From: gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch)
Subject: Re: MacKinnon (was Re: Please explain this quote)
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 23:35:53 GMT
Organization: mydog in exile

This is response to two of Kenn Barry's articles which
missed my machine and were sent to me by mail.  So it's
sort of old....

1.  Kenn says that my construction of his attacks on
MacKinnon as part of a general attack on feminism was
incorrect.  Let's leave it at that.

2.  Is MacKinnon the biggest threat to free speech around?
Prior to the election, I would have said that the
totalitarian social reactionaries represented by Robertson
and Buchanan were more serious, since they were much closer
to the levers of power, and Bush appeared to be a Von Papen
type, an opportunist with no visible principles beyond
immediate political advantage.  With the defeat of Bush, we 
can hope that the Republicans will drive the totalitarians
out of their party.  In any case, they're out of power for
awhile (except for the some of the judiciary).  So it may 
be that the kind of person Kenn says MacKinnon is will 
become more important.

3.  I continue to feel that psychological analysis of
MacKinnon is a waste of time, except for opening the 
"analyst" to satire, which is always fun.

4.  Quote time.  This is about projecting things onto
pictures in a magazine.  It's a digression but it's my
job to "educate" people and I've got to pick up every
stitch ((c) Donovan):

barry@netcom.com (Kenn Barry):
| >|                     ... You should hear yourself, Gordon. This paragraph
| >| reads like a quote from von Daniken, or from that "Strange Ooogabooga"
| >| or whatever that is hosted by Leonard Nimoy. "Could be projected",
| >| indeed.  "Could the Ice Ages have been an extraterrestrial logging
| >| operation?" "Could our dreams be Martian attempts at communication?"

gf:
| >The idea that people take their culture and attitudes with 
| >them when they look into a magazine seems that outre' to
| >you?

kb:
|         No, just inane. You're squirming, Gordon. I take my culture and
| attitudes into the bathroom when I relieve myself, too, but that's
| hardly the question. Rather, it is whether the magazine selectively
| reinforces negative cultural attitudes. Shit, _anything_ can be evil in
| the wrong brain; Manson got inspired by an innocuous Beatles song.

That's not quite what I meant.  More like this: suppose 
we have people from three cultures: the ancient Knossian,
where women apparently went bare-breasted as a mark of
high status; some other culture, where it was the sign of 
a prostitute; and American studentry.  We show them a
picture from _Playboy_ of a bare-breasted woman sitting 
in a chair reading a book, and ask them what's going on 
in the picture.  Obviously, they'll come up with three
radically different answers.  

Now, if sexual availability is taken to be a mark of low 
status and vulnerability, as our language would seem to 
indicate, then a fairly reasonable argument can be made 
that _in_our_cultural_context_ such a picture might 
contribute to the disempowering of the category of person 
it represents.  (Whether that is so, and whether it leads 
to rape and murder, can only be determined by further 
investigation.  Even if so, the question of whether the 
material should be banned is a different story; as some 
have noted, the Bible would have to be suppressed under 
the same theory.  But I'm just talking about the 
projection of cultural assumptions above.)

5.  On what _Playboy_ is really all about...
kb:
|         Then try reading it instead of just looking at the pictures.
| Playboy is quite political, with a liberal though not radical bias.

If you'd like to send me, say, 20 or 30 recent issues, I'd 
be glad to analyze it more closely.  I'm certainly not going 
to go out and buy them.  And I can't examine them at the 
library because, according to a librarian I asked about it, 
there is no way they can protect the magazines from having 
all of the pages torn or cut out in a matter of hours.  This 
means something, although I'm not sure exactly what.  Rabid
anti-pornographers ripping them out with their teeth, 
perhaps....
-- 

 )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(
( 1238 Blg. Grn. Sta.,  NY NY 10274 * 718.273.5556 )
Xref: sparky alt.feminism:4116 rec.humor:33483