Kelley wrote:
>>well let's see here, i thought for sure you were comparing it to art. even
>>so, why use the giggly, embarassed words of childhood. be grown up about
>>it. aside from that, on another list, we determined that the stupid
>>childish words are for when you're talking about it with other guys.
>>'cock' is for when you're talking about doing something with it that you
>>perceive as important & powerful. i read you two as disingenuously framing
>>it as if it was a childish embarassment, when in fact you were objectifying
>>women's bodies, pornographically, and not eroticizing them--all the while
>>deriding your own bodies somehow just not fit for such 'giggly pudeur'
That's how you read 'em, Kelley. Fair enough. And then you asked them for confirmation or elaboration. Beaut.
Yoshie opens up with:
>Guys go giggly to have his cake and eat it too, as you note. In other
>words, they giggle so they can enjoy sexism while trying to look like they
>are above it. A way of preempting feminist critiques by saying, "Hey, who
>can take this seriously? Certainly not you, a sex-positive post-feminist!
>Anyone who takes this seriously is just being uptight!" (Of course, the act
>doesn't convince anyone but themselves.) Giggles especially help leftist
>guys who have more reasons than other guys to be embarassed about the
>enjoyment of sexism.
Is the portrayal of half-naked, or buck-naked, women all that sexist? It's commodification, sure. It's probably objectification, too (although it ain't that simple - a naked woman generates an altogether chemical response from us if we're sharing a pool or a sauna with her than if she were to display herself with what we take to be an intention to arouse us. Same with pictures - I gotta be imagining someone trying to turn me on if I'm to slobber appropriately - so a picture does it only after mediation by my sordid imagination - an imagination overly populated by wanton wenches perhaps, but wenches with agency/intentions before all other things at least - their T&A ain't explosive until the gazer lights the fuse by imagining a willing person around it all). Sure, the intention is purchased in this instance - but that's our lot, innit? And we do all know it's purchased - so I don't rate arguments that boys are being misled into expecting from, and hence imposing upon, the girls in their world such behaviour and intentions.
I mean, any worker is subject to commodification and objectification, right?
The sexism would come in if a limitation were set on the possible roles in which women are represented, and if that limitation were more severe than that set on men, no? And do we respond to that by excluding one more representative possibility?
It occurs to me that Anglo-Saxon feminisms take this stuff more seriously than do their continental European counterparts, anyway.
Reckon Yoshie goes overboard here:
>Also, more generally speaking, jokes are about allaying anxieties. Guys
>joke about sex, porn, etc. to manage many kinds of anxieties: anxieties
>about gender, sexuality, race, class, knowledge, etc.
One of the good things feminism has managed over the last few decades is to convince most of us that the best source of information about being female, the best way to find out what women's actual interests might be, and the best way to achieve those ends, is to have a society where women do the talking about themselves, identify their interests among themselves, and are materially free to pursue them as they see fit (albeit much of this may be enshrined only formally - I'm not making a 'post-feminism' case here). So I reckon all this telling us boys about our anxieties is a bit irritating. I'm anxious about lotsa stuff, and jokes are a perfectly understandable and, I think, potentially useful way to give 'em expression.
But it's for me to tell you what I'm anxious about, okay? Reckon my guess'd be better than yours. And I generally manage not to be anxious about stuff that ain't up for grabs anyway. I'm a white boy and I'm where I'm at on the sexuality spectrum - have been for a long time - I have no trouble living with it. I might joke about it, but not all jokes come from one's own anxieties, Yoshie.
>Nowadays, some guys go to a great length to look like "they have already
>dealt with IT" (whatever IT is).
Perhaps there ain't that much to deal with, Yoshie! Feminism's demands don't seem to have had a lot to do with my todger (which I'll call what I bloody like, Kelley) or my aspirations for it. Those aspirations are pretty well what they've been since our Germaine was a lass. Mebbe a slight supply/demand differential persists, but nothing worthy of the tag 'anxiety'. What's with this Yanqui obsession with psychobabble - 'clinicising' and 'problematising' others and selves all the time? Scratch where it doesn't itch long enough and you will have a nice lesion before long. Self-fulfilling, psychiatrist-enriching, neuroticising, socially fragmenting bollocks, in my arch-left-conservative opinion...
>Quentin Tarantino has the Wolf (played by
>Harvey Keitel) say to Jimmy (played by Tarantino himself), who just
>expressed amazement at how Jules (played by Samuel Jackson) and Vincent
>(played by John Travolta) cleaned their car of splattered blood and brains:
>"Well, let's not start suckin' each other's dicks quite yet." Then he
>commands Jules and Vincent to strip. When they change into Jimmy's
>T-shirts, Jimmy laughs at them for looking like 'dorks,' while Jules
>counters by reminding Jimmy that the 'dorky' T-shirts belong to him. Jokes
>and laughter here provide comic relief to defuse the threat of
>homoeroticism inherent in men stripping in front of other men, while the
>Keitel character and Tarantino the director emerge from the scene looking
>like bigger men for having the 'balls' to raise the hint of the homoerotic
>at all. (This in a film whose plot is driven by homophobia and the making
>of straight manhood, though carefully wrapped in Irony so noone will accuse
>Tarantino of taking any of it seriously and thus being homophobic himself.)
Well, 'postmodernist directors' have to be ironic. It's compulsory, innit? Gawdforbid you should be serious about anything and show yourself to be a metanarrative-wielding tyrant! And the characters in question are a particular bunch of blokes - their attitude to themselves and others should not be taken as a reliable pointer to the three billion of us who happen to possess bobby's helmets - that'd be metanarratory tyranny, no?
'Nuff said.
Cheers, Rob.