@atreestump
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I think it’s fair to say that pornography does give men, especially young men and boys, a wrong impression of sex in general and certainly does add to domination, I don’t think you can isolate it from capitalism in that regard either. She did at least talk to sex workers directly and based her works around those experiences, which is fair enough. I guess one has to draw a line between art and porn though at some point.
While I don’t see any problem among consenting adults, I think I have the same grind with this type of ‘liberation’ as being similar to the Cosmopolitan ideal of woman, which may be promoting a kind of street wise version form of woman, but can also be regarded as being for the male gaze and in that sense, it still adds to unequal gender relations.
As Dworkin was a radical feminist, I think she was in the mind of active solutions that don’t beat about the bush and so she isolated porn as a major exploitation of women and was against it for precisely that reason – radical feminists are the backbone of feminism to me, they carry the true spirit of the first wave.
No, it hasn’t arrived yet. Really annoying. Think I might just ask for my money back, it’s well overdue.
This is another Eastern book that apparently had an influence on Heidegger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Tea
@”thetrizzard”
I bet you are happier now that you have time to read again!
It’s a simple book to grasp Post Structuralism, also check out Richard Harland – Superstructuralism.
I opened up a thread about Solitude today. Let’s move the discussion over to that and try to keep this thread about Greer and feminism. 🙂
You can see the new post here: https://ontic-philosophy.com/Thread-Solitude
@”notathoughtgiven” What are your thoughts on Andrea Dworkin?
The David Wood book, so far, has been difficult to read. Derrida is perhaps the most complicated philosopher ever. I am looking into something called ‘Aporia’, which is where language breaks down, it’s impossible to speak or act, an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.
I think Derrida focuses on this as a starting point for mystical and religious experiences and exposes a ‘secret’, which is not a secret in the way we use the word. An everyday secret is just a problem to be solved, that is someone knows the secret and someone else can uncover it and understand it. This secret that Derrida discovers has no time or place, it does and does not have to exist for us to even begin to start looking for it, but there is something secret. Passion can take the place of the secret. That’s as far as I got with it and so I have been reading up on this secret and aporia.
I haven’t readmuch of the Christopher Norris one, so can’t really comment.
The Foucault Reader is far more easy to grasp and I have got to the 3rd or 4th chapter. It’s really good and I think he says more or less the same things as Derrida but focuses on bodies in the same way as signs. There is just too much to convey at the moment, I will be opening threads soon about this book.
Thanks for sharing guys.
Not having dysphoria, I have never been maternal, so it’s interesting to hear how intensely you both feel about this. How do you both feel about surrogates and adoption?
2. Verb [spoiler]Demonstrate[/spoiler]
How so, specifically? I might want to discuss this.
Solitude is where Nietzsche ends up (well, not that Nietzsche has ‘ends’ as such) but he seems more like a weirdo aristocractic douche sometimes to be honest, he takes the ‘pathos of distance’ too far and doesn’t go any further as regards who is superior and who is inferior.
Foucault looks at the tools we need to eventually return from our solitude to rejoin ‘the herd’, being well aware of how exclusion eventually leads to confinement. This is where Kristeva come in too when she says ‘I stray in order to be’. Even though we refuse to assimiliate, we are excluded, yet enclosed at the same time.
Solitude is neccessary if one wants to become an individual, but we form our identity out of exclusion and rejection, rather than through inclusion and desire, we are not subjects, we are dejects.
A thread on Solitude would be great. That is a very interesting philosophical inquiry.
Just noticed Thom Avella has taken the video down, he must have had a change of mind. That’s good.
People love to blame and point the finger, this is stigma that many anti-feminists don’t seem to be able to comprehend as it includes a feeling of shame, instead of being objective about it and learning, they project their shame on to others.
4. 2 x articles [spoiler]in the[/spoiler]
I would not even consider Germaine Greer a TERF by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I have a lot of respect for her as a person. From what I have read of her works, she does not exclude or put down transgender women just that she doesn’t see them as women. Which is fair enough. She can have her opinion and I have mine. As long as we respect each others view then that is all that matters.I agree, the key is respect. There are a lot of views that are intolerant, yet they can be conveyed in a different way.
I think she is right in that I do not experience womanhood the same way biologically. That is a given. But that doesn’t mean I am not a woman, just experience it in a different way.
It’s not so much the biology. I mean, some women can’t have children and some women don’t mensturate at all, are they still women? I think Greer is getting at cultural differences when talking about ‘woman’, as biology is only referring to that which is female sex.
There’s a great feminist channel called Go Fem Yourself, she is a buddy of mine. She made some great videos about rape culture, she like many women and young girls, was told they hadto stay sharp and watch out for rapists, even being told to wedge a key between her fingers to make a fist weapon to offer some defence against a sexual attack, should it occur. Now, this is going off into the topic of rape culture, which would be great for another thread, but the point relevant here is that men aren’t told to do those things for those reasons and so they have socially constructed differences. Another experience that is different is infantalisation.
A trans-person or homosexual person will probably find gender roles in society to be constricting, as do women and men, so we are not excluding trans people when we define woman and woman, it just means there is no binary, it’s a spectrum of differences.
What is not acceptable however, is to say they are not women and that we should prioritise women in a supremecist way, but again, as we both agree, Greer certainly isn’t doing that. I was dissapointed with this video by Thom Avella as it does reval a sensitive topic that is stalled by labels and cis-white men telling women what being a woman is and that they ought to be proud of it and wear it like a badge of honour.
To me a TERF is a feminist that not only doesn’t see transgender women as women, but goes out of their way to bully, harass and put down transgender women. To convince by any means fair or foul that their view of themselves is wrong and should be excluded.
This is why it’s only a useful topical label, rather than an actual consistent position. If anyone bullies anyone for these reasons, they are not feminists anymore. It is anti-feminist.
Well as far as sex work being liberating of women’s and men’s rights. It is more about being treated equally regardless if a person is or was a sex worker. That it liberates rights of the person by seeing it as a choice like any other line of work. That just because someone was or is a sex worker doesn’t mean anything more than that was their line of work. If it is seen that way then it is a choice and liberates the person to be who they are and not to hide or be ashamed that they where a sex worker.
What I previously said was incomplete regarding this subject. While I don’t see sex work as something that should be encouraged, we should not exclude sex workers either. I have known quite a few sex workers personally and they only improved their lives once they were confident enough to ask for help. If a sex worker is raped for example, they will expect to be interrogated so harshly that they may say they were lying to avoid the traumatic experience of the legal process. Ths isn’t something that exclusively affects sex workers however, but the ideal of ‘the chaste woman’ is what perpetuates the myths within rape culture and further increases persecution of victims. They believe it is better to ‘not make a fuss’ as they don’t think any one will believe them. Even if they succeed with their accusations and get their attacker(s) convicted, they may still be rejected by society. Things have changed for the better, but these problems are still prevelant. This stigma and blame is what can lead women into sex work as they don’t value themselves as anything more than a sex object – dropping stigma can and does lead to women coming away from sex work and seeking alternative ways of life that they themselves consider worthy of their time and energy.
If a woman wants to be a sex worker because of a desire to do so, for sexual preference and not because of abusive relationships, there is no problem for me there either personally, I am tolertant toward the issue, that is to say, I am apathetic towards it. It doesn’t affect me in the slightest, so why should I care so much about what someon does with their body? Things are just not black and white.
The main reason I see it as a good thing is like you say, to remove stigma. It is an important part of tackling rape culture and I do advocate self determination. I think a thread on whether or not rights are a good idea or not should be opened, as you can give rights, but you can also take them away and this brings the entirety of the state into question.
We live in strange times. Authority is not regarded as absolute in any one partiocular area of knowledge or discourse – when that happens there can only be a natural progression toward anarchy, where rights become irrelevant.
2. Verb [spoiler]grab[/spoiler]
I suppose it should be ‘Relent! Push hungrily on that church!’
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