When the defenders of so-called lads' mags argue that there is nothing wrong or shameful about the naked female form, you know they are either willfully misunderstanding the arguments made against pornography, or that they are morons.
Personally, I tend to think that they are cynical and slimy rather than stupid. Thus they know perfectly well that the objection of feminists like Kat Banyard is not to female flesh per se, but to the sexual objectification and exploitation of female flesh.
And they understand - as we all understand - how the young girls who model in such magazines are obliged to adopt a familiar series of poses and display their nakedness within a recognizable erotic environment. Reclining bodies on a bed, or bodies crawling around on all fours sticking out parts for penetration are not simply unclothed. They are, rather, naked for a purpose within a context of meaning and they don't so much expose the flesh as promote its desirability and advertise its availability as a commodity.
This doesn't mean I automatically lend support to the UK Feminista and Object campaign to "lose the lads' mags" from the shelves of supermarkets, but it does mean that there remains an important debate to be had on the intimate relationship between pornography, sexism and capital.
Arguably, porn has always been the secretly privileged discourse of bourgeois society ...
Objectification theory is utterly absurd. It is part of the human condition for a person to construct out of everything to hand (including other persons) an object for management or manipulation and then make choices about value.
ReplyDeleteIt is the decision about value that matters somewhere on a continuum between an absurd abstract universalism and a ridiculous narcissism. The most humane decision on value comes through direct emotional and sexual relationships.
There is no inherent reason why a person should not treat another person as instrumental under instrumental circumstances (how else would dams be built and planes fly) so long as the instrumentality is equalised - that is, each person is permitted equally to withdraw from an instrumental position and engage in their own construction of value. Let women fly planes as much as a man. Let women be instrumental!
Pornography is simply an alliance of desires - in the one side, we have male or female desire for pleasurable stimulation and, on the other, female or male desire to be represented for gain or pleasure.
These are two sets of equal persons and the community's only interest is ensuring that the industry is no more or less equal than any other form of enterprise - such as retailing or professional services. Indeed, very beautiful and desirable people charge 'extortionate' sums and steer capital from others in ways that upset the inherently resentful.
There is a socialist argument against pornography but it is not really an argument against representation but against 'exploitation' and would, to be credible, encompass all forms of power relation in society. Most people have found and will find such arguments intrusive to the point of social fascism.
What we are really seeing at the moment is a socially conservative cultural war on desire and not a socially progressive interest in the management and dimunution of exploitation. The two must not be confused.
Feminists and Evangelicals are in alliance now as once Communists and Christians were in alliance in the 1950s to ban American 'violent' comics using similar spurious arguments. This is sinister in the extreme ...
This is simply about a minority graduate branch of womanhood - matriarchal in nature - working with weak feminised males in an alliance of convenience to assert power over free males and sex-positive females. It is a cultural war, no less and no more which now has support from the State.
Everything is a commodity. These activists make power and culture a commodity, seeking to corner the market in values.
The point is not to worry about objectification and commodification like the sad essentialists of a miserablilist Frankfort School but to learn how to use power effectively for self development.
This is a lesson the sex-positive woman and man can teach the woman who is so frightened of the disorderly nature of desire that they replace objectification with categorisation and eternal and fruitless analysis. All men are threats to such women ... they are misanthropes.
Feminism has moved from its purpose of equalising access to resources into something else - a pure expressioon of ressentiment and a power-hungry war on humanity.