What would Gloria Steinem say?
You know, if a magazine devoted to the degradation of women picked Reclusive Leftist as one of its Top Ten Blogs, I’d think I was doing something wrong.
But Playboy has named Pandagon one of its favorite reads, and Pam and Amanda seem positively giddy about it.
Porn feminists sure are funny.
58 Responses to “What would Gloria Steinem say?”
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Mandos says:
I took their tone as irony. I don’t think they’re genuinely giddy about it at least not how I read them.
October 7th, 2006 at 4:39 pm EST -
richard cherry says:
just a touch of sour grapes, vi? surely they can now adorm their site with some cute fluffy ears and a tail. just what feminists should be compelled to wear. not like a hijab at all…
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Amanda Marcotte says:
I think it’s hysterical. Frankly, I’m surprised they’re even bothering to do articles about politics anymore. None of the above means I approve of Hef or really of their lame pictures. We’re all kind of disappointed that the write-up was only mildly sexist, because I was hoping they’d hit it out of the park and we could have a great time making fun.
I have a vague plan to pose slouching a chair wearing overalls and the bunny ears while drinking a Natural Light. However, this will require purchasing all three, and I’m feeling lazy.
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Burrow says:
Good god. I’d bleach my blog. Not that they’d ever enjoy reading me that is, unless they are sadistic.
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Burrow says:
This had to be my favourite comment:
“Congrats Pam! You haven’t made it till you’re in Playboy.You should do a photoshoot. “Women of the blogosphere.”‘
grrrrrrr
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gordo says:
If one of the reasons to blog is to raise consciousness, then this is a very good thing. Of all the blogs mentioned, Pandagon was the only one that sounded interesting at all in the write-up and the only one that scored well on the “fun factor.” I would think that Pandagon would get some huge traffic from that mention.
Jonathan Kozol has done several interviews for Playboy. One could make a case for the idea that he shouldn’t, as his appearances help promote the magazine. But if he didn’t, then he’d have lost an opportunity to communicate with people about education.
In my opinion, the bottom line is this: a lot of readers are going to be drawn to Pandagon as a result of Playboy’s review. To the extent that having people read the ideas in Pandagon is a good thing, this is a good thing.
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Violet says:
Amanda, I liked your post about the worms and the can opener, which I’ve read now (but not the 700 comments).
Gordo, sure, traffic is good, etc. But frankly I see this as yet another attempt by Playboy to make themselves out as being all pro-woman and empowering, which they’re not.
Consider, for example, Playboy’s practice of asking every single famous, near-famous, or professionally accomplished woman in the entire world to pose naked (as long as she’s a hot babe under the age of 30, that is). Why do they do that? Here’s why:
Back when Playboy started, its message was easy: women are nothing but tits and ass. With the rise of feminism in the 70s, though, this message was threatened as women started joining the work force and crashing the formerly all-male universities, achieving power and recognition and actually demanding to be considered fully human. Playboy has met the challenge by convincing these coeds and executives and Olympic athletes to take off their clothes.
The pitch is that this is “empowering,” and Playboy says that it even proves that they just love the liberated woman. But the whole point is to restore the natural Hefner order by literally stripping these uppity women of their suits and uniforms and reducing them to anonymous fuckbots. Outside the pages of Playboy a woman might be an athlete, a scholar, a business woman — but inside, she is still nothing but tits and ass. Patriarchy smiles.
I see their write-up of Pandagon as being the same kind of thing: “See? We don’t degrade women! We love the cute little feminists!”
Blech.
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Amanda Marcotte says:
I really did think it was ironic they picked the blog. I honestly doubt there was a lot of thought put into it—Playboy’s like any magazine, they give writers assignments and as long as the language fits the general tone of the magazine, it’s in. It’s clear the writer of it wrote the blurb to flatter the Playboy sensibilities (that they’re somehow big warriors against moral scolds), but I’m sure the editors didn’t bother to make sure that every blog on there was pro-them or something.
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Sam says:
What a great opportunity for self-reflection this brings.
If you consider yourself a feminist and Playboy is praising your blog in it’s pages, it’s time to turn off the computer, turn off the lights, and sit down in the quiet to think really hard about where the flight plan fucked up in your feminist trajectory.
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Rob G says:
Sam, so if Jerry Falwell says you’re a good artist, you should give up painting? Fact is, Playboy has always made pleasing noises about feminism without apparently recognizing the inherent contradiction. Praise from them is not necessarily an indication that you have lost your way.
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Infidel says:
Praise invariably implies a reference to a higher standard.
-Aristotle-
….like Penthouse Forum
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Violet says:
Yeah, I should definitely clarify here that I don’t think Playboy’s endorsement means that Pandagon is genuinely pro-Playboy. What I was posting about was Pam’s unalloyed joy (as I read it) in making the announcement and the subsequent high-fiving in the comment thread. I was utterly weirded out by that. Here I am thinking about creepy Hef and the Playboy Mansion and that whole creepy deal and remembering Gloria going undercover and now watching all these feminists go “woo hoo! we’re in Playboy!” and my brain just melted.
It’s possible that there was irony in Pam’s post that I just missed, as Mandos suggested. It’s also possible, and this I think is likely, that for a lot of younger feminists Playboy just doesn’t loom as the Evil Empire that it does for me. I mean, hell, I’m old enough to be Amanda’s older sister. Maybe they can laugh at it in a way I can’t, and maybe that’s good.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything at all. My goal wasn’t to get into a better-feminist-than-thou thing, which I really dislike, and I generally try to avoid those areas where I simply can’t understand what those young whippersnapper third-wavers are up to. The reason I did post was because my freak-out level was simply so high. Like, maximum high. I just didn’t know what to think.
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Infidel says:
Perhaps in an attempt to drum up business, Edward Grosynhill, an early Englishman pamphleteer wrote on both sides of the issue: his poem, The Schoolhouse of Women (1541) denigrates women while his poem The Praise of all Women, called Mulierum Paean (1542) offers women lofty praise
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Sam says:
Rob, if Falwell payed any positive attention to me at all you better believe I’d wonder what the hell was up with that.
But this is not a mere “ironic”, or accidental, or mistaken endorsement. Why wouldn’t Playboy love the kind of feminist Amanda says she is?
The kind who proudly calls herself a porn liberal and masturbates herself with captured images of prostitutes being prostituted.
The kind who defends the use of misogynist pornography by her friends because of course they don’t get off on humiliated and abused women desite watching misognist pornography that humiliates abused women.
The kind who goes on a trip to Happy Whoreville, Europe paid for by prostitution profits and specifically tailored to librul folks willing to ignore the girls and women in prostituted slavery for the sake of a good time souvenir shopping.
The kind that defends a very well-known white Playboy columnist making racist remarks against criticisms made by a nonwhite alt-media nobody named Aura Bogado with the same illogical “gut feeling” men use to justify hiring men over equally or more qualified women applicants.
The kind who acknowledges Chuck Traynor was clearly an abusive fuck but insists Linda Boreman’s testimonies of being raped and tortured to make porn are untrustworthy so it’s better to just ignore the rerelease of Deep Throat into theaters months after Linda’s death because it’s water under the bridge and we can never really know the truth of what happened to Linda.
The kind who thinks the institutional rapes of legalized prostitutes are just a little less bad than those suffered by illegal prostitutes because in theory they have access to antibiotics, EC, abortions, stitches, casts, painkillers, depression pills and other health care needed to keep them alive before some pimp or john irreversably damages them beyond topical fixability.
It’s not terribly hard to see why Playboy would endorse Amanda’s prostitution-positive, pornography-positive feminist self when she’s all right with men (and women) having all the whores they can afford just so long as they have access to the hospitals and doctors they’ll need to help mitigate the extreme damages to body, mind and heart prostitution inflicts.
I think Amanda is a good enough moderate issue-of-the-day feminist, but she is dead wrong about the 35-40 million and rising pornstitutes around the world and since those are my people I will not forget them or ignore their suffering just because we agree on reproductive rights, fundamentalist godbags, etc. When someone who has expressed the opinions outlined above as Amanda has, Playboy’s thumbs-up makes perfect sense. She wants to brush it off with a “it’s ironic” or “they probably made a mistake” even as she defends violent pornography as adequately “filterable”, the men who use it Nice Guys who don’t actually enjoy or watch the misogynist parts, and continues to prominently host the XXX Bloggers in Amsterdam logo. Playboy’s admiration for Amanda is not ironic or a mistake, but admitting that would take some serious soul-searching on her part.
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Mandos says:
The vertical XXX thing comes from Amsterdam’s city coat of arms, I hope you understand.
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Jimmy Ho says:
No, at best you can say that it is a visual “pun” playing on both the coat of arms and the now universal symbol of sex trade, white triple X on red background. When you see such such a sign in Amsterdam’s red light district (or any other Western-influenced place for that matter), you know quite well that it doesn’t stand for some municipal heraldry. It is silly to pretend otherwise: displaying this banner is advertising for the male supremacist institution that is the legal sex industry.
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Mandos says:
OK, I knew that XXX meant porn, but I didn’t know that the specific incarnation meant even more specifically porn.
I looked at the Bloggers in Amsterdam blog, when I first read Sam’s accusation about it in a thread a few months back, and I found it very hard to find a reference to the red light district. One post, maybe, referred to it briefly. I also look at the Dutch tourism board web site, and the only references I could find to it—admittedly, I only spent a half-hour looking—were in the “Amsterdam is GLBT-friendly” section.
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Violet says:
Sam, have you read Amanda’s post about the worms and the can opener, which I linked to above (comment 7)? If not, I recommend that you do. In it Amanda outlines her current thinking on pornography.
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Jimmy Ho says:
The Dutch tourism board doesn’t need to refer to it, because everyone already knows about it. A large part of West-European weekend tourists, especially young ones, who go to Amsterdam are looking for two attractions: coffee shops (where you can smoke marijuana) and prostitutes (either for guilt-free “consumption” or what I call “whorespotting”). For the latters, those who can’t make it to Holland can stop in Belgium or Germany, where masturbating inside a woman is also legal. The rest is standard capitalistic hypocrisy.
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Jimmy Ho says:
The “worm can” post at Pandagon would be less annoying to read if the self-identified pro-/feminists commenting there who are pornography users had the honesty to admit it.
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Violet says:
I didn’t read the gigantic comment thread. I just read Amanda’s post, which I appreciated for its acknowledgement that pornography as it exists today is extremely problematic.
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Mandos says:
The comment thread was interesting. I thought it really only got interesting by about post 300 once all the Standard Bases had been covered.
I agree with a lot of the antiporn argument, but I stop short when I see what I call the “Strong Objectification Thesis”.
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Sam says:
I don’t want to trash all of the post, because like most of Amanda’s writing on the subject she gets some things right and for that I’m grateful. Yet what I didn’t like about was the repeated insistence that pornography and men using increasingly racist, hate-filled masturbation imagery is not really a problem.
She says pornography is not the cause of misogyny and feminists who focus on misogynistic media are wasting their time and efforts, and she goes on to dismiss that this most misogynist of misogynist media should be a cause for concern or feminist action in any way, even after learning her male friends “were willing to go a little further than me in suggesting that there’s something to the idea that porn is uniquely good at instilling misogynist attitudes in men.”
Despite appearing to say pornography is a problem, she makes sure to make it clear that it is not pornographic media that needs to be confronted and dealt with, it’s “conquering the hate that creates the porn”, whatever the hell that means. Really, what does that mean except, “You’ll have to pry my pornography out of my cold, sticky hands”?
Similarly, I think it’s downright dumb to say, “the reason porn evokes such strong reactions is most of it is so nakedly misogynist and racist, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the cause of those feelings.”
Do you think if I posted to Pandagon calling Amanda a slew of the nasty, misogynist names pornographers title their pornography with that I could get out of the uproar sure to ensue by saying that it wasn’t actually me who caused those bad feelings, it was the patriarchy that infuses such words with hate that’s the real problem? I don’t think people would say, “It’s all right for Sam to call Amanda a hysterical cuntwad cocksocket because it’s actually patriarchy making those words hateful and not Sam doing something injurious in her use of them.”
I don’t blame an ideological abstraction called the patriarchy for pornography, I blame pornographers and the pornsturbating people whose money keeps them in business.
Wouldn’t it be something if upon seeing the next installment of Kick Dawn Eden in Her Conservative Crotch I were to chastise Amanda for attacking Dawn when really the problem she should be bringing attention to is how to “conquer the hate that creates the Dawn”? This blame-avoiding game could be done for everything; it’s not the string of assholes who denied BB the medicine she needed we should blame for her surrent predicament, you know, it’s just the patriarchy’s fault.
And this is just madness, “It’s the discussion that I think the intellectually dishonest porn wars are basically conducted to avoid answering. We talk about this or that or anything but that one question, which is why the majority of men are getting off on women’s degradation and humiliation, even men we know do not feel that way about women.”
I don’t know if it’s possible for radical feminists to talk any more than we do about the Swedish model and turning the spotlight onto questioning why men want to degrade women via pornstitution in the first place. Where the perception comes from that I or other radfems have been neglectful of this “WTF, men?” duty I do not know.
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Mandos says:
Well, so, the thing is, a lot of the discussion is *not* just about the acts of the pornographers. It may be for *you*, Sam. But if you read Delphyne’s comments, it’s clear that some people say that *use of sexual images themselves*, being a cause of objectification, are misogynistic in se, pornographers or no.
I mean, towards the end we had JackGoff and Delphyne arguing over whether JG and his girlfriend trading naked pics of each other made JG a misogynist. Delphyne said that for JG even to look at such things with an eye towards sexual gratification, even with the full and knowing consent of his gf, even with the apparent reciprocity, even with the claimed privacy, is tantamount to Girls Gone Wild.
I’m under the general impression, Sam, that you are interested in what the bulk of distributed porn and its participants actually are and what it does to them. That’s a good argument. But I think people like Amanda are reacting to Delphyne’s much stronger idea: that the Terrible Male Gaze itself has such intense power that the image in se is a tool of oppression in all cases.
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Violet says:
Sam, I don’t agree entirely with Amanda either, but I think I read her post differently than you did.
For example, you refer to her “repeated insistence that pornography and men using increasingly racist, hate-filled masturbation imagery is not really a problem,” whereas I thought she was explicitly saying that this is just the problem we should be thinking about. And when she said “We talk about this or that or anything but that one question, which is why the majority of men are getting off on women’s degradation and humiliation, even men we know do not feel that way about women,” I thought “we” referred to pro-porn feminists who have not been willing to address this issue.
Also noteworthy was Amanda’s acknowledgement that “porn reinforces misogynist attitudes.” Which is an improvement, since a couple of years ago I remember Amanda saying that sexist porn is purely a reflection of sexism in society, and if you get rid of a sexist society you’ll get rid of sexist porn. Which of course is facile, since we all know that media and society influence each other in an ongoing dialectic. Otherwise nobody would give a damn about how minorities are portrayed in movies and so forth. But pro-porn feminists have historically been loathe to admit that wall-to-wall imagery of women as degraded fuckbots could possibly have any impact on how men see women (or how women see women), so Amanda’s post seems like an improvement to me.
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Jimmy Ho says:
Delphyne’s criticism of JackGoff’s pornography-inspired practice was totally justified and her comparisons with racism were quite relevant. The bedroom is not some kind of vacuum disconnected from culture and society: if a man pays his girlfriend before having sex, he has to adopt the “john” mentality and treat her as a prostitute. That shouldn’t be so hard to understand for the “pro-feminist” JackGoff says he is.
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Mandos says:
“Delphyne’s criticism of JackGoff’s pornography-inspired practice was totally justified and her comparisons with racism were quite relevant. The bedroom is not some kind of vacuum disconnected from culture and society: if a man pays his girlfriend before having sex, he has to adopt the “john” mentality and treat her as a prostitute. That shouldn’t be so hard to understand for the “pro-feminist” JackGoff says he is.”
Well, I’m not sure that trading pics is the same thing. If you believe that the problem with porn is the image itself, I guess what you say makes sense. I’m not convinced that the image itself is the problem.
And by “image itself”, I mean the one-way objectification that people often invoke in these discussions about images.
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Mandos says:
Oh, and her comparisons with racism: no, as a POC myself (whatever that means!), I don’t buy that a consumer of racist literature must be a racist as such. It does not involve much mental acrobatics to deny it.
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Sam says:
There’a reason that red herring was tossed into delphyne’s face by more than one commentor, and that reason was to divert the discussion of PORNOGRAPHY as surely as people chiming into rape threads with, “Howzabout this scenario; is it rape if she did a,b,c, and he did x,y,z?” are seeking to divert discussions about rape.
If I’m talking about the world’s #1 private employer Wal-Mart and how they exploit poverty-stricken women in sweatshops, mistreat Western women store clerks, refuse women birth control, and set abusive new low industry standards for employment around the world, I’m gonna get upset when some jackoff pipes in with, “Well, I knit my own sweaters and bake my own bread, so what does that say about your theories of how gender and capitalism combine to oppress women globally?”
It’s a narcissistic diversion men do all the time, combining a drastic change in subject with some version of “See, I got a girl friend who approves of what I do, so you other girls must be wrong.”
When liberals pull black people out of their back pocket to justify their racism with “But I have black friends!” anti-racists know it for the ruse it is.
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Mandos says:
“There’a reason that red herring was tossed into delphyne’s face by more than one commentor, and that reason was to divert the discussion of PORNOGRAPHY as surely as people chiming into rape threads with, “Howzabout this scenario; is it rape if she did a,b,c, and he did x,y,z?” are seeking to divert discussions about rape.”
Yes, but your classification of it as a diversion only exists because *you* yourself are focused on the (to me understandable) capitalist aspects of the situation. For Delphyne, she made no effort to claim that it was anything different. I mean, you say,
“If I’m talking about the world’s #1 private employer Wal-Mart and how they exploit poverty-stricken women in sweatshops, mistreat Western women store clerks, refuse women birth control, and set abusive new low industry standards for employment around the world, I’m gonna get upset when some jackoff pipes in with, “Well, I knit my own sweaters and bake my own bread, so what does that say about your theories of how gender and capitalism combine to oppress women globally?””
But Delphyne didn’t get upset on this basis. She has a theory of porn that goes well beyond the feedback loop created by its putative mode of production, which is what—in making this distinction—you implicitly focus on.
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AradhanaDevindra says:
It’s not irony or sarcasm that Amanda responds to playboy pornstubators, she actually baits them on, EXPECTING and HOPING for traffic from playboy.
QUOTE: And in honor the fact that Pandagon managed to get on Playboy’s top ten blogs list, but especially in honor of the interesting discussion last night, an appropriate video on the list “This Is Hardcore” by Pulp. For visitors from Playboy, I highly recommend this video. ’s hot.*
Oh, yeah, she clarifies what she means by hot, which could be read as a ‘gay joke’, as we all know playboy purchasers are mostly straight men:
QUOTE Amanda: *If you dig skinny, sarcastic English singers who write angry lyrics about how they’re not impressed with their abundant opportunities for pornographic fantasy style sex that’s got no possibilities of anything real behind it.
This is the thing, if I, or any other stripe of feminist knew that something like playboy - an ‘institution’ unto itself, was linking to me I would fucking protest it asap. I would have an anti-plaboy banner up asap, instead of ENCOURAGE readership. I would dedicate an entire post to the shitty history of playboy - it’s not that hard to find anti-playboy material you know.
But Amanda doesn’t have that kind of integrity, her ego has shot up so much that she won’t even directly comment on what playboy actually is.
It’s about T n A Amanda, and you haven’t been invited to the table because they ‘like you’, somewhere down the road they’ll use this against you. To do what Maxim does to women (recent feministing post about how they have an ‘ugly’ woman’s list) - to subject them into categories …. look hot girls are dumb, smart girls aren’t hot, come on boys you’ve gotta pick. And this is what capitalism does to women - it categorizes them, and you’ve just fallen into that trap. Further more, it’s good measure for playboy to have some ‘women’s’ content, it makes them look so fucking liberal and ‘woman-loving’.
The sexuality of women in playboy is equivalent to that of doormats.
Why didn’t playboy link to BB’s site? Or Ms. Musings? or any other feminist site? Simply because your stance on pornography and most feminist issues is so run of the mill, so tame in comparison to anything else.
You’ve been coopted Amanda, congratulations.
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Jimmy Ho says:
Oh, and her comparisons with racism: no, as a POC myself (whatever that means!), I don’t buy that a consumer of racist literature must be a racist as such.
If by “consumer” you mean “who takes pleasure/enjoys reading it”, which is what Delphyne was saying, I don’t understand why you would give any such person the benefit of doubt. I am not a person of colour, but if someone tells me they like watching lynching scenes, I tend to think that they have a racism problem, especially if they’re white.
Also, it is not “trading pics”, but masturbating on a picture of a woman, which is exactly what consumers of pornography do.
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Mandos says:
“If by “consumer” you mean “who takes pleasure/enjoys reading it”, which is what Delphyne was saying, I don’t understand why you would give any such person the benefit of doubt. I am not a person of colour, but if someone tells me they like watching lynching scenes, I tend to think that they have a racism problem, especially if they’re white.”
So as I said in that thread, I have read racist propaganda that is quite beautiful and interesting and gratifying as such to have read.
“Also, it is not “trading pics”, but masturbating on a picture of a woman, which is exactly what consumers of pornography do.”
This is a somewhat transparent fallacy of composition.
http://www.nizkor.org/features.....ition.html
Users of all porn masturbate on a picture of a woman. Boy trading pic with girl masturbates on her picture. Therefore, boy using pic to masturbate is the same as all porn users.
That’s the fallacy you’re invoking here.
It hasn’t been shown that the objectification inherent in masturbating on a picture is in itself harmful, and that’s the axis around which your argument and Delphyne’s revolves. Sam’s argument (so far) doesn’t, because she’s focused on porn production and prostitution.
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Sam says:
Violet, I completely agree there have been many improvements in Amanda’s expressed thoughts on pornstitution. It’s not my intention to ignore those shifting beliefs, and indeed I back off intentionally sometimes so as not to seem to be hounding one person unfairly. But the time to strike is when the iron’s hot, and though I didn’t start the fire I’d be missing a ripe opportunity to do my part in shaping the tools that will shape the future. Heh, I guess I’m calling other feminists tools, but I truly mean it in the constructive, forge-a-new-world positive sort of way.
“She has a theory of porn that goes well beyond the feedback loop created by its putative mode of production, which is what—in making this distinction—you implicitly focus on.”
It’s easier to speak with people about the harms of capitalism than the gendered entitlement of men that constitutes sexism. If we only analyze production, the capitalism part of the gender + capitalism = oppression paradigm, then we’re missing the trickier part of the equation, and that’s where I saw delphyne bravely trying to go.
Capitalists, like rapists and men who get off to violent pornography, are conceived of as “other men, not the man who is me” by almost all men.
Capitalism leading to abuses is agreed on by many, and though there’s work to be done on that end, I think there’s more difficult work to be done on dismantling men’s belief, adopted by most women in a Stockholm Syndrome way, in the inferior, submissive role of females and the right of males to makes sexual demands of females.When I give talks in classrooms I write my thesis on the chalkboard: Men do not have a right to demand sex from women, ever.” I’ve had wives tell me their husbands expected sex on demand after a fight, or that the men refused to give up pornography or strippers/prostitutes despite their protestations and the family’s financial insecurity. One woman did not like S&M sex but her boyfriend & father of her child said he would leave her if she didn’t provide the sex he demanded.
A United Nation official said in some documentary about AIDS that the problem of AIDS is a problem of “male sexually predatory behavior”. From rape, to prostitute-use, to condomless sex, to cliterectomies, to traditions forcing women to submit sexually to their dead husbands’ brothers, the spread of AIDS is a men’s issue and that issue is their belief that women were put on the Earth for their sexual gratification.
I think delphyne’s questions about male sexual entitlement did more to get at the heart of the sexual predation of women that is the dominant reality of relations between the genders than any other commentors to that thread. What else could be the true patriarchal “cause” of misogynist pornography than that men feel they have a right to demand any and all sorts of sexual performance from women? Capitalism alone is an insufficient explanation.
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Mandos says:
“I think delphyne’s questions about male sexual entitlement did more to get at the heart of the sexual predation of women that is the dominant reality of relations between the genders than any other commentors to that thread. What else could be the true patriarchal “cause” of misogynist pornography than that men feel they have a right to demand any and all sorts of sexual performance from women? Capitalism alone is an insufficient explanation.”
Oh, agreed. The problem is the relationship between that entitlement and the use of sexual images, deferred gratification, etc. I don’t think that it’s as clearcut as Delphyne seems to think it is.
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Mandos says:
Another way of putting it is that Delphyne theory is *so* radical that not only is the role of consent as such demoted, it is almost completely absent from the theory. Completely socially determined.
That was the function of JohnGoff’s example, at least in part. He was obtaining sexual gratification from his girlfriend’s pics and vice versa. Both of them knew that this was the case—we had a brief intervention from JG’s girlfriend on the thread even. But this level of consent is still insufficient for Delphyne. If that consent is insufficient, then no consent level would ever satisfy her. Hence it is the act of using the image *itself* that is an unacceptable level of male entitlement.
That’s a really very profound claim, I’m sure you’ll agree.
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Burrow says:
I’m just here to cheerlead Sam. Kick ass, lady.
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Amanda Marcotte says:
I didn’t say porn wasn’t a problem. I simply stated that the assumption that “porn viewer”=”absolute misogynist” was simple and my experience doesn’t uphold it. I’m also not going to flagellate myself for the high crime of being read by someone who works at Playboy. I can’t even wrap my mind around the idea that crossing bridges is a bad idea.
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AradhanaDevindra says:
“I can’t even wrap my mind around the idea that crossing bridges is a bad idea.”
Um, if you were an anti-poverty website (which you AREN’T by any means) - you wouldn’t be too happy if Fortune or Forbes said that you were the best source of ‘political information’. In fact, you would tell Fortune and Forbes THEY WERE PART OF THE PROBLEM and partially why you created your website in the first place.
But you know even this analogy doesn’t hold, cause PLAYBOY is the FIRST internationally published magazine that literally invented the COMMERCIAL pin-up. Fortune and Forbes didn’t invent hyper-capitalism….
You know what’s really funny, as a dedicated anti-porn feminist, I find something like PLAYBOY far more offensive than faux lesbian porn. At least in some sense faux lesbian porn actually has women ‘pleasuring’ each other.
Playboy is just a seemingly ‘nonthreatening’ legitimation of male entitlement to see naked women. And it’s not just that now, it posits itself as a ‘legitimate’ source of info on sex, on politics, on entertainment gossip (re: rock stars and celebs), on whatever you can think of.
You know, I would have given you credit for ‘trying’ to cross bridges with anti-porn feminists from your worm post - but not now, not ever cause you would rather cross bridges with PLAYBOY???? Why build a constructive dialogue and reach out to other feminists when you can be on a perverted old fucker’s “I’m pandering for liberal legitimacy list”.
You’ve already PROVED you suck at race relations… You can’t even build bridges with feminists of colour - why would you want to build bridges with the already vilified anti-porn feminists. It’s not good PR to build bridges with us anyways.
You might as well cross bridges with Fortune and Forbes too, stick on a nike logo on your site, and sell more ad space than you already do - I’ve heard Larry pays big bucks for barely legal ads. You go girl!!! You are pegging down patriarchy one notch at a time.
I am going to hurl.
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AradhanaDevindra says:
Oh yeah and did I mention that Playboy also is a legitimate source for children’s stationary and clothing!!!
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AradhanaDevindra says:
You know what Amanda, by baiting playboy pornstubators on - you’re basically ‘writing for free’ for playboy.
But that’s pretty much what your run of the mill site has been all along. You’ve been writing for self-congratulatory egomaniacs who can feel okay to jack off to porn.
So, since playboy loves you soooooo much, would you actually write an article for them given the opportunity?
Do give me the privilege of hearing an answer to that one.
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Violet says:
Ouch. I hope she says no.
AradhanaDevindra, I hate Playboy as much if not more than you do, and for the same reason (the insinuation of the Hefnerama harem ideology into the mainstream, the normalization of women-as-bunnies, etc.). But Amanda has said before that she thinks Hefner and Playboy are ridiculous, and I’m assuming (hoping) that’s still the case.
As for the worm post — that was an effort at bridge-building, and I don’t think we should dismiss that so quickly. Amanda’s always been a pro-porn feminist, and so it was great for her to acknowledge that existing pornography is for the most part some pretty nasty shit and not the Utopian ideal of sexual liberation that the pro-porn crowd usually claim it is.
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delphyne says:
“that was an effort at bridge-building, and I don’t think we should dismiss that so quickly”
Actually it wasn’t: it was an effort at clouding the issues and defending porn use behind the tactic of “but we object to the *bad* stuff”, as if it wasn’t all bad. In Amanda’s world men fast forward past porn’s nastiest bits to get to the famed non-misogyny so they can safely masturbate; in the real world men use the fast forward button to get to the dirty bits that turn them on.
Pro-porn feminists like Susie Bright or Nina Hartley have been using this approach for years, arguing that the answer to misogyny in porn is to make “feminist”, “egalitarian” porn. It’s a smokescreen which the industry hides behind. They can send out their shills to argue with anti-porn feminists or pretend to build bridges (depending on the day) whilst they get on with their real job of commodifying women and making HUGE amounts of money from it.
If Amanda truly was serious about criticising pornographers, as AradhanaDevindra says, she would have used the opportunity of the Playboy endorsement to actually criticise them. Instead she tee hees and puts a pair of Playboy bunny ears on her head. Playboy will be delighted.
I think if Amanda is so interested in bridge-building, she should start with the religious right whom she can’t stop talking about. The only problem with that is that liberal men would disapprove - building bridges with pornographers on the other hand will get her a whole lot of kudos and male readers.
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Jimmy Ho says:
“Egalitarian porn” is a convenient alibi for the rich white men behind the sex business. When feminists who use porn start giving us specific titles and scenes descriptions of that oh-so-progressive stuff, we may consider examining how “feminist” it is, although Candida Royalle has to pay her entry in the AVN Hall of Fame by keeping her mouth shut about Larry Flynt’s, et al., racism and misogyny.
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Mandos says:
“I think if Amanda is so interested in bridge-building, she should start with the religious right whom she can’t stop talking about. The only problem with that is that liberal men would disapprove - building bridges with pornographers on the other hand will get her a whole lot of kudos and male readers.”
Dunno what this is supposed to mean. She’s supposed to build bridges with the religious right?
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delphyne says:
“Dunno what this is supposed to mean. She’s supposed to build bridges with the religious right?”
The point is that she would recoil from bridge-building with the religious right - she’d never do it. Amanda hates them. The question is why doesn’t she hate pornographers. Why does she want to be friendly with them? They are every bit as damaging to women as the religious right are.
I don’t usually bother to read your posts Mandos, but I see from people’s reactions that you often need fairly obvious things explaining to you. Is this another of those instances?
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Mandos says:
“I don’t usually bother to read your posts Mandos, but I see from people’s reactions that you often need fairly obvious things explaining to you. Is this another of those instances?”
I’m not certain I should make an effort responding since I’m not sure if you would bother to read my response.
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delphyne says:
It was closer to a rhetorical question than a real one so you needn’t bother.
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Mandos says:
I’m curious to know why you bothered.
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Sam says:
“I didn’t say porn wasn’t a problem.”
Yes you did when you concluded that anti-porn feminists in the past wasted their time and anti-porn feminists right now are wasting their time by addressing pornography as if it were a problem that really needs to be addressed. If you believed pornography were a problem then you’d have to conclude it’s a worthy target for feminist activism and significant enough to actually do something about, and that’s not what I saw in your recent missive.
“I simply stated that the assumption that “porn viewer”=”absolute misogynist” was simple and my experience doesn’t uphold it.”
Is that all you think you ’simply’ did? No wonder you’re confused as to why you’re the misogynist-of-the-day’s pet feminist of choice.
All the points laid out in post #14 came from your long track record defending men’s, and your own, right to demand sexual performance from women whenever it’s desired. The opinions listed are the opinions you’ve given on the subjects mentioned to the best of my knowledge. That is how a track record that pimps and pornographers can approve of gets constructed over time, by refusing to believe Linda, by saying Aura Bogado is probably just confused about the racism of your favorite Playboy columnist, by accepting an expensive gift trip and not asking “why?” or showing the slightest feminist backbone to look the whores you’re on the record as okay leaving to their prostituted fate in their human eyes.
“I’m also not going to flagellate myself for the high crime of being read by someone who works at Playboy.”
Of the many ways detailed in post #14 that I think you have ignored or sold out your poorer, darker-skinned sisters, Playboy commending Pandagon is not one I placed on your shoulders. Genderberg is read by someone who works at Playboy too, mostly because of this article about Playboy I wrote after attending the 50th anniversary tour.
The difference is that my stated beliefs about pornography and prostitution do not reflect the woman-consuming, pussy-renting ethos of the Playboy mentality like your abstracted pornography apologism and trick-defending does.
The idea that Playboy is anti-feminist because Hefner is a harem-having perv is not a feminist critique. It’s a gossip columinist’s critique, something Joan Rivers might say. A feminist critique would be more like what Violet alluded to above, questioning “a magazine devoted to the degradation of women”, calling foul on the “Hefnerama harem ideology into the mainstream, the normalization of women-as-bunnies,” detailing the misogyny of Playboy asking accomplished women to pose naked. That’s what a real feminist critique begins to look like, and what that means is not revealing your personal distaste for one old man but analyzing through feminist philosophies the impact Playboy as a culture-defining behemoth has had on women, men, sexual expectations, the pornography business, children’s access to pornography, the sexual development of girls, racist pornography, prostitution tourism, etc.
What does it mean that the kid’s movie “Spongebob Squarepants” featured a Playboy-like magazine centerfold?
What does it matter that the New York Times ran a photo of a South Asian prostituted slave wearing a shirt with the bunny logo on it?
That pink Playboy logo stationary is one of the hottest back to school items for schoolgirls?
That women bring copies of Playboy to plastic surgeons so they can slice ‘n’ stitch their genitals into Playboy-perfect pussies?
That Playboy has intentionally been seeking the woman market since vast numbers of their male readers have moved on to Bang Bus, Gag Factor, gonzo violent shit? Paris Hilton on the cover, Debbie Gibson’s tits inside, and Susie Bright’s sex advice all in one issue are deliberately calculated towards growing a female audience.
Pandagon’s praise is just one more marketing device to reel in the REALLY hot grrls who insist that in a better world we’d all be paying to fuck each other on a regular basis, another specious opinion about pornstitution you’ve expressed.
Calling Hefner an old perv should be a lead-in sentence to an actual feminist critique.
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delphyne says:
It must be pornographers’ reachout week in the feminist blogosphere, what with Ampersand’s blog linking to hardcore porn and the Fleshlight site and now Amanda and her colleagues being feted by Playboy.
Hooray for pornographers exploiting feminism!
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AradhanaDevindra says:
We (anti-porn) feminists all had our hang ups about these sites, alas, pandagon and feministing (the big three ‘feminist’ sites).
But you know what, despite the constant “Dworkinite” bashings, we stuck in there. We knew that we shared almost 75% of our views in common with these people - anti-racism (HA HA HA Amanda), Anti-poverty issues, Anti-Class issues, Ableism etc…
But the truth is out now, you people are such a big let down, it seriously hurts. But what should have we expected?
Violet, Amanda’s attempt at ‘bridge-building’ happened AFTER she knew that playboy was checking her site out.
This could have been interpreted in two ways:
1) she was trying to be proactive about her dislike of mainstream porn (I don’t know how you do that without ever mentioning playboy even ONCE).
2) she was alerting playboy audiences that “I am a feminist, I have my hang-ups about ‘certain kinds (undisclosed kinds of course) porn’ but you know I’m not one of those ‘crazy’ feminists of the past!!! so don’t worry we aren’t going to attack you if you post here”.She knew that us anti-porners would show up there. It was not an attempt to build bridges - it was a set-up.
I don’t care if this sounds like hyperbole, in hindsight this is what it was about. I WAS GOING TO SAY SOMETHING POSITIVE ABOUT HER ATTEMPT - but the whole thing was about alerting playboy readers that “she was not US”.
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AradhanaDevindra says:
I am fairly upset about this whole thing, I hate posting in choppy parts but I have to add:
Finding hef “hysterical” is not a stance! And Amanda can use ‘finding this hysterical’ as a nice little foil to avoid taking a stance. “I don’t really think this is in line with my ethics, but I do think it’s a riot”. What does that mean? Nothing!
That’s not a stance, this whole thing is a joke to her. Because she couldn’t really give a flying fuck that Playboy affects women’s body image and men’s legitimacy (read biological essentialist view of entitlement).
She doesn’t really give a shit. She can go off to her site Pandagon and have her minions do the anti-porn bashing, cause she’s been egging them on all along to create a virtual fandom of sorts. And that’s precisely what they’ve done.
You can check out her bunny ears thread to see a bunch of morons talking about anti-porn feminists in such loving ways after I made one damn comment there.
Amanda is an egomaniac.
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Heart says:
I can’t even wrap my mind around the idea that crossing bridges is a bad idea.
Then maybe it would be good to work on the bridges which are totally burned out as a result of burqua-gate instead of tending to these new ones Playboy is building in your direction?
Tell you what, Playboy would not have chosen my blog as their favorite, other than as a joke or in an attempt to tarnish my reputation, but and if they had, I’d be telling them very publicly precisely where they could stick it. They have done you no favor, Amanda. They haven’t done any feminist blogger a favor.
If you step aside, then maybe they’ll give the award to Ampersand. He’ll be up for it.
Heart
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Violet says:
I’ve been thinking about whether to say anything else here, because I don’t really want to start up the argument again. But for the record, and for anyone reading: I like Pandagon. I like Amanda. She’s one of my favorite feminist bloggers. I disagree with her about some things, but overall I think she’s sharp and funny and I’m usually right on her wavelength.
I was startled and dismayed by the reaction to the Playboy endorsement, but for me that was ameliorated by Amanda’s worm post, which I really welcomed. And also, the fact is that Amanda’s way of dealing with sexism is always to laugh at it, so it’s no surprise really that she would deal with Playboy similarly. I would love it if she were more blatantly anti-Playboy, but we have to allow for each other’s differences.
I respect and sympathize with the anger expressed in this thread by some of the commenters. I really do. Pornography hurts, Hefner is infuriating, and…so. But you know, Amanda’s not the enemy. I think we can disagree with each other about certain issues within feminism without declaring war on each other.
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Pony says:
So. Violet. You issue an invitaion. We take you up on it because we have something to say about this poseur, who then shows up at your door with her lower lip dragging, and you slam the door in our faces.
You want to read the responses to the can of worms post that you like so much, particularly Delphyne’s cogent analysis of Amanda’s feminism. And warmth.
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Violet says:
Oh, Pony. I’m not trying to switch signals. What I’m doing is balancing on a knife-edge, I guess, that’s clear to me but difficult to communicate.
I believe in healthy, respectful disagreement. I really do. I know how I feel about pornography and how I feel about Playboy in particular. But I also believe in trying to understand where other feminists are coming from.
What got to me in this thread was the increasingly personal attacks on Amanda. I didn’t invite that. We ought to be able to disagree with each other without demonizing each other. Why is that so hard? I disagree with almost every popular feminist blogger about some things, occasionally enough (as in this instance) to post about it. So that we can discuss the issue.
What’s uncomfortable for me here is that the thread has gotten away from what it means when a popular feminist blog is endorsed (co-opted?) by Playboy, and into an indictment of Amanda as a racist, egotist, and god knows what else. That’s where I get right off the bus.
Come on, pony, haven’t you ever been on the receiving end of people disagreeing with your stance on a particular issue, and then taking that three steps further and saying Pony is a bad feminist? Doesn’t it suck? Isn’t it unfair? Haven’t you wished people would stick to the issue and not accuse you of being a bitch/sellout/whatever?
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Pony says:
The blog doesn’t write itself Violet.
I had read Pandagon very little, until this past week when I looked around, found the writing smart but then noted that the smart writing too frequently had some woman paying Amanda’s tab.
I don’t think any women has an exemption pass from Amanda…
…Violet.
