There are some excellent videos made by and for womyn's erotic
fantasies. The best that I have seen are the "femme" videos, these are
videos which show beatiful views of nature as well as heterosexual love
scenes. I find these much more pleasurable than the typical male
fantasy pornographic material. What are everyone's views on pornography
in relation to the womyn's movement? Does it help or hinder womyn's
attempts for equality?
Vanessa
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Feb 9 20:42:44 MST 1995
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 22:48:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Ronnie Hawkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "STEFANIE S. RIXECKER" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Reference request/Forwarded Message
In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On Thu, 9 Feb 1995, STEFANIE S. RIXECKER wrote:
> ---------
> Hello! I'm a graduate student in Interdisciplinary Studies. I've been
> lurking for awhile, but haven't entered any of the fascinating exchanges
> because I'm preparing for comprehensive exams. However, a reference to
> Katherine Hayles' "Searching for Common Ground" did catch my eye. I'm
> sorry to have to address this request to the whole list, but I
> accidentally dumped that digest and don't know who made it. Can anyone
> give me more info on this reference? Is this a new book or essay?
> Thanks very much!
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
Hi Stefanie--
I'm the one who brought up Katherine Hayles's "Searching for Common
Ground"--it's one of the essays in _Reinventing Nature: Responses to
Postmodern Deconstruction_, edited by Michael Soule (founder of the
Society for Conservation Biology) and Gary Lease (dean of humanities at
UC Santa Cruz), a book just out (1995) from Island Press. Some of her
thoughts
have to do with the fact that "we are embodied creatures," as Jayne has
brought up.
Hayles criticizes the objectivist belief that there could be a
"God's-Eye-View" of the world existing independently of human
understanding, but she acknowledges something existing "'out there'" as
an unmediated flux, which "interacts with and comes into consciousness
through self-organizing, transformative processes that include sensory,
contextual, and cognitive components" relating to a human observer,
processes she calls "the cusp." Thinking about the outside of the cusp
leads to objectivism; focusing on the inside "leads to solipsism and
radical subjectivism." The hardest thing to do, she claims, is "to ride
the cusp--to keep in the foreground of consciousness both the active
transformations through which we experience the world and the flux that
interacts with and helps to shape those transformations."
Her view "insists that embodied experience constructs a world, not the
world." At the same time, "unlike many versions of cultural relativism,
this position maintains we can determine whether some statements about
our interactions with the flux are more valid than others." There are
constraints on our interactions with the flux such that, while we may not
be able to assert the "truth" of our representations in matching up with
"reality" we can come to certain sorts of agreement about what may or may
not be "consistent with our interactions with the flux."
Since we can interact with the flux only by virtue of being embodied, with
the nature of those interactions being determined by the particulars of
our embodiment, we must realize that "we know the world because we are
involved with it and because it impacts upon us"--a stark contrast with
the Baconian view that we stand separate and apart from the natural world
and can act upon it without ourselves being affected by that interaction.
Hayles's position has important implications for our conception of
nonhuman animals as well. An objectivist view holds laboratory
animals to be objects for manipulation to further our human knowledge, and
"no fundamental connection is posited between what we learn and what they
experience as suffering subjects." By the "interactive model," we
realize that they, like we, are indeed subjects, and "different
subjects--a human, a dog, a rat--construct different worlds through their
embedded interactions" with the flux. "To sacrifice animals or
exterminate species in this model directly reduces the sum total of
knowledge about the world, for it removes from the chorus of experience
some of the voices articulating its richness and variety."
I hope this hasn't run on too long--I wanted to give you something of the
flavor of her view. She is noted to hold "advanced degrees in chemistry"
though she is currently a professor of English at UCLA. I much
appreciate her efforts at trying to bring some of the insights of science
together with a more critical view from the humanities. The position she
is formulating
could have profound implications for our way of thinking about nonhumans,
and about our own human role, both within experimental science and within
the larger environmental domain.
Hope this has been helpful.
Ronnie
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Feb 10 16:12:48 MST 1995
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 1995 15:16:56 -0800 (PST)
From: Coyote1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Vanessa Micol Vanderbrug <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re:Female "pornos"
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.950209160727.6161A-100000@gladstone>
First, I think we need to define what we mean by Eroticism and
Pornography. Then, do we classify subsets of pornography? I'm not sure
I know where the line is between E and P, but I do know when what I see
or read is violent and/or exploits children, and those do bother me (not
to say that children aren't sexual beings).
There are some things to consider, though before getting in a dither
about pornagraphy, and I will try to list a few -
The First Amendment
Does one want to share the camp with the religious right?
Is one reacting to porn from some base of guilt/shame?
All the gazillions of other ways womyn are exploited and
oppressed in much more real day-to-day ways.
Where does one spend one's energies?
It's my feeling that our society is too caught up with the guilt/shame
shadow on sexual expression. As the goddess Aphrodite says, `All acts of
love and pleasure are my rituals' which pretty much endorses whatever
people do when they're (mutually) loving what they're doing. If one
doesn't like it, one needn't participate - even by watching. People (yes
normal people) use eroticism and porn for for fantasy/stimulus for
partnered sex and for self pleasuring (watch out Dr. Elders) and for self
instruction.
It is regrettable that there are those who use porn images to fuel fires
within themselves that are destructive and violent, but maybe that's the
price we pay as a society for harboring the attitudes we do about sex and
gender and nature. To paraphrase that other guy, `The twisted you will
always have with you.'
Lets all hope/work for the day when each person can acknowledge the
sacred and honor it within themselves and work from there.
On Thu, 9 Feb 1995, Vanessa Micol Vanderbrug wrote:
> There are some excellent videos made by and for womyn's erotic
> fantasies. The best that I have seen are the "femme" videos, these are
> videos which show beatiful views of nature as well as heterosexual love
> scenes. I find these much more pleasurable than the typical male
> fantasy pornographic material. What are everyone's views on pornography
> in relation to the womyn's movement? Does it help or hinder womyn's
> attempts for equality?
> Vanessa
>
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Feb 11 14:06:43 MST 1995
11 Feb 95 16:11:55 GMT-5
From: "Brian A. Luke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: University of Dayton
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 1995 16:11:24 EST
Subject: first amendment and porn
>
> There are some things to consider, though before getting in a dither
> about pornagraphy, and I will try to list a few -
> The First Amendment
I've heard Andrea Dworkin's view about this, which is that The First
Amendment, along with The Constitution as a whole, was carefully and
self-consciously created to protect slavery, so there is really no
need to hold ourselves bound by such a document. In particular, the
founding fathers knew that the first amendment would in no way
empower blacks, women, indigenous people, or indentured servants,
since it only gives one the RIGHT to speak, it doesn't give anyone
the RESOURCES to speak publically. In those days subordinated people
were usually illiterate (I think it was even illegal to teach blacks
to read and write), so the first amendment was perfect for protecting
the rights of rich people to debate how best to further their power
structure, without in any way empowering blacks to write
against slavery, etc.
The same is true today, in that the first amendment does not give one
access to the media, which is largely corporate controlled. It just
says that if you have the money to publish or broadcast, you can.
Pornography is a large segment of the mass media, with tremendous
financial resources, so the first amendment is great for protecting
their "right" to publish sexualized propaganda about the nature of
women (pornography literally means the graphic depiction of whores,
and the primary message of pornography is that women are whores by
nature--this message is present in everything from Playboy to the
most graphically violent stuff, the idea that women like to pose
naked for men, women like to be hurt and humiliated in sex, etc.).
Women as a class, on the other hand, are financially disempowered and
thus have much less opportunity to publish and broadcast. The first
amendment does nothing to remedy this. In particular, the women in
pornography, like virtually all prostituted women and men, come from
backgrounds of poverty and sexual abuse. The mass media is not about
to publish their stories about the kind of abuse that is behind a
life of selling sexual access to one's orifices to strangers. They
can speak about it all they want, but it doesn't change anything
because who can hear you if you're excluded from the print
and broadcast media?
It seems ironic to worry about the free speech, first
amendment rights of pornographers, when so much of their work is
about silencing women. In fact, one large segment of pornography is
about bondage. How does the first amendment help a woman speak when
it primarily functions to protect a man's right to photograph her
tied down and gagged?
Brian
