Monday, February 28, 2005
Update: pornography
A short update on the previous post about pornography.
On a panel about Inside Deep Throat, leading, erm... light of feminist wing of the Neo-Victorian stormtroopers, Catherine McKinnon, hilariously demonstrated her, may I say, modest amount of factual knowledge:
Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. "What's so funny?" she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff's hand shot up - "I can do it," he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going "me too!" (Gigi Grazer - wife of Brian - later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.
Funny as this may be, one could ask how much distance there really is between the way women are portrayed by such activists as McKinnon - as asexual, innocent, wide-eyed creatures perpetually preyed upon by men - and between the idea, prominent not so long ago, that there was no such thing as a female orgasm, or further down, the medieval idea that women had no soul, the way the ancient German laws made the relatively humane punishment of beheading a male privilege, since a woman, fickle creature as she is, would not be able to keep from fainting before it, and essentially, all the noxious crap handed down through the ages ever since the serpent preferred to seduce Eve rather than Adam. Is there such a long way from all that to the eerily familiar second coming of all those clichés within contemporary difference feminism? Sorry, I am indulging in rhetorical questions here.
Via God-knows-where I ended up at the Anti-Porn resource center. I am not going to waste time to deal with the many instances of spurious argumentation and tortured logic found on this site, particularly as the maker of it, one "One Angry Girl" makes very clear in the disclaimer that it is meant only for the True Believers anyway. Most of it seems to consist of context-less (and reference-less) quotes designed to show how hideous pornographers are, such as the following howler from Larry Flynt:
"Women are here to serve men. Look at them, they got to squat to piss. Hell, that proves it."
Which forms all of the "On Biology" section. Ummm, would One Angry Girl have taken into account the distant possibility that Flynt was, well, perhaps not entirely serious? That he even might have been engaging in a, perhaps slightly self-deprecating joke?
Anyway, I note with some amusement, though, that she helpfully provides a pocket-sized cheatsheet full of ready-made anti-pornography arguments. This reminds me of the odious way I used to unimaginatively rote-learn arguments when I was sixteen years old or so. Four legs good, two legs bad! The Anti-Porn resource center is hereby going to the sidebar under the heading "Know Thy Enemy", together with FreeRepublic, the main virtual gathering place of the U.S. proto-fascist yeehaw right, and the unimitable GodHatesFags. Warning: do not try to ingest any fluids while visiting last-mentioned page. The PSSST(KA) won't cover the costs of a new keyboard.
Merlijn
On a panel about Inside Deep Throat, leading, erm... light of feminist wing of the Neo-Victorian stormtroopers, Catherine McKinnon, hilariously demonstrated her, may I say, modest amount of factual knowledge:
Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. "What's so funny?" she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff's hand shot up - "I can do it," he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going "me too!" (Gigi Grazer - wife of Brian - later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.
Funny as this may be, one could ask how much distance there really is between the way women are portrayed by such activists as McKinnon - as asexual, innocent, wide-eyed creatures perpetually preyed upon by men - and between the idea, prominent not so long ago, that there was no such thing as a female orgasm, or further down, the medieval idea that women had no soul, the way the ancient German laws made the relatively humane punishment of beheading a male privilege, since a woman, fickle creature as she is, would not be able to keep from fainting before it, and essentially, all the noxious crap handed down through the ages ever since the serpent preferred to seduce Eve rather than Adam. Is there such a long way from all that to the eerily familiar second coming of all those clichés within contemporary difference feminism? Sorry, I am indulging in rhetorical questions here.
Via God-knows-where I ended up at the Anti-Porn resource center. I am not going to waste time to deal with the many instances of spurious argumentation and tortured logic found on this site, particularly as the maker of it, one "One Angry Girl" makes very clear in the disclaimer that it is meant only for the True Believers anyway. Most of it seems to consist of context-less (and reference-less) quotes designed to show how hideous pornographers are, such as the following howler from Larry Flynt:
"Women are here to serve men. Look at them, they got to squat to piss. Hell, that proves it."
Which forms all of the "On Biology" section. Ummm, would One Angry Girl have taken into account the distant possibility that Flynt was, well, perhaps not entirely serious? That he even might have been engaging in a, perhaps slightly self-deprecating joke?
Anyway, I note with some amusement, though, that she helpfully provides a pocket-sized cheatsheet full of ready-made anti-pornography arguments. This reminds me of the odious way I used to unimaginatively rote-learn arguments when I was sixteen years old or so. Four legs good, two legs bad! The Anti-Porn resource center is hereby going to the sidebar under the heading "Know Thy Enemy", together with FreeRepublic, the main virtual gathering place of the U.S. proto-fascist yeehaw right, and the unimitable GodHatesFags. Warning: do not try to ingest any fluids while visiting last-mentioned page. The PSSST(KA) won't cover the costs of a new keyboard.
Merlijn
# posted by Merlijn de Smit @ 2:09 PM 
