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Mar 09, 2006 01:13

I am having an incredibly hard time motivating myself to write my paper on the Franco-Prussian War which is really annoying since I actually find it an interesting topic. Today instead of doing the paper I spent time doing the following ( Read more... )

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terryspeed March 9 2006, 22:43:13 UTC
Yeah that was about my reaction too but what do I know, I'm just a male oppressor (according to this woman). Below is a description I found of her views, it's from a critic so I can't guarantee the accuracy but my professor who loves everything that ends in ism said mostly the same thing.

"It was sexuality that explained the social inferiority of women because sexuality is itself hierarchical. Heterosexuality becomes a force for subordinating women. "Women and men are divided by gender...by the social requirements of heterosexuality," MacKinnon explained. Ultimately, these gender roles are guaranteed by force. "To be rapable, a position which is social, not biological, defines what a women is," MacKinnon wrote. MacKinnon’s theory clearly painted an unflattering portrait of men as sexual predators. Yet it was hardly more flattering to women, who were portrayed as too weak to defend themselves. They are not only weak: they are misguided. They have been brainwashed into accepting subordinate roles and into believing themselves to be inferior to men. This is not their fault, of course: ...[M]ale dominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious system of power in history...Its point of view is the standard for point-of- viewlessness,its particularity the meaning of universality. Its force is exercised as consent, its authority as participation, its supremacy as the paradigm of order, its control as the definition of legitimacy.

Women see the world as men want them to see it. It follows that while they may believe themselves to be free, women cannot exercise free will. This is particularly true of sexual intercourse, which in a world of male dominance operates within an atmosphere of "mandatory heterosexuality." No matter who their sexual partner may be--lover, husband or rapist--women are coerced into sexual relations. "[S]exual intercourse under conditions of gender inequality...[is] an issue of forced sex," MacKinnon wrote in 1983. In fact, MacKinnon seemed to doubt even the possibility of consensual heterosexual sex, involving as it does the "penile invasion of the vagina." Penetration is probably synonmous with rape: It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that penetration itself is known [by women] to be a violation and that women’s sexuality, our gender defintion, is itself stigmatic. If this is so, the pressing question for explanation is not why some of us accept rape but why any of us resent it.

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