A photoshop request mr billmon, please.
I saw someone use the name “The Traitor Bunch” somewhere in blogistan, and that is just begging for Karl Rove as Alice and Bush as the Lovely Lady and Cheney having three kids of his own…Libby…uh, well, I haven’t worked it out, but maybe Judith Miller can be Jan and Jeff Gannon can be the youngest one in curls.
Maybe Bolton is Marsha.
But then, you probably need flash, too, so they can all look at each other adoringly…and then Wilson and Plame and Chalabi and Ghorbanifar will probably have to be in panels too, or maybe just a gif that looks up and…
Someone needs to help come up with some good lyrics, too.
Here’s a story, of a man named Rover,
but he’s called Turd Blossom by the prez.
When he heard Wilson was gonna out him,
He got the wife instead.
okay, just a first pass, anyone game?

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 27 2005 18:40 utc | 4

Good take on the rebranding of the GWOT by d r i f t g l a s s

Posted by: beq | Jul 27 2005 19:15 utc | 6

since it’s been tough to make the terrorist label stick when we do it, surely it’ll be easier to accept that our aggressions have been both “extreme” and “violent”. fallujah is a tragic textbook example of our violent extremism. they’ve really spun themselves into a spiderhole w/ this one.

Posted by: b real | Jul 27 2005 19:31 utc | 8

@lonesomeG
Better marketing is exactly what Tom Brokaw recommended, either just before or just after the official start of the invasion. His proposal was to set folks in the Third World up with satellite dishes so they could share in our brainwash, er, broadcasting. Then they would have common interests with the United States of America. Just like that. Don’t have the link handy, but I do remember falling off my chair when I read it.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 27 2005 21:00 utc | 10

@jj
I’ve been having many similar thoughts myself. It seems to me, despite my angry comments about there only being one real party on the scene, that there are currently schisms going on in both the Democrat and the Republican parties. The Republicans who wish to distance themselves from the neocon wing are not as ethically against the wall as the Democrats who can not get on board with the Rockefeller Republicans that are the DLC… but, still, if anyone wants to break ranks and work towards a more sustainable and inclusive future for everyone, I’ll take any comers.
Unfortunately, finding a platform for a progressive/populist party that appeals to people of the Capitalist “I got mine!” psychology is not going to be an easy thing. I recall the short-lived Gramm-Rudman Act in 1985 and how unpopular the idea of Conservatives actually conserving something was in practice. The general populace are pretty much agreed that drastic changes need to be made, as long as nothing is required from them personally. Of course, that is exactly why the Mammon Party is currently the only game in town, but maybe people are more fed up with it than they were twenty years ago. Speaking cynically, though, if people grumble too much, it is now a lot easier to point to specific policies and personalities that have necessitated their sacrifices.
It is a mistake, though, to assume that just because we (strongly!) disagree with the current face of American politics that we are all cut from the same political cloth. My current thinking is admittedly going not going to gain a large groundswell of approval. Primarily, I believe the rôle of the federal government needs to be reduced drastically. I believe that its primary purview needs to be the ministration of its citizenry as far as social programs go and that the rôle of the military as it stands (basically, the penultimate welfare program that the poor turn to when every other option dries up) needs to be de-emphasized. A national health care program could very easily have been instituted with the money we have sunk into wasteful and unnecessary military ventures.
The bugbear we are facing (and I can not recall who it was on this board that brought it up; I’d give them full credit for it if I could remember) is the hysteria factor. The idea that an external enemy is lurking around every corner has facilitated the consolidation of power into the hands of the most unscupulous… and this issue needs urgently to be addressed. It is accepted that a weak position on national security will sink a candidate. This is preposterous. The populace need to recognise and internalise that no draconian policy is going to make them invulnerable and that the federal government is not an ersatz parental figure. We will never be entirely secure and we are less secure the more militaristic we become. This needs to be addressed and dispensed with immediately. Nobody is attacking Canada or Sweden because they are not defying anyone to attack them. Cheap, sane and sensible.
Along those same lines, the issue of US support for Israel needs to actually become part of the national dialogue instead of being the elephant in the room. My unequivocal position on this is that US financial support for Israel needs to come to a screeching halt until Israel terminates its aggressive policies vis-a-vis its neighbors. Period. Our blatant favouritism on that issue has engendered more wasted lives and money than perhaps any of our other follies and it needs to end. The Middle East (and the rest of the world) need to be dealt with evenly and humanely… and not with one set of rules for Likuds or wealthy Sauds and another set for everyone else.
We are facing an imminent petroleum crisis and need to wean ourselves on to other alternatives. Period. Many of my ideas are tied up with that one (I will not go into too much detail due to space considerations and the fact that I am conscious that few people want to hear any ideas from an semi-anonymous person like myself anyway), but I believe that this issue can be addressed with another issue… and that is the strengthening of community participation.
People who work for multinational corporations suffer a decreased quality of life because they are not invested in their labour. They have no sense of identity and a contempt for the faceless, ethereal forces that make all the policy decisions behind their backs. By empowering citizens on a community level, that is to say sustainable local commerce and government, the citizens are actually immediately invested in what they are doing, become less apathetic about political decisions that affect them, and enjoy a much higher quality of life (if one is not too married to the idea of a Playstation in every home).
This might sound like I am hearkening back to a 19th century dynamic, but that is really missing the point of my argument. In order to correct mistakes, some degree of backtracking is necessarily going to have to occur… but the specific quality of life in any given community should be governed almost exclusively by that community insofar as it affects only themselves. This is not to say that the federal government has no regulatory function… quite the contrary. But the priorities of this regulatory function as it is currently employed need to be severely re-evaluated.
I am, principally, anti-capitalist… but what I am describing here is actually fundamentally capitalist in nature. Every empowered community in this paradigm is in competion… not for capital per se, but for population. A community that consistently makes poor decisions in relation to its constituents runs the risk of losing those constituents to its neighbours. This mechanism allows for a degree of self-regulation and individual investment. We were discussing the same thing on a larger scale in another thread by talking about giving up and going to Canada. The difference I am proposing is giving up on less harmful people than the current state and moving ten miles away to another community who run things a bit more in line with the way you are comfortable. To me, that seems a hell of a lot more reasonable, but how to achieve it?
Well, in the long run, corporate disincentives need to be employed. There’s really no way around this one, anyway. Between an equitable taxation rate and stringent pollution controls, it should be cheaper and ultimately more satisfying for the entrepeneur to run a local business. It is ridiculous that we are pursuing Bill Gates-levels of wealth. Certainly, none of us could spend it and there is no reason for this cultural value except to cement power in the hands of a (necessarily corrupt) few who are forced to implement suicidal measures to ensure it.
But enough with the Utopia-talk. These are mostly “long-run” visions. As far as an actual working platform go, I can only reiterate the de-emphasis of security hysteria and overturning the “burglar under the bed” mentality, placing severe limits on defense spending and a more equitable foreign policy, reeling in corporate malfeasance with non-negotiable penalties and disincentives, and social programs such as universal health care and incentives to local employers, farmers and manufacturers.
Ultimately, none of these things will change anything until the cultural consumer value system is overturned and a genuine preference towards sustainability and social justice can be implemented. That will take time and a concentrated marketing effort, but I see no reason why jingoistic nationalism can not be subverted into productive local pride.
For what it’s worth.

Posted by: Monolycus | Jul 27 2005 22:48 utc | 12

@Monolycus
The unifying power of hysteria was one of my rare substantive observations.
Mancur Olsen wrote that there are two main sources of economic growth: efficiency gains; and market expansion. Of the two, market expansion ramps up much more quickly, and it is the source of growth that the investment world chases most fervently. It will be sad to see it go when the oil runs out, but for the present it is the engine behind the world we know.
The downside of market expansion has always been that it increases crime levels, because increases in mobility make monitoring more difficult. The dispassionate view is that the losses have always more than offset the gains. This is true of interstate commerce and property crime — and also of cellphones, air travel, the Internet and terrorism. In the current climate of hypertrophied crisis talk it sounds strange to say so, but the US economy and the international economic system are not seriously threatened by terrorism. People with high-level corporate experience (the “Cheney administration”) should know this better than anyone.
Seems that way to me, anyway.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 28 2005 0:45 utc | 14

Full credit to you, then, Jassa. Fortunately, this is one genie that can go back into the bottle (no matter how catastrophic 9/11 was). Independent observers can laud the neocons for how successfully they have exploited the terror mentality, but this is not a tactic that can be utilised indefinitely and still have any impact. Unless the neocons are one-trick-ponies, or unless we can have daily anthrax attacks and suicide bombers, this tactic has hit the point of diminishing returns.
Simply put, we have become a car-alarm culture. When deadly warnings go off ubiquitously, we stop caring about them. Even if someone actually is breaking into a car, who drops everything they are doing when they hear that obnoxious alarm go off? We were more inclined to call the police or intervene because of suspicious noises before suspicious noises became so prevalent. So it is with the war on terra. You can’t be terrorised forever, even on days when the colour code is fuschia. It just stops having any meaning.
The message that we need to get people to understand is that the government is only capable of making them less secure by their actions… it is simply not within anyone’s power to make anyone more secure. It’s like Heisenberg’s principle… you can’t measure a panicky idiot without affecting their panickiness or idiocy. But after the panic wears off, you are just numb to it. I’m hoping that’s where the culture is now… or at least I hope that they can keep their sudden awareness of their own mortality out of the national debate and let us get on with the business of addressing things we can do something about.

Posted by: Monolycus | Jul 28 2005 2:07 utc | 16

JFL,
Norman Solomon finds the Bayh/Clinton/Kerry DLC/RNC line faithfully echoed at the bottom of Friedman’s column of 27 July …
You know, once you have given up on civilization, this article is actually quite funny. A war on graffiti! And merit badges for people who state the obvious and then don’t get themselves killed! I think ol’ Tom’s got the plan for turning this one around. Boy, that was close. For a couple of years there, I almost thought the world might be headed for a spot of trouble.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 28 2005 2:55 utc | 18

@Monolycus
Full credit to you, then, Jassa.
(Uh-oh. Me and my big mouth.)
I think what will happen with the global war on terror thing (er, sorry, the global struggle against violent extremism thing) is what happens already with common or garden crime; it will be reported in waves that have little connection with real changes in the rate at which things and people are actually being blown up (or otherwise rendered inoperative). To the extent that the perennial crisis is used as a tool for manipulating public opinion, it can be controlled through selective reporting.
I have a feeling that the constant thrumbing on the heartstrings is going to get really tiresome. “[D]ispute … the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative” indeed. The reality of the human suffering by everyone who has been touched by this poisoned chalice is going to make the ersatz melodrama of what I am sure will be Karen’s “America Cares” offensive all the more … offensive.
But who knows, maybe Tom Friedman’s offer of merit badges will bring forward a truth teller now and then to tell us what a chain of searing experiences this really constitutes. Somehow I think that his precious “light of day” won’t reach to the bottom of the well, though.
Bah. Humbug.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 28 2005 3:27 utc | 20

b
Here here. Or rather, here.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 28 2005 4:10 utc | 22

the war on terrorism kicked off in 1981 when reagan and haig shifted national priorities from human rights policies to terrorism. this war on terrorism served to both divert attention from the escalating state terrorism & human rights violations that the u.s. both engaged in & supported, esp in their “backyard”, while providing a cover for aggressive, overt operations which concurrently pumped up the military budget, and distracted the masses from the plundering going on w/ reagan’s domestic agenda. it worked. that’s why they pulled the war on terrorism out again for this cowboy. and he’s f**ked that up too. they aren’t changing the name b/c they plan on going after ELF, or in order to get their rollout before august. they’ve changed it from a position of weakness. an extremist, in doublespeak, is “an advocate of change sufficient to have an effect.” they’re now the ones w/ a sense of terror.

Posted by: b real | Jul 28 2005 4:28 utc | 24

It’s not Friedman’s merit badges that caught my eye, it’s his system of defamation :
‘ We also need to spotlight the “excuse makers,” the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. ‘
I am one of those who traces 9/11 to American support for Israeli expropriation of Palestinian lands, to America’s military presence in the Middle East. I am “one notch less despicable than the terrorists” according to Thomas Friedman.
Certainly Thomas Friedman’s opinion of me makes no difference; but his and the nascent DLC/RNC party line is to make all of us opponents of their world war “one notch less despicable than the terrorists” themselves.
“There is no political justification for 9/11, 7/7 or 7/21.”
This line to me is the tell.
I in no way “excuse” or justify the terrorist murders. I point out that they are the predictable consequence of a foreign policy based upon injustice.
Thomas Friedman and the others of his ilk have invested everything over the years in constructing a “justification” of Israel’s “works” in Palestine, so it is their nature to assume that their critics are following their lead; in any case it is their desperate desire to paint that picture.
The world is caught up in a cycle of terrorist violence which ultimately has its source in US foreign policy toward the Middle East, which is based upon greed. The oil lobby wants Arab/Persian oil. The Likud lobby wants Palestinian land and water. The war lobby wants a continuation of war, against “terrorism”, against “violent extremism”, makes no difference.
Friedman’s Giving the Hate Mongers No Place to Hide is an admission that the Likudnikons cannot repeal the law of cause and effect. Unjust, violent deeds do have consequences and Friedman’s, the Likud’s, the Christian Right’s constant drum beat of war, constant invocation of hate cannot hide that forever.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 28 2005 4:49 utc | 26

@JFL
I only picked up the NYT habit during the build up to the Iraqi slaughter so I had no idea of Friedman’s foulness in earlier conflicts until I read the link you posted to Norman Solomon’s article.
It’s a damn shame I just can’t justify the use of violence on anyone anymore because this Friedman fellow is badly in need of witnessing extreme violence 1st hand. Perhaps then he may not think it’s a good idea to “give war a chance” or that the destruction of power stations, water pipes, bridges and hospitals is a legitimate military objective.
One can fall into despair sometimes since this Friedman worm appears to be able to add up, string a sentence together and must be past his adolescence by now, so how can he justify the deliberate incitement to mass murder?
I suppose he has the old “If I didn’t do it someone else would. It’s only really about making a buck at the end of the day anyway” attitude that is common amongst what Galloway likes to refer to as popinjays.
The Cheneys and even the Bushes are understandable if despicable but I have never ever been able to comprehend the motivation of relatively powerless apologists for despots and tyrants.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 28 2005 5:42 utc | 28

For the record: http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1537613,00.html“>Brazilian did not wear bulky jacket

Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead in the head, was not wearing a heavy jacket that might have concealed a bomb, and did not jump the ticket barrier when challenged by armed plainclothes police, his cousin said yesterday.
Speaking at a press conference after a meeting with the Metropolitan police, Vivien Figueiredo, 22, said that the first reports of how her 27-year-old cousin had come to be killed in mistake for a suicide bomber on Friday at Stockwell tube station were wrong.
“He used a travel card,” she said. “He had no bulky jacket, he was wearing a jeans jacket. But even if he was wearing a bulky jacket that wouldn’t be an excuse to kill him.”

Posted by: b | Jul 28 2005 6:52 utc | 30

Speaking of having cache around here, as I believe Slothrop was on another thread, does anyone know anything about Kate Storm??I’ve been really concerned about her. Occas. I stop in @allspinzone & haven’t seen her there either. I miss her contributions & fear the worst – lost job, mortgage, casualty of ec. war, illness….

Posted by: jj | Jul 28 2005 7:14 utc | 32

FBI seeks to probe senior Israeli diplomat in Pentagon spy case
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is demanding that Naor Gilon, head of the political department at the Israeli embassy in Washington, be interrogated in connection to the Pentagon spy case.
It is possible the FBI will also want to interrogate other Israeli diplomats in connection with Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin, an Iran expert under investigation for allegedly passing classified documents to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)…..

Posted by: Nugget | Jul 28 2005 8:00 utc | 34

Hastert to Can Patrick Fitzgerald?

Late this evening I got emails from a few readers who told me about a news story on Chicago’s Channel 9, WGN-TV which pointed out that Patrick Fitzgerald’s term as US Attorney in Chicago is coming up in October and that pressure is building to deny him a reappointment.

Puts a new perspective on Pat Roberts recently announced “investigation.”

[Sen. Roberts’ spokeswoman Sarah]Little said the Senate committee would also review the probe of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Plame case for nearly two years.

Is Rove trying to get Roberts and Hastert to do a Saturday Night Massacre for Bush?

Posted by: lonesomeG | Jul 28 2005 13:02 utc | 36

COMPARATIVE $ COSTS OF SEVERAL US WARS

Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 28 2005 13:57 utc | 38

weird

By all appearances, Wal-Mart stands some chance of success.
The store on the outskirts of the city was packed with thousands of people, some of whom had travelled from adjacent provinces to queue for hours, waiting for the outlet’s doors to open.
Many looked as if they had just gotten out of bed as they dashed around the brightly lit store in pajamas and flip-flops, arms laden with cans, bottles and plastic shopping bags.
“This is chaos, just utter chaos. I’ve never seen so many people show up for a store opening and we’re struggling to make sure things remain stocked,” store assistant Yang Yihua shouted above the cacophony, as shoppers grabbed cans of porridge from her hands before they made it to the shelves.

Posted by: beq | Jul 28 2005 15:20 utc | 40

catlady,
I got your posts on both this thread and the “Labour Struggle” thread but it is indeed curious why the dearth of posts.
Is everyone on summer vacation or WHAT’S UP? Yes, I’m shouting. Is there anybody there to hear me?

Posted by: Juannie | Jul 28 2005 18:37 utc | 42

I came across this today: Tom Hayden, SDS founder and Los Angeles state senator, writing about Co-opting The Radical Instinct.

“How do we contain and stop this direct action movement? … they created a chart. At one end were the radicals … anybody who understands that globalization is a system. … Their prescription was to isolate and discredit them … because they were pointing out that it was a system.
…
The second group on the spectrum were the idealists … who want to give the system a chance. They believe in the same social justice values that the radicals do, but … they don’t have a cold, cynical view that nothing is possible under the system. So, it’s extremely important, the study said, that the idealists don’t become radicals.
…
You have to give the idealists occasional victories in order to keep their hope in the system alive.
…
Third on this continuum came the pragmatists … former idealists who’ve won some victories, who start to believe that the system works. So, they said, it’s extremely important for the idealists to have victories — not because of justice, but because that way they become pragmatists. And you want the pragmatists to be able to say: See? The system works. Be pragmatic.
…
And the final part of the spectrum … is that you can become an opportunist … a pragmatist who gets attracted to the money, the glamour, the status, and the power. And then they had a whole workshop on how this could be done. How to discredit the radicals, cultivate the idealists, make them pragmatists, and then find the opportunists among the pragmatists. And there — you have the story of my generation, the 60s generation.”

This was written in 2000, I’m interested in any other details of this analysis. Hayden offers no prescription in the article, “I have not found an answer to this problem, but I’m here to tell you it is the problem. And you are its answer.”

Posted by: jonku | Jul 28 2005 20:15 utc | 44

beq, Juannie,
Looks like Christianity in the United States of America is finally catching up with its more modern cousin.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 28 2005 20:53 utc | 46

beq, juannie,
Oops. The site I linked above leaves out the minor detail of the The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 28 2005 21:16 utc | 48

rapt: Fascinating.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 28 2005 21:49 utc | 50

rapt,
Your link to “… ?topicID=22” doesn’t work for me. I get an error message that says: “The post you selected no longer exists. It may have been recently deleted.”
Are they that hot onto our gig? 🙂
Jassalasca,
It’s a small wonder that Twain is still accepted let alone sometimes required reading in the public school system here. If I worked at mind control center I think I would have all his books burned. Hadn’t heard of the The Mountain Meadows Massacre before but as horrific as it was it doesn’t surprise me nor that it was Mark Twain who publicized it. In high school I was memorized by the just released “Letters from the Earth”. It made my atheism acceptable and respectable to myself.

Posted by: Juannie | Jul 28 2005 22:16 utc | 52

TalkLeft Tuesday :: July 26, 2005
Alberto Gonazales: Roberts Not Obligated to Follow Roe v. Wade
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/011646.html

Posted by: Ray | Jul 28 2005 22:48 utc | 54

Time for me to get back to work now, but meanwhile here is a heartwarming story about a cute little boy that had his face handed back to him by friendly doctors in the United States of America — and his ungrateful, irrational father who flew into a “tirade” because the nice Americans gave him presents to take home to Baghdad.
You can see why the Democrats didn’t oppose Karen’s appointment; she will provide lots of opportunities to let those caring Democrats show off their good works to their deeply concerned constituents. Unity. It’s so … oh, it’s just … I’ll be back, I have to go for a tissue.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 28 2005 23:26 utc | 56

Reviewing events of the last week or so today, I think we’re well & truly f—ed. It looks like the Admin. appeased the factions on Wall Street & CFR that wanted their ouster. I fear the only hope is they’ll realize this is their chance to get them & if they don’t do it now, they really will invade Iran w/consequences beyond imagining.
To appease Wall Street, pls. note that they got the Chinese currency unpegged from the dollar & rammed CAFTA through last night. I’d also said that they’d had it w/the “war on terra” paradigm, and the final straw was when Gelb came back w/the report on the debacle in Iraq followed by BabyBu$h’s speech on how he was staying the course. This week we hear that there’s no longer a “war on terra” – it’s called something else, but that’s the beginning of we know not what – and there’s yak about reducing troops next yr.
When you put it altogether, the changes are more than merely cosmetic; however, the powerful factions driving toward impeachment, would be foolish to think they have these Totalitarian Apocalyptic Fascists under control, merely ‘cuz they’ve wrung a few concessions from them.
(I’m not including links to these developments, as I trust that the locals are well enough read. I’m just trying here to pull together recent developments & put them in the context of our discussions the past few weeks. Speaking of which, bloggers thoroughly disgraced themselves in not covering 911 events last weekend in Washington. Sadly, they’re proving to be a bunch of incredibly well trained seals. I heard a talk by one of the guys today. He’s highly recommended by G. Vidal & his talk will be on CSPAN this weekend. He gives the history of “terror” as a political device, dating from it’s origins @Conference in Israel in ’79 attended by Bu$hDaddy. Had the bloggers been more on top of it, Impeachment would be a lot more hopeful as the popular movement would be building faster.)

Posted by: jj | Jul 28 2005 23:36 utc | 58

Follow up. Here’s a link for more info. on this weekend’s CSPAN presentation I mentioned. Political History of Terrorism & 911. His talk today was history of political usage of “terrorism” as well as details of xUS relations w/so-called “terrorist groups”. This is the only talk all weekend that CSPAN chose to film. I don’t think he’s involved w/details of events that may/may not have transpired that day!!!

Posted by: jj | Jul 28 2005 23:51 utc | 60

Well, the way we do things in the States is to make the military the only employment/health care program for our lowest classes. That way, when those left with no social options are killing and getting killed, they are at least doing it in a state-approved direction.
Cool! Looks like the recruiting officer who signed up Timothy McVeigh needs to get with the program, though.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 29 2005 0:50 utc | 62

@fauxreal, @slothrop
it has taken me a while to get back to the interesting subthread from Robust Australopithecus — the side discussion about Dworkin/MacKinnon and the ethics of the porn/prostitution industry.
first I would say that coining a name like “Macdworkin” to conflate the life work of these two very different femininists (and to reduce that life work to one unsuccessful legislative campaign) to my ear indicates a dissy approach to start with, not likely to lead to productive discussion. it is kind of like starting any discussion about feminist issues with “let’s see what the feminazis are saying about XYZ”. or perhaps more aptly, a discussion of the Clinton era by referring to Clinton as “Billary”. well perhaps less extreme, but the bias is in from the git-go 🙂
suggesting that AD’s agenda is identical with that of the US Right is either disingenuous, or symptomatic of a failure to read her actual writing; this is often a problem with Dworkin-bashers, who tend to respond to things that AD never actually said or wrote, but which have been attributed to her by her political enemies.
rightwing is the last label I could hang on AD — she was vilified by the US Right for (among other things) her anti-Likudnik stance (cf the heartfelt essay ‘Planting Trees in Israel’) and her open support for lesbians (despite her committed relationship of decades with male partner Jon Stoltenberg). her book Right Wing Women remains a classic attempt to describe and understand the mindset that motivates a Phyllis Schlafly (let’s say). it was not well received by the subculture she sought to anthropologise. oddly enough AD is/was taken far more seriously as a C20 radical philosopher in France than in her native land the US. she has perhaps an unusual distinction, among US literati, of being hated and badmouthed with almost equal venom by both Left and Right….
a complex figure, and one of the most powerful US literary voices of the last century. she was also admired and read by an unusually mixed audience — smaller than the army of her detractors, one suspects, and less well funded 🙂 — after her recent death a small memorial web site was installed, and the comments there indicate some of the startling range of her admirers: international, widely diverse in age, and of both genders.
—
as to the benevolence, harmlessness, or sheer bloody irrelevance of pornography and prostitution to a progressive politics, this recent API review of a fresh book on the subject suggests reasons to rethink the reflex middle-class liberal American defence of the industry:

The most refreshing thing about Not for Sale is its radical departure from those tired debates about ‘dirty pictures’ and the ‘objectification of women’. What we are seeing in contemporary pornography gives lie to the suggestion we are simply talking about any old images of ‘sex’. (Whisnant p 17) Contemporary researchers on pornography inevitably incorporate in their work a focus on international human rights violations. What we are increasingly seeing is the eroticization of all sex crimes: rape, gang rape, harassment, molestation, confinement of women, the sexualisation of childhood, the infantalising of adult women, ‘documentary’ pornography and the direction of the industry towards the more and more ‘extreme’. (Whisnant p 17) There is an increasing ‘cruelty of touch’. (Whisnant p 14)
[…]
Not for Sale reworks the insistence that pornography and prostitution equate to sexual liberation and progress. Frankly, those who define the sex business as a force of liberation overlook the fact that women and children are prostituted most commonly through violence and poverty. They overlook the life expectancy of sex workers, the average age of induction, the average income of sex workers and, most urgently, their inability to leave their situations. To coerce women and children into this work, to permanently affect their lives in this way, and then to force them on a daily basis to fake enthusiasm, suppress fear and disgust, and to tolerate violence and humiliation to their bodies is no banner for sexual liberation. […] What freedom means in this case is ‘no more than the “freedom” of men to access the bodies of women and children. It’s predation redefined as progress’. (Clarke p 169)
Despite this, it remains easy for contemporary consumers of pornography to distance themselves from the harm and the sweatshop that lies just on the other side of the screen. After all, ‘women are there because they choose to be’. Perhaps, as some of the sex workers make painfully clear to us in this book, ‘voluntary slavery’ is a better concept to describe the situation. Female sex workers live in that unsympathetic space between the appearance of choice and the overwhelming, relentless coercion behind that choice. (Farley and Lynne p 113)

the same might be said of the globalised working class (trapped in that netherworld between just enough agency to flee the starving village for the prison-like factory [they ‘choose to be there’], yet without the agency or political power to improve conditions in either venue). there are many parallels. much of commercially distributed porno is made under maquiladora conditions, and much of global prostitution is conducted under maquiladora (or worse) conditions. yet the sweatshop aspect of this very large capitalist enterprise is overlooked or excused by many observers who would otherwise be vocal in their criticism of labour abuses, capitalist exploitation, the for-profit commodification of human relations, etc.
in most popular discourse, to critique this rapacious and often abusive transnational industry is immediately to be labelled “anti-sex”, which to me seems as absurd as calling people who protest over McDonalds’ labour or enviro record “anti-food”, or people who protest at GAP stores about sweatshop garment labour “anti-clothes.” surely mass produced corporate schlock is not the be-all end-all definition of clothing, food, or sex. but then Monsanto et al does repeatedly slander critics of its GMO skulduggery as “wanting the third world to starve” so I suppose the porn industry’s very successful marketing effort to paint its critics as a bunch of dour Puritans is not so surprising.
it is true that the US right has a small echo chamber devoted to “global trafficking,” often dedicated to showing how the US official enemy du jour is a notorious trafficking haven (somehow this charge seems never to be levelled by the rightists at allies such as Israel or Saudi, despite the substantial “import business” in trafficked women in both countries). Donna Hughes comes to mind as a highly visible “rightwing feminist” scholar who has published widely on the topic. but to regard the issue as untouchable simply because it has been adopted by a subsection of the US Right is, I think, too squeamish. after all, the US Right gleefully “adopted” the Poor Downtrodden Afghani Woman when it suited their agenda of bombing the hell out Afghanistan; that opportunistic politicking didn’t render the Taliban’s real abuses of real women any less ghastly or worthy of serious study and opposition (by supporting RAWA and other indigenous resistance groups, for example).
rightwing persons may occasionally get angry about issues that progressive persons also get angry about (torturing small animals is usually frowned upon by the saner elements on both sides, for example, and very few people of either faction can be relied upon to support child molestation as a harmless hobby). as the old Godwin-baiting saying has it, just because Hitler loved his dogs doesn’t make all dog lovers Nazis…

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 29 2005 1:44 utc | 64

@debs Yeah I’m sure there are a few women who have successfully used this sick industry as a stepping stone to advancement and economic independence but they would be in the minority.
Well as with the garment industry really — for every Coco Chanel or Laura Ashley there are legions of teenage Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Malaysian women sweating in hellhole FTZ factories for pennies an hour. There’s a global aspect to the trade that closely parallels any other extractive industry — cheap sex tourism for wealthy Western men, for example, or “recreation centres” set up by Western oil/timber/mining companies in 3w countries with local “comfort women” for their workforce. And certainly major tie-ins with US militarism, base ownership, etc.
And then there’s the lucrative side effect of the IMF interventions: wherever they crash an economy and throw millions into poverty overnight, piratising and eroding social services, a sudden trove of hungry young women is thrown on the global market, at considerable profit to the mafiyas and other pimps. For example iirc shortly after the fall of the FSU, “Russian girls” were a hot item. They were hungry and desperate, they answered ads for “au pair” and “housemaid” and “escort” positions that turned out to be flypaper; then the usual MO, passports confiscated, earnings docked for “room and board and expenses”, the usual company town tactics that would be familiar to any student of sweatshop labour, old TVA mining towns pre-union, etc.
I often suspect that if prostitution were really rendered “harmless” (say, by unionisation, comparable pay scales to other demanding and dirty jobs, OSHA style health and safety regulations, workers’ coops instead of bullying pimps or mafia management, genuine prosecution of johns who beat or kill prostitutes rather than the “who cares, she was only a whore anyway” attitude currently prevalent)… that for many men all the fun would go out of it. One of the satisfactions of prostitution, for many of the clientele I suspect, is precisely that the prostitute is despised, marginalised, vulnerable, socially powerless. She can be treated in ways that one would never treat an equal, or a friend, or a lover whom one ever expected to see again, or a wife who could hire a lawyer, etc.
Even a relatively powerless man can know, securely, that someone else is even more vulnerable, even more marginalised, and available for them to do whatever he wants to her (and obliged to smile and pretend she likes it) — and if he can’t afford a US prostitute, he can always go across the border to Mexico where rates are cheaper (kind of like global capital chasing vulnerable cheap labour eh?). You can find web pages out there (I found one by accident once when doing some Cuba-watching) informing potential sex tourists where they can find the cheapest girls this year, the “best deals” — no surprise, they were in the poorest countries. The invisible hand jerks off, I guess.
I suspect sometimes that ubiquitous porno and prostitution is a very effective (and profitable) way for bully capitalism to placate and disperse the class anger of underpaid, underemployed, insecure men of the working and lower middle class. Perhaps it offers the same social function as the Untouchable caste in India — a social ranking so low that even the lowest prole can feel superior to it. If that is the case then the institution would crumble (as we now know it) if the social standing of prostitutes were improved and it became “a job like any other”. But that of course would require unwiring 3 or more millennia of cultural beliefs about sex, female virtue and vice, body tabus, notions of taint and purity, and the symbolism of male sexual dominance that asserts itself daily in casual utterance. Prostitution will be a respectable, reputable trade the same day that “F**k You” is no longer an insult or a put-down. I ain’t holding my breath.
For US liberals, prostitution and porno seem to be rather like military service for wealthy US Rethug war-hawks — it’s a fine, acceptable career for someone else’s kid. But not for me or mine.
I once realised that we know everything we need to know about double standards in gender and morality when we consider that “she’s such a whore” is an everyday, readily-understood insult, but “he’s such a john” is never heard and many people would have to think twice before they figured it out. And of course in our present hyperactive corporate/media culture, pimps are cultural heroes — and why not, they represent the triumph of the financial transaction and the contractual relationship (the Market) in the most intimate realm of human interaction… how perfect for late capitalism — the ultimate ueber-Dickensian Boss in the ultimate laissez-faire unregulated market.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 29 2005 4:42 utc | 66

@b real, I heard today specifically that ny indymedia spiked it. Maybe they’ve been threatened/warned after having been shut down so many times.
Thanks, I’ll check guns ‘n’ butter. Peter Dale Scott is Always worth listening to.
I was surprised – I thght. that since it came from Nat’l Press Club & included a member of BabyBush’s admin. ’01-02, they’d overcome their usual trained seal behavior.

Posted by: jj | Jul 29 2005 6:11 utc | 68

DeA wrote:
“I often suspect that if prostitution were really rendered “harmless” (say, by unionisation, comparable pay scales to other demanding and dirty jobs, OSHA style health and safety regulations, workers’ coops instead of bullying pimps or mafia management, genuine prosecution of johns who beat or kill prostitutes rather than the “who cares, she was only a whore anyway” attitude currently prevalent)… that for many men all the fun would go out of it.”
The ‘harmless’ situation is what pertains in Switzerland, more or less. (For ‘legal’ prostitutes, not for illegal immigrants, who cannot inscribe for health care or pay taxes, etc.) My judgment (no numbers, sorry, but vague impressions from no. of ads, no of massage parlors, students who now openly admit to earning money as prostitutes, etc. etc.) is that it has increased trade sharply.
DeA is forgetting the men (and increasingly, the women) clients who previously refrained from hiring prostitutes through fear of illegality, fear of the milieu in general (e.g. of pimps, who now no longer exist), of disease, etc. When prostitution is made completely legal and regulated – normalised – it becomes “safe” and respectable for both for the service provider and the client. The usual marketing and rating processes take hold (unionisation, too!), creating a boom…

Posted by: Noisette | Jul 29 2005 9:37 utc | 70

I seem to remember him as a failed conspiracy theorist. He has an entry in wikipedia. For what it’s worth.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Dick Cheney’s nerves were a bit frayed these days. But firing nuclear weapons in anger … hard to imagine this side of $150 per barrel.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 29 2005 12:00 utc | 72

@fauzreal
It some obscene hour of the day here as well and I just wanted to assure you I wasn’t trying to insinuate that you did argue porn/prostitution is a way to empowerment. My post was more a response to DeAnder’s one on the repressive aspects of porn/prostitution.
I am interested to see that you view these quite seperately since the workers in both ‘industries’ are frequently interchangeable. I have tended to view porn as prostitution by proxy. That is the ‘john’ isolates him/herself from what he/she perceives to be the seamier side of the business thereby enjoying the benefit of repression/objectification and avoiding the ‘dangers’.
I have never considered the written word as porn. It frequently can perpetuate the same underlying ideas as porn but doesn’t usually include the use of actual victims.
I also question the morality and efficacy of banning these foul practises. Most societies have criminalised prostitution and as has been already said in here, that just contributes to the marginalisation and disempowerment of prostitutes.
On the other hand I too live in a society where prostitution is legal and have already taken issue with a commercial run on our publicly owned TV network. It shows a young woman in black silk rolling on a bed covered in 50 dollar bills. The voiceover goes something like “Do you want to work part time, night time anytime?”
The commercial comes on late at night in between the ads for exercise equipment and self improvement courses. The TV company argues that this is to protect the young who will be safe in bed at that hour. Maybe in the nice home he/she lives in but out in the real world all sorts of people are watching late night TV. The one thing they have in common is they aren’t sleeping often because they are already feeling pretty vulnerable.
So although criminalising this industry hasn’t worked, I doubt that de-criminalising will ‘fix’ it.
As far as the power relationships in allegedly ‘non-commercial’ human relationships such as marriage goes to me that is a seperate issue.
Humans being what they are it seems that many, many, relationships derive their momentum from an imbalance of power. That is one partner psychologically exploits the other. Yes probably that is the male most often in a traditional heterosexual marriage, but that is by no means always the case. Non-traditional relationships can also get impetus from exploitation.
Perhaps the behavioural evolution of the human will catch up with humanity’s societal changes.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 29 2005 13:29 utc | 74

faux: Concerning prostitution, one can’t consider CH as a whole because the Cantons are so autonomous. In the Canton of Geneva, legal prostitution has always existed (since mid 19th cent). Prostitution was (and still is in part) regulated by the police; the prostitutes carried cards, and were subject to various rules, including obligatory ‘sanitary visits.’ At that time, prostitution was more or less confined to ‘maisons de tolerance’ or in French French, ‘maisons closes.’ At the same time, clandestine prostitution flourished, but was not considered a serious problem, as it was carried out by illegal immigrants (for the most part) who could, and most often were, expelled from the Canton, just as occurs today. The activity itself is not illegal, but working without a permit was, and is.
Maison closes were forbidden in 1925. Legislation evolved…the latest frill is that prostitutes must pay VAT.
However, it has often been questioned whether the legalising framework actually helps prostitutes. In Geneva, illegal or clandestine prostitution – some of it very miserable with its human slave trade aspects- is rife. Yet, pimps and other profiteers do have a very hard time of it, and an independent legal prostitute can have a good life.
Obviously, many of the changes over time are the outcome not only of (more) tolerant laws, but also of changing attitudes towards sex (acceptance of homosexuality, a certain chicness to sado-masochism, the thrill of sex exchange clubs, the social acceptance of sex without a relationship, etc.) as well as growing exploitation of all types world-wide linked to economic conditions, globalisation, war, etc.
Here, girls from ex-Yugo sometimes enter packed into trucks like sardines… and some turn up dead from time to time. Other girls come from Brazil, stay for two years, laugh and make a fortune (avoiding VAT and all that nonsense.)

Posted by: Noisette | Jul 29 2005 14:45 utc | 76

… bloggers thoroughly disgraced themselves in not covering 911 events last weekend in Washington …
The 9/11 ‘movement’ is stagnating because:
1) No really new evidence has emerged, and the same old ground is being picked over endlessly, with the old hands trying to educate newbies and gather new adherents.
2) The facts themselves (what there is of them!) have become conventionalised and rigidified. For example, the myth of Atta’s passport being found in the WTC wreckage, the fact that some of the perps are alive and well and living in Saudi Arabia, and so on, have become disconnected folklore that can no longer be critically examined, or, more important, fitted into some kind of overall scheme. They serve to feed skeptical attitudes, not more.
What could have been accomplished with these diverse facts, described events, conjectures (the temperature of melting steel, NORAD stand down, Vigilant Guardian, lost black boxes, green Pentalawns, etc. etc.) has been done (e.g. the books by D. R. Griffin) and has accomplished little. The body of the ‘research’ remains stuck in conspiracy land; all of it arguable, refutable, ignorable – disconnected, sloppily argued.
3) Likely, disinfo. and internal quarrels and dissent amongst the various factions (LIHOP, MIHOP, the ‘no plane’ crowd, etc.), as well as the interference of opportunists and cranks, have taken a heavy toll, absorbing energies, muddying the issues, and driving the competent and determined away…
4) The road forward is blocked because new actions and ideas are required. I am certain some people have some but naturally these new ideas, if they are to take hold and lead to coordinated action, must be seen as having a definite, or at least probable, impact or result. They must be expected to ‘work’.
Et c’est la que le bat blesse..
Going beyond saying the Emperor is not quite himself to yelling he has no clothes on would be dangerous. Note that no Gvmt. or official entity or organisation has debunked 9/11. They limit themselves to obliquely expressed doubt (e.g. Saudi Arabia) and smarmy lip service (e.g. France). Enthusiastic supporters (e.g. Blair; Putin after the first shock) are very circumpect and avoid direct, detailed mention, emphasising general aspects (extremism, terror, etc.) The mixture of self-interest, fear and uncertainty as to results of an exposure that keeps Gvmts. quiet gags individuals as well. Add to that, the individuals or citizen groups are powerless, uninformed; moreover, those good ideas are hard to come by.
There, I fear, the matter will rest. I suppose that is what many have concluded, consciously or not.
It has been a long time now; the fact that no outcry arose end 01, mid 02, or even in 03, and that the official investigation was apparently accepted …well. The mainstream media effectively …runs the show.
It is to be an open secret, an accepted pretend fact, a conventional ‘as if’.

Posted by: Noisette | Jul 29 2005 15:50 utc | 78

OK, it’s not super serious. But it kind of made my morning. scroll down to the Update, that is the good part.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 29 2005 19:29 utc | 80

Debs- again, I guess it depends on what your definition of porn is. Is the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee tape porn? What about actresses who undress for Playboy for publicity..is that porn? What about all the women flashing their…chests at Mardi Gras, as people take pictures…or girls gone wild…which has to be the most annoying thing I’ve ever seen, fifty times a night, if I’m up late with the tv on as background.
As far as I know, those people are also not involved in prostitution.
Maybe what you’re talking about is hardcore porn, vs. the silly playboy video porn with storylines written in service to a sex scene every twelves minutes?
Is something like “A Very Long Engagement Porn?” It features sex scenes, but the story isn’t only about those sex scenes.
And, back to the issue of power…what I’ve wondered so often is how to value traditional female work in the traditional way in a society like America…i.e. by payment. Euro countries have allowances for families, no matter what their income…that would really go over well here (snark). But what sort of protections do women have who use their most prolific earning years doing unpaid labor…or, rather, labor that is paid via a secondary source?
Isn’t marriage, the conservatives claim, the most basic institution in society? So why don’t they recognize the unpaid labor that women perform…and how can you adequately value those things?
You say these two issues are separate, but I don’t see it that way because, as far as I can see, there are no societies that do not separate females from their child-bearing functions, which stem from the same activities that are presented in porn as a variation on that theme…i.e. sex in which children and the responsibility for them magically disappears.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 29 2005 22:29 utc | 82

@fauxreal
I will continue the debate a bit longer primarily because I can’t get interested in finding the most obscure quotation to describe US imperialism or worry too much about which brand of comb-over is going to lose to the repugs in Ohio (yeah I’m snarky this morning).
The Pamela Anderson tape is porn (I haven’t seen it and have no idea how explicit it is) because it has a real extant victim in Ms Anderson who regardless of her acting abilities was being exploited by a bloke who used his skill at draining the power of another to find fulfilment. This Tommy guy may have been a celebrity within the US but the tape enjoyed circulation around the rest of world where he was strictly the ‘aging rocker husband of Ms Anderson’.
There is another even more unsavoury aspect to it. I don’t know the details as I really don’t keep up on alla that celebrity/PR stuff that fills the airwaves/newstands. There appears to be a possibility that the tape was released by someone close to the aging rocker in a fit of pique at her having the gall to assert some independence. I realise that no-ones relationship let alone one observed thru the filters of gossip can be reduced to she good, he bad, but there is something about Ms Anderson that has the bruised look of a biker’s old lady.
The Playboy stuff depends on individual circumstances of each photo shoot I guess. I certainly don’t believe the image of the human body can be per se classed as porn. This is why the whole subject of porn can’t be easily reduced to a couple of simplistic statements/laws and why we need to be hesitant of any regulation that rings of censorship.
If attitudes toward women in society do change it will be because people within that society have changed their own attitudes and not because they have been forced to change their actions.
Without an extended litany of prostitutes I have met, let me say that the vast majority of ‘workers in the sex industry’ that I have come across are sad and feel trapped. Of course some of that is due to the condescending attitude the rest of society has towards them, but in most cases the source of their grief goes back way further than when they first decided to allow others to do what they wilt in return for cash.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 29 2005 23:38 utc | 84

Demographic stats (perhaps not all are reliable, but it seems unlikely that all are unreliable) bear out Debs’ anecdotal evidence of sadness and entrapment.

The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years (M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines, 1982, “Victimization of street prostitutes, Victimology: An International Journal, 7: 122-133) or 14 years (D.Kelly Weisberg, 1985, Children of the Night: A Study of Adolescent Prostitution, Lexington, Mass, Toronto). Most of these 13 or 14 year old girls were recruited or coerced into prostitution. Others were “traditional wives” without job skills who escaped from or were abandoned by abusive husbands and went into prostitution to support themselves and their children. (Denise Gamache and Evelina Giobbe, Prostitution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation, National Coalition against Domestic Violence, 1990)
Estimates of the prevalence of incest among prostitutes range from 65% to 90%. The Council for Prostitution Alternatives, Portland, Oregon Annual Report in 1991 stated that: 85% of prostitute/clients reported history of sexual abuse in childhood; 70% reported incest. The higher percentages (80%-90%) of reports of incest and childhood sexual assaults of prostitutes come from anecdotal reports and from clinicians working with prostitutes (interviews with Nevada psychologists cited by Patricia Murphy, Making the Connections: women, work, and abuse, 1993, Paul M. Deutsch Press, Orlando, Florida; see also Rita Belton, “Prostitution as Traumatic Reenactment,” 1992, International Society for Traumatic Stress Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines, 1982, “Victimization of street prostitutes,” Victimology: An International Journal, 7: 122-133; C. Bagley and L Young, 1987, “Juvenile Prostitution and child sexual abuse: a controlled study,” Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health, Vol 6: 5-26.)
80% of prostitution survivors at the WHISPER Oral History Project reported that their customers showed them pornography to illustrate the kinds of sexual activities in which they wanted to engage. 52% of the women stated that pornography played a significant role in teaching them what was expected of them as prostitutes. 30% reported that their pimps regularly exposed them to pornography in order to indoctrinate them into an acceptance of the practices depicted. (A facilitator’s guide to Prostitution: a matter of violence against women, 1990, WHISPER – Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt Minneapolis, MN)
90% of prostituted women interviewed by WHISPER had pimps while in prostitution (Evelina Giobbe, 1987, WHISPER Oral History Project, Minneapolis, Minnesota).
“About 80% of women in prostitution have been the victim of a rape. It’s hard to talk about this because..the experience of prostitution is just like rape. Prostitutes are raped, on the average, eight to ten times per year. They are the most raped class of women in the history of our planet. ” (Susan Kay Hunter and K.C. Reed, July, 1990 “Taking the side of bought and sold rape,” speech at National Coalition against Sexual Assault, Washington, D.C. ) Other studies report 68% to 70% of women in prostitution being raped (M Silbert, “Compounding factors in the rape of street prostitutes,” in A.W. Burgess, ed., Rape and Sexual Assault II, Garland Publishing, 1988; Melissa Farley and Howard Barkan, “Prostitution, Violence, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” 1998, Women & Health.)
78% of 55 women who sought help from the Council for Prostitution Alternatives in 1991 reported being raped an average of 16 times a year by pimps, and were raped 33 times a year by johns. (Susan Kay Hunter, Council for Prostitution Alternatives Annual Report, 1991, Portland, Oregon) 85% of prostitutes are raped by pimps. (Council on Prostitution Alternatives, Portland, 1994) [… more …]

Summary Paper from US anti-rape site, source of the ‘Rape Is…’ educational video
I find it impossible to draw a neat line between pornography and prostitution — i.e. to claim that the first is mostly harmless even if the second is often harmlful. If we consider the etymology of the first “p word”, it means the writing (or graphic depiction) of whores, or writing about whores. Not just any whores, but the porne class of whores in classical Greece. (porne I am told derives from the verb pernemi, to sell.) Iirc the high-class or ‘geisha’ prostitute in that era was called hetaira. Hetairae I believe were occasionally literate, certainly influential with their powerful patrons, etc. Porne otoh were the expendable underclass of sexual peonage — ‘cage girls’ or ‘crib girls’ in trad brothel parlance. One way that porne were recruited was via the exposure of unwanted girl babies — also the children born to porne were fresh material for the brothels, as is the case today in India and other third world economies. I believe the genre starts in the classical Greek era, as “witty” plays written by literate men, claiming to reproduce the talk and antics of porne, as stage buffoons or for satirical impact. How witty they really were I suppose depends on how you feel about minstrel shows — since women were not allowed to appear on the classical Greek stage and all parts were played by men and boys…
Anyway, I digress as usual… Much of pornography since the invention of photographic reproduction is basically the photography or videotaping of prostitution — but the loose C19 use of the word, to mean any material with sexual content, has thoroughly confused the issue. There are many categories of “material with sexual content,” some do not require the use of live human beings to produce. Some which do involve live human beings are not (to my mind) pornographic because the human beings are not treated as whores in the production.
DH Lawrence’s famous novel about Mrs Chatterley’s gamekeeper lover was considered pornographic in its day and denounced by the male power structure (the same men, some of them, who patronised the thriving brothels of their time). Yet it was not, by and large, consumed as a commodity item for the stoking of sexual titillation (except perhaps by some disappointed schoolboys). Wouldn’t the mindset and intention of the consumer have something to do with definition the function of the cultural material?
Are “sex education” (sexual technique instruction) videos pornographic? Probably not, if the participants are voluntary, adequately paid, uncoerced, etc. So nudity, and explicit portrayal of sexual acts, are not sufficient to make a video pornographic. Is objectification (regarding a human being as an aesthetic object to look at) the same thing as harm? Probably not, if the image being looked at was not produced by harmful means (coercion, deception, etc.) and if the subject being looked at is not posed in a humiliating or demeaning way. [a male psych student at my U did an experiment in which he recruited male volunteer subjects and had them pose (fully clad) in the same postures as “soft porn” models, as accurately as they could. the men reported feelings of embarrassment, anger, and discomfort assuming the “attractive” contortions required of female porn models — and those were just cheesecake shots.]
But there are many forms of pornography which imho involve harm, and many are inextricably linked to physical prostitution. The images being circulated may be taken without the subject’s consent (concealed cameras, etc) thus constituting a gross violation of privacy; or they may have been taken with consent on the understanding that they were a private form of love play, and then sold or posted online without the subject’s consent (violation of privacy and betrayal of trust). The images may have been produced using an unwilling or coerced subject, or a subject who was willing uo to a point but was then coerced into doing more extreme or more dangerous things than she had consented to (this is not so uncommon in commercial porn where there is a premium for unprotected sex and actors are under considerable pressure to consent to condomless intercourse). The images may document actual abuse being done to the subject (as with the pornographic collections of Abu Ghraib images collected and traded by US troops in Iraq). The images may be taken using willing subjects and simulated harm, yet be part of a larger pattern of harm such as racism/militarism (cf the “fake Iraqi rape” porno sites which used US porn models in uniforms and burqa for photo shoots allegedly depicting the gang rape of Iraqi women by US troops in a desert setting). The images may be taken of prostitutes in the course of their work, and then sold or distributed to extract extra profit from the operation (which of course is not shared fairly with the workers). The images may be used to blackmail the subject into consenting to prostitution. The images may be used to instruct prostitutes in their duties, or to instruct wives and girlfriends in how to behave more accommodatingly (more like prostitutes).
In general I would hazard a guess that the content of material is pornographic if it celebrates the abuse of power. This covers both the pornographic TB coverage of the bombing of Baghdad, and the oodles of ‘genuine live nasty rape footage’ available online. Gratuitous rape/battery/torture scenes in conventional film, playing to prurience and voyeurism, might also qualify. This definition would cover the porn (even if soft) which dwells on a prurient fascination with Massa/Slave and Nazi/Jew fantasies, or focusses on the humiliation of Asian, Black, or other non-Caucasian women. As a further guess I would venture that material is pornographic if it used live human beings who, in the course of production, were treated like porne, that is, like second class citizens, people with no rights, people with no control over the uses to which images of their vulnerability will be put, and who receive no fair share of the profit.
Where this leaves such items as Japanese mangaporn, with its endless fascination with the violent rape of big-eyed schoolgirl moppets (but all in cartoon form, no live schoolgirls involved) I am not sure. Cultural taxonomy is always a frustrating endeavour as any lit critic can attest when faced with a really good new novel or play that doesn’t fall neatly into the Dewey system 🙂 At any rate, a definition of “pornographic” other than that which veils the breasts of Justice with a handy curtain, would require thinking about power and abuse, rather than whether nipples are shown on camera or not.
As to “gay porn”, I am sure it can celebrate the abuse of power, or not, just as variably as any other cultural material… seems to me the same criteria roughly outlihed above would apply regardless of the genders involved…

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 30 2005 0:39 utc | 86

@slothrop, to whom was that telegraphic thanks directed and for which post? just checking.
… class, power, money, race, gender — sometimes it seems like a buckyball structure, you can’t isolate just one strut or spar and understand the bigger picture….

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 30 2005 1:18 utc | 88

Deanander
can you whip out a few authors to read? thanks.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 30 2005 2:27 utc | 90

jj
We part company w/ any feminism, any ism, that finds its freedom in the exploitation of labor. You demonstrate here what I believe to be a false consciousness of the social relations that contribute mightily to any powerlessness experienced by women, laborers, disabled persons, and so on. Don’t lecture me about walking a mile in so and so’s shoes. You do not know me, and do not know my experience.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 30 2005 3:19 utc | 92

jj
btw. what makes you so certain I’m a man?
I can tell you, in all seriousness, I am not a man.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 30 2005 3:28 utc | 94

@slothrop
I know I don’t need to say this because your response when the mega fool came in the other day demonstrated admirably your understanding of the concept that we criticise each others ideas in here and when we do so we aren’t criticising the person.
The net being what it is how could it be any different? There is no way that any of us could really know who/what gender/type of person another poster is and why would we want to?
Someone was talking about the Heisenberg principle in here the other day. That is by observing an event, the act of observation can influence that event. I’ve always considered that Heisenberg flows two ways that is the event effects the observer and for that reason I have come to prefer deduction made upon my own observation rather than someone elses.
But that is just me and it would be unreasonable to expect everyone else to reach that conclusion since there are a myriad reasons for anyone to choose to do anything.
Don’t imagine that because you prefer using published sources to advance your arguments in here that the rest of us neccessarily think that is how you live your life or more to the point if you do that you don’t have sound reasons for doing so.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 30 2005 4:57 utc | 96

that would be The Huffington Post (not report.)

Posted by: anna missed | Jul 30 2005 6:43 utc | 98

@anna_missed — remember T E Lawrence and Gertrude Bell swanning around in Mesopotamia when the Brits were unsuccessfully trying to maintain a colonial presence in the mid ‘teens? this Miller story sounds strangely reminiscent.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 30 2005 7:03 utc | 100