Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!ucivax!gateway From: csluder@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (KirK) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Who's Exploiting Who? (Was Re: A Moral Question) Message-ID: <65210@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Date: 17 Oct 90 15:23:37 GMT References: <16098@s.ms.uky.edu> Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington IN. Lines: 40 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: alexandre-dumas.ics.uci.edu In article kaveh@ms.uky.edu (Kaveh Baharestan) writes: > >hmm... the fight against porn movies may not be on the agenda of most >feminists simply because they are dirty or what ever. Porn is basically >anti-feminist and promotes the objectification, humiliation, control, >and hate of women. Isn't this an objective thing? I feel that men are downgraded just as much in bad pornography as women. Look at how men are portrayed. Men in pornography are usualy jaded, insensitive piledrivers. I find this to be almost as insulting as its portrayal of women. >There is no pornagrafy that does not promote one >or more of these ideas in its viewer-readers. So the fight agianst >Porn is the fight for equality. (this does not mean that I believe the >church fanatics are correct - as one article i read said, the church >and pornographers are codependent.) I have a problem with the idea that porn is exclusively women exploitive. Who is exploiting whom? Recently I've met a semi-professional drag queen, and a topless dancer who both say that what they love about performing is the control they have over their audience. Is pornography a case of male consumers exploiting female porn stars? Or is the female porn star exploiting the men who chose to buy into her image of a wanton uninhibited "slut"? I'm not opposed to the idea of pornography. IMHO there can be pornography (there is but it doesn't sell well) that caters to both men and women and refuses to buy into sexist steriotypes. On another note how do feminists feel about performers like Madonna who are subtlely twisting our ideas of gender by taking sexual "femininity" to an extreme? RE: Story of O Yes there are some women and men who enjoy masochism. I have met quite a few people into a milder form of S&M, usualy dubbed bondange and dicipline, who claim that sadomasochism is a thriving sexual fetish. Some people are unable to get sexual pleasure unassociated with the giving or receiving of pain.