Obscenity is not a synonym for pornography. Obscenity is an idea; it requires a judgment of value. Pornography is concrete, "the graphic depiction of whores."
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He is always in a panic, never large enough. But still, his self is immutable however much he may fear its ebbing away, because he keeps taking, and it is taking that is his immutable right and his immutable self. Even when he is obsessed with his need to be more and to have more, he is convinced of his right to be and to have.
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The legend of male violence is the most celebrated legend of mankind and from it emerges the character of man: he is dangerous.
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men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself.
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Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. Men have defined the parameters of every subject.
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The male power of naming is upheld by force, pure and simple. On its own, without force to back it, measured against reality, it is not power; it is process, a more humble thing.
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She says no; he claims it means yes. He names her ignorant, then forbids her education. He does not allow her to use her mind or body rigorously, then names her intuitive and emotional. He defines femininity and when she does not conform he names her deviant, sick, beats her up, slices off her clitoris (repository of pathological masculinity), tears out her womb (source of her personality), lobotomizes or narcotizes her (perverse recognition that she can think, though thinking in a woman is named deviant).
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The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way.
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Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture.
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He is, he takes; she is not, she is taken.
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In the photograph, the power of terror is basic. The men are hunters with guns. Their prey is women. They have caught a woman and tied her onto the hood of a car. The terror is implicit in the content of the photograph, but beyond that the photograph strikes the female viewer dumb with fear. One perceives that the bound woman must be in pain. The very power to make the photograph (to use the model, to tie her in that way) and the fact of the photograph (the fact that someone did use the model, did tie her in that way, that the photograph is published in a magazine and seen by millions of men who buy it specifically to see such photographs) evoke fear in the female observer unless she entirely dissociates herself from the photograph: refuses to believe or understand that real persons posed for it, refuses to see the bound person as a woman like herself. Terror is finally the content of the photograph, and it is also its effect on the female observer. That men have the power and desire to make, publish, and profit from the photograph engenders fear. That millions more men enjoy the photograph makes the fear palpable. That men who in general champion civil rights defend the photograph without experiencing it as an assault on women intensifies the fear, because if the horror of the photograph does not resonate with these men, that horror is not validated as horror in male culture, and women are left without apparent recourse.
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Hunting as a sport suggests that these hunters have hunted before and will hunt again, that each captured woman will be used and owned, stuffed and mounted, that this right to own inheres in man’s relationship to nature, that this right to own is so natural and basic that it can be taken entirely for granted, that is, expressed as play or sport.
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The fact of the photograph signifies the wealth of men as a class. One class simply does not so use another class unless that usage is maintained in the distribution of wealth. The female model’s job is the job of one who is economically imperiled, a sign of economic degradation. The relationship of the men to the woman in the photograph is not fantasy; it is symbol, meaningful because it is rooted in reality. The photograph shows a relationship of rich to poor that is actual in the larger society. The fact of the photograph in relation to its context — an industry that generates wealth by producing images of women abjectly used, a society in which women cannot adequately earn money because women are valued precisely as the woman in the photograph is valued — both proves and perpetuates the real connection between masculinity and wealth. The sexual-economic significance of the photograph is so simple that it is easily overlooked: the photograph could not exist as a type of photograph that produces wealth without the wealth of men to produce and consume it.
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The pornographic image explicates the advertising image, and the advertising image echoes the pornographic image.
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The excitement is precisely in the nonconsensual character of the event. The hunt, the ropes, the guns, show that anything done to her was or will be done against her will. Here again, the valuation of conquest as being natural — of nature, of man in nature, of natural man — is implicit in the visual and linguistic imagery.The power of sex, in male terms, is also funereal. Death permeates it. The male erotic trinity — sex, violence, and death — reigns supreme. She will be or is dead. They did or will kill her. Everything that they do to or with her is violence. Especially evocative is the phrase “stuffed and mounted her, ” suggesting as it does both sexual violation and embalming.
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In the photograph, all visual significance is given to the ass of the woman on her knees, which is in the foreground, exaggerated by the light markedly on it, and to its echo, the raised buttock of the woman reclining. The camera is the penile presence, the viewer is the male who participates in the sexual action, which is not within the photograph but in the perception of it. The photograph does not document lesbian lovemaking; in fact, it barely resembles it. The symbolic reality of the photograph — which is vivid — is not in the relationship between the two women, which not only does not provoke but actually prohibits any recognition of lesbian eroticism as authentic or even existent. The symbolic reality instead is expressed in the posture of women exposed purposefully to excite a male viewer. The ass is exposed and vulnerable; the camera has taken it; the viewer can claim it.
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The photograph is the ultimate tribute to male power: the male is not in the room, yet the women are there for his pleasure. His wealth produces the photograph; his wealth consumes the photograph; he produces and consumes the women. The male defines and controls the idea of the lesbian in the composition of the photograph. In viewing it, he possesses her. The lesbian is colonialized, reduced to a variant of woman-as-sex-object, used to demonstrate and prove that male power pervades and invades even the private sanctuary of women with each other. The power of the male is affirmed as omnipresent and controlling even when the male himself is absent and invisible. This is divine power, the power of divine right to divine pleasure, that pleasure accurately described as the sexual debasing of others inferior by birth. In private, the women are posed for display. In private, the women still sexually service the male, for whose pleasure they are called into existence. The pleasure of the male requires the annihilation of women’s sexual integrity. There is no privacy, no closed door, no self- determined meaning, for women with each other in the world of pornography.
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Virginia Woolf wrote: “I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not to talk about themselves anymore. ” Men have claimed the human point of view; they author it; they own it. Men are humanists, humans, humanism. Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it Her. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination. Men battle each other and Her
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Becoming a man requires that the boy learn to be indifferent to the fate of women. Indifference requires that the boy learn to experience women as objects. The poet, the mystic, the prophet, the so-called sensitive man of any stripe, will still hear the wind whisper and the trees cry. But to him, women will be mute. He will have learned to be deaf to the sounds, sighs, whispers, screams of women in order to ally himself with other men in the hope that they will not treat him as a child, that is, as one who belongs with the women.
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The boy seeks to emulate the father because it is safer to be like the father than like the mother. He learns to threaten or hit because men can and men must. He dissociates himself from the powerlessness he did experience, the powerlessness to which females as a class are consigned. The boy becomes a man by taking on the behaviors of men — to the best of his ability.
The boy escapes, into manhood, into power. It is his option, based on the social valuation of his anatomy. This route of escape is the only one now charted.
But the boy remembers, he always remembers, that once he was a child, close to women in powerlessness, in potential or actual humiliation, in danger from male aggression. The boy must build up a male identity, a fortressed castle with an impenetrable moat, so that he is inaccessible, so that he is invulnerable to the memory of his origins, to the sorrowful or enraged calls of the women he left behind. The boy, whatever his chosen style, turns martial in his masculinity, fierce, stubborn, rigid, humorless. His fear of men turns into aggression against women. He keeps the distance between himself and women unbridgeable, transforms women into the dreaded She, or, as Simone de Beauvoir expresses it, “the Other. ” He learns to be a man — poet man, gangster man, professional religious man, rapist man, any kind of man — and the first rule of masculinity is that whatever he is, women are not. He calls his cowardice heroism, and he keeps women out — out of humanity (fabled Mankind), out of his sphere of activity whatever it is, r out ofall that is valued, rewarded, credible, out of the diminishing realm of his own capacity to care. Women must be kept out because wherever there are women, there is one haunting, vivid memory with numberless smothering tentacles: he is that child, powerless against the adult male, afraid of him, humiliated by him.
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Men develop a strong loyalty to violence. Men must come to terms with violence because it is the prime component of male identity. Institutionalized in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, it is taught to boys until they become its advocates — men, not women. Men become advocates of that which they most fear. In advocacy they experience mastery of fear. In mastery of fear they experience freedom. Men transform their fear of male violence into a metaphysical commitment to male violence. Violence itself becomes the central definition of any experience that is profound and significant.
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