I am still fascinated by the debate on Porn in the feminist community. This post is more about the subject of rape, which is an area I have strong feelings in as well. I found this great description of why rape may never go away from Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy. I like her because she isn't afraid to say what she really thinks, instead of being the "cheerful feminist" which I find I (and others) sometimes fall into being or thinking I have to be for people to listen to me.
She writes (emphasis mine):
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If women were not systemically oppressed, pornography could not exist. In a post-patriarchal society, free of the degrading paradigm of dominance and submission, pictures of people fucking would have all the prurient allure of a podiatrist appointment. It is the rape-based degradation to which consumers of pornography respond, dum-dum!
But I digress.
The remaining part of my theory is that the populus is so desperately invested in patriarchy that they are unwilling, even in the interest of justice, to part with one of its primary cornerstones: the slut class. Patriarchy depends on the slut class to serve as the receptacle for its pornsick incontinence. A slut class naturally implies a good-girl class, from whose virginal ranks the privileged male selects his unpaid housekeeper/fetus incubator/childcare worker. It naturally follows that if you go around convicting rapists, you diminish the she-was-asking-for-it slut class, which in turn, as distinctions between the two become more and more nebulous, diminishes the good-girl class. See, convicting rapists has the undesirable side effect of making women a bit more human.
You know, if I were a little more on the ball this morning, I might dip a querulous toe into the argument that society will never stand for the eradication of rape. Such success as capitalism enjoys is largely based on the wide availability of unpaid domestic labor created out of the sex class. Which sex class could not exist if women were not rapeable. Can you dig it? The global economy would collapse without rape.
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2 comments:
The error I think I see in this argument is that not all porn is of the demeaning-women, choke-'em-on-my-dick variety. That sort of gonzo material is certainly widespread, and rather nasty, but there's many other forms out there.
One of my favorite porn companies is Abby Winters, which features primarily Australian women doing all sorts of dirty, consensual things to one another, and appearing to have a terrific time doing it.
Oh, and incidentally, much of it is filmed by the women themselves. Where is the rape-based degradation?
This is simply one example out of thousands more.
Is the point here that if women and men truly stood on equal ground, then suddenly any portrayal of sex would have absolutely no appeal? That to me would be a terrible, vanilla world to live in.
Rape is pretty much the worst thing ever, and I'll fully acknowledge that the good-ol-boys, she-was-asking-for-it reasoning to not convict rapists is absolutely wrong and needs to be shut down. But to drag porn, ALL porn, down into the same category is ridiculous. The good porn out there celebrates sex and pleasure, without subtexts of rape. And this is leaving out the fact that there are indeed perfectly reasonable, equivocal people with both penises and vaginae (or both simultaneously) who simply have a thing for degrading situations. To call dominance and submission a "degrading paradigm" is to insult a rather enormous fetish community.
The last paragraph of the quote is pretty much just absurd. I don't think the majority of labor out there mowing the lawns of Whitey and making their Wal-Mart toys in China is the offspring of prostitutes. That is concocting a grand conspiracy of cartoonish proportions. I agree that the mechanisms for prosecuting rape are traumatic for women, and need vast improvement. But I would not acknowledge even our own abhorrent, warmongering Executive Branch perniciously suppressing such improvements in the name of the global economy. I'm more willing to believe they're hiding alien spacecraft.
As a woman I think the point most often overlooked is that true equality means making your own choices. Some of those choices may be offensive to other women. But to say that a woman can not consent to participating in pornography with out automatically degrading herself is to say that there is only one choice that is worthy and educated. Nothing could be more narrow minded.
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