Illusions of Power through the Status Quo

found here 

In the past few weeks, my gaze has been overwhelmed by an increase in patriarchal propaganda. Whether it be mural-sized advertisements for pharmaceutical drugs that sport oiled up gals punching shit with boxing gloves, or posters featuring a woman's torso being smothered in a pink corset reading: Striptease, Sexual Shame, Sex Work - it is clear that everything Ariel Levy wrote about in Female Chauvinist Pigs has been ever-increasing in the West.


“We have to ask ourselves why we are so focused on silent girly-girls in G-strings faking lust. This is not a sign of progress, it's a testament to what's still missing from our understanding of human sexuality with all its complexity and power. We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept of 'sexy.' When you think about it, it's kind of pathetic.” (Levy, p. 198)

It seems that the whole confidence for cash shtick has really taken off. Usually, yet not surprisingly, these "confidence campaigns" target women. Women can be satisfied and confident about themselves, they say, but it has to be like in the good ole' days, through through our bodies, through our ability to sexually arouse and titillate men - not through our minds, our ideas, or our actions. Now, this consumer-friendly notion of empowerment and self-confidence is being sold as socially progressive and pro-woman - but it is only re-naming (or re-branding!) the status quo. 


“Women's liberation and empowerment are terms feminists started using to talk about casting off the limitations imposed upon women and demanding equality. We have perverted these words. The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom; it is not the only 'women's issue' worth paying attention to. And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist. There are other choices. If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire. We need to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex instead of mimicking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be liberation" (Levy, p. 200). 


Whether it comes from the billion dollar beauty industry, burlesque revivalist camps, the pornography industry, striptease weight-loss home exercise DVDs, or the comical yet profoundly vain self-help industry - the West is obsessed with promoting false reality and false consciousnesses that favors patriarchy and normalizes it.




Source:
Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, pp. 198 and 200, 2005, Free Press

Andrea Dworkin's Heartbreak: "Prisons"

Here is the entire (short) chapter "Prisons" from Andrea Dworkin's Heartbreak 

Prisons 1

   Perhaps because I came from the pacifist left, I had an intense and abiding hatred for prisons (even though the U. S. prison system was developed by the Quakers). After the publication of Our Blood, I wrote a proposal for a book on prisons. I was struck by the way prisons stayed the same through time and place: the confinement of an individual in bad circumstances with a sadistic edge and including all the prison rites of passage. I was struck by how prisons were the only places in which men were threatened with rape in a way analogous to the female experience. I was struck by the common sadomasochistic structure of the prison experience no matter what the crime or country or historical era. That proposal was rejected by a slew of publishers. I found myself at a dead end.

  But an odd redemption was at hand. I had noticed that in all pornography one also found the prison as leitmotif, the sexualization of confining and beating women, the ubiquitous rape, the dominance and submission of the social world in which women were literally and metaphorically imprisoned. 

   I decided to write on pornography because I could make the same points - show the same inequities - as with prisons. Pornography and prisons were built on cruelty and brutalization; the demeaning of the human body as a form of punishment; the worthlessness of the individual human being; restraint, confinement, tying, whipping, branding, torture, penetration, and kicking as commonplace ordeals. Each was a social construction that could be different but was not; each incorporated and exploited isolation, dominance and submission,humiliation, and dehumanization. In each the effort was to control a human being by attacking human dignity. In each the guilt of the imprisoned provided a license to animalize persons, which in turn led to a recognition of the ways in which animals were misused outside the prison, outside the pornography. Arguably (but not always), those in prison had committed an offense; the offense of women in pornography was in being women. In both prisons and pornography,sadomasochism was a universal dynamic; there was no chance for reciprocity or mutuality or an equality of communication. 

   In prison populations and in pornography, the most aggressive rapist was at the top of the social structure. In prison populations gender was created by who got fucked; so, too, in pornography. It amazed me that in pornography the prison was recreated repeatedly as the sexual environment most conducive to the rape of women.

   The one difference, unbridgeable, intractable, between prisons and pornography was that prisoners were not expected to like being in prison, whereas women were supposed to like each and every abuse suffered in pornography.

1. p. 127-129 in Heartbreak by Andrea Dworkin, Published by Perseus Books Group
Copywrite 2002 Andrea Dworkin

** All of Andrea's published works can be found online, courtesy of radfem.org **

Andrea Dworkin's Heartbreak: Passage in a Post I

Andrea Dworkin's Heartbreak was moving, inspiring, shocking, and honest. Since the entire book cannot be outlined in a blog post, several more passages will be posted at a later time.

[From the chapter Anita.*]

"She and Abbie had not been together for a while . It was clear that she was poor. She said that she didn't know what to do, that a friend of Abbie's had offered her work as a prostitute ("escort," high end of the line) and was putting a lot of pressure on her. Abbie's latest caper had left her destitute. This guy was a friend of Abbie's, so he had to be okay, right? She had thought of doing organizing -- poor, single mothers like herself had no political power in the system; but really, what was wrong with prostituting? She could earn a lot of money and she was lonely. Honey, I thought, you don't begin to know what lonely is. 


I told her about my own experiences in the trade, especially about the disassociation that was essential to doing the deed. You had to separate your mind from your body. Your consciousness had to be hovering somewhere near the ceiling behind you or on the far side of the room watching your body. No one got through it without having that happen. I also told her that she'd begin to hate men; at first manipulating them would seem like power, but eventually and inevitably the day would come when one perceived them as coarse and brutal, smelly, dirty bullies. She had said that she liked sex and that she had had sex with the guy who was now trying to pimp her. I told her that sex with Abbie's friend was a set up to make her more pliant and that in prostituting one lost the ability to feel, so if one liked sex it was the last thing, not the first thing, that one should do." 1



*Anita Hoffman, married to activist Abbie Hoffman


1. p. 162 in Heartbreak by Andrea Dworkin, Published by Perseus Books Group
Copywrite 2002 Andrea Dworkin

Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Yes, my copy of Andrea's memoir has finally arrived! I am considering a formal post, for my thoughts after the book is completed, but so far this book has been raw, honest and sometimes, surprising. This book, like her others, is incredibly inspiring to read - her writing is beautiful.

 Unfortunately, this book cannot be found in most mega-book stores like Indigo, but yet are purchasable as "used and rare" on their website. 

Thus far the book has been difficult to put down and in reading it, I have learned so much about Andrea's life that I would have never imagined or assumed. So many have  taken to distorting Andrea Dworkin's character  her ideas, but this memoir tears those misrepresentations to shreds. 

So, read it! 

(also, found a free copy of Susan Faludi's Backlash...!!)

Intercourse and Pornland

My books came in the mail! Since Dworkin's Intercourse and Dine's Pornland are not found in any stores in my city I was forced to order them online. To my surprise, the books arrived in a few days and now I am the official owner of Intercourse and Pornland. I am still waiting for The Female Eunuch to arrive.

Sadly, despite the advice from my fellow sisters, I ordered the edition of Intercourse that has Ariel Levy doing the foreword. This is probably the one they told me not to get. I would imagine, anyway. It's not that I dislike Levy, I enjoyed Female Chauvinist Pigs, but as for introducing Andrea's book? She's not really the ideal candidate in my humblest of opinions.

Anyway, I will probably be posting about either book, so keep checking back!

Hope everyone has a great new years!