Marilyn Monroe Died for Our Sins

I've just begun reading what looks to be an interesting book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell (Holt, 2004).  Churchwell's an academic, and her aim is not "to reveal the real woman behind the image, the truth behind the myth", but to tell "the story of the stories of Marilyn Monroe" (10), the mythology that has been constructed around her. 

So far, she's doing a good job.  For instance she notes the popular trope that Monroe was a "natural" woman, perhaps the last sex symbol to to be "'allowed' to be 'womanly': ... 'She would be told now to go on a strict diet and sent for liposuction, because we are no longer supposed to look womanly'" (28).  This particular version comes from an essay by Marge Piercy, who's one of my favorite writers, but flat wrong this time: she knows very well about whalebone corsets, and has written about the days of her mother's youth, when flappers bound their breasts and tried to have boyish figures.  As Churchwell shows, Monroe was attacked throughout her career for being messy, "overripe," overweight; Churchwell quotes a 1953 anti-fan letter which denounced Monroe for being fat, and "waddl[ing]" (29).  Once again, nostalgia is just amnesia turned around.

But this bit brought me up short:

Monroe also posed for what were then euphemistically referred to as "art" photographs, which was a code for pictures of nudes (the pinup would tend to be in a bathing suit, or at most seminude).  Art pictures were not pornographic; in fact, the difference between art photography and pornography at that point was whether pubic hair was visible; art pictures would reveal breasts, and perhaps nipples. (Playboy would make history when it first published a picture in which the model's pubic hair was barely visible, in January 1971) [36].

I'm not sure about this.  I think the distinction Churchwell wants to draw is between "pornography" and "obscenity."  Pornography is as imprecise a term as obscenity, of course, but I think Merriam-Webster's definitions would still fit the 40s and 50s, the period Churchwell is referring to: first,  "depictions of erotic behavior ... intended to cause sexual excitement"; second, any material that "depicts erotic behavior ... and is intended to cause sexual excitement."  The third is more metaphorical: "depictions of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction."  I suppose that even just standing there buck nekkid could count as "erotic behavior."  In this sense, even the pinups were pornographic.  But the big legal controversies of the twentieth century involved the legal category of obscenity, and many lines were drawn in the sand, only to be erased and replaced with newer ones.

What causes sexual excitement is highly variable and subjective, after all: those relatively chaste pinups of girls in swimsuits were meant to produce sexual excitement, so as to remind Our Boys what they were Fighting For.  It's a commonplace, which may or not be true (though it's supported by a famous episode in James Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922), that in the Old Days of long skirts, a man could be excited by the mere sight of a woman's ankle, even though it was covered in stockings.  Half a century later, young women still chanted, "We must / We must / We must work on our bust / We better / We better / So we can wear a sweater!"  A pair of breasts covered -- though not concealed; rather enhanced -- by bra and sweater could still excite a man.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that the European edition of Playboy, whose models had smaller breasts and bigger hips than the US ideal, also broke the pubic hair barrier before the American one did.  I could well be wrong.  And this isn't important to the interest of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, I'm just thinking.

Everything I Needed to Know About Porn I Learned from the Bible

It's a comfort to be reminded that not all the writers at The American Conservative are intelligent.  Daniel Larison isn't the only one who impresses me: look at this great piece on the know-nothing jingoism of the National Football League, for instance, or this one on the anarchism of Noam Chomsky.  You wouldn't often find such opinions published in the "liberal" media, let alone "conservative" outlets.

By contrast Rod Dreher, the convert from Roman Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy who first achieved notoriety for writing as CrunchyCon at Beliefnet before moving into the big time, falls into the willed know-nothing category, and he's not alone.  Same-sex marriage is one of his big concerns, but this past week he went after pornography.  It might be one of the few areas where Dreher agrees with Chomsky.

Dreher cites a report from "a Catholic magazine" (and for those who, inexplicably, "don't want to believe" such a partisan source, he provides another link to similar material: it's a pop-psychology site, which I don't trust any more than I trust the Vatican) that pornography changes our brains!  Neuroimaging proves it!!  And he concludes:

The more you entertain vice, the more hard-wired into your personality vice becomes. That’s not just a teaching from religious sages. In the case of pornography, at least, it’s neuroscience.

Actually, it's not science at all.  (Several of Dreher's commenters tried to educate him.)  Neuroimaging doesn't tell us all that much; it's useful for locating physical damage to the brain from tumors and other lesions, but no one is sure what the pretty pictures mean apart from such gross pathology.  Which doesn't, of course, keep scientists and laypeople alike from extrapolating wildly to advance their fantasies.

Robert A. Burton's A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind (St. Martin's, 2013), which I wrote about in October, has a lot of useful information about this.  True, what we learn affects the brain.  Burton wrote, for example: "Memorizing the street layout of London in order to become a licensed cab driver produces a dramatic increase in gray matter volume in the posterior hippocampus, a region of the brain known to be crucial for spatial navigation" (182), and reported:

In 2007, the Royal Society of England, in its flagship biological research journal, issued an extensive critique of twenty-five years of published results on brain size and behavior. “We all know that correlation does not demonstrate causation but causation is the context in which the results are invariably interpreted.” The society pointed out that neuroscientists disregard the lessons of history, remain ignorant of prior and present studies asking the same questions, generally persist with inadequate data collection, fail to carry out suitable confirming studies despite their availability, limit their correlations to those that confirm their hypotheses, and cite correlation as evidence of causation [188].

So the research Dreher cites should be taken with a grain of salt.  His sources also prattle about "addiction," another tricky area.  The notion of addiction to pornography, shopping, sex, and love was big in the 1980s and hasn't gone away, but it's dubious scientifically.  Even in the paradigm cases of opiates and other drugs, including alcohol, addiction is complex, and its physiological aspects are controversial.  But Dreher's authority, "psychiatrist Norman Doidge," has no doubts.

"The addictiveness of Internet pornography is not a metaphor,” he says. “Not all addictions are to drugs or alcohol. People can be seriously addicted to gambling, even to running,” he says. So why not pornography?

One giveaway about the addiction hustlers was that they borrowed Twelve-Step concepts and language, but broke with Alcoholics Anonymous by asserting the possibility of "normal" indulgence in sex and love.  According to AA, if you're an alcoholic, you can never drink again.  So if you're a love addict you can't love safely, but Robin Norwood, who popularized "love addiction" in her book Women Who Love Too Much -- still in print after 30 years, long after it was debunked -- promised that with therapy and a good man, you could love again in a healthy manner.  Ditto for the proponents of "sex addiction."  But they can't have it both ways.  If sex and love, or porn, are addictions like those people develop to drugs, then total abstinence is the only way to recover. and recovery will never be complete.  There's a good if controversial book on this subject, Stanton Peele's The Diseasing of America (Jossey-Bass, 1999), which is worth reading on general principles; it fits with other critiques of psychiatry and its satellite disciplines, like Mad Science by Stuart A. Kirk, Tomi Gomory, and David Cohen.

There are plenty of criticisms that can be made about pornography, from a vast range of perspectives.  The religious is only one of them, and I don't think it's a strong one, mainly because it's so conflicted.  Many Christian alarmists about porn have adopted cultural-feminist arguments about it, to the point of collaborating with Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon to pass anti-pornography laws in the 1980s.  I sympathize with the claim that pornography degrades women, but it's never clear how it differs in any important way from heterosexuality in general.

Numerous feminist critics pointed out in the 80s, when Dworkin and MacKinnon were getting a lot of corporate, mainstream media attention, that the same criticism should be made of "popular" commercial culture, yet Dworkin and MacKinnon and their Christian (mostly male) allies showed little interest in doing anything about it.  The use of nubile women, revealingly or scantily clad is almost universal to sell products; to add to the complexity, such women are also used to sell products to women.  The view of copulation as an inherently debasing, even violent act, difficult or impossible to distinguish from rape, is also a cultural commonplace.  And despite the laments of people like Rod Dreher, that "pornographic" view permeates Western religious traditions, a fact that many feminist and other writers have addressed before.

The Hebrew Bible -- known to Christians as the Old Testament -- assumes that women are men's property, to be exchanged between them in marriage.  One of the crucial love stories in Genesis, for example, is that of Jacob, who goes looking for his fortune and meets a pretty girl at a well.  Her name is Rachel.  He helps her move a stone and kisses her, and on learning that her father Laban is his mother's brother, decides he wants to marry her.  (First-cousin marriage, yuck!)  He offers to work for Laban, and when Laban asks what wages Jacob should be paid for serving him, Jacob asks for Rachel, and agrees to work for seven years to earn her.  "So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her."  But on the wedding night, Laban slips Rachel's older sister Leah into Jacob's bed.  Jacob deflowers her, and despite his protests is stuck with her.  Laban generously gives both girls to him, but Jacob still has to work seven more years to pay for Rachel.  Remember this story the next time someone tries to tell you that traditional marriage is one man and one woman, but notice also its treatment of women (not men) as commodities to be bought and sold.  It's typical of the Old Testament, and assumed in the New.

But that's only part of what I'm talking about here.  There's also the motif of the Bad Woman, the Harlot, polluted by contact with too many men (or with only one man who hasn't lawfully purchased her), rented out to them rather than purchased.  I've mentioned before the allegories in the book of the prophet Ezekiel which cast the city of Jerusalem as an abandoned baby girl whom Yahweh adopted and raised to be his bride:

⁸ “When I passed by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness; I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine. ⁹ Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil...

It's not clear to me what these lubricious details have to do with spirituality, as opposed to the prophet exciting himself and his male readers.  I suppose the two aims aren't mutually exclusive.  But blood will tell, and Jerusalem became a whore, selling herself to all comers.  (Yahweh, being male, could spread himself around as he liked.)

³⁵ “Therefore, O prostitute, hear the word of the Lord: ³⁶ Thus says the Lord God, Because your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whorings with your lovers, and with all your abominable idols, and because of the blood of your children that you gave to them, ³⁷ therefore, behold, I will gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated. I will gather them against you from every side and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your nakedness...

And so on.  The image of Yahweh as a cuckolded and violently abusive husband recurs in the Hebrew Bible.  It's the guiding theme of the prophet Hosea, for example, who claims that Yahweh ordered him to marry a loose woman and sire children on her.  Then Yahweh will punish his unfaithful wife Israel, saying:

“Rebuke your mother, rebuke her,
    for she is not my wife,
    and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the adulterous look from her face
    and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.
³ Otherwise I will strip her naked
    and make her as bare as on the day she was born;
I will make her like a desert,
    turn her into a parched land,
    and slay her with thirst.
⁴ I will not show my love to her children,
    because they are the children of adultery.

And so on.   There's a lot more.  In the New Testament this theme mainly occurs in the Book of Revelation with its symbolic Whore of Babylon, who is "drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (17.6).  (In general, the New Testament encourages a rejection of marriage and therefore of sexuality, but this isn't really at odds with the idea of sex as polluting and degrading.)  Whoredom is equated in the Bible with idolatry, which can be confusing sometimes, but it's meant to be: the reader is expected to be blinded with fury at those who are unfaithful to Yahweh, so why bother trying to make sense?  Jennifer Wright Knust has a good discussion of this topic in her Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire (HarperOne, 2011).  The Bible, as Knust's subtitle indicates, isn't consistent about women or sex (or any number of other subjects), but the Polluted Woman is one of its important themes.

The idea of the unfaithful woman as "whore" -- not meaning literally a seller of sexual services so much as a woman off the leash, and presumed eager to service all comers.  (I wonder if the ultra-orthodox males in today's Israel who spit on eight-year-old girls and call them "whores" mean literally that these children are selling sexual services.  As I noted above, it's probably not something they think about.  But they're certainly following tradition.)  That is why male ownership of women is justified, to keep women under control, to regulate "carnal lust, which is in women insatiable" as the late-medieval Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches put it.  There are good women, but they're only a blink away from jumping over the traces and turning into whores, which is why their fathers, brothers and husbands must keep them tightly restrained and confined.

This is one of the pillars of what people like Rod Dreher like to call the pornographic mind or the pornographic imagination, yet it's a major theme in the Christian tradition.  If a law like Dworkin and MacKinnon's were passed and enforced, it would require action against the Bible and the religious institutions that treat it as authority.

Dreher's secular source warns:

According to Online MBA, 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn Web sites. And in the U.S. $2.84 billion is spent on pornography yearly. And as with most addictions, the habit has intensified over time. Society’s taste in pornography has skewed further and further towards the extreme as internet porn has become more widely accessible: “Hardcore pornography now explores the world of perversion, while softcore is now what hardcore was a few decades ago, explicit sexual intercourse between adults, now available on cable TV. The comparatively tame softcore pictures of yesteryear—women in various states of undress—now show up on mainstream media all day long, in the pornification of everything, including television, rock videos, soap operas, advertisements, and so on.”

$2.84 billion is a lot of money, but it's a tiny amount compared to what the US spends each year to kill people.  Killing people, on the other hand, is a biblical value, mandated against idolaters by Yahweh himself.  Some Canaanite cities were to be burned to the ground as a burnt offering to Yahweh, including the livestock and all human inhabitants.  In others, everyone but virgin females were to be killed, and the virgins enslaved -- see Numbers 31:18 and Deuteronomy 20:13ff.  Slaves of course were available for sexual use by their owners, as were female captives taken in war (Deuteronomy 21:10ff).

I'm skeptical of the claims about the "world of perversion" in "hardcore" porn.  The same claims about violent porn were made by the feminist anti-porn movement of the 1980s, but they were debunked: only a small portion of commercial pornography could be called violent, and it was a specialty niche, inspired by or at least congruent with the biblical tradition.  Most pornography depicts nonviolent, consensual copulation.  (Consider the analogous argument that a religion -- Christianity, say, to choose one at random -- should not be judged by its most "extreme" versions; pornography, by contrast, should be.)  Perhaps the "perversion" referred to is oral and anal sex, and it does seem to be true that anal sex has become more common in mainstream heterosexual porn.  (It was always mainstream in gay male pornography, naturally.)  But is it "perversion"?  To some people, no doubt, even when they themselves practice it privately.  That's the beauty of words like "perversion" -- they raise the blood pressure and produce righteous excitement, but they don't contain much information.  They're not meant to: their function is emotional incitement.

As for the increasing acceptability of porn-inspired imagery in mainstream commercial entertainment and advertising, that's an issue that people can discuss.  Secular radical feminists have been talking about it for a long time, but because they were a bunch of hairy-legged manhaters with whom right-wing Christians saw no benefit in allying, no one paid attention.  The Christian Right's interest in working with feminist anti-porn crusaders expired years ago, though they also appropriated and assimilated Dworkinite rhetoric.  And the objectification of women remains disputed by males of all persuasions.  (For an introduction to the question, see this and this, then go from there.)  To be brief here, I'd say that the problems with pornography are themselves a result of mainstream misogyny and male supremacy.  Mainstream men need "sluts" and "whores" as an organizing principle for their dealings with women; women who collaborate with such men also need "sluts" and "whores" to try to ward off abuse and declare their allegiance.

Even if all secular pornography magically disappeared tomorrow, though, the treatment of women as sexual objects and commodities would still be omnipresent in Christian society.  It's inextricably entangled (love that word) in the cultural foundations of the Christian West.  (Which doesn't let the various cultures of the East off the hook; they're just not the issue here.)  I'm critical of those people who claim that pornography is an educational resource, to teach people the reality of sex; I think that's obviously batty, since pornography is about fantasy, not reality.  I don't have any broad answers about how people should be educated about sex, but I think honesty -- meaning accuracy -- is a good policy. There are exceptions (which prove the rule), but mostly Christian churches have been more interested in suppressing accurate and honest discourse about sex.  I don't see Dreher as one of the exceptions.

L'histoire de C, the sequel

I left out a number of points I wanted to make in my post on Noam Chomsky’s porn video (hee, hee, hee!), partly because I forgot them and partly because at 2400 words the damn thing was already pretty long.

For example, as Avedon pointed out, the infamous 1978 Hustler cover image of a woman being fed into a meat grinder was “satirical” (with all the complications attendant on satire, of course). It was accompanied by a quotation from the magazine’s publisher Larry Flynt: “We will no longer hang up women like pieces of meat,” and a fake inspector’s stamp certifying it as the Last All Meat Issue. Har har har. It also turns out that the cover was the brain child of Paul Krassner, who (like George Carlin) I’ve never thought was as cool as he clearly thinks he is.

It’s easy to jeer at ‘humorless’ feminists who can’t see the satire, but I haven’t noticed many males enjoying turn-the-tables feminist comix like Naughty Bits and Hothead Paisan. For that matter, does anyone else remember the male hysteria that Thelma and Louise engendered? It was widely regarded as an extremely violent film, even though as writer Callie Khouri likes to point out, only three people die in it, and two of them are Thelma and Louise. (And those two die offscreen.) Compared to most popular Hollywood product, Thelma and Louise is virtually a pacifist movie. On the other hand, I’ve heard that while most women say that what they fear most from men is violence, most men say that what they fear most from women is laughter. Thelma and Louise, I’ve always believed, was perceived as violent because it laughed at the foolishness of men.

And kiddies, a lot of male foolishness has been displayed in the great porn debates, including the backwash from that Chomsky clip. It does take a little work to bring oneself up to speed on this (or any) issue, but I’ve been following feminism since the 70s, and the feminist sex debates since they began in the early 80s, so I have a head start which I’ll try to share. Relying on the corporate media for information about any serious matter is not going to work. You need to read some, like, print matter, but don’t worry, this stuff is interesting. No, really. Turn off ESPN for a while, lay down the PlayStation controller, and gather round the campfire.

But come to think of it, the core problem isn’t so much the dullness of text, or even the difficulty of finding the relevant material; it’s defensiveness, and probably a failure of empathy. To quote Ellen Willis again, “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.” I’ve noticed over the years that when I repeat this quotation, women usually laugh delightedly, but men usually look unhappy. (The more so if the men had previously been complaining about “humorless feminists.”)

You may also notice a similarity to the way Noam Chomsky, and other critics of American foreign policy, has been accused of saying that America deserved the 9/11 attacks. When Martin Luther King Jr. said that the United States was the greatest source of violence in the world, he wasn’t calling for some other country to invade us – he was saying that America should be less violent. The reason so many Americans hear criticism of the US as a call for violence against us, I think, is that they are so used to following up criticism of other countries with violence. Plus, of course, reacting in this overwrought way is a convenient way to dodge the real issues: if the only alternative to invading Iran is for terrorists to level the United States, then no American could oppose an invasion of Iran, Q.E.D.

In the same way, many men hear women’s complaints about their attitudes and behavior as attacks on their maleness, to be followed by demands for literal castration of every male. It’s certainly easier than listening to what the women in their lives are saying. If you hear a request for help with the dishes as a demand for the removal of your testicles, of course you’re going to duck your head, clamp your knees together, and turn up the volume on Sunday afternoon football. (If you think I’m exaggerating, look at the comments on the Sex and the City movie that I quoted here. The views expressed aren’t universal, but they’re far from uncommon.)

It’s revealing that a lot of men couldn’t hear what Chomsky was saying about pornography. Even for another male to criticize the imagery of porn was going too far. They mostly reacted in two ways, both well known from reactions to feminist critics of porn: first, they heard his criticism of porn as a demand to ban it; second, they attempted to present themselves as pro-feminist allies of the women who freely chose to perform in pornography, and porn critics as totalitarians who would limit women’s choice.

A paradigm case of both reactions is this video response to the Chomsky clip. brainpolice2 begins by lamenting that he can’t understand why Chomsky is “considered by some to be the leading spokesman for anarchism” when he “favors gun control and banning pornography. … What am I missing here, guys?” Well, for a start, brainpolice2 is missing that Chomsky doesn’t favor banning pornography. That error throws off the rest of his, um, argument.

I understand the intentions, y’know, in the feminism thing going on. But this is an authoritarian kind of feminism we’re dealing with here, and it also seems to me that … it’s … what’s the word? Not patronizing, but uh… Chomsky, in the name of helping the women, is telling them what to do. Okay, and that’s what some people don’t seem to be understanding here. Y’know, you make out the women to be victims -- in the name of helping the victim you’re forcing them to not do what they want to do. And that doesn’t make any sense. Helping people by prohibiting them from doing what they want to do doesn’t make much sense to me. It’s like saying, “Oh, I want to help the illegal immigrants, so let’s … uh… stop them from getting a job.” I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. Under this thin veneer of helping people, you’re violating their rights and going against their will. [giggles] It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Now, even in that heavily edited original clip, Chomsky didn’t tell women what to do. He can be faulted for assuming that all women who work in pornography are humiliated and degraded by the job, and for his confusion about where the degradation lies, but even so he doesn’t advocate coercion, not even against their employers. Since brainpolice2 ignores the analogies Chomsky drew to sweatshop labor (and in fact he makes a confused analogy of his own to “illegal immigrants”), I have to suppose that he would also see anti-sweatshop activism and regulation as telling poor people they can’t work fifteen-hour-days in hellish conditions if they want to. People who work in the US porn industry may not come from such dire straits; I know that some women have put themselves through college, even graduate school, by working in porn or strip bars. Still the question has be asked, quoting Ellen Willis quoting Rosalind Petchesky: Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?

brainpolice2 ignores who’s running things. Sweatshop labor occurs where the state has already intervened on behalf of corporate capital to limit choices: by driving farmers and other rural dwellers off common land so that living in urban slums and breathing cotton dust in a garment factory has become preferable to starvation. (Of course there are usually other choices as well – petty crime, prostitution, and the like.) They may well make more money in the US than in Mexico, but then you have to ask why conditions are so bad in Mexico, and the answer again is historical and political. Similar conditions prevailed in England when it first industrialized, and they can be found in China and other countries now. Employers like illegal immigrant workers, who have less recourse under abuse: they can be threatened with deportation if they object to inhumane hours, environmental conditions, or pay, and they can be paid in cash, so annoyances like unemployment insurance or Social Security can be evaded. (It doesn’t always work that way, of course. Immanuel Ness’s excellent book Immigrants, unions, and the new U.S. labor market [Temple, 2005] details how some illegal immigrants in New York City managed to resist and unionize despite these threats. Laura María Agustín’s Sex at the Margins [Zed, 2007] discusses migration for work, especially as it affects the sex trade.)

brainpolice2 imagines the porn industry as “women [asking] for money to have sex with people on camera … [or] selling pictures of themselves naked, pictures of themselves having sex, or videotapes of it.” (Again, he keeps dragging legality into it, though legality was not Chomsky’s subject.) True, the Internet has enabled more porn performers to start their own businesses, selling their own images online; but the industry as a whole still involves people being hired by others to display themselves before cameras. Even online, success is measured in moving from performing to direction, and in being able to hire others to do the work. That’s a reminder that, though sex for pleasure is fun, sex for money is work; otherwise these performers wouldn’t want to get out of performing into production. Women who appear in Hustler, to return to Chomsky’s example, are not “selling pictures of themselves” – Larry Flynt is selling pictures of them. Whether this is any more exploitative than other ways in which performers are used by corporations is a complex question, but brainpolice2 hasn’t reached the point where it can be addressed, so I’ll leave it aside here.

And then he gets personal:

Another reason why I don’t buy into the whole radical feminism thing is that it’s really not accurate – entirely accurate in its description of the relationship between men and women in the modern age. While they might have some points in their favor for their premise that women are on the downside, you can’t ignore the fact that some women manipulate men to get what they want, okay? And I don’t know, I’ve experienced this first hand, I’ve been manipulated by women to get – so that they could get what they want. And I was very humble in this situation, okay? I was not trying to use them for sex or anything of that sort. I was being very humble, okay? And this chick was clearly fucking manipulating me, and I allowed it to occur for quite a long time.

If this is our boy’s idea of political analysis, he’s hardly in a position to complain about Chomsky or about feminists. To offer an extreme analogy: slaves also learn to manipulate their owners, to bow and scrape, to slack off, and so forth. Would brainpolice2 want to argue that slaves oppress their owners as much as their owners oppress them? Maybe:

And if you’re going to hold a world view that’s just, “Oh the women are the oppressed and the men are the oppressors,” it’s just a false dichotomy. It’s like, women can be oppressors too and the men can be oppressed too. Stop breaking everything up into these false dichotomies between the workers and the owners, and the men and women, and black and white … You are the one creating divisions, you’re the one increasing tensions when you take such a radically stupid world view that pits every single identity group against the other., It is entirely irrational, you have to view people as individuals, you can’t just say “Men versus women, oh the men are so evil, they’re oppressing women,” no, sometimes it’s the other way around.

There’s one other moment I can’t resist bringing up. About a third of the way through, brainpolice2’s cat meows offscreen, and he snaps at it: “Damn you, fucking cat! Why are you always meowing when I’m trying to make a fucking video?” Cats aren’t people, but I bet he’d behave just as humbly if his girlfriend came in to ask what he wanted for dinner, or to remind him to take out the garbage. Not only women, but cats too can be oppressors.

Maybe it’s unfair to pick on this guy, but his arguments and opinions – and ignorance -- are so common that quoting him saves me the trouble of quoting a range of Chomsky’s other critics: all their errors are conveniently united in a single six and a half minute video clip! To move into the world of cultural professionals, though, the auteurist film critic Andrew Sarris wrote that the 1972 porn-crossover classic Deep Throat “figured in the seesawing feminist attitudes toward pornography -- liberating women, according to the likes of Camille Paglia, or enslaving them, according to Ellen Willis and company.” Now, Sarris used to write for the Village Voice, where much of Willis’s feminist writings also appeared, so he should know that Willis was a prominent anti-censorship feminist. She wrote critiques of Andrea Dworkin and other feminists whose conservative views she disagreed with, and if she ever claimed that pornography enslaves women, I never saw it. She did, admittedly, pan Deep Throat (the review can be found in her collection Beginning to See the Light, Knopf, 1981), saying that “movies like Throat don’t turn me on, which is, after all, what they are supposed to do” (page 73).

Those who want to know something about this debate might try reading Willis’s writings on feminism and sex from Beginning to See the Light and No More Nice Girls (Wesleyan, 1992), or collections like Powers of Desire (Monthly Review Press, 1982), Pleasure and Danger (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), Sex Exposed (Rutgers, 1993). Yes, some of these are rather hefty volumes, but you don’t have to read them cover to cover – just browse around in them. You should, however, also read some anti-porn literature, such as Take Back the Night (Morrow, 1980), Susan Griffin’s Pornography and Silence (Harper, 1981), and Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women (Putnam, 1981). Yes, these are all older books, but they defined the debate that is reflected, however inadequately, in discussions today. (And they contain some surprises – I hadn’t realized, until I looked at Take Back the Night just now, that the libertarian feminist Wendy Kaminer was once a member of Women Against Pornography. You’d never guess it now.) If you read a good sampling of these, you’ll be better informed about the pornography controversy than Noam Chomsky!