Eva

It seems to me like it fits the definition in the ordinence.

“Women are presented in scenarious of degredation, humliation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.”

STAN REPLIES: It’s the final phrase that pegs the definition. Eroticizing (and celebrating) the humiliation. Dworkin was not writing to make humilitation erotic, but to expose what is putatively erotic as embedded in a system of power.

Apologies for the hasty inserted replies, but I’m running like the proverbial headless chicken lately.

“I haven’t called for stopping the Klan marches either (another libertarian fave – I’ll stick with rocks and bottles for the Klan.)”

I’m increasingly of the opinion that rocks and bottles may be a part of the solution to pornography too. It would be great to see Blac Bloc’s employed against porn shops in the same way they are employed against McDonald’s restaurants. The former seems to definately be a bigger offender in terms of abuse of workers and producing a toxic product that harms it’s consumer.

I have no doubts that the porn industry is destroying people. But as I see it , the act of producing sexual fantasy isn’t the problem. It’s the message and the moral context of the images and the manner in which those images are produced. Say tomorrow porn where to be erased from the Earth and the minds of men. How long would it take for a teenage boy to see a non-sexualized picture of a female and have a sexual thought? The stimulus isn’t social, it’s biological. Men are visually sexual. That notion gets exploited by every marketing firm in existence. The socialization that happens in sex isn’t about the visualization side of sexuality; it’s about what constitutes popular sexual appeal and how people can be conditioned into accepting and consuming it. And that’s the level I think we are left to contemplate moral dilemmas. And in my opinion, it’s the morality of the consumers and the producers that should be examined.

As Dworkin noted, the overall flesh of people of Colour becomes a sexxxualised genital in pornography. All that is physically (violently) done to white women’s genitals is done to the exterior flesh of women and men of Colour. In the case of women of Colour, specifically, in the pornography industry and in the larger pornographic society, they are deeply degraded and horrendously harmed both externally and internally, in various ways, depending on the particulars of their ethnicity.

Whiteness, as a politically charged (empowered) ethnicity, does not protect Caucasian women from harm in pornography or in pornographic society, but it does mean that their exterior skin is less exoticised and thingified, even while all women’s bodies are dehumanised through overall objectification, and fetishisation of their “parts”.

A key point that I especially welcomed being reminded of, by Jennifer, is one also summed up in this book title:

But Some Of Us Are Brave : All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies,
by Gloria T. Hull (Editor), Patricia Bell Scott (Editor), Barbara Smith (Editor)

Thanks again, Jennifer, for speaking your mind. And thanks, De, for your additional analysis and reflections on that era in Amerikkkan his-story.

Julian

This cultural moment I think influenced those of us who came of age (literally or politically) during the epoch. We saw mass media making a halfassed effort to show Black men as human beings with dignity, character, etc — even as heroic — and to critique racism (however naively) in a decade when female cultural icons were still merely pinup girls. And somewhere in the back of our minds (those of us who grew up on these images and themes), if we became feminists, is a lifelong memory of frustration — why couldn’t bigotry against females have been taken seriously, when the ice was cracking a bit after the dismal 50′s?

Those concerns (if we limit ourselves to selfconsciously liberal media) still apply. Black male characters and actors still get a better slot in mainstream pwog and librul film making. Take a look at Denzel’s career vs Whoopi’s (sigh)… Finally in the 80′s mainstream schlock caught up in its braindead way with feminism, offering us “issue films” on rape, battery, female rebellion; but the appeal of T&A never really faded. I would almost say that sexism outlasted racism in entertainment, while racism outlasted sexism in business; I could be wrong but it seems to me upper-middle White women made bigger inroads into the corporate boardrooms than Black males (and again, where were Black women? the lost demographic?), while in “entertainment media” the business necessity of presenting women as a consumable for male audiences tipped the balance the other way. I know cartloads of Libruls who are deeply and profoundly revolted by pre-Civil-Rights-Movement overtly racist kid’s books, cartoons, movies etc, yet have absolutely no trouble with contemporary porn. I think this may be where Stan was aiming that remark. And those Libruls I know are mostly of an age with me, and experienced that same half-assed cultural thaw in the 70s.

I agree that the country as a whole never got over its appetite for racism, and that contemporary “chic” stereotypes of Black gangstas and pimps are just a retread of Sambo. But that persistent “they’d recognise it if it was a racist image/joke/slur, dammit” meme I think does have roots in reality, in a particular historical moment.

I think it’s time to move on from that moment — it was a while ago, that was then, this is now, etc. But there are times when it still flaunts itself in front of us. I was watching the thriller “The Bone Collector” the other evening (Denzel again, as a near-quadriplegic forensic specialist); and noting that while we can now have Black men as charismatic authority figures, disabled men as romantic heroes, etc., we still cannot have a strong heroine who is not also pinup-beautiful, young, slender, botox-lipped, and destined to become The Hero’s Reward by end of plot. And the Black Woman? Count her, one — Queen Latifah as a live-in RN — one step up from Mammy and cook, though at least she is faithfully tending a Black rather than a White privileged male…

The fantasy world of semi-politically-correct mainstream film making is of course disconnected from the real life, grinding racism of American politics and economics; but it feeds that nagging sense feminist radicals have, that libruls and pwogs just can’t perceive insults to women as insults — that the librul/pwog understanding of racism is fundamentally as “hostility from White culture that diminishes the masculinity of Black men” — a definition which erases Black women from the picture, as well as keeping women in general firmly in their allotted cultural file drawer (Cute and Available)…