Thursday, October 4, 2007

I guess porn really does lead to violence....

Bond set for woman accused of killing boyfriend

[...]

On Sunday morning, Strowder allegedly found at least one CD with nude photos of women and confronted Martin in their home about 10 a.m. She then allegedly got a gun and shot him multiple times, including twice in the head, according to prosecutors. The 54-year-old man was later pronounced dead on the scene, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office said.

[more]

7 comments:

  1. I know I shouldn't laugh or appear to make light of this, but I noticed this happened in Chicago... and I couldn't help thinking that it sounds like a modern-day version of the Broadway musical Chicago.

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  2. I've only seen bits and pieces of Chicago, so I guess I missed the connection.

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  3. Presumably either the couple already had issues, or the woman has a brain disorder. But insofar as porn is really the issue here, it's easy to argue that those who promote intolerance of it are to blame.

    There's a curious hypocrisy on the part of some, as displayed in this passage from Diana E. H. Russell in her anthology Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography:

    "When [Andrea] Dworkin did a reading from [her novel] Mercy...I was struck by the empathetic rage of the mostly female audience in response to passages supportive of women's violence against men, whether or not the violence was in self-defense. At the end of Dworkin's reading, a woman ripped up a copy of Penthouse that a male member of the audience was conspicuously brandishing about. Then a second woman delivered a hard kick to his butt that sent him sprawling across the bookstore floor. Does this incident shock the reader? It didn't seem to shock the women in the bookstore." (p. 267)

    And so far as I can tell, it didn't shock Russell either. While expressing outrage at violence against women that she attributes to porn, despite the weakness of the evidence for a connection, she shows no qualms about this apparently direct incitement by her ideological heroine.

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  4. Not apropos of this post in particular, I'd like to suggest you add a couple links to your list: the Woodhull Freedom Foundation at www.woodhullfoundation.org and the Sexual Freedom Network (a service of Woodhull) at www.sexual-freedom.net. Woodhull sponsored an encouraging conference yesterday in Philadelphia attended by about 25-30 including yours truly.

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  5. "And so far as I can tell, it didn't shock Russell either. While expressing outrage at violence against women that she attributes to porn, despite the weakness of the evidence for a connection, she shows no qualms about this apparently direct incitement by her ideological heroine."

    veryone has their violent streak -- and their justification for it.

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  6. The incident Stripey describes doesn't surprise me, actually – it was actually pretty typical of the 1980s and early 1990s porn wars. Other incidents I can think of are the firebombing of several Canadian porn shops by the "Squamish 5", the crowbar attack on women at a UK S/M club by some of Sheila Jeffrey's associates, the destruction of Womenfyre books in Northampton, and bomb threats and direct confrontation with a knife-wielding radfem during Susie Bright's early 90s campus tours, as well as a lot of more petty acts of vandalism.

    (And I'll note that to the best of my knowledge, there has never been even one incident of violence from the "pro-sex" side toward anti-porn folks.)

    The anti-porn radical feminist movement in its heyday was pretty far from non-violent, which is one of the big reasons I'm not thrilled to see its regrowth as any kind of mass movement. So far, in the last few years they've managed to keep their rage confined to the blogosphere. I'm hoping this generation of radfems at least has the good sense not to take their more violent impulses out on the street, but some of the rhetoric I hear from people like Charliegrrl or Sam Berg make me wonder.

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