(no subject)
I just gave my first deposit to UVA Law School. I say gave because it occurred to me, as I put the check in the envelope, that it was inane for me to put it in the mailbox and send it down the road when I could just go over there and give it to them, and actually look at the school. So I did, and of_polyhymnia and I explored the building for a while and I looked in at classes and got all excited and squeeful and started apartment searching.
I had a great SWAG class this morning- I've been wanting to rant about the class's assumptions about pornography and prostitution. They tend to take a slightly less extreme version of the Catherine MacKinnon line, you know, "porn is bad because it oppresses women," and while I agree that porn CAN oppress women, I'm not a big fan of responding to that by saying we should outright ban it. I'm big on the whole being sex-positive thing, you know?
So, at a convenient point in the class discussion, I raised my hand and gave what I hope was a rational-sounding, well reasoned, considerate talk on why I think we need to think a little bit harder about what we're saying about porn. I then managed to derail class for the next hour or so. It was an incredibly fruitful discussion, actually, and I think I learned a lot (though obviously my opinion hasn't changed). What was really helpful was learning the sort of base roots of other people's oppositions to porn, things that I thought were obvious aren't necessarily obvious to other people, and other people have some root beliefs that don't quite mesh with mine.
Some interesting notes:
- One girl talked about sexuality as something inherently relational, rather than individual. I don't actually agree with her on this- I think sexuality is something that has an individual side and a relational side, but I can see where the implicit auto-eroticism of porn would be troubling if you think of sexuality as something that should be a function of enhancing a relationship rather than enhancing individualism or individual identity.
- A lot of people also objected to the idea of sex as a commodity, or talk about things like "the cheapening of sex." I also don't agree with this- I don't think that having some sex be commercial in any way cheapens or delegitimates the sex that isn't. This is a false comparison, really, but it's like the way that a meal in a restaurant can be good, and a home-cooked meal can be good, but they're generally "good" in different ways. I think that a culture in which sex is commodified uniformly as a service that women provide to men is problematic, but I don't think that's even an accurate view of prostitution as it stands now, much less in any sort of figurative ideal world I would bring up. Sex is commodified in a lot of different ways. What it comes down to, ultimately, is that the problem isn't prostitution or porn, the problem is patriarchy. (Sorry about the alliteration.) Prostitution and porn aren't, I don't believe, inherently patriarchal institutions (I'd need historical or ethnographic data to back this up, but I think it exists), but the way that they're expressed in our culture is, indeed, often patriarchal, and often damagingly so. The problem is, it's not porn/prostitution that we need to abolish, it's patriarchy- the attitudes that people were taking in my class tend, I think, to want to deal with the symptoms rather than the root causes, in a situation where the symptoms aren't inherently bad, they're just bad when they're in conjunction with the root causes. If that makes sense.
- My professor pointed out something about the statistic I kept bringing up, which is that 90% of women involved in sex work don't want to be. My argument was "Well, what about the 10%? Do we deny their experiences? Do we tell them they're living under false consciousness, that they've been deluded or brainwashed by the patriarchy? I mean, who's the one denying women agency then? He mentioned that he was suspicious even of those 10%. To be honest, so am I. I think that there are probably a fair number of women out there who say that they're happy in prostitution when they're really not. To also be honest, I think that there are probably a fair number of women in sex work who would enjoy their job if they weren't "living under the false consciousness" produced by being raised in a sex-phobic society. In a world where ex was openly discussed, not treated as shameful, some of these women would likely be quite satisfied with their careers. And there are, of course, the rare few women whose narratives we see in blogs and memoirs and autobiographies who clearly do completely enjoy their careers as sex workers.
I also had a classmate congratulate me for speaking up and tell me to go read Dan Savage. I think I will.
I had a great SWAG class this morning- I've been wanting to rant about the class's assumptions about pornography and prostitution. They tend to take a slightly less extreme version of the Catherine MacKinnon line, you know, "porn is bad because it oppresses women," and while I agree that porn CAN oppress women, I'm not a big fan of responding to that by saying we should outright ban it. I'm big on the whole being sex-positive thing, you know?
So, at a convenient point in the class discussion, I raised my hand and gave what I hope was a rational-sounding, well reasoned, considerate talk on why I think we need to think a little bit harder about what we're saying about porn. I then managed to derail class for the next hour or so. It was an incredibly fruitful discussion, actually, and I think I learned a lot (though obviously my opinion hasn't changed). What was really helpful was learning the sort of base roots of other people's oppositions to porn, things that I thought were obvious aren't necessarily obvious to other people, and other people have some root beliefs that don't quite mesh with mine.
Some interesting notes:
- One girl talked about sexuality as something inherently relational, rather than individual. I don't actually agree with her on this- I think sexuality is something that has an individual side and a relational side, but I can see where the implicit auto-eroticism of porn would be troubling if you think of sexuality as something that should be a function of enhancing a relationship rather than enhancing individualism or individual identity.
- A lot of people also objected to the idea of sex as a commodity, or talk about things like "the cheapening of sex." I also don't agree with this- I don't think that having some sex be commercial in any way cheapens or delegitimates the sex that isn't. This is a false comparison, really, but it's like the way that a meal in a restaurant can be good, and a home-cooked meal can be good, but they're generally "good" in different ways. I think that a culture in which sex is commodified uniformly as a service that women provide to men is problematic, but I don't think that's even an accurate view of prostitution as it stands now, much less in any sort of figurative ideal world I would bring up. Sex is commodified in a lot of different ways. What it comes down to, ultimately, is that the problem isn't prostitution or porn, the problem is patriarchy. (Sorry about the alliteration.) Prostitution and porn aren't, I don't believe, inherently patriarchal institutions (I'd need historical or ethnographic data to back this up, but I think it exists), but the way that they're expressed in our culture is, indeed, often patriarchal, and often damagingly so. The problem is, it's not porn/prostitution that we need to abolish, it's patriarchy- the attitudes that people were taking in my class tend, I think, to want to deal with the symptoms rather than the root causes, in a situation where the symptoms aren't inherently bad, they're just bad when they're in conjunction with the root causes. If that makes sense.
- My professor pointed out something about the statistic I kept bringing up, which is that 90% of women involved in sex work don't want to be. My argument was "Well, what about the 10%? Do we deny their experiences? Do we tell them they're living under false consciousness, that they've been deluded or brainwashed by the patriarchy? I mean, who's the one denying women agency then? He mentioned that he was suspicious even of those 10%. To be honest, so am I. I think that there are probably a fair number of women out there who say that they're happy in prostitution when they're really not. To also be honest, I think that there are probably a fair number of women in sex work who would enjoy their job if they weren't "living under the false consciousness" produced by being raised in a sex-phobic society. In a world where ex was openly discussed, not treated as shameful, some of these women would likely be quite satisfied with their careers. And there are, of course, the rare few women whose narratives we see in blogs and memoirs and autobiographies who clearly do completely enjoy their careers as sex workers.
I also had a classmate congratulate me for speaking up and tell me to go read Dan Savage. I think I will.