> Wonder what porn Noam's watched to arrive at his position.
> Dennis
>
I share your libertarian stance on pornography, but that hat's a surprising retort to what I thought were pretty obvious observations by Noam Chomsky. Surely it is glaringly apparent that the *vast majority* of pornography does indeed revolve around the degradation of women, in the specific sense that he states: women are reduced to vulgar sex objects, conforming to male fantasies of super-lubed, inflatable fuck-machines with embryonic personalities. That is, plainly, a form of symbolic violence against women, and not just the women who participate in the industry. And the logic of pornography is in that sense hardly restricted to the industry itself - it extends into advertising, fashion, literature, any of the manifold fora in which women might be objectified and humiliated. Incidentally, I was particularly impressed that he rebutted this nonsense about 'well, they chose to do it', which would be an odious enough argument coming from right-wing free-marketeers, but is bizarre when it comes from leftists.