Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero-c!nadel From: Marc.Ringuette@DAISY.LEARNING.CS.CMU.EDU Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: does healthy, mutual erotica exist? Message-ID: <1991Apr8.175404.9017@aero.org> Date: 8 Apr 91 17:54:04 GMT Sender: news@aero.org Organization: The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA Lines: 53 Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Status: R Originator: nadel@aerospace.aero.org jeanne@mica.berkeley.edu (Jeanne Dusseault) writes: > The role of various representations, i.e. photographs, films, > advertisements, is constructing what we know as reality. Since > reality can be known only through the forms that articulate it, there > can be no reality outside of representation. With its synonyms, truth > and meaning, it is a fiction produced by its cultural representations, > a construction solidified through repetition. Representation, hardly > neutral, acts to regulate and define the subject it addresses, > positioning them by class or by sex, in active or passive relations to > meaning. Over time and constant repetitions these positions become > fixed and acquire the status of identities and of categories. Hence > the forms of representations are at once forms of definition, means of > limitation, modes of power. This is the most opaque paragraph I've read for many months. Please try to be more clear! Don't hide behind words! On to your point, which I'll paraphrase as "...but representations create reality, and there's no reality without representation." There's a good point in there, but it's obscured by some total baloney. The good point is that the things we see on the TV or read in a magazine really do influence how we see the world and how we act. The baloney is that that's all there is. Of course there's a reality! We can feel it and touch it. We spend most of our lives dealing with real, tangible people, and how we act with them and feel about them is what our lives are made of. The point that has some real oomph, for me, is that fiction _influences_ us and how we see reality, and can guide us strongly in some direction. That direction, in my opinion, is determined most strongly by compelling ideas we hear, role models we see, and common ideas of how the world works. These vivid ideas, which come alive in our imaginations, are what motivate us and guide our choices. In the case of Playboy, I would argue that men, seeing (for example) rich older men frolicking with airbrushed 19-year-olds, may acquire some daydreams and ideals which they will unconsciously strive for later in life. The concept of "ideas having influence" seems like a more powerful way to understand this phenomenon than "media creating reality." One thing this point of view suggests to me is that we're in a war of ideas: if we (the freedom-loving, non-sexist, empower-everybody good guys) can create compelling visions of a world that we like and strive for, we can help make it happen by capturing some space in the minds of the people around us. In the war of ideas, the best weapon is a vivid daydream. ------------------ -------------------------- ------------------------------- | Marc Ringuette | Cucumber Science Dept. | If you can't stand solitude, | | mnr@cs.cmu.edu | Cranberry Melon Univ. | perhaps you bore others as | | 412-268-3728 | Pittsburgh, PA 15213 | well. | ------------------ -------------------------- -------------------------------