...the Buddha gazed upon a harem filled with lustrous female bodies sleeping... to cure himself of desire these figures were imaged to be dead, worm eaten, and diseased... and he became an arhat, a virtuous one). The question here is this: is there a qualitative and quantitative difference between each of these productions? The only similarity I see is not pornographic but masculinist. Men achieve their mature sense of subjectivity through the objectification of women's body and a simultaneous denial of female subjectivity.
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Ken, your interpretation of the story of Buddha's renunciation is similar to ideas I've encountered before -- mostly from a feminist perspective. It appeals to modern sensibilities and political concerns but does not address the actual heart of the tale.
I'm not a Buddhist but I believe the "masculinist" focus is misplaced. This word implies dominance of some sort but the renunciation story is not about the Buddha's mastery - as a man - over the seductions of women but his understanding of the impermanence of the things to which we cling.
The death reverie was produced by comparing the harem members' serious babe-i-tude to the expansiveness of nirvana. At least, this is how I recall the Pali Canon version.
If this line of analysis began and ended with a refutation of women - as was common of strains of Christianity at various times - the "masculinist" label might be accurate.
But all things, beautiful and ugly, great and small, were proper subjects for contemplation from the perspective of dependent origination. At the moment the death reverie occured, Siddartha happened to be in the harem (due to his father, Suddhodana's order he be entertained out of consideration of asceticism) and so the sleeping, disheveled-from-too-much-partying women around him became the subject of his meditation on birth, life, age and inevitable death.
Since Buddha described men in exactly the same terms when the opportunity presented itself I don't see how this point of view can accurately be called "masculinist".
DRM