Neil wrote:
Very true, and until recently the two were almost inextricably interconnected, women offering their unpaid domestic labour (which largely still goes unpaid) as well as their bodies in return for material
security.
I think we must have different ideas of the timescale implied by 'recently'. (I mean, we are at least notionally talking about a TV series first aired in 1978, so let's perhaps confine ourselves to this kind of timescale ?)
Patriarchal hegemony has been on the wane for barely a century and its decline might yet prove to be no more than a blip. The reactionary
backlash
has hardly disappeared - see <http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/talking_point/newsid_1245000/1245345.
stm>
for its latest manifestation and the enthusiastic reception it's getting from some quarters.
As I said in a recent post, I lived in such a society for several years (as part of a fundamentalist Christian church). I've spoken about my experiences with numerous people (men and women, Christian and non-Christian) in the UK, and never met a single person who agreed that such a society was a good thing. (I don't know about other areas in the world.)
Male-oriented pornography perpetuates the myth that women exist for male sexual satisfaction. Pseudo-lesbian imagery connives in this by turning female sexual independence into nothing more than a peepshow for male voyeurs. The real truth is that patriarchy is actually the dependent one, dependent on women's continued submission to its demands. That is what pornography
is
intended to conceal.
And therefore if *women* (who are not the target of male-oriented porn) refuse to submit to its demands then its power is lost. This is one of the reasons I personally tend to think that patriarchy -- in the developed world -- is on its last legs, if not actually dead.
Fluffy kittens don't explode. Well, not very often...
I mean that I (as a slash reader and sometime writer) don't see slash as a particularly political statement. But this is, of course, a purely personal viewpoint.
Tanstaafl.
I'm going to regret this, I know, but: what???
Tavia