Was there a time when this did not pertain?
Okay, I will not say through all the world in all societies, throughout the whole of history, but I do think that the guy in this interview is saying something that is of much longer duration and found more extensively is due to a phenomenon that's a mere fifty years old: I don’t think you can look at the misogyny that’s been evident in this election cycle, and what any female commentator or essayist or public speaker endured on the internet or any social media setting, and not realise that pornography has changed the demeanour of men. Just the way that women are addressed for their intellectual output, the aggression that’s delivered to women I think is informed by 50 years of the culturalisation of the pornographic.
I cannot help feeling that there is - maybe? perhaps? - more awareness of the viciousness of misogyny, because it's actually more generally visible because of the internet, rather than because: the anonymity of social media and the internet has allowed for a belligerence and a misogyny that maybe had no other outlet. It’s astonishing how universal it is whether you’re 14 or 70, if you’re a woman and you have an opinion, what is directed at you right now. I can’t help but think that a half century of legalised objectification hasn’t had an effect.
As if, you know, women hadn't been experiencing misogyny well before then; not to mention in societies where (at least until the internet) men did not have, or only had very limited, access to pornography.
I do wonder if this is part of a longer recurrent phenomenon (because that's the way I roll) of blaming Awful Behaviour By Men on some new thing in society: do I not recall, my dearios, when Feminism was blamed for The Decline of Chivalry (that chivalry that was as mythical as the unicorn, really). And assigning it a single causative mechanism rather than, you know, centuries of patriarchal hegemony. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2656627.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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