Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Andrea DworkinPornography: Men Possessing Women Sözleri ve Alıntıları
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Male culture thrives on argument and prides itself on distinctions. Objectification is natural, normal, to be encouraged; fetishism is unnatural, abnormal, to be discouraged. But surely fetishism proceeds logically from objectification: and if the perception of persons as objects is not a crime against the person so perceived, then there is no crime, because every violation of the female proceeds from this so-called normal phenomenon. And, in the final analysis, it must be recognized that the woman is the fetish, not just object, but magical charm, charged with symbolic meaning: the made thing that most consistently provokes erection.
Women are reared, and often forced, to conform to the specific requirements of ideal beauty, whatever they are at any given time. From foot-binding to waist binding to breast binding, ideal beauty often requires deforming of the natural body. From clitoridectomy to breast enlargement or reduction to surgically altered noses, ideal beauty often requires mutilation of the natural body. From hair dyeing to face painting to necessary ornamentation (for instance, high-heeled shoes), ideal beauty often requires distortion or denial of the natural body. Ranging from idiocy to atrocity, any and all strategies are employed so that the natural female body will fit the male idea of ideal female beauty.
Justine and Juliette are the two prototypical female figures in male pornography of all types. Both are wax dolls into which things are stuck. One suffers and is provocative in her suffering. The more she suffers, the more she provokes men to make her suffer. Her suffering is arousing; the more she suffers, the more aroused her torturers become. She, then, becomes responsible for her suffering, since she invites it by suffering. The other revels in all that men do to her; she is the woman who likes it, no matter what the “it.” In Sade, the “attitude” (to use Barthes’s word) on which one’s status as victim or master depends is an attitude toward male power. The victim actually refuses to ally herself with male power, to take on its values as her own. She screams, she refuses. Men conceptualize this resistance as conformity to ridiculous feminine notions about purity and goodness; whereas in fact the victim refuses to ally herself with those who demand her complicity in her own degradation. Degradation is implicit in inhabiting a predetermined universe in which one cannot choose what one does, only one’s attitude (to scream, to discharge) toward what is done to one. Unable to manifest her resistance as power, the woman who suffers manifests it as passivity, except for the scream.
Force to exist as such requires violence. Violence inevitably means the infliction of pain. The norm of femininity as it manifests in normal women is masochism. Force actualizes femininity. Violence is sex. Pain is pleasure for the woman. The pornographic conceit is that the normal female demands the force, the violence, the pain.
The function of beauty in the realm of the so-called erotic was further elucidated by Bataille when he wrote: “Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.” Beauty, then, consistently has meaning in the sphere of female death or violation. An object is always destroyed in the end by its use when it is used to the fullest and enough; and in the realm of female beauty, the final value of the object is precisely to be found in its cruel or deadly destruction.
“Women’s fashion” is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women; the failure to follow the dicta of this fashion has severe economic repercussions for any woman.
Female knowledge of objectification usually stops at a necessary but superficial understanding: beauty is rewarded and lack of beauty is punished. The punishments are understood as personal misfortune; they are not seen as systematic, institutional, or historical. Women do not understand that they are also punished through sexual use for being beautiful; and women do not understand the lengths to which men go to protect themselves and their society from contamination by ugly women who do not induce a lustful desire to punish, violate, or destroy, though men manage to punish, violate, or destroy these women anyway.
The importance of pornography to the human male is counted in gold; danger to the female is counted in feathers.
With a disgust common to all feminists who have tried to be participants in the so-called humanism of men, only to discover through bitter experience that the culture of males does not allow honest female participation, 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, human ism. 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; women battle to be let into the category “human” in imagination and reality. Men battle to keep the category “human” narrow, circumscribed by their own values and activities; women battle to change the meaning that men have given the word, to transform its meaning by suffusing it with female experience.
Men, perpetually searching to justify their perpetual search for objects that move them to experience their own desire transmuted to power, claim especially to love beauty as such; and under the formidable guise of aesthetic devotion, objectification is defended or presented as the recognition of the beautiful. Women ideally embody beauty: so the theory goes, even though men in practice seem to hate the female body per se.