Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Andrea DworkinPornography: Men Possessing Women Gönderileri
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Men do not believe that rape or battery are violations of female will in part because men of influence have consumed pornography in the private world of men for centuries. Men of sensibility and intelligence and cultural achievement have always incorporated its values into their mainstream cultural work in art, religion, law,* literature, philosophy, and now psychology, films, and so forth. In many cases, these otherwise thoughtful men have been educated about women and sex through pornography, which they see as hidden, forbidden sexual truth. The most enduring sexual truth in pornography—widely articulated by men to the utter bewilderment of women throughout the ages—is that sexual violence is desired by the normal female, needed by her, suggested or demanded by her. She—perpetually coy or repressed— denies the truth that pornogra phy reveals. It is either/or. Either the truth is in the pornography or she tells the truth. But men are the tellers of truth and men are the creators of and believers in pornography. She is silenced altogether—she is not a voice in the cultural dialogue, except as an annoying or exceptional whisper—and when she speaks, she lies. She hides and denies what pornography reveals and affirms: that she wants it, they all do. He has the power of naming and in pornography he uses it to name her slut: a lewd, dissolute, brazen thing, a whore always soliciting—begging or demanding to be used for what she is. Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.
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.
Force here is acknowledged. The form the acknowledgment takes is celebration. Force, rendered invisible or insignificant in other instances of female degradation, is here the point and purpose of sex. Force is sex. The woman who wants sex wants force. Every possible emphasis on force is encouraged through violence against the woman’s body and through concentration on the mechanics and artifacts of bondage. The conceit is that this is a woman’s story told in a woman’s voice, a woman’s celebration of the force she seeks out so that she can submit to it, be hurt by it, and experience her transcendent femininity.
And so there is a woman, tied with black rope, hands chained together at the wrists above her head, her body constrained by laser beams that crisscross in front of and behind her body. She is “an exquisite volunteer.” And so there is a woman, her ankles man acled, laser beams appearing to penetrate her vagina. The laser cuts as well as burns. The laser is used in surgery. The laser functions as a knife. Vagina means sheath. She is “an exquisite volunteer.” She volunteers to be what she is, what all women are: harlot and submissive in one, her presence and representation an affirmation and an echo of her essence as a woman—she wants it, they all do. In describing the laser, one pioneer in the field said that “[l]ight has become something not only to look with, but also a palpable force to be reckoned with.’” Used as a sadistic weapon against a woman in pornography, a laser cannot be regarded as a palpable force or any force at all because force has no reality when used against a metaphysical victim: she is always “an exquisite volunteer”— expressing her own free will and/or actualizing her own true nature. She wants it, they all do.
The meaning of force is also obscured by the liberal view, which grants that there is a social tendency to degrade women but assumes that women who want to resist can do so successfully. This means that women who are in fact mercilessly degraded bring it on themselves.
Bataille introduces the all-or-nothing variant: she can choose to be chaste or she can choose to be whore. The assertion that she has even this choice—that she can choose chastity—ignores the whole history of the world, in which rape is the perpetual sexual motion of the male. Any so-called choice for sex is a choice for prostitution. Since she is prey “in so far as she is attractive,” she can choose chastity only insofar as she is not attractive. Once raped she is, ipso facto, attractive because she has attracted a predator. Once raped, retroactively speaking, she has chosen—chosen her prostitute nature. Since she is prey “in so far as she is attractive,” forced sex reveals the prostitute nature that is her true nature “in so far as she is attractive.” If a man wants her and takes her, she is a whore and has made a choice. No matter what is done to or with her, the idea is that she has chosen her “price” and “circumstances.”