I knew before I read Katha Pollitt's review of the movie 50 Shades of Grey that she'd find some way to blame it on Christians and, of course, she does.
Let’s say you’re a woman who wants to have a handsome man worship your body, desire you intensely, focus on you sexually with incredible skill, and bring you to earthshaking orgasm in about thirty seconds. You never have to exert yourself on his behalf—his satisfaction happens automatically as a byproduct of yours. If porn for women mirrored porn for men, that’s what it would look like. But let’s say, in addition, that you are marinated in a Christianity-inflected culture that inculcates women with sexual shame, insecurity about their looks and lovability and self-worth in general, and tells them in a thousand ways that men are superior, male power is sexy, and suffering is redemptive. Then you might end up with porn for women that looks a lot like Fifty Shades of Grey.
Actually, if you lived in a "Christianity-inflected culture" you'd be more likely to have the Songs of Solomon (not exactly a book informed by Christianity, by the way) as being the raciest thing you're likely to encounter as approved literature. You could be expected to not have BDSM porn because every single thing about it violates every single thing about how to treat other people that is taught by Jesus. Somehow, I don't think a book in which the guy only did to the gal what he'd want done to him would sell as S&M. You do realize they weren't married in the story, don't you?
I don't know of a widely accepted Christian theologian who taught that bondage and sado-masochism are good or, in fact, anything but deeply immoral.
I can, though, think of lots and lots and lots of atheists, free speech industry hacks and the such who have advocated and supported such books, including Simone de Beauvoir and lots of totally anti-Christian writers and political theorists who have probably not been on Pollitt's to-crap on list.
At the very least, Katha, old chum, the authors of such stuff share more responsibility for its presence than Christianity does. I doubt any of them were pious and strictly observant Christians, though I'd like to know of any you can list who can be convincingly accepted as such.
Oh, wait, don't I seem to recall reading her talking about her job as a porn proof-reader in that collection of essays a dozen or more years ago? I wonder if she ever assisted in the publication of S&M porn. And I wonder what a review of the archive of the magazines she has worked for would reveal about support for the publication of that genre of junk.
And there was that weird essay about her Marxist study group full of her boyfriend's lovers. I wonder if they ever went into the rape murders of Comrade Lavrentiy Beria or the young girls forced into training as sex slaves in The Peoples Republic of North Korea or the widespread sex slavery in The Peoples' Republic of China. Apparently none of that is inconsistent with Marxism as practiced in the real world, though I can tell you no main-line Church would ever be reasonably accused of advocating it.
Pollitt is hooked up with the Freedom From Religion gang and probably any number of other venues of that part time employment for those who are finding that the paid scribbling gig isn't what it used to be back in the age of ink on paper. She can now be counted on to slam Christianity in just about anything she can fit it into. Perhaps she gets paid for a kind of product placement when she puts something like that in a piece.
And, by the way, I haven't encountered a single man who has either admitted to having read the thing or who I've seen carrying the book in public. You're way, way off base on this one Katha.
Well, I was going to come and complain about running into a clueless and humorless prig at Salon who got into an argument with me over Gershwin lyrics ("They all laughed") which I meant as a joke, but were taken as a serious statement of history because the nimrod didn't recognize the reference.
ReplyDeleteEven after I pointed it out three times successively. The response was I had devolved from an argument to saying it was just lyrics from a song. I had to explain it was ALWAYS just lyrics from a song, meant as humorously as the original words were.
But you win. Finding such cluelessness from a name author is not surprising, but still: you win.
Interesting, too: on BBC today, results of a study of female serial killers out of Pennsylvania.
ReplyDeleteSeems the pattern for women killers is to kill friends and family, usually for money. Male killers are hunters, they seek out strangers. Women gather (family for the slaughter), men hunt (for prey).
I'm not sure that's evolutionary, as the researcher thought it was, but it would indicate a radically different interest in porn among women and men. And without being "steeped" in a "Christian influenced" culture.
I don't think Japanese porn was all that "liberating" before the Edo period, when Japan was exposed to Western ideas (and became more prudish about sex, just as India did after the British took over). Not much in Japanese, or Indian, culture to establish a sense of equality between sexes that disappeared when Christian influences (greater in India, to some degree, but still not much) came along.
Provincialism makes things SO much simpler....
Not to mention (finally) that "50 shades" is pretty much "Mommy porn." There's a lot of it produced for "housewife" consumption. I sold a lot of it when I worked at a local bookstore a few years back.
ReplyDeleteWe got piles of it every month, and sold most of it pretty quickly. "50 Shades" stands out for its notoriety, not for it's content or even concept. Pollitt really has no idea what she's talking about, but since when did that stop anyone from collecting money for pontificating?
I can't stop myself: does she have any idea what prudes the Romans were? This idea that, but for Xianity,we'd all be libertines and living like the people in Brave New World is a bit much.
ReplyDeleteHell, the Romans considered sex during day time (or with any lights on) to be perverse. Libertines about matters sexual they weren't. At least, not by our standards.
Clueless, as I said.
Good points about the Japanese porn industry which has some of the most violent porn I've ever seen. There's a whole genre of gay male pedophile cartoon porn THAT IS PRIMARILY PRODUCED BY WOMEN. None of whom, I would guess, were much at all influenced by Christianity.
ReplyDeleteIn reading a lot of Emma Goldman's nonsense I'd occasionally come past a slam at Catholicism, the Jesuits. In none of her writing did I come across anything that would lead me to conclude that Emma Goldman knew more than a few anti-Catholic bromides and bits of lore common among the WASP mainstream. I doubt Pollitt has ever studied much of anything about Christianity or knows much beyond the common received atheist factoids about it. Like just about every ideological atheist I've ever encountered she probably figures she doesn't need to be accurate about it. Well, like so many in "journalism" today, I don't come across any description of what she's done as being a reporter of fact.
The fact is that it's her ideology and her social-professional milieu which has produced the culture and legal environment that lead to 50 Shades of Grey. That happens to be entirely incompatible with the feminism she has written in favor of, not to mention any possibility for a decent, peaceful life for women, is in tension with her "free speech-free press" absolutism. That is a problem for her ideology, not for Christianity which would not approve of its production or distribution. Her choice to irrationally blame it on the one part of society that had the least to do with its production only confirms what I've said about atheists not caring if they lie because they don't believe it's a sin to tell a lie, which is also an odd practice for a "journalist" though journalistic ... um,.... "ethics" are rather more malleable than "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or the various other rules that wouldn't say BDSM isn't only not good but it is evil.