The Porno-Sex Disorder
First, you’ll have to excuse me for recent, what may be seen as feministing, in that words about my writing haven’t been forthcoming here, but such “women’s issues” are important for my development. I mean to say, my ideas are becoming cemented, which feels pretty good after floundering around.
There are among our midsts women who believe flashing their breasts for cameras, for groups of men, dressing in revealing clothes, pruning one’s pubic hair, getting breast augmentations and vagina modifications to be “empowering.” As Susan Bordo aptly points out, as I know for myself, eating disorders are also felt as “empowering.”
The central mechanism I will describe involves a transformation (or if you wish, duality) of meaning, through which conditions that are objectively (and on one level, experientially) constraining, enslaving and ever murderous, come to be experienced as liberating, transforming, and life-giving.
…potential resistance is not merely being undercut but utilized in the maintenance and reproduction of existing power relations.
I would like to declare that there is a flood-tide sweeping through nations and it is called the porno-sex disorder. For if an eating disorder can arise out of the “normal” female practices of diet than the absurdity of construed sexuality is inevitable. Though the patriarchy may not consent that these scantily clad women are in need of medicalization there will be much suffering, as there is with all dramatic forms of normalization.
The “existing power relations” are self-evident, but for those giggling and thinking they’re so cute. The liberation of women’s sexuality has backlashed and so remains contained. We have no hope for our sexuality while the porno-sex disorder flourishes. Sexuality has been struck from our own person and declared as something public to display. Women have been conned again and someone’s making a lot of money.
Women want to experience pleasure. We want pleasure on our own terms.
This comes in lieu of unearthing the book: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy, which I hope to read soon.
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