Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Re: Hustling the Left (Response to Chip Berlet) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 23:43:58 -0500 From: "Chip Berlet" <c.berlet at publiceye.org>
Setting aside the weird website, this comment by Stan Goff makes sense to me.
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Sonali Kolhatkar's KPFK interview of Ann Simonton & Stan Goff about Hustler Magazine and some in the Left who support it. [If you have a dialup please double click here, go have a cup of tea and the radio interview will start up in approx. 30 minutes. Sorry.]
Sonali: Do you think you would have any success talking to people like Greg Palast?
Stan Goff: I sure hope I would. This is probably one of the most painful things about this and I would also say that sister Bogado was repaid for this important article that she wrote that did change some relations with a concerted and coordinated internet attack on her that included all sorts of the typical allusions to sexual aggression that she needed to be subjected to sex by a violent porn performer. Very very predictable. I think the comparison between Hustler and Fox is not an accurate comparison, saying we want to get our message out. I mean if that is all we're I mean if that is all we are trying to do then how far have we departed from our principles? I think the closer analogy is the comparison between Huslter and Southern Partisan. If images that are as overtly racist as they are in Southern Partisan, which is a magazine published by former Klansmen, and sometimes current Klansmen. No one on the left would ever think of associating themselves in any way, or legitimating a magazine that supported white supremacy. Why is it we don't have the same hesitation about a magazine that becomes an idiological organ for male supremacy. I think it tells you how far the male left has to go. And not just the male left because I was just as disappointed to hear that Amy Goodman who I know, and like, and respect, was legitimating this magazine as well. I think this comes from this libertarian impulse which says we are defending Free Speech. And how Larry Flynt became an icon for Free Speech is a complete mystery to me. I think we've got to go beyond this notion. I think it's middle class, and I think it's abstract, and I think it's libertarian that automatically put a the minus next to anything the Christian Right assigns as a plus. I think that's very superficial. They're going to defend pornography on free speech grounds and then they fail to critique the misogynist content. This is exactly what Chyng Sun <http://www.counterpunch.com/sun01312005.html> was saying and it seems to be completely lost on both the libertarian left and on the left in general which by the way is still dominated by males. I think we just have to be clear about this. That males on the left has not been willing to recognize how their own privilege, as males, their own social privilege as males, informs and creates this sort of myopia around gender. And I think it's time we start correcting this. God I hope it's possible.
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I agree with Stan Goff and Sonali Kolhatkar. It doesn't make me narrow minded, against broad coalition building, or a prude.
-Chip