Michelle Tea
Issue #22
The writer throws in her candid two cents about American politics, the sex trade, and the media's multitude of sins
By Tara Lombardo
Published: December 1st, 2004 | 11:49am
Michelle Tea kicks serious ass. The writer, poet, and co-founder of the all-girl open-mic event Sister Spit, Tea carves out words and lays them on the page like a chef preparing a meal for the pope. While hopping around the country doing readings from her new book Rent Girl (illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin) Tea took some time to talk to us about sex work, censorship, and America the beautiful.
The following is a continuation of the interview published in issue No. 22.
Politically speaking, where would you like to see the U.S. head over the next 4 years?
I honestly feel that the country is so far gone that we can’t turn back the corporate death machine we’ve turned into. I don’t want to be pessimistic, and even if I feel pessimistic I have to act and behave as if I am optimistic, because you can’t act out of pessimism. It’s bad, it means you don’t vote, you give up and things get worse. My vision of what I want the country to be seems so impossible; I would like us to have a Green president, to never go to war, and dismantle the military. I’d like us to put some redistribution of wealth plans in place — to get money to people, to beef welfare up, to beef up the public school system, to make socialized healthcare. I would like a socialist utopia. What can I envision that’s possible? I have such a huge distrust of politicians at this point and of the political system.
Well, when we print this interview, it will be after the election…
Yeah, so we’ll see how depressed we will all be…or, hopeful. I hope we are hopeful.
In terms of the media and the issue of censorship, do you think there is a new sense of national standards, or is it, like you said, a corporation inflicting their values on us?
I think it’s a corporation inflicting their values on us and I think that, unfortunately, there are a lot of easily led people. We have these huge media empires that are just layering all of this Republican-biased news and reality shows…every show is about rich people and what they have. Everyone has always accused television of being a brainwashing medium, but it really feels like it is. It feels like the media is suffocatingly leading people down this path of materialism, which supports the whole American dream, which supports the war. It’s like “we need all these things,” so we have to go to war with these other countries who don’t have what we have. The message is look at all the things you can have — you can someday ascend to the ranks Tara Reid and Paris Hilton. All those It’s Good to Be… shows are so gross and support this illusion that poor people in America can ascend to these consumer materialistic heights. I see a really strong link between people’s support or belief that the war in Iraq is necessary and what is being broadcast to these same people. The media they are consuming visually seems really insidious and creepy.
Can you talk more about prostitution as a job?
As I say it in the book, a lot of work is exploitation but no work is prostitution except prostitution. There are a lot of things that women are supposed to like in our society, or things that we are predisposed to want because we are women. But culturally I don’t think we are expected to want to be prostitutes the way we are expected to want to be mothers or married. I think we are expected to like heterosexual sex, you know, but not expected to like it too much or make money off of it.
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more