In the case of Clueless vs. Clueless … (Sex & Aggression)
By reader request a rant of DeAnander’s from Stan’s Man on Fire review thread has been promoted to a frontpage article.
I believe Stan posted this review in headbanging frustration at the liberal idiocy of this recent “fair and balanced” discussion of porn at Alternet. The two “debating opponents” — neither of whom, of course, goes anywhere near feminism or anticapitalism — dance delicately around the question of why so many men enjoy looking at pictures of women being (ab)used, humiliated and hurt. In the process, they make some statements that reek of cognitive dissonance…
Bader, the designated “porn is harmless” talking head, manages to say this:
Porn is not harmless. But neither is it an important cause of sexual violence or misogyny [...] The actors in these films are degraded, underpaid and used up by an industry with the morals of a slaughterhouse, despite what Jenna Jameson and Nina Hartley say. The women come into the industry with the self-esteem of earthworms, histories of physical and sexual abuse, and are often plunged into alcohol and drug abuse as a way of coping with their jobs.
In other words, somehow the process of making porn is not the “cause” of the sexual violence and misogyny experienced by the women used in the making of porn — who, he admits, very commonly resort to self-medication with alcohol and other drugs to numb the various kinds of pain inflicted by their work.
Let’s deconstruct that, because it’s important. What he is really saying — listen closely — is that the violence caused by the porn industry to the expendable class of prostituted women used by the industry doesn’t count. What counts is whether porn causes men who consume it to do “real” sexual violence, meaning violence to “respectable” females (presumably white and/or middle class and not officially prostituted). His argument is as nonsensical as saying that the meat packing industry is not a cause of animal suffering because consuming Spam doesn’t necessarily make you beat your dog.
More vintage Bader (you can’t make this guy up):
If there is one nearly universal common denominator in heterosexual porn it is that the women in it are generally portrayed as easily, constantly and powerfully sexually aroused, driven wild by whatever men want to do with and to them. For most men, this fact is crucial to their arousal, not because they’re looking for a rationalization for their violent impulses but because they are guilty about feeling strong, selfish and masculine; feel overly responsible for and worried about women; and secretly believe that women are unhappy and relentlessly dissatisfied with men and their own lives.
In other words: men are threatened by feminism, and by women feeling unhappy and dissatisfied with selfish masculinity — please note the clever in-passing patriarchal equation of selfishness with strength and masculinity, w/which any good Randian wingnut would certainly agree — so they escape into fantasies where women are obedient sex dolls who are “driven wild” by whatever men want to do with and to them. But this is not misogynist, dear me no! A less clueless charitable interpretation would be that porn is archetypical revanchist media for an uneasy privileged caste needing to reassure itself that the field hands really do sing happily at their work and find fun and satisfaction in doing whatever Massa tells them to do.
You’d have to read all of Bader to get the cumulative impact of his semi-apologetic admission that porn is a nasty woman-hating industry combined with his dogged insistence that the men who fund it, support it, and demand more and more intense misogyny from it are really just nice guys who love women. The two sides of his brain need to call a professional mediator and get in touch with one another, even if only by conference call.
In the case of sweatshop clothing you could argue for a marketing/provenance information gap — “out of sight out of mind” — the clueless consumer really loves his/her kids and doesn’t see or think about the child wage slave making the cheap T shirt. But if the T shirt featured the abuse of child labourers, if this was the whole thrill and point of buying the thing in the first place? How clueless can the consumer then pretend to be? How much could the consumer pretend to “love kids” while avidly collecting T shirts made by abused kids and featuring images of the abuse of those kids?
For the “porn ain’t nice” side, A’net brought in Vivian Dent, another psychologist — remember, porn is an individual psychological issue, folks, and is not in any way, ever, to be connected to propaganda, hate literature, the history of entertainment media as reflectors and enablers of social structures of power, and so on. She tries, she really does. But she ends up tied in knots trying to discuss male privilege without ever saying “male privilege,” trying to discuss misogyny without ever saying “patriarchy.”
Sex lives at the intersection of love and aggression. Aggression infused into love and desire makes sex exciting.
For whom, exactly, does “sex” live at the intersection of Love and Aggresion (and what’s the zip code?)? if sex lives at this intersection for humans generally, then why is there not a huge literature of sexually “exciting” videos and web sites featuring gangs of clothed women sexually abusing naked men, smearing menstrual blood and vaginal exudates on men’s faces, picking naive young men up in vans only to rape and dump (and publicly mock) them, etc? Why is the aggression (deftly degendered here) always in the one direction, except for a few “I’m into dominatrices” guys (who are still, ahem, calling the shots and paying a sexual servant to act out their fantasy of being “dominated”?)
Dent doesn’t have the guts to say, “In a patriarchal culture, for many/most men, sexual excitement is linked to aggression and dominance.”
Witness Abu Ghraib, where war, contempt, and an inexcusable lack of structure and training allowed young soldiers to become gleefully perverse torturers.
Which had nothing to do with the gleefully perverse atmosphere of misogyny and sexual cruelty in the porn culture in which they and almost all young males are raised, in the industrialised nations? These guys only started hating women, fags, and arabs, only learned to humiliate and insult men by “treating them like women,” only learned to take trophy pictures of sexualised victims, after they got to Iraq? Please.
What about the structure and training they received throughout childhood, boyhood, young manhood and military indoctrination, in How To Be a Violent Misogynist In Several Thousand Easy Lessons? Is the trouble that they received too little structure and training — or too much?
On a concrete level, a lot of kids and some isolated guys do use porn as a kind of “how-to” manual for sexuality. Porn’s getting more extreme could lead them into some very unfortunate blunders.
Unfortunate blunders like this one? [which btw has a sports connection, for those who like to track the correlation between jock culture and sexual assault]? Using any of the majority of porn on display online as a “how to” manual would lead not merely to a blunder, it would lead to assault, rape, GBH.
Back to Bader, who digs himself in deeper with each passing graf:
Now, I would agree with Vivian that a fair number of men — and women, for that matter — feel hostility toward each other. And some of them — both sexes — act this out in the bedroom. They might criticize each other’s performance or attractiveness. A man might unconsciously but intentionally refuse to “read” his partner’s cues about what she wants or enjoys, or he might detach the moment after he is satisfied. A woman might be consistently critical of a man’s ability to satisfy her, or make him feel bad for wanting sex too often. In these cases, the hostility of one partner hurts the other one.
But the fact that people can hurt each other in their myriad transactions around sex, while tragic, doesn’t bear on this debate at all.
This is the sexual equivalent of “collateral damage,” “friendly fire,” “extraordinary rendition,” and “payload delivery.” Mealy mouthed euphemisms to dance around a fundamental fact of sexual politics: men rape women (and boys and other men). Women do not rape men, very rarely rape other women, very rarely molest or rape juveniles of either sex. Are we to read A man might unconsciously but intentionally refuse to “read” his partner’s cues about what she wants or enjoys as a coy workaround for “A man might force intercourse on his partner disregarding her protests or statements that she would prefer to do something else”? That’s rape, Mr Bader, or molestation at the least. Only the most weaselly apologist for male privilege could imagine that it is anything else, or that it is in any way equivalent to a woman (gasp) criticising a man’s sexual skills or (oh no! how dare she!) “making him feel bad” for pestering or nagging her to “put out.” Notice how the reliable Bader has cleverly transformed female sexual unwillingness, or a wish for more skilful and sensitive lovemaking, into “hostility” implicitly equivalent to rape? Like I said, you can’t make this guy up.
There does seem to be a tendency in our sexual imaginations to seek out deeper and deeper taboos to challenge or violate, provided it’s safe to do so. I see no evidence that such potential for escalation in a world of fantasy poses a threat to women in the real world [...]
Note once again that the women used to make the porn flick are not, apparently, “in the real world” so the damage to their bodies and souls from all this genderless, disembodied, “taboo violation” doesn’t count.
Dent tries gamely to critique porn from inside this neoliberal faux-equality genderless world,
I’m sure that Michael and I agree that none of us is born taking pleasure in another’s pain and degradation. Yet in certain contexts, people — even people who under different circumstances are loving and concerned — get very excited in just this way. I believe that the current solitary, nonstop, and increasingly vicious realm of pornography can foster just this kind of excitement. And so I believe we owe it to ourselves, as men, women and a society, to take it seriously.
but being apparently incapable of naming male supremacy or patriarchy, she remains unable to put her finger on just what is wrong with the public celebration of sexualised violence, violence against women, the hypersexualisation/commodification of women, the pathologies of hyperconformant masculinity, the cult of predation and dominance, the connection between patriarchal sex memes and war memes, etc. She ventures timidly to the very brink of social conditioning (the Stanford Experiment reference) and then tiptoes away without making the obvious connection: the SPE was a microcosmic model of the prison experiment that we are all in, full time. Porn is one of several channels of socialisation by which one set of humans (males) are repeatedly instructed that another set of humans (females) are inferior and contemptible; and as both Milgram and Zimbardo demonstrated, the goalposts of who we consider and do not consider fully human are moved with alarming ease by sufficient repetition.
Here I am going to detour into the world of Milgram and Zimbardo, about which there is much much more to be said when we have some more time. Here’s an interview with the notorious Zimbardo sent to me by rootless (affectionate hat tip) and our brief chitchat about it:
rootless:
the article below seems to me highly relevant to the discussion on FS
about the effigy-burning. (no one sems to have taken up my claim that
it was actually, literally, a put-up job by the cops, but that’s OK.)
I don’t think this Zimbardo interview is the last word on the subject
(everyone should read Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men,” about a
German battalion whose assignment was to round up Jews, in town after
town, day after day for months, and murder them all) but it certainly
belongs in the mix.DeA:
I am always torn between an appreciation of the
fundamental truth of how mutable we humans are and
how strongly influenced by consociation and prevailing
local norms — i.e. finding Milgram and Zimbardo’s
results very convincing and useful in understanding
institutional abuses — and at the same time wanting
to shake them by their respectable academic lapels
and ask why they keep talking about “nice ordinary
boys” when we KNOW that nice ordinary boys rape,
and nice ordinary men molest kids and rape women
and beat their wives and girlfriends, and why is this
always swept under the rug when they talk about
‘making bad people out of good people’?they seem never to talk about gender, and the strong
gendering of their experiments (would they have been
different with female subjects? why was it a *female*
ex grad student who called Zimbardo on his own ethical
failure? why the feminisation of male prisoners by male
guards? to what extent are men preloaded by patriarchy
for these behaviours?)in other words they have half a clue but they continue to
pretend that “normal” life in a patriarchal culture is, well,
“normal” and OK and harmless, and can be contrasted neatly with
extraordinary abuses in these artificial contexts. whereas a
radical feminist would see the artificial context as a field
day or hypertrophy of the existing behaviour patterns of
dominance (gender, race, class), not an excursus into some
alien territory.nor do they discuss how pornography etc. form the consociative
matrix that normalises abuse of women in “normal” culture,
turning “nice boys” into abusers on a daily basis all around
us. I think this will be worth a separate post at FS. maybe
it will get us away from the apparently endless wrangle about
how much blame to lay on individuals…rootless:
this (the whole message actually) is really terrific, powerful
analysis. I’m especially grateful because (draw what “essentialist”
lessons you choose) I didn’t see this myself, didn’t connect the
“extraordinary” cruelty with the “ordinary” cruelty-structure of
which it’s just an exaggerated version. Yes, I completely agree this
deserves a post of its own…
That was back in April, and obviously I haven’t got around to writing what really should be written about Zimbardo, Milgram, and similar acknowledged and unacknowledged training programs for abuse and atrocity.
But in Liberalandia, we aren’t allowed to go there. There is no such thing as male privilege, no such thing as masculinism, and repeated consumption of misogynist propaganda has no effect on behaviour — and it isn’t really misogynist anyway because the women are paid to smile. The Milgram Experiment is very important when it shows how wicked fascists can train nice boys to commit mass murder and torture, but irrelevant when it suggests that nice young boys can just as easily be trained to despise and abuse women and girls. We’re all just genderless people (like those fantasised by “advanced” neolib economists) who “can hurt each other in their myriad transactions [my, what a reassuringly marketarian word, with its resonance of Level Playing Field and Rational Actors] around sex” — which is “tragic” to be sure, but never political, never a symptom of a social structure of power which we might actually be able to do something about.
And so the elephant in the bedroom — male privilege, masculinism, violence against women, the sexualisation of contempt and the contempt for sex, for women, for bodies and biota — sits there smirking while these two gender-blind professionals do their individualist fandango around it. What a sorry excuse for a debate. What, they couldn’t find even one feminist willing to say the P-word in public? I could name half a dozen off the top of my head.
Stan:
What Zimbardo proved with the prison experiment, and hasn’t seemed to transfer in the realm of gender, is that the obliged role (prison guard, military occupier, “man”) has built-in behavioral determinants.
Masculinity cannot be transformed into something benign, any more than the job of an infantryman as a foreign occupier. Aggression and control are intrinsic to these categories (roles).
This is a point made again and again in debates with the gender-as-identity crowd now purporting to represent something called feminism. They see masculinity and femininity as fetishized categories, as costumes they can put on and take off as expressions of their “sexual liberation.” Crossing these abstracted “lines” is called “transgressive,” with no clue that in the real, historically-constituted universe, as De has pointed out to me in more than one conversation, transgression only bright-lights those lines, and demonstrates the “aristocratic” social privilege of those who are not bound by them.
At bottom, this version of “feminism,” now stripped of its politics and re-coded as “gender studies,” et al, is little more than the McDonaldization of gender — consumerist to its very core — wrapped in fancy academic wax paper.
In a recent conversation with my friend, Reverend Greg Moore, about the meaning of freedom, we were doing a bit of biblical exegesis. John’s cult of baptism was not a re-enactment of birth, but of crossing the Jordan River, ie, going out of bondage. In the first spasm of freedom, the freed slaves celebrated their way back into the worship of gold. But the significance of freedom, according to that now famous Palestinian Jewish peasant who went to see John the Baptist, is that slaves cannot choose, therefore they cannot be accountable. When one crosses the River Jordan (out of bondage, whether literal or the bondage of ignorance) one becomes accountable for one’s actions. Don’t forget that the one time Jesu’ lost his temper in the stories was when he attacked the (gold) revenue stream of a temple that had fallen from accountability.
The liberal/libertarian notion of freedom is superficial and schematic and highly individualized. Yet this is where the pure constructionists of the Academy have taken what is possibly the most important liberation movement in history — that of women.
Me me me me me. It is the antithesis of political struggle.
10 November 2007, 6:00 amkathy miriam:
Hello there in cyberspace!
The feral scholar has been a life-line in terms of intellectual/political stimulation for me in the past month or so– the “leftist/progressive” blog-osphere is such a corrosive, massive disappointment–oh and sorry to say i have to include most of the radical feminist blogs as they are so completely identity-based.
Anyway, I had happened upon this liberal-bilous exchange about pornography myself the day before you posted De– and your analysis is of course completely brilliant. I do think it’s important to figure out how women are players in this “game” too– i.e. aren’t a lot of the subjects in the Milgram experiment also women? (I ironically just taught this topic in an Ethics course). We can talk about gender-decoys as Eisenstein does–any more thoughts on this?
(I also looked at the comments section on this exchange which were horrifying. I did a test to see whether similar bile would be spilled on a non-explicitly feminist issue such as immigration on Alternet and in fact, contrary to my expectations, there was equal racist viciousness. Do bigots dominate the blogosphere?? or whatever you call the comment-space of blogs?? oh learned ones of cyberspace???)
Stan, I love the idea of MacDonaldized feminism. I myself have been tinkering with the notion of botox-feminism involving a paralysis of the moral/intellectual muscle particularly with respect to one’s capacity to show outrage.. I was struck by this in conversation with academic feminists who try to defend a “regulation” of the “sex industry.” One philosopher actually argues that “sex workers” should be licensed and they should have to take “sex education” classes!!!! The licensing board would include therapists and “ex sex workers” health workers, etc… !!!! but there’s more to be said here.
At any rate the kind of trans-everything feminism based on identity- and identity is seen as a property to own, to manipulate, to wear, to take on and off, to play with… etc… is a very important topic and key to the degeneration/demobilization of today’s feminism. It has to do with the power of individualism today, but so much more too.
so– thanks for this great web-site and I hope to contribute more.
KM
10 November 2007, 5:22 pmRequired:
botox-feminism: Feminism involving a paralysis of the moral/intellectual muscle particularly with respect to one’s capacity to show outrage.
I like that.
10 November 2007, 8:47 pmJames M:
botox-feminism … I like that.
Mega-dittoes.
10 November 2007, 9:12 pmStan:
Several folks have noted how the blogosphere attracts some pretty hateful characters. Their screeds really do represent, however, not aberrations, but the mass psychologies of our culture that might be riskier to explicate in face-to-face public venues.
They have attempted intrusion after intrusion on this site (thank goodness for moderation-tools).
Brian — who lives more in the net community than I do — explained to me that many of these folks are Jekyll-Hydes who are mild-mannered in person.
OTOH, De reminded me that the mild manners of many men in the presence of other men is cast aside when situations throw men into the mix with women.
So, in a very powerful and concrete sense, a man like me can walk around in the same spaces as a woman and experience an entirely idfferent social reality.
Not a very original insight, but one that seems important nonetheless — for the boiz in particular, if we are to make our solidarity meaningful. I can walk a mile through some city street, with De 200 yards ahead of me. At the end of that mile, we will have dramatically different experiences to report.
Maybe a social experiment here.
At any rate, the struggle we are facing here and throughout cyberspace is how to balance the need for discourse and debate and the exchange of ideas with the need to keep those virtual spaces comfortable enough for women to participate.
Men don’t seem disinclined. But men on computers spend countless hours doing two things: jacking off to images of humiliated women, and pretending to kill people in war games. Apparently the mind-set that accompanies these activities is transferable.
One thing we are trying over at IA, though we aren’t up and running yet, aside from disallowing the trolling waters of a comment-section, is to place special emphasis on epistemology and practical skill exchange. No idea whether that will provide what is needed with a “practical strategic resource,” or whether FS is living up to its self-imposed expectations. Kathy’s note calling it a life-line is encouraging; so now it would be interesting to follow up by figuring out what specifically gives it that feel… and perhaps making it more available.
Thoughts?
PS: case in point http://www.offourbacks.org/Chilling.html
11 November 2007, 6:59 amkathy miriam:
The article from OOB is chilling indeed. I witnessed an instance of the phenomenon–effective censorship of feminist voices and writers–at the university in New Hampshire where I used to teach. A brilliant, ferociously radical student of mine was probably the first feminist columnist for the school paper in its history and wrote a series of sharp, unapologetic columns including one entitled “The myth of the good man”… Well… she not only received a death threat email; she not only was written about porno-gore-agraphically in a male student journalist’s facebook log (it included images of penetrating–to put it euphemistically–her eye); but another school magazine was dealt no consequences whatsoever (except some tepid talks on “civility”..)when it published yet another male student’s graphic- porno-graphic–slur against her. The male editor of the magazine who happened to be one of my students at the time! delivered the most hollow of non-apologies possible. Although some activism at the school was stirred up around this incident, my feminist student, the columnist, pretty much disintegrated–and certainly retired, at the age of 22! from any kind of public life. At the same time, many strong and smart feminist students of mine repeatedly refused to write anything for the paper citing their fear of what happened to the columnist. It’s interesting because “silencing” has become stretched into such a hollow cliche in most quarters– we don’t really comprehend the extent and quality of silence that feminism and feminists -and any woman who dares to take public stances on anything–suffer.
As for why FS is a life line to me–it’s because of the rare quality of synthesizing analysis found here–analysis that is radical, intellectually in-depth and stimulating, wide in scope AND feminist. I shouldn’t have to ADD the “and feminist” but at this point it seems very very difficult to find “radical” analysis that is also strongly feminist (that names the “p” word as De puts it for example) and radically feminist writing that is also encompassing of a range of public affairs/political issues. Are there any similar blogs that I’m missing?
As for making it more available–How does one do that on the web? I still crave print media and have to admit, upon finding FS, to glimmers of fantasies about a book of some sort.. Also the radio program which I have only listened to a minute of –and will probably listen to today because of some free time. I did a short-lived feminist public affairs radio show and have a powerful feeling about the potential of this medium. hmmm.. This might seem like an obvious ridiculous question but is the web the main source of media –and reading–for people these days?
11 November 2007, 10:44 amDeAnander:
@KM delighted to see you here!
I think reasons for the “incivility” quotient in internetlandia are many and synergistic, like everything else about subcultures. But the domination — and I do choose the word advisedly — of white, male, professional, often socially “backwards” or even mildly autistic persons in the demographic of the computer literate and the net-addicted has something to do with it.
another lifeline site for angry feminists is, of course, the redoubtable Twisty Faster, whose “I Blame the Patriarchy” takes no prisoners. Yolanda Carrington blogs infrequently, but always right to the point of the intersection of gender, race, and class. Feminist Law Professionals ia a good site. Biting Beaver used to be a visible angry feminist, but harassment and threats shut her down. FS is way overdue for another installment of our proposed series on “Enemy Women”, about the ways in which specifically misogynist attacks and threats are used to silence visible women in politics and media; how the “womanification” of male enemies is a standard-issue weapon for men sparring verbally with other male ideological opponents; and how misogyny is not only sexist but almost always specifically sexual that is, expressed pornographically, in the form of slurs against a woman’s sexual aspect or the sexualising of her public aspect. The archetypical version of this is the use of pornographic imagery or narrative involving the targeted woman.
I think it’s time for us to pick up this thread again… I’m thinking that Audrey has some original source material, KM has this excellent source material about the student newspaper, and Stan and I have an old piece of text lying around somewhere about a “funny” internet joke for lefty boys featuring Ann Coulter in a pornoganda text involving — of course — the good ol’ anal rape theme (thank goodness no images, the text was quite ugly-vicious enough). Wanna collaborate on a major frontpager?
11 November 2007, 3:34 pmkathy miriam:
Yes, I’d love to collaborate. One issue is keeping my student’s name out of it… I know what she’d be traumatized by use of her name… But there might be ways to get around it. In one of my radio shows some other students and I discussed the issue in relation to male “satire” such as Borat, and the mind-numbing reversal-thinking with which men scream castration over even the smallest of feminist criticisms while manically defending as “satire” (and thus transgressive- sound familiar?) completely banal and often violent sexism–this is of course a parallel to (and overlap with) the “fantasy” trope as defense of pornography. Gail Dines has a great critique of Borat.
My friend Nancy Meyer has been theorizing backlash as a structural part of the depoliticization of feminism: the word “reaction” doesn’t quite address the reality of the attacks on feminism, including the incorporation/assimilation/dilution of feminism a la botox feminism and other variants.
any more thoughts about how to go about a collaboration? hopefully this is the wake-up call i desperately need to re-start my writer self/political brain.. etc…
[DeA responds: sounds good, let's take this to email...]
11 November 2007, 5:50 pmaudrey:
I was just thinking this weekend that we’re overdue for another take on enemy women. I got some death threats on some guy’s blog not so long ago, specific even about the number of bullets to be used. I’m always naively surprised at the level of hate aimed at me because I don’t feel like much of an activist; I self-censor myself far more than any of the men I know; I don’t even keep my own blog, and it’s rare that I comment on others’.
My contribution to the clueless vs. clueless discussion comes from democratic underground, which I need to stop looking at because really my head is going to explode one day from it. Anyway this is my veteran’s day offering to FS, via DU: “The troops deserve mountains of porn for the work they do.” (Comments were running about 50:1 in support of that sentiment.) I can’t boil that down neatly like Stan and De do, I get stuck at the notion of “comfort women” being something (emphasis on thing) that men “deserve.” When I try to flip it around, swapping genders and extreme work that we do, I still can’t make any sense of it. I can’t imagine hospitals handing out male porn to women in labor: “She’s in the middle of delivering a 10 pound baby and she’s been in labor for 19 hours. Quick, somebody get her a photo of a man being sexually assaulted; it’s the least we can do for her.”
11 November 2007, 8:46 pmMarcilla:
It seems to me that in a practical sense, some sort of line has to be drawn. At one extreme, I don’t need a man coming into womyn-space or purporting to speak for wymyn’s issues based on some passing association at the periphery of femininity. But at the same time, a similar line of thinking has been used as an excuse to marginalize wymyn who are transgender in a way that IMO only further indicates the pervasiveness of misogynist thinking, even within the minds of “feminists.”
Gender is a multi-dimensional concept which defies purely biological, social, or other constructs. Anyone who says one’s identity is the sole determinant either doesn’t understand the meanings and ways in which the word is used, or isn’t dealing with reality. However, the same could be said of the person who completely discounts the role gender identity plays in shaping our world. BTW, the idea of a gender binary, though pervasive in Westerners, is not the reality in other cultures both previously existing or in other parts of the world today, and it is certainly not the biological reality any more than it is the experience of individuals. Within the gender (variant) community, there are certainly those who try to offer alternative, although equally over-simplified definitions, and therefore similarly invalid.
I don’t purport to offer some set of definitive answers, more I am looking to get people thinking. If feminism is not pluralistic and can be claimed by a single group, then certainly that group will be Christian, heterosexual, white, cisgender, well-to-do, citizenship holders. If it is to be pluralistic, then there must be a recognition that our identities and experience are more than simply the intersection of race and gender, sexual orientation and gender, etc.
Bringing this back to pornography, if the hallmark/membership fee of female class status is being a target of violence and hypersexualization, then speaking for my own class of wymyn (m2f transgenders), one need look no further than the rate at which we are murdered or at the disproportionate numbers of us advertising for sex work in the back of one’s local entertainment weekly to see that not only are we dues paying members, we’re major stakeholders. But try telling that to the Michigan Wymyn’s Music Festival.
Still, I don’t want some guy to follow me into the ladies’ room just because he’s feeling especially in touch with his feminine side at that moment.
16 November 2007, 11:48 amJason Kennedy:
This may be a little OT, but it picks up on Stan’s mention of trolls.
I am interested in the troll behaviours. The trolls appear to usually be men.
The anonymity afforded by the web, is it analogous to being in a crowd? This is how I interpret it. I am not sure why some people behave so differently once they have concealed their identity, it is sort of the opposite of Zorro or Batman, disguising themselves before fighting crime and is more like bank robbers pulling on balaclavas before committing a crime.
The answer appears to be to require a commenter to part with more of their personal information and/or be more networked into a group. In the wilderness, maybe everybody screams, and the answer is not just to silence the voices, but to work to reclaim the wilderness. I suppose I am biased towards viewing trolling behaviors as being caused by people feeling excluded or neglected, whereas the security of belonging to a group is also liable to breed another set of bad behaviors, as posts on this site demonstrate. Sooner or later, the Facebook model of networks where you can see one degree of separation and make approaches to friends-of-friends will become more prevalent, perhaps, in the blogosphere and begin to rid debate of people who only wish to employ their freedom of speech in order to stifle debate.
I hope some different methods come along, as I dislike the +/- comment rating that some sites employ, as it seems to reward people for, largely, consenting to hold the same ideas as others.
On my own site, a post I wrote became a popular link for people from the far right and they posted all kinds of offensive statements there. I let them stand and did not pass judgment on them. Later, I received an email from an African-American woman thanking me for not moderating the comments, because it showed what people really think. However, while those statements were offensive, I do not think they were trolling statements – ie: those people really think those things, whereas I think much trolling is just the troll estimating what is going to most outrage/incense/upset the image the troll has of the people who use a particular website. Sometimes it does just seem to be simple projection, as many many comments revolve around homosexual slurs, indicating that trolls tend to think that to demean another man’s masculinity is the most provocative thing you can do.
I don’t read about politics to have my opinions confirmed, but to be challenged and to learn. That is why I enjoy reading this site. Thank you.
21 November 2007, 12:51 amStan:
We struggle with the dilemma here on “free speech” v. trolls, though it is not that simple. It is also not reducible to “employing freedom of speech in order to stifle debate.” We will continue to exercise the precautionary principle, however. People of ill will are not welcome. Period. Abuse is not free speech. It’s abuse.
No web site or blog can be all things to all people, or even a panacea for one issue. It’s a form of communication media. If you’ve ever been to a Friends’ weekly religious gathering (Quakers), they spend a long time near each other in total silence. This is not exclusionary, it’s associative. And it is a form of communication. If someone demanded to be let in to make loud noises through the meeting as a matter of his rights, most reasonable folk would say that this is ridiculous.
FS is not primarily designed to promote “free speech.” Maybe the ACLU site, or somewhere else. We are attempting — very like people navigating in the dark — to get at some very specific epistemological assumptions and critique them, one of them being the assumed superior value of “intellectual production” that is part of the predominant intellectual division of labor… thus, the name feral scholar.
We have some points of view that are not “value-neutral,” or whatever the term is these days that casts pearls before swine and calls that “objectivity.” This site is pro-feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist. Given that the hegemonic point of view is exactly the opposite, we believe that apologia for the prevailing point of view is in great abundance… so much so that the kind of critical engagement we would like to promote is still a tiny craft in a vast sea. The idea of allowing unlimited access to the site to not only propound the prevailing ideology, but to do so abusively is a little like inviting a lynch mob to a trial.
That is not the same as saying points of view expressed here are not open to challenge. We challenge each other quite often. But abuse is not challenge, and we will not allow the site to be transformed into a loudspeaker for patriarchal, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or imperial-capitalist phrasemongering… nor will we allow a bunch of abusive boys yet another outlet.
Free-for-alls are always dominated by the loudest and most obnoxious.
Moreover, what seems like obnoxious behavior to males is often not merely obnoxious to women. The effect is likely to be more like the feelings triggered when a woman walks past a group of loud, obnoxious males… threat and danger. Feral Scholar will not allow its good-will participants to be abused or threatened (directly or indirectly).
21 November 2007, 7:43 am