>Doug Henwood says:
>
>Where you say: "and fucking sexiness or whatever Ariel Levy wants to use
>to uphold her own little Madonna/Whore complex."
>
>That's not really fair to her, though I'll concede she's not always clear
>about her underlying argument. But it is some variation on a critique of
>the American binary of purtitanism and prurience - the country that
>brought you abstinence education also has one of the highest rates of teen
>pregnancy in the world, and the country that
>brought you Donald Wildmon also brought you Girls Gone Wild. So she's
>actually doing a critique of the Madonna/Whore complex.
>
>Doug
I think she makes gestures at that as an explanation, because she knows this is an issue. But, in the end, she undermines her own claims by reappropriating the distinction, dressing it up in claims that suggest she gets it, doing her best not to come off as a prude.
But, it's not prudishness that I'm concerned about. It's the "looking down her meritocratic nose hole" (James Wolcott) that is a problem. It's about saying, "look at what it's doing to the children" and in the name of the children, we must reform. It's about making distinctions between those who know what they're doing, who are critical of the culture around them, and who act accordingly, and those who don't understand, social dopes who know not what they do.
You can see this in the debates the wracked Cultural Studies (which I hear is dead. Really?) and the Sociology of Culture. It's at the core of any debate we have on LBO about what the unenlightened masses do. There is this notion that we, here, are the Enlightened Ones. Those peolpe over there? The mass of humanity in the US? They know not what they do.
<etc. the rest here: http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/06/real-or-memorex/ >
Oh, and did you know? I think Cooper Anderson is completely fuckable, even more so now that I know he blushes so freakin' easily.
heh. http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/06/cooper-makes-me-blush/
"Scream-of-consciousness prose stylings, peppered with sociological observations, political ruminations, and in-yore-face colloquial assaults."
-- Dennis Perrin, redstateson.blogspot.com
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