From: barry@netcom.com (Kenn Barry)
Subject: Re: At the Barricades (was: Re: Catharine MacKinnon, Playboy and feminist propaganda)
Organization: QQQCLC
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 22:27:02 GMT

In article <1992Oct4.171050.27862@panix.com> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>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.

	Then you probably don't understand it. While I'm not _sure_
MacKinnon doesn't stick pins in little Hugh Hefner dolls, I wasn't
speaking quite that literally. I was speaking of animism as a manner of
thinking rather than as a religion. She externalizes the sexual demons
of her own psyche into a magazine.

>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?

	Creates itself? No. Seizes the mind? Yes. She's quite explicit
about it, Gordon. What is MacKinnon most famous for? The
Dworkin-MacKinnon initiatives, which offer the notion that Playboy and
suchlike are directly and legally liable for psychic damage to the
souls of women everywhere. There is nothing vague about such proposed
legislation in fixing blame. No reader of Playboy is even required. A
woman could sue and win on the grounds that she felt demeaned by seeing
the cover of the magazine at a newsstand. How explicit does she have to
be, before you get the point? She is demonizing "pornography", Gordon,
commercial erotica. If she were willing to admit where the
responsibility for sexual pathology lay, she would see no reason to
abrogate the principle of personal responsibility for one's actions in
this one, special case.

>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.

	Your problem, Gordon, is you read your own (presumably) more
moderate opinions into MacKinnon, and defend them in the mistaken belief
you are defending hers. You see what you wish to see. Like most people
with nothing of substance to say, MacKinnon is conveniently vague. "Hmm,
touch of Freud, there; OK. Touch of Pavlov, too - good science! And a
page from the psychology of advertising and propaganda - can't argue
with that". But what she does with it is about as intellectually sound
as a creationist quoting criticisms of Darwin by Steven J. Gould.

>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.

	No one denies that. The only reason the subject comes up is that
people like MacKinnon are unable to make a specific case against the
objects of their disgust, and so attempt to carry the debate off into
such vague generalities. Arguing specifics is a losing proposition for
her. MacKinnon would love to have the debate be about whether a book can
have bad effects, and tries in fact to make that the debate. I am the
one pointing out that her sky-is-blue truisms are irrelevant and
pointless. The question she fails to answer utterly, or even address, is
"so what"?

	Personally I find Playboy far too yuppie-glossy for my tastes.
That's not the point. I'm not campaigning to make Playboy legally liable
for encouraging a shallow materialism; MacKinnon is the one who's trying
to become the Anthony Comstock of the 20th century, MacKinnon the one who
is trying to raise her subjective reactions to the status of legal
principle.

>in general you seem to be saying that objectification is a fiction.

	No, a tautology, a basic principle of human reasoning,
unavoidable.

>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.  

	But that's not incidental, that's the crux of the matter. The
anti-porn crusaders try to convey the impression they're speaking of
some pernicious distortion of reality, but have no more to show by way
of example than the normal human process of abstraction.

>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.

	Then I take it that a picture of a man washing dishes is
perforce an attempt to demean the male sex? It's a logical extension of
MacKinnon's thesis. Guess we'd better outlaw such pictures, eh?

>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.

	Does Playboy refer to women as "cocksuckers"? Does it denigrate
the women whose pictures it publishes? Does its glorification of women
as sexual beings suggest that female sexuality is vile? Is it
responsible for attitudes that predate Playboy, that come from a time
when such public glorification of female sexuality was illegal?

>I can't help this; it's just one of the ugly facts of life.

	No, Gordon, you _can_ help it. You can help it by opposing those
who want to put human sexuality back in the shadows, to be reviled or
sniggered at. You can help it by speaking out against the MacKinnons of
this world, who wish to give their own warped perceptions of sexuality
the force of law.

>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.

	You're confusing two issues. Is it wrong _per se_ to spotlight
a particular facet of a person? Clearly not. We seem to agree there's
nothing sinister in presenting a multifaceted human being as a "doctor"
or "politician" or "baseball player", even though the failure to point
out their other facets could be termed a slanted presentation. So it
must be a matter of _what_ facet is highlighted, or the nature of the
highlighting. By suggesting that positively spotlighting a person's
sexuality is demeaning, MacKinnon demeans human sexuality, itself. And
so do you. You speak of the debasement of sex as a _fait accompli_ -
sex words are used as insults by some people, therefore any
highlighting of any person's sexuality, in any fashion, must be an
insult. Is that your normal mode of thought? Do you feel shame when you
masturbate because there are snide jokes about masturbation?

>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.

	They are not irrelevant, though we agree they are banal; I'd
have said "obvious" rather than "banal" but the slight difference in
connotation is unimportant. You can wear a crown, but I still won't say
"your majesty"; and a sexual neurotic like MacKinnon, who has as her
main purpose in life the forced arrest and internment of other people's
sexuality into the same dark hole she keeps hers in, can claim to be
anything she likes - the truth remains obvious.

>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.

	Knock yourself out, if you're competent to discuss them. But
I'll expect nothing more than the same vague generalities I've seen so
far; what else _is_ there in her ideas?

-  Nothing fails like success  -             Kenn Barry
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