> No, I wasn't talking about anyone here specifically,
> though I dunno, Leigh might not be mind being grouped
> with the MacDworkinites, apaologies if s/he would.
>
> Most porn is dreck. That doesn't make porn special.
> Most of everything is dreck. Although I am not an
> especially knowleageable analyst of porn, I doubt
> that, apart from being more industrialized and lest
> artistically crafted, the current lot more
> misogynistic or anti-humane than some of the classic
> stuff I still find to be a real turn on, such as Story
> of O. Anyone who knows that story will knwo what I
> mean. But others will know more about what's available
> than I.
>
> However, I still think that porn is a phenomenon that
> requires analysis and thought first before we get
> around to reflexive condemnation. E.g., Story of O,
> though artistic, is as morally appalling in its way as
> Birth of a Nation (another morally bankrupt
> masterpiece). Why it is still the stuff of fantasy for
> people who'd be appalled by even being offered the
> opportunity to act in the way suggested is something
> that calls for saying more than jsut that men are
> scum, or there are scummy corners in even nice guys,
> etc. Kipnis is a good place to start thinking about
> this.
>
> However, whatever the current crop of stuff, you'll
> have to pry my Bettie Page pix out of my cold dead
> fingers.
>
> jks
>
>
>
> --- Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
>>> Now this is a brave and original analysis!
>>>
>>> Here's a more interesting suggestion: read Laura
>>> Kipnis' Bound & Gagged -- I know that Doug doesn't
>>> like LK personally, but I think she's brilliant --
>>> which is a genuinely creative examination of what
>>> counts as porn (which is not obvious) and what
>>> function it serves in society. Her class analysis
>> of
>>> Hustler (yes!) as a liberatory (!) enterprise is
>>> especially interesting, real ice cold water in the
>>> faces of the PC crowd and the MacDworkinites.
>>
>>> jks
>>
>> Are you seriously lumping me in with the
>> "MacDworkinites"? Dude, I was in
>> the heat of the porn wars back in the day. I fought
>> against those types in
>> print and in person. I've also lauded Hustler's
>> satirical side in such PC
>> journals as USA Today. I was commenting on the
>> CURRENT crop of porn, which
>> has become incredibly misogynist, coarse, and at
>> times simply anti-humane.
>> There's plenty of erotic/explicit expression that I
>> still enjoy and will
>> defend. But the stuff today is, in many case, god
>> awful.
>>
>> DP
>>
>>
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I'm not highly read on Andrea Dworkin, so I don't know if I should be offended, I've always considered that extreme anti-porn is not an option... An admiring glance at a woman is not rape, which would put me at odds with perhaps 1% of the (female) feminists in the world.
I was raised in an evironment where women were *not* "chicks". I will tolerate men that use the term(after ragging on them), but I won't tolerate the current trend of calling girlfriends "bitches".
Just call me a selective moralist
Also of note... the local teenage girls term girls they don't like as "tricks".
Nice hunh? It's wannabe stuff like the "gangta" thing, but it a bit jarring. Maybe they'll grow up to be "...professional cocksuckers"... wouldn't that be great!
I admire Larry Flynt quite a bit. He caught my attention when Hustler published "truly obscence" material... a full color spread (there's that word again!) of the pile of bodies at My Lai, and the probablility that the feds tried to kill him(the name "Stoner" means more than just pot smoker to me... it means assassination weaponry) says he's probably on my side.
I'm not anti-hooker... lord knows I've spent enough years at street level, if not on the streets, to know enough of them personally(I'm male, and I'm talking about "tribal" friendship and "group" protection, not business and pleasure). That's why I think I've seen a pretty good sample of the damage that happens from the ... prostitution anyway, don't know too many that do porn on a professional, or regular basis, but I would surmise from the few I do know, that there's slighly less drug addiction, but more physical abuse.
I just think that the current "psychological" state of western society is FUBAR, and it gets reflected in a particularly damiging form by the pornography that emerges from it.
My take is: intensive, highly directed image marketing, the sociological "dismemberment" of eros as displayed *prominently* by magazines of every variety, Black Book to Vogue, and the objectification of the human being in a very selective and specific way to sell things that have nothing to do with sex.
I mean... someone might truly "enjoy" "pleasefuckmywife.com but I suspect that said pleasure is conditioned by people and organizations that have profit motives central to the issue, not sexual liberation.
It just looks like liberation... like a glass of water to someone dying of thirst... to continue the analogy, a mirage. Delusion.
I think Yoshie made my point on another thread:
Saturday, May 07, 2005 8:21 AM [lbo-talk] Stigma, Law, Sex, and Drugs
<...> Everywhere the military goes, the sex industry that caters to it flourishes. See, for example, Katharine H.S. Moon's <em>Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations</em> (Columbia University Press, <http://www.ciaonet.org/book/moon/moon.html>, 1997).
The same goes for Iraq, though to a lesser extent because Washington doesn't fully control any part of Iraq beyond the Green Zones and checkpoints. Christian Parenti says about Iraq today: "It is like an extreme version of the Wild West. There is a lot of drug use and prostitution. Drugs, especially Valium and other sedatives, are readily available throughout the urban centers. Prostitution is rampant because women are hungry, women are widowed, and there is a type of lawlessness that encourages it. Most of the prostitution caters to Iraqi men, but it also involves many U.S. soldiers" (qtd. in Tucker Foehl, "What Kind of Freedom? An Interview with Christian Parenti," <http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/01/parenti.html>, 26 Jan. 2005). Prostitution that depends on vastly unequal international relations of military and economic powers is more likely to become an explosive political issue than prostitution based on garden-variety inequality between men and women of the same class and nation or between men of higher and lower social classes or strata. <...>
I suggest quite seriously that US society is just as FUBAR, but in different, more subtle ways, and no one's seeing the forest for the trees. In a capitalist consumerist society, money buys that "...extreme version of the Wild West." any time it's desired...
If the price is right.
"...women are hungry, women are widowed(read disenfranchised), and there is a type of lawlessness that encourages it."
Leigh