Tuesday, December 4, 2007

More of AK Getting Off on "Getting Off"

Having now read Chris Hall's excellent review of Robert Jensen's Getting Off over at Sex in the Public Square (and greatly anticipating the lovely Amber Rhea's forthcoming review of same) has really brought up some points that I failed to address in my initial "review".

For starters, to quote this excerpt from Chris's review:


He does not, of course, ever say that we should just cloister ourselves and live lives of sexual abstinence. But when he does try to give solutions to the nightmare world that he depicts, Robert Jensen’s words lose their fire. His description of a positive sexuality is vague and bloodless, and speaks little of sex as a physical act but in semi-mystical terms about light and mystery and touch. It’s bland and dull, but even worse, it gives little in the way of practical advice. In the 90’s, I came away from reading sex-positive writers like Carol Queen and Susie Bright with sophisticated ways of thinking about safer sex techniques, talking honestly about limits, and what consent was and wasn’t. All that I get from Jensen is an admonition that we should try to make sex be more about light, and less about heat. (And god help me, I’m still not sure what that means.)



It took until this morning before reading that graph when it really did hit me: what Jensen means by his version of a "bloodless sexuality" that contains "more heat and less light" is similar to what the cultural feminists of the 1980s described as a "feminist sexuality" that would be imposed as much on women as on men. In that vision, sex would be concieved as much less a physical pleasure and more of a transcending, supernatural presence which would somehow go beyond the experiences and sensations of the individuals; more of a sprirtual and universal experience in communal bonding than any individualistic physical act. Of course, such a transcendent phonenom would be totally shorn of such "patriarchial" nonsenses as erections, body fluids, or even orgasms; such trite physical sensations would be whisked away by the sheer revolutionary outer-body experience that "feminist sex" would produce in men freed from their evil "patriarchial" ideas of power and domination. It's almost as if Jensen and his radicalfeminist mentors see his crusade against "masculinity" and the porn that he alleges is the foundation behind it as the key to ending world war, hunger, economic and social inequality, and most other ills of the world.

The problem with such a utopia, though, is that it comes dangerously close to an equally restrictive and "transcending" view of sexuality: that of the Religious Right.

It is no accident that the social conservatives have so appropriated much of Jensen's core theory about male sexual rapicity towards women; albeit with the aim of supporting and abetting their own traditional sexual morality of restraining sex within the act of procreation within marriage. The contraposition of the "liberating" and "beautiful" and "uplifting" power of what they call "the marital act" when "two become one" (or "when two become one") in the conception of a child, with the "ugly", "selfish", "compulsive", and "addictive" acts of sex for physical pleasure alone; has been a stable of conservative and traditionalist thought about sexuality since time immortal. Strangely enough, it has now been appropriated by the most sexually conservative feminists as a means of "protecting" women from the "male gaze", but with an added twist: "personal intimacy" and "emotional integrity" within codependent monogamy has replaced hetero marital procreation at the top of the privileged and sacred pyramid.

The emphasis may differ with each movement: the antipornradfems seek to regulate the supposed out-of-control nature of male sexuality at the hands of the "patriarchy"; while the fundamentalists target what they perceive as the threat of unbridled female sexuality in defiance of "God's law" (or "Allah's", or "Yawheh's" or any other deity of choice). But the effect is nevertheless the same: to inprision and restrict men's and women's sexual choices and impose a rather strained, exclusive, and repressive system of sexual regulation and choice by the use of shame and guilt (and with the full power of the State as a backup just in case the "gentle persuasion" and "conciousness raising" doesn't elicit the changes sought).

That such a reactionary concept of sexuality can be passed along as "progressive", even "Leftist" is one of the utter tragedies of this book....almost as much as the complete denial of female sexual agency that lurks just underneath the surface of Jensen's jerimiads.


The other thought that reared its head at me was about the individualistic approach that Jensen takes in his activism towards men who might be suspect to his illogic. He seems to see progressive activism as most of the culturalist Left and liberals of the 1970s do: as a means of consciousness raising of people already with "privilege" to confront, accept, and then repudiate such privilege and see the world as their apparant "victims" of such racial or gender or imperial privilege would. (Call it the "Walk a mile in their shoes" type of movement, if you will.)

This kind of activism sounds all well and good at first...but it ultimately suffers from the same flaw that most culturally-based movements falter on: the inability to take on fundamental physical institutions of inequality; and the confusion of individual acts of cruelty with institutional acts of inequality. Rape may be a universal crime of sexual anger and rage directed by men towards women (but don't forget anti-gay hate, either!!!), and certainly may be exploitable as part of larger hate campaigns against certain groups; but that doesn't change the basic fact that rape is for the most part an act of extreme violence done by an individual (or group of individuals) against an individual person.

Conversely, as much as many people might find facials or double penetration or anal sex "demeaning" and "filthy", the fact remains that even loving and caring and committed people can engage in such activities and find them personally upliftiing, or simply arousing. The difference is in the overall political and cultural outlook of whomever is making the prejudgment about such acts; not in the acts themselves.

On the other hand, though, laws specifically created to restrict and constrain sexual expression and behavior amongst consenting adults do far, far, far more damage to progressive activism than any of the dire consensual sex acts that so excise Jensen and his radfem mentors. Not only do they literally invite the State to intervene in matters of personal sexual tastes and asthetics that are better left to individual choice and free will; but they are the ultimate gateway to justifying more explicit political censorship.....the kind that has been traditionally used against the Left and against liberals in general for time immortal. Can't Jensen see the connection between McCarthyism and the anti-"homosexual menace" movements of the 1950s?? The intimate links between White supremacism and religious bigotry and sex crime so starkly seen in the castration and lynching of Black men (and rape of Black women) during the Jim Crow years??) The undercurrent of sexual bigotry and fear underlying the current memes against "illegal aliens" (read, anyone Latin@ who isn't a paid agent of the GOP or not useable as a slave for multinational corporations)?? The antiabortion movement and the attack on basic women's control of their own reproductive systems and all the "sluts get what they deserve" rhetoric??

Maybe Bob Jensen with his doctorate and his upper-middle-class background can overlook all this...but I as a working-class Black man certainly can't.

There are far, far more important issues of racial and gender and economic inequality -- and the institutions of capital and State that buttress and reinforce such inequality -- for liberals and Leftists to tackle; it is a distraction and a ruse and a dead end to get caught up in baiting and hating men for having impromptu erections (and women for getting damp panties and engorged clits) at the mere sight of imagery that doesn't fit a narrow ideologue's personal squicks. Save the hate for the rapists and true misogynists who earn it....and work the energy someplace else more fruitful than getting into every man's boxers....and every woman's panties.


[Cross-posted to The SmackDog Chronicles]

29 comments:

  1. Of course, such a transcendent phonenom would be totally shorn of such "patriarchial" nonsenses as erections, body fluids, or even orgasms; such trite physical sensations would be whisked away by the sheer revolutionary outer-body experience that "feminist sex" would produce in men freed from their evil "patriarchial" ideas of power and domination.

    I've not read the book, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like Jensen et al simply hate bodies, find them disgusting, find physical wants, cravings and desires shameful, don't want to hear about them, don't want to see anyone sharing theirs (either their desires or their bodies).

    This entirely batshit Pandagon thread convinced me of that; I think I was the only person there who wasn't happy to let her 'facials=spitting in someone's face' analogy stand (cunnilingus is messy too, did ya know?), and when I suggested that when people used words like 'dirty' and 'filthy' to describe sex, they were being literal - just describing the charged nature of bodily fluids, in the same way blood or spit or bile are 'filth' - I was told that sex is 'fun' and 'exciting' and not a dirty, physical mess at all. *le sigh*

    On the other hand, though, laws specifically created to restrict and constrain sexual expression and behavior amongst consenting adults do far, far, far more damage to progressive activism than any of the dire consensual sex acts that so excise Jensen and his radfem mentors.

    Very true. This should always be kept in mind when the government wants to round up all the deviants, and I'm surprised how many feminists will just go with it anyway.

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  2. I'm sadly currently uber uber busy,. but this post is fantastic.

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  3. Chris' review absolutely nails it on the head about what's problematic about Jensen.

    As for Jensen's call for a "positive sexuality" that's "more about light and less about heat". You and Chris are absolutely right about the implications of this, and how deeply conservative this vision is.

    The thing is, I have to wonder how many pro-radfems actually practice this kind of sexuality, much less liberal and moderate feminists who have been cheering Jensen on recently. Are they prepared to totally rework they're sexuality along these lines? Or is this something they're just going to impose on other people who's sexuality they judge as too problematic. The whole thing just reeks of hypocrisy.

    Another point you've really honed in on here is Jensen's deep-seated yet ultimately ineffective moralism. A good example of this is his essay "Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes". I'm not even a radical anti-capitalist, but I can tell right off the bat what a joke this essay is – its a hand-wringing moral critique of capitalism that's utterly lacking in any kind of structural understanding of capitalism. If capitalism was just a matter of bad moral choices, something probably could have done about it by now. The fact that the very structure of our society is largely predicated on capitalist social and economic relationships is what makes changing that system so exceedingly difficult.

    The fact that so much of the American left falls for this stuff so hard – eat vegan, stop watching porn, and constantly feel really guilty about your middle class privilege and that will save the world – is a big part of why the left is so marginalized in the US.

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  4. i think you're right iacb. there are people like demonista who do seem to be trying to live up to it (or down to it) but I really don't think most people are. I think they're either Larry Craigs of their own sort or just people who really aren't interested in sex generally so it doesn't feel like a big sacrifice and when we say "whoa hold up" they wonder why we care so much about pleasure.

    the sad thing is i suspect not all of that is due to inherently low libido.

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  5. oh and that anticapitalist essay is a laugh and a half. he doesn't even cite anything to back up his claims that capitalism is bad. like... not even Marx. wha?

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  6. Jensen recently became a Presbyterian, according to his recent article in Counterpunch. His religious convictions have been with him before the official declaration, but he is not up front about that in "Getting Off", which I have just finished reading.

    The APFers like to say that their objections are not religion-based but woman-based. Tee hee...

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  7. Jensen lectures people about why we shouldn't celebrate Thanksgiving, seeing it as an example of white people celebrating and/or covering up their genocode of the native American population. In his writing on that subject, he does not notice that African-American familes also celebrate Thanksgiving, as well as other non-white groups.

    He ignores the fact that Lincoln made it a legal holiday, not to reminisce about Plymouth Rock, but to celebrate the Union victory at Gettysburg, which helped put the nail in the coffin of slavery.

    In his writings on porn, he talks about the white male porn fan, not mentioning that there are sizable numbers of African-American males (it's not just AK!). [And even then, he talks ABOUT them - not to them or with them. He does not ask them why they enjoy certain types of porn - he just assumes he knows why.]

    And so, he talks about the fact that whites should feel awful about institutional racism, while indulging in the racist practice of rendering black people invisible!

    And when I say awful, I mean a-w-f-u-l. The amount of guilt he wants felt would be overwhelming, paralyzing those white males from doing anything useful on behalf of African-Americans. And he does not cite any African-American figures or personalities who are cheering him on in this approach.

    It's all about him. Jensen is so miserable about himself that he wants everyone dragged down to his low level of self-esteem, because, as they say, misery loves company.

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  8. Hey, Thene, the Pandagon thread wasn't all bathsit - your comments there were great.

    On the pressing matter of facials: Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo publisher, once remarked that she enjoyed it when her lovers ejaculated on her face because she thought it was good for her complexion. As her magazine has a popular following among women, it's entirely plausible that she speaks for many women, albeit she differs in her boldness to be up front about that.

    In porn films, the trend used to be that the woman jerked off the man's penis on her face. Nowadays, the man strokes himself on her face. While still problematic from a feminist point of view, the woman is generally depicted as wanting that and not feeling humillated about it.

    The most disturbing trend in the Pandagon thread is that many posters were assuming that the data in Jensen's book was accurate. It would never occur to them that he's a liar - they're taken in by his 'gentleness' and his 'need to to do the ethical thing'. They seem to for
    get that there are lots of anti-choice and anti-gay preachers who come off the same way.

    Also not mentioned is that he is an unswerving disciple of Dworkin and MacKinnon, who, of course, did support censorship. Jensen in the book mentions their model anti-porn ordinance postively but then says that now is not the time to discuss it because the prospects for its passage are bleak.

    Another example of Jensen's dishonesty: Dworkin was a supporter of the war in Iraq and blasted the anti-war movement as apologists for Saddam Hussein. She did this at a dinner where her companions were Maggie Gallagher, Bush speechwriter David Frum and Christopher Hitchens. Jensen claims to be part of the anti-war movement, yet nowhere does he disavow Dworkin's support of the war.

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  9. Sheldon –

    Yes, I linked to Jensen's essay about joining a Presbyterian church (in spite of his still-professed atheism), and I didn't think it was pure coincidence that he joined a church that was squarely in the Calvinist tradition. I also pointed to the strong religious background of a couple of the other notable male APRFs.

    While none of them would claim to have any truck with the religious right, the fact that they share many of the same core beliefs, and that their anti-porn sentiments are at least partly rooted in those beliefs, certainly at least problematizes their contention that their critique comes from an entirely different place from religious right anti-porn critics. One of the few good things I have to say about Hugo Schwyzer is that he's quite up front about this, and in his recent threads on Jensen's book even proudly refers to himself as a "puritan". Jensen himself needs to be more up front about this, though. Obviously, he's written about joining a church, but he's never written about it or referenced it in the context of his anti-porn activism, and that is disingenuous. (BTW, the denomination he's a part of, PCUSA, has a history of anti-porn activism – they even published an official book-length statement on it in 1988 called "Pornography: Far From the Song of Songs"; also check out Camille Paglia's essay "The Joy of Presbyterian Sex", a great take-down of the PCUSAs hopeless vanilla and repressed "pro-gay" document. (Yes, profems, I'm quoting Paglia favorably in this context – I agree with her on some issues – shoot me.))

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  10. Jensen's Thanksgiving essay – I actually agree with Jensen that as a holiday, TG has a problematic history and is based on a hugely sanitized view of indian-white relations. (However, it also has an older basis in feast days and fall harvest festivals, traditions I very much support keeping up.) I part company with him after that – the rest is vintage Jensen. He wants to transform it into a day of fasting and atonement, basically a guilt-fest. And Jensen is quite quick to find fault with other progressives who aren't with him on this, setting himself up once again in the position of right-thinking moral exemplar, not afraid to show his guilt and contrition, unlike the morally lazy 90% of the rest of humanity. As Chris pointed out, the man is utterly arrogant in self-deprecation.

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  11. Sheldon writes:

    "Also not mentioned is that he is an unswerving disciple of Dworkin and MacKinnon, who, of course, did support censorship. Jensen in the book mentions their model anti-porn ordinance postively but then says that now is not the time to discuss it because the prospects for its passage are bleak."

    Actually, Jensen has written quite plainly about his support of Catherine MacKinnon and Richard Delgado's restrictive views on speech, in some of his earliest published essays, in fact. Look for the anthology he edited, "Freeing the First Amendment", specifically the essays "Feminism and Free Expression: Silence and Voice" and "Embracing Uncertainty/Facing Fear". I'll see if I can't get electronic copies of these up somewhere – his writings on this topic should be better known then they are.

    In more recent essays, such as this 2002 essay in Counterpunch, he basically pooh-poohs the strong free speech protections in the US arguing that the US has a weak and non-participatory political culture. I agree, the latter is a problem, but why this is something to pit against strong free speech protections makes no sense whatsoever.

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  12. "He wants to transform it into a day of fasting and atonement, basically a guilt-fest."

    Wow. Citation? Not that I'd be surprised at this, but... link?

    Yeah, I think the whole Pilgrims N Indians Tra La La thing is... problematic, to put it mildly. But I also think there's a way of having/doing (a) harvest festival(s) that would avoid all that silliness, and I'm all for *that*.

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  13. Quoting Trinity:

    "He wants to transform it into a day of fasting and atonement, basically a guilt-fest."

    Wow. Citation? Not that I'd be surprised at this, but... link?



    Here you go, Trin:

    Robert Jensen: No Thanks to Thanksgiving (AlterNet article)

    It's one thing to acknowledge the faults and the sins of the Puritans and their treatment of the Native American Indians; it's completely another thing altogether to call for a holiday to be converted into such a negative tone of shaming and atonement.

    I'm sure that Bob would also give his support to Bill O'Reilly's "War on Christmas" because of the materialism and commercialism getting in the way of the "true meaning" of that holiday, too??

    I guess that his loathing and shame doesn't just apply to sex.


    Anthony

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  14. Quoting IACB:

    Another point you've really honed in on here is Jensen's deep-seated yet ultimately ineffective moralism. A good example of this is his essay "Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes". I'm not even a radical anti-capitalist, but I can tell right off the bat what a joke this essay is – its a hand-wringing moral critique of capitalism that's utterly lacking in any kind of structural understanding of capitalism. If capitalism was just a matter of bad moral choices, something probably could have done about it by now. The fact that the very structure of our society is largely predicated on capitalist social and economic relationships is what makes changing that system so exceedingly difficult.

    The fact that so much of the American left falls for this stuff so hard – eat vegan, stop watching porn, and constantly feel really guilty about your middle class privilege and that will save the world – is a big part of why the left is so marginalized in the US.


    Now, I do happen to be a strong critic of capitalism myself; even a socialist (of the democratic vision, of course)....and even I can see the fatal flaws in Jensen's bromides.

    First off, merely attempting to shame the main beneficiaries of capitalism (mostly middle-class to upper-class Whites) into submission or conversion to a "progressive" anti-capitalist agenda is exactly the MOST INEFFECTIVE approach you can do. For starters, people of privilege tend to like their privileges, don't really want to give them up.

    Second, they tend not to take too kindly to people lecturing them on their failures without offering some form of real alternative. The resulting backlash simply drives them even more in the arms of the Right, who is more than willing to defend their privileges openly.

    And finally, such "consciousness raising" tends to distract from the very efforts of organizing the primary VICTIMS of really existing capitalism (working class and poor people) who really don't have much time for waiting for such "consciousness raising" to take its effects.

    It's as if Bob Jensen and most of the "culturalist Left" activists have no trust in the actual people who suffer the most and who would be more amicable to a more substainable and institutional critique; and needs to rely on parlor tricks and massive guilt-tripping of whole groups to promote their theories.

    Maybe a bit OT, but I wanted to clear that up.


    Anthony

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  15. Ahhh, Sheldon....where have you been??? LOL

    Interesting about Bob's "whiteout" of Black folk and their consumption of porn: for someone who calls himself a "race traitor" and so wants to lecture others on their moral failings, I find that so typical that he can't even raise himself to actually talk to Black men who consume porn..heaven forbid actually talking to Black/Latin@/Asian) porn performers of color (it's not as if Lexington Steele or Mr. Marcus or Jada Fire or Vanessa del Rio aren't accessible, you know). I guess that Gail Dines (who also happens to be White) must be suitable enough a source for him.

    And oh, WOW...Dworkin was pro-Iraq War??? Really??? And they have the gall to (correctly) call Larry Craig a hypocrite?? Eeeeee-yah.


    Anthony

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  16. Correction: I was unclear about Jensen and Dworkin/MacKinnon. What I meant to say was that in the Pandagon thread (at least when I referenced it) no one discussed his devotion to Dworkin / Mackinnon. Also, the excerpts of his writings that appear on Counterpunch don't mention their names, in part, I suspect, because Alexander Cockburn's clashes with MacKinnon on the Balkan conflict are well-known.

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  17. Dworkin's widower, John Stoltenberg, comes from a strong Lutheran background.

    BTW, I agree with the analysis of Thanksgiving here and the way it is taught in most public schools is the bad way. But we didn't need Jensen for that - IIRC, Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" gives you the 411 on that.

    Celebrating Turkey Day in a Lincolnian spirit is the ticket to a more guilt-free holiday. And for that reason, don't expect Jensen to support that.

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  18. As a secular Jew who observes the Yom Kippur - the Jewish Day of Atonment - with my Reform Jewish wife, let me tell you that one Day of Atonement is enough.

    An additonal, federalized Day of Atonement, like the one Jensen is proposing, is a non-starter. I suspect lay Catholics will feel the same way about Lent.

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  19. And in the "great minds think alike" department, Portland Indymedia has a recent interview with Jensen by none other than Sam Berg (using the rather ironic name S.M. Berg here).

    Jensen comes out quite explicitly for the Dworkin/MacKinnon Ordinance with minor modifications and claims it isn't censorship. I think anybody who claims the MacDworkin ordinance isn't censorship either hasn't read it, is deluded, or is lying. I'll have to do a post sometime where I break down the details of the model Ordinance and show how it very-much constitutes content-based censorship of a very far-reaching kind.

    Also this statement from Jensen, ironic considering who he was talking to – "One is the mainstream pornography industry itself has been wildly successful at equating any criticism of it with prudishness, anti-sex ideology, and literally almost mental illness. If you critique porn, the industry presents you as being crazy." Though she's fairly low-key in this interview, I think Sam has done a bang-up job of presenting herself as crazy, all things considered.

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  20. I remember reading about Hitchens dinner with Dworkin and Stoltenberg (a few months before Dworkin's death), though I didn't know a Bush speechwriter was also in attendance. I know Hitchens said something to the effect that they'd discussed something to the effect of the Left's abandonment of muslim women (true enough in the case of the ANSWER and RESPECT left, and I use the word "left" for these sharia apologists and tankies rather reluctantly), but I'd never heard about what else was discussed.

    Sheldon, do you have a citation for Dworkin coming out as pro-Iraq War? I'd love to know more. I know Phylis Chesler and Laura Lederer had gone over to a an explicitly neoconservative radical feminist position. Would Dworkin have gone in the same direction had she lived longer? Sure would have been interesting – radfems can play the denial game around Chesler, Lederer, and Donna Hughes ("oh, well, I've never even heard of them"), but they sure as well couldn't have done so had Dworkin been making statements like that!

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  21. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  22. One link to Dworkin, the anti-Iraq war movement and the Right:

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
    news/world/article381977.ece

    Note: I've tried to get the http format correct, but it doesn't work for now, so I had to delete the prior post.

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  23. Here's a direct link, Sheldon:

    Right hails Dworkin sex campaign, The Sunday Times, April 17, 2005.

    Wow! Thanks for that – pretty telling stuff.

    One can't really conclude that she was pro-Iraq War just based on negative feelings toward the anti-war movement – that sentiment was shared by a lot of people, including people who were very much anti-Iraq War. (I'm reminded of how Ellen Willis was painted the same way because of her, in my opinion, very well-founded criticisms of the anti-war movement.)

    That said, it sounds very much like Dworkin was moving very much in the same direction as Phylis Chesler and Laura Lederer, and if she had been around today, I think would have been saying things that would have proven really embarrassing for her ostensibly leftier-than-thou followers.

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  24. Dworkin's comments are implicitly supportive of the war because of the context in which they were made.

    Ellen Willis did not have dinner with, say, Richard Nixon during the height of the Vietnam War. But Dworkin did have dinner with big-name supporters of the Iraq War, at a time when war fever was at its highest.

    Hitchens, Gallagher and Frum are not open-minded folks who are going to want to have a friendly dinner with anyone opposed to them on THE issue of the day. Else, Cindy Sheehan would have broken bread with them a long time ago.

    So, if Dworkin was invited to dinner, then they had to believe she supported the war. And, as far as we know, she made no statement there to the effect that she disagreed with them on that.

    Dworkin wrote a piece reluctantly endorsing Kerry in 2004, but she never flat-out said she opposed the war - she thought Kerry would handle it a bit better than Bush, that's all. (Her Kerry endorsement is on her website)

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  25. First of all, I'm really glad that my review has been so appreciated. I suffered in an almost Catholic way to write it, not only reading Getting Off in excruciating detail, but also more of Jensen's essays and interviews than any sane person should have to endure. Donations for my therapist bills will be accepted gladly.

    Anthony, this is a great entry all around, but I especially like it because you've brought up something that I wanted to go into about Jensen's conception of sex, but didn't really have the room to tackle. I think it's more basic than a difference in conceptions of sex; he and I have very different ideas not only of sex, but of self, of what makes a person themselves. His philosophy seems built solidly on a form of dualism similar to Descartes or the Gnostics: the essence of our selves is our mind/soul, while the body is just the flawed, vulgar vessel that holds it. This sense that our bodies are inferior to our minds as expressions of identity has been absorbed into a lot of liberal thought, especially among the middle and upper classes who labor primarily with their minds (although in the modern office, not necessarily with their intellect), but it's got a long history in both Catholic and Protestant religious ideologies.

    My atheism has a lot to do with my rejection of dualism. I don't believe that I have an immortal soul that will live on after my physical death. When my body dies, so will I. Even if there's some part of me that lives on after death, it wouldn't be me without my body. The fact that I have a penis instead of a vulva and clit affects the texture of my life every day. (I worry about size and endurance; I don't worry about getting pregnant or my next period.) So does the fact that, for my entire life, my brain has had a defect in it that, unless I take expensive medicines, sometimes makes it go haywire and sends me into violent convulsions. Would I be me if I had a pussy instead of a cock? Would I be me if I weren't epileptic? The differences might be subtle or enormous in either case, but it's certain that I wouldn't be quite the same person.

    But if you take the dualistic approach, and assume that the mind is the "real person," then it's easy to see porn and even eroticism of any kind as demeaning and vulgar. After all, it focuses exclusively on the flawed material vessel, rather than the higher, abstract "self." This is why I take issue with the idea of "objectification," and think it needs to be seriously questioned. While there may be some narrow, legitimate usage for the term, I've typically seen it expanded into a secular synonym for the Deadly Sin of Lust. And you know, there are guys who make me think that the radfems have a point. I've seen a few sex-worker friends of mine go on Stern-like radio programs where the hosts cause my insides to curl up in revulsion. But I don't think that lust is necessarily demeaning to the person you're looking at, even if you don't know much else about them. If you respect your lust, you can respect the objects of your lust. I think that's the problem with the guys who are inside the porn industry and outside of it who creep me out. At some level, Opie and Anthony have something very much in common with Robert Jensen; as he demands, they've accepted that the male sex urge is something violent and shameful, and they mentally drag the women who work in the industry down into the pit they've dug for themselves.

    What I like about sex, what makes it so interesting to me as a subject of conversation, is that it's one of those nexus points where the different aspects of self come together. It's as much a physical thing as a mental, and vice versa; the line where one ends and the other begins, and this is an inconvenient truth for Jensen and for middle-class America in general. We're brought up to believe that we should be "better" than that; we should be able to raise ourselves above the mass of primate passions and let our minds -- our "true self" reign. This is where a lot of sexual repression comes from: despite all the available evidence, people want to believe that they're a pure, clean soul and deny the power of their physical self, filled with sweat, tears, hormones, blood, cum, pussy juice, and all the other things that make us human. In a way, I grieve for Jensen's inability to see that one simple truth. Or at least I would, if he didn't want to drag the rest of us down into his own personal torment.

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  26. Hi Chris –

    I just picked up several Jensen books and anthologies on loan from the library – "Getting Off", "Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality", and "Freeing the First Amendment" – so it looks like a couple weeks of similar violence to self on my part, too. But I don't want to have it said that I've ignored what is, judging by the glowing press, the best arguments the anti-porn side can muster.

    You are absolutely right about contemporary ideas of "sexual objectification" – with a few exceptions, the concept itself is very poorly defined and is simply an updating of older strictures against pure lust.

    Your statement that Opie and Anthony and the like actually are locked into a similar frame as Jensen is right on the money. I was thumbing through "Getting Off", and I notice that Jensen quote John Stagliano as saying what he produces is basically unhealthy stuff. My first thought is, well, why not try and do something better? But the thing is, if he's trapped in Jensen's mindset about what's "healthy", then there's no way he can do better and still do porn – the only way out is to accept either a feminist or christian version of the straight-and-narrow, and for all kinds of valid reasons, he doesn't want to do that.

    Oh, and one other thing I caught – one of his prime examples of how porn is clearly geared toward stereotypical male sexual fantasies that no woman would possibly be into: the "Rocco: Animal Trainer" series. OK, I specifically remember one of the female guests on "In Bed With Susie Bright" was asked about what got her going in the current crop of porn – the first response? An enthusiastic description of "Rocco: Animal Trainer". Jensen's "no woman would possibly like this" rhetoric suffers yet another blow!

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  27. I just picked up several Jensen books and anthologies on loan from the library – "Getting Off", "Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality", and "Freeing the First Amendment" – so it looks like a couple weeks of similar violence to self on my part, too. But I don't want to have it said that I've ignored what is, judging by the glowing press, the best arguments the anti-porn side can muster.

    Blue, you miss the point. I have suffered so that others might not have to do the same. Think of me as a sex-positive Christ figure.

    You are absolutely right about contemporary ideas of "sexual objectification" – with a few exceptions, the concept itself is very poorly defined and is simply an updating of older strictures against pure lust.

    I think we need to make it a point to look more deeply into this. For one thing, I think that feminists have let themselves off the hook for treating sex workers as "rescue objects" for far too long. One of the anti-porn actions that I always found most repulsive was this thing that Women Against Pornography (WAP) did in the late seventies where they took women on tours of the peep shows of Times Square to show them their "oppression." I just bet. It always sounded very much to me like the Europeans who lined up to see the Hottentot Venus in the 19th Century.

    Also, there are different kinds of objectification. Used to be that at all of the big sex parties in NYC, you'd see this guy called the Human Carpet or something. He laid on the floor in a padded suit and people walked on him as they came in. That was his kink. He took pleasure in being objectified.

    And a lot of the criticisms based on "objectification" assume that appreciating someone for their tits or cock nullifies your ability to see them as a human being. I can hold both in my mind at once.

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  28. "And a lot of the criticisms based on "objectification" assume that appreciating someone for their tits or cock nullifies your ability to see them as a human being. I can hold both in my mind at once."

    My criticism of this position exactly. There is a point to the larger critique of "objectification" as a social process underlying stereotyping, but to blame sexual attraction and fetishization for the stereotyping of women is just bass ackwards.

    I had a bit more to say about "sexual objectification" over at this thread on Feminist Critics (at comment #349 if the link doesn't take you there) a few weeks ago.

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  29. Of course, obviously I love this whole review, as I've state elsewhere, and think it just gets better and better as it goes along. Without allowing himself to be flustered by Jensen's infuriating lies and distortions, Chris simply dismantles them logically, which is the most effective way of rebutting bad ideas - by countering them with good ones. This idea, of course, is anathema to a certain type of radical authoritarian who doesn't trust people to come to the right conclusions via critical thinking. No, to this individual who considers him- or herself enlightened and the rest of us hopelessly bewildered and deceived, only the "leadership" of those with "correct" ideas can lead to a just and decent society.

    And, as Chris hammers home in his devastating conclusion, the principle tool Jensen and his friends (and for that matter, Don Wildmon and his friends) would use to deliver us all from the scourge of pornography is guilt. Jensen essentially concedes in his writing that the radfem war on porn, like that of the religious right, is essentially lost at this point. There is more porn of all kinds available now and being consumed by more people of more different types through more different means than ever before in the history of the republic, and there is no evidence to suggest that this dynamic is likely to reverse itself anytime soon. He basically gives up on trying to choke off porn from "the supply side" and hopes to crush it from "the demand side" by making its consumers feel bad about themselves.

    But as the reviewer points out, making people feel bad about themselves is a dangerous, double-edged weapon that can easily be turned upon outside targets, ranging from those attempting to engender the guilt to those who might do no more than accidentally inspire it unintentionally. Guilt-ridden people are rarely kind and compassionate and egalitarian as Jensen would like us to believe. Instead, they tend to be hostile, paranoid and quick to judge others. Guilt is a terrible burden and those suffering from it want nothing more than to unload it on somebody else.

    When the guilt is displaced from the actual behavior of the guilty party, it's all the more dangerous and unreasoning. Ted Bundy blamed pornography for his sociopathic, homicidal acts, which must certainly have been easier than taking moral responsibility for them himself. Similarly, our old pal Stan Goff, who spent three decades as a spear-carrier for America's corporate interests in the Third World, undoubtedly prefers to see himself as a victim of patriarchal brainwashing as opposed to an enthusiastic war criminal. Both are scornful of the idea of individual moral choice, and given how they used theirs, it's not hard to see why.

    In fact, guilt, as opposed to conscience, is useless as a source of moral improvement. It merely makes those who suffer with it angry and resentful, first toward themselves, and subsequently toward anyone else whose own sins might somehow make the misery of that guilt less unbearable. In all of human history, I fail to see a single good thing born of guilt. While it is certainly possible to look upon our own actions in the light of conscience informed by reason and see the error of our ways. From that, we may elect to make positive changes, also informed by reason. But from guilt, we find ourselves mired in the paralysis of rage and blame, two commodities in which Jensen traffics with all the enthusiasm with which he falsely accuses pornographers of trafficking in women's bodies.

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