Is It the Sex or the Hate That Keeps Us Watching ‘Girls’?
by Gwen Reyes on May 17, 2012
If you’re like me and have slumped into a mind-numbing semi-sleep for the past five Sundays thanks entirely to the comings and goings of Westeros, then you have probably woken up with a jolt halfway through your Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) dreams to discover yourself staring down the barrel of a gun. And that gun is HBO’s freshman series Girls, a show so fraught with first world problems and entitlement it’s nearly impossible not to experience polarizing feelings.On the one hand, Girls is an engaging slice of life dramedy revolving around the personal and (maybe) professional lives of three recent college graduate lady friends (and one still-in-school cousin). Setting Girls apart from most shows currently broadcasting is creator and head writer Lena Dunham’s dedication to exposing the warts and imperfections of her four post-Sex and the City women while they each navigate the troubling landscape of sex, love, feelings, and career in New York. It’s just that her women, like their HBO godmothers, are living in a New York that doesn’t exist for most city dwellers.
In fact, these “real” women are still living in a fantasy world despite Dunham’s promise of financial struggle and hardship. What’s interesting is that after the first episode where money (or lack thereof) is discussed at length, the topic has yet to come up again with such fervor. Rather, the focus has turned to relationships and sex, which is fine with me. Who doesn’t like watching pretty young things make like rabbits?
On the other hand, Girls is both uncomfortably relatable and completely far-fetched. In a way it is The Office for Millennials, something we laugh at because it’s truthful, but also because it hits close to home.
Let’s start with Hannah (Dunham), whose parents have demanded she finally get her shit together, and have financially cut her off as their way of kicking her out of the nest. She’s twenty-four, unsure of what it takes to be a writer when she grows up, and easily susceptible to the influence of her best friends Marnie (Allison Williams) and Jessa (Jemima Kirke). She is also spending her time refusing to grow up by bedding an actor-carpenter named Adam (Adam Sackler) who has very little interest in her emotional well-being. It’s incredibly brave for Dunham to not only expose herself on screen in such heart wrenching, troubling, and intimate sex scenes, but to also write these moments for Hannah.
After five weeks I’m still constantly puzzled by how much heartbreak Hannah will put up with, but I’ve also started to realize Dunham is not interested in giving her protagonist any leeway when it comes to her poor decisions. As a writer, Hannah wants to learn and experience “stories,” and in a sick and masochistic way, Dunham holds up a mirror to all the Hannahs of the world through each pitfall. For example, it’s unclear if Hannah is aware of Adam’s manipulation, or if she likes to play the victim so that she has something to whine about later. She seems more interested in hurting than anything else, and I think many viewers have felt or still feel that way themselves. I’ve been a Hannah, and maybe that’s why I feel physically ill when she doesn’t stop Adam in bed the moment she feels uncomfortable. Or when she feels confused after she tries to break up with him and then he kisses her. Despite how caricatured Hannah is, she represents the sensitive soul of a lazy creative who distracts herself with sex, but doesn’t want to realize that someone who is sexing you may not love you.
Dunham is not concerned with having perfect characters, rather she seems to relish in providing her audience with what she views as accurate depictions of women just trying to make it through the day. Through the character Marnie, Dunham is able to expose someone who looks like she’s got everything together but under the surface is completely floundering. Unlike Hannah’s disheveled outward appearance, Marnie is straight up Duchess of Catherine put-together. She never has a hair out of place, an unmade face, or wrinkle in her best party dress. She works the job any art-loving New Yorker would die for and an adorable boyfriend who worships the ground she walks on. All these things make Marnie a perfect role model for the Connecticut set, except she is internally spiraling just as badly as her best friend.
I could sit her all day talking about how dissatisfied she is with her relationship, or how self-centered she is to think Charlie (Christopher Abbott) would never be a “real man,” but it just pisses me off. Marnie pisses me off. For someone who wants to talk so damn much, she has very little to say to anyone. And when she does, it’s all just negative chatter about how no one can live up to her standards. Marnie could die in a fire, and I’m not sure anyone would miss her. Well, the stick up her butt might.
However, my animosity aside, Marnie’s recent break-up with Charlie was both the most selfish and selfless move she’s made all season. It was the first time all season we saw Marnie both vulnerable and determined to change something about herself. Yes, maybe when you have a man in between your legs isn’t the best moment to rip off the Bandaid, but it’s a clean break. She needed something different (like maybe an Adam), and Charlie needed to run away from the crazy. Now she’s free to stumble her way through a multitude of one night stands that I’m sure will span the rest of the season.
Our last two ladies, Jessa and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) couldn’t be more sexually divergent; however their mutual potential for character growth is fascinating. One is a proud promiscuous lady and the other is a virgin, but they both learn something from the other. Jessa likes to use sex as her only weapon against men, yet she envies Shoshanna’s desire to be loved. She doesn’t want to admit that she has a heart and Dunham writes her in such a revealing way that after five weeks we’re routing for her to find self-assuredness through something other than sex. Jessa is intriguing and captivating, and her tougher outer shell will hurt like hell when she finally lets someone break it. She may think she can’t be “smotted” but if the series is really trying to be “real” then she is dead wrong.
Each week I promise myself I’m not going to aid my rising blood-pressure by watching Girls but then each week I get sucked back in. These four women infuriate me just as much as they enslave me, yet I don’t think I’ll ever be able to quit them. I’m hooked in for now, but to turn one of Hannah’s phrases: I think I’m at the point where I’m just hate-watching them. Or it could be I’m worried I’ll miss out on another one of Adam’s sexual kinks. Let’s be honest, those are fun to watch.
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Dominik Garcia-Lorido photographed by celebrity photographer Angelo Kritikos. Wardrobe styling by Sophia Banks-Coloma. Dominik Garcia stars in the new hit series MAGIC CITY on Starz network.
* Just waiting for her nude scenes in Magic City. Apparently in Season 2 - Andy's daughter Cuban assets will be in full display as her role is given more prominence. Though not certain which character is likely to be killed off in season finale. Hopefully not one of the girls.
“There was no nudity in the part when I read for it,” Garcia-Lorido says. “In fact, I had that written into my contract."
“But people don’t have sex with their clothes on, and if nudity makes sense for the story, I’m not opposed to it. It can’t be just for shock value. It has to mean something. That’s why people watch premium-cable television — for things to feel real. As a viewer, that’s what I want.”
Little birdy tells me Dominik is fibbing. The casting notice originally required nudity. Then it becomes "possible nudity" thanks to lack of real Cuban actress with real tits auditioning for the role. The producers had to play push-pull game with Dominik to lure her in with promise of "tasteful nudity". But her sensible view on clothed sex is positive (you hear that Allison Williams?). Dominik honey, I watch cable television just to see actress disrobing for the first time on-cam.
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Allison Mack in Marilyn - film trailer
* in case you guys don't know yet - Allison is naked in the movie.
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Siu Ding and Grass Mud Horse (partial) by © Martin Lui (2010)
People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet
Katrien Jacobs
(Intellect; US: Mar 2012)
'People's Pornography': The Mundanities of Pornography and Surveillance Culture
“In a previous study about Chinese women and sexually explicit media, it was found that young women resist repressive attitudes precisely by casting these kinds of furtive glances (Ho and Ka 2002). It is in these ‘sneaky’ or ‘stealthy’ types of gazing that female agency can be located.”It also reminded me of another version of the furtive female glance, enacted with brilliant and disturbing intensity by Isabelle Huppert in La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher). Huppert’s character in the film spies on couples at the drive-in having sex in their cars. Her character, based on Elfriede Jelinek’s novel of the same name, is that rare breed in cinema and literature: a female pervert, an actual female sociopath who is more desiring than desired, to borrow a phrase from Virginie Despentes, and one who muddies and perhaps redefines the concept of female agency and sexual roles through her harmful yet pleasurable furtive glances.
Jacobs is a cultural studies associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and she interviews students from universities in Hong Kong and mainland China in her chapter titled “Gender Variations on the Aching Sex Scene”. There’s a sameness to the responses that adhere quite neatly to stereotypes of gender roles: men like pornography because they like sex, while most of the women believe that pornography is a political right but not particularly enjoyable because “it’s just sex”. Whether these students felt compelled to give such predictable answers due to the nature of the interview sessions or directed questions is hard to tell, of course, but there is one particularly revealing response from a young woman who talks about her ambivalence to pornography:
“It’s very interesting, you know, my male friends, especially for the boys I hang out with, they always show a great deal of interest in such things. And one of my friends, he is very interested, he told me, ‘if you ever want to see such movies, and if you ever have such needs, you can ask me, and I can show something to you.’ And then I said ‘Oh well, so far I don’t have such kind of needs, and I also don’t understand why boys love them so much.’ And my friend said something very interesting, he said ‘Well, it’s a kind of male romance, you girls will never understand it.’ I think he’s right, because I really don’t understand it.”Much of the pornography that Jacobs looks at and analyses in this book fall within mainstream, heterosexist norms, and it’s worth noting that the man quoted in the example above has framed it as a “male romance”. The phrase can be read in two ways: either heterosexual romance for men = sex, or mainstream heterosexual pornography = homosocial bonding for heterosexual men (i.e., “romance”). And indeed, the book is peppered with comments from Chinese male consumers of porn about how porn is a means of knowledge and education that teaches them how to be “better” at sex, and also a means of conspicuous consumption in terms of how much they can amass, catalogue, and collect to share with other (more often than not, male) friends.
As Jacobs tells us in the introduction, pornography has been banned in the People’s Republic of China since its formation in 1949. Jacobs’ project is a positive one that occasionally neatly fits into liberal narratives because it frames “porn culture and porn taste as an aspect of civil sexual emancipation”. It shows that the emergence and current prevalence of internet and DIY porn is seen by some citizens as almost a modernising, civilising mission that will allow Chinese subjects to become properly cosmopolitan in a globalised, late-capitalist world. Such forms of “sex entertainment”, Jacobs explains, “aims at a kind of patriotism or social configuration of China’s place in the world.” It’s almost as if it’s one’s duty, as a Chinese citizen and a citizen of the world, to participate in expressions of the self and desire that have liberatory potential through predictable narratives of pornography: amateur sex videos, obligatory close-up shots of body parts, and a carefully cultivated digital sexual presence.
One cannot, however, accept this premise without running straight into Foucault, who reminds us of this in Volume One of The History of Sexuality: “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality.” Jacobs’ book reveals the numerous Chinese citizens who have said “Yes!” to sex as a means of shedding Confucian and communist values, many of which are carefully-manipulated stereotypes of gender roles much like the capitalist, liberal values of the first world. But while there’s plenty of discussion of government control in Jacobs’ book, there is little discussion on forms of control enacted by the corporations who are meant to provide us with a free and democratic internet, and how carefully crafted “individual identities” tend to exist as mere data to be fed into the ever-churning social media algorithms.
It must be said that Jacobs’ enthusiastic exploration of contemporary Chinese digital sexual expression covers interesting territory, from sex bloggers and Ai Wei Wei to Edison Chen’s sex “scandal” and queer love in the animation fan and cosplay communities. Among the more interesting segments are the ones of female sex workers and producers/creators of porn and online art: women who situate their naked bodies against China’s growing industrial urbanscape, or who place their bored, expressionless faces against a backdrop of middle-aged men in suits. The neoliberal dream, as it turns out, is as tedious and mind-numbing in China as it is in the rest of the world.
Although much of the material Jacobs explores follows the familiar trajectory of pornography that finds men as its main consumers and women as its primary labourers, Jacobs includes plenty of first-person accounts that provides a glimpse into how women negotiate the spaces of propriety and proper “female behaviour”. One blogger who goes by the name Hairong Tian Tian collected and posted pictures of men’s limp penises because she wanted to explore “the root of Chinese masculinity” by showing the “cock in its most mundane state”. Another blogger named Lost Sparrow attempted to compile an encyclopedia of lovemaking sounds “based on the premise that they would sound different in different parts of China”.
These are attempts to remake pornography, but whether or not they succeed in presenting pornography as something more worthwhile than a convenient commodity is hard to tell. For example, the DIY sex videos that Jacobs describes as popular among younger Chinese citizens certainly reify sexual pleasure and emotions and it leaves one to wonder about the emancipatory possibilities of the endless click-and-choose of online porn viewing. As Jacobs research shows, pornography has entered new spaces and is presented and enjoyed within new(er) forms of technology, but the patriarchal structures of society remain unyielding and resistant in the face of all this sexual and technological creativity.
Jacobs tells us that “China’s cultural-erotic mindset is in constant dialogue with the products of Japanese sex entertainment,” and points to Japanese Sola Aoi as the ultimate sex symbol for a Chinese male fantasy that desires youth, docility, and submissiveness, preferably within a small, slender, well-endowed female body. This preference for a cute, unthreatening female sexual presence brings to mind Sianne Ngai’s formulation in this interview in Cabinet: “Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness.” Ngai reminds us that “there’s a sadistic side to this tender emotion”, while also emphasising that cuteness is a “commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption”. This certainly complicates the notion of the liberatory potential of Chinese porn consumption when the most popular object of straight heterosexual male desire, Sola Aoi, personifies cute submissiveness.
Further on in her interview, Ngai also discusses the idea of cute as “a dynamic and complex power struggle” which explains why it plays a significant part in cosplay. Jacobs traces the queer dynamics at play in Chinese cosplay and shows how it provides an avenue for transgender people to inhabit their process of transition through costume and stylised images, where “cute” looks may provide camouflage or protection for marginalised sexual and gender practices. In this way, then, cute can be a power struggle in the way that Ngai talks about, but the reification of trans* experiences and identities may go hand-in-hand with its potential capacity for liberation.
However, homegrown women sex bloggers who present the radically disturbing image of themselves as women who are neither cute nor young are often denounced on websites and forums, Jacobs tells us, for being fat, ugly, and/or old. The Edison Chen scandal is also interesting because of how it automatically positioned his female companions as victims; Gillian Chung had to make a tearful “confession”, while Chen himself was made to apologise to his female lovers for what were consensual sexual encounters. In this familiar sexist narrative, women can be acted upon in sex, but are very rarely accorded the position of actors. Furtive glances and furtive fucking, apparently, bookend the realm of female sexual agency.
While liberals may read Jacobs’ project as proof that China is finally “becoming modern”, or “open”, or “liberal”, or – much preferred in our hierarchy of democratic terms – “progressive” (Just like the West! People having sex and others watching! And all the choices!), others may be less celebratory about the proliferation of largely heterosexist internet porn within capitalist structures. With apologies to Rousseau, it appears that sex is everywhere, and everywhere man is (still) in chains. Jacobs doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of her subjects or her audience, and while her book strikes a positive note both at the beginning and at the end, the numerous examples throughout show us that sexual expression in China is in a constant state of conflict between individual and collective desires and the ever-present and increasingly noisy demands of capital.
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Hardcore clubbing
Romp ... pair in club
NIGHTCLUB bosses were slammed last night after two raunchy revellers were snapped cavorting in the nude — so they could allegedly win £50 in DRINKS vouchers. A teenage fella was caught on camera in a naked clinch with his mystery girl pal in full view of stunned spectators at the Level 2 nightspot.
The smutty couple had been plucked from the crowd at the venue in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, to take part in a racy ‘sex positions’ game.But scene descended into sheer sleaze when the DJ allegedly invited them to repeat the act in the buff to win £25 drinks vouchers each.
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‘Game of Thrones’: Esmé Bianco Talks About Ros, Sexposition, Nudity, and More
Fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones who have read the voluminous novels in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series upon which the show is based often have an edge over non-readers, given that they’re only too aware of what’s to come.
But, in adapting Game of Thrones from Martin’s work, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss at times shift away from the texts to explore off-camera sequences, insert new twists and turns, and create new scenarios for the characters to face. In Season 1, Benioff and Weiss went so far to create an original character just for the show: prostitute Ros, who quickly fell into bed with several of the major players and continues to turn up throughout the show’s second season.
A fiery redhead who has clawed her way to a position of relative power within a King’s Landing brothel owned by Aidan Gillen’s Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish, Ros is played by 29-year-old English actress Esmé Bianco, a former burlesque performer, singer, and Agent Provocateur and Modern Courtesan lingerie model. Originally intended to appear in just the pilot, Bianco—who said her character was created initially as a “plot device”—has continued to add a level of unpredictability to the proceedings. Because she was created for the television show, viewers never know what to expect from Ros … or what her role in the overall story will become.
When we last saw Bianco’s Ros, who returns to Game of Thrones in Sunday’s episode, she was forced to brutally beat a fellow prostitute, Daisy (Maisie Dee), by the sociopathic child-king Joffrey (Jack Gleeson). It was a savage, disturbing scene of escalation and punishment, and served as a reminder that Ros is a pawn in a larger game of power.
“Things don’t become much sunnier for Ros,” Bianco told The Daily Beast, over cocktails at a West Hollywood hideaway. “I was trying to think of one character who is having a good time at the moment … and there’s no one. She’s having as much of a tough time as everyone else.”
The scene in question lead to a critics’ debate on Twitter about whether Joffrey had, in fact, forced Ros to sodomize Daisy with a stag’s head scepter, which Bianco quickly denied. “Wow, no,” she said. “What got cut from the edit was that I was beating her and you see the scepter coming down [with] blood on the end of it … I’m [actually] hitting a pillow. I had to hit it with all my force and I broke the scepter. People were gluing it back together because antlers were coming off.”
Mini-debate aside, the shocking scene underpinned the show’s exploration of the constantly shifting landscape of power. Here Ros is given a choice: beat this girl almost to death or die yourself.
“No matter where any of the characters think they’ve gotten to in terms of power, there’s always somebody that’s willing to beat them down,” she said. “It’s the one time that we see Ros where her sex appeal does nothing for her and doesn’t get her out of that situation. It’s not about her being a prostitute; it’s about her being just another person that Joffrey is going to stomp on.”
In person, Bianco is striking: graceful and porcelain-skinned, a soigné swan. She left behind a burlesque career when she relocated to America to focus on acting. Known for her neo-burlesque routines—fast, dark, and humorous affairs (“Nobody has the attention span to watch a girl take her stockings off for 15 minutes,” she said)—such as her signature show, “White Wedding,” in which she played a bride who gets jilted at the altar, Bianco performed at clubs and gave a well-reviewed show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where from atop a piano she sang “Put the Blame on Mame,” a song made famous by another iconic redhead, Rita Hayworth.
“Being new in town, it was really important to focus and knuckle down,” she said of her decision to focus on acting. “I didn’t want the fact that I was doing burlesque shows and also taking my clothes off on Game of Thrones to suddenly be seen as ‘that naked girl.’”
Much discussed has been Ros’ near-constant nudity in the series and what academic Myles McNutt deemed “sexposition,” the show’s usage of sex and nudity in order to service backstory or large swaths of monologue or exposition. Bianco has typically been at the center of this controversy, appearing in a Season 1 scene in which Ros and another female prostitute “practiced” on each other while Gillen’s Littlefinger indulged in a monologue. Bianco was only too aware of the criticism that the scene and its ilk engendered, and expected it.
“There was no way that the scene with Littlefinger in the brothel wasn’t going to ruffle a couple of feathers,” she said. “The books are not an easy read. They are brutal and have their fair share of sex in them. It would be naïve to think that HBO would take a story in that genre and just do the safe … version of it. That scene is beautifully shot and shows quite clearly the kind of world that the characters are living in.”
It also says something about Littlefinger as a character. “It’s very telling about his relationship with Catelyn (Michelle Fairley),” said Bianco. “He is watching these two girls get down and he cares nothing about it. All he’s interested in is the game of power and this woman who he never managed to marry.”
Which might be missed upon first glance due to two naked women in the background. Still, Bianco maintained that both this scene and an earlier one between Ros and Alfie Allen’s Theon Greyjoy revealed details about their characters that perhaps wouldn’t have come out had they been more guarded. But the presence of naked bodies has proven difficult for some to see past.
“When there’s a naked woman on the screen, people start making judgments about it,” Bianco said. “I’ve been over here [in Los Angeles] since Game of Thrones came out, so I don’t know how different the reaction has been in Europe, where people are a lot more tolerant of nudity on screen. People [here] see a pair of breasts and they forget that there’s a story going on.”
Yet Bianco thinks that the objectification of women in situations like these is not really relevant anymore. “Objectivity is almost a choice you make,” she said. “As a burlesque performer, I didn’t choose to be objectified. I’m entertaining people and people can choose to see me as an object because I’m naked, but I don’t choose to see myself like that … I hold the power.”
“It’s almost an outdated argument to a greater or lesser extent, because nobody is forcing anybody to be in that situation. I don’t think the very fact that I’m a woman makes me suddenly more vulnerable or more inherently used and abused.”
Bianco’s Ros has slowly become a literal connector between many of the main characters, building up an arsenal of secrets as she crosses paths with Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), Theon, Littlefinger, Joffrey, Grand Maester Pycelle (Julian Glover), and others. And, while we never see them meet, Jon Snow (Kit Harington) revealed that he almost lost his virginity to Ros.
“There’s definitely something to be said for the fact that she’s a common thread between all of these people, which I don’t think any of them realize,” Bianco said. “People are unguarded around her, which will prove to be interesting.”
Bianco sees Ros as having undergone a big transformation. “There’s a person beyond the plot device,” she said, and Ros is more than mere window-dressing. “She’s a cocky girl and there’s no denying that,” said Bianco. “She knows how far she can push it, but she knows at what point society is not going to ever accept her … The problems that she faces are very representative of the problems that women face today, but you hope that not too many women are forced to beat their coworkers with a large stag-headed scepter.”
Bianco is in the dark about where Ros is headed, however. “Anything is possible if your head’s not been lopped off,” she said, laughing. “As far as I’m concerned, if you’re not dead in the books, then you’ve got a fighting chance.”___________________________________________________
Katrina Law Heats Up Maxim Australia June 2012
She's known for her sexy small screen work in the "Spartacus" shows on Starz, and the lovely Katrina Law shows off her good looks in a feature included in the June 2012 issue of Maxim Australia.
The 27-year-old actress dons an array of skimpy lingerie for the Joe Deangelis shot spread lining the magazine's pages while dishing about topics having to do with her role in "Spartacus: Vengeance".
Highlights from Miss Law's Q-and-A are as follows. For more, be sure to pay a visit to Maxim Australia!
On if we're going to see more of her Spartacus character, Mira, in Season Two:
"Physically speaking, I don’t think there’s anything left to see! You’d have to go into a different genre of film for that. But you will get to know a different side of her – let’s put it that way. She is going to be a badass this year."
On if she had to do any intense physical training:
"I did the gladiator boot camp with the boys, and it kicked my butt. I don’t think I could walk for four days. I also did sword, dagger, and bow-and-arrow training."
The 27-year-old actress dons an array of skimpy lingerie for the Joe Deangelis shot spread lining the magazine's pages while dishing about topics having to do with her role in "Spartacus: Vengeance".
On if we're going to see more of her Spartacus character, Mira, in Season Two:
"Physically speaking, I don’t think there’s anything left to see! You’d have to go into a different genre of film for that. But you will get to know a different side of her – let’s put it that way. She is going to be a badass this year."
On if she had to do any intense physical training:
"I did the gladiator boot camp with the boys, and it kicked my butt. I don’t think I could walk for four days. I also did sword, dagger, and bow-and-arrow training."
On if she ever feels shy about stripping down for Spartacus:
"It does make me a bit self-conscious, because you're putting yourself out there. But my full-on frontal? I gotta tell you I feel like a bada** for doing it. Some actresses out there are like, 'Oh, don't ever do nudity', but I'm proud of my body."
"It does make me a bit self-conscious, because you're putting yourself out there. But my full-on frontal? I gotta tell you I feel like a bada** for doing it. Some actresses out there are like, 'Oh, don't ever do nudity', but I'm proud of my body."
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