One at a time. I'm firm in my belief that Laura is a radical feminist despite this difference in opinion on the value of trying to produce sex for consumer consumption that isn't predicated on objectified femininity.
I don't know if you also read the blog at The F Word, but I have repeatedly blogged against prostitution and sex trafficking there.
Yes, I have seen that and think it's good work you're doing.
The F Word does not have an editorial line
I disagree, and though rich's examples are far-fetched the thought behind them isn't, because I've never seen a pro-life, purity ball defending, or anti-third trimester abortion article there. Recently in addition to the Span article and this latest one, there was the pro-Suicide Girls article and the blog comment deriding addressing men's demands for prostitutes that led me to this back and forth with Abby
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2204 There were not this many pro-pimp, pro-pornographer articles at The F Word in 2006.
People don't want sexual images because it makes sex and themselves feel more real or important or free. Some people just like to be turned on. Simple as that. What, at the most basic of levels, is actually wrong about watching something to become sexually aroused? Right now, of course, because of the nature of porn, it means eroticising abuse and misogyny. But watching something that doesn't degrade or abuse anyone? Where is the problem?
Where's the excitement is the question you should be asking. People don't watch others eating food to work up an appetite for food, they eat when they are hungry and stop when they're not. In contrast, misogyny is the point of porn, I can see that was true for me back in my porn using days even if it wasn't the sole or even most prominent emotion (that would be man-pleasing Uncle Tommi egotism). Pornography is the original reality show humilitainment on which the current crop are modeled after in all their guilty, crowd-pleasing, consumer excess.
As delphyne said, "Egalitarian porn is an oxymoron, it's the inequality and exploitation in porn that make it so sexy for its mainly male consumers."
Negative excess is what porn really means in people's connotative lexicons, not "'depictions of sexual activity designed to sexually arouse" though that is the lie pornographers spent billions of dollars putting into people's heads, people who would otherwise feel in their guts the denigration of women in pornography if they didn't believe their heads over their consciences. When people say they went to a store and it was "clothes porn" or subscribe to a magazine as "appliance porn" they are tapping into the common cultural consensus that porn means "indulgent to the point of negative excess". They don't need to know the origins of the word to know it's about gratuitous, guilt-invoking consumption. I heard David Duchovny on Howard Stern when Stern asked him if he liked porn start his answer by saying, as if to render benign what we all instinctively know isn't,
"Pictures of people having sex? Sure, I like that."I agree with Kate on the sex thing-making of women being the problem more than the particulars of how that commodification is executed.
Laura wrote:But maybe if a man watches erotica/porn of a woman being whipped - and clearly this, like any egalitarian porn/erotica, would have to be made in an ethical, consenting way - and the woman's pleasure is shown to be of utmost importance, she is treated like and respected as a human being, the whipper is portrayed and the film shot in such a way as to avoid any kind of desire for degradation, it wouldnt have the same result in the viewer.
I don't understand this. Between people who love and trust each other I can maybe understand a little of how this sort of sex play is not inherently abusive to them, but once you commit that to film and have non-participants viewing it I feel it is impossible for such scenes not to promote violence against women as something women really want.
That's something I don't like about feminist blog poster Thomas, who is kinda anti-porn and very pro-Swedish model but insists his right to photos and film documenting sadism and masochism-themed sexuality stops him from adopting a solid anti-pornography politics. No one is saying he can't practice BDSM with his partners because no radfems I know are proposing laws against private sexual behavior, but pornography is not private sexual behavior, it is a commercial multi-billion dollar industry trading in anti-woman propaganda that directly causes enormous grief to the women and girls exploited in its making and millions more who interact with pornosexual men. Despite everything he knows about rampant global sexual slavery and the negative effects of pornography production and consumption, Thomas believes it is more important that he not just be able to engage in BDSM but
to make and own photographic trophies of it that capture the moment for his later and eternal gratification. In his arithmetic, his entitlement to pieces of paper with decontextualized violence pictured on them count more than the flesh and blood lives of girls and women he knows suffer and die in the pornstitution industries.
I'm willing to beg, "Can you please just not take photos? Can you just be happy engaging in sex however you like and not making a soul-less thing out of them men around the world utilize in their war against women?" but men don't hear women over the noise that photos of our naked and displayed bodies makes in their heads. Feminists know women are valued for what they look like more than who we are and what we say, and that's why pornography capturing all that women are 'worth' to men speaks louder to them than real women. Linda Boreman wrote books, testified in Congress, took a lie detector tests and stood up to her pimps and rapists publicly but all anyone - including thirdwave feminists - seem to remember is the image of her naked, penetrated, and smiling.