Pornography is a left issue

by Gail Dines and Robert Jensen

Anti-pornography feminists get used to insults from the left. Over and over we are told that we’re anti-sex, prudish, simplistic, politically naïve, diversionary, and narrow-minded. The cruder critics do not hesitate to suggest that the cure for these ailments lies in, how shall we say, a robust sexual experience.

Male and female, and departures from that physical polarity, among humans can be observed and described, anatomically and genetically. I carry both X and Y chromosomes, and which one I might have contributed to the creation of a human embryo before my vasectomy was a kind of biological coin toss. I do not have ovaries. If I am diagnosed with cancer, and opt for hormone therapy, I will receive estrogen, not testosterone — the latter would be like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Sorry for the delays in reconstruction and moderation. I had to wait on the able assistance of my techie comrades Ruby and Brian to fix this stuff.

“The late-nineteenth-century shift to a consumer economy provoked a more widespread acceptance of pleasure, self-gratification, and personal satisfaction that easily translated into the province of sex… this cultural-ideological process was overdetermined by the logic of the commodity, a logic that binds ways of knowing and forms of identity to changes in the relations of production… relationships that include forms of consciousness that are inadequate to new demands of production and consumption… the recruitment of women into the workforce and consumer culture and the gradual unhinging of sexuality from its procreative function as regulated by the family’s patriarchal gender system. One of the most signficant displacements was the conjuncture of rationalized production with the engineering of desire inducement.”

Compulsory Heterosexuality is predicated on an association between two biological genders (male and female) with SOCIAL constructions that impose behavioral expectations on these biologically gendered people.

This creates a lot of confusion for a lot of reasons.

I recently constructed a popular education “participatory chart” for a workshop on “Gender and Militarism,” for the Veterans for Peace Conference in Dallas. It occurred to me that each “frame” on that chart — a word or phrase — could be the subject for a discussion, and because many of the concepts that were being drawn out by connecting these “frames” are alien to our own epistemologies, that I should try a medium where there is more time for reflection and assimilation to build this relationship/connection chart.

No, I’m not talking about a person this time. The blog was hacked.

I haven’t been sure how to respond to the aftermath of Katrina, or its coincidence with the almost 1,000 Iraqis who were killed during a panic stampede when a bridge suffered a structural failure. I go back and forth, between abject killing rage and nearly despondent sadness.

I was recently apprised by someone from Belgium of a bizarre and disturbing internet porn-swap. A porn site that is registered in Florida has offered US troops in Iraq free access to sexual pornography in exchange for the more necrophilic brand of pornography — grotesque pictures of war dead, often collected as photographic “trophies” by troops in combat.

Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity

By Gail Dines

From the box office success of The Birth of a Nation in 1915 to the national obsession with O.J. Simpson, the image of the black male as the spoiler of white womanhood has been a staple of media representation in this country. The demonization by the media of black men as rapists and murderers has been well documented by scholars interested in film.