While I don't agree men who say that would be dishonest or untruthful (as they are quite clearly being honest), I do feel those men would be very
. I did not quote men as having said those, things, I said those things. I am ok with being rude.
I feel you are wrong about that. My post isn't about porn addiction. There are many men who could NOT look at porn, but I feel that is their choice to make, not their partner's.
As far as women being called whores being deceitful, degrading, etc., i am not talking about abusive behavior. I personally enjoyed being called a dirty whore by my loving partner. It is, in a sense, role playing. It is not degrading to me, quite the opposite. I am turned on by the fake degredation, because that's a role neither my partner and I take on in "real life."
Hi Arvan and letseatcake,
I'll reply to each of you in this comment.
First, to Arvan:
*If you accuse me of liberalism, I can only say "thank you".*
I suspect that is because you don't realise how dependent liberalism, as a worldview, and as a practice, is on rape, genocide, and ecocide. And if you want to understand how this is so, read the work of John Perkins and Derrick Jensen (also Robert Jensen, unrelated), along with Marimba Ani's
Yurugu, and
Conquest by Andrea Smith. To not understand what the consequences are of a worldview you hold is to be willfully ignorant. I posted some of what is above at my blog and the first comment I got was as follows:
See here for the whole post:
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-pornography-being-sham...
One person wrote, about my efforts above:
Ugh, an exercise in male privilege dressed up as honest inquiry. I see nothing in that discussion but mistruths delivered with a lot of smugness. I applaud you for fighting for women's equality and humanity. I wouldn't have the patience to try to penetrate that willful ignorance.
Another wrote:
*I don’t see masturbation, pornography or sex as a problem in itself.*
No it is never a problem when it is men as a group who demand and expect women be made sexually available to them 24/7. But then, given our world does supposedly revolve around men and their rights, demands, expectations, entitlements etc. whilst women continue to be constantly told, exhorted, ordered to serve men's needs, including being men's sexual stations; bolstering men's flagging egos; not challenging male-centered views etc. it is not surprising such myopic claims are being made.
Are women human? Not according to these individuals who claim to be 'objective and impartial.' So obviously [the "obviously" is meant to be read as sarcasm] pornography is 'harmless fantasy' rather than filmed prostitution and male sexual violence against women and children.
Always denial, denial and yet more denials because the realities of the pornography and its brother the sex industry cannot be accepted by men as a group because doing so means yes, women are indeed human and yes, women like men demand dignity, respect and justice.
Yet more evidence of how male power operates, because apparently only males have the capacity to define what is and is not violence against women. This explains why pornography is not male violence against women but simply 'fantasy!'
Thank you Julian for very succinctly debunking the lies concerning pornography which is not only about male pornographers and their cohorts who promote male hated and contempt for women but also earn vast sums of money by filming men engaged in committing sexualised sadistic torture against women.
[I'll interject. I have been called many things by many people. "Succinct" is not usually among them! Thanks, Jennifer!!!! All my political friends would be laughing about that. But I know what you mean. It can take hours and hours and hours of wasted time trying to make someone hear you. And I don't quite take that much time. (And it remains to be seen whether it was all wasted.) But, again, thank you! I'll add: one thing that became abundantly, sickeningly clear in 2009 was that white women hold the power to name reality over women of color and do so in racist/misogynistic ways. So it's not only men who hold this power. But, just as trans folks are not THE most powerful enemy of women, white women are not the most powerful enemy of WOC. But they sure can act like it at times. 2009 will go down in herstory, for me, as proof of that. Sadly. I hope you don't witness that there in the UK. But it is not uncommon here, I'm sorry to say.]
*You stated that rape must happen a lot within the porn industry. Where is your proof that it occurs?*
I know it does. Where is your proof that it doesn't? If pimps value gross sexual exploitation and violation, including but not limited to rape, and pimps run the sexxxism industries, how is it that you think it even possible that rape is not part of those industries? Do you think their behavior gets better for the camera? Just do an internet search on "double penetration" and tell me what you find, how much respect for women you see there. Get back to me on that. Do a search on "cum on my face" and tell me the dignity being shown those women. And also do a search on "feminist pornography" and compare the figures: how many hits you get on searching "double penetration" and "cum on my face" vs. "feminist pornography. That'll clue you into what the pornography industry actually is. It's not "feminist pornography" and it's not run by feminists, even the pro-sexxx kind. And any pro-sexxx feminist in the industry will quickly alert you to that fact. White male pimps, in the West, are in charge of the industry in this part of the world. They rake/rape in billions of dollars annually selling what? Respect for women. Hardly. The proof is sprayed all over the internet, go look at it. I'm not sending you the links.
*Then, prove how that is different from the rape that occurs at a drug store when a manager rapes an employee. Rape is rape. Abuse of power in the workplace is abuse of power in the workplace. Porn is sex on film. Sex is something that all animals do.*
OK. The rapes may be no different. And I never said they were. (Again, you're putting words in my mouth. NOT quoting me. Why is that? I quote you exactly and you "restate" my words. That's not respectful either.) The workplace for someone in a drugstore doesn't ask him, let's say the employee at the cash register is a him, to take penises into his mouth, buttocks, and other areas before going home for the day. Can you see how rape is more likely to occur to a woman who is being paid to be physically penetrated by penises all day or all night, than it is for someone who sits at a computer or works a cash register, or restocks shelves? To me, that's a no-brainer.
Rape happens most in the bed, actually, not in the pornographer's "studio". Men generally rape women they know, women they are involved with, even if only on a date, but also to girlfriends, wives, and the women they rent for sexxxist use and abuse. Those men consume pornography, to varying degrees, yes? And what they take in from the pornography shapes their tastes in sex, whether you acknowledge it or not. That is why Halloween costumes now sexxxualise nine year old girls. Because industry pornographers earn billions by selling the idea that women are wh*res who love to be raped. They sell this idea, dressed up or dressed down, to men, and not only to men. And just like all advertising, it has an effect. If it didn't it wouldn't be profitable.
You see, an industry that earns billions annually--something sex liberals refuse to contemplate the impact of, btw--does actually inhumanely impact the larger society it exists in. That's how massive industries work; it's what they do. They leave a "carbon footprint"
and a patriarchal punch. It's
the patriarchal punch sex liberals tend to not want to look at while getting all alarmed at the carbon footprints of the auto industry. You can see where the concerns flow and where they do not. Things that negatively impact white men are "important to look at and remedy". Things that cause rape and subjugation and humiliation to women, disproportionately, are not seen as significantly harmful to society. In fact, they are seen as generally "fun" and "harmless". And sex liberals tell those of us who actually give a damn about rapism in society, and the industries that ensure and enforce it, to "get over it". You have one guess as to why that is. (It's not because sex liberals really want the rape and subjugation of women to end, in all forms and manifestations.)
*I happen to agree that patriarchal, sexist, militaristic, corporate models of abuse, domination and violence exist. Porn exists within these items*
MOST pornography does. Pornography is "the graphic depiction of women as wh*res". Someone above dragged out Merriam Webster to tell me what a word means. Look up that one.
*, just as carpentry, organized religion, philosophy, and any other form of commerce and industry. Rape occurs in all of these fields and professions as well. So does slavery. Sex work, porn and the viewing of porn do not have the same meaning to all people. That's my point.*
Militarism, carpentry, religion, philosophy, and other forms of commerce are all imbued with similar values: domination of white men over everyone and everything else. Again, read
Yurugu and the work of John Perkins. It's all there for the white English speaker who is academically educated to absorb, unless they refuse to. Really, it is there. And don't tell me it isn't until you've read those books.
So militarism, religion, and philosophy, for example, together, are eurocentric/white supremacist/male supremacist/anti-Life/anti-Indigenous phenomena, which is to say they discriminate rampantly against the "Dark Other" and all people considered "womanly". Here in the good ol' U.S., we enslave, we murder, and we rape, not necessarily in that order. And we don't do those the bombing form of murder on land that most white men live on. Why is that? And we don't enslave white men disproportionately. Why is that? And across ALL areas of society, white men are more likely to be rapers (of women of all colors) than the raped. Why is that? (In my experience, this is when the sex liberals and conservatives love to bring up that prison rape phenomenon, ignoring that white men are far less likely to be pulled over while driving and arrested for shit they didn't do. And white men, relative to Black and Brown men and women, are far more likely to have access to "good lawyers" and to big bucks than their Black and Brown sisters and brothers. Why is that?
Industries and other forms of commerce make poverty inevitable--and profitable, just not for the poor. The poor are the population most at risk for any number of atrocities, from flood to famine (think Katrina and the tsunami), to rape without negative or punitive consequence to the rapists, to prostitution and sexual slavery. These things are all linked, but the liberal mind wishes to separate things out: look over here, ignore what's over there. Don't EVER connect the dots.
*As for your statements that you claim I misunderstood, I can begin by apologizing for any misinterpretation. I show you your own words and ask you about them.*
You do that once, here:
I think men feeling shame about looking at raped women is an appropriate feeling to have.
*What men?*
Those men who feel shame about looking at raped women.
*How do you know that they feel shame?*
Because I'm talking about the men who feel shame. Most of the men I have spoken to over twenty-five years, and that's hundreds, easily, felt shame when looking at pornography. I tended not to speak as much to men who were so fucking callous that they felt no shame at all about having or wanting or seeking out 24/7 access to quite-possibly raped women. The men who have been heterosexually active sometimes claim their shame is over "sex", but they don't carry the same shame about being with women sexually when the women are human and their is meaningful consent. I'm not talking there, at that point, about the men who look at pornography and don't feel shame. I address the reality of those men elsewhere.
*The quote you referenced was about porn and your response conflated porn with rape?*
No. Pornographers and pimps conflate them, not me. They make money doing it, not me. They have a multi-billion dollar a year "business" conflating rape, porn, and sex, not me. I point out the conflation, in business and in the liberal
lack of imagination as a human rights issue. I don't generate it for profit. Andrea Dworkin reflects back to us, in literary form, what men actually do to women en masse and is then called a man-hater for doing so, when what she's describing is how men hate women. You see how this works yet?
*How can you prove rape and prove shame in the hypothetical minds of the nebulous term 'men'?*
One more time: I was speaking about the men who feel the shame. They write whole sentences about it all over the internet. And the ones that feel no shame write more. Do I have to send you all the links? Go to misandry.com and xyonline.net. Go anywhere at all where men congregate in order to feel manly or to question what political, not cultural, manliness is. It's all there.
Clearly, then, you must reject all law, government, philosophy, religion, sociology, psychology, anthropology, science, humanities, magazines, media, and entertainment industries, which speak about "men" all the time. Do you take similar objection with them?
*You mentioned in your last response that I was twisting your words. I just want you to look at this and notice how exactly I took you to mean that rape = porn. So, if I got your meaning wrong - what were you saying there that you could have stated differently?*
I could have stated exactly what I stated, and hoped that the liberal lack of imagination could read it accurately. My bad.
*Porn is not rape.*
Except when it is.
[Note the value and practice of making grand, sweeping, generalising statements that aren't backed up with evidence. The privileged liberal gets to do this time and again, without owning doing so, but let a radical, privileged or not, try and do the same, and WHAM!, we are asked for "proof". When men speak, all rules are off. When women speak, all rules--men's, btw, are on her case. When whites speak, all rules are off. When people of color speak, all rules--white's, btw, are on their case. Ditto the rich and the poor. Ditto the "First World"ers and the "Third World"ers and never you mind about anything those Fourth Worlders have to say, as they aren't supposed to be invited!! Who let them in here!?]
*Porn is sex on film.*
[Again with the grand, sweeping statement of TRUTH. He doesn't say what "sex" is, though. And, really, isn't this an extraordinarily right-wing view? I mean, does this mean that ALL sex on film is PORN? So that means "The Secrets" is porn? I don't think so. And, can there be sex that cannot be depicted, let alone portrayed in pornography or otherwise mass produced and sold for patriarchal profit?]
If sex means sexxx, then yes. (You are conflating the two, you know.)
*I don't like all porn.*
And I don't like all food-like products made with hydrogenated oil.
*I don't like violent or degrading porn.*
Violence (exploitation, rape, trafficking) inheres in the pornography industry and in its product, just as violence (exploitation, poverty) inheres in capitalism, structurally and ideologically. Just as cheap "foods" make their way into our diets.
*But, I don't conflate porn and rape when discussing porn.*
The pornographer/pimps have already done it for you. All you need to do is deny what they do. You do that well.
*I'm willing to talk about rape,
even my own. I am willing to talk about slavery. These things are not synonymous.* [But men are not willing to talk about how we sexually abuse other people. Really, we're not. And allegedly that's because none of us men ever do that. Right. I write about sexually abusing my cousin elsewhere on this blog. I think it is important for any profeminist man to speak about how and when we do sexually abuse and visually violate others, including by looking at pornography. I don't hear much applause from the anti-feminist men or the pro-feminist men on this form of accountability, however. Funny that.]
Except when they are. You are well aware of sexual slavery and rape as atrocities. You say so yourself.
*Thousands of children go up into the woods every day and do not come home. Children are raped and killed in every country in the world. Children, barely able to think for themselves.
[In EVERY country? How could he know that? Has he been to every country and talked with every child?]
At the top of the human social ladder is .01% of the population running empires of weapons, oil, drugs, finance and bureaucracy that exists only to make them richer. While at the very bottom of the pile, being starved, raped, mutilated, burned and murdered - are hundreds of thousands of children whose lives are forever shattered every day.
[He does not ask himself to "prove" these claims. We are to accept them as fact. I don't know about the .01% figure, but I get what he's saying and agree with him generally. Note, after this next paragraph, how I don't ask him to PROVE IT.]
I don't know how the world gets fixed, how the economy turns around, how jobs come back and how we fight terrorists. I don't know how anything gets solved. I do know however, that I don't know how to fix all this crap, all the lies and all the cruelty. I do believe that until the children are safe from the absolute worst of humanity, we have accomplished nothing.*
You know the pain, the humiliation, the powerlessness and the shame of surviving sexual violence at the hands of a man. So do I. You "stand with" children. I stand with children and women. Every woman I have ever known has had one or more of the following happen:
She has been treated as a child, as ignorant, less intelligent and generally inferior to men, by men.
She has been sexually assaulted.
She has been called misogynist terms.
She has been coerced, sexually, sometimes with great force, sometimes not.
She has been grossly discriminated against and mistreated systematically by men of her class and ethnic group.
Why don't you also stand with women? I suspect its because you wish, desire, or need to sexxxually objectify women, look at women as pornography, and I do not. I'm gay. Not that gay men don't sexxxually objectify women or look at women as "wh*res". We do. Not all of us. But we do.
But I grew up seeing the parallels between homophobia, sexual violence, racism, pornography and misogyny. You, apparently, did not. As Arvan can tell you,
Hustler's Larry Flynt and his associate, created and published an image for the cover of the magazine, of a woman going through a meat grinder, as a "ha ha" funny commentary about feminist criticisms that pornographers turn women into pieces of meat. (Which might have been funny, except that they do.) Flynt and Co. wouldn't ever admit to being misogynists, but then that's why there are anti-abuse, anti-exploitation, anti-rape feminists, right? Because without them, everyone else seems utterly confused or in denial about "where the misogyny comes from". As if it is natural, like oxygen, not mass produced like automobile emissions and hydrogenated oil. Those men, I'll wager to say, don't respect the Earth and Life, including the lives of women, the way ecofeminists do. Is that too broad a statement to make to a pro-individualism, pro-sexxx liberal? I don't think it needs to be proven.
*Rape is rape and porn is sex on film.*
You get to name reality, sir. It really is your privilege and entitlement to do so. Never mind what reality is, or what happens in it. You want there to be a nice delineation between child sexual abuse, the rape of women, and pornography. Poof. It is so. Except that it isn't so. And all you need to do to see that, graphically and clearly, is look at ALL the pornography that is on the web and the stuff that is illegal, called child pornography. Then get back to me about those clear delineations, okay?
And I'm very sorry you were raped. As I read your story I felt tense, angry, upset, and sad. I wish Jimmy a horrid death, to be honest. Right now that's how I feel. I hope he burns in hell, even if hell is on Earth.
I'm sorry girls and women and boys are being raped now because a liberal lack of imagination, embodied in people with structural power, refuse to acknowledge how pornography, the rape of women, and child sexual abuse go hand in hand in hand, in the emotional and material world of human suffering and atrocity.
sexgenderbody quotes me as saying:
"I think men who use pornography and who tell their female partners to "get over it" or to "not worry" are being grossly unfaithful, dishonest, and untruthful about what they are doing, including in the act of telling their partners to "back off".
sexgenderbody goes on to say:
*While I don't agree men who say that would be dishonest or untruthful (as they are quite clearly being honest), I do feel those men would be very
rude. I did not quote men as having said those, things, I said those things. I am ok with being rude.*
That's clear.
Again,
sexgenderbody quotes me as saying:
"they can't NOT have the access, and they won't want to NOT have the access. Correct me if I'm wrong about that."
And
sexgenderbody replies:
*I feel you are wrong about that.*
We certainly can agree to disagree. I do that often with people I am talking with.
*My post isn't about porn addiction.*
No, apparently not. Nor are the men who use women sexxxually "addicts". You did not understand the point I was making, so I'll make it another way.
We live in a society which provides certain things to certain groups of people. To some, it offers something resembling justice. To the oppressed, no such "luck". To the privileged, it offers something called meaningful choice-making in life. To the oppressed, not so much. But what capitalist patriarchy provides to all who seek it is a shaming and condemning white male sky god and pornography, and bleached flour products, often with corn syrup or soy products, because that's what the U.S. makes in surplus, so it's cheap to put it out there for all of us to feed off of.
Sexxx, more than intimacy, more than mutuality, more than sexual equality, is marketable, made into something we can all be told we should want, even when it holds no politically liberating nutrition. So we are sold sexxx and bleached white flour, and soy products and corn syrup, ad nauseam. If you travel across the midwest, you see corn fields and soy fields, one often in place of the other, year to year. In society you see sexxx presented as sex, for all of us to feed off of.
With regard to sexxx, let's just say I'm an anti-animal abuse vegan. With regard to society, let's say I'm an anti-sexxx industry/sexxxual exploitation/sexxxual abuse "vegan". It's not impossible for me to crave "meat" but I choose not to consume "meat".
My point isn't about what any one person decides or doesn't decide to do, primarily. My point is that the poor and disenfranchised, the oppressed, do not have as much choice about what we consume, and those of us who are oppressors cannot easily avoid soy products, bleached wheat, corn syrup, or "meat". And I take issue with men who claim "meat" is good for us, if you follow my metaphor. And I take issue with anyone who makes liberal statements like "Meat is healthy! Meat is good!" while ignoring the cows being callously dragged to their death by their hooves or their necks in order for humans to eat it. Dragged in an industrial kind of way, not by "some individuals".
*There are many men who could NOT look at porn, but I feel that is their choice to make, not their partner's.*
And that evades, rather completely, the points I am making about how society works, and how liberal
lack of imagination functions within it to support it being oppressive to women. I understand that this is not the topic you wish to discuss. My question to you is: why is that?
*As far as women being called whores being deceitful, degrading, etc., i am not talking about abusive behavior.*
Why not? Do you see how privileged you have to be to NOT talk about it? There are many of us, and Arvan may be among us, who experience abuse and its aftermath. Those I know personally who have survived it cannot NOT experience abuse and its aftermath. So when we are not terrorised into silence, or too dissociated to know how we feel, we do, at times, want to talk about it. It's therapeutic and politically necessary. But we don't only and always need to tell our individual story as if it is something that happens indiscriminately, accidentally, or anecdotally. We have to talk about it as a system of abusive power, powerfully and forcefully maintained by some at the expense of others.
Plantation-owning white men in the U.S. South didn't have to talk about the pain of slavery, did they? And men didn't have to talk about the what it is like to be raped as a woman, did they? They were busy, you know, slaving and raping. Why should they take the time to consider how such acts make the people they harm feel?
But why don't those who do the harm take time to question its impact and feel what it does to those they harm? That's my question. Are we not, if we want to be humane, called to speak about the atrocities we don't experience, and the ones we do? It is easy to say "Well, I'm not talking about that." But why aren't you? Who benefits from you not talking about it? Who is validated and supported when you DO talk about it--responsibly and without being snarky?
*I personally enjoyed being called a dirty whore by my loving partner.*
As Andrea Dworkin once remarked, in a statement that was similar enough to this: The question is not why are some people into S/M. The question is, why isn't everyone? That you enjoy it doesn't mean that most people who are called that term DON'T enjoy it. And if you enjoying it requires you to be defensive and in denial around people speaking out about those of us who DON'T enjoy it, then you're participation in using it for fun, is part of the oppressive problem.
*It is, in a sense, role playing.*
More than that, it is being patriarchally/politically correct, sexually.
Patriarchy demands, in many ways, the compulsory acceptance and affirmation that sex must be fused to domination and subordination, to exploitation and dehumanisation. That you enjoy it is as surprising to me as someone telling me they feel awesome because they got something they wanted on sale.
*It is not degrading to me, quite the opposite.*
And does that fact mean you have to be snide, snarky, and shaming to those of us who DO find it degrading?
*I am turned on by the fake degredation, because that's a role neither my partner and I take on in "real life."*
Given that you say you enjoy being rude when discussing sexuality, and that you show great disdain for those who speak out about sexual degradation and pornographic rape as harmful, I'd say the jury is out on that one. I'd actually argue you DO take it on, and you enact it well.
Here on your blog. The evidence of that is in this post you made, above. You show disdain and shaming to women and anyone else who fights for justice and freedom from sexxxual violence and patriarchal violations that are produced by pimps and pornographers. I'd call that "taking on a role of valuing degradation". But we can agree to disagree.
Submitted by
Julian on 3 January, 2010 - 02:33.
_______________
A point to follow up on another time. The claim is often made by sex liberals and pro-sexxx advocates and defenders of those powerful pornographers against the allegedly mighty spoken sword of radical feminists, that there is no harm in smbd and in being pro-porn industry and pro-systems of prostitution. The most obvious evidence that this is not so, that there IS, in fact, harm in being liberal, is how quickly the liberals will turn on the radicals who seek human rights and justice for all. They will do so with alarmingly individualistic ahistorical, asystemic argumentation about the rights of each person, as if each person EVER had rights, or EVER had equal rights. As noted in another post, there never has been a level playing field, but liberals love to pretend that this exists, against all the evidence to the contrary. Liberals love to live in ideas about equality and lack of harm, because the world of inequality and harm busts their bubble of "it's all good in pro-sexxx liberal land". It's not all good. And it never was all good. And they hear this as me saying "It's all bad" as if I actually said it. But is it there? No. But do they hear me saying it? Yes. Ah, liberals. You can't live with 'em, you can't live without 'em. And don't get me wrong: some of my best friends have been liberals!
