So will there be dozens of these books in the end? Like a really disturbing shelf full of Nero Wolfe through the whooping glass?
Somebody should redo it in Robert Caro style.
Weird. I don't remember being aware of this book before today, then I saw a giant stack of them for sale in an airport bookstore, and several people boarding my plane carrying it. And now it's a post topic here. This has been around for a year?
The plate of shrimp scene is apparently mind-blowingly sensual.
Christian White and His Aryan Reggae Band
I was not aware of this book until this post. I still wouldn't say I'm very aware of it.
3, 6: Have you people been in a coma?
It was a piece of online Twilight fan fiction that was de-vampired and into an e-book. It became a monster bestseller as an e-book, so it was released on paper, and the movie rights were auctioned.
Nothing in 7.2 makes it any more likely that I would have heard of this book.
I was unsure if the account of the book's origin given in 7 was actually true, but it seems that it is.
I know. Your story just sounded so incredible, is all.
Smart money is that whoever got the rights takes a bath on the movie -- the phenomenon took off because people could download it on their Kindles, which allow you to read BDSM trash with no one the wiser. Going to a movie, not so much.
Surely tablets can also play movies. They just need to target the distribution channels right.
This article has several choice quotes from the book. Though none as hilarious/squicky as this one, quoted in another Jezebel article:
Christian lies beside me, his hand caressing my belly, is long fingers splayed out wide. "How's my daughter?" "She's dancing." I laugh. "Dancing? Oh yes! Wow. I can feel her." He grins as Blip Two somersaults inside me. "I think she likes sex already."
15 is indeed the very essence of squick. Starting from the use of the word "belly." I have an irrational aversion to that word.
13: That may be wrong.
I get the sense that it started out as something people could read secretly, but then the major media got hold of the story, and now everyone's talking about it, and they have a display for it in airport bookstores. This could be a game-changer, like when Deep Throat was shown in ordinary movie theaters.
In other words, see 9.
17: The italics were supposed to end after "Throat".
12: Reality is spinning out of control. We can no longer distinguish plausible from implausible.
From the Wikipedia article on E.L. James: In 2012, she was listed as one of Time's "100 Most Influential People in the World".
The are indeed the End Times.
Al th wrds gt shorten n th nd tms f whch Twitter s bu on manfestion.
I only learned about them in the past view days via Paul Krugman. So I'm tracking online book sales, and it turns out that there are three major categories: 50 Shades of Grey, Hunger Games, and everything else.
Ale thirty wierds gimlet shorten nooner thirty noodle tumors fuck whorecouch Twitter shhhhh Malibu Ron mansauceinfestation.
I like "the past view days," Stormcrow.
Al th wrds gt shorten n th nd tms f whch Twitter s bu on manfestion.
I almost called this post "Ffty Shds 'f Gry".
26: Yeah, that is something isn't it...
But I find I am full of a passionate intensity. and must post.
|| Oh. Oh my. One of my students, not taking any of the dozens of opportunities to speak to me about his research paper, has decided to explicate a work of fiction using a "theorist" who is some kind of scammy spiritual new age self-help person. Dude, if the author puts "M.D., Ph.D." on the front of his book, it's not an academic source. |>
re: 30
Heheh. As I've ranted about before, I had a student [when I still taught] who was fond of citing 'philosophers' who were in fact new-age bullshitters of the sub-Terence McKenna variety.
Is there some sort of rule that every several years the media has to make a big deal out of sexually explicit trash fiction aimed at women? Off the top of my head I can remember ones about 'urban fiction' and porny 'romance' books. I also remember friends translating English language romance books twenty years ago, some of which had about as much plot in them as a seventies porn movie.
32: Yes. The really fun part is how second-wavers come out of the woodwork to tell us that mainstream porn for housewives is actually not queer or anti-patriarchal or progressive at *all*. Please ignore the vast industry of queer, anti-patriarchal, progressive porn and focus on this one incredibly boring object!
There were people who tried to hand every passerby a stick crusted with petroleum jelly. (This comment is off topic.)
second-wavers come out of the woodwork to tell us that mainstream porn for housewives is actually not queer or anti-patriarchal or progressive at *all*
What's that? I too have heard very little about the book (except that it's a hot seller) -- second-wavers are coming out of woodwork to say what, now?
What's a second-waver? Why are they so wrong about everything?
They just are, ned. It's the way they are, the lot of them.
Second wave feminists, somewhat less fun and a bit humourless about sex and gender relations, a bit too middleclass and white, not like the happy rainbow coalition of third wave feminists.
Similarly third wave feminists are all a bit too ready to claim everything as empowering and feminist, not to mention more busy patroling each other for priviledge abuse than actually doing anything.
36. Second wave feminists - the people who led the big push in the 60s/70s - many of them tend to regard all het pr0n as indiscriminately exploitative of women. They also tend to regard all pr0n whatever as commercially exploitative of human sexuality and therefore a bad thing.
38: that certainly doesn't sound completely wrong does it?
Gah I meant 39 not 38. (although 38 is fine). For a lengthy bit of s&m erotica the title is certainly a failure isn't it.
I don't actually recall big waves of past media coverage about sexually explicit trash fiction aimed at women. I might have just missed it; certainly there are waves of discussion of women's fiction in general.
The publishing world has been changing: something like Amazon is able to push a book like 50 Shades of Grey (or Eat Pray Love, or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) to the top of the charts that might not otherwise have gotten so much attention, and huge blockbuster movie series like the Twilight series and now The Hunger Games work in tandem. Is it my imagination that this is a relatively new marketing phenomenon? Of course we had Star Wars a couple of decades ago.
All I can think of along the lines of 50 Shades of Grey is The Story of O, and Nine and a Half Weeks (which was made into a movie).
38, 39: To really capture the anti-sex stereotype of the second wave, you need to extend it through the 80s and bring in Dworkin and McKinnon. They are really responsible for all the negative stereotypes.
41: Not completely wrong as a set of propositions about pron, or not completely wrong as a characterization of second-wave feminists?
It probably goes a bit too far to say that (all) second-wave feminists regard all pron as exploitative of human sexuality, and therefore bad.
Whenever I try to demarcate the waves precisely, I wind up making the second wave extend from the victory of the suffrage movement though to Kathleen Hanna's first encounter with a microphone. Which can't be right.
44: Agreed. It'd be great to get rid of any supposition that all second-wavers are like Dworkin, who considered all heterosexual sex to be rape.
47. Because it doesn't actually make any sense to think about it like that really. I've no idea who came up with the "2nd wave/3rd wave" dichotomy, but they didn't help anybody.
||
Sarkozy is toast. One Neoliberal down...
|>
43:Fear of flying, Nancy Friday, >i>Our Bodies, Our Selves? All sorts of stuff. Greer wrote a lot about sex.
60s - age of the pill
70s - age of woman's orgasm?
I liked the Le Monde ticker: 19:59 Francois Hollande elu president de la Republique, 20:01 Sarkozy "ne menera pas la bataille des legislatives". With the latter link sending us to a series of quotes announcing the beginning of the UMP power struggle. Not really an ideal way to enter the legislative election campaign.
Whenever I try to demarcate the waves precisely, I wind up making the second wave extend from the victory of the suffrage movement though to Kathleen Hanna's first encounter with a microphone.
bell hooks' Ain't I a Woman? was published in 1981. That seems like a convenient demarcation point.
50: The toast was not quite as crispy as I might have expected, however. Although I guess incumbent toast rarely is.
||
This is weird: One of my friends, who gets some gov't benefits, just received a pretend bottle of medicine from the state health department, delivered by a postal worker and a cop, to "test how long it would take to distribute medicine in an emergency". There was a note explaining it was just a test.
||>
It's less a matter of a sharp chronological demarcation point, and more a matter of when those with feminist concerns shifted from the ones they had had -- since quite a few battles had been won -- to new ones they wished to have. The Feminist Sex Wars is one way to look at the shift. It's not the only way.
I'm kind of sympathetic to second wavers. They overstate the problems of porn, yes. But women are over-sexualized by others, and no one else seems to be concerned about that.
Except for extremely religious people. But they want hyper-neutered femalien beings, not 3d people.
I don't actually believe that last line, exactly.
I think what some of the reductionist stuff misses is that a lot of the critiques of the Second Wave came out of the Second Wave itself. Jo Freeman, bell hooks and others could only have risen to prominence within something similar to the Second Wave. Also, I think that, to the extent that feminism is or was a component of the left, there aren't too many social movements who can look back on the 60s and 70s without at least a trace of chagrin. Certainly, there were excesses within the Second Wave, but so too were there excesses in the civil rights/Black Power movement, the anti-war movement, the gay liberation movement, etc. etc.
I think where the Second Wave stands out from its contemporaries a bit is in producing a hard core of socially prominent and economically successful cadres who cling to the dogma they embraced back then and have the clout to make that atavism seem meaningful and useful for contemporary audiences. Sure, there are still hardliners in the black nationalist movement, for instance, but who gives a damn what they say? They don't have the money or the access to power that many of the Second Wavers do.
Also, recuperation.
They overstate the problems of porn, yes. But women are over-sexualized by others, and no one else seems to be concerned about that.
Over sexualization of women is a problem, but the sexualization of women in porn as such is not part of it. The issue isn't that when people are engaged in sexual fantasies or masturbating they're thinking about other people sexually, it's that women are too often seen in primarily sexual ways outside of sexual contexts. The focus on porn by certain feminists in the eighties is an indication that they completely misunderstood the issue.
I agree with 61. But it took some convincing - for a long time I felt like there must be some spillover effect, and I was pretty anti-porn. I'm still a little wishy-washy on the issue.
44: Agreed. It'd be great to get rid of any supposition that all second-wavers are like Dworkin, who considered all heterosexual sex to be rape.
I don't have real expertise on her work--I read Intercourse, but that was ages ago--but my understanding is that this is a rather misleading characterization of her views. My sense is that her argument was closer to saying that heterosexual sex, at least in our society, was always tied up in some degree of coercion and inequality, but I think it's misleading to say that's the same as "het sex is always rape," because I thought part of her goal was to attack the problematic way that moral evaluation of sex was focused exclusively on, and blind to everything but, the category of rape as opposed to the various other ways sex can be good or bad or terrible for someone.
Again, this is vague recollections from years ago; but I do get the sense that "all sex is rape" is something that only her opponents attributed to her.
Also this is connected to my problems with strip clubs. It's hard for me to believe that sexual contexts don't bleed over into everyday life.
The issue isn't that when people are engaged in sexual fantasies or masturbating they're thinking about other people sexually, it's that women are too often seen in primarily sexual ways outside of sexual contexts.
Yes. This is absolutely right.
I think what people want here is an Aristotelian mean, which isn't simply a moderate amount. It is the right amount, at the right time, for the right duration, for the right reason and with the right people.
I mean, everyone has times when they want to be hyper-sexualized, right?
Is second-wave anti-porn feminism a real live thing in the world today? I feel like people have been repudiating McKinnon and Dworkin for 20 years now.
but my understanding is that this is a rather misleading characterization of her views.
I like the way Susie Bright put it in her remarks on Dworkin's passing. Bright's comment was roughly: "She never said that all heterosexual sex was rape, but she said everything you could say up to that point without ever crossing the line."
I think the main difficulty with the spillover argument as applied to porn is that the rise of the internet has provided strong evidence that whatever effect exists can't be all that big: porn is almost immeasurably more prevalent now than it was 20 years ago, but that same period has, apparently, seen a dramatic drop in reported sexual violence. I think it's still reasonable to criticize porn as part of a broader project of feminist cultural criticism, and porn may well be a uniquely influential vector for modeling sexual scripts and so forth--to the extent that more guys than before really are acting like that asshole non-boyfriend in Girls who doesn't seem to think there's any need for a discussion or preparation before engaging in anal sex, porn may be rightly to blame--but if the more dire prophecies had any merit, our society would have completely fallen apart by now.
63 It's been a long time since I read Dworkin myself, but I remember it the same way as you. I also remember feeling that depending on how you looked at it, the argument was either a true but useless tautology or greatly exaggerated - if you live in a patriarchal society all aspects of your life are going to be affected by that on some level, however the degree to which that is true of het sex isn't that much more than all sorts of other stuff, and probably less than certain other key aspects of life, like work or raising children.
I think what people want here is an Aristotelian mean, which isn't simply a moderate amount. It is the right amount, at the right time, for the right duration, for the right reason and with the right people. I mean, everyone has times when they want to be hyper-sexualized, right?
I know I've brought it up before, but here's an article applying more or less that very argument to gay male pornography (and concluding that in that particular context [at least when it was written, over a decade ago now], it's probably not very problematic.)
I get the impression that Dworkin and McKinnon are more widely studied and discussed these days than they were when they were publishing their key stuff; at the time they were generally seen as interesting provocateurs, but definitely marginal to the main debates that were going on. I don't think they actually changed anything.
I don't think they actually changed anything.
Is that a joke? You might be able to argue that with a straight face about Dworkin, but as I understand things, MacKinnon was absolutely central in developing and promoting the legal theory that sexual harassment was legally actionable sex discrimination because it reinforced social inequality; her views became EEOC guidelines. You might claim that the ideas were in the air, and that something like that would have become the standard view with or without her, but I think this is actually an area where individual norm-entrepreneurs, so to speak, can have a lot of influence, and she really did.
71 -- 72 is my sense as well. But also, our society had then and continues to have a misogyny problem. A conversation about objectification has real value.
68 -- Claims about violence, whether from p)rn or the Super Bowl, may have been overstated. I'm not convinced of the lack of detrimental impact of objectification on our society. And while it may not be possible to eliminate this either instantly or entirely, progress is worth making.
OK, I withdraw that re McKinnon, if that's the case. I wasn't aware that she was so influential in US law; that particular influence didn't travel much. Also I was mainly thinking about their stuff on pornography, since that was the topic under discussion.
I realize chris y may have been talking purely about Dworkin & MacKinnon's work on pornography, in which case things aren't nearly so clear cut, but the stylized story I was told when younger is basically what's repeated in Wikipedia--they were much more heavily involved with actual legislators and activists than your average theorist; the overturned Minneapolis anti-porn ordinance was written by them, and the Canadian Supreme Court apparently at least partially endorsed MacKinnon's views in a landmark porn prosecution case.
I mean, Jesus, if that counts as being "pretty marginal," I don't know what it takes to be significant.
66: Yeah, I've got a friend whose FB posts are about 20% PRON IS TEH EEEEVUL. She's been know to get uptight about other stuff too, but really buys into all the anti-pron discourse. Never has much to say about where you draw the line with erotica/art/etc. or, natch, gay pron.
I just can't help thinking that it must have some connection to John Major.
66: Is second-wave anti-porn feminism a real live thing in the world today?
Try working in academic porn studies in the 21st century. I dare you. It's REALLY FUN. Conferences are so fun especially.
I hate that talking about the history of sexuality, especially representations of queer or marginalized sexualities, means that someone at the back of the room is going to accuse me of being a "fun feminist" whose work can't possibly be serious. No, Dworkin and McKinnon are not the only two feminists who ever attacked porn, everyone who has ever looked at any kind of any porn, everyone who has ever studied people who have looked at any kind of porn... Anti-porn extremists are everywhere in academia. They're women and men alike. They think it should be embarrassing to talk about sexuality as academic discourse. There are some things we just don't talk about in public, dear.
78 cont'd: Most of the people I'm talking about are not some kind of principled people who know what they're talking about; they're just straight bourgeois married white ladies who can't imagine anyone wanting to embarrass themselves by talking about sex, so anytime someone does, they tell them they're *actually* having orgasms in a politically unsatisfactory way.
78.2: I'm just not sure we can blame second-wave feminism/feminists for that, AWB. Not all second-wave feminists are anti-porn, not all anti-porn types are feminists, and so on and so forth.
I am anti-Wave. Fun in the '80s, but crowds at sporting events need something new.
@63 & others.
It's been a while since I've read any of it, but my recollection is that MacKinnon & Dworkin ended up in a stance of fairly absolute skepticism towards the possibility of genuine consent in society as it currently exists. Which strikes me as not particularly useful place to end up.
It seems that a lot of "radical" leftist thought, not just radical feminism, is drawn towards this idea that you're trapped in the Matrix, you're manipulated by vast forces you can't comprehend, you only think that you think what you're thinking (BUGA BUGA)!
It's one thing to examine influences and not just take preferences as given and natural, but a lot of this stuff ends up looking like giving up and taking cold comfort in the idea that at least you aren't being fooled: "At least we know that we're trapped in the Matrix, unlike you poor dupes!"
84: Okay. I'm not sure you can blame, &c.
85:It's all dialectical, you know. The enlightened aren't more aware than the falsely conscious, they're just on the other side of the mirror.
Especially since the consciousness and awareness are social or nothing. John Carpenter explained all this in They Live
That is the key, that I don't have an individual consciousness. It is socially given.
You cannot stand outside the Patriarchy and observe it, and therefore will never have an objective understanding of it.
Truth is subjectivity in social relations.
I paged through one of those books the other day...it seemed if anything less explicit than some Harlequin series are these days. There were also a lot of long speechs about the hero's helpless love for the heroine that raised doubts about exactly who was going to submit to who.
While googling for the Harlequin series, I came across another fantastic romance series, Billionaires and Babies . Each cover features a hot young single guy holding a cute little baby.
Wow, those Billionaires and Babies titles are really something. Aiming at a very specific niche demographic, I suppose.
Seriously. I thought "Daddy Surprise" was as weird as it got.
What's niche about it? Women love hot young billionaires, women love babies! It's like peanut butter and chocolate! I would have loved to be in the meeting that came up with that series.
The Harlequin link is hilarious. I see those things are available as e-books, so it's not that 50 Shades of Grey had chiefly the e-book format to recommend it (per 13). It might be a class thing: the Harlequins still seem trashy, so a lady might not want to catch herself reading them, while 50 Shades is more tasteful. Though I don't know if it is.
I don't understand why you would want babies in your porn.
Well, I'm sure they put the baby away before they have the porn.
But the babies are there having something to do with porn, right?
Judging by the plot summaries, the babies seem to function mostly as a way to bring the heroines into contact with the billionaires.
Right, the baby is a prop, or an extra. It's to sketch out why the heroine is interested in the hero in the first place: he might as easily be interested in horses, or dogs, or ranching, or the law.
94:
"Your true language is a format inconceivable to us," said the perfect holo. "But we do apologize for any untranslatable 1 you may have experienced on account of our welcome transmission; it was automatically generated, before any of us had a chance to apprehend your sexuality. We do apologize, I say; but who would ever have thought that a species would evolve to find reproduction a painful experience? For us, childbirth is the greatest pleasure we know; to be prolonged, not hurried."
"Oh," said the Lady Sensory in a tone of sudden enlightenment, "that's why the tentacles were pushing the baby back into -"
The baby is the means by which the heroine proves that she is good and deserves a billionaire.
There are a lot of children in romance novels.
55: I believe this is supposed to be part of biowarfare/plague response testing.
Oh, I thought the baby was the billionaire's -- his wife died tragically in a car accident or something, or it's his cousin's baby (the cousin and his wife died tragically in a car accident, and the billionaire is the only family they had) -- and he's valiantly raising it as a single dad, when our heroine comes along ....
The baby thus proves that the billionaire is good. Conclusion: babies prove that people are good.
...and here's a blogger. My gob is struck.
I had to click through for an excerpt:
'All done. But Damon Doukakis is probably just going to feast on the staff. He's like a great white shark.' Adding to the aura of menace, Debbie made a fin with her hands and hummed the theme from Jaws. ' He glides through the smooth waters of commerce, eating everything that gets in his way. He's at the top of the food chain, whereas we're right at the bottom of the ocean. We're nothing more than plankton. Let's just hope we're too small to be a tasty snack.'
"Secret passion: Shh! He's old-fashioned."
Is being old-fashioned a passion? You could have a passion for old-fashioned things, or for being old-fashioned, I guess (though that might come off somewhat newfangled). But just plain old being old-fashioned?
Huh. All billionaire-branded books are now 30% off at Harlequin. Probably a coincidence.
I don't understand why you would want babies in your porn.
As always, the answer is in the fucking archives.
110: I dunno. They just invited me to complete a survey on my customer satisfaction.
108 But Damon Doukakis is probably just going to feast on the staff.
IYKWIM.
101: Right, that's what the note said. But it still seems suspicious.
114: I've heard about that stuff before, and it's consistent with this Executive Order.
It's been a while since I've read any of it, but my recollection is that MacKinnon & Dworkin ended up in a stance of fairly absolute skepticism towards the possibility of genuine consent in society as it currently exists. Which strikes me as not particularly useful place to end up.
I dunno; I think there's actually some value, some of the time, in decentering the conversation from a singular focus on consent and choice in order to look at how the landscape of decisions is shaped, and how that affects well-being in various ways. Obviously whether this is valuable depends on whether it's done in a useful way; when what you get instead is the kind of scandalized moralism AWB is talking about, it's obviously not. And historically, that sort of thing--or even more explicitly misogynist forms of argument--has been the dominant form of substantive critique. So compared to that, a focus on proceduralism, on consent as the key thing, has probably been extremely helpful.
But I think just as focusing purely on whether employment contracts are consensual or not is a crabbed way of looking at work and the problems with capitalism, so too can an exclusive focus on consent as the locus of moral critique be limiting. And now I ban myself.
This is way too close to the third chapter of my dissertation for me not to wade in. Like AWB's 78--I live there.
At any rate, I'll stick to this: when I was first writing about radical feminists' analyses of male sexual supremacy (a phrase coined by MacKinnon to replace the concept of patriarchy), my advisor referred to the "all sex is rape" claim, and I said, "Nah, that's a misstatement of the McK/Dw position." He replied, "No really, I taught with Kitty MacKinnon and heard her say it more than once."
Then we went on to discuss the epistemological quandaries related to female orgasm, and I found $5.
100, 102: The series seems to encompass examples of both types of plot. The only common thread seems to be the combination of babies and billionaries.
Relatedly, I was at Barnes and Noble today and the 50 Shades books were on the "Paperback Bestsellers" rack but were not given any special emphasis, unlike the Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series, each of which had its own display table in a prominent central location.
Anyway, clearly my new goal in life should be to combine 104 and 105 and write a series of romance novels starring a sexy Alaskan blogger.
Teo, while you're in alaska you should stock up on birch syrup and then, on your return to the lower 48, give me some, so that I can avoid the prohibitive shipping.
123: Bill Murray needs to get his life together, man.
Don't hate me for living in paradise with my amazing wife, who also happens to be my best friend and hiking n fishing partner. Everything else unfolds as it will, but do be patient with my PTSD induced bouts of brain gas because like all bush Alaskans, we're heavily armed constitutionalists.
Yep, sounds about right.
on your return to the lower 48
My what now?
109 - I have a secret passion for old-fashioneds.
Also, prohibitively expensive shipping is part of the experience of living in Alaska, so paying it on your birch syrup is just another way of experiencing the product's authenticity.
I don't understand why you would want babies in your porn.
Judgey!
I had assumed that your gig was long-term but temporary—I apologize for my presumption.
Wanting birch syrup in your porn, though, is universal.
I had assumed that your gig was long-term but temporary
It is, but I'm hoping to find another more permanent gig up here when it ends.
I believe this is what's known as a "money shot".
Wanting birch syrup in your porn, though, is universal.
Noted.
You know, neb, you could also come up here and procure some birch syrup in person.
And then go backpacking! Or rather, it would be better to do that first.
Do they let you break off a birch branch and suck the sap directly from, I wonder. Because that's really what I'm after.
From it. As you can see, I'm all overcome.
139: Probably not, but if you head out backpacking you can probably find some birches yourself.
78: I had no idea. The real-world relevance of second-wave anti-porn feminism has dropped to zero. For example, when Andrea Dworkin died I had the impression that almost no one below a certain age had any idea who she was.
117: Maria Bamford has your decentering the conversation from a singular focus on consent and choice in order to look at how the landscape of decisions is shaped right here.
epistemological quandaries related to female orgasm
As in, how is it possible to know if you had one?
True story: my high school girlfriend, about two years after we broke up, told me (alluding to her new idiot* boyfriend), "I thought I was having orgasms with you, but it turns out I was wrong. Now I know what it really feels like."
* Somewhat later, a friend saw him on the news marching in a "white power" rally.
145.last: IT'S TWUE! IT'S TWUE!
("Every woman adores...")
148: It ain't all sunshine and roses on this side of the equation, either, Sylvie. Do you have any idea how much you whined as a child? (Less, amazingly, than you do as a woman).
34 was a very indirect way for me to say that I finished my 1/2 marathon.
72: It is interesting to think of McKinnon's fight against sexual harassment and her fight against pornography together. The law and most decent parts of society have accepted one of her arguments but not the other. Porn is ok, but porn at work creates a hostile environment and is discrimination. But for McKinnon they were both parts of the same argument: basically that expressions of male sexual desire are oppressive to women.
I think the current, partial acceptance of McKinnon's views is a good one. The problem isn't that women are turned into sex objects period. Its just that women are turned into sex objects in the wrong contexts. As it turns out, even women like male sexual desire in the right context.
She should have gone after advertising. Frankly I don't like looking at a billboard and seeing that what was once a picture of a bunch of Fords, Lincolns, and Mercurys has become a picture of a near-naked woman in need, trying to get me to go to Secrets, The Area's Top Gentleman's Club. Or even worse, a picture of a near-naked woman in need, trying to get me to buy Fords, Lincolns, and Mercurys.
I get the sense that men in general are uneasy with this and that it is a way the patriarchy hurts us all. But it has mostly been addressed in the form of standup comedians saying "Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? Apparently men think about sex every seven seconds. Well that's because we see a picture of a hot babe wherever we look, trying to distract us! Women can go about their day without having internet popup ads trying to seduce them every time they go to Yahoo.com."
153.2 -- I'm agnostic about whether pr)n is cause or symptom, but it's certainly part of a process where right contexts are exceeded. Can we reach a time when no man goes to the library, sees a bespectacled female professional -- hair tied back as a matter of convenience -- and imagines energetic sex in the stacks?
150: I assumed you'd been to some sort of anal sex convention.
I thought just imagining it was ok, as long as you keep your filthy book-fetish thoughts to yourself.
Great. Now I'm imagining energetic sex in the stacks.
Can we reach a time when no man goes to the library, sees a bespectacled female professional -- hair tied back as a matter of convenience -- and imagines energetic sex in the stacks?
Men are librarians too!
Besides, isnt that why libraries have remote areas!?!?
And is CC channeling his inner knecht this morning?
159.1 -- It's not about the sex, it's about the misogyny. I don't care if you have lustful thoughts about the male librarians, whether they are wearing glasses or not. Go ahead, reduce him to an object.
I'm liking the word contexts here.
I'm also squeamish about porn. Partially because I'm suspicious about working conditions without any real basis in knowledge, so that's something I should either find out more about or stop worrying about, but largely out of a Cryptic Ned/Twisty Faster-like distaste and discomfort with what you could call the pornification of everyday life: the conversation we had here about how Sarah Palin was obviously playing on porno-librarian images by being attractive with glasses and her hair up annoyed the hell out of me.
But I'm equally or more uncomfortable with censorship/banning, both because line-drawing is always going to include some things that I really don't think should be banned under any circumstances, and because lots of perfectly reasonable people are porn users and it doesn't seem to do any actual harm.
It would be nice if there were a stronger cultural separation between appropriately sexualized contexts and the rest of life; if pornographic imagery could be kept only for contexts where it would, e.g., literally be appropriate to masturbate. I'm not sure how to cause that to come about, though.
While I am slightly turned on by the idea of energetic sex in the stacks, as a bespectacled professional with my hair tied back for convenience (as I type this, even!), I would rather be sexualized at a time and place of my choosing. Because people are human, having wandering eyes and lust in their hearts, they will objectivize others. But they should keep it to themselves.
163 - as far as working conditions go they seem to range from awesome to awful. Frontline did a documentary on the porn industry that's available for streaming on their website. It's worth a watch if you're interested in finding out a bit more. There certainly seem to be islands of pretty pleasant working conditions in among the sea of questionable to horrible ones.
I don't think the pornification is exactly what's damaging, so much as the good-looks-ification. Which has always been around, although I think it does vary between different regions. But young girls are accurate when they realize that their worth to others is based on their looks, and I think that sets them up for a whole host of feeling shitty about yourself.
Because people are human, having wandering eyes and lust in their hearts, they will objectivize others. But they should keep it to themselves.
Well, right. There's nothing wrong with watching librarian-porn. And nothing much wrong at all about internally applying porn-derived imagery to one's thoughts about attractive people in real life, like Sarah Palin. It's when it becomes acceptable to explicitly allude to this process in public contexts that it wouldn't otherwise be acceptable to sexualize that it starts feeling like an injury to the women being observed.
so much as the good-looks-ification.
I caught John Carpenter's Halloween on TV a few nights ago and it got me thinking about how much wider the range of "acceptable" looks were.
It seems like sometime in the 90s a kind of standardized template look got established (I mentally link this effect to Aaron Spelling TV shows for some reason).
A list actresses and actors can be more individual, but if you watch a modern B movie it's downright creepy how similar everybody looks. Each gender is allowed 2 or 3 "types", and that's about it.
how much wider the range of "acceptable" looks were.
Was.
It seems like sometime in the 90s a kind of standardized template look got established
Part of this is because of plastic surgery becoming so common.
Moby has inspired me. I'm off to run a half marathon.
I wonder if the 70s were a high water mark for this. Certainly the heyday of black n white movies featured pretty uniformly attractive people, in leading roles, anyway. Whereas in the 70s you had Shelley Duvall getting lead roles.
Could be completely wrong, of course, but it strikes me that the post-studio, auteur era would have been a logical time for a little more openness in terms of who could get screen time, and that the end of that era coincided with the rise of the everyone's-pretty now.
I was watching the Ronettes on YouTube the other day and idly thinking how pretty the lead singer is, and that she'd probably get a nose job in this day and age, and what a shame that would be.
172: I had an old hippie boss once tell me that Barbra Streisand was incredibly meaningful to his generation because she could simultaneously be big-nosed and funny-looking and generally recognized as beautiful.
163.last: It would be nice if there were a stronger cultural separation between appropriately sexualized contexts and the rest of life; if pornographic imagery could be kept only for contexts where it would, e.g., literally be appropriate to masturbate
Don't know who specifically to give credit to for this, but this is an area where I have seen tangible improvements in a number work contexts over my career. As late as the late '80s, porn on a manufacturing shop floor was , if not ubiquitous, generally pretty easy to find.
It's funny, it's gone both ways. I think the disappearance of, e.g., tool companies putting out pornographic calendars, is about the end of an expectation of a sex-segregated workplace -- that used to be seen as okay because the workplaces where porn was acceptable was places where women weren't allowed to be, and once women were allowed to be there, the porn level dropped.
But the level of porny stuff; billboards, ads, references to porn in public discourse, that is in contexts that aren't supposed to be singlesex, seems to me to have gone way up in my adult life -- again, since the 80s.
I wonder if the 70s were a high water mark for this.
I think you're right. They were certainly a high water mark for most forms of adventurousness in mainstream cinema.
My students love to talk about how all sorts of moral standards are in decline. But when a 70s movie is remade, they often have to tone down the amount of violence.
176.1: Yes, that is true to a large extent. However, I experienced that climate just as women were expanding their bridgeheads, and it was not just a *reflection* of nearly uni-gender workplaces but also a significant barrier to changing that.
176.2: Absolutely. Sex has always sold, but the explicitness of the sex has gone up exponentially.
There's a current ad for Wild Turkey set in a bar. There's a young bartender and the gruff owner, and as the ad opens, the young guy is giving a pretty girl her drink and then gazing as she walks away.
This is a totally normal setup, not even especially sexist (he's not leering or doing anything more than looking at a pretty woman). But the woman, instead of being generically pretty and then moving off-camera so they can sell bourbon, is gorgeous with a great big chest, which is then walked towards the camera so the the viewer can leer.
Now, it's not that this is super-pornulated, but the expectation is that this tiny part, without even a word of dialogue, will be played by a woman with a perfect face, perfect hair, and perfect body.
And maybe H-G is right that it comes down to plastic surgery, but I can't help but pin it on the anti-feminist backlash of the 90s, which has put the dudebro ethos at the very center of our popular culture (even as all sorts of other narratives have thrived at the edges).
Somewhat on topic: The Sexual Politics of Meat.
But when a 70s movie is remade, they often have to tone down the amount of violence.
They do? Which movies?
I had an old hippie boss once tell me that Barbra Streisand was incredibly meaningful to his generation because she could simultaneously be big-nosed and funny-looking and generally recognized as beautiful.
I heard an older drag queen express much the same sentiment at a book reading a few months back.
But when a 70s movie is remade, they often have to tone down the amount of violence.
Although I would note that in the execrable Halloween remake they dramatically ramped up the violence.
181, 183: I will note that watching Game of WTF last night, we were all howling at their apparent need to show the head rolling on the floor after the episode's beheading.
181: I was thinking of Deathrace 2000 and Rollerball in particular.
But they should keep it to themselves.
There's the rub. [Warning: analogy follows] there was a time period when smokers hoped that 'keeping it to themselves' -- eg having smoking sections in restaurants -- was going to work out. Turns out that the smoke permeates everything, and can't be contained in that manner.
Can we have librarian p)rn and not have people making indecent cracks* about the former governor of Alaska? If so, it's in a different society than the one we are living in.
* Which cracks have all sorts of social consequences, far beyond hurting the feelings (if any) of the object.
My students love to talk about how all sorts of moral standards are in decline. But when a 70s movie is remade, they often have to tone down the amount of violence.
I think this is much much much much much much much much much much much much much more true for "sex" than "violence".
With Rollerball the original was a pretty serious movie and the remake was designed as a PG-13 movie for "Fast and Furious" fans. It has LL Cool J and Rebecca Romijn Stamos in in for God's sake.
As I understand the original Death Race was a Roger Corman production and far more gory than anything a Hollywood studio would come up with at the time. Whereas now the remake is a big mainstream production and almost as gory. Similar with the Hills Have Eyes remake and the like.
Maybe I'm wrong here but I haven't noticed an increase in the sexual objectification of women over the past decade and a half or so. If anything the reverse (anyone care to take a look at seventies liquor or cigarette adds?). This in spite of a massive increase in the prevalence of porn, courtesy of the internet. This would imply that there's a negative spillover effect. I don't actually believe that, just that the two don't have much to do with one another.
NB the sexy librarian thing is a staple of seventies porn and that type of playing with character stereotypes is a niche thing in post cheap video recording porn (i.e. the past twenty or so years) and it in turned played off existing sexual tropes (sexy repairman 'servicing' bored housewife, sexy prudish looking librarian type who is a secret wild nymphomaniac, sexy cop having his way with a woman who was speeding, sexy teacher teaching her students, etc. The way in which it was used against Sarah Palin didn't have anything to do with the pornification of contemporary society, but rather general sexual objectification seizing on a long established trope.
186 Restaurants have porn watching sections these days, disturbing other diners with loud fake orgasms?
This would imply that there's a negative spillover effect.
We should get a team of sociologists in here to give us some actual data. I wouldn't infer a negative spillover, so much as a decrease in the rate of reduction of the social acceptability of objectification that was ongoing.
Looked at from what a reasonably progressive person thought in 1975 might be happening 40 years on, the lack of jet packs is the most trivial of it all.
Looked at from what a reasonably progressive person thought in 1975 might be happening 40 years on, the lack of jet packs is the most trivial of it all.
I didn't really come into political consciousness until about 5 years after that, but my vision of the most likely political future involved nuclear annihilation.
Restaurants have porn watching sections these days
An unfilled niche is identified. Will Capitalism respond?
190 was my take, too. Ronald Reagan had something to do with that, I think.
(anyone care to take a look at seventies liquor or cigarette adds?)
I think this conflates misogyny with sexualization. The ad with the man standing on the head of the woman/rug is purely about social power and gender; more sexualized contemporaries of that ad tapped into the power issue first, the sex second.
The beer ads from a few years back with women in bikinis mud wrestling are less about power and gender*, and more about sexualization. The equation of women and sex is the primary message. And the level of sexiness required to get there is very different from what it was in the 80s.
* not that those things are absent, but they're not the primary message
Looked at from what a reasonably progressive person thought in 1975 might be happening 40 years on, the lack of jet packs is the most trivial of it all.
I was a baby, but I basically agree with this. Even as late as 1990, things seemed (to me) to be going in a greener, less sexist direction. Hawkeye Pierce to Sam Malone to Charlie Sheen in 2 1/2 Men is not progress.
190 & 192
I wonder if it's common for people roughly my age* to vividly remember watching that TV movie The Day After as kids.
*I think I was 12 when it aired
190 Here too. And for reasons mentioned in 192.
The beer ads from a few years back with women in bikinis mud wrestling are less about power and gender*, and more about sexualization.
This sounds right. There's not so much of the docile, subservient female and a lot more of the sexually aggresive big-tits-on-a-stick.
179.last: I can't help but pin it on the anti-feminist backlash of the 90s
That and the backlash against political correctness, which is of course related, and which may be tangentially related to the 30-years-long rehabilitation of conservatism (which project involved a rise in media power).
150: Have you finished the second half yet?
I'm sorry to hear that the transparent nonsense about nuclear annihilation in the early 80s* -- and yes, I participated in this, as a means to resist various aspects of Reaganism -- affected so many kids. In the teeth of the backlash, something was needed, and it seemed to make sense at the time to go with this one.
* Readily distinguishable from fear expressed/experienced in the late 50s early 60s.
Fears on nuclear annihiliation were transparent nonsense in the 80s?
Was it nonsense? I think Reagan was capable of launching a first strike, especially during the really hawkish first term.
You'll be glad to hear that as soon as the USSR ceased to exist, all childhood fear of nuclear annihilation ceased as well (presumably since all the Soviet nukes were then handed over to America). I never had any such feelings. (born in the early 80s)
I grew up during the Cold War and never had any particular fears of nuclear annihilation. I only remember a few people I knew thinking that way.
It was transparent nonsense. Misdirection.
Personally, I'm about Academic Lurker's age, and I recall the hyped fears, but never shared them. I had a lot of faith in MAD.
When I watched "Failsafe", sometime in the late 80s, I was shocked to realize just how terrified people must have been to be making such movies. It didn't align with my own experience of the era.
Although there was nothing nonsensical about the objection that we shouldn't be spending billions on systems that would surely fail to prevent the non-impending attack. When we could be spending that money feeding the hunger, housing the homeless, etc.
203 -- That's good. The spillovers from the 80s, though, are still with us, and quite serious. From a certain lack of faith in things like SS to, more seriously, no one in the intelligence services over the age of 40 who didn't believe in transparent nonsense in their 20s.
I certainly remember The Day After, though I didn't watch it, as I was old enough by then to have imagined and read a fair amount about just what would happen. The disarmament movement needed that kind of agitation in order to gain any traction amongst the general public; I don't find it regrettable. A little surprised that Charley does.
171 was me. I'm back! A bit tired though. Will liveblog it next time.
It was transparent nonsense. Misdirection.
My older brother (b 1970) was, I think, more worried about the prospect of nuclear war than I was, but I'm still surprised to hear you say that with such confidence.
I definitely thought that there was a small but non-zero possibility of a significant nuclear exchange (I don't think I tried to weigh the possibilities of "nuclear annihilation" separately from "nuclear exchange" since it was hard to know what the latter would look like in practice -- though I did take some comfort in not living close to any major targets).
The spillovers from the 80s, though, are still with us, and quite serious. From a certain lack of faith in things like SS . . .
My sense of 80s pop culture is that nobody had any faith in the idea of a future, and that the attacks on SS both fed into that and drew strength from that fact.
The air raid drills* that they had us do when I was in elementary school certainly didn't help so I'm not blaming disarmament activists. Also Reagan's "we begin bombing in 5 minutes" stunt.
Not exactly "duck and cover" but everyone into the hallway get on your elbows and knees with your head facing the wall and put your hands over your head.
I need to preview before posting more often.
My most vivid childhood nightmare (ca. 1983) involved nuclear annihilation.
I second 203. We've discussed this before, but I think this is one of the big things differentiating Millennials from Gen-Xers.
209 -- i don't regret the choice, just the effect on impressionable youth.
For whose benefit is the country run? What would they get from actual nuclear annihilation? As opposed to merely preparing for wars large and small.
210: It is probably harder when people aren't blocking cars and handing you water.
212: I didn't realize they had you kids doing that. I was in college by then, and just felt that people should not just laugh it all off, in a sort of "Oh, well, it'll probably be fine, but if it happens, it'll suck to be you" way, because clearly it would more than suck for all of us to be us, such that it wasn't funny at all.
I thought generally about this recently in connection with Japan's recent turning off of its last nuclear power station. The U.S. isn't going to be doing anything like that any time soon. A different perspective on the matter, no doubt.
For whose benefit is the country run? What would they get from actual nuclear annihilation?
The ruling elites frequently do things that are not in their best interests and can sometimes slide into full blown mass hysteria, just like anyone else. When they do, everyone hurts.
The 2007 banking collapse wasn't in their interest either.
More generally, though, I don't see why a reasonably progressive person in either the 70s or the 80s would think that things were more likely to get better, rather than worse.
217: Charley, I just didn't have a lot of faith in the Reagan administration: it's a fool's game to bank our lives on the sensibility of any given administration. Better to ensure that the stage is set in such a way that nothing really horribly bad can happen even if a nutcase is in power.
219: I asked my dad about it at the time and he told me the proper procedure he was taught when he was in the Army (mid-60s, Captain, Army Corps of Engineers) was to bend down, gripping your ankles firmly and kiss your ass goodbye. We had a good laugh about that at the time but still, it haunted me.
217: that's not really what you have to worry about. It's "accident, miscalculation or madness " as JFK said.
218: 1:56:38.2. GET IN MY SON.
214: I had recurring nightmares about nuclear annihilation as a child, born in '80. I later ended up reading a lot of post-apocalypse YA, which still seemed chilling and poignant even though supposedly the threat had dissipated.
@224
That seems surprising. I would have thought that being born in 1980 you would have missed most of the nuclear doomsday stuff. Did it hang on longer in different parts of the country (in California it was pretty much gone by 1992, maybe the riots distracted us).
223.2: I took about half an hour longer, but I'm old and never ran past 10 miles before.
202: We now know that Reagan genuinely regarded nuclear weapons as immoral. At the Reyjavik summit, offered to give the Soviets the "Star Wars" anti-missile technology in return for complete nuclear disarmament of both sides. It's hard to reconcile this with someone who'd order a nuclear first strike. The only plausible scenario is what Charlie linked to: the Soviets misunderstanding Reagan's attentions, and launching in response to an imagined attack.
Good thing everyone here is against the Republican sentiment that we should not have pursued that recent renewal of the nuclear anti-proliferation treaty with Russia (START II, or rather, New START).
This is why the 80s disarmament movement was valuable: it still shades public perception of what nuclear proliferation really means. More power to it.
The wikipedia piece on New START is interesting for the section on the Status of the strategic forces of Russia and the U.S.
Reagan was the head of a class bent on looting the treasury: no gain to be had from putting their own asses on the line. Risk of accidents, madness or miscalculations were at background levels. No greater than they are right now: what would you say about someone who is afraid, today, of nuclear annihilation? One might have some concern for mental health, depending on how the fear manifests.
In 1975, one could look back over the preceding 15-20 years and feel like the vector was going in the right direction. Even if not as quickly as desired. In 1981, one could look at the recent election as an aberration, and the backlash component of it as a matter of moving too fast. And definitely a tendency that could be defeated, with struggle and time. 1984 and then 1988 were the shocks that showed it not to be so (inasmuch as electoral politics reflects the Zeitgeist -- which is imperfect, because of the twin lagging effects of old people continuing to vote outmodedly, and young people continuing to sit out) in any reasonable period of time.
225: I don't know. I listened to a lot of NPR and was a nervous and over-sensitive child in general. The Gulf War started when I was 11, so it felt like there were weird wars still going on that absolutely shouldn't be and that the US had far more power than it could manage morally, which scared me a lot.
More generally, though, I don't see why a reasonably progressive person in either the 70s or the 80s would think that things were more likely to get better, rather than worse.
Because they had been getting better? Because the forces of reaction were being widely portrayed as buffoons in the most popular and acclaimed TV shows of the era?
Obviously, the assumption was wrong, but I think it's strange that you'd dismiss the idea as groundless. 1932 to 1980 looked like a pretty good win streak for the good guys. Not without setbacks, obviously, but even in the 80s it wasn't clear just how ferociously the forces of reaction would come back.
227: or in response to a weather balloon or a sounding rocket or a trigger happy destroyer captain : all of which very nearly happened. Everyone should watch Counting to Zero...
One the subject of the recent financial crash, it would be interesting to know now, four years on, just what injury the elite classes have sustained. If any.
OK, I guess certain heirs lost out if their decedents passed away at the exact wrong moment. I may have to learn to play the violin just to express my sadness for them.
...Which is to say that, contra 230.1, I am definitely worried about nuclear war. It's one of the tw o things that scare me.
233 etc -- I think the actual risks posed by flocks of geese and the like have been way overstated. Again, in service (at the time) of a positive agenda. But now generally deployed in service of a less positive purpose.
227, 229 - But Reagan was, uh, not a particularly strong president, and he was surrounded by a bunch of lunatics (who in turn fostered ever stronger and more lunatic lunatics as part of their continuing project to make Judge Dredd a documentary) who thought he was naive and could be dissuaded to the extent they took him seriously when he talked about disarmament. (SDI was considered valuable principally by softening Reagan's public image as a warmongering anti-Communist zealot.) There's an excellent history of SDI by Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue, that goes through the politics of SDI, how it was conceived of by ruthless Kissingerian RAND types, Reagan's admirable loathing for the idea of MAD, etc.
234.1: They haven't, much, which is why the financial crash isn't quite a perfect analogy to nuclear war. (I don't think helpy-chalk meant it to be.)
237 -- Also a great way to loot the treasury.
Contra 238, if you had money in bank shares - or indeed pretty much anything except government bonds - then you will have suffered significant losses.
236: why do you think that? And what less positive agenda?
Global climate change now occupies most of by Budget for Worrying About Global Catastrophe. I do however take some time out occasionally to worry about nukes.
A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan might not be world-ending, but it would be distinctly unfun. Or can we count on the elites of those countries to pursue their rational self-interest, too?
I wrote my senior thesis about The Day After but it was for AmStud and I was trying to be Greil Marcus so I really don't have anything helpful to add. It was during a short golden age when you could do free color laser prints in the architecture building, so I included a lot of screen grabs.
It's the fastest selling book of the year in the UK but British author EL James's erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey is just too pornographic for residents of Brevard County, Florida, according to local librarians.No comment.
Right for the wrong reason is about as good as it gets in Florida.
