----- Original Message ----- From: Dana Shilling dshilling@worldnet.att.net
Neil said:
It's a comparison I've drawn in the past, and I think it's a very valid
one.
(Well, I would, wouldn't I, having drawn it myself?) Whilst obviously
never
having been privy to real life lesbian relationships, I wouldn't mind betting that the male-oriented porn bears precious little comparison to
the
reality.
Ummm, name an orientation or a paraphilia..porn bears precious little comparison to its reality.
In defense of Neil, I would say that IMO porn by and for lesbians is closer to the realities of lesbian sex than Vampiros Lesbos II.
Pseudo-lesbian porn, made by men for a male audience, exists to do more
than
merely titillate. It serves to distort, corrupt, contain, ridicule and ultimately deny the reality of the single biggest challenge to
patriarchal
hegemony.
Perhaps I'm being too modest, but I think you're overstating here.
No, I'm afraid I'm with Neil here. IMO lesbianism, whatever its cause and manifestation, is a threat to patriarchy in that it suggests that women need not be dependent on men for the satisfaction of sexual or social needs. M-O "lesbian" porn effectively reduces this threat down to a wank, and also contains the additional message that lesbianism is something women do as a preliminary act to sleeping with a man, or because there's no man around. Which brings the patriarchy back into the picture.
("My God, Fiona! Where are you getting all this?!?" Simple. I often work till one or two in the morning, I like to have the television on in the background while I work, and Channel 5 is less likely to distract me from the task at hand than BBC2).
Lesbianism threatens a fundamental axiom of patriarchal ideology, the dependence of women on men,
No matter how satisfactory a woman's relationship is with another woman, she still has to pay taxes and operate in a largely male-controlled workaday world. Rather, I'd say that lesbianism is no more or less valuable than any other situation--I hope the world will progress toward making it easier for each individual to find expression in many realms, including but not limited to the emotional and sexual.
I don't like to prioritise one group as more "resistant" than any other (that's the biggest problem I have with Jenkins and Bacon-Smith, btw), but it has to be said that lesbians do provide a challenge to the existing order. In the same way that, for instance, the presence of a Jewish and/or Muslim minority provides an implicit challenge to Christian hegemony in the UK.
and the pornographic depiction of lesbianism deliberately seeks to subvert that threat by reconstructing it within ideologically permissible limits. Homophobic? Not as such.
Heterosexist?
Yes, very. Oppressive? Definitely.
Naah, I think that most consumers aren't naive enough to mix up a
particular
entertainment genre with reality. They don't think that they're seeing something accurate about lesbian lives, they're watching some good-looking women have sex together without intervention of (from the heterosexual male spectator's viewpoint) males who are Not Wanted on Voyage.
I dunno, but the most frequent misapprehension I've heard about lesbianism (from both genders) is that they're just misguided women whom sex with a man will "put right," and I suspect they've been getting that message from the pornos.
Side anecdote: for Queer Action Week two years ago, my college screened "Go Fish." The bulk of the audience which turned up was male, straight and rather, ahem, interested-looking-- but most of these had left by midway through the movie when it became apparent to them that "a cutting-edge film about lesbian relationships" didn't mean what they thought it did...
"Lighten up while you still can, Don't even try to understand, Just find a place to make your stand, And take it easy."
If I didn't think it was worthwhile trying to understand other people, I'd never even have sent this e-mail.
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Political dynamite at http://nyder.r67.net
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