Miles Jackson wrote:
> [clip] --What is it about sexuality that encourages such
> confidently epoused statements on the basis of such limited and
> anecdotal "data"?
[Prefatory Note. Jeffrey Fisher wrote: i guess i took the conversation a little more casually -- like talking over beer (Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:07). This seems to me perfectly fair, & quite a few follow-ups in this thread were probably also written in this mood. Good enough. But the subject line has been changed to Theory of Porn (no quotes), and it would seem worthwhile to continue it, and offshoots of it, in that mood as well.]
Miles here raises what I suppose is a meta-question, now no longer focused on "what is porn?" or even on pornography at all but on the wider question of sexuality. Why are so many confident that they can propound on this subject off the top of their head? And focusing on it in that way reminds of an earlier thread in which there were equally bumptuous statements of _WHAT IS_ on the basis of mere personal response -- the thread on the question of the number of sexes. If I recall correctly, Yoshie, Kelley, & I (and probably some others) had referenced the important historical work of Thomas Laqueur, _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_, in which Laqueur had pointed out that from Aristotle to sometime in the 18th century the prevailing theory of sex was that there existed one sex and two genders, women being not a separate sex but only an inadequately 'cooked' male. (Incidentally, Doug, Laqueur is not a marxist as far as I know, though Gould, who reviewed Laqueur positively was.) And as I recall, the prevailing counter argument (ignoring Laqueur for the most part) was "Women have babies and men don't. Question settled!"
As the thread developed, Ken brought in some impressive mainstream scholarship, including Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1996. And in a later post I printed her CV from the UCLA web page. The response to that consisted of the bumptuous, "Look at such and such, who cares what som moldy old prof says." (I think that's a pretty accurate paraphrase of the tone of the responses to Hunt.) And so I suppose Ian's intervention is also relevant at this point:
**** Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 09:55:19 -0800 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" Anyone who reads a good deall of erotic material from _before_ the 19th century and then reads the professional pornography produced in thousands of volumes in the late 19th century in England, and who still thinks that some major change didn't happen . . . doesn't even know the meaning of the word "historical." - Carrol
Likewise with the sophomoric bashing of the pomo re-emphasis on the contingency and malleability of our signifying practices...Protagoras, anyone? - Ian ******
And then Ian's later comment, "another arrogant academic [note to all the other academics on the list; not all academics are arrogant!] who doesn't know diddle outside your little rotting tower," the relevance of this being (for my particular purposes here) its raising of the question of how academic scholars should be responded to by non-scholars or scholars in other fields.
My provisional answer to the last question is that (a) ultimately specialist must be judged by non-specialists (or specialists in adjacent fields), nevertheless when a substantial scholarly or scientific work has been introduced, anyone responding to it with mere random examples (e.g., hey, that Roman statue is really something) has not said anything that needs to be taken very seriously.
Anyhow: That is my core questioh. How should non-specialists use and judge specialists?
Carrol
P.S. Gould on Laqueur: The _biological_ evidence for one sex and for two is undecisive. That is, there is an equal amount of biological evidence for one sex and for two sexes.