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Posts tagged incest

The Double Standard of What Gender-specific Quotes Mean and Represent: The Endless Parade of Anti-Feminist Quotes Continues

image of Dwaine Tinsley: cartoonist (creator of "Chester the Molester" published in Hustler magazine for years), good friend of Larry Flynt, and incest perpetrator of his daughter, is from here

From this blog website: http://heartlessriot.com/post/990641874/misandry-is-not-feminism. My reply to it follows.


Misandry is not feminism!

This (content warning) disturbs me a little as a believer that all people should have equal rights and not seek domination over another sex, ethnic background (I refuse the term “race”), or orientation. To me and many others; this is what feminism is about.
“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”
- Robin Morgan: civil rights, antiwar and radical feminist activist, writer, poet, and editor of Ms. Magazine

Nothing has ever been accomplished anywhere with hate. In fact I think that “man hating” pushes women and man further away from the ultimate goal of equality because it then places the sexes at “war” with each other as well as reinforcing the misconceptions about females.
“When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression.”
- Sheila Jeffreys: professor, political activist and author
This is plain BS. People are supposed to enjoy sex and having an orgasm isn’t making you a slave to the patriarchal system. Not having one is because that means your man only cares about his pleasure rather than yours as well. This lady is backwards and this statement is utterly ridiculous. To me it seems that she is stating you cannot be a feminist and enjoy sex or to be a feminist you must be a lesbian.
“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”
- Valerie Solanas (1936-1988): Author of the SCUM Manifesto, attempted murderer of Andy Warhol
This is what I call role reversal and it isn’t okay. Just because females have been treated as the proverbial slab of meat does not make it okay to treat men the same way. This comment is sickening…
“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”
- Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005): writer, antipornography activist
Physical abuse or assault is never okay no matter what sex it is EVER. I don’t think I need to say any more than that.
“We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men.”
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902): social activist, abolitionist, women’s suffrage movement leader
Again, this is just pitting the sexes together in a power struggle which is self defeating to the movement as a whole.

The bottom line is that these women weren’t feminists and women who think like this are not feminists. Just like misogyny; misandry is dangerous to the concept of equality and attitudes like this should be refused by the feminist movement.

Julian Real's reply:

Feminism isn't "misandry" and those tired old quotes don't make it so. They are trotted across the internet more often than the "important" news of which female celebrity was caught in the paparazzi's photographs not wearing any make-up. You're really misleading people here with this post, and it's sad to see--again.

Feminism has always been anti-rape (against anyone), against violence (against anyone), and for equality and dignity and human rights, for raising boys to be humane, for raising girls with self-esteem and confidence.

The people who most promote the hatred of men are MEN, not women. Haven't you noticed that? It is men, after all, not women, who start and maintain wars, right?

The people who do hate women most dangerously are men, and too many of them demonstrate it in ugly and lethal ways, as we all got to witness when recently hearing Mel Gibson be verbally threatening and insulting and degrading to Oksana Gregorieva, or with Phil Spector's murder of Lana Clarkson. We have story after story of male serial rapists and serial killers in the news, which also seems like a storyline prime-time programs like CSI, NCIS, and Law and Order cannot do without. How many more times do we have to see a young, thin, white woman appearing to be dead, bloody, wrapped in plastic, to "entertain" mass U.S. audiences? Those shows, every week, don't show bloody, naked, young pale men in plastic, do they? Who writes those story lines: women or men?

Lies are spread about feminists being "man-haters" by reproducing  five or seven or a dozen quotes, as you do above, as if we couldn't do precisely the same thing with just quotes that have left the lips of male actors, or that were composed by "great" male novelists, essayists, or playwrights. Shall we conclude then, that those men's quotes are representative of how most or all male actors, novelists, essayists, and playwrights feel about women? Why do men's rights activists regularly, online, promote this the double standard:

A few hateful comments by men towards or about women are indicative that some men are bitter about women because sometime in their lives a woman probably hurt them very badly; but a few quotes by some feminists, often from works of fiction or as noted in statements that have been made up completely (evidence linked to below), mean that feminists who disrespect or disregard men in some way are speaking the one truth that all feminists believe--or that even the feminist being quoted believes?

Is that fair? Is what you do above fair to feminism?

Why the very selective quoting? You could promote feminism with the quotes listed below. Feminists were and still are trying to achieve: an end of male violence against women and an end to rape. Feminists work to achieve equal rights, including equal pay for the same work done by men, and feminists note that "housework" is hard work.

See this for more on how your blog post dovetails with what anti-feminist men's rights activists spread across the web:


http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/08/catharine-mackinnon-is-not-proponent-of.html


http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/06/those-mratrolls-and-their-list-of.html

Why don't you put up the quotes below, by radical feminists? I'd recommend that you at least balance out the post you have above by also posting these (not just in a comment by me) to show how even more feminists, including the one's selectively (like Dworkin's and Morgan's) or quoted out of context (like Stanton's) by you above, really feel about men's humanity.

"The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself." -- radical feminist Audre Lorde

"People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals." -- radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon

"In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men -- but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily." -- radical feminist Robin Morgan

"[A] legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women —- with men relating to that the best they can." -- radical feminist Robin Morgan

One of the most spuriously quoted lines by Marilyn French is one from her novel, The Women's Room. It reads, "all men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes."

What is next was quoted from her in 2007 and is NOT from her fictional characters:

"Most men are on our side. They like their lives better than their fathers' lives. They like being involved with their children. They like having a better relationship with their women." -- radical feminist Marilyn French

"I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else." -- radical feminist Marilyn French

"For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?" -- radical feminist bell hooks

"No one deserves brutality because of what they are, there condition of birth." -- radical feminist Andrea Dworkin

"Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth." -- radical feminist Andrea Dworkin

"Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust." -- radical feminist bell hooks (Communion: The Female Search for Love)

"As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media." -- radical feminist bell hooks

Why do you quote Dworkin from a work of fiction? Does a misogynistic quote by Norman Mailer or Ernest Hemingway mean all male novelists hate women? And, noted above here, there are plenty of quotes you could cite by Dworkin that demonstrate she believed in the humanity of men. She was no man-hater, which is obvious if you read her work carefully and know anything at all about her life.

The Stanton quote was obviously written in response to the predominant and prevailing view that white men are superior to all women, of any ethnicity.

Let's visit a few of the quotes by men, throughout history. Because given what follows, you ought to conclude what you do about "feminists": that a few carefully chosen misogynistic quotes from men who say hateful things about women are representative of how men feel, generally, as a group. Is there or isn't there a double standard about what quotes mean when compiled in curiously biased ways?

Below are just a tiny sampling demonstrating that men's institutionalised hatred of women is centuries old and exists across many societies. These are men, who, unlike anyone you cited above, occupied positions of significant political leadership and social influence with actual power to control institutions and societies that radical feminists, as yet, have never had.

Jack Holland details the ways in which both the Greeks and Hesiod viewed the figure of Pandora.

 ‘The Greek phrase used to describe her, kalon kakon, means ‘the beautiful evil’.’

In Hesiod’s words...
 ‘From her comes all the race of womankind
 The deadly female race and tribe of wives
 Who live with mortal men and do them harm.’

Tertullion, one of the founding fathers of the Catholic Church, famously harangued the archetypal feminine thus...
‘And do you know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway, it was you who first violated the forbidden tree and broke God’s law. You coaxed your way around man whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: man!’

 ‘Woman is a stupid vessel over whom man must always hold power, for the man is higher and better than she is.’   Martin Luther, Protestant Reformationist. (NOT Martin Luther King!)

 ‘A man with a hundred tongues who lived for a century would still not be able to complete the task of describing the vices and defects of a woman.’  Mahabharata, Hindu.

Georg Hegel, wrote in his ‘Philosophy of Right’...
 ‘Women are certainly capable of learning, but they are not made for the higher forms of science, such as philosophy...Women acquire learning – we know not how – almost as if by breathing ideas, more by living really than by actually taking hold of knowledge.’

Friedrich Nietzsche said that...
‘When a woman inclines to learning, there is usually something wrong with her sex apparatus.’

And it lurches into the twentieth century with the words of Otto Weininger on the absolute nothingness of women...

‘Women have no existence and no essence, they are not, they are nothing, Mankind occurs as male or female, as something or nothing...the meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She represents negation, the opposite pole from the Godhead, the other possibility of humanity....A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her mental processes...she may be regarded as ‘logically insane’.    From ‘Sex and Character’, 1906.

Dr. Max Baff, Professor of Psychology, in 1910:
‘All women are fundamentally savage, and the suffragist movement is simply an outbreak of emotional insanity.’

‘Women who say no do not always mean no. It is not just a question of saying no, it is a question of how she says it, how she shows and makes it clear. If she doesn’t want it she only has to keep her legs shut and she would not get it without force.’  Judge David Wild, 1982.

And here's another bit of "brilliance" by Martin Luther:
‘Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence. Women have narrow shoulders and broad hips. Women ought to stay at home; the way they were created indicates this, for they have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon, keep house and bed and raise children.’

‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of senses and hands...’  Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man.

I haven't even tapped the vast body of "great" literature, exposing all the quotes from those famous misogynists Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway. I haven't even shown images of woman-hating mass produced by pimps like Larry Flynt of Hustler, who thought monthly cartoons created by a convicted incest perpetrator of his daughter, Dwaine Tinsley, and good friend of Larry's, about how funny it was to be a child molester. I've shown no images by Bob Guccione of Penthouse, such as his "classic" photographs, in his magazine, of East Asian women wrapped in white sheets appearing to have been dropped off a cliff onto rocks, as if dead--in a pornography magazine for men's entertainment (according to men and the fact that they said they enjoy the images). I haven't begun to quote what all those men have to say about women and especially feminists that is disgustingly pro-rape and virulently woman-hating.

So will you correct the perception you leave readers with above about what feminists generally believe, and please also clearly indicate what men, historically, have done to subordinate women, that far too many men still do?

Dr. Laura, Dr. Oz, and Dr. Phil: one of the three "get it" about White Het Male Supremacist Abuse and Terrorism: can you guess which one?

photo of Dr. Mehmet Oz is from here
photo of Dr. Phil McGraw is from here
These are two white het male doctors who owe their fame and great financial success to Oprah Winfrey: Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz. (We get to Dr. Laura shortly.)

The first man, who has a PhD in Clinical Psychology, supported her during a trial the commercial/atrocity-protecting meat industry put her through for simply stating her own point of view on the subject of burgers. The second is am M.D. who is a heart surgeon and is a proponent of complimentary medicine, to promote several less invasive methods of treating heart disease. He's also more infamously known for showing Oprah's audiences deceased humans' diseased organs and talking about healthy pooping. He's got some very good things to say--generally I like him and his style, and he's got a good bed-side manner, unless you're a battered woman in a hospital bed, that is. I also sometimes like Dr. Phil, when he isn't using his television series to exploit conditions and people and instead sincerely tries to alleviate human suffering, usually in the context of personal relationships. While I've seen Dr. Phil hold men accountable for the violence they do to women, I've never seen Dr. Oz do this.

I realise he didn't study sociology, social psychology, or the sexual politics of psychopathology, but Dr. Oz couldn't be more clueless about the reality and dynamics of men's war against women. He actually discusses inner brain structure to explain why it may be that some women kill their terrorist husbands or battering boyfriends. He doesn't seem to get that women who are terrorised and sadistically abused do not usually kill anyone, while the terrorists often kill a whole lot of people: most commonly the women in their lives, the women who leave them, and their children, in disgustingly horrid ways. But Dr. Oz's brain structure discussion isn't about THE TERRORISTS. He's concerned about the brain structures of the TERRORISED WOMEN who [usually don't] kill. What are the sexual politics of THAT?

In a case linked to below, he tries to explain to the audience why a woman guest may have killed the male terrorist in her life. He is wrong at every turn, and fortunately he has another "expert" guest on to set the audience clear on what is really going on. Unfortunately, it is yet another white man. (To be clear: Dr. Oz's family's background is Eastern European and Turkish. Dr. Phil is all white.) How it is that white and light-skinned het men have become the people women should turn to for expert advice on anything and everything, is a trick of the trades called WHM supremacist media and education. What undermines feminist knowledge and activists, scholars and doctors, is the owners and producers of mass media talk shows refusing to make women of any color the experts in matters that impact women--and men.

Well, there IS Dr. Laura, who has a PhD in physiology--which is not at all why she's on the air. At least Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil are discussing matters that usually fall within their own educational areas of study. She gives anti-woman, overtly racist, anti-gay relationship advice. She's way more WHM supremacist than Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz in her public advice. She should be removed from the airwaves. Immediately, as she should have been years ago for calling "homosexuals" deviant.

photo of Dr. Laura Schlessinger is from here
She is in the news this week for her arrogantly privileged racist-misogynist assault against a Black woman caller who wanted wise counsel on how to deal with a white husband who, along with his friends, makes racist remarks in front of her. He obviously enjoys trying to humiliate her. Would Dr. Laura pick up on that? Well...

Dr. Laura used the question--while berating and abusing the questioner--as an opportunity to pretend that THE ISSUE is African Americans who are the problem population who uses the n-word and COMPLAIN when whites do the same. Dr. Laura managed to work the word into her radio show eleven times in way fewer minutes than that. The caller, understandably, was totally taken aback and very respectfully attempted to call Dr. Laura's attention to the problem of turning this problem back on a Black woman, which only led Dr. Laura to intensify her own vitriolic volume, utterly silencing the woman seeking wise counsel. Dr. Laura understood the caller's predicament about as well as Dr. Oz understands why [very few] women kill terroristic men. NOT. AT. ALL.

While I think Dr. Phil makes mistakes many times with regard to appropriate forms of advocacy for women-in-patriarchy, too often presuming a kind of level playing field that patriarchal societies will never let exist, I'll say this: he's way ahead of where Dr. Oz and Dr. Laura will probably ever be on the matter of understanding that far too many men terrorise and grotesquely abuse women--and that men's use of physical violence is NEVER the women's fault! Proof of this difference between the two male doctors is in very intense (and potentially very triggering) programs each recently did about the subject of domestic violence leading to murder.

Dr. Oz's show wasn't about patriarchal abuse. It was about how the brain sometimes doesn't work right so some people cannot moderate their violent impulses. And he means women's violent impusles, not men's!

Dr. Phil's program was a VERY good program, if also deeply disturbing and triggering, about the FAILURE of FAMILY COURTS across the U.S. when it comes to adequately protecting children and women from adult male terrorists. His show centered around one case, in which a woman's baby was murdered by her ex- and the baby's father, after she repeatedly went to the court for orders of protection for herself and the baby--each time she was told by the white het male misogynistic judge that she was lying and had no evidence, even when she brought evidence. But there was another interview he did with a teenaged young woman who is a survivor of incest and witnessed a court give custody of her little sister to the incest perpetrator, after she testified about his abuse of her. Yes. It happened. The audience was also filled with women who had similar stories to tell, which appeared to have a VERY supportive effect on anyone who spoke out on this horrendous issue of VIRULENT PATRIARCHAL PREDATION PROTECTIONISM in family courts across the country.

What gets revealed is that the terrorists and their attorneys, along with generally misogynistic society, have effectively convinced the courts to not believe mothers if they raise "domestic violence" as a factor in why those mothers should get custody of their children, not the fathers. Even the women's attorneys are counseling women to not bring up the fact that the ex-husband is a batterer or incest perpetrator because too many judges hear that as a big ol' lie--an allegedly sure sign that the woman is trying to manipulate the court against the interests of the fathers' "right" to have more access to their children. When it comes to court manipulation, however, look no further than the battering, raping, incesting men and their attorneys, who convince the courts that the lack of evidence presented means they aren't sadistic brutes. In this case, the rule "presumed innocent until proven guilty" cannot apply, because no one's attorney will let the proof into the courtroom to begin with.

This is the case across the white het male supremacist globe, from the U.S., to the UK, to Australia. That there are WHM organising to undermine women's credibility in the courtroom even more is despicable and evil. There's nothing loving or just about such efforts by these misogynazis (fascistic, terrorising woman-haters) at all.

To note how this impacts U.S. women, compare these two episodes of programs that, one would hope, are supporting both physical/emotional health and human rights:

Dr. Oz: http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/tuesday-dr-oz

vs.

Dr. Phil: http://www.drphil.com/shows/show/1442/ 

But I cannot write about Dr. Phil without noting this CLEAR FORM OF MISOGYNY he regularly engages in. HE REFUSES TO STOP SAYING THE B WORD WHEN REFERRING TO WOMEN, and as an adjective (b-word with a y at the end). He a conservative guy, socially-politically, in many ways, and doesn't welcome cursing on his show, generally. I'm not sure you can get away with saying ASS on his show without it being bleeped! But he says the b word like it's going out of style, which of course it won't while he and other major media personalities keep legitimising it on TV. Please write to him and ask him why that's the only derogatory curse term he allows on his show.

And visit *here* for more on the Dr. Laura story of the week. TRIGGER WARNING for OVERTLY RACIST LANGUAGE AND GROSS MISTREATMENT OF A BLACK WOMAN BY A WHITE WOMAN.

Will the Actual Buttman Please Stand Up? No, really: there’s this one white het dude, San Fernando Curt, who doesn’t think ANY straight men get off to misogynist pornography! (Proof here.)

What follows is from here at TPM. It is being reproduced here for non-profit, political discussion purposes only. This is the author of the article that follows. And after that is me taking him to task for his silliness and stupidity.

San Fernando Curt

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  • Location North Hollywood, CA
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  • 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 | Permalink

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