...Professor Robert Jenson is a professor from UT who has been following and analyzing the pornography industry from a feminist perspective for over 10 years. He was in the movie and also at the screening....The Doc then went into how the pornography industry objectifies women. Most porn stars have little to no education, and are basically forced into prostitution/stripping/pornography as a viable alternative to making money to support themselves. They could make more in a day at a pornography shoot than they could make all month as a waitress or at any other entry-level job position. Pornography filmmakers take advantage of that and force these girls to act and fake pleasure in their films, while the girl is often extremely not happy to say the least. She just does it because it is a job. The filmmakers often make these girls do "fantasy" type things that are far beyond normal sexual acts. This causes some pornography consumers own sex lives to be extremely twisted and perverted, usually destroying their relationships with their wives and girlfriends. The industry makes over a billion dollars a year. All in all this was definitely an interesting documentary that I would recommend to anyone in the class.(Emphasis mine.) I think this speaks volumes about the real message TPoP and Jensen are conveying, in spite of the disclaimers to the contrary. For all their rhetoric about being absolutely against media that defames women, these people are certainly happy to engage in some rather nasty defamation of a whole group of women when it serves their purposes. "Honest and nonjudgmental" indeed!
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
What a fool believes
There's an interesting post about TPoP written by a student at UT Austin (where Robert Jensen calls home) in a class blog. Its pretty clear that this student isn't thinking critically about what Jensen or TPoP is telling him, and generally, he doesn't come across as the brightest bulb in the pack. But what's interesting here is what "facts" are picked up about porn and people in it by those who aren't engaging this subject critically. To wit:
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That's what happens when people get their info from only one source. They feel sure it's absolute fact.
ReplyDelete(On a vaguely related note, this is precisely why I'm not joining the petition getting sent to Obama over Larry Summers. I know nothing about him besides the "women don't have the math aptitude men do" kerfuffle, and while no, I do not like that and I do not like that at all, I do not feel I know enough about him, his positions, or why Obama deemed him a good choice to petition his appointment yet.)
Amusingly, ColorTabs appears to have chosen flushed-skinned-white-people pink for BPPA. Hee!
ReplyDeleteI had to comment, could not stop myself...poor dumb porn girl that I am.
ReplyDeleteyour blog is so good......
ReplyDeleteThat's some pretty shitty writing.
ReplyDeleteWOW....what an idiot.
ReplyDeleteIf this is what is passing for undergrads these days at UT-Austin, then call me an Aggie.
I mean, can't Mike even get his idol's name right??? It's "JENSEN", jackass, not "Jenson".
(Talking to Mike there, of course, NOT IACB.)
Anthony
Agreed on all points here, but I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the significance of this piece of typical undergrad nonsense.
ReplyDeleteThat's one of the target audiences for TPoP precisely because (shudder) this nation's future leaders will be taken from the graduates of the colleges and universities where this movie is being shown. No doubt one of the intentions of the producers is to make porn "uncool" with up and coming journalists, lawyers, political activists and others whose support for First Amendment rights enables us to do what we do as pornographers.
And if a few women are defamed, humiliated, exploited and otherwise misused by the TPoP gang in pursuit of the goal, well, they're just collateral damage and who cares about them anyway?
For all Jensen's hand-wringing about the terrible tragic fates of sex workers, I have observed him to be unfailingly rude and condescending whenever he actually meets one in person, and I've seen this now three times. I would call that a pattern at the very least, and it's not pretty.
We can only hope that the author of this review may learn something useful during the rest of his time on campus that will help him overcome his deficiencies as a critical thinker.
"That's one of the target audiences for TPoP"
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly what I was thinking when I was reading it. So here we have an example of what the target audience is actually taking away from it when it actually works as propaganda. And there isn't anything the least bit nuanced or "nonjudgmental" about that message.
And we should duly note that the producers showed up for this screening, as opposed to the one here in L.A., where Jensen had to take the incoming on their behalf.
ReplyDeleteThis road show has a clear agenda, both in its content and in its presentation, and the results are woefully evident in the review.
One of the many infuriating things about TPoP is its insistent and constantly repeated assertion that pornographers are deliberately targeting young viewers in an attempt to create a "demand" for the ideology Jensen accuses us of peddling.
In fact, that is exactly what the producers of this tripe are all about. They're the ones pushing an ideology on young people, including those not even old enough to legally purchase pornography.
This is a very old propagandist's trick, accusing the enemy of doing the thing the propagandist is doing. All counter arguments can then be cast as exemplary of exactly what the propagandist deplores.
Nothing new here. Just something old, ugly and very, very dangerous.
Off topic, but have you folks seen this anti-porn film from 1965?
ReplyDeletehttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6732024662575303848&hl=en
"i like your blog"
ReplyDeleteThen don't spam it.