From the Ranted Files of Dr. G, brought to you at great cost...

ENCINO - Many times, in ostensibly enlightened company, I have been berated for suggesting that it is somehow unnatural for women to get boob jobs. This kind of neo-philistinism is rampant in our socio-culture, but nowhere is it more apparent than in the systematic marginalization of the films of Jenna Jameson.

Just recently, in the pages of a purportedly progressive blog, when yours truly mentioned her body of work in an artistic context, her films were dismissed as the butt of a crass wanking joke. Is this all we have for the artist who gave us “Where the Boys Aren’t 7”, a radical meditation on modern psycho-sexual identity politics that is almost completely overlooked by the feminist-academic community. Or “Up and Cummers”, in which, judging by the first 7 minutes, she seems to be some sort of naughty librarian. In the tradition of Joyce and Goddard, these texts turn ideas of conventional cause-and-effect narrative and character development on their heads.

In fact, according to her inaptly titled autobiography that my book club read last year, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Jameson is now the producer and a distributor of the movies in which her naughty bits star. In taking a lead role in her own degradation she has turned the tables: The peddled becomes the peddler, the exploited becomes the enriched. Of course the obvious question, the “800 pound gorilla in the room”, so to speak, is what exactly happens on the casting couch now? Before she decides to give herself the lead in her studio's next film, does she just give herself a good going over? Sadly, her otherwise very thorough, and often highly-autobiographical, memoir remains silent on this subject. However, such minor philosophical inconsistencies must be forgiven in light of the vital and necessary critique that is spewed forth in her cinematic works like a string of pearls. For clarification I turn to the writings of the deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida:

...the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre…The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. -"Structuralism Destructured Structurally"

Clearly, viewed under the unapologetic light that French literary criticism allows into the darkened theater of bourgeoise aesthetics, we can no longer sit back and conveniently view Jameson’s films exclusively as young-adult fiction. In fact, her proto-neo-feminist protagonists are sympathetic actors, not mere objectified, non-agent receptors of the male gaze.

Stated simply, in the post-media-globo-corporato-neo-fasco-meta-iCulture, it is inevitable that all of us are going to get f&#%ed, but if we act with courage and ironic self-awareness then maybe, like Jenna, we can at least choose which hole.

That is all this American has to say on the subject. Good night...and good luck.