First of all, Mr. Berlet: The mispelling of your name was nothing more than a typographical error, nothing more. If you want to make anything more of it, that's on you.
Secondly, how do you say that I distorted Professor Jensen's article??? Perhaps I may have been blinded somehow, but how else can you interpret an article which attempts to link serial killers, rapists, and boorish behavior of some men to the availability of pornography??? Did Mr. Berlet miss the opening paragraphs, which I now post directly from the article:
"Look at mass-marketed pornography, with estimated sales of $10 billion a year in the United States, consumed primarily by men: It routinely depicts women as sexual objects whose sole function is to sexually satisfy men and whose own welfare is irrelevant as long as men are satisfied.
"Consider the $52-billion-a-year worldwide prostitution business: Though illegal in the United States (except Nevada), that industry is grounded in the presumed right of men to gain sexual satisfaction with no concern for the physical and emotional costs to women and children.
"Or, simply listen to what heterosexual women so often say about their male sexual partners: He only seems interested in his own pleasure; he isn't emotionally engaged with me as a person; he treats me like an object.
"To point all this out is not to argue that all men are brutish animals or sexually sadistic psychopaths. Instead, these observations alert us to how sexual predators are not mere aberrations in an otherwise healthy sexual culture.
"In the contemporary United States, men generally are trained in a variety of ways to view sex as the acquisition of pleasure by the taking of women. Sex is a sphere in which men are trained to see themselves as naturally dominant and women as naturally passive. Women are objectified and women's sexuality is turned into a commodity that can be bought and sold. Sex becomes sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate."
Maybe I missed something about those paragraphs, Mr. Berlet, but they certainly sound quite puritanical and anti-sex to me. Does Professor Jensen ever think about the fact that women who willingly perform in the sex industry -- or who happen to be erotic entertainers -- happen to have minds and choices of their own, and may choose for themselves to have sex for their own purposes and pleasures??? And what about the genre of gay male and lesbian porn, which represents a large portion of the commercially made porn in the US; how is that genre promote "female passivity" and "male dominance"??? I won't even begin to consider Mr. Jensen's emotionally loaded overgeneralization of men (and women) who actually view the material and still manage to respect women as full human beings. I could go on ad infinitum, but there are people far more qualified than me that could give a proper response to his article.
Also....when I refer to "The Left", Mr. Berlet, I refer to the entire vast diaspora of progressive political thought, not to any particular trend or tendency. I do understand that there is no monolith on the part of the Left, and that there are a wide variety of movements, concerns, and tendencies. I just happen to believe that some portions of progressive thought have given very short shrift to the subject of sex and its relationship to the human project; that was the purpose of my original post.
Since I appear to be boring people now, I will defer a mor complete response to this thread to my own clubs. If I offended anyone, I sincerely apologize.
Anthony Kennerson
--
On Fri, 18 Oct 2002 10:46:56
Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>
>Chip Berlet wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> > Anthony Kennerson [wrote]
>> >
>> <<SNIP>>
>>
>> > As for Carole's notion that the "anti-sex left" is only a
>> > [MORE SNIPS cbc]>
>> <<SNIP>>
>>
>> I really urge people to go and read the Jensen article to appreciate what a
>> major distortion of the work is contained in the above paragraph by
>> Kennerson.
>
>Perhaps misspellings of my name are less innocent than I usually take
>them to be. If Chip is correct, then Kennerson's spelling of my name,
>like his reading of Counterpunch, exhibits a tendency to read what one
>expects [hopes] to read rather than read what is on the page.
>
>Anthony's other misreading of my post stems not (at least not
>necessarily) from misreading but from the fact that he is new to the
>list and not familiar with my continual campaign against a reification
>of "The Left." That of course was the animus of my post -- I was
>indifferent to what he had to say one way or the other about sex. I
>neither agreed nor disagreed with his description -- I disagreed with
>his assumption that there was something, "THE LEFT", to be described.
>
>Carrol
>
>> -Chip Berlet
>
>
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