Geroge Gershwin, Piano Solos v. 26

Hal Leonard publishes some really great collections of piano solo arrangements of jazz standards. The difficulty ranges from things I can play (intermediate level) to things it'll be a while until I can play. But these do not come with recordings, even online. Fortunately, they have started putting them on MuseScore. You can't download them without paying (I've already paid for the books!), but you can listen to them (played via MIDI), which can be very helpful, especially for getting the rhythms right. 

Here are links for the ones in the Gershwin book:

1. Bidin' My Time
2. But Not For Me
3. Embraceable You 
4. Fascinating Rhythm
5. A Foggy Day (In London Town)
6. How Long Has This Been Going On?
7. I Got Plenty O' Nothin'
8. I Got Rhythm
9. I Loves You, Porgy
10. I've Got a Crush On You
11. It Ain't Necessarily So
12. Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
13. Love Is Here to Stay
14. Love Walked In
15. The Man I Love
16. Nice Work If You Can Get It
17. Oh, Lady Be Good!
18. 'S Wonderful
19. Somebody Loves Me
20. Someone To Watch Over Me
21. Summertime
22. They All Laughed
23. They Can't Take That Away From Me
    

New Paper: Are 'Facials' Misogynistic?

Find it here.

Abstract:

So-called ‘facial’ cumshots, when a man ejaculates onto a woman’s face, are very common in pornography.  While they are frequently said to be degrading and misogynistic, the fact that women are usually shown as enjoying this act should make us think again. Facials are instead rooted in male insecurity: of a fear that an aspect of how men orgasm—semen—is disgusting to women. By contrast, the fantasy, which pornography makes vivid, is that women might not just tolerate but celebrate and eroticize both ejaculation and its product. The way mainstream pornography presents facials may often be misogynistic, but it does not have to be, and it is not always. 

NOTE: This may not be a philosophy paper. My intention is to submit it to a sexuality studies journal. 

Published: "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?"

Abstract:

Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts of presuppositions that Langton and West's explanation of silencing requires it to make. (3) Even ‘Dirty Pool’, for all its other problems, does not make such presuppositions. (4) Langton and West misread ‘Dirty Pool’ because they do not take proper account of the fact that pornography often traffics in sexual fantasy. The broader lesson is that we need to read pornography more sensitively if we are to understand its capacity to shape socio-sexual norms (for good or for ill).

Find it here.

Porn Reviews Site

Whenever I go somewhere to talk about my work on pornography, I have at least a few people ask me whether there really is decent porn out there. Well, there is, if you know where to look. Even then, though, it may hard to find the really good stuff. So I've started a new blog, "Sexually Explicit Visual Media", where I'm going to post short reviews of that sort of thing. I'll be watching quite a few such films in the next few months, since I'll be teaching my course on pornography this spring.

At the moment, the only things there are a mission statement and an annotated list of links to websites that have 'better' porn. But I'm intending to post the first review within a day or two. I'll link to those reviews from this blog.

"Coming To Terms With My Rape Fantasies After Being Assaulted", by KS Woodmansee

This piece was originally posted at The Establishment, on 16 November 2016, but it has since disappeared from the web (with that whole site), and does not seem to be archived at the Wayback Machine. I have found it worth reading myself, so I'm reproducing it here.

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Coming To Terms With My Rape Fantasies After Being Assaulted

KS Woodmansee

I first learned about rape fantasies when I was a naive 17-year-old who had never even masturbated, much less considered power dynamics in sexual relationships. A friend told me that a girl he was interested in wanted someone to sneak into her bedroom and “force” her to have sex. I was intrigued, but quickly dismissed my interest in the topic. I saw it as aberrant, and the last thing I wanted was to be seen as weirder than I already was.

New Paper: Sexual Fantasy and the Eroticization of Evil

Abstract

Many people have sexual fantasies about being forced to have sex, or forcing someone to have sex. Several authors have argued that it is wrong to enjoy such fantasies: They lead to harm, or reinforce oppressive social structures, are liable to corrupt our character, or, mostly interestingly, are wrong in themselves, because they involve the eroticization of things that are wrong. I argue here that all such arguments fail properly to distinguish between fantasy and desire (despite authors' acknowledgement of that distinction), and between objects of desire and sources of arousal. The broader significance of this point is also discussed.

This paper is intended, in part, as a defense of claims about sexual fantasy made at the end of "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?".  

Download it here.

Schirmer's Early Intermediate Level Masterpieces

During the pandemic, I started teaching myself piano. Recently, I've been working my way through a book of 'selected piano masterpieces' from Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics: Early Intermediate Level. Of course, this is all public domain, and you can get the music online, but it's nice to have it in a book.

That said, it's also nice to be able to hear the pieces, and for that I've been using MuseScore, which is open source music notation software that will also 'play' whatever you enter into it. There's also a huge library of music that various people have uploaded into it, including a lot of the 'classics'. 

So here's a list of links to versions of the pieces in the mentioned book. Note that you can download these or play them directly from the site. Please let me know if any of the links should break.