heh. good call. here's what was said about her recently in a spat over cyberporn, libraries and filtering software at cyberia-L. i thought Mina would "like" it! :)
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"Eric C. Grimm" <ericgrimm at MEDIAONE.NET> Subject: Re: [CYBERIA] MacKinnon Biography
In-Reply-To: <OE47IMT5xDEX4TZvQBF0003515d at hotmail.com>
Kitty MacKinnon's bio hardly comes as news to those of us who have worked on issues related to war crimes prosecutions or who have studied at Michigan Law School in the past decade (some of us have done both).
What may really come as news to you, Laura, is that -- at least when I was a student at Michigan ('93 grad) -- there was a common sense of agreement among most male law students, or at least male students who were not gay (almost all of us had seen her speak at one time or another, and I even had a housemate who took one of her classes, thinking he might find it easier to pick up dates in MacKinnon's class, since just being present would make him seem more "sensitive") that of all the women at the law school (students, staff or professors), MacKinnon routinely ranked among the top five on almost every male student's list of most desirable sexual conquests. I think it was the sense that MacKinnon's forceful personality (she'll deny it, but she got it from her dad) would make her really interesting in bed.
So tell me, Laura, can you recommend any software to prevent men (some of whom are now partners in prestigious law firms) from sitting in Kitty MacKinnon's class in law school and fantasizing about what they would like to do with her in the sack?
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Laura, darling, the point is perhaps more subtle than you think. I happen to like a lot of the things that Professor MacKinnon has written. In particular, I admire her willingness to recognize that the power imbalance between men and women involves a LOT more than pornography, and if real change is to be accomplished, it would involve changing what is happening not just in the heads of your "internet scholars," but also inside the heads of high-status men in law school classes and in corporate boardrooms -- and in a lot of other peoples' heads as well. Susan Faludi did an even better job in helping elaborate on the real scope of the problem in her recent book "Stiffed," which I recommend to you.
Sure, both women, generally, and high-status men would like it if the sex drives of low-status men (a category in which your "Internet scholars" fall almost by definition) could be turned off as if by flipping a switch. But they have the same genes as the rest of us, including about a billion years of programming that make the urges that censors wish to suppress the most pressing of imperitives.
You can go ahead and beat up on low-status men to your heart's content, and you won't accomplish anything real. That strategy has been tried for hundreds of generations, and many other societies (the Incas, or the Ottoman Turks) were much better at it than censorship-minded librarians can ever hope to be. It will never work.
I have no idea whether pornography has a socially beneficial impact as an outlet for impulses that might otherwise be aimed in even more anti-social directions, but the "safety valve" theory seems at least equally as plausible to me as the "cause of violence" theory that you have posited, Laura. All we have to do is look at the level of violence against women (both on an absolute scale and as a proportion of violence overall) in countries that are particularly restrictive about the distribution of ponography -- Afghanistan comes to mind. Suppression of pornography there certainly has not been associated with a reduction in violence against women.
Seems to me that women are much less at risk in societies that are relatively open about issues of sexuality -- European democracies, for example. In the United States, the overall level of violence is quite high, but I am unaware of any studies suggesting that women bear an unusual or disproportionate share of violence in the U.S.
So, what I'm really sugesting is that your impulse to do something about the "internet scholars" involves some important class dynamics that need to be investigated more carefully (low status men are an easy target, certainly), and that you have a much bigger social dynamic on your hands if you want to make real progress with respect to the harms that you seem to believe that you want to fix.
I also think it is quite interesting to think about the unexpected phenomenon that one of the social strategies that men in this particular law school adopted in response to a woman who has spent her career saying that objectification of women is a bad thing, has been to objectify her in particular as a target of sexual conquest. I'm not saying that this behavior or mindset was or is good or bad. I'm just reporting the datum for the audience to draw its own moral and other inferences.
Its nice sometimes to spend some time thinking about the way the world "ought to be," but I've often found it more constructive to observe the world as is is, and to work from there. Sorry if you find some lack of subtlety in my description of the world as it is. The world isn't always as "subtle" as people like you would like it to be, I suppose.
Eric C. Grimm CyberBrief, PLC 320 South Main Street P.O. Box 7341 Ann Arbor, MI 48107-7341 734.332.4900 fax 734.332.4901
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