Freud, Porn Snobbery, and Failed Messianic Romance
[EDIT: Struck most of the blustering, tongue-in-cheek introduction and added a line about Jesus.]
Brilliant and awesome person that I am, it has been suggested that my attentions to Miss Wren have been so copious as to risk producing retinal damage or awesome toxicity (to the latter of which she is particularly susceptible given her abnormally high natural endowment). OK, that’s not exactly how the matter was put to me: a participle of the verb “to smother” was used. In any case, difficult though it be for an altruistic gentleman such as I to deny the benefit of my great wit and wisdom to some deserving soul, I am now trying very hard to avoid giving Isobel any unnecessary (direct) attention.
In pursuit of that objective, I have resolved that, instead of commenting on her blogs and videos directly, I shall put my comments in this journal, so that any readers who happen upon them may benefit. Seriously, though, [I]f you’re interested in Isobel’s mind (as you should be, since it’s a critical element in her particular brand of sex-appeal), you might be interested in being a participant in, or at least a spectator to, the intellectual threads originating therefrom.
By way of preface, a note of protest. Miss Wren herself did suggest that it might be healthier for both of us, and for her other fans and colleagues, if I were to “scale it back on the Isobel consumption.” The specific occasion for her suggestion was a YouTube video on which I had left 2 pages worth of comments. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I won’t deny that the camel was already severely in need of chiropractic care. I will also acknowledge that leaving so many comments violates the prevailing ethos of the fivenakedmodels channel.
But I protest that voluble commenting is not an inherently bad thing, and is perhaps a trend that should be encouraged. As the self-styled “thinking man’s nympho,” Isobel should be aware that thinking men seldom express their thoughts in the concise (and incomplete) manner that the YouTube format encourages. Intellectual conversations generally involve a lot of talk. Talk is good. Here endeth the preface.
Freud
In Isobel’s video “Isobel in the butt” from the “fivenakedmodels” YouTube channel, she discusses the revisionist view of Freud’s theory of development:
I read something recently that said people in the mental health profession are beginning to think that perhaps Freud was not all they’ve thought he was: People think that maybe the people that Freud interviewed to make his views on sexuality were all victims of sexual abuse. Our researchers are finding that in his notes with his interviewees, most of them alluded to sexual abuse or outright said that they were abused, and most of their ideas on sexuality were those that we would see in contemporary victims of abuse. If this were true, that would really mess up the whole base of psychotherapy as we know it. A lot of the things that Freud made us think were healthy are apparently not.
My comment, short version: Dude, Freud is ancient history. The base of psychotherapy has been completely rebuilt over the past 40 years. Worry about Aaron Beck or Karen Horney if you will, but the ashes of Freudian psychoanalysis are little more than fertilizer today.
My comment, long version: I was hearing that stuff about Freud and abuse already when I was in college 25 yrs ago. It has since become more widely accepted, and I’m sure additional evidence has accumulated, but it’s not a new idea, and IIRC the evidence already available 20 years ago was nothing to sneeze at. Most psychologists today regard Freud’s theory of development as a quaint curiosity at best. It is of much more interest to critics of art and literature than to psychotherapists. A lot of new psychotherapeutic ideas and techniques have been developed in the last 40 years, and the base has completely changed, so there is no need to worry about its structural integrity.
But to be fair to Freud, his concepts of the unconscious mind and defense mechanisms are still widely employed and AFAIK in no way contradicted by the data. And many of the specific defense mechanisms that Freud identified are clearly important. His own story provides a telling illustration. During Freud’s early work, he actually did come to the tentative conclusion that sexual abuse was the cause of the psychopathologies he encountered. But as the evidence accumulated, he was unable to believe that childhood sexual abuse was as widespread as his studies seemed to indicate, and when his self-analysis turned up memories of abuse in his own family, he finally abandoned the theory and came up with that nonsense about the Oedipus complex. We may thank Freud for both identifying and exemplifying the mechanism of denial.
Porn Snobbery
In Isobel’s video “She’s ba-ack” from the “IsobelWren05” YouTube channel, she discusses models’ responses to tough economic times and, by occasion, the attitudes people have regarding various different genres of pornography:
A couple of my friends have made the jump from soft core or hard core girl/girl to hardcore boy/girl, which a lot of independent nude models do not want to do: most of us don’t do boy/girl, and quite a few girls look down on girls who do boy/girl, which I think is kind of funny sometimes because we all are lumped into porn together - soft-core porn, hard-core porn, still porn.
My comment: I’m glad Isobel brought up this issue, because it has been a subtext in some of her earlier videos and writings. I will note first that Isobel is inconsistent in her use of the term “porn.” Ordinarily she describes much her own girl/girl and solo girl erotic work as “porn.” In an early video responding to one of mine, she says: I call what I do “porn” to label myself before other people can, like how gay people will sometimes call themselves “fags” or “queers.” I enjoy my porn, and I say “porn” first to sort of destigmatize it and take away the sting of people who will say it and mean nasty things when they say it.
Elsewhere, though, she explicitly excludes her own work from the category of porn, as in this excerpt from one of the members-only blog posts (“I am an exhibitionist”) on her site (referring to an incident where she and her boyfriend were posing nude together): He let me touch him for a moment before snatching me up and turning me to the camera again. I tell you, the man has willpower of iron. Iron. I got so worked up that if he'd let me I would have filmed the first ever Isobel Wren porn that day! Well, in stills...and probably would have regretted it later!
In an exchange of comments in one of her early videos (apparently one that YouTube removed), she told me that she’s not sure why she doesn’t do boy/girl porn. One possibility I suggested is that she doesn’t like to have sex with men, but subsequent information indicated that hypothesis to be quite dramatically contradicted by available evidence. An alternative hypothesis, which I pointed out as ironically the opposite of the other, was that she really likes to have sex with men and considers it special and doesn’t want to ruin it by making it part of her job. After a while, I came to think that hypothesis was wrong, too.
There is a thread running through her videos and writings (which I noticed for example in her impressively tactful answer to my question about “sex workers” in her “Ask a nude model 2” video) that seems to me to indicate a conflict about the social perception of boy/girl porn, somewhat like the conflict about the social perception of nude modeling that causes her to tell people she’s a makeup artist. I suspect that in the case of boy/girl porn, she just hasn’t had the strength to defy society’s values by going into an area that even many erotic models consider to be “whorish.”
More specifically, Isobel is, as one of her slogans suggests, “putting the ‘ass’ in ‘class’,” or trying to. She wants to make a “classy” kind of porn that people can respect. It’s quite a challenge to overcome the contempt society has for any kind of pornography. But it’s an area where some progress can be made. However, overcoming the contempt that even erotic models have for boy/girl porn, making “classy” boy/girl porn, that’s beyond even a goddess like Isobel. Baby steps.
Presumably the contempt that some people have, specifically for women who act in boy/girl porn, is an outgrowth of a longstanding social taboo against prostitution. Acting (or modeling) in boy/girl porn is quite different from prostitution in many ways, but it does involve getting paid to have sex with a man. And in the aforementioned “Ask a nude model 2” video, Isobel specifically includes them both in the category for which she would normally use the term “sex work” (as opposed to what she does, which meets the technical definition of “sex work” but which she analogizes to having a military desk job during the Vietnam War). Real “sex workers” are “on the front lines” fighting the real battles. What battles, exactly? Is having sex with a man, even in the well-regulated world of porn, a “battle,” while having sex with a woman isn’t? That didn’t make much sense to me, but now I don’t think it’s what she had in mind. The “battle” is a battle against society’s contempt.
(OK, yeah, that comment wouldn’t have fit on a YouTube video.)
Failed Messianic Relationships
From Isobel’s latest blog entry on her website:
I started writing two essays today only to realize, when 3/4 of the way through each of them, that they were stupid and had no interesting conclusion. They started well, one was about my latest attempts at sticking things in my butt, and the other was about how I feel like I've broken up with Jesus. However, the stories were really best as paragraphs, and worst as stories. Distilling them into tales or essays really ruined the joke and made them boring...but as paragraphs there wasn't enough information to tell the story.
EDIT: Short version of my comment: Now I understand what was going on earlier this week, when I saw a vision of the cross and heard a mysterious voice say, "And I dumped Mary Magdalene for that bitch!"
My comment: So make it a paragraph with footnotes, or with links to somewhere else, or tell the stories and warn us in advance that they’re boring, whatever. Please. Please. Please. I want to know about your breakup with Jesus! You seemed like such a nice couple, and he dumped Mary Magdalene for you. What happened?
Seriously, though, it sounds like pretty intense stuff, the kind of thing that shows off your heart, mind, and soul even if it doesn’t show off your writing talent very well. Heart, mind, and soul are what set Isobel Wren apart from ordinary erotic models. Even if you’re joking, and even if the joke doesn’t make sense, you can’t talk about a major religious figure without touching those things. Stop being a literary perfectionist and just give us the raw material. Please. It’s kind of like videos you don’t get around to editing. Sure, the edited version would be nice, but if that’s too tall an order for the near future, give me the raw material and I’ll edit it myself. All matters of theology are inherently inconclusive because we just don’t know the Ultimate Answer. Just give us what you have and let us find our own meaning in it, or our own humor in it.
When I did my dissertation (y’all didn’t think I got to be this pretentious without doing a dissertation, did you?), they told me, “Don’t think of it as a book, a single work that has to solve one problem completely; think of it as 3 separate papers, each of which makes a small but significant contribution in its own area. Write those papers, slap on an introduction and a conclusion that make some attempt to tie them together, and you’ve got a dissertation.” It worked.
On a smaller scale, I think that’s the attitude that Isobel should take with this post. Don’t try to write a single self-contained essay that hangs together neatly and ties up all the loose ends. Write 3 separate paragraphs - paragraphs that have something wonderful in them even if they do leave a lot of loose ends. If you can write a whole paragraph about breaking up with Jesus, you’ve got something wonderful even if it doesn’t make sense, even if it leaves confusing loose ends. I mean, religion, the way it’s experienced and described by spiritual people, never does make sense. I’m talking about avant garde blogging: the brushstrokes don’t necessarily have to represent something that is easily identified, but to someone with the right sensitivity, the result is still beautiful.
And, damn it, I want to know about you and Jesus. Before we read about it in the National Enquirer.
Brilliant and awesome person that I am, it has been suggested that my attentions to Miss Wren have been so copious as to risk producing retinal damage or awesome toxicity (to the latter of which she is particularly susceptible given her abnormally high natural endowment). OK, that’s not exactly how the matter was put to me: a participle of the verb “to smother” was used. In any case, difficult though it be for an altruistic gentleman such as I to deny the benefit of my great wit and wisdom to some deserving soul, I am now trying very hard to avoid giving Isobel any unnecessary (direct) attention.
In pursuit of that objective, I have resolved that, instead of commenting on her blogs and videos directly, I shall put my comments in this journal, so that any readers who happen upon them may benefit. Seriously, though, [I]f you’re interested in Isobel’s mind (as you should be, since it’s a critical element in her particular brand of sex-appeal), you might be interested in being a participant in, or at least a spectator to, the intellectual threads originating therefrom.
By way of preface, a note of protest. Miss Wren herself did suggest that it might be healthier for both of us, and for her other fans and colleagues, if I were to “scale it back on the Isobel consumption.” The specific occasion for her suggestion was a YouTube video on which I had left 2 pages worth of comments. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I won’t deny that the camel was already severely in need of chiropractic care. I will also acknowledge that leaving so many comments violates the prevailing ethos of the fivenakedmodels channel.
But I protest that voluble commenting is not an inherently bad thing, and is perhaps a trend that should be encouraged. As the self-styled “thinking man’s nympho,” Isobel should be aware that thinking men seldom express their thoughts in the concise (and incomplete) manner that the YouTube format encourages. Intellectual conversations generally involve a lot of talk. Talk is good. Here endeth the preface.
Freud
In Isobel’s video “Isobel in the butt” from the “fivenakedmodels” YouTube channel, she discusses the revisionist view of Freud’s theory of development:
I read something recently that said people in the mental health profession are beginning to think that perhaps Freud was not all they’ve thought he was: People think that maybe the people that Freud interviewed to make his views on sexuality were all victims of sexual abuse. Our researchers are finding that in his notes with his interviewees, most of them alluded to sexual abuse or outright said that they were abused, and most of their ideas on sexuality were those that we would see in contemporary victims of abuse. If this were true, that would really mess up the whole base of psychotherapy as we know it. A lot of the things that Freud made us think were healthy are apparently not.
My comment, short version: Dude, Freud is ancient history. The base of psychotherapy has been completely rebuilt over the past 40 years. Worry about Aaron Beck or Karen Horney if you will, but the ashes of Freudian psychoanalysis are little more than fertilizer today.
My comment, long version: I was hearing that stuff about Freud and abuse already when I was in college 25 yrs ago. It has since become more widely accepted, and I’m sure additional evidence has accumulated, but it’s not a new idea, and IIRC the evidence already available 20 years ago was nothing to sneeze at. Most psychologists today regard Freud’s theory of development as a quaint curiosity at best. It is of much more interest to critics of art and literature than to psychotherapists. A lot of new psychotherapeutic ideas and techniques have been developed in the last 40 years, and the base has completely changed, so there is no need to worry about its structural integrity.
But to be fair to Freud, his concepts of the unconscious mind and defense mechanisms are still widely employed and AFAIK in no way contradicted by the data. And many of the specific defense mechanisms that Freud identified are clearly important. His own story provides a telling illustration. During Freud’s early work, he actually did come to the tentative conclusion that sexual abuse was the cause of the psychopathologies he encountered. But as the evidence accumulated, he was unable to believe that childhood sexual abuse was as widespread as his studies seemed to indicate, and when his self-analysis turned up memories of abuse in his own family, he finally abandoned the theory and came up with that nonsense about the Oedipus complex. We may thank Freud for both identifying and exemplifying the mechanism of denial.
Porn Snobbery
In Isobel’s video “She’s ba-ack” from the “IsobelWren05” YouTube channel, she discusses models’ responses to tough economic times and, by occasion, the attitudes people have regarding various different genres of pornography:
A couple of my friends have made the jump from soft core or hard core girl/girl to hardcore boy/girl, which a lot of independent nude models do not want to do: most of us don’t do boy/girl, and quite a few girls look down on girls who do boy/girl, which I think is kind of funny sometimes because we all are lumped into porn together - soft-core porn, hard-core porn, still porn.
My comment: I’m glad Isobel brought up this issue, because it has been a subtext in some of her earlier videos and writings. I will note first that Isobel is inconsistent in her use of the term “porn.” Ordinarily she describes much her own girl/girl and solo girl erotic work as “porn.” In an early video responding to one of mine, she says: I call what I do “porn” to label myself before other people can, like how gay people will sometimes call themselves “fags” or “queers.” I enjoy my porn, and I say “porn” first to sort of destigmatize it and take away the sting of people who will say it and mean nasty things when they say it.
Elsewhere, though, she explicitly excludes her own work from the category of porn, as in this excerpt from one of the members-only blog posts (“I am an exhibitionist”) on her site (referring to an incident where she and her boyfriend were posing nude together): He let me touch him for a moment before snatching me up and turning me to the camera again. I tell you, the man has willpower of iron. Iron. I got so worked up that if he'd let me I would have filmed the first ever Isobel Wren porn that day! Well, in stills...and probably would have regretted it later!
In an exchange of comments in one of her early videos (apparently one that YouTube removed), she told me that she’s not sure why she doesn’t do boy/girl porn. One possibility I suggested is that she doesn’t like to have sex with men, but subsequent information indicated that hypothesis to be quite dramatically contradicted by available evidence. An alternative hypothesis, which I pointed out as ironically the opposite of the other, was that she really likes to have sex with men and considers it special and doesn’t want to ruin it by making it part of her job. After a while, I came to think that hypothesis was wrong, too.
There is a thread running through her videos and writings (which I noticed for example in her impressively tactful answer to my question about “sex workers” in her “Ask a nude model 2” video) that seems to me to indicate a conflict about the social perception of boy/girl porn, somewhat like the conflict about the social perception of nude modeling that causes her to tell people she’s a makeup artist. I suspect that in the case of boy/girl porn, she just hasn’t had the strength to defy society’s values by going into an area that even many erotic models consider to be “whorish.”
More specifically, Isobel is, as one of her slogans suggests, “putting the ‘ass’ in ‘class’,” or trying to. She wants to make a “classy” kind of porn that people can respect. It’s quite a challenge to overcome the contempt society has for any kind of pornography. But it’s an area where some progress can be made. However, overcoming the contempt that even erotic models have for boy/girl porn, making “classy” boy/girl porn, that’s beyond even a goddess like Isobel. Baby steps.
Presumably the contempt that some people have, specifically for women who act in boy/girl porn, is an outgrowth of a longstanding social taboo against prostitution. Acting (or modeling) in boy/girl porn is quite different from prostitution in many ways, but it does involve getting paid to have sex with a man. And in the aforementioned “Ask a nude model 2” video, Isobel specifically includes them both in the category for which she would normally use the term “sex work” (as opposed to what she does, which meets the technical definition of “sex work” but which she analogizes to having a military desk job during the Vietnam War). Real “sex workers” are “on the front lines” fighting the real battles. What battles, exactly? Is having sex with a man, even in the well-regulated world of porn, a “battle,” while having sex with a woman isn’t? That didn’t make much sense to me, but now I don’t think it’s what she had in mind. The “battle” is a battle against society’s contempt.
(OK, yeah, that comment wouldn’t have fit on a YouTube video.)
Failed Messianic Relationships
From Isobel’s latest blog entry on her website:
I started writing two essays today only to realize, when 3/4 of the way through each of them, that they were stupid and had no interesting conclusion. They started well, one was about my latest attempts at sticking things in my butt, and the other was about how I feel like I've broken up with Jesus. However, the stories were really best as paragraphs, and worst as stories. Distilling them into tales or essays really ruined the joke and made them boring...but as paragraphs there wasn't enough information to tell the story.
EDIT: Short version of my comment: Now I understand what was going on earlier this week, when I saw a vision of the cross and heard a mysterious voice say, "And I dumped Mary Magdalene for that bitch!"
My comment: So make it a paragraph with footnotes, or with links to somewhere else, or tell the stories and warn us in advance that they’re boring, whatever. Please. Please. Please. I want to know about your breakup with Jesus! You seemed like such a nice couple, and he dumped Mary Magdalene for you. What happened?
Seriously, though, it sounds like pretty intense stuff, the kind of thing that shows off your heart, mind, and soul even if it doesn’t show off your writing talent very well. Heart, mind, and soul are what set Isobel Wren apart from ordinary erotic models. Even if you’re joking, and even if the joke doesn’t make sense, you can’t talk about a major religious figure without touching those things. Stop being a literary perfectionist and just give us the raw material. Please. It’s kind of like videos you don’t get around to editing. Sure, the edited version would be nice, but if that’s too tall an order for the near future, give me the raw material and I’ll edit it myself. All matters of theology are inherently inconclusive because we just don’t know the Ultimate Answer. Just give us what you have and let us find our own meaning in it, or our own humor in it.
When I did my dissertation (y’all didn’t think I got to be this pretentious without doing a dissertation, did you?), they told me, “Don’t think of it as a book, a single work that has to solve one problem completely; think of it as 3 separate papers, each of which makes a small but significant contribution in its own area. Write those papers, slap on an introduction and a conclusion that make some attempt to tie them together, and you’ve got a dissertation.” It worked.
On a smaller scale, I think that’s the attitude that Isobel should take with this post. Don’t try to write a single self-contained essay that hangs together neatly and ties up all the loose ends. Write 3 separate paragraphs - paragraphs that have something wonderful in them even if they do leave a lot of loose ends. If you can write a whole paragraph about breaking up with Jesus, you’ve got something wonderful even if it doesn’t make sense, even if it leaves confusing loose ends. I mean, religion, the way it’s experienced and described by spiritual people, never does make sense. I’m talking about avant garde blogging: the brushstrokes don’t necessarily have to represent something that is easily identified, but to someone with the right sensitivity, the result is still beautiful.
And, damn it, I want to know about you and Jesus. Before we read about it in the National Enquirer.