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From: marla@Eng.Sun.COM (Marla Parker)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Pornography AGAIN
Message-ID: <3121@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 23 Nov 90 07:54:53 GMT
References: <272090CA.26470@ics.uci.edu> <1741@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <45691@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <658778710@grad17.cs.duke.edu> <46878@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
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In article <46878@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> feit@acsu.buffalo.EDU (Elissa Feit) writes:
>Premise 1: People's fantasies tend to be tied to distresses they
>suffered. If someone is abused as a child, that abuse (even if not
>conciously retrievable) finds its way into "what turns them on" - it's

This theory seems to address the question of why degrading acts turn
some people on.  You don't quote any sources for your premise, so I
assume it is just your own theory.  I am equally unqualified to answer
this question, but I have thought about it and I do have my own
theory.

I think that people like attention no matter what weird, twisted form
that attention may take.  For example, I've read about half of the
Sleeping Beauty series of porn written by Anne Rice under some penname
like Rabelaire [A. N. Roquelaire -- AMBAR] or something.  All of the
slaves in those books dread yet love the punishment/attention they
receive.  It is fiction, but Rice goes to great lengths to create a
world in which equal beings agree to treat each other in a most
unequal way just for serious fun without being considered sick.  At
least, that is what her message seems to be to me.

>MY proposal is to fill the demand for arousing material with
>"erotica", defined as different than pornography in that it DOES NOT
>degrade women.

After seeing the movie "Henry and June", I looked up Anais Nin at my
library.  I found a book of erotica by her, short stories written long
ago and published decades later because she felt that she had
inadvertently written porn with a woman's slant to it.  The
introduction to the book is absolutely hilarious.  She describes the
circumstances under which she wrote the short stories in the first
place.  They were sold to an anonymous "collector" who kept sending
back the message, "less poetry, more sex."  She and other starving
artists would sit around in cafes inventing the most outrageous,
unbelievable sexual escapades they could come up with, and she would
write them up and sell them to the collector through a go-between
publisher.

Back to the politics of porn: I agree that more women should write
porn, with no restrictions applied.  Given the impossibility of
defining "obscene" or even "degrading", I would oppose any legislation
in this area as a threat to my civil liberties and a violation of the
Constitution.

marla
--
Marla Parker		(415) 336-2538
marla@eng.sun.com