Or, Is there nothing so obviously wrong and inconsistent with liberalism that pseudo-liberals, especially academics on the make,* won't promote it?
First, I'm not sorry for the caps in the title. I figure that if you didn't know that someone should emphasize the point.
One of the milestones in my realization that there was something basically wrong with the left that was developing from roughly the first years after the death of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was a review I read of a manual of lesbian S&M. I almost want to say it was in Mother Jones magazine, it sounded like some lame brained attempt at San Francisco style shock, I-can-be-more-outrageous-than-you-LOOK AT ME!, coolitude (something I didn't identify by name till much later) but it could have appeared in many of the gay newspapers I looked at in that period. I think that the desire to appear kew-el accounts for almost all of the support for maiming, harming, abusing and dominating people as sex in the pseudo-liberal world.**
It was a shock to realize, after years of reading Shirley Chisholm (still one of my greatest heroes), Gloria Steinem, even dear old Betty Friedan, that in the name of women-power, lesbian power, the act of women hurting and maiming other women (razor blade safety was mentioned, as I recall) was supposed to be acceptable. No, more than that, an expression of some weird pantomime of liberation. All in the name of sexual arousal.
Well, I like sexual arousal as anyone else and was quite sexually active at the time, but the boundaries of what should be tolerated end considerably before taking advantage of any mental disability and internalized hatred which would lead someone to want to be hurt, maimed, bound, gagged, tortured, humiliated, abused .... essentially legitimizing the very worst things that the very worst of men do to women, men, children, animals, because arousal and orgasm is involved. And liberalism ends considerably before considering the desire to hurt, maim, abuse, degrade and enslave anyone for sexual arousal to be a right and a tolerable expression of freedom. A liberalism that accepts that has junked the most important of all bases of liberalism for fascistic libertarianism.
What brings this to mind is this Salon piece by the ever typing Jenny Kutner claiming that the UK law banning some sadistic depictions in porn produced there is an attack on women. In a period when allegations of a form of bondage has produced at least ten pieces of outrage at Salon, the appearance of this article supporting its commercial promotion is pretty amazing. Apparently doing much worse to the prostitutes who work in porn for the titillation of an almost exclusively male audience is alleged to empower women. Or at least the suppression of it is pretended to target women who, I guess we are supposed to believe, benefit from the niche market of "femdom". Just in passing, have you ever noticed that the creation of some jargony word like that is supposed to legitimate stuff like that? I suspect that habit flows directly from the social science scribblers we were assigned to read in college.
I would like to see an honest study done on the percentage of porn in which those practices are inflicted on straight men as opposed to being imposed on women by straight men. How many of you want to bet that in almost all of it, the target for abuse and enslavement is a woman? I can assure you from my knowledge of gay porn that that form of internalized hatred accounts for a huge percentage, perhaps most of gay porn. It is the way that the gay-haters got into our minds and turned us against ourselves, I am convinced that this Salon article and the many others like it has something of the same effect for women.
Internalized hatred is what "BDSM" is all about, internalized hatred that leads some of us to figuring that any sex that respects our rights and dignity is something we don't deserve, that we don't deserve to have a relationship based on love instead of inequality, use and abuse. I don't expect you will be seeing many magazine articles on that theme, commerce is at basic odds with that kind of human relationship and selling is what the media is all about.
* See this piece of unreadable, unintelligible jargon flinging, tripe. Though, to be fair, I don't think that the academic BS distributors are nearly as likely to fling it as the typists of "journalism".
** See also, the motto of my blog from Jack Levine on fashion.
N.b., I've all but given up on Salon. The vapidity of some of the articles there is only matched by the stupidity of some of the comments; and I don't speak lightly about that.
ReplyDeleteThe advent of the intertoobs has not brought about the Great Awakening and the New Enlightenment we were promised. Prejudice and ignorance prevail and like bad money under Gresham's Law (? Do I have that one right from Friedmanian economics on PBS from 20 years ago?), it drives out good thought everywhere.
Well, almost everywhere. All the major outlets and their comments are mostly drivel and ignorance. Far from presaging a new Renaissance, we seem to be slipping into a new Dark Ages. Although I'm more impressed with the humanity of the original, to be honest....
Did you look at the William Cobbett book I linked to the other day? It's quite interesting, if a document of its period, commenting on the far less unjust system in England before Henry VIII and his heirs destroyed the independence of the church? That along with Marilynne Robinson's Mother Country have taught me so much about the reality that the medieval period wasn't quite the horror show (by comparison) that it's usually made out to be. Victorian England was far, far worse.
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