I’m the son and father of committed Democrats and was a Democrat for two decades before becoming a Republican. I’m now a registered Libertarian.

MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THIS ELECTION. Visit and post on:

http://pep.typepad.com/

What, exactly, is the point of saying this in refutation(?) of Catherine MacKinnon’s analysis of the inherent gender inequalities of sexual capitalism? I’ve heard others say similar things before, and since I have the opportunity to ask you what you mean I’m taking it.

“And frankly I find the anti-porn thing plain silly…But showing pictures of people having sex is not inherently sexist, which isn’t really their argument”

Perhaps with a better understanding of the antiporn argument you might not find it so silly.

That ordinance aside, I think MacKinnon is brilliant, even when I don’t agree with her. Nonetheless, I think her discussions of “liberal feminism” are deeply flawed by her mistaken understanding of what liberal feminism stands for. Just because liberal feminists are relatively libertarian on first amendment questions, doesn’t mean they (we) are libertarians overall.

Whew. Good luck getting THAT on a bumper sticker. :p

I also believe that much porn is anti-woman garbage.

So, a quick note: If you’re into porn, either get free porn or stick to female-friendly production companies so you won’t be giving money to some really sick minds.

Thank you and have a nice day.

(To continue on Julian’s point re: “I’m not a feminist but…”, this guy in my History of Medicine class was completely misrepresenting feminism as the academic kind you frankly don’t see much of at Chicago. This got into a pointless and off-the-topic debate over how people try to recontstruct words.)

About the porn thing–right now, it’s so geared towards men that I just get cheesed off. People who call themselves open minded about sex ironically don’t seem to realize that a lot of porn out there reinforces very archaic views of gender and sexuality. I wouldn’t get so bent out of shape about porn if there was stuff out there geared for women (and I’m not talking about those stupid and sickly sweet videos with roooooomannnce and flowers.)

It was interesting how the anti-porn activists (before trying to change the laws) were turned away from porn venues by the owners and managers. And they would take people in just to see it, not to disrupt, in order to educate them. (So much for the so-called free-thinkers who have nothing to hide. Read “In Our Time” by Susan Brownmiller. Here’s an exerpt:

In what became our most popular tactic, Women Against Pornography opened up the hidden life of Times Square for a suggested five-dollar donation. I plotted the intinerary and wrote a script based on information, supplied by Carl Weisbrod and Maggie Smith, about which mobster reputedly owned what X-rated theator or coin archade, and what sort of wages the employees at Show World, the Dating Room, the Mardi gras, or the Pussycat received of an evening. . .The unexpected appearance of women in clothes, to observe men in clothes watching naked women writhe in mock sexual pleasure for the men’s entertainment, dratmatically altered the atmosphere of the live sex shows’ self-contained world. . .

They were often forcibly ejected from these venues. What a shock.

. . .We escorted, most memorably, two intrepid Benedictine nuns from Erie, Pennyslvannia, a delegation from the Jewish War Veterans and the Anti-Defamation League, livid with rage when we showed the the Nazi porn genre, a study group of Chinese-American women wanting to see how they were portrayed in Cherry Blossoms and similar magazines.

In theory, I don’t have anything against sex, watching it, or looking at naked people. (Though being a heterosexual female, I’d much rather look at guys than women, thanks.)

If most porn (and the sex industry in general) serviced women in the same proportion it did men, then I think the debate would definitely shift to things like workers’ rights (it’s very exploitive on several levels).

I don’t like an analysis of sexuality that makes all men into rapists and all women into victims, and I don’t like an analysis of porn that makes it the only industry that is affected by capitalism. Both sexuality and capitalism are a lot more complicated than that.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm

porn would not be sexist if society were not sexist. period. i am reminded of the bumper sticker, “people are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it’s easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.” same principle–radical feminists seem to be more violently opposed to porn than to institutional sexism because the former looks easier to eradicate than the latter. looks are deceptive, but that never stopped anybody.

and, am i the only one here who’s noticed the heterosexist nature of most of the standard “feminist” objections to pornography? essentially, porn’s bad because it reinforces the male-as-superior/woman-as-inferior patriarchal stereotype. to which i’d reply, what the hell about gay male and lesbian porn? do these simply not exist?

sad thing is, i’m straight… and i see this. what’s up with that?

Have you read Susan Brownmiller’s “In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution”? She discussed the porn split in the feminist movement in great detail. It was damaging to the feminist movement.

LOL I really need to read ahead first…

Maybe I’m just strange, but I like to read porn. When it’s well-written it can be quite good. So much visual porn is so geared towards straight men that I find it unappealing because it doesn’t relate to me at all. The woman is just a receptacle.

I’m not even sure if I’m a liberal or a radical feminist, especially since the issues I work on are not popular with mainstream feminism and major feminist groups like NOW and the Feminist Majority. Feminist motherhood and parenting aren’t likely to be big ticket issues at NOW conferences.

Dana and others: Actually, MacKinnon is quite aware of lesbian and gay porn; why would you assume she’s not?

Look, I don’t agree with MacKinnon on porn. But here’s the thing: she is very, very, very, very smart. Smarter than me. Probably smarter than you, too (whoever you are). That doesn’t mean she’s right; but it does mean that she’s smart enough to have thought of most of the obvious objections to her proposals.

So if you think that MacKinnon hasn’t even thought of [insert obvious objection here], chances are you’re mistaken about that. Chances are, she has thought of it, and if you look through her writings you can find out what she says about it. You may not agree with her, but it’s not safe to assume that she’s so stupid she hasn’t thought of the obvious objections.

Although, frankly, I think to do so is a waste of time. The M/D porn ordinance war is over; MacKinnon lost; the ordinance is dead, dead, dead; discussing that issue further is moot. If you’re going to read MacKinnon, it makes more sense to read her other writings, rather than trying to refight a debate that’s been over for years.

I think the larger problem might be that undergraduate women’s studies classes focus too much on theory. If students studied and had experience with the real American “liberal feminist movement,” then you might be able to ask them to account for the differences between that movement and what MacKinnon describes.

I wouldn’t be so quick to come to that conclusion Amp (BTW Hi, long time no speak, it’s Lorenzo);

While you could narrowly define liberalism as libertarianism, I don’t think that doing so gives fair treatment to the point, and ideologies that social theorists (political economic and radical feminist alike) are describing when they use the term. The way I interpret it, she means liberalism in the sense of liberal individualism in general, rather than the specific strain reffered to as classical liberalism (also known today as neo-liberalism as I’m sure you know). A political example is that those who are progressives, yet come at things from an individualist liberal perspective very much do not share the same perspective as those comming from a class analysis based perspective(s) and I think it is this difference she is stressing between a feminism of class analysis and social revolution and the extension of liberal individualism to women.

Of course, one could be equally uncharitable and say that radical feminism is merely the application of marxian class analysis to gender. While both may hold seeds of truth, they are both rather uncharitable and unecessarily insulting.

That’s just my opinion, having recently gotten to read a good bit of MacKinnon.

I certainly did not get any such impression reading Catharine MacKinnon’s “Only Words.” The impression I got was of a well constructed and supported argument that porn did not constitute speech and thus should be actionable as actions, and should be acted against on that basis.

          ,

-Vardibidian.