Women and Snakes

Well, it's time maybe for a little meta-update here, and I must say that it's a little disappointing to have all this fine intellectual and pop culture fodder here, not to mention the wit and poignant memoir, only to discover that the main reason that people drop by here is to see Lisa Lyon wearing a snake.

Okay, okay, I get it. Women and snakes. I see the attraction. I'm a little surprised that my essay on Black Snake Moan didn't get more attention, but that was a movie review, and didn't have any sexy pictures in it. Maybe I should have reviewed the remake of Bedazzled, and put the Elizabeth Hurley photo in it.

More pop culture reference, I was watching a CSI rerun on cable a few nights ago, the one about the UFO cult that thought we'd been invaded by lizard people, and there is some goofball saying something like "The Snake is a symbol of knowledge." Uh, yeah. Right. Knowledge. That's the ticket. That is absolutely what I'm thinking about when I see a woman with a snake. Knowledge.

As you might expect, there is an entire "Women and Snakes" fandom, no surprise there. Actually, I'd say that there are several, interlocking fandoms. There are guys who like to look at women with snakes, or photographs of women with snakes. There are photographers who like to photograph women with snakes. And then there are a lot of women who like snakes.

One person, who is in both of the last two categories seems to have a studio in Oakland, fairly near where I live, called "Snake's Kin Studio." Her site also has a number of videos, for those who like to be sure the snakes are still alive.

One of the sites these images come from has the specific disclaimer, "There is no pornography on this site." I pretty much agree, although I don't always know it when I see it.

Images

In November 1973, Leon Harmon, a researcher at Bell Labs wrote an article for Scientific American titled, "The Recognition of Faces." It included pixilated images, most notably this one of Abraham Lincoln:

The Lincoln image in the Scientific American article had already seen wide distribution through the college engineering magazine circuit; it seemed like half of us put it on the cover. It had been part of a press release from Bell Labs, and well, the first time you see it, it’s a revelation. Or at least it was. Everyone is used to pixelation now, and few people think about it as such; they’re usually more interested in what it’s obscuring, i.e. the “naughty bits” on basic cable channels like E! when the show is about porn stars or Howard Stern re-runs are letting the strippers get professional.

A few years after the Scientific American article, Salvador Dali entered the arena with one of his last truly striking works "Gala contemplating the Mediterranean Sea, which at 30 meters becomes the portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko).":

Several years ago, I spent several days looking at the face of Mika Tan. You may now think whatever thoughts you wish to think about the psychological meaning of my focusing on the face of a porn star:

What I was doing was experimenting with various image processing filters. I’ve been fascinated by voice and image processing since college, and periodically I reacquaint myself with the tools available. Things that once took days of mainframe time now take seconds on a mid-level PC, and there are also a lot more tricks and methods available to the professional or the hobbyist, because people are clever, and there are a lot of people interested in images. Do tell.

I’ve done a lot of experimenting with computer generated abstract art, often starting with more conventional photographic images. One of the things I’ve confirmed along the way is that faces are special; we see them easily, even when they are not there, and modified images of faces carry emotional weight far more easily than other images. We’re built to recognize faces (that’s part of the point of the Scientific American article), and the images go deep.

So anyway, if you’re going to be nerding about in Photoshop, Irfanview, Corel Photopaint, and Pro Motion for days on end, it’s not a bad idea to begin with an image or images that are both evocative and easy to look at. So that pretty much answers the question of “Why Mika Tan?” At least to me it does.

Finally, in an earlier essay, I noted the ability to creating hidden codes and subliminal sexual images via image processing. So here you go:

Good luck and never let it be said that I’m a prude, just way too subtle.

Voyeurism goes deep. A Chicago friend once told me, “You’re not really into voyeurism until you’ve done things like put a photograph of a naked girl in a glass cabinet, lit by candlelight, and then spied on it from behind a chair across the room with a telescope.” – Fritz Lieber

Mika

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
-- H. L. Mencken.

Mika Tan bills herself as “The Nice Girl with the Naughty Job.” I ran across her MySpace page a few weeks ago, and I was struck by her self –description:

I am a Taiwanese/Okinawan (mom) and Japanese/Samoan (dad) mutt who grew up in Oahu, Daly City, San Diego, and Guam, in that order. My dad was in the military, so went to 14 schools by the time I graduated high school. I have been described as a free-spirit, goofy and down-to-earth. I have only a few good friends and I treat them like gold; I am one of those kind of friends who will actually show up on moving day with a U-Haul.

The “only a few good friends and I treat them like gold” might have been copied out of Jung’s Psychological Types. It’s one of the descriptors of an introverted thinking type.

It might seem strange to consider that a performer, any performer, much less a performer in erotic films, aka “porn star,” might be introverted. The “thinking type” goes just as strongly against stereotype, doesn’t it? In fact, it easily, almost inevitably, fits into Jungian theory. The performing persona becomes an expression of “the shadow self,” and why do you think actors love playing villains, madmen, and the outlandish?

My wife Amy used to be a librarian. She’s always been bookish, shy, and ill-at-ease in social situation—as herself, at any rate. But she has a performing persona, “Madame Ovary, The Lady with the Flaubert-ghasting Name,” and when she in character, she is extroversion personified. She is outgoing, magnetic, flamboyant, and, above all, she takes energy from the audience. After a show she practically vibrates and it sometimes takes days for her to come down. A bit bi-polar? Only in the theatrical sense, not the clinical.

I am jolly and effervescent most of the time (whoa…but when I am tired, I totally crash). – Mika Tan

The stereotype of the porn star is a sexually abused, drug addicted, exploited prostitute. I’m sure there is some exploitation involved; this is show business we’re talking about here. But a friend of mine once observed that the adult film industry is the only area of show business where the actresses routinely make more money than the actors. They also form their own production companies and move on to themselves direct films at a rate that I daresay exceeds that in “regular Hollywood.”

I once read an interview of Georgina Spelvin, the star of The Devil in Miss Jones where she said that she’d encountered “the casting couch” (the exchange of sex for a stage or motion picture role) much less often in adult films than in the theater or regular motion picures. Again, exploitation is a relative term.

One of the chasms in “The Great Divide,” the gap between both sides of The Culture War, is the attitude toward pornography and those who make it, especially the performers. Realize that it’s not the actual consumption of pornography where the differences lie. One of the exquisite ironies of the “community standards” court interpretations came when those accused of possessing or manufacturing pornography could point to the internet traffic to porn sites from the communities where they lived. It turned out that porn consumption in those small towns in Utah, Iowa, and Georgia was as high as anywhere.

But the puritanical smut hounds hate themselves for it, and they hate those who provide it to them. In practice, that comes down to hating women. It finds expression in all sorts of ways, from the demeaning stereotypes to outright stalking.

I REQUEST THAT YOU DO NOT POST ANY PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOUSELF, ME, OR MY FAMILY. THIS BUSINESS IS FUN, BUT IT ATTRACTS SOME ODDBALLS, WHO HAVE PROVEN TO BE VERY DANGEROUS AND I DO NOT WANT TO MOVE AGAIN. – from Mika Tan’s MySpace page.

On the other side of the Culture Divide there is respect, even admiration for the performers. I remember an article describing how the Saturday Night Live cast treated Seka, another adult film star, when she appeared briefly on the show hosted by Sam Kinison. The word “reverence” was used.

In many respects, the profession resembles that of the professional athlete. The performers in porn do things that the average person simply cannot do, both physically and mentally. Star baseball, basketball, and football players are sometimes spoken of in the language of the superhuman. Mainstream actors and actresses are praised for “digging deep,” or “exposing raw emotion.” Action stars are lauded for performing their own stunts.

In mainstream discourse “hard core” is a superlative and a compliment, except when it’s hard core pornography, which, of course, was the origin of the term. But to those who have actually colonized the other side of the cultural divide, the hard core performers are heroic. They’ve broken chains that the rest of us lack the strength to break.