“The new porn zeitgeist is hard-core sadwill bem. Hard-core porn turns misogyny into sexual fascism and sells it as freedom. Torture porn, where young women are tied up and strangled, defecated on. Incest adult with young ladies becoming bashed about sexually by dads, grandfathers, uncles, brothers. There will be adult with canines bestiality, horses, with eels. There is Nazi fetwill beh porn, lots of racist porn. There are countless “18 and abused” sites showing young girls being gang-banged while crying, drunk, vomiting, with guns and kitchen knives to their brains.
Feminised gay men being beaten and anally raped by hyper-macho gangs. There will be “retarded hard anodized cookware porno” actually, “retarded and horny”, “full on retard porn . Gran porn where old women are exposed to the required triple penetration and spat about for HOT being outdated now. . . legless sluts being triple penetrated”, amputee porn, dwarf adult, anorexia porn.”
This is an extract from a piece written by Dr Abigail Bray in the Sydney Morning Herald last week on the dangers of pornography. Dr Bray will be co-author with Melinda Tankard Reist of the latest Australian collection of anti pornography stories.
On reading this piece I was immediately reminded of a series of articles on the Drum written by Tankard Reist to which I responded with a contrary point of view. Given the publication of their book, and the spate of extracts from it recently, it seems timely to put up my Drum piece again.
One of the big problems I have with many anti porn activists is their apparent inability to distinguish between the rage they feel at the sight of an actor’s cleavage and the rage they feel at violent porn. Problem is, when they obtain apoplectic about rod dance and knickers, they’ve undermined their credibility when they come to protest the hard-core sadistic stuff that I’m sure is out there. It’s all or nothing with them. If you happen to be someone who doesn’t care much about people showing cleavage and do care about violent criminal porn they can’t hear your point of view.
Pornify this
The recent Drum articles by Christian sexual conservative Melinda Tankard Reist are based on appeals to presumed universal truths and values. Melinda will be in the company of producing totalising social narratives, than getting solutions to concrete issues women face rather.
Totalising narratives quite rightly arouse the healthy ire of thinking people, even more therefore when they are usually sexually proscriptive actually. So, Melinda, pornify this. Faced with these attempts to legitimise as universal the limited authority of one particular perspective, a thinking woman has to lodge her protest.
Censor and ban, ban and censor
It seems there is little in popular cultural representations of female sexuality that escapes Melinda’s disapproval. Even, I see on her website the US underwear company Victoria’s Secret,and twenty something TV star Lea Michele appearing on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine showing cleavage, offends her conservative values.
The latter incurs wrath because Michele is, in Melinda’s terms, “sexifying” herself, and in so doing setting a bad example to the teenagers who watch Glee in which she plays a considerably younger character.
Christian sexual conservatives seem to have embarked on a mission to pathologise the entire world, instead than offer with unavoidable and at instances large pouches of malfunction realistically. Their solution? Ban and Censor.
The problem with the censor and ban approach is that it addresses the symptoms while completely ignoring the cause. It’s the easy way out.
They do. They’ll erupt again. We possess recognized this often. Repressing them may not aside create them proceed.
The Patriarchy did it
Tankard Reist is about to surpass Derrida in her creative use of neologwill bems such as sexification, adultification, childification, and pornification, all terms she uses to describe what men are doing wrong to women, and what women are letting men do wrong to them.
Infantalizing women (a psychological action, as opposed to childifying us, which is sartorial) is part of the sexual conservative’s strategy. Women are acted upon. Also when we believe we’re also working out company we aren’capital t actually, because our actions are predetermined by the overwhelming influence of the patriarchy.
This is where Chrwill betian sexual conservatism intersects with radical feminism, resulting in, dear God, I don’t know what. Every act of heterointimate intercourse is an act of rape unless it results in a baby girl?
If we follow this infantalizing to its logical conclusion, women aren’t responsible for anything. The only other human beings not required to take responsibility for themselves are babies, and those without the capacity.
Of course, women are usually accountable for everything furthermore, which makes us goddesses. There’s no middle ground in these metanarratives.
Sexified, pornified women apparently aren’big t politically smart or advanced sufficient to understand their collusion within their very own practice of -ification. Just unsexified females understand what’t actually heading on. The process of sexifying yourself destroys your brain.
As with all lies that work, there is some truth in it. I recall occasions when I’ve severed contact with my mind and made decisions from another part of my anatomy entirely. But I fought against my method back again, and I can’t remember what I was wearing.
This attitude puts MTR in bizarre alliance with factions that hold beliefs such as: blondes are brainless. You can’t be a pole dancer and have a PhD. You’re being exploited and you’re only happy in your thong because you’re too ignorant know you’re being exploited. Female sexual power is an illusion, and the notion that it is an expression of assertiveness is false.
Well, if it is such an illusion, why the struggle to keep it in chains?
That which we most fear becomes our obsession, observed Hélène Cixous.
How to pornify yourself
A woman doesn’t have to do much to sexify and pornify herself in the world of MTR. Put on lacy underwear and an uplift corset from Victoria’h Magic formula Simply, and you’re in.
If childification is more your thing, pull on a pair of white knee suck and socks on a lollipop while tugging at your t-shirt. Either of these looks (and many others shown on her website) will incur MTR’s pity, and her undwill beguised contempt. You can furthermore sit on a table and display your underwear.
You may like these looks, or you may find them absurd, but are usually they actually some of an orchestrated patriarchal attack in women’s human being privileges? Think about the real attacks on women’s human rights round the globe, rarely mentioned by MTR, by the way, and just when they with her ideology as an anti option feminist comply, and answer that question then.
The beast in them
The message I am taking from these articles is that for MTR there is no acceptable public representation and expression of female sexuality.
In holding a belief shared by, among others, the Taliban, she seems to feel that public (I don’t know why, but I hardly ever type “public” without leaving out the l) displays of female flesh lead inevitably to a culture of exploitation and rape, switching rational men into the beasts they almost all secretly are usually.
The beast in me, is caged by frail and fragile bonds…
Ergo, women must not reveal their flesh, or not really the bits that could be seen as erotic. That’s much everything pretty, if you’re imaginative.
All those KanYe West and Brian McFadden lyrics churning round in men’s animal minds, leading to them to lose what little feeling of decency they may simply possess been recently created with, if they were lucky, and then, dammit, a woman in a sparkly thong hoves into view, and she’s not wearing it on her foot, either.
In the world the conservatives inhabit, not really just are usually all of women ridiculous to understand if they’re getting used as well, all men are too base to think about a woman as anything more than a root, a drunken root if possible, or if it’s KanYe West we’re talking about, a dead root.
The discourse of sexual conservatism, like that of radical feminism, is dependent on generalisations and stereotypes. Without them, they both implode.
The contempt these attitudes reveal for humanity in general is disturbing. Add to that the conservatives’ insistence that young men in particular have no capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality, learning from the lyrics of pop songs and videos to behave very badly towards women, and the sex-related conservatives are usually unmasked as anti and spiritual contemporary fascists.
As a mother of young men who negotiate popular culture and emerge with loving and generous hearts, I find their attitude offensive.
So, tell us the right way to show off our tits
If I’m doing you sexual conservatives wrong, just tell us what kind of public (oops, that wretched l again) representation and expression of female sexuality you do approve of. Display people a new image of something that matches your requirements Today. If you possess a good eyesight of how she can become indicated by a female libido, now’s the time to share it. Show us a picture. You’ve demonstrated us a lot of photos of what you don’capital t like.
This is important because it will ben’t enough to tell young women what they shouldn’t emulate. You need to be able to offer a positive alternative model. So far, all we’ve heard is unrelenting negativity, and the ongoing, indiscriminate blaming of all men.
Are your husbands, sons, brothers, dads, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, close friends and fans integrated in the universal “men, ” by the way? Or are usually you fortunate sufficiently to possess obtained the just great types on the globe, and the rest of us copped the duds?
Some women want to show their bodies, and I can’t see a single thing wrong with that. In itself the entire body is definitely often totally innocent, and tainted only by the decision and perceptions we inscribe upon it. Prove me wrong. The human body can be glorious. Breasts can be wondrous. Read the Song of Solomon.
Decades of feminist rage against men and the patriarchy has not solved our problems with each other. Rather than continuing to rage about what men shouldn’t do and should be, can we focus instead on what womales can perform and can be, and depart recognized man failings apart for a while?
It will take the whole village, rather than an individual sarcastically demolishing a hapless male writer of really stupid songs. But like a redirection of power might simply lead to empowerment in a method that victimology, complaint, ideology and fault may never.
This piece resulted in some 472 comments, the bulk of which had been in entire or partial contract, except for granny porn website someone hiding behind the screen of anonymity who pursued me round the blogosphere for weeks, and I figured out just who she is finally. Ha ha!