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Pornographic query: Is a DP inherently sexist?

14th November 2006, 08:53 pm by Stan

Pornographic query: Is a DP inherently sexist?

( http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov06/Jensen14.htm)

by Robert Jensen

Is the sexual practice in which two men penetrate a woman anally and vaginally at the same time — a “DP,” or double penetration in the vernacular of the pornography industry — inherently sexist?

When I first got into academic life, I couldn’t have predicted some of the questions that would come my way. But after nearly two decades of writing and speaking about the contemporary pornography industry, not much surprises me.

This question was posed to me recently by a man who had read an essay of mine in which I had
argued that men’s ability to achieve sexual pleasure by masturbating as they watch DP scenes in pornographic movies was an example of a failure of empathy.

Is a DP inherently degrading and therefore sexist, as my essay implied? After corresponding a bit with the man, I realized I had never addressed the question directly in print. He pressed for a simple yes-or-no answer, but it seems more useful to walk through a careful response to the question. So, let’s start with …

Observation #1: The only people who have ever asked me that question are men. I’m not suggesting that no woman has ever considered the question. But it is the case that in my 18 years of working on this issue, it has been a question raised exclusively by men.

From there, let’s move to other important observations and assumptions on which my conclusion will be based.

Assumption #1: There in considerable individual variation in the human species, yet there are also patterns in human behavior. That is, we cannot ever predict what any specific individual will feel, think, or do, but we often can find patterns in human emotions, cognition, and action. That leads to …

Assumption #2: There are women who in their personal lives find sexual pleasure and/or emotional fulfillment in DPs, which I call an assumption because …

Observation #2: In my 48 years, I have never met a woman outside the pornography industry who has
acknowledged participating in a DP or having a desire to do so. It’s possible that I have met an unrepresentative group of women, or that some of those women have participated or harbor such desires but remain silent about it. But neither of those possibilities square with my experience, which includes traveling widely for many years to talk in a variety of settings about these issues.

Observation #3: When I ask women whether they think a DP is degrading and sexist, all have
answered yes or refused to answer, suggesting the question is meant to be a diversion from a focus
on men’s behavior. I do not claim this is a scientific sample from which generalizations can be made. Again, it could be that I have spoken to an idiosyncratic group of women, but I think there’s a pattern here.

Observation #4: I have never met a man outside the pornography industry who has acknowledged
participating in a DP, though some have told me they would like to. Given men’s typical celebration of their sexual feats, there’s no reason to think men are hiding their participation in DPs. These observations lead me to …

Assumption #3: Outside of pornography, very few heterosexuals are participating in DPs. There is no systematic data on this, because surveys of sexual behavior don’t ask specifically about DPs. But the most reasonable assumption is that DPs, while common in pornography, are relatively rare outside of the industry and are not part of the routine sexual practices of the vast majority of people.

Assumption #4: Heterosexual men who watch pornographic movies featuring DPs — whether or not they have a desire to participate in DPs in their lives — know that the vast majority of women would not find sexual pleasure or emotional fulfillment in a DP and do not desire to participate. Male pornography consumers have told me they think that the women being DPed in pornography like it, and some say that women outside pornography might like it if they tried it. But I’m relatively confident that most men
don’t think most women really want to be DPed.

Based on those observations and assumptions, I reach a conclusion that seems uncontroversial to me:

Conclusion #1: The key to the sexual attraction of DPs for men is the knowledge that women don’t want it. The men who watch DPs in pornography know that the vast majority of women outside pornography do not seek out that sex act, and this knowledge is at the center of the sexual charge. The attraction of a DP in pornography for heterosexual men is not just that it’s a social taboo — a sexual practice considered by many to be inappropriate or immoral — but that men know women don’t want it.

So, is a DP inherently degrading and sexist? In the minds of the men who want to watch them, I think the answer is yes. That is, men understand and experience it as a degrading and sexist practice. That’s why it’s sexually exciting, precisely because of men’s assumption that women don’t want it — because it’s degrading, something that has to be forced on women who don’t want it.

Please note: This conclusion is not based on a moral or political judgment of mine about the practice. It’s based on the moral and political judgments of the men who want to watch DPs. Lest we float too far away from the real world of pornography, let’s remember how DP movies are marketed to men. I put “double penetration” into Google, and this was the first site with text that explained DPs to potential consumers:

“This blonde slut is in serious double penetration hardcore sex. She is getting her pussy and asshole destroyed by two fat cocks that will enter her holes and make her cry. Her pussy and asshole were tight a long time before, but now this slut is ready and willing to do anything like double or triple penetration hardcore sex scene. Her holes are destroyed and she cannot be satisfied with one cock so we give her two cocks for the beginning!”

There may be DP movies marketed with less overt misogyny, but this is typical of the material I have seen. Again, I think the pattern is important.

My main goal here is to refocus our attention. When this question about the nature of DPs is posed to me by men, their focus is implicitly on women: Is a DP inherently degrading for a woman and therefore sexist? The more important question: Is a DP inherently degrading in the minds of men? The only conclusion I can reach is that men think of a DP as a way to degrade women. Based on my analysis of men’s use of pornography, I believe men see a DP as a something dirty and degrading that is pleasurable to watch women submitting to.

That a DP is dirty is not my moral judgment, but is simply borrowed from a popular female pornography performer, Ariana Jollee. In an interview with a documentary film crew, she said: “Double penetration isn’t painful at all. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. It’s filthy and if you believe it feels good, it will always feel good, so just give it a try.”

That a DP isn’t painful is not so clear. The human body is amazingly flexible and can adapt to
a variety of practices, but that doesn’t mean all such practices are easy on the body. I am not a woman, and so I obviously cannot experience a DP. While I speak without knowing how such acts feel, from watching these acts on screen it’s reasonable to assume — even though women performers routinely say they enjoy them — that they are hard on a woman’s body and require conditioning to endure. Belladonna, another well-known pornography performer, in an interview with ABC News, described such scenes this way:
“You have to really prepare physically and mentally for it. I mean, I go through a process from the night before. I stop eating at 5:00. I do, you know, like two enemas. The next morning I don’t eat anything. It’s so draining on your body. “

Some men have challenged my analysis by saying that the women they see being DPed in pornography seem to enjoy it. This claim is rooted in the belief that pornography is not a performance but is “real sex,” and therefore one can read the experience of the performers directly from their performance. But just as we wouldn’t claim that a performer in a Hollywood movie was enjoying a scene simply because the person was acting enjoyment, we should be cautious about such claims about pornography.

Similarly, many Hollywood actors will say they enjoyed the process of making a film not because they necessarily did, but for complex reasons regarding their desire to continue to work in the industry. Just as we are skeptical that what actors say about the non-pornographic moviemaking process, we should maintain the same skepticism in regard to pornography.

This position is bolstered by the fact that while some women in pornography appear to be enjoying being DPed, many appear to struggle simply to endure it and others display facial or vocal expressions of pain. That is, it’s plausible that in some cases a DP is so physically difficult that the women cannot maintain the “fuck me harder” script of pornography and must concentrate simply on getting through the scene.

Conclusion #2: This conclusion is more speculative, based not on direct observation but on my experience and gut feeling: I don’t think most men — even those who enjoy watching — want to engage in DPs in their lives, though they may talk about such a desire, for two reasons.

First, remember that a DP puts two penises in close proximity during what is allegedly a heterosexual act. For many, if not most, straight men, actually participating in a DP likely would spark homosexual panic. They may be aroused by this gay subtext in a movie, but aren’t ready to act on it in the world.

Second, I think men find it easier to watch certain acts they believe are degrading to women than to actually perform those acts. I realize that in a society with epidemic levels of sexual assault, such faith in the humanity of men is the most questionable assumption I have yet made. Perhaps it reflects a hope that I need to nurture. Perhaps it reflects my need to believe that even in a harshly patriarchal culture, men can hold onto their humanity. I’ll leave that to readers to judge. I want to believe in men, to believe in myself. Sometimes it’s difficult.

A final story: After a talk at Stanford University to a mixed-gender audience, a man raised a similar question, this time about a double anal (the practice in pornographic movies in which a woman is penetrated anally by two men at the same time). Was I suggesting a double anal is inherently degrading to women, he asked?

I don’t remember exactly how I answered the question that evening, but I remember clearly what I wanted to say to him. I wanted to suggest to this privileged young man at one of the United States’ most elite universities that we conduct an experiment. I wanted to ask him to come to the front of the room and take off all his clothes in front of the group, lie down on his back, put his legs up, and make his anus as open and available as possible. Then we would ask other men could volunteer to do a double anal on him, and he could then report back to us about whether that experience felt degrading.

It would have been inappropriate for me as an older man with a professor’s status to be so harsh to a student, and I was more measured in my response. But that’s what I wanted to say to him: Why don’t you come up here and we’ll let two of the biggest guys in the room fuck you in the ass at the same time so that you can tell us from direct experience whether a double anal is inherently degrading.

I’m not a woman. As a man who has studied feminism and worked in feminist movements, I don’t believe it’s my place to speak about women’s experience. I do, however, think it is appropriate as a man to challenge myself and other men to resist the ideology of patriarchy and the desires it creates in our bodies.

Is a DP inherently degrading to women and therefore sexist? I don’t know, and I don’t have to know.

Is a DP inherently degrading in the minds of men? That’s a much more important question, and that answer is much more disturbing.

* * *

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of
the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org/.
He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu .

Category: General  |  Comment (RSS)

98 Comments

  1. Elaina:

    I read this, then cried, then threw up a bunch of coffee, then cried some more. Then I could think well enough to type.

    1. Stan, it’s very good that you posted this.
    2. The answer to the question posed is yes, for the record, from a woman.

    15 November 2006, 12:03 am

  2. Jimi 45:

    Insofar as his discursive method appears to be both feminist and postmodern (as if the two are ultimately separable), I find Jensen’s attempted answer curiously essentialist.

    Jensen, however, avoids answering it based upon the paltry anecdotal data available to him. And wisely, I might add.

    Surely his admittedly “unscientific” data is skewed by his status as a male, and a older male professor at that. Of course many women will find DP uncomfortable and sexist. But of those who decline to answer he cannot speak–especially when one considers that “good girls” don’t do DP. Nor do they lie.

    Surely in some cases, if not most, the failure to answer might be due to shock and discomfort at such a traumatic thought; then, of course, there are probably those who simply think such a question impertinent; but there are also, quite possibly, others for whom lack of an answer might represent a “sin” of omission–a failure to positively account for practices that they deem unacceptable by “polite” society.

    My own anecdotal evidence, based upon the experiences of my lifemate, a feminist, contradict Jensen’s theory. Not only has she initiated and enjoyed DP, she found it “exhilerating” and empowering. This was neither uncomfortable, nor was it submissive in her view.

    I believe Jensen has wisely deferred, too, on men’s attitudes while (correctly) identifying some sadistic/homosexual motivations on the part of at least some (if not most men who watch and/or seek DP.

    However, even in this his inclinations are suspiciously essentialist/universalist. It may be true for large numbers of men, and this is significant and should be troubling. But it is likely to be only a generalization.

    Jensen cites clearly mysogynistic and sadistic rhetoric in the form of pornographic advertisements to further his case regarding mens’ attitudes toward DP, but a few searches of more “vanilla” sexual practices will reveal much the same rhetoric.

    Furthermore, his (understandably) reactionary attitude toward the valid question posed at Stanford demonstrates well his understanding of feminism but it betrays a lack of understanding of some other marginalized segments of humanity. It is irrelevant whether Jensen or the questioner would find DP anal horribly painful, unacceptable, humiliating, and so on–which I submit they likely would. What is relevant is whether there are those who would find such a practice pleasant.

    Jensen seems to wish to reduce these behaviors/practices to polemic issues, but it is not clear that this can be done; on the contrary it seems unlikely that a purely polemic case can be made. Further, he seems to favor purely socio-political explanations for what are sometimes more personal reasons, based on isolated fetishistism and/or individual biological impulses.

    None of this is to suggest that his final statements aren’t generally correct. But they’re ambivalent, and wisely so. People aren’t easily essentialized, and their attitudes and behavior are perhaps doubly difficult to boil down to singular impulses.

    15 November 2006, 1:42 am

  3. Marilyn Farhat:

    I guess us women are such mindless, appendages who have no power, opinion, or choice when in comes to matters of having sex with one or ten men. I wonder if Mr. Jensen would pose the same question in the case of two women having sex with one man. But forgive me, I keep forgetting that the implication is always that men have sex with women and not vice versa.

    I guess for the sake of philosophical debate, the questions posed by Mr. Jensen can be considered an exercise in mind (and body) bending, linguistic pornography and eroticism of hedonistic proportions designed to prove some hidden mystery about the oppression of women.

    I have read some really valuable insights into the issues of gender here, but I have also seen some comments and descriptions that have left me wondering about the value of much of the feminist literature out there.

    We cannot have it both ways. If a woman says no during the act of sex and the man does not stop, it is rape, but if a woman says “yes” to two men, it is still degrading to women.

    We live in a free society (at least in most bedrooms) and what happens between two or three or ten consenting adults is their business no matter how offensive we may view it. THAT is the important point. I doubt if Mr. Jensen’s questions will solve the mystery of why men are the way they are and why women are the way we are told we are.

    I refuse, as a female, to succumb to the notion that if I willingly have sex with two men that somehow it is sexist on their part and, even if it is, if I consent to it, who cares? Men and women cannot be gender neutral when dealing with each other, especially in intimate relationships.

    If I am offended by the portrayal of such acts in movies, I don’t have to watch. If others want to watch them, I think they should go for it as long as no one forces ME to do anything I CHOOSE not to want.

    I am tired of hearing how helpless we women are in all the variety of sexual positions, imaginations, and hallucinations of all the drug and alcohol saturated brains out there. Who thinks this stuff up anyway?

    Feminism is “in” and many are hopping on the train to fame. It is being done in such a superficial manner in areas that really do not promote women’s autonomy.

    I would like to hear about any ideas that the feminist writers have about “empowering” women to be who they CHOOSE to be. We have to acknowledge that women do have a choice in the good and bad they do. Many are oppressed but many also make mistakes and many more have come a long way.

    I always admire the American women of the early 20th century. They were the true feminists and the true promoters of peace, justice, and human rights. I am also a great admirer of the American nurses of the same era and before.

    I would ask a really important question here: is the feminist movement in the United States in its last throws? It has maybe become symptomatic of the “gluttony” of empire, where moral depravity and affluence have really removed the citizens from the true meaning of struggle and suffering.

    I look up to the women of RAWA - http://www.rawa.org/ and their struggles against oppression, and who have been active since Bin Laden became the playboy stud frequenting the nightclubs of Beirut (before he found god and before he had four wives, one in each corner of the globe). No one paid any attention to them at the time when their female doctors, lawyers and professionals were committing suicide by the droves because they lost their freedoms as a result of the psychotic religious and cultural rules of the men. I do not think you will find them arguing about who should be on top or bottom during sex.

    I look up to the civil defense and Red Cross women of the Middle East who are out there picking up burned and charred bodies of children after bombardments and firefights, and they do not get paid for it. Those same women drive medical trucks around remote villages vaccinating the women and children and teaching the women about birth control and health checkups, free of charge. They teach women to help themselves when the men refuse to participate.

    I look up to women who teach in schools that cannot afford to hire teachers, and they do it for free.

    And tell you what, if those same women choose to have sex with five men or five monkeys, I really couldn’t care less as long as they did it with a smile on their faces.

    p.s. We all think “degrading” and “violent” thoughts. Such thoughts are normal. It is what we choose to do about them that matters and it is the actions that determine our degree of dysfunction, not the thoughts alone.

    15 November 2006, 2:06 am

  4. Consumer:

    It’s like the cum-on-her-face bit that seems to be in most porn movies. That shit strips the facade off the porn-is-cool-and-liberal shtick. DP and face shots and BDSM and gang bangs, these are all inherently degrading. But one might find that for a lot of men, it’s simply overload-induced numbness, the need to take it to the next level. If a guy regularly watches porn and fascinates in line with the content, straight one-on-one sex becomes less stimulating. Then it’s threesomes, lesbian orgies, next thing you know the woman is taking on 8 guys at once. There’s no end to it.

    I used to be heavy into porn and one day I swore off it, to the surprise of my friends. I couldn’t articulate it clearly but simply said that it isn’t healthy to watch that shit. I guess it’s the author’s point, that the degradation on the screen becomes a mirror of the viewer’s soul. And I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror.

    15 November 2006, 3:29 am

  5. Consumer:

    Sorry, “fascinates” should be “fantasizes”.

    15 November 2006, 3:31 am

  6. Stan:

    Jensen’s discursive method is not postmodern, but yours is. Jensen talks about pornography as an industry, a fact that both Jimi and Marilyn seem to evade. It exploits the “performers” (the empitical evidence for this is already overwhelming), and it markets directly to misogyny (as Jensen showed). It is, in this context, sexually as well as economically exploitative of women, and it serves as a special kind of hate speech against women, that is reinforced biochemically by men’s masturbatory orgasms.

    Every time anyone says anything against porn, it provokes this this liberal (sometimes dressed up in academic postmodernism) kneejerk about individual rights, which never says anything about how desire gets constructed by patriarchy (which is essentialist, the naturalization of desire, that is).

    For anyone interested in “essentialism” and anti-essentialism, which is thrown in here to sound erudite and reasonable as a way of carefully throwoing doubt on what Jensen is pointing out about how men desire (not how women desire, Marilyn), it is covered in an earlier post-series on gender.

    http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=215
    http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=218
    http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=219

    As to postmodernism, Maria Mies, Margaret Dierdre O’Hartigan, and Alf Hornborg say it better than I can:

    “Although biological determinism had been criticized quite early in the women’s movement as a method of explaining man’s patriarchal dominance by the biological difference between the genders, the postmodernists tabooed even the use of such concepts as ‘woman’, ‘mother’, ‘land’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘capitalism’, and so on. The fact that women have the capacity to bring forth children, that they can become mothers, is totally devalued, de-historicized and dematerialized. It is considered to be a mere biological accident which nowadays can be changed by biotechnology. The same applies to the category ‘woman’. The fact that most people appear in this world as male or female is not accepted as a given, because it is possible today physically to change one’s gender or one’s sexual orientation. The gender discourse in particular contributed to the elimination of such categories as ‘mother’, or ‘woman’. In this discourse ‘sex’ as supposedly biologically determined and ‘gender’ as culturally constructed are being separated and contraposed. This results in the old schizophrenic situation that ‘sex’ is again dehistoricized and declared a matter of biology only, which can be left to reproduction and genetic engineers, while ‘gender’ becomes the ‘higher’ affair, where culture plays the determining role. Old dualism in new garb.” -Mies

    “The ‘postmodern’ supposition that sex is nothing more than a ‘constructed social identity’ threatens the very concept of ‘woman’ while leaving intact the oppression of women. Little wonder that the sophistry of ‘deconstruction’ - primarily developed and promulgated by white men such as Michael Foucault - has found such favor in our sexist society. But whenever ‘off our backs’ publishes a two-page paean to ‘deconstruction’ which cites Colin Powell and Jerry Springer as its only “authorities” (”Identity Politics and Progress”, off our backs, April 1998) it is time for a reality check in a world in which women are routinely discriminated against and murdered because they are women. ‘Deconstruction’ may very well eliminate the perception of such injustice by mutilating the bodies beyond all recognition but the injustice itself will continue unabated.” -O’Hartigan

    “It is not a coincidence that the postmodern paralysis is a condition that mainly afflicts academics, for it is at a distance [eg, cloistered in the academy] that human meanings assume the appearance of ‘constructions’…

    “… the ‘postmodern.’ It is a condition where the exhausting attitude of radical skepticism tends to give way to a structurally enforced feigned gullibility. All hope of certainty has vanished, but precisely because no pretense to power or truth can be admitted, any pretense is as good as any other. Signs are once again perceived as indices of identity, but now simply by virtue of positing themselves as such, rather than through assumed correspondences with essences… ‘” -Hornborg

    Here is my own point for the day on all this: IF YOU AIN’T TALKIN’ ABOUT HOW PATRIARCHY TRAINS US TO DESIRE, YOU AIN’T SERIOUS!

    Treating desire as if it is beyond critical reach is sly as hell, liberal as hell, and the most insidious of all rhetorical defenses of patriarchy.

    All of Jimi’s response seems to throw sand in our eyes on this key point, with these conversational appeals to authority (science, etc) and casual dismissals of Jensen, while never directly confronting what Jensen is pointing out. Men get off on the humiliation of women. Porn gets women (by various means) to behave as if they enjoy these humiliations (DP’s, facials, etc), then sells that often-coerced performance to men, who jack off to it.

    If the Klan could get people to experience an orgasm every time they viewed pictures of the humiliation of Blacks, immigrants, Jews, etc., then we would recognize how deeply dangerous this is to Blacks, immigrants, and Jews, and we would fight against employment this method of indoctrination. When it happens to women, however, everyone becomes a goddamn Constitutional lawyer or a detached academic (especially boiz and a handful of privileged women who see sex and identity as consumer choices… hmmm).

    Jimi sez: “It is irrelevant whether Jensen or the questioner would find DP anal horribly painful, unacceptable, humiliating, and so on–which I submit they likely would. What is relevant is whether there are those who would find such a practice pleasant.”

    So you get to set the terms of the debate, eh. You get to determine what is relevant. And with you, it is the rare individual who elects (apparently without any socialization at all) to have sex in a particular way. Not the millions of women who are harmed by this industry — god forbid one person might have his or her desire subjected to a critique — nor the millions of men who are being socialized (with biochemical reinforcement) by this porn genre to desire the objectification and humiliation of women

    You say, “Jensen seems to wish to reduce these behaviors/practices to polemic issues.” This is, of course, a lie. Read what he said.

    I’ll leave it to others to describe Marilyn’s abstract liberalism, and continued penchant to naturalize power. I have to run.

    15 November 2006, 8:41 am

  7. Mayo:

    Just to throw in my two cents.
    Maybe I have traveled in different circles or something in my life. I don’t consider myself to live in the fringe at all.
    I’ve met multiple women in my life that enjoy the “DP” and have initiated the request themselves. I was approached in a bar by a married couple on one occasion and by friends at other times.
    I am a member of an internet “dating” site and there is no limit to the number of women on there who state in their “fantasies” portion of their profile that a DP has always been a fantasy…fulfilled or not at the time. There are also a fair number of women who with the help of their husbands seek out gangbangs whereever they travel.
    Well….my two cents isn’t all that useful. It’s just what I’ve observed.
    Everybody take care.

    15 November 2006, 10:19 am

  8. Stan:

    Actually, it’s very useful… to show once again how Jensen’s central issue here is being avoided. the last two sentences of this peice read:

    “Is a DP inherently degrading to women and therefore sexist? I don’t know, and I don’t have to know.

    “Is a DP inherently degrading in the minds of men? That’s a much more important question, and that answer is much more disturbing.”

    It’s no surprise that some MEN “seek out” gangbangs. What is just as exhaustingly not surprising is that people who come to the defense of the pornography industry seldom deconstruct language like… gang… bang. Like double penetration.

    I did Jensen’s experiment, googling “double penetration.” Then I opened the first link, and here is the very first verbiage:

    “Man if you’ve never had the chance to fuck some willing chick who wants to get into some dirty double penetration then I have to tell you that you are really missing something. Plowing a chick’s ass while there’s another cock in her pussy is an experience not to be missed. Of course if you’re never going to get the chance to do some double penetration yourself you can always enjoy watching the action in the sites we have listed here.”

    15 November 2006, 10:37 am

  9. Charles:

    “…Men get off on the humiliation of women… ”

    ^^^^^

    If it has come to this, it seems to me that we should end our species ,commit species suicide. The human race has been rendered utterly despicable by the male gender.

    15 November 2006, 11:51 am

  10. Charles:

    IF YOU AIN’T TALKIN’ ABOUT HOW PATRIARCHY TRAINS US TO DESIRE, YOU AIN’T SERIOUS!

    ^^^^^^

    Some talk about how patriarchy trains us to desire:

    Is there absolutely no essentialist desire ? Is it 100% culturally instilled ( in this culture by patriarchy) ? Is there zero biological component to desire ? In other words, are human beings no longer animals at all, completely anatural, and now supernatural in the way their desire is formed ?

    15 November 2006, 11:57 am

  11. Charles:

    How does patriarchy train women’s desire ?

    Does patriarchy train women’s _affirmative_ desires or only negatively ? How can a person be instilled with a positive desire by oppressive training ?

    15 November 2006, 12:30 pm

  12. Legume Sam:

    Stan quoting Maria Mies:

    “The fact that women have the capacity to bring forth children, that they can become mothers, is totally devalued, de-historicized and dematerialized. It is considered to be a mere biological accident which nowadays can be changed by biotechnology.”

    I know of no existent biotechnology that will allow male-to-female transsexuals to become pregnant. Do you?

    15 November 2006, 2:12 pm

  13. antiprincess:

    “Is a DP inherently degrading to women and therefore sexist? I don’t know, and I don’t have to know.

    so, a woman’s opinion on what gets up her own ass is not important to this man?

    MODEATOR’S NOTE: That is not what he said.

    “Is a DP inherently degrading in the minds of men? That’s a much more important question, and that answer is much more disturbing.”

    The opinion of Class Man on what gets up a woman’s ass is the important question?

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: That’s not what he said, either.

    some feminist.

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Ah, so you write the credentials? Porn posse trolls… be advised. We have been through this gang tackle crap before. We have seen all these polemical fallacies before. You make us very very tired. If we post you at all, when you have nothing to contribute but this kind of misrepresentation and venom, then we will intervene thus, right inside your comment. If you don’t like it, troll elsewhere.

    15 November 2006, 3:38 pm

  14. Julian Real:

    Hi posters.

    In order.

    First, Elaina–I’m sorry that piece was so upsetting, and I concur it was traumatic to read. Men need to be careful about how and where we discuss topics like this, in the name of feminism, no less. And I think that piece was irresponsibly presented.

    Second, a recommendation to Robert: Please put a warning on any sexxxplicit writings you do, including any descriptions of degrading acts against women, including anything that mentions an unsoft penis. Too many people have LIVED that CRAP, been harmed by men’s genitals, and it would be respectful of you to warn folks that some hard-core whitemale supremacist material is about to be graphically described. To not do this is irresponsible, in my view, and is uncaring of all of us who are survivors of this sort of abuse.

    Third, Jimi, I’m ignoring what you wrote entirely. It isn’t worthy of a response.

    Fourth, to Marilyn. Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I’ll respond a bit.

    MF: We cannot have it both ways. If a woman says no during the act of sex and the man does not stop, it is rape, but if a woman says “yes” to two men, it is still degrading to women.

    I remember a conversation with a white woman who told me when she was young, due to the unwanted sexual attention she got from her mom’s boyfriends, she learned she had better “really like sex” a lot, or else suffer being degraded and violated. What this meant, in the real world, was that she learned that what men do to and with her she had better consider “consensual”–regardless of the degree to which it was so–because she was determined not to be a “raped woman”. She felt she was too empowered to be that, to experience that. She told me she arrived at this decision not based on what she was capable of enduring or resisting, but on the fact that to make herself heterosexually available to men would, necessarily, mean she would be available to men’s use and abuse of her, no matter how much she pretended it was all “what she wanted”. She told me she now realizes that she had to internalize what men wanted from her as what she wanted with men, in order to get through it all believing she was not used and abused. Note: the experience of many women I know, and many I don’t know, is this: women don’t have a choice about what sex is, socially and politically. Women are increasingly told that what prostitutes do, what women coerced into pornography do, what women and girls who are sex-trafficked do, is “sex” for normal men. Do women have the choice to never encounter THAT kind of sex? How many women have that option? Honestly, Marilyn, not many women I know have that option. In fact, none do. Every woman I know has been sexually used and abused by men, except one woman I know who has only ever been sexually involved with women. She’s been emotionally abused by some women, but not sexually abused.

    MF: We live in a free society (at least in most bedrooms) and what happens between two or three or ten consenting adults is their business no matter how offensive we may view it.

    I would argue that consent is relatively meaningless in a world in which men are predatory due to political position and right of access. Not all men need to be, of course. Some are tender and kind. But there is a system, the hierarchical gender system of power, in which women are routinely and systematically forced into being and doing things that, were it not for the ubiquity of male supremacist force, covert or overt, women would not have to consider doing. Within this perspective, we cannot know what anyone would desire outside of whitemale supremacist-influenced patriarchies, until such systems of power are eradicated. To think “natural human sexual desires” exist in this world, as we live it, is, in my view, and others, not only dangerous, but also essentialist.

    MF: If I am offended by the portrayal of such acts in movies, I don’t have to watch. If others want to watch them, I think they should go for it as long as no one forces ME to do anything I CHOOSE not to want.

    For me the core issue is the woman in the films, photo stills, brothels, streets, bedrooms, websites, etc., and what the conditions are that led her to be there, doing what the director/pimp wants her to do that he calls “sexy”. How people are secondarily affected by such abuse of women inside the industry is also important, but not if it invisibilizes the women and girls and boys trafficked, sold, enslaved, and otherwise harmed. (And some men too.)

    MF: I am tired of hearing how helpless we women are in all the variety of sexual positions, imaginations, and hallucinations of all the drug and alcohol saturated brains out there. Who thinks this stuff up anyway?

    I know women who were in the sexxx industries. Their stories are real, compelling, political, and if you wish to know what happens in the sex-trafficking world, including in pornography and prostitution, globally, I warn you, it’s “not pretty” to say the least.

    I agree with you that it is also that case that women’s condition globally is impacted by many other forces other than directly sexual ones. You note them well. Thank you for reminded me, a U.S. white man, about such atrocities.

    Fifth, to Consumer.

    After my concerns about women and girls and boys in the global sex-trafficking systems and industries, and after how that violence impacts (negatively) on the human rights and dignity of women who are impacted by it, because of men who consume it, there’s a mild amount of concern for how you experience this material. Frankly, given the other priorities, what you think of it doesn’t matter at all to me. And for you to prioritize “what it does to you” over what it does to those women in the industry, is a real mark of your own inhumanity, in my view.

    There’s no mirror into the viewer’s soul, as you state it. There’s a lens (literally) on reality, on the reality of women used and abused in systems of whitemale supremacist sexxxual exploitation. Please spare us your self-indulgent musings about how whitemale supremacy impacts on you.

    15 November 2006, 4:55 pm

  15. T:

    “But one might find that for a lot of men, it’s simply overload-induced numbness, the need to take it to the next level.”

    This seems to me to be the raison d’etre of the pornographic industry.

    15 November 2006, 5:14 pm

  16. Elki:

    Some woman do love DP - and a woman who holds her power (as she should), has the sexuality that woman have the God-given right to have, which includes DP. Admittedly I’ve never done it, but I have found it in my fantasies, along with many other taboos that thrill me.

    (This is coming from a 31 YO woman who shines in her sexuality and would want the same for every woman on this planet).

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Do you think the women who are doing this in the pornography are “shining in their sexuality”? Do you think the women in pornography and prostitution, by an large, “holds her power”? Did any of you read this piece? Of course not… the issue is always about me, me, me, me, me, me… the consumer.

    15 November 2006, 5:41 pm

  17. peggy:

    Charles,

    Patriarchy trains women to desire by training us to want to please men, to desire to please men, and to please them by doing what they want. Men also are trained to think that whatever pleases them pleases women, or alternatively, that a woman seeking pleasure for herself, through acts which are different from what the man thinks she should want, is selfish and to-be-shunned. Experiencing the effects of such expectations day after day, year after year, is exactly what puts some women off sex altogether. We are trained to believe something that is not true. We are trained to deny ourselves what our own bodies scream out for, to accept what our own bodies find unpleasant or worse, because this is what we are expected to want. We are expected to want pain and humiliation. Look at the quote from the pornographic web site cited by Jensen. LOOK at it. READ it.
    “This blonde slut is in serious double penetration hardcore sex. She is getting her pussy and asshole destroyed by two fat cocks that will enter her holes and make her cry. Her pussy and asshole were tight a long time before, but now this slut is ready and willing to do anything like double or triple penetration hardcore sex scene. Her holes are destroyed and she cannot be satisfied with one cock so we give her two cocks for the beginning!”

    The message is that she WANTS pain. She WANTS her body to be destroyed. Get it?

    No biological imperative makes women want pain. I hope that no biological imperative makes men want to inflict pain on women.

    We are absolutely NOT leaving biology out of account in our discussion of sex and desire. This is why Stan put up the quotes by Mies,O’Hartigan, Hornborg above.

    Of course biology counts. Biology is our bodies. Culture may deny our bodies or protect them or fetishize parts of them or mutliate parts of them. Our minds and desires, which are inseparable from our bodies, are especially subject to mutilation. Biology makes us feel a need for sexual fulfillment. Culture - training and learning - tells us what to desire. It can lead our desires in the wrong direction, just like our desires for food can be led in wrong directions, which is why so many people are addicted to sugar and other unhealthy but tasty foods. Some people get addicted to porn just as others get addicted to sugar or drugs or gambling. You know it is an addiction when you want more and more, when you cannot get enough. Addiction is bad for you. It makes you neglect your life and your health. It makes you do bad things for the sake of getting another fix. Mere biology does not make you get addicted to things. Harmful influences do. In particular, people who want to sell you something will be very pleased if you become addicted to it. That is why the porn industry profits, just like the drug industry profits. This is where capitalism comes in, you see. It makes you desire certain things, and more and more of them. It is very hard to resist. Some of it is ugly, like porn. Some of it is beautiful and tasteful, like Victoria’s Secret Catalog was in the eighties. Porn makes men want to see more and more cruel degradation of women. Victoria’s Secret made women want more and more pretty, expensive underwear.

    The question of whether DP is “inherently sexist” is unanswerable. Probably some women do enjoy it. But that is not the point. The point is that pornographic REPRESENTATION of DP as a practice which is DEGRADING, PAINFUL AND DESTRUCTIVE TO THE BODIES OF WOMEN, AND THEREFORE ENJOYABLE TO BOTH MEN AND WOMEN is sexist to the Nth degree. It distorts the sexuality of both men and women, and is harmful to both, but especially to women, because it causes men to desire to hurt women for their own pleasure.

    Maybe men have this desire anyway. Maybe it is part of their biological make-up. If it is, then all male babies should be destroyed. Or maybe it is just one of many possibilities for men, and this particular one has been chosen by our culture for magnification, distortion, and transformation into a monstrous addiction. What do you think?

    15 November 2006, 6:53 pm

  18. DeAnander:

    gee it seems far easier for the liberal/left to believe that desire is constructed, when it is the earnest desire of a female Quiverfull cult member to bear 14 children for the Glory of God, than when it is phallocentric sexual desire that just happens — allegedly, in anecdotal evidence — to correspond to scenarios marketed by porn profiteers (sex-capitalists).

    when we talk about ultra-natalist women — women who do not serve lefty male fantasies of sexxxy bimbodom, nor lefty values of conservation and “enlightened” family life and workplace gender equality, nor male liberation from the most burdensome demands of fatherhood — then immediately the analysis and the exegesis begin, whether scholarly or defamatory: these women are “insane,” they are “brainwashed,” they are “stupid,” “ignorant,” “a primitive religious tradition,” etc.

    but if we try to analyse the power structures, the ideology, the survival strategies, the demographics, the sociology, the psychology, behind the public statements of paid porn stars that they “just love” DP, well… all of a sudden that line of inquiry is off limits, desire stands outside and beyond critique. how dare we?

    the desire for lots and lots of children can be critiqued and examined and even vilified. but the desire to be fucked by two men at once — a fantasy which also serves male supremacy and patriarchal power — is somehow pristinely “natural,” inherent, dare I say essentialist, and it is kapu to examine that desire, where it comes from, whether it might (gasp!) be learned as much as, or instead of, being innate.

    in other words, righty men want women to be breeding machines and lefty men want women to be fucking machines. the enemy of my enemy is, unfortunately, also my enemy.

    the righty men can see all too clearly how false consciousness lures women into the evils and abuses of prostitution, when it’s natural and right and God’s will for them to stay home and have a kid per year until menopause. and lefty men can see all too clearly how it’s false consciousness and brainwashing that leads women to stay home obediently bearing babies, when it’s natural and right and Enlightened for them instead to be providing maximal amounts of sexual commodity to “liberated” male consumers on the open market.

    can any of these men see women clearly at all?

    more later

    15 November 2006, 7:27 pm

  19. Consumer:

    JR: “Frankly, given the other priorities, what you think of it doesn’t matter at all to me. And for you to prioritize “what it does to you” over what it does to those women in the industry, is a real mark of your own inhumanity, in my view.”

    Well, you didn’t really read what I wrote. I was disturbed by what my consumption of a clearly destructive product (destructive in its production and presenttation) was sshowing me about my humanity.

    I was speaking as a consumer of pornography, in the context of the given that it’s terribly degrading to women. I was indicating that it slowly became clear to me that the product I was consuming was harmful, not only in the way it was produced and packaged but also in the way it was consumed. You’re not interested in insight as to how consumers abuse an abusive product? By understanding the process behind the consumption, you might find a way to do away with the demand for said harmful product.

    Or maybe that’s not what you really want? Either way, I couldn’t care less. I was just sharing a personal and private insight. So please spare me your tired sermonizing.

    15 November 2006, 7:28 pm

  20. antiprincess:

    your blog, your rules, man. I can respect that.

    I wasn’t trying to dis his academic creds, or his activist creds, but I sure don’t get how someone can specifically say “what women think about it IS NOT IMPORTANT TO ME - what men think about it IS IMPORTANT TO ME” and still everyone thinks he’s a big whomping feminist.

    I read it, and you read it - maybe we just differ in interpretation. you see a guy who wants to save women from The Patriarchy. I see a guy who cares more about how men feel than how women feel.

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Are you deliberately being this obtuse? Or is this shit for an audience among the pro-porn posse that seems to suspend in the ether, only to descend en masse any time anyone criticized this violent industry. There is no interpretation here. Jensen is explicit. Consumers of this pornography — men — are consuming the humiliation and objectification of women, because they have eroticized objectification and humiliation. He doesn’t say that he cares more about how men feel than how women feel. Men have the power in society over women. This is an exercise and celebration of that power. Jensen is not valorizing men’s misogyny, he is critiquing it.

    15 November 2006, 8:23 pm

  21. Randy Morris:

    Julian,

    I agree with the vast majority of what you post here–including in this thread–and I have a lot of respect for your views…I am, however, having a very hard time understanding how your rebuke of Consumer was constructive. As it stands, it seemed arbitrary and mean.

    If I am misunderstanding something please help me out, and I apologize in advance if this is inappropriate.

    Randy

    15 November 2006, 8:47 pm

  22. Elaina:

    “Is there absolutely no essentialist desire ? Is it 100% culturally instilled ( in this culture by patriarchy) ? Is there zero biological component to desire ? In other words, are human beings no longer animals at all, completely anatural, and now supernatural in the way their desire is formed ?”

    Unfortunately, until we live in a world where women are not considered less than human, I don’t think we can know the answers to these questions.

    However, the relentless search for a “naturalized sexuality” seems to have served, thus far, to back up patriarchy. It has nothing to do whatsoever with “natural” or “anatural.”

    Isn’t this called a “straw man?”

    “Cultural” or “non-cultural,” or “biological,” neither concept exists outside of nature. IF they did, then, uh… culture wouldn’t exist.

    You’re trying to make us think here that certain things can’t be changed due to “nature,” albeit in a roundabout way. Which is stupid. If people can figure out how to farm, they can figure out, collectively, to NOT see women as a secondary species, how TO create a culture that doesn’t exploit women sexually. And you don’t have to supercede “nature” to do that, because nature can’t be superceded. Bits of it can be destroyed to the point where life on earth grows closer to impossible. But “beating” nature? It aint’ happenin’. Not in this lifetime, and not in this existence. To beat nature we’d have to beat the entire universe and all possible universes outside it.

    Our brains are where our culture comes from. Purposeful hurt is something we think up with our brains. Our brains have evolved biologically with specific adaptations that don’t pertain to other animals, such as the capacity to define shit such as “desire,” “hatred,” etc. and so forth. I mean, these capacities might have evolved in other mammals such as dolphins who have brainage of comparable size, but… apparently human brains aren’t big enough to figure out dolphin language to a point that we know the answer to that. Anyways.

    Culture is a human adaptation to the earth. Our sexualities are constructed culturally- the simplicity of the act itself should show us that in comparison to the ridiculously complex traditions, rituals and practices that surround it. Our ways of doing sex have evolved alongside culture. These circular “naturalizing” arguments are a diversion, because how is it that ONE aspect of life, when we live up to our cerebral cortices in culture every minute of every day- can be separated from it- how can we remove all these aspects of sexuality that do come from our culture, when we can’t do it in other areas? How could we make sex exist apart from “culture?”

    To do so would be a feat, that’s for sure, even for one instance. Hell, you couldn’t even technically utter a human word during the act, if you tried to do it that way.

    The “naturalization” argument only acts as an attempt to justify stupid shit that men do to women. Just as we can “learn” patriarchal sex we could feasibly “learn” sex that is not oppressive- however, the attempt would have to occur at the institutional, and not the individual, level.

    15 November 2006, 9:10 pm

  23. RedDan:

    Does it not, in the end, always come down to intent, desire and agency?

    Does it not, in the final tally ALWYS depend on true communications between sexual, familial, business, political, or working partners in ANY interchange or exchange or transaction or whatever?

    Is it not true that what one individual might find extremely exciting, lacivious, and cosmically orgasmic, a different individual might find disgusting, degrading, and demeaning?

    Where one person finds bondage, pain, and rough play a true turn on, another finds it scary, hurtful, and threatening.

    Where one person finds candles, aromas, and soft music to be charming and romantic, another finds it to be insipid and stupid.

    Where one person finds anonymous pickups and one-night-stands to be exciting and mysterious, another finds it cheap and degrading.

    The answers to these questions cannot and will not be found in exploration of an exploitative industrial complex and its workforce.

    The answers to these questions will ONLY be found in honest, empowered, and free expression from individuals.

    ANY sexual act can and will be deformed and degraded by a patriarchal, hierarchical, commercial profit-based industry. ALL sex acts can and will be demeaned by commodification, just as ALL labor can and will be devalued by capitalist production.

    Conversely, ANY sexual act, no matter how “deviant” can and will be enjoyed and sought out by some folks completely independently and freely.

    The key to evaluating those sex acts in terms of sex-ISM is, to me, both extremely simple and extremely difficult to measure in any “objective” way:

    1) Did the people involved WANT TO?
    2) Did they enjoy it?
    3) Do they want to again?
    4) Was anyone reluctant, forced, or swayed by factors other than simple desire (money, power, etc)?
    5) Were the results of participation used in any way to gain more money, power, or etc?
    6) Are the people involved happy about being involved, and did they remain happy about being involved?

    For me, if I apply those questions to ANY sex act - straight, hetero, missionary, one-on-one sex all the way to multiple-partner, hetero/homo, DP, anal, piss/shit games, toys, BDSM….

    Well, if the answers were “affirmative” in that everyone wanted to for no other reason than they LIKE TO, and they were happy at the time and remain happy afterward…then who cares? No one got hurt, everyone came, and let’s do it again next week.

    On the other hand, if the answers were “negative” in that someone was unhappy, felt forced or coerced, benefitted or suffered in some way or another NOT connected to having sex, and came away from the interaction feeling dirty, abused, used, forced, or whatever…

    Well, I don’t care if you were going to the movies, having dinner, or engaging in a multiple-penetration, multiple partner anal-oral bondage orgy…it was wrong.

    Can the responses to these questions be “quantified”? And if they could be quantified, would that “number” be applicable to every individual or group?

    No, and no.

    So, do you want to? Did you want to? Did you enjoy it? Do you regret it? Did you feel good at the time? Do you steel feel good now? Did anyone force you or did you force anyone?

    Those are the only ways to approach this kind of issue.

    And if the answer is “Yes I wanted to because I was programmed to want to…” then it qualifies as bad sex, because the point is to look at power, and social programming is power.

    Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to examine “programming” is to participate and then evaluate one’s feelings afterward.

    Stan, you were in the military, and your experience in the military is what showed you your path to the Left. Your experience with “programming” and your “following the program” is what exposed the program to your mind and gave you the insights to see the program for what it was.

    I think the same may be true for many folks when it comes to sexual relationships and sexual preferences.

    Wisdom comes from experience…unfortunately, experience is all too often very painful.

    15 November 2006, 9:34 pm

  24. Stan:

    “Does it not, in the end, always come down to intent, desire and agency?”

    No.

    It comes down to power.

    15 November 2006, 10:31 pm

  25. RedDan:

    By “agency” I meant “power”…

    15 November 2006, 10:38 pm

  26. peggy:

    I’m surprised a person called Red would make that argument in the first place.

    16 November 2006, 12:25 am

  27. peggy:

    Or maybe he just has red hair.

    16 November 2006, 12:29 am

  28. Fire Witch:

    “Stan, you were in the military, and your experience in the military is what showed you your path to the Left. Your experience with “programming” and your “following the program” is what exposed the program to your mind and gave you the insights to see the program for what it was.”

    This is the equivalent of saying that because a woman was raped, rape liberated her to fight against the injustice of rape.

    Which is of course completely insane.

    The raper did not do the work of surviving a degrading and traumatizing act and thus does not get the credit for a woman’s own great effort to exist as a survivor.

    16 November 2006, 1:18 am

  29. RenegadeEvolution:

    Moderate me…it would only be typical.

    If you see in my own blog, I have had, as a woman, the “DP” conversation with Robert Jensen before. I am a woman. I like DP. I find it amusing yet insulting that so called feminist minded men presume to know what woman may or may not like in the bedroom. I find it sexist as well. And women who DO like DP? Well, considering a mans unwillingness to generally have his penis that close to another penis? At least half the time, those women who DO like it request it. And it is for pleasure, not power.

    Prove me wrong.

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: I don’t have to. You just proved you are going to argue against an argument that Jensen didn’t even make…

    We also note that antiprincess has in the past, on her own blog, rallied the porn-posse troops to launch flame attacks on other porn-critical sites, like Den of the Biting Beaver. So our suspicion that there is a porn-posse is proving to be correct… as is our decision to nip this in the bud.

    16 November 2006, 4:22 am

  30. peggy:

    But I think Red’s comment was thoughtful and thought-provoking. The person who is sharing my house with me right now (a thoughtful and intelligent gay man fwiw)agrees with Red’s point of view.

    16 November 2006, 4:25 am

  31. James:

    Hi everyone, this is my first post here. I’m writing because I see a certain subtext in Professor Jensen’s article that I find disturbing.

    It seems to me that he regards the meanings assigned to sex by culture to be the only meanings that are of any importance. His use of the word “inherent” is ambiguous. It could mean a number of different things, but what I think he means is that the sexist and degrading character which is assigned to the act by culture is immutable. I think this is a very dangerous belief. If we can’t put our own meaning on our daily lives, we are doomed to forever be victims of our culture. If we can’t reform our own minds as individuals, there’s no way we stand any chance of reforming society.

    He writes of his “need to believe that even in a harshly patriarchal culture, men can hold onto their humanity” in terms that indicate that he doesn’t think that belief can be justified. I think that whole paragraph is very telling. I think there are implicit fatalistic assumptions in the article, and I think they are wrong.

    I think that a lot of the people who have criticised the article have been motivated by concerns similar to mine.

    16 November 2006, 11:40 am

  32. Julian Real:

    To Mayo.

    You wrote:
    Just to throw in my two cents.
    Maybe I have traveled in different circles or something in my life. I don’t consider myself to live in the fringe at all.
    I’ve met multiple women in my life that enjoy [pornographic sex] … and that [pornographic sex] has always been a fantasy… There are also a fair number of women who with the help of their husbands seek out [pornographic sex]. Well….my two cents isn’t all that useful. It’s just what I’ve observed.
    Everybody take care.

    I find your “two cents” post to be pornographic, hostile to women’s radical efforts to make the world safe for women, and deeply racist and misogynist, and so I don’t buy your “everybody take care” ending one bit.

    Your two cents are whitemale supremacist CRAP. Please, from now on, for those of us here who do not wish to know about your pornographic exploits, spare us your “small change”. The actual price people, globally, pay for “your two cents” is whitemale supremacist dehumanization and oppression.

    16 November 2006, 1:24 pm

  33. Elaina:

    So we have again the same circular arguments presented more as a form of brainwashing the potential reader than actually arguing anything.

    I wonder if anyone will even consider what I have to say, in the midst of so many “liberated” fuck-me feminist arguments.

    FMF: I like DP. I’m a woman. Punto.
    Random Male Lurker: See. A woman likes it. It can’t be bad.
    Other FMF: I like it too. See?
    Other Random Male Lurker: Now we know it must be true!

    So the man dictates, via porn, what both men and women like, women speak up in support, men have what they feel is a concrete reason to argue for their “right” to porn and lack of guilty sentiment when they ask their female partners to do what they “see in the movies.”

    I’m glad for the moderator interruptions, here. I’m surprised that this space got invaded just now- stan’s been exposeeing the porn industry for a while now. The moderation clearly illustrates the circular nature of these arguments.

    If ya talk until we run outta breath, it doesn’t mean you’ve won the argument.

    Now. I’m gonna put my “cred as a woman” cards on the table and say: I like DP.
    *waits for collective gasp*
    Furthermore I’ve had orgasms in the act.

    Does that mean it isn’t inherently sexist? Uh, NO.

    What I “like” and or “don’t like” doesn’t make or break an act as “sexist” or “feminist.”

    Now. When women say that they 1. support pornography 2. get off on doing the stuff that’s portrayed in pornography and 3. think other women should shut up about the ills of pornography as an industry, does it get the attention of/ respect from men who have power?

    YES, IT DOES. Men will back you up much more easily when you say, inadvertently or otherwise, that you support their vision of you as a fucktoy, when you support an industry that very firmly and viciously holds their power still and augments it.

    Will I ever do DP again? NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT.

    Whether or not an orgasm is achieved in a sexual act is irrelevant- because, and I’m sure I’m not the only one here, in this murky wealth of sexual experience that I’m seeing unfold in this particular comments section, who knows this- it’s not at all rare or uncommon to “feel bad” or “feel weird” or whatever after experiencing an orgasm. Even a big one. Even one that makes you feel like your eyes are popping out of your head. The orgasm’s not the point. Individual satisfaction is not the point.

    I think I’ve said it before; it’s like somebody’s threatening to take these women’s toys away.

    The reason we have to look at the “why” behind men’s sexual suggestions lies in their political and institutional power over us, something that we all know cannot be wished away while we’re out here wasting time searching for the perfect orgasm. What Jensen illustrates here, in the case of DP, is that the “why” is that the act will potentially cause pain and humiliation for the woman- and that enough men have brainwashed themselves through masturbatory practices that it’s the common denominator.

    The reason that so many of these trolls, who are just now chiming in on this conversation after it’s been a part of this blog’s dialogue for at LEAST a year and a half, is that it illustrates so clearly how these WOMEN are acting in a way that supports MEN’S DOMINANCE of not just other women, but themselves as well. Folks tend to get kinda wiggly when they realize they’re active in their own oppression.

    This essay is illustrative of the NON-individualized, COLLECTIVE attitudes that men have about women and “their” sexuality. It shows us that men think that women’s pleasure should be derived from painful situations that they inflict upon us; our own experiences as such and our own individualized reactions as women cease to exist- if it’s not painful to us, it isn’t pleasurable, or isn’t as pleasurable, for the men who want to do these things TO us (note, I didn’t say with us?)

    Men still think that women’s sexual experience revolves around men’s perceptions of what “good” and “pleasurable” and “satisfying” sexuality should be- for men. Women who preach and preach about the “liberating” aspects of pornography do not/have not/will not create a “new sexuality,” because the framework from which they begin is the OLD sexuality, it’s a men’s sexuality.

    You want to create a new kind of sexuality? Start at home, with your partner. Why does it have to bolster an industry that destroys women? Why does that industry have to be part of our sexuality? Why does a “liberated” sexuality have to consist of the same-old same-old?

    These attitudes are not new. They are not ingenius, they do not transgress power. They uphold it. Get that through your thick skulls, then you can get on with the work of liberating women.

    16 November 2006, 1:32 pm

  34. Julian Real:

    To T:

    You wrote: “But one might find that for a lot of men, it’s simply overload-induced numbness, the need to take it to the next level.” This seems to me to be the raison d’etre of the pornographic industry.

    Let’s be clear: the pornography industry and other sexxxism industries and systems of sex-trafficking exist to seriously injure women and children, with force, with exploitation, with unmitigated harm called “sex” by men who are sufficiently dehumanized to register acting oppressively as erotic. These systems and industries are controlled by pimps, some corporate, some not.

    The “numbness” of the male consumer of pornography is part of the dehumanization, but it is not men–as a group–who name or know the harm done to women and children, mostly of color, globally, let alone care about that as real harm to real human beings. It is, generally, men, and some female apologists for whitemale supremacy–the loyal sisters of the White Brotherhood, who wish to speak about how wonderful this all is, as if it weren’t part of a global sexual slavery and sexual abuse racket organized against women and children’s bodies, organized to create large profits for corporate pimps like Larry Flynt, organized to maintain whitemale supremacy.

    16 November 2006, 1:36 pm

  35. Elaina:

    One more thing…

    I have to add, for the sake of liberal argument,(and because I know that some dope is gonna say something about lesbians, they always do) which is what seems to be the main form of narrative here, that even when men are removed from the act, for example, when lesbians do this to each other, the act is still oppressive.

    Why? Women can’t oppress each other. If lesbians do it, it’s gotta be kosher, right?

    Wrong.

    It’s called internalized oppression. Google it.

    16 November 2006, 1:39 pm

  36. Elaina:

    OK. Another thing.

    “Agency” is an individual’s capacity to make decisions. This is not “power.” Power is institutional, only at the highest levels of hierarchy do INDIVIDUALS have POWER. Power among common people is only found collectively. Our own “agency” can lead us to make decisions that support “power.” Such as, allowing men to perform oppressive sexual acts upon us. This “agency” does not support women’s “power.” It supports the “power” that is already in place, that of The Man. So.

    All done now, I swear.

    16 November 2006, 1:43 pm

  37. Julian Real:

    Hi Consumer.

    You wrote: You’re not interested in insight as to how consumers abuse an abusive product? By understanding the process behind the consumption, you might find a way to do away with the demand for said harmful product. Or maybe that’s not what you really want?

    I don’t think finding out why people want tobacco will do shit to stop the tobacco industry from reaching out to other markets, to maintain their profits. Finding out why men use pornography means that women and children around the world are going to be destroyed while men do these studies. My argument is this: attend first to confronting the industries’ owners and destroying the systems, not by “boycotting” or getting men to not desire pornography (as if that’s currently possible, en masse), but by taking on the controllers of those systems by any means necessary.

    After the pornography industry, and other systems of sexxxual exploitation and oppression are destroyed, we can engage in discussion about why it turned so many people on. To do this without confronting the machine which is destroying people is like Good Germans in the early 1940s talking about where their anti-Semitism comes from while the cattle cars roll into the death camps.

    As a Jew, I see the priorities differently than you do, about “what needs to happen first”.

    16 November 2006, 1:52 pm

  38. Lya Kahlo:

    “the righty men can see all too clearly how false consciousness lures women into the evils and abuses of prostitution, when it’s natural and right and God’s will for them to stay home and have a kid per year until menopause. and lefty men can see all too clearly how it’s false consciousness and brainwashing that leads women to stay home obediently bearing babies, when it’s natural and right and Enlightened for them instead to be providing maximal amounts of sexual commodity to “liberated” male consumers on the open market.”

    I love this paragraph. Pretty much a perfect explaination of Patriarchy.

    ~~~~

    I think this alone:
    “This blonde slut is in serious double penetration hardcore sex. She is getting her pussy and asshole destroyed by two fat cocks that will enter her holes and make her cry. Her pussy and asshole were tight a long time before, but now this slut is ready and willing to do anything like double or triple penetration hardcore sex scene. Her holes are destroyed and she cannot be satisfied with one cock so we give her two cocks for the beginning!”

    Makes it abundantly clear that whether or not DP is sexist is irrelevant. Adults will do what they want to do. But, it is clearly marketed as a way to punish and hurt women. It’s still clear proof that the porn industry has made equating male sexual desires with exploitation, degradation and humiliation of women a big money maker. To the detriment of us all.

    16 November 2006, 2:00 pm

  39. Julian Real:

    Hi Randy.

    Thank you for sharing your observations with me about my behavior towards Consumer.

    I appreciate it and welcome it.

    I am experimenting a bit here, with how the White Brotherhood works. It seems to me, as evidenced on this blog, and in the non-cyber world, that some men get to do hostile things, racist things, misogynist things, and when someone else responds to them, without being deferential or preferential, without being nice and easy on ‘em, it is the critic of the oppressor who is called into account, and the committer of the oppressive event is left unchallenged by the person who is calling the critic into account.

    This is what I am surmising by how things run here, there, and everywhere. It is a learning experience–to learn how whitemale supremacy works, really, in detail, in intellectual discourse and in domestic life, in cyberspace and cities, in codes of conduct which always protect the speech of the oppressor first, and his other actions. When the oppressor is not respected or catered to, when his inhumanity is responded to as such, the knee-jerk response, by an apologist for the oppressor, is to criticize the messenger’s tone, her/his conduct unbecoming, her/his lack of respect for those who destroy others, her/his unwillingness to be nice and easy on those who do real harm.

    Consumer does harm here. Why he is allowed to do that is not clear to me. I’m still trying to figure that out.

    In the mean time, it will be the speech of the betrayer of the White Brotherhood–and especially the tone and content of that speech which will be considered most “offensive” and obstructive of allegedly otherwise “respectful discourse”. This pretends that Consumer is being respectful of women. He isn’t. I am practicing gauging the level of my respectfulness to another to the level of respect that the other human being is demonstrating. I have no problems with throwing flaming bottles at neo-Nazis, for example. This is a loving act, as far as I am concerned. Calling out whitemale supremacists (not even necessarily touching them so as to bruise their skin), when people behave as such, and are structurally located to be such, is an act of love, not disrespect. It just depends on who you see as human, I guess–and most deserving of care and respect. I see white women and women, girls, and boys of Color as more human than white men, given how white men actually and systemically treat white women and women and children of Color, globally. I live each day with the visceral knowledge that women and children around the world are not only being starved to death, are not only being poisoned, are not only being blown up, but are also being sold and trafficked as sexxx-things for white male consumers, many from the U.S. I am a white man in the U.S. and feel it is my responsibility to try and hold those men accountable, and to name the ways those men are allowed to proceed through their destructive lives never being held accountable.

    Having said that, it is not my personal political policy to be mean, abusive, or bigoted. So if you find me straying too closely onto that terrain, I welcome you to call me on it, as you just did.

    Thanks, Randy.

    In struggle for a world finally free from whitemale supremacy.

    Julian

    16 November 2006, 2:18 pm

  40. DeAnander:

    @elaina you are on a roll! I had to take a break but returned to find much of what I woulda said has been said, and better.

    now a brief engagement with the hedonic defence.

    I don’t understand why it is so very easy for people to understand that not everything that is tasty to eat or drink is good for us — that too much sugar rots the teeth, that too much corn-fed meat hardens the arteries, that too much alcohol poisons the liver, that swordfish may be contaminated with mercury, a tasty salad may be saturated with pesticides, irresistible fried chicken may be contaminated with E coli or soaked in synthetic hormones, and so on — that food that “feels good” and is tasty and pleasurable in the immediate physiological act of consumption may actually be
    (a) damaging the body of the consumer,
    (b) produced using unsustainable or dishonest or cruel means, oppressing workers, torturing animals or committing biovandalism (etc),
    (c) putting money and power and control into the hands and pockets of The Man and hurting/depowering our families and neighbourhoods,
    (d) part and parcel of global systems of racist imperialism, hurting people thousands of miles away (cash-cropping and land enclosure, fishery collapse, ag subsidies, dumping)…

    that is, we have no trouble, most of us, in understanding that eating a Mickey D meal can Feel Good — heck, that pseudofood is engineered by high paid experts to hit those limbic centres with the Feel Good neurochemical message, they spend millions tailoring it to do just exactly that… just like commercial porn producers carefully tailor their product to hit the limbic centres and tickle the dominance node and the racist node and the woman-hating node and the paedophile node and (above all) to Get It Up By Any Means Necessary. with all that tailoring and targeting, and the way it tickles our ancient omnivorous food preferences, how could A Happy Meal not Taste Good?

    and yet we have — except for the most militant neocon market-cultistas — a clear understanding that it can nevertheless be Bad For Us: bad for justice, bad for indigenous peoples, bad for the biotic community, bad for labour, bad for your town’s economy, bad for your children’s future, bad for all of us. the fact that it “tastes good” — the famous “pleasure-positive principle” is only the surface, the thinnest veneer on the total meaning of the decision to participate or not participate in that system. the meaning of that act of consumption is miles deeper and wider than the brief stimulation of some neurochemical machinery in the brain and GI tract. skating forever on that thin veneer and not looking beneath it is what the bosses want us to do.

    why is this so easy for left/liberals to understand in the realm of food — also a primal animal need, and a highly developed human social/cultural nexus, a marker of identity and selfhood, and a compelling individual pleasure with enormous emotional resonance — and yet the disconnect between orgasm and ethics is totally obfuscated, so that “whatever gets me off is by definition Good” can actually be taken seriously as a point of foundational ideology by liberals?

    sure I understand a backlash against the legendary “age of Victorian prudery” and its double standards which prohibited sexual pleasure and adventure for women as stringently as today’s phallocracy demands that women make ourselves sexually available and experience pleasure from male-defined sex. back then a woman was considered “sick” and in need of treatment if she had any enthusiasm for sex at all, nowadays she’s considered abnormal or “repressed” if she doesn’t greet the foreceful penetration of her every orifice with lascivious glee. back then a woman was considered immoral if she admitted to enjoying any form of sexual intimacy. now we are not allowed to talk about the morality or ethics of sex at all. we’re suppose to shut up and eat our Happy Meal, and not look any deeper than “it tastes good”. the bosses are smiling all the way to the bank, or the brothel which also leads to the bank.

    it tastes good and it’s cheap. what more do ya want? asking any other questions is forbidden, because that would threaten the consumerist trance (and male hegemony).

    from one kapu to another, from one form of repression to another. as one Islamic feminist said to women of the West, “pornography is your veil.” we’re back to T H White’s definition of totalitarianism, Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.

    not everything that tastes good is good for us. we now face the Omnivore’s Dilemma (hat tip to Pollan) in our sexual lives, as more and more traditional kapu and constraints are relaxed or abandoned. and in this arena we face the totalising power of capital and phallocracy in tandem, with “market demographics” driving the culture’s sexual imagery and norms like all other media and standards… in a race to the bottom.

    16 November 2006, 4:34 pm

  41. Charles:

    test

    16 November 2006, 5:42 pm

  42. Charles:

    I’m trying to send a note,and I get a message that it’s a duplicate, but it’s not on here that I can see.

    16 November 2006, 5:49 pm

  43. Stan:

    Charles, there is some glitch. I’m trying to figure it out. That is not a cause for celebration, since mhy tech skills are actually negative… that is, I souls not be allowed to monkey around with anything more than the mouse, and that with close supervision.

    De… Elaina…

    Thank you.

    I am not sure why the porn-posse hasn’t jumped into the next thread, the on on the character of occupation, since it deals with sex and men having orgasms. It was also posted at Huffington today. I invite them to comment there, after reading how three men achieved their orgasms. My little rebuttal to the hedonistic defense… and all the generic, naturalized discussion of desire.

    16 November 2006, 7:54 pm

  44. RenegadeEvolution:

    perhaps because we see a difference between the horrific rape and murder of Abeer and a woman willingly being double penetrated?

    MODERATORS NOTE: Perhaps you are again avoiding my point, which does not compare these two things, but gives the lie to the hedonistic defense (if it feels good, it must be good). In fact, no thread here has been about women “being doubly penetrated” (do you ever think about this expression???), but about why DP in pornography appeals to men the way it appeals to men, as evidenced by the way it is described in the advertizing directed at men to view it. My inivtation to comment on the trope of male sexual vengeance still stands. The one thing none of you seems willing to confront is masculinity constructed as eroticized violence. But if you really oppose patriarchy, this is actually pretty important. Your priorities are in evidence when ths thread has dozens of posts from your posse, whining about YOUR rights, which were never in question, and not a word about what is written about the imperial murder-rape.

    16 November 2006, 8:37 pm

  45. RedDan:

    Thanks for the responses - I learned a lot.

    To Elaina and Stan, my use of “agency” was incorrect - I did mean power (I talked about it later in the comment). Thanks for the correction.

    To Peggy - I am a Red of the International Socialist variety…but, as I would hope is clear to all here, cleaving to a particular political outlook or party does not make one conversant or expert in all facets of that political theory, nor does it require that one agree with all interpretations or ramifications of that theory…nor does it make one correct about one’s views or opinions (obviously!).

    DeAnander, the problem I keep running up against is this (and I am going to probably not be able to express myself well): Invoking the “feels good in the short term is not necessarily good for us in the long term” argument seems to me to come awfully close to the “it may taste good but it’s not natural” argument. DP, or anal sex, or bondage, or whatever form of sexual activity is arguable not “natural” because it serves no biological purpose, and fits parts together that are not biologically intended to fit together…but then we start getting into the area of determining that “natural” is therefore straight hetero sex, only.

    But that is not the point of this conversation, at least as far as I am understanding it.

    The point of this conversation as I see it is not the act in and of itself (ANY act), but rather the intentions, purposes, and motivators behind the act or acts.

    Is that correct?

    The point is not that DP itself is necessarily sexist or oppressive, the point is that domination, domination for profit, domination and subordination (whether overt or internalized) are part and parcel of the patriarchy, and that those motivators can be (and are) deeply intertwined in EVERY act, whether that act be the purchase of a particular product, meal, toy, or the performance of a particular act.

    The point of using double penetration as an example is not, to me, because of the act itself, rather it is because of the fact that the act is generally so far outside the experience of most people that it acts to focus the attention and shock the senses into thinking about the use of power to sell particular relationships and behaviors and attitudes.

    If the act in and of itself is sexist because it is inherently unnatural and damaging to the body, and it is only performed in service to and in furtherance of a patriarchal worldview about lascivious women who want more more more cock and nothing else…

    Then what are we to say about anal sex whether hetero or homo?? Again, an act that is distinctly not “biologically normal,” an act that is actually not particularly healthy for the body over the long term, an act that is also used and portrayed by the pornography industry in much the same way that double penetration is used and portrayed (destroyed holes, wrecked asses, and etc).

    Should we to condemn anal sex as well?

    Again, I am not baiting you or anyone else, nor am I trying to “score points” - this is nowhere even close to the areas of inquiry that I generally get involved in, and I am probably woefully ignorant about the thoughts, theories, and discussion…I am trying to learn a bit, so try and be gentle…please?

    16 November 2006, 9:26 pm

  46. DeAnander:

    here’s a question I offer for RedDan to ponder along with me… when we say “anal sex” why is it that what we really mean is “penetration of an anus by an erect penis?” isn’t that always the first meaning that the brain latches onto? we don’t think about the penetration of the anus by a finger, or some kind of wiggly little sex toy, or a tongue — no, that might be described in the literature as “anal play“, but is not what the average native speaker of colloquial English understands by “anal sex.” that is imagined pretty reliably as “a man fucking someone’s anus.”

    why then would “play” be different from “sex” — and why would “sex” always, invariably, mean penile sex? unless perhaps it is some kind of “work” to service a penis? [hmmmm….] is it “not sex” if no erect penis is involved? and so on. is that normative power not even more hegemonic than considerations of “gay vs straight”?

    actually while I hear and (I think) grok your concern, I don’t think the feminist challenge to phallocentrism is in danger of leading us to any ringing endorsement of the Missionary Position for het couples only :-) if anything, taken to its logical extreme it is more likely to deconstruct all such claims of “naturalness” and expose the centrality of the phallus and male power in the entire language and ideational space of sexual discourse under patriarchy, including so-called “natural” missionary-position het intercourse (if you recall, Dworkin stirred up a shitstorm that rages still, simply by writing one book — count it, one — that critiqued het intercourse).

    I think to the extent that the gay male porn industry focuses on domination, punishment, and damage in the imagery and language it uses to describe anal/penile intercourse, it is sexist in the same way as het porn — it constructs a Manly Man punishing and hurting a Feminised Other with a weaponised penis, as the paradigmatic turn-on, The Script. and that’s patriarchal to the max.

    I would like to make a provisional distinction here between three realms: a) the realm of corporate junk sex (Taylorised mass produced sexual fantasies and sexual services, unitised and price tagged) or sex-propaganda; b) individual sexual quirks, preferences, and carnal experiences; and c) the intersection of these two realms with violence and criminality, i.e. sexual abuse, rape, coercion, extortion, etc. arguments about porn and prostitution wander all over these three realms without, usually, pausing at the borders.

    Jensen’s paper was clearly focussed on the first realm — pornography and what kind of message it sends, and what kind of message men are looking for and being reinforced in when they purchase and consume it. he is investigating the relationship between men and their pornography, and asking whether pornographic presentations of “DP” are inherently sexist, i.e. “can men consume this type of porno with a clear conscience?”

    I’ll leave aside the deeper ethical question of whether men can consume any kind of porno with a clear conscience :-) — that is, is it ever a good idea to Taylorise, unitise, and sell sexuality?

    several respondents from the Internet Porn Posse, as ever, pop up to drag the discourse into the second realm, that of individual/anecdotal experiences. I’m going to risk a whomping big Godwin Ticket here and say that the ability of an individual to attain an orgasm w/in an oppressive structure does not invalidate critique of the structure. it’s well known that concentration camp guards “had affairs” (made sexual use of) prisoners in their power, both male and female; it’s statistically probable that some percentage of those favoured inmates experienced sexual arousal or orgasm in the company of their guard/masters, or even that some kind of affection flourished in some of these relationships. [orgasm is not always even voluntary, since it’s a physical reflex; and kindness can take root in the unlikeliest soil.] but those moments of sexual “success” do not by any means rehabilitate the surrounding oppressive and lethal system. individual adaptations to an oppressive system do occur, they may even be spectacularly successful. but they do not invalidate systemic critique, any more than one individual “rags to riches” Horatio Alger story about an immigrant to the US invalidates all critique of American foreign or domestic policy, la Migra, or capitalism.

    from the second realm we can still connect to the third realm — the wider implications of our choices, and whether all of our choices are of equal value or benefit to us and to others.

    I can certainly imagine that anal/penile intercourse could happen in private life with respect, mutual trust, pleasure, etc. (as noted on an earlier thread, if both participants were male the pleasure might actually be more reciprocal and mutual than in vaginal/penile intercourse). but this would not mean that the stock pornographic representations of this practise were not sexist, phallocratic, male-supremacist, whatever. and the intrusion of pornographic phallus-propaganda into private and ouglic life, plus the multi-millennial history of patriarchy, phallocracy, misogyny, stack the odds against such private bubbles of mutual respect and trust.

    we might also question (as we have on previous threads) the reflexive association of “orgasm” with “Feel Good,” which sets up orgasm as the ultimate goal of sex, without which sex is “incomplete” — this dogma prevengs us from acknowledging that physical orgasm does not always feel good, or that sexual intimacy might not necessarily be contingent on, or dedicated to, orgasm. the ironclad equation of Orgasm and Feels Good defines any and all orgasms as so 110 percent Good that the mere fact of their occurrence wipes out any possibility of further ethical considerations or critique… and this is what is being challenged upthread by Elaina among others.

    I think Jensen condemns pornographic presentations of DP, and rightly so. those presentations are transparently woman-hating propaganda. I think he sounds a warning note that men who consume porn will be likely to carry misogynist and male supremacist expectations into the interpersonal realm, which then poses a threat to women and to those men’s relationships with women. I do not read his text as “condemning” DP in the second realm, if freely chosen by a woman. I read his text as questioning what it means to men, what meanings they are carrying with them from the world of porn into the bedroom.

    do I condemn the urban poor who eat at Mickey D’s? nope. I might ask why they have so little choice, why junk food is so much more prevalent and affordable than healthy food, what role Mickey D plays in impoverishing their neighbourhoods; how their situation ties into the destruction of the rural poor by Enclosure and agribusiness monopoly; how it ties into the abuses of the US health care system… and I think it is always possible — no, always advisable — at some point or other to ask ourselves, “so why does this feel/taste good?” and “on what time scale,” (focussing on orgasm exclusively is like focussing on next quarter’s earnings report at the expense of the long term) and “what are the [ahem] externalities,” and most importantly, “why am I not allowed to ask these questions?”

    16 November 2006, 10:25 pm

  47. DeAnander:

    @elaina Individual satisfaction is not the point.

    Commie pinko subversive! Shut up and go shopping :-)

    16 November 2006, 10:30 pm

  48. RedDan:

    DeAnander,

    Well said.

    I think I was saying the same thing in my first comment…and if that’s NOT what I said, I demand that everyone interpret what I said to mean what DeAnander said!

    Within the realm of idealized “personal space” I do not think that any particular act or position is intrinsically sexist, degrading, or whatever.

    Within the realm of commodification and “real world” interactions, ANY act (and one could and probably should argue that EVERY act) can be and most often is intrinsically sexist, often degrading. For a very clear reason or set of reasons that have everything to do with alienation as a powerful tool of imperialistic, patriarchal hegemony.

    What most (and many would argue all) pornography does is bind the personal realm to the commodified realm in the same way that McDonald’s commercials use happy families and ecstatic children to reinforce the purchase of poison made by destroying the environment using de facto slave labor.

    (did i do good?)

    16 November 2006, 10:42 pm

  49. Julio:

    I believe I get Stan’s point about the social construction of desire. Patriarchy, male domination and exploitation of women, is an old institution that reappears in a very hideous forms in today’s societies. Given how pervasive and noxious this institution has been historically, no wonder men and women have internalized these relations and come to rationalize and even naturalize the psychological traits conditioned by them.

    I think this kind of critique of the most fundamental institutions underpinning our society is indispensable. My next question is, how do we deal with the here and now? We don’t have to accept the tenets of liberal individualism to distinguish between rape or abuse, on the one hand, and consensual sex, on the other. I’m talking here about consensual sex, whatever the patriarchal kinks that may accompany it.

    I understand that, even when/if they come from the same social milieu, men and women enter a sexual relationship asymmetrically, from the getgo. But there’s a difference between women being enslaved overtly and formally, and women being subject to more subtle forms of oppression, cloaked under the liberal ideology. There’s no doubt in my mind that, at each point in time, the role of men is to support women’s assertion of their specific needs, wants, and interests — even if this assertion takes place at the individual level and even if it — as is — is not sufficient to dynamite the foundations of patriarchy.

    Now the objection: What if these needs and wants, when asserted, reproduce the basis of patriarchy, since they are motivated by psychological tendencies that constitute internalized sexual oppression? IMO, it is women who have to articulate their own emancipation. The emancipation of women has to be the task of women themselves, with “enlightened” men playing a merely supportive role. We men may secondguess them, but so what? Ultimately, the main agents or protagonists in revolutionizing their condition (and thus the human condition overall) have to be women, collectively.

    And what do we (women and men) do with our desires, as we feel them here and now, the desires that shape our personal sexual experience — as twisted as these desires may be, as twisted as they may have become under the pressure of millennia of patriarchy and exploitation of women? Perhaps our understanding of women’s oppression can help us humanize them. But perhaps not. I’m talking about deep-seated, desires or feelings that emerge from our subconsciousness. And I’m talking about desires, both of women and men, that may arise in the context of a basically respectful, consensual relationship, at least in its liberal sense?

    Should we repress them because they have been shaped up by millennia of male domination? I’m not attributing this view to Stan. I’m just wondering aloud what follows from the view that a sexual practice historically conditioned by patriarchy (and which form of sexual interaction hasn’t been conditioned by patriarchy?) is to be condemned. Does that historical “original sin” of male patriarchy precludes sexual enjoyment if and when tainted by desires that have their roots in patriarchy and the exploitation of women?

    One thing is clear: Rebuilding or re-founding the relationship between men and women is going to be a long struggle. True cooperation between the sexes in a truly free society is going to require a whole series of social and cultural revolutions. And the leading force will be the women themselves, collectively.

    16 November 2006, 11:57 pm

  50. Elki:

    My guess and comments are as good as any. Stan I admit I didnt read the full article before I posted, i think because once i got to your comment about woman being DP’d and how it seems to only be porn stars who take pleasure in such acts, i felt this to be untrue - for myself. I feel there are generalisations being asserted that are not necessarily true - so i gave my comment as a different viewpoint.

    I asked my husband what he thought and he expressed that most men would find this method of sex - being DP’d by two other men, not something they would enjoy let alone perform.

    Based on the complexity of sexuality, in, of and between the sexes, your comments could be taken as sexist or they needn’t be sexist.

    17 November 2006, 12:40 am

  51. peggy:

    It was not the idea of a woman having sex with two men at one time, nor the picture that bothered me. It was the words that went with the picture. If it had said instead, “Here is a gorgeous sexy woman with a PhD in geophysics, who writes exquisite poetry that she reads only to her best lovers. If you think her body is to die for, wait until you discover her mind!” - if the caption had been along those lines, I wouldn’t have been bothered at all.

    17 November 2006, 1:50 am

  52. Lya Kahlo:

    “why am I not allowed to ask these questions?”

    Because people will go to great lengths to protect Teh Porn. It is perhaps the best evidence of the selfishness porn relies on.

    17 November 2006, 8:42 am

  53. Lya Kahlo:

    “It was not the idea of a woman having sex with two men at one time, nor the picture that bothered me. It was the words that went with the picture.”

    EXACTLY. The caption literally says “make her cry”. There is absolutely nothing acceptable, or justifiable about that. The porn industry is making big money off of selling abused, humliated and degraded women for male sexual gratification. It doesn’t matter if the women is ACTUALLY abused, or if she ACTUALLY enjoyed it. The point is that this is blatantly tieing male sexuality to abusing women. There is also absolutely nothing acceptable or remotely justifiable about that.

    It’s not selling sex as a mutually pleasurable experience - that even DP may well be in real life for some people. It’s selling it as a punishment - an abuse that the abused comes to “love”. There is absolutely nothing not fucked up about that. It is indefensible. Period.

    17 November 2006, 9:58 am

  54. DeAnander:

    It’s selling it as a punishment - an abuse that the abused comes to “love”.

    I think this is one reason why the Pimp/Ho theme plays well as “romantic” or “sexy” in pop culture today — because of the knowledge, ubiquitous in our culture, of how pimps “season” (intimidate, beat, torture, rape, threaten) girls to turn them in to obedient and productive prostitutes, and how Stockholm Syndrome — or variants thereof — leads battered and dominated human beings to form affective bonds with their oppressors. the paradigmatic SM fantasy, in other words, as in “Story of O” and similar claptrap.

    it is the “gloves off” version of the old fashioned romance novel — in which the dark and brooding, “masterful” and violent hero causes the heroine all kinds of pain and suffering, doubt and anxiety, fear and humiliation, and she remains loving and (in the end) gets the gold ring. Patient Griselda. except that in the modernist fable, there’s no gold ring, no pretence that the master will come to love his underling, reform his character and become a feeling human being capable of tenderness and commitment. he will remain brutal and domineering, and she is the one who will adapt and learn to love being dominated and abused. the Pimp and Ho fantasy openly celebrates the domination and intimidation phase of the old romance script, without even offering the carrot of love and marriage at the end of the plot.

    occasionally I have to wonder whether the Victorians were as badly off as we think. they at least had a canonical cultural fantasy that men should be redeemed and made loving and human by the Influence of a Good Woman. we in our day have instead the mythology that women should be debased and brutalised into enjoying male supremacy and their own oppression. it is a sad reality that the many Victorians did not live up to their cultural fantasy, and I suppose a comforting notion that many people in our own time do not live up to ours.

    more thoughts on our obligations to ourselves and each other in the “private” sphere of relationships, later.

    17 November 2006, 2:58 pm

  55. Charles:

    A while back when I worked in the City Council law department, one of my areas of assignment was the ordinances regulating nude dancing joints, etc. In this capacity, I interacted with the anti-smut activists. I used to joke about the one guy Mike Q., I can just hear Mike saying ” Yes, I’ll have to view all these dirty strip joints to make sure they are not obscene.” ( By the way, I never inspected any dancing joints. I did all my work in the office on the legal angle:>) )

    I get a bit of the same type of feeling doing anti-smut critiques of socalled DP ( at first I thought that was the Democratic Party) with all this graphic description of kinky sex.

    Anyway, to me, DP seems kind of gross. And I certainly don’t ignore our Feral Scholar main theme political critique of this “rape genre”.

    I have to say that there is a bit of a paradox or contradiction in my utterly denouncing it, and it is a paradox that is somewhat general here. For me to pronounce that the women who profess to enjoy DP are brainwashed by patriarchy to think they enjoy something that is really inflicting pain on them is substituting my male opinion for the opinion of a woman, my “objective” thinking for her subjective feeling. How do I know what she is feeling really ? Should I impose my male opinion over hers about her own feelings ? Unless these women have to go to the hospital or doctor for medical treatment after these things, how can I objectively say she is hurt ? Are they bruised or bleeding afterward ?

    As far as the objective symbolic aspects, this is one woman “having” two men at the same time, which is a woman “powerful” menage-a-trois (as opposed to one man and two women). It’s the _reverse_ of the mancheating double standard. If a woman is walking down the street with two men on her arms, isn’t that the opposite of a man walking down the street with two women on his arms ? The structure “one woman-two men” is _female_ dominant, in the classic way we think about these things. It’s like polyandry, not polygamy.

    Having noted all that, I’m glad to denounce DP as “inherently sexist” .

    17 November 2006, 5:02 pm

  56. Stan:

    I have to say that there is a bit of a paradox or contradiction in my utterly denouncing it, and it is a paradox that is somewhat general here. For me to pronounce that the women who profess to enjoy DP are brainwashed by patriarchy to think they enjoy something that is really inflicting pain on them is substituting my male opinion for the opinion of a woman, my “objective” thinking for her subjective feeling. How do I know what she is feeling really ? Should I impose my male opinion over hers about her own feelings ? Unless these women have to go to the hospital or doctor for medical treatment after these things, how can I objectively say she is hurt ? Are they bruised or bleeding afterward ?

    Charles, and everyone, please read the article. Jensen NEVER NEVER NEVER aims his critique at “what women want.” This is NOT the subject of the article. If it were, it would be a different article. The critique is what male consumers are “consuming,” which is pain an humiliation.

    As far as the objective symbolic aspects, this is one woman “having” two men at the same time, which is a woman “powerful” menage-a-trois (as opposed to one man and two women). It’s the _reverse_ of the mancheating double standard. If a woman is walking down the street with two men on her arms, isn’t that the opposite of a man walking down the street with two women on his arms ? The structure “one woman-two men” is _female_ dominant, in the classic way we think about these things. It’s like polyandry, not polygamy.

    This kind of remark is exactly why you have not convinced me that you are familiar with feminism at all, except the liberal variety still firmly ensconced inside the phallocentric paradigm. By this standard, a woman is super-empowered during a “gang-bang”, as long as she legally “consents.”

    Here are some ads for DP sites:

    Hot chicks take two cocks one in every hole, then get a face full of cum!

    These hot sluts are fucked by two dudes at the same time & they fucking love it!

    Double penetrated sluts taking it in the cunt and the ass for the very first time. Two holes are better than one!

    Real dolls come to life and get to be the center of sexy sandwiches in the incredible double penetration action here at Real DP Doll!

    Plowing a chick’s ass while there’s another cock in her pussy is an experience not to be missed.

    Every one of the girls on this site is a complete anal whore who will take it any way she can get it and if it comes as double penetration then that’s just how they want it.

    Get it, now?

    Having noted all that, I’m glad to denounce DP as “inherently sexist”.

    Jensen only used that as a snag-title. Read the article. He has no judgement whatsoever on the actual practice outside the production and consumption of pornography.

    17 November 2006, 5:26 pm

  57. Charles:

    Charles…What do you think?

    Comment by peggy — 11/15/2006 @ 6:53 pm

    Peggy, I read your whole comment. Some of what I think is above, though it doesn’t reply directly to your comment.

    I guess I’ll take up your discussion below

    Patriarchy trains women to desire by training us to want to please men, to desire to please men, and to please them by doing what they want. Men also are trained to think that whatever pleases them pleases women, or alternatively, that a woman seeking pleasure for herself, through acts which are different from what the man thinks she should want, is selfish and to-be-shunned.

    ^^^^

    CB: I can’t and shouldn’t deny your experience as expressed here. All I can say is I might be living in some kind of bubble , because your experience is somewhat foreign to mine. I have never met a woman who was focussed on pleasing me and or pleasing me by doing what I want. Most of them seemed focussed on getting me to do what they wanted. So, maybe I’m one in ten million, ….

    ^^^^^^

    Experiencing the effects of such expectations day after day, year after year, is exactly what puts some women off sex altogether. We are trained to believe something that is not true. We are trained to deny ourselves what our own bodies scream out for, to accept what our own bodies find unpleasant or worse, because this is what we are expected to want. We are expected to want pain and humiliation. Look at the quote from the pornographic web site cited by Jensen. LOOK at it. READ it.

    ^^^^

    CB: Again, I certainly can’t deny what you are saying. I can say I have never trained or asked anybody to accept pain and humiliation. If this is what the women I have talked with are feeling, they are certainly hiding it very well. None of them have ever evinced the slightest desire for pain and humiliation. In fact, entirely the opposite. All the women I have known very emphatically and effectively demand joy and respect.

    ^^^^

    “This blonde slut is in serious double penetration hardcore sex. She is getting her pussy and asshole destroyed by two fat cocks that will enter her holes and make her cry. Her pussy and asshole were tight a long time before, but now this slut is ready and willing to do anything like double or triple penetration hardcore sex scene. Her holes are destroyed and she cannot be satisfied with one cock so we give her two cocks for the beginning!”

    The message is that she WANTS pain. She WANTS her body to be destroyed. Get it?

    ^^^^^

    CB; Yes, I get it. Pretty weird. Sounds extremely stupid to me. Totally foreign from my experience, both direct and as reported by women I talk with. I don’t know any men talking this stuff either. Of course, I don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.

    Also, I can’t deny that I have heard of sado-masochism. Always seemed strange to me, but there you have it. Some people seem to be “into” it. As I understand it’s not always the man who is the “sado”. In a way, if the woman is inflicting pain, it could sort of be a compensation for patriarchy type of thingy. They get off on making up for all the pain men have inflicted upon women ( Did I really just say that :>) ?)

    ^^^^^^^

    No biological imperative makes women want pain. I hope that no biological imperative makes men want to inflict pain on women.

    ^^^^

    CB: Yes, when I bring up biology, I’m sort of thinking of the exact opposite: that biology makes women and men desire pleasure.

    Now I do have to say that sometimes you hear this thing about pleasure and pain being close , unity and struggle of opposites or something. Laugh so hard you cry, and the like

    ^^^^^

    We are absolutely NOT leaving biology out of account in our discussion of sex and desire. This is why Stan put up the quotes by Mies,O’Hartigan, Hornborg above.

    ^^^^

    CB: Yea, I read those. Let me take a look again…

    OK yes, Stan had a good quote from Mies on biology, but then he goes to “IF YOU AIN’T TALKIN’ ABOUT HOW PATRIARCHY TRAINS US TO DESIRE, YOU AIN’T SERIOUS!”, which shifts it back away from biology. Now I agree that patriarchy and the rest of culture shape desire. What I am wondering is if biology specifically shapes women to desire sex specifically with men and men to desire sex specifically with women AT ALL ANYMORE SINCE WE LEFT THE OTHER PRIMATES. IS THERE ANY INSTINCTUAL HETEROSEXUAL DESIRE LEFT IN US ? Or has culture , patriarchy and otherwise totally taken over in shaping our sexual desires ? Those quotes from Mies, et al. are not clear on whether they think that or not.

    I’ll finishing replying to the rest of your comment later.

    17 November 2006, 6:01 pm

  58. DeAnander:

    The structure “one woman-two men” is _female_ dominant, in the classic way we think about these things. It’s like polyandry, not polygamy.

    Charles, forgive a moment of asperity or impatience here, but what planet are you living on? Tell it to the girl in Maryland who was raped by two boys in a car and then told by a male judicial panel that she had no right to “change her mind”. Think she was feeling “female-dominant”? Two men on one woman? that is not an empowering notion for the average woman. That’s a nightmare. Or a traumatic memory.

    What kind of neoliberal economist fantasy land is your brain residing in, where the average woman has enough power — financial, social, political, and physical — to guarantee her own safety in a sexual encounter with two men?   When did the playing field suddenly become level as a good pool table?  I can’t think of any two men in my entire acquaintance that I would trust to engage in such a practise, even supposing that I wanted to do so — to feed any two men raised in this culture such a pre-digested fantasy, right out of the vile misogynist porn industry, and expect their behaviour to be untouched by it — to expect them to remain true to our friendship or their hearts rather than the hegemonic script — would be imho optimism of an insane order.

    Like feeding a kid Classic Coke and Twinkies all day and then expecting him to be quiet and polite at dinner.

    If a woman is wealthy, or has powerful relatives, maybe she could count on her social ranking to ensure that sex with multiple simultaneous male partners was safe: she could threaten severe personal consequences if it got out of hand, or she could be paying the men, or…? I can’t think of any other way to be sure that it would not turn into a gang rape — and even if it did not become one in any legal sense, what the hell would be going on in those men’s heads? would those porno slogans and soundbites (some of which Stan listed above), deeply ingrained, always present, ever closer to the surface of pop culture, not be rolling before their eyes, the tickertapes of patriarchy?

    Do you really want to have sex with two people stronger and more socially empowered than you are, who have been programmed from early youth to think of that act as a way of punishing and degrading you? Are you so damn powerful that you can deprogram them with a wave of your magic libertarian-wand? I harbour no such delusions of grandeur.

    what’s going on in their heads… a thought which must haunt everyone these days I should think, as the contempt and hatred of the body — especially the female body — expressed in porn permeates the culture. how can any wife know what is going on in her husband’s head when they are in bed, any girlfriend know what her boyfriend is jerking off to in his head while he is inside her body? the ubiquity of porn and the increasingly unapologetic, open, unconcealed hatred of women it expresses raises the bar for trust in sexual relationships to a pretty daunting height…

    maybe two men and one woman, exceptionally pure of heart, could in some magic cocoon insulated from the rape culture and 5+ millennia of patriarchy and gang rape, insulated from the accelerating avalanche of rape trophy pictures and their gloating captions, inside some kind of Faraday Cage immune to the memestorm of patriarchy, have sex in this way without any sexist overtones, in pure animal innocence. and what are the odds on that?

    17 November 2006, 6:09 pm

  59. Consumer:

    (LoL) No, I don’t do any harm here, Julian. If I’m even a fraction as despicable as you say I am then at the very least I’m a snapshot of the enemy you wish to topple. But don’t feel obligated to engage with a bug like me, I mean, I wouldn’t want to keep you from doing battle with the minions of the Evil Sexxxploitation Empire.

    All kidding aside, your analogy regarding tobacco is quite fitting and it shows that you would attack the porn industry head-on, instead of wasting precious time giving thought to the reasons behind consumer consumption. In that regard, a more fitting analogy of your strategy seems to be the War Aagainst Drugs in South America, as waged by the US gov’t.

    Still, I can respect the passion and urgency behind your view, despite its quixotic futility in its current form. You need masses of people to take on big industries in this country. And you won’t even accept recruitment of “harmful” men like me with my mostly far-left political views. You think you’re going to get Joe Six-Pack behind your movement, which is an urgent and noble one, with all your angst-ridden whiteboy-bashing diatribes? Doubtful. That’s why I asked if you really want to solve this thing. Because if you do, then you need lots of people, even people you don’t like, people like me. People who may not fit neatly into your little constricted boxes.

    That’s “what needs to happen first”, imho. Know thy enemy, even if you can’t love him ;)

    17 November 2006, 6:28 pm

  60. Sam:

    Yes, I’ll have to view all these dirty strip joints to make sure they are not obscene.”

    I get a bit of the same type of feeling doing anti-smut critiques of socalled DP ( at first I thought that was the Democratic Party) with all this graphic description of kinky sex.

    In my opinion, a big part of coming into feminism was stopping the automatic jokes and easy giggles that sexual subjects bring out in people to get at what’s really going on socially behind the nervous laughter.

    I attended the opening of a movie and the warm-up act walked onto the stage and simply said, “Porn!” He got laughs from the audience because the sex-related word is a joke in itself, no context needed. He probably would have gotten the same laughs from the “joke” by saying penis or boobies.

    An elderly woman I know made reference to a strip club near her home and immediately a smiling, “funny” intonation came when she said the name of it. I know from talking to her seriously another time that she did not like the place but the conditioning to snicker at sex-related anything was the knee jerk reaction that came out in a spontaneous moment.

    It’s a common reaction that makes critiques of sexuality difficult to take seriously. People don’t genuinely hear the critique until after they get over the, “Tee hee, she said vagina” reaction.

    17 November 2006, 6:31 pm

  61. Charles:

    Stan:
    This kind of remark is exactly why you have not convinced me that you are familiar with feminism at all, except the liberal variety still firmly ensconced inside the phallocentric paradigm. By this standard, a woman is super-empowered during a “gang-bang”, as long as she legally “consents.”

    ^^^^^
    CB; Let me deal with this first. It’s a bit presumptuous for you to claim that your version of feminism is “the” feminism. What you mean is I’m not familiar entirely with the version of feminism _you_ subscribe to. I am extremely familiar with the feminism which I think is correct, and I have presented quite a bit of very strong discussion for why that might be the preferred approach to feminism. And there are plenty of women feminists who are closer to what I think is the best version of feminism. So, lets try to discuss this with a bit more co-respect for our different points of view. You may call that “liberal”. I just call it courtesy. And as far as “liberal” in general, I don’t think I quite subscribe to your definition of that either. What I follow is “revolutionary feminism”, and as I say, I put it up there with any of them. So, lets drop that epithet too, because I can make out a case that other people are liberals too. “Liberal” is basically bourgeois, and my critique of the bourgeois is excellent. My criticism of individualism is first rate.

    ^^^^^^
    Charles, and everyone, please read the article. Jensen NEVER NEVER NEVER aims his critique at “what women want.” This is NOT the subject of the article. If it were, it would be a different article. The critique is what male consumers are “consuming,” which is pain an humiliation.

    ^^^^
    CB: Maybe not in his article, but I have definitely read somewhere around here about “women being trained by patriarchy to think they want or desire to be humiliated, forced and dominated. ” Right ? Surely DP brought here is meant to demonstrate that hypothesis as well as whatever Jensen is talking about.

    Also, that means Jensen is totally focussed on what the _men_ think. Why _is_ he leaving out what the women think ? That’s a prima facie case of male supremacist thinking, not feminist thinking. In other words, he’s ensconced in the phallocentric paradigm.

    Both of the feminist women I have been discussing this blog with offlist have noted that pattern of this analysis. I didn’t note it. They did. I just gave you a little feedback from some women feminists.

    ^^^^^

    As far as the objective symbolic aspects, this is one woman “having” two men at the same time, which is a woman “powerful” menage-a-trois (as opposed to one man and two women). It’s the _reverse_ of the mancheating double standard. If a woman is walking down the street with two men on her arms, isn’t that the opposite of a man walking down the street with two women on his arms ? The structure “one woman-two men” is _female_ dominant, in the classic way we think about these things. It’s like polyandry, not polygamy.

    Here are some ads for DP sites:

    Hot chicks take two cocks one in every hole, then get a face full of cum!

    These hot sluts are fucked by two dudes at the same time & they fucking love it!

    Double penetrated sluts taking it in the cunt and the ass for the very first time. Two holes are better than one!

    Real dolls come to life and get to be the center of sexy sandwiches in the incredible double penetration action here at Real DP Doll!

    Plowing a chick’s ass while there’s another cock in her pussy is an experience not to be missed.

    Every one of the girls on this site is a complete anal whore who will take it any way she can get it and if it comes as double penetration then that’s just how they want it.

    Get it, now?

    ^^^^^^
    CB: I already got that. I really don’t want to argue back as if I’m defending or advocating DP or its representation. I’m not. I think if you just think about it for a moment you will see that there _is_ a contradictory structure in terms of the power. A woman with two husbands is an expression of power of the woman. The one woman-two men structure contradicts that the woman is being humiliated or dominated in the portrayl. The thing is contradictory. ( I’ll refrain from saying “Get it ?”)

    I don’t like to get into dissecting the obscene language (because I’ve looked back and said, “I don’t believe I was just writing away about some of that stuff on the Feral Scholar “; I gotta watch my language) but even if you are focussed that this ad language is aimed at the men , one phrase is “they fucking love it!” That’s not appealing to a man who wants to think he is hurting a woman. That’s appealing to a man who wants to do something she “loves” ( likes a lot), something that is pleasurable. You might say that it’s a fraud. No woman could “love” this. But then we’re back to deciding what some woman likes. That’s a contradiction in this analysis, whether you want to see it or not.

    And if you call what I’m saying liberal, I might show folks a stunning critique of liberal.

    Having noted all that, I’m glad to denounce DP as “inherently sexist”.

    ^^^^^^

    Jensen only used that as a snag-title. Read the article. He has no judgement whatsoever on the actual practice outside the production and consumption of pornography.

    ^^^^^^^
    CB: Well, I’m glad to denounce the representations of DP to the extent that they imply that women enjoy being hurt. Oddly , what you quote above doesn’t actually say that the woman enjoys being hurt or is being hurt. I might regret saying this , but it is not entirely unthinkable that having two you know what’s filled at the same time _is_ pleasurable for some women, not painful, as long as its not too rough. I really don’t know. A lot of it says she loves doing things which are conventionally considered “nasty”. It is extraordiarily I don’t know what to be unaware of the psychological impact of “nasty” in the sexual context. Do I really have to explain that for some reason the naughtiness of sex gives a kick because of kids getting away with stuff, and all that. Come on.

    That’s certainly an idealist approach Jensen has. He has an opinion on the representations but not on the material practice. Like I said. You don’t want to get me started on a critique of liberalism.

    17 November 2006, 7:02 pm

  62. Delphyne:

    I’ve been reading this thread with interest. I notice that one of Jensen’s observations has been underlined yet again, that whatever else happens, heterosexual men will absolutely not admit to taking part in double anal, least of all enjoying it (at least not in feminist conversations, what they say to their buddies elsewhere is probably quite different). That observation could be extended to pretty much any sexual act, where vast amounts of energy and words will be expended on whether women enjoy it or whether we find it degrading, but men’s feelings and motivations never ever come under scrutiny. Even on the rare occasion when they do, as in this discussion, it’s difficult to maintain that focus: it’s almost as if people are so used to talking about women’s desires that they automatically fall into that groove. Meanwhile men once again escape examination.

    The only two who have come close on this thread are Jimi, who talked about his feminist partner’s predilictions but didn’t actually mention whether he had been involved or how he had felt about it -

    “My own anecdotal evidence, based upon the experiences of my lifemate, a feminist, contradict Jensen’s theory. Not only has she initiated and enjoyed DP, she found it “exhilerating” and empowering. This was neither uncomfortable, nor was it submissive in her view.”

    and Mayo, who it seems is always being assailed by women demanding two penises inside them (although like Jimi he didn’t mention if he actually went for it or, if he did, how it made him feel)-

    “I’ve met multiple women in my life that enjoy the “DP” and have initiated the request themselves. I was approached in a bar by a married couple on one occasion and by friends at other times.
    I am a member of an internet “dating” site and there is no limit to the number of women on there who state in their “fantasies” portion of their profile that a DP has always been a fantasy…fulfilled or not at the time. There are also a fair number of women who with the help of their husbands seek out gangbangs whereever they travel.”

    If we took what has been said here at face value it would seem that men do not really have sexual desires and that in fact it is women who really, really want particular sexual acts.

    17 November 2006, 10:03 pm

  63. peggy:

    Charles, I think in the real world when you have two or more men having sex with the same woman (or animal) at more or less the same time, it is a male-bonding thing. The men engaged in such an act are, at best, not expecially concerned with what is going on in the mind of the person or animal they do it to. They are more interested in impressing each other, and getting off on that. There may be exceptions to this rule. And even, a woman may feel empowered by such an act, even while the men are thinking quite different things about her than she is thinking about herself. It is like the stripper who feels empowered by having so many men seemingly entranced by her performance, but then she discovers to her horror that she is not in control of them at all. To them she is just a slave, and a stupid one at that.

    We learned long ago that men and women cannot just simply change places with each other, as though in a dance. Women and men have whole histories within them, different histories, that they cannot just simply shed as though they were costumes. Two men with one woman is not at all a mirror image of two women with one man. If we could look at actual empirical cases, and a good number of them, apart from just my experience and impressions or your experience and impressions, I think we could all learn a lot.

    18 November 2006, 1:10 am

  64. Audrey:

    Charles – every now and then I find myself having a good laugh at the thought processes that run through your head, and I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. DP being interpreted as the Democratic Party in the context of this thread is hilariously apt in a metaphorical way. In another discussion, when your musings on the sexual contract wandered into the realm of law related to giving gifts upon one’s death, I found myself mentally scripting movie scenes where a new bride was patiently explaining to an increasingly agitated husband how that would be applied to their marriage.

    Other times I read your words and am left standing alone at the edge of a giant gulf that lies between your experiences and mine. “A woman with two husbands is an expression of power of the woman.” The first thing that ran through my head when I read that was the thought of having to make dinner for two men instead of one, and never having a moment’s peace to myself – no additional power, just additional work and additional people to try to please.

    On your side of the gulf, there is “a woman walking down the street with two men on her arms” which sounds grand. On my side, there is a woman holding down a full-time job, trying to go to night school, feeling guilty about the housework that’s been left undone and not spending enough time with her family, staring mutely at her feet while listening to complaints from the husband(s!) that dinner isn’t on the table quickly enough.

    Maybe two husbands could be empowering in Hollywood fantasy world where all real work is done by mythical servants that the camera never shows, and nobody makes demands on anyone else. I suppose having an extra salary in the family could be a welcome addition to the family’s budget – assuming they’re both employed, but even so, relying on someone else to support you is an expression of dependency, not power.

    18 November 2006, 1:27 am

  65. Elaina:

    I honestly didn’t want this to turn into another “Charles Brown: King of Amorphous Feminism and his Followers Who Only Exist Offline” discussion. I can’t take it. I WON’T.

    Ciao.

    18 November 2006, 3:40 am

  66. DeAnander:

    @Delphyne good call! it would seem that men do not really have sexual desires and that in fact it is women who really, really want particular sexual acts.

    which makes it really odd, no, that the brothels of the world are full of women being paid and/or coerced to service male demand? why not full of men being paid and/or coerced to service female demand?

    but men are always asserting that the woman “wanted it” — I am told it is the most common “defence” offered by convicted rapists, that they insist their victim wanted and enjoyed the rape.

    Julio asks a question very challenging to liberalism: And I’m talking about desires, both of women and men, that may arise in the context of a basically respectful, consensual relationship, at least in its liberal sense? Should we repress them because they have been shaped up by millennia of male domination?

    The word repress is a very powerful one for liberals and modernists: it always means Bad, with associations of stifling religious dogma, Victorian hypocrisy, body-hatred, paternalist patriarchy, and so on. It’s also heavily associated with the hydraulic or cathartic theory of sexuality — particularly male sexuality — which holds that men would all be calm, gentle, nice little pussycats if they just got enough nookie on a regular basis, and that it is only “repression” that makes them mean and violent. A female version of the theory holds that all old maids are neurotic, that virginity is unhealthy, etc.

    I’m going to suggest another theory, which seems to me better substantiated by real-world observations. In the absence of social restraints, there are no limits to greed (what economists call “demand,” what sex-liberals call “desire”). And this goes for sex as much as for more material goods. I’ve covered this ground in print before, but we can look at the behaviour of ruling-class elites throughout feudal history, the behaviour of elites and super-elites in the affluent nations of modern times, and what we find is that men (at least) who are allotted “infinite” access to sexual service (or “companionship” to be more euphemistic) consistently learn to want more, more extreme, and more bizarre and cruel thrills over time.

    I don’t know why this should be obscure and surprising. Given apparently “infinite” access to cheap energy, affluent consumers want bigger and bigger houses, bigger and bigger cars, more and more “energy slaves”, More — well into the realm of the grotesque. Wanting More seems to be a basic human problem. Any level of consumption quickly normalises and escalates desire to a new level of ambition. We see it today in the US reaching what one hopes is some kind of boundary condition of grotesquerie, in Hummer H2s and the glut of pornography and sexual obsession with “extreme” (painful, dangerous, degrading) sexual acts.

    Capitalists love that “repression” meme because it can be brought into play any time anyone questions consumption. “Repression” is interference with the free market, see? To critique desire (demand) is heretical; to constrain desire (demand) is unAmerican, unEnlightened, Repressive, “unnatural.” We should all just be free to act on any desires we have, at all times, without constraint. Well, liberals acknowledge, not if it “harms” anyone else. But then the bar for the definition of “harm,” like the definition of “torture” under BushCo, gets moved around and juggled and bent until it happens not to describe whatever harm is necessitated by the degree of license that is currently considered acceptable for consumers. Thus prostitution becomes a “victimless” crime, carbon taxes are unthinkable because they would “harm the economy”, and people honestly believe they have a “right” to drive a Hummer and it’s no one’s business what they choose to do with their own money.

    How about we substitute “limits” for “repression.” Is it inherently wrong to have “limits”? Ignoring limits, pretending that we don’t have limits, is the root of ecocide (and much other destruction).

    Anyone who suggests constraints or limits upon desire/demand is immediately stereotyped as a Puritan, Calvinist, etc. — unless of course it is a diet fad; food seems to be the one area in which the affluent West, and particularly America, is willing to constrain and demonise desire and appetite with startling zealotry!

    I’m gonna run two thought experiments here about “harm” and “repression” and try to respond to more of Julio’s thoughtful comment upthread: The emancipation of women has to be the task of women themselves, with “enlightened” men playing a merely supportive role. We men may secondguess them, but so what? The dilemma that seems to be raised by implication (for men) is, what if a woman initiates or requests some sexual activity but the (pro-feminist) male partner has reservations about it, thinks it feels patriarchal/sexist somehow? Who is he to say what she should or should not do?

    And here I say, we have consciences of our own to consider. The immortal Bobby McFerrin said once that what you put into your head, through your eyes, is just as important as what you put into your stomach, through your mouth. And the same, I believe, goes for what you put into your head through experience and through imagination and through kinaesthetic patterning by physical repetition, and by associative conditioning with strong sensations like sex and orgasm. What we have orgasms to — thoughts, words, images, ideas — gets burned into the brain pretty deeply. It’s a great brainwashing method.

    Reverting to an analogy I’ve been making for 30 years, suppose your kids are out with the neighbourhood rugrat pack playing in the park, and when you arrive you find they are playing “Cowboys and Indians” — with the cowboys winning of course. Now, who’s harmed? Suppose all the kids are white bourgeois kids in some isolated burb, “no actual indigenous person was harmed in the making of this movie” sort of thing, they’re just playing a make-believe game, and most bourgeois parents would tell you to chill if you objected. Hey, they’re just kids playing a game.

    And yet, your kids by participating in this game are practising, rehearsing, programming themselves with the racist attitudes and the racist national mythology. Should you let them go on playing? Should you discourage them? Should you give them a serious talk about real history and real indigenous people, to counterbalance the pseudohistorical triumphalist BS? The effect on your kids — even if your kids are white, i.e. not themselves “victims” of the racism they are learning — is a kind of harm. To teach them racism, to reinforce that lesson with the compelling patterning of repetitive play (young primates learn by repetitive emulation, it’s how we are wired), is a kind of harm.

    Is there any such thing as “make believe,” any more than there is any such thing as an “externality”?

    Now I return to Consumer’s sense that consuming pornography does men a kind of harm. It does them a kind of harm in the same way that playing cowboys and indians does a kind of harm to privileged little white kids who are obediently training themselves to be racists. It is a repetitive conditioning — not merely repetitive but in many cases obsessive and addictive — and what you take into your brain through your eyes and ears is just as important as what you let into your stomach through your mouth. It is voluntary self-programming in the belief-system of patriarchy, the sexuality of domination and misogyny, the cult of the Almighty Penis and its rigid [ahem] dogma. The cult whose conditioning leads to the kind of unexamined misogyny and phatic utterance that we’ve been deconstructing of late. The cult of male supremacy. Brainwashed into place by reciting ritualistic, repetitive woman-hating words and phrases and images of female submission and male dominance through thousands of orgasms in a lifetime.

    So I think if a sexual partner invites us to enact or reproduce a cultural pattern that reinforces and trains us in some kind of oppressive ideology — as oppressors I mean — if we’re white, some fantasy or activity that reinforces and trains up our racism; if we’re male, some fantasy or activity that keys into our male supremacy preconditioning and reinforces and trains up those patterns (already there, acculturated from birth), then it’s doing us a kind of harm. We don’t have to “second-guess” the other person or try to figure out if they really know what is good for them, or whether they are really enjoying it or just the victim of false consciousness. All we have to know is that it is not good for us, that it will tend to undo whatever work we’re trying to do to pry loose the grip of those ugly belief systems on our own brains.

    Thus I think that men cannot dodge their responsibility and say, “But my girlfriend likes me to play rough,” or “But she wanted me to do [whatever].” Because whatever she wanted or didn’t want, there’s still the issue of our responsibility for the state of our own souls or consciences or whatever you want to call it… and our own resistance to The Man.

    If you earnestly, seriously do not wish to play the piano, then it’s best not to practise 3 hours a day. And if you earnestly, seriously, do not wish to be sexist or racist, then it seems to me very unwise to practise (rehearse, enact) sexism or racism. Even playing “silent piano” on a mock keyboard, or playing a cheesy little plastic electronic board, is a way of training and internalising the layout and the symbology and the whole-body reflexes of piano playing. Even playing “make-believe” patriarchy, enacting “rape fantasies,” playing at dominating, playing cheesy little plastic scenarios that only imitate real rape, real domination, real pain… to me seems like a way to practise and rehearse and train our brains in the same old patterns… the patterns that as leftists, radicals, social justice workers, we’re consciously trying to change… patterns of cruelty or instrumentality when we are struggling towards kindness and intersubjectivity.

    The paradox of the kids playing Cowboys and Indians is that it’s all make-believe and no one really gets shot or killed. And yet the racism isn’t make-believe, the racism is real. And the training in racism is real — real and deadly earnest.

    I think in the end the person with oppressive power in potentia (someone with social privilege/rank who is trying to be less oppressive) has to follow two lines at once: when the oppressed person says, “Hey, that’s oppressive,” we have to take this seriously and believe it and examine it carefully. But when the oppressed person says “Hey, it’s OK, it’s no big deal, I’m fine with that,” then we still have to examine it carefully and try to figure out what our own ethical stance is on the matter, and follow our conscience even if someone seems to be giving us a free pass for the moment.

    And btw, I think the Coke/Twinkie analogy I used earlier is treacherous. I did not mean to imply that men are like sugar-rushing kids, not responsible for their own actions, and that women who encourage men to enact patriarchal scenarios are in any way responsible; we are all responsible for our own actions. I was thinking more about what goes on inside our heads, in light of what I just said about training and rehearsing and the function of play in acculturating primates including humans. As a Clueless Gringa struggling with my own racism, there is no way in hell I would ever indulge in “race play” (as some sex-liberals like to call it) — sexual fantasising or role playing — hingeing on any racist scenario. Even if a person of colour told me it was OK, or that it turned them on, I still have my own struggle with The Man and all his works… I’d have to say, “Sorry, can’t do that.” Not because I’m second-guessing them on what’s OK for them or what it means to them; because I know what’s not good for me and what it means to me. Even if that other person trusted me that much — that somehow we could play out some racist fantasy and miraculously it would not activate any real racism inside me — I don’t trust myself that much. I don’t know if that makes sense (it’s late, I’m tired, yada yada). But it’s how I see it at this point in my thinking…

    18 November 2006, 3:50 am

  67. Stan:

    More.
    Mine.
    Now.

    Not sure this is human nature, either. We associated these with childhood, when I was growing up… with immaturity. That was when the system demanded thrift and humility from its laboring classes, and there was a culture that relfected this. (It was the pre-Nixonian, pre-Vietnam, “productive” Keynesian economy) More, Mine, Now were those demanding behaviors that eventually came to be associated also with adolescence, which is a relatively recent phase in human society, created by age segregation in schools. The notion is foreign to, say, Haitian peasants living in the countryside.

    Now, as the US and other industrial metropoles are operating as the consumption machines within the global capitalist economy, we have seen the culture come to celebrate acquisitive selfishness; and advertizing promote the idea that this is a rebellious stance against being uptight. Hedonism is part of this operant conditioning posing as somehow revolutionary. (As De points out, we are also conditioned to believe that consumer-hedonism is the polar opposite of reactionary Christianity, or whatever, in a construction that is pure false dichotomy… but then, the vast majority of folks don’t know what a fasle dichotomy is.)

    The majority of our consumption is now of things we don’t really need. Marketing is a bigger and bigger share of corporate budgets, because we have drifted into demand-production to prevent an overaccumulation of money-capital. We are now incessantly bombarded with messages developed by marketing psychologists to want MORE cars, tech-gadgets, sex, and also — with insecurity as the marketing hook — to market ourselves as sexaul commodities, or risk losing social esteem. In fact, the very insecurity created by late-capitalist patriarchy, with its ever more extreme disenchantments and atomization, has become the basis of many marketing appeals. Our very identities have become something we see as commodities, something we can buy, a selection along a department store shelf all laid out for us; and this is what liberalism calls… freedom.

    18 November 2006, 9:04 am

  68. Julio:

    DeAnander

    > I don’t know if that makes sense

    Yes. Thanks. Good stuff.

    18 November 2006, 12:29 pm

  69. DeAnander:

    I was musing this morning on the essentialist premise of sex-liberalism, i.e. that sexual arousal and orgasm are somehow more inherently authentic and authenticating than any other social experience. This is the nub of the argument that ‘whatever feels good must be good for you’. We know in the case of food (as I went into at some lenghts above) this is not true. We know that in the case of drugs this is not true. We know that politicians make false promises. We on the Left are highly suspicious of other subjective/hedonic experiences of great physical and emotional power, such as the emotional and physical rush of a mass rally, or religious ecstasy.

    Yet we are stuck with this assumption that the experience of arousal, tumescence (whether male or female), and orgasm is some kind of touchstone of authenticity and an accurate indicator of unsullied Good. That sexual consciousness cannot be false consciousness. Everything else can be — the easy appeal of racism and xenophobia, the heady rush of power over others (so long as it is class or race power, we can critique it level-headedly), the lump in the gut and the throat of patriots as they salute the flag or soldiers as they hear Taps played over the grave of a brother officer, all these we can dismiss as cultural products, from our superior Left/Englightenment point of view as Marx-literate anthropologists with an understanding of structural power. We can even feel them ourselves and yet retain a split consciousness, standing aside far enough to recognise our own emotional response as acculturated — we can even attempt to change our emotional responses in resistance to our acculturation.

    If we are anthropologically literate we know that food tastes and preferences are acculturated and that people from other cultures can genuinely enjoy foods that we would find revolting (rotted fish, insects, sheep’s eyeballs, whatever) and vice versa. But we (speaking as the Left collectively, not for myself personally) refuse to believe that sexual sensation and sexual preferences are somehow ultimately authentic, not cultural. All critters have to eat, yet we understand that food cultural behaviours which seem so deep in us as to be innate are not really innate, but acculturated. All critters need to reproduce, and we somehow take that to mean that sexual behaviours in human culture are “natural”, or that those behaviours and tastes which exceed the minimum required for reproduction are somehow idiosyncratic, wholly personal, and not reflective of cultural patterns or imbued with cultural meaning.

    I am wondering whether this insistence on the authenticity of individual sexual experience is not just a smoke screen for male supremacy, a desperate defence of The Man behind the curtain — but a reflection of our culture’s shift to individualistic rather than communitarian values. We have awarded the stamp of unquestioned authenticity to the most private and individual of experiences, reversing a centuries’ old trend in European thought. There was a time when the state of the individual soul, and the conformity of the comportment of the body and of intimate life with the “higher law” of religious faith, was the fitting subject of personal concern and public discourse; but the institutions of collective culture were beyond critique. We seem to have turned the model on its head and now have no faith and much critique of all collectivist institutions (not in itself an unhealthy development), but we have drawn the fence of the Sacred around personal consumption and sensation, refusing to admit moral critique into the realm of the private experience.

    And I keep doing sloppy typing in this thread. I said above I did not mean to imply that men are like sugar-rushing kids, not responsible for their own actions, and that women who encourage men to enact patriarchal scenarios are in any way responsible
    and this was sloppy. I was in a hurry to wind up the post and get some other writing done. what I meant, in fuller exposition, was that a woman who invites, say, two male friends (or hired men) to perform a DP with her, on a clear mutual understanding that this is for her pleasure, is not “responsible” for the behaviour of those men if they take advantage of that situation and rape her, doing by force other things not agreed upon or whatever. they are responsible for their own behaviour.

    I do think (as a feminist) that this woman has responsibility for her own actions, however. she has responsibility for reinforcing in the minds of those men, pornographic fantasies that hurt women in general. this is a small responsibility no doubt — one woman’s contribution to the multi-$B brainwashing industry working 24×7x365 to teach men to despise women is about as powerful as one person’s vote in a corrupt Republic, or even less so. but we are all responsible for our own actions and I think when we live in a culture where rape and male supremacy are hegemonic, we bear the responsibiity of resistance in our personal behaviour as well as in organised and public life.

    I may be on thin ice here, but I have always felt that to “play” with sexual violence as a bedroom game is not dissimilar from telling misogynist or racist jokes in company — even when men tell misogynist jokes with no woman present, when whitefolks tell a racist/ethnic joke with no one of the offended ethnicity present, there is moral responsibility. it is to make light of something very serious, to take profound human suffering and turn it into a joke or a toy. it encourages a dismissal or “externalising” of human suffering, a smothering of empathy. or so I read it.

    the best parallel I can come up with is that highly-recognised and sacralised human tragedy, the Holocaust. among most civilised people there is an understanding that the Holocaust is simply Not Funny. and I think most people would be quite disturbed if a lover or friend suggested playing “Nazi camp guard and Jewish prisoner” in bed. we have managed to mark this particular epochal human brutality and atrocity in our collective brain as a Genuine Tragedy, so that it is not OK to laugh at, or make a plaything of, the suffering of European Jewry under the Nazi regime.

    the suffering of women as a global class under male supremacy has not attained this status. not for the population in general, not for left/liberal/radicals, not even for most women. it is still “OK” to play with and make a joke of the brutality of men towards women, to play with our own acculturated sexism. it is still OK to worship the erect penis and find the image of rape sexually thrilling, when it is distinctly off-colour to worship the swastika or get all hot under the collar watching movies of Nazi rallies or find an image of Treblinka sexually thrilling.

    and before everyone goes ballistic about comparing an erect penis to a swastika, I would remind my learned friends that the swastika wasn’t invented by the Nazis, and had other meanings before they co-opted it and associated it with a culture of totalitarian State violence and racism. the erect penis could have any number of meanings in human life, but under patriarchy both historical and contemporary it has heavy symbolic meaning as a weapon, an instrument of punishment, a symbol of male supremacy. those meanings have been so strongly imposed by the “Thousand Year Reich” of male domination over women that I think as a cultural symbol — semiotically — in the pornographic idiom that dominates our discourse and our sexual culture, it has become troubling in a way legitimately comparable to the swastika. and as long as men (and women) continue to say Fuck You as a threat, an insult, a put-down, fighting words, I think we can assume that we have not yet redeemed that symbol… and that if we take social justice seriously, we have some responsibility on the micro-level of our own little lives, to dissociate and distance (as much as we can) our actual sex, actual penises, actual orgasms, from that semiotic nexus of male power, rape, war, injury, harm, etc which pornography so openly celebrates.

    but then I cut my eye-teeth in radical feminism, in which we admitted that the personal is always political and vice versa.

    18 November 2006, 8:57 pm

  70. DeAnander:

    Oddly , what you quote above doesn’t actually say that the woman enjoys being hurt or is being hurt. I might regret saying this , but it is not entirely unthinkable that having two you know what’s filled at the same time _is_ pleasurable for some women, not painful, as long as its not too rough. I really don’t know. A lot of it says she loves doing things which are conventionally considered “nasty”. It is extraordiarily I don’t know what to be unaware of the psychological impact of “nasty” in the sexual context.

    Charles is really batting zero on this thread so far, I’m afraid. The naivete of this passage is imho staggering.

    This “as long as it’s not too rough” bit is a red herring. Does the word “gentleness” appear anywhere in the porno soundbites? Does “plowing a chick’s ass” sound gentle or caring? Does the use of words like “chick” and “slut” suggest respect or affection? Does “anal whore” suggest respect or affection or friendship? Roughness — the treating of a woman’s body brutally and without care, causing damage — is the essence of the imagery being peddled to the male consumer. We would like to think that, as in a Hollywood movie, the stunts are carefully faked so that no actual women are harmed; but we know from personal testimony that this is not the case, that porn actresses are treated roughly, hurt, and used with disrespect in the making of pornography (except for a few high-profile “porn starlets”, and even they often endured a rough start on their way to the limelight). So enough with this “as long as it’s not too rough” temporising with the well-documented brutality of the industry and its marketing of that brutality to the consumer.

    Now let’s ask why the pornographer’s blurb — which should be read with the same cynical media-savvy eye that we would bring to the J Perelman catalogue or what Pollan calls “supermarket pastoral” ad copy in Whole Foods Market, or the Op/Ed page of the WSJ, since all three are the product of marketing departments trying to sell us Product to make money for capitalist bosses — talks about the woman liking to do something nasty.

    Let’s ask why this blurb doesn’t read “Watch these dirty boys get into something really nasty with a willing woman! They put their sensitive little dicks in the most dangerous and dirty places! These boys will take any risk! They just love doing something really nasty!” First, because despite the strong homoerotic (gangbang, heterosexually-acceptable male-male sexual intimacy) context of the content, the male gaze is supposed to focus on the woman, not on the men — just as the juridical treatment of rape focuses relentlessly on the woman’s behaviour, morals and reputation and not on the male perp. It is the woman who is described as a slut and accused of doing something “nasty” or “dirty.” The men’s agency is invisible and there is no judgment or description of anything they are doing.

    Do we really need an exegesis of the meaning of accusing another person of enjoying their own defeat/humiliation? What did it mean when Rummy and his coterie insisted that the Iraqis would greet the invading American occupiers with rice and flowers? How did that pornographic fantasy compare with the real feelings of real Iraqis? What beliefs about American power and status, and “lesser races” submission and obedience to American will, did that Rumsfeldian fantasy imply and express? what does it mean, the durable male fantasy that once a rape is initiated, at some point the woman will swoon and start to adore her violator? Why is it a standard jokey tag in contemporary conversation to say “You love it, you know you do,” to tease or put down another person — a pornographic tag line, domesticated into common parlance?

    The only insult greater than raping another person is to accuse them of enjoying the rape. It’s the ultimate measure of being Unmanly — not only to be dominated but to enjoy being dominated, not only to be penetrated (the ultimate fear of most men, as I think is clearly indicated by analysis of male speech patterns, homophobia etc) but to enjoy being penetrated. Not only to be penetrated violently and brutally but to enjoy it. Not only to be penetrated unnaturally or multiply, but to enjoy it. That is the ultimate shaming of the victim, and thus the relentless insistence in pornographic fantasy on “making her admit that she loves it.” A previously obscure form of abuse was popularised by the release of the infamous ‘Deep Throat’ movie which took that “she loves it” fantasy to science fiction extremes by inventing a woman with a clitoris in the back of her throat, who would actually enjoy being fucked to pharyngeal depth. A puerile and absurd fantasy, a vastly popular movie, and a new “extreme sex” benchmark which added to the burden of expectation and obligation placed on women by male lovers and husbands demanding More. And all based on this durable “she loves it” fantasy/excuse/insult meme.

    The accusation that the woman “likes it nasty” is the punchline of the misogynist joke. “She likes it nasty” is a way to project male demands and desires onto women, to project men’s need to dominate women onto women. It is the gender version of the old British colonial’s (itself also highly gendered) conviction that the natives “appreciate a firm hand,” that the natives are grateful for colonial rule, and — this is the cream — that this gratitude and submissiveness is the clinching evidence of their inferiority and the whiteman’s superiority. The only “natives” the British in India ever respected iirc were the Afghans who never submitted to their rule. The invading British hated the Afghans and fought them brutally, but there was a sneaking admiration for the “manliness and courage of the Northern tribesman” in their literature that contrasts vividly with their lofty masculine contempt for the “weak, hysterical, effete, soft” Indian native of the subcontinent.

    If the connection between the fantasy of happy Iraqis greeting the invading Americans with flowers and kisses, and the fantasy of women lining up for the privilege of being fucked by two guys at once, isn’t obvious, I really don’t know how to make it any clearer…

    BTW, the one and only only DP I ever knew of or heard about personally happened — I think — to someone I vaguely knew in high school. She was exceptionally pretty in a placid, strawberry-blonde All American California Girl way, she was also developmentally disabled — what in those dark ages we called “mildly retarded”; and two football jocks got her drunk at a party. Or so the story came, via high school gossip, to me. I was fifteen and a bit fuzzy on the details of het intercourse in general at the time, so I wasn’t at all sure what I was being told; it was only years later that I figured out what the sniggering tittle-tattle might actually have meant, and was struck with retroactive horror and pity (and retroactive shame that I was too young, naive, and clueless to know that I was being told about a drink-rape and therefore did nothing, informed no one, didn’t even approach the girl and ask her if she was OK or needed help). I did have a college roommate who was definitely more heavily into boys and screwing than average — she had three simultaneous boyfriends — but she never invited them over at the same time. In fact I think it amused her to make sure that none of them knew about, or was quite sure about, the other two. Now that was a woman — within the confines of patriarchy — who was exercising some localised power. In a petty way of course, hardly revolutionary power, but I don’t think anyone was taking advantage of her.

    18 November 2006, 9:37 pm

  71. Sam:

    Your writing rocks my world, De. Thank you.

    19 November 2006, 2:21 am

  72. peggy:

    Here’s a clip from a book I have almost finished :-) Thought it might be vaguely relevant to this discussion.

    **************

    Ashis Nandy (2004) argues that violent oppression of children by adults is the prototype of violent oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. In the modern world, the process of transformation from childhood to adulthood is construed as a form of progress, applied to the individual life-cycle. The child is imagined as undeveloped and primitive, the adult as developed and civilized. On the basis of this model, colonial powers justified their violent oppression of the colonized as benign paternalism, that would develop and improve the colonized, who were seen as both “childlike” and “childish.”

    “The former [the childlike] is circumscribed by those aspects of childhood which ‘click’ with adult concepts of the child; the latter [the childish] by those which are independent of adult constructions of the child. Childlikeness is valued, sometimes even in adults. Childishness is frowned upon, sometimes even in children” ( pages 423-424).

    The construction of the colonized as children, Nandy continues, is not only a matter of racism. More deeply, it conveys “a certain terror of childhood … [the sense] that children could be dangerous. … [Children] symbolize, once we have seen through our constructions of childhood, a persistent, living, irrepressible criticism of our ‘rational’, ‘normal’, ‘adult’ visions of desirable societies. … Colonial ideology required savages to be children, but it also feared that savages could be like children.” (page 425)

    Nandy argues further that the construction of both children and the colonized as potentially dangerous savages, legitimized the infliction of devastatingly cruel and violent punishment upon both, as the only way to discipline and improve them. Such habits of thought and action have not entirely died away.

    In the concluding paragraph of his article (page 439) Nandy asserts. “The ideology of adulthood has hidden the fact that children see through our hypocrisy perfectly and respond to our tolerance and respect fully.”

    ************************

    Nandy, Ashis. 2004. “Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood.” In Bonfire of Creeds: The Essential Ashis Nandy by Ashis Nandy, 423-439. New Delhi: Oxford University Press

    19 November 2006, 3:06 am

  73. Lara:

    I’m no intellectual feminist scholar, so will refrain from entering that arena.

    What I am is a woman, who has made a considerable effort to explore my sexuality, where I found much to my surprise that, under appropriate and intimate circumstances, I, in fact very much did, and probably would again, enjoy making love to two men.

    I had experienced vaginal orgasm, but only if it was accompanied by clitoral stimulation.

    On the other hand, with anal penetration my orgasm was much more overwhelming and required no clitoral stimulation.

    So, in answer to Mr. Jensen’s first question, my personal answer would be: No I do not think that being penetrated by two men, whose actions were focussed on both my and their enjoyment and intimacy, is inherently degrading.

    However, — as I read Mr. Jensen’s article – that was not the issue he was attempting to address. He was addressing the intention or the motive for reaching pleasure, as generated in the mind of the man, viewing DP in pornography.

    Personally, I found his argument rather convincing.

    Furthermore, I don’t think that just some or most, or X number of men get off on humiliating women. I think that:
    X number of women get off on humiliating men.
    X number of women get off on humiliating other women.
    X number of men get off on humiliating other men
    X number of muslims/Christians/…. Get off on humiliating other religions
    X number of whites/blacks/Asian…. Get off on humiliating other ethnicities
    X number of individuals get off on humiliating anyone else….

    MODERATOR’S INSERTED NOTE: I hope we don’t begin to see this a some Penthouse forum for voyeurs, so I am moderaitng ths in with some trepidation, and with my finger on the trigger. The other point that has to be made, with the kind of abstract equality implicit in the X remarks immediately above, is that this gives no account of social power. None. Zero.

    I think all of us can safely say that we have observed daily incidences where individuals (including, and most often ourselves) achieve a sense of intellectual, emotional, physical or sexual pleasure, by means of the exploitation of another being physically, emotionally, or sexually.

    Please note, My attempt here is not to legitimize or lessen the conclusions of Dr. Jensen related to the intentions of degradation by these men, in their own minds. Only to possibly go a little deeper, personally, into my own black hole/dark side: urges to degrade/humiliate others.

    Like most people, I was taught in school and at home, and via the marketplace to anticipate what other people expect and to perform accordingly, regardless of whether it made sense to me or had anything to do with what I wanted. There was a strong taboo against telling the truth about how I actually felt and what I actually thought, and strong reinforcement for doing what I imagined my peers and elders expected of me (In South Africa that was to be a good little ‘white’ (read pure) girl, to stay away from the natives, who were savages, and to know that I was ‘superior’. I was not to question the political, economic or social system, only to appreciate it’s benefits.)

    For most of the time I was convinced that this performance was very important; and when I now and then questioned it, there was always someone on hand, with either the carrot of ‘don’t forget you will lose your white benefits’, or the stick of ‘shame’ you disgrace to ‘whiteness’ (to put it simplistically).

    Frankly, constantly performing required huge amounts of energy, and wore me out. Physically I simply could not produce the amount of energy, my performance was demanding! I experienced my own inner “Peak Oil” crash!.  And quite an emotional, psychological, sexual crash it was!

    Since then I have, and continue to, depending on how embroiled I get in prosletysing my ‘story’ about the right or wrong beliefs to adhere to, have additional “Peak Oil” crash déjà vu! ‘s

    These are moments when, for some or other reason, due to some event, circumstance, statement or action, I experience a surge of angry energy, which wants to experience an intellectual, emotional, psychological or sexual ‘surge’ at another’s degradation or dehumanisation. I want to ‘humiliate’ them, and get a surge of ‘YEAH’ from it, because they just don’t ‘get it’ the way I do, or for thousands of other – in my mind, very justified reasons!

    Generally, when I don’t veto the ‘urge’ to experience my ‘energy (emotional / intellectual / sexual, etc. superiority) surge’ and actually experience it, feeling the ecstasy of the put-down, revenge or humiliation of the other person, and I later find the time to come to my petrocollapse senses, I confront the following reality in the mirror:

    I recognize that bragging about being superior by virtue of the humiliation / inferiority of the other individual is not very superior, and even if it is, so what? I am equal as a being to other beings. When I brag about being better than, smarter than, or superior to others, or behave in a manner indicating my superiority by degrading or dehumanising them, it is not my being I am referring to, but my beliefs. I come to understand that the beliefs I continue to generate in my own life experience are just more beliefs, which includes the belief in my own superiority. I start losing faith in my own ego. I begin to see through my mind: I am still attached to a few fundamentalist beliefs I call my own, one of which is about my so-called superiority.

    My tentative conclusions not nearly as eloquently elaborated as Dr. Jensen’s, and others above:

    1. It is in my moments of experiencing a ‘belief’ in my inferiority, that I attempt to emotionally, intellectually or otherwise project an image of my superiority.

    2. IF a world with a greater degree of gender / racial / religious etc. voluntary and freely given equality is a factor within my existential purpose (my system of thought and action that offers me a frame of orientation and an object of devotion), giving my life meaning: then I must begin with deconstructing my ‘urges’ for sexual / emotional / psychological / intellectual / economic and other ‘superiorities’, and notice how I enjoy the ‘surge’ of humiliating others, and begin the SuperiorHumiliator Anonymous (Belief in my Superiority/Enjoy others Humiliation) journey.

    3. Step One: Good Evening Everyone: My name is Lara and I am Addicted to my Superiority enjoying the Humiliation of others.

    19 November 2006, 6:08 pm

  74. peggy:

    Lara, your mind has been so colonized by patriarchal white South Africa that I you can hardly see. Get yourself into other environments. There are white South African women who have fought and won against the colonization of their own minds, and are working with blacks, learning from blacks, how to make that country a better place. But you are not even trying. Now, here is some advice:

    Step One: Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You were and remain a privileged and spoiled little girl.

    Step Two: Do not imagine that some Higher Power is needed for you to overcome your “addiction” (this is what the AA program teaches people to believe).

    Step Three: Do not normalize your own perversity, as when you say: “I think all of us can safely say that we have observed daily incidences where individuals (including, and most often ourselves) achieve … pleasure, by means of the exploitation of another being …”

    Step Four: Do not excuse your oppression of others by claiming victim status. So you were socialized as a child to believe certain things that were wrong and to act in certain ways that were wrong. So was I. So was just about everybody. You think you are special because of that?

    Step Five: Forget about yourself. Pay attention to other people: those you enjoy humiliating. Catch yourself and stop it. Apologize and mean it.

    Step Six: See clearly that you are not in any way superior to others. You are inferior to most people because of your pathetic, transparent need to put others down. Most people do not have this need, and you are inferior to all those other people. You are a narcissistic little bully.

    Step Seven: Learn genuine humility, and practice it.

    There are no more steps.

    19 November 2006, 8:37 pm

  75. seb:

    Superiority Complex: projecting your feelings of inferiority onto others so as to feel superior to them.

    You described it to a T. What gives?

    20 November 2006, 10:50 am

  76. Lara:

    Peggy,

    Lara, your mind has been so colonized by patriarchal white South Africa that you can hardly see.

    Really???

    Get yourself into other environments.

    Get myself into other environments!? I left south africa 20 years ago, spent 16 years travelling, where I lived among many others, China, Russia, US (Berkeley, VA, NYC, etc), UK, Skipper a yacht around the Mediteranean for 1 year, and sailed around the Indian Ocean, Med and Carribean for 6 years, as a deckhand, cook, etc.

    There are white South African women who have fought and won against the colonization of their own minds, and are working with blacks, learning from blacks, how to make that country a better place.

    Peggy, who said I was talking about being superior to blacks? My husband is black! Yes we – and liberal whites especially – are excruciatingly aware of whites who feel superior to blacks, but many times they are totally in denial about their own addiction to superiority over ‘right-wingers’, or ‘conservatives’ or you name it. My point was that superiority which manifests by men against women, or by whites against blacks, and so on, are simply superiority manifesting against generalised other groups of persons. We wish to take a look at other people’s addiction to their superiority, and judge it (which in and of itself is an attempt to make ourselves superior to them), but we don’t wish to take a look at our own.

    But you are not even trying.

    Indeed! I’m not! I spent 14 months in a South African prison, on behalf of black equality for nothing! Hmmmm Interesting! Oh well, if that’s your conclusion, no problem! :-)

    Now, here is some advice: Step One: Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You were and remain a privileged and spoiled little girl.

    A victim! Really! Far from it my dear Peggy!! I am amazed how those who intellectualise an abstract concept, such as ‘freedom’, sometimes fail to notice when another has in fact experientially internalized the very concept they themselves so dream of. I stopped being a victim a long time ago. But you are welcome to your conclusion, if you like it. Perhaps if you had read my post from another perspective, you may have read a total different truth into it. All observations are after all reflections of specific levels of consciousness and valid only at that level.

    Step Two: Do not imagine that some Higher Power is needed for you to overcome your “addiction” (this is what the AA program teaches people to believe).

    Oh my dear, it appears you have a pretty stereotypical view of ‘white south African women’! ;-) The reference to ‘AA’ was a personal growth analogy, which it appears you took highly literally. No problem. ;-) Shit happens.

    A possibility: I at least confronted (many years ago) that I had an addiction. You are still in major denial. But perhaps I am incorrect!

    Step Four: Do not excuse your oppression of others by claiming victim status. So you were socialized as a child to believe certain things that were wrong and to act in certain ways that were wrong. So was I. So was just about everybody. You think you are special because of that?

    No, I don’t think I’m special comparatively to anyone else’s socialisation. In fact my point was that we have all been socialized to believe certain things, which if we take a look inside ourselves we find were not our truth, and which we then confront and change. My point was that I changed, and continue to change by continuing to notice such ‘perverse’ (your word) thoughts, and by not acting on them, simply noticing them and letting them go. That is the way in which I changed, not be denying that I never have them, and pretending to others that I am somehow superior, because I never have such thoughts. I still do, now and then, much less than before, and I hardly ever act on them, but that does not mean that they don’t appear in my thought patterns.

    Step Five: Forget about yourself. Pay attention to other people: those you enjoy humiliating. Catch yourself and stop it. Apologize and mean it.

    My tentative conclusion from your above statement: You would make a good liberal thought police woman! Many liberal do-gooder lefties indeed would!

    Personally, I’d rather have honest sincere conversations with people, who can admit their flaws, and their perversions and work together to interrupt each other, than spend time with a bunch of liberal do-gooder thought police, paying attention to other people, we covertly and – in denial – enjoy humiliating, by telling htem how ‘wrong’ their behaviour is. But that’s just me.. for now!

    Step Six: See clearly that you are not in any way superior to others. You are inferior to most people because of your pathetic, transparent need to put others down. Most people do not have this need, and you are inferior to all those other people. You are a narcissistic little bully.

    Any projection going on above??? Perhaps? Feel any thoughts of superiority when you were writing step 7 Peggy?

    Step Seven: Learn genuine humility, and practice it.
    Should I learn genuine humility, and how to practice it, from you perhaps?

    There are no more steps.

    Perhaps not for you…. For me, life is a neverending journey of discovery and there is world of unknown steps of learning, growth, experiencing and noticing remaining to be observed, experienced and learnt…. :-)

    No doubt we shall bump into each other again, in this or another lifetime, and till then, I wish you all the best.

    21 November 2006, 1:41 pm

  77. Lara:

    Oh and last thing Peggy,

    You said, referring to me:
    You are inferior to most people because of your pathetic, transparent need to put others down. . Most people do not have this need, and you are inferior to all those other people..

    Question: Are you serious when you say that most people do not have this need to put others down.

    If so, approximately what percentage of persons would you say would comprise most?

    21 November 2006, 1:48 pm

  78. splatto:

    I just read all the posts in this thread. It’s a very good discussion. One bit in particular that I found good was someone’s response to Charles. Part of me doesn’t want to bring it up because one of the last things I want to do is encourage him to post here again. As unintentionally humorous as his writing is it’s not really worth it.

    However, he and for that matter a lot of other people keep asking the question “but Jensen says he doesn’t care what women think about DP, isn’t that sexist?”

    It’s kind of like Randal (in the generally god-awful Clerks 2) accusing Dante of being racist because Dante told Randal he couldn’t “reclaim a word” for the black community because he wasn’t black. Randal’s response (which was intended by the film makers to highlight his stupidity) was some along the lines of “well now who’s racist, you’re telling me what I can and can’t do because of the color of my skin.” I see the same stupidity in the question posed by Charles and chums .

    There are lots of reasons why this line of questioning but many others have already dealt with it. I just want to point out something I noticed in the hopes it might be beneficial to someone reading.

    I don’t believe that reclaiming words is an effective political strategy. The reason I believe this is because of the reason why I am apposed to the use of certain dehumanizing terms “slut,” “fag,” and “nigger”

    for example. The reason why I am apposed to their use is not because they are “rude” or “crude” but because the way they dehumanize oppressed groups with in our community helps to perpetuate the oppression of those communities. “Hadji” helps the war go round.

    The tactic of reclaiming the word (having the oppressed use words traditionally used against them, amongst themselves (most notoriously “nigger”) is in my opinion based on the false assumption that the problem with these words is that they hurt the feelings of the oppressed. If the oppressed could only stop “getting offended” at their use then there wouldn’t be a problem. But this is wrong. These words will continue top be damaging for as long as the oppressors use them AMONGST THEMSELVES to dehumanize the oppressed. I do not wish to down play the damage done to oppressed people when they are assaulted with these words, but want to highlight their other sinister use as well.

    This might explain why it doesn’t matter in terms of structured power and oppression whether or individual women find pleasure in the production of propaganda which is used AMONGST MEN to dehumanize women.

    Here’s a little skit I wrote about what I think…

    Oppressive words are a weapon that the oppressor uses against us. Let’s imagine what would happen if we applied the same tactics people are using with language to traditional arms.

    Reclaim Revolutionary: The oppressor shoots us, so we’ve “reclaimed” his guns and now we shoot each other!

    War Reporter: Why the fuck would you do that!?

    Reclaim Revolutionary: Well, it makes it hurt less when the oppressor shoots us.

    War Reporter: You don’t think it will give people the idea that you like being shot?

    Reclaim Revolutionary: Um… well it’s different when you get shot by a friend.

    War Reporter: But before you “reclaimed” the guns you weren’t getting shot by your friends. Now you’re getting shot at by your friends and your oppressor.

    Reclaim Revolutionary: But here’s the trick you see. Eventually the oppressor will see that we don’t mind being shot and then he’ll stop shooting us.

    War Reporter: Some would argue that the oppressor never gave two fucks what you thought about being shot and was doing it not to hurt your feelings, but to oppress you. Don’t you think it would be advantageous to not hurt so many of your comrades?

    Reclaim Revolutionary: Look, we’re in the middle of a very busy revolution, we don’t have time to keep track of everybody we shoot and everybody we don’t shoot.

    War Reporter: So what about the people who are hurt by being shot from either side? Do they simply need to learn to like being shot?

    Reclaim Revolutionary: Yes.

    War Reporter: Even by revolutionary leaders?

    Reclaim Revolutionary: Especially by revolutionary leaders.

    War Reporter: Thank you for you time.

    The reclaim revolutionary opens fire on the war reporter. War reporter slumps forward and bleeds to death.

    Reclaim Revolutionary: Jesus, you’re so up tight.

    22 November 2006, 11:43 pm

  79. Yolanda Carrington:

    Splatto…your example above was perfect. I couldn’t have said it any better myself. :)

    23 November 2006, 2:15 am

  80. v:

    splatto - thank you for that!

    23 November 2006, 9:08 am

  81. Required:

    This is gonna sound really weird but Required and Splatto are the same person, me! I have been trying for days to get that thing to post but it hasn’t been working. Stan has more than a couple emails sitting in his inbox about it. I finally went to another computer and it worked fine. Trouble is I got into that weird superstitious thing people who are crap with computers sometimes do, where you think it could be anything that is making it not work. I though it could be my name, for some reason, so I changed it. But I wasn’t really meant to be on the computer I used so I didn’t have time to fix it. I still can’t post on FS at home but I’m back on another computer where I can.

    Any way, thanks V and Yolanda. I don’t really know V, but I’ve read Yolanda’s blog and I’m a blushing a little at praise from such a smart person. I originally wrote the skit when I got into an argument with a LGBTI activist, she actually tried to argue that gay men had reclaimed “slut.” I thought, “yeah, and het white men have reclaimed “whore,” “queer,” “fag,” “nigger,” and “gook.” She used every excuse, (except the friends one (which is common none the less)) that the Reclaim Revolutionary used. On other issues she was very good politically but just not language. To me it seemed like her reluctance to examine the nature of this language was that she didn’t want to be seen as uncool in the LGBTI scene because it would make people less able to relate to her. I didn’t live where she lived so maybe she was right. You got to pick your battles to a certain extent. But she didn’t just not call people out on it when they used that language but used it her self, which to me if someone won’t listen to you because you won’t call people “slut,” then that is an issue to address not ignore.

    As I said, I wrote this a while ago before I had really thought (wanted to) examine the word fuck. So it should probably read “never gave two shits.” You can hardly swear at all without resorting to mysoginy.

    23 November 2006, 10:24 pm

  82. Marilyn Farhat:

    I got back on this thread late:

    No one is denying that the commercialization of sex is degrading to women or sexist. I think some people here do not really listen to what others are saying and prefer to place labels on them. The issue of choice in DP is given to make the point that we cannot divest the individual from the culture and both influence each other. We are not mindless individuals who have total lack of control over our role in the process. Therein lies our salvation, through the ability to go against our cultural dictates and change. That is why people who have influenced society for the better tended to be outcasts because they violated the norms of what they perceived as wrong, sometimes to their own detriment. But they laid the groundwork for future generations to correct injustices. Writing from behind a computer screen late at night, unfortunately, may not always be the best way for effective communication. It can create misunderstanding and judgment about people without the proper facts. Jensen’s study, while posing a few good questions, did not address the heart of the problem and that is, how do you correct the notions held by both men and women about what is degrading to women how do you not beat up on the women in the process.

    Maybe it is my cultural background and personal experience that prompt me to feel very protective of my worth and the worth of other women. I cringe when I see women with money and intelligence, who cower when it comes to the issues of men and power. Many times they do not want to talk about it. It is difficult to go against your own group. How do we empower women, before they have been victimized, to identify the warning signs? How do you help women who have already been victimized to take control of their lives and not spiral into a world of addictions, self-mutilation, depression, apathy, oversexualization of self, and other ailments that come with being controlled and abused? How do we make it difficult for the abuser to abuse women and children?

    Most women have some degree of low self-esteem based on our past, and exacerbated by what we are told we are capable of. I am always talking to women I know about the importance of standing up for what we believe in. There is genuine fear of abandonment and loss of security if women do not tow the line. Many also believe that it is their role in life to be submissive. Many women will defer to men in areas not traditionally deemed a woman’s domain.

    As far as erotic literature and pornography material, if the material was designed to exploit women for economic or psychological reasons, then it is a rape issue and it is sexist because we only have men or women involved. One will tend to exercise power over the other exclusively and that power will HAVE to be gender based since the groups are gendered groups.

    However, this brings up another issue: the area of transgender behavior/exploitation/fetishization/eroticization and flaunting.

    That is a very serious and sad social problem that has many a transgender individual caught in moral, spiritual, and social dilemmas. It is a conflict between the biological and the social.

    We have gay pride annually in SLO one block from my house. I wonder how their sexual public displays fit into all this discussion. Included in that are the overtly public sexual displays of the attendees to prove that they are “proud” of their sexuality. If that is the case, can the same apply to heterosexual couples and groups? Maybe some of the feminists here can help out and talk about their approach to acknowledgment of one’s sexuality and how it is different from a highly sexualized show by females for a male audience? If a man dresses up in drag and flaunts his stuff while wearing tons of make-up and fake eyelashes, a girdle, black net pantyhose, high heels, humongous fake boobs, and a blond wig that puts the best hairdo to shame, does that mean the whole thing is sexist or does that make it is a matter of personal choice? Does it mean that women are being beat up on and exploited because a man chose to dress up and act like one? Is it soft porn? Or is it a “political statement?” Maybe it is all of the above? Maybe there is a psychological aspect of it that makes certain men fantasize about dressing up as women. You men out there, have you polled yourselves in secret and asked about your fantasies? Is one of your fantasies dressing up in drag? Have you seen the Mardi Gras and Christmas parades where many men dress up as women with scant or virtually no clothes, fake boobs and all? How does that all fit in the politics of power, control, and personal choice? Are there better less sexualized ways to promote justice for gay and transgender people? Could it also be that role play and role reversal is a reinforcement of the current system of power? How about the gay women who choose to dress in predominantly male attire? How does that reflect on their gender power or is it an identifying statement more than anything else? Is it that they wish to “jump” into another gender because it is a sign of power to take the role of the male in their particular relationship? Could heterosexual people have their own set of identifiers of their availability like the gay community does?

    There are many feminists out there, in their zeal to speak out against injustice, who get into the role of enforcer or judge about what EVERY woman out there wants. By denying women the ability to fight for their rights by placing them in such a helpless position, such feminists are contributing to the oppression of women.

    There are no easy answers to the question, but I think if women continue to wallow in their own victimization, they will add to the problem. I see rape and incest as serious issues that rob women of their lives, dignity and self-esteem. Usually those are the problems that start their demise. We have to make it really difficult for the abusers to abuse by making the punishment for such abuse harsher and more costly. That is the bare minimum though.

    26 November 2006, 4:10 pm

  83. Julian Real:

    Hi Consumer.

    I appreciate what you are saying and thank you for taking the time to express it.

    I am questioning, quite seriously, whether white men, of any ilk, can do much to save the world as women of Color experience it. (This is an assessment of location, structural, political location, not a commentary at all on pale male’s biology or souls.) My hunch, based on lots of living and information from folks (women and men) of many colors, is that white men cannot lead a movement out of whitemale supremacy. It keeps too many of the master’s tools in play and in war, and doesn’t even see the danger of doing this–let alone acknowledge that this is the case. The world of women of Color, globally, is largely if not entirely invisible to white men. How then can white men lead a movement to liberate women of Color?

    I now am almost entirely convinced that it is either ignorance or arrogance for us to think we can. (There many be other factors, such as delusion, too.)

    That’s the conclusion I have come to, which helps explain why making meaningful connection to politically active white men is no longer a central or even peripheral part of my political agenda. I will talk with my white male friends, of course. I love them and support them in their struggles to be humane, and they support my struggles to be humane, unless or until they see that I am serious about not respecting the authority of white men.

    I stand with radical women of Color, and all those others, including some white women, who, without publicly flinching, systematically betray the White Brotherhood–women who do their structural best to refuse to enable or apologize for whitemale supremacy, its actors and behaviors. I hold myself directly accountable to radical women of Color.

    What white men cannot do, it seems to me, is know what is wrong, or know what white men do–what we do–that is part of the problem, even those of us who are radical or Leftist, or whatever. We are a profoundly ignorant and arrogant bunch, us white guys, and so we continue to think we’ve got all the answers. “If only women of Color understood white-euro-male philosophy”, is one form of this dangerous nonsense. “If only white men would listen to radical women of Color, and be genuinely accountable to them” is my response to that.

    I support radical women of Color taking leadership, and will not, any longer, support any white man being in leadership or in other positions of prominence and power. That includes holding myself to those standards, of course. I will probably continue my activism in a supportive role, for the most part, and without a false and dangerous belief that I need white men as allies to do something useful, politically. I will keep writing, I will most likely never have a blog, I will most likely never publish a book, and I will instead support, nurture, and encourage the publishing of radical women of color’s written work, and their other radical actions to survive and, when possible, take down whitemale supremacy. I will also not hesitate to expose white men’s racism and sexism, publicly and unapologetically.

    White men are, structurally, evil. Our work, historically, guides too many human beings directly to hell (on Earth, or under it). I am not a theist as men I know define that term. No white male sky-gods inform my actions.

    I know enough about most of the key white men in “the feminist movement” and trust none of them to do right by women of Color. Nor do I trust myself to do right by women of Color, except in meaningful political friendship in which I am fully and directly accountable–each time I fuck up in stupid whiteboy ways, while learning, always learning more and more about what it means to be a white man, but not primarily from a whitemale vantagepoint. In this way I have the opportunity to be, interpersonally, if not structurally, an ally to radical women of Color.

    It is a dangerous, insideous lie that white men care about women of Color’s humanity–as defined by women of Color, not by white men. What white men care about, in my experience, is our whitemale supremacy-shaped worldviews, ideologies, feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and values.

    Peace after whitemale supremacy is dead, globally.

    Julian

    26 November 2006, 9:36 pm

  84. Consumer:

    Thanks for your comments Julian. Wow, I don’t know what to say. It seems to me that you’re writing off an entire demographic, and some of your conclusions seem extremely unfair. Let’s not forget that the moderator of this site is a white male, and I think we can all agree that he’s done a lot of educating and fighting for women and people of color. Hypothetically, had you met him 20 years ago when he was in the military and maybe had different views, would you have written him off as a mercenary of patriarchy, not worthy of engaging or educating? Knowing what you know now about the work he’s done and all he’s accomplished?

    It’s not that I don’t hear you about the evil things that white males have done/still do. History is filled with endless lists of atrocities and most of them are saturated in the blood of non-whites. And the system perpetuates that in order to retain the power dynamic. So I hear what you’re saying.

    But from a tactical standpoint, ignoring white males as potential allies renders your movement for justice powerless, imho. Not only is it unfair to write us all off, it’s self-destructive, to just bash us over the head with the we-hate-your-oppressive-masculinity shpeel. That pushes a huge number of people into one box, and turns them all unfairly into enemies. And we all know that white men with fragile egos do when they feel threatened. Much violence ensues. So I think yours is a disastrous stance to take. And it’s unfair to men.

    On that note, I’ve mentioned this earlier but I have never heard anyone on this site advocating some sort of constructive replacement for masculinity in its current manifestation. The result is that men often react or act as men would and then the posters here bash them for being, well, men.

    Don’t forget, men are under extreme pressure in this country to be strong and virile, to kick ass and make money. To win. It’s hammered into our skulls from the very beginning. So, understandably, when even a liberal-minded man like me reacts in what is perceived here to be a threatening and inherently male fashion, a way that is viewed to be harmful to women and people of color, then we tend to get bashed, written off or deleted. For being white. For being white men. But what would you have us be? You can’t take away “manhood” in the current paradigm without replacing it constructively with something else.

    I think a lot of people on this site don’t get this fundamental point.

    27 November 2006, 2:31 pm

  85. Stan:

    Julian, the direction of your questions has headed down a path of overarching essentialism and terminal moral simplicity. You have divided the world, literally, into good and evil, and from that entry point we inevitably isolate ourselves into a state of absolute paralysis.

    Who in the world do you think is listening to this? Who has talked about saving the world? We have spoken of political sruggle, but there is nary a gram of politics in your position. It is the purest, most unadulterated, and volunaristic idealism. You really need to revist your history, and not just to determine what has not been accomplished, but what has… and how.

    Being a member of an oppressed group seldom corresponds to a good understanding of the system that oppresses. There is no doubt that the oppressed know the experience of oppression, but that is not the same as an understanding of it. In most cases, almost all people internalize the dominant ideology all the way to their marrow; and it is through this lens that we interpret our experience.

    Moreover, oppressed groups who begin to contend against their oppression have always collaborated with class-traitors, gender-traitors, and race-traitors. Harriet Tubman spent as much time fund-raising with white abolitionists as she did guiding escaped slaves through the Maryland marshes.

    I am living in a household right now, in Raleigh NC, where two of us at home this minute are white, and three of us are African American. 30 years ago, in the same place, that would have guaranteed that we would be attacked by vandals and receive threatening mail and phone calls. I know that may not seem like the best of all possible worlds; but it’s a damn sight better than it used to be. The movement that made that possible had Black leadership, and it had white support, often with white leadership.

    The world you are apparently living in — where there is good and evil, and we have to choose sides — is a good deal less complex and dynamic than the one I live in, where poltics is about the struggle for power, and the relationship between the powerful and the powerless is dialectical and often complicated.

    In your imaginary world, there is some movement to liberate women of color. If you really see that, or any other efficacious social movement out there right now, give me directions: I want to join up somehow. If there is no real movement (the two women of color in the room 20 feet away haven’t heard of it, or felt compelled to enlist), then the idea that white men, or men, or anyone else might assume control over it seems a little dissociative.

    This is why I can’t imagine what you mean by your “political agenda.” There is nothing there. You have an idealized vision, not even a program, much less a program that translates into any practical form of struggle against any concrete aspect of existing social power.

    It reminds me of my argument with sectarian leftists who tell me that we shouldn’t look to Congress to get out of the Iraq war, because Congress is a ruling class establishment. But for those of us who have real live people we love who are at direct risk in this war, this kind of moralism is pretty hollow. If Congress doesn’t say so, then I need someone to explain tome exaclty how the troops get out… do they buy individual airline tickets, after exfiltrating to Syria?

    That where I am with this kind of moral posturing. We have substantial areas of agreement about gender, at least theoretically. But preaching is not politics. And poltics is not about good and evil, except at the most superficially polemical level.

    That’s what taking rhertorical stands is. It’s relatively easy to say, I stand with so-and-so. During the inital stages of the antiwar struggle — in 2003 —
    when we were trying to win over larger sections of the population to a position opposing the war, we had a section of the left that insisted on unfurling banners that said “We support the Iraqi Resistance!” in a military town, where we were trying to win support from military families. What did that banner mean? Were they going to organize a modern-day Abraham Lioncoln Brigade to join the Iraqi National Alliance? Of course not. It was a purely polemical position, with nothing concrete behind it, designed to demonstrate ther radical bona fides. When I spoke with an Arab leader in San Diego, he said that American radicals should be toning down that rhetoric, because greater opposition to the war, for any reason, provided more material support ot the resistance than these declarations… which drove people away from us.

    Your claim that “it is a dangerous, insideous lie that white men care about women of Color’s humanity–as defined by women of Color,” again fails to take into account the complexity of the real world. Like I said, there are two women of color right here, and I’ve been participating in their lives, as they have mine, for a minute or two.

    This kind of categorical moralism is a caricature of politics, and a recipe for paralysis. There is so much that is wrong with this that I’m not sure where to start, so this will have to do. I have to work now.

    27 November 2006, 8:13 pm

  86. Stan:

    Consumer,

    Masculinity doesn’t need to be replaced by anything. It’s not a real thing, like an auto part, that you can swap for a different one. It is a word, a linguistic marker, for a set of seemingly coherent behaviors related to the expectations placed on men as individuals to preserve the power of all men.

    None of these behaviors need replacement. I listed a few in the post on the Weaponized Phallus. For starters, just stop doing those, pasted in below. You won’t break down for lack of a replacement part. Then while you are working on that most excellent self-improvement plan, that can be accompanied by the general mantra — I will not be defensive — you can back out of the fray for a bit, and pick up some new books to read very carefully… books by women, about gender, that are enjoyable, illuminating, and engaging.

    Obviously, I don’t agree with Julian’s post, but for totally different reasons than you have. This business of feeling bashed is largely defensiveness… for which males are socialized to a very sophisticated degree. I hate to resort to past social movements again, but it’s the only analog that seems to penetrate this gender thing. Slave holders very much felt that they were under attack by abolitionists. When men are engaging in behaviors that devalue and bully women, women are not obliged to sit back and quietly be our Buddhas, guiding us to enlightenment. This shit is serious to them, and seriously hurts, and what we are supposed to be doing is figuring out how to get into the habit of taking it seriously ourselves.

    I’m not suggesting — as I think Julian is — that we all put on hair shirts. I don’t get that… at all. It’s a much simpler, less painful (though psychically very threatening to some) program I’m advocating. When you recognize a behavior that is an exercise of gendered power, then stop it. It’s okay to be wrong… until you realize it. Then you have to get right.

    Here’s that starter list:

    (1) Stop using gendered language thoughtlessly. There is a politics to language, and it is not just being “PC.” That term was invented by right-wingers to fight back against things like women’s studies, African American studies, and other non-white, non-male, non-imperial challenges to a racist, Eurocentric, and patriarchal canon. When you use male nouns and pronouns to describe human, you are reinforcing the idea and practice that makes male the norm. Calling the species homo sapien “Man” is a problem. Calling land and ships and other things “she” and “her,” that men are seen to control, is a problem… because it assigns the controlling role to males. Saying that “it is colder than a witch’s tit” is a sexist turn of phrase. Using the term “balls” to describe courage, and making courage a male characteristic, is a problem. Calling people who lack courage or strength “pussies” is a devaluation, as well as objectification, of women.

    (2) Stop saying things that are homophobic, and stop tolerating homophobia. Homophobia, as Suzanne Pharr once pointed out, is a weapon of patriarchy. When you make jokes about prison rape, that is homophobic, as well as buying into a notion of rape as legitimate tool for social control, and masculinity constructed as sexual revenge.

    (3) Stop saying clueless shit about sex that makes sex an unmitigated good (in reaction to the theocratic right’s squeamishness about sex). It might sound liberated if you are still trying to shock you aging parents, but it erases women’s experience of sex as often obligatory, manipulative, humiliating, and even frightening — one of the practices in a system where they are on the wrong end of social power.

    (4) Stop reinforcing the devaluation of women by measuring them by some media-concocted version of what they are supposed to look like.

    (5) Stop thinking it is okay to attack the “enemy’s women” based on their gender. When you make a sexual remark to put down Anne Coulter or Condi Rice, or crack on them about their appearance, you are attacking them based on their status as women…

    27 November 2006, 9:08 pm

  87. James:

    The idea that only white men are opress women is highly eurocentric. Last time I checked there were plenty of non-white males doing it.

    28 November 2006, 12:08 am

  88. James:

    Regarding the replacement of masculinity, I think some system of gender roles is unavoidable. There are very real biological roles involved in reproduction, and there are other physical and mental differences between the sexes. These roles need not be based on inequality of power, and so maybe the words ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ (with their present meanings) are not appropriate to describe them. But something has to replace the current system.

    Also, I think that it is a mistake to overlook the fact that we are all living in gendered societies and we are going to be playing masculine and feminine roles whether we like it or not. We can choose the content of those roles, but we can’t simply opt out of them altogether.

    28 November 2006, 1:55 am

  89. Consumer:

    There’s a lot to process and digest here. I’m a bit wedded to what James is saying with regard to some form of gender roles, but I just need to reread all of this.

    28 November 2006, 9:10 am

  90. Consumer:

    CONSUMER: OK, so masculinity or whatever we’re calling it isn’t a tangible physical thing like an auto part, but it is a thing nonetheless, perhaps more akin to an installed program or OS that dictates what we are expected to do in certain situations. So the fact that it doesn’t have actual physical proportions doesn’t mean it doesn’t have weight. Quite the contrary.

    Your starter list would rewrite the program, and that’s great in that it might lead to more humane and aware thinking, translating to action.

    However, with regard to (4), I’d say this is different from all the rest in that it seems that you’re advocating changing a person’s likes and dislikes. I mean, I can consciously change my behavior to stop using certain language. But I can’t “will” myself to take a liking to, say, chicken sashimi. I think the same holds true with physical attraction between people. Media-concocted or no, people are attracted to certain types of people. So I think you should clarify what you mean by “measuring” women.

    STAN: Clarify? This wasn’t clear? Is it impossible for you to consider that you might be wrong, or are we headed down an extremely long and tedious path? Your example about food just made MY point. There is not some gene that sets the standard for female sexual objectification (men’s version of “desirability”) as being hairless, anorexic, painted to look like a pre-adolescent, and jacked up on debilitating spiked heels. Do you think a gene makes Koreans like kimchee, when most Americans can’t eat it? (I can, and do, because I practiced. Love it now, and eat it every chance I get.)

    And you damn well CAN will yourself to change. Invest half the energy you have in ducking and dodging the reality of gendered power, and you’ll be there in no time. Enjoy your sashimi.

    CONSUMER: Which brings us to the very real biological roles that James touches upon. The current paradigm ensures that even women (quite a few!) are looking for strong men to be providers. To sweep them off their feet. To lead in a dance, etc. (we all know the tired cliches, for more check out any number of classified ads on Match.com). So unless you’re talking about massive restructuring of societal norms, gendered roles will always exist. Not just in the US but all over the world.

    STAN: I am not among the solopsistic crew that claims there is not difference between men and women. I have never mensturated. I have never been pregnant. I cannot lactate. I can get cancer of the prostate. But difference has to be extricated from heirarchy.

    But you leap from a general claim of difference directly to roles that are constructed socially… like provider. And yes, what some of us are working toward is a world where women need not fear nor be forced into dependence upon men.

    I’m posting this albeit by shortcutting the response inside it, but you are gonna raise more hackles than mine with that provider, sweeping-off-the-feet thing.

    CONSUMER: To take issue with the balance of power between these roles is one thing. But to abolish it or ridicule it in it’s current form is counterproductive (e.g., mocking alpha-types posters by calling them “Real Men”).

    STAN: I mock them because they are trying to be bullies. That kind of behavior is posturing and a power-play, and it needs to be called out as posturing and power-play. There is a place in society for shame. It’s what we tell a child who is being socialized not to hit other kids: Shame on you.

    And we will keep on mocking them, or throwing them out altogether. That kind of shit is a pattern that triggers a fight-or-flight response for many women — straight out of their life experience — and while we’re not trying to restrict the site based on phenotype, this behavior will be ridiculed, then expelled. This will be a relatively safe-feeling space for women to post without having to put up with that shit… or at least we are trying.

    It is NOT counterproductive from a lot of people’s point of view; in fact, more than one woman has asked us to be more unforgiving. Men are entitled, if they behave, to post here. I am a man, last time I checked. But you are not entitled to have anyone treat you with kid gloves when you are being offensive. If that doesn’t work for you, then there are gazillions of other blogs out there.

    Do you hear what you just said? Let me rephrase it:

    “To take issue with the balance of power between the roles of slave and master is one thing. But to abolish it or ridicule it in it’s current form is counterproductive.”

    CONSUMER: That’s what I meant by replacement of masculinity in it’s current form. For example, here on a microcosm level, instead of ridiculing a poster right off the bat for exhibiting defensiveness that may or may not stem from indoctrined masculinity, it might be more productive to appeal to positive aspects of masculinity, e.g., “a gentleman wouldn’t make such a comment when someone is obviously upset”. That sounds dumb but you know what I mean.

    STAN: Half right.

    I ain’t tryin’ to promote any more gentlemen. How the hell is it that any time bullying behavior is called out, the bullies become the victims?

    CONSUMER: I must work (your site is killing me!)

    STAN: Me, too.

    28 November 2006, 5:16 pm

  91. Required:

    “That sounds dumb but you know what I mean.”

    “STAN: Half right.”

    Cheap but chuckle worthy. I second every thing that Stan has inserted into Consumer’s post.

    28 November 2006, 10:43 pm

  92. Audrey:

    Stan was right about hackles being raised at men claiming women are looking for strong men who are providers, like we are genetically programmed to be silly romantic fools. We’re trying to survive here by whatever means necessary, and we’re trying to make sure we and our children have food and a bit of shelter when we lie down at night.

    Sometimes we rely on men to help provide that because we can’t seem to earn as much money to support ourselves as they do, or we can’t earn a living on our own when we’re in the hospital with a pregnancy that’s gone wrong in some way, or we can’t figure out how to pay for daycare and food and rent and health care on a single salary. Sometimes we stay with men who are abusive - have sex with them, even - because the alternative is not knowing if we’re going to have a roof over our heads or where our next meal is coming from if we leave.

    That’s not romance; it’s fear.

    And it’s not right for any man to sit back and say there’s no point in trying to change that because that’s how women want it to be.

    28 November 2006, 10:52 pm

  93. Elaina:

    There are a lot of guys who are very open here about #4 on the laundry list, and their percieved “difficulty in dealing with it,” or however you want to put it.

    Consumer actually comes closest to being totally honest about it, I think, yet falls short at the whole “I just can’t help what I like” marker.

    I’m glad that folks are saying that they are “willing to work” on stuff. Yay. That’s just dandy.

    But you need to be honest with yourselves, here. This is a very important point, and it’s not OK that it’s the last on everyone’s list.

    I refuse to believe that the men who are stating that they “have a hard time” with the issue of objectifying and codifying their relations with women on the basis of said women’s “fuckability” can honestly say they’ve never, ever been “attracted” to a woman who wasn’t “fuckable” upon initial “measuring.”

    You men, are you saying that you just don’t talk to “ugly” women? That you judge a woman completely and totally on this basis? Or are you saying that you won’t use an “ugly” or “unfuckable” woman as a masturbatory aide (i.e. for sex)?

    And while I’m at it, I would like a breakdown of EXACTLY what difficulties y’all are stumbling over, here. You want to figure out how to “overcome” what’s going on in your heads, then you have to really be honest about it and not attempt to gloss it over. When you do this thing, when you measure women at first site based solely upon your definition of attractiveness, or “fuckability,” (which HAS been formed culturally) then all the other shit that you’re here patting yourselves on the head for gets kinda cancelled out. You have to stop thinking that you have some sort of “right”, abstractly or materially, to judge women on the basis of their looks. You don’t. Until you get that down you are, for all intents and purposes, still a misogynistic bastard and you don’t get any sort of “brownie points” for whatever schmarmy philosophizing you might do about how “far you’ve come”.

    And as far as the “soft approach” that Consumer suggests in order to avoid bruising the amazingly-fragile-for-their-enormously-sized egos of the white men who post here. Fuck that shit. Here’s why: In my daily life and activism as a union organizer, I deal with macho, macho men on a daily basis. I have to be the fat lady that leads these men in their activism. That means I have to make them respect me. Given y’alls attitudes, as you’ve expressed them here, in regards to “first impressions” and the ways that you measure women, I think it’s pretty self-explanatory as to why that’s hard. Now, put on your little thinking caps one more time and try and come up with a good goddam reason that I should have to hold back when I post on this forum in response to backwards, oppressive, misogyny that is clearly spelled out in english characters and very, very easy to dissect?

    The men I work with are primarily men of color; and yeah. They have their own set of internalized white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal notions that I have to combat while combating my OWN white privilege at the same time. I see it for what it is (white supremacist/ male supremacist) because I know from head-on experience that where I can’t get a guy to sit still and listen to me that, most of the time, my white-ass boss can do it. I’ll “work with” these men in questions of male supremacy. I will not, however, curb my words here. Go post on the Huff Po if you want kid gloves. I take those damn things off the second I get home and sit down to type.

    So to recap: 1. you don’t get off without dealing with #4 in a real and concrete way and 2. the women who post on here have earned their voice. Quit trying to squash it.

    Thanks.

    28 November 2006, 11:27 pm

  94. Elaina:

    Oh yeah, one more thing.

    “Counterproductive” my ass, Consumer. Whether or not the conversation is “productive”, as far as both parties learning from it and the criticized party learning how to act right leans highly upon Y’ALL’s DEFENSIVENESS.

    If you’re too defensive to learn and to listen, then that ain’t my problem. It’s yours. Deal with it, go chew your nails over it, do whatever you need to do in order to accept that as a person in a privileged position YOU HAVE TO GIVE UP SOME PRIVILEGE IN ORDER TO MAKE CHANGE. That means that when you talk stupid, you don’t piss and moan when someone highlights it, especially someone who’s talking from a space that isn’t so privileged.

    If you are refusing to do that then my suggestion is that you admit to yourself that you are struggling and clinging and clawing around in order to preserve the male privilege that you enjoy.

    Ok. That’s all for now. Really.

    28 November 2006, 11:36 pm

  95. Yolanda Carrington:

    Consumer—goddamn boy. You’ve must be trying for the Grand Prize in obtuseness.

    Given your blatantly white supremacist interaction here a few weeks ago, I can’t figure out for the life of me why you weren’t BOUNCED. But it ain’t my call, so I digress. Anyway, if you’re going to participate here, please learn to keep your mouth shut long enough to listen. You see, you know absolutely NOTHING about the basic interaction between men and women in patriarchy; in fact, you’ve clearly demonstrated that you know next to nothing about men. So why are you arguing with folks, huh? Come on now.

    Get it together or leave it alone, dude. I’m serious.

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: We have grown weary, and Consumer will be posting elsewhere.

    29 November 2006, 2:48 pm

  96. Concerned:

    Hi everyone,

    I frequently visit this site and greatly enjoy your blog, and in fact I agree with virtually everything Stan and others have to say about gender. I’m perfectly content with just reading and learning and so have never thought to contribute; except now. I cannot understand why in the world Consumer was tossed of the blog. Granted, I did not agree with much of what he was saying, but he demonstrated that he was open to self-reflection and was not, at least in my opinion, in any way disrespectful to other participants (though I’m not sure what Yolanda was referring to when she referenced his “white supremacist interaction”). I understand that you don’t want flamers on the site, but I’m stuck with the feeling that Consumer has been banned he showed an unwillingness to fully agree with some fellow bloggers. I don’t see how this is constructive, since I honestly believe he could have been reached.

    Concerned

    29 November 2006, 8:17 pm

  97. witchy-woo:

    Elaina - you ROCK!

    30 November 2006, 11:54 pm

  98. James L:

    Stan’s point (4) can be interpreted as meaning that attraction should be repressed altogether, and I wonder if the guys that have referred to it as being difficult are interpreting it this way. I think a man judging a woman’s attractiveness is perfectly appropriate in the context of a heterosexual relationship (or a potential relationship, ie courting). I think it would be a mistake to only judge a woman on her attractiveness, and that in most other contexts attractiveness should be unimportant.

    I would also note that the distinction between socially conditioned attraction and any other kind of attraction that may exist is not a clear and simple one, and this may be another source of difficulty. It’s not like the experiences come with labels indicating their origin.

    Moderator - Have you considered writing down some guidelines for participation in the discussions and put them somewhere that new visitors will see them? It’s a somewhat Orwellian state of affairs when people get kicked out for breaking unwritten rules.

    1 December 2006, 1:03 am

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