[lbo-talk] War Pornography

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Dec 7 21:23:13 PST 2005


Kelley wrote:


> OK. If you're going to insist on calling it pro=porn, I can't
> really have a discussion with you.

Firstly, pro-porn and anti-porn, for me, are mainly shorthands like pro-war and anti-war. We talk about "the anti-war movement," but only a few in it are actually against all wars. The same goes for pro-porn. Secondly, I can be fairly characterized as pro-porn in the sense that I believe that porn is a genre that has lots of aesthetic and political potential, notwithstanding the present sorry sexist state of it. As for "sex-positive," one can very well be sex- positive and anti-porn, or at least that's how Joanna describes her position, and so would probably Jensen and Dines. Surely we owe it to Joanna (who is here) if not Jensen and Dines (who aren't here) not to imply that we are sex-positive and she is sex-negative.

Also, you know that I don't think that "pro-choice" is an improvement over "pro-abortion." It fails to remove the stigma attached to abortion, so it allows people to keep it out of health care plans and (worse) put more and more restrictions on the right to abortion so long as women still have "choice." If you can reclaim "bitch," why not abortion also?


> *sigh* repeating what someone's already typed and then pretending
> that you said it doesn't really fly.

Well, you talked about objectification, while Jensen and Dines talk about commodification. (Not the same thing obviously -- it's one thing to objectify reproductive capacity in a non-profit scientific study or artistic creation -- it's another thing to commodify it for for-profit surrogate motherhood.) I think that those who have responded to Jensen and Dines haven't really addressed their points.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



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