From: kadie@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie)
Subject: [alt.feminism] Re: Catharine MacKinnon, Playboy and feminist propaganda (Was: Value of...)
Followup-To: alt.censorship,alt.feminism
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 01:02:02 GMT

[A repost - Carl]

Newsgroups: alt.feminism
From: barry@netcom.com (Kenn Barry)
Subject: Re: Catharine MacKinnon, Playboy and feminist propaganda (Was: Value of...)
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 05:51:23 GMT

In article <1992Oct4.020348.8205@panix.com> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>| >Do you mean to say that one cannot use the term _Playboy_ 
>| >to mean the whole system of composing, publishing, selling,
>| >buying, and reading _Playboy_, as McKinnon is clearly doing,
>| >and be understood?
>
>kb:
>| 	Gosh, Gordon, if I'd meant to say that, I would have said it,
>| wouldn't I? And my article would have stopped where your quote of it
>| did. If you can't comprehend the entire argument, don't bother
>| responding to just the 1st paragraph.
>
>Why not, if it seems to contain an absurdity?

	Well, no doubt it's just my suspicious nature, but it suggests
to me you _have_ no response to the rest of what I wrote. 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?

>How am I 
>supposed to get past the statement that "'Playboy' cannot
>objectify women [because it's] inanimate"?

	Well, since you insist, I'll hold your hand thru this one. Let's
take MacKinnon's quote from the top:

#From feminist perspective, what exactly does _Playboy_ do?  It 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.

	Already MacKinnon has removed the reader from the process,
making it clear she speaks of the magazine, itself. The buyer/reader
gets what Playboy "takes and makes", as a finished product. Animism,
Gordon, animism. What has Playboy "taken" from these women whose
pictures it publishes, in truth? Nothing. It has bought the rights to
publish their pictures, that's all. All I see is satisfied merchants
and satisfied customers.

#She becomes 
#something to be used by him, especially, an object for his sexual use.

	Animism in its purest form. The viewer is using _photographs_
for recreation, not women. And photographs are objects, purely objects.
Except to MacKinnon, of course, who, like certain unsophisticated
primitives, seems to believe a photograph steals the soul of its
subject. Indeed, we are to believe that some occult process has stolen
the souls of _all_ women, via these photographs.

	It is MacKinnon who confuses sentient beings with inanimate
objects, and MacKinnon who desperately projects her confusion onto the
readership of Playboy. She says it herself:

#To criticize _Playboy_ as a standard for how a woman 
#should be treated is to say something very simple: a woman is not a cup,
#and her sexuality isn't either.

	Yes, us poor dumb boys surely needed MacKinnon to point out
this distinction to us :-). As do Playboy's models, apparently, who
must not be allowed to treat their beauty as a saleable commodity.
MacKinnon does not argue that women's sexuality should belong to women
as individuals, but that it belongs to some fantasy of Womanhood which
shall decide for individual women the proper use of their own bodies.
What might be more useful would be for someone to point out to the pure
and Platonic law professor that women do have visible, physical bodies,
and that these bodies and their varied functions are as integral to the
person as the disembodied female spirituality that she so jealously
guards.

	MacKinnon is psychoanalyzing a magazine, Gordon; you don't get
much more animistic than that. She confuses her own subjective distaste
for what she sees therein for the actual contents of the magazine.
Reminds me of the old joke about the patient who, given a Rorshach test,
berates the psychiatrist for showing him filthy pictures :-). Obscenity,
like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I see no need to limit the
reading matter of normal adults to what is innocuous to children and
neurotic law professors.

-  Nothing fails like success  -             Kenn Barry
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Carl Kadie -- kadie@cs.uiuc.edu -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Newsgroups: alt.censorship