Caught in the Web: Sexual Fantasizing, Character, and Cyberpornography
Caught in the Web: Sexual Fantasizing, Character, and Cyberpornography
Susan Dwyer
In a culture committed to individual liberty and value pluralism, any critique of sexually explicit material runs the risk of being misunderstood. Criticisms of pornography are apt to be thought of as symptomatic of sexual prudishness or as recommendations for censorship. Now, while some critiques of pornography have been just that, most are far more complicated. For example, different feminist theorists have claimed both that being “for†pornography and being “against†pornography are inconsistent with feminist goals.[1] And a good number of pornography’s defenders are not defenders of pornography per se, but of more noble or abstract things, like the right to free speech or the “right to moral independence.â€[2]
Interesting and important as they are, the quite sophisticated moral, political, and legal debates about pornography of the past three decades have tended to obscure our intuitive – some would say, naive – reactions to pornography. To say these reactions are naive, however, is not to denigrate them. I believe they are manifestations of deep, though tacit, moral judgments. I also believe that we will have more success talking to one another about pornography itself as well as about what we should or should not do about it, if we pay attention to these intuitive reactions. For they are resilient, and we will be left unsatisfied by the best of arguments, if those arguments fail either to respect or explain away these judgments.
In this paper, I present a moral critique of pornography that attempts to accommodate some intuitive moral judgments about certain kinds of sexual fantasizing. The central idea is that some pornography is morally problematic because it provides the raw material for and helps to nurture a class of morally bad actions; namely, sexual fantasizing about a variety of harms to oneself and/or to others. Sexual fantasizing is something we deliberately and consciously do. We construct fantasies that please us and return to them over the course of our lives. Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that sexual fantasies are among the most enduring elements of our respective psychologies. But, some kinds of sexual fantasizing are moral risky. A person runs a serious risk of compromising her character if she persistently and deliberately engages in an activity that yokes sexual pleasure and satisfaction to conscious thoughts of degradation, humiliation, and violence. And, as I shall explain below, there is reason to believe that this risk is significantly increased when pornography is consumed on-line.
Put so bluntly, my critique is ripe for both types of misinterpretation I mentioned at the outset. No matter how they are gussied up, one might say, claims about the character-corrupting potential of pornography are nothing more than thinly-veiled expressions of nose-wrinkling disgust at what turns other people on sexually. Alternatively, an objector might conclude from the mention of pornography’s harms that the critique is simply a long-winded call for the legal prohibition of pornography. But both of these are misinterpretations. Explaining why my critique is not merely sexual prudery masquerading as moral argument will take some time, and a good deal of this paper is devoted to that task. Dispensing with the second misinterpretation is (moderately) easier.
Precisely because the harm of some pornography is what it is – the facilitation of character-corruption – the state can neither be an effective nor an appropriate agent in addressing that harm. The criminal law is an effective restraint on many (though perhaps not enough) people who would harm others. And various paternalistic laws – for example, regarding the use of motorcycle helmets and seat belts – protect our physical selves. But the state and the law are ill-equipped to deal with our characters.[3] The state cannot enact successful coercive policies to make us better people, in the very personal and intimate sense of having better characters. Our characters are our own business, where this does not mean that they are immune from evaluation (far from it). Rather, our characters are essentially our projects. The impetus for both the development and reform of character must come from within. Of course, other people can be helpful or instrumental in modifying our characters. But those others need to be intimate particulars; people who know us, not the faceless, bureaucratic state. Requests or recommendations for change must be motivated by love and respect, and not backed up by police powers. Hence, the very nature of the critique I offer makes censorship irrelevant.[4]
To reiterate: the proposition I wish to defend is that some pornography is morally problematic insofar as it plays a role (perhaps a pivotal one) in morally dangerous sexual fantasizing. It will be helpful to begin with an example…
Stan:
I’ll add this one, too.
http://www.sociology.org/content/vol005.003/ia.html
12 July 2006, 1:03 pmDoyle Saylor:
Susan Dwyer writes;
moral judgments…The central idea is that some pornography is morally problematic because it provides the raw material for and helps to nurture a class of morally bad actions;…
Doyle;
Morality is basically an attempt to shape human emotion structure. The primary agent of this are the words of the moral position. Hence the word ‘bad’. Good or bad are obviously relative to who says what. Further finding a ‘universal’ morality has foundered for a very long time.
Emotion structure is what we ‘regulate’ with morality. If one gets angry don’t beat to a pulp someone else. Thous shalt not kill. That really regulates anger despite what the words ‘say’. Any emotion that leads to killing, stealing, abuse, etc are subject to ‘moral’ rules. Morality and ethics do not work well if at all because the emotion structure is being regulated by a non emotion mental process.
Susan Dwyer writes;
Precisely because the harm of some pornography is what it is – the facilitation of character-corruption
Doyle;
A more realistic way to bring this up is to ask is a porno movie language like? Movies are not language like, they are a one-to-many media. One can’t capture ‘morality’ or emotion structure in a one to many media because the media is not based upon an exchange of emotion that connects the person seeing to society.
Susan Dwyer writes;
To reiterate: the proposition I wish to defend is that some pornography is morally problematic insofar as it plays a role (perhaps a pivotal one) in morally dangerous sexual fantasizing.
Doyle;
Here is a thought experiment. A dog walks by fantasizing about the lady dog up the street. Since the dog can’t use language it’s ability to be moral about it’s fantasy of the female dog cannot rest upon language like exchange about the ‘good’ thing to do.
When we ask a movie to be ‘moral’ we are really attempting to impose upon the media a language like function upon it. In my view we waste our time calling this moral this, moral that.
I want to be clear about this. Morality really is an attempt as it were to engineer emotion structure. When you are angry don’t do this. Emotion structure is really in parallel to language and therefore what ever the content of any media it is about how to interact or use the material in a language like way. We don’t care about a picture of genitals, we care about how the person acts upon their feelings.
12 July 2006, 3:47 pmthanks,
Doyle Saylor
tom:
I assume that we don’t just want to judge the actions, but perhaps improve them.
A problem is to create a new, less morally dubious sexual fantasy that is still powerful enough to get off on – generally new stuff lacks effect. So far the best seems to be letting go of the constant urge to get off, and avoid fantasies. It is quiet hard initially, especially when significant items of the fantasy are in one’s immediate surroundings &/ conscious.
As to the compulsive people, I’d suggest Ilan Shalif’s stuff (self-help guide).
12 July 2006, 6:42 pmtom:
Perhaps a tad off topic, but:
While sexual fantasies may be morally problematic, how does one go about changing them? Non-violent non-exploitative pornography?
More seriously though, does anyone know of any studies on changing sexual fantasies without losing their arousing ability? Trying to go for a weaker fantasy sounds like a weak sell for many, though I’ve settled for it thusfar.
Finally, for the compulsives, Ilan Shalif’s stuff (self help guide) is quite good…
13 July 2006, 12:24 amRobin Hering:
A local high school recently invited parents to attend a presentation by individuals from AA and Al-anon. It seems the high school students had a “drug problem†and the faculty/administrators wanted to address it with parents and their kids together. Well, I had just been reading lots of Goff and Jensen about the contradictions in our culture, so I took the morning off work to attend because I wanted to say something on behalf of our children to the adults. (Note the uncontainable act of holding this during parent work hours – it happens a lot – and teachers DO say over and over that parents just don’t care.)
I offered several examples of simple, self-explanatory, contractions that might be unnerving to children. What I experienced was that the presenters and the teacher didn’t want to consider what I was proposing. Or maybe they were just thinking about it, caught off guard. I also had the impression that some of the presenters were addicted to 12-step culture. They were still victims. (Not dissing AA, here. I know it’s a lifeline!) But you know, afterward, the children wanted to talk to me, gathered around. I think they maybe felt liberated.
What about MDs prescribing anti-depressants and other drugs to children, failing to take the time to explore the troubles of a child – many of which, I believe, result from struggling in a culture of contradictions and hypocrisy and then, of course, the physician doesn’t acknowledge it either – primarily because he/she has only eight minutes with each patient per corporate P&L consultants and a drug rep has marketed this quick fix to him/her.
Carolyn Myss has been calling to women, telling them that the discomforts of PMS are their bodies telling them something’s wrong – culture, situation, self – and to heed the warnings, but MDs blanket over the symptoms with pharmaceuticals; women develop breast cancer (their “broken heartsâ€) and on and on.
It seems to me that this right-wing Christian phenomenon, a sort of cult, is a manufactured compulsion and destroys the basic sense of personhood – freedom of thought and expression. It’s frightening to see so many so easily trapped by this “fad,†like Cabbage Patch dolls (I date myself) and Pet Rocks. Very creepy.
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering†(Jung) and we don’t permit legitimate suffering. Somewhere I read, “Eventually, the substitute becomes worse than the suffering it was contrived to dodge.â€
13 July 2006, 11:41 pmJames M:
I’ve largely rejected Christianity with regards to my own beliefs, though I’m respectful of others’ adherence to that faith.
Nevertheless, I’ve spent a lot of time with the words of Jesus, both volitionally and against my will, and have had some time to consider them.
One saying by Jesus, from the sermon on the mount, has struck me in relation to the argument Dwyer is making:
“But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
The typical reaction by literalist evangelicals to this verse is to harp solely on its reinforcement of traditional sexual mores. And lacking much capacity for abstract thought, they take the statement solely in its exoteric sense — as a proscription of Law against lustful thinking.
Jesus is, of course, condemning adultery and lustfulness, but he’s also making a certain connection. From an esoteric perspective, the loftier idea Jesus lays out here has not so much to do with sexual law. What’s more important, and valuable, at least from my reading is that he’s saying thought and action are not so distinct as we might like to believe for our own convenience. That, as Dwyer explains, internal fantasizing does affect one’s character, one’s *heart* in Jesus’s terminology, which cannot help but affect one’s external behavior.
And here I will agree with both Dwyer and Jesus. I cannot view images of degrading & dehumanizing pornography without that affecting my interactions (negatively) with my fellow human beings, male and female. Thought does not exist in a closed system, separate from deed. I don’t understand how anyone can claim to respect women with the same mind that has just, for instance, “gotten off” to images of women being treated as “service animals” (which is an actual title of a series of porn videos.)
14 July 2006, 2:46 amDeAnander:
This is probably as good a time as any to quote
Feminist Reprise:
Sorry for the lengthy quote, but these comments are so relevant and insightful that I felt it was worth the bandwidth to share them. The author writes from a lesbian perspective, but it seems to me that what she has to say is just as true for a straight man or woman — we are all taught by pornography, as by advertising, what we are allowed to want, at the same time as pornography, like advertising, is engineered to appeal to what industry analysts think we want or think we can be persuaded that we want.
The relationship between media and media consumer is not the simple one that marketistas tell themselves in their favourite bedtime story — “demand creates supply, we only give the public what they want.” Advertising (the realm of demand-creating media of which pornography is a major sector and perhaps the archetype) has a complex feedback-loop relationship to its consumer. Consumer demand drives the industry, which in turn shapes new generations of consumer and guides/shapes the tastes and perceptions of each individual consumer closer and closer to a standardised model — the medium is normative and prescriptive as well as responsive. The junk food industry responds to consumer demand, and also spends millions trying to socialise children into making corporate junk food their sentimental “food of childhood” and a lifelong attachment — shaping taste as well as catering to it.
The most normative thing porn does is, as noted above, that it externalises sexual arousal, making it a purchasable commodity rather than a spontaneous (for Stan’s benefit I will throw in “self-organising” and “authentic”, to cross-ref an offline discussion) experience. Pornography is the culture’s way of telling us how to be sexual: as consumers. It is the culture’s way of responding to the dominant male paradigm of sexuality: that men are consumers of women. That model — the model of externality and consumption — is both reflected by the industry, and enforced/propagated by the industry.
The 12-step program family has done good things for individuals I’ve known, so I’m not knocking it completely; but as any political animal (particularly in the radical feminist house at the zoo) knows, the “syndromising” or pathologising of individuals is one way that the dysfunctional family (read: culture) makes its own systemic dysfunction vanish and finds a scapegoat to blame and “cure” (or isolate and demonise/exorcise). When we focus exclusively on describing addiction in individuals, we cease to describe predatory marketing and systematic structures of power in the culture in which those individuals move and live…
Ran Prieur said in an essay that responsibility is not divided, it is multiplied. When a hundred people witness a crime and do nothing, they are not each 1/100th responsible, they are all 100 percent responsible. I think the same unfamiliar mathematics is at work in consumption and provision of harmful materials — harmful to self, to society, to others — the consumer is 100 percent reponsible (even when we acknowledge that the material in question has addictive quaities), and the provider/pusher is also 100 percent responsible… I find this a useful idea to keep in mind while thinking about porn.
Another stray thought while I’m at it: the addiction model is powerful partly because it’s very real, attested over and over both anecdotally and clinically. Behaviours that give a buzz or thrill tend to lose their positive impact if too often repeated; an immunity or resistance builds up which means that more stimulus is required to produce the same response. Novelty is in itself a powerful stimulus and is not found in familiar or repeated inputs; either an intensification or a change is needed to produce a “high” similar to the high remembered as resulting from a stimulus in the past. Where I’m going with this is simply that the 12 step model and the addiction model both succeed and fail because they are too damn universal and self-evident. Everything we like or enjoy is “addictive,” including chocolate and torture; those who enjoy either one will find that overindulgence (or routine indulgence) blunts the enjoyment and they require either stronger chocolate, or more of it, to get the same satisfaction. Those who commit atrocities tend to escalate their crimes for similar reasons; many porn consumers tend to escalate the exoticism, or misogyny, or both, of their fantasies.
An excess of peak experiences (high stimulation) tends to “spoil” ordinary experiences, which come to seem bland or boring by comparison; the reaction of a generation of men to constant and escalating, inyoface sexual stimulation in media seems to follow the same pattern — men report themselves bored with “ordinary” sex with “ordinary” women, who cannot compare to the engineered fantasy environment provided by pornography or the sexual submissiveness or amenity provided by professional or coerced “sex workers.” Television advertising routinely celebrates the similar triumph of corporate massmarket foods (loaded with heavy stimuli like salt, sugar, and fat content) over boring old home cooking — “better than Mom’s” and so on.
Apologists for the porn/prostitution industry used to claim that its impact on the culture was cathartic; that men who consumed corporate or commercial sex would become less misogynist because their apparent misogyny was merely the result of pent-up sexual “urges” frustrated by a repressive society. However, field work in social psychology indicated the reverse; that after exposure to standard commercial pornography, college-age males were more hostile to, and less sympathetic to, women in various scenarios (such as rape survivors). The catharsis model appeared to be far less applicable than the addiction model; and in this sense at least the 12-step framework was more useful in understanding porn use than the industry’s official line.
I suggest that Lord Acton was right about power corrupting; and one of the reasons that power corrupts is the same addictive pattern we’re talking about in 12-step-land. One reason power corrupts is that we tend to want more. The buzz we get off feeling powerful (more powerful than another person) is yet another feeling whose impact diminishes with repetition or familiarity. The customary response is either to want more power over a person, or power over more people
One of the appetites that pornography feeds is this feeling of power over other people — specifically male power over women. We would logically expect the demand for porn content which humiliates or demeans women (emphasising the vicarious, imagined, and real power of the consumer over the women depicted) to escalate as the buzz of the stimulus wears off over routine repetition. And, if we survey the last few decades of porn production and the profile of internet porn sites, there’s some evidence that the percentage of “gonzo” (i.e. extremely misogynist and demeaning) porn is indeed increasing as (a) older consumers require more and more stimulus to satisfy the habitual appetite for vicarious power over women, and (b) younger consumers start their consuming careers (like children of SUV owners) at a higher consumption baseline.
Now I’m going to pose a Socratic question based on a quote from upthread: Trying to go for a weaker fantasy sounds like a weak sell for many, though I’ve settled for it thusfar. — note the term “weaker” used here to describe a fantasy that is … what? less misogynist? involves less humiliation or coercion of women in the theatre of the imagination? why is this a “weaker” fantasy? what is the use of “weak/strong” in this context?
I assume it is by analogy with substances — like coffee or other drugs — can I get by with a “weaker” dose of the drug and still get my high? but what content makes a sexual fantasy “weaker” as opposed to “stronger”? if it were coffee we’d be talking about “more caffeine” or “less caffeine”. What is it that is left out of “decaf” sexual fantasy, and why would one feel one had to “settle for” it (as for an inferior substitute for The Real Thing (TM))? I suggest that if we look closely at what ingredient is being left out we will find that it is power-over-women, or more generically, power-over — the sexual expression of a marked disparity in power and someone taking advantage of that disparity.
I was saying recently in private conversation that for me, in recent years, the definition of the word “obscene” has boiled down to this: that which celebrates a grotesque disparity of power. The appropriate — the humane or compassionate or caring response to a grotesque disparity of power (such as the disparity of power between an infant and an adult, a mentally disabled person and a highly functional person, a very elderly or ill person and a young, robust, and healthy person, an established community and a rootless, friendless newcomer, etc) is to feel a protective concern for the disempowered person and a desire to “even things out” in order to ensure that no harm comes to that person. We have two responses to vulnerability, however: one is concern and protectiveness, the other is predation and taking advantage of the situation. Much of pornography focuses obsessively on the vulnerability of women, and the porn/prostitution industry qua industry relies almost exclusively on the financial and social vulnerability of women. On seeing the image of a naked woman in a dangerous situation (isolated in a landscape with no shelter, confronted by a man or multiple men, bound, apparently exposed to a voyeur or intruder in her private space) one reaction is to feel alarm and vicarious fear on her behalf (something bad could happen to her, she is at risk) and another is to find the image “sexy” because the woman’s vulnerability contrasts pleasantly with the image-consumer’s own safety and well-being. This pleasure or satisfaction in contemplating the abuse of another person’s vulnerability (whether vicarious or direct) is the essence of what is wrong about pornography. It celebrates the cultural imbalance of power between men and women, much as Fox News gloatingly celebrated the overwhelming imbalance of power between the mighty US air force and the bankrupted nation of Iraq.
I note that the staple theme of “female porn” (before there really was much porn marketed to women, this is what some feminists used to call romance novels) is the resolution of this theme of vulnerability in one of two ways — the Woman In Danger is rescued by a Good Man, or the apparently Bad Dangerous Man turns out to be, in actuality, a Good Man After All (or is transformed into one by the female’s patient love), or something happens to humble the Powerful Man and make him also vulnerable, thus rectifying the power imbalance in the direction of more justice or equity (cf the classic Jane Eyre in which the powerful and authoritative Mr Rochester is wounded and blinded in one eye, becoming an invalid dependent on the love and care of his faithful Miss Eyre). Traditional female-oriented fantasies tend to hinge on remediating power disparity by some compensating factor or by the decency of the romantic hero (decency being a shorthand for “the kind of person who does not take advantage of another’s vulnerability”); male-marketed fantasies tend to hinge on accentuating or dwelling pruriently on the taking-advantage-of another’s vulnerability.
Well, I am rambling aimlessly (it’s late and I’m tired)… but maybe someone else can take some of these ideas and wander a little farther with them?
14 July 2006, 4:01 amskol:
(Doyle)”Morality is basically an attempt to shape human emotion structure. The primary agent of this are the words of the moral position. Hence the word ‘bad’. Good or bad are obviously relative to who says what. Further finding a ‘universal’ morality has foundered for a very long time.”
Of course morality attempts to shape human emotions. I don’t think you’ll meet a lot of people who’ll say they want to live in a world with more wars and more hatred. And of course there isn’t a universal morality, but there has to be a common one. There are few people living, I think, who look back at some of the things they’ve done and don’t know that they were bad. I’d have to say morality does a good job of attempting to shape emotion.
We’re all drenched in this depression and anxiety, and I wonder what morals made it possible to suffer those?
I hope we can agree that “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (something along those lines…) is a fundamentally good idea, especially since it’s corollary, “don’t do…”, seems to be such common sense.
“A more realistic way to bring this up is to ask is a porno movie language like? Movies are not language like, they are a one-to-many media. One can’t capture ‘morality’ or emotion structure in a one to many media because the media is not based upon an exchange of emotion that connects the person seeing to society.”
A deaf person can’t listen, a blind person can’t read. There’s more to language than sound. Like hell I can’t get a moral lesson from porn. It just won’t be a good one. I might not even notice the moral!
“We don’t care about a picture of genitals, we care about how the person acts upon their feelings.”
If they’re acting upon their feelings from seeing a picture of genitals, I’d have to say the picture is part and parcel to the feelings they’re acting out.
Your comment confuses me a bit, so please tell me if I’ve made a fool out of myself. This blog alone can give anyone a huge stack of things they have to bend their mind around to accept. Or like inheriting a crazy philosopher’s bookshelf.
14 July 2006, 6:02 amCharles Brown:
… we are all taught by pornography, as by advertising, what we are allowed to want, at the same time as pornography, like advertising, is engineered to appeal to what industry analysts think we want or think we can be persuaded that we want.
^^^^^^
14 July 2006, 11:52 amDon’t some people learn sex in having sex, not from pornography ? How many people observe pornography portraying a sex act before ever having sex themselves ? I saw nude pictures when I was young, but I never saw a portrayl of sex acts until I was in my fifties, after having had sex a number of times. When I was young there was no such thing as videos and no sex acts shown in movies.
Julian Real:
From Doyle:
A more realistic way to bring this up is to ask is a porno movie language like? Movies are not language like, they are a one-to-many media. One can’t capture ‘morality’ or emotion structure in a one to many media because the media is not based upon an exchange of emotion that connects the person seeing to society.
To Doyle: A more realistic way to bring this up is to ask, where is the harm in the pornography industry, and to note how women are, systematically, harmed in it and because of it. Materially-physically-emotionally-spiritually-politically harmed, in ways that impact on the status of women in cultures where there is pornography.
How does getting raped in front of a camera affect one’s emotion structure? And, is it the emotion structure that is most harmed? Or is it the sense of self, including AND beyond emotions, that is harmed. Is not the used/abused person-as-person harmed? Is not a person more than an emotion structure?
Do not big, important white heterosexual men, every day, make “rational” (unemotional, according to them; objective, according to them) decisions, such as to “debate” the matter of global warming, which will, necessarily have the effect of killing scores of millions of people within the next century, if not decades.
Doyle writes:
Here is a thought experiment. A dog walks by fantasizing about the lady dog up the street. Since the dog can’t use language it’s ability to be moral about it’s fantasy of the female dog cannot rest upon language like exchange about the ‘good’ thing to do.
Are you assuming “dog” is heterosexually male, and “lady dog” is heterosexually female? If so, your language is deeply sexist and heterosexist. That is seriously problematic for me, Doyle. Human is not a synonym for “male [heterosexual, white] human”, and “dog” does not mean “male dog”. Can you incorporate that knowledge into your use of language, please?
Are you assuming dog’s “fantasize”? First, dogs do not have sexual orientations from which their minds conjure “fantasies”. And, to compare dogs to humans is to make yet another in a series of grand mistakes that all those who go to the non-human animal world make: we are humans, Doyle. Please keep your thought experiments grounded in our reality.
Doyle writes:
When we ask a movie to be ‘moral’ we are really attempting to impose upon the media a language like function upon it. In my view we waste our time calling this moral this, moral that.
To Doyle: I think MacKinnon might agree with you. She and Andrea Dworkin steered clear of the “pornography as moral or immoral” route, and went directly to analyzing the reality of pornography as a whitemale supremacist system of political harm to women’s civil status. This takes us beyond the “moral” question, to a much needed POLITICAL analysis of what pornography is, and what its function in a white and male supremacist society is, and the PAYING ATTENTION to who is harmed there, thereby getting us beyond this tired old notion of pornography-as-fantasy-material. Pornography is not fantasy for the woman being plowed into by several men at once.
As radical lesbian-feminist Therese Stanton once said:
“The burden of proof will be on those of us who have been victimized. If I (any woman) am able to prove that the picture you are holding, the one where the knife is stuffed up my vagina, was taken when my pimp forced me at gunpoint and photographed it without my consent, if my existence is proved real, I am coming to take what is mine. If I can prove that the movie you are looking at called Black Bondage, the one where my black skin is synonymous with filth and my bondage and my slavery is encouraged, cause me harm and discrimination, if my existence is proved real, I am coming to take what is mine. Whether you like it or not, the time is coming when you will have to get your fantasy off my ass.â€1 [1. Therese Stanton, “Fighting for Our Existence†in Changing Men, No.15, fall 1985, quoted in Andrea Dworkin’s, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women, (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 89-90.]
See this site for more: http://www.mediawatch.com/wordpress/?p=28
This is to say, men, particularly white men, have the political privilege and social status to “pretend” that pornography is “fantasy”, while completely and self-centeredly ignoring pornography as an actual, real multi-billion dollar industry manufacturing hate speech and physical harm to human beings.
See also: http://www.hustlingtheleft.com, especially: http://www.hustlingtheleft.com/mclune.html
Shall we next discuss the fantasies Aryan Germans had of Jews in the 1930s and early 1940s, while the trains of bodies rolled into the camps?
I think to do so is to utterly disregard real harm and suffering as such. I would expect this level of discussion about pornography on a liberal blog, but not on Stan’s. This is not a critique of Stan. He gets the pornography issue better than most men I know, which is why I call him friend. This is a hopefully constructive critique of the comments here so far–as missing the key political points about pornography.
14 July 2006, 12:15 pmJulian Real:
Tom writes:
A problem is to create a new, less morally dubious sexual fantasy that is still powerful enough to get off on – generally new stuff lacks effect. So far the best seems to be letting go of the constant urge to get off, and avoid fantasies. It is quiet hard initially, especially when significant items of the fantasy are in one’s immediate surroundings &/ conscious.
To Tom. I say this with great sincerity: that is not the problem, and if that is the problem, there’s, well, a problem!
The problem is political, that men control women, including women’s sexuality, including naming and enforcing sexuality, over time, to be what it is. The goal is to eradicate this form of sexuality, the kind that means women must be harmed for it to exist. Pornography is one of several industries in which women are harmed. Children too. Some men too. Some trans folks too. That harm, that pain, has to register in the public conscience, in the public heart, as REAL, just as real as what you feel when you are hurt in a very serious way, emotionally or physically. Just as real as you smashing your thumb with a hammer. Just as real as seriously stubbing your toe. Just as real as having something big shoved up your penis.
When MEN get it, that THAT level of harm is happening to women and children disproportionately, in the pornography and overlapping racist sexxxism industries, THEN men will get something really important, that will take men out of their understandings of porn-as-fantasy-material. It’s not that pornography doesn’t generate fantasy material. It’s that there’s a reality that creates pornography, that is the pornography industry, that is not a fantasy. And it’s systematically harming real people, who you and I may never know personally, although I do know some women who have been affected by pornographers, personally-politically. And I can’t and won’t for one goddamned second, pretend they don’t exist, while liberals banter on about finding better porn.
14 July 2006, 12:26 pmJulian Real:
Tom writes: [...] does anyone know of any studies on changing sexual fantasies without losing their arousing ability? Trying to go for a weaker fantasy sounds like a weak sell for many, though I’ve settled for it thusfar.
Tom, is it really more important to your humanity that you find ways to have strong orgasms, than it is for you to work to end systems of male supremacist harm? If so, this is a problem, as far as I’m concerned.
Men are not entitled to orgasms if they depend on an industries and systems of gross human destruction (the collective racist, ageist sexxxism industries: child and adult pornography, child and adult prostitution, child and adult sex trafficking, sex tourism, and child and adult sexual slavery).
It is from a grand place of privilege that men get to worry about the quality of their orgasms. We, as men, are not entitled to sex, if sex is sexism. Patriarchy and patriarchs, and their supporters and apologists tell us the opposite, but that doesn’t make them right.
14 July 2006, 12:32 pmJulian Real:
To De.
I didn’t mean to include your post in the posts-so-far comment, above. I have copied and pasted what you wrote/quoted, and have sent it to the feminist group I am part of, as I think it states so well so much about this very serious political matter.
Thanks for weighing in, tired or not! Damn, if that’s you when you’re weary… ; )
Julian
14 July 2006, 12:52 pmJulian Real:
a revised/added to comment, from one I posted above:
Just as real as having something big shoved up your penis. And the denigration and degradation, and the humiliation, and the experiencing of that AS PART OF a system of harm, as one moment, or more, in a hundred thousand moments of harm, such that each one becomes less clearly political, because they are all political, and most are inescapable.
14 July 2006, 1:10 pmDoyle Saylor:
skol writes;
Your comment confuses me a bit, so please tell me if I’ve made a fool out of myself.
Doyle;
No I don’t think that at all. You ask quiet thoughtful questions even if you say ‘like hell’ indicating some strong passion underlying your point. Let me try to draw upon your comments to clear up what I said above.
skol writes;
A deaf person can’t listen, a blind person can’t read. There’s more to language than sound. Like hell I can’t get a moral lesson from porn. It just won’t be a good one. I might not even notice the moral!
Doyle;
Some researchers propose that sign language came first in humans. So language isn’t tied to sound at all. Language is a kind of brain work process we do based upon some reasons clear to us from each persons every day experience. Mainly if we use our eyes then things that move and things that are inanimate are the basics of language just because visual experience clearly follows those basics. Same thing could be said of touch and hearing of course. Contrast that with say math! So mental work can diverge from language mental work in distinctly different paths. For example learning to read is not language like. Reading doesn’t come naturally. So it becomes a different sort of mental labor. Yet it records and reproduces language in a way that we become so familiar we forget the differences. Which leads to your other point.
skol writes;
Of course morality attempts to shape human emotions. I don’t think you’ll meet a lot of people who’ll say they want to live in a world with more wars and more hatred. And of course there isn’t a universal morality, but there has to be a common one.
Doyle;
I think most efforts to find a common morality have had a lot of consequences we find in our times quite painful. First for example, see the whole ‘moral’ debate about gay marriage. There is no common ground. Though most national states have common law framework to shape human conduct which seems to somewhat ‘universalize’ morality.
Here is the core of the problem. Words and emotions are parallel to each other. Diverge from each other to distinctly different content. But they are also combined in real language. We tend to think because writing is language that writing adequately expresses emotion. So we trust that ‘morality’ is best expressed that way (text only).
I am saying we ‘MUST’ make emotions as well as write the words to fully understand others and ourselves by language. They must come together but be made separately. Words in text do not take the place of expressing emotions.
How many times have you heard or thought women’s work is emotion work? Is that words? If it is just words it is empty of ‘feeling’. That ought to make something ring a bell also. Why are women the emotion workers?
Reason or Enlightenment philosophy arose roughly when the printing press made mass produced books possible. Those books reproduced text well. But the reproduction of emotions was very poor using text. Despite the novel, despite romance, gothic, etc literature, text is not a good medium for reproducing emotions. And without emotion language is not ‘language’.
Or women are said to have more language skilled than men on the average. What is going on? A ‘work’ process. A work process then is where equality is not being done.
What does a universal morality imply? Well in Christian terms, Heaven. But for us on the earth what does that mean? Take for example a family. Everyone in the family is emotionally tied together. Though many families disintegrate these days. Those broke back families emotional ties are not servicing their needs. Gay or straight.
A ‘universal’ emotion structure means when you walk down the street you feel like no one is a stranger and all is one family that ‘loves’ all the family. A concept so alien to the present system it’s virtually science fiction.
It means that we make a leap from small groups we are emotionally attached to, to a society wide process.
The only way to consider that is to drop the word relationship to emotions, and ‘make’ emotions a separate and central part of society. So for example, no woman ever again feels threatened going out on the streets because the universal emotion would not allow anyone to harm them.
Now I’ve written this using a medium (text) I have just severely criticized, is there any way to consider this with text alone? Yes there are some femminist, some scientists (usually also women), some historians, etc. that have written and discussed some ideas about how to approach this subject. So this isn’t just about ‘emotion structure’ as a bunch of words about nothing. I use that phrase, emotion structure, to avoid saying ‘morality’ because ‘morality’ implies text alone without proper and needed emotion production.
14 July 2006, 1:33 pmthanks,
Doyle Saylor
skol:
To Doyle:
. Not that what I said doesn’t stand, it’s just all the wrong words. I’m not great at arguing theory.
No, no strong emotional point with what I said. Just seemed to, I dunno, work better, excuse me
You and Julian have gone completely over my head. I get what you’re saying, sort of, but I can’t reply effectively whatsoever.
I agree that morality is pretty vague, and tends to manifest itself (morals this, morals that) ineffectively (although it guilt-trips quite well); and that arguing through morality isn’t nearly as effective as arguing practically (as Julian was saying about MacKinnon and Dworkin, whom I’ve never read and probably should…). So I understand that critiquing morality is important, but I don’t necessarily agree with critiquing certain ‘moralities’, ironic as that is (it is the language these days). So I’m sorry if I came across as aggressive. I wasn’t sure of your intentions, and they are hard to see through text
15 July 2006, 2:28 amlapetrov:
I’m reading all this and thinking of the guy who, for whatever reason, can’t seem to convince any females to have sex with him. I don’t feel sorry for him or excuse him, but I understand how porn serves a practical purpose in his life. (Masturbation is not trivial.)
I see how pornography would make him more rather than less hostile to women; he’s watching all these guys who are, unlike him, having lots of good sex with very willing women, and he doesn’t want to focus on or remember that it’s all STAGED, faked in many ways.
I also see how it becomes more and more necessary (still no sex for him because many women have keen senses and can detect porn-obsessed “creepy” types), and perhaps his need reaches the level of addiction. It seems to me that the best chance this guy has to rid himself of the slavery the porn industry has imposed on him is finding a woman who will have sex with him, but who refuses to accept the role of pornography in his life. He then has a chance of maybe breaking himself of the addiction (with her help), but only if he already has considered it unhealthy (emotionally, economically, however) or somehow has discovered it makes him more rather than less unhappy. At least that’s what person experience leads me to conclude.
Now, if you’re going to try and convince this guy that what he really needs is to find a non-sexual way to meet his need for “peak experience” (and not a sexual partner), I think you have a harder sell than a sailboat in the Sahara.
There are many people in this world who are simple folk. Sex is a peak experience any and all can achieve. No higher consciousness necessary, no political sophistication required. If you are now going to tell me that simple folk need to achieve a different awareness of themselves, the world, other people, etc., I’d agree, but that’s preaching to the converted. I’ll just say, yes, education is in serious need of rethinking, overhauling, redirection and expansion. But alas, bombs are better funded than humans.
In the end, “the sell” has to be to the individual to abandon, not fantasy, but the need to fulfill it in the form of a real partner. And, reality is the toughest sell there is. Lots of male porn consumers could find themselves a good woman to have sex with and peak to their heart’s content if they accepted the fact that they aren’t going to get a Pamela Anderson, a Selma Hayak, or a Beyoncé. Consumer culture is what drives that sick form of self-other alienation and insane expectations, not pornography. Pop culture makes guys think they are entitled to a “hot babe” and if they settle for less they’ll be “losers.” Watch MTV for a few hours.
What disturbs me is how willing some women are, especially young women, to deny themselves, their authenticity and subjectivity, to be that babe for the male of their choice. (Maybe, maybe not the guy who isn’t always able to find a willing sex partner.) Commericalism certainly contributes signficantly.
What confounds me is the difference between the person who resists the brainwashing and the other who does not. We are either naturally passive some of us, or some are more suseptible to the power of suggestion.
15 July 2006, 6:42 pmDeAnander:
Masturbation is not trivial?
care to expand on that?
it doesn’t seem like rocket science — kids start doing it at a fairly early age w/o instruction pamphlets.
15 July 2006, 8:36 pmDeAnander:
I’m reading all this and thinking of the guy who, for whatever reason, can’t seem to convince any females to have sex with him.
Again I fear we’re still in the realm of “I want Sex, whom can I persuade to provide it for me” (from the POV of the hypothetical or average guy we’re discussing here). In other words, Sex still sounds like a commodity which is to be acquired from another person, rather than an impulse of intimacy, affection, and generosity springing from deep affection and trust for another person (which is — see earlier threads — how many women seem to experience it, or at least wish they could). It also sounds like it’s still being identified with fucking; would our test subject be more likely to “have sex” if he advertised his willingness to offer female-centred sexual services, rather than just looking for someone who would let him “do stuff to her” and fuck her? Still sounds like he wants to be a taker, not a giver.
I re-quote the writer from Feminist Reprise whom I excerpted at length above: Yet when I was first alone with a woman I adored, none of these prescribed activities was useful in the least—and yet, it had never occurred to me before that the knowledge, impetus and motivation necessary for making love comes from within.
Notice the extremely different emphasis here: I was first alone with a woman I adored — and sex was a logical extension of the feeling of adoring and loving that other person, wanting to get closer to her, make her happy, win or enhance her love with reciprocal giving of pleasure. First came the affection, love, crush, whatever — then came, as a logical consequence, the desire to be intimate and sexual. Not the first time I could talk anyone into Doing It with me — which is a whole different (and to me, apologies if this sounds intolerant, to me rather repulsive) way of looking at the issue.
Let’s take the classic question that women are popularly supposed to ask men “But Will You Still Respect Me?” I think this is not only a reference to the double standard. Sure, it is common knowledge that many men have a low opinion of women who are “too easy” (in addition to having a viciously hostile opinion of women who “won’t put out”) and often a man will discard a woman after “having her” since he now values her less than when she was unattainable. And this is a surface reading of “will you still respect me in the morning.”
But I think the underlying anxiety — I can speak only for myself here as I can’t see inside other people’s heads, but the odds are that what one woman feels, some other statistical grouping of women will also feel — is “is this intimacy happening because you care for me and want to be closer to me, because I am special to you — or because you just want the sex and I am merely a convenient provider of something you want”? In other words, would Anyone Else Do Just As Well? The implicit attitude of our hypothetical subject trying to find some woman — any woman — to have sex with him is an attitude that very few women in my experience want to find in a lover; taken to its extreme, it leads to masculine “jokes” like “Put a bag over their head and they’re all fuckable” and the reduction of women in pornography to serviceable (to men) body parts — no individual woman involved. The erasure of our individuality, the negation of our personhood, is the essence of oppression — not being seen as a whole person. There is a huge difference between “You are just so neat, I wish I could sleep with you,” and “I sure wish I could sleep with someone, you’ll do.”
A feminist musician from the 70′s 2nd wave wrote a song called “I Am Not Your Service Station,” about the anger women feel about being used by men as conveniences — laundry-washing, food-preparing, and bedroom “appliances” — rather than friends/partners/lovers in any real sense of those words. I think it is a fundamental human need to be recognised and valued as an individual rather than as a function — to be valued personally rather than instrumentally.
So imho a guy who is wandering about the world hoping to “convince females to have sex with him” is imho already on the track of objectifying women and regarding them as providers of a commodity that he wants (and is in some way entitled to). This quite logically leads to the belief that he has every right to this commodity so long as he pays for it — after all, that’s how commodity transactions work — and bingo! we have prostitution.
Any student of mammalian field biology will probably be hopping up and down right now protesting that this is, in fact, exactly what male mammals do — wander around hoping to convince females to have sex with them, driven by a reproductive imperative. Why should male specimens of homo sapiens be any exception?
And yet we know that some men do form deep emotional bonds with specific individual women, in which desire is associated with love, trust, intimacy and affection rather than with opportunism, convenience, or some kind of commercial exchange. And we know that codifying the “male shopping around for available Sex” model into the culture leads to the institutionalisation of abuse of women. Where women are seen as an extractable resource base of Sex — an oil field or gold seam of Sex which should be made available to meet male demand — abuse of women is inevitable. Reifying Sex, separating it from the relations between individuals, seems to have far more serious consequences than reifying food, land, shelter, etc … though from my current analytical standpoint I suspect that we are paying a tangible and mounting price for the reification and commodification of these other essential components of community, kingroup, and culture.
Whether as a culture we can really overcome whatever wiring men have to be “shoppers for Sex” is for me an open question, but I think we could definitely, as a culture, have norms very different from our present ones. If some of us must think of sex as some kind of trade or exchange activity, then why not insist that the currency of trade must be pleasure — that men are not entitled to sex with anyone — any partner — unless they are willing to give as much pleasure as they get? Sex should not be traded for food or money or a roof over one’s head, because the lack of food/money/roof is life-threatening, and sex traded under that paradigm is inherently coercive. If “casual” sex — sex between people who do not deeply love one another — were traded solely in pleasure (you do this for me and I do that for you, and if either of us feels shortchanged we don’t do this again), at least that would remove the element of coercion. This would be somewhat similar to gay male “cruising culture”, if we ignore the very real presence of prostitution, class, etc. in that subculture. But what we see under patriarchy is the endless replication of sexual servitude, a sexual paradigm in which women are the sexual servants of men — service stations…
Some people have proposed that teenagers should be taught lovemaking techniques in school, and that this is the moment at which boys should have it drummed into their confused adolescent skulls that they owe it to girls to be able to give as much pleasure as they get — or even that a real gentleman would try to ensure that his partner got the best of the deal
… it is hard to imagine a teen culture in which boys’ reputations as skilful, generous lovers were discussed and evaluated by girls, rather than girls’ willingness to do Sex Acts A, B, and C being discussed and evaluated by boys. Whether or not the currently paradigmatic anecdote about “nine year old girls giving blow jobs to boys on the school bus” is literally true or not — it sounds both horribly believable and suspiciously urban-legendesque — it says a lot about the replication of patriarchy. There is no scandalous story that people are clucking and shaking their heads over, about nine year old boys performing cunnilingus for girls on school buses. That is almost unthinkable. The power relationship (female as sexual servant or service station) is already established.
15 July 2006, 9:19 pmelaina:
“There are many people in this world who are simple folk. Sex is a peak experience any and all can achieve”
How magnanimous of you, lapetrov, to allow the lowly “simple folk” of which you speak (who are these folk, and just what is it you’re assuming that they can’t DO, anyways) the “peak experience” which is ejaculation, or orgasm. You don’t seem to know too much about folks that aren’t “like you.” I only say this because I’ve spent a number of years caring for folks that many would call “simple,” “retarded,” or “disabled.” There have only been a few people that I have met who were actually obsessed with masturbation and orgasms. Actually, if I were to hork up some sort of formulaic statistics for the folks I’ve known that society deems as “useless” and gauge their “obsessions,” the honest truth is that I think statistically more of these “folk” would be obsessed with stuff like keys or baseball stats.
Even the “simplest” of humans are still human. And it’s highly presumptuous of you to assume that it’s only sex that gauges with them as a “peak experience.” Going out shopping for bedroom furniture or securing employment, or doing a really good job baking a cake can, for some people who’ve all their lives been told that the ONLY things they do well are things that aren’t socially acceptable, or nothing at all, be “peak experiences.” But this assumption that you make is quite common among those who don’t give enough of a shit about humanity to find out different. I mean, what the fuck exactly are you saying here? Give them some porno tapes or magazines and a tub of vaseline and they can validate their existence?
The problem that I see highlighted here is the exhaltation of what, on a sheerly physical level, is the equivalent of scratching a particularly itchy itch to spiritual heights. To reiterate what DE says, and I hope that I’m summing it up properly here, SEX is TWO sided, and it’s not just rub-rub-orgasm. That would be masturbation, and I really don’t care if I’m not being “tolerant” when I say that if you think that that one type of physical sensation is soooooooo important that it’s worth thousands and thousands of women suffering to cull it, to bring it out for some people, then you’re head’s unimaginably far up your ass.
Nothing sounds more like shit than somebody’s voice sliding down their nose. Ugh. “Simple folk.” *shakes head* Don’t you see how this particular sentiment illustrates, so clearly, The Problem? That “folk” aren’t simple, no matter who they are, and that folk like YOU don’t get to decide who is or isn’t more or less human? Or offhandedly say that women should charitably give their bodies and their suffering to an industry, to make sure that those poor men who don’t bother to learn how to interact as humans with other humans can squirt out orgasms? OR equate said simple folk with men who are like this?
Also illustrates rather well what you actually know about human experience, in a broad and non-elite sense. Which is jack-shit, in case you’re wondering.
Fucking elitism.
16 July 2006, 1:47 amelaina:
And on the triviality of masturbation… I’m sorry, but I think it just has to be said… when masturbation or the lack thereof in the world becomes a social crisis as big as the oppression of women, then maybe you’ll have something that resembles a valid point.
Till then, go jack off in a corner. You don’t deserve a ticker-tape parade for getting off. Nobody does. Hate to bust your bubble, but in the greater scheme of things, it’s really not at all un-trivial.
16 July 2006, 1:54 amlapetrov:
All excellent points De. True, very true. I guess I just haven’t quite gotten to the stage of repulsion and disgust yet. I mean I am, but not very. Nevertheless I too think that teens should receive real sex education from someone they can trust to be cool about it. Unfortunately in the US that’s impossible since some among us are powerful and trying to preach “just say no” to basic biological urges. Which is all I meant by “masterbation is not trivial” –that these basic urges are not dismissable, regardless of how simple they may be. Yes, they do start at an early age (I witness my 3 year old communing with his penis plenty). And yes, rocket science it ain’t, but universal, undying, pan-cultural and ahistorical (in some ways) it is. It won’t be “wished” different.
I think a critical point in the sexual development of an individual is exposure to explicit sexual content (porn). At what age? Under what circumstances? Too many children are exposed too young when they find their dad’s hidden/secret stash (and in some cases of abuse, not at all hidden or secret). From stories I’ve been told, it’s mind-bending and the obsession often starts then. Boys are too often, too early “initiated” into the consumption of sexual content. We all know girls suffer a different fate.
As far as the average guy is concerned he considers his cock all the “sexual service” a woman needs. And it would truly be a sexual revolution for sex to become an experience of mutual adoration/love/intimacy/fun and pleasure. (I hear an “old” talk of faked orgasms ringing in my ears.) And here we are back again at the question of authenticity in sexual experience. Patriarchy resists with all its might change on this frontier because it is one of its core elements. Sexual access to women is foundational to male dominance. Change that and the rest will fall too. By all means, let’s boycott, censure (not on moral but political grounds), let’s work to eliminate pornography and prostitution. Can someone out there knowledgeable in resistance tactics offer up some advise on actions to take, besides not buying/renting any porn/strippers/prostitutes?
On another note, having tried to have conversations about sex in classrooms with college students I can tell you that the silence is overwhelming. They are extremely reluctant to discuss anything, not so much with a “grown up”, but in each other’s presence. They are unwilling to put themselves on the line with each other. It’s all weird to me because I don’t shy away from talking about anything and never have really, but it’s understandable given the culture in which we live. I can however imagine a context in which conversation can take place about sexual expertise of males judged by females, but it will take a lot of effort to build community and arrive at truth of that kind.
Next spring I will be teaching a course on hispanic cinema that will focus on representations of ‘love’ –and will of course include a lot of sex. I am going to do all I can to warm the class up to conversation about sex, when appropriate, and see what I can get from them about this world culture of sex-consumerism, which is no different in the Hispanic context, and maybe even be a bit more intense. We will be seeing a few films that challenge the dominant cultural paradigm somewhat (“Talk to her” by Almodovar is one). We’ll see how it goes. I’m considering including “Don Juan de Marco” even though it isn’t a hispanic film, because it revisits THE Hispanic icon of love. Neither film is perfect vis-a-vis this subject, but all of the ones I’ll be showing bring up interesting points that I’m hoping will get the class at the very least thinking, and hopefully talking about these issues.
16 July 2006, 10:16 amlapetrov:
Elaina, thanks for engaging my post, even if only because I pissed you off.
I used the word simple, not simple-minded or retarded. I wasn’t thinking about people who are “differently abled” –though of course, I could have been. I see why you took offense because “simple” is most definately used to mean stupid, retarded. That wasn’t my intented meaning. If I mean stupid or retarded, I’ll use those words. I was thinking more along the lines of “uncomplicated.” But certainly, elitist is a fair slur to direct at me for using a misleading word and even for calling some people uncomplicated (vs. those of “us” who are complex.) Good point. And, point taken.
That said, let me respond to some things you say. First:
Even the “simplest†of humans are still human. And it’s highly presumptuous of you to assume that it’s only sex that gauges with them as a “peak experience.â€
Agreed. I didn’t exactly say that sex was their ONLY avenue to peak experience, but I wouldn’t presume to tell them that they can’t have the peak experience of their choice (especially masturbation) because their form of enjoyment expliots others. Why wouldn’t I tell them that? Because I have nothing to give them in its place.
So I ask you, what can YOU offer someone in the place of pornography? The sense of being a “good person” because s/he isn’t contributing to the exploitation of others? I may be elitist, but I’m not naive. Elitist and jaded.
You say:
those poor men who don’t bother to learn how to interact as humans with other humans can squirt out orgasms? OR equate said simple folk with men who are like this?
You are very dismissive of a critical group to the solution of this problem. First “those poor men” didn’t necessarily not learn how to interact as humans with other humans because they couldn’t be bothered to do it. Maybe they never saw anyone model it for them as children. Maybe THEY were never treated as humans. Who are you to know? I don’t. I conceed the point on equating them with simple, but again I meant “uncomplicated” –though yes, I agree there is elitism to that because we are all “complex” in our own way. Ok. maybe. Anyway, point being, those men aren’t going to go away because we wish they didn’t exist. There won’t be less pornography consumers in the future because you think that women’s oppression is more important than their masturbation. It ain’t to them! They don’t give a shit and will continue to consume pornography, protitutes, strippers, etc. How do you propose to eradicate them? Make pornography and prostitution “illegal”? Non-existant? Are you going to educate them to the ways of human interaction? How exactly?
Finally, I’ll respond to this:
Also illustrates rather well what you actually know about human experience, in a broad and non-elite sense. Which is jack-shit, in case you’re wondering.
I have already admitted to being “elitist” because to deny it would be to lie to myself. I am a college professor and so I am most certainly a part of elitist culture, working from within an institution (The Academy) that works hard to maintain the status quo and too often does too little to fix the grave problems of our world, women’s exploitation among them. But, my elitism is by training, not by birth. I am from NYC. First generation American. Educated in the public schools. I did go to ballet and classical music concerts at Lincoln Center, but I also took the subway to school everyday and lived a modest middle class life in Queens. I didn’t grow up on Park Avenue or the upper east side. I’m not rich and neither is my family.
I went to a small college in a rural part of Ohio and when I graduated I moved to Washington DC. I lived and worked there like a regular person, making all of $18,000 a year at Bloomingdale’s (keeping up with my Spanish with whomever would speak to me). I moved to NY and got a job as a receptionist. After awhile, through a family member, I was talked into taking a job as a public school teacher. I taught Spanish to native speakers –mostly immigrant kids from the Dominican Republic, and ESL to mostly Chinese and Dominican students. After a few years of that I decided, after a trip to Guatemala, that I wanted to return to school. I went to Tulane for a master’s in Latin American Studies. In New Orleans I partied with some people I met through my sister, who wasn’t a student; I lived and studied there, learned a lot and decided that a PhD was in order, that I wanted to be a college professor. Sorry, I admit to wanting a nice life too.
From there I came to Madison to get my PhD and have lived here for a long time –takes a while to learn enough to be called “doctor.” In the meantime I met a great man with whom I’ve had a beautiful boy child. I’m not so elitist, my partner has no education of any consequence but is smart and engaged with ideas in his own way. So, actually, he is my “simple folk” paradigm, and his way of understanding sex is neither political, nor ethical/moral, nor is it anything other than physical.
I may know nothing about “people not like me,” as you said, but I haven’t lived in a bubble. And I know enough to write an opinion here and stand by it, as I am lucky to refine it in dialog with “people like you.”
16 July 2006, 2:39 pmelaina:
My suggested reading here is the essay by Audrey Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”
Relationships of love that include sexual intimacy, in the current paradigm, for lack of a better word, are often defined by the supposed quality of the sexual intimacy. There are power structures extant within sexual relationships that repeat and replicate patriarchal modes of living and thinking, among both men and women, and in relationships that are “straight” and that are “not straight.”
While the sensation of an orgasm is incredibly intense and pleasurable, my problem with it’s power within a relationship has to do with it’s short duration in comparison with other aspects of a relationship.
Women have been taught and we’ve tried to teach ourselves to place the same emphasis on orgasms and reaching them that men do- and I think that the cultural accountability here should be placed upon the shoulders of males who, since they’ve been ruling the world so poorly, have forced us women into a place where we have to adapt to a very male notion of what “sexuality,” of what “eroticism” is in the first place.
We haven’t yet been consulted on how to reconstruct sexuality, from the ground up, in cultural terms.
We look at a sex-crazed society and assume that the males and females within it have some sort of equal say-so in creating the “crazed” component. This is problematic, because sexuality, as I can see it, has been constructed culturally in ways that keep women reproductively in check, with the assurance that women will act in the interests of men on the reproductive level.
I think that when we’re talking about educating children and attempting to create a world where women and children are fully equal with the rest of humanity, we have to talk about creating a sexuality that doesn’t take this sort of high place on the social totem pole. There ARE factors that are more pressing, and that’s something that’s just as unlikely to be “wished away” than the tendency of people to enjoy having their gentitals rubbed.
I don’t see it as sexually oppressive to teach kids that maybe it’s a bit selfish to think that feeling that physical peak of sexual arousal is a bit selfish when it’s at the expense of somebody else. I don’t think it’s oppressive to teach kids that physical sex is the most important thing.
Yeah. Your three year old communes with his penis. If you had a daughter, she’d commune with her vagina. That happens. Kids also dig in the dirt, they commune with insects and animals, they are humans in development with very large brains for their small bodies. We have a say in what they think about with these brains, because humans learn from other humans. I don’t think it’s right to tell a kid, “hey! quit doing that” when you happen upon them communing with those parts of themselves. IF they’re spending too much time on it, though, it’s not wrong to tell them to go out and find other stuff to commune with.
I don’t think it’s liberating to encourage women to spend the same amount of time obsessing over physical sexuality as men do- and I think it’d work further towards liberation for men to curb their own obsession. And I don’t think that women should have to think up ways that men can do that- because men already know what they need to do. Stop looking at porn, stop exploiting women who work in prostitution or the sex industry, stop trying to make the women in your lives into a dump for the sexual frustrations that come from living immersed in these modes of thinking. Start to understand that the ways that you think about sex are wrong and probably harmful. Be very careful with what you let your children watch on television or see on the internet, because all the corporate and institutional stuff that we see in those media are run and controlled by a system that wants everything- us, the way we think, the way we feel, the way we see that the world should work- to remain as is.
And lapetrov, I realize I mighta got a little squirrely and defensive up there, but you have to look at yourself, too. Thinking that for some the only way to happiness or a “high” or some sort of “peak experience” is sex isn’t forward-thinking. It’s something that’s been presumed over and over. I don’t see how it’s wrong to do the extra work to see how folks can enjoy other things that the world has deemed them encapable of enjoying, without even stopping to figure out if that’s indeed so.
That’s why I’ll repeat my suggested reading, Audrey Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” and say that sex isn’t the greatest great thing out there. It’s good when it’s done right, that’s for sure. But it can’t be something that we allow ourselves to focus on as a primary goal any longer.
16 July 2006, 2:54 pmlapetrov:
When I re-read the posts, I thought of what was written about the woman from Oaxaca Mexico in the other thread:
Gloria has never been held in the arms of a loved one. No one has ever said to her “I love you†“I want youâ€. Her entire body aches. No ADVIL nor herb can lift her pain. She told us she wants to die, to throw her “body in a well.â€
If she were a man, what would be different? She’d have the sanctioned solace of pornography/prostitution. And I don’t mean to argue necessarily that it’s reason enough to tolerate the sex industry (because it offers something to some people who can pay for it). But, I think only political censure is valid. Fuck morality. Emotion doesn’t substitute for physical sensation and morals can’t argue with the body.
It’s Gloria’s BODY that aches, as well as her heart. Someone could tell her “I love you” but that would only fulfill one of her desires. Even with the crazy threats from Maria’s long-lost husband demonstrating to her the dangers men can pose to women in her culture, Gloria still wishes for one of her own. Only because indigenous “patriarchy” demands it? I don’t think so.
16 July 2006, 4:12 pmlapetrov:
Elaina, I am with you on most of what you say re: what is and isn’t oppressive in educating youth about sex. I agree that sexual gratification doesn’t justify exploitation. Ever. And, I also agree that I am wrong if I propose to argue that people shouldn’t do the work to enjoy all the peak experiences that come from activities that earn them good kharma (if such a thing exists), positive & non-exploitative actions and respectful interactions with human beings. I try to balance hope with realistic expectations, but sometimes my idea of realism is very pessimistic.
You are right, that sex shouldn’t be a high for one person if it’s at another’s expense. And, I’ll only add that sex isn’t the only high that reproduces that economy. Drugs do too. The sad thing is that too many people are at the mercy of their physical addictions. And Stan is right, the society we live in would prefer to avoid dealing with the root causes of the need to self-medicate (with sex, drugs, shopping, self-mutilation, or any of the ways in which people deal with what ails their soul), than to see itself as it truly is, or recognize the ills its love of greed inspires.
16 July 2006, 7:39 pmDoyle Saylor:
Morning!
Julian writes;
Are you assuming “dog†is heterosexually male, and “lady dog†is heterosexually female? If so, your language is deeply sexist and heterosexist.
Doyle;
My point is that unlike animals we can construct our social relations via language. Emotions began to rise amongst the reptiles and mammals extensively use emotion to construct their social lives. They are limited by not having language in what they can build with their ‘feelings’. Though one might admire say cats for how well they can live with humans, or dogs, or domesticated farm animals. Their sex lives cannot be modified by them though in ways we can modify ours or we modify theirs for them.
Julian writes;
A more realistic way to bring this up is to ask, where is the harm in the pornography industry, and to note how women are, systematically, harmed in it and because of it. Materially-physically-emotionally-spiritually-politically harmed, in ways that impact on the status of women in cultures where there is pornography.
How does getting raped in front of a camera affect one’s emotion structure? And, is it the emotion structure that is most harmed? Or is it the sense of self, including AND beyond emotions, that is harmed. Is not the used/abused person-as-person harmed? Is not a person more than an emotion structure?
Doyle;
Certainly all human beings are more than just how they feel. However, there is no way one can estimate rape except by how someone raped feels. In that sense reason which humans can engage in also, is never enough to meet abuse. Abuse wears a cloak of emotional structure that allows it to go on. For example a beaten wife begins to feel she is responsible for whatever accusation her partner (male or female) makes. That emotion structure quickly makes her a prisoner. Through enormous effort many women eventually break out of that, but the recovery takes months and years to heal the pain structures abuse creates.
I’m not saying emotion structure alone, the full human being needs to be thought of. What is very clear to me if not you is that we rely upon ‘reason’ to regulate the laws. We downgrade emotion as being inevitably frivolous and rubbish in reporting any sort of oppression. We are simply repeating the Western notion of reason. But functionally emotion and language are partners in communicating meaning. We cannot separate words from emotion or those words become empty of real meaning.
I would step well beyond your focus upon rape and intensely felt abuse structures (pain structures). We must be able to more generally address patriarchy. It is not enough to focus upon intense emotions. The passions are certainly very important. But all of us go day to day trying to just live life and minimize all that passion which exhausts our resources. So any solution to patriarchy has to include not just a focus upon intense feelings but how ‘ALL’ feelings need to be reshaped by ending patriarchy.
I’ll do another thought experiment. When all of us walk down the street we are passed by thousands of strangers in the big city. We simply don’t know what they feel. They are cyphers. ‘Knowing’ what someone feels is a lot of work. One has to know them a long time. We construct ritual appearances, social masks to give the impression our state of feelings mingle correctly with all the many strangers.
There is really enormous work to make known what anyone feels. Their thoughts are masked by social conventions. We also have a culture that says emotion is not appropriate. Women who work are advised by their female colleagues not to ‘cry’. If they do cry that will ruin their work career.
So to summarize, I have made three points, first animals use emotion for social purposes but they can not shape emotion like humans because they don’t have language.
Two I differ from you Julian in asserting we want to address the full range of emotions not focus upon just intense feelings.
Three Emotions are hard work to do. Take a lot of effort to know how someone else really feels. And most of our social encounters are cyphers about how people feel.
17 July 2006, 12:42 pmthanks,
Doyle
Ethan:
I think masturbation is important–guy (and gals, but guys especially) need to learn that the rest of the world doesn’t exist for the sole purpose of getting them off. It follows a bumper sticker I saw posted to the urinals in the men’s locker room on campus: “the power to prevent rape is in your hands”
I thought it was hilarious. The hipster bed-head next to me thought it was offensive, playing into the aforementioned idea of “free love” being about “guys getting it from girls” whenever they want vs women sexual liberation…at any rate, the stereotype image in my head of hipster feminism was forever shattered.
With that said, my general opinion (and there are exceptions) on pornography is that so much of it is social/cultural context, in two parts:
1) Inasmuch as that context influences the content and the type of relationships/power structures etc generally depicted in the porn
2) Inasmuch as that context is responsible for shaping, directing, and/or limiting interpretations of the pornography regardless of #1–where the viewer’s background and associations determine the harmfulness or harmlessness of the porn…i.e., there is, I think, some pornography that would be harmful if watched by “person a” but not if watched by “person b”–i.e., the difference between the former viewing it as an abstraction of generally how gender relationships ought to go whereas the latter views it simply as a fantasy and/or role-playing situation (“ok, now you’re turn!”)…i.e., kinky doesn’t have to be oppressive, but I would go as far to say that I believe it MOSTLY is, not because of any inherent value in itself, but because of the value/use society projects upon it.
However, going back to #1, there is some pretty sick, violent shit out there that I think anyone would be hard-pressed to defend even as a non-general representation of socially *constructive* sexual fantasy/role-playing
21 July 2006, 1:46 pmEthan:
Just to clarify my previous post (if I get my head bitten off, hopefully it’s from a shared understanding of what I meant to say and not miscommunication)
I think MOST porn is harmful becuase of the combination of factors 1 and 2 above
and to the extent that I pretty much agreed w/everything Elaina said in the post re: “The erotic as a tool of power,” masturbation is an important component i.e., in combating the “Well, I’ll just get some bitch drunk and do her” and other forms of violence stemming from sexual shame/repressed/hidden sexuality…but it IS only a component in the movement for, IMO the liberation of both women AND men.
21 July 2006, 6:24 pm