I tried to post this yesterday...

I AM a Bookslut. Perhaps more accurately I am a Bookslut slut. I love that site. And now that Trent of "Pink is the new blog" has moved to LA and stopped posting before noon my time, I need some new reading material for the morning at work.

Thus, Bookslut. Today, via that site, I found this article, which is kind of interesting even if it's a little ridiculously radical. However, I can't resist quoting this part:

Is pornography always wrong in MacKinnon's view? "If you actually think about it," she says, "what is sexual between people is, up close, not particularly visible. Therefore you have to do things to it to make it acceptable by a camera. So already there's an intrusion. Most people, when they are having an intimate experience, don't have someone hanging out with a camera there. And if there is someone hanging out with a camera, what is most intimate about that experience and most equal between the people is not accessible to that camera.

"If you've got that material being sold, there are people who are not intimate to the experience who are experiencing it. How equal is that? Your sex is being bought by somebody over there. You're now a thing in relation to people experiencing you sexually. How equal is that?"

But surely lesbian and gay porn at least eludes such criticisms? MacKinnon disagrees. "There's a good book by Christopher Kendal which studies the real content of gay male pornography and the children who are violated to make it as well as the men who are used in the industry. I recommend it." How about lesbian pornography - made for, by and about lesbians? MacKinnon says most of it is "sold in liquor stores and mostly it is men who are its consumers".

"Some of it is about a real aspiration to recapture women's sexuality for women, no doubt," she concedes. "The fact is that the materials themselves in general are about the use of women for sex and when women are being used for sex that is about a male-dominant model of sex, whether men are doing it or not. It's not biological. It's about sex roles. Anyone can play them."

I hate to be one of those close-minded girls who resists men's attraction to porn - I recognize that it's a thing guys like, or feel compelled to watch occasionally, or feel mildly interested/amused by in other cases. I won't go so far as to say that it should be banned - free speech and all that, and I don't exactly consider it hate speech. I guess the way I look at it is, porn is the sexual equivalent of Ali G without irony. And without irony, isn't it sort of terrifying? And if it's being propagated throughout the world, the images and roles that "anyone can play" (and that means mild-mannered, non-rapist type men, the way I conceive of them, MacKinnon aside), then doesn't that mean it's something to be concerned about?

To be honest, I wouldn't actually care so much about pornography if its gender-imbalance hadn't been inherited by our Puritanical, male-dominated, sexually repressed culture that we have inherited from the coldhearted Brits and sturdy Scots in the 17th century. Et cetera. It is all very complicated. I tend to believe that at least part of the reason for inequal gender roles and male-dominated creepy porn is the lack of sexual openness in the United States. At least, that is how I conceive of porn having more than its desired effect - warping brains or at the very least teasing them into believing that women should be like porn stars. If only women were allowed to act like sexual beings to begin with - than maybe they would no longer be portrayed as overblown caricatures in men's fantasies.

Donnovan, who is awesome, and sort of a mentor to me, does a lot of work on how gender roles in the media screw with people's heads. I wonder which screws people up worse - and which kind of person. Are men more affected by porn in their conception of human relationships, and are women more affected by crap TV shows like Dawson's Creek and fairy tales like Cinderella? (Why is it that fairy tales are portrayed as female fantasies, anyway? Most of them were originally written by men. I think part of the reason is that today, fairy tales = Disney, and Disney has made a fortune off of its line of "princesses." But perhaps more deeply, fairy tales were all originally written by men, so perhaps you can argue that the princess-being-rescued-by-the-handsome-prince plot is actually a representation of a male fantasy about dominance and strength.) And which is more detrimental to equal gender relationships?

Just some things I’'m thinking about today.