When White Males Attack: Larry Flynt, Racism and The Left

This thread is fucking bizarre...

Lucy writes:

what fundamentally is wrong with fetishizing or objectifying body parts? isn't that human desire? what you gonna do when you see someone you fancy? shut your eyes and never, ever think he/shes got a nice arse again? what do you think about when you wank just out of interest? thats a serious question, i'm fascinated. how does the new sexuality operate in practice?

So this is a discussion board about how to get off? I thought we were discussing Dot's question, among others. Why won't someone (else) answer it?

Those of you that post your "witty porn" can go on being dehumanised by it. Your patriarchy-worshipping selves are showing, btw. Objectification and fetishisation are patriarchal sexual practices made to seem "natural".

It is truly striking how little you all know about other ways of being sexual. Too bad, eh? Ever hear of Tantra? Ever hear of love? Ever hear of intimacy? Massage? Kissing? The pleasure of your own bodies? Can you really not get off unless you turn a person into a thing? Wow. Sad. It's like talking with folks who cannot imagine life without the mall, without shopping, without debt. In this case your debt is both emotional and spiritual. How old are y'all, 11 to 13? Your sexualities sound like those of early adolescents raised on porn.

Btw, there's nothing essentialist about my arguments, so whoever is accusing me of that can fuck off. It must be difficult living with shite for brains and soaking up all the sexxx that patriarchy has to offer you. Pathetic, really.

Anyone with anything intelligent to say, or are y'all just a bunch of pro-patriarchal wankers?

I think you've said it all.

People have accussed me of putting up strawmen arguments regarding anti porn feminists but you've came along like a real life Wurzel Gummidge. You tried to hide your smug elitism for a wee while but ultimately the authoritarian, puritan and narrowmindness of your premises shone through.

Is it any wonder so many young women who are really feminists are too embarrassed to label themselves as such?

Hi

I'm having tantric sex right now. It's rubbish.

Love

Chris

thats bullshit dot. that was written to be abusive. there was no support or affection or respect in what captainmission wrote. all that is true is that it was deliberately abusive and employed use of rape language.

even when used within consensual sex that would still be a rape fantasy. revol, that was not aimed at "abstract ideas" that was aimed at "my dearest liberation". it started patronising and ended worse.

it is predictable that captrainmission would get this sort of support here when doing something so obviously fucked up.

for fuck's sake, stop taking things so seriously. this is a bulletin board. it was obviously meant to offend, as a joke.

but random i'm a surviour of patriarchy too. my fantasy mostly about my submission- to get arse fucked, to be tied up, whipped and objectified. So how can this be an attack on liberation? Power realtions in sex are simple- fuck or get fucked, violate or be violated? To accept that i could act submissively yet still attempt to exceprt control over liberation is unthinkable.

Hi

captainmission, you are making me hot. Post more.

Love

Chris

If that offended you how do you deal with the real world?

Have you ever read any erotic journals or books, such writing is very common, especially amongst female writers. And i wouldn't call it a rape fantasy, unless all rough sex is a "rape fantasy".

I loves u too, Mission, and would very much appreciate some more! {reaches for dildo without guilt, and shouts to the rooftops 'I'm a feminist' without embarrassment}. Ahh, the perks of working from home - titter ye not!

PS. whose the hot date?

foucaultian porn is the new black!

yea, captmiss, i join the ranks of those who appreciate you, both for your creative writing and for your more serious response to my question.

on the other hand, it's fucking bugging me that people aren't interested in leaving their camps.

example - revol - "real world"?! while i totally get where you're coming from (and agree with your point on that level), it is also somewhat farcical to talk about the real world on a libertarian communist/anarchist website.

i.e. if you use a bit of imagination, you know exactly how random (et al) will respond to that. who here is interested in defending the "real world" in all its fucked up glory?

probably i should give up on the idea of inter-camp discussion here; seems like the language/style question (if nothing else) is insurmountable. reinforces the idea that we have to have personal relationships to get past the knee-jerk responses. (not to say that everyone's responses have been knee-jerk, just that the KJs have been prevalant.)

so - one last attempt. if the pro-porn folks were having a discussion about the consequences and issues with porn and sexwork (i.e. if we ignored the "other side") what would that conversation be like?

Here's a good article about some of what this thread is dealing with.

http://www.giantleap.org/envision/choice.htm

Here's the opening of it:

To Choose or Not to Choose: a Politics of Choice

by Steven Hill

This article was published in The Humanist

Post-modernism, at its best, stands for multi-culturalism, decentralization of power, and emergence of new foci of power other than the white male heterosexual paradigm. At its worst, post-modernism degenerates into a New Age naivete and shallowness tha t tells us "don't worry, be happy," "we create our own reality," and promotes notions of "free choice" and "liberty" stripped of any analysis of power imbalances or historical context.

A shallow "politics of choice" has crept its way into gender politics, acting as a wedge to slowly pry apart the integrity of the feminist analysis of society. It threatens to turn feminism upside-down on its head, transforming feminism from a liberatio n movement into one that caters to a libertine sensibility pursuing simply the cause of liberty -- the ability to do as one wishes. Best-selling authors like Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia, as well as MTV feminists and sexual liberals like Madonna and Suz ie Bright, have elevated the cant of free choice and individual liberty to a new plateau, issuing a challenge to the perceived "prudery" of traditional feminists.

Yet these two movements -- one for liberation, the other for liberty -- are very different ones, aiming for very divergent outcomes. Oddly enough, this liberal/libertine feminist philosophy of free choice has more in common with the laissez faire, free market economics of the Clinton, Bush and Reagan Administrations than any civil libertarian or sexual liberal would care to admit. In curious ways, left meets right.

Hi

Ive always been mildly disturbed by the way that prostitutes in films (ironic and realist movies excepted) are always really hot, but in real life they’re unhappy mingers.

What’s the difference between porn stars, prostitutes and strippers?

Love

Chris

From the book, Sister Outsider:

(from the ground-breaking essay: The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, p. 54)

"The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies." --Audre Lorde

From the book, Intercourse. Chapter: Communion, p. 48-49:

'Lost in the simple-minded pro-sex chauvinism of Right and Left is the real meaning of affirmation, or any consciousness of the complexity--the emotional tangledness--of a human life. "It is really quite impossible," writes James Baldwin, "to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question: one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn't, by an act of imagination, made one's own." There is no imagination in fetishlike sexual conformity; and no questions are being asked in political discourse on sex about hope and sorrow, intimacy and anguish, communion and loss. Imagination is both aggressive and delicate, a mode of cognition unmatched in its ability to reveal the hidden meanings in reality now and the likely shape of tomorrow. Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which is only--pathetically--a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses. The paring down of the vocabulary of human affect to fuck-related expletives suggests that one destroys the complexity of human response by destroying the language that communicates its existence[...]

[...]There is an awful poverty here, in this time and place: of language, of words that express real states of being; of search, of questions; of meaning, of emotional empathy; of imagination. And so we are inarticulate about sex even though we talk about it all the time to say how much we like it--nearly, one might infer, as jogging. Nothing is one's own, nothing, certainly not oneself, because the imagination has atrophied, like some limb, dead and hanging useless, and the dull repetition of programmed sexual fantasy has replaced it." --Andrea Dworkin

the reaction to missions post didn't surprise me nor the fact that the points he was making were ignored in the furore/whoopfest that followed it. it made me think today about the power of verbal and visual imagery. the same points have been made earlier in different ways but didn't excite the same response. i don't think its possible even if it was considered desireable to take on porn. its too many nuanced (i think i just made that term up ) anyway, there are too many sublties and differences of experience and operation. its too complex.

it seems to me, going back to my question about exploitation, that where women (and presumeably this applies to men too) are being exploited by their employers and working in conditions that can cause them harm (and i don't accept that every employer in the porn industry is doing this simply because of the type of industry this is) then that is what should be challenged, just as working young people for long hours in flower farms breathing in pesticides for the lucrative flower industry should be challenged. porn is ultimately an industry like any other and to deny that, and set it apart for special vilification seems to me to just strengthen the grasp of those employers who do abuse.

it also seems to me that to set porn apart makes it more desireable. it feeds the sense of the exotic and forbidden. The danger also is that the arguments of Liberation et al lead to a new kind of puritanism.

anything that starts to change the way in which some women (and again presumeably some men) are treated has to begin from themselves, with their experience and knowledge of the industry they work in, their definition of what is happening and their ideas and demands for change. all of this like anything outside the hyperbole of much of the conversation on this thread is easier said than done. like anything else (and possibly more tricky than some things) the question is how can outsiders be involved? is it desireable to be involved even? how would that change the dynamics?

sorry going on with myself again and not making original points but being sandwiched between acres of cut and paste is giving me a headache.

Also from this site: http://www.giantleap.org/envision/choice.htm

What's wrong with liberty, an inquiring mind might ask? What's wrong with the 'freedom to do as one wishes?' Isn't that one of the great philosophical tenets of this United States democracy?

Of course it is, which should be enough to cause alarm to any justice- and equality-seeking person. In the name of liberty, free choice, and free enterprise, slaves were shipped from Africa, Native Americans were massacred and their land stolen, and wom en and children were held as property of the male head of household. In the name of liberty, as late as 1868 a North Carolina court applied the "rule of thumb" standard, which said that a switch used for beating one's wife must be no wider than the width of one's thumb. "The violence complained of would, without question, have constituted a battery, if the subject had not been the defendant's wife," ruled the court. White male liberty has almost always come at the expense of women and children, and eth nic minorities. White male liberty has usually been the antithesis of women's liberation.

Despite the passage of over a century, as well as the sweat, tears and triumphs of grass roots feminist activism, nineteenth century modalities of liberty still linger into our modern age. Much of our contemporary construct of liberty and free choice sp rings from the 19th century and its tradition of classical liberalism. Central to this tradition was the view that "government governs best that governs least." This laissez-faire attitude saw government interference as the natural enemy, whether in the bedroom or the corporate boardroom. We can see the descendants of classical liberalism today in two disparate groups: free traders and private property rightists like George Bush and Bill Clinton, columnist George Will, and Ron Arnold of the Wise Use M ovement on the one hand; and civil libertarians, pro-pornography advocates, and sexual liberals like Madonna, Camille Paglia, Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione and the American Civil Liberties Union on the other.

The First Amendment tradition of the latter group builds on the classical liberal view when they equate free speech to maximum individual liberty and define liberty as the absence of government interference. Their paradigm of free speech is an absolutis t one, championing a cause based on the street corner radical, inveighing from her soapbox unhindered by police authorities. Their paradigm is also obsolete, and increasingly conservative, since the impact of individuals like street corner radicals on th e arena of public discourse have been totally eclipsed by the corporate media, cable TV, and the fetishized privacy of the VCR generation. Practically speaking, most people today cannot afford to produce the kind of media that impacts public discourse. The free speech -- the "liberty" -- of corporations like NBC and the New York Times are hardly equal, either in frequency or quantity, to the free speech of most individuals, whether the latter yell at the top of their lungs from a street corner or not.

If history is any indicator, a milieu in which pure liberty reigns results in the strong prevailing over the weak and the wealthy overpowering the poor; men are privileged over women and small underdeveloped countries are at the mercy of larger, indust rial powers. Large newspapers gobble up smaller ones, and strong corporations raid the weak. Pure liberty is "survival of the fittest" and the "law of the jungle" wrapped in a prettier -- a kinder and gentler -- bow. Today, philosophies of liberty and free choice, shorn of any analysis or remedies for power imbalances, leads to such travesties as international free trade agreements where corporations have the "free choice" to pick up and move at will to the Third World, pitting the workers and the heal th and environmental standards of one country against another. They also give a potent, undeserved weapon to the language of discrimination and backlash in the debate over political correctness, as hate speech is defended as simply another choice of free expression. They allow property rightists to claim as their "free economic choice" their right to blacktop a wetlands or clear cut a mountainside they own. They accord corporations the same legal status as private individuals in the areas of speech, pr ess and property rights, despite the great gaps of inequalities between corporations and most individuals. And they lead to shrill claims of reverse discrimination by white men and the melting away of affirmative action programs, as the privileged watch with horror their loss of "liberty," their ability "to do as they wish."

Yeah they never look like the pics on the phonebox cards

Liberation - if you want to make an argument please do, rather than putting up long cut&pastes.

Hi

Is it true that porn stars often have to get special surgery to rebuild their arses after years of damaging anal banging?

Love

Chris

no u muppet, the arsehole is a muscle and therefore like anyother muscle gets stronger with use, unless of course you actually completely destroy it.

and dot i take on board your point about "real life" often meaning "just accept the shit the world throws at you". What I meant was not accept the world the way it is, but engage with people as they are, try and discover their issues, desires and see where there is a potential for creating common dialogue. I would expect liberation therefore to be pointing out trends and fissures in which a "revolutionary sexuality" can develop in the here and now, instead of blaket comdemnation. Unfortunatley I don't think there can be any dialogue with a group of people who profess to know how other people should arouse themselves. I have no problem with people not liking porn for whatever reasons, the problem is when they start second guessing those of us who do enjoy it.

Any dialogue has to be started on the basis of people being able to express their desires without shame, embarrassment or guilt.

On another note do you think people should have to worry about some arsehole like random being offended every other second? I don't, no one owes random anything other than respect her right to arouse herself or not in anyway she sees fit within meaningful consent.

I think i've laid out my opinion on porn and how it can be liberated from the commodity form enough now, and am really beginning to get irked by your attempts to place yourself as the "reasonable umpire", especially cos you haven't been singled out for attack like me and john have.

you're funny, revol.

that comment about how you're being attacked makes you sound remarkably like random.

like i said, i knew what you meant about real life, and i agree with you. it's just that you pretend to be talking to random (et al) and you're not really, because you're not making any effort to make sense to her.

that's fine, i get frustrated trying to talk to her too, just... why pretend?

and it's not about offending people (or not offending people), it's about having an interesting conversation in the face of people who want to have a boring one.

sigh.

have fun you all.

see that sigh is just a teeny bit patronising, non?

My interest in this discussion is more to do with the theoritcal justification of anti porn activists, the essentialism and authoritarian nature of it. I have no real wish to spend my time on an internet board pretending we can get to the root of sexual oppression/repression, atleast not a debate that centres around one rather marginal sphere, porn. I would imagine any sort of attempt to analysis the roots of the problem would require us to look at every aspect of society, schools, parenting, religion, the work place to name just a few. To be honest im really not that interested in what people get off to, as long as it's consenual. Thats why im more interested in getting rid of those power structures which restrict peoples freedoms and so undermine the concept of consent (though obviously we can still differiniate between consent and non consent even within bourgeois social relations). The problem with seeking to rationalise extremely subjective power relations is that it tends towards either elitist moralising or just becomes meaningless when faced with an onslaught of complexities and contradictions even within one person not to mention the "masses".

we could of course have a discussion about what turns people on and why and what sort of porn we would like to see but I don't think thats possible if people like random are going to play the offended moral minority card. And im not trying to play the victim, just pointing out that it is very hard to have an honest discussion on such topics when your opening up leads you to be labelled a sexist pig, with implications that you sexually abuse women or are a self hating woman. When i have used examples from my own sex life about how sexual dynamics are all very confusing I was accused of cock waving by Redtwister.

Im really quite fed up with this thread because no matter how much you politely explain your position, liberation and random will never accept it. The debate can not progress whilst some people think they have a right to police others sexualities whether by guilt tripping ala random or outright insinuations of abuse ala liberation.

Hi John.

My cuts and pastes ARE my additions to the conversation. Have you read them? They directly apply to THIS conversation.

Not that anyone wanting to degrade this conversation to the lowest levels of engagement will care to read serious, thoughtful writing by real writers.

But what do you think of what I've posted, other than telling me not to?

well both your cut and pastes say absolutely fuck all about the current debate.

The one from Dworkin seems to spend along time getting to the very banal and ridiculously sweeping claim that sexual imagination has been reduced to a video loop of fetishised body parts. Not only is this reductionist but in itself says nothing. She has not told us in any meaningful way what a non objectivised sexuality would look like (a celebration of obesity or dungarees?) nor what it would sound, feel or smell like (bullshit one imagines).

The other cut n paste is just a very simple critique of bourgeois individualism, an argument advanced far more eloquently by thousands before. It again says nothing concrete beyond the blatantly obvious. The article is dealing with concrete power imbalances that are much more quantitive than sexual relations.

If you have anything of interest other than cut n paste or poorly transcribed sub academic feminist theory please feel free to post it. Please feel free to fuck off if you intend to post another ridiculous post filled with grandoise assumptions about peoples sexual and emotional relationships.

I'm quite interested in the poetry particularly of Audre Lorde though - from what I remember of her she is pretty anti-essentialist. Zami is pretty cool too by her.

I have a copy of Sister Outsider somewhere which I must revisit. I quite like Adrianne Rich's poetry as well.

To John: Oh, never mind, I mistook you for someone with a heart and soul.

Well there's no chance of anyone mistaking you for someone with half a brain.

When god made you he must have used a McRib burger by mistake.

To Mitch:

Yeah, the poetry of Lorde and Rich is excellent, eh? Have you read Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by A. Rich? And her discussion with A. Lorde in Sister Outsider? My fav essays in that book are The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action, and The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power, as well as The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House, and The Uses of Anger: Women Responding To Racism.

I loved Zami as well!

And although you wouldn't know it from what some people here say, neither Dworkin or MacKinnon's work is at all essentialist, and the fundamentalist libertines repeating it a thousand times here doesn't magically make it so. I'll post an essay of Dworkin's which proves it.

(Dworkin clearly states that gender, and its roles, power arrangements, values inside patriarchy, are all socially constructed. As does Catharine A. MacKinnon. This seems to irritate those who want to believe that their attraction to people-as-things is natural.)

Do you have any other thoughts about this subject, while the likes of John and revol68 try and turn this discussion into meaningless porny blather?

I'd be happy to correspond with you here. It's not worth wasting any breath trying to converse with revol and John. Random, Chris, and Wendal have some good posts here, earlier on, and there are some other posts that are pertinent to the questions of how corporate sexism shapes our sexuality, whether gay or straight, or anything else, and how patriarchal values find their way into our (socially constructed) sex lives. Have you read Unpacking Queer Politics, by Sheila Jeffreys? Controversial, probably, but a really good analysis of the ardent "patriarchally conservative" libertarianism (i.e., "anything goes, everything is good, because the personal is no longer political: never mind how our collective acts dehumanise ourselves and others") that revol and John are so bound to they can't think for themselves.

Welcome, I guess is the point. Glad to see a new voice in the mix.

Peace to you. What are your fav Lorde poems? Or what's your fav collection of her poems?

LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE

WRITINGS 1976-1989

by

Andrea Dworkin

Part III

TAKE BACK THE DAY

Biological Superiority:

The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea

1977

Copyright © 1977, 1988, 1993 by Andrea Dworkin.

All rights reserved.

One of the slurs constantly used against me by women writing in behalf of pornography under the flag of feminism in misogynist media is that I endorse a primitive biological determinism. Woman Hating (1974) clearly repudiates any biological determinism; so does Our Blood (1976), especially "The Root Cause." So does this piece, published twice, in 1978 in Heresies and in 1979 in Broadsheet. Heresies was widely read in the Women's Movement in 1978. The event described in this piece, which occurred in 1977, was fairly notorious, and so my position on biological determinism--I am against it--is generally known in the Women's Movement. One problem is that this essay, like others in this book, has no cultural presence: no one has to know about it or take it into account to appear less than ignorant; no one will be held accountable for ignoring it. Usually critics and political adversaries have to reckon with the published work of male writers whom they wish to malign. No such rules protect girls. One pro-pornography "feminist" published an article in which she said I was anti-abortion, this in the face of decades of work for abortion rights and membership in many pro-choice groups. No one even checked her allegation; the periodical would not publish a retraction. One's published work counts as nothing, and so do years of one's political life.