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?

Richard:

I can’t figure out why so much resources are going to protect one Supreme Court case ….

Because women’s lives are at stake, and this is one of the fronts we have to fight on.

Richard:

I live in New Jersey. We will have abortion rights whether or not Roe v. Wade is overturned, because we’re all pro-choice here, even our Republican governors.

I’m happy for you, really, but not all of us are nearly so fortunate. If Roe v. Wade is overturned tomorrow, then abortion will certainly be recriminalized, more or less immediately, in most or all of the states in the Southeast, the interior West, and a substantial swath of the Midwest. You might say, “Look, Mississippi only has one abortion clinic in the whole state today; does it make that much difference to a woman from Tupelo or Biloxi or Sunflower County whether she has to travel to Jackson, or go out of state, to get an abortion?” But the answer is that yes, it does. Not everyone has the privilege of living in a state where reproductive rights are safe, or even near one. And not all the women in the states where abortion would likely be recriminalized have the privilege of being able to take several days off to travel to New York or New Jersey or California in order to get surgery that is already expensive.

This is setting aside the further question of federal abortion laws. Depending on the legal reasoning given in a hypothetical reversal of Roe, a blanket ban may or may not be a likely outcome; but whether it is or not you can certainly expect the Republican President and Republican Congress rumbling to pass federal procedure bans and federal laws aimed at restricting women from traveling across state lines to get abortions.

So, yeah. It’s important.

Richard:

I can’t figure out why so much resources are going to protect one Supreme Court case, and so little to changing the cultural attitudes that lead to the case in the first place.

If you don’t think that enough cultural work is being done to change people’s attitudes about abortion then why not do something about it yourself instead of fussing about how people and organizations who are already very busy with other important and closely related work aren’t doing it for you? (For example: write a letter to the editor, volunteer to become a clinic escort, tell an anti-choice family member about how you volunteered to become a clinic escort and explain why, buy books or music or films that advance the pro-choice position, etc. etc. etc.)

Glaivester:

But a lot of people would never think of that unless they asked the question “why didn’t she just leave?” and then search for the answer.

There is more than one way to ask a question. If all you’re saying is that we ought to be willing to honestly inquire into the conditions that keep women in abusive situations, I can’t think of anyone who would disagree with you. (At most, feminists will — rightly — point out that we also need to inquire into why men abuse women, rather than simply treating that as a given fact.) If women who have survived abuse volunteer the information, all for the best. But if you mean that we are entitled to demand an accounting of her reasons from any woman who is battered or raped (rather than presuming that she did have her reasons, like any other human being, and letting her explain them or not explain them as she sees fit); and that we ought to interrogate specific women in specific cases about why they didn’t leave, and suggest that — whatever reasons they may have had — it’s that that’s necessary and sufficient for systematic male violence against women to continue — then what you’re doing is fucked up and it needs to stop. Because yes, that is victim-blaming, and yes, that is making excuses for the rapists and batterers, and yes, that is a hostile and hurtful way to treat survivors of violence. This kind of attitude can be either ignorant or malicious. Often it’s a bit of both. If it’s malicious then there’s precious little reason to care whether your response helps the interrogator to understand or not, because people who do this maliciously generally don’t care and don’t want to understand. If it’s ignorance, then I don’t think it’s obvious that sympathetically catering to ignorance is always either obligatory or helpful as a means to getting people to understand better. And, on the subject of ignorant interrogations that weren’t malicious in intent, you should be aware that it’s very easy to ask a question that you think is just honest inquiry, but which really comes across as a demand or an interrogation. Particularly to someone who has been through hell and is already struggling with self-doubt and self-blame.

Avenir:

Punish the individual men, for sure, but cure whatever societal disease is producing these men, too.

Glaivester:

I am not questioning why society is treating them like they are helpless. I am questioning what society is doing to make them helpless.

Avenir:

I do think that society raises women in a way that makes them vulnerable to victimization.

Y’all keep talking about “society” as if it were a gaseous medium or an airborne disease instead of a bunch of individual men and women living in roughly the same area. “Society” doesn’t “raise women,” or treat anyone like they’re helpless, or make them helpless, and male violence against women is not a medical condition that “society” contracted. Men and women raise children; men and women can choose to, or decline to, treat people as if they are helpless or make them helpless; and male violence against women is something that men choose to do to women, every day, everywhere. I mention these things because when you start to talk about “society” doing this or that you are quickly and thoroughly changing the subject from the real facts of real men and women’s daily lives to some reified abstraction, treated as if it were some looming presence outside of us (when in fact it just is you, and I, and our neighbors), and in the process nicely obscure questions such as: who in “society” is doing the actual hitting and raping; who in “society” is making the excuses for it in conversation, commentary, and high theory; who has the most power to determine what we learn to say and do when we are being brought up, and so on. Here’s a hint: it’s mostly men. If you sincerely want to stop encouraging passivity and irresponsibility, maybe you should start by talking in a way that actually demands that actual men be actually accountable for the specific things they do wrong, rather than passing the buck to “society” and treating male violence as if it were a given natural fact.

Robert, much earlier in the thread:

EC prevents the implantation of a fertilized embryo into the uterine wall. It is an abortifacient. (At least some forms of it work this way; I hear conflicting reports that there are non-abortifacient ECs but I haven’t seen details.) This, by many of us, is abortion, albeit about the most attenuated possible form of abortion. So, EC is abortion, EC is abortion, EC is abortion. There, now we’re functioning at the same discursive level.

No, it’s not. “Abortion” is a medical term, referring to the premature termination of a pre-existing pregnancy (when that termination doesn’t result in live birth). Emergency Contraception works in one of two ways, depending on matters of timing and chance: either it prevents ovulation from happening at all, or else it prevents a blastocyst from implanting in the placenta when it reaches the uterus. (Pregnancy — another medical term, mind you — does not begin until implantation.) In neither of these cases is there a pregnancy to be aborted; in neither of them is there an abortion. EC does not cause abortions; it is not, therefore, an “abortifacient.”

You may think that Emergency Contraception has something morally in common with induced abortion; you may oppose it for precisely the same reasons, and so think that there should be a common term to cover everything that you oppose for whatever those reasons are. That’s fine; innovation of that sort is something that competant speakers of the language do all the time. But “abortion” is a term that already has a perfectly good meaning, and making up new meanings for it to inject into public discourse, without making it very clear that this is what you have done, amounts to telling lies about EC in order to try to get people on board with your agenda.

Telling lies is wrong.

Q Grrl said:

As a feminist, however, I don’t think that the personal agency of women or their bodily integrity is up for debate. It simply isn’t.

Will responded:

Excuse me? Since when does a topic suddenly get closed to debate?

When a woman decides what she wants to do with her own body. Women’s bodies belong to them, not to you and not to “the public”. You can keep talking about what other people ought to do as long as you want but you haven’t got any right to demand that a woman listen to what you have to say about it. Period. Sorry.

I’m sorry, but any policy that affects my rights, or will affect the society I live in will always be up for debate.

Great. I think that male anti-choice commentators should be forcibly sterilized and publicly branded with hot irons because of their immoral political beliefs. This clearly affects the society I live in. So let’s debate! Let’s put it up for a vote! You’re not against democracy and intellectual discourse, are you?

Amp:

Forgive the digression, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t true – I’ve been meaning to do a post on the subject. For instance, Haven House in LA began taking in wives of abusive alcoholics starting around 1964.

Fair enough; but part of this is just a terminological question over what comes up to the “modern” battered women’s shelter. I mean, you can find records of refuges for “unhappily married” women going back to 16th century Italy, and while it’s clear that they have something distinctly in common with the modern battered women’s shelter it’s also clear that there are some distinct differences. In the case of Haven House (and Rainbow Retreat in Arizona, which I believe was operating around the same time and doing the same things), one difference is their growth out of Al-Anon and their primary focus on helping spouses of violent alcoholics, specifically, rather than battered women as such and domestic violence as we understand it today. My understanding (which could perfectly well be mistaken) is that the network of shelters which women built over the course of the 1970s modeled itself mainly on Chiswick, not on the pre-existing U.S. examples, so that while there are some pre-1971 institutions that look interestingly like modern battered women’s shelters (and which did similarly important work in their home communities), there was a significant break with the 1971-1972 shelters, and that these new developments were vital to understanding the huge growth in local shelters between 1970 and 1979.

Whatever the case may be, it’s a fascinating history and I haven’t been able to find nearly as much about it as I’d like. With some of the activity that’s been going on for the past several years in writing feminist history I hope that more of it may be available in the near future.

I look forward to your post on the topic!

Sloopy:

Right, Ampersand. Feminists (men and women) stood up and made lawmakers take notice and take action. Why is it unthinkable, why is it bad, when other people do the same?

Feminists (and, let’s be honest, most of them just happened to be women) created the modern network of battered women’s shelters in the 1970s by forming their own groups and buying property on short money from local women’s groups and the support of larger feminist organizations such as the Ms. Foundation. The first modern battered women’s shelter was probably Chiswick Women’s Aid in London, which began offering refuge services in 1971. The next year, the first battered women’s shelters in the United States were started with a similar model in the United States. These shelters were started in nonprofit storefronts, squatted spaces and women’s homes. They built fundraising networks from Women’s Liberation groups, Al-Anon meetings, whatever formal or informal networks they had at their disposal. With time they managed to purchase houses and begin to offer more comprehensive services. Cooperation from law enforcement was minimal and government funding mostly nonexistent until the 1980s, and not provided in any large-scale and coordinated way in the United States until the passage of VAWA in 1994. You should note that by 1979 there were over 250 shelters operating in the United States, even without any particular help from the government. You should also note (as Bean mentioned earlier) that shelters continue to receive the vast bulk of their funding from private donors, not from grants, today. The battered women’s movement did not come about by “making lawmakers take notice” or by extracting government funding. Women did it themselves and carried the torch for years without any help.

Men today have more money, more valuable social networks, and more political clout than women’s liberationists had in 1971. If MRAs were working to use the resources that they have in order to boost funding and availability of resources for battered men, rather than filing suits to try to force women’s shelters to be defunded, or filing suits to try to force existing women’s shelters to admit men, or whining to the legislature to try to get them to give men’s shelters a cut of the very limited government funds that are currently appropriated for women’s shelters, then it would be much easier to take them seriously and I would applaud their efforts. As it stands, though, they mostly don’t seem to be interested in doing the work for themselves and they mostly seem interested in zero-sum legal maneuvers that will only profit men’s shelters at the expense of women’s shelters. To hell with that.

Amp:

Well, if I were a judge in that case, I’d certainly decide for “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Why? This looks alarmingly like treating someone as crazy simply because their beliefs are morally depraved. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but in actual historical reality lots of Nazis and Klan members have actually thought this way about Jews and Blacks (for example) and acted accordingly, to horrifying effect. I don’t think they were “insane” in any sense that affects legal or moral responsibility. They were just evil. Why should our hypothetical murderous anti-Christian be thought of any differently?

Thus Robert:

Murder is a legal term that means the deliberate ending of a human life with a certain type of intent. It’s murder for me to shoot my wife’s ex-husband because I want him to die; it isn’t murder if I run him over by accident, or if I shoot him in the woods because I mistake him for a deer.

The only way abortion would be legitimately considered murder is if the person performing the operation, or the person who requested it be performed upon her, thought the fetus was a human being and wanted to end its life. That’s murder by anyone’s definition. If a person is honestly convinced that a fetus is not a person, then by definition they do not have the requisite frame of mind to commit murder. Manslaughter, at most.

So if I earnestly believe that Christians are not human beings, and that I therefore have a right to hunt anyone who makes a confession of the faith like a beast, and I act on this earnestly held belief by gunning down some folks at Sunday services, does that mean, on your view, that I am not guilty of murder, but rather of manslaughter at the most?

Come on, now. If you’re going to come down on abortion, at least don’t be mealy-mouthed about it.