Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Andrea Dworkin
Language: English
Pages: 300
ISBN: 0399505326
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This volume presents a study of the damaging effect of pornography and its ramifications on society.
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and boys expressed a rigid hierarchy of male power; the youth used was feminized vis-i-vis older men; sex was not consensual, that is, among peers (in fact, on Crete and in other parts of Greece, boys were kidnapped into sexual apprenticeship); the boy became the man, changed status, his reward at the end of an apprenticeship; populations of women and slaves, neither of which had any rights of citizenship, absorbed the brunt of male sexual aggression. Male homosexuality in male-supremacist
fifty shadows. Rape a shadow and watch it disappear. Rape a shadow, and does it matter? Sometimes, it appears that shadows pursue. They cannot be lost. They follow, nipping at the heels. Attributions of malice are made. Shadows become ominous, haunting. In histories and biographies, in philosophical and literary essays, male-supremacist culture perpetuates the power of men over women by turning women into shadows. The shameful inequities of life are maintained by the distortions and manipulations
combination of any of the aforementioned that is carried to the point where this fetish-object becomes dominant in the individual’s sex life, or without which sexual satisfaction is incomplete or impossible. 47 Krafft-Ebing, in his definition, reveals a preoccupation with perpetuating heterosexual intercourse as the norm of sexual behavior: The concentration of the sexual interest on a certain portion of the body that has no direct relation to sex (as have breasts and external genitals)—a
hair so close to the skin that the skin is left bruised or cut. The teeth of the comb suggest vagina dentata. The ivory tooth hanging from the neck of the older woman suggests the same, removed from the genitals and generalized to the whole personality. The two photographs posit an all-female sadism. The lesbian motif is supposed to mean that the values in the photographs really have to do with women, not men. The threat of the scissors gives testimony to the fact that in the male mind two women
is used, why, by whom, by how many, or how often. Her sexual will can exist only as a will to be used. Whatever happens to her, it is all the same. If she loathes it, it is not wrong, she is. Within this system, the only choice for the woman has been to embrace herself as whore, as sexual wanton or sexual commodity within phallic boundaries, or to disavow desire, disavow her body. The most cynical use of women has been on the Left—cynical because the word freedom is used to capture the loyalties
