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March 14, 2005
Where did the anti-porn feminists go?
The Boston Globe asks a question I've been wondering about, as much of the blogosphere I see defines porn as 'not worksafe', but otherwise perfectly mainstream, entertainment.
Perhaps it's porn's very ubiquity that has most weakened the anti-pornography case, feminist and conservative. Thanks to the growth of home-video pornography in the 1980s and the more recent shift to the Internet, far more people have access to X-rated material than ever before. As Linda Williams [a film studies professor and leading porn theorist] puts it, ''In a way I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were able to invoke the kind of horror that they did at pornography at a time when not as many people had seen it. For better or for worse, now it has become part of the vernacular of our way of talking about picturing sex to ourselves.''
MacKinnon agrees, though she sees the shift as more insidious: ''The data just show that pornography sets community standards, so the more pornography there is, the less will be seen to be wrong with it. It's just its own intrinsic dynamic.''
Posted by Foe at 04:00 PM in General | Permalink
Comments
I think the term 'not worksafe' includes huge swathes of 'unsuitable for casual viewing' media that happens to include porn - but also various 'nasties' that populate many of the 'bored at work' sites, plus things like body-painted artwork, and images of 'Darwin Award' death and destruction.
As with anything that we are exposed to, it desensitises us to further examples, so using porn alone (as undesirable as it may or may not be, which isn't my point) is presenting an unfair and unbalanced view of the way all forms of media is now available to us, so much more easily.
Posted by: Phil at Mar 16, 2005 10:29:46 AM
I think it's that we're moving towards a more nuanced view of porn, where "women are toys" is not inherent in the definition. Porn is pretty one-dimensional anyway. I question the value of saying that porn is only degrading to women. I think the better questions to ask are "Is it possible to have egalitarian and/or female-centered porn?" "What is 'women's sexuality'?" and "What would female-centered, egalitarian porn look like?"
Posted by: tiffany at Mar 18, 2005 1:16:29 PM
Oh, and I forgot to add: The Salt Lake City Weekly has an article about porn and feminism on its site:
http://www.slweekly.com/editorial/2005/feat_2005-03-17.cfm
Posted by: tiffany at Mar 18, 2005 1:20:02 PM
I don't know if men are "allowed" to post here.
But I will offer a comment on the very interesting article tiffay cites from The Salt Lake City Weekly:
Where are all the societies where males are not dominant?
Certainly not Western culture for the last few thousand years. Certainly not Middle Eastern culture,
in the past or now. I'm not an expert on Asian societies, but I think we could not find a
technological modern culture in Asia (or even third world cultures) where men and women share equal
power.
For that matter, with all the "advances" of feminism in the United States, I think any fair minded
person would have to grant that the power between the sexes in this country is not equal and that men
definitely do predominate.
Is this a good thing? Does it lead to social "harmony".
No.
Can we change this?
I don't think so. This seems to be almost ubiquitous among homo sapiens.
Sex and aggression seem to be biologically intertwined.
Males are more aggressive and generally stronger than females.
Does pornography inherently degrade or victimize women? Again, it really depends on what pornography
you watch. Most does not display a power schema different than one encounters in daily life.
However, I would never deny that too much pornography IS egregiously hostile towards women.
But the article makes it quite clear that cultural conservatives are enormously mysogenistic, and I
would add that women like MacKinnon are pretty hostile towards males. I find it astounding that she
would side with virtuall "know-nothings" to promote her anti-male-dominance doctrine.
It's like the Jews siding with the Nazis to get rid of the gypsys.
I liked the article. I thought is was nuanced and tried to be fair minded.
I like this blog, from what I've seen of it, and hope you continue to think and write about issues
like this.
Posted by: Larry Turner at Mar 20, 2005 12:48:45 AM
Maybe the anti-porn feminists are now making porn for women. There are
certainly some women doing this, if not feminists.
But I still think it is wrong to have porn and bad language on billboards or
available to children under thirteen or whatever age, whoever makes it.
And what does "It's just its own intrinsic dynamic" mean?
Posted by: John at Apr 4, 2005 4:50:12 PM
Lucinda Marshall, who has published a host of articles about violence against women, has a new blog at ZNet: http://blog.zmag.org/bloggers/?blogger=marshall
When she blogged a brief comment on the ubiquity of porn and cited an article called "Addicted to Porn" (at http://www.citizensforethics.org/activities/campaign.php?view=31 ), literally hundreds of vicious comments were posted, so many that another ZNet blogger felt compelled to protest; and ZNet finally barred several posters.
Many Congressional "cultural conservatives" benefit directly from donations to their campaigns from publishers of porn. Just a little hypocritical, don't you think?
Posted by: Margherite at Apr 6, 2005 9:07:43 PM
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