Sean Lynch: Shows of force evolved from actual warfare, where the participants were actually willing to fight for their cause.

I have no particular opinion about the connection between warfare, ritualized shows of force, and voting, but as an empirical description of warfare, I am quite sure that your comment is false. Historically wars in which there was a discernible “cause” for which most or even many of the foot soldiers “were willing to fight” have been extremely rare. Most common soldiers throughout history have fought either (1) in order to share in the spoils, such as they could, (2) for pay from the commander, or (3) in order not to be maimed or killed by the warlord for refusing to fight on his side. The warlords and commanders may have had different ideas about what they were fighting for, of course, but they have almost always been in a very small minority on the battlefield, if they were on the battlefield at all.

reddecca:

Radgeek – can you expand on what you think the implications are for pornography involving masturbation. How does that mean we should react to it differently, why does that mean that different tactics would be effective?

Sure. The fact that pornography, unlike the rest of pop culture, is made and marketed and consumed and talked about with the expectation that men will masturbate to it, and the fact that many or most men do in fact habitually masturbate to it, changes the nature of the debate because it changes the effects that pornography has on how men view themselves as sexual creatures in ways that, and to degrees that, other forms of pop culture do not. It’s well known that habitual practice can change our beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, desires, pleasures, and behavior; I think that it should be no surprise that sexual habits can change our sexual beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, desires, pleasures, and behavior. If men habitually masturbate to pornography, i.e. use pornography as a part of arousal and orgasm under our solitary control, then it is going to have an effect on our sexual lives. One of the facts about masturbation is that most men do it very often, and the fact about masturbating-to-pornography is that men both do it very often, and also very often imagine pornographic scenes or close variations on them, when they are masturbating without porn directly in front of them. It’s habitual, and it’s one of the more frequently practiced habits that many men have. It’s also one that they usually take up in their sexually formative — i.e. adolescent or pubescent — years. (And in fact the average age has been getting younger as a result of the mainstreaming of pornography and its prevalence on the Internet.) So you can expect whatever effects pornography has to be correspondingly strong. I think this much is not reasonably disputable; a theory that suggests that pornography has no effects, or neglible effects, on men’s sexual lives is just not a theory responsive to the facts. The question is what effects pornography does have, and how fine-grained those effects are. If it has good or neutral effects on balance, then that doesn’t support the anti-pornography critique of pornography consumption; if it has bad effects but those effects apply in a pretty fine-grained way to the parts of men’s sex lives that don’t directly affect other people, then that would tend to undermine it also. (That doesn’t mean that the antipornography position would be wrong; it would just mean a shift of priorities is needed towards other parts of the critique, such as the critique of its production, rather than the traditional double-barrelled analysis.)

Here are some specific ways in which antipornography feminists claim that masturbation to pornography affects men’s sexual lives in ways that are pernicious, and that contribute to both social systems and individual behavior that hurt women: (1) pornography is repetitive. (It’s repetitive both across different pieces and in the use of a given “favorite” piece by individual men; men who use pornography very frequently and unapologetically often crow about their “collection” or “hoard” of porn and pick out “favorites” within it to use over and over again. I know because I used to be one of those men, and to talk to other men with similar attitudes.). (2) It associates a pretty strictly scripted progression of situations and sex acts with sexual arousal, pleasure, and orgasm for men who habitually arouse themselves by watching pornographic scenes, please themselves while watching pornographic scenes, use the scenes to heighten the pleasure, and orgasm to pornographic scenes (which was, typically, the purpose of viewing the pornography in the first place). (3) The content is generally concerned specifically with sexualized masculinity and sexualized femininity (this, of course, is also true within gay pornography and pseudolesbian pornography intended for male audiences; I wouldn’t know about pornography intended for lesbian audiences, because I haven’t seen any). (4) This content is specifically hostile to women in any number of ways (contains rape myths, focuses on acts that are often not nearly as satisfying to women as they are to men, focuses on acts that aren’t really satisfying to anyone but are easily filmed with extreme close-ups of engorged body parts, fixates on visual display in general, makes frequent use of deception or coercion from positions of authority to gain sexual access, etc.). (A full explanation of the details and defense of the claim here, if you don’t buy it, is really beyond the space I have available here, and is better found in book-length treatments or essays on specific sub-topics by antipornography feminists. Anyway, the hostility of pornographic content towards women is part of what Amp was stipulating to in the comments I was remarking on.) (5) Pornography provides a staple of sexual fantasies (that is, scenes that are found enticing and desirable). The fact that many of the themes alluded to in (3) and (4) are widely recognized as ridiculous and unrealistic may affect men’s plans but not their fantasies about what would be enticing and desirable. (6) This affects, among other things, how men look at women (think ogling), how men talk about women (think locker-room talk), how men treat women whom they have never met (think street harassment), how men approach women that they’re sexually attracted to, the sort of acts and positions that men typically want and typically don’t care about, the sort of emotional reactions men do or don’t have toward women that they’re having a sexual relationship with, including during sex itself, the sort of situations in which men think that sex is appropriate, the sort of reactions that a man may have when a woman isn’t interested in having sex with him — at all, or in the situation he wants to have sex in, or at the time he wants to have sex at, or of the kind that he wants to have. (Think about the idea, more or less universal in pornography involving women, intended for male audiences, that women are wildly and indiscriminately hypersexual once aroused, and that it’s acceptable to use coercion or deception to ratchet up the level of sexual contact until she becomes aroused. Think about the fact that many men are habitually masturbating to this kind of material, using it to arouse themselves and having orgasms to scenes that revolve around it. What does that mean for the sorts of things that men may find exciting and desirable in their own interactions with women?)

There’s a lot more to say, but this is already very long and contentious as it stands. I hope this gives some kind of idea about what I’m saying, though, when I say that some specific details about social use mean that there may be some specific differences between pornography and “the rest of pop culture” that merit special attention towards pornography. That pornography has a specifically sexualized role that other forms of pop culture don’t have should (I think) be obvious; that its specifically sexualized role might make reactionary themes in pornography of special interest and concern to people who are concerned with men’s sexual aggression towards women shouldn’t be much harder to see. But I hope this helps explain in some more detail. Feel free to prod me if I’m not being as clear as I could.

(Of course an explanation is not yet a defense. If you think that this position is wrong, fine, but you’ll find a better defense of all these positions in printed book-length treatments of pornography, and essays on specific sub-topics, by antipornography feminists.)

reddecca:

The odd thing about the feminist pornography debate is that both sides do appear to feel like the attacked and betlittled minority, which isn’t particularly good for discussion.

That’s a very good point. It doesn’t help at all that each of them tends to treat the other as a mere appendage of, or at least a spiritual cousin of, some larger and much more clearly menacing and mean force in cultural politics (i.e., the Religious Right, on the one hand, and mainstream pimps and pornographers, on the other).

It’s certainly possible for terms to outrun their origins and it’s certainly true that people who use “meme” to describe weblog games that involve suggesting the game to other people aren’t using in its strictly technical sense. But (1) being divorced from a strict technical doesn’t necessarily mean being divorced from all the connotational baggage along with it; it’s pretty clear (to me at least) that the term “meme,” even when misused, is still associated with close relatives such as “mind virus” and the Dark Magic view of persuasion. This is especially true when it is either used or misused to describe anything more serious than silly weblog games; and especially hwen it’s either used or misused to describe anything with which the speaker disagrees (say, religious beliefs or various political myths). I think that the abuse of the term to (for example) simply polemically shove your opponent’s positions out of the space of reasons clearly is a part of both the canonical use and the canonical misuse.

Also, (2) this is especially true when the word is some ghastly neologism with less than 30 years of philological background behind it, with the original coiners and a linguistic community of true believers still using it to mean what it was coined to mean. Particularly when that sub-community is where the people habitually misusing it got the word from, and when they are still in active conversation using (or misusing) the terminology with the echt-memeticists. This isn’t a case like “snob”, which everyone used to use to abuse supposedly vulgar poor tradesmen, but now everyone uses to abuse the snooty rich. It’s a case of a misuse that is not linguistically very far separated from the technical use.

Both (1) and (2) mean that it may very well be worth sticking to the original technical meaning, so as to cast light on the sort of language-games that users of the term are playing, and misusers of the term are dipping their toes into. (For related examples that aren’t ghastly neologisms, consider the gross distortions by the Dobsons and Limbaughs of the world that are now applied to recent coinages such as “moral relativism” and “radical feminism,” both of which admit of a technical definition and both of which are still actively used in their original senses. The abuses of the terms are now much more widely circulated than the correct uses, but that doesn’t mean that we should just admit multiple meanings and defer where necessary to common usage amongst know-nothing blowhards.)

Also, (3) even if we would be right to just distinguish meme-1 from meme-2 (objecting only to the echt-memetics and not to the common twisting of the term), there’s still always aesthetic criticism.

I mean, Jesus, who would want to cast aside perfectly lovely words like “idea” or “game” or “suggestion” with a bunch of ridiculous, cutesy “memetics” argot?

Thomas:

Actually, I think that giving performers a say in how their images are used over time is, while difficult, ultimately a good thing. However, that leaves open the Norma McCorvey problem: fundamentalists have sometimes been really effective at recruiting allies that will embarass feminism. I don’t want to see some “ex-gay” converts to the far right using a statute to attack material that they were perfectly happy with when it was made.

Thomas, let’s set aside for a moment the legal question of whether or not (say) born-again people who were once in pornography should have the right to force pornographers to stop distributing images of them, in favor of an ethical question. Let’s imagine that someone used to be in pornography and didn’t have any particular trouble with it at the time, but later in life regretted it, for reasons that you don’t agree with (for example, becoming a born-again Christian). Let’s also imagine that this person wishes that he or she had never been in the movies, and doesn’t want people masturbating to her or his pornographized image.

Do you think that it’s right for you to keep doing so, even against the explicit wishes of the person whose image you’re using for masturbation material?

Hustler is racist? How?

Yes. In fact Hustler is one of the most crudely and overtly racist of the old guard of pornographic publications.

You can find plenty of examples and discussion in King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity and at the Hustling the Left website in general. (Warning: emphatically not “work-safe,” as they say.)

Re-reading, I’d just like to note that by “pornographic display” I was slipping into jargon. I don’t mean the (circular) claim that pornography is bad (including “mainstream” pornography) because it involves the kind of display that you see in pornography. I meant to pick out display based on the presupposition that you were discussing, Amp, when you said “For instance, a lot of porn (such as Playboy-style naked posing) endorses not only very traditional ideas of what is or isn’t attractive, but also implicitly endorses the idea that sexuality is something possessed by women, which men must pry out of women.”

Also, here’s an attempt to say it more concisely. The special role that pornography plays in sexual fantasy and masturbation for most men, from our teen years onward, means that the sort of experiences we associate with the reactionary stuff in pornography is different in at least two important respects from the reactionary stuff that we see in other media. (1) The pleasures we associate with it are more intimate and intense, and (2) the use of it has a much more direct relationship to the sort of sexual person that each of us chooses to become. I have trouble buying the line that “it doesn’t make sense to single out porn in general for this critique, since these flaws are evident in virtually all of pop culture” because it papers over an essential difference between the role that pornography and other forms of pop culture plays in men’s sexual lives, and thus an essential difference in the effects that its content has.

Amp:

None. I can’t understand the [relevance] of this question, however, unless you misunderstood my post.

I wasn’t saying that porn shared EVERY trait with women’s magazines, etc; just that it shared certain, particular traits I object to. “[Masturbation] material” isn’t a trait I object to, and isn’t one of the shared traits I was referring to.

Amp, the reason I asked is because for most antipornography feminists, the role that pornography plays in the formation of men’s sexual fantasies, desires, attitudes, pleasures, and activities is not just incidental to the critique of its consumption. It’s an important fact about pornography that men masturbate to it; not because masturbation is bad, but because fantasizing about and orgasming to scenes that are supposed to derive their “sexiness” from pornographic display, infantilization, sexualized humiliation and control, misogyny, racism, et cetera is.

Of course antipornography feminists need to, and do, strenuously object to misogynist content in all forms of media. (Dines’ and Jensen’s main point in the article you link is actually that if you accept those forms of media criticism — as you should — then it doesn’t make sense to suddenly turn off the scrutiny when it comes to the usually much more overtly reactionary content of pornographic media.) But the problem with saying, “This isn’t a problem with pornography specifically, it’s a problem with all media” is that there is a specific difference between “media” that you relate to by laughing at it, getting kicks from it, relaxing to it, etc., and “media” that you relate to by orgasming to it, habitually.

And that difference might explain why antipornography feminists think that pornography’s role in men’s sexual desires, fantasies, pleasure, and behavior deserves particular attention and criticism.

Amp:

However, this isn’t a problem with porn qua porn; the same harmful ideas I dislike in even “non-violent” porn, are also found in abundance in non-porn media like “women’s magazines,” “men’s magazines” and popular sit-coms. So although I think this is a legitimate critique of a lot of porn, it doesn’t make sense to single out porn in general for this critique, since these flaws are evident in virtually all of pop culture.”

Just out of curiosity, how many men do you know who habitually use non-pornographic content in “women’s magazines,” “men’s magazine’s” and popular sit-coms to masturbate to orgasm, or to provide scenes for masturbatory fantasies?

Interestingly enough, these kind of displays were a common element of stateless arbitration in medieval Iceland, as well. Here’s Jesse Byock, in Viking Age Iceland:

The absence of pitched battles does not mean that the island inhabitants eschewed all forms of militant show, only that they ritualized the actual use of force. Parties to a dispute that was moving toward resolution frequently assembled large numbers of armed baendr [freeholders]. Sometimes these groups confronted each other for days at assemblies and at other gatherings, such as when a successful party was trying to enforce a judgment at the home of the defendant (féránsdómr). Althought opposing sides often clashed briefly, and a few men might be killed, protracted battles were consistently avoided. It was not by chance that the parties showed restraint. Leaders really had few options if they hoped to retain the allegiance of a large following, since the baendr were not dependable supporters in a long or perilous confrontation. They had no tradition of obeying orders, maintaining discipline, or being absent from their farms for extended periods. The godhar, for their part, were seldom able to bear the burdens of campaigning. They lacked the resources necessary to feed, house, equip and pay followers for more than a brief period.

Rather than signalling the outbreak of warfare, a public display of armed support revealed that significant numbers of men had chosen sides and were prepared to participate in an honourable resolution. With chieftains and farmers publicly committed, a compromise resting on a collective agreement could be reached. (p. 125)

Dude. There’s no such thing as a “meme”. This is an idea that you’ve chosen to suggest. You are not an information-pattern replicator; you’re a human being. Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind!