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Post by Paige (Admin) on Nov 30, 2017 15:51:16 GMT
What can be done to fight the violence against women that takes place in pornography? Civil rights ordinances, like the one proposed by MacKinnon and Dworkin? Grassroots activism? Educational workshops? Storytelling?
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Post by xmelaniex on Dec 1, 2017 15:16:09 GMT
Educational workshops would be awesome. It would be great to start educating other feminists, because I think people just don't understand. As a woman, you can't read some of these stories and be unmoved.
There was a documentary about AIDS where a health worker held these "truth circles" where her friends would discuss whether or not they had unprotected sex. I forget the name of the documentary, but after watching it I remember being in a group of women and all of us realizing we had done things we weren't comfortable with. Maybe something like this could encourage women to talk about how pornography effects our own lives. I think many of us have had sex acts suggested to us by male partners/saw something in porn that had us thinking "what?? I'm supposed to like that? other women do that? ...well, okay, I guess..." But we don't ask each other about it, and if we do we don't want to seem like prudes so we sort of demur. But if we could start a dialogue, we could figure out how much damage porn culture is doing.
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Post by Paige (Admin) on Dec 4, 2017 19:18:52 GMT
Educational workshops would be awesome. It would be great to start educating other feminists, because I think people just don't understand. As a woman, you can't read some of these stories and be unmoved. I agree! I was thinking about making informational pamphlets and distributing them at my school. A lot of people here "identify" as feminists (which gets on my nerves, but that's for another discussion), and I think they'd be receptive to that kind of thing. I'm new to activism, too-- does that count as activism? I'm not sure, but I think it might be beneficial either way. Dialogue is a great starting point. I think you're right to say that women's silence accounts for at least some of the success of the porn industry. (Langton picks up on that, too, if I remember, in "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts.") It's interesting to me that there still exists that element of shameful silence when modern liberal feminism is so sex-positive. Even among so-called sex-positive feminists, the realities of porn are rarely talked about, and even discussion of their own fantasies of the realities of porn are limited. The nature of the silence reminds me, personally, of the kind of silence that occurs in victims of sexual abuse. Women are afraid to talk about it. They're afraid of being told that it was okay, or that it's their fault, or that they deserved it. They avoid resisting, at least openly, for fear of retaliation. I wonder if there's anything to that. |
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