On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Kendall Clark wrote:
> miles> So does any porn provoke violence against women? It's not as
> miles> simple as the Dworkinites assume.
>
> I don't know what a Dworkinite is, but M&D certainly present a
> nuanced, careful view in *In Harm's Way* and Dworkin does so alone in
> many places. They claim porn causes or contributes to a fairly wide
> range of social ills, from the objectification of women, to the undue
> focus on sex as penile-vaginal intercourse, to diminishment of some
> men's willingess to credit testimony of rape survivors, to apathy
> about sexual violence in general, to the actual commission of rape and
> sexual violence.
>
I've never heard someone use "Dworkin" and "nuanced" in the same sentence before. Is someone who calls any sexually explicit materials harmful to women really providing a "nuanced" analysis? Is erotica is just "porn for the intellectuals", as D claims, with all the same harmful effects as hardcore porn with images of bound, gagged, and beaten women?
I notice you share Dworkin's enthusiasm for misinterpreting the scientific research on this topic. Yes, there is clear scientific evidence that sexually explicit films with aggressive content provoke violence against women. But does that mean that any sexually explicit films "objectify women" and legitimate rape? Again, the data are fairly clear: they do not! Your conflation of all types of sexually explicit materials overlooks the fact that the most substantial effect of nonaggressive sexually explicit films is sexual arousal, in both men and women.
What's not to like about that?
Miles