Susannah Breslin

Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment by Susannah Breslin is a recommended memoir - for the right reader.

Right after Susannah Breslin was born in 1968 her parents enrolled her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley. She was one of over a hundred children who were research subjects in the Block Project, a thirty-year study and psychology experiment of personality development. The study was supposed to predict who the subjects would be as adults. The memoir has limited memories and revelations concerning her participation in the study and instead focuses on her various life experiences.

The description of this memoir does a disservice to the actual book Breslin wrote since the Block Project plays such a small part in the actual text. Now, the book written is not one I would have been interested in reading and reviewing. I'm not interested in the adult entertainment scene in San Francisco or the porn industry. I pushed through, hoping for more on the study she opened with. Honestly, in the end her memoir and style of writing weren't appealing for this reader. She does finally circle back to the study. The final examination of what happened to it and questions about the future were interesting.

This would have been better if it was an article about her participation in the study, skipped over the memoir bit, and then jumped forward to the final summation of her later research into it and what it could mean for the future. 2 for me, 3 for memoir readers.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Grand Central Publishing via NetGalley.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2023/10/data-baby.html… (más)

Breslin gives us a powerful article on the state of the porn industry and the mental landscape of its purveyors, actors and victims, suffused with the "American decay", boulevard-of-broken-dreams aesthetic that's dominated portrayals of California since at least the seventies, with exemption for the occasional Reaganite flashup, Full House or what have you. I'm pleased with that idea--nowadays Reagan gets so closely tied to the freaky right wing, the "teabaggers" or "bitters" or whatnot, but what I remember from childhood is something a lot more blandly terrifying, a lot more totalitarian, a lot less pathetic, and a lot more mainstream and therefore pernicious. Like, Oxytocin man at the protest isn't gonna appeal to anybody--but the people on Full House were so clean.


You may now be like "what's this guy on about? Full house?! J-GHHHH!!!!" but bear with me for a second. The bourgeois project has failed,right? I hope we can agree on that. (If you have compelling evidence that it hasn't, PM me!)

And it seems to me that given that first premise, much of our contemporary politics, especially American politics, can be read as the attempt from so-called Left as well as Right, to breathe life back into said project's exquisite corpse. To give people, in other words, a way to still believe in the American Dream (with whatever dampened resonances and local changes it might have outside the US). And that kind of ideological state apparatus, that movement to control and colonize people's heads and then exploit them and let them down and throw them to the gutter for the next exploiter--that's what pornography is. Porn is capitalism in its purest form.


And since porn is everywhere now--since there are affecting appeals online from even the hardest-boiled basement misogynists to make it less ugly, along the lines of "I enjoyed Weapons of Ass Destruction 1 through 8, but now I just want something more"--there's a backlash, sure, but also an intensification. Like, he isn't sure whether more getting out of the basement or getting a (creepy yet touching) view into someone else's intimacy--an emotional pornography--or whether it just means more ass destruction.


So we have people getting offline, closing their facebook accounts even, and getting out into the sunshine and trying to build a life, however belated, and thank God for that. Debrutalizing. And we have people looking to consume a more loving brand of pornography, with all the sadness and contradictions that contains.And we have people who wall off the corner of the mind in which the damage occurs and keep watching the awful, because step one is the compulsion or the release, and step two is worrying about it. And these last are not all of us. They're not me.


And it doesn't matter if they're being inundated with this stuff--they need to face up to what that means as much as (more than?) any sweatshop-product buyer. They are supporting an industry that destroys lives via psychic torture. I see this "home for orphaned girls" workhouse meme out there now--cf. e.g. the terrible human Gavin McInnes of Vice, in the shitty Taki's Magazine, saying the women in porn are broken, pathetic basket cases that need porn to survive because they can't do anything else any more. In his context, it's an attack on hipster kids (if you'll forgive the term) who do this stuff because they think it's sexy or fun, flooding the market, bringing down the worth of labour, and since in McInnes's world everybody fashionable has a trust fund, he tries to dress it up in this pseudo-progressive attack on rich kids on behalf of the broken poor. So caring. "Won't somebody think of the bitches?"


And we get the exact same thing here. "Jim isn’t the bad guy. He’s the good guy. “I sleep at night,” he informs me, his voice rising, “because I know, in my heart of hearts, I’m giving people money, that could not hold a job at fucking McDonald’s, for the most part. I’m paying people’s rent.” He waves his hands spastically. “It’s a lot more than I can say for a lot of the companies in America, pieces of shit, like Madoff, and Enron, all of these son of a bitches the Bush administration funded that do nothing but take, take, take! Here, I just give, give, give! And this is a fact!” he shouts, wild-eyed. “We are helping these girls! Anybody that comes into this business, for the most part, is a broken toy.” He leans towards me, earnestly attempting to make himself understood. “We’re giving them a place where they can make money, and get by, so they’re not standing on line in a welfare department. Thank God for people like me!” He bangs the desk."


Bullshit. Juxtapose:


"The camera moves closer, following the man we can’t see like an obedient dog. From the right side of the frame, his left hand reaches out and grabs her by the top of her head. His right hand secures her under the jaw, trapping her in his vice. Her grimace fills the screen.

“So, what do you do for a living?”

“I work in porn.”

“Whore?”

“Of course.”

“Absolute whore, right?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of whore?”

“Dirty whore.”

“Piece of shit whore?”

“Piece of shit whore.”

“Yeah?” he pauses. “You know, lately, I haven’t had any energy. Have you noticed that?”

“Mm-hm,” another man we can’t see concurs.

“What do you think?” the first queries.

“Girls are getting off easy,” the second advises.

“She’s a little nervous,” the first considers. “I’m a little nervous, too,” he mock-confesses. “I don’t even want to hurt you,” he tells her. “But I have to—because my friends are here.”

Over the next ten minutes, he threatens to beat her, threatens to torture her, pulls up her shirt, pulls up her skirt, hits her breasts, hits her thighs, throttles her by the neck with both hands, humiliates her, degrades her, makes her cry, chokes her until she is gasping for air. He gets her to tell the camera she is 27 years old and the only reason she’s here doing this particular job on this particularly day in this particular hotel room in the Valley is for the money, and the fact of the matter is she has two young children to support, of whom the man asks rhetorically, and seemingly for the sole purpose of screwing with her head, “They’re going to grow up to be proud of her, right?”

The woman is becoming unmoored. He orders her on her hands and knees, and begins beating her with a leather strap that cracks! across the bared skin of her backside every time he hits her, leaving angry pink welts, until, finally, in a futile attempt to protect herself, the woman reaches her arm around herself, her hand turned upwards, her palm facing outwards, and the man stops.

The camera pans to the side to find her face buried in the sofa cushions.

“Can I ask you a question?”

She doesn’t move or respond.

“Could you look at the camera, please?”

He repeats himself. Eventually, she turns her head and faces the camera. There are tears tracking down her flush cheeks. Her body is shaking uncontrollably, and her breath is hitching with every intake.

“To steal a Quentin Tarantino line,” he muses, mockingly, “‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’”

There can be no mistake. This is when he breaks her. Her expression flattens. Her eyes go blank. She appears to be dissociating. Slowly, she turns from the camera, going somewhere else, inside herself, anywhere but here.

“OK, I’m going to bring the guys in here,” the man announces to no one in particular. “Because you’ve just gone to pieces on me.”

And, with that, the real scene begins."


This cannot be borne. Not by the victims--and yes, I mean the actors--not by any of us. Porn consumer=maybe not "sex criminal", but somebody whose lonely, addicted actions are putting them on the wrong side. (And I propose we define porn, or obscenity let's say, in terms of its backstory, not in terms of what it looks like and if it offends a "representative of the community". If there's a story like this behind it, it's obscene.)


I can't agree with Breslin's conclusion that the reason this stuff exists is because it's what people want. It's cart before horse. People consume it because it's what exists. And I also can't accept her other conclusion that the misogyny is "almost beside the point" because the misogyny is so absurdly intense. Misogyny is what allows this. The same sex-repressiveness of--speaking broadly, ha ha--the "past"--that gave birth to the ugly over-the-top reaction in culture from the sixties onward, anti-sex woman-hating giving way to sexualized woman-hating, or I guess just a shift in emphasis because one is always present in the other--this same repressiveness creates a population of men who, while they would suffer to see a woman hurting like this in real life, can turn off their brains and get into the groove, because hatred of women hasn't been stigmatized enough. It also creates a smaller population of men who get excited by this stuff, or are just reptilian predators, and out of that population come the people who make ugly, misogynistic porn and put it out in the world, thus perpetuating the cycle.


Let me put it another way: Would YOU become a pornographer? If not, why not? Because it's an ugly, grimy business? Yet by consuming the ugly, hateful product, and not demanding or producing any sex-positive alternative of significance, good men are abdicating the field to these hate goblins, these dark spirits.


I have fallen in love deeply and often in this life, and rarely been alone, and while a surfeit of love leads to its own problems, it's meant that pornography has never been a big part of my life--and one I'd like to be even smaller. But I weep for the haunted headspace of my lonely brothers; and if I have to weep for them and the things they've seen, and the effect it's had on some of their relationships, or even their ability to form relationships, then what of my sisters? This brother and sister language is cloying, but I think it's more important here to make the gesture of solidarity. If seeing this stuff hurts, then having it done to you . . . is something I can't even really think about, understand, imagine. Full stop.


And obscenity is the symptom, not the cause. We need to do to misogyny--wherever and however we find it--what we did to Holocaust denial. It needs to be beyond the pale. And we can do that, because while sexism, like racism, is nebulous, and borderline gradations are infinite, misogyny, to the committed person in the physical world, is concrete. It means the negation of a woman's humanity, so she can be treated like meat. It can be excluded. This is its face.


Buy fair-trade coffee; don't let David Irving speak at your school; and if you consume pornography, do your best to find out where it comes from, and whether human dignity was harmed in its making.… (más)