I know, I'm over my limit. But I haven't posted for weeks...
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Charles Brown
CB: How about the "adulterers" ? Hard to see that as a property or fertility relationship. Fornicators ?
** Adultery is a crime: the misuse of your neighbours property.
CB: Anyway, it doesn't take the majority. If a minority had secular sex and some of them used depictions or poems about sex for pleasure, then ain't that "modern" pornography ?
** "Secular sex" (did I really invent that?) didn't exist until... I don't know, recently. Until there is a firm conception that the gods and goddesses aren't going to mess with you for what you do there is not secularity. For instance: in Europe people didn't torture animals until pain was secularised. This isn't to say that people didn't kill animals in lots of unpleasant ways... but the attempt to measure pain through infliction (quantity and quality) emerged through secularisation (in the same way that "genius" is secularised "revelation").
CB: A lot of modern pornographers are male supremacists, no ?
** I don't mind the supremacy bit (anyone can cop an idiotic attitude) ... the question is really one of power.
CB: Well, yea. You've made it a tautology, by defining "pornography" in terms of linkage to "modern notions of political economy", which by definition means nobody before modern political economy could have "pornography". Of course, there was masculine power before modern times, and one might suspect it played a role in sex and representations of sex. Do you think people had sex in public all the time before the modern era ? I don't know about that.
KM: I'm not sure why focusing on genre automatically end up in a tautology... I wasn't arguing for a link with the political economy, I was asking about that. Does pornography, as a genre, emerge with contemporary forms of economy. In particular - I was thinking about modern notions of the public and private sphere and trying to think about this with the emergence of a masculine citizen, fraternity as a regime of the brotherhood. And yes, I think people had sex in public (if by public one means with people around) - more often then than now. If an extended family of thirty lives in one room and a couple has a dozen kids and both work from morning till sun fall under conditions of separation... you don't have to be a geographer to figure out where and when they're having sex. Well, maybe you do.
CB: I guess if you want a political economic differentiation, modern pornographics are commodities ( fetish in a different sense :>), maybe ?); old stuff probably wasn't commodities as much.
KM: Yes, this is exactly what I'm asking about. Now... is there a link between commodities and masculinity? I'm assuming that sex-gender systems are pervasive... but so is commodification... how do the two entwine? Maybe I should head back into silence and read my Freud in piece(s).
ken