  Female sex workers are targets of obsessive rage and disgust-prompted gaze-aversion by nice people that allows the workers to be attacked and killed with impunity.  I don’t think it would be hard to find police cases where exotic dancers emerging from their place of work are attacked with acid, knives, guns.  The novel and movie “In the Cut” outline the sort of obsessed control freaks who try to destroy women.  Yet the former mayor of Great Falls, owner of a bar just outside of the city’s zoning restrictions (restrictions imposed because of worries about danger and nuisance to neighborhoods) hired exotic dancers and was convicted of “allowing” prostitution in a secluded back room.  This went on for a long time until the mayor’s DUI convictions piled up enough to provoke authorities.  (Arguably, DUI presents more danger to the public than exotic dancers or even prostitutes.)

As Tim often says, “you probably won’t believe this,” but decades ago a local rancher took me across the Canadian border to a nude dancing establishment in Lethbridge, which has always been a notorious “sin town.”  I thought we were going to the movies.  It’s about the same distance from here as Great Falls is.  The two dancers (it was afternoon so things were a little quiet) were at opposite extremes on just about every measure.  One was a very young girl, just beginning, awkward and insecure.  Her farmboy/boyfriend/pimp sat at the edge of the stage and coached her.  The other dancer was a muscular dark-eyed woman with bright red hair (not natural) whose dance was gymnastic and gynecological.  She was in total contempt of her audience, spoke taunts, and glowered in particular specifically at ME.  (Sometimes when you’re curious to know about something, you find out a lot more than you bargained for. ) 

That first girl was about as vulnerable as a human being can be, skinny (the rancher remarked, “that little girl needs feeding!” as though she were a calf), pale, goose-bumped, poorly made up, bad haircut, homemade costume, callow young “boyfriend” who could not have protected her.  I suspect the tough redhead had a gun and could use it.  But there would be no danger to the community in this place because its viability depended upon secrecy.  It was in a warehouse district, unmarked, and large alert men leaned against the walls with folded arms, watching the clientele.  I went back some years later, found the building, and saw when I circled the block that the back entrance was protected by a high brick maze (probably bullet-proof) that allowed cars to pull in so that the distance to cross when entering was very short and unseen.  Of course, such an arrangement -- which would protect emerging women -- was also convenient for taking in drugs -- or drugged women.  Use your imagination.  

Men can also be prostitutes.  But women’s vulnerability is shared by boys.  Small children are, of course, vulnerable to everything and adults must take responsibility for their safety.  Across the planet trafficking in small children of both sexes is common.  We’re told that in some places when they are no longer useful, maybe infected with HIV,  they are simply taken into the woods and shot.    

I’m thinking of Tim’s adolescent boys, sometimes legally adult, depending on the country.  Self-supporting, they are under the same economic sword as women, which is one kind of vulnerability.  Smaller and less developed than they will someday be, they are vulnerable to violence.  (Think Mathew Shepard.)  Not experienced enough to have awareness, strategy, and a portfolio of possible resources, they can be deceived or overpowered.  Spared the contempt some men have for women, they are nevertheless hated for being “pansies,” “nancys,” -- or should I say, “marys.”  A further vulnerability is simply being invisible, their existence denied and ignored by the larger culture, even though in hard times it is boys who are thrown out of their homes or who leave voluntarily, runaways.

I’m aware of my own vulnerability for even being associated with Tim Barrus or writing about these subjects.  It is my age, isolation in an orderly small town, and education that makes me able to talk about it in ways I could not when I lived in the city.  Even as a clerical person in a city bureaucracy, I felt I had to keep bear spray in my desk because of the raging people who sometimes came to the counter over nuisance issues.  And yet Portland is or was known to have chickenhawks who included local politicians.  (The mayor of Portland was caught shtupping his underaged baby sitter.  Female.)

This failure of awareness (both ignorance and suppressed knowledge) leads to inconsistent laws and enforcement, which undermine the integrity of the police and courts, and fail to protect all citizens and youngsters.  Tim and the boys often stage workshops on how to keep safe: partly practicalities like tying safe bondage knots, partly safeguards like taking another boy to the location to watch from nearby, maybe by carrying a tiny “smart phone.”  HIV-AIDS is not the only hazard.  Men pay to beat boys and get carried away.  The core group of Cinematheque had already discovered that pay-per-view cyber-sex was safer in the immediate situation, but could create a known public image that put them at risk from stalkers who wanted to “own” them or destroy them.  Thus, masks.  In the past Tim had also worked with female prostitutes to improve their safety and, indeed, much of what he taught came FROM them and their sorry experiences.  He himself had been raped.

Law makers are often liberal white people who simply don’t have enough raw and rough experience.  Considering whether pasties and g-strings will incite disorder if they are left off is a far cry from trying to protect sex workers.  Underlying disgust distorts reality and encourages denial.  Someone needs to bridge the gap in consciousness.  But it’s very easy to use disgust to shut up any reports.

DISGUSTING!

Martha Nussbaum is suddenly the legal/religious thinker du jour, a writer of such fearlessness and logical clarity that she takes on the really impossible subjects without flinching.  At the moment Gerald Fetz on the Montana Humanities Roundtable is trying to get a reading discussion going, based on her book called “Not for Profit.”  The subject is  really why we are discarding the arts/humanities, but so far everyone is mostly praising each other and the humanities.  Kim Anderson has doubts but is not expressing them yet.

I’m reading Nussbaum's “From Disgust to Humanities: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law.”  She’s a very clear writer, but it’s probably easier to get a sense of her thought by watching YouTube videos of her.  This book is part of a series from Oxford University Press and she was asked to write it.  Her ideas of disgust come in large part from thinking about untouchables in India, who were originally “untouchable” because they handled excrement and the dead, among other “lowly” and repetitious jobs.  Now that even much of India has proper plumbing, the names identified in the public mind as “untouchables” remain a stigma.  There is even more disapproval of people who change their names.

The basic idea is that considering the nature of some people to be “disgusting” is a way of controlling them, keeping them in their place.  Though it seems as though the objectionable qualities are objective descriptions, justified in the public mind by associating them with nastiness like excrement, stink, bugs, ooze, slime, disease  (J.K. Rowling’s “mud people”) , it often becomes obvious that calling them disgusting is a prelude to treating them like animals, excluding them, beating up on them, defunding them, and -- in the most extreme -- herding them into the prison camps and gas chambers of the Holocaust.  Retarded and otherwise disabled or crippled people, gypsies, gays, Jews, dissidents, and so on were all considered “disgusting” and therefore their extermination could be called “cleansing.”

My own most vivid witness has been to the stigmatizing of Native Americans and part of the counter-battle has been getting tribal children to give up their internalized self-definition of “disgusting.”  Missionaries of various kinds used this to force change in the lives of tribal people.  They combined the “cleansing” idea of baptism with the “cleansing” of eternal fire in the Afterlife and linked two words into a phrase I still hear:  “dirty Indians.”  The push-back, both by Indians themselves and by guilt-stricken idealists (mostly back East), was to make them so ethereally noble that they were hardly physical, defined as spiritual beings with connections to Another World.  

In the practical world, a stigmatized person is thought to deserve punishment for the original sin of being dark-skinned or poor.  A couple of decades ago an enrolled Blackfeet drunk (oh, disgusting!) pestered around a bar until the bar owner simply shot him dead.  The tribal people started out being indignant but pretty soon they drifted back to the bar, saying that the drunk asked for it with his disgusting behavior.  Times have changed.  Not long ago three brothers who liked violence picked out what they thought was a likely victim in the parking lot of a bar at quitting time: a drunk Indian ranch hand.  But in the middle of their melee, another Indian -- a tribal council member and his wife -- tried to stop it, so the fun-lovers turned their fists and boots on them.  The interveners  were not powerless.  They knew how to use the law.  The brothers are serving jail time.  But even the tribal council member was accused of the disgusting practice of hanging around in a bar until closing time.

Following the example of blacks who resent the n-word and find that forbidding it is a powerful weapon in resisting disgust, some years ago the word “squaw” was fingered as a vehicle of disgust.  The associations with the word “squaw” had come to be pejorative: a squat, dark, old, dirty, possibly infected woman with no powerful husband who could legitimately be used by men as convenient and then discarded or killed.  Evidence is in the newspapers and police dossiers across both the United States and Canada.  (I suspect in Mexico as well.)  “Squaw” is considered by some to be equivalent to “whore”, not least because poverty and social disorder (as is often seen on reservations) is one source of sex workers.  Some of them have learned to be dangerous themselves.

Respectable Indian women who know how to use the system came to the conclusion that eliminating the epithet “squaw” -- which is scattered over all the maps of the continent as thickly as the words “willow,” “beaver” and “deer” -- would get rid of the stigma.  It did get rid of a lot of old maps and a lot of money necessary to rename everything on new maps.  This deed was done in part because of the conviction that “squaw” meant “cunt,” which is a forbidden dirty, slimy, disgusting word.  (Scholarship showed that “squaw” did NOT mean sexual parts but rather gender, which is as much a social role as an anatomical part.  A hard distinction to grasp.)  And this took the conversation to the familiar white man conviction that women in general are basically disgusting.  

Compare other epithets for Indian people:  “buck” or “papoose.”  Papoose is close to the European ‘puppet” or doll, making an Indian child less of a real human family member.  (Compare "pickaninny.")  “Buck” has implications of sexual potency and physical strength.  Those word-inventing men (because they wrote) boasted, half-sheepish/half-proud, “when I was a young buck,” meaning “when I got into fights, had adventures, and prowled for women.”  Like a dark-skinned man.  “Before I became civilized.”  Unlike that Indian buck idling on the porch.

Today’s civilized people do not use such words.  They come from hierarchal assumptions based on the European empires, particularly the English, who used stigma to control their subject countries.  But contemporary Native American people must still emphasize their professional, educated, and meticulously conventional qualities in order to get respect.  Even the school children respond to the advertising-driven obsession with cleanliness, not smelling, “proper” clothes and other appearance markers that are meant to prevent disgust.

But then a curious wave of resistance is always in such situations, used by those who either make victimhood into an entitlement or those who embrace the disgustingness with slogans, markers of the ghetto, flaunting sexuality of every kind, and shouting words used as markers, not just of filthiness but also of sex and evil.  

It is so powerful a kind of terrorism that it can drive the missionary-minded, empire-seeking, power-invested, domination-obsessed into apoplectic violence.  The law must deal with it constantly.  Literature and art address it everywhere.  But the academic “humanities” people are afraid to, which is why they’ve become irrelevant.  Except that they are now part of the problem, defining every nonconformity as “disgusting.”  Or to use their phrase, “so ugly.”

"GENOCIDE": HOW DISGUSTING!

Those who have good memories or who have been taking notes will recall the last on the list of five universal and innate value dimensions recently proposed by research is “disgust.”  There has been quite a bit of discussion about “the morality of disgust.”    I’ve been rereading the third of Tim Barrus’ Eighties novels about AIDS, the one called “Genocide” that is a favorite of adolescent boys out on the edge.  Do not read this book if you’re easily disgusted.  If you believe “cleanliness is next to Godliness,” just go away.  If you are one who argues for compost-as-renewal and dirt-as-fertility, you might be okay.  Maybe.

This essay is a first attempt to understand the relationships among:  prejudice against those who are different, disgust with disease, the escalation from disgust to moral blame to criminal law that justifies extreme punishment, and our faulty management of the messy processes of birth, death, sex and excretion -- the four necessities of life.  This is my way “in” to the book and to the real-life phenomenon of genocide.

Minorities slated for genocide are generally portrayed as “disgusting”: dirty, degenerate and contagious.  Diseases are “disgusting”:  vomit, diarrhea, pus.  Excretion is considered disgusting: stinking, germ-laden.  Some people are disgusted by the whole idea of sex and everything connected with it, like nakedness of sexual organs (including breasts).  In general the value of disgust (note the root of “gust” shared with “gustatory,” meaning appetite and eating) evolved to protect against eating spoiled food, avoiding practices that are unsanitary or likely to attract insect vectors of disease, animals that eat filth and corpses (rats, pigs, dogs), places where rot and excrement collect, or signs of disease like open sores or leprosy.  The weapon that has been most effective against meth use in Montana has been disgust: graphic photographs of rotted mouths and supporating skin.

I would suggest that this disgust may be a way of distinguishing between pornography and eroticism.  Maybe not.  But it seems a good guide to perversion and fetishes, where the conventional prohibitions or precautions become so strong and enmeshed with their opposites that they become obsessions.  Like Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing.

In this book, “Genocide,”  the power of Barrus’ transgressive writing violates our sense of what is disgusting more than any of the other moral values.  He mixes oral with anal, the repellant with the delicious, disgust with delight.   The same photograph of a hopeless bathroom shows up repeatedly in his vids, ironically, since those with the HIV virus must be scrupulously clean (their immune systems don't work).  Wherever the boys are, the washing machine will run constantly.  The polarities between filth and the great (and historically recent) luxury of cleanliness entwine in a strange way.  Barrus celebrates the funky smells of armpits and butt cracks in a time when men are urged to use body sprays to eliminate their own pheromones.  He ignores our culture’s identification of strong smells (garlic, sweat, smoke, grease, tobacco) with low class minorities.  But he strongly endorses loyalty, honor, strength, love and bathtubs.

Decades ago there was a notorious murder mystery in Cosmopolitan magazine about women found dead on operating tables with their spinal columns laid open and electrical torture machines nearby.  The concept was that someone had invented a drug that converted pain into pleasure.  The greater the pain, the more pleasure was felt, so the women urged their torturers to go on and on until they died.  Of course, it was “really” about heroin.  And it was also about masochistic women hooked on abuse.  And perhaps it was about the value struggle over whether women are entitled to freedom from pain in childbirth when it was fancied to be a punishment for Eve’s sin visited on her descendants.
It was so easy to assume that AIDS was a disease specific to homosexual men because sodomy mixes oral/anal/penile.  The disgust of that became entwined with the disgust of the symptoms of the disease itself.  It was not until it was shown that the fluids of childbirth or transfusion or injection could also carry the retrovirus that the disgust withdrew a little, but some people consider all those things disgusting.  Barrus is not going to talk them out of it -- he’s going to throw it in their faces.

Several sources have led him to this.  One is his own history, for instance, his attempted suicide by shotgun blast to his abdomen.  He was fourteen.   In addition to the necessary colostomy, which was eventually reversed, healing involved the formation of many fistulas that leaked so much nastiness that he improvised a disposable diaper taped across his belly in order to go to school where he isolated himself in the library lest someone smell him.  An influence that has affected a generation of gay men is nursing innumerable cherished friends as they died of AIDS.

Hospitals are places that mix the nastiness of disease with constant dedication to the cleaning of bodies, equipment and surfaces.  Babies fill their diapers with stuff that would drive a skunk out of the room, but once cleaned they are considered sweet and desirable.  This interface of cleaning/healing/comforting against the ordure of illness is where Tim stands his ground in real life when he personally nurses (okay, double meaning) the at-risk boys, pulling them back from death.  In fiction he presents disgust mixed with delight.  He demands that we look at the mess, but then alongside it admits the sweet desirability that keeps us from simply eliminating the source.

For the reader the effect of two strong emotional forces colliding is intense, even addictive.  One wants to know but dreads to know, like the consequences of a terrible accident.  Some yearn to “fix” everything; others want to stamp out the irresolvable complex.  These forces are strong in our culture, partly because of the compassion charities that try to help people like Haitians in the midst of mud and cholera, a fecal disease.  We see them on the news.  Movie warehouses are full of carefully authentic rotted zombies and crispy black victims of immolation, convincing severed heads and prosthetic wounds.  We love CSI autopsies.  Horror has us in thrall.

And we feel the connection with glamour, stimulation, risk, gambling, exhibition.  Tim’s chapter, “Chinatown Chinatown” is about the brothers “Star” and “Adonais” (both echo Jesus) who are bodyscrapers “slushing” body parts out of the sump under the joy rides that tear people apart in the death camp that is neon candyapple Vegas in the clean dry desert.  This is very much like the sequence in the movie “A.I.” where androids are destroyed for the pleasure of the flesh people.  Supposedly obscenity is removed by the lack of humanness, which is distinguished from machines by the human capacity to suffer or love.  Does that work in reverse?  The first story in “Genocide” is about two male lovers -- shot into space to escape “the virus” -- who eventually allow their version of “Hal” the spaceship computer (who is named Tsan) to share their lovemaking.  Is this an obscenity?  A perversion? 

When I remembered this book, I thought it was one long road story augmented with short poignant inter-chapter poems, but it is not.  Rather it is a series of reflections on the forcible quarantine of illness, the obscenity of suffering, the disgust of death, the necessity of survival, the uses of flight, persecution by culture, and -- most of all -- salvation by intense relationship with another like yourself.  Not long ago I watched “The Road”, Cormac McCarthy’s take on the disgust of filth and cannibalism.  I have not forgotten that his roots are in southern gothic horror -- necrophilia, captivity.  (See “The Orchard Keeper,” written five years later than “Genocide.”)  Whether society will accept reflection on these issues depends upon the context:  McCarthy discovered that they fit well with the Mexican border country.  In fact, better every day that more heads are found in empty lots.

For Barrus to choose the story-core of two brothers/lovers is transgressive.  This suits him, though he backed off the horror a little in the Nasdijj trilogy.  As the world considers the consequences of sterility, emptiness, oppression of the many in order to support the luxury of the few, the political dimension of disease (controlling the meds), and whether ants crawling on a crucifix is more shocking than crucifying a man for teaching tolerance,  surely we ought to pay attention to this testimony from a man who knows the territory, even as he tries to flee across it to escape death.

I'm not through with this topic, but this is the last in a series of three reconsiderations of Barrus’ Eighties books.