April 9, 2014: The 9th Anniversary of Andrea Dworkin's Death

image is from here

It is good to see some of Andrea's work being regarded as important. It doesn't happen nearly enough.

It is 2014. A twelve-year-old boy rapes his 7-year-old sister after watching hardcore pornography. Should this be a feminist issue? Judging by the lack of any mainstream feminist response, no. Perhaps once it would have been, but not today. 

We’ve grown too worldly wise for moral panic. No longer are feminists shouty, sexless beings, piecing together a politics based on exception, exaggeration and fear. Terrible things happen to women and girls but when it comes to blame (such an awful word!) we are circumspect. Men rape women, boys rape girls, but it’s nothing to do with how we represent sex. It’s nothing to do with the stories we tell our children. Hatred of women just is.

For the rest of the article, please see here:

http://www.feministtimes.com/dworkin-right-about-porn/

I hope that Andrea's work continues to inspire radical activism against all forms of white male supremacy.

Catharine A. MacKinnon on "Lovelace", and the subject (not object) of the film, Linda Marchiano

All that follows is a cross-post from Harvard University Press Blog.

09 August 2013

Catharine MacKinnon on Lovelace

The pornographic film Deep Throat, released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of the film.
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Q. You’ve noted that prior to the 1980 publication of Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal, you had no view of pornography one way or the other. For those unfamiliar with her story, who was Linda Lovelace?

“Linda Lovelace” was the fictional name of Linda Boreman, later Linda Marchiano, who was forced into captivity and made to perform fellatio and other sex acts by pimps, including organized crime, so that pornography, notably the notorious film Deep Throat, could be made of her. The film was instrumental in establishing pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. After her escape, Linda’s valiant opposition to the sex industry included chronicling her abuse in Ordeal and extensive public testimony. Her revelations enabled a change in the way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from morality to harm.

Q. This film comes decades after the landmark pornography civil rights hearings at which Marchiano testified, as documented in In Harm’s Way. Can you remind us what was at stake in those hearings?

The anti-pornography civil rights hearings collected in In Harm’s Way created a space for people victimized by pornography to speak about what had been done to them in its making or through its use.  Up to that point, the legal argument over pornography had essentially only considered the freedom of speech issues.

The hearings documented the inequality that is foundational to the industry: that the “speech” of the pornographers is the use and abuse of the bodies of mainly women, who were far from free and were not speaking for themselves. The consequences of the distribution and use of the materials was shown to be equally silencing and endangering to legions of women and children who are abused by its consumers.  Thus the sexual exploitation of women and children in making pornography is mass-produced through its consumers to become violation of other women and children.

The civil rights ordinances the hearings debated were passed several times, then found to violate the First Amendment on the theory that the more harm the materials do, the more protected as speech they are–an incorrect, indeed reversed, view of First Amendment law. The ordinances could still be passed and found constitutional today.

Q. What was your involvement with the Lovelace film?

I represented Linda from 1980 until her death, was her friend, and continue to represent her Estate and her children. Lovelace is based in part on our life story rights. It shows Linda as human and credible, as she was not seen as being in life. All she ever wanted was to be believed and respected, to have people face what really happened and take steps to stop it. We see this film as a major step forward in that process. Apparently, when you make fact into fiction, people begin to believe it is true.

We participated in the making of the picture, are proud of it and the people who made it, and feel strongly that Linda would be proud of it.

Q. Gloria Steinem has said of the film that the true story is actually much more violent, but that the filmmakers “did the best they could.” To the extent that the trauma of Marchiano’s life had to be toned down to bring the film to a wide audience, why is that a compromise worth making?

The filmmakers had full creative control, which is as it should be. The film’s compromises with factual accuracy are not mine to defend. Artists operate on assumptions of what the experiences of audiences prepare them to see; sometimes audiences say they want to see pretty standard tropes when they go for entertainment.

Through a brilliant structure, Lovelace unmasks the myth that Linda was freely acting and shows her enduring coercion and terror, trapped by lack of support from her family and authorities. And it shows her victorious, getting free of what is increasingly understood as sex trafficking. It shows the core truth of her story and her triumph.

Q. The impact of the internet on the pornography industry has obviously been enormous, and this film depicts an era much different from that in which we now live. With that said, what would you hope that the Lovelace audience takes from the film?

Society is substantially more saturated with pornography than it was before, as Andrea Dworkin and I predicted in 1983 would happen if nothing was done to stop it. That means we need a law like the civil rights law we proposed even more now than we did then, because even more people are being violated as a result of the sex industry.

Linda had no rights over Deep Throat when it was made, and without the law we wrote for her and others, she would have no rights over it today. And she is not alone–far from it.
Once Linda is seen as a human being rather than a sex doll and sperm spittoon, a process Lovelace advances light years, we hope audiences will begin to consider that the pornography industry traffics in a form of sexual slavery that is neither protected speech nor free. Meantime, they will see an enlightening story as they enjoy a very smart, splendidly acted, and good movie.

The Politics of Cultural Appropriation

image of  "American Indian" "wallpaper" is from here

What follows is a typically LONG comment I left on a blog called "Race Files", linked to *here*. I encourage you to read the conversation there. Yes, being white, middle class, and male means I feel very entitled to blather on and on about things, and, often enough, I act accordingly. 

Hi Scot. I just read your post and the comments here. I have several thoughts to add to the conversation. First, I want to commend you on keeping the focus on the political contexts in which cultural appropriation happens. For me, there are a few key issues that I try and keep central when considering this stuff.

One is: who politically benefits from such appropriations? Who is left with more or less than what they had? What are the larger patterns of appropriation and exploitation? Are those patterns part of something else that is less easily disguised as innocuous or innocently done (such as genocide)?

Another key issue, speaking as a middle class white gay Jewish male, is this: what assumptions are carried, usually unconsciously or insensitively, into the process of appropriating others' cultures?

I agree with a commenter above: I'd also say that learning from great thinkers and activists about oppression and resistance isn't "appropriation". Keeping in mind the first key issue, you are using this knowledge to co-create a less oppressive world WITH marginalised people, not just FOR yourself.

I see many middle class whites with Native American, Asian, and Caribbean art and "artifacts" in their possession. They will speak very positively about those cultures and admire the artwork. And I wonder: what do you offer to those cultures and to the people, collectively, who make the art you consume and enjoy? Because what a one-time or regular "collector" paid an individual artist or seller for the artwork isn't a way of responsibly and ethically being with other people with less social privilege and political power. It is an expression of the advantage, the privilege, and the power. This isn't to say that owning the artwork is "bad"; the money one paid for the artwork was likely needed by the artist (this is also true for most white artists I know). It is to say it is part of something beyond but inclusive of the act that is more insidious and hideous.

I learned as a white person to consume despised-while-coveted cultures in a very white supremacist/male supremacist/capitalist way, with great regard for what such acquisition could do for me, and with little to no consideration of what I ought to be offering in return. My people didn't encourage me learn what the conditions were and are that led me to be able to be that kind of consumer or coveter; instead, they taught and encouraged the behavior; after all, it serves the rulers of the oppressive status quo by mimicking their most horrible acts without revealing the rulers' bloody hands.

I see many white middle class people practice New Age spirituality which sloppily and grossly (racistly or "whitely") appropriates practices that may or may not be Indigenous North American. Workshops are offered or classes are taught, never to Indigenous people; only to other whites. The goal is to enrich the lives of whites, to make "culturally deprived" white lives seem more fulfilled, and maybe to cut a profit while doing so. But the capitalist/male supr./white supr. practice of taking-without-giving, and taking-without-asking, operates under an overarching assumption that the world is "for" me not "with" me; it exists to plunder and pillage; bodies exist to be exploited and raped. This is the problem. Appropriating more and more, consuming more and more, is not likely to be a solution--surely not an ethical, responsible, or considerate one. Lorde's caution to us, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house", comes to mind.

The most central global atrocity, to me, is this: white/Western/Anglo and male supremacist "cultures" are built on the backs, brains, and blood of other cultures and people. The ruling classes mass murder, exploit, rape, and otherwise seek to steal from, deplete, and destroy, people and their/our ways of being as well as their/our natural "resources", including stealing and polluting land bases intimately and intricately tied to the cultures being destroyed.

Middle class whites purchasing stocks of corporations that commit genocide for retirement, and whites teaching "Native Ways", and white het men purchasing corporate, for-profit pornography or renting girls or adult women, usually poor, often of color, for sexual assault named "consensual" and "harmless" by the men, all contribute to genocide and gynocide. In my experience, men don't encourage other males to learn what the conditions were and are that led us to be able to be that kind of consumer; instead, we teach and encourage the behavior in other males.

In this view, these practices are all part of a dominant US white/male supremacist culture: these practices define, delineate, replicate, and enforce that culture. These practices, and so many others, tell us what it exists, fundamentally if not only, to do. Ignorance, sometimes feigned or willed, and arrogance, often denied, are two crucial ingredients of that culture.

So, for example, whites appropriate Indigenous North American cultures without understanding the history of whites forcing Native Americans to either give up their own cultures, "adopt" the dominant culture (religion and language, for example), or perish. Another example: men consume corporate pornography as if the people in the pictures or videos aren't as real as the consumer and without regard for the conditions that led the prostituted person to be in front of a camera to begin with. Are girls and women and LGBTIQA people across gender made to fear homelessness and poverty, or are they/we beaten or killed if they/we don't do what pimps (with or without cameras) want? The women I know who have endured and survived such abuses say racist and misogynistic threat and force are endemic and systematic: requisite and definitive rather than anecdotal or apolitically "unfortunate". And of course too often they/we are made homeless, are impoverished, are beaten, raped, and killed for doing exactly what the pimps want, which is, after all, to be a thing for him and other men to possess, use up, and discard--dead or alive.

Whites and the rich appropriate, steal, and consume the lives and cultures of people of color and the poor, including through slavery and mass murder. Men appropriate, steal, and consume girls and women, including women's sexuality and labor, including through slavery and mass murder. We do not share or borrow. We certainly do not "give back". "White-giver" or "Anglo-giver" ought to replace the deeply racist term, "Indian-giver".

I believe these realities ought not be obscured or ignored when the conversations happen. I believe those of us with at least one foot in a structurally oppressive position, if not also a hand, a home, and a retirement account, must strive to continually arrive at less exploitive, less oppressive, less lethal ways of being while challenging and transforming those larger structures and systems of harm and horror. Thank you for not putting these issues aside in your discussion here and in your work beyond the internet.

Post script:
I'll add this question to the discussion: do whites' and men's seemingly non-terroristic acquisitions, purchases, and collections of Asian, African, Pacific Island, Caribbean, Latina/o, and Indigenous cultures contribute to and reinforce the problem of Western white and male supremacist imperialism and terrorism, or do they work against it?

Pornography is the Depiction and Documentation of Sexual and Racial Oppression

image is from here

Below is a revised and expanded version of a comment I posted to a Kyler J.'s blog, A Radical Black Feminist Teenager. To read her post, titled "Erotica is not feminist and other things like Porn, BDSM, and Prostitution", please click *here*.

This is my response, adding to the discussion:

As a white gay intergender [anti-gender] male who has witnessed the effects of pornography on gay males over the last thirty years, I'll add a few thoughts about how corporate pimps exploit the LGBTIQA community.

I completely agree with you that "lesbian porn" is consumed by het men for het men's pleasure. There's nothing progressive about it in terms of its overall social effect, even if the intention by a very few lesbian producers is progressive. (Needless to say, most "lesbian porn" is not produced by lesbians.) Many times het men have asked me, "What about the porn that lesbians make for themselves?" Aside from noting that the question is blatantly (if not always consciously) self-serving, my response is this: Any such porn is such a tiny percentage of the whole of the horrific pornography-prostitution-trafficking industry; to pretend it actually effects any sort of progressive to radical change in the overall aesthetics or agendas of controlling forces (that, in the Western world, is predominantly rich white het men) is to engage in wishful thinking not backed up by "hard-core" reality. And whatever lesbians make, for whatever purposes, will, if it is public (such as being on the internet or for sale), be appropriated by het men. Once consumed by het men, it is then in service to their patriarchal, misogynistic sexual appetites, which, far too often, are acted out against pimped girls and women, usually poor and of color, with no lesbian empowerment in sight. And, as you well note, most of it is not distinguishable from dominant non-lesbian pornography in overall style and content.

The pornography that is marketed to gay males is also produced and owned by white het males and functions to reinforce white supremacy, het supremacy, male supremacy, corporate capitalism, and Western anti-Indigenous imperialism. Gay males have been willing to consume this material for complex reasons, but the effect on our community has been to teach us how to "do sex" the way patriarchal het men "do sex", except to one another not to women and girls. But the aesthetics of het pornography show up in white gay men's actions. A disheartening example of this in the "legitimate" film industry is the new film "Rock of Ages", which Adam Shankman had a strong hand in shaping as the director: the "look" (which means the racist misogynist behavior and the values) of white het men's pornography is infused into it. (You can get a sense of that from the movie's trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USxhXb5VC5E)

The effect of gay male consumption of het male-made pornography has been to promote and promulgate white power, masculinist power, and anti-queer heterosexism among gay males of all colors and ages and to forge an alliance between gay and het men against feminist lesbians who have been taking on the rulers of pornography and prostitution, showing them up for what they are: corporate pimps, serial rapists, traffickers, and slave traders of girls and women of all colors.

The pornography of allegedly "transgender" people has been historically racist, anti-transgender, anti-gay, anti-lesbian, and anti-woman. It, too, serves the same dominant forces mentioned above. And it also promotes some very dangerous ideas about what being transgender is: male-bodied people with silicone breast implants and bleached, straightened hair, for example. Similarly to females in the sexxx-ploitation industries, gay and non-gay males, and intersex and transsexual people are economically coerced to alter our bodies to appear the way white het male consumers, procurers, and pimps insist we appear--and do what they profit from us doing. Similarly to "lesbian porn", very destructive portrayals of transsexual people of all colors are marketed by the pornography industry's owners as a niche fetish for non-transgender male consumers.

Liberals habitually promote "gender" as a social difference in need of greater diversification, while the radicals I know believe that it is the power of capitalism and heteropatriarchal white supremacist gender hierarchies that must be abolished. Gender has been diverse outside of white imperialist societies; this is both destroyed and forgotten by ruling classes of people. To argue for diversification of gender while keeping ruling structures in place is to participate in anti-Indigenous genocidal behavior.

Pornography, as an industry, is virulently anti-queer, anti-woman, anti-female, anti-transgender, anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-Asian, and anti-Indigenous. The fact that many gay males and other queer people have supported it financially and otherwise only speaks to the effectiveness of the ruling class in trying to convince all oppressed people believe that we need to buy what the ruling class sells as if our sexual and social lives depended on it.

On Pornography and Sexual Athleticism

image is from here

[Added to at the end, on 9 March 2012.]

It is often argued by pro-pornography consumers and sexxxism industry producers and investors that the actors in pornography films are amazing human beings demonstrating a kind of Olympian ability to have sex over and over and over again. Below is one such comment that appeared here: http://nextgenjournal.com/2012/02/inside-pornography-a-rational-feminist-critique/

It is the first comment offered following the article by Larisa Manescu.

Jim Graham [writes:]

It is true that since the mid-90's, BDSM-inspired power play has become the dominant style of sex act portrayed in mainstream pornography. There is quite a bit more slapping and choking in the porn scenes released from the mainstream porn industry over the last 20 years, but this is not just because of the porn industry's traditional misogyny (though there certainly is that).

Porn stars are sexual athletes who demonstrate advanced sex play for the viewer's pleasure. Anal sex and threesomes are advanced sex. These (and most) porn sex acts are activities that many sexual beginners hope to experience one day, and as they become more sexually advanced these men and women (swingers, poly, kinky sluts, and other monogamish people) often live out their fantasies, with or without integrating elements of power play. The extreme acts that you mention (ATM, gagging, DP/DV/DA, etc.) are much dirtier than regular sex, and porn stars make their money by pushing boundaries, but not unusual at a private sex party.

While the women in most pornography are portrayed as submissive, please keep in mind that there are thousands of porn scenes where the man is dominated, cuckolded or otherwise made to submit in the same ways.

All modern sex scenes include more spitting than ever before, which you and I probably agree is much less appealing, but for most porn watchers sloppier is dirtier and indicates that the actress is putting some effort into it, and that is exactly what the average porn watcher is looking for - a woman who they find attractive pushing her sexual boundaries while devoting her attention to her sex partner(s) until everyone is satisfied. That is the porn I watch, from studios like Elegant Angel and Belladonna Productions.

"The thought is that pornography, in the late 20th century, could have adopted entirely different sexual practices, ones more intimate, realistic and yet still erotic and stimulating. However, at the expense of the woman, it spiraled down a more intense, risky, and demeaning path."

Various people (most famously Candida Royalle) have tried to convince the porn industry that they should produce erotic imagery that women would also enjoy, but I don't believe that there was ever a time where the industry would have adopted different sexual practices, or had the talent to portray the more subtle sex play that you wish porn provided, until today. As more women and couples purchase porn for their mutual enjoyment, then the now internet-diversified industry will produce a wide range of videos that are intended for more than just male masturbation.

This is my response:

Julian Real replies:

I want to respond to this statement specifically (but also to the whole of the comment): "Porn stars are sexual athletes who demonstrate advanced sex play for the viewer's pleasure."

From all the people I know who engage in or have engaged in casual-sex-for-money, within or outside systems of prostitution and procurement, within or outside systems of sexual slavery, I'm not hearing that "advanced sex" and "sexual athlet[icism]" are the most accurate, appropriate, or pertinent terms to use, any more than someone working twelve to fourteen hours per day in a sweat shop ought to be considered an "income athlete", or someone who is showing the rest of us how to do it (work-for-pay) better or more maturely. Your analysis leaves out (curiously and completely) the trauma involved in being physically invaded and assaulted by many people over many days. For empathy-building, I'd suggest you go out and engage in the kind of "sex" that is promoted by corporate pimps and let me know if you find it untraumatic. But as someone who might potentially be your friend, I wouldn't advise you do so.

There is a rather cynical and callous assumption built into an argument for valuing such sexual athleticism that there are, in fact, some people--some peculiarly abuse-immune class of human beings--who can and do manage to engage in serially physically, emotionally, and spiritually abusive and exploitive "sex acts" and *not* be traumatised by them. We might note that if the acts weren't abusive, drug abuse as a requirement for getting through a day or night of them might not be so ubiquitous.

If you could only have body-pummeling sex by being drugged or drunk, your dearest friends might question whether the sexual behavior was good for you. (As well as the excessive daily drug and alcohol consumption.) If the performance of such sexual athletics necessitates dangerous levels of drug abuse and often unconscious dissociation to simply be part of it, ought we not demonstrate at least occasional compassion for those of us who are inside systems of sexual exploitation, abuse, and slavery? Every person I have known who has willfully engaged in these forms of sex were either grossly sexually assaulted first, learning at a young age that they ought not have some basic and fundamental sexual boundaries that perhaps you enjoy, or they were bullied, battered, threatened and terrorised inside the systems after being part of them. If it is shown beyond question that pre-existing or on-site sexual, physical, and economic trauma is a de facto requirement for being part of the systems of procurement and slavery, I'd argue that we ought to condemn and organise against the owners and financial investors of such systems of terror and horror and, through available avenues of jurisprudence, throw the serial rapists and corporate pimps in prison.

As for this: "While the women in most pornography are portrayed as submissive, please keep in mind that there are thousands of porn scenes where the man is dominated, cuckolded or otherwise made to submit in the same ways." 

We must keep in mind that when men are submitting to women, it is always their choice to submit: they choose to do so because it is their sexual fetish or desire to submit. This demonstrates to me only that men maintain control of sexuality however and whenever they wish to. Het men being a sexual submissive in no way means he's not in charge of the whole scene being acted out. 

To Hugh Hefner: Old Pimps Don't Die, You Just Keep on Pimping

photo of Hugh Hefner with three young extremely white women is from here

Above, Hugh demonstrates, in action, his racist, heterosexist, misogynist values. He surrounds himself only with the most narrow understanding of female people. Apparently, if you're not Aryan-looking and made up in CRAP-loaded ways, he doesn't want to know you. And even if you are Aryan-looking and made up in CRAP-loaded ways, he doesn't want to know you, he wants to sexually exploit and domineeringly control you.

If you're looking for ageist jokes about an elderly man's penis and Viagra, you've come to the wrong place. This post is about the alleged humanity of Hugh Hefner, not his age or genital functioning.

As Mark Twain said about reports of his demise, rumors of Hugh Hefner's death recently have been greatly exaggerated. What cannot be exaggerated is the extent to which Hugh, over more than half a century, has made US society a far more classist-racist-misogynist society, promoting ideals of women's beauty that has been so horrifically harmful that he ought to be charged with crimes against humanity—the humanity of women, and girls.

To an alarming number of white men, he is seen as a hero; to liberals he is also seen as a fighter of civil liberties and human rights—claims of his humane humanity have also been greatly exaggerated. Not too long ago his soon-to-be wife, Crystal Harris made what some viewed as a surprising decision: she elected to not wed and also dump Hugh Hefner. If anyone doubts the wisdom to be found in women who appear to be what Hugh insists women must look like, let it be noted that before she signed away her rights to self-possession, she got the hell away from this controlling, domineering, manipulative, oppressive play-prick. Hugh is to human rights what B.P. is to environmentalism and what General Petraeus is to the Peace Movement.

On Piers Morgan Tonight, last night, he put forth the nonsense that we can't really know why she dumped him. We can: he was an oppressive, misogynist prick. No, she's not likely to say that on television or in print media. He thinks a case can be made for them not having much in common intellectually. Perhaps: while a successful business-man, he's not especially smart at relationships or anything else that doesn't have to do with his own ego, his compulsively racist-sexist-heterosexist value system, and the bank accounts he has due to profiting off of those values-in-action. Hugh isn't just a pimp; he's also a filthy white supremacist, and an anti-Lesbian activist, and a virulent misogynist.

Hugh is not a lonely man; he makes sure his economic clout and social stature keep women around—women who would not likely know life without economic woes without him. I doubt they are anything resembling economically free while living under his roof—by many accounts he is so controlling that he wouldn't let anyone else co-own his money, not even a spouse.

He brought with him to the program, to wait for him backstage, two “new loves”--both blond, both young--briefly referred to by only their first names as if they were his daughters: one woman has been a girlfriend for a couple of years. Hugh made polyamory into a lifestyle well before it took off in progressive queer community. His brand of polyamory is insistently WHM supremacist. So when I say things like “polyamory” and “monogamy”, what I mean is possession and oligarchy.

Hugh believes liberalism is a solidly good ideal. But when it comes to him hoarding male supremacist power he's entirely conservative.

He says he wanted to give Crystal “what she wanted” by marrying her, but if she wanted freedom and economic independence, he wasn't likely to support her having either. He speculates she had another man, as if this is a reason to not marry—clearly for Hugh it's not a reason—he's never been monogamous. He says “I never played shady. I've always been who I am.” Yes, a pimp. But I doubt he ever tells anyone that's exactly what he is—to the core of his being. Nothing he's done with his life was not done to serve himself.

Hugh and Piers sat together speaking about politics, the kind organised around elections, not erections. Piers remarked: “Like everyone, I'm sure you've been through a very tough time in the last couple of years.” Huh? Right, Piers: most folks live in their own mansion, have plenty of access to health care, and have enough social-sexual capital to sell women and his own image.

Hugh got in a xenophobic slam against China's economic power, and at least Piers reminded him capitalist China's values are largely [US] American. What could Hugh say: he agreed.

He said he didn't think Casey Anthony acted like “an innocent person”; I'd argue it takes one to know one. I don't mean that Hugh is a murderer of children. I mean he has done gross harm to children—far more children than Casey Anthony ever could. Yet she will continue to be demonised as evil, while he got a film made about him proclaiming him a great human rights activist. This could only be true—well it could never be true—but it could only be proposed as possible truth if we pretend girls and women are not human deserving of the human rights fought for by groups like Amnesty International—not that they have a great record on fighting for rights for women against patriarchal atrocities. He once refused to do a pictorial of Vanessa Williams, a former Miss America, because he knew it would ruin her career. He pretends to actually care about women by stating insincere things:

"They clearly weren't authorized (by Williams) and because they would be the source of considerable embarrassment to her, we decided not to publish them," Hefner told PEOPLE in 1984. [source: here]

He hasn't given enough thought to how perpetuating heteroracist-sexist standards of exploitative femininity harms Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women and girls, I guess--as well as white women and girls. When asked if he thought of Playboy as exploitive, he unsurprisingly, if bewilderingly, said “I don't”. Fortunately Piers reminded Hugh he has his own moral compass on such things. Well, a pimp's moral compass that is not quite only his own. Hugh has a new show, The Playboy Club, coming onto US television this fall; it will likely attempt to airbrush or Photoshop the heterosexism and racist-misogyny of the time and re-present them as forms of liberation for young blond white het non-Jewish, non-Muslim women. The program Mad Men deals with the same era and economic culture, but has reportedly attempted to show sexism as sexism, not freedom.

At the end of the show, Piers misogynistically verbally welcomed Hugh to go off-stage to the “comforting bosoms” of his two girlfriends, who had been shown a few times through the show, never allowed to speak. Hugh chuckled in a unsurprisingly creepy way—these are women who are not yet old enough to be the average age of his own children.

Aesthetic and Actual Misogyny: Kanye West's video, "Monster", is Mass-producing and glamourising Misogyny. (And why don't whites see the racist-misogyny in the video?)

Kanye West sparks controversy with 'violent' Monster video

December 31, 2010

US rapper Kanye West has sparked controversy with dead models hanging from nooses around their necks and dismembered heads in his leaked video for Monster. The video for Monster, which leaked online yesterday, also shows West in bed with a couple of apparently dead models, while he positions their hands to touch one another. In another scene a woman is seen dragging a dead male model across the floor. The video features appearances from Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross and Bon Iver. The 33-year-old rapper also shows off his shiny teeth in the clip. [source for text and photo above is *here*]

It's not new news. But as I steer clear of most overtly misogynist popular music, I haven't encountered Kanye West's somewhat recent video.

The line between visual depictions of overt woman-hating in pornography made by rich white pimps for procuring men's consumption, and visual depictions of woman-hating found outside of that industry, is blurred to the point of being aesthetically non-existent. And if misogyny were only a matter of aesthetics, we'd be in better shape. But no aesthetic that is misogynist or racist is only aesthetic. It's also economic, social, structural, actual: lived out against the bodies and minds of real people.

No Black woman I know supports, encourages, or apologises for Black men's misogyny--whether culturally or commercially produced--including when funded by white rich men who own most of the companies that mass distribute misogyny--not just Black men's. In Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Byron Hurt does a very good job, imo, of locating where African American men's misogyny comes from: it comes from society. And dominant/controlling society in the US belongs to the White Het Man. So let's not forget that. And, as I see (and hear about it), African American men's misogyny is damaging, degrading, and dehumanising to women across race, but particularly to African American women.

I try not to reproduce and mass distribute misogyny--even from my blog when critiquing it. So I'll just link to the video, titled Monster, *here*. White men want to believe Black men are monsters, while Black women have to endure too much racist-misogynist monstrosity from Black men, Brown men, and white men, and, tragically, from white women who call themselves "radical" too. There's very little difference, in my experience, between the denial or defensiveness of white women's racism against women and men of color and men of color's misogyny against women of color and white women.

When I searched for feminist critiques about this online, I knew that if I found some by white women they'd likely be racist in some way. Here's an example from Tennessee Guerilla Women; in their writings about who they are, they appear to be white. Here's an example of white women's speech:

Tennessee Guerilla Women are working to mobilize a very large state-wide internet-based community of politically active women who are committed to achieving the following goals: Equal and full opportunity for all regardless of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religion, ability, marital status, or age. The full range of reproductive choices from legal abortion to bearing healthy children. Generous social support for the most vulnerable among us, especially poor mothers and children.

Not mentioning forced sterilisation is one clue the women are white. Not noting that the most vulnerable women are not only poor, but Black, Brown, and Indigenous, is another clue. Given that American Indian women are raped more than groups of more privileged women in the US (one in three, compared to, for example, one in four white women), how are they not more vulnerable, even if you only measure vulnerability in terms of who gets raped?

Here's more typical white women's speech, from [white] TNGuerillaWomen, on the West video:

If a woman depicted black men in a similar fashion, she'd be lucky to retain her life, never mind her career. But misogyny ain't hate speech in a woman-hating culture. The depraved so-called men in this woman-hating video are Kanye West, Rick Ross and Jay-Z[.] [source: *here*]

Um. Women? Which women? Do they mean WHITE women? Because plenty of WHITE women produce and distribute racist images of Black men and of Black women, and they get away with it all the time--including by retaining their lives. Institutionalised racism in media produced by white women and men is conveniently invisibilised in such a comment. So the comment reads as truly fucked up and white supremacist to me. Racist speech isn't hate speech either in a white supremacist society, in case that collective of bloggers and activists haven't noticed. And if the speech is both racist and misogynist--well, forget anyone who is white or male seeing that as hatefully BOTH racist and misogynistic; typically, white women only see the misogyny, and men of color only see the racism.

The people in US society who are murdered and imprisoned most disproportionately are not white men or white women with any economic power. The most imprisoned and invisibly murdered people are poor, are women across race, are trans, and are men who are not white.

Also from that site, though, is this:

From the 'Petition to Prevent the Official Release of Kanye West's Women-Hating-Monster-Video:'

Dead women, clad in lingerie, hang by chains around their necks. West makes sexual moves toward dead or drugged women propped up in a bed. A naked dead or drugged woman lays sprawled on a sofa.

The victims in this video are clearly women. Only women. And the men, Kanye West, Rick Ross, and Jay-Z are far from bothered by the female corpses. They seem to enjoy being surrounded by lifeless female bodies, apparent victims of a serial killing.

We call on Universal Music Group and MTV to combat violence against women by refusing to support, promote, and/or give airtime to West's "Monster" video. Please add your name to the petition.

Beyond that protest, also from the blogosphere, there are these discussions:

Champagne Lady has posted this:  Representations of Women in Kanye West’s video for “Monster”.

Post Bourgie posted this, titled:  "Rant-ish? On Kanye’s ‘Monster’". Analysis and observations typically ignored by whites are these, from Post Bourgie:

The dichotimization of women as it pertains to race;  in the video, white women are predominantly locked into roles of subordination to the point of gruesome lifelessness while black women are cast as aggressive, angry  and threatening sexual beasts.

Nicki Minaj’s scenes are mild compared to rest because  A) they have no corpses of any kind and B) the self-interrogation part can be seen as “edgy” and “different.” But, that would be too kind. What sort of internal conflict can be that deep if the two versions of yourself that are having issues with one another — dominatrix Nicki versus barbie Nickie —  are also ones that readily appeal to male-fantasies?

Supporting those observations are these by Latoya Peterson at Racialicious, in a post titled, "Black Monsters/White Corpses: Kanye’s Racialized Gender Politics":

In some ways, the conversation around dead women in Kanye’s video reminds me of the conversations that happen around feminism and black women. The reality of black women is assumed to be exactly the same as white women – if it is mentioned at all. The fact that the majority of the women pictured lying dead where white, while black women are all part of the monster crew is generally not mentioned.

So, I’m not surprised that no one has looked at the very specific positioning of white women in the video as opposed to black women, which dives deeply into the history and construction of black women as beast-like and fearsome, the sexualization of violence, and how the video is a win for both normalized misogyny and upholding the ideals of white supremacy.

But back to you Kayne: please cut the CRAP. ASAP. Just because you're making social commentary doesn't give you license to promote the dehumanisation of and violence against women--of all colors. And please call out the racist-misogyny of the men all around you. Because if you don't, you leave it to Black women, disproportionately, to do so. And that's also really fucked up.

An Open Letter to Leslie Cannold @ The Age about the Rape-and-Tape Industry (Pornography)

photograph chronicling the early years of anti-pornography activism is from here

Hi Leslie Cannold,

I've known many women across my life who have been negatively effected by pornography both inside and outside the industry. I found your comments about pornography startling in some regards. I'll note what was surprising or problematic for me below. You ask what motivates people: fear or hope? I'd first like to say that there are more choices than that. Hatred motivates some people. Desire to acquire power or to acquire more power--as they define it--motivates lots of people. So too does the desire to survive another day or night. Other motivators in my experience are selfishness, addiction, loneliness, desperation, need, compulsion, obsession, desire to not feel certain feelings, to not feel pain, and to not feel disconnected or isolated or alone.

As you probably know, most women in the pornography industry got there out of a need to survive, and to not be alone. A good friend of mine was taken off the street by a male pimp when she was fourteen. He seasoned her to be available to strange, much older men for sex--she was at least as young as many of the procurers' daughters. She was still on the street part of the time--working, but at least had a place to rest occasionally.

Her story would be "an anecdote" were it not for the fact that her age at the point of becoming a prostitute is the average one. This means that half the women in prostitution are fourteen or older when they start, and half the girls are fourteen or younger. Half. Do you want us to focus only on those fourteen and older in order to get us to feel more hope? Or ought we contend with the harsh reality of the fourteen and younger population no matter what it leads us to feel--even despair? I'll take the despair and the hope--and the fear--that comes from consciousness. The denial your article supports actually makes me feel far more hopeless than the facts Gail Dines brings to the public for consideration. I find activism inspiring, and efforts to shut down appropriate activism really disheartening.

Trafficking of girls as sex slaves and sexxx-things for consumers is globalised. Millions of girls are trafficked daily, as I hope you know. Every girl--a person with a future collapsed into getting through one more day--is made to endure some form of sexual abuse, or to withstand another rape, several times a day or night. To say the conditions are abysmal wouldn't be inaccurate.

This is the primary population of people who comprise the performers in pornography. And by pornography I mean the corporately produced material that is published by pimps for mass consumption that earns billions of dollars annually for those already rich-enough pimps. (I'm not talking, at all, about some heterosexual or gay or lesbian couple's sex tape, or individuals who have a web cam and decide to earn money letting people see into their bedroom as they masturbate or have sex with someone else. That stuff, quite honestly, isn't my concern. If people genuinely want to do that, then they will and they should. Nothing in my own political practice or that of any anti-pornography feminists I know will have any effect on their ability to earn money or to try and get other needs met that by performing sex in those ways. This is also to say, there's nothing the anti-pornography feminists are doing that will take away or "ban" any of your pornography of that of any else. Gail Dines opposes all efforts to ban porn: you didn't make that explicitly clear in your article.)

The primary population of girls and women who are raped and otherwise sexually assaulted as a requisite way of getting them into the industry, or to keep them there, means there's nothing only-anecdotal about the experience--it is common, usual, ordinary, and entirely status quo. (I accept that a few, more privileged women in the world "freely choose" to be in pornography, although when women are paid as much to do everything else, I'll find the words "free" and "choose" to be more socially and economically meaningful.)

Girls and women are being raped multiple times a day and some of them are photographed or videotaped and some of those images and films are sold. This is accepted, defended, protected, and accommodated in every country in which it is happening: the trafficking of girls is accepted, defended, and protected; the prostitution is accepted, defended, and protected; visually recording rape is accepted, defended, and protected. For most women--for most of us--to do it for any length of time, opiate and other categories of addictive drugs are usually needed. That's the norm, not the exception. It's easier to go after messengers of that unpleasant news than to really emotionally comprehend what that feels like.

So we have a large group of girls and women, many drug-addicted so they're not in the most empowered or liberated frame of mind, who have been raped countless times--dozens, at least; more likely hundreds. Do you really mean to pretend that there's no normalised harm in that industry? If so, I'd say that's a stunningly callous and pro-status quo position to hold.

Throughout your article, you phrase and frame the issue as if it is one of ideas only--with no rapes happening anywhere at all to the girls and women in the industry who are being photographed and videotaped while drugged. Do you honestly believe most of those performers are not experiencing routine sexual harassment and sexual abuse? If you do, please see The Price of Pleasure. You can find it free, online. (Note: I'm linking you to images that are pornographic, not trying to censor them.)

I would argue, based on the knowledge of pornography and pornographers you show in your article, that you're living an unusually advantaged life relative to most women on Earth. One kind of advantage is having the option to be unaware of the atrocities going on around the world in places you do not socialise or live.

I had some contacts in Tokyo after the earthquake hit earlier this year. Had I not, I wouldn't have known what was really going on there. The US media was not reporting most of what was happening that was terrifying--long after the tsunami destroyed so many people and so many other people's livelihoods and homes. I had to have those connections to know. (It's still a nuclear nightmare.) But being a US citizen, I wasn't required to have those connections. This is how it is with most atrocity that isn't happening to you or me, of course. Those of us who can afford to not know, generally won't take the time--or don't have the time--to find out.

If you were a girl in many cities across North America, in Europe, and in Asia, you would be far more likely not be able to not know what I've written above. You might find ways to block it, blunt it, or dissociate from it, but not knowing a thing about it would be exceptional to impossible.

Your article contains a few statements that skip over the atrocities I've identified above as socially existent and significantly and traumatically affecting the lives of millions and millions of female human beings--and plenty of male human beings too.

I'll excerpt a few below from your recent article for The Age.

Dines used her many festival and media platforms to contend that pornography degraded women. It did this by modelling Brazilian waxes and depicting women enjoying anal sex and men ejaculating on their faces. 

Have you seen a great deal of the pornography--the stuff produced by millionaire pimps? It appears from this statement you have not. Again, I hope you see The Price of Pleasure.

Dines asserted without evidence that boys as young as 11 were viewing this material, which she said was not only more violent than Playboy or Hustler but also apparently the snuff films of the 1980s that so outraged her hero, the American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin. 

Surely you're kidding. (Aren't you?) You don't actually think most eleven year-old boys with access to computers have never sought out images from that rape-and-tape industry? Do you seriously doubt that most eleven year-old boys have seen internet pornography that we used to call "hard core", and plenty of images depicting more degrading violence against women than that?

And surely you're kidding when you imply that today's pornography, overall, isn't any different than that from the 1970s. You don't see images ubiquitously on the internet that are more violent than Playboy and Hustler? You must not be looking. As I recall, those paper magazines were violent in many ways that people didn't readily see as such. Hiding the worst of what's done is standard practice for all major corporations. Why would the pornography industry be an exception to this rule? For example, with its own abuses, the pharmaceutical industry does a great deal of harm to animals, people, and the environment, but not in full-frontal view of those of us who purchase or are prescribed their allegedly safe drugs. To say any significant industry hasn't changed much in the last thirty to forty years is to not know much about what has and is going on there.

The minds of young Aussie boys would be deformed by this stuff, Dines conjectured, leading to a future filled with sexual assault, paedophilia and all forms of "economic, political, and legal discrimination" against women.

The minds of anyone who consumes anything at all--from sugar and sugar-substitutes, to McDonalds fast food,  to cocaine, to cell phones, to the exhaust from fossil fuel-burning cars, to pornography to television commercials will have their minds affected--that's the reason those things can be marketed and sold at all: surely you don't think they exist to actually meet our deepest needs or for our health. Or do you?

Dines's claims are vulnerable on almost every level.

They'd be more vulnerable if they were, in fact, just claims. But, as several commenters have noted at the article's website, her facts are backed by very solid research. That other researchers--often those hired by pimps--come up with other results that makes the industry seem not-so-bad, surprises me not at all: tobacco industry researches told us cigarettes were harmless for decades after they knew they were both addictive and damaging to our health.

So I'd argue Dines' assertions of fact are not vulnerable on the level of reality, if one cares enough to know what is happening there. Again, you'd have to be willing to leave the comforts of a middle class life to really find out. The pornography industry is many things: 'pretty' isn't one of them. Here's the first portion of what each of the two filmmakers of The Price of Pleasure--a woman and a man--have to say on beginning the journey into that largely hidden world:

Having grown up in Taiwan, I did not see my first porn film until I was thirty years old, when I came to the U.S. as a graduate student in Boston in 1990.

Contrary to many women being pushed to watch porn by their boyfriends, I had a shy partner who never had the courage to rent a porn video. The few times that I reached for the top shelf at the Video Smith in Brookline to grab a porn video, I had to endure the torturous journey – ignoring other men peering at me out of the corner of their eyes while I was cruising through this off limits section, holding the extra large video box with vivid pictures for everyone to see while I stood in a long check-out line, and then waiting for the clerk to slowly take the video out of its box and put it in a black box which everyone knew was for porn anyway. Although this journey made me descend from a respectable to a fallen woman, there was something thrilling and daring because I was against the constraints set by both Chinese and American patriarchy that disapproved of women's consumption of porn. I figured, if not being allowed to watch porn was part of the sexual repression, then rebelling against it must be liberating and even feminist. -- Producer, Director & Writer: Dr. Chyng Sun

When I began working on The Price of Pleasure over 4 years ago, I expected, more than anything, to learn the process of filmmaking. That the film’s topic was to be pornography was, at the time, of a secondary consideration. I had what can be considered conventional liberal beliefs about pornography and the contemporary pornography industry – pornography was free speech; pornography represented a liberatory sexuality, intervening in the repressive moral codes of religion, conservatism, and infantilizing protectionism; that pornography was a “free” choice, made by both consumers and performers who made their living by engaging in sex onscreen; and I had also assumed that the majority of the pornography out there looked very much the like the pornography I had experienced as an adolescent, or saw at bachelor parties during my career in investment banking – mostly “conventional” sexual practices, with a nominal degree of mutuality. -- Co-writer and Associate Producer: Robert Wosnitzer

They don't sound like fascistic anti-free speech people to you, do they? Their film is more speech on this subject, not less--isn't it?

You go on:

She confuses evidence with anecdote (talk of "my students" is the latter) and correlation with causation

Is someone referencing the experiences of people they know unethical to you? As commenters below your article remark, what backs up your arguments, besides anecdotes and possibly some well-funded research paid for by pimps to produce the outcomes that put them in the least criminal light? You offer nothing to bolster your speculations and distortions.

(does horrible violent porn turn healthy men into rapists or do rapists watch horrible violent porn?).

It might work for you to pose ridiculous-sounding questions as a strategy to discredit an expert speaker on a subject. I'll have a go at it:

Do cigarettes always turn smokers into lung-cancer patients who die an early wretched death? The answer is no. But the answer is also that cigarettes do substantively contribute, as one factor among others, to the normal maintenance of significant and grievous harm--people do lose their lives, and many lives are cut short. Many of us grieve our lost relatives or loved ones who died of smoking-related illness and disease. Someone arguing your points on this matter would come across like a shill for the tobacco industry. Do you intend to do that for the rapist pimps?

You also wrote:

She also wasn't averse to mischief


This is not to mention the irrationality of her basic proposition. Rape and misogyny pre-date hard-core internet porn by thousands of years. How then was turning off the tap of internet porn going to solve the problem?

Rape and other sexual violence against women pre-existing pornography doesn't mean pornography isn't tied to rape, Leslie. Your argument, put in other terms, might go like this: massive human suffering and death caused by plagues pre-dates the AIDS crisis by thousands of years. How then would curing AIDS stop suffering and death caused by disease? Do you get what's truly cynical, callous, and flawed, about the argument?

Unfortunately, it will probably work for most readers for you to use these words: contend, asserted, conjectured, claims, mischief, irrationality, to categorise and dismiss the work of a long-time human rights activist, professor, and writer. Regardless, I think it fair and reasonable to assume that she knows far more about the pornography industry and exactly how it is implicated in harm to human beings than do most people--except those who have worked in it and survived it. If you think Gail has never bothered to speak with many women who are in or have survived and gotten out of the rape-to-tape industry, you'd be just plain wrong. I say "survived it" because I'm not willing to make atrocity disappear; that seems like something Germans-in-denial wished to do during the era of Nazi rule. As a Jew, I object to that sort of evasion of difficult or inconvenient truths. And if the mass rape of girls isn't enough of enough of an atrocity to you, I'm worried about your conscience and your heart.

You continued:

But the big difficulty with the Dines approach is its cultivation of fear over hope. From the moment Dines set foot in Australia, she was beating the panic drum. Panic about the internet, about the developing sexuality of adolescent boys and the inevitable victimisation of poor, vulnerable girls. Don't forget about rape and sexual violence, girls, she seemed to be saying, or the complexity of pre-marital sex! Don't get too confident, or careless with your trust or your movements, the world is still a terrifying place. 

If we correct your misstatements and inaccuracies, and simply deal with the facts of the matter,  we are left with this question: what is the appropriate level of disregard and denial when confronted with news that is disturbing and upsetting because it involves actual human beings being treated inhumanely? Should we work hard to repress our anger about rape and gross sexual exploitation of girls and women--and boys and men and transgender and intersex people too? Should we try and shore up our false sense of security and delusions that the status quo works by not harming millions of people in dreadful ways?

If you are a white Australian citizen, I'm hoping you know about the genocide in your country, and the anti-Indigenous genocide in the US as well. Or do you think that because dominant media won't cover these atrocities, they aren't happening? Shall we feel hope in the face of mass denial and the corporate maintenance of delusion? Is disrupting the relative peace of the privileged, perhaps even to the point of generating some fear in those masses--or outrage, compassion, or a consciousness with which to do then work with others to effect social change--really something that is unwanted and unwelcomed by you?

I see it differently. When I look at the sexuality and values of young people, I feel hopeful of a increasingly gender egalitarian world. I read the studies and see the young men who populate my own world and feel confident that growing numbers of men understand the difference between healthy lust and sexual violence, accept their duty to share the work of home and children and respect women's rights.

Which world is that, Leslie? What part of the big, challenging world is that happening in? To whatever extent it is happening, great. But that doesn't mean that's all that's happening, does it? I mean if we have some promising research in cancer cures, does that mean chemical pollution of our bodies stops causing cancer, globally--at alarming rates?

Things can be (and are) truly awful--increasingly so for millions of people who are far less advantaged than you and me. These are the people who, so far, don't seem to be real to you. If you did, would you relate to, befriend, and believe them?

Yes, nasty porn is nasty and I'd certainly advise against watching it.

Once again you and Gail see things differently: Gail actually thinks we should be watching it--to know what it's trying to tell us about ourselves, our sexuality, and our society. So once again you're making stuff up and pretending it's a position Gail Dines takes. She doesn't. So why do you feel the need to lie? Why not just argue with the facts she describes? Are they too threatening to deal with? 

When it comes to sex, and all areas of life, I'd urge young women who don't want to do something to learn to say no. For a saner take on this issue Google Cindy Gallop's Make Love Not Porn TED video.

To learn to say no? So you want girls to say no to their fathers or step-fathers who rape them, who then grow up and have many problems with boundaries due to being told, incorrectly, that they are worthless or only exist to sexually please men? Do you want drug-addicted women living on the street, picked up by pimps, to say "no" and remain on the street--and to just say no to drugs too? Do you want the Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Asian girls and women who are enduring misogyny and racism to do what you're able to do because you're so advantaged? That's a callous and utterly compassionless thing to suggest to people, I'd say.

For the record, I like the Make Love, Not Porn website very much. And, it doesn't exist to help the privileged masses come to terms with the atrocities happening to girls and women around the world.

Yes, violence against women still happens and must be stopped but violence is not caused by porn.

How, Leslie, must it be stopped? I mean honestly and sincerely: how? Because it's very easy for liberal-minded white people to say things like "racism is bad" and "misogyny must end" without ever following that up with (or, even, promoting and supporting) decades of sustained activism actually working to achieve it. Someone once told me the definition of liberalism is that its practitioners make promises they have no intention of keeping. What are you, in your life, doing to stop the violence women and girls endure for being female not male, including in the pornography industry? Is attempting to discredit someone (who actually has been working to lessen racism and misogyny by showing it to people in such a way that they can't deny it's prevalence in our society, for decades) the best you can do?

Julian Real

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/sexual-violence-against-women-predates-porn-20110603-1fkcw.html#ixzz1OSkc1Hki

A response to "GuiltyPornUser". Posted to support the work and life of Andrea Dworkin

photograph of Andrea Dworkin is from here

I am trying to steer clear of many places online--especially non-feminist and anti-feminist blogs--because what I find there is, to me, usually discouraging discussion with no interest in activism whatsoever. Often the discussions go on and on and on about the same things, seemingly for the purpose of trying to be right--to shore up one's own ego, or to make it seem like the politically oppressed group "women" are now oppressing more and more people.

I'm glad to see new people come into feminist spaces online, however, in order to go over topics that have been discussed in the past. I'm glad new voices come into discussions about important matters, like how men oppress women and how that oppression can end. Hopefully a good percentage of those newcomers will become radical activists. I have found one such site, that gives me hope that more and more women are finding their own voices and are willing to fight for freedom for all women. Not that it ought to be women's job to do so. But Lorde knows men aren't going to do that work. They're too busy looking at pictures of raped women online--because, you know, it's their white het male god-given right to do so.

What troubles me is how men, and sometimes also women, invade discussions among women for the sole purpose to derail them or be obstructionistic. This happens a lot. The men who I see do this routinely and preDICKably are called "trolls". "Occasionally, though, there are people who are not trolls, who apparently do want to learn something but nonetheless use all manner of techniques of argumentation to do what the trolls do: derail important pro-activist, anti-patriarchal conversation. Below I respond to one such person. I place that person's commentary in italics. My responses follow, portion by portion. I'm  not going to link to the source website because I don't have their permission to do so.

JulianReal Sun 24-Apr-11 18:13:29

I came here to note something simple. Andrea died six, not seven years ago. She passed on April 9, 2005. I remember the day all too well. This matters to me as I work to keep online information about her accurate.

But then I read the discussion and I am going to respond to one of the commenters who seems to me to be quite determined to "not get it".

To GuiltyPornUser @ Mon 11-Apr-11 11:09:57

I'm from the other thread, and my problem when I read Dworkin is that it seems to start with an assumption and carry on.

GPU, It starts with reality--with what girls and women experience, horribly, in reality. The theory builds from there. It's not like so much of men's theories, which men adore going on and on about endlessly, across eras. In so many of men's theories, we start with an idea, and go from there. Dworkin's theory is rooted in actual experience, across era, across region, across culture, noting differences in experience due to race and class, often.

Going straight to the third paragraph where the argument seems to begin

..."We know that men like hurting us. We know it because they do it and we watch them doing it. We know that men like dominating us because they do it and we watch them doing it."

To me, that reads as big assumptions - it uses big categories "men" and "women". Would it dilute the message if she said "some men"?

Dworkin was a political philosopher and activist, GPU, not a sociologist. It is a strategy, I believe--a pro-patriarchal one at that--for you to take what she said about horrific reality and immediately wish to move that into the realm of ideas and abstraction. Did you read what she said? Did you feel it too? What do you feel, deep down, when you read what she wrote and not toss it away into your need for cerebral processing? "Men like hurting us". "We know it because they do it and we watch them doing it". That's rather horrific, isn't it? Do you feel the horror and terror of it? Do you know a battered woman wrote those words? And a woman who was living on the street for a time, after escaping the sadist abuser? Do you empathise with the millions of girls and women who are beaten and raped by men? What does that feel like, in your body, to empathise with them, GuiltyPornUser?

Also, "men" is not a category as much as it is a real group of people--human beings each one, who identify themselves as such--if they speak English--and who behave in ways to bolster their own ideas, in practice, of what it means to be "a man". Some men beat up more feminine men; some men beat up women whether they are feminine or not. But however the beatings occur, they occur to shore up this identity and to practice the power to control other human beings. Men beat up people to practice something many men call "being a man". And the evidence for men doing that is most everywhere. Surely you can note how this has manifested in your own life.

What you are asking of her is spurious, to me. It is also functionally pro-patriarchal and pro-rape. I see you wishing she had shifted her intellectual pursuits, her mode of investigation and her approach to demanding accountability, at least, and liberation, at most, to better suit your guilt-ridden self; I conclude this based on your chosen name here. Her work doesn't exist to take care of you or make you, as a man, feel better about yourself.

You know what you do: you access still images or video clips--whenever you wish to--of pimped and raped women, who were, disproportionately, incested and trafficked girls, so that you can obtain sexual arousal and orgasm. Who gave you the right to do this? Who told you doing this was not callous and inhumane? Was it other men, by any chance? You know most (but not all) males who have access to the internet do this. So whose interests are served, and what political agenda is served, by feminists such as Dworkin writing "some men"? Her point is that MEN do it. And MEN do it to WOMEN. If I note that U.S. white men committed grievous and heinous atrocities against enslaved West Africans and genocidally mass murdered Indigenous Americans through the 18th and 19th century in particular, would you prefer I note that it was "some white men" who did this? How does that shift the history? The point is that it was WHITE MEN, isn't it? So why do we need to hem and haw our way around this point? Is it so that you don't have to come to terms with what it means to uphold and defend--in actions--your own and other men's manhood?

Going on "Pornography is the sexualised subordination of women. It means being put down through sex, by sex, in sex, and around sex, so that somebody can use you as sex and have sex and have a good time."

It's not clear to the casual user of porn that women are being subordinated.

GPU, it's not clear to the average regular purchaser of McDonald's meals that they are harming their health. That's how capitalism, advertising, and propaganda works. How patriarchy's advertising and propaganda works is to promote the brutality of women and make it look like--and be--"fun" for men. I assume it is enjoyable for you to use pornography. Is that correct?

We are told the women are happy, they smile, they enjoy what they do. Her arguments starts with the conclusion, which is great if you agree.

She is speaking about what happens, GPU. Not about what you think happens because you buy the pimp's lies about what he produces for your entertainment. If you see a woman being raped and smiling, do you assume she's having a good time? Why? Does it not occur to you that there's a director--perhaps also her pimp who is also her rapist--ordering her to smile? Do you think the conditions on pornography sets are free of sexual harassment and coercion? You are demonstrating a level of naivete (I'd argue willfully, but you tell me) that is astounding.

I think a stronger anti-porn argument for me would be empirical rather than theoretical

Have you read Dworkin's book titled "Pornography: Men Possessing Women", GPU? Have you heard her testimony before the Attorney General?

Part 1 of 4: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmEsu1TTJ-Y
Part 2 of 4: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fzf-LLwVRw&feature=related
Part 3 of 4: www.youtube.com/watch?v=neQeea4rmLA&feature=related
Part 4 of 4: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPPAeySECS4&feature=related

Have you read the book she co-edited with Catharine A. MacKinnon, a U.S. Constitutional law professor and human rights attorney, titled:
In Harm's Way? See here for more:
www.amazon.com/Harm%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%99s-Way-Pornography-Rights-Hearings/dp/0674445791

(please note from my other thread, I'm not a defender of porn)

What are you then, GPU? An advocate for women's and girls' human right to be free of men's rapist predation and pimping? What actions do you take, with other men especially, to ensure that your idea of men and women being equal finds rooting and growth in social, economic, political reality? In what ways do you organise with men to stop rape and pimping for example? To stop trafficking of girls? To stop men from beating up women the men say they love, and then taking the children who they also abuse? By "men" here, I mean the men who do such things. Do you understand how many systems are infused with ideas of inequality, such that when many women come to court and speak of their husbands being abusers, the court systems are rigged to find her guilty of trying to slander him, rather than finding him guilty of being a terrorist and abuser?

And also to
GuiltyPornUser @ Mon 11-Apr-11 11:27:42

I posted because as I have this strange notion then men and women are equal and have the right as a parent to post on this board about something that concerns me.

This is a classic example of the problem referenced above, GPU. You start with an idea: "men and women are equal" without backing that up with material evidence. It's a premise--an intellectual argument; it is an argument that has been made by many women across many eras. The problem is that men, as a class of people, won't allow the idea to find ground and prosperity in reality; men defend their power over and against women, legally, religiously, socially, culturally, economically, and, not least of all, sexually.

Statistics and Action Fighting Sexual Trafficking of Girl Children by Het Men who Rape Them

logo for anti-trafficking organisation is from here

Just reported on CNN:

79% of all trafficking is by het men for rape with children.

1,200,000 million children worldwide are trafficked so het men can rape girl children.

Approximately 300,000 girl children are trafficked in the U.S.

1 in 4 pornographic photographs is of a child

For more on what is being done, please see this newsletter (a PDF document) from the anti-trafficking group Maiti Nepal. For the source website, please see *here*.

• Maiti Nepal Newsletter January -March 2011 - 2011-04-20
  Newsletter January- March 2011
  
  Newsletter_January_to_March_2011.pdf

What Calling Boys "Girlie" Does and Means

image of "Maximo Oliveros" (a fictional character in an amazing Filipino movie linked to below) is from here

Revised on 25 March 2011 and revised significantly again on 29 March:

Years ago I wrote a piece, autobiographical, called "The Trauma of the Gendered Child". You can read that *here*. I wrote it before I knew being intergender was something I could say about myself. Since writing it, I've realised that my experience of childhood was not uncommon. Many children, female, male, and intersex, live our lives not feeling like we belong to the gender we are assigned to and forced to become, under penalty of rejection, scorn, and violence.

I'm aware of three movies which deal explicitly with issues of boys who behave in ways that make most het men uncomfortable (and, for different reasons, some gay men too). Those movies are The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Breakfast With Scot, and Ma Vie En Rose. Each of these excellent movies deals with different issues related to being an non-masculinist boy. (Two of those links go to sites where the movies may be watched in full.) If you watch them, please pay attention to and compare the political, economic, regional, cultural, and social realities influencing the decisions of adults in accepting or not accepting their "feminine" boys.)

I believe there is emotional, psychological, and political trauma done to boys who are called "girlie" by their misogynistic-homophobic fathers (or, well, mothers, or other parent-figures). Socially, there is usually a knee-jerk misogynist, anti-girl reaction to this happening. What typically happens in liberal to progressive families and communities is that boys are told "you're not girlie" or "that's not girlie" or are otherwise encouraged to shore up their self-concept as a boy in some ways--including by believing that boys can do anything, no matter the gendered associations.

The misogyny beneath this approach, which I find myself caught in, is to not tackle, head on, the violence to girls of using the term "girlie". It shames boys, yes. But it shames girls too. It communicates to girls and boys that they are of less value, are worth-less, if they are like girls, as determined by misogynistic homophobes. It should surprise no one that most girls identify as girls--they don't have any choice. And the trouble with patriarchal, woman-hating gender tyranny and terrorism is that if girls are like girls--if girls are "girlie"--they too are not valued. There's no way to be a girl in a patriarchal society and be valued, socially, as much as boys and men are valued, if the boys and men are pro-patriarchal, misogynistic, and masculinist.

We live in tricky times, re: gender. If male children grow up being "feminine" we now have doctors and other "experts" telling us that they must be transsexual. Or gay. Or that there's something wrong with them that needs to be medically "fixed". There are far too many children being told there's something "not normal" about being girlie. But being feminine--as defined by patriarchs (and in the U.S. racist patriarchs)--is part of what is normal for boys and some girls too. It is normal even while it is a largely both a mandatory and manufactured concept in the minds of men. Some boys and girls are not feminine, are not masculine, and are not transsexual. And many transsexuals who transition M2F are also not "feminine" and don't desire to be, either. People, trans or not, simply are who they are: human, fine, healthy--except for the society that tells them they are not healthy or fine, or human. And to label children anything other than "normal" (re: gender and sexuality) for being "who they are" is a form of sexual violence, in the opinion of this blogger.

The point of the earlier essay was that labeling and enforcing a gender hierarchy in which "boylie" boys are valued and girls--whether like girls or boys--are not, is sexually traumatic, abusive, and sets children up to act out that violence against themselves and other children. Also against their mothers, often. Boys learn to hit to be masculine, for example, and can and do hit their mothers, especially if they've seen daddy or other men do it. Girls learn to be silent and self-deprecating, and too often self-abusive in other ways too.

I believe that any man who teaches his sons (or daughters) that they are not okay if they are "feminine" or "girlie" ought to be found guilty of psychological child sexual abuse. And any men who devalue their daughters because they are girls ought to be found guilty of the same thing. Because these actions by men do irreparable harm to children. And of course any het man who bullies his family, who is a terrorist or tyrant, who is a rapist and batterer of his female spouse, should never be allowed to be around children or women at all.

I think a healthy response to witnessing a child being told they are too feminine or too much like a girl is to note that there's nothing at all wrong with being "girlie".  That is essentially the message all children need to get, with confidence and social assurance: that there's nothing wrong with being who they are, intrinsically, even while we know that gendering children is social and political, designed to replicate male supremacy and female subordination, and that children absorb social messages about gender as it applies to them.

I hope children can grow up knowing that that girls being "boyie" and boys being "girlie" (or any other combo) doesn't make them transsexual any more than it makes them lesbian or gay. Being transsexual makes them transsexual. Being lesbian makes them lesbian. Being gay makes them gay. Those are complex social-psychological teenage to adult realities that, along with the labels heterosexual or bisexual, are not appropriate to put on pre-pubescent children, in my opinion. It's not that I think pre-pubescent children can't know who they are attracted to and don't learn how to be misogynistic and heterosexist. It's that coming out as a lesbian, as bi, or as gay, is a social experience, not a private intra-psychic one. It requires negotiating social, cultural, political spaces, not just private mental, psychological, emotional spaces. And to label small children as "gay" or "lesbian" or "het" is to layer onto them adult social/cultural ways of being that simply ought not be applied to young children, in my view. To reinforce ideas that being a feminine boy means he's going to be gay, or a non-feminine girl is already a lesbian is to participate in hetero/sexist stereotyping.

When adults proclaim "their" children to be heterosexual, for example, they are projecting or simply reinforcing gross heterosexism. To do so because their son likes sports and their daughter doesn't, is sexist nonsense. This, to me, is a form of psychic sexual violence against children as it leads children to feel bad about themselves if they end up not being heterosexual as homophobic patriarchs violently define and politically defend the term and it being "natural" among children.

And in my experience queer and non-queer communities are increasingly confused about this, to the detriment of queer and non-queer children. Because as soon as young children are labeled anything other than "normal", their understandings of themselves changes and begins to absorb self-concepts and negative feelings they see being attached to those terms. When adults, some of us realise that being "normal" is far from desirable. But I don't believe children are capable of forming strong self-concepts and confident senses of self if they are labeled or feel "abnormal". I personally would rather not be normal; but at age six or even at age sixteen, I wasn't entirely capable of genuinely wishing to be abnormal as a healthy rejection of the status quo.

Being transsexual isn't abnormal either. But, unlike being lesbian, bi, and gay, only a very few children are transsexual--although this will be socially, medically, and culturally determined. I witnessed the harm to teens and young adults who suffered the malpractice, most systematically through the 1990s in the U.S., of them being labeled as ADD and ADHD children. There is currently a social trend among some "specialised" mental health care workers and medical professionals, who are effectively pro-misogynistic and pro-heteropatriarchal, of labeling children both as non-transsexual when they are, or as transsexual when they're not. I've seen this over the decades done by het, bi, lesbian, and gay adults too--of deciding who their children are based on insufficient evidence, or biases from the dominant culture or alternative cultures parents live in.

I'd argue that sexual and gendered identities and conditions are so culturally relative that they can likely only be known and determined in later childhood or adulthood--and even then, as many of us know, such determinations shift with time across adulthood.

Being heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, transgender, intergender, or transsexual are largely social-cultural-political phenomena. We can note that being Two-Spirit, for example, isn't something any white medical professionals will likely determine anyone to be while they may determine some children, teens, and adults to be non-transsexual or transsexual. Does this mean no one is Two-Spirit? No. It means labels are ideological, cultural, and political. And for many decades, for centuries non-industrialised, Indigenist societies have had differing ways of acknowledging and honoring people who were not what white, English-speaking, Westerners call "straight" or "women" or "men". It is so easy for white, English-speaking Westerners to forget that "heterosexual" is not an acultural, ahistorical, or asocial reality. Not is being lesbian or gay. Nor is being "gendered"--whether non-transgender or transgender.

Each involves finding out what one's own experiences and feelings mean within the societies and cultures we grow up in. In some cases it means finding out about our cultural traditions that have been devalued or traditions that are being destroyed. Our understandings of ourselves--how we come to name ourselves--cannot be done outside of political, social, cultural realms, and young children are not really equipped to know all of that when so young.

Dominant Western society is heteropatriarchal, racist, and favors labeling children in ways that benefit adults, especially adults who profit by this labeling. To label pre-pubescent children in any way as being definitively sexual in one particular way is inhumane, even while it is required by heteropatriarchy: all children are presumed heterosexual until proven otherwise, for example. But, other than for political, cultural, and economic reasons, there's no need to label any young children, period. Children are "human"--and even that term has very culturally specific social and economic meaning.

In my opinion, children deserve to be encouraged to express themselves as they wish, in age-appropriate ways. This means protecting children from adult practices that are traumatic when imposed on or introduced into the lives of children in confusing and abusive ways.

If possible, keep all pornography away from children. And good luck with that. In my opinion, anyone who intentionally makes pornography or other graphic manifestations of racist, rapist society repeatedly available to children should be found guilty of child sexual abuse. I recognise that loving parents may need to show children adult images--not sexually graphic ones--to explain what is and is not appropriate for children to see. Given how pornographic many societies have become, one needn't go further than magazines like Maxim, Vogue, or Seventeen to find these images. Each contains plenty of examples of sexxxualised racism and misogyny. Children never "need" to see graphic, sexxxxually explicit pornography, for any reason, to become healthy adults. That children are so often made into sexxx-objects, disproportionately for white Western men, worldwide, ought to be beyond outrageous. It ought to be completely unacceptable, globally. But that means radically transforming all capitalist, patriarchal, and racist economic and social systems.

I've heard the details of the harm of girls being exposed to their fathers' pornography--written and depicted. Most women I know who have very painful sexual fantasies that are deeply troubling and shame-inducing to them were exposed to their fathers' pornography when young girls. That arranged exposure is also a form of psychological-sexual child abuse by the fathers. The girls I know who also grow up with deep conflict about their own sexuality and self-image are those exposed to normal racist misogynistic media, and those who are incested or molested by males in their families.

Het men, as a class of human beings, are dangerous to children because they are often enough predators and perpetrators of child sexual abuse and rape. They are dangerous to all children. And the denial about that is intense. This reality is displaced by het men onto gay men and lesbian women so that only the latter two groups of adults are stigmatised as "dangerous to children", including sexually.

Because of the sheer number of het-identified men, and also because they are not stigmatised as the most predatory population of adult "child molesters", "procurers", "traffickers", and slavers, this means het-identified and het-behaving men have infinitely more access to children than do gay men or lesbian women. I'm not saying any woman or man or transgender person is not capable of abusing children in many ways, including in overtly sexual ways. I'm saying that the population of adults who most perpetrate overtly psychological and gross sexual abuse against children is het men.

Het men who abuse their children emotionally, physically, sexually, and spiritually are usually not held accountable at all. That tells you a lot about het male supremacy, entitlements, privileges, and power over women and children.

Het men have way too much corrupt and abusive power in society. And the forms of power they have and exercise allows them to do whatever they want to do including anything that is abusive and irresponsible. This includes beating up their spouses, beating their children, raping their spouses, incesting their children, procuring and pimping girls and women, homophobically assaulting children and other men and women, and otherwise terrorising and degrading anyone around them who they can assault without being held accountable by the larger society.

What I hope is that from now on, when I hear of a boy being called "girlie" my response is to cheer, celebrate, and say "congratulations"!!! "Let's throw a girlie-boy party!" And let's not invite anyone who is likely to shame any child who isn't behaving in misogynistically, patriarchally (politically) correct ways.

What complicates this particular matter of gender and children is that toys and so many other products are manufactured in racist capitalist patriarchal societies, and are marketed to children with the understanding that being a girl means being submissive, and being a boy means being active and dominant. Most of what is marketed to girls is sold to ensure girls are submissive and subordinate to boys and men specifically. I think that the "girlie" and "boylie" things that C.R.A.P. manufactures are likely to be harmful to children in the context of living in a society in which male dominance and female submissiveness is normalised, naturalised, and sexxxualised.

As I discuss a bit in the essay linked to atop this post, I didn't neatly fit into any gendered category when growing up. I could play with dolls with a female cousin. I could also play chess with a male relative. In what sense is playing with a doll or playing chess "gendered"? Boys play with dolls, of course, but tend to be sold dolls that are soldiers or superheroes of some kind. It's difficult to know who one is when media and parents tell you there's only one choice.

It took me over forty years of living to come into my own identity as intergender, in part because the term and concept wasn't presented to me as a child, a teenager, or a young adult. We tend to call ourselves terms that are socially real. If a child is not traditionally gendered or sexed, they will likely be especially vulnerable to the terms adults around them use to describe and define them. I choose a term that is hopefully respectful of women and girls, that doesn't allow me, as a male person, to impose my self-naming over and against women and girls, and that honors women and girls as specific groups of people oppressed by men and boys in patriarchal societies from day one onward--as long as those people are perceived to be female by men.

I hope that children, teens, and adults are offered terms that don't make medical interventions necessary. This isn't to make medical intervention "wrong". It is to make it possible to understand our lives as ones which are more collectively politically shaped than individually medically fixed.

I want to thank all the women, and the few men, over the decades, who have refused to raise their children in oppressively gendered ways. Goddess bless you. But let's not forget that it will take collective, sustained, organised activism aimed at the radical transformation of the whole of these societies to ensure that those parents' good work keeps children emotionally, psychologically, politically, and spiritually healthy.

Boys who are identified by adults or peers as "feminine" are wonderful just as they are. They don't need harmful, misogynistic labels or Western patriarchal medical interventions to be wonderful. Spread the word.