21 Comments

1. chip sommer:

   I appreciate and to a large extent agree with your discussion of lesbian porn. Much of it is a bad joke that caters to puerile fantasies, and is generally un and anti-erotic in nature.

   However, regarding your comment on the personal appearance of lesbians who you know – I think you are working with a construction of ‘lesbian’ as a woman who is exclusively attracted to other women and who exists in a certain political frame of reference. It is my opinion, based upon a certain degree of observation, that sexual identities(as expressed by choice of sexual partners and activity), at least among younger people, are of a much more fluid nature in many individuals.

   Among my younger employees (‘straight’ males, we are engaged in a playground maintenance and construction business) on occasion I have met some of their friends in a social setting, and more than once have been told that a young woman who looks kind of like the photo at the top of the article (conventionally beautiful, maybe even some makeup, nice clothes) has a girlfriend or is engaged in relationships with both men and women. This is generally stated as fact, without any particularly negative connotation, altho often with a certain degree of titillation factor. And the women I am referring to who I have met were friendly and sexually appealing, and were not bothered by male desire, at least as expressed in normal social interaction.

   In other words, leaving out the ridiculous and sometimes degrading nature of many of the acts portrayed in ‘lesbian’ porn, I do not regard it as outside the realm of reality that some very attractive young women, who are attractive and do not mind being attractive to straight men, might have sexual relationships with other women. This statement does not negate in any way your observation that it is being done for the camera for money, which changes the nature of the interaction itself.

   BTW, what do you regard as the essential difference betwenn’ pornography’(bad) and ‘erotica’(good, at least some do say) ? Is it. ” I know it when I see it” or can it be pinned down a little tighter? The element of degradation , of course is an obvious first place to look.

   One more thing- I think in the entire discussion of pornography which you have been conducting (and it’s made me do some thinking, OUch) where do you account for the fact that a lot of human sexuality and desire is just not a pretty thing? That the essential nature of human sexuality might include a darker side of domination and submission, power and control that just might not be entirely subject to social construction?

   Regards

   Chip Sommer

   30 November 2005, 4:16 pm

2. Stan:

   Pornography is:

   (1) More than its content.
   (2) A commodity for sale.
   (3) An industry.
   (4) A process of production.
   (5) Multi-media representations of sexual activity produced as a commodity.
   (6) Content that is not neutral in terms of what it says about male power.
   (7) Content that is designed with a (largley male) consumer in mind.
   (8) Content that is often advertized and displayed in ways that devalue and debase women, and that display sexual activity as phallo-genitally focused (even the “lez-porn” under review) and highly instrumental.

   I did not make any assumptions about any woman’s sexual activity. I simply noted that most of the lesbians *I know* are far too woman-centric to to hyper-fem with the infantilizing hairlessness, baby-doll face paint, and all the other demobilizing, silencing, and pedophilic man-pleasing forms of dominated sexual conformity.

   I talk about erotica in the preceding two-part piece.

   30 November 2005, 4:33 pm

3. Isaac:

   This post was interesting but honestly nothing new or particularly radical imho. I don’t see that it is sufficiently radical to stand alone as a critique of lesbian pornography (more on this in a second), so it seems it would function better as a chapter in a discussion on pornography in general. What I am more interested in and what I think requires a more sophisticated radical analysis is a critique of so-called feminist porn. Lesbian pornography such as the examples cited in this article clearly recreate the dominant patriarchal power structures, but publications such as On Our Backs (a snide reference to the landmark feminist journal Off Our Backs) are not very different in a radical analysis. These publications eschew the shaved vaginas and just-turned-18 models as well as (usually) the phallic devices, which allows truly radical feminists / women’s liberationists to distinguish ourselves from our moderate counterparts. I won’t go into my own analysis here, but I’m curious whether other readers agree that OOB and other so-called feminist pornography corporations fall within your crosshairs in spite of their transcendence of the blatantly absurd recreation of patriarchal forms.

   Sorry so sloppy, it’s late and I’m taking a break from grading papers.

   PS: OOB is online here.

   1 December 2005, 2:10 am

4. Elaina Gibbs:

   Speaking as a woman, who calls herself “queer”, highly politicized, and not only by means of academic involvement in theory and organizing, who’s been involved (to a limited degree) in the production of “amateur” pornography, and also privileged to call a very diverse and amazing crowd of people (many of whom are lesbians who look all kinds of ways) I’ll just say this: I have never known a woman who was not “bothered” by some aspect or another of “male desire.”

   It’s not just the invisible rules that we unconsciously follow when we’re in public that needs examination, here, in response to the first comment. To me, the framework from whence these “rules” and the subsequent consequences that result from not paying them some sort of homage (in and out of social settings) have to be considered— an unconscious, insidious self-abuse cycle, the “inherence” of the “triumph of the will” rings out in this comment.

   As with any problematic system that’s entrenched in our psyches and lives, in ways which we don’t even SEE, until we scrutinize closely, superficial and individualistic anecdotes do not serve to dish out appropriate analyses on the subject.

   Of course a lot of Lesbians act like they don’t mind the rules. Look at what happens to them when they don’t.

   1 December 2005, 5:09 am

5. Julian Real:

   Hi Chip.
   I wanted to comment on some of what you have written here:

   Chip: BTW, what do you regard as the essential difference betwenn’ pornography’(bad) and ‘erotica’(good, at least some do say) ? Is it. ” I know it when I see it” or can it be pinned down a little tighter? The element of degradation , of course is an obvious first place to look.

   Julian: I think the notion that erotica exists at all, as distinct from pornography (that is, what the porn industry sells), is somewhat mythic. As Andrea Dworkin correctly noted, erotica is often or basically high-class pornography. If our political values or ethics critique the dehumanisation of people through objectification and fetishisation of body parts, then what is radically different about erotica? These forms of dehumanisation, among others, are a prerequisite, it seems to me, in erotica or porn—that is, erotica and porn in the real world, not in the imagination of those who think something else exists. Please describe erotica that doesn’t require people to be decontextualised from their actual lives, from their emotional lives, from their spiritual lives, from the actual people that they are. If we are working for humane community, mustn’t that necessitate not turning people into things—even, or especially, things that turn us on?

   Chip: One more thing- I think in the entire discussion of pornography which you have been conducting (and it’s made me do some thinking, OUch) where do you account for the fact that a lot of human sexuality and desire is just not a pretty thing? That the essential nature of human sexuality might include a darker side of domination and submission, power and control that just might not be entirely subject to social construction?

   Julian: You carry certain assumptions into what you are saying here, in my view. One is that there is an ahistorical, transcultural thing called human sexuality. I would argue this is not the case, and direct you to an alternate view, one once stated (I hope I have the wording right) by Catharine A. MacKinnon, that sex is whatever a society sexualises. Seen this way, human sexuality is produced in society, not carried into it. That your idea of human sexuality (correctly) includes what we might call an unseemly side, goes without say in a society that necessitates both repression and hypersexualisation of what it chooses to call and make sex at any given time. The combination of patriarchal religious repressive forces, such as from the Catholic Church, aka the child abuse sex ring, and nun-raping circuit, and liberal free-to-be-dehumanised oppressive-called-liberatory forces, conspire to create, manufacture, or and/or force a sexuality into us, that feels both naughty and nice, or dangerous and safe, or wrong yet so right.

   We cannot know what sex would be outside CRAP (corporate racist atrocious patriarchy) because we do not live outside of it, and were not raised outside of it, unless raised outside of the West, generally. But tell me where there’s a sexuality that isn’t a product of patriarchy—that has no contact with patriarchy, and then we can begin there to look at what such a sexuality might look and feel like.

   The sexuality you speak of, accurately, is not outside patriarchy, and is, rather, the erotics of patriarchy, in both repressive and oppressive forms.

   1 December 2005, 4:20 pm

6. Elaina:

   Julian: I wish that I had your gift for articulation and analysis. When I find myself jumping outta my desk chair and shouting “hell yeah” (often to the confusion of my family, who’s in the kitchen, looking at me right now) it cheers up my weary soul. My aforementioned family gets this show regularly when I read Stan’s blog, but not so much when I read his blog’s comments. So thanks for all that you’re saying here.

   2 December 2005, 4:36 pm

7. Yolanda Carrington:

   Everytime I read something Julian has wrote, I have to challenge myself and my conclusions. Just a minute ago, I took for granted the idea that sexuality was one of the few aspects of human life that was not socially constucted, but now that I think about it, what most people call “sexuality” is definitely based on political/material conditions. And in this world, those conditions are Western-influenced capitalist patriarchy.

   This raises another important question: What is erotic? Again, when I am honest with myself, what I think of as erotic, sexual, etc. has been deemed so by someone else, or by a specific group of people (i.e. men). But what about the things women “like” and “want,” such as being made love to by a loving monogamous partner, who they will be with forever, and who cares for them and protects them? Uh, well, men again.

   What about strong families, where there is a man in every household, and the mother/father are together and in love? Oops—based on a White man’s idea of what family is (heteronormativity, patriarchy). Well, what about queer sex, that “rejects” or refashions gender roles, and is about trascending and “smashing” boundaries? Oops—comes from people (usually White male Americans) who have the time and relative privilege to even come up with something called “queer sex.”

   So critiquing those aspects of culture that claim to be healthy, family-friendly, pro-woman, pro-queer, and/or radical (i.e. On Our Backs and the like) is very necessary. ‘Cause nine times out of ten, if we scratch just an inch below the surface, we might find the same old shit.

   3 December 2005, 9:06 pm

8. Consumer:

   “We cannot know what sex would be outside CRAP…” Genius.

   The British Independent posted an article by Ariel Levy on the “new raunch culture”. She comments on what is purported to be recent girl-centric phenomena (e.g., Girls Gine Wild and popular women’s accessories sporting the Playboy logo, etc.) and her basic stance is that this is not liberation, in fact, it’s betrayal.

   “Why can’t we be sexy and frisky and in control without being commodified?”

   Julian’s CRAP here, in that sexuality is inherent in all of us but has been molded into acceptable and marketable manifestations.

   She also says that somehow “we have accepted as fact the myth that sexiness needs to be something divorced from the everyday experience of being ourselves.” Examples are given here where some girls on the beach are taunted into doing a fluffy lesbian BDSM type skit for a bunch of drunken beach-goers.

   She says that women do themselves a disservice by accomodating to the accepted “adult entertainment” concept because it reduces sexuality, a beatiful thing, to “bikini waxes and polyester underpants”.

   http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article330823.ece

   4 December 2005, 2:35 am

9. DeAnander:

   Stan asked if I would comment on “what is porn” and “is it porn if…” [if it is made by women for women, if it is made by women who call themselves feminists for women who call themselves feminists, if it features models who do not conform to received standards of hetero beauty, if it eschews phallic imagery, if it is creative and/or funny...]

   The only answer I have been able to come up with for myself, and it may not be particularly useful because it hinges partly on the attitude or intent of the reader/consumer, is this: if material (visual, audio, animated, still, literary) is read or watched primarily for the purpose of inducing sexual arousal in the reader/watcher, i.e. if it is being used as a “meme dose” like a dose of Viagra, to produce a predictable physical/mental reaction (in men, this is usually erection — in women it might be clitoral erection or lubricity or nipple-erection or whatever the individual woman experiences as sexual “readiness”) — then the material, and by implication the persons featuring in it, are being used in an instrumental way, a consumerist way, and for me personally this would mean that the interaction between media and consumer was pornographic. The media/material would be “like a prostitute” in the sense that it would be serving the immediate sexual arousal of the reader/watcher and no other major purpose; the reader/watcher’s only interest in the material is in its effect on the self.

   Now, I am on thin ice here, and can toss up any number of objections to this extremely vague and general definition. Suppose I am sad and blue, and I watch a videotape of a comedian/enne — Goldberg or Izzard or Cho — to cheer me up, to change my mental state. Am I not “using” that person’s performance like a meme-dose to alter my mental state, just like popping a pill? Well I suppose so, but one hopes that I am also interacting in some way with the material — experiencing or re-experiencing insights or discoveries that the performer is attempting to share with me. If I feel like a good cathartic cry and I pop a Bette Davis movie into the VCR, am I “using” that material in a dosage sense, like a psychoactive? or am I, in both these cases, trying to “be taken out of myself,” trying to transcend for a moment the prison of the inside of my own head and identify with other people, broaden my emotional horizon, empathise and identify with experiences different from my own?

   Pornographic entertainment, I suggest, is that which is intended to, or is used to, take us further into ourselves, material in whose universe of discourse we-the-consumer are the centre, material that strokes our own narcissism, our own sexual obsessions, our own ego trip. When little boys read the Song of Solomon, not for the astonishing poetry of the King James version but so that they can snigger over the word “breasts,” they have (imho) made the reading of that passage a pornographic experience by using it in a way that takes them nowhere but into their own adolescent obsessions, into themselves.

   Which may explain why there is so much confusion over what is and is not pornographic. One could look at statuary like the David as simply “something beautiful,” something that elicits the little brain-rush that pulls us out of our petty little heads in the presence of great beauty — and I think it may even be possible to admire the body of another living person in this same detached or transcendent way, but it seems more difficult; or we could look at it and think only “oooh a naked person, snigger snigger, that makes me feel all hot and itchy”: — where the real topic of our thoughts is Me, Me, Me, My reaction, My erection, My desires, My fantasies.

   Men in our culture are, demonstrably, totally obsessed with their own genitals and their sexual responses: the Me, Me, Me refrain is deafeningly loud in the media they consume (porn, pinups, etc), and they consume human beings in exactly the same way (it matters nothing what the prostitute thinks of the client, the only thing that matters is whether she can get him hard and then bring him off — or whatever his personal script is). What characterises “male sexuality” in patriarchal culture is precisely the failure of intersubjectivity, i.e. what Buber called the I/Thou, the recognition of the other person’s humanity, the recognition that they perceive us in the same moment of time that we perceive them, that they react to us in the same moment of time that we react to them, and that our impact on them is just as important as their impact on us. Christians would call this the ability to “see the face of God in every one,” and in Buddhism it is evoked by the doctrine that all souls are bound upon the same Wheel, and we might well be reborn tomorrow into the same body or life as the person we are now looking at (or down at).

   The failure of intersubjectivity is of course the signature of power. The employer does not have to care what the servant thinks or feels; literature and history are full of the paradigmatic treatment of servants “like furniture,” of peasants and workers like disposable commodities — a long sad story of upper classes and aristocracies who become psychotically incapable of perceiving the humanity and reality of persons of lower class or caste. Slaves must be hyperalert to the master’s changing moods and whims for their own self-preservation, but the master does not have to worry about the subtleties of expression in the slave’s face or voice — other than to detect, and punish, any hint of insubordination.

   Now let us consider the stereotypical behaviour of men and women. Paradigmatically we accept that women “want to be loved” and “care about what others feel,” want to make eye contact and know what the loved one is thinking, want constant reassurance of affection and connection. We accept that men “just want sex” without strings, that men are uncomfortable with too much emotional talking, do not like too much direct eye contact, and are notoriously oblivious to women’s moods and feelings, failing to perceive even obvious signs of discomfort or distress. [The servant must be hyperalert to the feelings and happiness and mood of the master. The master can be oblivious to the feelings and subtle facial expressions and moods of the servant.]

   So we have to ask ourselves, is this obliviousness really linked to the broken Y chromosome, some kind of perceptual deficit or brain specialisation? or is it merely the cumulative cultural effect of male privilege? That the privilege differential, the power differential, which makes the average man a petty aristo compared to average women of his own approximate class, age, race, gives rise to the traditional behaviour of elites and aristos, i.e. “treating the servants like furniture”? Do men insist on a “male style sexuality” simply because that is the sexuality of people who hold all the power, and in most cultures worldwide men have grabbed all the power? If women had institutional, structural power over men would their sexuality become “male style”, non-intersubjective, lacking in reciprocity and tenderness? Or is it something more physical, the central and difficult fact that because of their sexual physiology men can experience (through coitus) sexual pleasure and orgasm from activities which actually hurt or harm the receptive person? And that this complete breakdown in reciprocity, at the physical level, conditions male attitudes to sex, self, and other?

   Let’s just say that dominant/insertive male sexuality can be functional and satisfying, and yet completely fail to be intersubjective. For a rapist, rape can be sex, even if it is not sex for the victim. For one who desires a male partner to perform coition, the male partner’s state of mind and arousal is very important (or his erection will fail and so will the anticipated activity); but for the male who can achieve an erection and wants to screw something or someone, in physical terms it may make little difference whether the accepting orifice is human, animal, or watermelon — or if human or animal, whether it belongs to a willing or happy participant. This one fact about male sexuality may explain a lot, not only about how men approach sex but about how males grabbed and held onto power in human societies…

   Anyway, I’m wandering. But let me see if I can connect this back to “what is porn”… I think (and I am not a hifalutin media critic so I speak as an amateur here) that when we read/watch some kind of art, be it live performance or a movie or a good book, a poem, a song, a play, an opera — if it “speaks to us” we engage in a kind of vicarious intersubjectivity with the author/performer/writer, allowing ourselves to be “drawn into” the text and the performance, allowing our emotions to be caught up in it, perhaps finding ourselves willing to learn something new from it, accept new information, allow ourselves to be challenged by it. When we consume pornography we are interested only in how it serves us — it is a servile art form, dedicated only to inducing in the consumer a very specific response. In a sense we mimic the “consumerist” potential in male sexuality, the pattern of taking without caring or giving.

   What the heck, it’s late… I’m going to wander off into another riff here, excuse the digression…

   Late capitalism and contemporary pornography are just two faces of a similar process: the convergence of privilege, efficiency, laziness, and mercantilism in a kind of apex of marketing taxonomy. One might almost say that there are two cultural parents of the McDonalds — the factory and the brothel. The factory gives us the regimentation, the strict Taylorism, the mechanistic fetish for Efficiency; but the “efficiency” meme and the “choice” meme also derive, by a long line of descent, from the whorehouse — where the otherwise time-consuming business of romance and sex is streamlined into a simplified, hurried, and highly specialised procedure. It is age-old tradition that the customer gets to choose from a “menu” of available women, and that women are sorted by type (redheads, blondes, fat, thin, exotic foreigners, underage girls, etc) — also that different brothels specialise in different “kinky” practises. And the management is interested in getting the customers in, parting them from their cash, and moving them on out, in the minimum possible time.

   Brothels — except for the most leisurely and cultured catering to the very uppermost upper crust — have from time immemorial been “fast sex joints” where men wait in line for their hurried pleasures. And where “the customer is always right” and the men get to “have it their way” of course.

   To my way of thinking, there is a spectrum of the pornographic ranging from material which can by some stretch of the imagination be used by the consumer as pornographic (hey, some people can read anything into a cigar) but which the original artist or producer or writer meant sincerely as intersubjective art, a communication on many levels — and material which is frankly and openly made with the express purpose of reliably inducing male (or female) erections and nothing more, though a thin veener of plotline may be laid on top of the machinery to flatter the consumer into imagining himself more civilised than he really is.

   The enormous volume and variety of pornography raises the same questions as the overwhelming presence of advertising in modern culture. (1) if human beings are just naturally sexual creatures, why the hell do we seem to need so much artificial stimulation in order to act or feel sexual? (2) is this flood of artificial stimulation merely a by-product of How Human Beings Are or is it actually shaping or changing How Human Beings Are?

   Now, getting back to “feminist porn,” my personal take would be that a fundamental ideal of feminism is egalitarian reciprocity, or intersubjectivity by another name, which means that the further any art or media or material get from intersubjectivity the less feminist they become. Therefore the presence of erotic passages in lesbian and/or feminist literature is not at all problematic for me, until the publisher starts telling the author to insert a gratuitous sex scene here or there in order to “make the book sell better” or to “keep the reader’s attention.” At this point, where the content becomes merely a way to manipulate the reader’s libido or prurient interest, I believe we start veering into the fringes of the pornographic: we are no longer interested in telling a story about characters and their feelings, but in “getting the reader hot” or encouraging readers to buy the books “just for the hot bits.”

   And this gets us back to “what is erotica” — obviously if a piece of art or performance has been labelled and/or expressly produced as “erotica” then its whole purpose and intent is to arouse the viewer/reader/consumer, though perhaps in a somewhat more hifalutin, ironic, literate, or effete way than the brute voyeurism and sadism of downmarket porno. What then makes it any more intersubjective than regular old porn?

   Can the depiction of sex — graphically or in detail — actually have intersubjective impact, given that we do tend to respond to erotically-charged words or imagery in a physical way? Many women I know, self included, have experienced the rather bewildering feeling of reading some quite disgusting pornographic text and yet responding physically in some obscure Pavlovian way to some portion of it, almost without volition. The porn apologist would here crow with triumph and proclaim that this is the “repressed goody-good girl being overcome by her natural impulses” and insist that we should pursue this path and “liberate ourselves” to enjoy raunchy porn of whatever flavour. I would counter this claim with several interesting facts — one, that many men get an involuntary erection if anally raped; two, that many people molested as children report becoming physically aroused despite the strongest feelings of fear, terror and loathing for the adult abusing them; three, that some women experience a kind of physical kinaesthesia in which fear translates to physical arousal, even with no mental or emotional intent or interestl four, that professional (male) torturers, it is well-attested, often get erections in the course of their “work,” even when no explicitly sexual abuse is taking place. The connection between physical arousal and volition, “sex,” and intimacy etc. appears to be fuzzier than we might wish.

   Anyway, I personally would regard OnOurBacks as pornographic because it attempts to separate the sexual from every other aspect of life — as do all “stroke mags” no matter how pretentious — and packages it conveniently so that the reader can isolate the sexual from the rest of reality and experience it in a controlled-dosage way, a consumer experience. The key words are package and convenience, which is why I’ve stressed them. When you run across an explicit moment in a 400 page novel that is not packaging sex for convenient consumption. When you create a whole magazine that consists of nothing but titillation and “erotic” prose, that’s packaging sex for convenient consumption. [for contrast, I offer the common knowledge that "relationships are hard work," i.e. that genuine intersubjective engagement with a respected and loved Other can be difficult, complex, and time-consuming, and far from efficient or convenient if one's only goal is to get an orgasm.]

   The worst consequence of this particular face of the corporate capitalist culture, I think, is that it tends to move sexuality itself into the mercantile/consumerist realm generally, including sex between inviduals in supposedly intimate relationships… which in turn encourages us to perceive other people in terms of “what will s/he be willing to do for me,” rather than in terms of reciprocal altruism (“what can I do for X that will strengthen the bond between us of mutual obligation and respect?”) or generosity of heart (“I love X and want to make him/her happy”). It also encourages all girls and women to imagine themselves as prostitutes or porn stars in the same way that a previous generation might have imagined themselves fairy-tale princesses or glamourous movie stars; and encourages all boys and men to think of all women as prostitutes or potential prostitutes. Thinking of women as “pieces of ass” is nothing new among men, but the mainstreaming of porno and prostitution lends this type of thinking a new trendiness and even camouflages it as trangressive rather than — what it is — deeply obedient to patriarchal tradition in commodifying and reifying the female.

   “Service industries” in general are a fascinating vulgarisation of privilege, an attempt to make both the condition of servitude and its consumption democratic. As an aside I note that travellers to the ex-USSR were often dismayed by the “surliness” of hotel and restaurant staff — the new cultural atmosphere of Communist revolution made aristocratic assumptions and behaviours “ugly” and tabu, including “treating other people like servants,” and this in turn made “acting like a servant” (being servile) a counter-revolutionary and antisocial quality. Therefore “service” workers took pains not to appear servile, not to toady and bow and scrape. Maybe they went a bit overboard What relationship all this bears to simple courtesy and where that boundary should be drawn, I would be hard-pressed to say… certainly servility makes me acutely uncomfortable but rudeness is also unpleasant.

   The essence of prostitution and pornography is servility: an industry set up to cater to, coddle, baby and (literally) kiss up to the male ego and genitals. All we need to do is consider the derogative meaning of “cocksucker” or the ways in which prostitution is used as a political/ideological metaphor for spinelessness, venality, gutlessness, corruption, etc. — servility to money, and the servile indulgence of the privileged, is the fundamental popular definition of porno or prostitution.

   This is miles from being a finished argument — an undisciplined ramble all around the mulberry bush is more like it — but I hope I have thrown in some food for thought, that might help us to think about “erotica,” “porn,” service industries, sexual commodification, etc. in more structural and general terms, rather than getting bogged down in “gay porn vs straight porn” or “feminist porn” and so on. IMHO there are two quite distinct issues in pornography: one is primary and political and strategic for me, and that is “is anyone being harmed.” The other is personal, reflective, ethical, moral: and that is “is it good for me, my character, my sense of dignity or right action, to indulge in this or that sensationalist or consumerist experience?” This question I think cannot be resolved by public action — we can always read the Song of Songs just for the “breasts” stanza, which hardly justifies restricting access to the text; it is up to each of us to decide whether we are engaging with the world in an intersubjective or a consumerist way. But in the case of the international sex trade there is ample evidence of harm; in the porn industry there is ample evidence of harm and the exploitation of harm and the capitalisation of harm. And here I think it is easier to contemplate action.

   I object to the pornographic on philosophical, moral and aesthetic grounds. I object to the harm done to women and girls and boys in the sex trade on human rights, social justice, and antiviolent grounds; OnOurBacks is, I believe, pornographic, and as such it bores me to tears and I have never bothered to read it, but I would also not bother to take any political action against it as I believe the instance of harm being done to women who appear in its pages is probably quite small. I could be wrong about this, but I hope i am right. The kind of sadistic mainstream porno that Robert Jensen (and Andrea Dworkin and dozens of other activists) has exposed and analysed, involves immediate harm done to the women used in it, and it is to me a far more urgent issue — an issue of criminality rather than bad taste, emotional immaturity, or wasting dead trees

   4 December 2005, 3:42 am

10. DeAnander:

    afterthought: I should have said “I have not bothered to read OnOurBacks since taking a look at a couple of early issues many years ago.” typing fast late at night, I fear my sloppy phrasing left me sounding like a Know-Nothing critic — “I’ve never read it but I know I don’t like it!”. more precisely, I have never bothered to keep up with it or read it regularly, I merely know that it exists and what its content and editorial policy were when last I looked.

    My disinterest may seem intellectually flimsy — shouldn’t I be constantly updating my opinion/position? Maybe… but I studied pornography fairly deeply for some years and saw enough of it to last a lifetime. Despite all the marketing hoopla and freakshow excesses, pornography is as much a standardised commodity as cars or CD players or USB cables, and there is approximately zero novelty in it, to my mind — only the endless repetition of a very limited menu of scenarios and images. No matter how “kinky” some pornographic image or scenario may be, it will quickly be mass produced and replicated with businesslike efficiency, as fast as Disney movies turn into Walmart-special action figures. It is — as Hannah Arendt memorably remarked about evil — banal, and intensely boring in the way that all addictive substances are boring unless you are the addict. (how interesting, after all, is the 10,000th cigarette or the thousandth dose of heroin, except to the person who really, really needs it?)

    Simone Weil once said something that has haunted me ever since reading it: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied, full of charm; imaginary good is tiresome and flat. Real evil, however, is dreary, monotonous, barren. Real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” The adjective that occurs to me when contemplating porn and the mainstream of world prostitution is “dreary”, i.e. tiresome and flat. Its attempts at variegation are nothing but the same feeble fakery that produces “new” hollywood blockbusters with tired old conventions; “new improved” detergents and mouthwashes ballyhooed with language more appropriate to first love or opening night; “new” car models that consist of a couple more drink holders and a different colour of upholstery on the same old, same old model.

    The essence of intersubjectivity, like the essence of health in biotic communities or functionality in urban form, is in a kind of fractal, dynamic, unfathomable level of detail and synergy whose very nature is uniqueness and high complexity — the very opposite of Taylorism and mass marketability… Mass production by its very nature cannot capture this quality. The experience of “making love” with a trusted lover/friend/partner, I think (when there’s peace and good feeling between the participants) is an experience so multilayered, infinitely rich in detail and nuance, that it cannnot possibly be replicated or captured in “convenient” marketable cartoon form. Kunstler talked about contemporary corporate architecture as “cartoon architecture” made to be seen in quick glimpses from passing cars — architecture that is no more than a sketch of a building. The same may be said of the “convenience” products generally, whether they be fast food, “airport paperbacks,” or convenience sex; they are generally cartoons, quick expedient sketches substituting for the real things which take real time, skill, and commitment to produce or to appreciate. Velveeta is not cheese.

    This then raises the question of whether “quality sex” could be provided or appreciated on a commercial basis. For example, whenever a discussion of this sort takes place on line it seems there is inevitably a poster who announces that she is a prostitute, loves her work, has a small clientele of johns of whom she is genuinely fond, finds them interesting, thinks of them as friends as well as customers, is on terms of mutual respect with them, makes good money, and considers herself to be more of a skilled sexual counselor or therapist than a wage slave. Though I am sometimes a bit suspicious of the similarity of these posts (kind of like the infamous Letter from a Soldier in Iraq?) I am not impervious to the argument being made.

    The kind of prostitution being described here might be described as “artisanal” rather than sweatshop, craftswomanly rather than Taylorist, communitarian rather than impersonal, cheese rather than Velveeta — “free range” rather than factory farmed, you might say. What a world of difference between an artisan who enjoys his/her skills and craft spending a leisurely day at a fulfilling occupation, and a child chained to a workbench in a hellhole in some FTZ, doing some repetitive low-skill task as fast as possible in fear of the overseer’s fist.

    But I think the essential concept again is not how much money is made, but intersubjectivity. In this kind of prostitution the essential elements of the male power fantasy are mitigated (though the money relationship remains the same): anonymity and disposability of the woman. The ongoing relationship between provider and consumer, like the relationships between family businesses and regular customers in a small community, humanises the commercial transaction. Lunch for the locals at Joe’s Diner in Nowhere Montana is a more communitarian, intersubjective, unique, interesting and nuanced affair than a McLunch at a McD for a freeway traveller buzzing through Sprawlville.

    It is possible to conduct structurally oppressive relations in a civilised, mitigated way. It is possible for owners of capital and plant to treat workers kindly and decently, to respect the labour that creates their wealth — without ever questioning the elite ownership of the means of production, or challenging the ultimate control of the operation. It is possible for an employer to be kind, familial, and caring towards a domestic servant, to treat him/her “like one of the family.” In some Muslim societies slaves are bought at the market but then raised and treated like family members (of course in patriarchal cultures, family members are saves, the property of the patriarch — the word ‘family’ derives from famulus after all). It is possible for patriarchal, traditional husbands to be kind and loving and accommodating to wives and children. (It is also possible to be cruel, arbitrary, and mean in the service of allegedly humanitarian and egalitarian goals or projects, which muddies the water even further). We can mitigate the abusive potential of human hierarchy by a kind of “affirmative action,” in which those with power choose to behave well towards those without; or in which those without power manage by skill, ingenuity, or dumb luck to negotiate for themselves a niche of safety or respect, a refuge from the more brutal operations of the system in which they’re embedded.

    If all the prostitution in the world were of the type described by this type of “happy hooker”, the overarching system of male sexual prerogative would still be in place, the institution would still exist to serve that prerogative, but a civilised layer of padding would have been installed over the brutality of naked power (which always comes down to force). Prostitution with neither force nor fraud (the Libertarian ideal) would certainly be an advance over the current situation. [The question is, given the nature of male ranking strategies, dominance displays, and the vexed connection between male sexuality and aggression -- would men ever be satisfied with a system of sexual barter and trade in which no one gets hurt? can the Libertarian ideal of mitigated hierarchy be generalised beyond a few fortunate niches, given the nature of patriarchy and male dominance requirements? if not -- and I suspect this is the case -- then this doesn't get us off the hook for challenging patriarchy and male dominance themselves, systematically.]

    4 December 2005, 3:54 pm

11. Consumer:

    DeAnander is quite the prolific writer. As this is very important stuff we’re talking about here, let me see if I can sum up your main points on pornography in two sentences or less.

    1) Porn can be described as commodified pre-packaged sexual material with a patriarchal background designed for the consumer’s instant and one-way gratification.

    2) Porn features members of society that are less privileged and ultimately victimized in that they are dehumanized for profit, usually someone else’s profit.

    I unreservedly agree with the first and most likely with the second.

    But all this discussion has yet to provide any concrete action that can be taken on a mass scale (given the current capitalist system) short of a massive revolution in thought and action by high-profile influential people (read: famous men).

    So porn will remain, as it should. I would tourniquet that diseased limb and slowly cut off its blood supply rather than chop it off.

    What is the tourniquet that works in the current consumer-based capitalist society? Reduction of demand. To reduce demand, we need to first observe ourselves and then initiate conversations with those around us who may be current or potential porn consumers.

    If by some educative chain-reaction we were able to raise awareness of loving interaction and of the beauty of sex as expression as opposed to subjugation, then we might kill the demand for porn as it currently manifests itself.

    This seems to me to be the mother of all Heraklean tasks. If its difficulty is a reflection of its importance, then let’s get cracking with those conversations at the local bar. But I’m not holding my breath for any noticeable changes in my lifetime.

    I think the most we can hope for is what happened to me, initiation of a thought process.

    4 December 2005, 5:49 pm

12. Randy Morris:

    Thanks for that, DeAnander. A very enjoyable and educational read.

    5 December 2005, 1:31 am

13. Julian Real:

    Hello Yolanda and Elaina.

    Thank you so much for your kind words and additional thoughts on this matter.

    Audre Lorde’s “Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power” in her amazing book, Sister Outsider, contains one of the best understandings of eroticism seen and understood by someone who was militantly anti-CRAP, and fiercely human.

    Here’s Audre Lorde, in an interview with Claudia Tate: “We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way. And when I say living I mean it as that force which moves us toward what will accomplish real positive change.”

    For the whole essay and the interview, see:

    I think it is important to do what Audre Lorde recommends: to search the specifics of our lives, collectively, not in isolation. Isolation breeds depression and despair, but in justice-loving community (wherever we can find it), our own struggles, sufferings, confusions, and desires, can be expressed and placed into a perspective that we—each one of us—has a hand in creating, thereby not alienating ourselves further. Each one of our stories is tremendously important, especially yours. Let us speak to one another about what we know, including what we are confused about.

    Towards that end, I write here, on this site.

    I am gay, celibate, anti-sexxx, and anti-CRAP. My class background is mixed. I have experienced ethnic hate up close and personal, and also have light skin privilege. I do not believe in “race”: I think it is one of CRAP’s tools of destruction, used to categorise and separate out those who are to be privileged from those who are to be disenfranchised, marginalized, ignored by the elite, and killed or left to die. I believe whole-heartedly in ethnic and cultural diversity. I think “Black” or “Asian” or “Native American” or “Latina/o” makes diverse peoples into one thing, which is sometimes necessary to survive, of course—to rally around an identity to form resistance, but is also, often, a weapon of dehumanization, of cultural and ethnic over-simplification. “White” is an evil word to me, an evil idea, like “Aryan”. “Black”, and other racial categories, are not evil to me: they carry a mixed history of misuse and survival. But one must be aware of what they mean, and how they are used by dominant groups to separate us out from one another, and, especially, to turn us against one another, while CRAP grows stronger. Why is it that only white women and white girls are reported missing in the media? Why is it that only white boys are reported as molested by priests? What about all those missing and raped girls and women of Colour, and all those molested and hurting boys of Colour? Are they not worthy of media attention?!

    Perhaps I focus too much on the evils in society. People around me, my friends, sometimes tire of hearing me go on and on about rape and racism as ATROCITIES. I know some people find comfort, intimacy, and exhilaration in some of the sex they have, whether with a stranger or a long-time loved one. I have not been so lucky to know these experiences. I was sexually abused in several ways in my childhood: fondled when 7 or 8, involved in a strange incestuous relationship with a guy who was ten years older than me and lived in my family’s home for years, when I was 11, and grossly sexually assaulted by a rampant child molester, at the age of 12.

    I found myself compulsively and habitually playing out some learned forms of that sort of sex in my adult life. Thanks to anti-racist feminism, I then learned how to stop it (never abusing anyone, thank God, but certainly using others and being used, while trying to find connection and value). Getting out of those habits and stopping those compulsions allowed me some perspective on CRAP. Eroticising CRAP is dangerous to the soul, I have found. Stopping the behaviours that CRAP wants us all to enjoy meant that my mind, body, and actions could work against CRAP, instead of with it. But there is no pure removal of oneself from CRAP, unfortunately. We are part of a web of destruction and dehumanisation, no matter the intent behind our actions.

    I find little here, in this Caucasian-dominated part of the world, that I would consider to be “erotic” except, perhaps, the passionate intensity I feel when I confront CRAP. This does not mean that activism “turns me on” unless we mean that in a non-sexual way. It means that activism makes me feel real: not like a commodity, not like some projection of some bigot’s CRAP-formed “imagination”, and not like an invisible thing.

    If a female or male lover wants a woman to “dress like the porn model” she or he is asking that woman to be a sexxx-thing, not the deepest dimensions of who she is. If a corporate pimp, like Larry Flynt, is selling “ideas” of women as racially exotic he is both using those real women who are in the photos to do so, and he’s selling a form of bigotry, a hatred of humanity, for mostly Caucasian men to get off to, ignoring the fact that there’s a real woman in that picture, who either was forced, economically or patriarchally, to be there, or worse… DESIRED to be there, like that, because looking and acting like that is what makes her feel like she’s worth something. CRAP wins when we ALL desire its versions of sexxx and inhuman being.

    I militantly resist all of this, because I know the cost in my body: I know the terror of being used as a thing, by that child molester. I also know, for a fact, that he was lost… long gone in some trance state, even though he also planned and practiced how to get me—and many other kids—in the working class neighborhood that my aunt and uncle lived in. The molester and his wife were tenants in my aunt and uncle’s multi-unit home. Even with that income from the tenants, my aunt and uncle were usually cash poor, struggling to raise five kids; rents were much lower in those days, and my aunt and uncle didn’t believe in exploiting people.

    The feelings generated by being assaulted flare up in me every day, without much warning: the fear, the powerlessness, the utterly, callously exploited vulnerability, and, perhaps hardest of all to witness… the self-contempt for being there with him, like that, all passive and pleading, wishing there was a way to turn back time, but knowing, deep down, there was no escape.

    CRAP may have fucked up my sexual life, but it also fucked up my eating patterns, the degree to which I do and do not care for myself properly, and my mood and energy levels as I work to get through each day. I see suffering and stamina in people’s eyes—most especially in the eyes of the socially disregarded, and I know what that suffering and stamina means: it means we have to do terrible things to ourselves, and sometimes to others, to get by, and that we know a lot about grace as well. It also means we cannot bear to know too much, because we are often too alone to bear that knowledge, of what CRAP does to us, every damned day.

    I know that when I am being objectified, I am supposed to feel flattered, but I feel violated instead, because I am not being seen as the full human being I am.

    “The erotic”, as I understand it, following Audre Lorde, is the power to become fully human DESPITE CRAP’s efforts to make us enjoy existence as a thing. Most of what is offered up to us as sex/sexxx is disempowerment disguised as the “desire” to be that thing we think we must be, which will never be a whole, real person. We ritually shave and tweeze and modify our bodies with clothing or dieting so that we can appear as something that someone might find attractive and alluring, AS IF OUR SPIRITS WERE NOT ALREADY SO.

    CRAP wants us and needs us to treat ourselves and others as things, not as individual uniquely gifted and suffering people, each one of who has something damned important to express, in some form or another.

    I look into the angry, glazed, or sad, sad eyes of people I pass on the street, and try to convey, in an extended glance, “I know at least a bit of what you are feeling. I know. You are not alone”.

    “Put that rage and pain to good use”, is my wish for each one of us. Don’t waste it on self-destruction, if you can find a way not to.

    It is exhilarating, and temporarily lifts me out of a depression I have known most of my life, to fight CRAP. I think fighting CRAP, or resisting it, or learning about it, is a much better anti-depressant than most medications, but some of us do need the medications to stay alive in CRAP.

    Power and strength to you both, as you work to withstand and confront CRAP in any of its lethal forms, when time and energy allow.

    With love and respect,

    Julian Real

    5 December 2005, 5:32 pm

14. Julian Real:

    I’m not sure if the link to Audre Lorde’s words appears above, so here it is:

    http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lorde/erotic.htm

    5 December 2005, 5:40 pm

15. DeAnander:

    Julian: very moving. very true. I was lucky in being spared the abuses you describe but I too had to get over playing out that learned CRAP in my own personal life — it gets into our heads early (ick). thanks for writing. btw I love the CRAP acronym, it will be a comforting tool in my personal toolkit for master’s-house-dismantling — many thanks.

    5 December 2005, 11:04 pm

16. elaina:

    This is incredibly well said. Thank you for that link as well.

    6 December 2005, 4:18 am

17. Randy Morris:

    And thanks to you, Julian, for that. I’m trying to learn, and you are helping.

    I’m about as pasty as a white guy gets, and so I don’t have anything valuable to add to this conversation except to try to show my appreciation for the reality that you all are helping me to see.

    One of the links posted on this site pointed me at the quote “The Revolution won’t need you until you realize the Revolution doesn’t need you.” This was a (good) slap in the face for me.

    Thanks

    6 December 2005, 6:06 pm

18. Yolanda Carrington:

    First off, I just want to say thank you to you, Julian, for sharing your powerful story with all of us. I know firsthand how hard it is to name the hurts that can be inflicted on the self. I still struggle with that.

    In the spirit of naming, I’ll give a brief glimpse into my tale, for those of you who have ever wondered where this craziness comes from. A heads up: I plan to write some future essays for this blog, and hopefully I will be able to share more with y’all there.

    I’m a woman, African American, twenty-eight years old, born and raised in the US South (Raleigh, North Carolina), come from a working-poor family on both sides, and when not working for the Man, am a writer and poet (and pinko commie). I’m a queer virgin who is waiting for just the right man (Where is he?), and I’m both a high school and college dropout. I love history, music, literature, cinema, politics, and crappy TV (well, maybe I’m addicted to that last one).

    I am the second child (three daughters) of a rape survivor (now deceased) and an alcoholic, who split up when I was eight. I became my mother’s confidante and counselor at that time, being that she trusted no one else except her mother (and also being that some White domestic violence expert told her that she was so “strong” that she didn’t need therapy). It is from my mother that I learned how to argue effectively—it was the only way I could deal with her sometimes. In public however, I was always the good girl, and I never had an unkind word to say to anyone. I am still a good girl—too good for my own damn self.

    By the way, Mom was a high school dropout, struggled with epilepsy and hypertension, was un(der)employed for all of my childhood, and raised the three of us on limited income by herself.

    I learned the game of oppression and privilege from three important institutions: the public school system, the media, and my family. From these three gods and that god called the State (the only gods I’ve ever known) I learned the greatest fact about race and gender: It is horseshit that matters.

    I became queer not through the sin of homosexuality but through the virtues of homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, first encountering them at age nine (back then I didn’t know they had names). From then on I struggled to understand where these monsters came from and why they existed, and I realized that there was more to the tale than mean boys. There were mean parents, mean teachers, mean aunts, mean principals, mean preachers—a whole lotta mean adults. I learned to hate my body, my voice, and my appearance. I LEARNED to hate myself.

    The last nineteen years for me have been a process of trying to love myself again, and of listening to my own voice, and the voices of people like me. I began calling myself a feminist at age twelve, back when my idea of feminism was that all women should have jobs outside the home (I reject this idea today—who IN THE HELL wants to work for the Man?) and that women should do everything that men do (yeeaaaahhhhhhh). I still struggle with trusting myself, and with naming what happened to me, and with believing what happened—and is happening—to others. I’m constantly deprogramming the CRAP inside my brain.

    So it is from this starting point that I enter the battle. Sometimes, I resent it. I hate fighting for the right to survive, the right to say that I am a human being. But I realize now that I’m not alone, and when I look around me and I see that ninety percent of the world is in my shoes, I don’t question my humanity.

    Julian, Elaina, and DeAnander, thanks for your voices, and all that you are.

    In struggle,
    Yolanda

    6 December 2005, 7:59 pm

19. Julian Real:

    Thanks for the support and care, and bravery, Yolanda, Elaina, and DeAnander. Thank you, also, Yolanda, for sharing some of your important story here. I’m glad we’ve all made it this far. And thanks, DeAnander, for your thoughts and analysis about this global mess which we might call CRAP.

    To the pasty white guy, Randy: please don’t minimise the importance of your story too: you have one, and it may contain more experiences of privilege than women of any ethnicity and men of Colour experience, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t fully human and haven’t suffered, at least as a child, for goodness sake! Also, I am around white people most of the time, and am seen as white, or off-white. So we share an experience in the world based on people giving us privileges and entitlements, socially, based on having light skin. Admittedly, Randy, yours may be lighter than mine! But I know full well that if my skin were darker, those privileges and entitlements would evaporate faster than spit on a hot summer sidewalk.

    I am multi-ethnic (my “family” contains people who are are of Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Canadian, Eastern (Jewish) and Western (Christian) European descent. But it must be noted I am seen as white. I do not wish to misrepresent myself to you as someone who is seen as definitively of Colour. I am not. And my family lives in Great Britain, Japan, and the U.S., primarily.

    I do not choose to categorise myself in terms of “race” because I believe that way of categorising people, along with gendered ways, are too often destructive in their intent and effect on us–and are often not done with any meaningful consent on our part. I think to survive we must quickly recognise each other’s unique humanity, while holding one another fully accountable to the acts we do, in speech and other behaviour, which demeans any one of us, and especially a whole group of oppressed people who know interpersonal and institutional degradation far too well. And I believe we must also be accountable for the acts we do NOT do–the sins of omission, as Jewish faith describes them.

    So, Randy, I will not let you escape into an identity of oppression. You are only you, after all. You are as responsible as anyone else for the world around you/us. Perhaps you have more to report about the world of white people, which could be useful in the struggle to radically transform CRAP… to compost it, if you will. Being a “spy” as it were, primarily among white heterosexual and gay men, has proven infuriating, tiring, and invaluable to me and my activist work. And perhaps, if you have class privilege, you have access to other resources as well, and can prove valuable to this movement towards global peace, built on actual radical justice.

    Being around white, often middle class, men a fair amount, I have learned to listen closely and to challenge a lot: to speak up whenever I hear or see racist, anti-Semitic, classist, homophobic, or sexist comments and other hateful or dehumanising non-speech actions, for example. And, when the acts are sexist, to demand that the men involved humanise themselves now, for women’s sake, if not for their own. It is more important for men to do so for women’s human sake, in my view.

    I am “seen” and treated as mostly male, meaning here, in gender-privileged ways. I have had and still have some forms of male privilege. But, just between us friends, I don’t identify as a man (nor did I identify as a boy, except to the degree that I had to–as in when responding to someone referring to me with a male pronoun). I was bullied daily from the ages of 7 to 14, by many boys–and a couple of girls, for seeing and treating girls as equals, meaning, in non-political lingo, as friends, deep friends, and for seeing boys as suspect. I made up my mind early on in life (by age 10) that I would never seek to become an oppressor of others, even if that meant losing status and privileges, or attracting hostility, which, at times, it has.
    As a hero of mine, Andrea Dworkin, noted: men will care about populations of people that include men. They are capable of that. But can men care about a population that doesn’t? Can men care, as passionately, as fiercely, about matters of justice, and freedom from oppression and repression, when the harm is not done also to males? This statement of hers CHANGED me, forever.

    I now see it as my duty, as a human being–perhaps especially as one who is seen as male, to CARE, fiercely and passionately, through action after action, about women as a class of REAL HUMAN BEINGS. Women are not seen and treated as such, usually (and never systematically) because female human beings are seen and treated ONLY as girls and women, too often–far too often as a sexist idea of girl and woman that patriarchies globally enforce, varying as it does from place to place and time to time, without ever socially escaping an oppressive space.

    I do not seek to live in a world where women learn to be a patriarchal idea of woman, or man, or where men act like patriarchs. That would mean patriarchy has won, in an awful, awful way. I seek a world where gender (and race, and sexuality) is not a measure of one’s value, status, esteem, nature, or place in a political hierarchy. I seek a world when men learn to be humane and are routinely held accountable in meaningful ways when they are not. And I seek a world without economic injustice in any form, without any social, politically maintained, hierarchies.

    I seek a world of diverse community and deep friendship, including with non-human animals and the Earth. As a mentor of mine, a white lesbian-feminist anti-racism activist, once said to me: “There are two categories of people in the world: friends, and not-yet-friends.” That’s the world I’m working for.

    Love,

    Julian Real

    7 December 2005, 5:05 pm

20. Julian Real:

    Apologies, of a sort, for the back to back postings.

    I wanted to get something out today, in part to inspire Randy and any other men, especially white men, who visit here, but also to more generally inspire all of us.

    Today is the 25th anniversary of Lennon being murdered by a “fan” who had an album autographed by John earlier in the same day (12/8/1980) that he later put four fatal bullets into the husband,father, writer, visual artist, and musician. (You may have heard of a little band from Liverpool… The Beatles?)

    John Lennon is a great example of someone who went from patriarch–batterer of his first wife and neglecter of his first child, to being a profoundly sensitive and equality-loving partner to his second wife, Yoko Ono, and an amazing primary parent to his second child, Sean, who was born on John’s 35th birthday. Yoko spent her days out of the home, in her office dealing with complex business affairs (that is to say, she was a normal non-primary parent).

    Withing a few years time, Lennon went from these lyrics, in “Run For Your Life”:

    “Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl,
    than to be with another man”

    to these (from “Getting Better”):

    I used to be cruel to my woman
    I beat her and kept her from the
    Things that she loved
    Man I was mean but I’m changing my scene
    And I’m doing the best that I can.
    I admit it’s getting better
    A little better all the time

    To this:

    “Woman is the Nigger of the World”
    John Lennon & Yoko Ono

    Woman is the nigger of the world
    Yes she is…think about it
    Woman is the nigger of the world
    Think about it…do something about it

    We make her paint her face and dance
    If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love us
    If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man
    While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us

    Woman is the nigger of the world…yes she is
    If you don’t believe me, take a look at the one you’re with
    Woman is the slave of the slaves
    Ah, yeah…better scream about it

    For the rest of the lyrics, see:
    http://www.john-lennon.com/songlyrics/songs/Woman_is_the_Nigger_of_the_World.htm

    About his transformation, John said, in an interview, that he was even more feminist later in life, after writing that song with Yoko. It was in his last five years, 1975-1980, that he let his non-speech actions speak for themselves, respecting his partner, and parenting his child.

    Let’s not forget that people can radically change, in a matter of a few years. Let’s hope society and its institutions can, as well, in our lifetime. I’ll close this post with Yoko and John’s other, more famous, song:

    Imagine
    by Yoko Ono and John Lennon
    (Live in NYC version)

    Imagine there’s no heaven
    It’s easy if you try
    No hell below us
    Above us only sky
    Imagine all the people
    Living for today…
    Imagine there’s no countries
    It isn’t hard to do
    Nothing to kill or die for
    And no religon too
    Imagine all the people
    Living life in peace…

    Imagine no possesions
    I wonder if you can
    No need for greed or hunger
    A brotherhood/sisterhood of man
    Imagine all the people
    Sharing all the world…

    You may say i’m a dreamer
    But i’m not the only one
    I hope some day you’ll join us
    And the world will be as one

    For more on John Lennon, see this site: http://www.john-lennon.com/

    I hope you are resting in peace, John.

    Love,

    Julian Real

    8 December 2005, 3:23 pm

21. Linda Jansen:

    When I started discussing the Jensen/Dines article Stan posted earlier on pornography with my husband, the task I was trying to describe to him seemed very daunting. CRAP is so woven into the fabric of our society that unweaving it seems impossible. The discussion ended with our agreement that we needed to encourage healthy sexuality that doesn’t dehuamnize anyone. I think what Consumer says above about having conversations with people about pornography gives all of us a human sized task that we can take on. These conversations are a place to point the people we run into that see the need to engage on this. Thanks to you all.

    11 December 2005, 4:59 pm

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