> ps specially for B|L: Hustler is nasty and it sucks but they did
> manage to produce the greatest magazine cover ever:
>
> http://www.uncharted.org/frownland/pix/hustler_bicentennial_cover.jpg
>
> The photo says it all, my heart swells with patriotism; _this_ is
> why we're better than the jehadis.
In my opinion, a nation's rank doesn't rise or fall according to how much or how little clothes women wear. As a matter of fact, it's a problem that women, their clothes, their behaviors, etc. are so often made to become symbolic vehicles of "national cultures," "national traditions," and so forth.
A country that is good to women is one in which women aren't politically or culturally compelled to hide or bare their bodies more than men and in which sexual images and services of women are no more or no less commodified than those of men. The key is equality and freedom, rather than volumes of clothing.
Brian wrote:
>> Women are not part of their implied audience at all: they sell
>> images of women to men, period.
>
> And?
>
> Colt Men sells images of men to gay men.
Colt Men sells images of men to gay men, which probably don't interest many lesbians. There's no sexual problem there -- after all, gay men tend not to have sex with lesbians.
Straight men, however, are presumably interested in sex with straight women or bisexual women, but images of straight sex that they are encouraged to consume are images that fail to interest most straight women and even bisexual women. That is a problem. When men are from Hustler and women are from Harlequin Romance, that's a sexual equivalent of Deborah Tannen.
Where there is lack of gender-equal participation in production or consumption, in whatever branch of human endeavor, there is almost always a problem of gender oppression either as a cause or an effect or both.
WDK wrote:
> What's the word when working class people vote Republican against
> their own class interest? let's say "suckery," after "being a
> sucker." If a guy is guilty of both suckery and sexism, and
> somehow you manage to win him over and cure him of suckery at
> least, I call that progress.
Why do you assume that Hustler buyers are mainly working-class men who vote Republican? Larry Flynt is a Democrat, and, for all you know, a majority of Hustler buyers may very well turn out to be working-class men who don't vote Republican if you survey them.
That said, a political strategy that leftists should pursue is to rally the base first and then go after the rest.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>
