trashing, sexuality and porn

I really enjoy reading Joanna Russ's feminist essays (and her prose!), but this anthology was a disappointment. The intro was promising, and I loved her personal essay "Not for Years but for Decades" about her journey to lesbianism (five stars for that alone), and she offered interesting thoughts on the active/passive destructive dynamics of "magic mommas" and "trembling sisters" in the women's movement, but then: all the defense of S&M and pornography. I get where she's coming from, and her intentions are clearly good, but her arguments aren't convincing in the slightest! Russ completely underestimates the strength (and consequences) of the pro-S&M movement — and pornography. For example, she approaches porn as a habit of a minority of men, a habit that could be replaced by having actual sex. She brings up statistics to show that porn use has not gone up and neither has sexual violence. Looking at the debate from 2016, it's obvious that everything the anti-porn camp warned about has come to fruition and, in the process, contributed to the decimation of feminism as a political force. So no, I'm not swayed to support the "perverts" over the "Puritans" (her words). Not at all. There's also an interesting essay about Kirk/Spock and the beginnings of female-driven slash culture, if you're into that. (It was never my thing.) She offers a well thought-out exploration of what women get out of M/M fan fiction. It's an analysis I've read before, but I suspect her piece was the original source.

QUOTES

"[I am] absolutely certain that men's insistence on women's 'attractiveness' and sexual availability has nothing to do with either carnality or aesthetics. For one thing, 'attractiveness' in women changes too fast and too often (this decade's fashion is next decade's hilarity) to have any deep connection with male instinct. Moreover, men make it clear that the way unadorned women actually smell, feel, and look (which surely arouses lust in conditions of actual copulation) is exactly what is not acceptable otherwise. What is demanded is that you 'make something of yourself. Sometimes this means being artificially thin or girdled and sometimes it means being artificially fat and padded, but it always means being unnatural and uncomfortable. What it also always means is giving off signals of the availability of your energies, time, emotions, and resources to men, that is, your loyalty to the patriarchal order." (p. 13)

"There is immense social pressure in our culture to imagine a Lesbian as someone who never under any circumstances feels any attraction to any man, in fantasy or otherwise. The popular model of homosexuality is simply the heterosexual institution reversed [...] This idea of what a Lesbian is is a wonderful way of preventing anyone from ever becoming one; and when we adopt it, we're simply doing the culture's dirty work for it. There are no 'real' Lesbians—which is exactly what I heard for years, there are only neurotics, impostors, crazy virgins, and repressed heterosexuals. You aren't a Lesbian. You can't be a Lesbian. There aren't any Lesbians." (p. 29)

"I knew that I did not really want to sleep with men. But that was sick. I did want to sleep with men—but only in my head and only under very specialized circumstances." (p. 37)

"[T]he choices presented to me and my friends were: 1) Marry so you can have sex in safety, and thereby prove your inferiority and vulnerability, 2) stay celibate and go crazy (it was an article of faith then that all spinsters were 'sexually repressed' and therefore diseased, 3) have sex outside of marriage and die of an illegal abortion, or 4) become a Lesbian—a state so unthinkable and unspeakable, so utterly absent from anyone's view of reality that it probably didn't exist—but was, of course, unutterably criminal, insane, and destructive at the same time." (p. 103) ( )

An excellent collection of rather personal essays about literature from a liberal feminist perspective by a great writer. I am not a fan of Russ' fiction but the moment I started reading her non-fiction I was hooked. She's direct, easy to understand and profoundly coherent throughout.

Includes essays:
'Not From Years but For Decades’
'News From The Front'
‘Pornography and the doubleness of sex for women’
'Power and helplessness in the women’s movement’

'Being Against Pornography' focuses on how obsessing over one aspect of oppression makes us lose sight of the underlying oppression in every other aspect of our lives.
If pornography is bad because it tells lies about women, is it any worse than - or even different - from the rest of the culture? Patriarchal culture and ideology are nothing but lies about women. 12


‘Pornography by Women For Women; with Love’ is seminal essay about slash fandom in which Russ theorizes about the motives of slash readers and writers. It being 40 yeras old and fandom evolving faster than most things, it has details that don't work anymore but I find the overall thesis convicing.
( )

An excellent collection of rather personal essays about literature from a liberal feminist perspective by a great writer. I am not a fan of Russ' fiction but the moment I started reading her non-fiction I was hooked. She's direct, easy to understand and profoundly coherent throughout.

Includes essays:
'Not From Years but For Decades’
'News From The Front'
‘Pornography and the doubleness of sex for women’
'Power and helplessness in the women’s movement’

'Being Against Pornography' focuses on how obsessing over one aspect of oppression makes us lose sight of the underlying oppression in every other aspect of our lives.
If pornography is bad because it tells lies about women, is it any worse than - or even different - from the rest of the culture? Patriarchal culture and ideology are nothing but lies about women. 12


‘Pornography by Women For Women; with Love’ is seminal essay about slash fandom in which Russ theorizes about the motives of slash readers and writers. It being 40 yeras old and fandom evolving faster than most things, it has details that don't work anymore but I find the overall thesis convicing.
( )

Published in 1985, this book of essays nonetheless engages with still ongoing debates, not least including “tone” and, separately, the uneasy relationship between sexual fantasy and political/cultural antipatriarchal work. She specifically discusses slash, both the ways in which it’s liberating and the ways in which it’s depressing in that women writers imagine freedom as male, as well as nonfandom-generated porn/erotica/call it what you will. Key quote: “The feminism I know began as politics, not rules for living. To call X a feminist issue did not then mean that there was a good way to do X and a bad way, and that we were trying to replace the bad way with the good way. X was a feminist issue because it was the locus of various social pressures (which it made visible) and those social pressures were what feminism was all about.” She strikes me as deeply, fundamentally sympathetic--trying to understand where various behaviors and positions, including male sexual fantasies, are coming from and how feminist theory ought to respond to them. ( )