#good discourse

Mae Tyme: In 1995, there was a big story when I was in Europe about two girls, ten and eleven years old, who had escaped from a porn ring. They’d been kidnapped. The porn ring was busted, and they discovered other girls who had been starved, beaten and enslaved.

Annie Sprinkle:

That’s horrible.

Once I was making a little sex magazine with some friends, as a labor of love, not a big money making thing. We unknowingly hired an undercover police woman to be our typesetter. The people whose house it was had two kids, who were not involved in any photographs. The parents made a living making magazines from pictures that people sent them.

Twenty-five state police officers came into the house with guns drawn, arrested us and confiscated everything, from tampax to the dog’s leash. In the family photo album there was a photo of the two kids in the bathtub naked when they were three and five, the same photo every family has.

The newspaper headline said “INTERNATIONAL CHILD PORNOGRAPHY RING BUSTED”. The two kids were put in dreadful foster homes for several weeks which really traumatized them. That’s when I realized how much the press perverts the facts, and how sex negative attitudes are used to hurt innocent people.

Every time I do a lecture at a college or a reading at a book store, with my good intentions, inevitably this scary topic about children being abused comes up.

Mae Tyme: The same thing is used against lesbians. We are called child molesters. Undercover police used to bust us for what we were doing innocently, good heartedly and among adults. We view ourselves as nice people. We point out over and over that most molestation of children and others is done by straight males.

Annie Sprinkle:

I’ve been putting out sexually explicit images of myself for years. I know this sounds bizarre, but somehow it makes me feel safer.

Mae Tyme: Being very out as a lesbian makes me feels safer. I think blatant is best.

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WOAHOHOHO THESE ARE THE KINDS OF ASKS I LOVE

Honestly, I don’t feel like there is a lot of differencebetween American and Korean Hip-Hop (other than the obvious languagedifference). Like … at all. Especially since a lot of Korean hip hop artistsare Korean American.

Of course Korean hip hop appropriates … a lot from Americanhip-hop. From hair to experiences to at its worst, black face. And as Masta Wusays, “That’s no-no”.

I think that a lot of Korean hip hop fans, especiallynon-Black ones need to get educated on not only American hip hop but also BlackAmerican issues, because I think most of the absolute stupidity and racismcomes from being misinformed by American media or just plain ignorance. We needto stop condoning racist appropriation and start giving credit where credit is due.

However, I don’t think Korean hip-hop is all bad. I’m notBlack, so I’m not the best person to speak on this subject nor do I haveauthority to make a “final decision” of sorts. Rap music in general started asa means to fight and unite against oppression. And from what I have observed, alot of Korean rap seems to be about introspection, loss of individuality, classdifferences, and the evils of a materialistic and shallow society, which I’massuming are struggles of their society and culture. To me, that seems likevalid rap or hip-hop.

A really good example off the top of my head is Rap Monster,Suga and Jin’s cover of Swimming Pools by Kendrick Lamar. If they had coveredthat song but still rapped lyrics about alcoholism and growing poor in Compton,it would have been a completely inauthentic and shitty, disrespectful song( assumingthat no one actually struggled with alcoholism, but you get what I’m saying).However, they changed the lyrics to be about struggling in the Korean schoolsystem, which to me sounded pretty dumb on the surface, but as I thought aboutit more, I realized that this was a much more authentic and seriousrepresentation of rapping rather than just appropriating someone else’sexperiences. They rapped about what (I’m assuming) is their own pain andstruggles at the hands of a force they could not control, thereby making anoriginal contribution rather than just stealing something that wasn’t theirs.

As for R&B? I have no idea. I don’t listen to that muchof it from either culture.

“The struggle to move beyond [gender] stereotypes is far from over, and trans activists could be women’s natural allies moving forward. So long as humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be “assigned” genders at birth. But what we do with those genders — the roles we assign ourselves, and each other, based on them — is almost entirely mutable.

If that’s the ultimate message of the mainstream of the trans community, we’ll happily, lovingly welcome them to the fight to create space for everyone to express him-, her- or, in gender neutral parlance, hir-self without being coerced by gendered expectations. But undermining women’s identities, and silencing, erasing or renaming our experiences, aren’t necessary to that struggle.