>So, to reiterate Gar's question: what is so bloody bad about Hustler,
>compared to other mass media, if our paramount concern is gender equality?
I think Angela once put it into sharp focus quite some time ago on the topic of racism and sexism. I posted it not too long ago with regard to the Ann Coulter's bony knees thread.
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/11/the-fantasy-of-being-outside-fantasy/
Ang argues that, by focusing on the most heinous examples of racism (such as crypto-fascism, the most violent types of porn (as with Dines), we don't bother looking at the more insidious forms of racist and sexist oppression.
And, borrowing from Butler, we can talk about the ways we tend to look for some bedrock egregious form of oppression. I think of it the same way Butler does when she asks us to examine how "biology" as a discourse provides the bedrock against which we talk about what most of us agree is a socially constituted "gender".
Hustler (etc.) becomes the bedrock, everyone agrees its nasty bad and evil, and let's leave that unquestioned, a thoroughly unsupported claim in this convo so far. And just as it operates with the biology/gender dichotomy, it leaks - spills over -- into gender so that we've never really given up biological determinism after all.
My kid has picked up all kinds of misogynistic ideas, I have them, we all do. But, my kid? Living in a feminist household? He's never seen an issue of Hustler. He doesn't have to in order to pick up those ideas.
I think it's fine to criticize all of this, but to suggest that anyone who reads it or writes in it is, in essence, not a feminist is tantamount to doing precisely what Carrol has often complained about. _THAT_ was what started this conversation in the first place.
"Scream-of-consciousness prose, peppered with sociological observations, political ruminations, and in-yore-face colloquial assaults."
-- Dennis Perrin, redstateson.blogspot.com
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