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San Fernando Curt
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- Location North Hollywood, CA
- Party Democratic
- Politics Neo-Realist
Porncone
July 30, 2010, 5:42PM
OK, folks, we can wrap up the vigil: Buttman walked.
I know some of you dreary wags out there are ignoring our government and media protests that there's nothing new in the WikiLeaks documents. That they're as interesting as plastic spoons, revelatory as barking spiders and profound as Snooki. Yeah... some of you have gone right ahead and dove in to discover silly stuff like
Task Force 373, our super-secret targeted-assasination squad - and its nasty habit of shooting the shit out of anything that doesn't look Taliban, including innocent children and various barnyard animals in Afghanistan.
In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.
But enough of this trivial nonsense. We know what the real story is: Obscenity charges against John A. "Buttman" Stagliano
have been thrown out by a District Court Judge in Washington DC.
Stagliano, a married father nicknamed "Buttman," is known for pushing the edge of industry standards in his depiction of fetishes, and the video scenes selected by the government for prosecution involved urination, use of enemas and bondage.
In the first porn-related case tried in the nation's capital since the mid-'80s, the Van Nuys (where else?) producer faced a sentence of up to 32 years if things didn't break his way. But since the judge rebuked the Justice Department special anti-nookie squad for failng even to define the crimes Stagliano supposedly broke, this could be the swan song of Bush-era moves to put porn prosecutions back on the front burner. Also, it's probably a blow (so to speak) for that weird consortium of radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists who wanted dirty pictures stricken everywhere as indecent! Even... knavish!!!
Few of the rest of us give a damn.
There are ideas, once popular and prevalent, that are now obsolete, unfashionable "dead horses" we still pointlessly kick. Racial superiority is one of these. Any white person above the age of, say, eight knows white people are superior to nothing. The feeble-minded antics of too many friends, embarrassing relatives, and our own misshapen pasts convince us by adulthood that we honkies are but commonplace among the human species.
Then there are ideas - theories, if you will - that can only be called "zomboids". These are scholarly proposals and popular fairy tales that either are disproven or never validated yet return from the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions to totter about in tiresome replay.
And that brings us back to the case in point: That much-proffered, never-proven feminist theory that pornography is a threat as great as nuclear weapons and dengue fever to our healthy human commonweal. According to the corkscrew logic of this dim brainstorm, porn takes normal, happy, sexually repressed men and turns them into raving BONIACS! They hanker only for cootie! They lust for anything pink!
This somewhat insulting proposal, which galvanized that strange Right-Libber alliance decades ago, holds that any man is a potential rapist, that beneath the calm exterior of nerdy khakis and short-sheeve seersucker lurks highly stimulated lunatics on the hunt for sexual prey. All they need are the hot buttons of full-color, two-panel twat shots to set off monstrously horney fission.
In case you thought this crusade went the way of Kalso Earth Shoes and lava lamps, think again. A Boston professor and veteran of those long-ago windmill tilts,
Gail Dines, has come up with a new book to pump some fresh blood back in an old nag.
"Pornography today is not your father's Playboy,'' says Dines, 51, a Wheelock College professor of sociology and women's studies. "It's hard-core, cruel, and brutal. So you're bringing up a generation of boys who are more cruel, bored, and desensitized.''
She's doing the motel/scrambled eggs tour for her new "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality'', which makes the specious case that this new, ugly stuff risks nurturing millions of future predators. The thesis, simply put, is that any ambulatory, air-breathing male is a de facto attacker already; he's only waiting for an opportunity to drop his drawers and commit serious felony. Porn lurks ever-ready to push him to his erectile brink. It's a case of academia and the media taking itself a little too seriously, assuming perversion of their magical crafts can mesmerize the public to deviant action. Whew! Evidently there's wondrous alchemy in all that turgid prose and badly photographed asscracks.
If all this sounds familiar, it should. We've heard it all before - from Dines, in fact. Seems she was feverishly publishing anti-porn diatribe back in the '70s and '80s. As with this new book, her case always has rested on anecdotal evidence, urban legend and not a speck of scienfitic research or credible statistics. There is nothing to support her contention that many men are aroused by degrading porn. Or, get this, that they hate women. Nothing at all. In an earlier interview she said, "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear." Ah... patriarchy. I knew that old chestnut would be lurking somewhere. Daddy did it. Daddy's a big penis-Nazi! Smash his capitalism and Western civilization! EVIL!
I suspect "their hatred..." means, for Dines, "men's hatred". All men. Everywhere.
Self-described on her website as "scholar, activist and social critic", Dines has worked with and has been annointed successor to the late Andrea Dworkin, the great, chronically angry, overstuffed couch of a woman who was a pioneer of the anti-porn movement.
That tells me juuust about what I need to know. And it's time from some, uh, deconstruction of this particular oeuvre.
Andrea Dworkin was an unhappy, mentally unstable, thoroughly untrustworthy fanatic who hated men. Dines, obviously, is more than suited to step into Dworkin's self-assigned role as the "world's leading anti-pornography campaigner." Their's is the kind of thinking that cooked up, out of thin air, the ugly fabrication that men commit sexual abuse of women and children as commonly as we wear shoes. That never-walked-back lie has destroyed families and ruined lives. It lives today, since unquestioned infamy has the veneer of truth. And, God knows, our media and academia never has doubted this crap. It's absolutely convincing simply because it's trash spouted by the RIGHT people.
Obviously, as a heterosexual male, it's not in my best interest to support a revival of this tripe. Dines is a product of a world long ago, when dogmatic bullies hustled their way into academia and bit off press attention by combining loud overstatement, pure obnoxiousness and fake "scholarship".
Even with the milk enemas, I prefer Buttman, any day.
Julian's reply:
Does internet media need to be accurate, or just play up the same old politically correct tropes over and over and over again?
I'm not seeing much above that hasn't been filtered through a truly astoundingly inane mass media lens; that concerns me only because if news, including political and cultural commentary and analysis, isn't anything but what conservative-liberal (no meaningful difference any more) corporate media sells us, what do we really know about anything? I'll cite a few examples of this problem from your post here.
I know some of you dreary wags out there are ignoring our government and media protests that there's nothing new in the WikiLeaks documents.
Except that is does back up our arguments that the U.S. government is in the war business, and not in the business of promoting democracy anywhere, including in the U.S. That our government sees it as a right to go abroad, illegally invading countries, raping women and bombing children, and mass murdering non-combatants, out to be a source of outrage, not apathy.
The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.
One might even be tempted to actually listen to what Malalai Joya has to say about the U.S. "protecting women in Afghanistan" as she is, well, a woman who has been living in Afghanistan. And she wants the U.S. out, and CNN won't let you that, unless you catch the British feed of CNN, that is.
that weird consortium of radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists who wanted dirty pictures stricken everywhere as indecent!
So where did you get that assessment of alleged alliance? From what faulty, very intellectually and factually flawed academic book? Because it's one of those lies that just flies around and around without anyone really caring to know the truth about it.
There are ideas, once popular and prevalent, that are now obsolete, unfashionable "dead horses" we still pointlessly kick. Racial superiority is one of these. Any white person above the age of, say, eight knows white people are superior to nothing. The feeble-minded antics of too many friends, embarrassing relatives, and our own misshapen pasts convince us by adulthood that we honkies are but commonplace among the human species.
And yet, the laws in Arizona, which may or may not remain in tact, do reinforce white supremacy in the U.S., so for you discussing racial superiority may be passe, but for people of color in the U.S. it's, how to put it, a "hot topic".
Then there are ideas - theories, if you will - that can only be called "zomboids". These are scholarly proposals and popular fairy tales that either are disproven or never validated yet return from the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions to totter about in tiresome replay.
Such as radical feminists were, in any meaningful, effective, or systematic way, working with the Christian Right-wing? Or that radical feminists are "crazy"? Those kind of "zomboidal" observations that are never proven or validated? Is that the Dead Zone of dumb assumptions you are speaking about?
That much-proffered, never-proven feminist theory that pornography is a threat as great as nuclear weapons and dengue fever to our healthy human commonweal.
That's not been the theory, ever. So you're just making this up, aren't you? How zomboidal of you. The theory, which you obviously didn't fact-check before writing this Dead Zone material, was that males are not born misogynists, just like so-called whites are not born racists. Misogyny and racism are learned, and culture is a teacher. That's pretty basic stuff. Is that really too controversial for you to identify as coming from years of feminist theory and sociological analysis?
This somewhat insulting proposal, which galvanized that strange Right-Libber alliance decades ago, holds that any man is a potential rapist, that beneath the calm exterior of nerdy khakis and short-sheeve seersucker lurks highly stimulated lunatics on the hunt for sexual prey. All they need are the hot buttons of full-color, two-panel twat shots to set off monstrously horney fission.
You enjoy your writing, don't you? Well, at least it's sort of witty. Never mind if it reflects anything non-zomboidal, eh?
A Boston professor and veteran of those long-ago windmill tilts, Gail Dines, has come up with a new book to pump some fresh blood back in an old nag.
Old nags like pretending the Religious Right and radical feminists were shacking up? You've got that one on an IV drip, don't you? Have you found a pulse yet?
"Pornography today is not your father's Playboy,'' says Dines, 51, a Wheelock College professor of sociology and women's studies. "It's hard-core, cruel, and brutal. So you're bringing up a generation of boys who are more cruel, bored, and desensitized.''
She's doing the motel/scrambled eggs tour for her new "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality'', which makes the specious case that this new, ugly stuff risks nurturing millions of future predators. The thesis, simply put, is that any ambulatory, air-breathing male is a de facto attacker already; he's only waiting for an opportunity to drop his drawers and commit serious felony. Porn lurks ever-ready to push him to his erectile brink.
Uhhh, no. Can't you even accurately interpret quotes you put in your own post? Seriously. THAT'S sad, man. Damn sad.
What she's saying is that culture is part of what socialises us. You know, that same theory from before that has been shown to be accurate--like, say, that my cousin's son watched Top Gun and from that moment on decide--with no military folks in our family--that he'd go into the Navy to gleefully kill those foreign people of color? And that his dad's affection for strip clubs has infused in him a sense that "going to strip clubs" is cool, and he and his dad go, together. And that his dad, before he was born, was a Hustler magazine subscriber, and his wife (my cousin) had to ask him to please stop subscribing because they had three growing sons. And so my cousin's son is into calling women wh*res and using women as if they actually were wh*res. You don't see any analysis there that my cousin's son was "born that way" do you?
It's a case of academia and the media taking itself a little too seriously, assuming perversion of their magical crafts can mesmerize the public to deviant action.
Deviant action like not being able to analyse a quote that's pretty straight-forward in its meaning, because you've got some tired old nag of a theory you can't let go of, that's wrong?
If all this sounds familiar, it should. We've heard it all before - from Dines, in fact. Seems she was feverishly publishing anti-porn diatribe back in the '70s and '80s.
Nothing you've read, apparently. Or, well, comprehended without the Misogynist Mass Media and McAdemic Cliff Notes.
As with this new book, her case always has rested on anecdotal evidence, urban legend and not a speck of scienfitic research or credible statistics.
Like, say, what millions of people experience. Because those millions weren't in a lab, right?
There is nothing to support her contention that many men are aroused by degrading porn.
Are you kidding? You're actually stating--seriously--that men don't masturbate to men ejaculating on women's faces? Really? You're actually saying gonzo porn isn't selling well? Really? And that men go limp watching it? Really?
Or, get this, that they hate women.
No, because,
pssst: there's no such thing as misogyny! That's something those feminists made up so they'd have stuff to write about. Yeah, about that. About the women who leave men and then are murdered--3000 a year in the U.S.: as many as the number of people killed by the Taliban on 9/11/2001. Yet there's no "terrorism" when men do it to women, is there? Nope. None at all. (Never mind that the women were terrified when the guy shows up with the gun. Never mind that a medical assistant I knew is dead because she rejected and walked out on a man, who, apparently, according to your theory, was what? Not misogynistic?) What do you call what Mel Gibson spews? Woman-loving cooing?
In an earlier interview she said, "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear." Ah... patriarchy. I knew that old chestnut would be lurking somewhere.
Because you live in a matriarchy? Since when? Either men (and white men at that) rule every significant social, religious, economic, and political institution in U.S. society or they don't. Hold on... I'm going outside to check... Yup--men still rule them. Sorry to put a crack in your chestnut. (Well, yes, Black women do have a significant role in the Black church. I'll give you that. Funny, though, how men won't let those women be the preachers, isn't it?)
Daddy did it. Daddy's a big penis-Nazi! Smash his capitalism and Western civilization! EVIL!
Calm down. Take a breath--you're getting a little too worked up here. When we speak of "patriarchy" we're speaking of "a male-dominated society", yes? You grasp that, right? We're not talking about "daddy", so climb down off your Freudian dead horse please.
I suspect "their hatred..." means, for Dines, "men's hatred". All men. Everywhere.
You know what it does when you "Assume" right: it makes an ASS out of you and me. Or, in this case, out of you and you. Where does Dines say or write that? Hold on... lemme check... Oh, nowhere! So you like pulling stuff out of your *ss, don't you? Which brings this full circle, in a jerky sort of way.
Self-described on her website as "scholar, activist and social critic",
As opposed to, say, actually
being a scholar, activist, and social critic? What parts of those descriptors seem especially "off" to you? Do you get, yet, how silly you're being here? And, well, kind of sexist, to be honest. I mean why do you need to question her credentials, white straight man? You appear to be taking advantage of those social entitlements to put down women and make them seem like idiots. What's that called??? Ah, yes: sexism. What are your credentials for dismissing her? Is it that you know your audience has also been well-trained by mass media, and hasn't read anything carefully that feminists have written?
Dines has worked with and has been annointed successor to the late Andrea Dworkin, the great, chronically angry, overstuffed couch of a woman who was a pioneer of the anti-porn movement.
Wow. You're respect for dead human rights activists--hmmm, again, a woman you're disrespecting because of her weight--isn't that, um, well, your sexism showing? Chronically angry? As opposed to you, who are not chronically angry? I mean, seriously: who isn't chronically angry? Only the brain-dead. And, Andrea Dworkin was far more of a scholar than you'd ever hope to be. Have you checked the books she read, which she listed in the backs of most of her books? I'm guessing now, but I'll wait for your reply. Have you seen the scholarship in her book Scapegoat? Have you studied the Nazi Holocaust, in which she lost family, as much as she did? I'm guessing not. Or the history of Israel? Have you traveled the world to listen to what women around the world have to say, honestly, about their experiences of their particular "patriarchies" (which doesn't mean "daddies" remember)? I'm guessing not. But you tell me.
That tells me juuust about what I need to know.
You parroting mass media BS tells you just about what you need to know. Don't you see: that's the problem.
And it's time from some, uh, deconstruction of this particular oeuvre.
Okay, so now that you're hauling out the fifty-cent words, I'm assuming you might have something accurate and non-sexist to say. But we know what happens when someone "assumes"...
Andrea Dworkin was an unhappy,
Not especially. She enjoyed laughing a lot, actually, and anyone who knew her says that about her. She had a great sense of humor, which you'd know if you knew her or, well, didn't parrot what antifeminists have said about her.
mentally unstable,
Nope. Wrong again. You're not demonstrating a high aptitude at "personality assessment" skills. But your sexist Dead Zone tropes are stunning. (You're welcome.)
thoroughly untrustworthy fanatic who hated men.
You mean the woman who has written about loving her father, a father who supported her intellectually? Or do you mean the woman who loved her brother and nephew? (Photographic and written evidence exists.) Or, do you mean the man she loved and lived with for thirty years? You mean she hated those men? Or are you saying that if she demonstrated that she loved men, that means she hated all men? Please clarify, because, once again, all you're doing is parroting antifeminist/anti-Dworkin tropes, that you know nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand you'll get away with, with people actually think you're being intelligent and not at all sexist, or, misogynistic.
and Dines, obviously, is more than suited to step into Dworkin's self-assigned role as the "world's leading anti-pornography campaigner."
Dworkin wasn't just an anti-pornography activist. She was also against fascism and white supremacy, quite explicitly in those things she wrote--what do you call them, again: ah, yes: each and every one of her dozen or so books (which you obviously haven't read--like her analysis of Right-wing women, in which she makes it explicitly clear she isn't Right-wing, as if her past, protesting the Vietnam war, prison abuse, and fascism, and being pro-abortion and pro-lesbianism wasn't evidence enough). You must hate it when your didactic diatribes get interrupted with things like verifiable facts and truth.
Their's is the kind of thinking that cooked up, out of thin air, the ugly fabrication
Wait. Are you speaking here of your sexist mischaracterisation of the dead feminist? Or your micharacterisation of feminist theories on pornography's relationship to racism and misogyny? (Have you been online lately, looking at pornography? What of it do you see that isn't misogynistic and racist? Just curious.)
that men commit sexual abuse of women and children as commonly as we wear shoes.
And that would be something no one but you and other zomboids has written and passed off as "verifiable". I challenge you to cite one sentence where the living feminist Gail Dines says that. She hasn't written nearly as much as Andrea Dworkin did, so this won't be difficult for you. You do read books, don't you? Dines is the person you're going out of your way to demean, disrespect, and dismiss, isn't she?
That never-walked-back lie has destroyed families and ruined lives.
You mean the one that men promote that there's no such thing as patriarchy? That never-walked-back lie that destroys families, friendships, ruins lives, and is part and parcel of wars the U.S. engages in?
It lives today, since unquestioned infamy has the veneer of truth. And, God knows, our media and academia never has doubted this crap.
This crap you're writing?
It's absolutely convincing simply because it's trash spouted by the RIGHT people.
Yes. That's so true of what you write. And so very sad.
Dines is a product of a world long ago, when dogmatic bullies hustled
Um, what do you consider Larry Flynt to be, who would demean feminists in his magazine routinely, in the name of "free speech" and all? Who would promote violence against women and child molestation in his magazine's cartoons, by one Dwaine Tinsley, who was found guilty of incesting his daughter, btw. See here for more on that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_the_Molester
So you're more concerned about "hustling bullies" like Dines than, say, corporate pimps and child molesters? That's some system of ethical triage you have going there, sir.
their way into academia and bit off press attention by combining loud overstatement, pure obnoxiousness and fake "scholarship".
You mean Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, and Mr. Flynt? Or are you speaking here of Max Hardcore, known for filming his rapes of women and selling them. How obnoxious is that, to you?
So you haven't read Dines' work then. Because even on CNN, the white heterosexual male interviewer brought the stats to her about how pornography addiction is negatively impacting a HUGE number of heterosexual relationships. The rather decidedly liberal interviewer, John Roberts, gets it that some men prefer to have sex "alone" with pornography than with their actual sexual partners in the other room, wondering why they aren't joining them in bed. You call that knowledge "right wing" or even "feminist"? Hardly.
Would you call John Roberts any of the negative terms you've hurled here at Dworkin and Dines?
Posted by
JulianReal
July 31, 2010 1:13 AM | Reply |
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