> i also think carrol and miles were trying to point out that sometimes
> we make generalizing statements, applying our own subjective
> experience to every one every where. e.g., -- all het men favor hetlez
> pr0n, that they do so because they are competitive and possessive
> about the women in the flick and a male elicits those feeligns and
> anxieties; that they do so because when men are in the flick it
> unleashes repressed homoerotic desires which make them uncomfortable;
> yadda; that men are visual creatures, far more so than women.
I think it's interesting that some people on the list want to proscribe generalizing statements and applications of subjective experience when it comes to the topic of sex, while, on general political topics (the main fare of the list), such statements and applications are the rule. I wonder why?
> i think the question elicited personal reflections and the language
> people used distanced them from the topic so they could appear to
> speak for all men who enjoy hetlez pr0n. without that appeal you could
> be interpreted as admitting, "hell yeah, i look at hetlez pr0n and
> this is what i like!"
For the record, "hetlez pron" has no appeal for this particular het male, so any comments I might make are purely speculative, granted. In fact, I think that most of what most of us say on the subject of sex, not being registered, certified professional sexologists, are speculations. Certainly it's an interesting subject to speculate about. More so, to me at least, than subjects like the relative merits of alternative methods of measuring unemployment and productivity -- but hey, some people get tremendously turned on by economic theory! <g> But speculations are apparently verboten on this particular subject on this particular list, for some reason.
> in other venues, a more typical tack is self-deprecation: "hell yeah,
> i watch pr0n cause i'm such an ugly bastard i can't get a date." among
> hackers, "i'm such an asocial bastard i can't get a date." here,
> watching pr0n is legitimated by reference to one's status as
> undesirable, worn like a badge of honor. which is interesting in so
> far as that sort of rhetoric seems far more available to men than
> women. women might acknowledge that they can't get a date, but its
> invariably by reference to the lack of people with whom to have sex.
> desirable people, that is. which is why so many hetmen have a hard
> time believing women don't have power. :)
It's interesting to me that the subject how many het men feel powerless in their relationships with women has not come up. Most feminists have a simple view: as you say, women don't have power; men do. Men rape women; women (hardly ever) reciprocate. Therefore, it's impossible for men to feel that women have more power than they do.
But in fact, as any het man who is being honest will tell you, we often do feel that way. In fact, the self-deprecating hacker-types you mention (and a lot of other men) are regularly seized with the fear that if they ask a lady they are smitten with for a date they will be turned down, which will "prove" that they are ugly, unattractive, and unlovable, yadda, yadda. I spent quite a few years of my youth seized with just that fear, until I gradually realized that it was absurdly irrational and got up the courage to take some chances with rejection. But irrational fears and irrational passions like this are what sex is all about. It's not just a tidy, rational subject that one can safely "theorize" about. And it's not surprising that, on such an emotionally powerful subject, people might like to distance themselves from personal matters that they find it difficult to talk about in public.
> think about it in another context: Jane Radway wanted to look at the
> way women receive romance novels. the messages its creators are
> sending can be examined and then contrasted to the readers'
> interpretations of the material. for all the 'patriarchal' (sorry,
> shorthand) crap doled out in these novels, the stay-at-home mothers
> reading the books used them to carve out time for themselves. in spite
> of their own gender ideology, they resisted it by insisting on time
> for themselves to read and enjoy romance novels.
I'm quite interested in this aspect of the pornography subject, also. I think that sexual fantasies are akin to dreams -- basically generated by unconscious impulses that we would rather not acknowledge consciously (thank you, Sigmund). Ideologies such as feminism, on the other hand, are products of rational examination of personal/political issues. The result is often a good deal of cognitive dissonance: women know that romance novels are full of "patriarchal crap," but they enjoy them anyway. Feminist men are perfectly aware that a lot of their fantasies, were they to make them public, would be horribly inconsistent with their feminist convictions (see Nancy Friday's book on male fantasies), but they can't turn them off. Despite their politics, they just can't stop enjoying these highly non-PC daydreams. So what to do? I would say, enjoy whatever fantasies you enjoy, but recognize the difference between fantasy and real life. The feminist ideology is in fact right for real life, but adopting an ideology doesn't mean diddley-squat to the good old Id. :-)
> a guy on the old pulp culture list once made me think pretty hard
> about this when he argued quite persuasively that, the pr0n he's
> watched, tends to make him feel as women have all the power. that the
> feminist claim that women are degraded was very strange to him.
He was a rare, honest man. This is precisely Friday's theory -- and she's a rare, courageous woman to have gone through the wrenching experience of researching and writing her book.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit, 'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet; Nor ever ever shall, until that I die, For the longer I live the more fool am I. -- Wit and Mirth, an Antidote against Melancholy (1684)