NPNH...

For those who ask what the endless pissing matches with NPNH have to do with feminism (though this blog is, of course, not only about porn and feminism), I just wanted to post a brief reminder that NPNH did, at one point, get linked in a Carnival of Feminists:

The wonderful Sparkle*Matrix takes apart the apologetic Myth of Porn and the Cathartic Relationship, by means of an analogy to chocolate and some scary data. NoPornNorthampton notes the underrepresentation of women in the media, remarking on how silence can be construed as lack of dissent, rather than as a result of the difficulties in speaking that the powerless have.

Sparkle*Matrix's post is also impressively thin on logic, in my personal opinion (while I see the point of comparing a woman to a consumable, and it's a very common one in certain radfem circles, I find that whole analogy shaky. To truly consume a person, one would have to kill her.

But my larger point is the linking to NPNH. While I strongly suspect that many anti-porn radical feminists do (or would if they bothered to take a long enough look) disapprove of some of NPNH's tactics and justifications, here again we see anti-porn radfems allying with people who have the same goal for very different reasons.

NPNH is one of those groups that latches on to feminist criticism of porn as one of many reasons they can round up to convince people to hate porn. It sits right alongside reasoning that has nothing at all to do with feminism. As Belle has said before, NPNH seems to be more about garden-variety NIMBYism than radical feminist analysis of women's oppression.

I still can't for the life of me understand why many APRFs are so, well, okay with allying with people who have the same goal but only on a completely superficial level. How the hell can, for example, NFAM link to Enough is Enough, whose founder is also behind the unabashedly religious-based and anti-gay Protect Kids without exploding from the cognitive dissonance?

On the one hand, well, yeah, if your own base of activism is small you will have to look the other way at some things. But on the other: okay, now that you've won, once your allies can turn their efforts to other indecencies like, oh I don't know, lesbian nonmonogamy, what's your plan? Can I see it, judge it, hear it?

Or are you still caught up in TheoryWorld, where somehow political "activism" against pornography isn't actual lobbying or working for bans, but a strange and creepy kind of "education" that does... well, as far as I can see, Jack Nothing to change society as a whole or shut down the industry?