Pornography is Rape?!
 

I was doing some random reading on the Net when I came across this doozie:


"Pornography, like rape, is a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access, not to free sensuality from moralistic or parental inhibition. The staple of porn will always be the naked body, breasts and genitals exposed, because as man devised it, her naked body is the female's 'shame', her private parts the private property of man, while his are the ancient, holy, universal, patriarchal instrument of his power, his rule by force over her. Pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda." Susan Brownmiller
Against Our Will

Fortunately, the major trend in feminist theory is moving away from porn as a degradation of women to the position that porn can sometimes liberate women by viewing them as equal economic participants trading on their sexuality.

Personally, I often view the resistance to porn by old school feminists as hold overs of deep rooted Victorian morality that reduced women's sexuality to the level of property. As long as the model knows full well her rights and she signs a release...

go read some andrea dworkin :) fucking stupid cunts.

Andrea Dworkin... Another classic. I remember taking a Critical Studies class in college and going through some of her writings. Let me paraphrase -- "Women = Good / Victims Men = Bad / Oppressor" It basically boiled down to that. Very simplistic. Reductionist logic.

she quite literally is pathetic - http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/09/20/dworkin/

intercourse is oppression? the only type of sex she advocates is the woman sitting on top of the man rubbing her clitoris against his prone cock... i don't know why people give a shit about what she has to say on such topics.. she's a lesbian for fuck's sake - what possible merit does her ruminations have over heterosexual sex? she's as bad as the people she rails against that say lesbianism is wrong... *sigh*

im just glad that young feminists today have had a significant swing away from the "old guard" and see them as hysterical dinosaurs..

The sad part about the whole "Porn is rape" discourse is that it distorts notions of FREE WILL. If a person decides to strip for cash, as long as she/he is sobre, knew what he/she is doing, then there is no oppression--its a simple economic transaction.

It's all about penis-envy.

pornography is actually prostituion. sex for $.

Prostitution is where the person paying is paying for pleasure. This might apply somewhat to the POV stuff and the ExploitedTeens.com stuff, but not to the general run-of-the-mill porn, and certainly not to softcore, where no sex takes place.

You know, when I was in university i remember thinking that the problem with Women's Studies was that it was run by women.

My friends used to get pissed at me when i would declare that.

I'm a woman by the way

Slim

What's wrong with prostitution? As long as it's not forced (some guy forcing his gf to be a hooker), who cares?

The mainstream feminists are hypocritical. On the one hand, they argue that women should be able to make their own decisions as individuals. On the other hand, they want to take the individual woman's ability to have a choice away and impose their (the mainstream femininsts') choices on individual women. And to make matters worse, they appeal to a paternalistic government for protection, thus making the argument that women are like children.

Read a REAL feminist: Camille Paglia.

Camille Paglia ROCKS! She really schools the old line feminist overtly simplistic duality of MALE EVIL v. FEMALE VIRTUE by attacking their core assumptions. Like Ayn Rand, Paglia is a voice of common sense. To paraphrase... "You have FREE WILL... USE IT!"

UnseenWorld, the contradiction you noted applies to race as well as exemplified by using racial category to remedy the effects of racism.

Whats funny is if Porn oppresses women, why do they get paid more per scene????

:Graucho

Goddamed Feminists. In case they are too busy fingering themselves to realize it, WOMAN LOOK AT PORNO TOO. Something like a quarter of the visitors to my sites are woman looking for HARDCORE pictures because they enjoy looking at men and woman in a sexual situation.

They are also to stupid to notice the fact that there are lots of woman who DIRECT the fucking porn films men watch.

AND for all we know, the first rape may have been against a man.. If a group of woman got together and decided to have a big orgy with one guy, but couldn't find one willing to do it, they could just hit a guy in the head with a sack of potatoes and drag him away.

It's so fucking annoying hearing woman going on the way they do about how females are downgraded in society. THEY AREN'T. In case they haven't noticed, the west is full of woman in charge of major corporations, and sports teams and stuff. I seriously think they would have faired better in the early 19th century, where it was fit for a man to beat a woman with a stick no thicker then his thumb. That would fucking keep em in line.

I agree: We have a liberal government which has turned the Black community into people who feel like the children of the government and that the government can through patriarchal fiat and pressure eradicate racism, whereas in fact it fosters racism in the form of resentment. I feel this is a huge reason why more progress in terms of ending racism has not been made.

this is cute. you guys are so pretty when you're talking about feminism.

camille lapaglia's a cow.

Leave it to a woman to reply to a more intellectual woman by calling her a catty name. MEEEEOOOOWWW!!!!

no, we're not talking about feminism, we're talking about fanatics. I agree with feminist tenets.. hell my girlfriend of 8 years isn't even going to take my last name when we get married.. which im fine with.. it's the extreme feminists that are comically warped that we're taking potshot at here..

Yeah, I agree...it's like the time I was leaving the bank just as a woman was entering, and I held open the door for her, and she spat at me: "I'm perfectly capable of opening a door for myself, you pig!"
Hell, I would've held the door for a guy as well.

I would have to agree and disagree. Of course, pornography in and of itself is neither rape nor oppression. Nudity and sexuality should be celebrated instead of turned into things that are viewed puritanically as dirty and/or shameful. Since the current overriding cultural view IS puritinical the women in the porn industry bear the burdens of the notion that sexuality = immorality. They are seen (through mainstream eyes) as inferior. It is to their credit that many have overcome this and found power through the financial benefits. However there are at least as many who have not found the strength of their position (understandably) and thus I feel their is a good deal of eploitation still involved. Particularly when the choice involved in influenced by feelings of inferiority that are encouraged by society at large. That said, I think the ultimate solution is to destroy the negative views we (collectively) seem to have towards that which is the essence of life - sex. Equality through embracing sexuality.

Until women decide what they want and speak with one voice, perhaps they should have degrees of feminism broken down into easy-to-understand codes, and then have their code tattooed on their forheads. This way you'd know whether this is a female who can open her own door but still expects you to pay for dinner on a date, and so on.

When will the feminists understand that exploitation is an ambiguous word that can mean either to "to use" or "to use to the used party's detriment"? We are all exploited. My talent is exploited by those who buy photography from me. A model's beauty is exploited by the photographer. This is not exploitation in a bad way. On the other hand, if I take a picture of a girl that makes her look, not beautiful, sexy, and alluring, but like some kind of human Kleenex who is being merely used for sex, only to be thrown away (a good deal of the hard-core material is this way)...THAT does exploit in the bad sense.

One could say that the model is exploiting her own beauty and the business contact and acumen of the photographer to make a lot of money in a relatively short time. A lot of the girls I work with are students, and how many other ways are there where they could make $50/hr. They can make as much with me in three hours as they would make in about 20 hours working in a Starbucks, thus giving them 17 hours of study time.

If we all assume that women have a brain in their head, can weigh alternatives, and actually make the choices they want to make, then we can stop thinking of women as quasi-children incapable of thinking for themselves and therefore needing the government and feminists to protect them from themselves.

I bet if you did some digging you would find that things like this are always said by women. Women who blame men for everything bad in the world, Women who are so ugly the have never been laid in their lives, Women who have never and will never be married cause they say men are evil when the truth is they all run out the door the second she takes her clothes of LOL

She is just jealous that she cannot control men with her sexuality like so many other women do. :evil-laug

Men are the ones being exploited here. Just look how much $ they spend everyday to see a women without her clothes on and the "Goods" she is supplying costs her nothing and is always in stock :drinkup