" ... he went to church every week, ... "
... but ...
"much more often than not ... "
31 December 2009
NATURE: any year, any century, any millennium, ANY TIME
NATURE observes ITS OWN ( ... NON - calendar - ... ) TIME. And TIMING.
As do, in TRUTH, ... NATURE's mamas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZvLEcwM-1M
As do, in TRUTH, ... NATURE's mamas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZvLEcwM-1M
25 November 2009
“ … the Man in the Sky – forbid! ”
"... the Man in the Sky - forbid!"
.––. Anna McDoogles’ mama, The Invention of Lying, 2009
Check out http://evolvefish.com/fish/buttons.html#4221 for all of your Winter Solstice's christ - less, shopping - less statements and http://ffrf.org/books/wws/wwsquotes.php as well as http://www.ffrf.org/news/2009/seattlebus.php for those, now and before, freethinkingly ... like - minded.
.––. Anna McDoogles’ mama, The Invention of Lying, 2009
Check out http://evolvefish.com/fish/buttons.html#4221 for all of your Winter Solstice's christ - less, shopping - less statements and http://ffrf.org/books/wws/wwsquotes.php as well as http://www.ffrf.org/news/2009/seattlebus.php for those, now and before, freethinkingly ... like - minded.
24 November 2009
“ … yet again, … another National Day of Mourning …”
"Some ask us: 'Will you ever stop protesting?'
Some day we will stop protesting: We will stop protesting when the merchants of Plymouth are no longer making millions of dollars off the blood of our slaughtered ancestors. We will stop protesting when we can act as sovereign nations on our own land without the interference of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and what Sitting Bull called the "favorite ration chiefs." When corporations stop polluting Our Mother, the Earth. When racism has been eradicated. When the oppression of two – spirited people is a thing of the past. We will stop protesting when homeless people have homes and no child goes to bed hungry. When police brutality no longer exists in communities of color. We will stop protesting when Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal and and the Puerto Rican independentistas and all the political prisoners are free.
Until then, the struggle will continue."
–- Moonanum James, UNAINE, 26 November 1998
Some day we will stop protesting: We will stop protesting when the merchants of Plymouth are no longer making millions of dollars off the blood of our slaughtered ancestors. We will stop protesting when we can act as sovereign nations on our own land without the interference of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and what Sitting Bull called the "favorite ration chiefs." When corporations stop polluting Our Mother, the Earth. When racism has been eradicated. When the oppression of two – spirited people is a thing of the past. We will stop protesting when homeless people have homes and no child goes to bed hungry. When police brutality no longer exists in communities of color. We will stop protesting when Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal and and the Puerto Rican independentistas and all the political prisoners are free.
Until then, the struggle will continue."
–- Moonanum James, UNAINE, 26 November 1998
18 November 2009
“ … the PREDATORY nature of the DOMINANT culture … ignores the history or attacks those who make the arguments … ”
How I stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid
by Robert Jensen
I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday.
Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.
http://www.alternet.org/story/44661/no_thanks_to_thanksgiving/
http://www.alternet.org/story/68170/why_we_shouldn%27t_celebrate_thanksgiving/
Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning” (http://www.uaine.org/).
In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.
Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart -- an empire in decline.
Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.
Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.
In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately -- the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.
I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.
The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?
Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).
Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.
However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises -- economic and ecological, political and cultural -- that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.
As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.
----------------------
Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). His film, “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” has been released by the Media Education Foundation. http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=141
Jensen also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). His articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
by Robert Jensen
I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday.
Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.
http://www.alternet.org/story/44661/no_thanks_to_thanksgiving/
http://www.alternet.org/story/68170/why_we_shouldn%27t_celebrate_thanksgiving/
Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning” (http://www.uaine.org/).
In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.
Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart -- an empire in decline.
Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.
Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.
In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately -- the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.
I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.
The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?
Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).
Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.
However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises -- economic and ecological, political and cultural -- that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.
As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.
----------------------
Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). His film, “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” has been released by the Media Education Foundation. http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=141
Jensen also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). His articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
01 November 2009
“If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because we face an overwhelming situation.”
"If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because we face an overwhelming situation."
An interview with Robert Jensen on war, ecological crises, and the quest for justice
excerpt: "CS: If we were to inevitably make this transition, or at least in the process of making it, do you believe that there will be restoration of matriarchal values?
RJ: I don’t think it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system that emerged in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years, and it imposed systems of hierarchy, not just around gender but around other differences as well, and we are still trying to get out from under those. If we succeed in that -- if we succeed in realizing that power does not come only with the ability to control other people, that power comes in the creative potential of human collaboration, it can come in non-hierarchical ways to organize ourselves -- it doesn’t mean obviously that there will be a matriarchy, if by that we mean a world in which women dominate. It means that we move into a real space where mutuality and egalitarian values can reign.
What will that look like? I don’t know. If we were to magically get there in my lifetime I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would look like. I know that it won’t look much like the institutions I live in today -- it won’t look like the modern corporation, it won’t look like the modern nation-state, it won’t look like the modern University. But you don’t really predict those things, you try to live them. And you live them in small steps, not in some grand utopian fantasy."
by Calvin Sloan
The following is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the KVRX radio show "The Pursuit of Injustice." The podcast can be streamed or downloaded at http://www.divshare.com/download/9029846-04a
An early version was published by Energy Bulletin, 30 October 2009. http://energybulletin.net/50523
CS: So to start off, let's address some topical issues. The war in Afghanistan has been described in the mainstream media as America's good war and as the cornerstone of the "War on Terror." President Obama is currently debating an increase in troop levels there. He's already sent an additional 21,000 since taking office, and as the Washington Post recently reported, has been deploying without public announcement 13,000 additional troops. You've been an outspoken critic of the war since its inception, what is your take on the current situation there?
RJ: I think any assessment of the current situation has to remember that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was illegal. The United States invaded the country with no legal authorization. It claimed the right to do this because of the relationship between the governing Taliban and Al Qaeda and the events of 9/11, but there were many ways that the United States could have pursued a just solution to the question of the terrorism of 9/11.
So, why would it pursue an illegal and, I would argue, immoral invasion? Here we have to remember that U.S. military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, whatever the stated reason for them, are really about energy resources. The Middle East especially is home to the most extensive reserves of petroleum. There's a lot of natural gas in Central Asia, plus it has geostrategic importance. So let's get rid of the idea that this is about the "War on Terror." Does the United States want to end terrorist attacks against Americans? Sure, but that doesn't mean that this particular war is a war on terrorism. We also should remember the phrase is a bad joke, that terrorism is a method by which people try to achieve political goals. You don't have a war on a method. If you're going to make war, you're making war for specific purposes against specific people in specific places, and the "War on Terror" is simply way too obscure for that.
So with all of that background, if the United States were to pursue a just and legal path it would begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan, pay the reparations it owes to the people of Afghanistan, and attempt to work with the appropriate regional and international organizations to try to help Afghanistan transition to a decent government. The United States has no intention of doing that.
So, the proposed buildup in Afghanistan is not only immoral, it’s not only fundamentally unjust, it’s also incredibly stupid. On all counts, anyway you want to evaluate this, the United States is making crucial errors.
The fact that Barack Obama, the alleged peace candidate in the last election, is willing to pursue this just reminds us of the limits of contemporary mainstream electoral politics with a choice reduced to Republicans and Democrats. What we should be thinking about is the whole structure of, and motivation behind, our involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia, and we should also be rethinking the whole structure of our political discourse at home.
CS: So if this is by all means a stupid endeavor to continue this occupation, why are we doing this? Who is profiting from this? What are the underlying motivations of our occupation?
RJ: Remember that just because people in power might be corrupt and immoral doesn’t mean they’re always competent in pursuing that corruption. If you look back at probably the most grotesque U.S. intervention in the post World War II period, the Vietnam War, there were corrupt and immoral reasons the United States invaded Vietnam -- mostly to undermine independent development and try to dominate the third world -- but in trying to carry out those objectives there were a lot of incompetent decisions made. And sometimes incompetence compounds itself, so as you get further and further into a set of bad strategic decisions, there is an instinct to want to rescue them, but unfortunately it often leads to even more bad strategic decisions.
So, why are we doing it? Well, there’s a certain amount of irrationality to these strategic decision making, even though it’s in the pursuit of a rational -- albeit I would say immoral -- goal, which is to dominate the Middle East and Central Asia. Why are we doing it? Are there profit motivations for private contractors, who are making a killing? Sure. Are there oil companies and gas companies that want concessions? Sure. There are always those things, but I think that the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy tends not to be the interest of any particular industry or any particular set of contractors, but the fact that the whole system is designed to perpetuate this quest for dominance. And those other factors, like the interests of Blackwater (which has changed its name to Xe Services) or ExxonMobil, just contribute to the motive force behind the policy more generally.
CS: So here we are in 2009, and we’ve entered the ninth year of the war in Afghanistan and we’ve similarly occupied Iraq since 2003, yet when you look around it’s hard to notice that we’re running on a war economy. It’s become so normalized, and from a student’s perspective it’s interesting to note that the majority of undergraduates across the country have spent all of their high school and college careers with our nation at war.
And my question is, how do you think history will judge this perpetual war? Do you believe we’ve entered into Orwell’s 1984 realm, are we living in a society where war has officially become peace?
RJ: I don’t think we have to wait for history to judge it. I think we can assess it today and it’s pretty straight forward. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was illegal. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a cover for other interests, and that’s all doubly true with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The whole project is corrupt beyond description. Yet, the propaganda industries, not just the propaganda emanating from the government, but the propaganda industries -- advertising, entertainment, journalism -- are all perpetuating this crazed interpretation of the War on Terror, because they all have an interest in doing that. They are all ideologically connected to the same project.
And yes, it’s Orwellian in that sense, it’s corrupt, it’s immoral, it’s illegal, it’s all these things that we’re talking about, and we don’t have to wait for history 30 years from now to make that judgment. What we have to do is recognize it, and try to organize against it. But I think what we should be doing is not just opposing this war but recognizing that the disease from which this war springs is more deeply set in the culture than ever before.
You can clearly see that on a college campus. Remember that when the United States invaded and began to destroy Vietnam, the opposition to that war started, and was always strongest, on college campuses. There was a kind of “natural,” if you’ll accept the term, resistance from students to that imposition of power from above.
Well in some sense, campuses are the most passive places when it comes to anti-war activity today. To the degree that there is an anti-war movement, it’s mostly rooted in the community. So, that tells us something about what’s happened in universities, the way universities have been turned toward a more corporate and ideologically neutered position, though campuses could potentially be centers of opposition, resistance, and struggle. Well, that’s about not just the war, that’s about what’s happened to American higher education, the corporatization of higher education.
In other words, the war is an indicator not just of the depravity of the war-makers, it’s a very important indicator of what’s going on in society more generally. And about that, I’m terrified. The direction the whole culture is heading is very scary. It’s an imperial culture in decline. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world, at least in raw military terms. It remains the largest economy in the world. But it’s an affluent imperial society in decline, and such a society is very dangerous. I think we should be paying attention not only to what these wars tell us about foreign policy and military affairs, but also what they tell us about our society at a much deeper level.
CS: So are you saying that the universities aren’t actually free? Do you think that that’s affected by the politics of tenure and publishing grants?
RJ: It’s affected by the structure of financing, it’s affected by the rewards and punishments that faculty members respond to in building careers. For students, it’s about the economy that the students are going into, and how students are conditioned to believe that college is career training. It’s about trying to create the University as an allegedly politically neutral space, but of course any time you talk about political neutrality what you’re talking about is de facto support for the existing distribution of power. All of these things are part of it, and we should be concerned with it.
Is the University free? Well at some level, obviously yes. Here we are in a University office, I’m a University professor, we’re talking about things that will be on a University radio station. Of course it’s free in that sense, but it’s also a system structured in a way that is going to divert most people from the kind of conversation we’re having. So there are constraints. That’s true of any institution. There are opportunities and freedoms, and then there are constraints. I think what we should be focused on -- whether we’re talking about the Universities or the media or any of the other intellectual institution -- is how the freedom that exists on the surface is often masking a deeper kind of pressure toward conformity, a conformity that’s not enforced through the barrel of a gun, as in a totalitarian society, but a conformity that’s enforced in a much more complex, and in some a ways a much more effective, fashion, through the rewards and the punishments we’re talking about.
CS: I’d like to move on to your most recently published article entitled “Is Obama a Socialist?” In this article you express a deep concern for our evolving ecological crisis, specifically I’d like to refer to the following statement: “Capitalism is an economic system based on the concept of unlimited growth, yet we live on a finite planet. Capitalism is, quite literally, crazy.” Can you explain this concept further to us?
RJ: For most of the past couple hundred years, we’ve been living really in a rather unique historical moment. First of all it’s a moment made possible by unleashing the enormous energy of coal, oil, and natural gas, the fossil fuels. That’s a blip in human history. There’s never been energy like that available to human beings before, and we’re quickly running out of it. So, all of this bonanza of consumption and material comfort is really subsidized by that energy source, and there is nothing on the horizon to replace it. All of the talk of alternative fuels and biofuels and wind and solar, that’s fine, they are all going to supply some energy, but they are not going to replace the energy we’ve been using from coal, oil, and natural gas.
The explosion of this energy is also the time in which modern industrial capitalism has emerged. It’s all based on a fantasy that is easy to understand because of all that energy. It did look like we could simply grow endlessly. But the ecological crises, and I use the plural quite specifically -- multiple crises, not just global warming but levels of toxicity in the air, water, loss of top soil, the reduction in biodiversity -- are part of a global pattern that is uncontroversial: We are reaching, and probably are long beyond, the carrying capacity of the planet, and we are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet at a rate that is increasingly threatening, not just centuries from now, but likely in decades.
That’s all part of an era in which capitalism led us to believe we could have unlimited growth. It’s a crazy claim, and more striking is that it is a crazy claim that is considered to be the conventional wisdom. This is the kind of thing we should be worried about. We’re not having a debate about capitalism in this country -- there’s no debate for the most part in the mainstream. Capitalism is taken to be the only way to organize an economy, yet it is a system of organizing an economy that is literally crazy. Well, if that doesn’t scare people, then I don’t know what will.
CS: If you are implying that if we are at a level of overreach, that there will be, that we might reach a population crash?
RJ: I think it’s inevitable. Ecological overshoot is the key concept. The planet has a carrying capacity. The planet can host only so many human beings, depending on the level at which we live. I’m not a scientist, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not trained in any of this, but reading people whose judgment I trust, and trying to synthesize the information that I can, my judgment is that we’re probably well past the carrying capacity of the planet already.
And at the level of first-world consumption, we are dramatically past the carrying capacity. That is, if you are going to expand this high energy consumption and lifestyle of the first world to the whole planet, it would be game-over tomorrow. If everybody in the world lived like you and I live, the planet would literally die tomorrow. So the only reason we can continue this system is the fact that a good portion of the world’s population is living at a dramatically lower level than we are. Even at that level, I don’t think that the world can support this many people. So we’re in a position of overshoot.
When is the crash going to come? Well in some sense the answer is it’s already here. You have half the world’s population living on less than $2.50 a day, you have hundreds of people dying every hour in Africa from easily preventable diseases, you have the beginnings of ecological crises that are manifesting themselves not only in the reduction of biodiversity but in the direct threat to human life.
When is all of this going to come crashing? Well I don’t know, because I don’t have a crystal ball and no one else does. The question shouldn’t be when can you predict all of this is going to fall apart. More important is the recognition that it inevitably will fall apart, and we should prepare for it, in both physical terms and moral terms. My own view is that, if not in my lifetime certainly in yours, there will be a massive human die-off. That’s an antiseptic term -- it means that millions upon millions of people will die in large sweeps across the planet. What do we do about that morally? What do you do if you’re living in a world in which you know that simply by virtue of the luck of where you were born, you are protected from a scourge that is literally killing millions around the planet?
Well we’re seeing small examples of that today with such things as the devastation from easily preventable diseases in Africa for instance, but what if that happens on a massive scale? I don’t think the human species has a way to cope with that. We’re not ready physically, technologically, but we’re also not ready morally. And the only way you get ready for that is by openly discussing it, but it’s still a culture that cannot come to terms with this. Everything we’re talking about today would have been unthinkable as subjects for the presidential election. No candidate could talk like this and expect to be elected, because the culture is still in such deep denial about the fundamentally unsustainable nature of our economic system and the moral implications of that.
CS: How do you think nation-states will respond to these collapse scenarios?
RJ: First of all I think we should recognize nation-states are not inevitable for the rest of human history. My own view is that were going to end up finding other ways to organize ourselves politically, because the nation-state is at the center of so much of this destruction.
How will people respond? Well I think a lot of that has to do with how the most powerful nations respond. Remember that one of the aspects of being the most affluent and militarily powerful countries on the planet is that what you do matters a lot. You can continue to pursue insane strategies in a crazy system, or you can tell the truth. And if powerful countries tell the truth, start to actively reduce their energy and other material consumption, start to take seriously the demands of justice in equalizing the distribution of wealth around the world, give up on fantasies of control and domination, well that would have a huge effect.
The developing world, which clearly doesn’t trust us and shouldn’t trust us, might be able to move into a posture of more cooperation. Democratic movements within those countries might strengthen when they know there is in fact a commitment from the powerful states to real law, real democracy, real justice, real moral principles. Well, all of that is possible. It’s not a guarantee of success. We could do everything we can imagine in the realm of just and sustainable policies and still fail. The human species does not have some magic guarantee of endless success. Other species have come and gone, and it’s quite possible -- in fact, I would argue it’s probably likely -- we're going to go that way relatively soon. And people always say, well that’s a rather depressing fact. Well, if it’s a fact, it’s a fact, but of course there’s no way to know for sure, and we can struggle to create a different future, without guarantees.
But even if it does seem to be our future, what of the time we are here? I think part of what makes one fully human is to resist that, to struggle, even with no guarantee of success. And that’s where I put my faith. Maybe it’s a faith that is going to be betrayed, but I don’t see any better option at the moment.
CS: If we were to inevitably make this transition, or at least in the process of making it, do you believe that there will be restoration of matriarchal values?
RJ: I don’t think it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system that emerged in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years, and it imposed systems of hierarchy, not just around gender but around other differences as well, and we are still trying to get out from under those. If we succeed in that -- if we succeed in realizing that power does not come only with the ability to control other people, that power comes in the creative potential of human collaboration, it can come in non-hierarchical ways to organize ourselves -- it doesn’t mean obviously that there will be a matriarchy, if by that we mean a world in which women dominate. It means that we move into a real space where mutuality and egalitarian values can reign.
What will that look like? I don’t know. If we were to magically get there in my lifetime I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would look like. I know that it won’t look much like the institutions I live in today -- it won’t look like the modern corporation, it won’t look like the modern nation-state, it won’t look like the modern University. But you don’t really predict those things, you try to live them. And you live them in small steps, not in some grand utopian fantasy.
CS: Given our trajectory towards this cliff, this ecological cliff, should college students be rethinking their career choices? Are we being trained properly?
RJ: Reality is going to force college students to reconsider career choices, when certain assumptions will no longer hold. The most important thing that Universities could do right now is be laboratories for experiments outside of the dominant system, which is exactly what we’re not doing.
What we’re doing is still training people to be rats in a maze. Well, what if we said, the maze is over. For now, the maze may still exist out in the world, but we’re going to spend four years here going beyond the maze, and your job as a student, and your job as a faculty member, is to experiment with alternatives. That would mean a dramatically different curriculum, that would mean a dramatically different classroom.
I would like to see that happen. In journalism education, the collapse of the commercial journalism industry -- the fact that there are fewer jobs for our students in the traditional journalism institutions -- gives us a kind of opportunity. It’s a disaster at one level, in that the way we’ve done things no longer works, but it’s also an opportunity to reshape those methods.
In my own experience, there is a lot of resistance to that kind of change, because it is kind of frightening. If you’ve been doing something on a model that in the past has worked, or at least appeared to work, and now people are saying that model is over, well it’s not exactly easy to jump to that position where everything is up for grabs. But that’s what Universities should be doing. Unfortunately, not only in journalism but in the University at large, I think there is a distinct lack of that spirit. There is an attempt to kind of hunker down, and make this model work, but I don’t think the model can work. I don’t think it ever worked for real education, but it’s certainly not going to work in a dramatically changing landscape.
CS: What advice do you offer UT students, or just to activists of all ages, who want to participate, want to fight the system, but feel overwhelmed by its strength?
RJ: If you feel overwhelmed, let’s recognize that that’s a rational response. If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because we face an overwhelming situation. We’re facing a collapse economically, a collapse of U.S. power around the world, and ecological crises that defy the imagination. Well that is overwhelming. But we should also look at history and realize that this is not the first time the world has appeared to be on the brink, and people didn’t lie down and die in the past. People organized, people committed to long-term projects to create a different future, and we can still do that.
In my case, I’ve moved toward a focus on helping to build local community networks and institutions that can help people explore other alternatives. One of the groups in Austin I’ve connected with is the Workers Defense Project (http://www.workersdefense.org/), a wonderful group that helps immigrant workers, especially undocumented immigrant workers, who are vulnerable to exploitation by employers. Through that work it offers a critique of the underlying power structure and a vehicle for people to build the power to change things. It’s really inspiring.
If we’re going to be effective, we’ve got to dig in for the long haul. There’s a paradox in all this. We may feel the crisis is more urgent then ever -- and I do feel that, more than ever -- but we have to recognize there’s no short-term solution, and we have to dig in for the long haul. That might be difficult, but it’s the only way I can see us moving forward.
----------------------
Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). His film, “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” has been released by the Media Education Foundation. http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=141
Jensen also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002).
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html .
An interview with Robert Jensen on war, ecological crises, and the quest for justice
excerpt: "CS: If we were to inevitably make this transition, or at least in the process of making it, do you believe that there will be restoration of matriarchal values?
RJ: I don’t think it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system that emerged in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years, and it imposed systems of hierarchy, not just around gender but around other differences as well, and we are still trying to get out from under those. If we succeed in that -- if we succeed in realizing that power does not come only with the ability to control other people, that power comes in the creative potential of human collaboration, it can come in non-hierarchical ways to organize ourselves -- it doesn’t mean obviously that there will be a matriarchy, if by that we mean a world in which women dominate. It means that we move into a real space where mutuality and egalitarian values can reign.
What will that look like? I don’t know. If we were to magically get there in my lifetime I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would look like. I know that it won’t look much like the institutions I live in today -- it won’t look like the modern corporation, it won’t look like the modern nation-state, it won’t look like the modern University. But you don’t really predict those things, you try to live them. And you live them in small steps, not in some grand utopian fantasy."
by Calvin Sloan
The following is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the KVRX radio show "The Pursuit of Injustice." The podcast can be streamed or downloaded at http://www.divshare.com/download/9029846-04a
An early version was published by Energy Bulletin, 30 October 2009. http://energybulletin.net/50523
CS: So to start off, let's address some topical issues. The war in Afghanistan has been described in the mainstream media as America's good war and as the cornerstone of the "War on Terror." President Obama is currently debating an increase in troop levels there. He's already sent an additional 21,000 since taking office, and as the Washington Post recently reported, has been deploying without public announcement 13,000 additional troops. You've been an outspoken critic of the war since its inception, what is your take on the current situation there?
RJ: I think any assessment of the current situation has to remember that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was illegal. The United States invaded the country with no legal authorization. It claimed the right to do this because of the relationship between the governing Taliban and Al Qaeda and the events of 9/11, but there were many ways that the United States could have pursued a just solution to the question of the terrorism of 9/11.
So, why would it pursue an illegal and, I would argue, immoral invasion? Here we have to remember that U.S. military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, whatever the stated reason for them, are really about energy resources. The Middle East especially is home to the most extensive reserves of petroleum. There's a lot of natural gas in Central Asia, plus it has geostrategic importance. So let's get rid of the idea that this is about the "War on Terror." Does the United States want to end terrorist attacks against Americans? Sure, but that doesn't mean that this particular war is a war on terrorism. We also should remember the phrase is a bad joke, that terrorism is a method by which people try to achieve political goals. You don't have a war on a method. If you're going to make war, you're making war for specific purposes against specific people in specific places, and the "War on Terror" is simply way too obscure for that.
So with all of that background, if the United States were to pursue a just and legal path it would begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan, pay the reparations it owes to the people of Afghanistan, and attempt to work with the appropriate regional and international organizations to try to help Afghanistan transition to a decent government. The United States has no intention of doing that.
So, the proposed buildup in Afghanistan is not only immoral, it’s not only fundamentally unjust, it’s also incredibly stupid. On all counts, anyway you want to evaluate this, the United States is making crucial errors.
The fact that Barack Obama, the alleged peace candidate in the last election, is willing to pursue this just reminds us of the limits of contemporary mainstream electoral politics with a choice reduced to Republicans and Democrats. What we should be thinking about is the whole structure of, and motivation behind, our involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia, and we should also be rethinking the whole structure of our political discourse at home.
CS: So if this is by all means a stupid endeavor to continue this occupation, why are we doing this? Who is profiting from this? What are the underlying motivations of our occupation?
RJ: Remember that just because people in power might be corrupt and immoral doesn’t mean they’re always competent in pursuing that corruption. If you look back at probably the most grotesque U.S. intervention in the post World War II period, the Vietnam War, there were corrupt and immoral reasons the United States invaded Vietnam -- mostly to undermine independent development and try to dominate the third world -- but in trying to carry out those objectives there were a lot of incompetent decisions made. And sometimes incompetence compounds itself, so as you get further and further into a set of bad strategic decisions, there is an instinct to want to rescue them, but unfortunately it often leads to even more bad strategic decisions.
So, why are we doing it? Well, there’s a certain amount of irrationality to these strategic decision making, even though it’s in the pursuit of a rational -- albeit I would say immoral -- goal, which is to dominate the Middle East and Central Asia. Why are we doing it? Are there profit motivations for private contractors, who are making a killing? Sure. Are there oil companies and gas companies that want concessions? Sure. There are always those things, but I think that the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy tends not to be the interest of any particular industry or any particular set of contractors, but the fact that the whole system is designed to perpetuate this quest for dominance. And those other factors, like the interests of Blackwater (which has changed its name to Xe Services) or ExxonMobil, just contribute to the motive force behind the policy more generally.
CS: So here we are in 2009, and we’ve entered the ninth year of the war in Afghanistan and we’ve similarly occupied Iraq since 2003, yet when you look around it’s hard to notice that we’re running on a war economy. It’s become so normalized, and from a student’s perspective it’s interesting to note that the majority of undergraduates across the country have spent all of their high school and college careers with our nation at war.
And my question is, how do you think history will judge this perpetual war? Do you believe we’ve entered into Orwell’s 1984 realm, are we living in a society where war has officially become peace?
RJ: I don’t think we have to wait for history to judge it. I think we can assess it today and it’s pretty straight forward. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was illegal. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a cover for other interests, and that’s all doubly true with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The whole project is corrupt beyond description. Yet, the propaganda industries, not just the propaganda emanating from the government, but the propaganda industries -- advertising, entertainment, journalism -- are all perpetuating this crazed interpretation of the War on Terror, because they all have an interest in doing that. They are all ideologically connected to the same project.
And yes, it’s Orwellian in that sense, it’s corrupt, it’s immoral, it’s illegal, it’s all these things that we’re talking about, and we don’t have to wait for history 30 years from now to make that judgment. What we have to do is recognize it, and try to organize against it. But I think what we should be doing is not just opposing this war but recognizing that the disease from which this war springs is more deeply set in the culture than ever before.
You can clearly see that on a college campus. Remember that when the United States invaded and began to destroy Vietnam, the opposition to that war started, and was always strongest, on college campuses. There was a kind of “natural,” if you’ll accept the term, resistance from students to that imposition of power from above.
Well in some sense, campuses are the most passive places when it comes to anti-war activity today. To the degree that there is an anti-war movement, it’s mostly rooted in the community. So, that tells us something about what’s happened in universities, the way universities have been turned toward a more corporate and ideologically neutered position, though campuses could potentially be centers of opposition, resistance, and struggle. Well, that’s about not just the war, that’s about what’s happened to American higher education, the corporatization of higher education.
In other words, the war is an indicator not just of the depravity of the war-makers, it’s a very important indicator of what’s going on in society more generally. And about that, I’m terrified. The direction the whole culture is heading is very scary. It’s an imperial culture in decline. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world, at least in raw military terms. It remains the largest economy in the world. But it’s an affluent imperial society in decline, and such a society is very dangerous. I think we should be paying attention not only to what these wars tell us about foreign policy and military affairs, but also what they tell us about our society at a much deeper level.
CS: So are you saying that the universities aren’t actually free? Do you think that that’s affected by the politics of tenure and publishing grants?
RJ: It’s affected by the structure of financing, it’s affected by the rewards and punishments that faculty members respond to in building careers. For students, it’s about the economy that the students are going into, and how students are conditioned to believe that college is career training. It’s about trying to create the University as an allegedly politically neutral space, but of course any time you talk about political neutrality what you’re talking about is de facto support for the existing distribution of power. All of these things are part of it, and we should be concerned with it.
Is the University free? Well at some level, obviously yes. Here we are in a University office, I’m a University professor, we’re talking about things that will be on a University radio station. Of course it’s free in that sense, but it’s also a system structured in a way that is going to divert most people from the kind of conversation we’re having. So there are constraints. That’s true of any institution. There are opportunities and freedoms, and then there are constraints. I think what we should be focused on -- whether we’re talking about the Universities or the media or any of the other intellectual institution -- is how the freedom that exists on the surface is often masking a deeper kind of pressure toward conformity, a conformity that’s not enforced through the barrel of a gun, as in a totalitarian society, but a conformity that’s enforced in a much more complex, and in some a ways a much more effective, fashion, through the rewards and the punishments we’re talking about.
CS: I’d like to move on to your most recently published article entitled “Is Obama a Socialist?” In this article you express a deep concern for our evolving ecological crisis, specifically I’d like to refer to the following statement: “Capitalism is an economic system based on the concept of unlimited growth, yet we live on a finite planet. Capitalism is, quite literally, crazy.” Can you explain this concept further to us?
RJ: For most of the past couple hundred years, we’ve been living really in a rather unique historical moment. First of all it’s a moment made possible by unleashing the enormous energy of coal, oil, and natural gas, the fossil fuels. That’s a blip in human history. There’s never been energy like that available to human beings before, and we’re quickly running out of it. So, all of this bonanza of consumption and material comfort is really subsidized by that energy source, and there is nothing on the horizon to replace it. All of the talk of alternative fuels and biofuels and wind and solar, that’s fine, they are all going to supply some energy, but they are not going to replace the energy we’ve been using from coal, oil, and natural gas.
The explosion of this energy is also the time in which modern industrial capitalism has emerged. It’s all based on a fantasy that is easy to understand because of all that energy. It did look like we could simply grow endlessly. But the ecological crises, and I use the plural quite specifically -- multiple crises, not just global warming but levels of toxicity in the air, water, loss of top soil, the reduction in biodiversity -- are part of a global pattern that is uncontroversial: We are reaching, and probably are long beyond, the carrying capacity of the planet, and we are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet at a rate that is increasingly threatening, not just centuries from now, but likely in decades.
That’s all part of an era in which capitalism led us to believe we could have unlimited growth. It’s a crazy claim, and more striking is that it is a crazy claim that is considered to be the conventional wisdom. This is the kind of thing we should be worried about. We’re not having a debate about capitalism in this country -- there’s no debate for the most part in the mainstream. Capitalism is taken to be the only way to organize an economy, yet it is a system of organizing an economy that is literally crazy. Well, if that doesn’t scare people, then I don’t know what will.
CS: If you are implying that if we are at a level of overreach, that there will be, that we might reach a population crash?
RJ: I think it’s inevitable. Ecological overshoot is the key concept. The planet has a carrying capacity. The planet can host only so many human beings, depending on the level at which we live. I’m not a scientist, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not trained in any of this, but reading people whose judgment I trust, and trying to synthesize the information that I can, my judgment is that we’re probably well past the carrying capacity of the planet already.
And at the level of first-world consumption, we are dramatically past the carrying capacity. That is, if you are going to expand this high energy consumption and lifestyle of the first world to the whole planet, it would be game-over tomorrow. If everybody in the world lived like you and I live, the planet would literally die tomorrow. So the only reason we can continue this system is the fact that a good portion of the world’s population is living at a dramatically lower level than we are. Even at that level, I don’t think that the world can support this many people. So we’re in a position of overshoot.
When is the crash going to come? Well in some sense the answer is it’s already here. You have half the world’s population living on less than $2.50 a day, you have hundreds of people dying every hour in Africa from easily preventable diseases, you have the beginnings of ecological crises that are manifesting themselves not only in the reduction of biodiversity but in the direct threat to human life.
When is all of this going to come crashing? Well I don’t know, because I don’t have a crystal ball and no one else does. The question shouldn’t be when can you predict all of this is going to fall apart. More important is the recognition that it inevitably will fall apart, and we should prepare for it, in both physical terms and moral terms. My own view is that, if not in my lifetime certainly in yours, there will be a massive human die-off. That’s an antiseptic term -- it means that millions upon millions of people will die in large sweeps across the planet. What do we do about that morally? What do you do if you’re living in a world in which you know that simply by virtue of the luck of where you were born, you are protected from a scourge that is literally killing millions around the planet?
Well we’re seeing small examples of that today with such things as the devastation from easily preventable diseases in Africa for instance, but what if that happens on a massive scale? I don’t think the human species has a way to cope with that. We’re not ready physically, technologically, but we’re also not ready morally. And the only way you get ready for that is by openly discussing it, but it’s still a culture that cannot come to terms with this. Everything we’re talking about today would have been unthinkable as subjects for the presidential election. No candidate could talk like this and expect to be elected, because the culture is still in such deep denial about the fundamentally unsustainable nature of our economic system and the moral implications of that.
CS: How do you think nation-states will respond to these collapse scenarios?
RJ: First of all I think we should recognize nation-states are not inevitable for the rest of human history. My own view is that were going to end up finding other ways to organize ourselves politically, because the nation-state is at the center of so much of this destruction.
How will people respond? Well I think a lot of that has to do with how the most powerful nations respond. Remember that one of the aspects of being the most affluent and militarily powerful countries on the planet is that what you do matters a lot. You can continue to pursue insane strategies in a crazy system, or you can tell the truth. And if powerful countries tell the truth, start to actively reduce their energy and other material consumption, start to take seriously the demands of justice in equalizing the distribution of wealth around the world, give up on fantasies of control and domination, well that would have a huge effect.
The developing world, which clearly doesn’t trust us and shouldn’t trust us, might be able to move into a posture of more cooperation. Democratic movements within those countries might strengthen when they know there is in fact a commitment from the powerful states to real law, real democracy, real justice, real moral principles. Well, all of that is possible. It’s not a guarantee of success. We could do everything we can imagine in the realm of just and sustainable policies and still fail. The human species does not have some magic guarantee of endless success. Other species have come and gone, and it’s quite possible -- in fact, I would argue it’s probably likely -- we're going to go that way relatively soon. And people always say, well that’s a rather depressing fact. Well, if it’s a fact, it’s a fact, but of course there’s no way to know for sure, and we can struggle to create a different future, without guarantees.
But even if it does seem to be our future, what of the time we are here? I think part of what makes one fully human is to resist that, to struggle, even with no guarantee of success. And that’s where I put my faith. Maybe it’s a faith that is going to be betrayed, but I don’t see any better option at the moment.
CS: If we were to inevitably make this transition, or at least in the process of making it, do you believe that there will be restoration of matriarchal values?
RJ: I don’t think it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system that emerged in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years, and it imposed systems of hierarchy, not just around gender but around other differences as well, and we are still trying to get out from under those. If we succeed in that -- if we succeed in realizing that power does not come only with the ability to control other people, that power comes in the creative potential of human collaboration, it can come in non-hierarchical ways to organize ourselves -- it doesn’t mean obviously that there will be a matriarchy, if by that we mean a world in which women dominate. It means that we move into a real space where mutuality and egalitarian values can reign.
What will that look like? I don’t know. If we were to magically get there in my lifetime I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would look like. I know that it won’t look much like the institutions I live in today -- it won’t look like the modern corporation, it won’t look like the modern nation-state, it won’t look like the modern University. But you don’t really predict those things, you try to live them. And you live them in small steps, not in some grand utopian fantasy.
CS: Given our trajectory towards this cliff, this ecological cliff, should college students be rethinking their career choices? Are we being trained properly?
RJ: Reality is going to force college students to reconsider career choices, when certain assumptions will no longer hold. The most important thing that Universities could do right now is be laboratories for experiments outside of the dominant system, which is exactly what we’re not doing.
What we’re doing is still training people to be rats in a maze. Well, what if we said, the maze is over. For now, the maze may still exist out in the world, but we’re going to spend four years here going beyond the maze, and your job as a student, and your job as a faculty member, is to experiment with alternatives. That would mean a dramatically different curriculum, that would mean a dramatically different classroom.
I would like to see that happen. In journalism education, the collapse of the commercial journalism industry -- the fact that there are fewer jobs for our students in the traditional journalism institutions -- gives us a kind of opportunity. It’s a disaster at one level, in that the way we’ve done things no longer works, but it’s also an opportunity to reshape those methods.
In my own experience, there is a lot of resistance to that kind of change, because it is kind of frightening. If you’ve been doing something on a model that in the past has worked, or at least appeared to work, and now people are saying that model is over, well it’s not exactly easy to jump to that position where everything is up for grabs. But that’s what Universities should be doing. Unfortunately, not only in journalism but in the University at large, I think there is a distinct lack of that spirit. There is an attempt to kind of hunker down, and make this model work, but I don’t think the model can work. I don’t think it ever worked for real education, but it’s certainly not going to work in a dramatically changing landscape.
CS: What advice do you offer UT students, or just to activists of all ages, who want to participate, want to fight the system, but feel overwhelmed by its strength?
RJ: If you feel overwhelmed, let’s recognize that that’s a rational response. If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because we face an overwhelming situation. We’re facing a collapse economically, a collapse of U.S. power around the world, and ecological crises that defy the imagination. Well that is overwhelming. But we should also look at history and realize that this is not the first time the world has appeared to be on the brink, and people didn’t lie down and die in the past. People organized, people committed to long-term projects to create a different future, and we can still do that.
In my case, I’ve moved toward a focus on helping to build local community networks and institutions that can help people explore other alternatives. One of the groups in Austin I’ve connected with is the Workers Defense Project (http://www.workersdefense.org/), a wonderful group that helps immigrant workers, especially undocumented immigrant workers, who are vulnerable to exploitation by employers. Through that work it offers a critique of the underlying power structure and a vehicle for people to build the power to change things. It’s really inspiring.
If we’re going to be effective, we’ve got to dig in for the long haul. There’s a paradox in all this. We may feel the crisis is more urgent then ever -- and I do feel that, more than ever -- but we have to recognize there’s no short-term solution, and we have to dig in for the long haul. That might be difficult, but it’s the only way I can see us moving forward.
----------------------
Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). His film, “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” has been released by the Media Education Foundation. http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=141
Jensen also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002).
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html .
17 October 2009
blondesense
Poetess Eve Merriam:
"I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, 'Mommy, what was war?' "
“I actually do read male authored works oooonce in a loooong view while.”
Great - Great - Grandma Adeline Baach Maas, 1896 - 1985, had three cherry trees to the north side of her wraparound porch and front yard. Out along the country dirt road, these swayed: one of only a very few memories I own ... of her homeplace farm.
She ... a woman 98 pounds total -- maybe -- of which about four of them were spent up in the six inch - wide brim of her massive black, wool - felt hat with on its left the huuuuuge red rose which she always wore ... when dressed to the nines.
Adeline Baach was born in 1896, the same year as the writing and publication of Englishman (Alfred Edward) A E Housman's poem of below:
LOVELIEST OF TREES, THE CHERRY NOW
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, for my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
She ... a woman 98 pounds total -- maybe -- of which about four of them were spent up in the six inch - wide brim of her massive black, wool - felt hat with on its left the huuuuuge red rose which she always wore ... when dressed to the nines.
Adeline Baach was born in 1896, the same year as the writing and publication of Englishman (Alfred Edward) A E Housman's poem of below:
LOVELIEST OF TREES, THE CHERRY NOW
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, for my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
11 October 2009
thebondbetweenmotherandchild
APA: The Bond Between Mother and Child
Without a secure motherly attachment, children’s bodies activate a stress reaction to unexpected events.
By Beth Azar
Monitor staff
With the cutting of the umbilical cord, physical attachment to our mothers ends and emotional and psychological attachment begins. While the first attachment provides everything we need to thrive inside the womb, many psychologists believe the second attachment provides the psychological foundation and maybe even the social and physical buffer we need to thrive in the world.
Psychologists’ research shows that the quality of care infants receive affects how they later get along with friends, how well they do in school and how they react to new, and possibly stressful, situations.
The psychological construct of attachment, developed in the late 1950s, describes how babies become attached to their primary-care giver, usually their mothers. Securely attached babies consider ‘Mom’ a safe base from which to explore their environment.
They gain assurance from her presence and use her as a source of comfort when they are distressed or upset. Insecurely attached babies seek comfort from their mothers, but gain less assurance from her.
Attachments infants and children form with other primary-care providers also affect a child’s development, research shows. The nature and impact of such attachments have become a focus for researchers interested in the increase in daycare for very young children.
Social development
Many researchers have found correlations between secure mother-infant attachment and later psychological and social development. Infants who securely attach to their mothers become more self-reliant toddlers and have a better sense of self-esteem, said Alan Sroufe, PhD, an attachment researcher at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota.He’s been following a group of 180 disadvantaged children-now age 19-since before birth, looking at mother-infant attachment and multiple developmental measures such as the kids’ expectations from relationships with parents and friends. He’s also looking at the children’s life stress, success in school and peer relationships.
Sroufe has found that even though these children lead unstable lives, if they had a secure mother-infant attachment they were likely to be self-reliant into adolescence, have lower rates of psychopathology, enjoy successful peer relationships through age 16 and do well in school-especially in math-at all ages.
Sroufe doesn’t think infant attachment affects aptitude, but he believes it affects confidence, attitude and, subsequently, attendance and achievement.
His sample has more life stress and less social support than the average, middle-class samples most researchers study. He’s found that this stress-including instability and loss-can deflect even the most positive life course.
‘Kids who had secure attachment histories but suffer losses will become less secure,’ said Sroufe.
He also found that anxious, poorly attached infants can become more secure if their mothers enter stable love relationships or alleviate their symptoms of depression.
Buffering stress
Secure infant attachment may provide children with a crucial tool for dealing with stress by buffering their physiological reaction to novel or unexpected events, said Megan Gunnar, PhD, of the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota.To test this theory, Gunnar exposes children to mildly stressful events and measures changes in their stress-related hormones. An increase in the hormone cortisol, for example, indicates an extreme stress reaction.
In a recent study now in press, Gunnar, along with her then- graduate student Melissa Nachmias, PhD, and others, exposed 77 18-month-old children to three stimuli that the children could choose to approach or avoid: a live clown, a robot clown and a puppet show. Mothers were always present, but for the first three minutes with each stimulus researchers asked them not to participate. For the second three minutes, researchers told the mothers to try to comfort their children.
After the experiment, researchers measured cortisol levels in the children’s saliva. A week later, the researchers measured mother-child attachment using the ’strange-situation’ test (a commonly used measure of attachment).
As expected, the researchers found no increase in cortisol for children who approached the stimuli without fear. However, cortisol levels for inhibited children, who appeared scared and wouldn’t approach the stimuli, varied depending on their attachments to their mothers. Inhibited children who had secure attachments showed no increase in cortisol while inhibited children with insecure attachments showed an increase.
‘The secure children seemed to be saying, ‘This is scary but I feel safe,” said Gunnar. ‘They had the resources to cope.’
Mothers of more inhibited children differed dramatically in how they responded to their child’s distress. Mothers of socially attached children were able to calm their children immediately. They seemed to have an established history with the child that didn’t require any work.
But mothers with insecure attachments were working hard to get their fearful children to not be fearful, said Gunnar. ‘They seemed to think it was their job to change the child, to make the child look bold.’
In a similar real-life experiment, also in press, Gunnar measured cortisol in about 60 toddlers who received inoculations from a physician. She again found that only fearful, insecure children exhibited increased salivary cortisol.
Secure attachments may act as a buffer against the stress of new, strange or scary events, Gunnar said. Without that buffer, children find it difficult to cope and their bodies activate a stress reaction.
No attachment
And what happens if there is no motherly attachment? Psychobiologist Mary Carlson, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, asked that question when she went to Romania last September to measure cortisol levels in orphans.Many Rumanian mothers can’t afford to care for a newborn, and send their children directly from the hospital maternity wards to orphanages. The children receive little to no physical or emotional stimulation from the caretakers in the orphanages. She worked with two groups of 30 children. As part of another study, one group received enriched care-one adult for four children-for a year, six months prior to Carlson’s visit. The other group received standard 20-child-to-one-adult care the entire time.
On an average day for a typical child, cortisol levels peak in the morning and decrease by the end of the day. In both groups of orphans, however, cortisol levels increased from morning to noon and decreased slightly by evening.
There were slight differences
for the children who received the enriched care, but because it ended six months before Carlson could study them, there’s no way to know if the care had positive effects that then diminished when the children returned to standard care.Rhesus monkeys reared with a ’surrogate mother’ made of a wire frame covered by cloth-a poor mother substitute-demonstrate abnormal cortisol cycling similar to those of the Rumanian orphans, according to experiments by Gunnar and Stephen Suomi, PhD, Thomas Boyce, PhD, and Maribeth Champaux, PhD, at the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.
Gunnar wanted to know if the monkeys simply cycled improperly, or if it was a matter of ‘no mommy, no attachment, no buffer.’ So, she and her colleagues repeated the experiment, making sure to keep the monkeys’ environment unusually quiet-removing even normal daily movements around the lab. The monkeys produced normal cycles.
For these severely deprived monkeys, any stimulation seems to cause stress; they have no buffer to cope with even normal, daily events, said Gunnar.
These studies show that the most basic biological systems depend on social stimulation early in life, said Carlson. Without it, children lack the foundation to deal with everyday life, let alone trauma and stress.
Beyond the mother
With more children entering daycare, researchers have begun to look beyond mother-infant attachment to primary caregiver attachment, whether it be a mother, father or daycare provider.’If you take the notion that children form attachments from the daily mundane experiences of care-feeding, diaper changing, caressing-you need to look at all the caregivers,’ said Carollee Howes, PhD, at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In a series of studies, Howes found that the attachments children form with their primary caregivers is remarkably similar to the attachments they form with their mothers.
However, secure attachments only occur with 50 percent of caregivers as opposed to 70 percent of mothers. The lower rate of attachment probably reflects the lower quality and closeness of the caregiver relationship, said Howes.
In terms of effect, Howes and her colleagues found that in a group of 48 4-year-olds, attachment to a child-care provider better predicted peer interactions than mother-child attachment. Toddlers with secure attachments to teachers were more gregarious and more likely to engage in pretend play with peers; preschoolers were more sociable. Children with insecure teacher attachments were more hostile, aggressive, antisocial and withdrawn.
‘Attachments are relationships that develop from interactions,’ said Howes. ‘We have to figure out who the caregivers are’ and make sure they’re all competent.
While this is a relief to mothers who want or have to work, it also emphasizes the need for high- quality child care, Howes pointed out.
Many attachment researchers find themselves playing the part of child advocates, they admit. Their research points to the need for social policies that allow mothers to stay home or that require high-quality daycare for all children.
‘Babies need a lot of love and a lot of work, and denying that would be wrong,’ said Sroufe.
Without a secure motherly attachment, children’s bodies activate a stress reaction to unexpected events.
By Beth Azar
Monitor staff
With the cutting of the umbilical cord, physical attachment to our mothers ends and emotional and psychological attachment begins. While the first attachment provides everything we need to thrive inside the womb, many psychologists believe the second attachment provides the psychological foundation and maybe even the social and physical buffer we need to thrive in the world.
Psychologists’ research shows that the quality of care infants receive affects how they later get along with friends, how well they do in school and how they react to new, and possibly stressful, situations.
The psychological construct of attachment, developed in the late 1950s, describes how babies become attached to their primary-care giver, usually their mothers. Securely attached babies consider ‘Mom’ a safe base from which to explore their environment.
They gain assurance from her presence and use her as a source of comfort when they are distressed or upset. Insecurely attached babies seek comfort from their mothers, but gain less assurance from her.
Attachments infants and children form with other primary-care providers also affect a child’s development, research shows. The nature and impact of such attachments have become a focus for researchers interested in the increase in daycare for very young children.
Social development
Many researchers have found correlations between secure mother-infant attachment and later psychological and social development. Infants who securely attach to their mothers become more self-reliant toddlers and have a better sense of self-esteem, said Alan Sroufe, PhD, an attachment researcher at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota.He’s been following a group of 180 disadvantaged children-now age 19-since before birth, looking at mother-infant attachment and multiple developmental measures such as the kids’ expectations from relationships with parents and friends. He’s also looking at the children’s life stress, success in school and peer relationships.
Sroufe has found that even though these children lead unstable lives, if they had a secure mother-infant attachment they were likely to be self-reliant into adolescence, have lower rates of psychopathology, enjoy successful peer relationships through age 16 and do well in school-especially in math-at all ages.
Sroufe doesn’t think infant attachment affects aptitude, but he believes it affects confidence, attitude and, subsequently, attendance and achievement.
His sample has more life stress and less social support than the average, middle-class samples most researchers study. He’s found that this stress-including instability and loss-can deflect even the most positive life course.
‘Kids who had secure attachment histories but suffer losses will become less secure,’ said Sroufe.
He also found that anxious, poorly attached infants can become more secure if their mothers enter stable love relationships or alleviate their symptoms of depression.
Buffering stress
Secure infant attachment may provide children with a crucial tool for dealing with stress by buffering their physiological reaction to novel or unexpected events, said Megan Gunnar, PhD, of the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota.To test this theory, Gunnar exposes children to mildly stressful events and measures changes in their stress-related hormones. An increase in the hormone cortisol, for example, indicates an extreme stress reaction.
In a recent study now in press, Gunnar, along with her then- graduate student Melissa Nachmias, PhD, and others, exposed 77 18-month-old children to three stimuli that the children could choose to approach or avoid: a live clown, a robot clown and a puppet show. Mothers were always present, but for the first three minutes with each stimulus researchers asked them not to participate. For the second three minutes, researchers told the mothers to try to comfort their children.
After the experiment, researchers measured cortisol levels in the children’s saliva. A week later, the researchers measured mother-child attachment using the ’strange-situation’ test (a commonly used measure of attachment).
As expected, the researchers found no increase in cortisol for children who approached the stimuli without fear. However, cortisol levels for inhibited children, who appeared scared and wouldn’t approach the stimuli, varied depending on their attachments to their mothers. Inhibited children who had secure attachments showed no increase in cortisol while inhibited children with insecure attachments showed an increase.
‘The secure children seemed to be saying, ‘This is scary but I feel safe,” said Gunnar. ‘They had the resources to cope.’
Mothers of more inhibited children differed dramatically in how they responded to their child’s distress. Mothers of socially attached children were able to calm their children immediately. They seemed to have an established history with the child that didn’t require any work.
But mothers with insecure attachments were working hard to get their fearful children to not be fearful, said Gunnar. ‘They seemed to think it was their job to change the child, to make the child look bold.’
In a similar real-life experiment, also in press, Gunnar measured cortisol in about 60 toddlers who received inoculations from a physician. She again found that only fearful, insecure children exhibited increased salivary cortisol.
Secure attachments may act as a buffer against the stress of new, strange or scary events, Gunnar said. Without that buffer, children find it difficult to cope and their bodies activate a stress reaction.
No attachment
And what happens if there is no motherly attachment? Psychobiologist Mary Carlson, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, asked that question when she went to Romania last September to measure cortisol levels in orphans.Many Rumanian mothers can’t afford to care for a newborn, and send their children directly from the hospital maternity wards to orphanages. The children receive little to no physical or emotional stimulation from the caretakers in the orphanages. She worked with two groups of 30 children. As part of another study, one group received enriched care-one adult for four children-for a year, six months prior to Carlson’s visit. The other group received standard 20-child-to-one-adult care the entire time.
On an average day for a typical child, cortisol levels peak in the morning and decrease by the end of the day. In both groups of orphans, however, cortisol levels increased from morning to noon and decreased slightly by evening.
There were slight differences
for the children who received the enriched care, but because it ended six months before Carlson could study them, there’s no way to know if the care had positive effects that then diminished when the children returned to standard care.Rhesus monkeys reared with a ’surrogate mother’ made of a wire frame covered by cloth-a poor mother substitute-demonstrate abnormal cortisol cycling similar to those of the Rumanian orphans, according to experiments by Gunnar and Stephen Suomi, PhD, Thomas Boyce, PhD, and Maribeth Champaux, PhD, at the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.
Gunnar wanted to know if the monkeys simply cycled improperly, or if it was a matter of ‘no mommy, no attachment, no buffer.’ So, she and her colleagues repeated the experiment, making sure to keep the monkeys’ environment unusually quiet-removing even normal daily movements around the lab. The monkeys produced normal cycles.
For these severely deprived monkeys, any stimulation seems to cause stress; they have no buffer to cope with even normal, daily events, said Gunnar.
These studies show that the most basic biological systems depend on social stimulation early in life, said Carlson. Without it, children lack the foundation to deal with everyday life, let alone trauma and stress.
Beyond the mother
With more children entering daycare, researchers have begun to look beyond mother-infant attachment to primary caregiver attachment, whether it be a mother, father or daycare provider.’If you take the notion that children form attachments from the daily mundane experiences of care-feeding, diaper changing, caressing-you need to look at all the caregivers,’ said Carollee Howes, PhD, at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In a series of studies, Howes found that the attachments children form with their primary caregivers is remarkably similar to the attachments they form with their mothers.
However, secure attachments only occur with 50 percent of caregivers as opposed to 70 percent of mothers. The lower rate of attachment probably reflects the lower quality and closeness of the caregiver relationship, said Howes.
In terms of effect, Howes and her colleagues found that in a group of 48 4-year-olds, attachment to a child-care provider better predicted peer interactions than mother-child attachment. Toddlers with secure attachments to teachers were more gregarious and more likely to engage in pretend play with peers; preschoolers were more sociable. Children with insecure teacher attachments were more hostile, aggressive, antisocial and withdrawn.
‘Attachments are relationships that develop from interactions,’ said Howes. ‘We have to figure out who the caregivers are’ and make sure they’re all competent.
While this is a relief to mothers who want or have to work, it also emphasizes the need for high- quality child care, Howes pointed out.
Many attachment researchers find themselves playing the part of child advocates, they admit. Their research points to the need for social policies that allow mothers to stay home or that require high-quality daycare for all children.
‘Babies need a lot of love and a lot of work, and denying that would be wrong,’ said Sroufe.
03 October 2009
Maternal Deprivation
On one mahaTmA's 140th year after birthing, his quotation in the Prologue of the Mother - Fucking Trilogy, "Even if I am a Minority of One, the Truth is still the Truth."
--- Mohandas K. Gandhi // // http://bluemaas.public.iastate.edu
"Years ago, still small, I lost my mother.
Everyone wept around me,
but I grieved in silence,
Ignorant that to relieve sorrow,
a flood of tears must fall."
--- Thich Nhat Hanh, Viet Nam
[[[from the 20 September 2009 Domestic Violence by Proxy // http://justice.posterous.com
"Some unfortunate women after years of enduring domestic violence have then lost custody to the batterers who abused them. In these cases, batterers have made good on their threat to attack their ex - partner in the place she is the most vulnerable -- by taking her children away from her.
After separation, these batterers continue to wage their campaign of manipulation and abuse by attempting to convince involved children that their mothers never loved them. [thuggishly ... and hourly ... perpetrating the INVISIBILITY of her].
Looking for a way to describe their batterers' behavior, some mothers have called what their batterer is doing "parental alienation syndrome."
"In reality, what these women are describing from their ex - partners is better termed Domestic Violence by Proxy ..." For the article and more information, see: http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/pas/DVP.html
and http://www.thelizlibrary.org/site-index/site-index-frame.html .
Filed under // punishing mother therapeutic jurisprudence
Comments [1]
Recent comments randijames said...
AKA Maternal Deprivation [Syndrome]. Please noncustodial mothers, stop trippin off of pedo "parental alienation syndrome"]]]
--- Mohandas K. Gandhi // // http://bluemaas.public.iastate.edu
"Years ago, still small, I lost my mother.
Everyone wept around me,
but I grieved in silence,
Ignorant that to relieve sorrow,
a flood of tears must fall."
--- Thich Nhat Hanh, Viet Nam
[[[from the 20 September 2009 Domestic Violence by Proxy // http://justice.posterous.com
"Some unfortunate women after years of enduring domestic violence have then lost custody to the batterers who abused them. In these cases, batterers have made good on their threat to attack their ex - partner in the place she is the most vulnerable -- by taking her children away from her.
After separation, these batterers continue to wage their campaign of manipulation and abuse by attempting to convince involved children that their mothers never loved them. [thuggishly ... and hourly ... perpetrating the INVISIBILITY of her].
Looking for a way to describe their batterers' behavior, some mothers have called what their batterer is doing "parental alienation syndrome."
"In reality, what these women are describing from their ex - partners is better termed Domestic Violence by Proxy ..." For the article and more information, see: http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/pas/DVP.html
and http://www.thelizlibrary.org/site-index/site-index-frame.html .
Filed under // punishing mother therapeutic jurisprudence
Comments [1]
Recent comments randijames said...
AKA Maternal Deprivation [Syndrome]. Please noncustodial mothers, stop trippin off of pedo "parental alienation syndrome"]]]
26 September 2009
http://echidne-of-the-snakes.com
[from the Snakes' Echidne and her Posse this week:
" ... as the mother of 3 boys ... "
"What if you grow up believing that women should enjoy sperm in their eyes, to be sexual beings?"]
On Porn, Sex And Pincushions
It has been much on my mind because the recent let's-bash-women happiness study did not analyze the impact of the enormous increase on Internet porn on women's and men's happiness gap. And because of something Amanda (from whom I stole that pincushion part in the title) at Pandagon wrote recently:
With that in mind, I want to link this excellent post by Becky Sharper, who has a wonderful sense of irreverence in the face of people who are going to give you the least generous read imaginable when you suggest that perhaps porn isn't all roses and fountains of gold. I hesitate to open this can of worms, because when I pointed out that the facial exists in porn as a symbolic marker of female degradation, many, many, many people deliberately misread me, claiming that I said that coming on the outside was wrong, or that if any touched your face, it was wrong, or that you're a bad person if you like being degraded in bed. All I said was that it's funny to me that something that is overtly about employing the "this slut deserves to be humiliated" trope in porn gets to send its message to an audience that wants to hear negative things about sexual women, and the rest of us will pretend that they just didn't say that.
Even though, from my perspective, the implicit argument---that women who have a lot of sex, or with a lot of men are sluts who deserve humiliation---is anti-sex. In other words, for all the sex in porn, much of it adheres to the "family values" narrative, where a sexual woman is used up and deserves nothing but abuse. Being truly pro-sex, in my view, means believing that women who have sex, a lot of sex, or a lot of partners do not forfeit a single ounce of their dignity or humanity.
Becky notes that the heavy use of anal sex in porn has resulted in an uptick in anal sex in real life. And though I know a good half of the commenters will pretend I didn't say this: This isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. Just like coming on the outside is a fine way to spice things up, anal sex also can be a lot of fun for straight couples in the right circumstances. But porn morphs rather mundane sex acts into tropes about hurting and humiliating women, and then those tropes are repeated in bedrooms for that purpose. The problem with this is that many of the women engaging in these deliberately humiliating behaviors don't get off on being submissives or being degraded. They're doing it just because they thing that's what sex is.
I repeat: like coming on the outside, there's a way to do anal sex that isn't about hurting, humiliating, and punishing a sexual woman. (If only I knew the secret number of times to repeat to avoid being misread!) There are entire excellent books about it, and whole lines of sex toys that exist solely to exploit the sensitivity of that area of the body. In fact, straight men can put things up their butt and like it, too! This is not being questioned. (I predict 5 comments before someone suggests I questioned this.)
But porn doesn't show anal sex in the pro-woman way that many practice it, where there's an attempt to warm you up, make you comfortable, go slow, and stop if there's any discomfort. Like Becky says:
Problem is, hetero mainstream porn isn't depicting the kind of careful, attentive interaction that makes anal sex pleasurable. In fact, in porn there's no attention paid to the woman's pleasure--or even her comfort--at all. The male actors just plunge in and start pounding.
Emphasis mine.
Isn't it awesome how anyone criticizing porn must now explain very carefully why that criticism is not being anti-sex? But Amanda is brave, so she does the necessary work anyway.
I have written about some of my concerns earlier, but they are worth repeating, especially as I'm a little bit clearer about what I don't like when it comes to the extremely wide-spread use of porn. Here's the list:
1. I worry that too many confuse porn images with real actual human sex, that especially young viewers of porn go away with the expectation that real sex will be like porn. Yet porn is called porn and not art, say, for the very reason that it cuts out everything but the purely instrumental use of another person (or persons) for the purpose of getting an orgasm. I'm sure many people can make that distinction, especially among older users of porn who have also had real-life sex. But what happens if porn images are, in essence, your education in sexuality? What if you grow up believing that women should enjoy sperm in their eyes, to be sexual beings?
2. Hence my concern over the male-centeredness of heterosexual porn. That market is geared towards men and the women in the porn are there to do things that will get men off. If some men like humiliating women in bed, then that's what the female porn actors pretend that they will like. No, you don't need to use lube before plunging into my anus (a vulnerable part of the body, by the way, in the medical sense). Yes, please, urinate all over me. And so on.
That you can find all kinds of porn, even feminist porn, doesn't negate this problem at all. Because if most men, including the very young men, watch male-centered porn (and not feminist porn, say) then that's what their idea of sex will become: Something in which women don't have to be asked what they want, and in which women who don't want anal plunging or sperm all over their faces are somehow anti-sex or frigid. Because the women in porn like it!
3. If I am correct about all this, the impact of porn might be to make both young men and women to equate sex with what goes on in male-centered porn. I don't know if I am correct, but I see something of this sort taking place in discussions about sex on the Internet (and in the insults on political comments threads: Swallow, bitch, swallow). To even suggest that what is being talked about is male-centered heterosexual porn and not sex in general labels you as an anti-sex prude.
To re-frame this in feminist terms: I worry what porn is doing to the way young heterosexual women learn about sexuality. Is it just a service you provide men? Suck a lot of cock, let them come on your face or in your ass? Even if this is not what your body actually likes to do?
Comments (47) | Trackback (0)
Posted by: echidne / 9/23/2009 02:07:00 PM
I'm so glad you wrote this.
Suzie | Homepage | 09.23.09 - 4:32 pm | #
I worry about this too, as the mother of 3 boys. The lack of awareness of the woman's enjoyment in most video porn is appalling. I don't want their formative understanding of sex to be the distorted, frequently-misogynistic view presented by porn.
My only hope is in being clear and direct, to explain that porn may have its place, but the overwhelming emphasis on domination over women makes it cancerous to creating a real, healthy relationship with a woman.
Sam-I-am | Homepage | 09.23.09 - 5:17 pm | #
To re-frame this in feminist terms: I worry what porn is doing to the way young heterosexual women learn about sexuality. Is it just a service you provide men? Suck a lot of cock, let them come on your face or in your ass? Even if this is not what your body actually likes to do?
And then even worse, those same young women become receptive to the cultural conservative notion that sex is icky and women should hate it because, well, who likes sperm in your eye? Clearly only really sick people would like that, right? Worse and worse.
Gavel Down | 09.23.09 - 5:46 pm | #
I hate it that so many people think that porn is an accurate representation of sex. It's so confusing to me that men don't realize that the women in porn are being paid to act a certain way and that may not reflect the actual desires of the woman. I've met men who were genuinely shocked and surprised that I wanted to watch them take their clothes off or, ya know, enjoy sex for myself.
In porn, women are hot and men are generally mediocre because they're basically just placeholders. I don't watch much straight porn becuase the men simply aren't that hot. Even in the cases where the man is as hot as the woman, the camera is more focused on the woman. So of course men interpret this as "women don't like porn, and they must not like sex". The problem is that porn just isn't made for women.
I also get really frustrated about the anal sex thing. I'm sure some people like it and that's great for them, but I'm just no interested in doing it. However, at least half of the guys I hook up with insist that if I would just let them shove their magical penis up there, I would suddenly like it. I have no doubt that porn is responsible for this attitude. I'm very pro-sex and that's exactly why I'm not a big fan of the current state of porn. I like sex to be enjoyable for everyone involved, rather than a favor that one person does for another without enjoyment or pleasure.
catgirl | 09.23.09 - 5:47 pm | #
Even mainstream movies and tv ignore straight female sexual desire. The men get an ordinary looking man to identify with and a gorgeous female love interest for the male character and the audience to ogle. The actress playing the love interest is often much younger as well.
Sometimes there are movies with handsome leading men, but the camera doesn't film them the way it does with women, making sure you get a nice long look at the chest and butt, having them wear skimpy clothes. Even in R rated sex scenes the focus is on the woman. We get to see her and not him undressing, moaning, etc.
anna | 09.23.09 - 7:09 pm | #
Another scary thing: Many (most? all?) of our desires are formed from experiencing the world. Boys and girls who see porn (or have contact with porn culture) may catch on that this is supposed to be exciting and arousing, but is forbidden to them. Desires will be formed that are hard to undo.
Suzie | Homepage | 09.23.09 - 8:33 pm | #
Beautifully, sadly written.
I've a 13 year old daughter who is just on the cusp of curiosity. I dread the impression that she'll get from the subhumanizing, omnipresent porn. Her sexuality, self-esteem, and health of her future relationships can be so casually destroyed my the mindless porno-bulemia of our culture.
ColoKate | 09.23.09 - 10:18 pm | #
We have been worrying and fretting for fifty years that through media saturation we would get to a point where people were no longer easily able to distinguish between fact and fiction, myth and reality.
I think every indication is that we have arrived.
We have publishers putting out non-fiction books full of myths and made up stories.
The news media has moved through the infotainment stage to propaganda.
Carefully scripted shows are presented as "reality" teevee.
"Scientists" use scenes from films and teevee shows to support their arguments regarding social interaction as though it were representative real human interaction.
At the highest levels of government they are arguing that if it didn't kill you it wasn't torture.
Porn is obviously torture, but since the woman smiles and we assume she gets paid for her pain and humiliation, it's just another form of entertainment.
thebewilderness | 09.23.09 - 10:19 pm | #
yes there are alot of assholes in the world. and alot of bad porn. no shit. why not just come out and ask people to recommend good movies instead of saying all men, sex, porn and climaxes are negative, humiliating, slutty...(all the while saying you dont mean to say what your saying)
oh fer crissakes | 09.23.09 - 11:52 pm | #
and plenty of films do show women being pleased. hell the summer indie hit 'away we go' opens with the young husband going down on his wife.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:06 am | #
why not just come out and ask people to recommend good movies instead of saying all men, sex, porn and climaxes are negative, humiliating, slutty...(all the while saying you dont mean to say what your saying)
You talking to me? I didn't say any of those things, actually. In particular, that "all" word wasn't used.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 12:19 am | #
"porn is called porn and not art, say, for the very reason that it cuts out everything but the purely instrumental use of another person (or persons) for the purpose of getting an orgasm."
and there you have it.
first rather than just saying that most porn is bad art you claim that all porn is no form of art at all.
see what I mean about that too broad brush? if you were painting windows you'd be all over the glass.
art: is simply self expression.
thats all. it might be good or bad, simple or complex, stupid or genius, found, folk, modern, abstract...natural, semantic, sexual...but pretty much everything is art.
art is a neutral word. it requires adjectives. people make the same mistake with the word 'love'.
next you claim that no erotic representation has existed in the history of humankind which depics both sex and compassion. pretty sweeping wouldnt you say.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:28 am | #
yes I'm talking to 'you'. although yes you using anothers quotes.
and I dont mean to be mean, just short and clear.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:30 am | #
...(all the while saying you dont mean to say what your saying)
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:33 am | #
Gravatar 'you' meaning your post.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:33 am | #
Gravatar anyhoo..have a nice night. i'm just passing thru, didnt mean to ring the bell or wake the dog.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:35 am | #
Gravatar ...and 'wake the dog' was a figure of speech, um...which had nothing to do with you [woman starts beating stranger with cast iron frying pan]
no. no. really it was just a non-gender oriented figure of...oh fuck it..[stranger starts running]
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:45 am | #
oh fer appears to be one of those I was just speaking of who cannot tell the difference between scripted behavior on film and actual human behavior on film.
I don't imagine they can tell the difference between a woman smiling while under threat and a woman smiling who is pleased either.
thebewilderness | 09.24.09 - 1:01 am | #
Porn is the graphic representation of the torture and rape of women.
Sometimes men and children as well.
Kinda hard to see past that to some dehumanized art concept.
thebewilderness | 09.24.09 - 1:05 am | #
wow. you poor thing. your head must hurt
No. Porn is the graphic representation of sex. thats all.
if its good sex its good porn if its bad sex its bad porn.
oh fer crisspybacon | 09.24.09 - 1:22 am | #
oh theres my bus...[wanders off]
oh fer crisspybacon | 09.24.09 - 1:27 am | #
"too many confuse...images with real [life]."
yes. and?
thats the story of:
-film
-IKEA instructions
-bible
-constitution
-songs
-dance
-...
yet you know what? Some are not confused. And some media are not corrupted. so theres that.
and cheese raviolis...they solve everything. with some fresh chopped tomatoes spinach and seasalt. (good with eggs too) mmmm.
oh fer crisspybacon | 09.24.09 - 1:47 am | #
note: I understand your general concern about male-centeredness of things as illustrated in the classic cartoon of two women talking about actually finding a movie in which the women discuss something other than men (see link).
I understand male-centeredness can be a problem in life, in films, and specifically in films with sexual content. Firstly many people who are men are inconsiderate. Secondly everyone wants to be able to see people like themselves in life, in films, and in films with sexual content. Yet the larger problem is inconsiderate people. after all do you like inconsiderate women? hopefully not. thats all
http://petitesophist.blogspot.co...08/09/ rule.html
oh fer crisspybacon | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 10:28 am | #
"Even mainstream movies and tv ignore straight female sexual desire. The men get an ordinary looking man to identify with and a gorgeous female love interest for the male character and the audience to ogle. The actress playing the love interest is often much younger as well."
Oh, I know! It's everywhere, even game shows. On Wheel of Fortune, men get Vanna White to look at, and women get Pat Sajak. On Deal or No Deal, men get 50(?) beautiful, skimpy models to ogle, and women get one middle-aged bald guy to look at. It's the same situation with most news anchors, too.
catgirl | 09.24.09 - 10:35 am | #
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ziz...yphus/34585797/
oh fer crisspybacon | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 10:41 am | #
Porn is the graphic representation of the torture and rape of women.
Sometimes men and children as well.
No. Porn is the graphic representation of sex. thats all.
This is my biggest problem with the Great Porn Debate.
There doesn't seem to be any agreement as to how to decide whether a particular film/video/etc. is pornography or not, and the participants (including, unfortunately, Echidne) don't ever bother to say how they define "pornography." Everyone seems to assume that everybody already knows what pornography is, but they all apparently assume something different. It makes the whole discussion sound a bit psychotic.
For example, if you use the first definition quoted above, it's hard to imagine how there could even be such a thing as "feminist pornography."
I also sometimes get the impression that some participants are happy to be vague as to what they mean, so that the word can mean whatever is most convenient for them at the moment.
AMM | 09.24.09 - 10:49 am | #
Great post, Echidne. I agree with your point, which I haven't seen elsewhere, that the presence of feminist porn doesn't solve the problem if the young consumers are going to be consuming the other kind.
I've seen some porn scripts and yes, most do depict the (almost always female) recipient of facials or anal sex as being used or being a slut to be dehumanized. Whether or not the actress is consenting doesn't make this a good message.
octogalore | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 12:29 pm | #
AMM, the second definition applies to porn in theory. The first definition applies to porn in practice.
Kali | 09.24.09 - 12:32 pm | #
In light of the fact that human trafficking is at epidemic proportions, how does anyone know if the porn they watch has not been made by women or girls forced into these acts? This would make anyone buying or watching this garbage an accessory to a crime, as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently ethics, morals, and a personal conscience are things we all extract and put on a shelf when it comes to this "degradation-of-women" type of entertainment. Men have their needs you know, therefore cannot be held responsible...
EL | 09.24.09 - 1:03 pm | #
amongst his/her flurry of noise making, oh fer makes one point I agree with:
"too many confuse...images with real [life]."
yes. and?
thats the story of:
-film
-IKEA instructions
-bible
-constitution
-songs
-dance
-...
I think the primary problem with porn consumption isn't that there is crap out there (there will always be crap) but that there is very little porn (or erotic art or whatever) that values women (and people in general). I agree completely with echidne that there is a real threat that bad porn can negatively influence young people's perception of sex... but if there is a true marketplace of ideas about sex people will not be brainwashed by a single distorted view. At that point they may have several views to choose from, but will abandon those that don't feel real in comparison. This would not eliminate the association between sexist porn and sexism (as those who are sexist will still seek out sexist porn - since it feels more "real" to them) but it could reduce causality - i.e. it could cut down on the possibility of misconceptions by naive people due to porn (by having less naive people).
As usual, talking to kids (and others) about such issues (love, sex, sexism, media, crime) could also help significantly. How many people, for example, are consumers of porn without fully realizing its common connection with sexual slavery and exploitation? Perhaps also porn needs to be more above ground - regulated like organic farming or other consumer products - so that a consumer could consciously choose porn confirmed to be free of criminal elements. Suppression only feeds oppression.
Roger | 09.24.09 - 3:10 pm | #
Everyone seems to assume that everybody already knows what pornography is, but they all apparently assume something different. It makes the whole discussion sound a bit psychotic.
For example, if you use the first definition quoted above, it's hard to imagine how there could even be such a thing as "feminist pornography."
I also sometimes get the impression that some participants are happy to be vague as to what they mean, so that the word can mean whatever is most convenient for them at the moment.
A good point. The meaning I attributed to porn when writing the post was what you would find if you seek what's called vanilla porn by some on the net. The sites are not making movies with a plot. They just show sexual acts of various types, and the vast majority of them are geared towards getting a straight man to orgasm, not towards other goals, artistic or not.
Those sites are not the ones which explicitly trade in pain, humiliation and suffering of women.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 4:02 pm | #
No. Porn is the graphic representation of sex. thats all.
if its good sex its good porn if its bad sex its bad porn.
Good sex for whom? Bad sex for whom? It's quite possible to show sex which is really good for one participant and really bad for another participant.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 4:04 pm | #
That, to me, is part of the problem with this argument.
The "good sex" idea is not about the actors, but rather about the viewer.
The actors are doing their job, purportedly voluntarily, for money. They are making a product for sale.
They may be making a good or bad product, but their pleasure in the process is beside the point.
The viewer decides if they have been deceived sufficiently to believe the actors are enjoying themselves.
It is called "suspending disbelief". We do it when we are reading or viewing a story that we know to be fiction.
It astonishes me the degree to which people will argue that what they choose to believe about what they see in a film is accurate, while what the people say who made the film is not.
thebewilderness | 09.24.09 - 5:02 pm | #
The viewer decides if they have been deceived sufficiently to believe the actors are enjoying themselves.
But in the actual porn it's not really even quite that. It's whether the viewer comes or not, ultimately, and that depends on how the actor playing the viewer's role appears to be enjoying it all. The other actor/actors are kind of like dildoes.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 5:32 pm | #
I believe it was Twisty who said, "if it's not degrading to women, then it's not porn".
Personally, I thought that was fairly accurate, as referring to intercourse with a pro-all-human slant as "erotic porn" or "feminist porn" misses the entire point of what most people have internalized nowadays when they hear the term "porn". It's one of those linguistic whatchmacallits, like pleasant murder or dry water.
The advantage to cease using the term "porn" and to begin using a new term when referring to pro-all-human intercourse is that it creates a definitively seperate space. That harmful crap is over there, wallow in the dirt all you want -- we'll be over here having lots of luscious pro-all-human sex. (Obviously, it needs a snazzier term than "pro-all-human" sex, but hopefully you get the idea.)
To me, "feminist porn" only sounds like a weaker version of regular porn.
m Andrea | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:19 pm | #
"Even though, from my perspective, the implicit argument---that women who have a lot of sex, or with a lot of men are sluts who deserve humiliation---is anti-sex. In other words, for all the sex in porn, much of it adheres to the "family values" narrative, where a sexual woman is used up and deserves nothing but abuse. Being truly pro-sex, in my view, means believing that women who have sex, a lot of sex, or a lot of partners do not forfeit a single ounce of their dignity or humanity. "
I am totally stealing that. And not giving Amanda a link back unless I am feeling extremely generous. Because normally she's a total handmaiden of the patriachy. And the people I am going to share that with, don't need yet another source of feminist lite.
m Andrea | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:28 pm | #
In most porn the "actor playing the viewers role" is the camera lens. Viewers prepared to view sex are accepting the role of voyeur. I hear a lot about the so-called "diversity" of porn, but when the sexuality of all consensual porn is exhibitionism that expands into everything else viewers see, I doubt true diversity can come from such a narrow starting point.
Voyeurism is a sex act, and 99% of people viewing porn 99% of the time don't get the permission of the people they're watching get fucked. Porn-watchers assume because of the fact of the filming that people in porn have given permission to everyone viewing them, but viewers don't learn their real names or seek to verify their willing involvement in porn.
The De Anza case was about a gang-rape at a party. Most people walking into a situation where eight men were gang-raping a drunken girl wouldn't stand by, watch, and decide to masturbate. Yet I guarantee that no small number of times porn users are getting their voyeuristic sex on they have done exactly that, walked into a situation where a woman was being raped by multiple men, assumed consent to their voyeurism where none is given, and started masturbating.
It's an acceptable area of concern that women might be pressured into accepting sex acts they find degrading or unpleasurable because of what's seen in pornography. However, people discussing this effect often gloss over that porn is used as a tool to "break in" prostitutes and that prostituted women endure more sexual violence prior to entering prostitution compared to the general populace. If the "average" women might be harmed by re-enacting porn with their boyfriends, then what terrible sufferings must prostituted women be experiencing as they endure triggering sexual violations by strange men while their pain is preserved on film forever. Research finds prostitutes who are filmed for porn have worse PTSD than unfilmed prostitutes partly due to a relentless, lifelong fear of limitless voyeurs of their shame.
Factor in the profit motive driving pornographers to hurt prostituted women in ways it doesn't drive boyfriends to hurt their girlfriends, and feminists should be seriously more concerned for prostituted women performing in porn than in “average” women being unfinancially pressured to imitate those non-recorded acts with their lovers.
sam | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:31 pm | #
How el bizzaro. I swear I posted two comments.
m Andrea | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:41 pm | #
Factor in the profit motive driving pornographers to hurt prostituted women in ways it doesn't drive boyfriends to hurt their girlfriends, and feminists should be seriously more concerned for prostituted women performing in porn than in “average” women being unfinancially pressured to imitate those non-recorded acts with their lovers.
These are good arguments for writing more about how prostitutes are treated. But it is not necessary (or even desirable, from my point of view) to rank the concerns in a particular way. For one thing, changes in general norms about what sex means for women affect billions of women if they are successful. That's why the possibility of such changes needs to be discussed.
This doesn't mean that what actually happens to unwilling or mistreated participants in the filming of porn wouldn't be an outrage of a totally different level, for each individual so affected.
In other words, work needs to be done in more than one direction.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:42 pm | #
Also, if the general ideas about what sex is become more woman-loathing (to use a word I know might be attacked), then one of the consequences of that is that the female actors in porn will face ever worsening treatments, too
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:44 pm | #
I agree the problem is multifaceted, and I brought that part of it up because the blogger discussing only porn's harm to non-porn women said in response to her boyfriend's claim the 'actresses' are all consenting, "DUH, I KNOW THAT." [sic]
She doesn't know that. There are many excellent reasons for a feminist discussing the harms of porn to conclude opposite-wise about the women displayed in it that went unheeded.
sam | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 8:43 pm | #
Maybe it's hopeless, as m'Andrea sez, to rescue the term "porn" with any qualifier. Films deliberately designed to excite men and women to orgasm have definitely gotten nastier and nastier (and less and less sexy as a result, IMO) over the years, as Echidne sez.
We definitely need to find a better word for genuine eroticism than pro-all-human tho.
I think that there's a major brainwash problem here. When you , me, or one, or anybody watches sexually exciting images, very deep structures of the psyche get activated. Otherwise, what's the point.
Mix that with the sadism -- a nice exact term -- that Echidne is describing, and you combine an open read-write channel to program the brain, on one hand, with a visual or situational trigger to activate sadism in other (real sex) circumstances on the other. In short you're both associating erotic energy with sadistic energy and programming erotic situations to trigger sadistic scripts.
You could do it in a lab and I'd bet a good chili dog you'd get reproducible results.
And that really stinks for us as a society. Take something good and fundamental like sex. Link it to something nasty and counterproductive like sadism. Program it deep into the limbic systems of young and old. In a couple of generations sex could very well come to "mean" sadism.
Some very smart people have already suggested that, operationally, the equation already holds (Andrea Dworkin, I'm remembering you). And while I don't think it's come to that in individual lives, I can see her point when looking thru a larger social lens.
Not all sexual film is like that. The single greatest predictor in a sex film of sadism versus what I think of as genuine eroticism is, in my amateur opinion ...
The gender of the filmmaker.
Now who would've guessed that.
The second greatest is the presence or absence of men in the film.
It makes me think about the screwfly solution.
Or the Screwtape solution. It's an unpleasant note when some people can get rich really messing up the brains of masses of other people.
heraclitus | 09.24.09 - 10:08 pm | #
It is also important to remember that the effects of pornography are not just limited to the bedroom. Once you are willing to act sadistically to another person to get off the old hard on when else will you start to think (if you don't already) that the ends, what you want, are more important to the means? It will spread through the rest of the relationship, sex is not cut off from that.
It is not just the one relationship either. When people say "oh, it only effects his girlfriend/wife/friendw/bennies they have this consensual thing going on,(or, oh, it is no big deal he only does it for a wank by himself)" ignoring whatever you think about consent, it is ignoring that once a man is used to treating/viewing a woman/women in a specific way what is to stop him from having the line blurred between that and say everywhere else. Like I said, just because that door to the bedroom is closed doesn't mean it can't get out. Like men who insult women with porn tropes, or even something they don't think is an insult, or even just joking "among friends." So even if you have this great consensual thing with your boyfriend or whatever, no one else consented. No one else consented to up the skirt "shots" with cellphones, being stereotyped due to porn tropes (coed sluts, sexy librarian, hot lesbian, etc).
awfisticufferatlarge | 09.24.09 - 10:55 pm | #
No. Porn is the graphic representation of sex. thats all.
if its good sex its good porn if its bad sex its bad porn.
Good sex doesn't necessarily make for good TV. I mean, much of what I find pleasurable wouldn't show up well on film because someone's head would be in the way.
zuzu | Homepage | 09.25.09 - 12:25 am | #
When people say "oh, it only effects his girlfriend/wife/ ..., it is ignoring that once a man is used to treating/viewing a woman/women in a specific way, what is to stop him from having the line blurred between that and ... everywhere else?
It's the same reason it's a good idea to prohibit violence against even people you think deserve it -- because once you start giving people permission to do awful things to one set of people, who's to say they'll stop there? Or, as I like to say, "if they'll do it to anyone, they'll do it to anyone."
Wehret den Anfaengen!
AMM | 09.25.09 - 10:10 am | #
I've kept this post and comment thread open in my browser for days now, and keep re-reading, because there is so much here that is very well-said.
Helen Huntingdon | 09.26.09 - 11:41 am | #
" ... as the mother of 3 boys ... "
"What if you grow up believing that women should enjoy sperm in their eyes, to be sexual beings?"]
On Porn, Sex And Pincushions
It has been much on my mind because the recent let's-bash-women happiness study did not analyze the impact of the enormous increase on Internet porn on women's and men's happiness gap. And because of something Amanda (from whom I stole that pincushion part in the title) at Pandagon wrote recently:
With that in mind, I want to link this excellent post by Becky Sharper, who has a wonderful sense of irreverence in the face of people who are going to give you the least generous read imaginable when you suggest that perhaps porn isn't all roses and fountains of gold. I hesitate to open this can of worms, because when I pointed out that the facial exists in porn as a symbolic marker of female degradation, many, many, many people deliberately misread me, claiming that I said that coming on the outside was wrong, or that if any touched your face, it was wrong, or that you're a bad person if you like being degraded in bed. All I said was that it's funny to me that something that is overtly about employing the "this slut deserves to be humiliated" trope in porn gets to send its message to an audience that wants to hear negative things about sexual women, and the rest of us will pretend that they just didn't say that.
Even though, from my perspective, the implicit argument---that women who have a lot of sex, or with a lot of men are sluts who deserve humiliation---is anti-sex. In other words, for all the sex in porn, much of it adheres to the "family values" narrative, where a sexual woman is used up and deserves nothing but abuse. Being truly pro-sex, in my view, means believing that women who have sex, a lot of sex, or a lot of partners do not forfeit a single ounce of their dignity or humanity.
Becky notes that the heavy use of anal sex in porn has resulted in an uptick in anal sex in real life. And though I know a good half of the commenters will pretend I didn't say this: This isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. Just like coming on the outside is a fine way to spice things up, anal sex also can be a lot of fun for straight couples in the right circumstances. But porn morphs rather mundane sex acts into tropes about hurting and humiliating women, and then those tropes are repeated in bedrooms for that purpose. The problem with this is that many of the women engaging in these deliberately humiliating behaviors don't get off on being submissives or being degraded. They're doing it just because they thing that's what sex is.
I repeat: like coming on the outside, there's a way to do anal sex that isn't about hurting, humiliating, and punishing a sexual woman. (If only I knew the secret number of times to repeat to avoid being misread!) There are entire excellent books about it, and whole lines of sex toys that exist solely to exploit the sensitivity of that area of the body. In fact, straight men can put things up their butt and like it, too! This is not being questioned. (I predict 5 comments before someone suggests I questioned this.)
But porn doesn't show anal sex in the pro-woman way that many practice it, where there's an attempt to warm you up, make you comfortable, go slow, and stop if there's any discomfort. Like Becky says:
Problem is, hetero mainstream porn isn't depicting the kind of careful, attentive interaction that makes anal sex pleasurable. In fact, in porn there's no attention paid to the woman's pleasure--or even her comfort--at all. The male actors just plunge in and start pounding.
Emphasis mine.
Isn't it awesome how anyone criticizing porn must now explain very carefully why that criticism is not being anti-sex? But Amanda is brave, so she does the necessary work anyway.
I have written about some of my concerns earlier, but they are worth repeating, especially as I'm a little bit clearer about what I don't like when it comes to the extremely wide-spread use of porn. Here's the list:
1. I worry that too many confuse porn images with real actual human sex, that especially young viewers of porn go away with the expectation that real sex will be like porn. Yet porn is called porn and not art, say, for the very reason that it cuts out everything but the purely instrumental use of another person (or persons) for the purpose of getting an orgasm. I'm sure many people can make that distinction, especially among older users of porn who have also had real-life sex. But what happens if porn images are, in essence, your education in sexuality? What if you grow up believing that women should enjoy sperm in their eyes, to be sexual beings?
2. Hence my concern over the male-centeredness of heterosexual porn. That market is geared towards men and the women in the porn are there to do things that will get men off. If some men like humiliating women in bed, then that's what the female porn actors pretend that they will like. No, you don't need to use lube before plunging into my anus (a vulnerable part of the body, by the way, in the medical sense). Yes, please, urinate all over me. And so on.
That you can find all kinds of porn, even feminist porn, doesn't negate this problem at all. Because if most men, including the very young men, watch male-centered porn (and not feminist porn, say) then that's what their idea of sex will become: Something in which women don't have to be asked what they want, and in which women who don't want anal plunging or sperm all over their faces are somehow anti-sex or frigid. Because the women in porn like it!
3. If I am correct about all this, the impact of porn might be to make both young men and women to equate sex with what goes on in male-centered porn. I don't know if I am correct, but I see something of this sort taking place in discussions about sex on the Internet (and in the insults on political comments threads: Swallow, bitch, swallow). To even suggest that what is being talked about is male-centered heterosexual porn and not sex in general labels you as an anti-sex prude.
To re-frame this in feminist terms: I worry what porn is doing to the way young heterosexual women learn about sexuality. Is it just a service you provide men? Suck a lot of cock, let them come on your face or in your ass? Even if this is not what your body actually likes to do?
Comments (47) | Trackback (0)
Posted by: echidne / 9/23/2009 02:07:00 PM
I'm so glad you wrote this.
Suzie | Homepage | 09.23.09 - 4:32 pm | #
I worry about this too, as the mother of 3 boys. The lack of awareness of the woman's enjoyment in most video porn is appalling. I don't want their formative understanding of sex to be the distorted, frequently-misogynistic view presented by porn.
My only hope is in being clear and direct, to explain that porn may have its place, but the overwhelming emphasis on domination over women makes it cancerous to creating a real, healthy relationship with a woman.
Sam-I-am | Homepage | 09.23.09 - 5:17 pm | #
To re-frame this in feminist terms: I worry what porn is doing to the way young heterosexual women learn about sexuality. Is it just a service you provide men? Suck a lot of cock, let them come on your face or in your ass? Even if this is not what your body actually likes to do?
And then even worse, those same young women become receptive to the cultural conservative notion that sex is icky and women should hate it because, well, who likes sperm in your eye? Clearly only really sick people would like that, right? Worse and worse.
Gavel Down | 09.23.09 - 5:46 pm | #
I hate it that so many people think that porn is an accurate representation of sex. It's so confusing to me that men don't realize that the women in porn are being paid to act a certain way and that may not reflect the actual desires of the woman. I've met men who were genuinely shocked and surprised that I wanted to watch them take their clothes off or, ya know, enjoy sex for myself.
In porn, women are hot and men are generally mediocre because they're basically just placeholders. I don't watch much straight porn becuase the men simply aren't that hot. Even in the cases where the man is as hot as the woman, the camera is more focused on the woman. So of course men interpret this as "women don't like porn, and they must not like sex". The problem is that porn just isn't made for women.
I also get really frustrated about the anal sex thing. I'm sure some people like it and that's great for them, but I'm just no interested in doing it. However, at least half of the guys I hook up with insist that if I would just let them shove their magical penis up there, I would suddenly like it. I have no doubt that porn is responsible for this attitude. I'm very pro-sex and that's exactly why I'm not a big fan of the current state of porn. I like sex to be enjoyable for everyone involved, rather than a favor that one person does for another without enjoyment or pleasure.
catgirl | 09.23.09 - 5:47 pm | #
Even mainstream movies and tv ignore straight female sexual desire. The men get an ordinary looking man to identify with and a gorgeous female love interest for the male character and the audience to ogle. The actress playing the love interest is often much younger as well.
Sometimes there are movies with handsome leading men, but the camera doesn't film them the way it does with women, making sure you get a nice long look at the chest and butt, having them wear skimpy clothes. Even in R rated sex scenes the focus is on the woman. We get to see her and not him undressing, moaning, etc.
anna | 09.23.09 - 7:09 pm | #
Another scary thing: Many (most? all?) of our desires are formed from experiencing the world. Boys and girls who see porn (or have contact with porn culture) may catch on that this is supposed to be exciting and arousing, but is forbidden to them. Desires will be formed that are hard to undo.
Suzie | Homepage | 09.23.09 - 8:33 pm | #
Beautifully, sadly written.
I've a 13 year old daughter who is just on the cusp of curiosity. I dread the impression that she'll get from the subhumanizing, omnipresent porn. Her sexuality, self-esteem, and health of her future relationships can be so casually destroyed my the mindless porno-bulemia of our culture.
ColoKate | 09.23.09 - 10:18 pm | #
We have been worrying and fretting for fifty years that through media saturation we would get to a point where people were no longer easily able to distinguish between fact and fiction, myth and reality.
I think every indication is that we have arrived.
We have publishers putting out non-fiction books full of myths and made up stories.
The news media has moved through the infotainment stage to propaganda.
Carefully scripted shows are presented as "reality" teevee.
"Scientists" use scenes from films and teevee shows to support their arguments regarding social interaction as though it were representative real human interaction.
At the highest levels of government they are arguing that if it didn't kill you it wasn't torture.
Porn is obviously torture, but since the woman smiles and we assume she gets paid for her pain and humiliation, it's just another form of entertainment.
thebewilderness | 09.23.09 - 10:19 pm | #
yes there are alot of assholes in the world. and alot of bad porn. no shit. why not just come out and ask people to recommend good movies instead of saying all men, sex, porn and climaxes are negative, humiliating, slutty...(all the while saying you dont mean to say what your saying)
oh fer crissakes | 09.23.09 - 11:52 pm | #
and plenty of films do show women being pleased. hell the summer indie hit 'away we go' opens with the young husband going down on his wife.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:06 am | #
why not just come out and ask people to recommend good movies instead of saying all men, sex, porn and climaxes are negative, humiliating, slutty...(all the while saying you dont mean to say what your saying)
You talking to me? I didn't say any of those things, actually. In particular, that "all" word wasn't used.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 12:19 am | #
"porn is called porn and not art, say, for the very reason that it cuts out everything but the purely instrumental use of another person (or persons) for the purpose of getting an orgasm."
and there you have it.
first rather than just saying that most porn is bad art you claim that all porn is no form of art at all.
see what I mean about that too broad brush? if you were painting windows you'd be all over the glass.
art: is simply self expression.
thats all. it might be good or bad, simple or complex, stupid or genius, found, folk, modern, abstract...natural, semantic, sexual...but pretty much everything is art.
art is a neutral word. it requires adjectives. people make the same mistake with the word 'love'.
next you claim that no erotic representation has existed in the history of humankind which depics both sex and compassion. pretty sweeping wouldnt you say.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:28 am | #
yes I'm talking to 'you'. although yes you using anothers quotes.
and I dont mean to be mean, just short and clear.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:30 am | #
...(all the while saying you dont mean to say what your saying)
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:33 am | #
Gravatar 'you' meaning your post.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:33 am | #
Gravatar anyhoo..have a nice night. i'm just passing thru, didnt mean to ring the bell or wake the dog.
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:35 am | #
Gravatar ...and 'wake the dog' was a figure of speech, um...which had nothing to do with you [woman starts beating stranger with cast iron frying pan]
no. no. really it was just a non-gender oriented figure of...oh fuck it..[stranger starts running]
oh fer crissakes | 09.24.09 - 12:45 am | #
oh fer appears to be one of those I was just speaking of who cannot tell the difference between scripted behavior on film and actual human behavior on film.
I don't imagine they can tell the difference between a woman smiling while under threat and a woman smiling who is pleased either.
thebewilderness | 09.24.09 - 1:01 am | #
Porn is the graphic representation of the torture and rape of women.
Sometimes men and children as well.
Kinda hard to see past that to some dehumanized art concept.
thebewilderness | 09.24.09 - 1:05 am | #
wow. you poor thing. your head must hurt
No. Porn is the graphic representation of sex. thats all.
if its good sex its good porn if its bad sex its bad porn.
oh fer crisspybacon | 09.24.09 - 1:22 am | #
oh theres my bus...[wanders off]
oh fer crisspybacon | 09.24.09 - 1:27 am | #
"too many confuse...images with real [life]."
yes. and?
thats the story of:
-film
-IKEA instructions
-bible
-constitution
-songs
-dance
-...
yet you know what? Some are not confused. And some media are not corrupted. so theres that.
and cheese raviolis...they solve everything. with some fresh chopped tomatoes spinach and seasalt. (good with eggs too) mmmm.
oh fer crisspybacon | 09.24.09 - 1:47 am | #
note: I understand your general concern about male-centeredness of things as illustrated in the classic cartoon of two women talking about actually finding a movie in which the women discuss something other than men (see link).
I understand male-centeredness can be a problem in life, in films, and specifically in films with sexual content. Firstly many people who are men are inconsiderate. Secondly everyone wants to be able to see people like themselves in life, in films, and in films with sexual content. Yet the larger problem is inconsiderate people. after all do you like inconsiderate women? hopefully not. thats all
http://petitesophist.blogspot.co...08/09/ rule.html
oh fer crisspybacon | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 10:28 am | #
"Even mainstream movies and tv ignore straight female sexual desire. The men get an ordinary looking man to identify with and a gorgeous female love interest for the male character and the audience to ogle. The actress playing the love interest is often much younger as well."
Oh, I know! It's everywhere, even game shows. On Wheel of Fortune, men get Vanna White to look at, and women get Pat Sajak. On Deal or No Deal, men get 50(?) beautiful, skimpy models to ogle, and women get one middle-aged bald guy to look at. It's the same situation with most news anchors, too.
catgirl | 09.24.09 - 10:35 am | #
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ziz...yphus/34585797/
oh fer crisspybacon | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 10:41 am | #
Porn is the graphic representation of the torture and rape of women.
Sometimes men and children as well.
No. Porn is the graphic representation of sex. thats all.
This is my biggest problem with the Great Porn Debate.
There doesn't seem to be any agreement as to how to decide whether a particular film/video/etc. is pornography or not, and the participants (including, unfortunately, Echidne) don't ever bother to say how they define "pornography." Everyone seems to assume that everybody already knows what pornography is, but they all apparently assume something different. It makes the whole discussion sound a bit psychotic.
For example, if you use the first definition quoted above, it's hard to imagine how there could even be such a thing as "feminist pornography."
I also sometimes get the impression that some participants are happy to be vague as to what they mean, so that the word can mean whatever is most convenient for them at the moment.
AMM | 09.24.09 - 10:49 am | #
Great post, Echidne. I agree with your point, which I haven't seen elsewhere, that the presence of feminist porn doesn't solve the problem if the young consumers are going to be consuming the other kind.
I've seen some porn scripts and yes, most do depict the (almost always female) recipient of facials or anal sex as being used or being a slut to be dehumanized. Whether or not the actress is consenting doesn't make this a good message.
octogalore | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 12:29 pm | #
AMM, the second definition applies to porn in theory. The first definition applies to porn in practice.
Kali | 09.24.09 - 12:32 pm | #
In light of the fact that human trafficking is at epidemic proportions, how does anyone know if the porn they watch has not been made by women or girls forced into these acts? This would make anyone buying or watching this garbage an accessory to a crime, as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently ethics, morals, and a personal conscience are things we all extract and put on a shelf when it comes to this "degradation-of-women" type of entertainment. Men have their needs you know, therefore cannot be held responsible...
EL | 09.24.09 - 1:03 pm | #
amongst his/her flurry of noise making, oh fer makes one point I agree with:
"too many confuse...images with real [life]."
yes. and?
thats the story of:
-film
-IKEA instructions
-bible
-constitution
-songs
-dance
-...
I think the primary problem with porn consumption isn't that there is crap out there (there will always be crap) but that there is very little porn (or erotic art or whatever) that values women (and people in general). I agree completely with echidne that there is a real threat that bad porn can negatively influence young people's perception of sex... but if there is a true marketplace of ideas about sex people will not be brainwashed by a single distorted view. At that point they may have several views to choose from, but will abandon those that don't feel real in comparison. This would not eliminate the association between sexist porn and sexism (as those who are sexist will still seek out sexist porn - since it feels more "real" to them) but it could reduce causality - i.e. it could cut down on the possibility of misconceptions by naive people due to porn (by having less naive people).
As usual, talking to kids (and others) about such issues (love, sex, sexism, media, crime) could also help significantly. How many people, for example, are consumers of porn without fully realizing its common connection with sexual slavery and exploitation? Perhaps also porn needs to be more above ground - regulated like organic farming or other consumer products - so that a consumer could consciously choose porn confirmed to be free of criminal elements. Suppression only feeds oppression.
Roger | 09.24.09 - 3:10 pm | #
Everyone seems to assume that everybody already knows what pornography is, but they all apparently assume something different. It makes the whole discussion sound a bit psychotic.
For example, if you use the first definition quoted above, it's hard to imagine how there could even be such a thing as "feminist pornography."
I also sometimes get the impression that some participants are happy to be vague as to what they mean, so that the word can mean whatever is most convenient for them at the moment.
A good point. The meaning I attributed to porn when writing the post was what you would find if you seek what's called vanilla porn by some on the net. The sites are not making movies with a plot. They just show sexual acts of various types, and the vast majority of them are geared towards getting a straight man to orgasm, not towards other goals, artistic or not.
Those sites are not the ones which explicitly trade in pain, humiliation and suffering of women.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 4:02 pm | #
No. Porn is the graphic representation of sex. thats all.
if its good sex its good porn if its bad sex its bad porn.
Good sex for whom? Bad sex for whom? It's quite possible to show sex which is really good for one participant and really bad for another participant.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 4:04 pm | #
That, to me, is part of the problem with this argument.
The "good sex" idea is not about the actors, but rather about the viewer.
The actors are doing their job, purportedly voluntarily, for money. They are making a product for sale.
They may be making a good or bad product, but their pleasure in the process is beside the point.
The viewer decides if they have been deceived sufficiently to believe the actors are enjoying themselves.
It is called "suspending disbelief". We do it when we are reading or viewing a story that we know to be fiction.
It astonishes me the degree to which people will argue that what they choose to believe about what they see in a film is accurate, while what the people say who made the film is not.
thebewilderness | 09.24.09 - 5:02 pm | #
The viewer decides if they have been deceived sufficiently to believe the actors are enjoying themselves.
But in the actual porn it's not really even quite that. It's whether the viewer comes or not, ultimately, and that depends on how the actor playing the viewer's role appears to be enjoying it all. The other actor/actors are kind of like dildoes.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 5:32 pm | #
I believe it was Twisty who said, "if it's not degrading to women, then it's not porn".
Personally, I thought that was fairly accurate, as referring to intercourse with a pro-all-human slant as "erotic porn" or "feminist porn" misses the entire point of what most people have internalized nowadays when they hear the term "porn". It's one of those linguistic whatchmacallits, like pleasant murder or dry water.
The advantage to cease using the term "porn" and to begin using a new term when referring to pro-all-human intercourse is that it creates a definitively seperate space. That harmful crap is over there, wallow in the dirt all you want -- we'll be over here having lots of luscious pro-all-human sex. (Obviously, it needs a snazzier term than "pro-all-human" sex, but hopefully you get the idea.)
To me, "feminist porn" only sounds like a weaker version of regular porn.
m Andrea | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:19 pm | #
"Even though, from my perspective, the implicit argument---that women who have a lot of sex, or with a lot of men are sluts who deserve humiliation---is anti-sex. In other words, for all the sex in porn, much of it adheres to the "family values" narrative, where a sexual woman is used up and deserves nothing but abuse. Being truly pro-sex, in my view, means believing that women who have sex, a lot of sex, or a lot of partners do not forfeit a single ounce of their dignity or humanity. "
I am totally stealing that. And not giving Amanda a link back unless I am feeling extremely generous. Because normally she's a total handmaiden of the patriachy. And the people I am going to share that with, don't need yet another source of feminist lite.
m Andrea | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:28 pm | #
In most porn the "actor playing the viewers role" is the camera lens. Viewers prepared to view sex are accepting the role of voyeur. I hear a lot about the so-called "diversity" of porn, but when the sexuality of all consensual porn is exhibitionism that expands into everything else viewers see, I doubt true diversity can come from such a narrow starting point.
Voyeurism is a sex act, and 99% of people viewing porn 99% of the time don't get the permission of the people they're watching get fucked. Porn-watchers assume because of the fact of the filming that people in porn have given permission to everyone viewing them, but viewers don't learn their real names or seek to verify their willing involvement in porn.
The De Anza case was about a gang-rape at a party. Most people walking into a situation where eight men were gang-raping a drunken girl wouldn't stand by, watch, and decide to masturbate. Yet I guarantee that no small number of times porn users are getting their voyeuristic sex on they have done exactly that, walked into a situation where a woman was being raped by multiple men, assumed consent to their voyeurism where none is given, and started masturbating.
It's an acceptable area of concern that women might be pressured into accepting sex acts they find degrading or unpleasurable because of what's seen in pornography. However, people discussing this effect often gloss over that porn is used as a tool to "break in" prostitutes and that prostituted women endure more sexual violence prior to entering prostitution compared to the general populace. If the "average" women might be harmed by re-enacting porn with their boyfriends, then what terrible sufferings must prostituted women be experiencing as they endure triggering sexual violations by strange men while their pain is preserved on film forever. Research finds prostitutes who are filmed for porn have worse PTSD than unfilmed prostitutes partly due to a relentless, lifelong fear of limitless voyeurs of their shame.
Factor in the profit motive driving pornographers to hurt prostituted women in ways it doesn't drive boyfriends to hurt their girlfriends, and feminists should be seriously more concerned for prostituted women performing in porn than in “average” women being unfinancially pressured to imitate those non-recorded acts with their lovers.
sam | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:31 pm | #
How el bizzaro. I swear I posted two comments.
m Andrea | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:41 pm | #
Factor in the profit motive driving pornographers to hurt prostituted women in ways it doesn't drive boyfriends to hurt their girlfriends, and feminists should be seriously more concerned for prostituted women performing in porn than in “average” women being unfinancially pressured to imitate those non-recorded acts with their lovers.
These are good arguments for writing more about how prostitutes are treated. But it is not necessary (or even desirable, from my point of view) to rank the concerns in a particular way. For one thing, changes in general norms about what sex means for women affect billions of women if they are successful. That's why the possibility of such changes needs to be discussed.
This doesn't mean that what actually happens to unwilling or mistreated participants in the filming of porn wouldn't be an outrage of a totally different level, for each individual so affected.
In other words, work needs to be done in more than one direction.
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:42 pm | #
Also, if the general ideas about what sex is become more woman-loathing (to use a word I know might be attacked), then one of the consequences of that is that the female actors in porn will face ever worsening treatments, too
Echidne | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 7:44 pm | #
I agree the problem is multifaceted, and I brought that part of it up because the blogger discussing only porn's harm to non-porn women said in response to her boyfriend's claim the 'actresses' are all consenting, "DUH, I KNOW THAT." [sic]
She doesn't know that. There are many excellent reasons for a feminist discussing the harms of porn to conclude opposite-wise about the women displayed in it that went unheeded.
sam | Homepage | 09.24.09 - 8:43 pm | #
Maybe it's hopeless, as m'Andrea sez, to rescue the term "porn" with any qualifier. Films deliberately designed to excite men and women to orgasm have definitely gotten nastier and nastier (and less and less sexy as a result, IMO) over the years, as Echidne sez.
We definitely need to find a better word for genuine eroticism than pro-all-human tho.
I think that there's a major brainwash problem here. When you , me, or one, or anybody watches sexually exciting images, very deep structures of the psyche get activated. Otherwise, what's the point.
Mix that with the sadism -- a nice exact term -- that Echidne is describing, and you combine an open read-write channel to program the brain, on one hand, with a visual or situational trigger to activate sadism in other (real sex) circumstances on the other. In short you're both associating erotic energy with sadistic energy and programming erotic situations to trigger sadistic scripts.
You could do it in a lab and I'd bet a good chili dog you'd get reproducible results.
And that really stinks for us as a society. Take something good and fundamental like sex. Link it to something nasty and counterproductive like sadism. Program it deep into the limbic systems of young and old. In a couple of generations sex could very well come to "mean" sadism.
Some very smart people have already suggested that, operationally, the equation already holds (Andrea Dworkin, I'm remembering you). And while I don't think it's come to that in individual lives, I can see her point when looking thru a larger social lens.
Not all sexual film is like that. The single greatest predictor in a sex film of sadism versus what I think of as genuine eroticism is, in my amateur opinion ...
The gender of the filmmaker.
Now who would've guessed that.
The second greatest is the presence or absence of men in the film.
It makes me think about the screwfly solution.
Or the Screwtape solution. It's an unpleasant note when some people can get rich really messing up the brains of masses of other people.
heraclitus | 09.24.09 - 10:08 pm | #
It is also important to remember that the effects of pornography are not just limited to the bedroom. Once you are willing to act sadistically to another person to get off the old hard on when else will you start to think (if you don't already) that the ends, what you want, are more important to the means? It will spread through the rest of the relationship, sex is not cut off from that.
It is not just the one relationship either. When people say "oh, it only effects his girlfriend/wife/friendw/bennies they have this consensual thing going on,(or, oh, it is no big deal he only does it for a wank by himself)" ignoring whatever you think about consent, it is ignoring that once a man is used to treating/viewing a woman/women in a specific way what is to stop him from having the line blurred between that and say everywhere else. Like I said, just because that door to the bedroom is closed doesn't mean it can't get out. Like men who insult women with porn tropes, or even something they don't think is an insult, or even just joking "among friends." So even if you have this great consensual thing with your boyfriend or whatever, no one else consented. No one else consented to up the skirt "shots" with cellphones, being stereotyped due to porn tropes (coed sluts, sexy librarian, hot lesbian, etc).
awfisticufferatlarge | 09.24.09 - 10:55 pm | #
No. Porn is the graphic representation of sex. thats all.
if its good sex its good porn if its bad sex its bad porn.
Good sex doesn't necessarily make for good TV. I mean, much of what I find pleasurable wouldn't show up well on film because someone's head would be in the way.
zuzu | Homepage | 09.25.09 - 12:25 am | #
When people say "oh, it only effects his girlfriend/wife/ ..., it is ignoring that once a man is used to treating/viewing a woman/women in a specific way, what is to stop him from having the line blurred between that and ... everywhere else?
It's the same reason it's a good idea to prohibit violence against even people you think deserve it -- because once you start giving people permission to do awful things to one set of people, who's to say they'll stop there? Or, as I like to say, "if they'll do it to anyone, they'll do it to anyone."
Wehret den Anfaengen!
AMM | 09.25.09 - 10:10 am | #
I've kept this post and comment thread open in my browser for days now, and keep re-reading, because there is so much here that is very well-said.
Helen Huntingdon | 09.26.09 - 11:41 am | #
09 August 2009
"""That's because a large portion of feminist scholars and activists are i) male – identified or ii) childless themselves and / or iii) the second wives of older men or iv) the partners of lesbian mothers or v) still carrying the culture's anti – mother belief systems or vi) well –meaning but just motherhood – ignorant and vii) so forth ––– so have a huge embarrassed problem with it themselves. It's not the gender – neutral, androgynous world they would prefer.
So ––– it's okay to demand that women who want to trot right back to work postpartum get facilitated in their efforts to do so, but there really is no desire or intention to facilitate women's wanting to actually BE with and nurture their children. Very cognitive dissonant.
The same thing comes up in the daycare / child care issue.
----------------------------
http://www.thelizlibrary.org
----------------------------
******
On 07 August 2009, c____ wrote:
I wish the breastfeeding issue was not only mentioned but publicly written about, discussed, and outraged against. This is one of those issues that when I've told people about it, most have simply not believed me. It seems to get no publicity at all.
c_____
*****
On 07 August 2009, l__ wrote:
Breastfeeding: Natural Protector Against Swine Flu
Cecilia is a lawyer. Why is there no mention in the article of the abomination of judges in child custody cases ordering mothers to stop breastfeeding in order to facilitate father's rights?
Why is there no mention in the article of the abomination of judges ordering women involuntarily to have to pump their breast milk like they were cows in order to facilitate men's exalted demands for playing mommy?
l__"""
So ––– it's okay to demand that women who want to trot right back to work postpartum get facilitated in their efforts to do so, but there really is no desire or intention to facilitate women's wanting to actually BE with and nurture their children. Very cognitive dissonant.
The same thing comes up in the daycare / child care issue.
----------------------------
http://www.thelizlibrary.org
----------------------------
******
On 07 August 2009, c____ wrote:
I wish the breastfeeding issue was not only mentioned but publicly written about, discussed, and outraged against. This is one of those issues that when I've told people about it, most have simply not believed me. It seems to get no publicity at all.
c_____
*****
On 07 August 2009, l__ wrote:
Breastfeeding: Natural Protector Against Swine Flu
Cecilia is a lawyer. Why is there no mention in the article of the abomination of judges in child custody cases ordering mothers to stop breastfeeding in order to facilitate father's rights?
Why is there no mention in the article of the abomination of judges ordering women involuntarily to have to pump their breast milk like they were cows in order to facilitate men's exalted demands for playing mommy?
l__"""
08 August 2009
“ … misogyny = ‘ ... an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.’ ... “
misogyny = " ... an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment." ...
whether in its gyms, its schoolhouses, its engineering curricula, its print and video media or inside its ... family – law courtrooms.
http://bluemaas.public.iastate.edu/chapter_27, pages 230 - 231 ...
Women at Risk
By BOB HERBERT
07 August 2009 // http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/opinion/08herbert.html?_r=1
"... there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.
One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.
... we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.
A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.
There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.
We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.
whether in its gyms, its schoolhouses, its engineering curricula, its print and video media or inside its ... family – law courtrooms.
http://bluemaas.public.iastate.edu/chapter_27, pages 230 - 231 ...
Women at Risk
By BOB HERBERT
07 August 2009 // http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/opinion/08herbert.html?_r=1
"... there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.
One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.
... we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.
A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.
There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.
We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.
25 July 2009
IF there at all has to be a mawwiage, and IF it at all has to be accomplished within any religion's venue, then ... then the Midwest’s Ms Jillian's blissful boogie is THE only way to get it going: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0 with "explanation" by another Midwesterner, a preacher - type person named mAAs ... of http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/news/2009/07/24/4290602.htm
19 July 2009
Haaaappy, Happy Birthday today, Grace Portia! -- Legion True
""" ... Grace Portia of the Listening College. She is my truest, my best friend; and when she does finally speak, she is sober, she is deliberate and she is measured. She does not speak with a tiny voice. I do well to listen to her, and that is what she says.""" -- Chapter 25, "Men of Conscience"
""" ... Grace Portia of the Listening College. She is my truest, my best friend; and when she does finally speak, she is sober, she is deliberate and she is measured. She does not speak with a tiny voice. I do well to listen to her, and that is what she says.""" -- Chapter 25, "Men of Conscience"
04 July 2009
14 June 2009
Sorry -- I’ve been away editing Chapter 27, that is, http://bluemAAs.public.iastate.edu/chapter_27
its 70 pages now posted ... and I’ll be back to blog very soon ... even as it is also on to the edits of the 104 pages (so far) of Chapter 28, "An Opera in Three Acts – But with Five Parts – – Act Three: Parts Four and Five."
-- -- as June's Full Moon wanes while its Ides and 2009's Summer Solstice ... wax on.
Blue
its 70 pages now posted ... and I’ll be back to blog very soon ... even as it is also on to the edits of the 104 pages (so far) of Chapter 28, "An Opera in Three Acts – But with Five Parts – – Act Three: Parts Four and Five."
-- -- as June's Full Moon wanes while its Ides and 2009's Summer Solstice ... wax on.
Blue
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