A night of Steel Reserve behind me, I "struggled out of bed" this morning (see Waits, 1975) and I sat down with my morning news, ready for the daily cringe-and-sneer. Trying to embolden myself for the knee-jerk reactionary ramblings of a confused and hostile populist-proletariat I'd inevitably find in the Opinion pages, I first turned to the "Life" section - "interest pieces" about children and family and calories and other "woman" things. The lead article was on abstinence and sex education in local public schools. Looks like the Macomb County Abstinence Partnership 's staffers and volunteers have been giving presentations to middle-schoolers about how you "don't have to have sex to be cool." (this link is to an older MCAP story - see note 1). The MCAP felt it was especially effective that they used high-school age girls to talk to the younger kids. The director of the Partnership stated how they had been on a shoestring budget since coming into existence a few years ago - not wholly surprising, because of course MI is careening helplessly to a state of complete financial ruin - but things are now on the up-and-up: the MCAP has recently received a generous national grant that will allow them to expand their efforts, possibly hire more staff, etc. This top-down support is also not horribly surprising given that the MCAP ostensibly supports the only kind of sex education the current administration supports: abstinence-only.
Full disclosure: I did somewhat consider entreatying them (MCAP) for such a staff position. If you know anything about me, it's that I'm a huuuge proponent of abstinence. Or celibacy. (note 2). Whatever you call it, I am staunch defender of the right to not be ridiculed for not wanting to have (ritualistically promiscuous) sex. During my long walks in which I try to make sense of my life and future, I've often considered that I should devote my life as an activist for the cause of abstinence. (Or celibacy.)
The obvious rub is that 99% of those supporting abstinence these days are faith-based programs and/or right-wing organizations such as The Heritage Foundation. "Abstinence-only sex education" has been a controversial policy promoted under the current president, and myself and any other self-respecting leftie does well to decry it. Abstinence is tremendously political.
If I were in charge (ha!) I suppose I would endorse an "Abstinence-inclusive" or "Abstinence-tolerant" or, at my most extreme, an "Abstinence-encouraging" form of "sex education." I pre-emptively accept "defeat" in that I realize of course there is no way you are going to stop 10 year old children from having sex, so of course you need to educate them on safe sex and birth control - because they're going to do it anyway and so they might as well be informed about it. Just because sex ed never seemed useful to me -- because I went to a Catholic school and the moral of the story was "if you have premarital sex, you're going to hell and you're going to get AIDS", not to mention the idea of me actually having sex was absolutely ludicrous on several levels -- doesn't mean sex ed would not be useful to (,e.g.,) an ignorant middle-schooler who has no idea how to use a condom and who grows up listening to cool misogynist boys talking about their "numbers" and how condoms are gay because they take away all the feeling and you can't get your dick wet. When I say "Abstinence-encouraging," I mean that the encouragement of abstinence could well save children much trouble - physical, psychological, sociocultural, etc.: You won't get pregnant. You won't get horrible diseases. You won't lose your self-respect. You can, in fact, gain a healthy air of moral righteousness and superiority. Ooops, might want to leave that last one out of the curriculum. To my knowledge, an "abstinence-inclusive" sex ed is what is indeed supported by most feminists and most other progressive thinkers with a mind for gender equality and public health. The "evil" feminists aren't telling children to "go out and fuck;" they're teaching children about contraception and disease prevention and realistic options for unwanted pregnancy. Or they would, if we were not spoon-feeding what is essentially xian fundamentalist claptrap to public school students. Maybe we should argue that the "theory of contraception" should get "equal time" in the classroom, har-dee-har-har.
Certainly young people do love to fuck like rabbits, so they'll do it despite whatever you tell them. And when the only thing you tell them is to ignore these genitals who have recently seized executive control of the childrens' minds, hearts, and bodies, the abstinence-only policy can only be mocked by boys and girls who can't wait to scuttle off to their next between-class oral sex session. Besides the omission of basic medical facts, another part of the sex ed problem is the idea that the kids must indulge their every fucking-and-sucking whim - indeed, that they even want to fuck and suck so badly. You can say this desire is hormonal and there's no denying it; to suppress it is unhealthy. Besides, wasn't I ever young and horny once? Yes, I was. But as I near my quarter-century mark, I'm realizing how pointless, destructive, and inarguably stupid was the raging sex drive of my youth. What's just as stupid is the unthinking indulgence of youths' every sexual desire:
"I'm going to sleep with whoever I want, whenever I want. Fucking is so much fun!"
"I want to suck this boy's cock, so I will. Cock tastes good, besides, I don't want to be the only one in my group of friends who's afraid to give a boy a blowjob."
"It's okay to fuck somebody you don't even know. After all, I'm horny. We're all horny."
"The broad was fat, dumb, and skanky. But we were fuckin' hammered. I got my dick wet, and when she passed out, I even threw it in the pooper for a laugh. High five!"
"What's wrong with having fucked over 40 people? Morals are relative anyway; I love to fuck; and I'm not going to get hung up morally or emotionally over this fundamental human urge."
Regardless of how you feel about the word "promiscuous," there is little doubt that people, especially anyone under 30, are largely promiscuous. (Especially when it comes to highschoolers and their "blowjob culture.") How big of a mirror must we hold up to these children before they see how excessive their behavior actually is? The mirror must be enough to deflect all the advertising dollars and the attendant images of "hotness" created in all manner of adolescent-focused media - fashion, tv, movies, music, books, and the simulacra thereof who parade around every high school in the nation. I'm not too optimistic.
"Simply," we must change young peoples' opinions, attitudes and beliefs about sex. We need to make them believe in the evident truth that the world will not come to a grinding halt if a cock is ever removed from a mouth, vagina, or anus. (We might do well to return to a sensibility espoused by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who infamously encouraged that masturbation be encouraged among youth as an alternative, or substitute, to more risky sexual behavior.) We need to definitively show that sex is most decidedly what's not portrayed pervasively in our media - that it's not all fun and games and coolness; it's something to take damn serious. We absolutely need not be afraid of "over-emphasizing" the damaging nature and disgusting commonplaceness of rape and sexual abuse against women. We need to tell kids what to say and how to fight back against homophobia and misogyny. We need to be so bold as to bring on full discussions of patriarchy and misogyny. The patriarchy is doubly damaging: it's the raging, insatiable cock that rewards with favor those who suck it, while at the same time condemning as "fuckin' skanks" anyone who sucks one cock too many, sucks one cock too few, asserts her individuality - falls from the favor of the cock.
How about we take a little break. In case you're not one of the 5999999999 people who have already seen the following movie, I present it for your examination, and as thought-provoking semi-entertainment for the rest of us:
I'm losing my edge here. My argument is going fast. So let's just cut to the chase:
Who are promiscuous young women having sex with? Mainly promiscuous young misogynists. There is nothing wrong with having a "free and open" sexuality, some feminists argue, but I think another feministic idea we should not forget is that this sexuality should also be fair. What kind of sexual liberation is it when a woman consents to lay down with - to collaborate with - a woman-hater? When a woman decides she can "do the same thing as the guys" and have promiscuous sex with men just because they have "hot bodies" - even though they are obvious misogynists who sincerely view women as nothing more than skanks and fuckholes? Well, his political views don't matter, the one getting fucked might say: I'm entitled to a piece of ass just like he is, and what do I care if he hates women. I'm not particularly fond of many men. But I need my sex.
I think it's appalling that anyone would need their sex so badly that they would sleep with someone who is wholesale biased against their gender (or race, or religion, etc.) It's tragic that a woman might sexually reward a misogynist for hating women - he can continue being the hateful prick he is, and think nothing is wrong with his beliefs because he's still getting ass. Maybe it's because he's such a tough prick that the ladies love him. Maybe it's A-OK that he continues shaping his real life in the mold of the pornography he worships. I just fucked the hottest, wettest fuckhole. The kind of feminist I'm talking about does not let anyone get away with treating her as a hot, wet fuckhole. (No matter how tall, dark and handsome he is, or how "ripped" his abs are.)
So let's get feminism in the classrooms. That's what I've been trying to say. Teaching boys and girls about the underpinnings of gender -- especially the insidious will-to-dominance of patriarchy, itself a more (or less!) hidden hand which has skewed cultures and histories and ideologies -- would be a revolutionary and enlightening way to teach sex ed. It might also help begin to crack the rigid shells of misogyny that have already embittered the boys - a childhood of immersion in a woman-hating culture can do untold damage to both the child and the society, and to make the slightest intervention against misogyny is better than nothing at all.
Are pubescent girls aware of the women's movement? Are the boys? Popular culture ignores the meanings of the history and the struggle of women - in favor of a (big surprise!) sleek, commercial, uber-sexualized painting of how young men and women are and how they should be. I would be equally cynically nonplussed if I knew I had read more on the women's movement in one week than most pubescent types have ever heard of in their lives. Adolescence is already a very "confusing" time of shifting identities and "raging hormones." Why should we turn these already-chaotic children loose in an already-confusing culture of sex and sexuality? Who's to say that a fundamental understanding of feminism would put adolescents at a disadvantage to navigate this culture? That nothing educational and genuinely empowering could be gained? That both girls and boys might not start off with a healthier view of sex, which might not in turn extend to a healthier sex praxis?
I suppose, though, feminism would never be accepted by the youth because it's simply too much "fuckin' bull dyke bullshit." A woman can't view herself and other women with respect unless she wants to be seen as a "dyke." Homosexuality is not allowed - unless it's the raunched-up, hot-bitch-on-hot-bitch-action faux-lesbianism that men have created and controlled for their own enjoyment at the expense of women. No kinda homosexuality at all.
Amidst the fire and fury of Dworkin and MacKinnon, I decided to take a break with some light reading on raunch culture. ("Female Chauvinist Pigs," Ariel Levy.) Levy is a young, non-ugly, non-dykey, non-gentile magazine writer who is about as comfortably east-coast bourgeois as you can get. The book was (and is?) indeed a popular success, and propelled Levy into instant celebrity. (I wouldn't be surprised if she was on the daily show ::crinnnge::). None of this is a secret; so you have no reason to view her book as feminist activism, so this leaves little actual room for disappointment. Yes, I do wish Levy were a radical feminist. Yes, I do wish a resurrected Dworkin had written this book instead of Levy, so I could be a bit more enthusiastic about the book and have some fiery passages I could recite to women-haters. Yes, I do wish Levy hadn't written that woeful introduction to a recently-republished edition of Dworkin's "Intercourse." But Levy's "hit book" presents a lot of good points that I have a hard time disagreeing with. Maybe it's a selection effect of myself only choosing to read books in which I'm pretty sure I'll agree with the author. Maybe it's because Levy wasn't trying to get an "objective" viewpoint and didn't seek (or write about) any evidence that didn't support her points. Whatever the case, it's difficult to deny that the phenomenon of which Levy writes doesn't exist at all in our culture. It may get to the point where men don't have to objectify women any more because women will do all the work for them - just another way in which women can be subservient to men. There's some interesting comparisions made between self-objectifying women and the self-deprecating "Uncle Tom Negro" stereotype.While reading the book, I kept a unwavering perspective of radical feminism, and sneered during some passages in which I felt Levy wasn't being as condemnatory of pornography as I felt she should have been. I kept words like "complicity" and "collaboration" and "subterfuge" and "brainwashing" in the front of my mind. But even if Levy wasn't using such strong language, the implication definitely came across loud and clear a couple times: women are being fooled again. I think any responsible and contemporary form of feminism needs to address these themes of complicity, and to compassionately yet firmly show girls how they are missing the point, and how it's nothing to giggle about. Because how can you teach school-age children responsible, respectful sexuality when 12 year old girls rub their "porn-star wannabe" rumps against barely-pubescent cocks who get hard at the thought they might "superman that ho?"
NOTES
1. I don't feel 100% comfortable linking to an ACLU site because I have my doubts about how beneficial the ACLU is - mainly concerning hateful, pornographic, misogynist speech - but there's also a link to the local paper found there. The Macomb Daily article from today is nowhere to be found on the absolutely shoddy MD website. This site would only be useful if it had archives of the vomitous editorial/opinion/invective pages as well as the fairly opinionated interest pieces, but it only has reprints of the "local news" pieces.
2. I sometimes use the word "celibacy." I'm pretty sure either word is acceptable for my own position. The distinction is that all celibacy is abstinence, but not all abstinence is celibacy. In my mind, to be celibate is something that you "vow" - a near-sacred promise; a clear choice that you willfully abstain from sex for a while, perhaps your whole life. Or perhaps until you find a person who can genuinely excite you sexually, and with whom you actually want to have sex.
Abstinence (i.e., simply "no sex" - whether voluntary or not) has a negative connotation - that sex is something irrevocably awesome , or at the very least, there's something unnatural and involuntary about going without sex. This makes you wonder why the "abstinence-only sex education programs" even deploy the term - perhaps they are trying to "reclaim" the word "abstinence" and show that "It's not so weird to be abstinent;" at any rate, "celibacy" has a probably even worse connotation - using similar reasoning as above, who on g-d's green earth would willfully choose to go years without sex? Priests who rape little boys, that's who! Still, imho, the phenomenon called Involuntary Celibacy (Incel) would be more accurately named Involuntary Abstinence, but it's nonetheless a very interesting concept and, I'd argue, something that is woefully understudied in psychosociocultural research. (The site is certainly worth checking out.)
Um, skip ahead to the 4:30 mark. Not that everything preceding that point is not fuggin kigass.
NOW PLAYING
Copious amounts of Joy Division; which has sparked a copious resurgence of New Order. I love these guys (and girl)! I wouldn't mind meeting non-obnoxious people who also appreciate both groups. I have also been busting my hump trying to devise the perfect soundtrack to "languid, gloomy despair." The songs can be occasionally dancey but never "upbeat;" sometimes tense to the point of apocalyptic, but never, ever violently so; ideally dirgey; pessimistic and humanity-and-world-hating in tone. I.e., it's something to listen to when you are walking alone on a grey day as the snow gently falls. There should be beauty, but not a lively, flowery or overt kind; but instead, the beauty of trudging step by step, with a heavy heart and a heavy head, to your waiting grave. The inspiration came from a day in November or December 2005. It was one of the first snowings of "winter;" I woke up in my gloomy room in V-House on a gloomy day, saw the snow falling outside, pondered my fate, and listened to "Dirt in the Ground" by Tom Waits. I have painstakingly tried to extend that musical feeling with everything from Chopin (guess what song, Hahaha) to Burzum (not the guitarcentric variety, of course).
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
when a man hates a woman
Again, no exciting events to report. I did see an old friend recently who I haven't seen in forever, so I'm pretty happy about that. But anything else that would appeal to the disinterested blogophile / student of journalism? I still would rather blow my brains out than look for a job, and I'm still a pretty-proud member of the 3 Year Club.
The most notable thing is that I am trying to stimulate my mind wik teh buchz. I've constantly been complaining that "Waaah, I can't find any books I want to read because nothing is relevant to my life" and thus I have 1000000000000z of books on the shelf that I'll never read simply because I don't ever feel like reading them. Andrea Dworkin is changing this from beyond the grave.
I had not even been aware of Dworkin until very recently, and that's a crying shame. I'm surprised I never ran across her work whilst I was at Univ, but, I'm not too surprised: maybe the fashion show that passes for student feminist activism roundly rejects the brave words of Dworkin. (There are those who would describe her as "anti-free speech" or "fascistic.") Or, more likely, I simply hadn't dug deep enough into the scholarship of the women's studies department. A friend had drawn my attention to an article by laura kipnis in a recent Harpers magazine; kipnis discussed Dworkin and other feminists, and viewed them as somewhat of an oddity for what kipnis saw as their man-hating, sexophobic ways. At least that's how I remember my interpretation of the article. Either way it made me put Dworkin on the top of my reading list, and I proceeded to do some research on her life and work and was fascinated by what I read.
Finally I was at the library doing my semiweekly movie run when the thought entered my mind, hay, maybe I should look for some books this time too. (Because sometimes it's just a movie grab-and-go.) And the problem with books is, I can never remember which books I want to read when I go to the library, because there are very few books (besides Marx or Hank) that I'm never not interested in reading. Novels are just a no-go for the reasons of irrelevance and bourgeois-suckoffery that I've mentioned before. Anyway, I remembered A.D. and looked her up and got the two books the library had: Heartbreak and In Harm's Way.
I started reading Heartbreak one afternoon and did not put it down until I finished reading it in the evening. Yeah, it's a very short book, but I don't think I've ever read an entire book in one day. Usually it's such a fucking torturous chore. This one was just cover to cover. I'm not saying it's the greatest, most life-changing book in the world. Parts of it seemed "thrown together" and it wasn't anything like i thought a memoir should be. But for whatever reason, I liked reading it. I liked what she had to say. I don't consider myself a fan of controversial, thunderous activist-speak at all, but I was getting into this quite enthusiastically, even though I could see how critics might call her a "man-hater." So I was pleasantly surprised by all that.
I then moved right into In Harm's Way, which details the pornography civil rights hearings in the 80s and 90s that sought to pass civil legislation in some areas that would give those hurt by pornography a course of defense. This "crusade" against pornography is one of Dworkin's main legacies. She goes on and on about how her pro-woman/anti-porn agenda is what separates her and other feminists from "The Left," who she views as pro-pornography and misogynistic. In a way she's saying she's more left than left. Radical. I like that.
I'm wishing she hadn't recently died so she could have written more on pornography, because I believe the porno of the new millennium has - in a limited way, mind you - a kinder, gentler face than it did 20 years ago. By that I mean: many actors look like happy people who just loooooove to have sex on camera, and there's also a semblance of "adult stars" being "safe" and "ethical" about the business. I'm sure Dworkin would say (and I'd agree) that this is just a lot of talk and nothing's really changed. Of course the women getting fucked look ecstatic - porno is designed to show them enjoying being sex slaves to the men. Show them being happy and horny to be receptacles. Besides, it's not like most porno shows women getting blatantly raped on camera - at least they're pretending at consent and enjoyment.
At the same time, Dworkin would have had a field day with what is a growing violence fetish. I would argue that porno now is more violent, rape-and-humiliation-focused, and openly woman-hating than it's ever been, especially considering the internet seems to make all manner of "fetishistic" porn widely available. You just don't go to the video store and rent a VHS of ron jeremy fucking some swooning blonde: you get on the internet and can find blown-out assholes and women drinking piss and eating shit and getting fucked to death by horses and bukkaked, with their terrified, agonized faces fully covered with the jizz of 100 men. The sadism has become so overt that even pro-pornography types would not hesitate to call it blatant Degradation. What's most terrifying is it would not be unrealistic for a man who likes this violence to openly admit it: "Yeah, I like to jerk off to bitches getting degraded." 20 years ago, the degradation was still motivating the men's libidos, although I believe the violence was more subconscious back then. A guy could get off on raping a girl but he might not be sure exactly why. I feel that porn viewers today are much more articulate and comfortable with the violence aspect, and have come to demand more of it. And have they ever got it. Max Hardcore is a perfect example. What I wouldn't do to see a debate between him and Dworkin. MH is the poster boy for this new vanguard of violence and misogyny in porn. I shouldn't have to quote the things he's said and done!
It's sad we don't have Dworkin to comment on this, because I suspect the internet has caused the availability and "diversity" of porn to skyrocket. I suppose it'd be easy enough to prove if people now are waaaay more porn-addicted than ever, but I'll wait until I'm done here to dig up some numbers.
The framing of the porn problem as "porn addiction" rather than "unlimited and unprecedented trafficking of women" is itself a horrible problem. Our culture has definitely become more sympathetic to "the victim" over the years, but we might argue that our still-misogynist culture views the porn-addict as the Primary victim. The porn-addict needs help more than these nameless (Dworkin would say "silent", not inaccurately) women who are getting ripped in half.
And what about gay porno? Like, just two dudes fucking each other in the ass? I guess it's misogynistic if one plays the "bitch" role, but whether you're bitch or butch or both, couldn't you say that a gay man is pretty much as hated as much as a woman is? Would this sexual violence and hate still be apparent in gay porn, or not? (I thought about this as we watched an episode of "The Office" where Dwight was trying to improve his gaydar by watching gay porn on his office computer.)
And what about so-called "erotica," with its tender love-making and whatnot? There's companies that produce this "tender" stuff for couples who want to stimulate their own "love life" without the blatant violence of "hardcore" porno.
So, WWADD? I guess I have to find a new antiporn feminist. I get the feeling that some so-called feminists/leftists would view this "non-hardcore" stuff the same as they viewed the 1980s hardcore: it's free expression - free speech in a free marketplace of ideas - and it should not be suppressed. This is sexual liberation. I might argue the "tender erotica" would be viewed by the dominant (woman-hating) culture as "girly" and the gay porn would be similarly viewed as "gay fag shit." "Gimme some real hardcore shit with bitches being abused in all holes." So that's not really progress. Also to think that all those porno "subcultures" are clearly separated would be naive. I'm sure some "tender erotica" stars probably work in max-hardcore style abuse films - possibly with male actors who may have been getting fucked in the ass in a gay porno the other day. I just don't know.
I think that The American Porn Industry has become more of a "family," going along with that "falsely kinder gentler" theme I mentioned earlier. I've known guys ("borderline" porn addicts) that could rattle off names of actresses (and actors) and their movies like they were football statistics. It's not just some guy with a big dick fucking that hot little bitch in half - It's Jimmie Nutbuster fucking Jennie Jizzguzzler. Each porn star has their own cult (more like business) of personality. (Let's not even get into how the term "porn star" itself has entered the lexicon as a compliment-word [cf. with "rock star"], although "porn star" is a double-edged sword, perhaps an attempt to "reclaim" the meaning of "skank," although the dominant, anti-skank culture would view any woman who delights in being called "porn star" as a mere skank, ulitmately.) So maybe guys have become more attached to and obsessed with porn, the way they have always been obsessed with sports. Only porn this is a sport where men fuck women. (The idea of sexual/intergender relations being a "sport," a "game," or a "contest" has been researched, but I don't know how extensively. I think the more you endorse these above attitudes, the more of a chauvinist/authoritarian/misogynist/fascist you are. Duuuuuuuuh.)
Speaking of games, WWADD about "The Game?" That is: both the chart-topping book by neil strauss and the described lifestyle/subculture - the life of the pick-up artist, a "hobby" which is moving ever closer to mainstream acceptance, with shows like "The Pick-Up Artist." Or the scads of educated, professional young men paying thousands upon thousands of dollars so they can be schooled by the world's "top pick-up artists."
This topic is especially near and dear to me since I've been studying PUA for quite some time, going back to my college days when I knew it "pick up artistry" as "being a 'Don Juan.'" (Some would call it "Venusian artistry.") 2 points:
1. These men have of course faced accusations of misogyny - that they only want one thing and they will manipulate women to get that pussy and pump 'em and dump 'em. Their usual response is: we're not misogynists, we're just trying to become sexually self-actualized. We don't rape women. We don't make women do anything they don't want to do. We're just making ourselves more attractive to women so we can get the sex we so desperately need. (I believe there's an underlying sex addiction in our culture - that today a dangerous number of people want a dangerous amount of sex - but more on that later.) A "true" pick up artist does not boast in a disrespectful way of "his conquests." If anything, he's learning how to treat women with more respect, and how to be capable of finding and successfully attracting a woman he can truly fall in love with.
Please. This is all a bag of bullshit to make the pick up artist look like anything but a woman hater, and to make women think more favorably of a pickup artist: "Oh, they're not such bad people. It'd be fun to hook up with a pickup artist. Tee hee." And I'm not being a woman-hater by characterizing women as such: there's an old belief of mine - and of many feminists - that it's men (patriarchy) who are writing this "airhead" script, and men who are rewarding (or, rather, not punishing) women who follow this script.
2. I would imagine most, if not all, of these men would argue that "the Game" is in place because of women: We have to metamorphose into this because this is what a woman wants. A guy has to "change into something he doesn't want to be just so he can get laid," and he doesn't have much of a choice, because those are the simple rules of the game. And who writes those rules? The more savvy pick-up artist will say that The Game evolved as a symbiosis between men and women over thousands of primal years - do the Evolutionary Psychology, baby. I'd argue that the "Average Frustrated Chump", and probably also many so-called masters, certainly believe in their hardest of hearts that they've had to adapt and change to a system - a Game devised by women. Women who make and enforce the rules that men have to be this and have to do that in order to get laid. Which, evolutionarily, is all a man really needs to do. Don't hate the player; hate the woman.
So I'm dyyyyyyiiiiinnnnngggg to read what a Dworkinesque radical feminist scholar would have to say about that.
Dworkin worked closely with Catharine MacKinnon throughout her life. MacKinnon was a person I did learn about in my liberal college days, though only in my final year. I was in a psych class where the grad student in the vaunted "combined program in women's studies and psych" (not that any psych program at the U is not vaunted as fook). She slipped some MacKinnon in the course readings packet and it was the reading that stuck with me the most out of any that year. I had a very bad memory for psych papers, and to read something that was more blatantly feministy was fun. My "fave" line of that reading was "man fucks woman: subject verb object." That pretty much hit me over the head, and I became an instant fan of this white-hot, controversial, and at times deliciously-dense style of writing. It was slightly frustrating at the time, but now I'm all about her kind of stuff. I then proceeded to use the MacKinnon (and some Adorno) readings as my main jumping-off points for my term paper for the class. I got an A+ .
Why the grad student didn't mention anything about MacKinnon being a professor at the UM law school was surprising. Maybe she did and I wasn't listening. Maybe CM hadn't taken the position yet. (This was 2004ish). I certainly wasn't as goddam serious then about being a know-it-all as I am now - indeed, I baaaarely even used wikipedia at the time. I detested using the academic search engines to crawl though hundreds of abstracts. Now I do this for hours a day. I had no desire at the time to dig any deeper, to find out more. Sad: - How hard is it to type her name into wikipedia and discover that she's a professor at your alma mater. Damn. I was, unfortunately, taking the university/intellectual/research culture completely for granted and I thought I could find those opportunities (or perhaps other people who read MacKinnon) in any town in Michigan and not just ann arbor. So regrettable - the unforgivable naivete of my youth.
Maybe I could have just waltzed into her office and talked to her about, O Idunno, her groundbreaking work with Andrea Dworkin on the pornography issues? Some very informed discussion about porn in the new millienium? Her opinion on the sleazy pick-up culture and their skewed interpretation of evolutionary psychology? (full disclosure: I'm sure a letter of recommendation from her would be like Charlie's Golden Ticket. I would not be sitting here in my parents' basement in white-flight suburbia writing all this drivel. I'd be out there making a difference in the world!)
So I trace my interest in "women's studies" back to that time. I also became somewhat close with a professor who was teaching a class in which gender was the main topic, and there I ran into other women's studies/psych grad students. Again, I really wish I was as into the subject as I am now. It's tragic that at the time, I was straining my brain trying to come up with intellectuallike topics to discuss with them and I was always at a frustrated loss. Goddam.
I've just crossed my Blogspot threshold for regret, so I'll stop now. Also, suppose I ever get to the point of trying to get into a satisfactory grad school or doing anything women's studies-related - people will probably find this page and deem it to be remarkably unprofessional. So let me state on the record that I have nothing but the deepest respect and admiration for the lives and work of every one of the women's studies scholars mentioned in this post.
Moving on: you may be saying to yourself, But misogyny isn't such a big deal as you're making it. Me and my friends don't hate women. We Loooooooove to fuck women. Haha! High five bro!
My response is, this is women-hating. You can be the world's friendliest guy who gets along well with men and women both. You're very social and sociable. Men and women both honestly like you; and you'd never think of raping, molesting, or abusing a woman. But sometimes you may boast about using women's bodies; taking advantage of their presentations. This "manly ego boost" is itself a kind of woman-hating. Sure, a lesser kind of woman-hating than raping a woman who is screaming bloody murder, but still a kind of woman-hating. If you fuck a woman who you can't stand (hate, perhaps?) just because she presents herself to you and you want to "Getchadickwet," that's woman-disrespecting too. Is "disrespect" really that long of a non-slippery slope to "hate," anyway? Maybe you joke among your male friends in a fratboy manner that you'd loooooove to fuck so-and-so if you didn't have a girlfriend, or if she would never find out, or if you just didn't have this most "inconvenient" and "misdirected" sense of guilt or responsibility. There's those who treat getting laid so cavalierly. Drunken one-night stands; instant inebriated hook-ups and subsequent dumpings that make Glen Quagmire look like a woman-respecting man.
I don't see this as sexual freedom. I see it as a dialectic of disgrace between women who don't have any respect for themselves, and the men who don't feel that their using a self-loathing woman to get their dick wet is disrepecting either party. It's a sad farce. Maybe you don't believe wholeheartedly the "masculinist" things you say, but you just say them because it's a guy thing to say; it's what amounts to small talk among men. This "guy talk" code is a passive form of woman-disrespecting, and it's everywhere. It's the norm. People don't recognize it because it's all around them at all times. It's not as obvious as pornography.
So my points are: women are degraded everywhere at all times; pornography is bad; Andrea Dworkin is amazing and has gotten me back into reading; and I have a background of women's studies semi-scholarship that I should stop overlooking in my own "research interests." I need to reconnect with the women's studies scene and read some research, dawg. I'm sure this field extends into all sorts of radical political/social realms that would also be of interest to an upstart class warrior such as myself.
The most notable thing is that I am trying to stimulate my mind wik teh buchz. I've constantly been complaining that "Waaah, I can't find any books I want to read because nothing is relevant to my life" and thus I have 1000000000000z of books on the shelf that I'll never read simply because I don't ever feel like reading them. Andrea Dworkin is changing this from beyond the grave.
I had not even been aware of Dworkin until very recently, and that's a crying shame. I'm surprised I never ran across her work whilst I was at Univ, but, I'm not too surprised: maybe the fashion show that passes for student feminist activism roundly rejects the brave words of Dworkin. (There are those who would describe her as "anti-free speech" or "fascistic.") Or, more likely, I simply hadn't dug deep enough into the scholarship of the women's studies department. A friend had drawn my attention to an article by laura kipnis in a recent Harpers magazine; kipnis discussed Dworkin and other feminists, and viewed them as somewhat of an oddity for what kipnis saw as their man-hating, sexophobic ways. At least that's how I remember my interpretation of the article. Either way it made me put Dworkin on the top of my reading list, and I proceeded to do some research on her life and work and was fascinated by what I read.
Finally I was at the library doing my semiweekly movie run when the thought entered my mind, hay, maybe I should look for some books this time too. (Because sometimes it's just a movie grab-and-go.) And the problem with books is, I can never remember which books I want to read when I go to the library, because there are very few books (besides Marx or Hank) that I'm never not interested in reading. Novels are just a no-go for the reasons of irrelevance and bourgeois-suckoffery that I've mentioned before. Anyway, I remembered A.D. and looked her up and got the two books the library had: Heartbreak and In Harm's Way.
I started reading Heartbreak one afternoon and did not put it down until I finished reading it in the evening. Yeah, it's a very short book, but I don't think I've ever read an entire book in one day. Usually it's such a fucking torturous chore. This one was just cover to cover. I'm not saying it's the greatest, most life-changing book in the world. Parts of it seemed "thrown together" and it wasn't anything like i thought a memoir should be. But for whatever reason, I liked reading it. I liked what she had to say. I don't consider myself a fan of controversial, thunderous activist-speak at all, but I was getting into this quite enthusiastically, even though I could see how critics might call her a "man-hater." So I was pleasantly surprised by all that.
I then moved right into In Harm's Way, which details the pornography civil rights hearings in the 80s and 90s that sought to pass civil legislation in some areas that would give those hurt by pornography a course of defense. This "crusade" against pornography is one of Dworkin's main legacies. She goes on and on about how her pro-woman/anti-porn agenda is what separates her and other feminists from "The Left," who she views as pro-pornography and misogynistic. In a way she's saying she's more left than left. Radical. I like that.
I'm wishing she hadn't recently died so she could have written more on pornography, because I believe the porno of the new millennium has - in a limited way, mind you - a kinder, gentler face than it did 20 years ago. By that I mean: many actors look like happy people who just loooooove to have sex on camera, and there's also a semblance of "adult stars" being "safe" and "ethical" about the business. I'm sure Dworkin would say (and I'd agree) that this is just a lot of talk and nothing's really changed. Of course the women getting fucked look ecstatic - porno is designed to show them enjoying being sex slaves to the men. Show them being happy and horny to be receptacles. Besides, it's not like most porno shows women getting blatantly raped on camera - at least they're pretending at consent and enjoyment.
At the same time, Dworkin would have had a field day with what is a growing violence fetish. I would argue that porno now is more violent, rape-and-humiliation-focused, and openly woman-hating than it's ever been, especially considering the internet seems to make all manner of "fetishistic" porn widely available. You just don't go to the video store and rent a VHS of ron jeremy fucking some swooning blonde: you get on the internet and can find blown-out assholes and women drinking piss and eating shit and getting fucked to death by horses and bukkaked, with their terrified, agonized faces fully covered with the jizz of 100 men. The sadism has become so overt that even pro-pornography types would not hesitate to call it blatant Degradation. What's most terrifying is it would not be unrealistic for a man who likes this violence to openly admit it: "Yeah, I like to jerk off to bitches getting degraded." 20 years ago, the degradation was still motivating the men's libidos, although I believe the violence was more subconscious back then. A guy could get off on raping a girl but he might not be sure exactly why. I feel that porn viewers today are much more articulate and comfortable with the violence aspect, and have come to demand more of it. And have they ever got it. Max Hardcore is a perfect example. What I wouldn't do to see a debate between him and Dworkin. MH is the poster boy for this new vanguard of violence and misogyny in porn. I shouldn't have to quote the things he's said and done!
It's sad we don't have Dworkin to comment on this, because I suspect the internet has caused the availability and "diversity" of porn to skyrocket. I suppose it'd be easy enough to prove if people now are waaaay more porn-addicted than ever, but I'll wait until I'm done here to dig up some numbers.
The framing of the porn problem as "porn addiction" rather than "unlimited and unprecedented trafficking of women" is itself a horrible problem. Our culture has definitely become more sympathetic to "the victim" over the years, but we might argue that our still-misogynist culture views the porn-addict as the Primary victim. The porn-addict needs help more than these nameless (Dworkin would say "silent", not inaccurately) women who are getting ripped in half.
And what about gay porno? Like, just two dudes fucking each other in the ass? I guess it's misogynistic if one plays the "bitch" role, but whether you're bitch or butch or both, couldn't you say that a gay man is pretty much as hated as much as a woman is? Would this sexual violence and hate still be apparent in gay porn, or not? (I thought about this as we watched an episode of "The Office" where Dwight was trying to improve his gaydar by watching gay porn on his office computer.)
And what about so-called "erotica," with its tender love-making and whatnot? There's companies that produce this "tender" stuff for couples who want to stimulate their own "love life" without the blatant violence of "hardcore" porno.
So, WWADD? I guess I have to find a new antiporn feminist. I get the feeling that some so-called feminists/leftists would view this "non-hardcore" stuff the same as they viewed the 1980s hardcore: it's free expression - free speech in a free marketplace of ideas - and it should not be suppressed. This is sexual liberation. I might argue the "tender erotica" would be viewed by the dominant (woman-hating) culture as "girly" and the gay porn would be similarly viewed as "gay fag shit." "Gimme some real hardcore shit with bitches being abused in all holes." So that's not really progress. Also to think that all those porno "subcultures" are clearly separated would be naive. I'm sure some "tender erotica" stars probably work in max-hardcore style abuse films - possibly with male actors who may have been getting fucked in the ass in a gay porno the other day. I just don't know.
I think that The American Porn Industry has become more of a "family," going along with that "falsely kinder gentler" theme I mentioned earlier. I've known guys ("borderline" porn addicts) that could rattle off names of actresses (and actors) and their movies like they were football statistics. It's not just some guy with a big dick fucking that hot little bitch in half - It's Jimmie Nutbuster fucking Jennie Jizzguzzler. Each porn star has their own cult (more like business) of personality. (Let's not even get into how the term "porn star" itself has entered the lexicon as a compliment-word [cf. with "rock star"], although "porn star" is a double-edged sword, perhaps an attempt to "reclaim" the meaning of "skank," although the dominant, anti-skank culture would view any woman who delights in being called "porn star" as a mere skank, ulitmately.) So maybe guys have become more attached to and obsessed with porn, the way they have always been obsessed with sports. Only porn this is a sport where men fuck women. (The idea of sexual/intergender relations being a "sport," a "game," or a "contest" has been researched, but I don't know how extensively. I think the more you endorse these above attitudes, the more of a chauvinist/authoritarian/misogynist/fascist you are. Duuuuuuuuh.)
Speaking of games, WWADD about "The Game?" That is: both the chart-topping book by neil strauss and the described lifestyle/subculture - the life of the pick-up artist, a "hobby" which is moving ever closer to mainstream acceptance, with shows like "The Pick-Up Artist." Or the scads of educated, professional young men paying thousands upon thousands of dollars so they can be schooled by the world's "top pick-up artists."
This topic is especially near and dear to me since I've been studying PUA for quite some time, going back to my college days when I knew it "pick up artistry" as "being a 'Don Juan.'" (Some would call it "Venusian artistry.") 2 points:
1. These men have of course faced accusations of misogyny - that they only want one thing and they will manipulate women to get that pussy and pump 'em and dump 'em. Their usual response is: we're not misogynists, we're just trying to become sexually self-actualized. We don't rape women. We don't make women do anything they don't want to do. We're just making ourselves more attractive to women so we can get the sex we so desperately need. (I believe there's an underlying sex addiction in our culture - that today a dangerous number of people want a dangerous amount of sex - but more on that later.) A "true" pick up artist does not boast in a disrespectful way of "his conquests." If anything, he's learning how to treat women with more respect, and how to be capable of finding and successfully attracting a woman he can truly fall in love with.
Please. This is all a bag of bullshit to make the pick up artist look like anything but a woman hater, and to make women think more favorably of a pickup artist: "Oh, they're not such bad people. It'd be fun to hook up with a pickup artist. Tee hee." And I'm not being a woman-hater by characterizing women as such: there's an old belief of mine - and of many feminists - that it's men (patriarchy) who are writing this "airhead" script, and men who are rewarding (or, rather, not punishing) women who follow this script.
2. I would imagine most, if not all, of these men would argue that "the Game" is in place because of women: We have to metamorphose into this because this is what a woman wants. A guy has to "change into something he doesn't want to be just so he can get laid," and he doesn't have much of a choice, because those are the simple rules of the game. And who writes those rules? The more savvy pick-up artist will say that The Game evolved as a symbiosis between men and women over thousands of primal years - do the Evolutionary Psychology, baby. I'd argue that the "Average Frustrated Chump", and probably also many so-called masters, certainly believe in their hardest of hearts that they've had to adapt and change to a system - a Game devised by women. Women who make and enforce the rules that men have to be this and have to do that in order to get laid. Which, evolutionarily, is all a man really needs to do. Don't hate the player; hate the woman.
So I'm dyyyyyyiiiiinnnnngggg to read what a Dworkinesque radical feminist scholar would have to say about that.
Dworkin worked closely with Catharine MacKinnon throughout her life. MacKinnon was a person I did learn about in my liberal college days, though only in my final year. I was in a psych class where the grad student in the vaunted "combined program in women's studies and psych" (not that any psych program at the U is not vaunted as fook). She slipped some MacKinnon in the course readings packet and it was the reading that stuck with me the most out of any that year. I had a very bad memory for psych papers, and to read something that was more blatantly feministy was fun. My "fave" line of that reading was "man fucks woman: subject verb object." That pretty much hit me over the head, and I became an instant fan of this white-hot, controversial, and at times deliciously-dense style of writing. It was slightly frustrating at the time, but now I'm all about her kind of stuff. I then proceeded to use the MacKinnon (and some Adorno) readings as my main jumping-off points for my term paper for the class. I got an A+ .
Why the grad student didn't mention anything about MacKinnon being a professor at the UM law school was surprising. Maybe she did and I wasn't listening. Maybe CM hadn't taken the position yet. (This was 2004ish). I certainly wasn't as goddam serious then about being a know-it-all as I am now - indeed, I baaaarely even used wikipedia at the time. I detested using the academic search engines to crawl though hundreds of abstracts. Now I do this for hours a day. I had no desire at the time to dig any deeper, to find out more. Sad: - How hard is it to type her name into wikipedia and discover that she's a professor at your alma mater. Damn. I was, unfortunately, taking the university/intellectual/research culture completely for granted and I thought I could find those opportunities (or perhaps other people who read MacKinnon) in any town in Michigan and not just ann arbor. So regrettable - the unforgivable naivete of my youth.
Maybe I could have just waltzed into her office and talked to her about, O Idunno, her groundbreaking work with Andrea Dworkin on the pornography issues? Some very informed discussion about porn in the new millienium? Her opinion on the sleazy pick-up culture and their skewed interpretation of evolutionary psychology? (full disclosure: I'm sure a letter of recommendation from her would be like Charlie's Golden Ticket. I would not be sitting here in my parents' basement in white-flight suburbia writing all this drivel. I'd be out there making a difference in the world!)
So I trace my interest in "women's studies" back to that time. I also became somewhat close with a professor who was teaching a class in which gender was the main topic, and there I ran into other women's studies/psych grad students. Again, I really wish I was as into the subject as I am now. It's tragic that at the time, I was straining my brain trying to come up with intellectuallike topics to discuss with them and I was always at a frustrated loss. Goddam.
I've just crossed my Blogspot threshold for regret, so I'll stop now. Also, suppose I ever get to the point of trying to get into a satisfactory grad school or doing anything women's studies-related - people will probably find this page and deem it to be remarkably unprofessional. So let me state on the record that I have nothing but the deepest respect and admiration for the lives and work of every one of the women's studies scholars mentioned in this post.
Moving on: you may be saying to yourself, But misogyny isn't such a big deal as you're making it. Me and my friends don't hate women. We Loooooooove to fuck women. Haha! High five bro!
My response is, this is women-hating. You can be the world's friendliest guy who gets along well with men and women both. You're very social and sociable. Men and women both honestly like you; and you'd never think of raping, molesting, or abusing a woman. But sometimes you may boast about using women's bodies; taking advantage of their presentations. This "manly ego boost" is itself a kind of woman-hating. Sure, a lesser kind of woman-hating than raping a woman who is screaming bloody murder, but still a kind of woman-hating. If you fuck a woman who you can't stand (hate, perhaps?) just because she presents herself to you and you want to "Getchadickwet," that's woman-disrespecting too. Is "disrespect" really that long of a non-slippery slope to "hate," anyway? Maybe you joke among your male friends in a fratboy manner that you'd loooooove to fuck so-and-so if you didn't have a girlfriend, or if she would never find out, or if you just didn't have this most "inconvenient" and "misdirected" sense of guilt or responsibility. There's those who treat getting laid so cavalierly. Drunken one-night stands; instant inebriated hook-ups and subsequent dumpings that make Glen Quagmire look like a woman-respecting man.
I don't see this as sexual freedom. I see it as a dialectic of disgrace between women who don't have any respect for themselves, and the men who don't feel that their using a self-loathing woman to get their dick wet is disrepecting either party. It's a sad farce. Maybe you don't believe wholeheartedly the "masculinist" things you say, but you just say them because it's a guy thing to say; it's what amounts to small talk among men. This "guy talk" code is a passive form of woman-disrespecting, and it's everywhere. It's the norm. People don't recognize it because it's all around them at all times. It's not as obvious as pornography.
So my points are: women are degraded everywhere at all times; pornography is bad; Andrea Dworkin is amazing and has gotten me back into reading; and I have a background of women's studies semi-scholarship that I should stop overlooking in my own "research interests." I need to reconnect with the women's studies scene and read some research, dawg. I'm sure this field extends into all sorts of radical political/social realms that would also be of interest to an upstart class warrior such as myself.
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