A semi-live-blogging review of Getting Off: (Pornography and the End of Masculinity) by Robert Jensen that I began here.

Chapter #1:

Andrea [Dworkin] was the first person to understand that the contemporary pornography industry and the images it produces are a place to look squarely into the consequences of patriarchy and masculinity.

Yeah, I still don’t think people give Dworkin the credit she deserves for the transformation she wrought on society through her critique of pornography as it stood (and, far too often, stands) and, more importantly, her distinguishing the idea of consent (where even the most whole-hearted “yes” is meaningless without a corresponding and irrevocable right to say “no.”)

Chapter #2: The Paradox in the Mirror

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it’s about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men’s cruelty to women…. And that is much more difficult for people — men and women — to face.

My main quibble would be that industrial pornography today certainly is primarily about men’s cruelty and/or indifference to women (though cruelty with a point that I’m afraid might dishearten Jensen even more than he already is. More on that later.) But it has not always been so. (For instance in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, photographic porn was either not cruel at all or was nervously cruel to the intemperate men who “spent” their precious bodily fluids.)

Later in the chapter Jensen asks

How do we explain the simultaneous appearance of more, and increasingly more intense, ways to humiliate women sexually and the rising popularity of the films that present those activities?

Jensen maintains that while we’ve had strong support for individual rights the U.S. has also always been culturally brutal and cruel and therefore an increase is only par for the course. As explanations go that disappoints because if he was right then there’d be no increasing intensity to explain.

My own feeling is that the increase in violence coincides extremely well with the advent of sexual autonomy in 3rd-wave feminism which autonomy, by the way, was made possible in large measure by Andrea Dworkin’s work on consent. The problem being that if, as I contend, the dominant male paradigm is that women are the “no-sex” class.

And if men remain largely unreconstructed and trapped inside the paradigm, then to the extent women find newer and more adventurous ways to enjoy themselves sexually we’re going to see men working harder and with greater desperation to extract the “no” their/our paradigm expects and demands of women.

I’ve mentioned this effect early on but in a post from last summer called “Anal is the new ‘third base,’” Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy editorialized about this perpetual ratcheting in search of “no.”

Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality — getting jizz in your wig is a big compliment! — too many women have been giving up the vagina too easily, and even blow jobs are hackneyed now that housewives are writing mundane marriage manuals on the subject. “Regular” het sex just isn’t brutal or insulting enough anymore. There’s no sport in it, no swaggering triumph, nothing to give men “a good story to tell over beers.” Anal sex may be “the new deal-breaker,” but it’s only a matter of time until blush is off that rose, too. If a ‘sex’ act fails to egregiously humiliate or even harm a woman, men will keep pushing the limits until they find one that does. How long until we’re reading this in mainstream magazines?

“I only had to persuade two girls. [I asked] ‘Can I shit in your mouth and mutilate you with razor blades?’ At first they were like, ‘No, it will hurt.’ It hurt them the first time, but after that they always said they enjoyed it—if not a little, then a lot.”

She said it here

[Note: the “I only had to persuade two girls…” quote is Twisty’s near-word-for-word rephrasing of an asshat Details Magazine article. Also note: yes, yes, some of you surely do enjoy being cut up with razor blades: blood and needle play are perfectly respectable activities for a very specialized group of fetishists. However even those of you who are into it… maybe especially those of you… would tend to look askance if every industrial porn set moved quickly to dangerous, un-sensual, context-free, and hashed-up versions of mixed blood play with or without scat. I’m just sayin’ —fl]

Anyway, does that help illustrate the point that this dominant masculine paradigm that describes, prescribes, and proscribes women as not wanting sex objective at least in porn leads sexual gratification to be superseded by a drive to find “no.”

The point being that it probably isn’t a coincidence at all that violence and degradation in porn, or at frat/beach/spring-break parties, have increased as women themselves have become more open and expressive about their own sexual agency.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this is an area where more women becoming feminists might not make as much difference as bringing it to men as a way out.

Now in her razor-blades-are-the-next-new-thing Twisty added no-win conditions to insure a future full of blame-worthy posts when she declared that

Whenever I write about how much men hate you, somebody — usually a dude, but sometimes a Mrs Nigel — always chirps up, “That’s no way to win men over to your nutty Twistolution!” And they are right. Dudes won’t support feminism unless there’s something in it for them.

Yeah, funny how nobody does anything unless there’s something in it for them. Fortunately, in this case, and perhaps even fortunately for Twisty who wouldn’t have to get involved, there really is a lot for men to get out of feminism that doesn’t involve giving up anything anybody in his right mind would want to keep. Beginning with an idea of sexual scarcity, moving on to an idea that women innately dread sex with men instead of merely dreading the self-centered boring kind of sex we imagine we’re entitled to, moving on to the idea that sex is not a reward women bestow on worthy men, leading on to an idea that men and women can each earn ordinary dollars instead of men killing themselves to earn 30 cents on the dollar more in order to “deserve” sex.

In fact all those are things men might want to work towards even if there was no such thing as feminism lighting the exit signs for us.

At least so far that’s how I’m reading Jensen’s first and second chapters. We’ll see what, if anything else, comes from further reading.