From: riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory,misc.legal,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Hate Speech Okay, says the Supreme Court
Keywords: egnilges
Date: 28 Jul 92 23:49:12 GMT
Followup-To: talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.theory
Distribution: usa
Organization: LNK Corporation, Riverdale, MD

(Second section - I'll try not to screw up the deletions this time)

>>>It is the same with other forms of censorship -- the 
>>>censorship of sexual or of violent material, for example.  
>>>The censorship sets up a structure in which the thing 
>>>prohibited is the central idea which lies behind every act 
>>>of enforcement.  The result is (in the case of censorship 
>>>of erotica) to sexualize everything on the boundary 
>>>between what is censored and what isn't, because _the_ 
>>>_boundary_points_to_the_center_.  That is why, in the 
>>>Victorian era, it was considered rather improper for a 
>>>woman's ankles to be displayed, at least if she were of 
>>>a certain class.  The ankle became sexually inspiring
>>>because it indicated the calf, which was hidden; the
>>>calf, the knee; and so on.  Sometimes, people felt the
>>>need to cover the legs of tables, and call them limbs!
>>>
>>
>>You don't say. This is the old "steam engine" theory of sexual
>>repression.  It has some validity.  However, for many men, venting rage
>>and having sex leads not to relief but to addiction to sex and violence.
>
>Go to school, learn a little psychology. Hunger, thirst and lust are
>*primary drives*. Rage is an *emotion*. They are not the same. Lumping
>them together in this context is dishonest, Ed.
>
>Primary drives go away when slaked. Or do you say that eating often leads
>to addiction to food?
>
>Emotions stick around until their cause goes away or they are released.
>They are released by expressing them (not necessarily *giving in* to
>them). They are only repressed when they are *disowned*, when their
>reality is denied. This act of release never creates any sort of emotional
>addiction. The "uncontrollable" urge to take out any sort of rage on its
>object is actually a defect of character or maturity. It certainly shows
>a lack of discipline.

	But the attack on Ed's statement is not as self-evident as the
respondent would have us believe. There is a difference between the 
motivation behind behavior and behavior itself. Most human behaviors,
and certainly the ones we are talking about, are learned, or modifications
of instinctive behaviors. A man who strikes another in self-defense is
engaging in instinctive behavior at some level. He may strike well because
he has learned to fight, but he strikes hard out of instinct. There is
no biological instinct that explains a man who strikes his pregnant wife.
Such behavior is completely counterproductive biologically. 
The dilemma of liberals is that they seek not only to eliminate 
what they define as undesirable behavior in a given social context, they
understand that to accomplish their goals, they must eliminate certain
categories of behavior wholesale. I remember a pacifist friend who
posted out the comment (This was about the time of Desert Storm) that
he wondered what form man's violent urges would take as we "achieve
peace." My reply was based on a newspaper article that I found,
which described Vietnam's drive to make money out of its war relics,
including guided tours of the Iron Triangle tunnel complexes, and
week-long outings on the Ho Chi Minh trail, complete with paint
gun battles. But this level of sublimation, though bizarre, is far
superior to turning the modern home into a battleground.

>
>>This is probably the result of the way in which our society is

>>structured, in which personal behavior is "free" but economic and
>>political arrangements are insanely rigid.
>
>How do you define "rigid" in this context?
>
>>So maybe in the past the
>>"steam engine" theory had validity which it nowadays lacks.
>
>Again, learn some psychology before you go running your mouth.
>
>>
>>Addicts in successful recovery often report that they think of the
>>object of their addiction every single day and they welcome these
>>thoughts.  These thoughts, it is said, "keep the memory green."  Perhaps
>>we need Dworkin and MacKinnon to remind us of the way in which women are
>>victimized.  Perhaps here, too, silence=death.
>
>Huh?

	Ed does not quite say so, and I really don't think he 
understood what he meant to say, but this turns out to be written from
a completely feminist perspective, one in which only women's behavior
is taken into account, rather than dealing with both sides of the problem.
In the feminist view, the problem is not really that men do disgraceful 
things (Ironically, feminists, too sometimes subscribe to Tailhook 
thinking in which boys will be boys), but that women put up with it !
The addict, then is not the wife beater, but the wife who can't force
herself to break away. This reconciles the two sentences, in a way that
Ed may not have consciously intended.

>
>>
>>>
>>>The prohibited erotism becomes, so to speak, the shadow or 
>>>dark side of everything said within the reach of the 
>>>prohibition -- and the more that is said, the more 
>>>messages that are sent, the more probable it is that the 
>>>prohibited is implicit in the permitted.  The repressed 
>>>does not have to return; it simply hides behind the 
>>>unrepressed and becomes part of it. 
>>
>>This has validity.  However, you appear to assume that Dworkin and
>>MacKinnon want us to be silent about sex, and violence against women.  I
>>should think they want the opposite.  Dworkin is quite explicit about
>>the ways in which she was victimized.  They DO wish to attenuate
>>discourse about sex and women from a male point of view; one of
>>Dworkin's writings is titled "Against the Male Flood."
>
>You said it yourself. They want to shut *other* people up. Their true
>motives, lusts for power others, come shining through.

	It would be pertinent to describe exactly how Dworkin was
"victimized". Nothing else can give us the appropriate context in
which her writings should be judged. I am continually fascinated
by the extreme manner in which feminists choose to express themselves,
and it does help to gain some insight into how these people come
to the conclusion that there is some impersonal, dominant male
force that keeps them down. I cannot help but be identified with
such a "force", and so, it is simply necessary for the purpose of
my own self-defense to attempt to understand just how and why I
became part of the forces of darkness.


	Bill R.

	"My opinions do not represent those of my employer or any
government agency."
-- 
Bill R.
Xref: sparky talk.politics.theory:3120 misc.legal:15189 alt.postmodern:2236 alt.censorship:6484