I have been reading "Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism" lately, and it's full of great articles and essays. It features a lot of Sheila Jeffery's work as well as Andrea Dworkin.
Recently, I made a youtube video mocking Violet Blue, a so-called "sexpert" with zero credentials. She has a blog up where she scopes out apparent "feminist, female-friendly porn" and shares it. This makes her an expert on sexuality.
So much so that Oprah featured her via Skype to talk about how great porn is with Jenna Jameson. To my surprise, Violet Blue, after I left her a rather spiteful message on one of her chauvinistic blog posts, blogged about ME! Yes, she did. All of her "feminist" followers complained about what a puritan I was, how awful I am and how repressed I must be. An anti-feminist by the name of MadShangi found the blog and paraded it allover youtube. This inspired me to get even more involved in anti-exploitation feminist work. I wanted to find out more about these women who hurt women.
For now, let's get back to the book. I think Sheila Jeffreys has a bad rep. because she has a lot of ideas that a lot of feminists probably do not share. I find her fascinating and fair. Last Christmas I received "Beauty and Misogyny" which examines western cultural practices of beauty, fashion and feminist politics. Some of the material was a bit much for me, but a lot of it was new and I took it in the best I could. Keep in mind however, that I do acknowledge flaws in myself
I give into patriarchal cultural practices:
leg shaving
pit shaving
wearing a little makeup
I guess it's not that brutal. It could be much worse. I suppose that I could be wearing push up bras, using fake tanners, wearing fake nails and shaving my vulva. I could be piercing my clitoris and my breasts, wearing stilettos and thus ruining my future chance at having a healthy back.
I could be doing a lot of things, right? I don't like having that "it's not that bad" attitude. Nevertheless, my attitude acknowledges the practices put forth by the patriarchy (and thus I feel they need to be analyzed) but there are more important and dangerous (at least in my mind) practices occurring. These practices should be obvious to most women, they have been around for far too long.
Right now a woman is being pimped out, beat, raped, exploited and possibly killed.
Right now, some man is in his home watching a woman being pimped out, beat, raped, exploited and possibly killed.
That man is masturbating to those practices. He is taking pleasure in witnessing these things - these practices that he feels he is entitled to.
We live in a culture where men feel that they need unlimited access to a woman's body, be it through prostitution, sexual assault, or pornography. Our society calls this "free speech".
Where is our speech?
There are self-proclaimed feminists who take part in this male privileged, misogynistic behavior. Yes, there are women who purchase and use pornography, women that go to strip clubs and buy prostitutes.
They call it liberation. Sexual liberation.
They equate female liberation with male pleasure. This is where sex politics play a role. Females are sexually liberated, according to sexual libertarian 'feminists', when they allow themselves to become subordinate to male sexuality. When we fail to challenge our own lives and our own privilege, we fail to examine what women as a class go through. When we fail to question power struggles in our relationships, we fail to find out how those dynamics affect all women.
To conclude,
"Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity -- the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her."--Andrea Dworkin
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