From: gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch)
Newsgroups: alt.feminism
Subject: At the Barricades (was: Re: Catharine MacKinnon, Playboy and feminist propaganda)
Date: 4 Oct 92 17:10:50 GMT
Organization: mydog in exile

barry@netcom.com (Kenn Barry) writes:
|                                                       ... Care to
| explain why "objectifying" a woman as a doctor (e.g., a picture of a
| woman wearing a white coat and stethoscope) is acceptable, but
| "objectifying" her as a sexual being is a no-no?

There are two issues here.  One is the question of whether
McKinnon is an animist; the other has to do with
objectification.  I regard the first proposition as absurd.

I have only the quotations to go on, but throughout them
McKinnon is obviously to be referring to _Playboy_ as a
project involving producers, speech, hearers, and money.
When she says "[_Playboy_] takes a woman and makes her 
sexuality into something any man who wants to can buy and 
hold in his hands for three dollars and fifty cents" I
don't think she means that the magazine creates itself,
and then seizes the mind of "any man" against his will.
Do you? I think she's saying that a number of people are 
engaged in a project which ends up with some psychological 
or social effect she doesn't like -- which she wants to
criticize.  There's no animism involved.

If you want to deny that magazines and books can have a
bad effect on people, it would seem simpler to do so
without going into McKinnon's supposed religious beliefs.
I really can't go further into this; the idea that 
McKinnon is an animist, or that you can't analyze a text 
psychologically, is too dumb for me to contend with.  I
think you must be joking.

Then there's the part about objectification.  I'm somewhat
confused about what is to be demonstrated, since it is woven
with arguments about animism, but in general you seem to be
saying that objectification is a fiction.  Incidentally, by
"objectification", we don't mean conceptualization or
generalization.  As far as I know, when people complain
about it as being inculcated or supported by _Playboy_,
they mean denying or obscuring the personhood of the
objectified.  

To use your initial example of a doctor, suppose "doctor" 
represented a minimum-wage, low-status job like 
"dishwasher."  Then when we referred to someone as a doctor
we might be dismissing them as of no account; we could use
the term to deny recognition of them as a person.  In the
real world, we can't do this with doctors because they have
high status, authority, and get a lot of money, but it's
done plenty with other categories.

Now, does sexuality confer high status?  It doesn't appear to.
People use terms like "cunt", "prick", "cocksucker", "slut",
"whore", and so on as terms of abuse.  Many people refer to
semen as "scum" and to condoms as "scum-bags"; they then use
the latter word as a term of personal abuse.  That is, they
see receiving semen as a degrading act.  Similarly, when
people don't like something they often say it "sucks", a
term which is taken from oral sex to refer to the receiving
of semen.  I can't help this; it's just one of the ugly
facts of life.  If it were up to me, "cunt" and "suck" would
be terms of high praise; but I have to contend with the rest
of you.

So if a person is seen primarily as a mechanism for the
excitement of sexual desire and the receipt of semen, it
does seem that they are being objectified in reductive way,
just as if they were referred to as a mop jockey.  The only
difference is that in the case of sex objectification, the
reduction seems stronger; people don't say "it mops" in the
way they say "it sucks."  

That being the case, it seems to me that McKinnon has made 
a reasonable assertion.  One might dispute it, or call for
better evidence, but one can hardly say that her argument 
is ridiculous.  I might add that the speculations on 
McKinnon's sexuality, the references to her as a prude or
"Platonic" or "Victorian", are not only irrelevant but 
excruciatingly banal.

Once again, I think, we are seeing the effects of barricade
thinking.  That is, first one decides which side of the
barricades a person or an idea is on; then, if they're on
the wrong side, a search for knock-off points is made, with
no time taken out to try to figure out what the person was
trying to say, or the idea was about.  In this case, the
search for knock-off points has taken place in a thoroughly
middle-brow atmophere, where nothing beyond the kind of pop
psychology and social criticism found on television or in
_Time_ magazine -- or possibly, the texts of _Playboy_ -- is
known or recognized.

It would be interesting to have a real discussion of
McKinnon's ideas some time, but the prospects don't look to
good at this point.
-- 
 )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(
( 1238 Blg. Grn. Sta.,  NY NY 10274 * 718.273.5556 )